Book Review

  • The Wreck of the River of Stars, Michael Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2003, 534 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34033-X

    This is a review about a book, but like most reviews about a book it suggests more players than simply a review and a book. It suggests a reader and an author. It also suggests a reviewer as an actor in the melodrama that is a review. It suggests that every word of the review shines as much on the critic than the readers of the review who may (but not always) be also readers of the book. This is all very simple, or as simple as human affairs can ever aspire to be.

    The book may be called The Wreck of the River of Stars and its author may be Michael Flynn, but wouldn’t it be too quick to simply reduce this review to a mere work and a mere man? Isn’t it true that this book is the product of an entire genre called Science Fiction, of generations of writers all building upon the foundations left by previous writers? This review itself is the product of decades of reading, of writing, of confronting the reviewer with the harsh realities of the outside world as it exists outside the critic’s mind. This review, already quite simple, will turn out to contain multitudes.

    While the reviewer would want to discuss the novel, it would be more exact to say that, as with the vast majority of reviews in the history of humankind’s literary progress, it confronts an existing set of prejudices to a new work to be absorbed in the reviewer’s mind. That The Wreck of the River of Stars is a psychological drama masquerading as hard Science Fiction is less important than the critic’s preexisting prejudices about psychology, drama, masquerades, hardness, science and fiction. Deeper analysis is left to the readers, who will undoubtedly see the intricacies under the surface.

    Nothing, for instance, would be so simple as to say that the novel is about a crew’s efforts to save their spaceship from peril. Doing so would be doing a disservice to the intricately-defined interactions between characters and their environment. Historical antecedents for this type of novel may include an unworthy strain of “pulp SF”, which would negate this novel’s ambition as a fine exploration of complex psychological group dynamics.

    And yet there is another player in the drama of this review, this book, this appreciation. Is it possible to discuss the book intelligently without talking about the Voice of Reason narration so overwhelmingly used by the author? Is it possible to read The Wreck of the River of Stars without being spellbound by a narrative voice more knowledgeable than God himself? Is it even possible to criticize the author as the Voice itself seems to preclude any discussion? A Voice that knows the characters in all their folly, and yet describes even their silliest thoughts with a patience borne out of an infinite compassion?

    Hush, says The Voice with mellifluous kindness as frustration arises about the book’s length and patronizing narration. Don’t you know that humble SF fans such as yourself scarcely deserve the kind of psychological insight I proffer with this glorious work of literature? Haven’t you seen that the whole structure of the novel rests on a savvy use of the Briggs-Meyer schema? Don’t you-

    At this point, a number of entities in our joyous motley crew of parties dealt with in this essay, perhaps readers, would mumble vaguely about other concepts such as entertainment and pleasure of reading without spending an entire frickin’ weekend slogging through a hundred-page description of two guys eating space pudding while they’re thinking nasty thoughts about the rest of the doomed crew.

    But-, would say The Voice.

    Shut up, would reply the critic, you’ve had your five hundred pages. Let’s face it: The Wreck of the River of Stars is not just the most pretentious title of the year, it’s also one of the most overwrought excuse for an engineering-SF story that goes wrong and kills off more than half its characters through stupid stuff and the desire to show that you’re not just “another hard-SF writer.” To heck with that, and to heck with the Voice of God crap and to heck with taking a perfectly good thriller and messing it up with three hundred pages of material that could be handled in three lines and a half. Cripes.

    Surely you can’t be so angry, would say the Voice, breaking into the author’s voice.

    At eleven bucks, five hundred pages, a swarthier-than-thou narration and a downer of an ending, I can be as pissed as I want.

    Exit Author, Voice, Novel, Genre, and Critical theory.

    Exit Reader, Reviewer, Prejudices, Audience and Review.

  • Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2003, 292 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34909-4

    I don’t read a lot of fantasy, and that fact may have worked to my advantage as I made my way through Jo Walton’s short-but-rich Tooth and Claw. Perhaps the most succinct description one could make of the book would be “Austen with dragons” and it would even be exact: A comedy of manners set in a world peopled with wings-and-fire dragons, Tooth and Claw re-imagines the rigidly-defined social roles of Victorian romances as being motivated by the biological imperatives of dragonkind.

    As a book, it’s definitely a one-in-a-kind curiosity. But don’t think that the interest stops with the premise: Walton is able to do more than paint a pretty world, and so it doesn’t take a lot of time for the dragons, —scales, snouts and all— to grow on us as characters every bit as enjoyable as anything else in the Romantic canon.

    The plot is set in motion by the peaceful death of a family patriarch. His corpse has barely any time to cool down that it’s already being torn apart –literally. One thing leads to another and before long the whole inheritance issue is causing its share of troubles between the rest of the family, and those surrounding them.

    Despite the scaly eight-foot-tall characters, readers will immediately feel an atmosphere of comfortable reading pleasure. Walton deliberately sets her story in a universe not unlike the English Regency era, alternating between rich country estates and the griminess of a city not called London… Even the dullest fantasy/romance readers like myself will be off and running within a few pages.

    Don’t be fooled by the book’s relatively short page count: The story is so gripping that you’ll slow down to read every sentence in full, savouring how Walton is able to build a fabulous novel of character on top of a fantastic premise.

    What’s particularly noteworthy for a Science Fiction geek like myself is the way dragons are here approached almost as an exercise in alien world-building. Walton makes it seems as if the most outlandish aspects of her pseudo-romantic society logically derive from biological factors. I knew the novel was going to work for me when Walton explained the irreversible “blushing” effect and made it an integral part of dragon courtship: clever, clever stuff.

    Fans of Jane Austen’s work will be bowled over by the way Walton pays careful homage to the conventions of the genre, through inheritances, disdain of the church, reversal of fortunes, hard-working heroes and the reason for it all, big romantic love. There’s no shame in loving a book like this one when it’s so well done.

    Tooth and Claw is so surely manned, in fact, that it’s obvious midway through the book that this will end well not just for the characters, but for us as readers. Only a few misstep (the fortuitous arrival of a sizable fortune; too-similar names) mar the overall portrait, but they’re nowhere near denting the considerable reading pleasure offered by the book. An awe-inspiring hybrid between a literary joke and a wintertime-fireside comfort, Tooth and Claw is well worth a look, even for those who think they’ve got no time for romance or fantasy.

  • Gridlinked, Neal Asher

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 423 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34905-1

    Even since his 2001 debut, Neal Asher has been part of a new generation of British Science Fiction authors with ideas to burn and no mercy to spare. Along with other writers such as Alastair Reynolds or Richard Morgan, Asher has been busy putting thrills back in SF action novels. His fiction has only recently made it over this side of the Atlantic thanks to Tor’s reprints of his first few novels. Clearly, it was time to see what the fuss was all about.

    Starting from the beginning means going back to Gridlinked, the first novel in the “Polity” sequence that has so far tied together most of his work. The book works well as an introduction, even though its own introduction may be the best thing about it.

    Fans of hard-boiled espionage thrillers will feel right at home throughout the first few pages, as protagonist Cormac is revealed to be an agent for the interplanetary human government. Within a few pages, he efficiently dispatches a rebel threat to the Polity, blows up a part of the city and escapes with his life. It’s all good fun, packed with fast-paced action and a bit too much dripping violence.

    The real story then starts rolling, as the Polity sends Cormac on a primitive planet far away from the Grid in which our protagonist has been plugged for too long. A destructive act of sabotage may not be an accident –and it’s up to Cormac and his team to make sense of it. Meanwhile, the mindless action prologue turns out not to be so meaningless when a grieving man decides to hunt down Cormac wherever he is, bringing along some very scary friends…

    As setup, the first half of Gridlinked works beautifully. Despite some awkward language (“runcible” may have some appeal to native English-speaking readers, but it doesn’t carry much emotional weight for me), the Polity universe is efficiently introduced, with plenty of details to keep us interested. Civilization spans the galaxy, Hyper-intelligent AIs run everything, bioengineering is common and there are troubling signs of long-lived aliens. As if that wasn’t enough, Asher comes up with Mr. Crane, an insane, indestructible and very homicidal brass android. Killer robots are a dime a dozen in SF, but to see an schizophrenic one travel with a briefcase of meaningless toys is something else. (It’s no coincidence if the latest Asher novel is titled Brass Man.)

    But for all the cool toys and the fun stuff, the expansive playground and the thrill of good old action-adventure, Gridlinked seems to run out of steam midway through. Even weeks later, I remember a number of elements from the beginning of the novel, and almost nothing of the end. Not so coincidentally, I do remember a deep feeling of let-down at the point where the Dragon is revealed to be part of the novel’s plot rather than an amusing side-detail.

    The rest of the novel plays like a standard chase thriller with stranger pursuers and faster vehicles. Asher doesn’t to much with the un-gridlinking of his protagonist and spends too much time with the antagonist. After a while, it just becomes a big blur. You’ll keep reading to see what happens to a few characters, and sigh in slight exasperation as one miraculous escape follows another.

    I’m still not so sure why my interest evaporated so quickly: this is the type of novel that I’m supposed to like, and yet it just fell flat. The book as a whole runs significantly too long, leaving the impression that it’s overwritten. The mundane eventually overwhelms the interesting. Even the answers to the original mystery don’t seem so urgent by the end of the book. I found myself wondering when I’d be able to get my hands on Richard Morgan’s next novel.

    But I’m not giving up on Asher. He’s clearly part of Cyberpunk 2.0, and likely to grow into a more skillful writer: the memorable elements of Gridlinked clearly show that he’s not to be dismissed lightly. My dissatisfaction with Gridlinked may just be a freak accident of public transportation distraction, or it may be the result of a first novel’s lack of control. Whatever the reason, I’m likely to have a look at Asher’s other work… in due time.

  • Deception Point, Dan Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 2001, 557 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-02738-7

    Books seldom get a second chance. Most of them surface in bookstores, don’t sell all that well and disappear in a whimper, never to resurface. In lucky cases, they may be reprinted after a movie adaptation or a runaway bestseller by the same author. In Dan Brown’s case, his publisher didn’t just get one mega-seller with The Da Vinci Code: It got three bonus best-sellers by reprinting Brown’s previous novels, none of which had sold all that well during their first print runs. (The good news is that if you’ve got one of those first editions, you can pretty much pay for your next holidays by selling it to collectors.)

    And so that’s how Deception Point re-emerged in bookstores three years after original publication, granted a second life by the boffo success of Brown’s fourth novel. For fans of The Da Vinci Code or Angels & Demons, how does Brown’s third novel stack up?

    The least one can say is that there is consistency to his method, even though the atmosphere of the book is different from the “Robert Langdon” thrillers. Deception Point is more political (not partisan, mind you, but with a number of power-playing politicians as characters), more action-oriented and, in some respects, closer to a typical techno-thriller than Brown’s best-known works. For those who complained that The Da Vinci Code was all talk and little action, have a look at this one.

    It starts in Washington D.C., as protagonist Rachel Sexton is sent to an Arctic glacier on behalf of the president. Her mission: validate a revolutionary scientific find that you won’t have any trouble guessing ahead of time. But things aren’t so simple, of course. For one thing, Rachel is the daughter of another politician with excellent chances of taking over the White House. For another, there are three Delta Force operatives buried in the snow, making sure that everything goes according to plan…

    No doubt about it: Deception Point is a full-bore, straight-ahead thriller that faithfully understands the rules of the genre. Exotic facts, clear characters, steady forward momentum and unobtrusive writing are the norm here, and it’s not hard to imagine Brown asking himself “How can I juice up this storyline?” over and over again. As a result, there are the usual nick-of-time escapes, chases, explosions, fancy deaths and ruthless operators. It’s formulaic, but it works really well in sucking the reader from one tight chapter to another. While the literary and religious world have united in condemning Brown’s success, faithful thriller readers can only appreciate that Brown is just doing what he’s supposed to do. NRO, nuclear submarines, oceanographic research, high-tech weaponry, White House operational details, woo-hoo!

    It’s not all good, of course. A number of errors here and there spoil the effect (somehow, I don’t think that an entire meteorite can be heated up by a focused laser), but not as much as a few outrageous developments. In his quest to amplify the impact of his storyline, Brown often overreaches, and the reader is abruptly reminded that this is only, after all, a particularly sophisticated thrill machine. (This impression gets worse as the book nears its end and lasts just a bit too long.) Brown does himself disservice by swearing up and down that technologies described in the book all exist: knowledgeable readers will roll their eyes at the ways he stretches a number of point. His sources of inspiration are also obvious: Echoes of 1996-1998 Bill Clinton are obvious in at least two separate plot threads.

    Worse yet for Brown fans is the way he repeats himself from one novel to another. Never trust his mentor characters! What’s both amusing and infuriating is the way Brown is willing to take on sacred cows (the Vatican, CERN, here NASA) in his quest for ever-more fantastic antagonists: While it may be interesting to read about, it also sends a generally muddled message –assuming messages are what Brown wants to send.

    Otherwise, well, this is another solid thriller from a writer suddenly hyped beyond any reasonable chance of fulfilling expectations. It may or may not be better, from a technical perspective, than The Da Vinci Code, but it’s sure to offer what people are looking for when they’re picking up a thriller. It seldom slows down during its 550+ pages, and neither will readers.

  • The Republican War on Science, Chris Mooney

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Basic Books, 2005, 342 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-465-04675-4

    Faithful readers of these reviews (if any) already suspect my distinct lack of enthusiasm for the Bush administration in particular and modern Republicanism in general. If there was plenty to admire in the traditional Republican model (fiscal restraint, promotion of civility, determination to use force when necessary), the newer post-Goldwater Republicanism has forged an alliance between religious conservatives and big-business interest that’s simply too dangerous to condone. Especially when its starts messing with science.

    In The Republican War on Terror, science journalist Chris Mooney takes aim, as the title clearly indicates, at the steady pattern of anti-scientific behaviour from Republican politicians. While acknowledging early on that political abuse of science is a bipartisan affair, Mooney thinks that there is particular cause to single out Republicans (not just the Bush administration) as the worst offenders. They, argues Mooney, have a long history of deliberately misrepresenting research, shutting down independent enquiries and financing their own brand of contrarian research through ideological think-tanks. After reading the book, you’ll be hard-pressed to disagree.

    The problem stems from the modern Republican Party’s two biggest constituencies: The Religious Right and Big Business interests. Neither of them are particularly interested in the objective assessment processes of science, nor in factual conclusions. Mooney takes us back to the Reagan years, with a look at the Goldwater campaign, to demonstrate the long history of anti-intellectualism within the Republican Party. Then he works his way forward, showing the damage caused by both of those factors.

    Big Business, of course, has a number of business models to protect. Anything that suggests health impacts from industrial activities directly threatens those business models. Hence the tobacco companies’ efforts at discrediting links between cigarettes and lung cancer. Hence the efforts to finance studies by ideologically-driven institutes to disprove or dismiss evidence of Global Warming. You can expect industry lobby to say these things, but when Republican members of congress parrot the same lines, (allowing the “moderate” Bush administration to say “well, there’s doubt out there”), it’s clearly not the same game.

    The Religious Right, on the other hand, has realized that strictly moral points aren’t “sellable” by themselves and so resorts to false science in order to “demonstrate” its ideological values. Can’t argue that abortions are immoral? Just manufacture proofs that abortions offer health risks. Can’t deal with the reality of condoms? Just say they don’t work. Studies that suggest that abstinence-only sexual education programs are ineffective or that needle-exchange programs work are dismissed not because they’re flawed, but because they don’t agree with the conservative social agenda. Again, you would expect church leaders to make those claims, but when carefully-chose federal officials start messing with research funds in order to eliminate dissenting research, it’s time to ring the alarm bell.

    Mooney shows, over and over again, a steady pattern of scientific abuse, dismissal, politicization of government agencies, anti-intellectual trends, attack mechanism that the anti-science agenda of the Republican party becomes more than obvious. (And we haven’t even said anything about the “Intelligent Design” nonsense.) Particularly revealing is the pattern through which politicians can influence scientific research through spin or budgetary manoeuvres. It’s impossible to claim an interest in the modern scientific research process and ignore this book. (And lest I be accused of cheap anti-Americanism, it’s true that Canada’s own federal research infrastructure has known its share of controversy. Search around for “Shiv Chopra” for the details.)

    The Republican War on Science is certainly not a pleasant reading experience. It’s infuriating, depressing, mind-boggling and completely convincing. Mooney has spent a lot of time and effort proving his thesis: Of the book’s 342 pages, eight list interview subjects and over sixty are made of notes and sources. A dozen-page index makes this a great reference source. The main text itself is clearly written and utterly damning. The thin appendix suggests a few solutions, but the problem itself seems formidable. Maybe it’s time for our American friends to clean their House?

  • Looking for Jake, China Miéville

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2005, 303 pages, C$21.00 tpb, ISBN 0-345-47607-7

    After the highly atypical success of Perdido Street Station and the two subsequent “Bas-Lag” novels, China Miéville now has a short-story collection on the shelves: Looking for Jake. Unlike other authors with drawers full of short fiction, this collection took a fair time to assemble because of the scarcity of material to reprint: Miéville is a long-distance writer, and his predilection for writing long means that his short-story output has been comparatively slight, and late in coming: Of the 14 stories in Looking for Jake, only two date from before Perdido Street Station. This anthology will allow readers to answer an interesting question: We know that Miéville can write novels, but is he as good with his short stories?

    At first, the answer is reassuring. Cherry-picking the collection for its best material, one quickly settle on a few noteworthy short stories. “Reports of Certain Events in London” is a natural choice, given how it was nominated for a 2005 World Fantasy Award. Much like most of the other tales in the volume, it features unusual storytelling (a writer named “China Miéville” telling us about a package mistakenly received) and an original idea (migratory street-fighting!). “Foundations” tells us about buildings thirsting for sacrifice, with a political twist. “Go Between” is about a man asked to bring things (discovered in the strangest yet most ordinary locations) to other places, with no idea what or who he’s working for and even less of an idea if his work (or refusal to work) is doing anything at all; a fine tale well-told. “The Ball Room” packs a mean chill as a horror story told from within an IKEA-like store, though you’ll have to squint at the table of contents to discover that it was co-written with Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer.

    Clearly, Looking for Jake shows that Miéville, for all of his critical acclaim, remains a horror storyteller first and foremost. “The Tain” and the title story may be exquisitely written, but they remain post-apocalyptic stories with mean beasties lurking in the background. (In “The Tain”, as the title suggests, mirror reflexions take over “our world”. The scene revealing the idea is deliciously shocking.) I may not have cared too much for “Familiar”, but it features plenty of gruesome and grotesque content. Miéville even allows himself some faint Lovecraftian overtones of someone who has clearly Seen Too Much in “Details”. Unwelcome vision also plays a part in “Different Skies”, which brings to mind a riff on the classic “Slow Glass” concept.

    But there isn’t just horror in Looking for Jake: Miéville is a funny fellow in conversation, and so a few humorous stories pepper the anthology. The most obvious of them is “’tis the Season”, a holiday tale (first published in no less a venue than Socialist Review) set in a future where Christmas™ is only available to those with the means to license it. “Entry Taken From a Medical Encyclopedia” re-prints Miéville contribution to the Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases: It’s impossible to summarize, but it’s both spooky and hilarious. “Jack” may not be a funny story, but it’s a fine nod toward fans of the Bas-Lag universe, with a twist. “An End to Hunger” is a dot-com tale halfway between humour and horror, though its overall impact is muted.

    Not that it’s the only misfire in the collection. Tastes will differ, but I myself couldn’t make myself care for “Familiar”, “Details” nor “Different Skies.” I still can’t make much sense of “On the Way to the Front”, a short graphic short story (with illustrations by Liam Sharp) that’s heavy on mood but light on meaning. In the same vein, a number of stories bury their central idea in too much distraction, with “The Tain” being perhaps the most obvious example.

    On the other hand, “The Tain” is the story with the best characterization, which is no accident given how it’s three times as long as the other stories. Miéville’s talent for well-written invention shines through his short stories, but it’s obvious that he needs the space offered by a novel to develop his visions. Still, Looking for Jake offers plenty of thrills for Miéville fans, and plenty of chills for all readers. In fact, it’s a decent introduction to his work for harried readers without the time to read any of his massive novels. The writing is good (if not exactly tight) and the ideas are there. It’ll probably take five years before Miéville writes enough short stories to fill another collection, but Looking for Jake will do until then.

  • The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pan, 2002, 284 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-330-32312-1

    There is a lot to be said against the type of book exemplified by Douglas Adams’ The Salmon of Doubt. It is, after all, a posthumous collection of Adams’ shorter pieces. The very idea of a bundling of scraps ready to be sold to hordes of grieving readers is borderline distasteful. Literary necrophilia is one way of calling it; fan exploitation is another. It’s the sort of thinking that leads to authors being more prolific after death (hello, L. Ron Hubbard) through a homoeopathic publishing technique in which more and more of the original content is distilled away by hired ghostwriters.

    Fortunately, The Salmon of Doubt manages to please fans without too much of an aftertaste. Offering the closest thing to a Douglas autobiography, it brings together several short magazine pieces, interviews and columns. More unusually, it bundles everything with a short story, a barn-burning speech on artificial intelligence and eleven chapters of Douglas’ unfinished last Dirk Gently novel, the eponymous Salmon of Doubt.

    Ignore, if you will, the ghoulish foreword in which the knowledgeable editor describes how he had Douglas Adams’ hard drive mirrored and rescued from the digital abyss. Most of The Salmon of Doubt is made of previously published material (a lot of it available online) previously scattered over thirty five year’s worth of publication. There’s nothing evil in bringing together this material. It’s even a service to Adams fans who want to complete their collection of material. What’s more, it allows Adams to speak for himself, a fascinating prospect given the breath of his intellect.

    And so we get to the book’s first section, “Life”, which collects autobiographical material. From Douglas’ first published piece (a 1965 letter in Eagle and Boys’ World Magazine) to essays about his schooling, his work, his nose and so on. A number of interviews are here collected, giving a glimpse in the number of passions that Adams pursued. The inimitable Adamsian wit is in full display throughout the section. (As far as I’m concerned, the following quote is worth the price of the book: “Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent thirty-five year old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson.” [P.45]) Two lengthier travelogues complete the picture, representing Douglas’ love of exotic places.

    The second section, “the Universe”, deals in weightier topics and lengthier pieces. Computers are discussed in general, and Apple computers in specific. Also reprinted is Douglas’ famous interview with American Atheists magazine in which he claims his desciption as a “radical Atheist”. Newspaper and web columns make up the bulk of this section and portray Adams as a visionary, a deep thinker and a playful philosopher. The cornerstone of the section is the reprinted impromptu lecture “Is there an artificial God?”. Extemporaneously delivered and fortuitously recorded, this lengthier piece studies man’s place in the universe thanks to the “four stages of sand” metaphor, tying together an awe-inspiring number of concepts and ideas dear to Douglas. I’m not sure how much of it was truly spontaneous, but it’s an exceptional speech that is well-worth reading. It, fittingly enough, is also widely available on-line.

    But the real selling point of The Salmon of Doubt is the last section “and everything”, which bookends eleven reconstructed chapters of Douglas’ last manuscript with a number of bits about his creative process and the short story “Young Zaphod Plays it Safe” (reprinted in some omnibus editions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) Readers will quibble about the value of the material: I myself was never Dirk Gently’s biggest fan, but the excerpts here were enough to warm me in anticipation for a full novel that will never exist. Which may be the biggest let-down of the whole thing: We’ve been handed the first part of an unfinished novel.

    But the rest of the book is no let-down. As an act of posthumous fan plundering, it’s a good and deserving one: Douglas’ memory is well-served by the pieces collected in The Salmon of Doubt, and so will his readers. Enjoy this last trip down the galaxy of Douglas Adams’ imagination.

  • Foley is Good, Mick Foley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Torch, 2001, 592 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-103241-7

    I’m not a wrestling fan. And yet, thanks to the pervasive turn-of-the-century pop-culture complex, it’s nearly impossible to avoid even a cursory knowledge of sport-entertainment superstars. Vince McMahon? The Rock? Chyna? Yup. I’ve never seen a single wrestling match, but I’ve read Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s autobiography, seen Chyna on “Third Rock From the Sun” and enjoyed the BEYOND THE MAT documentary. Knowledge of the small wrestling pocket universe seems to be spreading by osmosis, without any conscious effort from my part.

    I even think that Barry W. Blaustein is right in BEYOND THE MAT when he says that wrestling is real. Yes, the outcome of matches is fixed. But so are movie fights, and that doesn’t take away anything from the talents of stunt people. What’s more, stunt people aren’t usually asked to create characters, and do live fights in character every second evening for weeks at a time. Injuries are real, and so is the talent of the performers, however unusual that talent may seem to you.

    So that’s how you could find me in September 2005, reading the second autobiography of a wrestler. In one of those “oh, what the heck” second-hand book purchases gone horribly amusing, the book’s time in my to-be-read pile was up.

    And you know what? I really enjoyed it. Mick Foley’s writing skills may or may not be artificially enhanced by a team of copy-editors, but his raw honesty is real. A follow-up to Have a Nice Day!, Foley is Good (a slight deformation on the “Foley is God” fan posters) tells the story of Foley’s last few years in the wrestling world. (If “last” is a concept that applies in a universe where one can have a dozen retirement matches.) At a hefty 592 pages, this book aims to tell all and then tell a little bit more. This isn’t just an autobiography, but also an answer to media critics decrying wrestling. In enjoyable but overlong segments, Foley takes some pleasure in disproving conservative groups’ charges against wrestling (hard task, that…) and doesn’t miss an opportunity to point the finger at other sports in the violence department. While his points are often over-articulated (don’t be surprised if you start flipping the pages after muttering “enough is enough”), it makes for an interesting position paper. Foley, of course, has been through the media wringer a few times, and he doesn’t shy away from claiming that “the real world is faker than wrestling”.

    You may or may not want to take that last affirmation with a grain of salt, but what’s far less disputable is Mick Foley’s joy in being, well, Mick Foley. In spending time with his family, indulging in theme-park rides, talking movies and ragging on his usual gallery of comedy targets. BEYOND THE MAT showed him as a reasonable family guy doing an unusual performance job. This book does little to dispel this impression, crammed as it is with scenes from Foley’s home life. It’s intended to be very likable, and it is.

    What’s not as likable, but perhaps more honest, is the description of how wrestlers are just ordinary schmoes with regular jobs. Travelling from hotel to hotel for weeks, away from family, being forced to deal with constant pain and injuries –wow, no thanks. To add fiscal insult to real injury, the wrestlers themselves aren’t particularly well-paid, certainly not at the level their fame would suggest. At some point, Foley shrugs off soft-drug consumption by saying essentially –they’re bruised, they’re alone and they’re not even home: what do you want them to do? Ouch.

    Non-wrestling fans may feel a lot of this material flying well over their head. The lingo is specialized, the feuds are layered and the basic assumptions are… unusual. Compounding the difficulty is that Foley is Good is a sequel to another book. And yet, despite the lack of background knowledge, this is a very accessible autobiography. Better yet, it’s impossible to stop reading once you’re into it: Foley’s chatty style is enough to make you want to read just one chapter before calling it a day. At the end of the book, I’m still not much of a wrestling fan… but darn if I don’t find the whole circus a lot more interesting.

  • Tomahawk, David Poyer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1998, 371 pages, C$33.99 hc, ISBN 0-312-17975-8

    I remember reading David Poyer’s The Gulf a long time ago. I also remember not caring too much for it: not enough action, ambiguous ending, bad plotting and useless subplots. That certainly explains why it took me so long to read another of Poyer’s books. This one is better than The Gulf. Not by much, but it’s better.

    Tomahawk is a novel in the same “modern Navy” series than The Gulf which stars career Navy protagonist Dan Lenson. As this novel begins, sometime during the late eighties, Lenson is recalled to Washington to work on the development of the Tomahawk missile. Confronting Lenson is a career that’s not going anywhere, growing doubts about the morality of military force and the last tatters of a painful divorce. As he falls for a peace activist and indications of a spy start swirling around the office, what’s Lenson to do? Quit his career or keep working in something with which he doesn’t agree?

    I certainly wasn’t expecting much from Tomahawk. Late eighties setting? Pulse-pounding procurement action? Musings on the nature of force? Give me a break: I read military fiction for other reasons. Heck, I read military techno-thriller for fun. Give me something interesting.

    Even the beginning of the novel doesn’t inspire confidence, showing a Lenson sinking deeper in self-doubts, stuck in a project attacked from all sides. You can throw as many spies, peace activists and journalists as you want in the mix, there aren’t too many ways of making a weapon development process sound sexy. (Although Stephen Coonts came damn close in The Minotaur)

    It’s almost amusing to see Poyer try everything he can think about in order to juice up his inner-beltway storyline. Sometimes, it works: One of the book’s standout sequence show our protagonist surviving a terrible Canadian snowstorm. Another highlight comes later in the book as an espionage sting goes spectacularly wrong. But Poyer isn’t perfect, and so other attempts to inject artificial interest in the material don’t fare as well. A random death comes as a convenient shock (it’s later revealed not to be so random, but still convenient), but the vigilante reaction of the protagonist comes as a dumb idea made even dumber by a secondary character’s lack of self-preservation sense. Being a military fiction writer isn’t easy when readers expect you to shoot, blow or trash something every hundred pages, and Poyer copes only moderately well with the challenge.

    Most of Tomahawk isn’t nearly so interesting one way or another. The stale atmosphere of the late eighties isn’t overpowering, but it’s certainly there. Lenson goes to meetings, briefs people, follows night classes, goes to parties, learns how Washington works, deals with his growing doubts and generally experience a mid-life crisis for the benefit of the book’s readers. Yet the novel dares to be something more, something closer to a character study. It is simultaneously more and less ambitious than other military thrillers, almost taking the book in mainstream fiction territory at times.

    The surprise is that even with its low-octane content and misguided high-energy spikes, Tomahawk ends up deserving some attention. The various controversies surrounding the testing of cruise missiles in Canada has long since abated (it’s hard to argue with a completed, successful project), but Poyer brings them back in the forefront, along with the palpable sense of a genuinely new revolution in weapon-making. We’ve had fifteen years to get used to the idea that an American president can point at any point on the map and say “destroy this” without endangering any human life in the process, but that is a very new development in warfare, and this book shows a slice of this revolution.

    I found myself absorbed in Lenson’s adventures and the way Poyer describes the Washington power game almost despite my most sarcastic intentions, regardless of the sometime sketchy plausibility of the book’s developments. Military fiction may be about people shooting at each other, but there’s a decision-making component in military strategy that ought to be explored more often like Poyer does. Don’t be fooled: Tomahawk won’t make me rush to grab every single Poyer book in existence. On the other hand, I just became far less averse to the though of picking some of them up at the next second-hand book sale.

  • Scatterbrain, Larry Niven

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2003, 317 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30137-7

    It’s impossible, nowadays, to discuss Larry Niven’s career without mentioning something about how he’s just not as good as he used to be. That would be a gentle use of an understatement, mind you: From being one of Science Fiction’s essential authors during the late sixties and early seventies, Niven has declined to a point where most SF critics would be hard-pressed to even like his latest output. 1980 seemed to mark the decline point in his solo work: His collaborations started sucking much later, but it’s been years since anyone has been impressed by something with “Larry Niven” on the cover. Scatterbrain is unlikely to change anyone’s mind. If nothing else, it’s likely to evoke weak puns on being a scatter-shot collection.

    Your guess is as good as mine in trying to guess why the Larry Niven of 1965-1975, once so vital and central to the genre, would degenerate into the sort of parody exhibited in latter work. I have among my prized possessions a personally dedicated copy of N-Space, the 1990 anthology bringing together essential pieces from Niven’s early career. This was followed by 1991’s Playgrounds of the Mind, a weaker but still interesting collection. Scatterbrain is meant to be a third volume in this best-of anthology series, but the only thing its serves to do is highlight how little there is to keep in Niven’s last decade of work.

    There are, to be fair, a number of good bits. A piece on “Autograph Etiquette” provides hard-earned advice to both readers and writers, advice which I intend on following to the letter. His “Ice and Mirrors” collaboration with Brenda Cooper is a decent story, though one notes from the email correspondence that follows that Cooper seems to have done most of the work. “The Woman in Del Rey Crater” isn’t bad either, but it was first published in Niven’s own 1995 Flatlander theme anthology, where it took a back seat to Niven’s earlier work about “Gil the ARM”.

    Even Niven’s non-fiction, once so witty and accessible, is noticeably worse this time around. Scatterbrain contains a number of pieces on space exploration, high technology, SF fandom and Niven’s other interests, but don’t blame me if you have a hard time getting through them: Nearly all of them exhibit a tendency to fly away in incomprehensible directions, tripping readers through incoherent content and rambling development. They certainly make an impression: that of a writer who doesn’t know what to do next.

    Novel excerpts (from Destiny’s Road and the awful Ringworld Throne) also serve to highlight that Niven hasn’t done much better in writing at longer length these past few years either. The short stories are all similarly uninspiring, the worst of them recycling once-vibrant Niven creations (like the Draco Tavern and Beowulf Shaeffer) in insipid outings. Reading Scatterbrain is an experience best avoided by whoever still has a shred of confidence in Niven’s greatness: it just serves to suggest that his decline is irreversible. Everything in this volume is an awful reminder that Niven is simply nowhere as good as he used to be.

    What’s more, you almost get the sense that Niven and his editors know it. Why else include, in a slim “best of” volume, pages of email correspondence between Niven and his collaborators? Why waste our time with what are essentially scraps and shopping lists culled from Niven’s recycling bin?

    No doubt about it: Scatterbrain is pure frustration in hardcover format. It’s a book that scarcely deserves to be placed next to Playground of the Mind, let alone N-Space. And that should tell you all about Niven’s current status as a Science Fiction writer. Sure, if someone has earned the right to coast on an established reputation, it’s the early Niven. But why does it have to be such a painful spectacle for the rest of us?  Retirement is always an option.

  • The Men Who Stare at Goats, Jon Ronson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2004, 257 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-7432-4192-4

    It’s a comforting fiction to think that the world is rational. That people take decisions in their own best interest, that the truth will shine, that rationality ultimately prevails. The last few years have certainly been a shock in this matter, as the American government keeps making one stupid mistake after another (with often-fatal results), as so-called “intelligent design” finds popular favour, as evidence of global warming is casually dismissed by oil profiteers and blind followers.

    If that’s not depressing enough, wait until you read Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, a book describing, in its own subtitle, “what happened when a small group of men –highly placed within the United States military, the government, and the intelligence services- began believing in very strange things.”

    It starts early in the “War on Terror” as Uri Geller tells Ronson that he’s been reactivated by elements of the US government. You won’t believe where it ends.

    As Ronson starts to unravel the Geller/government link, he begins to hear very strange rumours. A psychic unit deep in the US Army. A “goat lab” where soldiers would stare at goats in the hope of remotely stopping their heartbeat. Plans for a US Army “First Earth Battalion” applying new-age concepts to warfare. A covert war for psychic warriors waged between Al Quaeda and the US government.

    Then Ronson starts meeting the people who believe in those things.

    Albert Stubblebine, for instance, a general who tried to walk through walls (bruising his nose) and led the US Army’s secret psychic team. (A team so secret it didn’t even have a budget for coffee, and whose lack of success eventually led them to believe they were an expendable front for another even more secret team.) Jim Channon, whose new-age “First Earth Battalion” ideas later led to some curious real-world applications. Guy Savelli, the man who arguably stared a goat to death. Pete Brusso, capable of inflicting extraordinary pain with an ordinary-looking plastic object.

    In Ronson’s sweetly disbelieving style, this trail of absurd research is deeply amusing and often laugh-out-loud hilarious. But the laughs taper off as we come to realize the uncritical momentum of a government gone out of control in the drive to wage “war on terror”. “You cannot afford to miss something.” argues Stubblebine while justifying his experiments, and while it’s hard to counter this type of logic, it doesn’t do much to calm down qualms that nuts can be found everywhere, including places of considerable power.

    What’s worse is Ronson’s growing suspicion that some of the “crazy” stuff is deliberate misdirection. Every newscaster became a comedian when reporting that American interrogators were blaring the Barney song to Iraqi prisoners in effort to break them down. Barney and torture: a hilarious combination! But the gut-smile effect of the purple dinosaur quickly takes the sting away from, yes, state-sponsored psychological torture techniques. What if, suggests Ronson, the Abu Ghraib pictures were a completely deliberate way to scare the wits out of Arab audiences already convinced of American decadence? What if ridicule obscured the truth, made it inconsequential?

    Despite the laughs and the easy writing style (you can read this book in ninety minutes, easy), The Men Who Stare At Goats is deeply disturbing. It paints the picture of a “war on terror” that justifies just about everything, even things that would be considered insane. While hardly a perfect book (The lack of an index betrays the difficulty in using the book as reference), it’s certainly unique and memorable. Despite the obvious difficulties in confirming some of Ronson’s reporting (a number of conversations are of the “I will deny everything” category, and whole sections are mere informed speculation from Ronson’s part), what can be confirmed is unsettling enough.

    The world is not rational. But what’s even scarier is that it may be very rational in being irrational.

  • Hitchhiker, M.J. Simpson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, 393 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-340-82766-1

    Douglas Adams, author of the mega-selling Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, died in early 2001. As the publishing industry turns, the arrival of at least one posthumous biography could be expected by 2003. The surprise was that there would be two of them: An official biography written by one of his editors (Nick Webb’s Wish You Were Here) and another, unofficial one, written by the ex-president of his fan club. (M.J. Simpson’s Hitchhiker) As a critic, the temptation was irresistible to re-read the two book in light of the HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY video release, with a two-year buffer to check the reception of both books.

    Unusually enough, even a casual Internet search shows that the appearance of two biographies within months of each other wasn’t completely unexpected by the authors. They apparently decided, early on, to focus on different aspects of Adams’ life: Webb on Adams’ life and Simpson on Adams’ work. As you can expect, this doesn’t completely remove all duplication, but it means that you can read both books and find something of value in each.

    If there’s one recommendation to make before delving too deep in either biography, it’s that Douglas’ work is an essential prerequisite. Don’t assume you’ll be fine because you’ve read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ten years ago: Douglas only published nine books, and given his fabled tendency to procrastinate, every one of them is important. The “Dirk Gently” duology is important. The Meaning of Liff is important. Last Chance to See is very important. Heck, The Salmon of Doubt is especially important given the wealth of background material information contained therein. Additionally, you may want to beg, steal or borrow a copy of Neil Gaiman’s Don’t Panic! (as revised by Simpson) before attempting Simpson’s book, as he makes clear in his introduction that he tried to avoid duplicating anecdotes. (Granted, you should also read Douglas’ work on its own merit, but I’m trying to be helpful, here.)

    Douglas was a complex individual, brilliant and quirky, sometimes genius-level and sometime of an astonishing naiveté. Both biographies do a good job at trying to illustrate what was Douglas’ essence and of the two, Wish You Were Here comes perhaps closest, informed as it was by all-access interviews with Douglas’ friends and family. Simpson’s Hitchhiker, on the other hand, takes a decidedly more sceptical stance toward Douglas’ stories given his gift for self-aggrandizement. The whole “I first imagined a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck” story, for instance, is debunked late in Hitchhiker, after several other stories (including the Forbidden Planet “so many people mobbed the store I nearly didn’t make it to the signing” story.) are similarly questioned. As per the Webb-Simpson agreement, Hitchhiker is also more satisfying from a critical viewpoint, as Simpson spends more time covering the strengths and weaknesses of Douglas’s work, as well as why it’s so appealing to so many people.

    Writing-wise, Webb sometime makes a valiant attempt at writing a book in the style of Douglas, and if it doesn’t always succeeds (some diversions, such as the take-off on left-handedness, are more distracting that helpful), it makes for a more interesting reading experience than Simpson’s workmanlike prose. On the other hand, Wish You Were Here sometimes offer too much information, while Hitchhiker is more to the point.

    Ultimately, I find myself unwilling to recommend either book at the exclusion of another. As with most people, Douglas Adams is too complex for a single interpretation. While Webb and Simpson don’t offer very different views, there are facets covered in one work that aren’t covered in the other. Read both in close succession (preferably right after The Salmon of Doubt, which could be called Douglas’ own fragmented autobiography) and you’ll get the idea.

  • Venus, Ben Bova

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 382 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87216-X

    Like the true professional that he is, Bova delivers another entirely ordinary novel with Venus, the result being good enough to make us think that this is entirely acceptable.

    Bova, of course, is one of the Grand Old Men of hard Science Fiction. A scientist and engineer, his career in the genre dates back to the late sixties and his bibliography is, by now, as long as some people’s entire libraries. Looking through the titles, one finds a good number of solid works, but not one single classic. There’s a good reason why.

    While Bova can occasionally be funny (Cyberbooks) or meddle in alternate history (Triumph), most of his output is nuts-and-bolts hard-SF with plenty of details and a fascination for the future history of the Solar System. His career is even long enough that his first future history (The “Kinsman” saga) was obsoleted by the end of the Cold War, requiring a new one loosely inaugurated by 1992’s Mars. This second series, the “Grand Tour,” is nothing less than an attempt to write a future history of the Solar System, one book and one astronomical feature at a time. As of late 2005, he’s up to fifteen books; more are promised.

    Despite having been one of the first “Grand Tour” books written, Venus is, in internal chronology, supposed to be one of the last. It doesn’t matter much, of course: The story stands well alone and the background information is of the classical future variety: If you’re a faithful SF reader, it doesn’t take much effort to assume the standard “mine the asteroids, colonize Moon+Mars” stuff.

    But Venus isn’t your usual kettle of cold fish. Easily one of the most inhospitable places in the Solar System, Venus is almost deliberately hostile to human life. Not only is it devoid of life-bearing features like most of the solar system, but it’s also hot enough to melt lead, with an acidic atmosphere that’s hungry for man-made material. The usual space-going technologies won’t be enough for whoever is bold enough to explore the second planet.

    As the novel begins, Venus has already made one victim: Alex Humphries, brother of our protagonist Van and son of Martin, one of the solar system’s richest individual. Our protagonist isn’t the type of man heroes are made of: sickly, superficial and reluctant to face danger, Van is rapidly forced to made a bold gesture when his allowance is cut off and he’s manipulated in retrieving the remains of his long-lost brother. A simple objective with complicated prerequisites, including a vessel capable of diving deep inside Venus’ atmosphere. But he’s not alone in looking for the prize: His father’s worst enemy is also heading for Venus…

    As a story, Venus is straight-up classical hard-SF. Define a problem, put the protagonist in danger, reduce the size of their survival box and provide plenty of technical details. There are twists and turns, but nothing terribly surprising. (Even the surprises are seen well in advance: One particular plot twist is shouted nearly a hundred pages before: only the dullest readers will fail to perceive the implications of a successful blood transfusion.)

    If I’m being flippant, there’s good reason to: You can almost imagine a reader of fine literature grabbing ahold of Venus and singlebookedly confirming his or her worst predictions about genre SF: shoddy characters, by-the-number plotting, featureless prose and a dramatic arc designed to end on a happy note. Whoever is interested in state-of-the-art SF won’t find it here: This is comfort food for fans of engineering fiction, with nary an unsettling moment.

    But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. Despite the book’s flaws, I was surprised to feel swept along for the ride in the best tradition of classical SF. Venus won’t make a splash in the memory pool of genre fiction (five years after publication, it’s possible to be definitive about such a statement), but it’s adequate reading for fans of the sub-genre. We all need good mid-list books now and then, if only to keep the careful illusion that there is indeed a “genre” out there from which the best books can distinguish themselves. Venus is part of the solid whole of SF, exactly -indeed- the kind of work to confirm whatever prejudices one may have about Science Fiction.

    If nothing else, it doesn’t take a long time to read.

  • From Time to Time, Jack Finney

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1995, 303 pages, C$20.00 tpb, ISBN 0-671-89884-1

    Time travel is, by now, one of Science Fiction’s most well-worn themes. In steady use since at least H.G.Wells’s The Time Machine, is it still possible to do something, anything new with it? Whatever the answer, it won’t be found in Jack Finney’s From Time to Time, a disappointing novel that illuminates more by its failure than its qualities.

    It is perhaps unfair to attack the novel with the cognitive tools of SF criticism. From Time to Time is, after all, primarily a sequel to Finney’s own Time and Again (1970), a time-travel fable that mishandled its SF element in much the same fashion, for much the same goals.

    Finney, despite non-trivial genre credentials (he was the author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, mind you) isn’t terribly interested in the verisimilitude of time-travel in either novel. In Time and Again, protagonist Si Morley discovers through a government agency that he, alone among perhaps billions, is able to self-hypnotize himself in an earlier time. The hand-waving explanation involves individuals being “bound” to their time-lines by countless details, but immersing themselves so completely in another time that they literally project themselves in the past. No, it doesn’t make sense. No, you’re not supposed to think about it.

    Your not supposed to nit-pick the time travel mechanism because the whole point of both books is to allow a contemporary character the chance to experience another time. Both books are historical novels in disguise, wrapped in some mubo-jumbo science-fantasy and structured along the lines of a thriller. Both books sometime stop for entire chapters as Finney spends his time describing this or that aspect of the period. I suppose that fans of New York in 1882 and 1912 will be delighted at the amount of period detail. For others, it can be all a big bore.

    This isn’t to say that Finney is unsuccessful. If his goal was to deliver a hidden chronologue, it works: He’s got an eye for detail, and there are a number of small culture shocks that are reasonably striking. Unfortunately, Finney’s romantic vision of the past is so often selective that it loses its credibility. His rose-tinted nostalgic vision of past New Yorks really grates after a while.

    It goes without saying that his protagonist is a healthy white male: One suspects that Si Morley’s enchantment with long-gone New York wouldn’t last as long had he been part of any oppressed minority, or had he found himself in need of medical treatment. The past may be an interesting place to visit, but one would definitely want to avoid living there. Alas, that’s exactly what Morley comes to prefer at the end of Time and Again, taking the opportunity to destroy the government’s time-travel project after some unconvincing moustache-twirling from the book’s antagonists.

    But don’t worry: Time appears to be as resilient as the author’s thirst for sequel dollars, and so From Time to Time begins with an intriguing coda in which time anomalies are studied. This notion of a “correct” time-line isn’t terribly convincing, but at least it’s some real SF content. But as Si starts travelling again, as is the case, from time to time, he discovers the unremarkable elasticity of time and finds himself unable to change the past, or the future. As an SF concept, it’s not terribly original (nor carefully explored), but it’s better than nothing at all.

    On the other hand, the lengthy digressions are maybe even more obvious in the sequel, as Finney stops the action for a chapter and takes us to vaudreville, or flying around 1912 New York. Again: history buffs will be taken. Others will skip ahead.

    Reading Time After Time, it occurs by contrast that the vast majority of written SF often treats time-travel as an instrument for change, as a way to explore other ideas. Here, time-travel is merely a device to blanket oneself in comfortable nostalgia, a quick way to describe historical details to modern readers. Should you find yourself obliged to explain why Finney’s two books aren’t science-fiction despite featuring time-travel, begin with this difference in intention.

    Obviously, this book -like its prequel- isn’t written for the SF audience. The cheap candy-coated nostalgic sentimentality, the eye-rolling time-travel mechanism and the lack of willingness to engage in serious speculation makes it a failure as a genre novel. Given the book’s continued longevity in print, mainstream readers obviously had a different reaction.