Book Review

  • In the Country of the Blind, Michael Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 549 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34498-X

    In the history of the Science Fiction genre, few notions have captured readers’ imagination as much as psychohistory – the idea that given a sufficient number of people to study, sociology becomes as deterministic as classical physics. In Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation series, political movements can be described using mathematical equations, and a savvy psychohistorian can predict the future of the empire by running a few statistical models. It’s a seductive idea in part given SF readers’ fondness for hard science and cold equations, but also because it gives validity to SF’s pretencions of predicting the future. Why, yes, a sufficiently clever writer, well-versed in history and sciences, can say what’s likely to happen: Victory for Hugo Gernsback’s spiritual inheritors.

    So it shouldn’t be surprising to see other writers jumping on the bandwagon from time to time. Michael Flynn (best known for the Hard-SF Stars series) did so in 1990 with In the Country of the Blind, a book now revised and republished with a nonfiction appendix. In this novel, ex-reporter, real-estate developer and all-around competent woman Sarah Beaumont gradually discovers the existence of a secret society, dating back more than a hundred years, that has figured out the elementary rules of “cliology”. Using calculating machines derived from Charles Babbage’s Analytical engine, this “Babbage Society” has spent decades subtly manipulating history to its own purposes. But now that Beaumont knows too much, well, she’ll have to be silenced…

    I really, really wanted to love this novel and for the first hundred pages I truly did. Despite some too-hasty plotting and early characterization problems, In the Country of the Blind efficiently sets up a secret history in which history is silly putty in the hands of a few master manipulators. The means of The Babbage Society’s developments are convincingly portrayed (Chapter 1-IV features a wonderful discovery of an attic filled with analytical engines) and the story steadily moves forward.

    It’s such a shame, then, that the book ends at this point. Oh, sure, there are twists and turns, revelations and betrayals, chases and gunfights for the rest of the book’s duration. But as a science-fiction novel, In the Country of the Blind essentially ends as Beaumont is welcomed into the society she discovered. The two or three refinements (that there are more than one such society, and that cliology just doesn’t work as well as one would think) are obvious from the get-go, and they’re not handled nearly as efficiently as they should have been. No, after page 101, In the Country of the Blind devolves into a standard-issue thriller in which the various parties could be just about anything. Replace “cliologists” by “industrial spies”, or “Nazi revivalists” and this novel wouldn’t change much.

    And that’s a real shame given how, from time to time, we get a glimpse into cliology’s interest in a Science Fiction setting. The idea that the future is predictable and that we can influence it if we know where to act gives a realistic framework to exploit two of SF’s traditional obsessions: Given solid predictions and “inflexion points”, isn’t acting on these opportunities a form of preemptive time-travel? Isn’t this also a way to exploit the concept of alternate realities without actually alternating realities? Readers of this novel will be allowed a moment or two of intellectual vertigo as past, present and future, real or alternate, all merge into a solid whole of speculation.

    What’s even more interesting is that since Foundation‘s publication in 1943, we are finding out that cliology may not be completely fanciful. Flynn gives out tons of examples in the non-fiction appendix that follows the book (a case of the appendix being more interesting that the previous novel), but you don’t have to look far elsewhere to find out how social sciences are becoming predictable. Jared Diamond did a lot to quantify history in his best-selling Guns, Germs and Steel. Political scientists are starting to understand how government falls or evolve given their social contexts. Wall Street is leading the way in building models to predict the evolution of markets, trends and economic activity. Even governments and corporations are getting in to the act with “strategic analysis” units.

    If Flynn wants to use cliology as an excuse for a standard chases-and-gunfire thriller, fine. But as a Science Fiction novel, In the Country of the Blind wastes its considerable potential. It doesn’t make it a bad novel… just a very disappointing, very ordinary one.

  • Air, or Have not Have, Geoff Ryman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2004, 390 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-312-26121-7

    Early-21st century Science Fiction occupies a curious philosophical position. It has inherited a tradition of rational techno-optimism that has never been more relevant, at a time where the future has never been less predictable. SF knows that the world does not and will not look anything like what it has been predicting for the past fifty years. And yet it struggles to evolve, dying of a thousand weak Star Wars tie-ins and falling on its knees as the reality thunders past.

    It’s in this context that Geoff Ryman’s Air arrives, like a bootleg Bruce Sterling novel, like a fusion between SF’s traditional ideals and the values it has to espouse in order to evolve. It’s a novel about then, about now and about soon, a novel that makes unlikely heroes out of people who wouldn’t have been out of place in the nineteenth century.

    Most of the novel takes place in the small village of Kizuldah, somewhere in the fictional country of Karzistan (presumably set close to Khazakstan). Thirty families. Two or three cars. One stone bridge. A subsistence economy based on the culture of rice and a few odd barn animals.

    The heroine of the tale is one Chung Mae, a self-styled “fashion expert” who acts as nothing more than a skilled conduct between the outside world and her faraway village. She’s doing well, but her entire life is about to change: Air is coming, and it promises nothing less than the ultimate connection to information. A test is run; things go wrong, people die and Mae is irrevocably changed. Shunned by her peers, stuck with a ghost in her head, obsoleted by technological changes, Mae nevertheless becomes an unlikely advocate for change. Illiterate and impulsive, she understands information trading better than anyone else, and wastes no time in adapting her village to the coming changes.

    If you think that this is a parable about our own society and how it’s being changed by, oh, The Internet, you’re absolutely right. Air may plug your brain into an always-on T3 connection, but its impact on Mae’s village meets with the same type of change resistance seen in our world. Arguments raised for and against this technology are similar to what we’ve heard ourselves over the past decade.

    But there’s more to it than just a thinly-veiled retelling of the Internet Boom. The product of a skilled storyteller, Air is first and foremost a story filled with good characters and a compelling plot-line. The scale of Mae’s village allows for a cunning personalization of issues: Access to information is initially restricted to one “TV”, then a second one, and then many more. Characters see their livelihoods threatened on a very basic level by the arrival of this opening on the rest of the world.

    By setting his near-future story in the third world, Ryman also touches upon an under-exploited subject in SF, how the first world is as alien to the third-world (and vice versa) as any type of extra-terrestrial. And even how, thanks to modern communication technologies, the alien is only one address, one number away. Ryman never treats Mae and her villagers with even a hint of condescension; the result is the kind of world-literate novel that shouldn’t surprise us, but still does.

    Air gnaws on the future and takes a big bite out of it. It’s almost a brilliant novel. The only things holding it back are the inclusion of a (quasi-magical) pregnancy subplot that seems too contrived even for its own good, and a general lessening of tension that runs through the entire second half of the book. Chapter 14 opens up a can of worms that is never fully satisfactorily explained, almost as if the novel has become too small for its own ideas, then abruptly brought back in familiar surrounding. The final crisis seems too conventional (and too drawn-out) for such a snappy and unconventional novel.

    But those caveats aside (caveats that may be ways of saying “the book didn’t go where I wanted it to”), Air is still one of the best SF novels of 2004. It takes the best the genre has to offer and sets it in a situation that has relevance to us, right now. It may even have a thing or two to teach to other Science Fiction writers. Accessible to mainstream audiences and well-written, it’s an ambassador the genre has nothing to be ashamed about.

  • The Rainmaker, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Island, 1995, 598 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-22165-X

    At his best, John Grisham delivers a satisfactory re-telling of his favourite story (“Young southern lawyer fights evil organization”) but never strays too far away from it. It’s a good niche, when you think of it: there’s regional colour, a crowd-pleasing plot, solid movie material and the potential for a sympathetic hero. (There are worse ways to earn a living than being a best-selling author.) But the real fun starts when Grisham starts playing tricks and variations on his familiar elements: Often, those quirks and structural choices can become the central point of interest of a book.

    Nowhere else in Grisham’s oeuvre so far is this truer than in The Rainmaker, an obvious David-against-Goliath story whose courtroom component is one of the most lop-sided legal contest you’ll ever encounter in legal fiction. If the courtroom drama was the main focus of the book, we’d have a problem justifying the existence of The Rainmaker as a piece of fiction. But it’s not. For better of for worse, Grisham has other things in mind for the novel, and I’m not sure they all fit together.

    The break from Grisham’s other books is obvious from the first page: For the first time in his career, Grisham uses first-person narration (present-tense, no less) to tell the story of one Rudy Baylor, a law student about to graduate. At the beginning of the story, most things seem to be running in Rudy’s favour: He’s got cash-flow problems, sure, but he’s also weeks away from a job with a well-regarded law firm. But then the hammer falls. In short order, Rudy loses the job, files for bankruptcy, moves out of his apartment and finds himself with next to no prospects. Still, he’s got a file in his hand, a civil suit that just may be worth millions…

    Plot-wise, Rudy’s fight with the eeevil insurance company of Great Benefit Life is one of the most one-sided contest you’ll ever read. Sure, it’s the whole single-David against corporate-Goliath fight again, but Grisham stacks the deck so ridiculously in favour of his populist protagonist that the courtroom becomes the vicarious blooding of an easy target. Rudy’s corporate opponents make every mistake in the book, and face the added difficulty of having the facts against them. Rudy, on the other hand, has a sympathetic jury, a friendly judge, two or three dirty tricks up his sleeve and some killer pieces of evidence. It’s not much of a contest, and not much of a drama either (though it makes for cheerful reading).

    If that was all there was to The Rainmaker, there wouldn’t be much point in going on. But there’s more. You could argue that the real point of the novel isn’t the insurance case, but the portrait of a young lawyer during difficult times. Rudy doesn’t come from a good family, can’t depend on a trust fund and doesn’t display prodigious legal abilities. But he works hard, never gives up and scrapes by on the strength of his conviction. The first-person narration is an ideal vehicles for the elliptical asides, the showy supporting characters and the day-to-day drudgery of being a working lawyer. Tasty stuff; fans of Grisham’s other thrillers won’t be surprised to learn that this novel is as compelling as Grisham’s previous onces. Set aside some free time to make your way through this one.

    Still, the novel is also filled with loose ends and choices that don’t ring true. A number of those things (a mysterious fire, for instance) seem to be kept in reserve for a final revelation that, ultimately, never comes. All, including a romance, seems rushed and crammed in an ending that doesn’t conclude as much as it gives up and throws everything back onto the table in desperation. Conscious choices by Grisham, I’m sure, but the purpose of which still has me dubious: Sure, part of it is an attempt to subvert Grisham’s own favourite story… but the way it’s handled seems just as contrived as the one-sided courtroom theatrics.

    But don’t let that stop you from grabbing a copy of The Rainmaker. Grisham devotees will note the blueprint of The Runaway Jury buried deep in The Rainmaker, what with the emphasis on civil suits and the passing mention of jury consultants. But even readers without an encyclopedic knowledge of Grisham’s fiction will be so completely swept along by the narration that the book’s problems will hardly register. And that’s a trick that sets the magicians apart from the other authors, whether or not they’re telling their favourite story all over again.

  • Assemblers of Infinity, Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1993, 278 pages, C$20.00 hc, ISBN 0-553-29921-2

    The gradual endangerment of the Science Fiction mid-list over the past decade and a half has already been discussed to death elsewhere, but that doesn’t make it any less important. The conglomeration of publishing under ever-hungrier multinationals has increased the drive for clear profits. Authors who used to sell profitably but not spectacularly have been driven away in the hope of finding strings of best-sellers. This, in turn, has affected what gets into bookstores. Authors are encouraged to do series, to do novelizations, to “co-write” something with a celebrity.

    Unfortunately, what has gotten lost in this evolution is what I call the meat-and-potatoes genre novel. The kind of adequate, but unspectacular standalone book that entertains despite not breaking any genre convention. Novels like Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s Assemblers of Infinity.

    The story is one we’ve seen many times before: Twenty-five years in the future, astronauts on the moon discover a strange alien artifact that is both intriguing and dangerous. People die, scientists are sent to investigate and soon enough, we’re stuck in a race against time, between revelation and annihilation. Simple enough: that Anderson and Beason choose to exploit nanotechnology as the Danger Tech is a sign of the times, but otherwise there isn’t much that’s not instantly recognizable by SF fans.

    Not that this is a bad thing: From the opening prologue, in which a discovery turns deadly, fans will slip into Assemblers of Infinity like in an old set of clothes. The technology-heavy vocabulary is familiar. The easy prose is unobtrusive and compulsively readable. The characters are engineers and scientists, bright folks with just enough back-story to avoid charges of cardboard characterization. In short, it’s a perfectly lovely hard-SF story in the Clarke mold, with enough ambiguity to make it interesting: the characters don’t neatly divide in good/bad bins, and that’s already nice enough. In retrospect, few fans will be surprised by the twists and turns taken by Assemblers of Infinity, though there are a number of pleasant developments here and there (much like the authors’ previous Lifeline, which tweaked a few genre conventions by the nose). The somewhat gratuitous suggestion of ESP power is old-fashioned, but not in an intolerable way: Everything ends up fitting together nicely.

    Assemblers of Infinity is not meant to be innovative, but comforting. Working away from genre spotlights, the Anderson/Beason team has produced more than half a dozen interesting Hard-SF/techno-thrillers that are well-worth a quick read. Comfort food for the SF audience, meat-and-potatoes novels that are fulfilling but hardly spectacular. And that’s fine, because those mid-pack novels are the true backbone of the genre, the structural blocks that define what people imagine when they think about SF. The genre classics stand out over the background noise that is generated by novels such as this one. Without a strong fuzzy stream of good solid SF novels, there isn’t much of a genre. Assemblers of Infinity may be a middle-of-the-pack book, but there’s no dishonour in that.

    Ultimately, this thought brings us back to why the much-heralded “death of the mid-list” hurts the genre. Without a support net of mid-list building blocks, SF is stuck without references, without a way to keep readers from abandoning the genre while waiting for the next Big Thing.

    So authors adapt and evolve. Like Kevin J. Anderson, they start massive trilogies and series. They turn to comic-book writing. They shill themselves to cults and celebrities. They write novelizations. They try other genres in the hope that they’ll find a magic formula. But most of all, they stop writing those mid-list novels that define the genre. Assemblers of Infinity may not be publishable today (The Anderson/Beason team has certainly stopped writing anything like it), and that’s a real shame.

  • Crush Depth, Joe Buff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2002, 449 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-000964-0

    By now, Joe Buff fans should know what to expect from his third novel. Cutting-edge near-future submarine warfare. Shaky grasp of story-telling techniques. An absence of political complexity. A story that emerges out of the water mid-way through, to conclude with yet another duel between submarines. At least Joe Buff is getting better with every following book, though Crush Depth doesn’t show the same stark improvement that set Thunder in the Deep apart from the debut Deep Sound Channel. In fact, it’s such a small improvement that some readers may come to question why they’re reading the entire series.

    For it is obviously a series, and there’s no hope that it will conclude anytime soon. Buff is slated to write nearly a dozen novels in the “Jeffrey Fuller” universe, each one describing a campaign in a fictional near-future war opposing English-speaking Allies to a new Germany-led Axis. In this third book, captain Jan ter Horst and XO Gunther van Gelder both return from the first novel, while our stalwart hero Jeffrey Fuller must once again go head-to-head against enemies that are as smart as he is. Plot-wise, that’s all you need to know: You can infer the structure of the novel from Buff’s previous ones: There will be a submarine fight, a terrestrial raid and another submarine fight. One wonders if all twelve Fuller books will suffer from the same structure.

    What’s new here is a land-bound prologue in which Fuller and series love interest Ilse Reebeck tour a wartime New York city. Unfortunately, this segment only highlights how Buff’s political sense comes nowhere near his expertise in military affairs. What becomes obvious is that Buff is merely using his future history to re-fight “The Good War”: Wartime New York suffers from rationing and plays big-band music as if it had escaped from a romantic WW2 film, whereas the big bad Germans are only one snappy salute short of being total Nazis. Given the pacifist learnings of real-world Germany, let’s just say that a German civil war is more likely than them presenting a credible challenge to the Anglo-speaking power bloc. Buff constantly tries to hand-wave “nuclear weapons!” as the big equalizer, but that excuse doesn’t excuse much given, once again, the anti-nuclear forces at work within Germany these days. (Don’t try to make me believe that massive executions would resolve that problem.)

    The political unlikeliness at the root of Buff’s future history have always been problematic, but it becomes even more so as the series advance and Crush Depth, for instance, suggests an escalation of warfare from countries lining up against the US. Now, I would pay good money for a military thriller in which the US was the antagonist that a righteous alliance of nations would try to contain (heck, we’re already half-way there today), but somehow I don’t think that this is what Buff has in mind. (Wouldn’t it be a fantastic twist, though?) Oh well, onward, what with tactical nuclear weapons raining down on our protagonists like so many cheap fireworks.

    Buff’s strength has been in portraying submarine warfare as a complex interrelationship between psychological, military, oceanographic and technological factors. While the degree of innovation is smaller in Crush Depth than in the series’s previous two volumes, there are still a number of good ideas and scenes here and there. Particularly noteworthy is a third act taking place under the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf, though the final conclusion seems weak after all the build-up leading to it.

    In terms of story-telling, Buff is still improving, though he still has a way to go before delivering a novel that can be enjoyed by laypersons: There are a number of hilariously unconvincing dramatic blunders in Crush Depth, including the clumsy introduction of Fuller’s father (“I haven’t thought about my father in months because I don’t like him… wait… who’s that man at the urinal? It’s my father!”) and a fake death that just isn’t unconvincing (no one will buy in it), but doesn’t even make sense in the internal logic of the series.

    Given that even this type of stuff represents an improvement over the previous novels, you can see why I’m sceptical as to whether I’ll ever truly enjoy one of Buff’s novels. I happened to have the first three books on my shelves, but now that I’m done with them, it’ll be a challenge to convince myself to pick up the follow-up Tidal Rip. Maybe at a used book sale. Provided it’s really, really cheap.

  • Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Hodder & Stoughton, 2004, 393 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-340-83827-2

    There’s something rotten in the state of England. Fortunately, Thursday Next is back on the case, two years after the events of The Well of Lost Plots. As Something Rotten begins, the twin pressures of Jurisfiction leadership and homesickness are getting to her: After a problem in a genre Western is solved in an entirely unsatisfactory fashion, she decides to get out of the Bookworld, come back to Swinton and finally get her eradicated husband back.

    This fourth book in the Thursday Next series is meant to be a conclusion of sorts to the series, and so a whole bunch of errant plot threads are tied back together one after another in the madcap fashion by now so familiar to Fforde fans. Something Rotten reaches back all the way to The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book for references and in-jokes, successfully concluding the series. (Maybe.)

    This being said, there’s enough new material here to keep everyone interested. Next doesn’t come back alone from the Bookworld. For one thing, her infant son (Friday Next, of course) comes back with her, giving rise to all sorts of complicated situations of which finding day care is the least difficult. For another, she’s shepherding Hamlet as he visits the real world to assess his own reputation. This wouldn’t be a Fforde novel without tons of subplots, so you can also expect Thursday Next to confront assassins, coach a cricket team, save the world, team up with agent Spike for another supernatural adventure, get news from her deceased time-travelling father, deal with Neanderthals, find cloned Shakespeares, deal with the Goliath corporation and fight the evil Yorrick Kaine. Whew!

    Given the depth and complexity of Fforde’s imagined universe as developed over the first three books, I can’t imagine how a new reader would react at the sight of all this stuff. But for faithful fans of the series, Something Rotten is pure gold. Fforde doesn’t necessarily preclude further volumes in the series (you can even see hooks for something called The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco buried into the plot-line of the novel), but we should be grateful that he’s willing to bow out in style. After setting most of The Well of Lost Plots in the fictional Bookworld, Fforde wisely re-sets Something Rotten to take place almost entirely is Next’s “Real World”. It gains in plausibility, but loses in invention. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the world of Thursday Next has gotten boring, it’s true that it doesn’t offer as much that’s completely new.

    Still, Swinton is a pleasant place to visit, and the fevered pace of Fforde’s invention is almost as manic as in the previous books. What’s more, it even finds a very dramatic ending that deftly balances real emotion and amusing slapstick. Also included is gentle political satire (as Denmark is designated as the root of all evil as part of a dastardly plan by Yorrick Kaine), the usual typographical finds (here, a historical figure speaking in Gothic fonts) and two or three revelations about the characters’ future. All told, Something Rotten is just as readable, just as enjoyable and just as amusing as the first three books of the series, giving form to a quartet that’s well worth recommending to every ardent reader on your Christmas list.

    With this, a natural end to the Thursday Next series, Fforde and ffans find themselves at a branching point: The author surely has some other universes to create, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll allow his readers to box him into a narrow series of books that is perhaps best left complete. We’ll see: His next book, The Big Over Easy, is supposed to be a stand-alone book. Better a singleton than overcooking a series which, at this time, seems to have reached its potential.

  • Call of the Mall, Paco Underhill

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2004, 227 pages, C$37.10 hc, ISBN 0-7432-3591-6

    After explaining Why We Buy, retail naturalist Paco Underhill sets his sights on shopping malls in Call of the Mall, his second book on the nature of today’s shopping environment. Focused and dramatized through fictive conversations with fellow mall-goers, this follow-up on “the science of shopping” is both a retread and an improvement on the previous book.

    Successfully structured as “a day in the mall with Paco Underhill”, Call of the Mall examines the modern institution known as the shopping mall from a variety of aspects, from retail to architecture, security to wilful inaccessibility. In doing so, Underhill shows what’s wrong with malls and why they’re doomed to failure. But don’t take this book for what it’s not: Neither scientific textbook nor anti-capitalistic screed, Call of the Mall is just as focused as Why We Buy on improving the performance of stores, sometimes at the shoppers’ expense and sometimes not.

    To give you an idea of how Underhill approaches his subject, consider that he doesn’t take us inside a mall until Chapter 5: In the meantime, he discusses what malls are (a real estate business more than a retail one: mall owners make their money renting space to stores, not selling products), where they’re built (far away from anything else, to keep customers inside as long as possible), how they’re built (not very esthetically) and the whole problematic of finding a parking space. Underhill clearly knows malls: His day job, after all, is to study shopper’s habits, spending hours and hours “in the field”, shadowing shoppers as they normally behave in retail environments. So when he discusses his own emotional attachment to malls, he knows what he’s talking about.

    It helps that his writing style is readable like few others. It’s all too easy to be taken with Underhill as he invites us to spend a day at the mall with him. It doesn’t take much to imagine this as a documentary film, as he dramatizes shopping situations with typical customers or invites us to see a food court through his well-trained eyes. Call of the Mall is unpretentious, sometimes superficial, but seldom boring.

    At most it can be repetitive, especially if you’re already familiar with his previous Why We Buy: Underhill, after all, has spent his professional career establishing his consulting firm and building his own theories of shopping: If he sticks to the same ideas from one book to another, it’s not dogmatism as much as it’s professional experience. While his tendency to systematize experience can be exasperating, they’re generally on-target: The way he describes male shoppers in malls isn’t quite a perfect match for me, but it’s close enough to make me trust his descriptions of other demographic groups.

    But beyond the easy entertainment value of the book lies a series of insights in the world of malls and how they work. If you have ever wondered about food courts, mall toilets, pushcarts, the disappearance of bookstores from suburban malls (hint; it’s not because people don’t read, it’s because people browse more than they buy, especially where they’re waiting for other people), why similar stores are located in clusters or secret entrances to malls, don’t worry: Underhill has studied these things and now he’s ready to tell all about them.

    Ironically, Underhill concludes his book by saying that malls are past their heydays. Their “lack of mercantile DNA” [P.202] will prove fatal: Built away from transit routes, slapped together without regard to architecture or communities, those self-sufficient island of shopping are not going to find any supporters when they start falling down (often literally, as they reach their thirtieth or fortieth year). What’s the next step, then? “Big boxes” retailers, on-line shopping or a return to shopping districts? Maybe we’ll have to wait until Underhill’s next book to find out.

    Fascinating conclusion, but I couldn’t read the book without tying it to the malls I know and it seems to me as if the Ottawa-area malls have at least a fighting chance. For one thing, they’re all built near transit routes (my own morning bus ride takes me through or near four malls) and often act as transit for people going from one place to another. For another, they’re covered and heated: When you’re dealing with Canadian winters, that’s not an inconsequential factor.

  • Why We Buy, Paco Underhill

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1999, 256 pages, C$37.00 hc, ISBN 0-684-84913-5

    The next time you’re out shopping, pay attention: someone may be looking at you. No, I’m not talking about security cameras or other shoppers checking you out (though, hey, enjoy the attention if you can get it). I’m talking about people like Paco Underhill, shopping scientists studying the habits and behaviour of ordinary consumers in a retail environment. Perhaps more accurately called “retail naturalists” than “shopping scientists”, Underhill and members of his consulting firm Envirosell spend hundreds of hours per year following shoppers, analyzing store layouts, looking at store signs and trying to improve the shopping experience.

    Why We Buy is Underhill’s first book, and it brings together several of Underhill’s painstakingly-developed theories about the modern state of shopping. At a time where North-American shopping has nowhere to go (ie; no fast population growth, no rapidly increasing income levels), the only alternative is to sell more efficiently. That’s where consultants like Underhill come in: by studying the way we shop, they can identify problems and fix what’s clearly not working.

    One easy example: The “landing strip”. You can’t just walk inside a store and start shopping: You need time and space to adjust, remove your sunglasses or your toque (depending on the season), take stock of the store’s layout or pick up a shopping cart. Clever managers won’t try to put merchandising inside the “landing strip”, but will exploit the area in more subtle ways.

    Another easy example: The “butt-brush” aversion. North American simply don’t like being touched (even accidentally) when they’re bending down. Trying to make them bend in confined spaces, where closely-arranged shelves only allow for a limited amount of space, is an exercise in futility. Solution: more space, and re-arrange merchandise so that people who can’t bend (older people, for instance) won’t have to.

    Both of these things may sound like common sense, but at a time when increasingly chain-driven shopping is being managed from corporate headquarters, retail operations can need a reality-check. The drive to rationalize operations by using fewer clerks, minimal wages, more crowded shelving can actually decrease sales rather than improve operations. In a competitive industry where even tiny adjustments can make the differences between black and red ink, Envirosell’s advice clearly finds a market.

    This type of information is a boon to retailers (one can imagine a conscientious store manager reading this book and making significant changes to his store), but it’s just as interesting to the consumer cattle being studied. It’s impossible to read even two pages of Why we Buy without a sigh of acknowledgement as Underhill explains how the retail industry works, or at least ought to work. But be forewarned; Underhill comes to the store to improve it, not to destroy it: His lucrative perspective isn’t one of a consumer muckraker, but a merchant optimizer. While the two often coincide (a happier shopper is a bigger spender), you will not find in Why We Buy a critique of consumerism or a scathing exposé of modern marketing techniques. Lavish consumerism is seen as a desirable objective to attain, and Underhill spears nearly all of his time suggesting ways to improve the spending experience.

    The other problem with Why We Buy is that Underhill has so much experience in stalking the habits of the wild shoppers in retail environments that his perspective is limited is areas other than his own. His “suggestions” for bookstores will be greeted with aghast stares by book-lovers, while his own open contempt for the “cyberjockeys” driving on-line shopping betrays both ignorance and shortsightedness.

    Still, for shoppers both enthusiastic and reluctant, Why We Buy is a compulsively readable, highly informative book. Deliciously written and stuffed with telling examples, it’s a way to deconstruct the shopping experience and understand our behaviour. (I thought Underhill was indulging in gratuitous stereotypes as he was describing female shoppers… until he started describing the habits of male shoppers, which are pretty much spot-on identical to mine.) It may be a book solely about how more dollars can be squeezed out of our wallets, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

  • Fugitives and Refugees, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Crown, 2003, 176 pages, C$25.00 hc, ISBN 1-4000-4783-8

    If you’re not a fan of Chuck Palahniuk and you’re not in any hurry to learn more about Portland, this is going to be a very short review: Don’t bother with this book. It’s written by Palahniuk for Palahniuk fans, with an appropriate look at the city of Portland and the weirdness contained within. No, it’s not an accident if you haven’t seen Fugitives and Refugees in bookstores and may never even have heard about it. Please skip the rest of this review. We’ll see each other at the next one

    As for the rest of you, I can only assume that you want to learn more about Portland and/or are already die-hard fans of Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction from Fight Club to Diary. If you have already read his non-fiction collection Stranger Than Fiction, you’re already halfway ready to have a look at Fugitives and Refugees.

    Part of the “Crown Journeys” collection, this is, obviously, a look at the city of Portland. But unlike a typical travel guide (and much like a typical Palahniuk book), it focuses on the weird, the cool, the unusual and the perverted. Portland high quotient of quirkiness, explains Palahniuk though an interview with Geek Love‘s author Katherine Dunn, can be attributed to the theory that “everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives [the city] the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits.” [P.14] The fugitives and refugees of the entire country, one could say.

    And so Palahniuk takes stock of his chosen city and reports back from the field. Half of Fugitives and Refugees is built like a typical travel guide; here’s a chapter on restaurants (complete with recipes, to the grand pleasure of all Palahniuk-naggers who maintain that his fans would buy even The Man’s grocery lists); here’s a chapter on shopping; another on museums. But then the book gets weirder: There’s an explicit chapter on the city’s sex trade; another on the haunted buildings of Portland; a third one on the underground tunnels under the city…

    Palahniuk has done his legwork in tracking down the fugitives and refugees of his city. His guide to the city’s landmarks is augmented by mini-interviews with zoo keepers, milling experts, fancy carmakers, drag queens, museum owners and the inventor of a self-cleaning house. Fascinating stuff, regardless of whether you intend to visit Portland or not. It’s in this section of the book that you can perhaps most clearly see similarities with Palahniuk’s other non-fiction collection Stranger than Fiction.

    But much as Stranger than Fiction also found some of its best moments in self-reflective pieces about Palahniuk’s life, every chapter of Fugitives and Refugees is interspersed with “Postcards” from the author’s personal history, from his starring role in a MTV video to his participation in Portland’s SantaCon’96. Palahniuk’s fans will be delighted and fascinated by another peek at the author’s life, but even regular readers are likley to consider these pieces as the book’s highlights. I’m still laughing myself silly about his description of an LSD trip inside a planetarium, and I’m fascinated by his description of the “Portland’s semiannual Apocalypse Café”, a potluck held in a condemned industrial building, as if it was in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic society. Very Fight Clubish indeed.

    Palahniuk’s fiction is less distinguishable by its overall plot than its shocking vignettes and affectionately described oddball characters. This holds true with Fugitive and Refugees: while this won’t leap on top of anyone’s reading list based on the sole distinction of having been written by Palahniuk, it makes for an interesting (and fast) read for his fans. They will find everything they like about the author’s fiction on full display here, along with a number of tasty anecdotes from his life. What remains to be established for non-Portlanders is the ratio of impression-to-reality: From Fugitives and Refugees, we get the impression that Portland is a city teething with repressed craziness, but is it truly as special, as weird and as off-the-wall as Palahniuk says? Heck, it almost sounds as if a visit is in order to find out…

  • Schild’s Ladder, Greg Egan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2001, 250 pages, £16.99 hc, ISBN 0-575-07068-4

    Sometimes, there is no shame in saying that you’ve been beaten by a book.

    I certainly feel like that after reading Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder. I may think of myself as a savvy hard-SF fan with a good understanding of science and a facility for technical jargon, but Egan has clearly bested me with this extrapolation of thirty-first century physics.

    The central plot isn’t terribly complicated. First, the prologue describes how a far-future scientific experiment goes wrong and starts eating the very fabric of the cosmos. Schild’s Ladder then jump hundreds of years later, on a station perched at the frontier of this novo-vacuum’s continuing expansion. Aboard the station, two post-human factions: The Preservationists, trying to fight back against the expanding blight, and the Yielders, who are looking for an accommodation and a way to exploit this new set of circumstances. Stuff happens, discoveries are made, a trip is taken and soon enough, well… oh, there’s not much to spoil, but let’s still not spoil it.

    If the plot is simple enough (and, to be truthful, not that different from a number of classic SF stories in which heroic scientists have to face an alien enigma) it’s the details that will make cry in confusion and beg for simpler novels. Open up a page at random, and you’re likely to read a line like “Once that was achieved, Tchicaya scribed a series of probes that would spread out laterally as well moving straight in, improving their changes of gaining a comprehensive picture of the Planck worms.” [P.187]

    Uh-huh. Okay. Not bad, but imagine 250 pages of that and you’ll quickly reach for a romance novel in order to speed-read once more. Not content to play around with advanced physics, Schild’s Ladder boldly invents post-“Theory of Everything” physics that are to our understanding of the universe what super-string theory is to Newtonian physics. Ambitious, undoubtedly fascinating for the Nobel Prize crowd, but utterly baffling for even smart-ass readers such as myself.

    But difficulty of comprehension doesn’t necessarily betray lack of enjoyment. Midway though the book, it struck me that even though I couldn’t understand half the jargon, I was swimming once more in the comfortable thought-space of hard-SF. Egan’s protagonists are scientists for whom the hunger of knowledge is all-powerful, and there’s a pleasant vibe to this kind of attitude that I was missing after so many hum-drum thrillers and pedestrian SF novels. What’s more, you eventually learn to tune out the most advanced sections of Egan’s prose, and simply extract whatever meaning you can from the plot-line surrounding the physics.

    Interestingly enough for a writer whose short stories are usually better-rated than his longer fiction, several of Schild’s Ladder‘s best moments come in smaller portions. The opening novella isn’t bad, Protagonist Tchicaya’s shared childhood experience with Mariama is worth excerpting by itself and the final voyage is -though at the limit of intelligibility- almost worth another story. Even in the nuts-and-bolts linking scenes, Egan goes farther than anyone else, fiddling with acorporeal characters and their psychology as if it was just another thing. Never mind that other novelists (paging Richard K. Morgan) can devote entire novels to the very same throwaway ideas.

    Ultimately, it’s the sense that Schild’s Ladder does things impossible to achieve in any other genre of expression but science-fiction that gives full meaning to the book. For someone to sit down and extrapolate far-future physics in sufficient details for readers to recoil in stunned incomprehension is nothing short of admirable. I have long maintained that science-fiction should first be defined by what it can do better than anything else, and this is the kind of novel, utterly cryptic to anyone not already well-versed in the genre, that best exemplifies that kind of thinking. Is it one of 2001’s best SF novels? I don’t think so. Is it one of 2001’s purest SF novels, though? Ah-ha.

    It took me a while to get to this novel, and now that I have, I suddenly find myself at the end of Egan’s oeuvre so far: The already-mysterious author has almost completely stopped writing since 2001, devoting himself to the cause of Australian asylum-seekers. For hard-SF, this pause has been deeply felt; Egan continues to show signs of life (His web site is still regularly updated), but it’s an open bet as to when he’ll be back in bookstores. In the meantime, enjoy this novel as maybe the most advanced piece of diamond-hard SF he’s ever penned, and wonder if anything will ever top this. In this light, beating my head against this novel is nothing short of the ultimate compliment.

  • Freefall, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket Star, 2005, 559 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7434-0607-9

    I seldom buy books as soon as they come out, let alone read and review them in the same month they’re released. I had to make an exception in the case of Freefall, the third techno-thriller by the Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens writing couple. Their previous Icefire (1998) and Quicksilver (1999) were easily two of the most interesting high-tech suspense novels of the late nineties, and a third one would be cause for celebration no matter what it was about.

    Luckily, the premise of their newest effort is a barn-burner: In 2008, the story goes, an automated lunar probe comes back to Earth, bringing back the first lunar samples in more than three decades. But just as the samples are transferred aboard the International Space Station, powerful explosions wreck half the station, kill most of the crew, destroy two space shuttles and strand the few survivors in orbit without hope of rescue. Stuck in a dying space station, geologist Corazon Rey opens up a sample canister and discovers, mixed with lunar rocks, the mummified remnants of two human fingers…

    That’s how Freefall starts. As for how it ends, well, I’d rather leave you in suspense. For the biggest thrills of Freefall are in reading about conspiracies and secrets, the hidden history of the space race and the surprises of today’s military forces. It’s a novel that features an entirely different picture of the race to the moon, a frighteningly plausible explanation for the Roswell/Area 51 conspiracies [P.295] and an exciting second race to the moon. Freefall starts with a sequence in which American operatives investigate the Chinese space program underneath a flooded hydro-electrical reservoir, and it never lets up after that. Even more so than in Icefire, the Reeves-Stevens take a malicious pleasure in cramming throwaway mysteries and cool ideas in every available crevice of their novel. The net winners are the readers with a taste for that sort of “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” speculation. In this type of fiction, there’s a fine balance between far-fetched but still plausible supposition and straight-out wonk-wonk UFO-nuts territory, and Freefall skirts that line as close as possible without falling in X-Files territory. (Though I’ve got my doubts about P.270)

    When thriller mechanics are concerned, the Reeves-Stevens know how to hook their readers like true professionals. Freefall doesn’t suffer too much from its twin-mountains structure: The middle lull between two complicated pieces of techno-adventure is exploited for some much-appreciated exposition and to tighten up the tension some more. The climax reaches a beautiful convergence of plot threads and emotional power, especially for those still carrying a torch for the cause of space exploration. This is the best space-based near-future techno-thriller since Homer J. Hickam’s Back to the Moon and that’s high praise indeed.

    Extensively researched and effortlessly convincing, Freefall aims straight at the techno-geek reader and scores a definite hit. Fans of the Reeves-Steven’s previous two techno-thrillers won’t be disappointed. Readers of Icefire will be specially pleased by the return of the earlier novel’s terrific characters, with a much-expanded role for NORAD wizard Wilhemina Bailey. I’m not normally a fan of thriller series, and this one is just a bit too contrived in how it places known characters in exactly the right jobs and places, but it’s a pleasure to see Cory Rey and Mitch Webber arguing once again.

    This pleasure carries further, of course: In terms of readability, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more compelling techno-thriller this year. There always the temptation to read “just another chapter” to find out what else the Reeves-Stevens will take out of their magic bag of techno-tricks. Suffice to say that after a steady diet of bland books and admirable literary novels, I had a blast delving in Freefall‘s too-few pages and all-too-wonderful secrets. For techno-nerds, reading this novel is like sipping on Jolt Cola syrup: all the caffeine, with the added advantage of a sugar rush.

    If you’re up for historical secrets, high-tech conspiracies, going back to the moon, exploding space shuttles and all that fun stuff, you can call Freefall “book of the year” and stop looking for anything better. As for myself, I have seldom been so well served by a “buy-on-sight” decision: Freefall is likely to remain one of my favourite techno-thrillers of the decade.

  • Hong Kong, Stephen Coonts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1999, 350 pages, C$39.99 hc, ISBN 0-312-25339-7

    The imperatives of commercial fiction can be tough, but as much as I feel for the poor authors trying to make a living out of their writing, my natural sympathies lie with the readers who have to slog through the barely adequate stuff produced by a publishing industry fixated on profits.

    Stephen Coonts’ Hong Kong is a perfect example of what happens when a hard-working writer gets stuck in the machine, churning out one commercial novel per year while trying to stretch a formula way past its expiration date. Taken apart, there are at least three or four good ideas in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, they never should have been put together, nor hammered in an existing series.

    Yes, Hong Kong marks yet another adventure for Coonts’ favourite protagonist Jake Grafton. After his tour of duty in Cuba, Grafton is back in the game in Hong Kong as a rear admiral sent to investigate a mysterious situation in the ex-British colony. He hasn’t been picked by accident: For one thing, man-of-action Grafton is twiddling his thumbs behind a desk at the Pentagon. For another, the man he’s set to investigate is consul-general Virgil “Tiger” Cole, making a return appearance after starring alongside Grafton in Coonts’ very first novel Flight of the Intruder. (If you’ve seen the movie, Cole is the character played by Willem Dafoe, which is actually perfect casting for this novel too.) Cole isn’t the only returning character: While “Toad” Tarkington is relegated to a cameo role via telephone, a large place is given to thief/agent Tommy Carmellini, introduced in Cuba.

    Most of the Hong Kong is spend dawdling around, waiting for the book’s set-piece: a revolution against the communist government now ruling Hong Kong. Cole, we learn, has spent his post-Vietnam years fruitfully, become a multi-millionaire with enough technological clout to ferment a popular uprising against the entire Chinese government. It helps, of course, that he can depend on impossible technology like the “sergeant York” killer robots… about which in a moment.

    There are, to be sure, interesting ideas here. The idea of having Grafton meet with old acquaintances of troubled loyalties is certainly interesting, and it’s exactly the type of story sequels are made of. Similarly, the idea of Hong Kong hosting a revolution with the potential to unseat the entire Chinese government is the type of big, big idea that deserves a novel of its own. There there is the technological showcase of the book, a half-dozen semi-autonomous robots able to outrun linebackers, shoot any hand-held weapon with computerized accuracy and operate without constant supervision from remote tele-operators. This is worth building a novel around.

    Unfortunately, this type of killer robots isn’t anywhere near reality right now for good reasons: They combine technological capabilities that are far beyond anything possible today. Spend some time reading about the state of automated targeting, computerized image recognition, mechanical locomotion, hand-like articulations and power sources required to do these things and you’ll start laughing at the way Coonts introduces a package combining all of these things in Hong Kong. This is a piece of mid-twenty first century technology dropped in a contemporary setting. While I’d pay good money to read a novel about the introduction of such technology on an appropriate future battlefield, this impossible technology just doesn’t mesh with the rest of Coonts’ novel.

    Well, it does meshes in a way, giving life to a few creepy/cool scenes, but that’s it. The final man/robot showdown (you know there’s got to be one, and you can even guess who’s featured in it) seems stolen from a Terminator fan-script. Add to that Callie Grafton’s role as the designated kidnapped woman, the annoying suspicion that this is the last we’ll ever hear of the Chinese civil war in the Grafton series, and, well, Hong Kong is problematic. Despite the good material here and there (including just about all of the showpiece Chapter Nineteen), the book suffers from a number of annoying contradictions that diminish its impact.

    This is a Grafton novel because that’s what the publishers demanded, in the false belief that this is what readers want to read. But the selective amnesia required to make long-running thriller series mesh with the ongoing real world gets progressively more exasperating as the series run to compound the difficulties with unbelievable gadgets and indifferent dramatic tension. It’s not an unpleasant book, but it could have been much, much better.

  • Russian Spring, Norman Spinrad

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1991, 567 pages, C$27.50 hc, ISBN 0-553-07586-1

    Read this:

    “The United States… had let the dollar drop like a stone against the ECU in order to try to devaluate its enormous external debt, was reinvesting its capital and excess military capacity in Latin America… and loud voices in the American Congress and elsewhere had started clamoring for debt renunciation and even expropriation of Common European holdings in the States, none of which exactly assured Americans a warm welcome in the metropoles of Common Europe. Besides which, with the dollar so far down against the ECU and all the currency restrictions on American tourists…” [p.86]

    Replace ECU with Euro and Latin America with Middle East, and the above sure reads like a news headline, doesn’t it? Then how about the fact that it was written sometime in 1990-1991?

    Norman Spinrad may have had guessed a number of details wrong, but the future described in his 1991 family epic Russian Spring is a great deal more familiar today than anyone would have guessed at the time. In this novel, America turns its back on the world and on civilian high technology, invades most of Latin America, blocks its borders and indulges in xenophobia. Meanwhile, Europe -led by a post-communistic Russia- takes the lead in space technology and personal freedom.

    As I said; creepy foreshadowing, isn’t it? Spinrad may not have been aiming for much more than a contrarian reversal of roles, but our reality has a way of being even stranger than we can imagine. It’s not a perfect one-to-one correspondence but it’s close enough to be unnerving. (In Russian Spring, the ex-Soviet republics haven’t yet seceded in independent countries, a fact that plays heavily in its conclusion –even though it also features Ukrainian election heavily influenced by Americans!)

    The real protagonist of Russian Spring is Jerry Reed, an engineer courted by Europe to lead an ambitious aerospace project. There’s one catch, though; America won’t stand for his defection and demands Reed’s passport, stranding him outside the US. Things are resolved, somewhat, by the arrival of a Russian girl, Sonya Gargarin, who is in a position to make a complex deal to allow them both to stay in Paris.

    But that’s not the end of the story. Russian Spring evolves over thirty years, as tensions rise and fall between Europe, America, Russia and the rest of the world. Four main characters over three decades barely qualify for the title of “family epic”, but Spinrad’s novel has an ambitious sweep that has the feel of a big big story. Jerry Reed’s dream is to get into space, but at what cost?

    There are many thing to love and admire about Russian Spring, but perhaps the best is the combination of political complexity with good old-fashioned SF spirit. The post-cold-war balance of powers and forces between old allies and enemies is skillfully developed through characters with a lot to lose from even the slightest power shifts. Readers of political fiction ought to find something worthwhile in this novel, especially today.

    But at the same time, you have thank Spinrad for using SF’s traditional fixation on space exploration as a way to bring all of humanity together and rise above petty squabbles. This is high-grade techno-optimism and Russian Spring, fourteen years later, offers a suitable prism through which we can see a way out of this crazy “war of terrorism”.

    I have my own reservations about the book (the rise of a character named Wolwowitz -of all names!- is dicey, and so is the way two gratuitous accidents precipitate the entire conclusion), but there’s a lot more good than bad in this unexpected, largely forgotten gem. Read it today, because it’s never been more relevant. Still not convinced? Read this:

    “President Carson… is a schmuck. If it talks like a schmuck, runs the country like a schmuck, and surrounds itself with other schmucks, it probably is a schmuck, even if it wasn’t cruising this poor screwed-up country for another international bruising like the biggest schmuck of all.” [P.397].

    Hmmm.

  • The Well of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    NEL, 2003, 360 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-340-82592-8

    There’s never a dull moment in the life of Thursday Next, and that serves both as a plot description for The Well of Lost Plots as well as a plotting technique for Jasper Fforde. In this third volume of his enormously amusing humour/mystery/fantasy hybrid, Fforde continues to throw everything he can imagine at us grateful readers, and if he stretches things perhaps a tad too far in this entry, it easily remains a must-read for everyone who loved Next’s first two adventures.

    If you haven’t read The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book, you may want to start there and come back after. Events in The Well of Lost Plots begin right after those of the previous book, and little time is spent catching up: If you remember the conclusion of the second novel, Thursday Next has decided to retreat from the alternate reality in which her husband has been erased from history and wait out the birth of her child in a novel still under construction. (Hey, don’t ask if you haven’t read the first two books.) The story picks up weeks later: Thursday is living the quiet life of a secondary character, but trouble is brewing in Text Grand Central, what with the disappearance of several Jurisfiction agents and the imminent introduction of UltraText[TM] technology.

    Seemingly proceeding on the principle that you can’t have enough of a good thing, Fforde sets the vast majority of The Well of Lost Plots inside the fictional universe of books first glimpsed in the first volume and defined in the second one. At the exception of two chapters set in the real world, all of this third tome is spent shuttling back and forth between novels and the Grand Library linking all of them together. As you would now expect from a Fforde novel, subplots multiply in an attempt to show us as many cool things as possible. We go deep in the “Well of Lost Plots” to find out how stories are constructed, how characters are defined and how unsuccessful fictions are slated for destruction. Amusingly enough, Fforde’s mythology reduces authors to mere transcribers, an ironic reversal when you compare it with the hundred of stories portraying authors as the end-all of literary creation, from Misery to Wonder Boys.

    But there’s a story of sorts behind it all, a twisty maze of double-crossings involving renegade Jurisfiction agents and an attempted takeover of Text Grand Central. Beloved characters die, Next investigates, everyone is a suspect and it all finds a somewhat satisfying deus-ex-libris ending at the 923rd Annual Fiction Awards. Meanwhile, Next herself has to deal with the aftermath of her husband’s eradication… or simply forget about it.

    As with Fforde’s first two books, The Well of Lost Plots is aimed at enthusiastic readers, and works on quantity as much as quality; there’s simply so much stuff to enjoy that it’s almost impossible to pause and reflect. In fact, this third volume starts to show the limits of Fforde’s premise: While all is well and fun, there’s a clear sense that this is almost too much; by setting almost all of his story inside the fuzzy boundaries of explicit fiction, Fforde also fudges with rules and limits. Anything can happen and pretty much everything does. Readers may start to yearn for the relative simplicity of Next’s native Swindon.

    There are also a number of troubling inconsistencies. Whereas Lost in a Good Book played around with the idea that Next was as fictional as the rest of the characters, The Well of Lost Plots makes her an Outlander whose reality is undisputed. The death of one character seems to contradict the epigram at the beginning of the second volume’s Chapter 29. But Fforde may have something else down his sleeve for Book Four, so let’s not be too quick to judge…

    Still, there are small problems compared to what you’ll get from the novel. Gems abound, such as the Wuthering Heights rage counselling session; the vision of all the other Grand Libraries; the way Generics are transformed in authentic Characters; the fantastic vyrus-fighting action sequence; the cameo appearance by Gully Foyle (Jurisfiction agent for the SF genre, as it turns out); the hilarious way Jurisfiction decide to deal with a shortage of “u”s. Wonderful.

    Of course, this book practically sells itself to Fforde’s fans, who probably pre-ordered the book as soon as it was announced. Onward to the fourth volume of the series, Something Rotten.

  • Thunder in the Deep, Joe Buff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 2001, 465 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58240-2

    The problem with most military thrillers isn’t with the “military” part. Often recruited from active or retired ranks, military fiction writers have the technical details down pat. Given them the slightest excuse for a fictional war and they’ll be able to describe in telling detail how men will fight. What’s usually missing is the stuff fiction thrives on: Characters. Engaging writing. Adequate pacing. Dramatic build-up. Your typical military thriller can be mesmerizing if it’s written with competence, but too many such novels are published without much attention to traditional story-telling skills.

    Joe Buff’s Deep Sound Channel was a submarine thriller that floated in the deep inversion layer between a good thriller and an unreadable thicket of military details. Saddled with a trite plot, unconvincing characters, overwhelming jargon and spots of awful prose, Buff’s debut model nevertheless found an audience thanks to its reasonably engaging depiction of near-future underwater warfare. Bad fiction buoyed by good ideas, in the grand tradition of military techno-thrillers everywhere.

    Things haven’t changed much in the sequel Thunder in the Deep, but at least they’ve evolved in the right direction. Once more, we find ourselves aboard the USS Challenger, a new “ceramic-hulled” attack submarine stuck in the midst of a future war opposing the English-speaking bloc versus Germany and South Africa. The reasons behind the war are better explained here than in the first book, but they don’t make it any less ludicrous. But, as ever, let’s grant the author one big assumption and hop along for the ride.

    This time around, protagonist Jeffrey Fuller (ex-SEAL, current submarine captain and all-around good guy) is charged with a desperate mission in two parts: First, rescue the crew of a damaged American submarine. Then (surprise), continue on to the shores of Germany to launch a surprise attack against a research facility building unstoppable cruise missiles. Aboard for the ride is Ilse Reebeck, the renegade South-American oceanographer who doubles as the series’ tangential love interest.

    Plot-wise, Thunder of the Deep is almost identical to Deep Sound Channel: A mission, a submarine fight getting there, a land-based raid and another submarine battle coming back to base. The end. But don’t despair yet: Buff hasn’t messed with his formula, but he has learned a few other tricks. Simply put, Thunder of the Deep shows some improvement in the basic art of storytelling: Characters are slightly more complete, the jargon is turned down, the suspense is better-defined, the battles don’t seem as interminable as in the first book and novel’s overall impact is generally stronger. Small wonder, then, that when French editor Fleuve Noir decided to translate Buff’s fiction, they began with this volume rather than the first one.

    It also helps that Buff’s strengths are carried undiminished in this volume. Once again, Buff (a civilian expert in military submarines; check his web site) portrays underwater warfare as a complex set of interaction between physics, geology, weaponry and plain old human psychology. The impressive climax of the book takes place around an underwater volcano, with both submarine captains making the most out of a desperate stalemate.

    This being said, there are still significant problems with Thunder in the Deep, enough to keep this novel strictly for readers with an established interest in submarine warfare. As savvy as Buff may be in military matters, his political sense simply doesn’t measure up. The psychology of the book’s antagonists is still ridiculously simplistic: All native Germans, we’re shown, seem to be partisans of the war despite the tactical nukes flying left and right, cheering whenever their reichkommandant shows them war news footage. Ahem: Countries are not monoliths and enemies are not stupid.

    But generally speaking, Thunder in the Deep is an adequate military thriller, one that should slightly expand Buff’s readership. Best of all is the sense of improvement in the series, one which bodes well for Crush Depth, the follow-up Jeffery Fuller adventure. I’m not a big fan of military series in general, but since I’ve got a copy of the next book on my shelves, well…