Book Review

  • Candle, John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 248 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-58968-8

    There are certain archetypal stories in SF, and one of them is the one about the hero of a corrupt society who, after being asked to destroy the rebels undermining the evil empire, discovers that the rebels are right and then changes allegiances to fight against his former masters. Revolution happens and the credits roll. It’s a good story, a familiar story and, by now, pretty much a cliché (unless you’re writing a screenplay, in which case a good EQUILIBRIUM is worth about ten adaptations of classics like The Time Machine)

    As it turns out, it’s also the story at the core of John Barnes’ Candle. At a time in the mid-nineties, Barnes seemed poised to take over the SF world and become one of its foremost writers; big books like A Million Open Doors (1992) and Mother of Storms (1994) demonstrated a writer with a good grasp of SF tools, an interest for complex socio-political issues, an accessible writing style and a willingness to shock readers once in a while. Then, something happened. I’m not sure what. The unpleasantness of some of his fiction may have rubbed off a few readers, along with the streak of sadism that ran throughout 1995’s Kaleidoscope Century. Maybe it was Barnes’ excursion in the “men’s adventure” category with the “Timeline Wars” trilogy. Maybe it was Barnes’ personal life, which reportedly took a turn for the worse at that time and may have contributed to the grim conclusion of 1998’s Earth Made of Glass.

    Whatever it was, Barnes never again regained the reputation he once enjoyed. The jury certainly isn’t out, and I’m woefully behind the times when it comes to his 2000-2005 production, but sarcastic fare like Gaudeamus could either be a work of genius or a genuine catastrophe. We’ll see when we get there: In the meantime we’re here to discuss Candle, its thin plot and how it demonstrate my thesis of an author that is capable of much more.

    Loosely set in the same “Meme Wars” (or “The Century Next Door”) universe, Candle presents the story of one Currie Curran, expert rebel hunter living the good quiet life… until the central intelligence controlling Earth requests his services one last time: There’s a last rebel to capture, one last individualist not plugged into the network. The rebel is the last and the best of them, but given how Currie himself was one of the best, well…

    It doesn’t take long for the expected beats to fall into place. The track. The chase. The capture. The long monologue in which the rebel isn’t so bad after all. The extended flashback in which the whole future is explained. A bit more action. The counter-twist. The final action sequence. The conclusion.

    Some of the book approaches parody, what with those two manly heroes talkin’ to each other’s ears like the studly cowboy type they are, complete with the colourful vocabulary and the false rural accents. Most of the book is deathly dull, as it merely goes through the motions of a well-worn narrative. The conclusion isn’t particularly surprising, especially if you’re there reading and shaking your head in dread that “it can’t be that simple”.

    But there are flashes of interest. The description of the Meme Wars (in which ideas literally take over humans and fight themselves) may be filled with wavy hand-wringing and gratuitous violence, but it’s a shining novella-length piece of world-building in an otherwise conventional novel. It’s by far the most interesting passage of the book, once again showing that while Barnes may be dormant, there’s still plenty of stuff for him to kick around. There is some material here and there about the tension between individuality and community, but after fifteen years of hard-core SF reading, I’m asking for a “get out of philosophical discussion for free” card when it comes to those issues: been there, thought about it, nothing new under the sun.

    All in all, Candle may satisfy some lenient readers and entertain even the toughest critics, but it’s not much more than yet another average SF novel. The problem is that we know that Barnes is capable of a lot more. And we’re waiting to see him rise once again.

  • The Miocene Arrow, Sean McMullen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 416 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-312-87547-9

    Awww, crap.

    It’s like being at the premiere for the sequel to a much-beloved movie of yours. The entire cast and crew of the original film is back; the trailers looked fantastic; the premise sounds interesting; early word hasn’t been awful. And then, as the movie unfold, you realize that even if it’s not too bad -and may even be more polished than its predecessor- it’s nowhere near as much fun as the first in the series.

    Welcome to Sean McMullen’s The Miocene Arrow, second volume in the Greatwinter Trilogy and sequel to the very interesting Souls in the Great Machine. Once more, we’re two thousand years into the future, following humanity as it finally breaks out of its post-apocalyptic stupor. The first volume introduced us to a strange new Australia, filled with pre-steam engine ingeniousness, human-powered computers, vast networks of communication lighthouses and an irresistible “Call” driving humans to perdition.

    This sequel recognizably takes place twenty years later in the same universe. The Call is still a major factor, but the setting is very different: We suddenly find ourselves in North America, where feudal empires have become the dominant form of government. Thanks to diesel-driven engines, small airplanes are instruments of war and prestige; the aristocracy is dominated by “airlords” and hereditary guilds. The feel is different from the first volume, as McMullen quickly plunges us in palace intrigue, warring kingdoms, ill-fated love and all that good stuff.

    It doesn’t take much time to tie the novel back to the first volume: Some characters return, though carrying dark hints of what happened since the first volume and what is likely to happen next. What are they doing so far from Australica? To answer the question is to reveal the meaning of the title, and spoil away part of the book.

    The one thing worth noting about The Miocene Arrow is that it’s much more technically successful than its prequel. I wrote that Souls in the Great Machine often felt like a great book fighting its way out of inexperienced writing; this one feels a lot more confident, a lot more controlled. The scenes are constructed with more skill, the breaks between scenes aren’t as jarring and the characters’ motivation are generally more believable than they’d been in the prequel. Sadly, if the writing is less intrusive, the story itself isn’t overly interesting.

    Oh, there’s combat, there’s action, there’s romance and there are neat inventions here and there, but nothing with the vertiginous sweep of a librarian-driven war, or the heady thrill of reading about a human-powered computer in meticulous detail. The airships are neat, the train-powered Internet has potential, but McMullen is a great deal more conventional in The Miocene Arrow, and if the result is smoother, it’s also blander.

    Things also take a long time to advance, and if the last hundred pages finally attain a good rhythm (the resolution of the romance is especially satisfying, though in typically sadistic fashion, it takes several deaths and the casual demonstration of life-and-death elite power to get there), the novel feels far too long for what it’s trying to say. I wasn’t completely satisfied by the links to the first volume: In a few sentences, most of the great characters and accomplishments of Souls in the Great Machine are discarded, maybe in anticipation of a third novel or maybe not.

    I concluded my review of Souls in the Great Machine by saying that a sequel was both superfluous and intriguing. At this point, I’m tempted to stick with “superfluous”; I’ll let you know of my final verdict once I’m done with Eyes of the Calculator, the third and final volume of the series.

  • Rebel Moon, Bruce Bethke and Vox Day

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1996, 282 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-00236-8

    It’s true that you always approach a book with the accumulated mass of your life experiences up to that point. But even by those standards, I approached Bruce Bethke and Vox Day’s Rebel Moon with a truckload of preconceptions both good and bad.

    On the positive side, you can put my admiration for Bruce Bethke: His debut novel Headcrash was not just a fairly funny novel, but the last biting nail in cyberpunk’s coffin. Given that Bethke himself coined the word “cyberpunk”, he should have had the last word on the subject –and he did. That he co-wrote a second novel was cause enough for celebration and anticipation.

    That the novel itself would be a near-future “war of the worlds” Earth-versus-Moon revolution novel Could have gone both ways. On one hand, Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a bona-fide SF classic. Furthermore, this particular theme is also one of the truly inevitable stories that SF has to tell: Sooner or later, off-Earth colonies will gain their independence from Earth, and how we deal with that juncture in time will mark one of the most vital chapters in human history. Sadly, for some reason, the scenario has proved particularly addicting to libertarian writers, leading to a steady stream of such stories re-fighting the American Revolution over and over again, usually with rugged über-American colonists predictably rebelling against a corrupt, communist and overbearing Earthican government. Yawn.

    And finally, on the gripping hand, there’s Vox Day, best known as Theodore Beale, a veciforous blogger, a right-wing columnist and an author of -they say- fine fundamentalist SF. (I don’t need to tell you how I feel about fundamentalists and right-wing pundits)

    But wait! There more! You see, Rebel Moon is the first volume in a trilogy meant to novelize a series of video games… of first-person shooter video games.

    Maybe I should have stopped there, shrugged and forgot about the book.

    But oh no. I had to see for myself. Memories of the Doom novelizations weren’t enough to stop me.

    I’ll be mercifully blunt and to the point: Just avoid this novel, m’kay? It brings nothing new to the “Libertarian Moon versus Evil Earth” sub-genre. It bashes the UN like that was an endangered sport. It can’t be bothered to include more than one mildly interesting character. It reads like military SF pablum, filled with gunfights and explosions than mean nothing and make no difference. It ends on a note promising a trilogy that remains unfinished to this day, but don’t worry: you won’t be asking for it.

    If you put the novel in a cyclotron and spin it at ludicrous speeds to extract the good from the bad, you may end up with a few concepts and passages worth saving. And, to its credit, it doesn’t take long to announce its colours: Barely a few pages it, interest isn’t piqued, the novel has no sense of place, the usual “Terra-UN sucks! Luna-USA rawks!” rhetoric starts to play and it’s obvious that it won’t get any better.

    I remained unconvinced by aspects of the set-up: The moon is portrayed as a major food source for Earth, an idea so nonsensical that it’s difficult to even begin explaining why it’s dumb. (But start with shipping costs, delivery delays and the relative density of food: pharmaceuticals may be fit for essential lunar production, but simple sustenance food? Er, no.)

    It’s also unclear if the authors know how to manipulate the tools of the trade: a lack of communication delays between Earth and Moon is mentioned early on (as a hint of You-know-what), but curiously unexplored until late in the novel, demonstrating characters almost too dumb to live. (You-know-what also screws up a lot of the hard-science pretencions of the story, but hey –they were only pretencions.)

    I wasn’t impressed by the Rebel Moon video-game demo floating around the web, and let me tell you that the novel doesn’t fare any better. The only thing making it even slightly memorable are its problems. It’s probably fitting that the game and its publishing company have sunk in oblivion. It sucks that Bruce Bethke disappeared from SF after this novel. It figures that Theodore Beale, under whatever name he chooses, would find a more receptive audience in right-wing groups. It’s sad that copies of this novel will continue to haunt readers for the next few decades.

  • Mindscan, Robert J. Sawyer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2005, 303 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-31107-0

    Only cranky critics can call award-winning books “disappointments”, and so let me be bold in saying that Mindscan is a return to form for Robert J. Sawyer after the award-winning “Neanderthal Parallax” trilogy. Granted, Hominids (2002, Book One of the Trilogy) won the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Still, most fans and readers will be reluctant to call this one of Sawyer’s best, especially as the trilogy went downhill in Humans and Hybrids (both 2003). But all is forgiven with Mindscan, his newest standalone novel.

    With it we see a return to what he does best: the rigorous exploration of an idea. Here, the concept is consciousness transfer: What if it was possible to duplicate consciousness in an artificial body? How do you redefine identity? Who, of the copy or the original, is the real person?

    In order to play around with the concept, Sawyer resorts to a protagonist with a time-bomb ticking in his skull: thirtysomething Jake Sullivan is afflicted with the (fictional) Katerinsky’s syndrome: At any time, a fatal stroke could kill him. So when immortality through consciousness duplication is introduced to seniors, young Jake sees it as a way to solve the niggling problem of his impending sudden death. There are a few complications, though: As the “original’ Jake is shipped away to a far-off lunar base for permanent relocation, his copy is embroiled in a few adventures of his own…

    If you’re a long-time reader of Sawyer’s fiction, a lot of Mindscan‘s material will feel familiar. The way Sawyer kicks an idea around for a few hundred pages. The blatant Canadian nationalism. (In this future fifty years removed, Canada has become a liberal paradise whereas the US has devolved into this ultra-conservative religious state) The fondness for courtroom drama.

    Sadly, many of Sawyer’s faults also make return appearances. For all of his skills in exploring ideas and his patience in researching all aspects of his stories, Sawyer still can’t break out of a rather pedestrian writing style. Bad jokes are bandied about as if they were unbelievably witty. The dialogue is banal. Many sentences are clumsy: you just look at them and think “There’s got to be a better way of saying this!” There’s a pedantic quality to Sawyer’s writing that quickly becomes annoying, almost as if he didn’t trust his readers to understand the material. It leads to on-the-nose writing which has to be ignored if the book is to be enjoyable.

    In addition to these usual flaws, Sawyer can be a little bit too quick and silly in setting up the mechanics of his plotting. Here, you can guess part of the plot-line as soon as they announce that the copied persons are shipped off to the Moon (why so far? Etc.) for permanent relocation. It sounds like a bad idea, and it is. The pro-Canadian angle is also annoying -even to a fellow Canadian- given how it ignores that not all Americans/Canadians are happy with the current state of things and assumes that current trends will simply go on without cyclical shifts. (But that takes me into the whole “societies aren’t monoliths” rant I went into in a previous review of Sawyer’s work.)

    Still, I’m buying Sawyer’s stuff in hardcover for a reason, and that reason is that even with the usual stylistic flaws, his work is top-notch when comes the time to straight-up extrapolation. Sawyer does a lot of thinking for every one of his novel, and Mindscan delivers a lot of satisfying SF content as it explores issues of consciousness and identity. While the ending of the novel is easy and disappointing (in a “no man, no problem” kind of fashion), the slingshot epilogue almost redeems it with a mind-expanding finish to a satisfying novel. Good stuff.

    Perhaps best of all is the sense that this is a return to form for Sawyer, who really should stick to standalone novels from now on. It’s perhaps my favourite Sawyer book since Flashforward in how it defines its area of interest, and then proceeds to explore every single facet of it. As is usual with the author’s work, you can read this book in one single sitting, and chances are that you will want to: Once the plot is launched, there’s no chance to be bored.

  • Spin, Robert Charles Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2005, 364 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30938-6

    What’s deceptive in Robert Charles Wilson’s work in that he makes it seem so simple. While other science-fiction writers really want you to sit down and study their books as if they were flight operation manuals, Wilson does the work for you, puts ordinary characters in the middle of big ideas, and then shows you what happens to them. This, of course, is how all SF should be: The difference is that Wilson, especially in his last three books, has mastered the mechanics of SF writing like few of his contemporaries.

    It’s not that he never makes mistakes. I don’t think a review of his Darwinia has been written yet that doesn’t include the word “flawed”. But out of Darwinia grew Wilson’s current golden age (and got him a steady spot on the Hugo Awards nomination lists ever since) His last few books, including The Chronolith and Blind Lake, have been very well-received, and Spin is another work in the same mold. In fact, it has more than it shares of similitudes with The Chronolith: Once more, a character describes, in retrospect, how he lived through a few tumultuous decades, in light of what may charitably be described as an invasion from the unknown.

    This time around, though, Earth isn’t colonized by mysterious monuments as much as it’s enveloped by a distortion field blocking it from the rest of the universe. Shades of Greg Egan’s Quarantine, you’ll say, except that Wilson develops the idea much further: The sun is blocked, but something substitutes its light and heat. The Moon disappears but its tidal effects survive. Satellites fall but the barrier is permeable. Then they discover that time passes a lot faster outside the field than inside… enabling Earth to survive more or less intact through thousands of years. Clearly, someone or something has gone through a lot of trouble to put the planet in a high-tech Mason jar. But why?

    Big ideas indeed, but Wilson would rather focus on a few characters and so, after front-loading most of the Big Ideas at the beginning of the novel, he then slows the pace down and focuses on three main characters. Spin then becomes a romantic/family saga spanning a few decades, throughout which our three main characters experience and demonstrate the social changes afflicting an Earth cut out from the rest of the universe. There’s still plenty of SF goodness to come (including a Hail-Mary Mars colonization plan whose result I won’t spoil here) but Wilson makes it all accessible and compelling through savvy writing. It will help non-SF audiences that Wilson knows how to make his characters as compelling as his ideas.

    Neither flashy nor boring, Wilson’s writing style finds beauty in simplicity. His prose is polished until all that’s left is the bare essentials. It looks easy, but it’s not: even after decades of development, SF writers often has trouble finding a good balance between good fiction and good ideas. It helps that Wilson (not a scientist himself) understands and respects SF’s base assumptions as well as any other SF professional, while acknowledging how the world really works. Spin, for instance, shows a good understanding of the interplay between politics and business. It also recognizes that the instincts of SF readers aren’t those of the real world: Worldwide superstition and irrationality end up forming a core part of the book, despite the main character’s understanding of the situation.

    There’s an elegance to this book that is difficult to describe in only a few short sentences. There are a few flaws (the lengthy rescue section, for instance, should have been shortened), but Spin leaves the reader fulfilled and entertained, just as any good science-fiction story should. It also demonstrates why Wilson is, in his own quietly spectacular way, one of the best writers in the business. Three of his four last novels have netted him Hugo nominations: this one won’t break the trend.

  • Hopscotch, Kevin J. Anderson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2002, 468 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-57640-2

    The pulp-magazine origins of genre science-fiction have allowed it to evolve its own self-sustaining market, its own rarefied standards of extrapolation and its own sub-culture of specialized fans. SF has prospered under these conditions, but in working within its own ghetto, has also relied too long on a few lazy habits that are hard to break. Intentional simplification is one of those conventions that has to go, and otherwise satisfying works like Kevin J. Anderson’s Hopscotch demonstrate why.

    The standard procedure goes like this: Given a really good idea, the author’s temptation is to write a story set in a future shaped almost exclusively by this idea. For most of SF’s history, this has meant flying cars in settings identical to white American suburbia, circa 1950-1960. Caucasian heroes saving the galaxy while their housewives are busy raising the mutated kids. Nuclear families with atomic rocketships.

    But back in the real world, we know that the present isn’t so simple, and that the future is even less likely to be so. The hallmark of today’s best SF writers (as represented by Sterling, Stross, etc.) is to present a future that is as textured, as shattered as today’s society. Futures with political complexity. Futures with doubt, incompetence and all sorts of human failings in environments that will never gleam with glass and chrome. Old-school SF, in this context, can still be enjoyable —but it just doesn’t hold up as a piece of credible extrapolation.

    Kevin J. Anderson’s Hopscotch, despite considerable lengths and a regrettable political naiveté, is a lot of fun to read. From a basic concept (what if minds could easily hop from one body to another?), Anderson imagines four hundred pages’ worth of incidents, anecdotes, economic transactions and other neat consequences. The plot is built as a template on which to hang as many of those body-switching ideas as possible. In many ways, it’s a throwback to the pure idea-throwing fun of classic genre SF. After the first few pages, it’s obvious that Hopscotch doesn’t mean to be cutting-edge SF, but a nostalgic idea-driven romp. (The hopscotching process itself is left purposefully vague, relying on foggy noosphere notions that aren’t developed very well.) The writer is purposefully playing a very specific SF game, and well-behaved readers will know how to play along.

    It works well, but only up to a point. I’m not going to say much about the straight-to-the-fact writing and the utilitarian style, mostly because genre SF has evolved a tolerance for efficient prose. What hurts a lot more is the emptiness of Hopscotch‘s world beyond the hopscotching. It all takes place in a vaguely specific America, with absent political structures and undefined social issues. (As you may expect, if the US is an abstraction in Hopscotch, the rest of the world is even less visible.) There’s a brand-new, all-powerful regulatory agency to prevent hopscotching abuse. Otherwise, well, you’re left wondering. The very concept of hopscotching seems to have been greeted with widespread approval, and there’s no word of anything looking like a counter-hopscotching movement.

    But is it fair to nit-pick this novel with such base concerns? Hopscotch, after all, doesn’t aim to present a “real” vision of the future. The lack of technical details points the way: this is old-fashioned science-fantasy, using the rational language of SF to make a point after a purely speculative, even fantastic premise. If the characters act like dim-bulbs through the entire plot, it’s to precipitate the action. If the world has no political complexity, it’s to simplify the plotting. (Even the organizational politics don’t make sense; an FBI agent today would not be allowed to head an investigation tracking down one of his best buddies.) Hopscotch has chosen to be a mean idea machine.

    A more serious objection to Hopscotch as a piece of old-school SF is that by those very same old-school standards, it’s almost unbearably long. Novels of the sixties barely topped 250 pages. This one clocks in a nearly twice that, and the last third of the novel seems needlessly long. Worse; it’s precipitated by stupid actions by characters. You know that a novel, as fun as it is, has overstayed its welcome when you wish the runaway character would just give himself up.

    It’s enough to drive you nuts: Hopscotch is a fun, fine novel, packed with ideas and easy to read. Yet it remains so far and so close to something better, something that could actually have relevance to today’s world rather than yesterday’s genre.

  • Wall Street, Doug Henwood

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Verso, 1997 (1998 revision), 372 pages, C$25.00 tpb, ISBN 0-86091-670-7

    The cover illustration really says it all: A Wall Street sign punctured by bullets. This is Doug Henwood’s critique of the financial system, informed by a solid background in economics and years of experience as a journalist. You wouldn’t expect such a book to be fun to read, but it is. And even the increasingly dated statistics in the book don’t make any less of a valuable exposé even today.

    I should explain that I’m neither an economist nor a political scientist, but as a layman I don’t do too badly with the stuff. I may not be able to pass Econ 101, but I’m able to follow the financial news to my satisfaction, and I like to spend some time looking at the trends out there. In some way, I’ve got a science-fiction fan’s interest in financial matters: Economics are just another way of explaining how the world works, and it’s just as worthy of consideration as hard science. Perhaps even more so when you take a look at today’s world, in which economic and political power is so closely matched.

    I should also add that I harbour some deep doubts about the sustainability of the capitalistic system. While free markets are better than the alternative, they also encourage a winner-takes-all mentality that’s incompatible with a good number of social values. I belabour this point; I’m just mentioning it given how it puts me in the target audience for Wall Street. This book will not convert the unconverted, but it will confirm vague suspicions and provide more arguments to support a sceptical stance.

    Structurally, the book moves on from target to target in successive chapters, gradually digging deep into capitalistic systems before a broader conclusion. All the main players of the financial scenes are studied one after the other, from the corporations themselves to the traders and the regulators, as well as the academics playing with their models without regard to reality. Surprising statistics help Henwood present some resonable arguments about the insanity of the market.

    Quite technical at times, Henwood’s work is also clearly aimed above my head. I won’t try to claim that I enjoyed every page of the book, because it started to lose me somewhere in the more academic “money market” section. Not being an economist, it became more difficult to associate Henwood’s subject matter with what I already knew as he started chewing on Marxist theory, modern economic models and other more theoretical concepts. On the other hand, you could always rely on one or two zingers per page. (My favourite comes on page 113, as Canadian celebrity father/businessman Frank Stronach is quoted as saying “To be in business, your first mandate is to make money, and money has no heart, soul, conscience, homeland.”)

    It’s easy to recognize enthusiasm and audacity even as the actual mechanics of the arguments remain obscure, and Henwood has tremendous energy to pour in this project. Even econ-challenged readers will get some enjoyment out of the anecdotes, quotes and arguments described by Henwood. Wall Street is a seriously funny book, even though I’m willing to concede that my definition of “funny” changed after pages of economic theory. If nothing else, the first three chapters (“Instrument”, “Players” and “Ensemble”) are reasonably accessible, as is the Conclusion.

    In hindsight, Wall Street gains a bit and loses a bit. On one hand, its cautious tone was vindicated three years later as the exuberance of the dot-com boom turned into the dot-bomb doom, wiping entire fortunes and making a great number of Wall Streeters look like idiots. On the other hand, the market moves quickly, and so the numbers from 1997 may not reflect today’s environment. Certainly, it’s hard to read Wall Street without wanting to know what Henwood now thinks of the current insanity of American economic policy. (Fortunately, you can alway head over to leftbusinessobserver.com for regular updates about what Henwood’s been up to.)

    I’m not sure that the above is meant to be a recommendation for the book. I’m glad I read it, but I’m not sure I understood most of it. I was entertained, but it took me a number of weeks to get through it all. I was fascinated by some facts and anecdotes, but I’m not sure how valid they are nearly a decade later. But then again I can recognize that few people will be able to fully understand Wall Street . You’ll have to decide whether that includes you. (And then you’ll have to find a way to get the book: a quick look at abebooks.com suggests that it’s a collector’s item.)

  • Souls in the Great Machine, Sean McMullen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1999, 448 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-312-87256-9

    As someone who provides technical support for libraries, I don’t have to be told about the awesome powers wielded by librarians. Sean McMullen may have dedicated my copy of Souls in the Great Machine with “watch out for strange librarians”, but that’s more of a reminder than a revelation.

    Today, librarians may be cataloguing pieces of dead trees, but in two thousand years, who knows? In McMullen’s imagined future, librarians are the undisputed masters of high technology in a world where anything more advanced than steam power is strictly forbidden. Arguments about how to run the library are settled through pistol duels, city-states dominate the political landscape and humans are regularly harvested away through an irresistible “Call”.

    Even though I many not be a big fan of post-apocalyptic futures, SF with epic fantasy trappings or massive trilogies, McMullen’s novel is strong enough, despite a few annoying writing flaws, to overcome most of my prejudices. For one thing, it’s SF that understand and espouses SF’s basic ideals. For another, it’s got enough sweep and scope to fulfil even the most demanding SF readers.

    It’s not your typical post-apocalyptic future, for instance, given how it sets its narrative at a point where humanity is once again starting to look forward. As the novel begins, ambitious chief librarian Zarvora Cybeline is single-handedly revitalizing the Great Library of Rochester and putting the finishing touches to the Calculator, a Babbage Engine made to work using enslaved human components. What follows is an information revolution, a war, a re-discovery of this future age’s underpinnings and a revolt against what could charitably be described as gods of an ancient age. Fun stuff, well-told through a cast of delightful characters. Three strong female protagonists share the spotlight of this novel, through epic adventures filled with large-scale spectacles and intimate moments.

    I could spend paragraphs describing McMullen’s constant stream of ideas, from human-powered computers to indirect space warfare. But that would spoil some of the book’s appeal while selling short its considerable reading pleasure. SF fans looking for a gigantic helping of ideas will be well-served by this book. Simply put, Souls in the Great Machine is a compelling read even at 448 pages, packed as it is with grand characters, great moments, compelling ideas and the comfortable sweep of an big, big story. McMullen’s writing is clear and clean, with occasional flashes of humour. (I was quite fond of the quote “Seneschal, allow [this character] to be harmed, and I will do something so pointlessly hideous that you will die as much from disbelief as pain.” [P.308])

    There are, unfortunately, problems with this book that prevent it from being a complete success. McMullen, though gifted, is not a polished writer, and so Souls in the Great Machine is still rife with inconsistent viewpoints (sometimes switching in the middle of a section) and rough development. Months, sometimes years pass between chapters and sections, and better control over the pacing of the book could have done much to smooth over some of the book’s most jarring moments. McMullen writes fantastic characters filled with both good and evil, but in two specific cases, I found the abrupt transition of some characters to the dark side to be unconvincing and, ultimately, harmful to my appreciation of the novel. Some plot threads end spectacularly while others simply peter out. The “Call”’s explanation is lame. Several annoying coincidences abound, including “chance” meetings between our main cast of characters over and over again. A more experienced writer (and a stricter editor) could have fixed those problems. In the meantime, the impression remains of a great novel fighting its way out of imperfect writing. Frustrating, especially given how enjoyable is the rest of the novel. Curiously enough, this book may have been better with an added fifty pages’ worth of smoother storytelling.

    But even so, Souls in the Great Machine achieves most of its goal as a solid and intelligent Science Fiction novel. Though not billed as such, this is the first volume of a series, and it ends on a high note that makes a sequel both superfluous and intriguing. I’m already on board for The Miocene Arrow (which feels like a sideshow more than a straight-up sequel) and you can be sure that I’m keenly interested in what McMullen thinks about next.

    Furthermore, it goes without saying that I remain on my guard regarding strange librarians.

  • 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.