Book Review

  • 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…

  • The Second Angel, Philip Kerr

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Henry Holt, 1999, 392 pages, US$25.00 hc, ISBN 0-8050-5962-8

    There are many ways to explain how much I hated Philip Kerr’s The Second Angel, but the most succinct one can be boiled down to only one word: Footnotes.

    Sure, you say, footnotes can have a place in fiction. I won’t argue the point, especially, when I so recently lauded their use in Mark Z. Danielewski’ House of Leaves and Jasper Fforde’s Lost in a Good Book. But Philip Kerr isn’t writing post-modern or amusing fiction: The Second Angel tries to be a mystery/Science Fiction hybrid, with the genre plot serving as a template on which to hang erudite musings on the nature of blood. In 2069, the story goes, a devastating epidemic called P2 has contaminated a good proportion of the population, and clean blood (which can be used to cure the disease through transfusion) has become an valuable resource, so valuable that it’s used as collateral and “blood banks” (har-har) are now better-protected than money banks.

    From its very premise, The Second Angel doesn’t even make sense: You cannot cure a blood disease by simple transfusion: given that blood is produced in the bone marrow, transfusion is, at best, an expensive reprieve. (Practical proof of this assertion is to be found in the number of AIDS victims nowadays) Kerr himself acknowledges this plot hole when a minor character is diagnosed with a different type of blood problem and transfusion is seen as an expensive way to delay the inevitable. But then he still goes on to base the rest of the novel on the idea that P2 can simply be cleaned away through a full transfusion. This is simple contempt from the author toward his audience, and once you latch on to the idea that Kerr thinks you’re a moron, supporting evidence is everywhere to be found.

    Which brings us back to footnotes. The novel contains a copious number of them, inserted mostly for pedantic purposes, explaining things and historical details to the reader. At best, most footnotes bring nothing noteworthy to the reading experience. At worst, they’re simply dumb: Is it really useful to put a footnotes at “intel1 workers” if the footnote just explains “1: intelligent”? Worse: the footnotes are presumably inserted by the omniscient 2069-era narrator, intended to a contemporary audience. Alas, these footnotes (Hey! “Intel worker” means “Intelligent worker”!) would be strictly useless to a circa-2069 reader.

    No, the footnotes are just the most visible aspect of Kerr’s worst trait as a writer: He’s not a storyteller as much as he’s a lecturer who’s openly disdainful of his audience. SF readers will have tons of fun with The Second Angel… not because it’s good, but because it’s so inept. Yet another example of a writer barging into a genre without doing any homework, Kerr painfully ignores SF’s basic storytelling techniques and the result is awful narration throughout the entire book: “As you know, Bob”-type explanatory conversations pepper the narrative until it overwhelms it, and the prose style distrust the audience’s intelligence so much that it takes pains to explain every single detail in exasperating detail. Rip a page off of this novel (better yet; rip them all off) and compare it to the self-assured storytelling of a true SF writer like Kim Stanley Robinson or Charles Stross, and Kerr looks like an arrogant fool who can’t be bothered to tell a story properly.

    Never mind that his story doesn’t even hold interest in a strictest thriller-genre template: If you want complications, twists or even plausible motivations, you’re better off in a novel that’s not nearly so drunk with its own false erudition. Here, everything proceeds as planned without much in way of unusual complications. The overdone antagonist (How overdone? How about “necrophiliac rapist”?) dies well before the climax. Characters think nothing of nearly killing themselves to fake malfunctions that could be hacked through improper telemetry. After the run-through, the end heist is an exercise in tediousness. Even the framing device is a seriously lame one, with a revelation that’s more exasperating than illuminating.

    That’s not even mentioning the actual mistakes every half-dozen pages. Kerr sets out to write a novel packed with scientific details, but then he proceeds to screw up half of them. You could wipe the floor with my knowledge of advanced biology, but it doesn’t take a Nobel prize winner to figure out that a character can’t have his hair turn white in a matter of minutes. (Nor is this an oversight: Kerr mentions it two or three times afterwards.) Stupid physics mistakes betray Kerr’s lack of basic common sense over and over again, from a false need for super-refrigeration units for space travel (useless even today) to an idiotic distinction between liquid and solid excreta as a source of space hazards. (Here’s a hint, Kerr: Water freezes) The hyperbaric stuff doesn’t make a single PSI of sense. The search query stuff is hilarious. The novel even takes a trip in psychic lalaland near the end, with an easily-guessable plot development stolen straight (and badly) from Larry Niven’s “Gil the ARM” short stories. And let’s not get into the economics of The Second Angel. Not when blood is a renewable resource. Not when blood problems are still a problem despite fairly strong and widely-available nanotechnology. Not when vault have “labyrinths” to deter thieves (You’d think that the authorized users would want a way to quickly get in and out of the vault) Not when… oh, forget it: This, despite the cut-and-pasted erudition and the fancy vocabulary, is a deeply dumb novel.

    Worse; it’s a deeply dumb novel from someone who think he’s much more clever than the very readers who are supposed to buy his stuff. Condescension and disgust drips from every page of The Second Angel like water from a leaky drain: Imagine Kerr as the worst teacher you’ve ever had, haranguing his so-designated inferiors from a pulpit, mistakes infusing every second statement he makes. You can read some novels and not understand them; you can read some novels and not care for them; but only a select few novels provoke fully-informed loathing, and Kerr’s pathetic attempt at a SF thriller falls squarely in this category.

    Some may protest that these criticisms are unfair, that Kerr was attempting a philosophical reflection on the nature of blood, that The Second Angel is best seen as a high-tech fable. To which I have to answer that if what you want to write is fuzzy philosophy, you shouldn’t be peppering your novel with technical details explained in luscious detail. That’s just asking for trouble, and a dissection from readers with a far more accurate sense of reality. It doesn’t help that SF, as a genre, has already gone over the metaphorical and literal consequences of AIDS-like diseases… at least a decade before Kerr set out to write his own take on things.

    Keep in mind that this isn’t the first Kerr novel to fail so spectacularly: While I could tolerate A Philosophical Investigation on its own terms, The Grid was an atrocious mess of a techno-thriller whose lack of success is only exceeded by The Second Angel. If nothing else, Kerr’s monstrosity can be dissected as case study of the worst mistakes in writing SF. The back cover blurb of the hardcover edition says that the novel “assaults your ignorance”: you can’t make up quotes like that.

    It’s certainly okay to hate him as an author. After all, he doesn’t think much of you as a reader.

  • Deep Sound Channel, Joe Buff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 2000, 401 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58239-9

    I’ve been reading military techno-thrillers for fifteen years now, so I shouldn’t be surprised at the peculiarities of the sub-genre. And yet I find the overspecialization of some authors to be a constant source of wonderment. The united markets of America are probably the only publishing environment in the world big enough to be able to sustain a handful of writers specializing in, say, submarine thrillers. You may already recognize the names of Mark Joseph, Michael DiMercurio and Patrick Robinson. Now you can add Joe Buff to this list of naval experts turned novelists.

    Deep Sound Channel is the first in what promises to be a long series of naval adventures set during a future war between English-speaking Allies and a Berlin/Johannesburg Axis. Never mind that the antagonism is as sketchy as it’s implausible: The point here is to have an excuse to study future submarine technology in combat situations. The Russian navy is on the rocks and the Chinese one hasn’t impressed much over the past few decades: Why not take it all the way into fantasy-land and hand-wave a resurgent Germanic Empire? Let’s just be lenient and let this one pass.

    What we’re quick to figure out is that circa-2011 wars are as nasty as the author wants them to be: This conflict is waged with so many tactical nuclear weapons that skyscraper-set snipers have a few at their disposal, and SEALs planning a raid can reliably expect to use a leftover nuke to cover their traces through excessive vapourization. Ahem. Letting slide the political ramifications of a tacnuke-driven engagement (hey, it’s nice to deal with a psycho enemy that doesn’t care about public opinion), let’s just say that this brings both an extra edge and an extra yawn to the whole novel: Sure, there are bigger explosions throughout the novel. On the other hand –where’s the buildup?

    It’s not as if the plot is particularly complex: Six months after the beginning of the hostilities, XO Jeffrey Fuller is asked to assist on a daring mission on South-African soil: A team of SEALs sets off to destroy a biowarfare facility, and Fuller’s ship (the ultramodern Virginia-class “ceramic” attack submarine USS Challenger) is the only one up to the task of bringing them there and back. There is, as you may expect, an obstacle: The crew of the Voortrekker, another higher-tech German submarine. As this is a military adventure, you can figure out the rest of the story.

    There are, to be blunt, plot problems throughout the book and a number of characters straight out of lazy characterizations class. Protagonist Fuller is too soft, too kind, and yet ready to jump off his submarine for a SEAL mission at the drop of a ping. The enemy captain often cackles in mad attempts to outdo B-movie dialogue, doing tremendous damage to the credibility of the novel. (“Idiots! Did they really think their engine tonals would be masked against the floes … Fools! Our merchant marine masters would never make that error. The Americans are soft, Gunther, I’m telling you, and desperate.” [P.78] and later, less triumphantly: “I underestimated the Americans. I took too much for granted, and I fell for their clever tricks. So be it, but I swear to you, no longer. Next time we meet Challenger, she and her crew will die.” [P.377]) As is the case with specialized military fiction, jargon and tedious procedural details (almost invariably discussed by professionals who should already know this stuff) often overwhelm the flow of the story.

    But criticizing Deep Sound Channel on literary qualities would be misleading, for the true worth of the book lies elsewhere. Joe Buff knows his stuff, and his first novel brings something new to the military thriller field by exploring the cutting edge of submarine warfare, without falling over in Science Fiction. For those of you sub-fans weaned on Tom Clancy’s Hunt for Red October, (already more than twenty years old!) this novel is your wake-up call: Things have evolved since then, and Deep Sound Channel is crammed with new gadgets, nifty tactics and neat ideas. There’s an amazing amount of oceanographic information enmeshed with the military stuff, and the result is both clever and interesting. Despite my lack of enchantment with the narrative qualities of the novel, I often found myself finding something new in the combat passages. This cutting-edge material is the true reason to read Deep Sound Channel, not the characterization or the quality of the prose.

    In fact, it’s good enough to make me look forward to the author’s second novel (Thunder in the Deep). Buff’s writing skill can improve, and if they start matching his ideas… watch out.

  • Stranger than Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2004, 233 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-50448-9

    Chuck Palahniuk is justly famous for his weird fiction, but as a hot young writer he has also earned a place in every hip magazine editor’s Rolodex as an ideal writer of weird nonfiction. Who else but the writer of Fight Club to go and take a look at amateur wrestling? Who else but the writer of Survivor to describe sessions where people try to sell their life story to Hollywood producers? Who else? Over the past few years, Palahniuk has accumulated more than a dozen nonfiction credits in magazines such as Gear, Black Book, Playboy or The Los Angeles Times.

    Now, Doubleday has packaged a real treat for fans of Palahniuk’s fiction: A collection of “true stories” (as the sub-title says) culled from Palahniuk’s work and Palahniuk’s life.

    Some articles are straight-up reportage pieces. A look at a raunchy festival that would make fundamentalist reach for their torches and pitchforks. A few days amongst college wrestlers, cauliflower ears and all. Profiles of contemporary American castle-builders. A backstage pass at a combine demolition derby. Unusual subjects, but Palahniuk’s unconventional style works well in presenting you-are-there pieces. He even manages to make nuclear submarine living interesting and unusual to a steady reader of submarine thrillers. There’s even a curious sympathy to it all; by reporting without editorializing much, Palahniuk allows for the obvious conclusion that there are just other modes of normalcy in our big and diverse world.

    Other pieces are interviews with people famous or infamous. Imagine Palahniuk’s choppy and gimmicky style used to do a profile of actress Juliette Lewis. Imagine the author of Invisible Monsters interviewing shock-rocker Marilyn Manson around a Tarot deck, then avoid whiplash as you consider a profile of conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan. In these pieces, Palahniuk’s acts less as a interviewer and more as a listener, an observer.

    But other pieces are much closer to autobiography, as the line between journalism and confession is crossed over and over again, as Palahniuk experiences gonzo journalism to a degree that would surprise even Hunter S. Thompson. Who else would dress up as a dog for a walk through the city, bulk up on steroids, not follow instructions on a bottle of hair depilatory and then write it all up? For Palahniuk’s fans, these pieces are the real substance of the book: They reveal that author as one of his characters, intentionally or not fashioning an image much alike that of his protagonists.

    For those fans, the book’s slim eight-pages introduction is almost worth the price of the book. Palahniuk tackles the American Dream (“Getting away from people”), his cyclical writing process, the nonfiction component of his novels and laces it all with introspection and tales of how his novels were written. It doesn’t really get any better than this, but it sets the tone quite well. After all, Stranger Than Fiction is part autobiography, what with Palahniuk dealing with his sudden fame, his experiences in Hollywood and the murder of his father. An interview with Amy Hempel (available online) says more about Palahniuk’s literary methods and lineage than about Hempel’s books —though it may lead more than one reader her way.

    All in all, it’s an enormously entertaining, highly satisfactory book. It’s difficult to imagine how well-received it will be by people who can’t distinguish Palahniuk from Patterson, but it ought to please the fan audience quite well. The biggest problem with the book is endemic with non-fiction collections: Magazine articles are often commissioned with both a writer and a photographer: While the writer can obtain comfortable reprinting rights for the text of the article, photos are another matter entirely, and often an expensive matter indeed. So the articles in Stranger than Fiction don’t have any illustration, which isn’t a problem most of the time, but can be very frustrating: whenever you hit pieces about modern-day castles, combine demolition derbies or other visually intriguing subjects, the void can be annoying.

    But when you’re dealing with a writer like Palahniuk, the lack of images is almost irrelevant. Anyone who has read even one of his books knows that he’s more than capable to keep our interest with just his words. And so Stranger Than Fiction is a treat, a pure dose of the writer looking at the world without the artifice of fiction. It almost ranks as an equal to Palahniuk’s non-true stories.

  • Fatherland, Robert Harris

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 1992, 338 pages, C$26.50 hc, ISBN 0-679-41273-5

    I’m not a big fan of alternate-history fiction, but even casual readers familiar with the concept know about Fatherland, Robert Harris’ highly successful 1992 debut novel. Whereas the alternate history sub-genre is often seen as a creation of science-fiction storytelling, Fatherland owes more to a blend between historical studies and crime fiction. While this may make the novel more accessible to general audiences (It was published by Random House, after all), I suspect that it also makes it a slight disappointment to experienced SF readers.

    Fatherland takes place in 1964, in a very different Germany. The Reich has won World War II by playing it smarter on the Russian front and then coming to an arrangement with the United States. Don’t expect many details: Harris apparently thought it better to stay vague and not give any ammunition to overly critical readers. It’s not as if any of the counter-factual details are important anyway: the real intent of the novel in not to reimagine WW2 as much as it’s to explore what it would be like to live under a victorious Nazi regime.

    As a “Nazi victorious” vision, it’s certainly more developed and interesting than, say, Len Deighton’s SS-GB, which laboured under the handicap of taking place too soon after the Nazi victory. Here, things have had time to change. The German population is living the life of imperial citizens and the centrepiece of this victorious Nazi Berlin is a trip through a rebuilt Grand Avenue, an imperial showcase in which the 80ft Brandenburg Gate is a mere architectural footnote when placed next to Hitler’s Palace, the 400ft Arch of Triumph, the 3 miles long Grand Avenue or the 1,000ft-tall Great Hall. It’s no accident if the hardcover’s flyleaf contains an illustration of the area, or if all of Chapter 3 is a guided tour of the area.

    But before you start applauding Harris for this spectacular setting, keep in mind that the details of this imperial Berlin were set out in Albert Speer’s architectural plans. Fatherland is not a work of imagination as much as it’s a work of historical scholarship, a fact that becomes obvious once the curtain starts rising on the book’s biggest revelations.

    Plot wise, Fatherland begins with the discovery of a body, a discovery that, in time-honoured noir tradition, will reveal bigger and darker secrets, leading SS investigator protagonist Xavier March straight to the secrets of the Nazi regime. This “secret” is all too familiar to us real-world readers, so don’t expect to be surprised by the story as much as be a witness to March’s own aghast surprise.

    Hence lies, I believe, the crucial difference between genre readers and general readers when looking at Fatherland. For genre readers, living in a Nazi regime is a hook and (perhaps more importantly), a good jump-off point to other things: If SF writers have taken so well to alternate history, it’s because they can then play with “what if?” scenarios and develop them in ever-wilder speculations. Here, living in a Nazi regime is the big concept and the point of the novel; all else plays within the margins set out by this cadre. I imagine mainstream readers reading this and going “Wow, Nazi Germany victorious!”, but genre readers going “Nice… but is that all?”

    It certainly doesn’t make Fatherland a bad book: The investigation proceeds at a decent pace, the characters are interesting (especially March’s own growing dissatisfaction) and the emotional punch of the novel does manage to wring some interest out of familiar elements. It succeeds very well in presenting a society that has integrated the banality of evil, and has even convinced itself of its righteousness despite a gaping blind spot in its recent history. Early twenty-first century readers may want to read the novel with an eye on imperial mechanics, and how a steady stream of far-away terrorism and dirty little wars on the empire’s outskirts are seen as good for “perpetual alertness”.

    On strictly literary qualities, Fatherland delivers more than enough interest to keep you reading. It certainly has found an audience over the past twelve years: Made in a movie in 1994, Fatherland has sold well and earned Harris a steady place on the best-seller lists with every one of his three other novels so far (Including Enigma, reviewed earlier). While a bit basic for SF fans, it’s a strong fiction debut, a satisfying read and conceivably a good introduction to the whole alternate history sub-genre.

  • ReVisions, Ed. Julie E. Czerneda & Isaac Szpindel

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    DAW, 2004, 312 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7564-0240-9

    As an on-line critic (or, more accurately, “some guy with a web site”), I seldom meet the authors of the books I’m reviewing. In all honesty, that’s a good thing. Otherwise, I’d spend half my time apologizing for writing “literary abomination” when I really meant “not up to the author’s usual standards” and then see subsequent reviews contaminated for having spoken to the author in question. Imagine my inner turmoil whenever I’m at a Science Fiction convention.

    All of which to say that this is a contaminated review. A while back, during my 2003 Prix Aurora Award roundup [May 2010: now offline], I bitterly complained about the quality of the nominated short stories and mentioned that “should I be forced to do so, I’d say that Isaac Szpindel’s ‘By Its Cover’ is a decent second choice”. Imagine my surprise when, looking through my web referral logs over the next few months, I started seeing hits from keyword searches on “christian sauve review szpindel”. Imagine my further surprise when, at Noreascon4, I found myself standing next to Szpindel. Fortunately, you won’t have to imagine my surprise when Szpindel proved quite amused by the comment and then turned out to be one of the friendliest author I’ve ever met.

    How do you not buy the guy’s next book after that? How do you not go to the book’s official launch event? How do you avoid having your evaluation of the work stay unaffected by the encounter?

    Well, you buy the book, you go to the reading, you get your autographs, you let yourself be influenced (that’s what signatures are about, right?) and you at least admit it up-front whenever you review the book. Onward, then.

    ReVisions is another of DAW’s original theme anthologies, which at least has the merit of offering another book-like publication outlet to SF authors at a time where readers, myself included, aren’t particularly tempted by magazines. DAW usually does a pretty good job at finding niches for their original anthologies, and so ReVisions is a straight-up collection of alternate history fiction.

    The pedigree of the authors’ contribution to ReVisions varies widely, and so does the quality. Veterans of past anthologies know to expect duds along with the nifty pieces, and as a reader, there’s nothing to do except go on to the next story. (As a critic, it’s perhaps best to highlight the successes and be silently nice on everyone else.)

    As usual, you can depend on the first and last stories to deliver on their promises and so hard-SF veteran Geoffrey Landis opens up the festivities with “The Resonance of Light”, a pre-WW1-era story that I particularly enjoyed given my fascination with Nikola Tesla. On the flip side of the book, lesser-known Australian writer Jay Caselberg also scores a hit with “Herd Mentality”, a whimsical little vignette in which cloned Einsteins plot to take over the world in a kindly older-uncle fashion. Not much plot, but an amusing atmosphere, and I can forgive a lot to a story that makes me smile.

    As it happens, ReVisions‘ best stories are, overwhelmingly, those who take chances with the “alternate history” premise and have a little fun on the side. Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross’ Unwirer is a lot like that, though their type of fiction is written in my native techno-English dialect; non-nerdcore fans may not get so much from this electronic civil rights tale. James Alan Gardner also tries an unconventional approach with the conterfactual angle, and so his oddly elliptical “Axial Axioms” works well, though it may require a second reading to fully appreciate. While “fun” is not a word we usually associate with Peter Watts, his “A Word for Heathens” is awe-inspiring in its unremitting pessimism, and almost delightfully enjoyable if you’re familiar with Watts’ oeuvre. As if it wasn’t enough, you can even call his highly unlikely story an exercise in converging history.

    Other stories are fine, but lack a bit of extra oomph to make them succeed on all registers. Browsing through the book after a few days, the one that strikes me as having the most unused potential is Robin Wayne Bailey’s ultra-dark “The Terminal Solution”. Excellent concept (HIV escapes from Africa during the Victorian age, leaving pre-viral medicine completely helpless), fascinating philosophical implications (do diseases progress alongside medicine?) and familiar setting (London, 1864), yet the overall impact is muted. Unfortunate. I found less to remember about John G. McDaid’s “The Ashbazu effect”, but this Sumerian-printing-press story seemed generally more satisfying. Mad props, half-raised, go to Isaac Szpindel for “When the Morning Stars Sang Together”: This Galileo-influenced tale fulfils its relatively ambitious stylistic aspirations, but loses in impact what it gains in fine writing. Paging through the rest of the book, I’ll finally single out Laura Anne Gilman for the pleasantly hard-SFish underwater thriller “Site Fourteen”. The remaining stories may or may not be any better, but they fail my memory test.

    Every story is followed by a “Revision Point” afterword, in which the author gets to explain where and why the short story diverged from our world. Some of those afterwords have an annoying pedantic edge to them, but others do offer some amusing or interesting insights into the short stories —often telling us more about the author than the stories themselves. Your mileage may vary, but I’m the kind of reader known for browsing through collections just for the interstitial material.

    As expected, ReVisions is an average original anthology with the usual mix of good and not-so-good. While the cookie-cutter nature of some of the early material can give the impression that this is an anthology at the frontier between adult and young-adult categories (a “problem”, if you think it’s a problem, that also plagued editor Czerneda’s previous Space, Inc.), the rest of the book is more assuredly in the adult category.

    As the product of two solidly Canadian anthologists, ReVisions includes more than its share of non-American authors, and will form essential reading for whoever wants to nominate stories for the 2005 Prix Aurora Awards. Heck, if two or three of the stories I mentioned above make it on the final ballot, I won’t even have to complain about a weak line-up this year.

  • The Partner, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Island, 1997 (1998 reprint), 468 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-22604-X

    Ever since John Grisham started hitting the best-seller lists, critics have been saying terrible things about his fiction: His stuff repeats itself, deals in easy populist clichés, lacks stylistic flair, etc. For a long while, I bought into the anti-hype: After an indifferent reaction to Grisham’s first four novels (A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Client), I took a long break. It took the movie adaptation of The Runaway Jury to make me interested in Grisham’s fiction again, with pleasantly surprising results. Picking up The Partner and being equally entertained may be the beginning of a renewed appreciation for the author.

    It starts as if it was a sequel to The Firm: After years spent running and hiding from his old life, ex-lawyer Patrick Lanigan is captured by men hired to find him. His crime? Faking his death, stealing ninety million dollars from crooks and slipping away. As you can guess, criminals can do many unpleasant things to get that much money back. Torturing Lanigan to find out the location of the money is one of the first things that comes to their mind once he’s safely handcuffed. But Lanigan has an accomplice, one that will engineer his transfer to lawful authorities and provide his defence lawyer with enough legal ammunition to keep things interesting.

    As the story moves back to Mississippi, everyone is only too happy to welcome Lanigan with a flurry of lawsuits. His wife files for divorce; insurance companies sue him for fraud; everyone wants the money and the state charges Lanigan with murder to explain the fact that a body was certainly buried in his place… Welcome back, Patrick; this way to the courthouse, please.

    Tortured, detained, swamped in unfriendly lawsuits, you’d think that Lanigan is merely a few courtroom scenes away from a crispy spot on the electric chair. But don’t be so sure: As the story of Lanigan’s disappearance is gradually revealed, there’s a lot more to this story than you may think. Maybe not much more than you’ll be able to guess, but more than enough to keep you interested.

    Entertainment is what Grisham is all about, after all. The Partner is a page-turner of frightening efficiency, which is all the more remarkable when you consider that most of the book consists of exposition thinly disguised as conversations between lawyers. Lanigan’s capture is the defining action moment of the story, but The Partner often spends more time explaining, in painstaking detail, the way Lanigan got away with his fabulous escape plan four years earlier. Before long, it’s not hard to guess where the novel is heading. (I certainly had an early lock on the big final revelation, though the last-page twist caught me by surprise.)

    From a technical perspective, Grisham often slips viewpoints between character without the adequate breaks, a sloppy lack of control that may annoy a number of readers. It’s not the book’s worst flaw: From the audience’s point of view, The Partner flounders a long time in search of a protagonist. Lanigan may have the lion’s share of the scenes, but he’s so secretive, even to the reader, that he’s more akin to an interesting phenomenon (a genius-level legal escape artist, one is tempted to say) than a sympathetic protagonist. Readers may come to rely on friendly defence lawyer Sandy McDermott as a stand-in, but even he is just another one of the supporting characters revolving around the bed-ridden mystery that is Lanigan. Too bad… but then again, if this is a procedural legal thriller, maybe it’s best to consider the convoluted escape plans as the book’s true stars.

    But no matter, because it’s difficult to stop reading once the The Partner gets going. Frankly, it takes a lot of guts and skills for Grisham to immobilize his main character in a hospital room, set most of his action in a series of meetings and still manage to deliver a novel that reads at two hundred pages per hour. The writing may be featureless, but it’s perfect when it’s intended to keep the reader around for “just one more chapter”.

    You could dissect The Partner until you’d be left with yet another populist southern-lawyer thriller written for speed over style, and you’d end up missing the point of the book: It’s fun, it’s surprisingly interesting and it leaves a good impression. Maybe even reason enough to pick up Grisham’s other novels.

  • Broken Angels, Richard Morgan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2003, 400 pages, C$24.99 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07324-1

    Few SF readers were left unimpressed by Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan’s enviable debut novel. A dazzling mixture of pitch-black detective fiction and hard-edged extrapolation, Morgan’s first book immediately announced the arrival of a promising new author, one who could build upon the genre’s traditions and bring them forward in the twenty-first century. While Broken Angels is a conventional side-step in a different genre, it offers plenty of rewards to anyone who won’t mind a bit of action-packed futuristic adventure.

    Takeshi Kovacs, the hero of Altered Carbon, is once again the star of this follow-up novel, but whereas his first adventure was modelled on crime fiction, this one is straight-up military SF served with a touch of treasure-hunting. Stuck on a remote planet fighting a war he never believed in, Kovacs begins the novel in rehab after a particularly nasty battle. He’s soon contacted by a man with a tall story of alien artifacts and a lost starship. Pages later, Kovacs can be found leading the retrieval effort, making deals with amoral corporations and training his crew of intrepid special forces soldiers.

    It’s no insult to Morgan to call him a white-knuckled writer of upscale men’s adventures. Altered Carbon‘s mix of hardboiled sex and violence made even jaded reader wince in shock. Broken Angels follows in the same path, even finding (not always successfully) a surprising amount of sex into a situation custom-made for action. Mercenaries, traitors, body-destroying weapons and humans sins are the norm in this thrill-a-chapter roller-coaster.

    Perhaps the best thing about Broken Angels is how it builds on the hints left in Altered Carbon (Martians!) to create a far more complex universe featuring a long-lost alien race, dirty wars galore, complex power plays between governments and corporations, factions within factions and enough grittiness to make it all feel real despite the plot contrivances. Clearly, Morgan has made himself a playground rich enough to serve as the setting for a few more novels if he so chooses. (Early word suggests that Kovacs will return in 2005’s Woken Furies) Kovacs himself is far more in his element here as a gun-for-hire, thanks to top-notch UN Envoy training and tons of hard-won experience. You can’t ask for a better narrator, even despite his tendency to keep the emotional side of what he does carefully locked away from his tough-guy personae. (Which often works at the novel’s disadvantage —especially when he flips out and starts shooting in chapter thirty-nine.)

    Perhaps just as interesting is Morgan’s explicit political positioning. After a number of rather heavy hints in Altered Carbon (where only the rich can exploit the advantages of “sleeve” technology, etc.), Kovacs’ reluctant-warrior reflections place Morgan squarely alongside other newish writers (Miéville, etc.) whose left-of-centre politics fully inform their fiction. Some will undoubtedly find this tiresome, but in many ways it’s a welcome shot in the arm for a genre who should be asking questions and upsetting the status-quo. In Broken Angels, the merciless portrayal of the corporations running the show is as nasty as the worst cyberpunk had to offer, but it’s partly influenced by the new anti-globalisation movement and developed with a great deal more skill and complexity. (More on this in the singleton Market Forces… at least if I understand the cover blurb correctly.) Despite the sex, the violence and the big guns, Broken Angels doesn’t have much in common with stereotypical military-SF nuke-em-ups. Imagine cyberpunk spliced into an anti-war novel.

    Cynics will be quick to point out Morgan doesn’t innovate much when plotting Broken Angels: “Explorers of various backgrounds banding together to explore an alien environment” can date back all the way to Burroughs’s The Lost World and earlier. But Morgan succeeds reasonably well in updating this template to current standards. Every weapon description is peppered with enough techno-jargon to make you see the serial numbers. The last chapter has as many twists as an entire noir novel. As alluded above, even the generic “war is awful and corporations are bad, m’kay?” message is developed with enough skill to be palatable, maybe even engaging.

    Nothing in Broken Angels is broken. Familiar, maybe, but in the end, what’s left is a fine slick read, with steady forward momentum and enough action to satisfy anyone looking for faster SF. Yes, Broken Angels suggests that Morgan could become a one-trick action/adventure writer if he so chooses. But it’s too early to tell: In the meantime, Broken Angels is a whole lot of fun, especially for reader who like stuff blowing up, but can’t face the prospect of yet another generic Baen military-SF book.