Book Review

  • Utopia, Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2002, 385 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-50668-6

    It would be easy to make a wisecrack about how theme park are like catnip for techno-thriller authors, but that would be designating Michael Crichton as “all techno-thriller authors”. It’s not because the guy has made a career writing about theme parks, from WESTWORLD to Jurassic Park, that one has to tar an entire genre with the same brush.

    Still, when Lincoln Child decided on a theme park as the setting of his first solo effort, he had to be aware that reviewers around the world would use Crichton’s oeuvre as a lead-in to their reviews. So there we are.

    Chances are that you have already read something at least co-written by Child: Douglas Preston and him are, after all, responsible for some of the best-selling thrillers of the past decade, The Relic to The Cabinet of Curiosities. What was stopping them from branching off on their own? Why, nothing, and so Child had Utopia out on the shelves in late 2002. (With a very attractive cover illustration which, might I add, shares a non-coincidental look with Swarz and Watkins’s Power Failure. But that’s an observation best left to cover design geeks such as myself.)

    As a thriller, it couldn’t dream of a better setting: Set deep in the Nevada desert within the imaginary theme park of Utopia, Utopia begins as robotic expert Andrew Warne is invited at the park to fix a few persistent problems with the robotic equipment. No, no, the novel has nothing to do with robots taking over the place: you can calm down. It’s merely an excuse to get Warne in place as terrorists make a well-coordinated assault on Utopia. The novel (save for the prologue and epilogue) takes place over a single day packed with thrill-rides, chases and explosions.

    As a setting, Utopia is a whole lot of fun: Child takes an obvious delight in showing us how theme park operate, which is fortunate given how this kind of techno-fetishism detail is exactly what readers likely to pick up Utopia are looking for. Divided in four parts (Gaslight/Victorian, Camelot/Medieval, Callisto/Futuristic and Boardwalk/Beachfront, though most of the story takes place in the futuristic “Callisto” area), the park attracts thousands of visitors per day, depends on the latest technology, makes tons of money, employs thousands of people, bla-bla-blah… The behind-the-scenes details betray either extensive research or a convincing imagination, but there’s not much to complain about given how it’s the setup of the novel. It’s like slipping back in a comfortable story-telling mode. Crichton fans, to name an obvious market segment, are unlikely to be disappointed.

    Things heat up a little bit more when Something Happens and the management of the park receive instructions from carefully-prepared terrorists. They want something, they’re ready to prove how evil they are, they’re obviously getting information from someone on the inside and so the games begin.

    Alas, the novel is never quite as good as its setting suggests. The final goal of the villains seems laughably pedestrian, especially considering the amount of complicated preparations they undertake to achieve their goals when simpler ways to get to it existed. The identity of the traitor can safely be guessed from the very first scenes. The book’s killer-app technology, perfect holography, is used in exactly the same way it’s been used on countless cheap TV series with scarcely any technological believability. Even the pacing of the novel seems to stretch on forever by the end, even as it should go a little bit faster.

    Don’t get the impression that any of this is a catastrophe: if nothing else, Utopia delivers the kind of summertime thriller-reading experience the name “Lincoln Child” has become (half) known for. But there’s something disappointing in putting down the novel and muttering something about how it could have been much better. Hardly essential but, hey, there’s always the next Preston&Child collaboration…

  • Iron Sunrise, Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2004, 355 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 0-441-01159-4

    Singularity Sky, Charles Stross’ debut novel, was immediately acclaimed as one of the best SF books of 2003 and went on to earn a spot on the Best Novel Hugo Awards nominee list. Its sequel, Iron Sunrise, is even better. Reprising some of the same characters in a different adventure set in the Eschaton universe inaugurated by Singularity Sky, it expands the scope of the series and also shows Stross’ progress as a novelist.

    It starts with a bang, of course, as a sun is detonated in spectacular technical detail. New Moscow has just died, taking along with it billions of people and destroying an entire culture. Who’s to blame for the star-killer? UN investigator Rachel Mansour (co-star of Singularity Sky) is assigned to the case after a messy interlude defusing a nuclear bomb in suburban Geneva. Things quickly get worse when it’s revealed that New Moscow’s destruction has triggered a doomsday device aimed at another star system. As the race against the clock begins to save an entire planet, events spin out of control when the Nazi-like reMastered faction steps onto the stage… and that’s not even saying anything about Wednesday Shadowmist, an exiled teenage girl with a very unusual education who comes to play a big part in the subsequent events.

    There is a lot to like about Iron Sunrise, and perhaps the best thing about it is how it shows Stross’ increasing control over his material. While Singularity Sky told a rather simple story with a lot of padding, Iron Sunrise goes for a more complicated plot and a tighter focus on what’s really important. Rachel Mansour herself is almost a supporting character, what with Wednesday constantly stealing the show. The threat of the reMastered has big repercussions outside the immediate events of the story, and the feeling of the novel is more vertiginous than its prequel.

    A lot of it has to do with the expanded scope of the Eschaton universe as used by Stross, which takes on new shapes and shades. This imagined future is profoundly upsetting, in a way, as it resets the clock on human history and reignites ethnic conflicts on dozens of world without much in a way of impartial mediation. For a writer quickly being known for light-hearted storytelling, Iron Sunrise proves to be surprisingly mean and effective at times: Times of London blogger Frank the Nose’s recollections of Newpeace, for instance, is awful, disturbing and one of the best thing Stross has ever written.

    Sometimes, though, Stross’ quirky sense of humour can get the better of him: I’m worried that the book will age prematurely, what with blogs and slashdotting being bandied about casually in this far-future setting (heck, Iron Sunrise even has a chapter called “Someone set us up the bomb”. Top that!) His energy is contagious, and his gift for putting characters in bizarre situations is getting better. (The sequence in which the characters have to plot inside a panopticon is definitely ingenious.)

    Fortunately, Iron Sunrise keeps moving at a steadier pace than Singularity Sky. The slingshot ending alone is a piece of work, kicking the novel in high gear just as you thought everything was winding down. Alas, Stross confirms on Usenet that he’s grown doubtful about the Eschaton universe and has no immediate plans to return to it. Too bad, but then again we’ve got more than enough to satisfy us with those first two volumes.

    As of this writing, Iron Sunrise looks like a leading contender for the Hugo Awards, helped along with Stross’ physical proximity to Glasgow in time for the 2005 Worldcon. Best of luck to him; the book certainly deserves consideration. It’s a fine piece of modern SF by a rising star of the genre, one who can be counted upon to deliver the good like a true professional.

  • The McAtrix Derided, Adam Roberts (as "The Robertski Brothers")

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2004, 300 pages, £6.99 hc, ISBN 0-575-07568-6

    I would like to write that after reading Adam Roberts’ Stone, I was so blown away that I bought everything he wrote and then tracked down everything he’s done under pseudonym and ended up with The McAtrix Derided in my hands. It would be a good story.

    Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be true. While I was impressed by Stone enough to buy the rest of Roberts’ SF novels, the truth is that I would have bought this Matrix prose parody regardless of the author. To know that Roberts was the not-so-pseudonymous author of it only made it more amusing to me.

    Now, I’m told that parody is a hot genre in the UK right now. Driven by such titles as Barry Trotter and the Unauthorized Parody and The Soddit (another Adam Roberts product, as “ARRR Roberts”), the category has known a brief white-hot flash of popularity in 2004, and The McAtrix Derided rides squarely on the crest of that particular wave. I’ll leave it to other scholars to discuss the pop-cultural implications of such a parasitic phenomenon, but the bottom line for me is this: I’m such a whorishly undiscerning fan of THE MATRIX trilogy (despite my progressive disenchantment with the latter volumes) that any parody is all right with me.

    Certainly, The McAtrix Derided has the decency to use the usual tools of parodies: The thinly-disguised puns on characters’ names (here, “Nemo”, “Thinity”, “Smurpheus”, “The Frurnchman” and so on), the roughly-parallel plot structure, the silly alternate explanations, the gentle jabs at the source material’s plot holes and the affectionate take-down of the pop phenomenon surrounding the original work. It’s all quite amusing, especially if you’re ready to be amused. After all, parodies are usually as good as the amount of slack you’re willing to cut them.

    The good news are that I was indeed quite amused by the whole book. It starts before even cracking open the covers of the book: As -I gather- is the case with other parodies, The McAtrix Derided comes in a tiny 6"x5"x1” hardcover scarcely bigger than my hand: if any book format can be called “cute”, this is it. Beyond the twin functions of cutting down on costs while making the thin narrative seem longer than it actually is (most pages contain less than 250 words!), it’s a format that, like most needlessly tiny objects, asks you to smile before you even start reading.

    Given that this is a parody, a summary of the story is probably irrelevant. Suffice to say that as Gordon Everyman (Database Coordinator) discovers the hidden truth about his world, readers are asked to follow along the usual slight gags and silly comedy of an extended MAD-magazine satire. Particular highlight include “Gents” antagonists (as in “Oh no, a gent!”), a mad dancing sequence, perpetual befuddlement from Gordon/Nemo (which allows Roberts to poke holes into THE MATRIX’s most dubious assumptions) and a series of bonus pages treating the book as a DVD release (along with Author’s Commentary, Deleted Scenes, promotional offers, previews of other “Victor Gollum” videos and promotional trailers that had me laughing like an idiot.)

    But the real treat comes late in the narrative: While most of the book is a parody of the first MATRIX film, the latter half touches upon the second film and then leaves the whole original trilogy behind for the conclusion. It’s not for nothing that the third part of the book is titled “The McAtrix Derrida’d”: It’s a clever conclusion that tones down the comedy and works both as a conclusion to the book and an alternate explanation for the original movie trilogy. Most interesting, and I say this despite the deliberately ambiguous conclusion. MATRIX fans will find here a reason to track down the book independent of the appeal of a parody.

    The best part of The McAtrix Derided (why couldn’t they call it The Mactrix Derided?) is that it’s a product by a real SF author, and not simply a literary hack chosen at random: Roberts knows his science, likes THE MATRIX, understands the appeal of a good story and never lets his natural decency as a human being stop him from cramming another lame pun in the story. You have to respect that kind of commitment.

  • Ghosts of Vesuvius, Charles Pellegrino

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2004, 489 pages, C$39.95 hc, ISBN 0-380-97310-3

    Charles Pellegrino’s two biggest gifts as a scientific vulgarizer are his ability to make unlikely connections between seemingly disparate elements, and his tendency to extract the last drops of dramatic intensity from these connections. Used in moderations, they can take any readers’ breath away. Overused, they can transform a book in melodrama. Ghosts of Vesuvius, Pellegrino’s latest and most ambitious work, succeeds despite nearly tripping over these elements of Pellegrino’s style.

    Regular readers of these reviews already know the tremendous amount of respect that I have for Pellegrino as both a Science Fiction novelist (Dust, The Killing Star) and as a scientific vulgarizer (Ghosts of the Titanic, Chariots of Apollo, Return to Sodom and Gomorrah). I was delighted beyond words to see him briefly featured in James Cameron’s documentary GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS. He’s one of the very few writer on my buy-on-sight list; please colour the following review accordingly.

    A quick look at Pellegrino’s bibliography will reveal a fascination for catastrophe: Life on Earth as we know it ends in both of his solo novels while two of his non-fiction books are entirely about the Titanic. In his latest work, Pellegrino tackles nothing less than the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius and, two thousand years later, the tragic events of 9/11. In both cases, Pellegrino goes in the field: first as a member of the team digging and analyzing the remnants of Pompeii and, later, as part of the team investigating the remnants of the WTC. (And as fans may guess, there’s also new Titanic-related material here and there in the book; see GHOSTS OF THE ABYSS for details..)

    The subtitle of the book says it all: A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall and Other Strange Connections. A mere summary of the high points of the book fails to do justice at the incredible stuff Pellegrino pulls out of the fire: A dramatic explanation of how Pompeii died, complete with a lesson in high-energy physics. The incredible phenomenon of “shock cocoons” in which people can escape, unscathed, from the worst catastrophes. (Pellegrino himself being a case study in these matters) The heart-wrenching stories suggested by the excavations in Pompeii. The unbelievable events surrounding the collapse of the World Trade Center.

    But as good as this material is, it’s never better than when Pellegrino starts making links between then and now, between this and that, between there and here. Roman and American arrogance, the fragility of existence on a geologically active Earth, the exploration of space and sea are all tied together in a strand of human history that does much to eliminate differences between all. Ghosts of Vesuvius is awe-inspiring in the way great science books often are, by making the obvious marvellous again.

    But Pellegrino, as a humanist, also manages the opposite trick, by finding the human touch in exceptional events. Slaves swallowed by a pyroclastic cloud or firefighters atomized by a falling tower; all are ordinary people in extraordinary situations. There’s plenty of grief and hope in this book, and it doesn’t matter if the tragedies happened three years or two thousand years ago.

    It adds up to an impressive, often disjointed five hundred pages. Pellegrino writes in a scatter-shot stream-of-consciousness style that makes the greatest of connections but can be hard to follow if you’re expecting a structured work. Thankfully, he doesn’t allow the drama to become melodrama, but the tremendous amount of heartfelt sentiment in this book may surprise those expecting a more dryly clinical work. (There’s also a good index, if that helps)

    Fans of Pellegrino will be delighted to find out that the man has been up to much since his last book (Ghosts of the Titanic, 2000) and get even more tantalizing hints about the infamous “Pellegrino Effect”. Newer readers may have to work a bit harder to get used to the flow of the book, but once that’s done, only one thing is obvious: Ghosts of Vesuvius is an exceptional book combining hard science and heart-felt sentiment. Pellegrino triumphs once again. So, when’s the next book due?

  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Raincoast/Bloomsbury, 1999, 317 pages, C$11.95 tpb, ISBN 1-55192-478-1

    Truth be told, I’m not unhappy to be the last one on my block to read the Harry Potter series. As a rabid reader with a serious hundreds-books-per-year habit, you could expect me to keep up with the fantasy bestsellers. But I’ve been content so far to follow the series along slightly behind the movies, trying to find a happy medium between being a cinephile and honouring my semi-rigid rule of waiting until the last volume of a closed-ended series has been published before reading it. Hey, it’s been working for me so far: Wait for the movies to come out, see film, read book, repeat… until volume seven comes out, that is.

    I’ve been generally satisfied by the movies so far, except for moments in HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN where crucial scenes seemed to run too quickly without the necessary information. As the crowd around me oohed and aawed in recognition, I started suspecting something had been lost in adaptation.

    Even a cursory reading of the original novel confirms these doubts. Oh, the basic thrust of the story remains the same: Harry escapes evil foster parents, goes to school (third year!), tries to follow classes but ends up stuck in yet another skirmish between the forces of good and evil. Harry learns a little bit more about himself, we learn a little bit about the world surrounding them and more magic ensues. How complicated can it be, truly?

    Quite complicated, as it turns out. I’m just about the last critic to make the wide-eyed discovery that the Harry Potter books are growing along with the characters, and so this third volume is much more darker in tone than the previous volumes, following the trend traced by the second book. Themes are more serious (even though there’s less emphasis on the muggles/wizard class divide this time around), stakes are higher and even the magic itself is getting more serious. (Just wait until Harry’s hormones kick in: I’m expecting riots and ravishings by volume seven)

    But Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban isn’t just more somber: It’s downright tragic. The biggest twist of this third volume is the growing realization that poor Harry and his friends are stuck in paths traced by their parents. Harry, Hermione and Ron would love to live the life of normal students, attending classes, making friends, playing quidditch and having fun. But no: Thanks to events having happened decades earlier, they’re constantly stuck in mortal perils not of their doing, trying to atone for the sins of their fathers. And that, in my book, is pretty damn tragic.

    Otherwise, well, there isn’t much to report. Readability remains sky-high, thanks to Rowling’s careful prose and steady re-use of common fantasy elements. I do like the way that her universe is expanding and coming together, though the big breakthrough in this matter so far remains the second volume. Still, Harry’s education is always a delight to follow. On a sentence-per-sentence level, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban does honour to the high standards of the series, though some lengths are found here and there.

    What’s unfortunate is that the wrong lengths have been excised from the film version. If you want to talk about the adaptation buts-and-bolts, I can always point out at the missing pets material (there’s a lot more in the novel, and even a quarter of it would have been nice to see in the film). Interestingly enough, the film includes hints of a budding romance between Ron and Hermione while completely ignoring the first appearance of Cho (blame it on casting), whereas the book scrupulously avoids any romantic foreshadowing except for Harry’s early infatuation with Cho. Hmmm.

    But not much of this really matters (including this review), because the Harry Potter juggernaut rolls forward, critic-proof and flush with accumulated good will. Has the third volume changed my opinion of the series? Not a bit: I still think it’s quite wonderful. Do I have any intention of altering my current reading schedule for the series? Not really. Is this review bringing anything new to the discussion? I really don’t expect it to.

  • The Zenith Angle, Bruce Sterling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2004, 306 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-345-46061-8

    Where oh where have all the cyberpunks gone? Bruce Sterling’s newest techno-thriller The Zenith Angle offers a few answers and takes on the post-9/11 environment by the barbed horns.

    Is it useful to point out that Bruce Sterling, chairman of what was then the cyberpunk movement, has now joined fellow neuromancer William Gibson in writing techno-thrillers? While Sterling’s been hovering near current-day settings for a while (His previous novel, Zeitgeist (2000), took place in a slightly-fantastic 1999), there’s no denying that this is the sort of emblematic factoid that makes contemporary observers of the SF scene stand up and take notice: Are we climbing the asymptote of progress so quickly that the singularity already looms over us all? Is this yet another sign that SF writers have given up on the future, flummoxed as they are by an increasingly bizarre present?

    Well, maybe. But let’s not be so quick to judge, for The Zenith Angle has a number of things to say, and they wouldn’t be as relevant anywhere but in a techno-thriller. The novel begins, after a brief, prologue, on a clear morning day of September 2001. Yes, that morning of September 2001. In a few short minutes, uber-nerd protagonist Derek “Van” Vanderveer sees his whole life change. For reasons soon to become clear (his family is no stranger to dark operations, though not enough is made out of this), he ditches his comfy dot-com job to become one of the government’s top cyber-spooks. His life dominated by a shadowy war, his personal fortune in shambles, his family left behind, his career at the mercy of the vagaries of bureaucracy, he struggles to reach a new personal equilibrium after The Day That Changed Everything TM. From theoretical geek to electro-warrior (in a community where a stupid fist-fight can raise one to demigod status), Vanderveer’s an ideal character through which to study this weird new millennium, and Sterling is the man to do the job.

    For he seems to realize that today’s world has a richness that is worth studying with lens polished by the tools of Science Fiction. Sterling, world-weary traveler, techno-prophet and sought-after keynote speaker, understands the world better than most, and The Zenith Angle often feels like an attempt at expressing how weird and wonderful today’s reality has become. Unlike the late nineties, dreams of electronic futures and endless leisure have been replaced by a stark battle for survival against powerful evil forces. Or have they? Because Sterling is too smart to swallow the “War on Terrorism” as anything but an empty slogan used to justify the worst the government can do. Vanderveer’s inherited idealism proves to be no match for the inertia of bureaucracy and the hollowness of the cause. Cyberpunk meets good old power-grab, and in the real world, let’s just say that the good guy doesn’t always win. But neither does he have to lose, and so the conclusion to the novel resorts to an ironic side exit in order to satisfy everyone.

    There’s a fiendish plot complete with a death ray laser sandwiched somewhere in the last fifty pages, but readers already familiar with Sterling’s novel-length fiction are right in suspecting that the plot of The Zenith Angle doesn’t have much to do with its intended effect. The real treat of the novel is in the description of the “cyber-security” government efforts, packed with red tape and empty org charts. It’s in how Vanderveer, like most of us, got stuck believing in a sham that was never meant to be more than an exercise in rhetoric. It’s how the glorious days of the dot-com era were slapped around by forces outside any geek’s control.

    Oh, it’s not all good. The above summary is likely to be a touch more incisive than the actual novel, which meanders from one situation from another, which has trouble balancing its satiric tone against what it it really means and lame attempts at thrills scarcely bothers to follow-up on promising plot threads. Charles Stross is blurbed as calling it “a Catch-22 for the slashdot generation” and it’s not a bad analogy, except that The Zenith Angle doesn’t (yet) have the required distance to the material to be anything but a quick rant.

    But it tells us where the cyberpunks have gone. Out of the private sector and into national security. Out of the future and into the present. Out of technology, even, and maybe into politics. Pick your weapons carefully, but first decide if we’re at war, and if so, against whom.

  • Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Al Franken

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Plume, 2003 (2004 reprint), 421 pages, C$20.00 tpb, ISBN 0-452-28521-6

    I had a plan. In retrospect, it was even a cunning plan.

    On November 2nd 2004, American Election Day, I would buy Al Franken’s infamous Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right) and start reading as the results came in. I would read as Election Night wore on and John Kerry would be declared the (rightful) winner. Being a Canadian, I couldn’t vote myself, but it would be the least I could do to celebrate. There would be schadenfreude as the Republicans would be driven out of office! A new age of reason, peace and prosperity would be ushered in! A fitting conclusion to the madness of the past four years would be written in the history books! And through it all, dependable humorist Al Franken would be my laugh track. Har-har.

    I did allow for the small possibility that Franken would be there to cheer me up in case of a Republican victory. Small. Possibility.

    Well, it didn’t turn out that way. By 10:30 (Ottawa Time), as early results from Ohio and Florida started trickling in, my tingling statistical senses told me that the game was already over. A look at the CBC and another at CNN.com pretty much confirmed the deal. Minutes, if not hours before even the most enthusiastic networks, I called the election to Bush and went to bed for further nightmares. By them, I’d made it only fifty pages into Al Franken’s book.

    The next few days were so full of gallows humour that even Franken’s political satire felt off-key. It’s one thing to humorously uncover lies after lies from American’s radical right-wing commentators, but when the results are in and they show that no one really cares, that’s a pretty damning criticism for Franken’s thesis.

    Oh, it’s not as if the book was completely lost on me. One of the unfortunate tendency of the last four years have been to give me a crash-course in American media despite not having access to any of it: While I’m constantly mystified by Ann Coulter’s popularity (does anyone really take her seriously as anything but a conservative stand-up comedian?), her name is familiar to me, as are those of other right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. Canadians not having this level of partisan discourse, this all looks like a bit of circus from up here. (But we’re glad to see you show us the worst-case scenarios. No, really, we owe a lot to you for what we’re not.)

    It goes without saying that American political expertise is essential background for this book, which merrily takes us across the conservative landscape, cracking jokes and scoring points. Some of the book is hilarious (Franken is a better comedian than he’s a pundit), some of it is devastating (as with Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, some of Franken’s criticism of his opponents’ statistics is just beautiful) and some of it falls flat (“The Waitress and the Lawyer”) or skirts tastelessness (“Operation Chickenhawk: Episode I”). Unfortunately, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them occasionally errs on the side of shrillness –and I say this despite basically being on Franken’s liberal side. Part of it is the nature of American discourse, where comparatively right-wing position have staked a claim to centrism. Part of it is also that the book is torn between being funny and being accurate, and the two don’t necessarily mesh well together.

    As it happened, I ended up finishing Lies four days after the election, by which time the sky was blue again and the worst of my depression had passed (but then again it rained a lot that week in Ottawa). Despite the partisan cries of, oh, half the American population and the vast majority of non-Americans, this administration too shall pass. (“Pass over our dead bodies, crushing our skeletons to dust”, am I tempted to add, but I would merely be kidding on the square, as Franken would say.) What is unlikely to pass, unfortunately, is the rabid polarization of American politics, of which Franken is as big a culprit as the Liars he exposes. It’s all good fun and circuses and trivialization of the nature of politics… until thousands get killed. Oh, wait, did that happen already?

    But really, what do I know? My pick didn’t even get elected.

  • Scores, John Clute

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Beccon, 2003, 428 pages, C$33.00 tpb, ISBN 1-870824-48-2

    Regular readers of these already know all about my steadfast admiration of SF critic John Clute. His work, after all, is essential reference for serious SF readers. Past mentions of Clute’s work (Strokes and Look at the Evidence) have made it clear that I worship the ground he walks upon. Reading his criticism sometimes makes me feel so inadequate as to jokingly contemplate quitting reviewing altogether. But a different feeling dawned on me as I was reading his latest Scores: Inspiration.

    From the onset, it’s obvious that Scores is meant to be a meaty collection. Some four hundred small-point pages of reviews spanning a decade from 1993 to 2003, Scores is a snapshot of the millennial turnover as seen from SF’s perspective. Clute doesn’t review every major work of the period, but he comes close and hits a lot of the essential points from Brin’s Glory Season to Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Additionally, many reviews have been edited and commented from a 2003 perspective… sometimes with amusing results.

    The reviews, of course, are the reason to buy the book: They’re packed with ideas, well-reasoned, well-structured, often hilarious, sometimes infuriating and far, far beyond the simple “buy it/forget it” reader’s guide. Clute doesn’t like or dislike as much as he appreciates and dissects. But sometimes, even his famous erudition gets the better of him: There are a few instances where the 2003 notes candidly explain obscure references, admit to rewriting passages for clarity and even, once, points out a deletion because Clute himself couldn’t even understand what he had written. Now that’s the kind of note fit to reassure every Clute reader occasionally wondering about their reading skills.

    For readers of such collections of critical material, there is a temptation to focus on comments about familiar works and skip the others. While I haven’t always resisted that particular impulse myself, there’s a lot of interesting material here and there, from general comments about particular sub-fields to enthusiastic recommendations about works that may have slipped through the cracks. Scores features, for instance, an absolutely fascinating explanation about “variorum text” studies (the delicate academic field in which revisions to the text are examined to understand the author’s true intentions) that is mentioned as part of a review of an academic text most of us will never read. There’s also a rave about Mary Gentle’s Ash fit to make anyone rush out to get a copy.

    All of which feeds into a sense of deep satisfaction as the book is read, review per review. One thing John Clute wants you to know is that he’s building a cohesive argument with his work. He’s already acknowledged as the field’s most perceptive critic, but this book brings it all together, ties links between elements of his overarching thesis (of which the famous “Real Year” is only a small section) and clearly establishes inroads into further dissections of the field. Throughout Scores, he not only makes numerous references to his previous collections, but peers ahead at an essay collection called The Darkening Garden. Further references are made to the three encyclopedias he co-edited as if to remind us that, yes, he’s the kind of guy who has co-edited three encyclopedias.

    The only sad part about Scores is that it makes so many references to The Darkening Garden that we want to read that upcoming book right now. (It will feature several general essays, which should be a welcome wide-scope view of the field rather than a series of ultra-focused texts.)

    But the most surprising thing about Scores is how, after closing the covers, I didn’t entertain any of my usual thoughts about quitting the SF criticism field forever. I felt, rather, empowered. Motivated to perfect my art, highlight the best examples of the field and dismiss the lesser ones. Sure, Clute wrote better at my age than I ever will: But once you strip away Clute’s vocabulary and his formidable critical insight, his exemplary passion for the genre remains red-hot. If nothing else, that should be enough to make me improve my craft past typos and lazy consumer’s-guide reviews. We all want better Science Fiction, and we’ll be better off if more of us stand up to say what works and what doesn’t.

  • Diary, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2003, 259 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-50947-2

    You’ve been a fan of Chuck Palahniuk for a while. You can appreciate the hipper-than-thou narration of his novel, the urban nihilism, the gimmicky recurrence of motifs, the catchphrases, the blistering contempt in which he holds the world. You think Invisible Monsters is beautiful trash. You think Fight Club has something deep to say to your generation. You think Lullaby was his best book since Survivor. And yet you’ve hesitated for a year before getting Diary. Lots of books to read on your bookshelves. But also bad comments. Rumours that it wasn’t such a hot book. Whispers that Palahniuk started believing in his own mystique. Then there’s the bizarre way Palahniuk outed himself late in 2003. You couldn’t care less (in fact, you learnt it months afterwards), but they’re all little justifications you can use for not getting to Diary any sooner.

    But now you have. You have bought the hardcover right on time, (just as the trade paperback came out) anxious to add another Palahniuk first edition to the nice little collection growing in your library. You have taken a long delighted look at the dust jacket design (with a hidden message inside). You have smiled at the neat unusual touches bestowed upon the book by the designer. You think, how bad can it be? It’s a new (well, almost new) Palahniuk book.

    You start to read. Bam; from the first few pages, you’re back in the groove. Nothing makes sense, but that doesn’t matter in the early chapters. Images are created: the fish-shaped island. Weird situations are introduced: people calling to complain that rooms have disappeared in their houses. exotic information is delivered, this time about facial muscles, all cleverly tying back to the emotional state of the characters. Recurring sound-bites are introduced to act as a chorus throughout the novel.

    And yet something isn’t quite the same. It’s a lot more somber, for one thing. Palahniuk is never chirpy, that’s for sure, but he’s usually darkly funny. Diary features a female protagonist, a first for Palahniuk (and no, Invisible Monsters doesn’t count). And it doesn’t take place in a city. That’s a major point: it doesn’t take place in a city. Palahniuk doesn’t cope well with rural areas. He’s a man of asphalt, concrete, smoggy back-alleys and lamplights. Nature doesn’t suit him, and neither do calm vacation communities. Even if the calm island where most of the action takes place has a deep secret that no one wants to reveal…

    For the longest time, you wonder where the story is going. Diary may only have some 260 pages, but it feels empty. It’s only in the last hundred that things are set in motion, that the real story emerges from the book. And the story is horror. Sufficiently realistic in parts to make you reject supernatural explanations, and yet subtly off the axis of reality, leaving only irrationality as an answer. There are evil humans and an evil fate united against the protagonist; what more could you ask of a horror novel? Why not a meta-fictional envoi? Because that’s what you see at the end. It’s a cute nod. It doesn’t explain the conceit break toward the end of the novel, as the “diary” form becomes obviously impractical for the teller of the tale.

    Ultimately, you close the book left unsatisfied. Oh, you’ve had fun and a few pleasant moments in the company of an author so unlike anyone else. But Diary still feels as if it was a contractual obligation more than a new novel from Palahniuk. You’re still going to remember more of this novel than most of what you’re going to read this year. You’re still going to buy Palahniuk’s next book. But somewhere at the back of your mind, there are alarm signals. Not ringing bells, but quiet electronic pulses, the kind that can make you wait months before getting a new book. And you wonder. You wonder of you’re going to remember Palahniuk’s name the next time you’re at the bookstore.

  • The Rift, Walter J. Williams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Torch, 1999, 932 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-105794-0

    Sooner or later, it happens to every good Science Fiction author who looks longingly at the stacks of Michael Crichton books nonchalantly plastered all over the the “Best-Selling” section of their local bookstore: I’ve got skills, they say to themselves, I can write as well as any of the morons on the best-seller lists. If I wasn’t stuck in a dead-end genre like SF, I could be a superstar. Then they go home and slap together a techno-thriller proposal. If their editor has any sense, they are reminded that SF may be a backwater ghetto, but it’s a faithful backwater ghetto packed with fans that can be cultivated over dozens of books.

    But sometimes, the proposal is accepted and the author embarks on a long voyage outside the familiar terrain of SF. Real-world research ensues, along with feverish dreams of mainstream success. The novel is published under a slightly different name to fool the evil Chain Ordering Computers. Few SF fans are tempted by the offer. Time passes. Mainstream success fails to strike. The author comes back to SF, much wizened and downright eager to get back to business.

    The Rift is Walter Jon Williams’ own trip in the mainstream wilderness, with typically mixed results. To be entirely fair, while Williams has enjoyed a steady amount of success in the SF field, he has never been totally comfortable within the genre: He started out writing historical naval adventures, then (following Ambassador of Progress, itself almost a medieval warfare novel) found the SF field far more receptive to his talents. His career has spanned several sub-genres of SF, from cyberpunk (Hardwired) to near-future thriller (Days of Atonement). His foray in disaster fiction shouldn’t be surprising. In the SF corral he’s always been the young buck sniffing at the gate.

    The Rift, unfortunately, hasn’t done much to further his mainstream career, nor his SF one. You just have to look at the book to suspect why: At nearly one thousand pages, it doesn’t fulfil its epic promise or delivers on the demands it asks of the readers’ time. It it too long, too fluffy. Despite the deaths and the destruction, nothing happens for hundreds of pages.

    Given the premise (An earthquake in the American Midwest, straight on top of the New Madrid fault), you already know the story. Plucky heroes with something to prove, faced with the evil born out of desperate situations. Heart-stopping (yawn-inducing) adventures. Lengthy exposition. Potential disasters even greater than earth-shattering quakes, narrowly averted. It’s all there. And yet we wish it wasn’t. Many part of the book are interesting… but many more of them just aren’t.

    Reading this thousand-page book is an exercise in self-configuring reading skills. You will quickly figure out to skip the lengthy page-long excerpts. You will learn to recognize the meaningless mini-dramas that extend over three pages (Oh no! A snake! Will it bite???) and then how to gloss over them. You will figure out that the young protagonist’s main task is to run from one bad situation to another, bringing light and happiness down the river. The problem isn’t with Williams’ writing skills. The problem is in the lack of editing, letting a middle-of-the-river tale overflow its natural boundaries to flow shallowly over land it was never meant to cover. This is a book to read quickly, for fear of staying stuck as the flow of your interest will recede in its usual boundaries.

    It’s not the first novel about the New Madrid fault, and it’s maybe the weakest one: Certainly, I had more fun reading Peter Hernon’s 8.4 (which clocks in at half the length and twice the excitement). It may not be Williams’ most ordinary novel, but it’s certainly his dullest. Hey, I can’t begrudge him the attempt at best-seller stardom… but it’ll be a good thing to have him back and firing on all cylinders.

    The five years since The Rift‘s publication seems to have independently validated this assessment; after running wild for a while (even writing an -ack, ptui- Star Wars novel), he’s now back in the SF corral, producing fine short stories and working on a space opera trilogy. The young buck has stopped sniffing at the gates, at least for a while. Here’s hoping that his next escapade will be more satisfying for all.

  • In The Beginning… Was The Command Line, Neal Stephenson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1999, 151 pages, C$14.95 tpb, ISBN 0-380-81593-1

    Now here’s another odd book. Originally conceived as a Wired article, then re-purposed for promotional purposes in time for Cyptonomicon‘s release and put up free on the web, In the Beginning… Was the Command Line is an opinion piece on Operating Systems that somehow found its way in book form, in libraries, available to all. It’s a technical piece and yet not a technical piece, a fantastic read by someone lucky enough to know an esoteric subject in depth, yet still be able to write about it for everyone else.

    In a room full of geeks, Neal Stephenson needs no introduction. Lucking out on the fading edge of the cyberpunk craze, his breezy Snow Crash wowed plenty of Science Fiction fans and (later) earned enough good will to net Stephenson a Hugo Award for The Diamond Age. Later books have not been so explicitly Science-Fictional (Heck, his latest trilogy is a work of historical fiction set at the dawn of our modern world) but no matter… for in the meantime, Stephenson had become enough of a nerd demigod that his audience is now willing to follow him wherever he goes.

    In the Beginning… Was The Command Line is a chatty essay about the very strange business of operating systems. Those pieces of software mediating the transactions between users and machines, applications and files. That business didn’t exist fifty years ago; now it’s worth multi-billion dollars, most of which are flowing straight into Microsoft’s business account.

    In this essay, Stephenson describes his own experiences with OSs, as a student, as a coder and as a writer. He grabs on to just about any socio-technical tangent he can find and tries to find the place of Operating Systems in today’s world. Are they (bad) metaphors? Are they essential? Which audiences do they target?

    It doesn’t amount to much in terms of a structured argument. Perhaps it’s best described as a lengthy rant fuelled by considerable intellect. Stephenson fans already know that the man can’t write a decent ending, and it’s a bit of a comfort to find out that he can’t manage to do so here either. But through the whole book, there are fascinating nuggets of hard ideas. The broad distinction of users between Morlocks and Elois isn’t a bad metaphor, reaching deep into something technical help-desk workers have known for a looong time. The parallels between operating systems and Disneyworld touch upon the vast layers of abstraction that have been layered, for centuries, over our society.

    Naturally, this book is written for a certain tech-aware crowd, and it often plays shamelessly to the crowd’s favour. There is an amusing segment describing Linux that will resonate with most hackers. (“It’s a tank! And we’re giving it away!”) Stephenson is both conversant in technological trends and gifted enough to write about them; this make In the Beginning. Was the Command Line an interesting artifact, halfway between the literary and the computer field. It’s interesting to note that even though it’s now pushing five years (a lifetime in technological contexts), the book hasn’t aged much: References to the obsolete BeOS system now have be seen in a historical context (a recent interview with Stephenson confirms that he has since become an unabashed fan of Apple’s OSX) but overall, the market dynamics and socio-technical reflexions haven’t changed a bit despite Linux’s growing acceptance and the introduction of Windows XP.

    Fascinating from start to finish, In The Beginning… Was the Command Line should provide geeks and technologically-friendly readers with a good read, plenty of minor revelations and maybe even a new look at the tools they’re using on a nearly-daily basis. Best of all, you don’t even have to buy it in a bookstore: it’s all available on-line.

  • Angels and Demons, Dan Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 2000, 572 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-02736-0

    Curiously, sales and awards often have less to do with the work itself than to previous factors. Movie sequels make most of their first-weekend box-office on the strength of the prequel. Authors sell to established fans. Denzel Washington gets an Oscar for TRAINING DAY. This sort of things.

    After the blockbuster success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, it’s only natural that all of his back-list should be reissued in mass-paperback format. But after reading Angels and Demons, the direct prequel to The Da Vinci Code, it’s not hard to feel as if Brown is now getting the success he should have enjoyed with the previous book.

    From the first few chapters, we can already recognize the ingredients that would make The Da Vinci Code such a success: A mixture of high technology, esoteric knowledge, straightforward (okay; clumsy) prose, pedal-to-the-metal pacing and an interest in the best-known secrets in history. Here, protagonist/symbologist Robert Langdon is summarily brought from Boston to Switzerland when a murder turns out to have links to the ancient legend of the Illuminati. The murder victim is branded by the sign of the mythical brotherhood, his flesh engraved with an ambigram. But there’s even worse; a canister of pure anti-matter is missing. Obviously, Truly Bad Things are about to happen. It doesn’t take a long time for Langdon to link powerful destruction to the Illuminati and deduce that Vatican City is about to go bye-bye. The rest of the book, needless to say, is solidly in the thriller tradition: Learn secrets! Follow the clues! Catch the guilty ones! Save the girl! Find the destructive device!

    But a flippant plot summary can’t do justice to the mile-a-minute sheer reading pleasure that we get while going through the book. Brown isn’t much of a stylist, and his exposition style is annoying when you already know what he’s talking about. (The whole CERN section is a bit condescending if you’re already familiar with it. “We invented the web”, etc.) But that soon stops being a problem as the novel advances and we’re swept along the heroes as they run around Rome trying to pierce the secrets of the Illuminati.

    While the ideas and secrets and bits of amusing historical trivia unveiled in Angels and Demons aren’t as arresting as the ones in The Da Vinci Code, this first Langdon adventure is far better-constructed than the more popular sequel. Langdon himself is a far more active hero: He fights, figure things out, gets himself out of impossible situations and gets the girl all in slightly more than twelve hours. Whew! The pacing actually accelerates throughout the entire book, unlike The Da Vinci Code, which started deflating halfway through.

    Oh, there are still numerous problems with the book: Beyond the clumsy style, the book’s opening is marred by a sense of unreality. Sorry, but CERN doesn’t have an X-33 ready for takeoff. No, “they” don’t have magical powers when it comes to find telephone numbers over the web (unless they’re using DNS records and on-line phone books like the rest of us shlubs.) After that, well, Brown does himself no favours by setting up a false religion/science conflict and lecturing the audience about “who won” in chapter 94. And when the identity of the secret Illuminati master is revealed, well, anyone could have seen it coming…

    …but wait! Because right after the big explosion, just as we expect the book to wind down to a graceful finale, something is wrong: There’s still fifty pages left even though everything is in the bag. Could this mean… a twist?

    Hell yeah. And not just one. The type of insane twists-upon-twists that pile up and either make the book or destroy it. We’re lucky: Angels and Demons doesn’t just redeem itself, but vaults in the “great thriller” category thanks to the stunning, laugh-in-disbelief finale. Grand revelations. Wonderful red herrings consumed. Dan Brown triumphant, setting the stage for another Langdon adventure.

    With retrospect, the success of The Da Vinci Code seems more an more like an inevitability. Books like Angels and Demons are kind of truly honestly good book that end up setting the stage for something bigger. The backlash against Brown is, by now, considerable, but it’s also misguided; if he was still toiling away in obscurity, we’d be in awe of his unusually brainy thrillers.

  • The Leaky Establishment, David Langford

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Cosmos, 1984 (2001 revision), 216 pages, US$17.95 tpb, ISBN 1-59224-125-5

    Over the years (and he’s been at it since the late seventies, almost as long as your reviewer has been alive), David Langford has built an enviable reputation as one of Science Fiction’s foremost fan writers. Through sagacious reviews and columns for a variety of outlets, through his editorship of the Ansible newsfanzine, though his involvement in electronic fan networks (Usenet, the web, etc), Langford reigns as a fandom superstar. (It helps that he’s supernaturally well-read in many genres, holds a nuclear physics degree and often write in a style guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.)

    But to merely call him a fan, even a superstar fan, is doing him a disservice. His for-profit bibliography is equally impressive, even though most of his books have now achieved the kind of mythical status only allowed to out-of-print works. Best-known amongst them was The Leaky Establishment, a tell-all bureaucratic comedy set in the bowels of Britain’s nuclear research facilities.

    The good news is that the recent rise in small-publishing houses (hurrah for technology and Internet bookstores) has allowed Langford to bring back into print a number of older works. Cosmos / Wildside Press alone has republished four of them in 2003, including The Leaky Establishment.

    The best way to describe the book would be as a twisted hybrid between a bureaucratic thriller, a dry British comedy and a tell-all confession about the United Kingdom’s nuclear research establishment. It sets in motion as protagonist Roy Tappen drunkenly smuggles part of the British nuclear deterrent outside the research facility where he’s working. Horrified by the mistake, he tries to smuggle it back in… only to find out that the facility has, over the weekend, upgraded its gate sensors. In an environment where misplacing a calculator can bring the wrath of the bureaucracy down on hapless workers, this places Tappen in an untenable position, especially when his neighbour (a fellow nuclear research scientist) starts commenting on elevated levels of radiation coming from Tappen’s house…

    And so the stage is set for a comedy in which Tappen takes on an entire research facility in order to keep his job, his wife and his sanity. Not that his mental well-being isn’t already threatened by the inanity of his workplace. You can more or less imagine the rest, especially when you throw in VIP tours, trips to the local pub, distressing working conditions and complex plans to smuggle nuclear material inside a research facility.

    But to focus on the story would be to short-change the typically delicious nature of Langford’s prose, equal part brainy comedy (the scientific bits are convincing) and bone-dry British humour. It wouldn’t work in an American setting or with an American author: The Leaky Establishment is a British work through and through. Fans of Ansible’s bite-size wit in are in for a treat with this novel: it shows not only more of Langford’s trademark humour, but impressive plotting skills and a true ability to sustain a book-length work. The comic timing works perfectly and the dialogues ring true.

    They may be actual transcripts, for all we know: Readers interested in knowing more about the truth behind the fiction should try to get The Silence of the Langford (an excellent book by itself) and read “The Leaky Establishment: The Final Drips”, for a behind-the-scene examination of his primary sources in writing this novel. (Here’s a hint: He worked there)

    Revised in 2001, The Leaky Establishment has lost none of its considerable amusement value since 1984. Good jokes, great pacing, compelling prose and unusually good science should do much to attract a vast audience for the book. Science-fiction fans already know how good David Langford is; now it’s time for everyone else to find out.

  • Veniss Underground, Jeff Vandermeer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Prime Books, 2003, 207 pages, US$15.00 tpb, ISBN 1-894815-64-5

    I’m not a big fan of fantasy. I’m not too fond of gratuitously-grotesque fiction. I can handle weird stuff (whether it’s the old weird or the new one), but I like my weirdness funny, not grim. Cordwainer Smith, you say? I reply Bah. In short, I’m not the target audience for Jeff Vandermeer’s Veniss Underground, a dark fantasy book borrowing equally from SF and horror, a nightmare trip through a far-future city that owes as much to Gregor Mendel than to Hieronymus Bosch.

    But the novel (and Vandermeer himself) kept getting such rave reviews in the specialized SF&F community that trying to ignore the novel was getting to be actively embarrassing. So when I found myself at the 2004 Boston Worldcon with twenty dollars, the new trade paperback edition of Veniss Underground and Vandermeer nearby, well, it all happened very quickly. “I hope you like the book” said Vandermeer after autographing my copy. Well, he wasn’t alone in sharing the sentiment.

    But I do, fortunately. I even do like Veniss Underground quite a bit, considering that I’m not an ideal target audience for it. It’s well-written, has plenty of good moments and enough spectacular images to satisfy even one of the most reluctant hard-SF fan in the crowd.

    Divided in three sections, Veniss Underground evolves and unfolds gradually, only revealing its true dramatic arc in the third section. At first, we get to meet Nicholas, an artist with good intentions but a rotten streak of luck. He slums in the garbage zone, and he is only too willing to tell us a story in exchange for water, food or drugs. His story is, all things considered, ordinary. A quest for a criminal overlord (or is it a genius scientist?), as Nicholas’ last chance at putting his life back together.

    But the story doesn’t go where you think it’s going. Soon enough, you become Nicola, Nicholas’ sister, an upper-class programmer who lives high above the city of Veniss. (You become her because you are the protagonist of part two, much as Nicholas narrated part one and part three is told via a third-person point-of-view) Her brother gone, Nicola finds herself the recipient of a curious gift, a genetically-modified meerkat only too willing to be her servant. But where is her brother? Could her meerkat be part of the answer… or the root of the problem?

    But wait again; before you even think you know where this is going, we settle in our final protagonist: Policeman Shadrach, who will have to venture underground (deep underground) to rescue what he loves and destroy what he hates. As he climbs deeper down, Veniss becomes poorer, stranger, crueler. This voyage to the heart of darkness won’t be easy… nor without consequences. What he finds down there could have repercussions for the entire human race.

    And that’s the book in a nutshell. But what this plot summary can’t tell you is the way it’s all shown to you. Vandermeer isn’t your usual SF&F-as-entertainment punk who only wants to tell stories. No; he’s a real writer, and this love for good writing shows throughout the entire book. Savvy structure, tons of allusions to classic literature and fine descriptive passages should please even picky readers. Those looking for a story aren’t as richly rewarded, but there’s a strong (if simple) plotline running throughout the entire novel, one that delivers a satisfying resolution to boot.

    But resolution isn’t everything, and so it’s the nightmarish imagery of the book that is likely to resonate with readers long after the final page. The trip through a magnificent organ bank (and a less-magnificent organ pile). The way to go to the last underground level. The final confrontation between hero and villain. The mixture of SF, horror and fantasy.

    No, I’m not the ideal target audience for this book. As a die-hard partisan of genre restrictions and a Hard-SF reader convinced about the primacy of plot over style, I didn’t go bonkers over Veniss Underground like so many of my fellow reviewers. But I liked it well enough to consider it time and money well-spent. As a piece of twenty-first-century imaginative literature, there’s even something to be said about the way Vandermeer borrows from multiple genres in order to tell the story he wants without necessarily fitting it in a particular niche like would have been the case thirty years ago. (Usually in SF; I’ll try to say something more about this purification of the “science-fiction” label in a latter review, preferably as a companion to the “domination of fantasy isn’t a bad thing” argument) Good work, Mr. Vandermeer. Yes, I liked your book. Am even looking forward to your next novel.

  • Cuba, Stephen Coonts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1999, 390 pages, C$38.99 hc, ISBN 0-312-20521-X

    The events of September 11, 2001 haven’t been kind to techno-thriller writers, ushering a brand-new age of geopolitical realities (some of them shifting on a monthly basis) and instantly relegating a whole decade of post-cold-war fiction into the dustbin of alternate realities. I took my time in making my way to Stephen Coonts’ 1999 novel Cuba and I shouldn’t have: Five years later, the novel seems both oddly prescient and irremediably dated.

    Not completely dated yet, though: As of this writing, Fidel Castro is still alive and (presumably) doing well, though getting ever-older. But Cuba open as Castro is dying, an event that will set in motion a number of highly unpleasant changes in the country’s ruling class. Meanwhile, the Americans are taking biological warfare components out of Guantanamo under the supervision of Coonts’ usual protagonist, now-admiral Jake Grafton. (But in a classic case of an author struggling to merge an unfolding military series with ongoing reality, Coonts has to ignore the events of his earlier Under Siege in order to briefly revive Castro once more.) After a prologue in which an old ex-Russian soldier contemplates a missile silo hidden under Cuban farmland, well, it’s obvious where things are going sooner or later. Viva la revoluçion!

    Setting a novel around the political changes to affect Cuba after Castro’s death isn’t too far-fetched, nor has it (by itself) passed in alternate realities. What’s more unsettling, however, is the fashion in which the Americans are driven to attack Cuba. You see, evidence shows that the country is developing weapons of mass destruction… oh, you heard that one already? Fortunately, in Coonts’ universe, there are actually a number of real weapons of mass destruction on the island. Whew!

    But wait a second: Through the first half of the novel, we’re led in following a plot-line in which the dastardly Cubans steal a shipment of American biological weapons taken out of Guantanamo Bay base. Weapons shipped out by what appears to be a Cuban freighter, no less. (No, that didn’t make sense to me either. But there’s worse; keep reading:) The shipment is hijacked to be sold (we’re told) to those even more dastardly North Koreans. But that’s not all! As we then discover, the Cubans already had a biological weapon program ticking away in warheads pointed to the United States. At this point, sharp-eyed readers may want to frown, let loose with a little “Whaaa?” and wonder why the Cubans, even as crafty as they are, would want to take the risk to steal American biological weapons even as they’re cooking up a few. Even granted an unexplainable Cuban freighter used by the US Navy, it does seem a little bit odd. The reason for this, of course, is sheer authorial decree. Much as the Bush administration fudged around for having an excuse to go to war with Iraq, Coonts fudges around for an excuse to go to war with Cuba.

    It certainly didn’t need all of this elaborate charade. If there’s anything significant in this novel in the context of Coonts’ oeuvre so far, it’s that he at least attempts to extend his novel past his usual military material. There’s some political and financial material, in addition to some espionage thrills and a memorable number of scenes set aboard a small civilian boat in peril. Cuba itself is described with a certain flair while Jake Grafton and friends don’t take over more than a half of the book. Sadly, when they do take it over, they do it will all the importance of pet characters; they fly planes, disembark on disabled freighter, go into action and do all sorts of things best left to subordinates. There are a few battles scenes; they are fun but quite ordinary.

    All of which leads me to regard this novel as the kind of book best described as a contractual obligation. Yes, it’s decent entertainment, but there’s scarcely any of the fun and excitement we could expect from a top-shelf techno-thriller. It’s as if Coonts woke up one morning to find a note on his to-do list saying “write next novel”. It results in a novel that gives some warmth but not fire; some whiffs of interest but no flair. Hey, it’s better than what most of his colleagues in the military fiction business were able to write at the time. But it’s still not much of a reason to buy the hardcover, or slog through it if you’re not already a fan of Coonts’ work.