Book Review

  • God’s Children, Harold Coyle

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Forge, 2000, 316 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86296-2

    I’m glad I’ve read this book. As a big fan of Coyle’s early work, I was dismayed to see that his return to contemporary-era military fiction after his “Civil War” trilogy had been marred by two clunkers, Dead Hand and Against All Enemies, two terrible novels that made me wonder if Coyle had lost his touch. The bad news are that God’s Children still isn’t up to the dizzying standards set by his earlier novels. The good news is that it’s a heck of a lot better than the two other books.

    In some ways, it’s even more of a surprise considering the subject matter. While everyone can agree that peacekeeping missions are important and dangerous, they’re not exactly an exciting subject for a techno-thriller. Coyle has, in the past, specialized in engagements taking place on a much larger scale, from World War Three (Team Yankee) to a second American Revolution (Against All Enemies). Here, our protagonists are simply thrown in the mud and the snow of Eastern Europe, on a peacekeeping mission where neither side wants protection and everyone wonders why Americans are intruding in the affairs of another state.

    Plot-wise, Coyle keeps a tight focus on a small cast of American soldiers at the exclusion of everything else: As their patrol is cut off from the rest of the world, no cuts to the White House or reassuring media reports come to break our isolation. It’s a repeat of stylistic choices made in Team Yankee (which followed an armoured team in the far-away context of John Hackett’s The Thirld World War) and it’s the single best element of the book. For it informs everything else and places the reader right alongside the soldiers forced to fight their way back to the base. It’s interesting to see that a simple plot (“get back home in one piece”) trumps such extravaganza as a Siberian meteor strike (Dead Hand) or war in Mexico (Trial by Fire) in sustained interest.

    Part of the novel’s continued attraction is based on, once again, a very simple conflict between seasoned protagonist Nathan Dixon (son of Scott Dixon, protagonist of numerous Coyle novels) and Gerald Reider, an officer fresh out of West Point. When a regular patrol turns into something far more dangerous, Reider find his theoretical knowledge useless and his platoon taken over by Dixon. As tensions mount between the two men and enemy forces get closer, repercussions of their personal animosity become more and more significant. Simple plot dynamics, but boy do they work.

    What also works well, but sometimes turns into straight-up lecturing, is Coyle’s description of what it’s like to be a soldier. At times, God’s Children, seems written to be taught at West Point. At others, it truly puts readers into a soldier’s mind. While Coyle is not a master stylist (Try this sentence: “Laced with the smells of mold and mildew common to wooden structures built by men to be used by men when enjoying manly pursuits was the pungent odor of urine.” [P.208]) but he’s certainly earnest and in military fiction, sincerity counts for far more than technique.

    Still, good technique can make you avoid simple blunders such as the abrupt ending of the book or the lack of definition for some of the secondary characters. Technique could have streamlined some exposition, cut some of the most conspicuous lecturing and wrapped some of those loose threads. Fortunately, God’s Children is good enough and interesting enough to compensate for those flaws. Make no mistake: It’s still military fiction, impenetrable to laymen and reprehensible to anti-militarists. But for anyone who has been looking for gripping tales of modern warfare, it’s not a bad choice at all. In fact, it’s making me curious about Coyle’s latest books, which is certainly something I couldn’t say after Dead Hand or Against All Enemies. Time will tell which of those three books is the aberration.

    (Fans of Coyle’s Dixonverse should note that even though Against All Enemies was published after God’s Children, it was written earlier and so explains why and how Nathan Dixon came to replace Scott Dixon as the series’ protagonist. Not an essential read, but it may explain some of the references in God’s Children.)

  • Nothing Lasts Forever, Sidney Sheldon

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1994, 384 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-35473-2

    There’s something to be said for trash, as long as it keeps me amused and out of trouble.

    I know, on some intellectual level, that Sidney Sheldon is a best-selling writer. That his name is (was?) mentioned alongside Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele or Stephen King as this model of a wildly successful multi-millionaire author. But in a classic illustration of how large the fiction publishing universe has grown, it’s entirely possible for even a voracious genre reader such as myself to go practically ten years without reading a single novel of his, nor have much of an idea of what he usually writes. The last book of his that I’ve read, The Doomsday Conspiracy, was by a significant margin the single worst attempt at Science Fiction by a non-genre writer until Robin Cook’s Invasion.

    I’m not a big reader of medical thrillers, but I believe that Nothing Lasts Forever does for them what The Doomsday Conspiracy did for SF: Barge into the genre with no affection and no refinement to develop a trite story featuring bad characters and entirely expected developments. But whereas The Doomsday Conspiracy‘s naive lack of sophistication seriously annoyed me, Nothing Lasts Forever ends up being… almost charming. I’m sure that my devotion to SF has something to do with my reaction (“How dare you make fun of my favourite genre?!”), but after this book, I suspect that there’s another element at play.

    Let’s briefly review the basics of the plot: Three new doctors, all women (and yes, discrimination still plays an important part in this 1990 novel), learning the ropes at one of San Francisco’s biggest hospitals. But, as the first page baldly states, “one of them almost gets an entire hospital closed down, the second one kills a patient for a million dollars and the third one is murdered.” And there we go. In a curiously sophisticated nod to storytelling structure, the first chapter of the book is a fast-forward murder trial that, of course, presents a cynical version of events that will be completely overturned by the latter “true” flashback narrative.

    If you’re used to daytime soap operas, Nothing Lasts Forever (a title that even sounds like a soap opera) will be instantly familiar. The shallow characterization. The casual evil inflicted by the tale’s villains. The twists and turns of fate (best described as “honking coincidences”). The way the story is pared down to its essentials in a series of short scenes. At the very least, no one wastes his time here, as the story races from beginning to end.

    And that’s just as well, because the plot jumps from one unlikely situation to another. Gainful murder is committed because that’s the first thing that comes to the mind of the villain. An incompetent doctor naturally turns to Kama Sutra-enhanced seduction as a palliative for her lack of knowledge. (Worse; her daily couplings always works in ensuring the cooperation of her superiors and colleagues. Surely she can’t be that good, right?) Reading pages of this novel at random is an exercise in preposterous plotting.

    But guess what? It’s so unsubtle, so unapologetic that it’s hard to resist. To quote the novel about the doctor with a specialization in Kama Sutra career-advancement, “There was a helplessness about her that they were unable to resist. They were all under the impression that it was they who were seducing her, and they felt guilty about taking advantage of her innocence.” [P.115] Bang on: This is such a fun novel, in its own skanky way, that’s it’s difficult to be harsh; it would be like spanking a mewling kitten.

    If this review sound awfully condescending, consider this hypothetical scenario: What if an unbelievably crafty writer learned after years of trying that general audiences don’t like to be challenged? What if he took secret delight in producing trash and actually agreed with his most severe reviews while lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills? What if he consciously dumbed down his stories so they’d appeal to everyone, including self-styled hipsters reading for ironic value? Hmmm… Twisted? Unbelievable? Even more so than this particular novel?

  • The Cheese Monkeys, Chip Kidd

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scribner, 2001, 275 pages, C$38.00 hc, ISBN 0-7432-1492-7

    Yes, I will confess: I’m just a sucker for design. Despite having no discernible talent for it (hey, just look at this web site), I’m quite willing to spend hours reading about graphic design, going “ooh” when I see good examples. Now, design freaks do learn to remember some names, and one of those names is Chip Kidd. He designs book covers, and with over eight hundred titles to his credit, it’s likely that you have seen his work at some point. In fact, it’s a virtual certainty given how his design for the first hardcover edition of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park became the basis for the movie’s logo. Hey, when Spielberg himself likes your stuff, how can you say no?

    But Kidd leaped from designing books to writing books with The Cheese Monkeys, his 2001 novel about life in a graphic design course during the 1950s. Tone: Humorous. Autobiographical content: Presumably high. Overall impact: Mixed.

    Narrated by some nameless student, The Cheese Monkeys is that old standby of literature, the coming-of-age story, mixed with an influential-teacher plot and wacky-college-hijinks vignettes. The interesting twist is that our narrator is about to get a crash-course in graphic design that’s halfway between boot camp and a sadistic psychological experiment.

    The Cheese Monkey changes dramatically the moment it introduces the character of Winter Sorbeck, enfant terrible and teacher extraordinaire. And I don’t say this in the usual hyperbolic sense: In one of the book’s clever design touches, the font of the text changes as soon as he comes on-stage. For our featureless narrator, Sorbeck is a revelation, a prickly mentor and maybe even something more. Through Sorbeck, we ignorant readers will learn more than a bit about graphic design, or as the novel puts it, art that makes you do something. It’s quite revealing, and even more so for all the design freaks in the audience.

    Naturally, you can’t be as accomplished a designer as Chip Kidd and not take the opportunity of a first novel to play tricks with book design. And so that’s how The Cheese Monkeys enjoys dozens of little touches, from the nonstandard book jacket to slogans embedded in the edges of the page to unusually-placed acknowledgements to content crammed in the book’s endpapers. The dust jacket wryly proclaims “Design by Some Guy” while the opening scrawl states “Copyright (C) 2001 by Charles Kidd. Yes. Charles.” Fun stuff, quite enough to make this a good buy for collectors.

    From a strict literary perspective, it’s not a bad book. The writing is generally clean, crisp and amusing. The narrator is purposefully left blank, but one can’t say the same of the other characters in the novel. (Perhaps too much, in fact: It’s difficult to figure why the book is supposedly in the 1950s when some of the characters and events seem so contemporary.) While the book takes a long time to heat up -obviously leading up to Sorbeck’s introduction-, the last half is crammed with memorable scenes as the sadistic teacher tries to whittle down his class.

    Unfortunately, Kidd reaches too far into surrealism for his last scene, and the book doesn’t grind to a halt as much as it collides with the back cover. What does it mean? What has happened to some of the characters, and what’s next for them? This is one of those annoying books which lets you decide. Some call this sophistication; I call it a lack of confidence. (Yes, I “get” the meaning of the last page. But really, wasn’t there a better way to do it?)

    But this frustrating caveat aside, there’s plenty to like here, and not just for design geeks: There’s a number of truly hilarious scenes, starting with the “Colonel Percy” dousing scene. The reflexions on graphic design are brought forth with conviction, with an impact that won’t be wasted on anyone who has even thought seriously about this stuff. It’s an interesting book, a short book, and now that it’s generously available in remainder stacks, what are you waiting for?

    June 2005: A frustrated reader wrote in to ask, in part,

    Hey – so you “get” the last page of “The Cheese Monkeys”? I sure don’t and I’m cranky about it. Been puzzling for two days. Clues? Hints? Blatant explanations for the retarded?

    Here’s what I sent back… (WARNING! EXTREME SPOILERS!)

    As far as understanding the ending of Chip Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys, I find myself in the awkward position of re-reading my review and thinking “What the heck did I mean back then?” Was I over-optimistic or deluded?

    Re-reading the last few pages brought back a few memories, but nothing definite. The key, of course, is that I believe that the ending doesn’t make sense in a conventional way. Elements of it are superficially suggestive of a wrapping-up of loose threads, but my belief is that Kidd found himself unable or unwilling to deliver a true conclusion and so jumped the rails to give something that, if you squint real hard, can actually look like a conclusion. (I read over 200 books per year, and that type of stuff is more common that you’d think.)

    The presence of the fish actually brings back to mind a bad joke…

    Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
    A: Fish.

    …hey, I said it was bad. But if this was a term paper, I’d actually use it to try to make the point that the ending isn’t meant to be conventionally fatisfying.

    This being said, a number of small expanations suggested themselves to me while browsing through the ending once more. Maybe one of those is what I had in mind when I wrote the review two years ago:

    1. The meaning of the last page (“…I want you to design a moment in time…” “…you will take something you have made and use it to claim a moment for yourself -yours and truly yours- in front of the class…”) is that it explains (pick one) the entire book, the last section or the last chapter (called “The Final Exam”). In this explanation, the last page suggests that the last chapter is not part of the narrative, but represents kind of a grandstanding attempt by Kidd to re-use elements of his narrative (“something you have made”) and make an impression on (“claim a moment for yourself”, or maybe just “piss off”) the reading audience (“the class”). If I was trying to deconstruct the novel in a post-modernist interpetation, I believe that this theory could be made to work.

    2. The “Fear and Loathing in Design Class” rests on the theory that “…we were somewhere around Bauhaus when the drugs began to take hold…” and that the narrator’s barriers of sanity start to erode roughly a hundred pages before the end and that by the end of the book, he’s blasted out of his mind by the pressure and exhaustion and what he perceived is half-informed by reality, half-shaped by wide-awake nightmares. In here, the last chapter is the kind of nightmare you’d make while drowsing fifteen minutes before the last exam, and the last page a reminder that it’s not over yet. If you want to be twisted, re-read the last page as if it was narrated by Keanu Reeves at the end of the first MATRIX movie (“…I’m not here to tell you how it ends, but to tell you how it begins…”) and then play Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up”.

    3. …and so we come to the allegorical interpretation, probably the one intended by Kidd, but my least favourite one given that it has an effect undistinguishable from saying “I give up! It’s too complicated!”: Himillsy as a feminist symbol (a fish in a bowl, unable to get out), fading away (as per the graying-out of her dialogue) as the novel ends and the narrator conveniently graduates and allows her memory to disappear. (But not being unaffected by the experience: the font never changes back to Apollo typeface)

    4. Then there’s the “Sixth Fish” theory that Himillsy was always a fish and that only the narrator saw her as a real person. (I’M KIDDING!)

    Well, that’s already far too much thinking about a book that’s probably intended as being a zen-like unanswerable object of contemplation. (Internal evidence of this: The hardcover edition dust jacket’s blurb: “Oh, wouldn’t you meatbags like to know”)

    Hopefully, you’ll be able to pick a half-satisfying theory from the ones above and let go of the novel. Please! Let it go! Read another one!

  • Ilium, Dan Simmons

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    EOS, 2003, 576 pages, C$39.95 hc, ISBN 0-380-97893-8

    Anyone who’s been paying attention to Dan Simmons’ career know that the man can write anything in any genre, from horror (Carrion Comfort) to thriller (Darwin’s Blade). But even with impressive credentials in other genres, Simmons started out as a science-fiction writer, and it’s still in SF that he produced his most impressive work, from dozen of excellent short stories to the massively successful Hyperion quartet. So any new SF work from him is a major event: Expectation for Ilium ran high as soon as the book was announced.

    At first glance, it appears that Simmons has delivered the goods with Ilium, the first part of a duology to be concluded in Olympos. (In a rare feat of honesty, the American EOS hardcover edition says as much both in the liner jacket and on the back cover. Hurrah for honesty!) An adventure tale set in a far-flung future packed with nanotech, quantum tunnelling, moravecs and other exotic technology, Ilium alternates between three plot threads: The story of a Greek scholar resurrected to report on the real-life recreation of the Iliad, the travels of two robots going from the Jovian system to a mysterious terraformed Mars and the adventures of a small group of humans on a very different future Earth.

    The first thing of note in Ilium is Simmons’ considerable literary ambition in telling a story which almost-literally takes place during the Iliad, featuring robots likely to quote from Shakespeare and Proust, and minor characters named “Caliban” for relevant reasons. The amount of research involved in writing this book must have been staggering; as a relatively ignorant reader (who had to rely on memories of TROY and visions of Brad Pitt as Achilles) it’s easy to be snowed under the weight of paragraphs packed with references to the Iliad, from character names to interpretations of Homer’s intentions to the complete back-story of even unseen characters. (Heck, this novel even has Greek gods as major characters.) Other literary allusions are just as likely to fly high above any non-scholarly heads, though the presence of such allusions is unlikely to be missed. In short, it’s easy to see classics-loving non-SF readers go nuts for Ilium‘s depth, even as it may not be totally successful in other areas.

    Things like pacing or plotting, for instance. Yes, it’s a long book, and one which doesn’t start to cook until well after the halfway point. There’s a ton of exposition (it’s difficult to do otherwise when quoting from Homer), a lot of scene-setting and plenty of description. For Ilium is first and foremost and adventure tale in which plenty of words are spent describing how characters go from point A to point B. There is a complicated plot, oh yes, but for the longest time it’s hard to see the difference between movement and progress.

    All of this is complicated by the fact that Ilium is, after all, the first half of a bigger novel. The three hundred pages of setup are for the 1100-pages entirety of the duology, not just for a single book. Some things don’t make a lot of sense; we can only hope that they will once the second half comes out. Similarly, the sense of pointless exasperation sure to strike any reader during the last few pages has to be tempered by the knowledge that the answers so preciously withheld should be coming up in early 2005. (Few of the book’s lines are so ominous as Zeus’s “We’re not?” [P.522]) Frustrating; it’s not for nothing if I usually wait until all the books of a series are out before digging in.

    Stylistically, it’s a Dan Simmons novel, so you can bet that there’s plenty of good quotes throughout the entire thing. I was particularly taken by the mixture of Greek mythology and easy swearing from scholic Hockenberry’s narration. (As a proud 20th-century representative, he’s our champion in this post-humanistic tale). The squabbling gods are a lot of fun to read about, though the “post-human” plot line is more often that not an exercise in impatient finger-thumping.

    All in all, a solid book but (at this point) not an essential one. I have a feeling that the sequel will deliver on more than enough intriguing suggestions, but a more definitive assessment will have to wait until Olympos.

  • Web Bloopers, Jeff Johnson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morgan Kaufmann, 2003, 329 pages, C$75.00 tpb, ISBN 1-55860-840-0

    As someone with more than a passing interest in web design (I know enough about what I don’t know enough to avoid calling myself a “web designer”), any book that wants to tell me what I shouldn’t do will be met with a mixture of eagerness and wariness: Yay for the hints and tricks, but really, who are you to tell me what to do?

    For Web Bloopers, usability expert Jeff Johnson scoured the web for examples of bad design and collected the worst examples. Government sites, educational sites, even commercial sites are all implacably dissected for lousy usability features in sixty “common web design mistakes”, themselves split in three parts (“Content and functionality”, “User Interface” and “Presentation”) and eight chapters. Aside from the mandatory screen-shots, Johnson describes and dissects the bloopers in detail, then presents solutions to avoid them. Most of the examples are illustrations of things to avoid, but some others are highlighted as best practises worth emulating.

    Like most technical books destined to a professional audience, this one doesn’t come cheaply at nearly 75 Canadian dollars. But the flip-side is that few expenses have been spared to give the book a generous design. There are enough illustrations in here to satisfy even the most demanding readers. (Though the accompanying text often tends to run ahead of the illustrating material) The layout is free enough to accommodate illustrations, annotations, cartoons, footnotes and very generous amounts of text.

    Perhaps too much text, in fact. Johnson has a tendency to repeat material and describe things in too much detail. His straightforward writing style works well when comes the time to present straight-up information, but it’s a fair thing to say that no-one will read this book for the style alone. Furthermore, the solutions he offers to solve the mistakes he describes are often implicit in the description of the problem. A lot of them simply boil down to “don’t do this”, which is a bit useless after an entire page of “this is not right because…”

    Now don’t get the wrong impression: “Too much detail” is a very minor sin in the litany of problems a technical book can suffer from. While Web Bloopers doesn’t have the same density of information-per-square-inch as Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!, not everyone can be Steve Krug. (Nor can everyone get Steve Krug to pen the foreword to their book, as Johnson has been able to do here.) If you assume that the book will more frequently be read by non-technical web managers rather than actual webmasters, the repetition almost becomes essential.

    As someone with a fair bit of web design experience, it was almost inevitable that I would have objections to some of Johnson’s “bloopers”. Non-standard link colours (#53), for instance, aren’t always a mistake; well-used, they can be a boon to the site’s design. (But a cursory recognition of this is included ) Redundant navigation schemes (#16) can, once again, be immensely helpful when properly used. Johnson’s perspective may be influenced by his experience in application GUI design; the web is evolving its own usability standards, and those often run at odds with the “usual” common wisdom. Then you have to consider the target audience of Web Bloopers, more likely corporate web managers than independent web designers willing to push the envelope and purposefully break rules.

    But a few disagreements here and there shouldn’t be interpreted as a dislike of the whole book: By and large, Johnston succeeds in presenting an invaluable collection of web design mistakes to avoid. The web would be a much better place if the principles of the book could be drilled into the heads of those wacky webmasters poisoning the experience for all of us. Yours truly included.

  • Blind Lake, Robert Charles Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2003, 399 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30262-4

    The most interesting thing about Robert Charles Wilson’s career is how he’s been able to re-invent himself and raise the quality of his work from very ordinary first novels to his current Hugo-award level. While Blind Lake may not be as good as The Chronoliths (even though opinions will certainly differ), it’s still a solid work of modern science-fiction from an author who knows what he’s doing.

    It doesn’t start out all that promisingly, if by “promisingly” you mean “Ooh! I have to read this right away!”: We’ve seen top-secret scientific bases elsewhere in fiction, we’ve seen “remote viewing” elsewhere and we’ve seen marital strife elsewhere too. But just wait: From the first few pages (in which one of our protagonists lives the morning aftermath of a one-night stand copiously sprinkled with illicit substances), it’s obvious that this is one novel that is going to take its time and avoid the usual clichés of bygone SF. The novel quickly shapes itself around four characters: A divorced scientist chafing against the restraints of objectivity, her manipulative ex-husband, their troubled daughter and a journalist with plenty of accumulated guilt.

    When those four characters are isolated from the real world, along with the rest of the staff at the “Blind Lake” scientific facility, tensions are left free to rise and boil over. The strife between the heroine and her ex-husband keep worsening, dragging along the sympathetic journalist. People are left to wonder why the entire world has cut them off. The daughter resumes having unusually persistent hallucinations. And the very purpose of the scientific facility changes when their subject of study (an alien they can track on its own planet thanks to a quasi-magical technology) dramatically changes its daily habits.

    It’s not a story that can be summarized in a few exciting lines. But don’t worry: Wilson makes it ridiculously easy to be engrossed in the lives of its characters, and milks a lot of effective scenes out of low-key events. To an unusual degree, the characters take as much space as the plotting… not that the plotting is in any way deficient once things start rolling. The mysteries of the book are sustained just long enough to make us interested in reading the next page, then the one after that, and yet another… before you know it, you’ve read the whole thing in a straight afternoon.

    Technically, Wilson has seldom been better, and it’s little tricks of the trade that show how much he has progressed since his early books. While he’s not a scientist, his novel is about scientists and he creates a believable bunch of them, along with the required technical and administrative support required in a modern research facility. He slights the jargon just right, with enough detail to satisfy and yet not too much to bore. (I was especially impressed by the way he described how the “mysterious” technology at the core of the book’s science got so weird: It’s still mysterious to the scientists in the story, but at least we as readers know exactly why it’s mysterious.) By shutting the real world out of the novel’s setting, Wilson is also able to use small hints and references (such as the “Saudi conflict” and the none-too-pleasant-sounding “North American economic confederacy”) to suggest a plausible future society without actually spending too much time describing it.

    Not that the entire novel is so credible, of course; it’s hard to imagine the feasibility of a complete shutdown of data transfers, even less so an extended one. The ending of the book is also surprisingly tepid despite the scope of the revelations and the sense of a good story well-told. I suppose that different readers will have different impressions.

    This being said, I found a delicious parallel between the plight of the isolated scientists, watching an alien far way, and the possibility that they themselves had to be watched by the rest of the world outside their perimeter. And yet another parallel with us, readers, watching them in their fishbowl…

    I wouldn’t have read the novel so quickly after its release had it not been nominated for the Best Novel Hugo Award. But having done so, I find it ranking pleasantly high on my list of 2003 SF novels. After such great books as The Perseids and The Chrononolith, Wilson continues his winning streak with Blind Lake. I wonder: what’s next for him?

  • Hacking Matter, Wil McCarthy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Basic Books, 2003, 222 pages, C$40.00 hc, ISBN 0-465-04428-X

    Oh sure, you know all about nanotechnology. The science-fiction you read describes atoms being rearranged all over the place and you’ve already put a pre-order on Amazon for the first prototype of the HomeNano universal assembler brewing kit. Good for you.

    But wait a minute: Not only is high-end nanotech a while away from Wal-Mart, it’s not even clear if it will solve everything we expect it to fix: Issues of energy requirements, information transfer, safe control and speed of operation continue to confound even the sharpest thinkers on the subject. Even when you’re done doing all you can, nanotech simply rearranges atoms around; it can’t create new elements and probably will take a while to work.

    Programmable matter is something else. A theoretical concept based on real-world research in the strange properties of quantum dots, it bridges the gap between straight-up nanotech and coarser material sciences. In theory, one could end up with a silicon material that could be programmed at will to emulate the characteristics of other elements, maybe even elements we haven’t yet discovered. While the actual real-world implementations of the technology are still a far way away, the theoretical underpinning seem reasonably solid. Hacking Matter is an overview of the subject, from the labs to the theory to the speculations.

    Fortunately, a uniquely qualified author is at he helm. Wil McCarthy is best-known in some circles as a capable science-fiction writer, one whose career has progressed from run-of-the-mill SF adventures (Aggressor Six) to meatier fare (Bloom). But McCarthy is also a tech journalist and an engineer and Hacking Matter is the ideal book for someone at the intersection of those three fields: Not only is he capable of vulgarizing the subject matter, he’s able to speculate on where it’s going, and even make useful contributions to the field himself.

    After a whiz-bang intro featuring some of the most outlandish speculations about programmable matter (including what happens when you bash artificial iron with a golf club), McCarthy settles down to the painstaking business of explaining the science behind the speculations. Don’t worry if your high-school physics are too far away to be useful; just keep reading until you reach the conclusions. It boils down to an arrangement of silicon in such a way that electrons are made to behave in unnatural ways. How unnatural? Well, unnaturally enough to recreate the properties of other elements that don’t exist. Unnaturally enough to change behaviour at the flick of a switch.

    Thanks to descriptions of the Boston-area research centres where this is taking place, interviews with the concerned scientists and the other usual tools of good scientific journalism, McCarthy efficiently illustrates the field’s current state of the art. But the book truly hits its stride when McCarthy-the-journalist cedes the stage to McCarthy-the-SF-writer. After a meaty chapter on how architecture (houses, cities, etc.) will be revolutionized by programmable matter, it’s hard not to wish for these cool toys, right away. There’s more good stuff squirrelled away in the last chapter (along with a comparative examination of other life-altering technologies currently inching out of laboratories), and if you want even more, well, there’s always McCarthy “Queendome of Sol” science-fiction trilogy.

    How credible is that stuff? Though it certain sound credible, that’s not neally for me to say. But simply consider this: McCarthy-the-engineer has his name on a patent application for a “Wellstone”. He obviously believes in it, and so do the scientists currently working on the field. (Check the latest version of the “Programmable Matter FAQ” for more details.) The history of science has progressed from far less likely concepts.

    And so Hacking Matter remains a tease of bigger things to come; clocking in at 175 pages without appendices and the index, it’s leaves us hanging just as things get interesting. A fitting impression for a book describing cutting-edge tech: How are we going to perceive this book in twenty years? As an overly-optimistic pop-science work, or the first mention of a commonplace technology?

  • Tilt, Nicholas Shrady

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2003, 161 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-7432-2926-6

    Designers will be the first to tell you you that design isn’t about funky colours, outlandish forms or eye-splitting typography. Design is, more than anything else, the art of solving problems. A well-designed chair is, simply put, more useful, more comfortable, more perfectly a chair than a badly-designed one. Granted, design can also be beautiful (ugliness is just another type of problem, after all) and not all problems are solvable at the same time (a chair designed to “solve” high manufacturing costs may not present the same solutions as a chair designed to “solve” lack-of-comfort), but those are minor issues when measured against the goal of good design.

    In publishing, the biggest problem is simple: How do you sell a book? How to you convince your average book-buyer to take hard-won money and exchange it for a mixture of paper, ink and glue? Success is measured both individually (has at least one individual been convinced to buy a book that, with an inferior design, would otherwise have been left on the shelves?) and collectively (has the publisher made more money on the book than would have been the case with a lesser design?)

    While I can’t say anything about the overall success of Nicholas Shrady’s Tilt (I did, after all, find it at a discount bookstore), I’m the living example of individual design success: Had the book been ordinary, I would have left it on the shelf without a second thought. The subject isn’t that compelling to me. But throw it a little bit of inspired design and, whoops, there I find myself at the cash register.

    You see, Tilt is no ordinary book-as-a-physical-object. Rather than being as square as most of the other books you’ll see in your life, this short history of the Tower of Pisa is… skewed. It’s a parallelogram. The edges of the books don’t meet at 90 degrees. Open the book flat, and it looks like a fat chevron. Put the book upright on the table and it tilts… just like the Tower of Pisa (albeit at a sharper angle).

    It’s a gimmick, of course, but also an inspired piece of design. Everyone knows the tower of Pisa because it’s skewed, because it’s unusual, because it looks as if it’s not supposed to exist like that. Well, Tilt is exactly like that.

    As a “biography” of Pisa and it’s infamous campanile, Tilt is slight but serviceable. At a scant 161 pages, it’s not very profound, and even pads its subject matter with (not uninteresting) digressions on Galileo and Italian history. It’s readable, features a few fascinating facts, includes a fair number of illustrations and pictures (though not quite enough to my own liking) and does its share to debunk many rumours about the Tower’s history (not built for skewing, not an experimentation site for Galileo). Even readers with a casual interest in the subject will get what they seek. If nothing else, it’s a lovely little (too little) piece of engineering non-fiction.

    But let me go back to the subject of the book’s design, given that it has its share of problems. For one thing, the interior design of the book hasn’t been optimized to take advantage of the tilt: The recurring page numbering and book titles are uncomfortably close to the edge, and copious amount of blank space is left in the “extra” areas. Maybe that’s part of the point (if the campanile wasn’t built to be skewed, why should it be the case with the book?), but it leads me to suspect that the skewed design was finalized after the interior layout of the book. The dust jacket itself is skewed.

    The second issue is that in Tilt‘s case, the design doesn’t just overshadows the content of the book; it stomps on it and leaves it as a mere afterthought. Just look at this review; I’ve spend one mere paragraph on the book’s content, and the rest of the words discussing the actual physical object. An ordinary version of Tilt may not have been bought, but it would have been reviewed with a greater attention to the actual quality of the text.

    Yes, sometime design can be too successful. And I’m not just saying that because I bought the book knowing fully well that I will never figure how to position it on my bookshelves.

  • Rules of Engagement, Gordon Kent

    Rules of Engagement, Gordon Kent

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1998, 474 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-17858-7

    If you read a lot of military thrillers, you may feel as if you can know everything about this book merely by reading the cover jacket: A young naval aviator following the footsteps of his celebrated father. A mysterious accident during a combat mission. The hunt for a traitor. Ah-ha.

    Reading the first few chapters, in which our protagonist comes to learn about life on-board an aircraft carrier, you may even feel that your assumptions are correct: This is going to be yet another average military thriller, with plenty of military details and vignettes, all leading up to a confrontation with the evil traitor. With a few combat scenes.

    Well, the above summary is not entirely incorrect (especially the part about the final confrontation), but the twists and turns in the tale make it a little different from the usual military thriller.

    For one thing, the biggest departure takes place as soon as the protagonist ends his tour of duty and goes back stateside for an assignment in naval intelligence. Yep; no more aircraft carrier life for us as we’re thrown, unusually enough, in the mechanics of intelligence analysis at home. While you’d except a fictional traitor to be exposed within days, Rules of Engagement stretches out over weeks, then months, then years. The death of the protagonist’s father is investigated, then dropped, then raised again.

    Rules of Engagement is, at times, a military thriller, a procedural mystery, an adventure novel and a spy suspense. The story twists and turns, characters are introduced or dropped (I especially liked the sudden revelation of the hero’s initial love interest as a promiscuous, coke-addled schemestress. Whew!) as the story is told over years, spanning the Gulf War (carefully kept in the background, if you can believe that of a military thriller) and the evolution of a career. Even the usual right-wing slant of most military fiction seems carefully leashed here, a smart choice that will broaden the book’s appeal to all sorts of readers.

    The focus on desk-bound analysis and intelligence work is certainly interesting: Apprehending a traitor takes a lot of work from several people, and it’s a treat to see this treated as a bureaucratic endeavour, with a team of investigators and the usual amount of red tape. The way this is mixed with spycraft and military protocols is quite intriguing and does a lot to distinguish this novel from countless other similar novels. Gordon Kent (actually a pseudonym for Ken and Christian Cameron, a father-and-son team whose web site can be found at www.navnow.com) knows his stuff and shows an impressive ability to ground his fiction in believable reality. It all moves more slowly than usual, but there are a lot of good details in this book.

    That’s good, but is it good enough? Well, it all depends on your tolerance for drawn-out plots. At some point near the novel’s two-third mark, things are proceeding too rapidly: The villain has been identified and all that’s left is to apprehend him. But, just as the novel should slide smoothly to a perfect finish, complications arise, and an unwelcome fourth act springs from the third, transforming the cloak-and-dagger intrigue to an adventure in a dangerous foreign land. It may sound intriguing, but once it happens, it’s hard to keep going the extra mile along with the author; a shorter finish would have done much to keep the best parts of the novel intact. As it is, the pleasantness of the book is almost stretched beyond reasonable indulgence by the last hundred pages.

    It’s still a pretty good book, mind you. But the lengths are barely justifiable in the context of a genre novel which should move as quickly as possible. It doesn’t help that the conclusion requires the involvement of another major character who really shouldn’t have been involved. Still, if that’s the kind of thing unlikely to bother you, there are certainly worse novels out there than this intriguing debut.

  • The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, Neal Pollack

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 2002, 205 pages, C$20.95 tpb, ISBN 0-06-000453-3

    I suppose that there’s something to be said about blogs when it comes to self-marketing: Had I not already been under the spell of Neal Pollack’s prose and his pleas to buy his books, it’s unlikely that I would have picked up his stuff at the local remainder sale. Hurrah for shameless self-promotion!

    Now, keep in mind that Neal Pollack is the very definition of shamelessly self-promoting writer. (And I don’t say this as if it’s a bad thing) His latest book, Never Mind the Pollacks, is a rock-and-roll novel telling the story of Neal Pollack, famous rock journalist and confidante to rockstars from Elvis Presley to Kurt Cobain. His first book, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, is a mock collection of snippets from the decades-long career of Neal Pollack, greatest American writer. While Never Mind he Pollacks is best left to those with enough knowledge of rock to appreciate the fine in-jokes, the Anthology is something else.

    For one thing, I suspect that it’s a bit more accessible to everyone. In this book, Neal Pollack’s character is that of a writer as a rock star, a fantastically self-absorbed man’s man whose universe revolves around him. It may be useful to be an avid magazine reader to piece together the pieces of his parodies (I kept flashing back to Sebastian Junger’s Fire pieces myself), but the bombastic quality of Pollack’s alter-ego is amusing enough that even people unaware of, say, Norman Mailer, will laugh along.

    The biggest wonder of the Anthology, surprisingly enough, is that it sustains this simple satiric concept for a full two hundred pages. Pieced together as an anthology of “Pollack”’s forty-year-long journalism career, it’s merely an excuse to explore different themes and subjects as a knuckle-busting, hard-drinking man’s man. “Pollack” has been everywhere from the USSR to Mexico, has written back from countless wars, has seduced hundreds of women (most of whom just have to hear his name before cooing “take me!”), is best buddies with this world’s leading figures (but especially John McCain) and has stopped at least one dastardly plot against the USA. Whew! Just take a look at some of the chapter titles: “I Am Friends With a Working-Class Black Woman”, “The Burden of Internet Celebrity”, “Why Am I So Handsome?”… An interview with his sister is, of course, all about him. Hubris seems too small a word for this oversize personality.

    (The “real” Neal Pollack, should you be spoilsport enough to ask, is in his thirties and is only beginning to take the literary world by storm. If he exists at all. But the real danger in reviewing Pollack is in either trying to be as funny as him, or doubt nothing.)

    In some ways, this is reminiscent of Mark Leyner’s Et tu, Babe?, another delicious piece of humour writing in which the author was left free to push the limits of literary self-disillusion to insane levels. While Leyner’s book was funnier (c’mon; visceral tattoos?), Pollack’s Anthology holds better as a unit. As a parody of those other “anthologies of literature”, it’s pitch-perfect… from the ancillary material (chronology, family tree, study guide…) to the tapestry of the star protagonist’s imagined career. Faked photos included.

    From what I can gather, the original hardcover version of the Anthology, as published by McSweeney’s, was a superb design parody of this type of book. (Head over to Amazon, and “look inside” the hardcover for a few extra laughs) While the Harper Perennial edition isn’t quite as respectable-looking, it does contain a third more material, and even brings up “Pollack”’s career to the Post-WTC era. It also includes Jack Shafer’s New York Times Book Review piece on the Anthology, which says everything I wanted to say about it, and better. (Bastard.)

    I’m always a sucker for satire, and this one is better than most. While the book didn’t make me laugh out loud constantly, I had a hard time wiping a constant smirk off my face; The only reason not to read it in a single sitting is running out of time. (Hey Neal; you can use this as a blurb: “There aren’t enough hours in a day for Neal Pollack.”) Witty, well-executed and liable to make you look at literary celebrities in a whole new light, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature is well-worth a look. Even if Neal Pollack’s ceaseless stream of self-promotion hasn’t yet reached you.

  • The Shores of Tomorrow (Chronicles of Solace #3), Roger MacBride Allen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2003, 493 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58365-4

    It’s not uncommon for third volumes of trilogies to make up for lacklustre middle tomes. Heck, it’s not unknown for conclusions alone to save entire series. But what’s not as common is for trilogies to dissolve as blandly as the Chronicles of Solace does in The Shores of Tomorrow.

    Actually, allow me to rephrase that: There is nothing strictly wrong with the way The Shores of Tomorrow wraps up the material first explored in The Depths of Time and The Ocean of Years. Nothing at all; the story of Solace is decently concluded, there’s a happy ending, characters get what they deserve and we finally see the logical implications of the series’ pet concepts.

    But what could have been done in fifty pages was stretched out to nearly ten times that. Worse: beyond the obvious waste of time, this lack of concision ends up harming other areas of the trilogy.

    If you can muster up the courage to go read my reviews of the trilogy’s first two volumes, it’s obvious that even from the first book, the series had serious pacing problems. Developments that could have been shown in a few lines took entire chapters to unfold, with preciously few marginal gains as far as pure entertainment was concerned. This tendency reaches an apex of sorts in The Shores of Tomorrow, especially when you consider the NovaSpot ignition sequence, a tense plot point that ends up spread over 90 pages of fluff.

    It gets worse when you consider the useless plot threads that are carelessly thrown in the mix. Despite the “Chronicles of Solace” designation for the entire series, there’s little doubt that the real story told here is the one of Anton Koffield and his quest to uncover and then understand Oskar DeSilvo. All else is sideshow, which becomes increasingly intrusive as the third book unfolds and the action is indefinitely delayed. Book One had its share of sideshows, and they make a return here; Any competent editor would have cut the “Elber Malloon” scenes, so peripheral are they to the book’s main story. But no; they’re all there along with even more filler. I buy trilogies with the assumption that they contain enough material for three books; here, it becomes obvious, after the fact, that the Chronicles of Solace is a two-book, maybe even a single book’s worth of intrigue.

    I can understand a deliberate and careful pacing when it’s leading up to something worthwhile, or when it’s sustained to enhance suspense. But there’s no real reason to delay anything in this story, especially given its race-against-the-clock quality as a failing world is at stake.

    But this slow-poke pacing has another effect that may be even more disastrous: It allows the reader to think about the story as it goes along, and even start to out-think the writer. When Oskar DeSilvo outlines his grand unified theory of terraforming, cultural stagnation and technological development, we’ve been waiting for it so long that it comes off as obvious and maybe even trite. The “solution” to the terraforming crisis was implicit at the end of volume one, and the characters were just too blind to see it. Allen stretches his central concept so much that he nearly snaps it. The whole “Chronological Patrol” concept, already iffy at first glance, suffers a lot from the extended story treatment; I doubt that it would have been as unconvincing in a single zippy 400-page novel.

    The other thing that bothered me about the trilogy’s intellectual climax is that it acknowledges humanity’s thirst for knowledge and innovation, and then immediately says that it can be delayed indefinitely. Not bloody likely, and that reflects badly on the series. Again; I doubt that I would have been so severe in the context of a short story or a single novel, but trilogies demand a higher degree of scrutiny.

    Take scissors, start cutting, end with a 500-page singleton and maybe the Chronicles of Solace would be worth a recommendation. As it stands now, there’s far too much build-up for too little pay-off. There are a few good ideas, the second volume has nifty material and the ending is suitably optimistic, but frankly, you could read three better single novels for the time and money you’d otherwise spend on this series. It’s no wonder if the last two volumes didn’t even get a hardcover edition.

  • Spin State, Chris Moriarty

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2003, 485 pages, C$17.95 tpb, ISBN 0-553-38213-6

    For me, one of Science Fiction’s more endearing qualities is its capacity to imagine neat futures where most of today’s less interesting problems are neatly solved away. Distances are erased, material needs are satisfied and reason takes over as a dominant conflict-solving mechanism. Humans are, at last, left to work on the most interesting problems –and half the fun is in figuring out which ones those can be.

    Such an interesting future is not in the cards for the protagonists of Chris Moriarty’s Spin State, a 2003 Philip K. Dick award-nominated first novel by a brand-new author who’s also seriously vying for the 2004 Campbell award. Once again, scarcity rears its ugly head, and millions suffer for lack of something: “Coal. Oil. Uranium. Water. This is not the first time humanity has depended on a nonrenewable resource.” [P.153] In this case, the nonrenewable resource is Bose-Einstein condensates, a substance that allows faster-than-light communication and teleportation. There’s one catch, though: Bose-Einstein condensates doesn’t occur in nature save from inside a coal mine on a backwater world called Compson’s World.

    As luck has it, that’s where protagonist Catherine Li comes from. But despite her best efforts at staying away, a series of unfortunate events lead her back home as the lead investigator in the mysterious death of a top-ranking scientist. As you can expect, complications rapidly accumulate: The scientist shares the same DNA as the protagonist, Compson’s World is on the edge of rebellion and Bose-Einstein condensates are a major source of friction between the UN-led Earth and the breakaway Syndicates. As is the norm with SF thrillers, the murder case quickly morphs into a nexus of major forces. Throw in a few AIs, genetic discrimination, twisted allegiances and long-buried secrets and it will take more than enhanced reflexes and superior combat abilities for Li to get out of the situation relatively intact.

    In some ways, Spin State is a solid SF thriller in the noirish vein. In others, it’s an attempt to integrate a few good ideas. It’s a typical first novel, filled with promises and yet not completely successful.

    There’s not a lot that’s wrong with the novel, mind you: A lot of the initial ideas are intriguing and introduced with skill. Li is adequately twisted: as a super-agent for the UN, she’s not terribly beautiful, remains wracked with neuroses, can’t trust a soul and has a quasi-omnipotent (yet completely untrustworthy) AI as a best friend. Far from the slick superhero of so much SF, Catherine Li works quite well as a real protagonist.

    But I kept waiting for Spin State to become more than something average, and that never happened. It’s far too long, for one thing: Cut at least a hundred pages of the interminable investigation (which doesn’t really pay off when the real story starts moving) and we’ll start talking again. Other annoyances are there; the contrived excuse to set a Science Fiction novel in a coal mine, coupled with unconvincing “evil leper mutant” discrimination yadda-yadda. Let’s move on, shall we? One of the book’s last big revelations is blindingly obvious hundreds of pages before, as soon as coral is mentioned. Though the book flaunts itself as hard-SF and includes pages of bibliographical references on quantum physics, not a lot of explicit science makes its way in the novel itself.

    (It doesn’t help that, by sheer coincidence, Spin State follows on the heels of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, a superior novel that just happens to touch upon some of the same subjects in a far more energetic fashion.)

    All told, it’s hard to read the novel with anything approaching enthusiasm. I trudged on out of duty and obligation, awaiting the magic spark that would ignite everything. Oh, I don’t begrudge the money I spent on the novel, or the time it took me to read it… but it’s not making me overly anxious to rush out and get Moriarty’s next book. One thing that SF can’t solve is scarcity of time and money… especially when it comes to reading more SF, some unpleasant choices must be made.

    (One final note; I’m a bit dismayed at the carefully gender-neutral jacket blurb and author biography. Yes, a trip to Chris Moriarty’s official web site will reveal Moriarty’s gender. But surely we know better than to assume that hard-SF readers will avoid works by a woman writer? Why the deception?)

  • The Ocean of Years (Chronicles of Solace #2), Roger MacBride Allen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2002, 441 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58364-6

    It is true that publishers are in the business of making money, not telling the truth. Still, you have to wonder at the relationship between the two when marketing ploys backfire. When, for instance, books like Roger MacBride Allen’s The Depths of Time come out and the only reference to it as the first book of a trilogy is buried, by inference, in the author’s note. Readers (and reviewers) charge through the novel only to find an ending that doesn’t solve much. And then Bantam Spectra wonders why sales tank.

    Unfortunately, sequel The Ocean of Years suffered from the stupidity of the original book’s marketing: Whereas the first volume was available in trade paperback format, this one was relegated to a cheapo mass-market paperback debut edition. As consolation, the follow-up book is more forthright about what it is, as can be read on the title page: “Second book of The Chronicles of Solace.”

    When we’d last left series protagonist Anton Koffield, he had just found out why he was marooned 128 years in a future not his own: A devilish plot by mastermind Oskar DeSilvo to prevent him from telling a secret too soon. But a lot of things happen in 128 years, and so Koffield also happened to come across nagging clues leading him to the current hideout of DeSilvo. As The Depths of Time ended, we were left with one certitude: Koffield was going to solve the puzzle, track down DeSilvo and ask him a few good questions.

    So it shouldn’t be a surprise if he does exactly that in the sequel. Travelling with a band of characters with as much interest in DeSilvo’s answers, Koffield makes his way to the Solar System of year 5341. Then their group splits up in search of clues, sending emissaries to Earth itself and the Grand Library in orbit around Neptune.

    One of the book’s highlight happens then, as three characters make their way through the gargantuan Permanent Physical Collection, a mega-library to end all libraries. So big that they have to hike in it, making their way from own human-livable reading room to another (the books are kept in a pure nitrogen atmosphere to ensure their preservation) to find out the real state of the physical terraforming collection as opposed to the one in the digital archives. Library freaks are sure to enjoy this passage, much like another latter one in a forbidden museum. MacBride Allen surely knows how to exploit environments that should be dear to anyone likely to be reading this trilogy.

    Secrets, archives, knowledge and patient clue-hunting form the backbone of this second volume. Save for a desperate what-are-they-going-to-do-now sequence in chapters 18-20, and a tiny act of physical violence at the very end of the book, there isn’t much conventional action in The Ocean of Years. It’s all exploration, searching, deduction and cogitation. Old-school science-fiction by any yardstick, this is the kind of comfortable genre novel that would be familiar for any pre-New Wave SF reader in the Asimov vein. There is nothing beyond a PG rating in this trilogy so far.

    Alas, the pacing is just about what you’d expect from brainy novels that take place in libraries. Just like in the first volume, the first hundred pages don’t mean much. Just like in the first volume, we spend a lot of time going from one place to another. Just like in the first volume, the characters think a lot before they ever act. It’s not a bad thing per se (it certainly creates an atmosphere, maintains the suspense and heighten the action whenever there is some) but there’s no telling what a more succinct version of the same events might have gained. The prose is compelling enough that it doesn’t matter a whole lot if it’s 400 pages rather than 200, but if the difference would have been a single 600-pages tome rather than a full 1200-pages trilogy, well, I know where my loyalties lies.

    Still, don’t think that I’m giving anything less than a good rating to this book and the series as it stands at the end of the second volume. There’s a lot of well-developed ideas here, a bunch of sympathetic characters, crystal-clear prose and a great sense of discovery as we peel away the layers of this imagined universe. Stay tuned for the final review of this trilogy.

  • Double Whammy, Carl Hiaasen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1987, 320 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-35276-4

    Over the years, I never had the luck to actually sit down and read one of Carl Hiaasen’s novels despite the good things heard about them. That changed when Double Whammy landed in my reading stack. If it’s any indication of what Hiaasen is capable, I just may have found a new favourite author.

    In the mystery genre, Hiaasen is often mentioned as being part of the “Florida school”, along with such writers as Lawrence Shames, Dave Berry and James W. Hall: Apart from the Sunshine State as a common setting, all of these writers also share a highly atypical sense of humour, especially when you compare it to the usual dour brand of crime fiction. I’m always a sucker for silly laughs, so it was only a matter of time before I got to Hiaasen’s stuff.

    Suffice to say that Double Whammy is an interesting introduction. Would you expect, for instance, a thrilling laugh-filled novel about bass fishing? It starts when R.J. Decker, a Miami-based private detective (also an ex-newspaper photographer, also an ex-husband, also an ex-convict), is hired to catch a bass tournament cheater in flagrante delicto. Soon enough, clues then bodies accumulate and it’s hard for Decker to deny that he’s stuck in a situation that goes way beyond getting the biggest fish.

    The laughs are obviously Double Whammy‘s biggest attraction. Hiaasen’s sarcastic eye for details does wonders at satirizing redneck America and the dangerous silliness that seems to permeate Florida. His improbable characters at generously fleshed-out: even the bit players all have a distinguishing trait or two. The narrative often takes tangents to describe an aspect of Floridian life or another, with smile-stretching results.

    But Hiaasen’s less overt accomplishment is to manage a delicate balance between tragedy and comedy without renouncing the funny stuff. There is a lot of truly nasty material in this novel, and a lesser writer may have been unable to reconcile the two. Beyond the murder and maiming of sympathetic characters, Double Whammy makes sure to remain in the domain of unlikely reality, rather than plunge ahead into a straight-out comedic vein. (Read Dave Berry’s stuff for that… not that there’s anything wrong with a pure comedy) Beyond the laughter, there is an array of serious issues brought forth in the novel, from environmental concerns to the easy media manipulation of crowds. But here too, the message doesn’t overshadow the plot as Hiaasen moves his pieces too quickly to dwell on any single element.

    Indeed, Double Whammy holds its own in the plot department against thicker and more serious novels. Anything you think you can depend upon at the novel’s beginning is overturned sooner or later. The protagonist is revealed to be someone with a bottomless reservoir of issues. Characters switch allegiance. Twists abound. Revelations are made. Readers are thrilled.

    All of that would be for naught if it wasn’t for Hiaasen’s impeccable style. So-called “humorous” crime fiction is not an easy thing to write and several writers have only managed a marginal success trying to do so (Joseph Wambaugh, I’m looking at you). Here, fortunately, we’re in good hands: The prose is straightforward and the scenes fly by. The quick-paced resolution ties everything together. Truly excellent beach reading, should you be so inclined.

    In short, a wonderful introduction to the Hiaasen oeuvre, and one that is likely to keep me coming back for more. Given my existing predilection for Shames and Barry, I just have to wonder –what is it they put in Florida’s water supply…?

  • Separation of Power, Vince Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 2001, 436 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-04734-5

    After the trashing I gave to Flynn’s previous The Third Option, you would think that I’d stay away from any of his other books, let alone a direct sequel. But hope springs eternal, some authors can be forgiven the occasional awful novel and it’s entirely possible to succumb at a used book sale where everything is cheap, cheap, cheap.

    So, onward with Separation of Power, which picks up moments after the conclusion of The Third Option. Once again, villains are running rampant over Washington and flawless hero Mitch Rapp is hunting them down. His attempts to find the real culprits of the previous book’s events soon take him to Italy (along with his civilian fiancée), where he’ll have to deal with a beautiful yet deadly assassin straight out of Central Casting. Meanwhile, brainy Irene Kennedy has been nominated to become the director of the CIA, drawing out plenty of political enemies, and Saddam is hiding nuclear weapons under an hospital in downtown Baghdad. Separation of Power isn’t quite a three-ring circus, but it’s scattered enough to make anyone feel like it is.

    I should probably tone down my sarcastic tone right away, though, because even though Separation or Power breaks no new ground and is unlikely to be celebrated by anyone but the author’s most ardent fans, it’s still much better than The Third Option.

    Oh, the annoyances picked up in the previous volume are still there: If there’s one genre that should just avoid series, it’s thrillers: Part of the fun of reading a suspense novel is in wondering how far the author will push it. Will presidents be killed, cities destroyed, countries devastated? Or will everyone live to sell another novel? When The Third Option ended with a pat “to be continued” promise, I surely wasn’t the only one to ask for my money back. At least Separation of Power offers a conclusion of sorts, even if it’s rushed in the last few pages.

    Alas, Flynn is still padding his books with useless material. Had Separation of Power been half of its length, I wouldn’t be so picky. (Heck, had The Third Option and Separation of Power been one single 400-pages novel, I might have given it a passing recommendation) But when Flynn piles useless scenes one after another right when the plot should get underway, it’s hard to be forgiving. It all reaches an exasperating apogee in the latter half of the novel, as we take a trip through pure soap-opera romantic theatrics, reading pages after pages of mopping even as we know that it’s profoundly silly. Someone needs an editor, and quickly!

    Fortunately, there is some good material buried under the morass of indifferent passages. Two good action scenes come late in the novel, saving it from total lack of interest. Plot-wise, it’s obvious that Flynn loves complications without understanding how they could all relate together: The connections between the three plot lines are tenuous if not ridiculous (see how Mitch Rapp gets to participate in all three for no good reason whatsoever!), even as they sheer kinetic force of the conclusion creates interest whether we want it or not.

    (I should probably make a note of this as being Yet Another Pre-9/11 Anti-Saddam Novel. In retrospect, there’s plenty of material in 1990-2001 American thrillers to show the widespread blood thirst that America had for Saddam Hussein’s regime. Canny social psychologists will undoubtedly mutter something about how the Bush II regime was able to tap into those unconscious feelings to obtain popular support for an unjustified invasion. But I digress severely.)

    All told, Separation of Power marks a slight step up for Flynn. It’s still average in almost all aspects, but at least it’s not actively bad, nor as dull as The Third Option. But we’re still far away from the promise shown in either of his first two novels: Before he started churning out those formula products, Vince Flynn had the spark of a real thriller author. Let’s just hope that he’ll regain it someday soon.