Book Review

  • Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2004, 221 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30759-6

    By now, everyone connected to the SF field should be aware that Cory Doctorow is rushing on the scene like a demented man. His second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, will only add to his reputation. A jumped-up mix of fallible characters and five-minutes-from-now speculation, this is the kind of book you read in a single sitting and then browse over for choice quotes.

    What if, on this ubi-connected globe, one feels more kinship to people living in another time zone? What if it’s just more practical to live online than offline, eschewing physical days for virtual ones set on the rhythms of your chosen “tribe”? In some fashion, the idea sort-of works: One can imagine Indian technological workers synced to their Californian managers (or vice-versa). Otakus can live “on Tokyo time” given broadband Internet access and plenty of Japanese friends. You can tie it with the “Global Village” concept without too much trouble. Where it fails the real-world test is when you assume that those “tribes” can start playing seriously dirty tricks on each other, or are anything more than arrangements of convenience. Then there are literal objections to the concept of “Eastern Standard Tribe”, as if everyone in that particular slice of time, from Abitibi to Bogota, was part of a homogeneous group. But that’s a lame objection, especially given that Doctorow adopts a satiric approach to the whole thing. Here, minor crime reporting to the London police will result in about half a day of inconveniences. Sony rentacops will tear-gas you without much of a due process. Legal advice can be obtained through an IRC channel. And so on. This isn’t real: Like many of his contemporaries, Doctorow reacts to the increasing strangeness of our reality by laughing at it.

    Other objections are more serious: Eastern Standard Tribe is a very short novel, and leaving aside the cost/benefit ratio, the book suffers from a few dramatic shortcuts: Here, awfully convenient freak meetings drive the plot forward, with sometimes-annoying results. The ungraceful ending feels compressed in about half a dozen pages, with scarcely any place for resolutions. Is also feels like a more scattered novel than Doctorow’s debut Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Maybe it is time for him to start working on bigger things with tighter plots and stronger endings.

    Still, this is far from being a disappointing novel: The structure of the book, as it alternates between a third-person flashback and a first-person “present” narration, is initially quite dazzling. (Unfortunately, it falters at the end, when the “present” is explained and the “past” starts being repetitive; we can figure out some plot points ourselves, thanks.) For techno-geeks such as myself, the type of nerd-core prose used by Doctorow feels natural, maybe even a natural extension of what we read on the net every day. There’s a strong identification to that particular brand of fiction… but some of the more specialized passages may very well be incomprehensible to the mundane masses.

    Still, it’s hard to be mad at a novel that clocks in at nearly 200 pages per hour in a single sitting. The brisk style, amusing vignettes, take-no-prisoners approach to the future are all in good fun. While I’m not as floored by this novel as I was with Doctorow’s first, it’s still likely to end up as one of my top choices for 2004. Of course, it’s already making me look forward for his next novel.

  • The Depths of Time (The Chronicles of Solace #1), Roger MacBride Allen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2000, 426 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-553-37811-2

    Looking at Roger MacBride Allen’s bibliography, one gets an awful glimpse in the life of a professional science-fiction writer. It’s a bizarre mis-mash of media novel (including a Star Wars trilogy), sharecropped series (“Isaac Asimov’s”), an unfinished series (“Hunted Earth”), some small-press publications and a scattering of novels which may or may not be singletons. Then there is his latest “Chronicles of Solace” trilogy, of which The Depths of Time is the first volume.

    While I have generally enjoyed a few of his earlier single works (The Modular Man and Farside Cannon, both solid SF books), this bibliography shows how difficult it is to be a working mid-list SF writer in today’s industry. Media tie-in and sharecropped series may not be glamorous, but they help to pay the bills. Unfortunately, they also plant the seeds of doubt in the minds of fans like me; Is he still capable of writing “honest” SF?

    The Depths of Time answers that question reassuringly. Despite some annoyances caused by the book’s role as the first volume in a trilogy, it’s a solid SF novel that ought to satisfy anyone looking for straight-up genre fiction.

    By far the biggest flaw of the book is how long it takes to set up all the elements of its world. It takes seventy-five pages to explain how the “Solace” universe is linked by a complex system of long-cryo starships and time-travel wormholes. Then we spend a few pages in the Grand Library around Neptune. And then nearly twenty-five pages to show how badly the terraforming on Solace is failing.

    In short, it takes more than a hundred pages to get to the main story. It’s a lot for any 400-pages novel, but it’s marginally more palatable for a 1200-pages trilogy. (This being said, only sharp-eyed readers will discerns the suggestion, in the acknowledgements, that this will be a “two or three” book series. Even the moniker “Chronicles of Solace” is taken from the subsequent volumes sitting on my shelves. Stupid editor, Caveat emptor!) Fortunately, it’s not uninteresting setup: MacBride Allen is a professional, and all of this laborious background is dramatized in an interesting fashion. He even manages to make us sorry about the death of a character barely twenty pages after her introduction.

    At least the story starts rolling along soon after: As a starship captain wakes up from cryo, he finds himself in the right solar system… but more than a hundred and twenty-five years too late! The ship has been sabotaged, and one of the passengers has to face the fact that his mission has failed: How useful will his warnings of impending terraforming doom be if he’s more than a century too late?

    The most engaging characteristic of The Depths of Time is how is keep son piling revelations and further mysteries as it roars forward. All the setup of the first hundred pages progressively starts paying off and even if some revelations can be guessed simply from dramatic deduction (“Oh, I wonder why those two events are introduced…?”), there is a lot to like in the gradual discovery of secrets, all the way to the very last chapter. Time-travel, vast archives and terraforming aren’t new ideas, of course, but they’re here used in interesting fashions. This is a first volume of a trilogy and while it’s not satisfying by itself, it does a great job in setting the stage for the rest of the series.

    It’s also quite good in how it defines its characters. Protagonist Anton Koffield is tortured, humiliated, and marooned decades after his era, but he’s a solid and capable hero; I look forward to his next adventures. Minor characters also get some viewpoint time, with involving results. MacBride Allen even manages to give life to two characters whose presence in the action is more legendary than physical. All in all, coupled with the clear style and the top-notch technical aspects of the writing, it’s a good example of perfectly decent core science-fiction.

    I’m often prompt in bitching about media tie-ins, declining authors and substandard science-fiction, but The Depth of Time is none of those things. Welcome back, Roger. It’s been a long time since your last “honest” SF novel. We’ve missed you.

  • Bright Messengers, Gentry Lee

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1995, 447 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-57329-2

    Gentry Lee is, by all accounts, a formidable man. JPL engineer, father of seven, renowned public speaker, he is best-known in the science-fiction field for his four collaborations with Arthur C. Clarke: Cradle and the Rama trilogy that followed on Clarke’s classic Rendez-vous with Rama.

    But perhaps is it more accurate to says that Lee is infamous in the SF community for his collaborations with Clarke. Critics have not been very kind to any of those books. Clarke’s succinct, no-nonsense, steely-agnostic prose was transformed into a sprawling mess of mystical experiences, unlikable characters in overwritten adventures that had few, if any, of the originals’ charm. Cradle didn’t have to labour under the heavy burden of any classic predecessor, but even then few readers liked it. Now here comes Bright Messengers, Lee’s first solo novel which also doubles as a prequel to the Rama trilogy. (aaargh!)

    Lee’s track record in other fields suggest that he’s able to do many things exceedingly well. But writing novels won’t one of those things. Let us see why.

    Part of it has to do with the pedestrian nature of Lee’s imagined future. The year is 2141, but there are no details (save for a few colonies on Mars and the usual economic catastrophe) to indicate that this is any different from, oh, 2010. Granted, Lee ripped off his setting from the “Rama” trilogy (and that’s another problem right there), but even that doesn’t excuse much when his characters all act like refugees from the mid-nineteen nineties. All except for Sister Beatrice, a spectacularly grating model of perfection whose unshakable faith is held up as an example for all. Or something like that; it’s difficult to care for sainthood incarnate.

    But onward, for despite a particularly boring first hundred pages, things soon pick up once our characters fly off to Mars. There is a deliciously decadent atmosphere of decay in the “Valhalla” section, as the red planet’s colonization effort is failing. Thanks to a bad economy, governments and corporations alike have turned their back on Mars and are in the process of sending everyone home. Everything is falling to pieces, and so (among other things), a colony has to make a Faustian bargain with a dangerous engineering genius to survive. This is perhaps the only section of the book worth reading, as the tension slowly cranks up.

    Eventually, mysterious quasi-mystical appearances lead our character to an alien base, which whisks off our merry bunch of characters away in alien lala land. A psychopath hops along for the ride. The book gets worse from that point on. People who complained about the strange guilty mixture of sex and piety in the Rama trilogy won’t feel let-down by the even wackier mix in Bright Messengers. The psychopath (whose short stature and Arab origins are often highlighted) fulfils his obvious role in the narrative. It results in a gruesome death and an eyebrow-raising character reversal. What happens to poor pretty perfect Sister Beatrice is straight out of the Catholic “Greatest Martyrs” play book.

    Lee is an avowed theist, but his dumb use of pseudo-religious elements does a disservice to all believers. When, late in the book, something spectacular happens in an environment built and controlled by mysterious alien intelligence, stupid sister Beatrice goes on to exult at the visible proof of God’s intervention. When her sceptical companion replies with a variation of Clarke’s third law, she retreats into pouting and wishing for another companion. If someone can explain how an editor can let an author self-defeat himself in his own novel, I’d be most grateful. (Unless the editor was being deliberately unhelpful; I can understand that after reading the book.)

    (Shuffling through the novel to re-read that passage, I see that I forgot to highlight the dull and lengthy Hiroshima-and-Nazis virtual reality section, but that’s okay: I ended up browsing them anyway and then found out that they had absolutely no impact on the rest of the novel. Yes, it’s a book like that.)

    This book barely has any plotting (Ooh, psychopath! Booga-booga!), nor anything resembling sympathetic characters. Aside from brief moments in the Martian section, it oscillates between stupidity and boredom. At least the book solves one mystery; the question of who wrote most of the Rama trilogy: Obviously, the quality of Bright Messengers speaks for itself. And, presumably, so will Double Full Moon Night, the announced conclusion of this unfortunate piece of fiction.

    [June 2004: Wow, Double Full Load of Nonsense indeed speaks for itself. The heroes are still gratuitously marooned on one, then another alien environment. People reproduce (giving rise to even more twisted psychosexual dynamics), bicker, die horribly, etc. It’s not much of a Science-fiction novel, though. It really doesn’t help that it’s so dull and clunky, filled with character not worth caring about and long philosophical speeches that could be demolished by any high-school student. If you haven’t read the first book, don’t worry: it’s summarized in a pithy introduction that contains such wince-inducing phrases as “Leaving [protagonist] to die in his cave prison, [antagonist] repeatedly raped and humiliated [character] in many additional ways.” Plot-wise, I hope you weren’t expecting any developments nor answers, because there aren’t any: Even when the insufferable beatified Beatrice makes a return appearance as a helpful ghost, she remains coy about their situation and start spouting off nonsense such as “It is never necessary for us to have all our questions answered. [P.226] and later “For reasons that you would never be able to comprehend, I cannot give you any more specifics.” [P.258] But even these get-out-of-jail cards can’t hide the fact that Gentry Lee is a poser who’s making this stuff up as he goes along, with an appalling disregard for his readers that borders on a prolonged insult. The last section tries to tie the two books back to the Rama trilogy, which would be interesting if we actually cared about even a tiny sliver of those five books. ]

  • Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1999, 538 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-43524-9

    At a time where reality is out-imagining science-fiction, is it any wonder if the line between the two is getting blurred? Michael Crichton has been making millions for decades by passing off a kind of science-fiction as something that could happen tomorrow. Isn’t it time for genre-grown SF authors to cash in on the mainstream moolah?

    Surely Greg Bear’s reputation as a science-fiction author is unquestioned. While his novels have been hit-and-miss (Hit: Moving Mars. Miss: Dinosaur Summer. Your mileage will vary), it’s hard to say that the author of Blood Music is anything but a hard-core hard-SF writer. But even the paperback edition of Darwin’s Radio comes packaged as “Fiction” by generalist imprint Ballantine Books. It scrupulously avoids “Science-Fiction” on the cover and shyly mentions it once in the in-leaf blurbs. Bear isn’t the first one to leap from the SF ghetto to the bigger techno-thriller audience, but he’s not likely to be the last to annoy his core audience by doing so.

    But enough fanboyish kvetching: what about the book? Here too, it’s impossible to avoid snarky comparisons to Crichton et al.: Darwin’s Radio begins sometime soon, with two separate discoveries that are obviously linked: a mass grave in Georgia and three Neanderthal-era bodies in the Austrian Alps. In the process, we’re introduced to the two main characters of the novel: biologist Kaye Lang and rogue academic Mitch Rafelson. In the accepted manner of such thrillers, clues accumulate, events start to snowball and pretty soon a horrible truth is uncovered: There is a virus out there which is doing very, very nasty stuff to expectant mothers. The end of the species may be in sight.

    Now, before proceeding any further, let us highlight one very important thing: Science-fiction has not traditionally been very interested in the yucky stuff of procreation. Physics are fine insofar as they allow rockets and Big Dumb Object and space travel and rock-jawed starship captain heroes. But soft smelly biology, with its unreliable mechanisms and small-scale working, leads to the icky matters of reproduction, which in human terms leads to sex and emotions and relationships and uncomfortable things like that. I’ll come clean; as a science-fiction fan, I’m not alone in preferring the clean lines of a mile-long alien starship to the squishy stuff of pregnancies.

    So when Bear uses Darwin’s Radio as an excuse to study the implications of a world-wide plague directly linked to reproduction, it’s difficult to remain unmoved and unconcerned. However bad the evening news are, they can’t touch the nightmare of widespread miscarriages, deformed babies and massive riots. It cuts close to the bone, and props have to be given to Bear for tackling such a subject.

    Unfortunately, audacity isn’t enough: It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out that with two protagonists of reproductive age in a tale concerned with pregnancies, something will happen. It also doesn’t take much SF literacy to remember similar tales told with a much greater economy of means, in short stories less than a tenth of this length. Most of Darwin’s Radio is spent waiting for the next shoe to drop rather than more active plotting.

    At least techno-geeks and bio-nerds will enjoy the technical details. There’s a lot of evolutionary speculations in the book, and while some of it is too scattered, it’s not a bad read. (Some questions seems to be purposefully left unsolved for the sequel, though.) This is where Bear’s background as a science-fiction writer resonates most clearly, through extensive jargon and reasonably convincing technical details.

    As a science-fiction novel, it’s a bit basic. Hence my disapproval for Darwin’s Radio‘s Nebula Award for best Novel of 2000. It also, with hindsight, marks a turning point in Bear’s career, as his last three non-media novels (Including a sequel, Darwin’s Children) have also been in a techno-thrillerish vein. Good? Bad? If nothing else, Bear is hopefully getting filthy rich with Crichton’s target audience.

  • With Hostile Intent, Robert Gandt

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Signet, 2001, 368 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-20486-7

    One of the great genre fiction tragedies of the past decade has been the progressive atrophy of the military thriller. From the genre’s heyday in the early nineties, we’ve been saddled with a number of unconvincing stories written by authors whose technical knowledge greatly exceeded their ability to tell a story effectively. Numerous best-selling authors have become mere parodies of themselves (I’m looking at you, Dale Brown) as others have moved on to other things or simply stopped writing.

    In the absence of reliable authors, finding new material has taken a hit-and-miss quality. While there’s been a steady number of new writers coming out of the US military, their novels haven’t all been wonderful. A lot of these books are burdened with far too much military jargon and not much of a story. Most feature unpalatable characters. Many are contaminated with the kind of gung-ho militarism that makes them incomprehensible even to well-intentioned civilians. Of the late-nineties crop of military authors, only James H. Cobb has struck me as an interesting and reliable writer.

    While it’s a bit early to judge Robert Gandt on reliability, his first novel With Hostile Intent suggests that he’s an author worth watching. It’s not a perfect book, but it’s certainly one of the most promising military fiction debuts in recent memory. Simply consider this: It’s a thriller in which the action scenes are not necessarily the most interesting part of the book.

    It all takes place around the turn-of-the-millennium Persian Gulf, from Bahrain to Baghdad. In this pre-9/11 setting (Published in October 2001, With Hostile Intent may end up being the last thriller of the twentieth century), this is a familiar area: Saddam Hussein is the undisputed ruler of a sanctions-bound Iraq and the Americans are enforcing a no-fly zone over most of the country. The action begins as a mistake is made and an Iraqi fighter is shot down.

    What follows is a pretty darn spiffy story of professional rivalry, tangled romances, aircraft carrier life and occasional military suspense. It’s not the first novel to take place on an aircraft carrier (see whole sections of Stephen Coonts’ oeuvre, for instance), but Gandt shows an uncanny knack at combining shipboard politics with more straightforward naval aviation action.

    By far the best thing about With Hostile Intent is how it quickly develops sympathy for its characters. Protagonist Brick Maxwell may sport a pulp-fiction name, an outlandish biography and a steely behaviour, but he’s nearly the perfect viewpoint character: His undisputed skills don’t diminish his struggles as a new guy on the block. He’s got good friends and excellent enemies. Plus he gets to act like an idiot and atone for it. The gallery of supporting characters is also serviceable in creating an involvement with the book.

    As an added bonus, With Hostile Intent isn’t the kind of jingoistic propaganda piece that gives military fiction a bad name. There are several rotten apples in this aircraft carrier, and our protagonist deals with them. The main Iraqi antagonist is described with some degree of respect and sympathy. Even the “sold-out” American journalist gets his fair moment of glory.

    It’s stuff like that which gives With Hostile Intent an extra edge when comes the time to compare it to other contemporary military fiction. The writing style is limpid and uncluttered with the kind of techno-fetishism that ofter overwhelms similar books. It’s a welcome change of pace to find our interest as engaged in interpersonal strife than in the air combats. While parts of the book are unbelievable (isn’t anyone else paying attention to the number of crashes for this particular cruise?), they stand out because the rest of the book seems so realistic.

    Time and other novels will tell if Gandt can sustain the promise shown by his first novel. But judging from With Hostile Intent, he certainly seems able to juggle the various demands of military fiction and deliver a pleasant reading experience on top of everything else. I may be suffering from low expectations, but this book delivered everything I could ask from such a thriller.

  • Atlantis Found, Clive Cussler

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1999, 532 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-17717-3

    In reviewing a Dirk Pitt[TM] adventure, there’s a tightrope path in between being an annoying spoilsport and a credulous fanboy. Cussler’s fiction is certainly not respectable litterature. Even allowing for the usual sub-standard latitudes given to genre fiction, Dirk Pitt’s adventures have serious problems. The structure of Cussler’s last dozen novels follow more or less the same template, down to the historical prologue. The breakneck pacing actually hides remarkably long stretches of nothingness. His protagonists are so invulnerable as to defy common sense. The series of whoppers he has managed to uncover in each successive novel have an uncanny way of disappearing before the next one.

    But that’s just your reviewer being a boring pedant: It’s not as if Cussler’s flaws aren’t already obvious to anyone who’s read even two of his novels. Find someone who has read more than two, however, and you’re likely to find someone who has learnt to enjoy the books on their own terms, as two-fisted adventures with some crunchy historical speculation. In fact, find someone who has read a third Cussler novel and you’re likely to find someone on their way to read them all: While a steady diet of Dirk Pitt adventures would be brain-damaging, there’s nothing wrong with a yearly shot of Cussler craziness.

    And there’s plenty of craziness in Atlantis Found for sure. Heck, even the title spoils very little: While stalwart Dirk Pitt indeed goes on to find the titular Atlantis, you won’t believe what else stands in his way: Modern-day Nazis, shadowy assassins, rotten weather, doomsday plans, nanotechnology and maybe even matrimony. Whew! As Cussler fans have come to expect, there’s the requisite archaeological expeditions, car chases, delicious dialogue, Clive Cussler cameo and a big race against time before Something Really Bad Happens. Good good fun.

    One could conceivably point out that the book hovers even more dangerously that usual above flat-out auto-parody, but that would be both self-obvious and, of course, annoying. Much like one could point out the scientific mistake in describing nanotechnology as a science with the potential to build things using new metals (P.243: er, no; it’s molecular technology, not atomic!): once again that would be criticizing the tree and ignoring the forest. After Cussler’s inclusion of a secret Lunar base in Cyclops, it’s hard to get worked up about his bad science or nonsensical plot developments.

    Heck, it’s difficult not to stand up and cheer considering the amount and quality of outlandish material crammed into Atlantis Found. Even casual Antarctic buffs will squeal in glee at the surprise appearance of the Snow Cruiser late in the book. Plus, you won’t believe what’s in the Nazi relics box (nor what happens to it). Ironically enough, all of this clever intellectual madness makes Cussler’s exposition scenes far more interesting than his action sequences; it’s easy to flip through the pages as Dirk Pitt(R) and friends mow down yet another squad of baddies, but the quiet discussions in which historical secrets are revealed are worth a careful read.

    True, internal consistency doesn’t match from one novel to another, the characters haven’t changed in decades (though some material late in this book may lead to romantic developments), the books keep expanding without good reasons besides repetitive action padding and the repetitive plotting is really starting to grate. But it’s all good fun: Atlantis Found even has this winking quality that also works on a second level for those jaded readers who know better.

    It sure looks as if Cussler is having fun too. His cameo appearance in the novel is amusing, and from what we can read elsewhere on the web, he’s busy re-investing his royalties in classic cars and underwater archaeological expeditions. Goodness knows there are worse ways to be a best-selling author… even if the latest flood of “Clive Cussler collaborations” suggests that the need to mint royalty money may outweigh his respectability as a writer.

    Um. Did I just associate “Clive Cussler” with “respectability as an author”? My mistake!

  • Conceptual Blockbusting (4th edition), James L. Adams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Perseus Publishing, 2001, 220 pages, C$25.95 tpb, ISBN 0-7382-0537-0

    At the intersection of psychology and business literature, it’s often difficult to separate useful works from loosely-outlined collections of pithy aphorisms. Businesses, by definition, have money and want to make even more money. There is no surprise, then, to see that there is a significant market for works promising untold riches in five (or ten) easy catchphrases. The “business” section of your local used bookstore is filled with past management fads, too-easy answers to complex problems and ridiculous attempts to exploit businesspeople’s massive insecurities. (My favorite in the genre being Richard Marcinko’s The Rogue Warrior’s Guide to Leadership.)

    If you don’t believe me, go ahead, take a trip and have a look. I’ll wait. But while you’re there, if you happen to see James L. Adams’ Conceptual Blockbusting, take it out of the stack and bring it home with you; it deserves better company than a stack of tomes on how to manage Japanese-style.

    For Conceptual Blockbusting is not your usual business psychology book, nor is its appeal strictly limited to anyone trying to get ahead in a corporate hierarchy. No; this is a book that, under a business guise, aims to teach everyone how to think better.

    In a nutshell, this is a book that purports to break the unproductive habits that defeat the most innovative thinking. But in doing so, it delves deep into the sources of inspiration and the methods of the human mind. The subtitle says that it’s “a guide to better ideas” and might as well believe it: in a succinct 220 pages, it delivers enough thinking material to keep anyone busy for a while.

    I’m hardly the first one to feel so positively about the book. “300,000 copies sold!” claims the title page. Not only is it at its fourth edition, twenty five years after its initial publication, but I was pleasingly surprised to recognize within its pages a few familiar classroom exercises. Adams’ work has been influential and this newly-refreshed edition is an ideal way to see why.

    More than half of the book is dedicated to the identification of conceptual blocks; the kind of constraints, acknowledged or ingrained, that restrict us in our quest for better ideas. Stuff like social taboos, hasty mis-perception of problems, personality quirks or lack of expressive knowledge can all contribute to dull solutions. By enumerating how we’re not quite as free-thinking as we perceive ourselves to be, Adams makes us conscious of the problems and gives us pointers on how to get around these blocks.

    Other areas covered in Conceptual Blockbusting include an examination of thinking languages (and how, say, mathematical or verbal thinking may not be universal problem-solvers, to the dismay of those trained in those techniques), ways to crack those idea blockers (far beyond the usual “brainstorming” cliché, though this is also covered and explained in good detail) and a savvy glimpse at how ideas can be nurtured in organizational structures.

    All of which could be trite stuff if it wasn’t for Adams’ polished delivery. After four editions, his material is optimized for both pleasure reading and reference purposes. His style is direct, dense but curiously pleasant to read and re-read. This is the kind of book worth refreshing once a year if only to ingrain those conceptual blockbusters in daily thinking. It doesn’t take much to see in Conceptual Blockbusting a good primer on the structures of human thinking and a springboard to deeper reflection.

    Or maybe not; if all you want are better ideas and a solid business psychology book, this one’s for you. Deceptively effective, solid without being flashy, there are good chances that James L. Adams’ book will still be available twenty-five years from now, in hopefully an even-better edition.

  • High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, Rusel DeMaria & Johnny L. Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    McGraw Hill Osborne, 2002, 328 pages, C$24.99 tpb, ISBN 0-07-222428-2

    Faithful readers of these reviews may recall my teenage fascination for video games, but they may not suspect the depth of it. Simply put, from 1983 to 1993, I knew just about everything about the subject. Blessed with ample free time and a network of like-minded friends, armed with a trusty Commodore 64 (followed by the latter succession of PCs), I devoured the magazines of the time, played games obsessively, wrote about them in the high school newspaper and basically lived a decade under the influence.

    Then I discovered the Internet, went to university and, well, something had to give.

    But thanks to Rusel DeMaria and Johnny L. Wilson, I now own a time capsule of the era: High Score! packs nothing less than three decades of video games in 328 gorgeously illustrated pages. Everything from Pong to the X-Box, complete with quotes from the industry’s historical figures, descriptions of games and companies and enough screenshots to make you feel as if you’re back in front of vintage games.

    Roughly divided in three chronological sections (the 70s, 80s and 90s), High Score! is crammed with material, both textual and visual. The scope of the book is, admittedly, bigger than my own experience with the subject matter: It delves deep into the prehistory of electronic games (namely; arcades and pre-Atari 2600 consoles), and then goes on to do a very good job balancing computer games with the series of consoles that developed concurrently. (Not being a console fan, I could only nod in recognition at memories of my friend’s video games from Nintendos to Playstations)

    The first part, “the 70s”, is the most linear of the three: Given the historical perspective and relatively uncluttered gaming landscape of the time, it’s easy for the authors to present a flowing narrative. One event clearly leads to another, copycats turn into innovators and there are so few games that they can be highlighted on a yearly basis. It’s a heroic age where personalities and individual talents are crucial.

    Some of that individual heroism carries through in “The 80s”, even as the field starts to mature and define itself as an industry. Small organizations start taking on the personalities formerly held by individuals. Mentions of Epyx, Electronic Arts, Activision, SSI and others all evoke warm happy memories of seeing those logos on my plucky Commodore 64. (“Accolade Presents”… Ooh, mommy!)

    Alas, the “narrative” of High Score! also starts to break down as the industry explodes in random directions. Whereas the book’s first third is linear and absorbing, it then switches to a more free-flowing approach as it tries to cover all facets of the field. Unfortunately, this leads to uncomfortable breaks; when covering a company like Sierra, for instance, there are clear differences between the King’s Quest Sierra and the Half-Life Sierra. Shovelling the entire history of the company between pages 134-143, in “The 80s”, is a jarring choice. Among many others.

    Given my declining interest in computer games during the nineties, it’s somewhat ironic to read how, in the introduction to the third part of the book, the authors had a harder time pulling together the final threads. Electronic gaming has since gone mainstream, taking over pop culture as yet another entertainment option. Oh well. Unfortunately (and this will only grow worse as we move away from 2002), High Score! ends at a curious junction, barely mentioning the Playstation 2 / X-Box / Nintendo 64 platforms, as well as Grand Theft Auto and other newer landmarks of electronic gaming which, after all, always marches on.

    But don’t think it’s enough to diminish my admiration for the book. High Score! and myself were fated to meet at some point. Especially noteworthy is the fantastic graphic design used to lay out the book. Every page is a thing of beauty, laid out clearly to highlight the interesting material. Screen-shots are crisp, quotes are appropriate and the material is well-written. I especially loved the profiles of specific games… especially when they matched my own favourites!

    No doubt about it: For an old-school computer game geek such as myself, reading the book was like surfing from one pleasant memory to another. You can keep your high-school photo album: This is the true record of how I spent my teenage years!

  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 2000, 639 pages, C$22.00 tpb, ISBN 0-312-28299-0

    Now that is one amazing book.

    Deftly mixing such disparate elements as World War II, New York City, Antarctica, homosexuality, the Empire State Building, the Holocaust, movies, Picasso and -above all- comic books, it’s a novel unlike any other, straddling history, alternate reality and a little bit of traditional fantasy. More than simply a snapshot of America between 1939 and 1954, more than a rags-to-riches story of successful artists, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay also stands as one of the few works compelling to both genre and mainstream audiences.

    It was inevitable, I suppose; after years of increasing literary sophistication in the comic book field, it was about time that someone on the other side of the fence took an interest in the world comic books. Michael Chabon isn’t merely just any mainstream author, though; without even looking at his biography, his love of comics shines through the book like a lighthouse. But as he sets out to tell the astounding story of Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, it’s also obvious that he’s doing a lot more than pay homage to the wonderful Golden Age of Comics.

    1939: After many misadventures (soon described in the book’s first section), Josef Kavalier arrives in New York, seeking sanctuary as the situation in his hometown of Prague gets worse and worse for all Jews. Scarcely a few days after arrival, Joe and his cousin Samuel Klayman are able, through a fortuitous set of circumstances, to create a brand-new comic book for an ambitious publisher looking for another Superman. Soon enough, “The Escapist” is born and a new age in comic books is underway. Meanwhile, all the way over there in Europe, a war begins.

    As Chabon describes the war through the viewpoint of two comic book artists working in New York, sublimating their anger through art and doing their best to get ahead in the comics industry, it quickly becomes obvious that this is a big, big, big novel. Romantic entanglements, family tragedies, period detail and comic book scenarios all intermingle to form a single narrative. It attains a climax of sort on December 7th, 1941, but the story is far from being over; indeed, the next section titled “Radioman” may just be the best part of the book. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is an epic story about two guys and the whole world. The depth of detail that Chabon gives to the story is just astonishing; even for casual fans of the era, he manages to seamlessly insert Kavalier, Clay and their Escapist in 1940s New York, all the way to the (hiss!) Wertram era.

    But scope and verisimilitude aren’t the only virtues of this novel; more than anything, this is a book that succeeds on great characterizations and superb writing. Chabon is a playful stylist, and so the narrative is told from a modern perspective that recalls the work of an enthusiastic biographer, albeit one with the omniscience required to peek at unread letters and buried feelings. Comic book scripts are dramatized and inserted in the narrative. Some historical cameos will make comic book fans coo with glee. A touch of matter-of-fact fantasy is inserted in the best magical realism tradition. Flashbacks, flash-forwards and dastardly twists are strewn through the whole book. Packed with delicious prose from the first to the last page, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is hard to stop reading after even the first chapter.

    But as the title of the novel suggests, it’s Kavalier and Clay themselves, along with the rest of the supporting characters, who make the book such a unique reading experience. The partnership and contrast between tall, quiet, tortured Kavalier and stocky, hustling, equally-tortured Clay is credible even as outlandish events unfold in their lives. Great stuff, enhanced by sympathetic portraits of them both.

    All in all, a heck of a book. It has deservedly won a Pulizer prize, but more important, it’s a hugely enjoyable novel with wide appeal in and out the mainstream literary crowd. It’s the sort of thing to make genre fans fall in love with the straight-up fiction category and general audiences pay attention to comic books. Everyone gets ahead!

    [May 2004: As I finish my review, I see that a derivative comic book called “The Escapist” is out there, giving tangible form to the comics described in the novel. Neat!]

  • Invasion, Robin Cook

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1997, 338 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-15540-4

    Wow, that book sucked.

    I know; I know; I shouldn’t expect much from a paperback original adapted from a TV miniseries. I should expect even less from a thriller author meddling with science-fiction for the first time. And, goodness gracious, it’s not as if I had big expectations for Robin Cook after his execrable Fatal Cure. It’s not as if I hadn’t read bad reviews of the book already. But you never know. Sometimes, there are surprises.

    But then again sometimes, there are no surprises. From the opening prologue, if not the very first page, something is wrong: Cook uses scientific words and expressions in a sloppy fashion, as if he only half understood what he was describing. The sequence -the apparition and crash-landing of an extraterrestrial space-ship- wants to be exact but ends up muddled. (As if that wasn’t bad enough, we don’t even know at this point that what’s being described doesn’t even match what happens later in the book.)

    Things get worse in the first chapter, as Cook throws the book’s characters at the unsuspecting reader. They’re not introduced as much as they’re dropped on-stage, with cute names (“Beau”, “Pitt”, “Cassy”, “Nancy”, etc.) and threadbare personalities. Half of them are medical specialists or students, which will obviously be handy later on. Fortunately, it’s not required to learn anything about the characters yet: Invasion quickly settles into a quiet rip-off of INVASIONS OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and anyone even remotely familiar with tales of alien invasions can just relax and see where Cook intends to go.

    Very quickly, it becomes obvious that Cook intends to go where every other science-fiction writer has gone before. As hunky Beau is taken over by an alien parasite, his personality changes and he becomes prone to saying things like “Hmm, humans are so strange.” His girlfriend isn’t particularly bothered by the changes given how he’s suddenly really really good in bed. (One would question how the alien knows those mad lovin’ skillz, but then again one could forever question just about everything in this novel.) Still, when he goes out and buys a dog without telling the missus, enough is enough and so she decides to leave and confide in her other platonic male best friend. (Why the heck would Beau-alien so spectacularly blow his cover without first infecting his girlfriend is a plot-busting question best left to anyone with an average IQ and up.)

    It gets more or less worse from there, as alien crafts magically replicate, take over the population and create black holes whenever it’s convenient for the needs of the plot. Like most struggling SF writers, Cook conjures up all sorts of really creepy events, but never bothers to offer a unified theory of how they all interrelate. Things happen randomly and that’s that. The aliens are invading; screw any other rationale than pure evil. Whatever happens after the invasion is left blurry.

    By the time a rag-tag bunch of misfits cook up an antidote of sorts in an abandoned high-tech laboratory hidden under the desert (hey, whatever), the book reads like a parody devoid of humour or even self-awareness. Invasion has a unique moment of SF goodness when it is revealed that the aliens are building an inter-dimensional gate to link Earth with the thousands of other conquered planets. While SF fans will read this and think “Cool! Let us see more of that!”, the characters react like xenophobic rednecks and go “We must destroy the gate! Eew! Icky aliens!”. Naturally enough, it’s all solved in the last ten pages as a counter-infection is going to kill off all traces of alien invasions. (Meanwhile, SF readers are concerned about whether those “infected” humans can, in fact, be uninfected without massive casualties, but that’s something that Cook obviously doesn’t care much about.)

    Ultimately, though, a 700-words review isn’t enough to detail all the logical mistakes and deeply stupid moments in Robin Cook’s Invasion. Nor is it enough to give a sense of how tedious this book is, thanks to the lack of surprises and the flat characters. But it is just long enough to tell you to stay away from it, unless you want to see a real compendium of bad Science Fiction by an author who ought to stick to medical thrillers. And maybe not even that, judging how even that portion of Invasion fails to be any more credible. But what else did I expect?

  • Medusa’s Child, John J. Nance

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 1997, 388 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-48343-0

    Modern publishing is a weird beast, afflicted like it is with demanding profit margins from corporate owners, rising costs, fickle audiences and the incertitudes of marketing artistic products. In face of these dangers, the industry has developed defence mechanisms, the most visible of which has been a tendency to place authors in very narrow niches. How narrow? It depends on genres: Mystery fiction tends to recycle the same characters in dozens of adventures. Fantasy goes for fat trilogies of overlong material ripped off from earlier, better writers. In the thriller field, specialization can attain rarefied levels as some authors specialize in very specific environment. Dale Brown loves B-52s, Michael DiMercurio can’t get enough of submarines and John J. Nance is the field’s foremost commercial aviation thriller writer.

    The specialization is not accidental: Writers are admonished to write about what they know best, and these three men have taken this suggestion literally: Brown used to fly on bombers, DiMercurio was a submariner and Nance not only is an “aviation consultant” for ABC, but was also (as of 1997) a professional airline pilot. He’s got eleven novels to his name, and all of them involve aviation to a degree or another.

    In Medusa’s Child, the focus is on a tiny cargo airline, Scotair, the dream-come-true achievement of protagonist Scott McKay. But as the novel begins, the dream is about to end: Dogged by debts and bad luck, Scotair is down to it’s last reserves; if anything goes wrong –it’s the end of the line for everyone involved. And things are about to go very, very wrong indeed.

    Within a few pages, the nightmare begins: A mysterious pallet is loaded aboard the leased 727 plane that Scotair is using, escorted by an even-more mysterious woman. Before long, mystery is replaced by terror as the crate is revealed to contain a nuclear bomb with enhanced EMP-generating capabilities. It’s all part of a complex revenge plan, but the threat is clear: within a few minutes, the bomb will detonate, destroying Washington and wiping electronic equipment across half of North America. Throw in a hurricane, the FBI and the American Armed Forces and you’ve got all the elements required for a crackling thriller.

    One of the best things about Medusa’s Child is how it really compresses the action into a time-frame approaching real-time reading. Save for the prologue and epilogue, everything takes place in less than nine hours, exactingly minuted through section headers. Of course, thanks to some devilishly convoluted complications, there is scarcely a break available once the timer starts ticking.

    One thing that Nance does exceedingly well, here or in the other books I’ve read from him, is dangle the possibility of a early tidy ending throughout the book. Medusa’s Child is packed with subplots which contain the very real possibility of resolution. But something always happens to cut it off at the last minute. At least two ways to defuse the threat are discussed –but are revealed too late. I especially liked the way Nance toys with his readers’ expectations: Given that this is an airborne thriller, it can only end once the plane has landed, right? “Unity of setting”, isn’t it? Well, Nance serves one almost-landing, then another false one, showing that he understands the game being played with his audience. It becomes nearly annoying, but also very thrilling as things just can’t seem to go right for the protagonists. Even when you think that it’s over, there’s one final niggling detail to fix –and it’s a good one. That final stunt is a piece of work, even for a reader who has read techno-thrillers for years.

    Granted, Nance makes up in breathless pacing what he blurs in credibility. There are a number of logical howlers here and there (to say more would be a spoiler), but they’re difficult to notice given how they’re buried under the rhythm of the story. But that’s the prerogative of thriller writer; if they succeed at making the story fly, no-one is going to complain about occasional details. Suffice to say that Medusa’s Child is excellent entertainment and that beach readers shouldn’t look any further. Good stuff, well-handled by a professional writer and aviator.

  • A Place So Foreign And 8 More, Cory Doctorow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003, 243 pages, C$20.95 tpb, ISBN 1-56858-286-2

    Cory Doctorow landed on the Science Fiction scene with a splash in 2000, winning the Campbell award for best new writer only a few months before publishing his first book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Audacious? Not as much as his acceptance speech, which ended with a URL. Doctorow is one of the new SF writers who has grown up along with the Internet, and his approach to fiction reflects that both in content (where he can sling the jargon like the worst IT consultants) and in presentation (don’t be surprised if just about every story of the volume has been made available on-line for free)

    A Place So Foreign And 8 More hardly collects all of Doctorow’s short-fiction output since his beginnings in 1990, but it’s a good start, and a great overview of what he’s capable of producing. On the heel of his excellent first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, it’s also a good indication that Doctorow has what it takes to have a sustained career in the SF field.

    The collection starts with a bang (even before Doctorow’s first story) with Bruce Sterling’s laudatory introduction, almost a passing of the torch from a top SF writer to another. “There are times when I suspect I’ve extrapolated Cory Doctorow” writes Sterling, and no more is required to understand where Doctorow is coming from, or where he’s going.

    Then there are the stories. Nine tales published in between 1998 and 2002, five years spanning two millenniums, a dot-com boom and bust and Doctorow’s emergence as a hot writer with a Campbell award on his (mobile) mantelpiece. Nine stories oscillating between comedy and drama, soft and hard SF, satire or nostalgia. There’s even a mini-cycle of three stories set in the same universe, with very different atmospheres. But most of all, nine markers telling you to pay attention to this particular author.

    There is a publishing tradition that makes anthology editors shuffle the content of short story collections so that the first and last stories of the book are the best ones. A Place So Foreign And 8 More is no exception, with “Craphound” occupying the pole position and “0wnz0red” closing the march. I’ll have more to say about “0wnz0red” in a moment, but “Craphound” has deservedly become Doctorow’s best-known story so far: a hypnotically readable look at the life of a professional nostalgic, the code of conducts between those “craphounds” and what happens when an alien breaks the rules. Great stuff, especially for those who like to spend too much time at rummage sales.

    It’s a bit uneven after that: I wasn’t particularly taken by the title story (something about the lack of development and plausibility of the imagined universe) and “All Day Sucker” is succinctly spoiled by its introduction, but they’re followed up by “To Market, to Market: The Re-Branding of Billy Bailey”, an excellent satiric look at the business of personality. I really didn’t go for “Return to Pleasure Island”: I’m not nearly as fascinated by Disney as Doctorow is —but then again few people are.

    The following three stories are part of a cycle in which Earth has been invaded by curiously apathetic aliens. All three stories cover very different emotional registers and the result is… curious. “Shadow of the Mothaship” seems too long and unfocused, but I must say that “Home Again, Home Again” gets better every time I read it. “The Super Man and the Bugout”, though, is immediately likable: What if Superman had stayed in Canada?

    But the real jewel of the collection is “0wnz0red”, a simple SF tale of personal rapture wrapped in diamond-hard geek-speak. I’m a geek, so it was almost like reading something in my own language. Hilarious, compulsively readable and meanly effective too. (Less technical readers may not find it so amusing or accessible.)

    All in all, a collection with the expected lulls and heights. But they certainly do place Doctorow as one of the brightest, most audacious new SF writers. The emphasis on computer technology also speaks volumes, I think about SF’s new direction… but that’s just one elements in an ongoing process for the entire genre. We’ll have to see more to judge, and it just so happens that Doctorow’s going to be writing a number of those new data points.

  • The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Signet, 1943 (1993 reprint), 704 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-17512-3

    It took me nearly two years to get over Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and muster up the courage to tackle the other novel that made her famous. As it turns out, I could have waited a little bit longer: The Fountainhead is a lot less fun than her latter book, especially if you tend to look at them as fine examples of comedy writing.

    The Fountainhead, in a nutshell, is the story of Howard Roark, an architect of singular vision and talent whose modernistic sensibilities are rejected by the masses and scoffed at by the intelligentsia. Thrown out of school, kicked out of dozens of offices, unable to work with most, Roark is painted by Rand as a tragic figure of brilliance dogged by universal mediocrity. In reality, he’s closer to the kid who just doesn’t want to eat his broccoli, but I’ll let that one pass given that I could spend pages parodying The Fountainhead as an endless discussion about broccoli-eating. (“Eat your broccoli!” “I once may have wanted to eat this broccoli, mother, but I will bow to no one! And so the broccoli shall stay in my plate and not in my palate!”)

    But even despite my endless reservoirs of sarcasm when it comes to Ayn Rand, I must admit that the first quarter of The Fountainhead is fun to read. I don’t know much about architecture, so the novel could at least fulfil my hunger for an inside look at the field. I’m also a sucker for depictions or thirties-era New York, with its industrial aesthetics and bustling feel as an emerging metropolis. The structure of the novels’ first quarter also helps, as we watch Roark struggle to maintain his integrity while a friend of his moves up thanks to a minimal amount of social skills. Roark may have all the sophistication of a stubborn five-year-old, but there’s a grander-than-life quality to the character that just makes him irresistibly compelling. The Fountainhead suffers whenever he’s off-stage.

    Alas, this happens a lot in the middle half of the novel, as Rand sharpens her knives against her antagonists, none of whom are credible and fewer still are of any interest. Roark is exiled, and all we’re left with is moustache-twirling bad guys and love triangles with all the maturity of modern soap operas.

    (Generally speaking, Rand’s attempt at human and romantic drama are nothing short of hilarious when they’re not simply boring: Here, sexual aggression seems to be the dominant romantic model of her protagonists as they’re only a step away from S&M practises. While this may have been of substantial shock value in 1943, this is not the case today, and our contemporary reaction to all of this may be a big smirking shrug.)

    Things pick up somewhat toward the end of the novel, as Roark once again becomes a major character. Things finally heat up, a city-wide crisis is triggered and fans of Rand’s multi-page screeds have something to look forward to. (Regular readers are advised to skip to the summation.) Things end up more or less as you’d expect, with human spirit triumphing over the bottom-suckers and Roark imposing his will on a subservient city as his opponents are grandly punished. Or something like that.

    Compared to Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead reads a lot like a far less interesting prototype of the same ideas. The emphasis on architecture and the character of Howard Roark aside, The Fountainhead is a lot more restrained, a lot less ludicrous and rather less interesting. Atlas Shrugged is firmly set in science-fiction, whereas The Fountainhead stays anchored to reality with predictably less exciting developments. Rand’s objectivism is more clearly explained in all of its ludicrous glory in Atlas Shrugged, whereas The Fountainhead only occasionally becomes ridiculously obnoxious. Both Rand haters and Rand admirers will be best-served by Atlas Shrugged. As for The Fountainhead, well, Rand herself adapted the book into a movie; why not save yourself a few hours and see for yourself?

  • The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1993, 246 pages, C$21.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-51862-X

    Most of my reviews focus on science-fiction, thrillers and truly odd non-fiction. Henceforth, it’s a rarity (outside science-fiction conventions, of course) when I can actually discuss books with other live people. Not so with James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, which has spent some unbelievable time on bestseller lists and seems to have been read by a similarly unbelievable number of people. At the office, about a third of my colleagues seemed to have read the book; a higher proportion still knew enough about it to snicker scornfully.

    I’ll be honest enough to admit that I’m often deeply suspicious of anything that becomes too popular. Yes, I’m an elitist. But an elitist who goes to enough used book sales to be willing to give a chance to anything cheap enough. And so that’s how I ended up with a nice hardcover copy of The Celestine Prophecy (thirty-third printing!) in my to-read stack.

    From the dust jacket, it’s easy to see why the book would inspire both such sales and such scorn. Some mumbo-jumbo about ancient insights, a spiritual culture, universal truths wrapped in contemporary pseudo-scientific vocabulary and the promise of life-shattering revelations. “A book that comes along once in a lifetime to change lives forever” soberly writes the Warner Books copywriter. Whew!

    No being a big fan of new-age yadda-yadda, I was prepared for the worst. What I ended up reading in an hour or so wasn’t all that bad.

    First, let’s state the evidence: Yes, this is feel-good new-age “personal enlightement” literature. It may be masquerading as a (poor) thriller, but the nature of the “insights”, the progression of the litany and the promises of a richer, more fulfilling life are familiar enough.

    But new-age literature is actually more complicated to write than its detractors will allow, given how it has to blend pop-psychology, motivational training and a fair bit of self-hypnosis. Redfield’s stoke of genius was to transpose his dry list of nine insights in a first-person thriller framework. Besides deliberately blurring the lines between reality and fiction, The Celestine Prophecy is kind enough to allow even sceptical readers like me to be swept along (somewhat) by the narrative flow of a story with just enough guns, sex and explosions to make it interesting.

    Now, let’s be truthful and admit that as thriller fiction, The Celestine Prophecy is trash. That’s obvious from the very first few pages, as the author gives himself a “get out of jail free” card in the form of a “nothing happens by accident” First Insight. Whee! Free opportunities to use convenient coincidences over and over and over and over again! The hand of the author in manipulating his characters is obvious though the novel, as the narrator meets one useful character after another and is thrown in a series of suspiciously convenient adventures. Hilarious logical howlers abound, from stupid character names (with no regard to ethnicity) to smack-obvious foreshadowing that allow any alert reader to predict the next chapter’s big insight. The fantasy elements are poorly integrated (Woo! Love-driven auras!), but I’m not about to review The Celestine Prophecy as fantasy, because otherwise we’ll be here until morning without much to account for.

    But you know what? It’s hard for me to be too harsh at a book that cost next to nothing to buy and took barely an hour to read. Fantasy auras aside, the “insights” of the book at the type of harmless things sold far more seriously by Psychology PhDs elsewhere in the self-help section. Heck, it wouldn’t take much to link The Celestine Prophecy to the trans-humanist movement, complete with the final rapture/singularity. And that, for some reason, just warms up my geek heart. Good, bad, just throw The Celestine Prophecy in the “interesting; won’t take too much of your time; fun to argue about” pile. At least it’ll give you something to talk about at the next science-fiction convention… or even at the office.

  • Underworld, Don DeLillo

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scribner, 1997, 827 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-684-84269-6

    Reading around the web for critical commentary about Don DeLillo’s Underworld, I find teachers, students, readers, fans and commentators all anxious to fit the novel in their own vision of late-twentieth-century America. I see numerous allusion to Underworld as a Great American Novel. I see everyone extracting meaning from the book as others press orange pulp for juice. So why not do the same? Why not assign great meaning to the book? Why not make it fit in my own theories about life, universe and everything?

    Why not, indeed, use Underworld as a prism by which to study the differences between literature and genre fiction, if indeed there is one? Underworld is usually discussed in hushed tones implying that it is the very achievement of literature, the pure concentrate of fine writing. Isn’t it possible, then, to see it as a quintessential manifestation of modern fiction? To oppose it against an entire corpus of so-called “lesser” genre fiction? If we bounce off particles of science-fiction, fantasy, thrillers or mysteries off of Underworld at ludicrously high velocities, what flashes of insight can we get?

    Our first order of business is to determine what Underworld is about, if indeed it is about anything. Certainly, even a careful reading of the text can leave anyone unsure: it’s about baseball, crime, waste, the cold war, the atom bomb, modern art, serial killing, religion, miracles, the Cuba Crisis, Lenny Bruce, Edgar J. Hoover, Vietnam, New York, affairs, marriages and so on… It themes are too restrictive, maybe a given period is the answer: Doesn’t Underworld span nearly half a decade, from 1951 to (roughly) 1997? If it’s not about something, is it about the entirely of the American experience from then to now?

    What it certainly isn’t about is a plot. While there are recurring threads here and there in those 862 pages, it’s not as if there is a single coherent drive to the narrative thrust. And that’s where we get the first hint of illumination regarding genre fiction: Regardless of style, characters or atmosphere, genre fiction is first and foremost a story being told, from point A to (roughly) point B. Underworld is a sprawling bag of knots: fascinating, difficult (and rewarding) to unravel, but certainly not a thread spooling from one axis to another.

    That, in itself may be a clue to the meaning of Underworld. For this novel is unstuck in chronology: Save for its prologue and epilogue, classically set as far apart as the chronology will allow, the novel runs backward, section by section. 1992, 1980s, 1974, 1960s, 1951… As we regress in time, some character’s formative experiences are explained and revealed. Like peeling an onion. Like uncovering a present. Like taking apart a bomb. Some sections jumble up the chronology even within themselves, presenting further challenges. Reading Underworld as quickly as possible is not just a good idea; it may be just about the only way to keep up with the vast amount of discontinuous information thrown at the reader. Most things interconnect, but it’s all too easy to miss those nodes of meaning.

    But ultimately, regardless of the complex structure of the novel, the way most things mesh with another, the rewarding feeling of accomplishment whenever one notices thematic resonance between very different areas of the novel, the question arises: Was it worth reading? Was it worth slogging though? Did it ultimately mean anything? Those are questions seldom, yet always asked of genre fiction, because the answers are more obvious: A good story is worth reading without questions, and doesn’t have to mean anything if it’s sufficiently entertaining. But as Underworld overwhelms with Americana and stylistic experiments, as it slows down to nearly a halt in Part 6, as it once again rehashes nuclear oblivion, the thought springs unbidden: Why bother? Why not wait for PBS’s “The Cold War” special series? What is so unique about Underworld?

    For the genre readers, it’s even worse, for they know that the same points, the same anxieties, have been covered elsewhere in genre fiction, with more entertainment value and often more depth. Nuclear Holocaust? Been there, saw the mutants. Serial killers? Read that, caught the culprit. American underworld? Bought the T-Shirt, got the Philip K. Dick novel. And once again, genre readers are reminded why they seldom bother with the mainstream stuff: why suffer through 862 pages of meta-referential fine writing when you can get more in a 350-pages novel of compulsively readable entertainment? Aside from being able to title-drop, that is?