Book Review

  • Hart’s War, John Katzenbach

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1999, 551 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-42625-8

    It’s impossible to be a genre fiction reader and not admire John Katzenbach’s audacity when it comes to Hart’s War‘s premise. What if, during World War II, there was a murder investigation set in a prisoner-of-war camp? Can you say “genre blender”? Can you enjoy a story mixing war elements, prison stories and courtroom drama? Of course you can. So buckle up and enjoy the ride.

    Most of Hart’s War is seen through the viewpoint of Tommy Hart, an aviator doing his best to endure the misery of his internment in a German prisoner-of-war camp. That is, until a new prisoner is introduced in the volatile mix; Leo Scott, a black airman from the famed Tuskegee unit. Racial tensions run high and Scott isn’t dumb or meek; he quickly sets himself apart from the other men in the camp through his haughty and aggressive behaviour. So when popular “Trader” Vic is murdered after a long period of acrimony between the two men, Scott is quickly accused of murder. Under the Nazi’s amused stares, the Allied prisoners arrange for a speedy court-martial. But who is unlucky enough to be designated defence lawyer? Why, Tommy Hart, of course. In the absence of qualified lawyers, his stint at Harvard Law School is more than enough to allow everyone to maintain appearances of a fair trial.

    So much for his plans to stay as discreet as possible while waiting for the end of the war: In the absence of anything more worthwhile to do, the trial quickly becomes a lighting rod for the latent tension in the camp. Assisted by expert British legal advice and capable Canadian muscle, Hart himself has to develop fancy survival skills in an environment where murder may be a front for something much more dangerous…

    The beauty of Hart’s War is how it seamlessly plays with elements of three very different genres to form a coherent whole. The book’s characters are plunged in an unusual situation, while their actions are constrained with deliciously complicated obstacles. This, in turn, makes the lines between allies and enemies rather less than definite. There are more than enough surprising twists and turns to keep anyone interested in the story.

    If the above plot summary seems like a crass attempt at throwing genres together to see what sticks, well, that may not be far from the truth. But it would also be ignoring that Katzenbach’s book is a slick and massively entertaining yarn. Among many other virtues, it’s a well-told tale that does justice to its premise and its plotting. Katzenbach may not be a particularly artful scribe, but his utilitarian prose works wonders at driving the story forward. Hart’s War is a page-turner in the best old-school sense of the expression. You may know when you’ll start to read it, but you can only guess at when you’ll want to stop.

    Time and time again, the book takes an unexpected tack. Some of them don’t work (the ending section is overlong and sends what was up to that point a thriller into more straightforward action territory), some of them are a bit silly (Hart takes forever to guess the “true” story behind the murder, even though it’s patently obvious to most readers) and some of them work beyond any reasonable expectation: The contemporary scenes that frame the story are unexpectedly moving even though they’re patently manipulative.

    Yes, a film was adapted from the book. But while I rather like the film, the book is much better. Less blatantly message-driven (the wonderfully acerbic Scott is an inspired character, one whose flaws are integral to the book’s arc), more realistic (Hart’s not a recent arrival like in the film) and considerably deeper when it comes to the details of prison-life, Hart’s War is still worth a detour for those who are familiar with the film adaptation.

    All-around successful thrillers should be celebrated. With a brilliant premise, great execution and straightforward prose, Hart’s War has more than enough to deserve a look from everyone looking for a good story. Heck, it’s almost as if you get three for the price of one.

  • The Silk Code, Paul Levinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1999, 308 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56775-7

    One should be lenient about an author’s first novel. The poor writer is just stretching his or her writing muscles without the benefit of latter career experience. Even though editors are there to prevent a first novel from going totally awry, there’s a limit to what they can do to correct amateur structural problems. Latter books are usually conceived with some experience with this whole publishing thing.

    Being a book reader rather than a magazine reader, I’m not terribly familiar with Paul Levinson’s body of short stories. Still, Levinson’s “The Mendelian Lamp Case” was a bright spot in David G. Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF 3 anthology (1998), enough so that I could remember details of its premise -secret biological warfare between the Amish and another shadowy group- even years later. The Silk Code is a direct descendant of that short story, reprising most of it in its first section. But whereas protagonist/investigator Phil D’Amato escaped the short story leaving a few threads dangling, the novel goes deeper in the mystery, first by going back in time and then by telling the rest of the story.

    The first section has problems, but they’re acceptable in the context of a short-story-turned-introduction. The pacing is a touch too rushed, for instance: as the deaths pile up, it feels as if the plot is moving too quickly for its own good. But it’s a rousing good read and a pretty unusual SF piece; what if, under our nose, overlooked “backwards” groups had managed to master what we consider to be high technology? Add to that the appeal of rural Pennsylvania as a fresh SF setting and it’s not hard to see why “The Mendelian Lamp Case” was so lauded. As the first part of a longer work, it’s not nearly as effective, but -who knows- maybe it would lead to better things.

    Those “better things” certainly aren’t the second part of the book, a long detour through 750 AD history to make a point that is succinctly summarized later in the book. As a device to keep readers on the hook for the rest of the adventure, it works more as a roadblock than an interesting segue.

    Things pick up in the third section onward. We’re back in contemporary times as Phil D’Amato is faced with an intriguing mystery as he has to entertain the possibility of Neanderthals living among us. Meanwhile, the occult war hinted at in the first section continues unabated, along with plenty of Amish tricks and weird occurrences. Levinson is a very smart man, and his considerable erudition shows throughout the book by way of digressions, exposition and educated conversations. Some are obvious, most are fascinating and many actually work quite well.

    Which is more than I could say for the novel as a coherent unit. The breakneck pacing of the first section continues unabated and a ridiculous pile of corpses accumulates as the chapters fly by. Worse is the lack of clear focus, as D’Amato goes from one country, one faction, one mysterious character to another and another and yet another. There is a lot of movement, but not much development. The rushed conclusion feels forced, as if plot threads are cut rather than tied together. D’Amato himself seems like a curiously low-key investigator: I suppose that had I read other stories by Levinson, I might have some built-in sympathy for the character. But I haven’t, and so I don’t.

    Then there’s the “Canadian thing”. It’s unfair to criticize a book based on a three-page humorous passage, but there’s a puzzling aside on pages 167-169 where D’Amato has to deal with obstinate Canadian custom officers (“’Will there be Canadian scientists at this seminar? Are you taking in account the contributions that Canadians have made in the area?’”) and praise New York at the expense of Toronto. Maybe this is based on real-life incidents; otherwise, well, it seemed a bit mean. (“What was the law here? Were you even innocent until proved guilty?”) I may have shrugged it off if it hadn’t confirmed a completely bone-headed comment about Canadian culture made by Levinson at Torcon3. Separately, both comments may have been dismissed; together, they indicate someone who ought to know better despite his erudition in other areas.

    While “the Canadian thing” doesn’t amount to much in the overall scheme of things, it might have crystallized a latent disappointment with the way the novel is handled. Despite the fantastic concepts, the new ideas and the grand concepts, I wasn’t particularly bowled over by the overall sweep of the story. Here’s hoping I’m just being a cranky Canadian: Maybe his next novel will be better…

  • Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values, Michael Adams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Penguin Canada, 2003, 224 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-14-301422-6

    As a teenage Canadian during the early nineties, it was easy to feel pessimistic about the future of my country: The free-trade agreement was being expanded to include all of North America, the Meech accord had failed and a recession was going on even as the government still spent like a drunken sailor. Common wisdom had it that, sooner or later, Canada was due for an ultimate absorption into the United States. After all, weren’t the two countries so similar anyway?

    But don’t assume that this kind of thinking was a product of the nineties; ever since Confederation, Canadian history has been dominated by this fear of American hegemony. What’s new, though, is Canada’s growing disbelief in this “myth of converging values.” As Michael Adams sets out to argue in his numbers-enhanced book-length op-ed Fire and Ice, Canada may in fact be at the threshold of a mature understanding of itself as a distinct entity from the United States.

    The genius -and chief distinguishing characteristic- of Fire and Ice is that it’s based on new data extracted from polls conducted in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Adams’ polling company (Environics) conducted surveys in both Canada and the US, asking respondents to agree or disagree with statement designed to measure their attitudes toward social values. Those answers were grouped together to evaluate respondents’ social values, which are then plotted on a two-scale map running from Individuality to Authority on one scale, and from Survival to Fulfilment on the other.

    When Adams started comparing the answers of Canadian respondents to Americans, he saw clear differences. In the book’s most shocking example, when pollsters asked (in 2000) if respondents agreed with the statement “the father of the family must be master in his own home”, 18 percent of Canadians agreed, whereas fully 49 percent of Americans answered affirmatively. (In response to another question, 44% of Americans in 2000 agreed that “a widely advertised product is probably good” versus merely 17% of Canadians.)

    Even more striking: When Adams started comparing results of his surveys from 1992 to 2000, he not only saw important differences between Canadian and American social values (Canadians generally being more individualist and more fulfilment-oriented than Americans), but also saw them headed in increasingly divergent direction: Canada toward Individuality/Fulfilment, and the US toward Individuality/Survival.

    The numbers get more and more interesting as Adams digs into subgroups. Among all age groups, for instance, the relative positions of Canadians versus Americans remains generally constant, but the divergence gets stronger as one goes down the age groups, suggesting than contrarily to popular belief, the difference between younger Americans and Canadians is increasing compared to their elders. More interestingly, regional dissection of social attitudes revealed a Canada clearly different, even region by region, from the United States. Quebec and British Columbia at one end of the social scale, and the American Deep South at the other extremity.

    All of those numbers are spun in a compelling argument about the divergent nature of both countries. Adams is clear in his belief that Canada is becomes an increasingly diverse and socially mature country. He’s not quite as certain of the evolution of trends in the US. Ironically enough, one of the most striking suggestions in Fire and Ice has to do with the American “culture war”. While opponents on both sides of the debate agree that it’s a tug-of-war between conservative and liberal ideology, Adams argues that his number are not showing “winners” in one direction or another, but an orthogonal disaffection with both sides. In the book’s terminology, the conflict between the Authority/Survival values and the Individuality/Fulfilment values are in fact resulting in a massive shift toward Individuality/Survival. (Or, in cruder words, a nihilistic “I get mine; screw you” attitude in a culture already predisposed toward violence.)

    All of which draws up a highly comforting portrait if you happen to be a Canadian or think like one. Adams makes his case with lively writing, plenty of pop-culture references, occasional slams at the Bush administration and a few well-used charts and editorial cartoons. By suggesting that Canada is not only different, but is also evolving in a “better” society than its southern neighbour, Fire and Ice is like catnip to Canadian liberals. I’d love to read American reviews of it.

    I do have a few reservations, mind you. Many of Adam’s examples feel cherry-picked for maximal impact. Even though it’s an argument visibly based on numbers, said numbers are still hidden in Environics’ proprietary databases. It’s also too easy to make sweeping statements based on three data points. The next step would be to conduct the poll again in 2004 and see if the trends are maintained. [February 2004: I was lucky enough to be able to contact Michael Adams by email, and he confirmed that Environics hopes to perform another North-American values survey in late 2004.]

    Certainly, Fire and Ice finds a lot of validation in what one may gather from news and current social trends. If the 2000-2004 period has proved anything for Canadians, it’s that it’s quite possible to disagree with the United States. To be more precise, while every Canadian may have felt like an American on September 12, 2001 (and don’t look at me like that: I was on Parliament Hill with 100,000 other silent Canadians as we mourned 9/11), the aftermath, including the American Invasion of Iraq, proved far more divisive than anything else in recent memory. Canada found spiritual kinship in Europe, not in America.

    What more, the arguments expounded in Fire and Ice resonate with plenty of other recent social commentary. Watch BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE again and tell me with a straight face that America isn’t regressing toward values centred on fearful survival. (Indeed, the Canadian segment of the documentary can almost act as a précis for Adams’ thesis) In an America gating itself in restricted communities, ever-more fearful of poverty and foreigners, isn’t Canada a counter-example worth admiring? One of the virtues of Fire and Ice is how it doesn’t simply lays out the differences between both countries, but also makes educated guesses as to why the land of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seems to be less free than the land of peace, order and good government.

    Adams’ argument also finds jaw-dropping resonance in another recent book, Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, a treatise on the growing rift between American and Europe when it comes to defence and foreign policy. Kagan argues that America is choosing Power (economic and military) whereas Europe is headed toward a post-modern Paradise of multilateralism and tolerance. Faced between those two choices, Canada’s logical alternative seems obvious. It’s difficult to escape the feeling that both Kagan and Adams are describing the same thing from different perspective, Kagan being strategic while Adams focuses on the tactical. The portrait, in both cases, h
    as an innate bleakness: The fracturing of the western democracies in two factions, one fully enjoying its position in history while the other one becomes paranoid and aggressive. Kind of takes the extra oomph out of being a kinder, gentler country, doesn’t it?

    In any case, Fire and Ice is a lot to digest in a few dozen pages. (Its main text is barely 144 pages long; the rest of the book is made out of more technical appendices) It’s a whole new social theory, but one that definitely looks like reality. Adams makes a forceful case, and his gentle flag-waving nationalism is a pleasure to read, not just because it happens to be pleasant, but also because it’s written in delightfully readable prose.

    Time and a few more surveys will tell if Adams is on the right track and if our new divergent values will, indeed, keep diverging. In the meantime, though, Fire and ice is likely to be picked up by thousands of interested readers and dozens of university-grade social studies classes. Maybe it’s even headed toward self-prophecy. Who knows? While Adams may spend the first few pages of Fire and Ice explaining why its thesis is so counterintuitive, it comes at a time where the nation (officially declared “cool” by no less an authority than The Economist) finds itself dealing with something new; self-confidence.

    Because, really, when was the last time you heard a Canadian complaining about the inevitability of assimilation? We left that in the twentieth century, baby!

    [April 2009: A new edition of Fire and Ice is now in stores, and if it doesn’t update the main text of the book, it does provide a new 30-pages preface that reflects upon the last few years and presents the latest data from Environics’ 2007-2008 household surveys. Bad news for those who thought that The Obama/Harper combo meant that the nations were growing closer together: Adams’ data suggests that not much has changed in the past few years, and that the nations are still on divergent paths.]

  • The Poet, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1996, 501 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-60261-2

    Michael Connelly has done it again. At a time where I’m quite willing to throw the towel on Yet Another Serial Killer Mystery, he manages to produce a gripping mystery novel about… a serial killer.

    It doesn’t start out that way, of course. All that narrator/protagonist Jack McEvoy knows is that his brother Sean is dead. Jack is a journalist on the crime beat. Sean was a homicide detective before killing himself with his service revolver. But there is something strange about the death, a suicide note quoting Edgar Allan Poe. Did Sean truly pull the trigger on himself?

    Digging deeper, Jack uncovers another suicide with troubling similarities to his brother’s case, a second homicide detective, miles away, killing himself after leaving a note quoting Poe. What is the link? Has Jack discovered a story he can’t handle? The Poet goes on from there, as it becomes more and more obvious that someone, out there, is hunting the hunters.

    Connelly’s reputation for slick crime fiction needs no further bolstering, but works like The Poet are what makes him so great. Serial Killers are, by now, a cliché of crime fiction. It takes some imagination to wring a twist or two out of the concept. In this case, the identity of the victims is a twist; it’s not giving away much that the identity of the killer(s?) is another. Some passages, details and situations show Connelly at his most clever self.

    Fortunately, this isn’t a contemptuous sort of cleverness. The Poet doesn’t take a long time to earn the interest of its readers with its grieving first-person narration, uncluttered close and steady narrative thrust. The novel keeps switching gears to make things interesting: Jack’s solo investigation is soon co-opted by larger forces and he’s swept along with the rest of them in a very different story.

    “The rest of them” is an interesting bunch of characters, most well-defined according to their role in the plot, and as competent as they can be. Nearly all major characters have a pleasing depth to them, and even the tale’s villains prove to be a lot more interesting than usual. As a narrator, Jack has seen so much of the dark side that he’s the next best thing to a hard-boiled detective protagonist. He starts both first and last chapter with the reminder that “Death is my beat” and often, you get a feeling that death has beaten Jack McEvoy at his own game. One can only speculate as to the similitudes between McEvoy and Connelly, himself a crime reporter before turning to the crime-fiction trade.

    As may be expected from the work of an ex-journalist, the wealth of procedural details to be found in Connelly’s book is mesmerizing. We get the feeling of an insider’s view of FBI profiling procedures as Jack is reluctantly made a member of an unusual investigation. As clues are discovered, planted or disproved, the investigation becomes more and more twisted. Connelly plays the mystery fiction game like a grandmaster; even as he honestly manipulates his reader in thinking something, he surprises them with a counter-twist. In some ways, this is a mystery novel for those who are jaded of mysteries; his narrative is stuffed with double and triple twists in an effort to surprise even those who think they can figure it all out.

    This elaborate game of subterfuge between author and reader can take its toll, though: The ending is a bit drawn out, and feels a little artificial in how the twists are finally revealed. After so many procedural details, it’s also surprising to see how little of the villain’s motivation is revealed. There is also a palpable lessening of tension as the precise timing and identity of the rescuing cavalry is never in doubt. But that’s small potatoes of complaints after such an exhilarating book. Clearly, this novel deserves all the acclaim it can get.

    The Poet is a complete entertainment package. It works on all levels, from characterization to plotting to the way the words are strung together. While it falters when comes the moment to present a conclusion, it’s still good enough to uphold Connelly’s reputation as one of today’s best crime novelist. Whether you’re contemplating beach reading or fireside reading, don’t miss it.

  • Nobody’s Safe, Richard Steinberg

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam, 1999, 469 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58188-0

    I remember standing at the local Chapters bookstore, looking over the New Fiction paperback rack. “For over fifty years, a mysterious organization has been guarding a secret that will change everything you have believed about our government” said the cover of Richard Steinberg’s Nobody’s Safe. I took a look at the back cover, read the blurb and frowned. Aliens, I said to myself. That’s the secret. I don’t normally glance at last pages, but this time the impulsion was too strong: I peeked. And confirmed that, indeed, aliens were the twist of the novel. Needless to say, it went back on the shelf.

    But everything comes around, and years later I met Nobody’s Safe again, this time at a dirt-cheap used book store. Things had changed between that initial contact and this one, though. I admit that I read some authors because they’re bad in interesting ways. Patrick Robinson is one of those, and Richard Steinberg certainly earned his place in that category after The Gemini Man (a rather silly story glorifying a serial killer) and The 4-Phase Man (one of the dullest thrillers I’ve ever read). If Nobody’s Safe measured up to his two other books, I might have been due for a treat.

    As it turns out, Nobody’s Safe is bad, but bad in different ways from his two other novels. Taken together, they could form an unholy trilogy of What Not To Do when writing thrillers.

    The novel starts a lot like Absolute Power (the David Baldacci novel or the film, take your pick) in that a master burglar at work witnesses a brutal murder. But the similarities end there, as Nobody’s Safe‘s Gregory Picaro has a bit more on his plate than a simple presidential homicide: the murdered man had some very intriguing things in his possession, and powerful forces are ready to do anything to retrieve them.

    Take a guess as to the nature of those documents and artifacts retrieved by Picaro. Or better yet, don’t: Among other stupid ideas, Steinberg bluntly reveals documents stamped “MJ-12” on page 72, but remains curiously coy as to the significance and meaning of those documents. Two problems, here: First, the fact that “MJ-12”, or “Majestic-12”, is ridiculously well-known in pop culture as being associated with UFOs, aliens and government cover-ups. Given the success of The X-Files, the prevalence of the Internet and UFO-literature, you’d have to work overtime to find a thriller reader who doesn’t already know about the MJ-12/Aliens link. Why does Steinberg spend so much time, then, pretending that there’s a big secret? Is this a sign that he’s taking his readers for idiots? As the author self-gratifyingly re-invents the big “alien” twist, more experienced readers are liable to frown and bristle at the dripping condescension.

    The second problem with MJ-12 is both more and less serious. It’s quite well-known, by now, that the MJ-12 documents are pure fantasy. No, not just “UFO freaks are nuts” fantasy, but well-disproved forgeries fantasy. (Search around for “MJ-12” and “Phillip Klass” for details) This is a minor issue because it’s been a while since I have expected total realism from my thrillers. To point out that this is a bad novel because, obviously, there’s no such thing as an aliens cover-up is not just highlighting the screamingly obvious, but it’s also somewhat besides the point. What is far more damaging to Nobody’s Safe, however, is that in cheerfully reusing the MJ-12 mythology, Steinberg demonstrates an appealing laziness. Not only does he stoop to recycling stuff, but he’s content to recycle debunked stuff too!

    The rest of the novel isn’t much better, and in fact gets worse and worse. Whole segments of the action are telescoped between chapters, and trivial inanities end up taking forever. (Hint: It’s easy not to care about gypsies if you’re not as fascinated by them as Steinberg is. Really easy, as a matter of fact.) Dozens of pages are wasted on dull scenes even as the action should accelerate. The characters are colourless, and so is the action as contact with the aliens is made. Nobody’s Safe is worse than insulting and condescending like The Gemini Man; it’s dull, and as such clearly points the way to The 4-Phase Man. (I simply can’t resist suggesting the blurb “Nobody’s safe… from that piece-of-crap novel”)

    There are, to be fair, a few interesting details about the art and science of burglary, and at least one intriguing scene where a judge discusses the status of truly illegal aliens. But that’s not nearly enough. The rest of Nobody’s Safe speaks for itself: It’s a bad thriller regardless of how one looks at it and it solidifies Steinberg’s credentials as someone who should be doing other things. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to have published a fourth novel… and while it would be catty enough to suggest that it should remain that way, another part of me can’t help but to mourn this drying fountain of bad books. It means that I’ll have to look forward to the next Patrick Robinson opus.

  • Every Man a Tiger, Tom Clancy & Chuck Horner (ret.)

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 1999, 564 pages, C$39.99 hc, ISBN 0-399-14493-5

    Tom Clancy may or may not have written any part of this book (it’s getting hard to tell with the spin-offs, sequels, computer games, recurring allegations of ghostwriting and substantial dip in quality), but his name certainly figures large on the cover. This second tome in the so-called “Command” series ends up combining the mass-market appeal of the Clancy brand with a detailed military study, once again bringing a highly specialized account to wider audiences. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the first volume, Into the Storm (by Clancy and Fred Franks) but if the second volume it still not quite perfect, it’s a great deal more interesting than its predecessor.

    Part of this appeal is Horner himself, a retired fighter/bomber pilot with plenty of tales to tell. From training to a difficult tour of duty in Vietnam to the dark era of the American armed forces to its rebirth through the eighties and its ultimate success during the Gulf War, Franks makes a sympathetic hero. His stories give a good idea of the life of a pilot during that time, and also serve as a key to understand the transformation of the US Air Force from Vietnam to Kuwait.

    This mini-biography takes nearly the first third of the book, and it’s essential in setting up what follows. The Gulf War, in some respects, was the first computerized war. In this case, however, the important things are not the computers, but the things now made possible through them. Coordinated sorties. Inter-forces communications. Precision bombing. Instantaneous battlefield monitoring. Lightning-fast supply lines. Unbelievable logistical feats. The Gulf War was also unprecedented in that air power effectively filled the role of ground forces in “plinking” the opposing land army, reducing their ability to fight well before the army got in action.

    The bulk of Every Man a Tiger offers a description of the Gulf War from Horner’s point of view as one of the allied commanders, with an obvious emphasis on air power. Gulf War buffs will relish the level of detail offered here, from logistical issues to anecdotes and step-per-step progress of the air campaign. Horner isn’t shy at telling what worked and what didn’t: He particularly singles out the search-and-rescue operations as deficient during the air campaign, and lucidly explains the reasons for this problem.

    Through it all, Horner comes across as a model soldier, a man who’s aware of the painful necessity of war, and the need for multilateral cooperation. His sense of humour comes through clearly, and so does his understanding of the constraints in which he operated. There are poignant passages in the book in which he professes his admiration for Arab culture and explains the sacrifices made by the American military forces to include as many allies as possible in their decision process. While it has become fashionable, in these days of the Bush administration, for non-Americans to decry the military might of the United States, it’s easy to forget that the real issue here is the political leadership and not the military forces. Men like Chuck Horner only represent a most admirable professionalism, and professionalism is exactly what we need from them.

    In fact, one of the unexpected treats of Every Man a Tiger is the meticulous description of the political decision-making behind the American intervention in Saudi Arabia and, eventually Kuwait. Horner was lucky enough to be a fly on the wall during some of the crucial top-level meetings, and it’s fascinating to see the ways in which military power is approved, and then how the military itself arranges to deliver this power. (It’s also somewhat unremarkable to notice many of the names which would later star in Gulf War II: Iraq Invasion. Hello Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz…)

    All in all, while this second volume can’t escape a certain trivial dreariness, it’s a somewhat better effort than the frequently-dull Into the Storm. Horner benefits from a bird’s eye perspective on the Gulf War (literally) and this perspective, coupled with a good flow of anecdotes and personal recollections, make this one of the best books yet written on that particular conflict.

  • How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway, Lawrence A. Canter & Martha S. Siegel

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 1994, 234 pages, C$28.00 hc, ISBN 0-06-270131-2

    Do you like spam? Well, if so, you’re the perfect target audience for this piece of trash book whose repellent reputation is only exceeded by the scorn heaped upon its authors.

    Allow me to use some of my Internet-Old-Timer credentials: In April 1994, Usenet users saw something very strange and very unusual: A message hawking legal services, posted to thousands of unrelated newsgroups. It wasn’t the first piece of spam, but it was widely acknowledged as such as the “Green Card Spam”. (Some will say that it was so appropriate that the first Internet hucksters would be lawyers with the temerity to charge hundreds of dollars for something that can be accomplished with a simple postcard) What we feared at the time (but really had no clue about, of course), was this was merely a small taste of things to come. For better or for worse, it was a significant event, a watershed in the transition of the Internet from its academic origins to its mass-market future.

    Almost immediately after, flush with their success, Canter & Siegel decided to further annoy the burgeoning Internet community by writing a how-to book. As the title so obviously indicates, How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway is decidedly a book dating from 1994 and a proud inheritor of the “Make Money Fast!” school of business methods halfway between doubtful legitimacy and outright fraud. Here, the spamming duo tells all about both using the Internet for making money and forcing any message on unwilling users.

    While I’m sure that the book must have been infuriating back then, things are somewhat different today: While I defy anyone to read this book and not want to slap its authors silly, this anger is somewhat diffused by the unfair advantage of hindsight. Nine years later, the Internet has changed a lot (No one ever calls it the “I-way”, for instance), and there’s a lot of twisted delight in seeing Canter & Siegel make bone-headed assumptions about Internet commerce that, of course, didn’t pan out. (The web as a series of virtual malls modelled after shopping malls? Er, not quite.)

    But it’s somewhat disingenuous of us 2004-folks to laugh, right? As much as it pains me to say so, the truth is that this book does “get” the potential of legitimate business on the Internet, and did so years before everyone else. Yes, the “you too can make tons of money!” tone is grating, and it doesn’t take along time for the authors to reveal their true anti-technological colours (Page 3: “You’re here to make money. Therefore, our best advice is to ignore those clowns. (By clown, we mean the glassy-eyed nerd over there with the pocket protector.)”), but there’s a kernel of truth in this book that, frankly, has to be acknowledged.

    That doesn’t let Canter & Siegel off the hook for what they did, of course. The first few pages of the book are a retelling of the infamous “Green Card Lottery Spam” as seen from their perspective, and no amount of self-congratulatory rhetoric and vituperation about those evil, evil techies can masquerade the authors’ venality. By the third time they’re kicked off their ISPs for their activities, no amount of tearful victimization can justify their wilful disregard for Usenet community standards. Time and time again, self-serving justifications show that Canter and Siegel have heard the right arguments against what they were doing. (Four simple words: “Tragedy of the Commons”. OK, one simple word: “inappropriate”) Yet they pooh-pooh the objections as ravings of marginal curmudgeons and proceed as if everything was OK. It’s during those passages that you start wishing for lighter fluid, a match and a private meeting with the authors.

    Internet historians will undoubtedly get a kick out of this book, if only to hear “the other side” of the story. The delightful text screen-shots alone brought back many memories of very early excursions on the pure-text Internet. Otherwise, well, the web has left this book behind as an artifact of a time that was both simpler and more difficult. In the light of the subsequent spam scourge, it’s interesting to see that even Canter & Siegel are somewhat leery of using unsolicited mass mailings to drum up business [P.104-105]. Go figure why their ethics went so far and no further.

    In the real world, there is a ghoulishly happy conclusion for all Canter & Siegel haters. According to sources around the Internet, the couple had a falling out soon after the publication of the book (a later edition was republished bearing only Siegel’s name), resulting in divorce. Then they lost their license to practise law once again. (They’d lost it in another state for unethical activities well before the “Green Card” spam) Siegel died of cancer in 2000 while Canter established a software company in California. Perhaps proving that there is such a fate worse than death, a 2002 CNET interview revealed an unrepentant Canter bemoaning the fact that he receives over three hundred spams per day.

    How fitting. Welcome to the Internet you have created, you idiot.

  • Wheelers, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Aspect, 2000, 505 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-52560-X

    I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating again: The most representative works of Science Fiction, the ones that really rekindle our burning love for the genre, are not necessarily the best. Great characters, gripping plotting and superb writing are nice, certainly, but they are in no way what differentiates SF from the vast body of “other” fiction. Fans of the genre can appreciate a good work of fiction over a bad one, but we read the stuff for other reasons: The ideas, the concepts, the unflagging dedication to logic and reason as our best hope for the future. These are what makes SF so special. Call it an ideological position fit for nerds and geeks if you want, but you won’t be able to shake the appeal of fiction that speaks directly to what we believe in.

    Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s Wheelers is pretty much a textbook-example of how to write hard-core Science Fiction. It’s not particularly strong in any area save for ideas, technical accuracy, respect of science and sense of wonder. In short, everything that makes this genre so great and so much fun.

    The plot ball takes a while to get rolling, but when it does, it places circa-2220 humanity in the path of a comet. (The situation is actually more complicated than that, given how the comet was redirected toward Earth after a decidedly unnatural realignment of Jupiter’s moons.) Given the nature of celestial mechanics, there’s both plenty of warning and not much time to spare: A team of crack scientists is assembled and shipped off to Jupiter to investigate the findings. It helps, somewhat, that proof of some Jovian intelligence had been discovered by the book’s protagonist right before everything started to go wrong.

    Naturally, the plot isn’t the main attraction here. Stewart and Cohen are both working scientists and so the real meat of Wheelers is in the details. While not staggeringly original, the imagined future presented in this novel is intriguing, what with Earth clawing its way out of an anti-technological age, the moon and the asteroids in the hand of a Zen sect and plenty of alien activity underneath Jupiter’s clouds. Just you wait, though: The revelations get progressively more exhilarating and even if the plot concludes far too early, the last few pages are a carnival of neat ideas.

    It speaks volume that by far the most interesting segment of the book is a pure application of physics: When, midway through, one character absolutely has to go from planet A to planet B in mere days rather than the usual months dictated by chemical propulsion technology, a hair-raising hack is devised involving celestial mechanics and mass drivers. It’s a wonderful, jaw-dropping sequence, and a neat idea that wouldn’t feel out of place in, say, one of Niven’s good hard-SF stories. Real SF fans will lap it up like milk chocolate.

    Happily, the rest of the book is a lot like that. To their credit, the authors manage to craft a good novel without too many obvious flaws —though the way the POV kept switching from one paragraph to another in the same scenes is truly annoying. Yes, the novel spends far too much time establishing back-story, ends too soon, muddles its “alien viewpoints” segments and doesn’t create much empathy with its human characters. But it does conform to most accepted standards, and heaven knows that other working scientists have churned out far worse stuff in the history of SF.

    But few of those things matter when considering the intellectual ride that is Wheelers. The erudition of the authors is obvious throughout (they can’t resist “As you Know Bob” scenes, but they do it in a reasonably entertaining fashion; see P.25-30), there are a fair numbers of cute little gags and the steady escalation of revelations is profoundly satisfying to anyone weaned on a diet of classic hard-SF.

    Every year, dozens of hard-SF novel pass unnoticed by fans who would rather complain that there’s nothing interesting being written in the Asimov-Clarke-Heinlein vein. While Wheelers is not -let’s be honest- in the same league, at least playing the same sport, and sometimes that’s just good enough. Hard-SF fans, rejoice… and give Wheelers a spin or two.

  • Of Paradise and Power, Robert Kagan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Knopf, 2003, 103 pages, C$27.00 hc, ISBN 1-4000-4093-0

    In the June/July 2002 edition of Policy Review, Robert Kagan wrote an article titled “Power and Weakness”, in which he tried to explain the growing policy differences between the US and European leaders. It begins with “It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.” and goes on from there. Lucky readers who consulted the article early on had the rare privilege of prescience over the next few months, as the whole unilateral rush toward the American invasion of Iraq gave proof to Kagan’s theory.

    While the article is available on line (and yes, you should read it), its lucid description of Pax Americana geopolitics was deemed worth of expansion and book publication. The resulting work, Of Paradise and Power: American and Europe in the New World Order, may be an exceedingly thin book, but don’t be fooled by its succinctness: It’s a brilliant piece of work.

    Kagan argues that since the winner of the Cold War has been decided, the western world is gradually losing its convenient cohesion. National interests are once again taking precedence over global ideological goals. Now that the burden of the “War on Terrorism” has been taken over by America, allies of convenience are looking at each other warily.

    But America and Europe (as Kagan explains, the success of the European Union is proof enough that “Europe” can now be considered as a cohesive entity) are dealing with this era in vastly different fashions. America’s thinking is being influenced by its military strength and its economic power, much like Europe’s thinking is being affected by its lack of military strength and its own version of economic success. The tools dictate the ways to perform the work and this has substantial implications in the way those two entities approach conflicts and dangers. If Europe can’t field an effective army, it will depend on economic and diplomatic negotiation to develop a mutually acceptable settlement. If America has unstoppable destructive power, it will try to fix a problem through overwhelming force before bothering with other options.

    But it doesn’t stop there: While America is increasingly willing to use power, Europe seems equally complacent in assuming that the United States will come in and solve everyone’s problems. Hence the lack of progress on the notion of unified European armed forces. Europe, in some ways, thinks of itself as beyond history, as living in a sort of postmodern paradise.

    Kagan takes great care to point out that this kind of thinking is not recent, nor has it been precipitated uniquely by the inauguration of the Bush Administration or the attacks of September 11, 2001. While the Clinton administration may have soft-pedalled America’s growing hegemony after the fall of the USSR, it established the bases of its successor’s unilateralism. Similarly, Europe’s insistence on multilateralism is an entirely consistent response with past decisions, including the formation of NATO. Then there’s the trifling detail that America is now acting like European powers did when they had power; the players may have changed, but the tactics certainly haven’t. It just depends on who has the most weapons at any given moment.

    This book doesn’t think small. Barring catastrophe or singularity, it’s a roadmap to the likely geopolitics of the early twenty-first century. Reading it is like placing the last pieces in an especially difficult puzzle. With clear prose and lucid examples, Kagan manages to link together past events, policy decisions, social trends and news items. Time will tell if it’s a truly important book, but at this moment it reads like one of the most compelling explanations of the way things are at the moment. It’s a perfect tool for anyone looking at international affairs, and can be applied to a surprising number of current events.

    There are a few objections, mind you; America’s trend toward self-centred isolationism is not particularly well-debunked (though Kagan does attempt to do so rather than ignore it) and there seems to be a lack of acknowledgement at the economic dimension of power and paradise. It’s unclear whether US military superiority can be maintained without massive amounts of foreign investment, and whether this money flow can be sustained even as foreign investors are figuring out the extent of American hegemony –not to mention the fact that they are the ones paying for it. (More speculative commentators are welcome to ponder whether America has finally put conventional warfare out of financial reach for everyone else. Wouldn’t that be a kickin’ application of lassez-faire market forces? An American monopoly on war!) Finally, the book may offer a cogent thesis of what is happening, but it’s not as successful in explaining what can happen next.

    But those are small quibbles. Letting aside the fact that the book is a pure delight to read and understand, its worth is obvious, because it just makes sense. It’s consistent with the evening news: Doesn’t Europe’s relationship toward American power also reflect the attitude of smaller states such as, say, Canada? Granted, Of Paradise and Power doesn’t have the eerily predictive aura of the original article… but chances are that over the next few years, we’ll see plenty of empirical proof for Kagan’s assertions. For better or for worse. Expect this book to be a fixture of political science courses for a while, and the precursor to other work expanding its central thesis.

  • Turbulence, John J. Nance

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Jove, 2002, 405 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-515-13486-4

    Civil aviation has changed a lot since the jet-set era of the fifties. Lower ticket prices coupled with the airlines’ insatiable lust for higher profits have made modern air travel less comfortable and more stressful. “Air rage” has entered the vocabulary, reflecting the distasteful truth that planes will still take you to destination, but in unpleasant ways that may be unacceptable to an increasing proportion of passengers. As if that wasn’t enough, the demonstrated propensity of terrorists to use airliners as guided missiles has tightened the screws even further on the pressure boiler of civil aviation.

    While aviation thrillers have existed for decades (reaching their height in popularity during the seventies, following the 1970 film adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s Airport), one of the best things about Turbulence is how uniquely modern it feels. Here, there is no glamour left in the cattle-like industry of air transport: Passengers are herded in uncomfortable planes, abused by airlines staff, ill-served by incompetent personnel, plunged in the middle of an overburdened airspace control system and at the constant mercy of a paranoid US government only too happy to eliminate security risks. Take a good long look at the 2002 publication date, because this book couldn’t have been published any earlier.

    In this particular case, Turbulence‘s Meridian Flight Six is -thanks to the author- custom-loaded with a powder keg of resentment: a heart surgeon with a deep hatred for the airline that killed his wife, a sadistic senior flight attendant, an insecure captain, rowdy passengers, unsafe equipment and plenty of aggravations. The first leg of the flight, from Chicago to London, is bad enough. But when things go really wrong over Africa on the way to Cape Town, it all spins out of control: The passengers mutiny, the planes is forced to land on a jungle airstrip and the US government becomes convinced that terrorists armed with chemical weapons have taken control of the aircraft. When the plane doubles back toward Europe, fighter jets are mobilized to shoot it down before it can do any harm.

    Nance is an old hand when it comes to thrillers (most who recognize his name will do so in his capacity of the author of the novel from which was adapted the TV series Pandora’s Clock, but he’s written ten other thrillers) and it shows: Turbulence is an ever-increasing exercise in heightening tension, as bad attitudes aboard the plane translate in small spats, leading up to more forceful arguments, physical confrontation and -ultimately- a good deal of violence. Meanwhile, the US government is confronted with mounting evidence of terrorist activities and is forced to take action against what it’s perceiving as a clear and immediate danger. While the various elements of Turbulence‘s suspense are a bit outlandish in how they all converge, there’s no denying that the result is a satisfying crescendo.

    It helps, of course, that Nance has got the traditional thriller style down pat. The characters are developed just enough to make them sympathetic. It takes a while, but eventually all the pieces of the plot have a place in the action, and the result is quite a readable novel. As the clock ticks down to a conclusion, Turbulence delivers satisfying suspense and entertainment. Unfortunate readers struck down by a sudden cold half-way through the novel may end up having plane-related nightmares.

    It’s not great art (the prose can be clunky at times) nor is it likely to be memorable, but it’s likely to be optioned by a studio any time soon. It it would be too presumptuous to flag the book as a call for reform in the airline industry (Meridian’s behaviour is a touch extreme, shall we say), but there’s no doubt that the picture described in this novel -however hyperbolic- reflects what many are thinking about modern civilian flight. It’s a fine line between affordable air travel and dangerous air travel; here’s hoping that Turbulence‘s suspense becomes increasingly unbelievable as things evolve.

  • Titan, Stephen Baxter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Prism, 1997, 676 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-105713-4

    In the first few chapters of Stephen Baxter’s 1997 novel Titan, space shuttle Columbia crashes upon re-entry and China sends its first astronaut into space. The timing is slightly off (both happen simultaneously in 2004, rather than over 2003 as it happened in our reality) but here’s hoping that Baxter’s extrapolative powers stop there, because the rest of the novel is of a bleakness quite unlike anything you’ve read outside of, well, other Stephen Baxter novels.

    Once Columbia reduced to bits and pieces over the desert, America goes in a tailspin. NASA is told to mothball itself, an ultra-conservative president is elected to the White House (eek), tensions between China and the USA grow ever more dangerous and apathetic American teens seems content to wear tattoos while shaping their own feces in artistic shapes. All is lost? Not quite: Space convert Paula Benacerraf comes forth with a bold new plan to take over all that’s left of the American space program and send a Shuttle to Titan. It’s a desperate mission, maybe even a suicidal mission, but if it can show the way to bigger and better things…

    Well, don’t bet on it. A decade-long Shuttle mission to Titan is insane in even the best of circumstances, and Baxter doesn’t miss a nasty trick as he whittles down his cast of characters. Titan is positively ghoulish in how it starts badly and keeps getting worse. And worse. And even worse. This novel rivals most horror films in how it keeps upping the body count through the stupidest and most gruesome ways possible. Baxter has often been a gloomy writer (see the Manifold series for more unremitting bleakness) but there’s a sadistic streak to Titan that makes it his most depressing book yet even as the ending is meant to be uplifting.

    Heck, it’s depressing even it’s obvious that he’s unfairly stacking the deck against his characters, if not humanity itself: Professional astronauts get stuck in solar flares, biochemists poison themselves, humankind dooms itself to destruction and no-one says a peep as America takes itself apart. The Internet is shut down, ethnic viruses are planned by the US government (huh?) and everyone whistles as the extreme right-wing shuts down institutions of higher learning and humans are left to die in space. You would have thought, somehow, that there was more to space exploration than the USA, that the left-wing would have emigrated to Canada or that no one would be stupid enough to re-align an asteroid on Earth, even for some (hand-wave, here) obscure reason. Baxter may have forgotten to include a chapter in which all of humanity undergoes forced lobotomies. Titan often doesn’t make sense, and even acknowledges its silliness at times, such as one character wonders how they’ve been able to take control of everything in the American space inventory from Shuttles to Saturn-Vs. Character development? Don’t look for it here; they remain sketches even as their hardware is lavished with details. Social/political development doesn’t fare any better. Titan, in many ways, is a profoundly stupid book.

    Plus there’s the length factor. Titan, as a proud hard-SF novel, is positively crammed with technical details. While it enhances the feel of the book as a credible piece of Science Fiction, it can quickly overloads the narrative with far too much detail. Exhibit number one: The first section, a snappy little action sequence that ends up splattered over not less than seventy pages. Yikes. It doesn’t really get any better. Exhibit number two: An entire X-15 subplot which has absolutely no impact on the rest of the book. Exhibit number three: The entire last section, which could have been cut with no detrimental effect on the novel’s impact.

    So; Depressing, silly and overwritten. Is there anything left to save from Titan? Why yes. Even despite all of these flaws, it remains compulsively readable throughout. There’s a fascinating sense of inevitable doom floating over the whole story, as the window of survival shuts down over humanity. Part of it is shared sadistic delight at how bad things can become. Another is just, well, narrative inertia: We might as well see what will befall our characters next. Certainly, Titan is an unusual piece of hard-SF. A more conventional work would have used the Titan expedition as a rallying cry for the forces of light and rationalism. Here… well…

    A word of caution, though: There are few words to describe the choking sense of dread that ends up contaminating the novel, and by extent the mind of anyone reading it. If you want a pleasant New Year’s Eve, for goodness’ sake don’t spend it reading Titan!

  • Nanotime, Bart Kosko

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1997, 311 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 0-380-97466-5

    Whoah! Where did that book come from?

    I mean; as a pretty wired-in hard-SF reader, I expect to be aware of most of the writers on the market. I’ve got contacts, reading lists, hangouts for recommendations: I don’t expect brand new writers to be sprung on me like that. Prior to cracking open Nanotime‘s spine, I didn’t know about Bart Kosko.

    Now I’m wondering why I haven’t heard more of him. Certainly, he doesn’t seem to stem from the fannish community: I can’t find any listing of him at a science-fiction convention, and indeed most of the web hits I get seem to indicate that Kosko hails from the futurology field, not the literary side of the SF genre.

    Well, bully for him. Regardless of the origin of a writer, I’m always glad to read a science-fiction with strong extrapolation, and if Nanotime has one quality, it’s in presenting to us tons of new gadgets. Kosko’s 2030 is a dangerously unstable time. It’s the end of the age of oil, and the usual players aren’t too happy about it. Israel and the Arab countries are still looking at each other with angry eyes, terrorists are everywhere, information technology is now exquisitely complex, sophisticated weapons like cruise missiles are now cheaper (a mere $10,000) than the means to defend against them and the United States now has a 51st state, Southern California. Everything costs more and is taxed beyond belief.

    In the midst of all this, one man still wants to save the world. John Grant think he’s got the perfect solution of the world’s energy problem: A molecule that splits water (!) to generate cheap, cheap, cheap hydrogen to be used as fuel. But as the novel begins, a Saudi missile strike on Israel (in retaliation to a nuclear terrorist act cleverly manipulated to look like the work of Israeli Greens) destroys the only facility in the world willing to test his ideas. Before long, though, Grant has other problems: A master terrorist has taken over his wife (literally), the US government thinks he’s a traitor and the Israeli themselves have other plans for him. It escalates. Everything escalates.

    Cyberpunk usually conjures up images of virtual reality and criminals using tech to their own purposes. Nanotime certainly qualifies when is comes to VR content, but takes the paradigm up to the next level: here, terrorists use tech to their own purposes, and the result isn’t as much a high-tech noir novel than a high-tech global thriller smacking of Clancy with nanotech. (It’s no accident if Clancy’s own Sum of All Fears figures in the book’s bibliography.)

    Kosko has a good eye for gadgets and the occasional good scene (remember the staple scene in cyberpunk literature where our protagonist is implanted with nanodevices? Well Nanotime has one in which the protagonist’s skull is sawn open… even as he’s conscious of it. Good luck stopping reading after that) but there are a number of annoying flaws in his novel that grate a bit. I can certainly forgive the portrayal of the protagonist as a rugged, two-fisted individualist in the grand tradition of typical SF heroes. But what’s more annoying is the lack of integration of the gadgets. Nanotech, VR and AI all prefigure prominently here, but in stunted niches. Why is there a super-acid that eats an entire ship, and no super-acid that can do the same for an oil slick? Why limit the use of AIs to personal assistants? Where are the silly tech derivatives to these? If the Internet revolution has proven one thing, it’s that every possible permutation of a high-tech idea, no matter how silly, will get VC funding.

    Furthermore, the novel has an annoying tendency to cut away from the main narrative to nearly-useless side-vignettes featuring characters not worth getting excited about. The ending is also a problem, almost as if the author simply threw everything up in the air (including our protagonist, in what is almost literally a cliffhanger) for the sake of closure and refused to see beyond the next step. Frustrating, especially given the build-up; destroying things is easy; building them after that is the hard part.

    Still, there’s way too much original stuff in Nanotime, from a writer-scientist whose latter silence in the SF field is puzzling. When is the next novel due? And why hasn’t Nanotime attained cult status?

  • Making Book, Teresa Nielsen Hayden

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    NESFA, 1994 (1996 reprint), 158 pages, US$11.00 tpb, ISBN 0-915368-55-2

    As an occasional visitor to the Nielsen Hayden’s blogs (both husband and wife maintain online journals over at www.nielsenhayden.com; go take a look), I couldn’t resist grabbing a copy of Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s Making Book at the Torcon3 huckster’s room. (NESFA Press books are usually so rare in Ottawa as to be invisible).

    At a scarce 158 pages, Making Book is a too-short collection of fifteen essays by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, long-time fan now editor at Tor Books. A fair number of them are reprinted from fanzines in which she participated (or edited!) and we can only consider ourselves lucky that they’ve now found a semi-permanent book-form home.

    It starts with a bang, as “God and I” details how she “got hauled up in front of an ecclesiastical court this summer and formally excommunicated.” [P.1] It’s a great story, a poignant testimony, and you’ll have to read it to know more. But already the bar is set pretty high for the rest of the volume. Half-confessional, half-esoteric pedagogy, Making Book stands in many ways as a testimony to what nifty stuff can be found in long-forgotten fanzines. (Hey, how long until a “Reader’s Digest” of past fanzine highlights? Just asking.) [December 2003: Ho! Look at that! Fanthology ’87 is what I’ve been asking for!]

    Not every essay manages to meet the standard set by the first one, but some of them still stick in mind. “Of Desks and Robots” ends up saying what a lot of us would wish to say about obscenely expensive purchases by billionaires who should know better. “Black Top Hat and Mustache” should find a special place in the heart of every public servant. “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoenherr” makes a fascinating point about theme parks and “The Big Z” will forever banish thoughts of narcolepsy as an amusing disease.

    Some of the other pieces aren’t as successful. Without mentioning titles, let’s simply say that a number of them depend on highly specialized knowledge of the fan scene in the early eighties, which is obviously not accessible to everyone even despite the Internet and best intentions. There are nuggets of goodness here and there, but like the disclaimer to “Over Rough Terrain” suggests, you’ll end up having to do a lot of culling by hand. What remains is well-worth a read, though.

    The other highlight of the book, however, is a reprint of her copyediting guide for Tor Books, back when such activities took place on a single manuscript copy that was passed from hand to hand (ack, ptui) and where copyediting jobs were subcontracted, creating an urgent need to make more of those freelance copyeditors conform to “the house style”. (Knowing the inherent conservatism of most publishers, things may very well still be like that nowadays, but that’s such an impure thought that I refuse to consider it.) “On copyediting” is a fascinating look at one of the most neglected parts of publishing, a revealing glimpse behind the scenes at one of the steps so necessary in making books for all. I’d love an update.

    In fact, I’d pretty much love an update to the whole book. Let’s see: Since 1996, what else has changed in Nielsen Hayden’s life? What else has she written? What can be stolen from her blog and reprinted in book form? (I’d argue that the Mary Sue blog entry ought to be expanded. Republished. Celebrated.) And could we have more, more, more, please? 158 pages is not nearly enough, especially when it’s so enjoyable.

    Oh well. Back to her blog. Maybe there will be new content over there.

  • Dude, Where’s My Country?, Michael Moore

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 2003, 249 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-53223-1

    2001-2003 have been a couple of weird and wonderful years for Michael Moore. From a relatively obscure documentary filmmaker (ROGER AND ME, etc.) with one rather poor fiction film (CANADIAN BACON) to his credit, he has now become, thanks to BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, Stupid White Men and a well-received Oscar acceptance speech (heh-heh), a leading figure of the American left-wing movement. His scathing denunciations of the Bush administration continue to leave few indifferent.

    And so Dude, Where’s My Country? comes along as the book-length expansion of Moore’s shtick over the last few years. By now, he’s got the “everyday man” routine down to a science: Ask superficially silly questions, be angry from time to time and don’t let a lot of research deter you from speaking at your audience’s level. I’m not doubting his honesty; on their other hand, he does make a good foil to similar tactics as practiced by other figures on the American right.

    What is discussed in Moore’s latest book shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who follows the news: The Bush response to September 11th, the frantic race leading to the invasion of Iraq, knee-jerk paranoia to whiffs of potential terrorism, America’s counter-productive foreign policy and Bush’s billionaire-friendly actions are all discussed. If you’ve been following left-wing blogs on the web, you’ll find a lot of the same material here, maybe packaged with a little more coherency but not radically new information by any case. Good? Bad? It depends on your level of understanding of today’s American political spectrum. Someone like me may already know all of this stuff already, but unplugged Americans may read this and feel the scales come off their eyes.

    So think of this as “2003-liberalism 101”, rehashing why Bush is bad, bad, bad for everyone and how to take back the political system from the far-right interests. For non-Americans, it’s important to note that Dude, Where’s My Country? is published in a rabidly polarized political context, in which both left and right are trying to grab pre-electoral mindspace, to the delight of publishers. (This has been going on for at least ten years, and reams of writing now exist on how Republicans have been remarkably successful in translating this polarization into political power)

    That Moore’s book is published by none other than Warner Books is sign enough that there’s a lot of money to be made by fanning the flames of political discourse. In this context, Moore is neither better or worse than Ann Coulter, Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh: All of them are not exactly contributing to a culture of compromise and understanding, not when Coulter and Franken are trading off “traitor!” and “liar!” as casual greetings. This being said, Moore includes a rather amusing pair of chapters (9 and 10) in which he argues that deep down, America is liberal, and then gives out tips on how to convert a conservative brother-in-law to liberal thinking (hint; it’s all about what good for him). Jolly good stuff, and already a step closer to a gentler, more inclusive brand of politics.

    Voluntarily provocative, smoothly readable, often laugh-out-funny, Moore’s book was nevertheless dated even before it came out. It wouldn’t be out of place to wish it a rapid descent to historical curio, a sign of a troubled time where partisan debate ruled over reasonable policy-making. If I may be so corny, let’s hope that all Americans end up finding the country so poignantly wondered about in the book’s title.

  • The Holy Land, Robert Zubrin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Polaris Books, 2003, 298 pages, US$14.95 tpb, ISBN 0-9741443-0-4

    [Requisite disclaimer: This particular novel was sent to me by the author in November 2003, with the understanding that I would review it shortly afterwards.]

    Given the increasing silliness of the last few years in the United States and elsewhere in the world, it’s been dismaying to see Science Fiction avoid the question altogether. Save for a few writers (goodness bless Bruce Sterling and his “In Paradise”), few seems to have the required guts in tackling today’s mounting problems. Where are the Pohls, Kornbluth, Sheckelys when you need them? Today’s stuff seems more interested in catering to the market than changing how people think about the world.

    Well, Robert Zubrin makes a valiant attempt at socially-responsible satiric SF with The Holy Land. The result may have a few rough edges, it’s still an audacious novel that deserves a much wider audience than it’s likely to get as a work published outside the mainstream cluster of publishers. The first book of a small publisher named “Polaris Books”, The Holy Land probably won’t make it to your local bookstore.

    A quick look at the book’s premise may help explain why bigger publishers may be reluctant to deal with it: One day, the American president awakes to find out that Kennewick, Wasington, has been taken over by aliens. Not just every aliens, mind you, but refugees from a galactic war, coming back to claim their ancestral land. Americans are booted out of there and placed in refugee camps, whether they like it or not. Meanwhile, the American government (a bunch of greedy fundamentalist morons –no relation to reality is implied) encourages kids in the refugee camps to sacrifice themselves in suicide attacks against the alien invaders. (Cry ‘pagan!’ and let slip the weasels of war, or something like that.) And so on. This summary barely scratches the surface of the first two chapters of the novel.

    The least we can say is that Zubrin has guts in tackling the Israeli/Palestian conflict in such a madcap fashion. But he’s got a lot more on his mind, as the rest of the novel picks apart the War on Terrorism, American foreign policy, oil capitalism, media demagoguery and the rest of what we’ve come to associate with this brand new century. This is not subtle stuff by any measure, at least initially: The first chapter is a laugh-a-page marvel of breakneck satire, served with more gusto than polish. It works incredibly well at sucking readers into the story.

    Such pacing can’t be sustained, of course. After the first twenty pages, The Holy Land loosens its grip on satiric content, allowing the “real” story to come to the surface, the evolving relationship between alien Priestess Aurora and human prisoner of war Andrew Hamilton (US marines). It’s a risky bet; not only does the book sell itself as humor, but such “humans and alien learn to get along” stories have been done before. Repeatedly.

    But it works. Against all odds, even as the laughs are replaced by a more restrained approach, The Holy Land becomes something else. Real drama surprisingly starts to emerge from the book, but so smoothly that it’s not immediately obvious that a tone shift has taken place. There are still a few good lines here and there (“an hour after the Weegee assault, over 80 percent of the Peruvian Earthlings are still alive… has the much-vaunted Western Galactic Imperial Navy finally embroiled itself in a hopeless quagmire?” [P.158]), but the book has moved away from staccatos satire to a brand of lighter science-fiction somewhat reminiscent of books like Peter Jurasik & William H. Keith, Jr.’s Diplomatic Act.

    Bits and pieces of sharp satire can be found scattered through the novel, mind you. The helicity segments are a not-so-subtle jab at oil-driven foreign policy . There are hysterical digressions on feminism, profiling, “the August 11th tragedies” and a cute little scientific inside joke about the real cause of the galactic Red Shift [P.137]. Droll stuff… and that’s not even going into the material that flew over my head during the first read-through. Some Internet digging on the “Kennewick man” and helicity is enough to make me suspect several such easter eggs buried elsewhere in the novel.

    Meanwhile, the real plot-line of the novel evolves into something that is interesting in its own right, and not simply as a support for satiric jabs. Aurora and Hamilton don’t simply act as stand-ins for their respective races, but as good characters in their own rights. They have a nice rapport, even as Zubrin generally avoids most of the maudlin moments you would expect from such stories. Even Aurora’s undercover visit to Earth (which becomes increasingly predictable as the novel’s structure becomes evident) has its unexpected delights.

    Being a product of a small publisher, The Holy Land suffers from a few rough spots in term of editorial supervision; while the production qualities of the book are nearly indistinguishable from what we have come to expect from major publishers, there are a number of prose snippets and segments of the plot which could have been improved with some editorial attention. But no big deal, really: Zubrin has good instincts when it comes to plotting and the novel moves at such a pleasant clip that it’s not worth nit-picking on small details.

    Readability remains high throughout; it’s quite possible to read the book in a single afternoon, pausing for occasional laughter. Only the unsatisfying Joan-of-Arc ending is bothersome, as it seems a little bit too dramatic, a little bit too quickly set up and resolved. On the other hand, the ultimate fate of the American President is a delightful last-minute punchline. The laughs are there right up to the end even though, for a moment, it looked as if Zubrin had started pulling his punches.

    All in all, though, The Holy Land is a pretty satisfying book. The satiric intensity of the first chapter (which you can read on-line at the Polaris Book website) isn’t sustained all the way through, but a much harder trick is pulled off in building a fun novel about issues that have been explored before in other stories. Much like in First Landing, Robert Zubrin proves uncommonly adept at making the most of his characters and rescue books from obvious pitfalls. It’s unusual enough to see a hard scientist manage to write a novel in which the characters come to life, it seems almost too good that they’d do so in a novel with satiric intent. Certainly, this is a welcome direction for SF. As today’s world becomes crazier and weirder, it wouldn’t be inappropriate for science fiction to follow suit, and maybe enlighted us in the process.