Book Review

  • 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.

  • Into the Buzzsaw, Ed. Kristina Borjesson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Prometheus, 2002, 462 pages, C$??.?? hc, ISBN 1-57392-972-7

    (Read in French as Black List, Les Arènes)

    Even though I’m a born-and-bred French-Canadian, I rarely discuss French-language books in these reviews. Why should I? It wouldn’t be fair to tease you with books you can’t get or read. The issue of translations seldom comes up: I’m too much of a purist to settle for translations, and the overwhelming truth is that English-language books are usually far more available (and affordable!), even in Canada’s national capital.

    Well, usually. Because chances are that Into the Buzzsaw‘s distribution in English-Canada was about as widespread than on the other side of the linguistic barrier. Prometheus Books is a solid and interesting publishing house (see my review of The Truth About Uri Geller), but their distribution network is quasi-confidential; their willingness to tackle controversial issues from a sceptical perspective is seldom a match for the major distributors.

    In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that Into the Buzzsaw would make it on my reading pile in French form. Silly American “patriots” may have thought themselves clever when they came up with the whole “freedom fries” thing as a way to protest foreign policy self-determination, but all they achieved was to forever make “freedom” a synonym for “French.” Sometimes, it takes an outsider to tell (some of) the truth, or in this case, translate it for us.

    Into the Buzzsaw is a collection of fifteen essays written by journalists with stories to tell. Stories of media censorship, of corporate influence, of smear campaigns, of government conspiracies, of dirty little secrets almost too controversial to tell… Most of these journalists have worked at highly-respected media outlets. Almost all of them have lost their jobs due to a story their were covering. This book is what they have to tell about the state of American investigative journalists. It’s not pretty.

    Every one of those fifteen stories is another brick in a convincing argument; American journalism has lost its nerve. It is easily cowed in submission by threats of lawsuits and official innuendoes. It has eschewed investigations for meek reporting of official press releases. It is now beholden to the vast corporate empires where the operative directive is to profit and not to serve the public interest. In becoming members of the bourgeoisie, journalists have lost their credentials as members of the public and now identify with the officials they’re supposed to interview.

    It’s a damning portrait, and a convincing one. While it’s always possible to dismiss one or two stories, all fifteen of them make up for alarming reading. Into the Buzzsaw is a horror show, a scathing description of how nowadays, the truth will not make you free. The vast majorities of the stories told here have been lauded for their integrity even as governments and corporations were casting doubts on their veracity. The truth will get you fired. It will get you branded as a conspiracy theorist or a politically-driven flake.

    But those fifteen journalists are no flakes; despite some occasional spirited prose (Greg Palast’s piece being perhaps the most stinging in attitude), there is no doubt that these are professionals, that they still believe, deep down, that the good guys ought to win and that journalism is a honorable profession. But they’re completely merciless in denouncing the abuses and apathy of the system. The gallery of rogues here exposed will surprise no one: Fox News, Monsanto, Dupont, Food Lion, Democrats, Republicans, the CIA and other assorted federal institutions are all here seen at their worst. If you’ve been paying attention to the news, many of those stories aren’t exactly new, nor the names of the journalists. I’ve got good books by Michael Levine and John Kelly on my bookshelves, and I’ve heard about Greg Palast and Carl Jensen before. This is not a book of crackpots or amateurs: They may be disillusioned, but the quality of their information and the righteousness of their conviction is irreproachable. Even Michael Levine, whom I had previously pegged as a borderline source, comes across as utterly convincing. The story I had most trouble believing was Kristina Borjesson’s own investigation into the TWA Flight 800 disaster, but even that comes across as a piece presenting intriguing allegations that should be investigated in further detail. There is obviously a common self-interest in those fifteen accounts. But that in no way invalidates the central thesis of the book; strong investigative journalism is key to true democracy and there are worrying signs that American newsrooms are shying away from the real stories. Maurice Murad’s description of how the “killer” stories are used to juice up newscasts is, alone, almost worth the (short) time it takes to read the book.

    For a layperson, Into the Buzzsaw make for unsettling reading. Sure, we laugh about Fox News as “Faux News”, but Jane Akre’s first-hand account of how they gutted WTVT’s solid newsroom in a bread-and-spectacle provider is gut-wrenching. Gary Webb’s piece on how The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times teamed up with the CIA to discredit his “Dark Alliance” stories on how Contras were allowed to sell crack cocaine to L.A. Gangs is almost beyond belief. One of the best essays is Gerard Colby’s astonishing account of how DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain, his meticulously-researched book on the DuPont empire, was “privished”: buried, gutted and sabotaged by his own publishers. There’s more, of course. Much more. Stories of American deserters being gassed. Stories of civilian massacres in South Korea by American forces. Stories of American POWs being consciously forgotten in Vietnam by their government. Then there are the corporations, happily suing any news organisation that threatens their bottom line, as if the public had no right to know. Infuriating stuff. Dangerous stuff.

    From a December 2003 perspective, it’s already regrettable that the book was published in 2002 and translated in early 2003. Certainly, the overall lack of nerve of the American press corp has never been so visible than during the breakneck lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. The Bush Administration has, so far, escaped unscathed from serious journalistic inquest, from the Valerie Plame affair to other business. The days of Watergate are long past… and no, the Lewinsky affair doesn’t count. Certainly, there would be another book to write on the subject of troop embedding alone…

    Flaws? Some. The book sometimes trades off detached objectivity for personal frustration, a choice that makes the result more readable, but may annoy some readers expecting a more academic work. The mosaic-like structure of a book of essays is, once again, a source of slight frustration as several points are repeated over and over again. In this case, however, those elements serve as useful counter-points to one another, places where we can triangulate the real story from multiple sources. (It also, I guess, allows ever chapter to stand alone, which is useful in an academic setting) More serious is the lack of index, at least in the French version of the
    book.

    It’s tempting to just throw back the book on the shelves and shrug in “what-can-be-done?” fatalism. But there are bright spots. Nearly all of the stories in the book have achieved some sort of legitimacy; favorable judgements in favor of the journalists (though not usually before they lose all of their money in legal fees), journalism awards, acclaimed publication of the stories, etc. In many cases, the Internet looms large as a source of alternate publication, extra documentation and, ultimately, truth. While the Internet hasn’t yet fulfilled all of its promises as an engine for democratic discourse, there are promising elements emerging from the net’s increased maturity. Blogs, among other things, are keeping stories alive and propagating articles worth reading.

    Ultimately, that may lead any contentious reader towards a solution of sort to the problems raised in Into the Buzzsaw. We will get the information we deserve. We will read good journalism only if we support and demand good journalism. Consider Into the Buzzsaw your wake-up call: look for those stories, refuse to settle for cheap alarmist entertainment masquerading as journalism. And keep digging for the truth. Start at http://www.intothebuzzsaw.com/ and follow the links. You shouldn’t have to wait until an improbable series of events makes a French-language edition of the book land on your desk.

  • Uncovering Clinton, Michael Isikoff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Crown, 1999, 402 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-609-60393-0

    Was the Clinton/Lewinsky affair a Watergate for the nineties? Hardly. Well, maybe. Every generation gets the scandals it deserves, and maybe all the carefree nineties warranted was a scandal about presidential naughtiness. Or was it just about presidential naughtiness?

    I certainly didn’t think so in 1998, and neither did Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who was an integral part of the affair. In Uncovering Clinton, Isikoff describes his own tortured history vis-à-vis Clinton (including his dealings with Paula Jones and Katherine Willey), the contacts he had with Linda Tripp (the real mover and shaker behind the Lewinsky business) long before the story went public and all the behind-the-scenes machinations at Newsweek, at the Kenneth Starr office, at the White House during the lead up to the entire affair. Isikoff isn’t shy about his opinion of the whole business: It was Clinton’s pattern of unrepentant deception and lies that were his real problem, not the assorted gratifications he pursued.

    (Which pretty much rejoins what I thought of the whole business. Naturally, there’s now a certain naive nostalgia is considering Clinton’s indiscretions during the Bush II administration. Nobody died when Clinton lied, goes the bumper sticker. But I digress.)

    All the President’s Men this isn’t, as poor Mickey Isikoff is dependent upon Linda Tripp for further tales of Clinton’s indiscretions. But it’s still an interesting story. For better or worse, Isikoff was at the center of the media side of the Lewinsky investigation, and was well-prepared to deal with it given his experience with Jones and Willey. His description of his work as a journalist is endlessly fascinating to a news junkie like myself, and at least this part of the book is a pure delight. There is a lot of good material in here on the lives of journalists, from interrogating sources to fighting with editors. Isikoff is a pro, and his meticulously detailed version of the story is fascinating to read. I suspect that this book will remain a primary source for all future historians with an interest in the scandal. (Don’t forget to read the end notes, some of them as fascinating as the main text.)

    But what emerges from Uncovering Clinton goes further than simply the revenge story of a spurned public servant (Tripp) or the unfortunate infatuation of a young woman who should know better: it’s the collision of two forces: Clinton’s own self-destructive pattern, and the right wing’s rabid obsession with something, anything, to get the sitting Democrat. All else was merely excuses and justifications. No one managed to get Clinton on Whitewater, Flowers, Jones, Vince Foster, Willey or any of the other little things. So they used Lewinsky. It was a dirty and complicated business (it takes hundreds of pages to get there and as Isikoff writes in one of the book’s best passages, sometimes the best stuff comes from the worst people), but things are seldom simple or admirable at that level of political viciousness.

    (In some ways, Uncovering Clinton is a charming reminder, to amend my previous digression above, of a simpler time where I was able to dislike a Democrat for the things that he’d done rather than cheering for anyone-but-the-Republican-madman. Aaaah, so that’s what it felt like to be non-partisan… I long for those days again.)

    And so Isikoff’s account will find a place as a point of view in this whole business. Not an impartial one (Isikoff is himself too much a part of the story to see it objectively), but a valuable one. The Lewinsky scandal started a long time before it broke on the Drudge Report, and there was more to it than a headline on a web site. At least this book gives proper appreciation to that.

    But what is maybe the book’s truest passage comes on the last page, where Isikoff suggests that yes, maybe journalists were scum to pursue a story like this. But that nevertheless, it was worth pursuing, and so will all stories like that in the future. And when that will happen, Isikoff’s ever-present notepad will always be there to note the details.

  • Hybrids (Neanderthal Parallax #3), Robert J. Sawyer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2003, 396 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87690-4

    And so the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy ends, not with a bang, but with a tacked-upon conclusion driven by a mustache-twirling villain. In some ways, this is a fitting end, an adequate finish to an adequate series that had both good and bad moments.

    You shouldn’t be reading this review if you haven’t yet started the trilogy, and you shouldn’t start the trilogy if you don’t intend to finish it. Suffice to say that the plot finally starts to roll in this third volume, as every element laboriously set up by Sawyer during the first two volumes finally comes into play. The Earth is threatened by an abrupt reversal of its magnetic poles. Evil villains take a long hungry look at this new unspoiled alternate Earth. Mary and Ponter want to have a kid. Whee!

    If any overly sensitive Americans, misogynists or fundamentalists were left in the room after the first two volumes of the series, they’re in for further shocks: The only American character of note turns out to be a lunatic with dreams of trans-universal conquest (how droll), our female protagonists muses at length on the destruction of human males and the novel more or less ends up celebrating a multi-racial bisexual marriage à trois. Whew! Check your prejudices at the door, a Canadian liberal is on a rampage!

    There is indeed some shock value built into this trilogy (witness the graphic sex scenes, for instance) and one gets the feeling that Sawyer is consciously pushing the envelope in order to piss off some people who ought to be offended. It’s all good fun, though it’s not pulled off quite as subtly as it ought to be. That type of material requires a deft touch and I’m not sure that Sawyer’s typically unsubtle style is appropriate for it. (I will once again remain bemusedly coy on the aftermath of the “rapist” subplot of the trilogy.) On the other hand, Sawyer’s treatment of the religious theme of the trilogy ends up someplace different than I expected given the author’s past track record; good.

    It’s somewhat of a relief, though, to see the plot moving after nearly two volumes’ worth of nearly constant exposition. Alas, the plot development sometimes feel quite a bit silly, such as when this isolated Neanderthal scientist ends up possessing the Magical Plot Device that not only turns out to be vitally important to our protagonists’ happiness, but also contains the seeds of destruction for both worlds! (Here are a few more explanation points to sprinkle freely in the previous sentence: !!!!!!!) Who would have thought that a whole industrial civilization would be useless in coming up with this stuff? Or that such a useful technology would stay banned like that, once again by a curiously monolithic civilization? (If you want to keep on nitpicking, you can also note my objections to rapid plague vectoring in a dispersed civilization. But I’m not forcing you to.)

    Generally speaking, I was also somewhat disappointed to see the direction taken by the latter two books of the trilogy. By focusing on two individuals and a very short time span, it merely suggests a bigger story worth telling: How contact between the two societies would ultimately result in some pretty significant changes along the way on the two worlds. The monolithic Neanderthal society, in particular, would seem to be ripe for some dramatic changes. But that may only serve to highlight the lack of political depth (as in “various interests competing”) in Sawyer’s otherwise expansive imagination of the Neanderthal civilization. (Eek; is he planning a sequel?)

    Silly stuff, but it’s hard not to see it with some affection when Sawyer’s writing style is so devastatingly efficient. A screwy novel that doesn’t take any time to read isn’t the worst thing in the world. Indeed, even the “Basic Suspense 101” twists that Sawyer keeps throwing in the second half of the book have a certain well-worn charm.

    But this is hardly Hugo-worthy stuff, and it’s not hard to share some pundits’ dissatisfaction with Hominids taking home The Big One in September 2003. I like Sawyer, and I think that some of his stuff is well worth reading. In the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, one gets the feeling that he did try for more ambitious material and succeeded only mildly. Still, the effort is commendable, and we can only wait for his next effort.

  • The Cold Cash War, Robert Asprin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1977 (1992 reprint), 212 pages, C$5.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-11382-6

    I’m not sure one could conceivably call this a “proto-cyberpunk” novel, but there’s certainly some eerily prescient content in here, even a quarter of a century after original publication.

    You see (and please note that spoilers will follow), The Cold Cash War posits a future in which corporations are almost literally fighting against one another. The only “almost” that makes it impossible to use the unqualified “literally” is that, at least at the beginning of the novel, they use mock weapons and mock munitions, relying instead on a computerized system to account for kills and damage and such. Though bloodless, this is no mere set of simulations: the objectives gained or lost during those battles are very real, and the corporations act accordingly with the results of those battles, bound as they are by intricate agreements about this sort of thing.

    But things escalate when a proposition is made at the highest levels arguing that “fake” munitions expended should be tied to real-world supply stocks. Suddenly, the war heats up and Real Deaths ensue in a shadowy campaign just this side of public exposure. But exposure there is, and by mid-book the governments are trying to shut down the renegade corporations. But in this particular reality, governments are breathtakingly corrupt and citizens quickly side with corporations (???) against the established order. Moments later, universal peace ensues and we’re left to imagine a future in which a cash-padded slipper is stamped upon the face of mankind –forever.

    Are you laughing yet? Because despite the grim plot summary above, the 1992 reprint of Robert Asprin’s The Cold Cash War is definitely marketed as a fluffy comedy: “Corporate takeovers were never so hostile” blares the cover illustration as two GQ-worthy young executives fire at each other over a backdrop of business suit-clad armies. Even the book itself seems to be aiming for a broadly satiric tone, with its broad-brush hopeless view of governments and corporations. Chapter 22’s concluding “Big Speech”, in all of its simplistic glory, hearkens back to the golden age of satiric SF more than conventional SF

    But one of the book’s biggest problem is that this satire falls flat, or more accurately that the tone of the book keeps shifting toward grimmer and grimmer territory as it advances. The encroaching power of corporations is no small matter nowadays, and there’s something quietly suffocating in the novel’s heady rush to oligarchy. This is dark comedy at its blackest, until it’s not comedy any more. The last line of the novel completes the circle, forever erasing whatever giggle factor the novel may have initially possessed.

    There are other problems, mind you: Threadbare characters, a profusion of useless vignettes, a lack of focus, hum-drum action scenes and truly inconsistent storytelling (at time broad and at other times quite specific) all fail to do justice to the ideas behind the story. But it’s the shifting tone that makes The Cold Cash War such a jarring read.

    Much better has been written on the subject since, whether in a serious or satiric mode. But this may take its place in cyberpunk’s anti-corporate lineage. SF historians take note. Meanwhile, I’ll still be waiting for the wacky SF novel promised by the book’s cover.

  • No Way Back, Rick Mofina

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pinnacle, 2003, 374 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7860-1225-X

    While I have generally enjoyed local writer Rick Mofina’s first three novels (If Angels Fall, Cold Fear and Blood of Others), I haven’t been shy to criticize protagonist Tom Reed’s complicated work/life balance as an overused plot device. It quickly gets worse in No Way Back: Barely forty pages in, Reed’s wife is kidnapped by Reed-hating criminals who just happened to recognize her during a bank heist.

    At least this happens upfront. The rest of the novel is a lengthy chase in which Reed goes well beyond his job as a reporter to get his wife back. Series co-protagonist Walt Sydowski also returns, though there isn’t as much for him to do this time around. This is Reed’s show, and he gets one of the series’ best moment in Chapter 40, as he confronts (or is rather confronted by) a big-time drug dealer who may have information about the identity of his wife’s kidnapper.

    Generally speaking, No Way Back is Mofina’s best book yet, mostly because he manages to milk an impressive amount of plot out of a very simple setup. The tension steadily ratchets upward, even as the body count accumulates and several false herrings are thrown to the reader. Mofina’s constant focus on journalism as an adjunct to police work is once again in full display. Here, “good” newspaper reporter Tom Reed is compared and contrasted to a “bad” tabloid show journalist, who stops at nothing to get exclusive footage she can sell at a profit. (Her porn-star-like name is no accident; as is wont with that type of one-note antagonist, her previous activities include nothing less than Thai pornography. Naughty, girl, naughty!)

    [April-May 2008: From the “reality inspired by fiction” department, it turns out (looking at my web referer logs) that there is now a small-time blonde porn model named like the tabloid show antagonist of the novel. Since I like to keep a clean site, I have scrubbed the name of said antagonist for this review. Invert “enyaL aiT” and Google it up, if you’re curious.]

    I was rather less impressed at the peculiar nature of memory so common in serial mystery fiction. As usual, Tom Reed can’t seem to remember that bad stuff always happen to him or his family. He can’t seem to be able to comfort his son by saying “look, champ, three books ago you were kidnapped by a crazy criminal and I still saved you in the nick of time, right?” In doing so and ignoring entire portions of his previous volumes, Mofina tries to have it both ways: All the attachement of recurring characters without any of the complications associated with such re-use. I understand the commercial necessity of developing series to pre-sell a struggling author’s next volume, but I would rather see a “same universe” sequence over a “same protagonist” series where events have to be conveniently forgotten like that. Cold Fear took a step in the right direction by re-using Reed and Sydowski in extended cameos. One would hope that future books will be similar in construction.

    Because, oh yes, there will be other books, I’m sure of it. Other novels that I’ll end up reading. There is a compelling quality to Mofina’s stories that is good enough even as it is, and if No Way Back is any indication, he’s steadily improving the quality and sustainability of his suspense. The next volume is announced for 2004: Let’s see what’s next.

  • Humans (Neanderthal Parallax #2), Robert J. Sawyer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2003, 384 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87691-2

    Ding! In this second round of the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, the plot thickens slightly, the exposition continues unabated, hard-core interspecies naughtiness is graphially described and a distasteful subplot is resolved in a manner that will strike some as silly and others as ridiculous. Sawyer’s usual preoccupations with theology and matrimony are also finally allowed to simmer to the surface. As if that wasn’t enough, more explicit Canadian flag-waving also ensues. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.

    When we last left Hominids, the (mostly) self-contained first volume in the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, a quantum bridge had been opened between two civilizations in alternate universe: Our human world and another one evolved from what we know as Neanderthals.

    Things aren’t simple as this second volume gets underway. Neanderthal physicist Ponter Boddit may start the novel in his alternate reality, but it doesn’t take a long time until he back in ours again as an assistant-ambassador. Meanwhile, Marie Vaughan may have been snapped up by an American think-tank, but she too doesn’t end up spending a lot of time away from Ponter. Later on, she even makes the trip over to the other universe and gets to see the differences between the two societies for herself. There is an assassination attempt (I’m not telling where or how), a Significant Scene between Ponter and Mary and one or two ominous developments regarding events in the upcoming third volume, but otherwise that’s the extent of Humans‘ plotting.

    What abounds, however, is plenty of exposition and speculation thinly disguised as dialogue. Neanderthal society, in this trilogy, has never known agriculture, has managed to develop information-age technology while side-stepping industrialization and has unanimously agreed on not only ritualized mating, but also the omnipresence of personal life-recording devices. With such radical notions, it fall to Sawyer to make us understand how this may have happened, or at the very least sufficiently suspend our disbelief. As a lifelong hard-SF fan, I’m easy when it comes to disbelief suspension, but this shouldn’t be taken to mean my agreement with Sawyer’s thinly-developed thesis. While the first volume hand-waved away doubts about the sustainability of development without large cities, Humans half-heartedly attempt an explanation in a horribly condescending chapter (Twenty-Four: P.210-221) that mixes Native American smugness (!) with silly non-rhetoric (“Hello!” said Henry “Earth to Angela!”) that ends up proving not much if the exact opposite of Sawyer’s argument. Add that to the “unified society” fallacy (in which alien societies are monolithic blocks where no dissension is ever expressed and where such whoopers as massive birth regulation are enacted with nary a peep) and the whole trilogy suddenly seems based on very wobbly foundations. In short, I wasn’t convinced. And I found it Highly Significant that the prehistoric annihilation of humans in the Neanderthal universe is never seriously discussed.

    I’d like to comment on the resolution-of-sorts of the “rapist” subplot, but I can’t trust myself to do it without being sarcastic. Your Mileage Might (Hopefully) Vary.

    But onward. For being a nitpicker is just no fun when confronted with such an easily readable book. While some of the material may be exasperating, it’s a creditable effort to develop an interesting alternate society and imagine what could happen if a brand-new Earth was discovered right alongside ours. As usual, Sawyer’s prose is lean, clunky, and instantly readable. There are better, more satisfying novels out there, but few of them are as absorbing as Sawyer’s work; even as you’re protesting rather loudly against what’s written down, you can’t help but to turn the page to see what happens next.

    Which will bring us, eventually, to the conclusion of the trilogy…

  • The Great Train Robbery, Michael Crichton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1975, 281 pages, C$6.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-39092-X

    (A fair warning to readers: This Michael Crichton novel will be reviewed according to the Crichton Critical Paradigm #1 (encyclopedia novel), which should not be confused with the Crichton Critical Paradigm #2 (theme park novel, itself a sub-genre of CPP#1). Crichton novel written and read using CCP#1 are thinly fictionalized strings of anecdotes gleaned throughout a careful study of a given subject. Rather than write an encyclopedia entry about the subject, Crichton then turns his research into a novel, every potentially interesting nugget of information becoming a chapter of the novel. Other Crichton novels written using CCP#1 include Congo, Eaters of the Dead, Sphere, Airframe and Timeline. CCP#2 stories include Jurassic Park and Prey, as well as -obviously- WESTWORLD.)

    Prisons, says Michael Crichton in his introduction to The Great Train Robbery, do not offer the ideal representation of the common criminal mind. For obvious reasons, prisons only bring together the criminals stupid enough to be caught, which is to say the least-competent criminals there are. True Criminality, he argues in a still-contentious essay, is not a matter of economic classes, innate evil or lack of intelligence. The Great Train Robbery of 1855 was in many ways an emblematic event, a watershed mark in our understanding of crime. It showed Victorian England that criminals could be smart, organized and rather likeable.

    The novel that follows is a fictionalized version of the events surrounding the Robbery, assembled from historical records and court documents. But The Great Train Robbery is less of a story than a trip through time to Victorian England, with its peculiar mores and methods, to the very sources of today’s western society in the hopes that we may, through them, learn something about ourselves.

    Certainly, 1855 London was a very different place, as Crichton takes pains to remind us at every chapter. The industrial age may have been running at full bore, but social attitudes were still adjusting to the new elements. From his high perch of 1974, Crichton feels free to comment on the Victorians (with what is often a strong authorial voice), and not-so-secretly delights in showing how little matters have evolved since then.

    It all makes for truly interesting reading. At the exception of Eaters of the Dead, this is easily Crichton’s most stylish novel, and also one of his most enjoyable ones. The tone is a screaming delight, halfway between a Victorian pastiche and a modern well-informed pundit. It’s easy to be sucked into the world of the novel and let the crime story take a back-place to the description of the era. Through the Robbery, Crichton tries to capture a time and a place. It’s enough to make one wonder which of today’s event would best describe our world. Any takers for the challenge?

    While critics (this one included) may have a lot of fun taking apart Crichton’s work for flaws real or imagined, this novel is a useful reminder that the man, from time to time, is capable of turning out excellent work. Granted, The Great Train Robbery is only slightly older than your reviewer, but it’s a slick piece of fiction, a recommended read even after a quarter of a century with the added dimension that Crichton’s then-commentary is itself becoming a curiously historical artefact in its own right…

  • Raft, Stephen Baxter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grafton, 1991, 251 pages, C$6.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-586-21091-1

    It’s common wisdom that every overnight success takes years to attain, but it’s still a surprise to find out that such a staple of contemporary hard-SF as Stephen Baxter “merely” published his first novel in 1991. Raft (an expansion of a previous short story) is, in retrospect, a pretty good harbinger of Baxter’s later work, from the strengths to the flaws to the full plot of entire subsequent novels.

    As with many such hard-SF tales, Raft is first and foremost a description of a peculiar environment and the cool things you can do in it. In this case, the entire universe is different, with a gravitational constant multiplied by some ludicrous factor. (“one billion times stronger”, argues the back cover with the supplied italics, which means business in a non-American edition) As a result, stars have a diameter of two or three kilometres, nebulae are perfectly inhabitable and humans have a perceptible gravity field. (which would logically make them pretty dirty in no time, but let’s not go there)

    Cool little playground, but not if you’re Rees, a child in a tiny human group that has been stranded there for centuries, living off the cannibalized parts of its own space ship, watching helplessly as the very fabric of this particular nebulae is doomed to extinction. Our protagonist has quite the usual hard-SF hero checklist in front of him: Be curious, escape his dead-end surroundings, get an unconventional education, make a significant discovery, be thrown around in various picaresque adventures, make new friends, draw up a bold plan and save most of his people. Whew. Plus, given that he’s a teenager, he’ll have to do all of that while subject to hormonal mood swings likely to make him brilliant one moment, and whiny a few minutes later.

    As a protagonist, Rees is sufficiently interesting, which may not sound like heavy praise, but actually is when considering the usual crop of hard-SF heroes, most of whom struggle to keep a distinctive name, let alone a personality. At the very least he’s all right and is curious about the universe, in a bid to allow the reader some ready-made sympathy. The novel is decently readable, with the usual hard-SF exposition ceding an appropriate place to the astronomical curiosities inherent to the heavy-gravity universe. (I have a few doubts about some inconsistencies I though I spotted in Baxter’s scenes, but as I’m not a physicists I’ll just shut up. It just may be a visualization problem, as some of the stuff is hard to imagine for non-specialists.)

    Readers with an interest in Baxter’s overall career will find Raft even more fascinating given that it neatly encapsulates, in barely 250 pages, most of the themes Baxter would later re-use in somewhat longer works. The weird environments (Ring), the depressingly violent human derivatives (Manifold: Origin), the spaceborne sea creatures (Manifold: Time) and, above all, the ludicrously improbable seat-of-the-pants space programs (oh… just about everything from Titan to Moonseed). Baxter’s continuing problems with human psychology are also on display, but here we’ll follow the tacit convention of hard-SF fans and not discuss the subject any further. You can always read it as a juvenile if you want.

    No matter; as a “weird environment” hard-SF novel, Raft has few things to envy to such classics as The Integral Trees and Mission of Gravity. It’s readable, interesting, decently-paced and even awe-inspiring at times. Good fun for readers with an interest in those kind of things and a most promising start for one of today’s leading hard-SF authors.

  • The Runaway Jury, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Island, 1996, 550 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-22441-1

    I remember reading John Grisham’s first four novel in rapid succession, then more or less abandoning him altogether. No specific reason: just a lack of I’ve-got-to-read-this oomph and a vague feeling that Grisham was repeating himself. (Best exemplified in the “Third Rock from the Sun” sitcom episode where the Solomon family tries reading books by “America’s number-one author” to fit in: “My John Grisham is about a young southern lawyer fighting the system” “So is mine!” “Mine too!”) Now the movie adaptation of The Runaway Jury comes along, giving me a splendid reason to check out Grisham’s work once again and see if I’ve missed anything.

    Well, if this novel is any indication —I’ve got some catching up to do. Much as the film was a taut exercise in how to build a slick legal thriller, the book comes across as a fascinating equivalent. Less action and more details, certainly, but as much an example in its field than the film was in its own category. Even better: those familiar with the film adaptation will get to rediscover the novel as an (almost) entirely new work. While the premise remains the same, almost everything else changes from the timing of the plot twists to the very issue of the trial itself.

    Written in 1996 -well before Big Tobacco started losing civil liability suits- the book is about how, even outside the courtroom, both sides of the argument will try to ensure that the jury will turn a favorable verdict. Trials are too important to be left to juries, claimed the movie, and the same rationale applies here: When the issue can be billions of dollars in potential profit, you can be certain that no cent will be spared in order to manipulate the jurors themselves.

    The potential jurors are spied upon, photographed, psychoanalyzed at a distance, meticulously rated for potential bias. At the jury selection step, they’re cautiously questioned and picked by both sets of lawyers. The resulting twelve people will get to decide an explosive civil suit. But jury selection is merely the first step. Jury consultant Rankin Fitch likes to think of himself as the master of the game, the occult power manipulating the jury to his own purposes for his powerful clients. But he’s in for a shock when he receives proof that someone else, in the jury, can manipulate the twelve men and women on whom he depends. The verdict is his, says his mysterious interlocutor, as long as he pays a few million dollars. Otherwise, well, it’ll be a disastrous legal precedent against Big Tobacco…

    At the very least, The Runaway Jury ranks high in terms of originality. While other novels have played around with the notion of manipulating jurors before, they’ve seldom done so with the scope and suspense of Grisham’s work. This novel is packed with fascinating details and vignettes about civil liability suits and the curious habits of jurys. The result is mesmerizing, gripping from beginning to end.

    What the book does better than the film is to give a clear picture of the mental game required in order to manipulate the members of the jury to a state where one leader could influence the matter one way or the other. It also makes clearer the admiring relationship between Finch and his elusive temptress, and throws in an extra little bit of financial manipulation at the end. Characters aren’t as clearly good (or bad) as in the film, motivations are a bit more complex and the result is a little more realistic.

    By far the best Grisham I’ve read so far, and indeed one of my favorite thriller of the year, The Runaway Jury is a unique procedural courtroom drama (to coin an unwieldy expression) with plenty of great details and no-less fascinating characters. Fans of the film won’t be disappointed, and neither will wayward Grisham readers.

  • Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2002, 404 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07322-5

    Science fiction and hard-boiled pulp fiction have always shared a lot of similarities, from the steadfast admiration of dedicated fans to the usual unwarranted dismissal by guardians of literary merit. What began as a union of understanding between the two was further formalized when cyberpunk took off, as it combined the grittiness and style of noir fiction with the ideas and ethos of SF. Altered Carbon is a grown-up follow-up to the cyberpunk movement, a hard-edged future crime novel in which the action and the ideas take equal billing.

    It starts with the death of its narrator and his resurrection on another planet. You see, in Morgan’s imagined 26th century, technology has perfected immortality: as long as a “cortical stack” at the back of your skull keeps on recording your memories, you can be revived afterward. Usually in someone else’s body (a process delicately termed “resleeving” ), but when it’s so bloody expensive to be resurrected, why complain? Naturally, the richer you are, the more options you get: custom-made bodies, automatic memory backups, etc.

    So when our narrator finds himself hired by a very rich man to investigate the mysterious death of this very same rich man, he doesn’t bat an eye. The man simply wants to know why he died. Was it a suicide, as the police suggests, or was it a spectacularly stupid murder given his guaranteed resurrection? Let the intrigue begin…

    In the best tradition of hard-boiled fiction, a lot of action ensues. Our protagonist can’t peek outside of his hotel room without smashing someone’s body parts, being threatened with Real Death, dealing with dangerously uncooperative witnesses or himself being kidnapped. Things aren’t any less exciting in his hotel room, where he can’t seem to avoid having sex with beautiful women. Tough life, being a tough guy…

    Even jaded readers should note at this point that Altered Carbon is not a novel for sissies; the violence is described as carefully as the sex scenes, and there are scenes of rare gruesomeness strung through the entire story. The virtual torture scene alone (where someone can be tortured to death… over and over again) is wince-inducing to a degree seldom seen. Compared to that, the harsh language used throughout the novel seems almost charming. Overly squeamish readers beware.

    But foregoing Altered Carbon on graphic content would be a disservice to anyone looking at the current state of the art in Science Fiction: The Fresh Ideas Quotient here is astonishingly high, what with the issues inherent in body-switching. There are a fair number of scenes in this novel where even jaded readers are likely to find something new and fresh.

    You won’t be able to let the book slip from your hands: Stylishly written (in a hardboiled mode, of course) at a hundred miles per hour, crammed with revealing details (Hey, how ’bout those Martians?), great characters and a steady stream of ideas, Altered Carbon is the real stuff, the kind of story SF was invented for. Don’t settle for run-of-the-mill watered-down derivatives. Get the stuff straight from the source. Grab a copy of Altered Carbon as soon as possible.

    (Sequel: Broken Angels)

  • The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1994, 397 pages, C$7.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-95500-6

    Regular readers of these reviews already know that when it comes to crime thrillers, I’ve had it up to here with serial killers. The Silence of the Lambs was the worst thing that could have happened to the genre: suddenly, everyone and their childhood bullies were writing serial killer stories, using just the “serial killer! booga-booga!” line as a crutch for unconvincing characters, lousy plotting, tepid style and a complete lack of understanding of police procedures.

    (You could say that my complaints have more to do with lousy fiction than serial killers per se, but that would distract from my argument and minimize my disgust at the umpteenth serial killer novel I read in which the would-be-last victim of the killer is someone near and dear to the detective. See Reich, Kathy: Déjà Dead.)

    The Concrete Blonde is a serial killer novel. Fortunately, it’s nothing like anything I’ve read to date, and fortunately so. It proves that a really good author can still do something worthwhile with those same elements that seem so tired in amateur’s hands.

    If you read crime fiction on a regular basic, you already know Michael Connelly. Loved by critics, acclaimed by fans, he’s at the top of the genre. I’ve been slowly reading his work, averaging one or two books per year, with the same care as a wine enthusiast will slowly stretch out his collection, secure in the knowledge that there’s more of the good stuff locked in his basement in case of a quick fix. Some authors are like that: Why hurry to completion when you know you’re going to read all of them sooner or later?

    Connelly 1994’s novel was his third one, and it starts unconventionally; detective Harry Bosch thought he had solved the “Dollmaker” case –with a single bullet. Now, years later, even as the widow of the Dollmaker sues him for shooting her husband, another victim appears, and it’s got all of the hallmarks of the Dollmaker. Again. Did Bosch get the wrong man? Was the Dollmaker a team? Ta-dum-dum, the investigation begins again.

    But nothing is simple, and so The Concrete Blonde offers the unique spectacle of a policeman enduring a civil lawsuit even as he’s investigating the very same case being argued in court. We are, quite fortunately, spared the entire first Dollmaker investigation: the novel begins in mid-story (where, indeed, most serial killer novels end), and the effect of this structural choice are dazzling, alternating between (and then intermingling) courtroom drama and police procedural. Woof!

    Fortunately, structure isn’t all that Connelly has on his side: The Concrete Blonde, like the author’s other books, is deliciously written in a no-nonsense style whose elegance nearly disappears behind its accessibility. The pages turn, the chapters fly and pretty soon we’re caught up in a good mystery. Connelly takes delight in confusing the readers with top-notch red herrings; no resentment ensues. Procedure details are top-notch and so are the characters, even including the titular concrete blonde. I tend to use the word “crunchy” when describing substantial novels one can just bite through, and there’s no doubt about it: The Concrete Blonde is one crunchy book.

    Yes, this novel is a rare treat, an intelligent and suspenseful thriller, exactly the model of what good crime fictions should be. It remixes familiar elements in a brand new format, and goes it all in an unobtrusive style. Even weeks after reading it, The Concrete Blonde remains strong in memory, which is a lot more that I can say about other crime thrillers, good or bad.