Book Review

  • Memento Mori, Shariann Lewitt

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1995, 286 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-85625-3

    One of the curses of moderating panels at science-fiction conventions is that you’re expected to pretty much know everything about a panel subject and the life’s work of the other panelists. So when I found out, a week before the event, that I was to moderate a panel about neurobiology (!) featuring -among other authors- Shariann Lewitt (!!), well, I knew I had some catching up to do.

    So I rushed to nearby bookstores and got copies of Rebel Sutra, about which I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, as well as Memento Mori, which was an unexpected revelation.

    I should probably explain that I’m not fond of moody goths, tortured artistes or pseudo-intellectuals posers. I can’t stand people pathologically unwilling to be happy. Doom? Gloom? Not for me, thanks.

    Which is why I was pleasantly surprised by Memento Mori. At the very least, this is a novel that doesn’t waste a lot of time before fully embracing a downbeat tone. In the first chapter, a faraway planet cuts itself out of the rest of humanity for fear of spreading the local plague ravaging its population. The announcement is met with muted acceptance from our cast of characters, a bunch of young adults with nothing else to do but feel sorry for themselves. A toast is made to the Reis colony. Pages later, terrorists starts killing off those who manage to escape the plague, claiming senseless death as performance art. This is the end of the world, not just as they know it, and they don’t feel fine.

    If Memento Mori had a soundtrack, it would be a funeral dirge. The novel steadily moves toward implosion, as characters are slowly picked off by disease, murder, bad luck and other assorted mishaps. But here’s the most remarkable thing: Despite my built-in resistance to this type of story, I quickly found myself looking forward to the rest of the novel. The characters simply fascinated me: I couldn’t wait to see what happened to them next.

    Beyond the mystery of the plague (and the nutso RICE AI who, obviously, has something to do with all of this), beyond the surprisingly engrossing prose, beyond the intriguing portrait of a city falling apart under the strain of a common death-wish, I couldn’t get enough of the Memento Mori‘s characters. I found myself caring for the surprisingly vulnerable master of cool Peter Haas. I rooted for Senga Grieg, that precocious genius with nary a clue as to what what truly going on. My own namesake, Christian, had an intrinsic interest despite (or maybe because) him being a complete weakling. And what about poor Johanna Henning, stuck in a fatal crisis she understands all too well?

    This is not an ordinary SF novel, and neither was my reaction to it. This bleak book works even when it should not. The despair, the gradual collapse of the society described in the novel is inspires more awe than pity. It’s a glorious catastrophe novel, a pretty good read and an unexpected page-turner. The attention to detail is stunning, especially when it comes to character-driven elements. Obviously, the book wouldn’t work as well if it wasn’t for the personalities described, and how they react to the collapse of everything they know. The ending comes as a relief for all involved.

    In retrospect, my favorable reaction to Memento Mori may not be so strange as it may seemed. Even though the nihilistic poseurs of the book are poseurs, reality eventually sets in quite significantly. Ultimately, poseurs end up dying like the most heartfelt of them. Cool is not a salvation. And that, just maybe, may be the source of my satisfaction with the book. Hey, one of the side-benefits of moderating panels at a science-fiction convention is that sometimes, you get to make discoveries that you otherwise wouldn’t get to read.

  • War of Honor (Honor Harrington 10), David Weber

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 2002, 867 pages, C$41.00 hc, ISBN 0-7434-3545-1

    I bought David Weber’s War of Honor hardcover in October 2002 for a good reason; bundled within its pages was a CD-ROM containing the entirety of the Honor Harrington series in electronic files I could read on my PDA. While I’d picked up discontinuous pieces of the Harrington saga at used book sales over the years, this seemed to be an easy (and cheap) way to fill the blanks. I got books; my SF bookstore got C$41 and everyone was happy.

    One year later, I’m done with the series. And when I say I’m done, I mean it: Done. Finished. Will not revisit. For what had started as a light and enjoyable series of standard but entertaining military SF novels has turned into a contest of endurance. The first four books of the series were all less than 430 pages. The last four all exceed 530 pages, in a steady progression that shows no sign of abating.

    War of Honor is, let’s say it right away, not as dull and ill-conceived as its predecessor Ashes of Victory. All of the increasingly annoying tics of the series are there (emphasis on trivialities; off-stage developments; self-congratulatory conversations; omnipotent heroine; tepid pacing; cardboard villains, etc.) but there are also a few interesting elements that do much to soften Weber’s bad habits. Much like in Field of Dishonor, Harrington has to deal with nasty political battles. (Alas, they’re too easily resolved thanks to Harrington’s growing fan club in the Manticoran hierarchies) Much like in Honor Among Enemies, Harrington gets back in the field by hunting pirates in the Silesian sector, but without much of the desperate urgency felt back then.

    The treecats can now talk through sign language, though Weber wisely doesn’t spend too much time on that particular development. (They’ll probably sing opera by the next tome) The novel takes forever to rev up, dwelling for hundreds of pages on the totally unacceptable peace negotiations taking place between Manticore and Haven. The eeevil socialist Havenites then pull a complete fleet out of their hats and take a technological leap significant enough to seriously worry the Manticoran Kingdom. Meanwhile, said Manticoran Kingdom has been taken over by Liberals (boo, hiss, etc.) who have managed to completely neuter the military might of the Empire. This, in case you’re still unaware of the delicate subtleties of Weber’s universe, is a Really Despicable Thing. Few will be surprised to find out that some hostilities break out before the end of the novel. Even fewer will be surprised to find out that they happen off-screen and barely qualify as a “Skirmish of Honor”.

    Harrington is somewhere in the book, but as usual Weber can’t hold our interest whenever she’s away. The ridiculous fashion in which he paints everyone according to their political opinions (All liberals are traitors, all conservatives are saints, all treecats are, like, the coolest, and so on) is increasingly goofy whenever he attempts serious political fiction. And of course, in the presence of a larger-than-life heroine who, herself, has become larger than her imagined universe, the Honor Harrington series has nowhere to go.

    And that, ultimately, is why I’m not particularly interested in knowing what happens to Honor Harrington next. The next volume will be released someday, but I’ll be able to let it float by until we meet again at a used book sale. The Harrington series reaches its climax with the fourth or fifth book. You can even throw in the sixth one for an extra space adventure. But the last four entries have each been a big long bore. I’ve rationalized my C$41 purchase. Now I can sign off… and I’m not coming back anytime soon.

  • Confluence, Paul J. McAuley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    SFBC, 2000, 878 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 0-7394-1271-X

    Note to self (1): Stay away from fat fantasy trilogies. Even when they’re not fantasy, not physically presented as trilogies and not particularly fat as far as fantasy trilogies go. Case in point: Paul J. McAuley’s SFBC omnibus edition of his Confluence trilogy (Child of the River, Ancients of Days and Shrine of Stars), which purports to be “sufficiently advanced” science-fiction masquerading as fantasy. While the background is undoubtedly a creation of nanotechnology and the tale eventually involves immortals, galaxies, massive celestial engineering and a bunch of other SFnal elements, the treatment is one of a classic fantasy quest. It begins as a child is mysteriously brought on a strange fantastical land (Confluence, evidently) and gets started as the now-teenager sets out to discover the world and the secrets of his origin. The usual adventures ensue, complete with revelations, escapes, bloodshed, battles, travels and betrayals.

    Note to self (2): It’s not because I liked one book by an author that I will enjoy all of his other books. If I had paid attention, I would have remembered my very mixed reactions to McAuley’s previous Pasquale’s Angels and Fairyland. Only The Secret of Life struck a nerve, and that was in an explicitly hard-SF mode. I should have read the Confluence‘s cover blurb more carefully before committing to it.

    Note to self (3): I have to face it; I’m just not suited to heroic fantasy. Even though Confluence is supposed to be a hard-SF world with a veneer of fantasy plotting, it’s probably more exact to speak of a heroic fantasy story with hard-SF details and justifications. The style of writing, the heroic progression of the protagonist, the serial nature of the plotting, the various medieval-era social structures are all unmistakable hallmarks of heroic fantasy. And try as I might, I just can’t get interested in this mode of storytelling. (No, I didn’t like Gene Wolfe’s New Sun cycle either.) The florid, often exasperating, prose should have been a tip-off. The episodic adventures and indestructible villains should have been another. But nooo, I kept slogging and that brings me to…

    Note to self (4): There is a problem if I spend more than two weeks on the same book. When I took Confluence from my bookshelves, the summer sun was still shining outside. While I slogged through the book, months passed, leaves fell along with the temperature, some actor had the time to announce his candidacy for the governorship of California —and get it. Yet I wasn’t making any progress through the book. I can easily do 500 pages per day if I want to. But this time, I just didn’t. Part of the problem, mind you, is that for the longest time the story doesn’t do anywhere either. And even what appear to be significant plot developments end up being, well, not so important in the grand scheme of things.

    Note to self (5): My stupid male pride has to go. I have to learn how to cut out my losses early. It’s not as if I didn’t know early on, even fifty pages in, that my chances of enjoying this book were becoming microscopic. But as other macho men may vow to spend weeks hunting that elusive elk, beating that world record or tuning that engine to a purr, my own feeble intellectual version of pure male obstinacy consists in never abandoning a book midway through. I have to learn how to get rid of that trait.

    Note to self (6): This is no reason to give up on Paul J. McAuley. Spring will come again, that actor won’t stay in office forever and McAuley will write other books. Should I stay away from them because Confluence was such a bore? Hardly. Any author capable of novels like The Secret of Life certainly deserves another chance. It just won’t be an expensive 800+ pages hardcover chance.

  • The Last Day, Glenn Kleier

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1997, 609 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-60598-0

    It’s very, very rare to see a novel so flawed as Glenn Kleier’s The Last Day manage to keep my interest through (most of) its duration. From the risky initial premise to the botched character development and the ridiculous conclusion, there is a lot of stuff to dislike here… but somehow, it all manages to hold together. It may be a triumph of concept over execution, but at least it’s worth a look.

    Dating back from long-ago 1997, The Last Day deals with the much-feared millennium, except with a supernatural twist. On Christmas 1999, a meteorite smashes through a top-secret Israeli military compound and destroys it. The only survivor is a beautiful young woman, “Jeza”, who soon appears to have supernatural power.

    But have no fear! Intrepid WNN journalist Jonathan Feldman is here! In a matter of weeks, even as the Jeza phenomenon sweeps the globe, Jonathan finds the truth and reports it live! It turns out that the top-secret Israeli project was trying to develop a better breed of soldiers; humans cloned from the same source and augmented with neural computers fed with reams of knowledge. Is Jeza a human experiment gone live or the second coming of Christ herself?

    As I said; risky premise. For centuries, people have reflected upon the New Testament, maintaining that its story is still as relevant, as extraordinary even today. In The Last Day, Glenn Kleier wrestles with a contemporary re-telling of the scriptures, to varying success. Some of the philosophical musings are fascinating, but some of them (like the made-up “parables from the book of Jeza”) also tend to be blindingly obvious. Chances are that your reaction to the novel will depend on your own relationship with faith. For jaded atheists like myself, it remains a story; I’m likely to shrug at the concept of a female messiah even as this may shock a few more fundamentalist readers.

    But back to literary considerations, the biggest flaw of the book is that Kleier is still an inexperienced writer. His prose is utilitarian, ham-fisted and not particularly elegant. His characters aren’t particularly well-handled, and are usually undistinguishable from one another. It doesn’t help, of course, that the reader can roughly guess where the story is going; taking the New Testament as a source book obviously leads to obvious developments.

    But whereas more conventional readers may reject this book on those grounds alone, I -as a Science Fiction reader- was taken by Kleier’s inventiveness in describing the repercussion of the second coming in a rough analogue of 1999’s world. There’s plenty of material here, a lot of it revolving around the Vatican, to digest and enjoy. There’s a pretty spectacular demolition of Roman Catholicism midway through, if you enjoy that type of thing. Kleier’s use of an international correspondent as a protagonist is a good way to quickly deliver a lot of information, though some of the author’s infoblurbs sometimes end up killing tension by delivering pieces of the conclusion even before the suspense has begun.

    There are too many rough edges to make The Last Day more than “interesting” on a “bad-to-good” scale, so readers without much tolerance for clunky prose and dull characters may want to pass up this one. But for refugees from the SF field, or merely curious thriller readers, there just may be enough here to keep anyone busy for a few hours. While it’s not a page-turner per se, there are more than enough reasons to keep reading, if only to see what else Kleier can pull out of his hat.

  • Grunts!, Mary Gentle

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    ROC, 1992, 464 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-45453-7

    There is no doubt that J.R.R. Tolkien did something magnificent when he created (“wrote” seems such a weak word) The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, in doing so he also ended up unleashing a copycat genre of derivative medieval fantasy. From “Dungeons and Dragons” to Terry Brooks, from KULL THE CONQUEROR to countless Fat Fantasy Trilogies, modern fantasy has all too often depended exclusively on rewriting Tolkien. Battles between good and evil can only be thrilling so many times…

    In considering Mary Gentle’s satirically affectionate Grunts (subtitled “A Fantasy With Attitude”), I started at a disadvantage: Not only am I functionally illiterate in medieval fantasy, but I also started with a significant prejudice against the genre. While her novel is accessible enough, it remains a genre send-up and so contains elements that certainly work better on anyone with a good knowledge of the heroic fantasy’s faults and clichés.

    It starts, interestingly enough, from the grunts’ point of view. Those poor Orcs forced to do all the fighting against the Army of the Light while their dark masters are busy scheming and torturing heroes in their citadels. But things take a turn for the weird when those Orcs slay a dragon and capture his hoards of weapons… all of them stamped “United States Marines Corps”. What might have been slightly amusing turns very amusing given that the dragon has cursed his hoard with a dastardly spell in which the looters become what they steal…

    Before long, the Orcs are swearing like Marines (literally so), target-practicing with rifles and training themselves to execute squad tactics. Initial success against the forces of light is middling (turns out those pesky “neutralize weapon” spells do work against M-16s), but there’s no turning back from a modern army… even the fall of the Dark Empire proves to be only a hiccup in the plot as the Dark Lords comes back and argues… for elections! (On a platform of universal health care and high taxation, naturally.) From evil fantasy satire, Grunts moves on to tackle military fiction, and then science-fiction as the Orcs must fight invading extraterrestrials. A human is transported from our world to this fantasy universe, and that proves to be… utterly unimportant. There’s a wedding. Funerals. Harsh language. Sex. Plus rejoicing by all.

    Yes, Grunts is a funny book. Plenty of jokes are sprinkled throughout its pages, tweaking the nose of everything from high fantasy to military fiction and Starship Troopers. (And it’s not a gentle tweaking, thanks to the rather sustained violence exhibited by everyone from orcs to humans) Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as interesting as you could imagine it from the above synopsis. Every humorous moment seems stuck in a duller wrapping of turgid prose that doesn’t do much in sustaining interest. I did love the descriptions of the protagonist’s attitudes toward the self-important “goody-goody” characters, but -oh- did I have a hard time slogging through the rest of the novel to get there. (Great cover illustration, though)

    I won’t be the first one to stress the importance of pacing and brief wit when it comes to comedy. Alas, Grunts is definitely not a brief or a zippy novel. At more than 400 pages, it’s overlong by at least a quarter, features too many characters and includes half a dozen indifferent subplots.

    Granted, lack of familiarity with the parodied genres may account for a distinct indifference to the spoof. Your mileage will certainly vary if you carry along a deep and unshakeable love for heroic fantasy. Critical comments elsewhere on the web suggest that many readers just went nuts for the book as it is. Still, even the non-fantasy elements of the book don’t seem to work or to free themselves from the morass of the surrounding prose. I certainly hoped for more than I ultimately got from Grunts, and that’s too bad. I just may give it a shot in a few years. After all, it’s not as if typical medieval fantasy —with all of its clichés and its stock situations— is going away anytime soon, right?

  • Hannibal, Thomas Harris

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 1999, 546 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-29584-X

    When Hannibal was first published in 1999, critics were flummoxed. Some suspected a practical joke. Indeed, Salon.com prefaced its spoilerful synopsis with the warning “this is not a parody”. Many speculated that Harris was having fun screwing around with Hollywood. After the success of Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs, Harris had become, despite himself, one of Hollywood’s darling authors. It turns out that all of his novels have been adapted for the silver screen at one moment or another: For a man who writes a novel per seven years or so (Black Sunday, 1975. Red Dragon, 1981, The Silence of the Lambs, 1988), that makes any of his books very hot stuff indeed. It’s no surprise if Red Dragon has been adapted twice in twenty years, once in 1986 (as Michael Mann’s MANHUNTER) and another in 2002.

    The mystery persists to this day; Has Harris deliberately played a trick on Hollywood by writing a novel that was almost unfilmable, or did he simply go off the deep end of sanity? Or was he simply having fun at his fans’ expense, writing a novel that was sure to piss them off?

    Transforming protagonist Clarice Starling from her goody-two-shoes persona in The Silence of the Lambs to a bitter, disillusioned woman on the verge of a break-down in Hannibal was just the first step. The second was to take the post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS portrait of Hannibal as a popular hero and make him even more so, by refining his qualities and showing someone even worse than he was in comparison. Here, Lecter turns out to be a charming man of considerable talents and erudition, able to work his way in an academic job in Florence, play the piano, enjoy life’s beautiful things and second-guess Stephen Hawking on advanced physics. (!) Meanwhile, the character of Mason Verger is introduced, and he makes Lecter look like a perfect gentleman. For starters, Verger is one of Lecter’s old victims; years ago, blown on drugs and encouraged by good old Hannibal, he cut off most of his face, fed it to the dogs and somehow survived, looking a lot like a faceless corpse. While that would be enough to cramp anyone’s style, Verger has one tiny advantage, being the inheriting heir of a massive meat-packing industrial empire. (An empire which thrived on such innovations as feeding animal remains to pigs, in an oh-so-subtle symbolic detail.) Flush with money and driven by revenge, he’s still looking for Lecter, snooping over the FBI’s shoulders while not handcuffed to mere trivialities such as ethics and the rule of law.

    If you’ve seen the film version of Hannibal, you will recognize our three main characters -the damaged heroine, the charming killer, the ultra-rich monster- more or less intact. All of the film’s insanity is to be found in the pages of the novel, from Clarice’s contrived difficulties with the FBI to Krendler’s last supper. What you can’t know is how much more silly stuff wasn’t shown on-screen. Verger’s bodybuilding lesbian sister, who wants to impregnate her partner using her brother’s genetic material (even though he abused her during childhood). Lecter’s memory palace (see DREAMCATCHER for that, or better yet—don’t!), along with the central trauma that caused him to turn evil (hint; sisters are big in this book.). The story of Florence’s Il Mostro, because you can never have enough serial killers in one single Harris novel. And so on…

    The biggest change, of course, is the ending. While the film wussed out and presented sort of a happy ending, Hannibal goes to the end of Clarice’s perversion and… well, I’m not going to spoil the surprise for you, right? Suffice to say that Jodie Foster had her reasons to decline playing the character again after she read the book. Her fate is much, much worse that simple death.

    But you know what? Even if Hannibal is the longest-running, most straight-faced prank played by an author on his public, it’s still worth reading. Much like the film was schlock horror directed with mastery, the book is schlock horror written with an impeccable sense of style. The book is playful, telling passages in the past, other describing the present and sometimes even warning the reader about what could happen if it went any closer to the characters. It’s a heck of a lot of fun to read, and Harris’ gift for research makes the end result always fascinating to read, even if it’s totally insane. You’ve been warned. But then again, so was I.

  • Against All Enemies, Harold Coyle

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Forge, 2002, 412 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34169-7

    Whenever the United States get around to fight their second civil war, I want it to be like in Against All Enemies: Dull, pointless, with few casualties and lasting only a few days. But what works for me in reality certainly isn’t what I’m looking for in fiction. Harold Coyle’s latest novel is, quite simply, a bore and to bore readers is the most unforgivable thing a so-called “thriller” writer can do.

    The good news is that Against All Enemies brings back Scott Dixon, the hero of many of Coyle’s best novels (Sword Point, Bright Star, The Ten Thousand, etc.) The bad news is that there was absolutely no reason to do so. In fact, given the amount of material that Coyle voluntarily ignores in re-establishing his character and his family, it seems even worse than useless. While the “adventure in Mexico” (Trial by Fire) is very briefly mentioned, almost no mention is made of Dixon’s previous adventures in Iran, Egypt and -very importantly- Germany. Like with Clancy and Brown’s latest works, the perils of juggling an imagined military history concurrently with our “real” history get to be a strain. Best to play in an entirely new universe every time, otherwise the amount of material to conveniently forget gets to be too obvious to ignore.

    Given that the emphasis, this time around, is on Dixon’s son (a brand-new army man by the time the novel gets underway) one would have thought that this would have been a perfect opportunity to get a brand new cast of characters. But no, and the contrivances are annoying. Here, Dixon’s wife (the always-beautiful-and-perfect Jan Fields-Dixon) is depicted as having a national-class TV show from the American Midwest. By sheer coincidence (of course), she finds herself part of the catalyst of the political crisis which will precipitate the Idaho uprising her husband and son will have to fight. As if that wasn’t enough, another returning character, Nancy Kozak, conveniently happens to be around (as a reservist, no less) whenever the action heats up. Ah, the curse of too much character background… Beyond “kill your darlings”, some writers need to be told “ditch your universe.”

    Now here’s the interesting part: The previous Dixon novel (Code of Honor) dates from 1994. While Against All Enemies is copyright 2002, Coyle mentions in his afterword that it was originally written in 1996. What happened next in Coyle’s career is well-known: a detour through civil war fiction, followed by a return to contemporary military fiction in the late nineties. (Alas, with works such as the wretched Dead Hand) One can speculate as to why it wasn’t published in 1996. And one can speculate very nasty reasons indeed…

    But why speculate when we can read the result? Even with years of revision, Against All Enemies still feels like a half-hearted attempt at a military thriller. While the premise is fantastic (A second American Civil War! What else do you need?) and so is the thematic intent to explore the conflict between serving one’s country versus the needs of one’s community, the result falls short of expectations. Any expectations.

    While you’d think that the rebellion of a state against the federal government would be caused by something big, something worth fighting for, Against All Enemies gives the impression that this comes from a governor’s oversized ego and a botched raid by the FBI. While you’d think that Coyle could milk a lot of juice from this type of premise (USA fights a war with itself! Films of modern weaponry at 11!), it ends up being a few planes and a bunch of tanks against a militia. Not very impressive, not very interesting. Even as the sort-of-antagonist governor eyes Dixon’s wife, you’d think that there could be some place there for very personal stakes. Naah. Coyle! You wuss! I accuse you of holding back! If there’s one more rationale for ditching the old universe, it’s this: With brand-new characters, you can blow them all up if you want.

    I really wanted to like this novel, and there are in fact a few passages I like here and there. But overall, Against All Enemies is just a snore, and that’s the worst thing I can say about a thriller. I can’t even work up any kind of hate for it like I did for Dead Hand (which was a much, much worse novel, though). At best, I won’t remember any of it in a few weeks. And that’s just too bad. I want my fiction to be striking and my reality to be unmemorable, not the other way around.

  • The Teeth of the Tiger, Tom Clancy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 2003, 431 pages, C$40.00 hc, ISBN 0-399-15079-X

    The most encouraging thing about Tom Clancy’s The Teeth of the Tiger is how comparatively slim it looks. After years of bloated 800+ pages novels with severe pacing problems, one could hope that Clancy had finally wizened up. Unfortunately, the length of this book ends up being one of the most deceptive things about a very disappointing novel.

    I wanted not to bury this novel, but to praise it; after all, I have all of the Clancy novel in hardcover on my bookshelves, and despite our increasingly diverging political views, I have always kept a soft spot for his no-nonsense style of writing and his gift for plotting.

    Sadly, little of that ends up in The Teeth of the Tiger, a novel that ends up smelling as if it escaped from those infamous “Tom Clancy’s” derivative lines. The setup seems depressingly familiar; as more evil middle-eastern terrorists plan a dastardly attack on America, a top-secret group of intelligence operatives fights to keep them away. It really does end up feeling a lot like Clancy trying to second-guess 11/09/2001, with all the predictable plotting that ensues.

    Had Clancy moved away from his Ryanverse, it may not have been too bad, but unfortunately enough, this novel takes place after the end of Jack Ryan Sr.’s presidency and features Jack Ryan Jr. taking his father’s initial role as an analyst in the intelligence community. The big, big problem is that Clancy has to juggle twenty years of Ryanverse events with real-world history. So September 11 is somewhere in the background, along with Afghanistan and Homeland Security, but also the Ebola attack that led to a ground war in Saudi Arabia (Executive Orders) and the whole Red October business. Curiously, little is said of the plane crash on the Capitol (Debt of Honor) or the Chinese nuclear strike (The Bear and the Dragon), presumably because those didn’t fit. But the whole setup is increasingly far-fetched and Clancy would have been better off just scrapping the whole Ryanverse altogether rather than present an increasingly problematic “next generation”. A smaller problem is that the end of the Ryan presidency is glossed over, along with the dramatic death of one major fan-favourite character; most will feel cheated by the curt paragraph that describes what happened.

    But wait! It gets worse! Clancy so loooves his characters that, guess what, those dastardly terrorists attack a mall where, as it happens, two of our main characters are shopping for shoes. Now, it just so happens that those two are members of the secretive “Campus” where, it just so happens, also works Jack Ryan Jr. Who, it just so happens, is not just also their cousin, but it also tracking down a guy who, it just so happens, is handling the finances for those very same terrorists! Wow! Some would call this series of links very convenient, but who knows—coming from Clancy, it just may be genius in disguise!

    That’s bad enough, but what really hurts is the ideological position at the centre of the book. Basically, The Teeth of the Tiger is a book-length rationalization of why it’s quite OK for a shadowy agency, not controlled by the government, to go out in foreign countries and kill suspected associates of terrorists. No less. “The Campus” is an agency outside federal regulations —thinly protected by a stash of blank presidential pardons— which gets in the business of assassination as the novel begins. Oh, our two would-be-assassins do have a few doubts… but a convenient terrorist attack in which they witness the death of a little boy (awww) wipes out every possible moral qualms they may have kept from Sunday school. (“They’re the bad guys, bro!”) And so they go on their merry way, rubbing out people on the streets of Europe using information that may not be entirely solid.

    Is this supposed to be good? Heroic? Lawful? Just? Am I the only one who still thinks vigilante-style retribution isn’t the sum of all answers? That it’s a simple-and-dumb solution to a complex problem? Is it perfectly acceptable to decree (without accountability, without recourse, without remorse) the death penalty on four targets whose tenuous support to terrorism was merely financial and logistical? Anyone who’s read Clancy for a while might justifiably ask whether this is from the same person who wrote Clear and Present Danger, a novel in which Jack Ryan Sr. went against his own government because it was involved in violent off-the-book operations which betrayed the spirit of the American Constitution.

    It would be inaccurate (and libellous) to portray Clancy as a racist or an anti-Muslim. But his portrayal of the bad guys (“bad guys” and “good guys” are helpfully pointed out in the novel, so don’t worry about making the distinction for yourself) is crude enough to warrant special attention. (By far the most hilariously offensive moment comes as one of the terrorists lays, dying, on the floor of a sports-goods store. One of the Killer Catholic Twins has the decency to put a football in his limp hands and add “I want you to carry this to hell with you. It’s a pigskin, —-hole, made from the skin of a real Iowa pig.” [P.252] Touching; I could hear legions of Rush Limbaugh fans weeping.) Clancy even feels obliged to add two pages on how “terrorism had about as much to do with the Islamic religion as it did with Catholic and Protestant Irishmen” [P.383] (Ever the good lad, Jack Ryan Jr. comes across this stupendous insight by “googling his way into Islam”. And yet people keep saying that a good conservative education has no benefits…) Fair enough, but next time it may be helpful to actually have real and realistic Arab/Muslim characters rather than making all of his protagonists good-old Catholic-Irish boys mowing down terrorists through Europe. This, coupled with other typical conservative tics such as the knee-jerk euro-bashing (with a particular dislike for the French; one wonders if those slurs will be kept in translation), media bashing and a rather short-sighted view of politicians, finally makes me wonder if Clancy, for all his gifts, may just not be as smart as I thought he was. Or getting dumber by the book.

    Certainly, other areas of the novel aren’t much brighter: The plotting also has its share of dumb moves; once the terrorists are identified and one lead is uncovered in the financial labyrinths of Europe, you would think that the best way to react would be to study the subject and identify his links to other terrorists. Naaah; Clancy goes gung-ho happy and immediately send his good little Catholic twin assassins to rub out the guy in a busy street. They do that in the hope of forcing other guys to react, calling it “recon-by-fire”. Uh-huh. Don’t let Clancy anywhere near the Organized Crime units, please. Other deeply dumb stunts abound, such as sending a team of fraternal twins (their mom “must have punched out two eggs that month”, as it’s delicately referred to on pages 32 and 89) as a tracking/assassination team. You’d think that a suspect might go “huh?” after seeing two eerily similar guys around (See P.74: “People often remarked on their resemblance, though
    it was even more apparent when they were apart”), but apparently that doesn’t seem to bother Clancy very much. (Neither does the idea of sending an untrained ex-president’s son on an assassination mission, for that matter. Makes you wonder what Chelsea Clinton truly does in her spare time, doesn’t it?)

    Once again, there are clear signs that Putnam’s editors have all given up on Clancy. Beyond the pacing problems, the bone-headed plotting, the flamboyant jingoism (anyone even considering an opposing viewpoint is accused of defending the devil), this novel (like the two before it) suffers from bouts of bad writing. Once again, every half-clever line is repeated at least twice in the course of the novel. (Some men may need killin’ more than horses need stealin’, but some novels sure need editin’) Some sentences have missing words. See if you can make sense of this comma-ridden one: “What to drink? If he was having a New York lunch, then cream soda, but Utz, the local potato chips, of course, because they’d even had them in the White House—at his father’s insistence.” [P.214]

    Technical accuracy? Don’t make me laugh. The time during which Clancy was considered an authority has long passed. Since Rainbow Six‘s memorable “life detectors” blunder, Clancy doesn’t even try to fact-check his stuff. Here, the NSA routinely crack all electronic traffic as a matter of routine, and our characters can check not just their email, but everyone else’s too. Convenient, especially when the all-magical “Campus” can simply slurp off the traffic being exchanged (over the airwaves!) between the NSA and the CIA. Isn’t there anything a rogue operation won’t do?

    Then there are the characters. Good little Jack Jr., praising his pop at every second internal monologue. The Killer Catholic Twins, who never seem to be any less than perfect. But then again, they’re all there to kill terrorists; no further development is needed. It’s certainly not as if we get to know them through adversity, because they just never fail. (Well, except for the odd occasional spilt wine, in a hideous plot cheat no one is going to forgive.)

    All of which may have been forgiven if the book actually had some suspense in it. But save for a few moments of tension whenever the action is about to begin, The Teeth of the Tiger is a thrill-free thriller. The mid-book terrorist attack has its moments or two, but everything pretty much goes like planned for the rest of the book. It’s dull and linear with no surprises: there is nothing in here that even looks like “rising stakes”. The second half of the novel is pure eye-for-an-eye neo-conservative wanking, as our two good little wisecracking Catholic Assassins joyride through Europe (driving brand-name cars), only stopping to kill the next terrorist-by-association. It brought back to mind a similar trip in Nelson deMille’s The Lion’s Game… except that in deMille’s case, it was a terrorist travelling through America to kill American servicemen. Hmm…

    Suffice to say that there is no heightening tension in The Teeth of the Tiger. It ends when there are no more easy targets to kill. The first half reads like a watered-down mixture of The Sum of All Fears (terrorists plan an attack in excruciating detail) and Rainbow Six (secret terrorist-killing unit is put together) while the second all brings to mind a thin rehash of Red Rabbit with Ryan Jr.’s contrived arrival in the field and his rite of passage where he proves his all-American manhood by killing one of the terrorists. But if you truly want to compare this latest novel with something bearing the Clancy name, you’d have to go and check the awful “Tom Clancy’s” derivative work; this latest novel feels as contrived, as lazy and as dumb as anything in the “Net Force”, “Op-Center” or “Power Plays” series. (Indeed the idea of a “good guy” rich conservative having his elite force of operatives ready to kill people around the world is a direct riff on Politika, the first “Power Plays” book.) The derivatives have finally tainted the main stream of Clancy’s work: Once you start playing with easy money…

    Worse of all is the realization that the end of the book is merely a customary one that solves nothing and simply sets up a sequel —or, goodness forbid, a series of sequel. (Last lines: “The enemy could not possibly know what kind of cat was in the jungle. They’d hardly met the teeth. Next, they’d meet the brain” [P.431] Oooh!) Don’t believe the length of the book; this is merely part one of a bigger (but maybe not all that greater) work. It’s not exactly a cliffhanger, but all that’s missing is a “to be continued”.

    If I take a deep breath and temporarily disengage my liberal/pacifist/Catholic ethical module, I’d still like to point out that the book is clearly written and that Clancy’s depiction of the military/espionage world (aside from all of that “Campus” garbage) still feels much more credible than most of his colleagues. You can easily read The Teeth of the Tiger in a single quiet afternoon, though the question arise whether you really want to do so. I certainly would have been pleased to savage the book even more if I hadn’t read The Teeth of the Tiger right after Joe Weber’s truly wretched Primary Target, another Middle-Eastern-terrorist book that -in comparison- clearly shows the difference between a hack like Weber and a flawed-but-competent novelist like Clancy.

    In Science Fiction fan circles, the gradual slide in mediocrity of a once-great author is often explained away by saying that “the brain-eater got him”. One can reliably track the careers of such luminaries as Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein to that point where every successive book gets worse, and worse, and worse. I think that with The Teeth of the Tiger, Clancy has confirmed the trend of his last few books, and may even have entered the final, terminal part of his career; the brain-eater has got him, and the results are spectacular.

    (While doing research for this review, I came along this rather telling quote from Clancy himself, posting on alt.books.tom-clancy (June 30th, 2003): “For those of you who think you can do it better than I do, please give it a try. If my pride can go before the fall, you own it to your intellectual integrity (chuckle) to expose yourselves as I do. You know, as I approach -gasp- 60 I find myself becoming less tolerant of critics. Perhaps this is because they are like reporters, or-worse-politicians.” Well, what can I possibly add to that?)

  • Ashes of Victory (Honor Harrington 9), David Weber

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 2000, 560 pages, C$37.00 hc, ISBN 0-671-57854-5

    I had been warned, early in my quest to read all ten novels of Honor Harrington’s saga, that the series took a sharp downturn in the last few volumes. It seemed difficult to believe during the first few books; how could such an enjoyable series turn sour?

    Well, after reading the ninth book, it’s now more than possible; it’s obvious. What started as a fun romp through classical military fiction in zippy three-hundred-pages instalments with plenty of overdone space battles has now degenerated in a contest of endurance with overwritten behemoths that tell the story in a self-satisfied manner that belies way too much overindulgence.

    When we last saw omnipotent Honor Harrington and her magical treecat Nimitz (I’m not beyond sarcasm at this point), she had successfully managed to escape the galaxy’s most secure prison, freeing half a million political prisoners in the process and destroying a sizable fraction of the enemy naval forces. No less.

    The previous novel, Ashes of Victory, ended as Harrington ran back to friendly territory, leaving all the tedious mopping-up work to be done—we assumed—during the two novels. Er, not so. Almost half of Ashes of Victory is spent tying the loose ends of the previous volume. As Honor meets and greets practically every single member of the Harrington household, she engages in a tedious series of insufferable discussions in which both parties do their best to be as smug as possible. Trivial points are explained in excruciating details, well past the point at which any reasonably patient readers cries uncle. Meanwhile, the treecats’ capabilities are expanded once more (this time, they’re learning language. Quantum physics research can’t be far behind.) and Harrington gradually becomes queen Elisabeth III’s trusted confidante. The only upside to the whole sequence (indeed, the whole novel) is that we’re saved most mentions of the icky Harrington/Alexander romance.

    That’s because Alexander (“White Haven”, whatever) is off grabbing the latest Manticoran technology and kicking Havenite butt. The war (launched all the way back in volume 3) finally ends here, though it ends with a abrupt twist: Rather than fight it out like men, those evil cheese-eating Havenite actually surrender! Those perfidious monkeys! How can they dare?! Heck, by that time even the readers are applauding, as the war seems to be won through large scale space battles… that are never shown on-screen. Weber’s tendency to explain useless things and gloss over major events is never clearer than in Ashes of Victory, where even the fate of several major antagonists are briefly explained away in a sentence or two even as treecat minutiae takes pages to resolve. When the ending finally arrives after chapters and chapters of self-satisfied armchair bon mots between Harrington’s best friends, Weber rushes through dozen of dramatically important events in mere pages in order to wrap up the novel.

    Worst of all is that while all of this is going on, Honor Harrington is safely back home, managing her stead and setting in her new job as… a teacher. That’s right; the war ends without her. In fact, the only heroics are late, late, late in the book, and seem tacked-on to contrive Weber’s pre-determined conclusion. Those who have been charting Harrington’s ascent through the ranks will be pleased to note that she ends this particular novel on quasi-kissing terms with the Queen.

    But that’s not much of a relief for everyone else who had to slog through the novel. The tell-don’t-show style of plotting is bad enough, but when you couple it with the grating dialogues and the overall lack of energy, well, suddenly it’s just as well if this is the penultimate volume of the series as it currently exists. There’s only one more Harrington book left on my bookshelves, War of Honor, and that’s more than enough for me. At this point, I don’t care all that much to see what happens to her next.

  • When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1987, 276 pages, C$5.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-25555-X

    While I’ll be the first to champion SF’s many virtues and defend it against all unbelievers, I’m not blind to its many fault and won’t pretend to ignore them. One of the biggest of them, for instance, has always been SF’s lack of cultural awareness. Borne out of the social homogeneity of early SF writers (most of which were male, young and Caucasian), the genre’s cultural horizon has always been firmly Anglo-Saxon, from copious references to Shakespeare to a religious outlook that was seldom other than Judeo-Christian. Heck, women had to wait until relatively recently to be granted access to this boy’s club, let alone people of other ethnicities and religions. For a genre that claims a stake to all of humankind’s destiny, science-fiction has often assumed that the future would be all-WASP.

    Things are getting better nowadays, thanks to an increased diversity of authorial voices and the slow realization that you can’t get away with such outrageous simplifications in a world where the North-American readership itself is becoming more heterogeneous. Still, the length of the distance to cover can best be demonstrated by the continuing impact of George Alec Effinger’s When Gravity Fails.

    In many ways, there’s nothing very special about the plot of this novel. Here, our protagonist is a private investigators (stuck between the criminals and the police, as usual) who is asked by a shadowy crime lord to investigate a series of gruesome murders. Save for some of the background details, the first half of the novel is familiar to everyone with a taste for noir mystery fiction. Only at mid-novel, when the protagonist has to undergo radical body modifications, does it become obvious that, yes, this is true cyberpunk science-fiction, where the street is almost a character and where the future turns out to be much like today… except with more lethal gadgets.

    It reads well and feels great, mind you: Effinger’s prose is perfectly compelling and it doesn’t take a long time to be sucked into the story, as familiar as it may be. The prose is simple, stylish, accessible and full of local colour. Indeed that “local colour” ends up being the novel’s main claim to fame.

    Because When Gravity Fails takes place in a future where both the United States and the Soviet Union have imploded in dozens of splinter states, essentially wiping them out of the global geopolitical map. For other countries, this means that they get to run their own affairs, without political power plays by one side or another (or, in today’s post-Cold War world, without American influence). The novel takes place in the Budayeen, a dangerously decadent section of an unnamed Arabic city on the south shore of the Mediteranean sea. (Effinger isn’t particularly forthcoming as to the location; I thought some clues may point to Tripoli, but there’s nothing I can refer to in the novel to bolster this claim)

    Our narrator is Marîd Audran, a young Algerian/French Arab whose religious convictions vary according to the person he’s dealing with. His girlfriend Yasmin used to be a boy (not that there’s anything unusual with that in Marîd’s world), his liver is bullet-proof and his contacts are to be found anywhere between the police station and the sewer.

    Thanks to him, we get to visit the Budayeen and immerse ourselves in a completely foreign culture that’s as fascinating as any of the alien worlds to be found elsewhere in SF. What makes this novel work is the environment in which the story takes place. Even as Bruce Sterling was developing his globalhead, Effinger was right there, showing us that the future wouldn’t necessarily be Americanized. The fun of When Gravity Fails is in large part in hearing Marîd bitch against other ethnicities and explain the particularities of the world he lives in. Here, age-old Arabic traditions meld successfully with high-technology and the result is so memorable that we can only ask why Effinger’s cycle (there are two sequels to this volume) has remained a curio even more than fifteen years later.

    No matter; thanks to the cultural content, When Gravity Fails remains relevant, readable and enjoyable even as other cyberpunk novels of the era feel like tired clichés. It’s a good story, but the atmosphere is just terrific: seek out the novel if you have to… it’s well worth it.

    [October 2007: The sequel, A Fire in the Sun, is more of the same: The crime plot is standard SF/mystery, but it’s the setting that captivates. On the other hand, it’s more familiar and not quite as fresh. Worth a look for fans of the first volume, but don’t expect to be bowled over.]

  • Knight Hawk, Pat O’Connell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Leisure, 1997, 358 pages, C$6.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-8439-4253-3

    If you’re looking for a quick trash techno-thriller, hop on board, because Knight Hawk is all guns and few brains, a guilty pleasure that’ll leave your mind half-satisfied.

    This is a novel that doesn’t dawdle, even at its very beginning. By page 50, a “statuesque and shapely dark-haired woman” called Kim Kenada (Brief AKIRA flashback: “Tetsuo!” “Kenada!”, etc…) has commandeered a top-of-the-line F-15 armed with two nuclear weapons and taken off, leaving behind burning trucks, a few crashed planes and a trail of bodies. As the entire US Air Force scrambles after her, it’s obvious that she’s got scores to settle… and enough nuclear explosives to reduce, say, New York or Washington to glowing cinders.

    But who is that woman and what does she want? Knight Hawk‘s only deviation from its tight pacing occurs as we flashback and see Kenada’s younger years, and the cold calculating way in which she murders her cheating husband. (See? Nothing to worry about; merely one run-of-the-mill psychotic terrorist!) Otherwise, the novel seems paced in real-time, taking place between 19:05 and 23:00 on one clear January night. Impressive conceit, and it actually does work quite well.

    How well? That would be judged by the number of fun scenes O’Connell manages to cram in a few hundred pages. It’s obvious from the get-go that Knight Hawk is an action novel through-and-through. The dogfights quickly accumulate as Kenada manages (from a plane she’s never flown before!) to shoot down dozens of expert fighter pilots. (What can we say? According to the novel, she learnt it all on her IBM PC.) One gets the impression that most of O’Connell’s research was performed using Microprose’s “F-15 Strike Eagle III” flight simulator. On the “ridiculously easy” setting.

    The centrepiece of the book is undoubtedly a massive dogfight above and between Manhattan’s skyscrapers, as dozens of jets cause untold damage to the New York skyline while trying to catch that one PC-trained rookie terrorist. Missiles fly, jets explode, windows shatter from sonic booms, Central Park gets hit a few times and it all culminates both with a fly-between the World Trade Center and a nuclear detonation above the city. Whew! I’d pay good money for a movie version of this novel, only for this crazy sequence alone. It’s exhilarating in its go-for-broke willingness to ignore most of what we’d consider to be normal physics. Most of all, it’s tremendous fun. The rest of the novel is downhill from there despite a nifty climax above Washington DC landmarks.

    I would be less than forthright if I didn’t point out the superbly over-the-top quality of the ending, which manages to run all the way through the very last paragraph before revealing the grand bogeyman behind this whole fiendish plot—our good old friend Saddam! If by that time you’re not shrieking with laughter, well, I’m sorry, there is nothing I can do for you. Knight Hawk just isn’t the kind of novel you’re likely to enjoy.

    On the other hand, it is true that not many people are likely to enjoy Knight Hawk, if only because it’s such a terrible novel. Evil protagonist Kenada is significantly more appealing than any of the other cardboard characters only because she actually has a personality of sorts, as clichéd as it may be. The rest are essentially names and pay grades, with scant place in the plot but in shouting orders and exclamations of astonishment. One pilot manages to accidentally destroy sections of the Staten Island Bridge, an oil tanker and at least two other aircrafts (including his own), and the best the novel can do is the equivalent of an embarrassed grin—and damn the dead civilians. The quality of the writing isn’t much better than adequate, and is frequently dull when not describing action scenes.

    And so it comes to pass that even though Knight Hawk contains more honest mayhem than any five randomly-selected techno-thrillers, it’s still a very disappointing book. A better writer could have done miracles with those insane action scenes or even the bare outlines of the plot. As it currently stands, though, Knight Hawk‘s only literary merit is in the compressed pacing. It’ll be of interest to military fiction-fans with an unquenchable penchant for Cool Scenes, but few others. Too bad; there’s a lot of wasted potential there.

  • The Silence of the Langford, David Langford

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    NESFA, 1996, 278 pages, US$15.00 tpb, ISBN 0-915368-62-5

    My first stab at electronic commerce took place in late 1993, as I was a wee young lad let loose on the Internet for the first time: The web didn’t exist back then, but there was a bunch of stuff to read on Usenet, and one of those was a ad for a CD-ROM containing a bunch of science-fiction material. I sent all the required information and never got anything back; maybe the email disappeared in the ether. Nevertheless, I finally got the CD-ROM months later by lucking out at a local computer store. One of the things on the disc was a copy of David Langford’s Let’s Hear it for the Deaf Man, a collection of hilarious shorts critical pieces on science-fiction.

    Ten years later, the web is everywhere and e-commerce is a matter of billion$, but I still had to wait until I saw a real paper copy of Langford’s much-expanded 1997 collection The Silence of the Langford at Torcon3 (along with a real-life original of the author) to buy a paper version of Langford’s writing. NESFA’s little gem brings together pieces of Langford’s long bibliography dating from (roughly) 1982 to 1996. Mostly humorous critical pieces, The Silence of the Langford packs enough hilarious barbs to keep any true SF fan in stitches for hours at a time.

    Where to begin? There’s always the classic “Dragonhiker’s Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune’s Edge: Odyssey Two”, a sharp literary disembowelment of 1982’s SF blockbusters from Asimov to (eek) Hubbard. Rarely has SF criticism been as incisive, or as fall-down funny. This holds true for the vast majority of The Silence of the Langford; there is a lot of material here, and very few of it is less than hilarious.

    But don’t go thinking that The Silence of the Langford is merely a book of nasty jokes strung together: There is a considerable intellect at work here and past the laughs, there’s a real critical intention. Langford’s dissection of mainstream writers attempting to write SF in “Inside Outside” is a wealth of information on how SF truly works, delivered with impeccable style and wit. It’s easy to laugh at Langford’s “Trillion-Year Sneer”, but his points about SF’s tendency to do really stupid things are well-taken.

    It takes a die-hard SF fan to get all the jokes, naturally. And British SF fans are naturally at an advantage, given the number of references to European SF fandom peppered through. Langford is a good member-in-standing of the SF community (his fifteen-odd Hugos—and climbing!— are testament to that) and he repays his debt in full through hilarious portraits of the community. “You Do It With Mirrors” portrays the insanity of a convention newsletter so well that it’ll discourage hundreds (well, maybe dozen) of SF fans to ever undertake the enterprise.

    Even though Science-Fiction remains Langford’s true love, his erudition doesn’t stop at SF. There’s noteworthy content here about more conventional mystery fiction, including the “Slightly Foxed” columns, each and every one of them a delight despite being (often) outside SF. It helps that in addition of being a top-notch SF commentator, Langford is also a physicist by training, and so a few essays apply hard scientific methods in order to make his point. His destruction of Whitley Strieber’s Majestic (in which one of Langford’s most fictional work had been integrated without even a nod at Langford’s self-avowed hoax) is nearly as good as his merciless trashing of L. Ron. Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth.

    But wait! There’s more! The Silence of the Langford also includes pieces about Langford himself, from one of the best “how we moved” memoir I’ve read to plenty of priceless pieces on the life of a freelance writer. If that’s not enough, well, be advised that there are even a few computer columns thrown in for extra fun.

    David Langford, one of the smartest beings on the planet? Maybe. Certainly one of the funniest, and when you combine the two, you get an extraordinary writer. SF fans with a love for the field could do worse than order a copy of The Silence of the Langford. You probably won’t get it autographed (e-commerce be damned, there are advantages in buying a copy in presence of The Man himself), but the book itself will be enough of a trip that you won’t care. After reading it, trust me; Langford’s collection of Hugos will seem well-deserved.

  • Year’s Best SF 8, Ed. David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    EOS, 2003, 496 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-106453-X

    One of the few things that annoy me about David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best SF anthology series is how it’s impossible to guess, from the cover, which year’s “Best SF” we’re talking about. It’s undoubtedly a flaw that came straight from EOS’ marketing department. For one thing, a “1999 best SF” collection dates itself on the bookshelves far more quickly than an equivalent “Year’s Best SF 5”. For another, Hartwell and Cramer may have been trying to distinguish themselves from other year’s-best anthologies in SF’s long history, quite a few of them with the actual year in their title. (But then again, the Gardner Dozois anthologies also don’t put the year in their title, preferring cumbersome titles such as “The Year’s Best SF: Twenty-First Annual Collection”. Sigh…)

    But as annoyances go, it’s minor. It may be best to focus on what Hartwell and Cramer do well. If you compare it to the Dozois annual collection, Year’s Best SF is usually shorter (the editors have to deal with more stringent space restriction, hence few -if any- novellas), ensuring a better time/variety ratio for the reader. (It also makes it possible to publish the book as a mass-market paperback, to the financial joy of everybody) Then —and this is the big advantage as far as I’m concerned— there’s the fact that the Hartwell/Cramer books tend to be more firmly science-fictional than their fantasy-contaminated Dozois counterpart. Part of the reason for this purist approach is that Hartwell/Cramer also edit a “Year’s Best Fantasy” series… so they don’t have to cram everything they like in one single volume.

    I’m not saying that one should avoid the Dozois collections: For a complete overview of the field, it’s probably essential to read both, plus the recently-introduced Silverberg/Haber “Best of” series too. But if you can only read or buy just one…

    In any case, Year’s Best SF 8 is about year 2002, and the choices are eclectic. Not everything in here pleased me or interested me; I started skimming some stories a few pages in, others held my interest throughout. Some of them made it on the Hugo ballot; some were unjustly forgotten in the selection process. But I thought maybe half of the material was worth a read, and that’s not a bad average when it comes to recent fiction.

    The book opens on a strong note with Bruce Sterling’s whimsical “In Paradise”, my choice for short story of the year. It deals with a Texan plumber who falls in love with an Iranian girl thanks to the automatic translator in their cell phones. The diplomatic repercussions are so severe that Homeland Security gets involved, threatening to destroy the couple on behalf of national interest. As a reflection of 2002’s zeitgeist, it’s pitch-perfect. It also helps that it’s both hilarious and touching.

    Other strong stories include Charles Stross’ “Halo”, a fresh and new look at what may be our complicated future by a relatively new writer who is quickly climbing to the top of the SF field. Nancy Kress’s “Patent Infringement” is a cynical and very darkly funny take on the current intellectual property insanity. Meanwhile, Ken Wharton’s “Flight Correction” is a down-to-Earth (har-har; read the story) take on the idea of a space elevator and the possible ecological ramifications of the idea, mixed with some good character drama.

    Other stories I rather enjoyed included Michael Swanwick’s “Slow Life” (Hard-SF in the Arthur C. Clarke mold), Robert Sheckley’s “Shoes” (a mean but funny little tale about high-tech running shoes that attempt to take control of the narrator’s life), A.M. Dellamonica’s “A Slow Day at the Gallery” (interstellar war and intrigue… in an art gallery) and Greg Egan’s “Singleton” (Egan continues his apprenticeship of how to write better characters). Meanwhile, stories like “Geropods” (Robert Onopa), “Snow in the Desert” (Neal Asher), “Grandma” (Carol Emshwiller), “I Saw the Light” (Terry Bisson) and “The Diamond Drill” (Charles Sheffield) left me interested but unsatisfied, as if something was missing.

    But taken together, there’s something for everyone in this latest Year’s Best SF 8, a vigorous anthology that shows clearly that SF isn’t even on the threshold of irrelevance yet. As the millennium recedes in the back mirror, maybe there’s a place for more newer futures in our fiction. And those stories show the way it just may be.

  • Picoverse, Robert A. Metzger

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2002, 389 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-01030-X

    It doesn’t take a lot to make me interested in a book. Simple words like “a hard-SF novel by a working scientist”, for instance, are more than enough to make me drool over furniture and rush toward the bookstore check-out counter. While most would sneer at the thought of literature where scientific content would take precedence over such niceties as plot and characters, I know where my sympathies lie.

    So Robert A. Metzger’s novel Picoverse would seem to be a logical choice for the generous hard-SF reader that I am. Blurbs with such choice expressions as “Fresh Thrills” (Benford), “Cosmic Concepts” (Sawyer), “mind-boggling work of hard SF” (Wilson) and “knows his science” (Sheffield) are enticing enough. The universe-spanning work suggested by the plot summary simply closed the deal. Unfortunately, as it so often happens, the reality of the book didn’t seem quite so fulfilling as the blurbs suggested.

    Picoverse is about a bunch of things, but it’s mostly about how a few scientists manage to create alternate universes that somehow happen to be quite close to ours. Close enough not only to allow inter-universal travel, but also to allow for interesting alternate realities. An heroic trio is quickly formed between a woman scientist, her very strange son and a man who proves to be far more than a government contract supervior. Arrayed against them are nothing less than an alien schemestress and her faithful immortal servant.

    For the first hundred pages or so, Picoverse charges full-steam ahead with a steady stream of revelations, zings of plotting twists and intriguing character setup. At some point, it’s almost impossible not to wonder it Metzger will be able to keep it up at this pace; some of the big secrets seem to be revealed far too soon for the novel’s own good.

    At the same time, quite a few elements fail to gel together. The ultra-special son, for instance, seems to spring forth without explanation, routinely defying physics as we understand them without much concern from his mother—who should know better! At least the development of Jack Preston as someone far more powerful than even he realizes is handled gradually, though his coincidental (?) involvement in the plot is never resolved to my own satisfaction.

    Those two early flaws contain the seeds of the novel’s ultimately disappointing impact. The twists continue (at an inconsistent rate), racing between alternate histories, grandiose cosmology and pure metaphysics, but my interest in seeing how the story would end waned as it departed further and further from any objective reality. This plot skids away from any kind of control like a screeching car, and the only possible reactions are either to hang tight or go in kind of an apathetic shock as the whole landscape spins outside the windows. Surprises are sprung with a depressing lack of effect; this is a novel where the whole point seems to be all about deus ex machina. By the time half the characters were transformed in Neanderthals, I couldn’t possibly care less. Worse; by that time I had come to actively hate the evil little kid and his mother’s one-note characterization. (Don’t hurt my son! Oooh, he may be an evil genius with the potential to destroy entire universes, but don’t you dare hurt my son!)

    The fun little epilogue (not exactly unpredictable given the novel’s early flirtation with alternate history) managed to salvage some of my initial liking of the novel, but not quite enough. I don’t think even all the plot-lines are resolved.

    Picoverse is far from being a disaster. It certainly contains at least a dozen different elements that could be assembled in a dynamite ensemble. (Will Rogers as the President of the United States? Heh-heh.) But for some reason, it just failed to ignite properly. I suppose that Metzger has other novels in him, and much better novels at that. I will even wait for them attentively. But in the meantime, I’m having a hard time liking Picoverse, a promising stab at an ultra-hard-SF novel that ultimately falls flat. Better luck next time; I’ll be there to check it out.

  • Echoes of Honor (Honor Harrington 8), David Weber

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1999, 736 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-57833-2

    Honor Harrington has managed quite a few tricks in the seven previous volumes of her adventures, but this time she one-ups everything we’ve seen so far and comes back from the dead!

    Well, sort of: As the novel opens, her family, friends and colleagues are devastated when they witness a video of her execution at the hands of the eeevil Havenites. We readers, of course, know better; at the end of the previous volume In Enemy Hands, didn’t Honor break out of custody, escape with dozens of her closest allies, kill the uber-nasty villainess who had planned her execution, destroy a major enemy warship and land undetected on an isolated planet?

    Why, yes. And you can guess where the plot goes on from there. Even as everyone is mourning her (while a neat science-fictional twist is thrown in the gears of hereditary succession, with significant implications for future volumes), let’s just say that über-frau Harrington is plotting her revenge. Said revenge indeed ends up being spectacular; all is well that ends well, and we can once more rub our sweaty little hands at how things will turn out by next volume’s time.

    I suppose that I’m become increasingly flippant about the plot of the latter Honor Harrington books, but the series itself is steadily approaching self-parody. Isn’t there anything Harrington (along with her faithful—and increasingly powerful—treecat Nimitz) can’t do? Even partially blind, even with one arm not tied behind her back, but entirely cut off? Gee-whiz: It’s a wonder Queen Elizabeth III hasn’t yet abdicated in her favour.

    Even if you’re the kind of person who’s soft on increasingly omnipotent heroines, Echoes of Honor has other flaws. I have said numerous times before that the series’ dullest moments always come whenever the action moves away from Honor, most specifically to delve in Havenite politics. This volume once again proves the validity of this complaint. As the villains cackle and Honor’s acquaintances mourn, it’s obvious that we’re just not having fun with them—it’s all about Honor, Honor, Honor.

    Another flaw in Weber’s work is also becoming glaring; his tendency to over-write the trivial and skip over the essential. Pages and pages of details are spent explaining minor political points even as space battles are glossed over in a blink. More often than not, his scenes tend to present characters reflecting on past actions and planning their next act, without any actual “immediate” description of the action itself.

    Some of the exposition is interesting, mind you: In this volume, it’s obvious that the war of attrition is certainly not working for the good Manticorians: Haven is out-producing them, and their newer ships are gaining technological ground. But don’t worry too much; by the end of the novel, Manticore has found one interesting advantage and seems poised for a major technological breakthrough.

    Having paid for all ten books, I’m still on-board for the rest of the series. But of all the flaws described above, the over-writing is really starting to annoy me. From a snappy first volume, the Harrington books have become huge behemoths, unwieldy and seriously dull in spots. It’s non-sensical to try to force political realism (as boring as it may be) around a heroine so obviously over-the-top. Echoes of Honor is a mixture of the good with the bad; the audacious stunts of Weber’s larger-than-life heroine mixed along increasingly annoying writing flaws. Hey, maybe the war will be over by the next volume? Unless, oh, no… does that mean we’ll have to endure the White Haven romance once more?