Book Review

  • Impact Parameter, Geoffrey A. Landis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Golden Gryphon, 2001, 340 pages, US$24.95 hc, ISBN 1-930846-06-1

    Hard SF is good to find, and so the news that there would be an anthology of Geoffrey A. Landis’ short-fiction made me giddy with joy. What didn’t make make overly happy was the fact that it would be published by a small specialized editor and widely available only through the SF Book Club. Eh, what can you do? At least it counted against my “minimal purchase” membership requirement.

    At least the book itself was worth the trouble: Sixteen stories clearly tilted toward the hard-SF end of the spectrum, with some variety (a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, a humour vignette, a hard-SF/magic hybrid) thrown in for extra fun. It’s worth noting that Landis has published over sixty stories since his entry in the field: no mention is made, however, of the rationale behind the selection of those particular stories. We can probably assume they’re the best and/or the most representative. Indeed, there are a number of award-nominated stories in those sixteen.

    Landis is a NASA scientist by day and a science-fiction writer whenever he’s got time, and so it’s not surprising to see that his fiction tends to focus not just on hard-SF, but on real-science science-fiction. Stories like “Dark Lady” study the interactions between modern-day scientists and the way their mind works, with only a tiny nod at a scientific breakthrough at the very end. “Beneath the Stars of Winter” is similar, as Soviet scientists struggle to understand the universe from within a gulag deep in Siberia. In this regard, Landis’ fiction feels like Gregory Benford in how eager it is in presenting science fiction in another sense of the expression, with very human scientists.

    The difference between the two might be that Landis has a slight edge in accessibility. Of the sixteen stories, few are anything less than compulsively readable. Stuff like the sarcastic “What We Really Do At NASA” is even too short.

    Fans of the Hard-SF stuff will be please beyond belief at some of the science puzzle stories in this volume. The book opens with “A Walk in the Sun”, the kind of quasi-classic tale that takes a simple premise and, well, walks with it. Other stories, like “Ecopoeisis”, “Into the Blue Abyss” and “Approaching Perimelasma” are straight from the Hard-SF school of fantastic explorations. (Murder on an abandoned Mars! A trip in the oceans of Neptune! A dive through a wormhole!) Good stuff, though some fans with a lower regard for “that yucky characterization stuff” (yup, that’s me) may not find some of the sub-plots so compelling.

    Occasionally, Landis takes a stylistic or conceptual detour, and the results are as fascinating: “The Singular Habits of Wasps” has got to be one of the best steampunk crossovers I’ve read. “Snow” is a moody piece that picks away at SF’s triumphant ethos. “Ourobouros” is a simple but unnerving idea, done well. (Maybe he’ll expand it in a novel some day) “Elemental” is sort of an odd-ball in the lot, his first published story mixing hard science and gonzotific elemental magic. While intriguing, the concept seems developed in a uneven fashion: I’d certainly welcome a slicker, longer take on the same ideas.

    Anthologies are always, in my mind, a better way to judge a writer’s strengths and themes than a simple novel. In Landis’ case, Impact Parameter is a much stronger work than his rather disappointing Mars Crossing. It shows his dedication both to the parameters of science and the impact of fiction. His afterword notes awards, inspirations and details about his stories, clearly showing a genre writer who’s aware of his strengths. I will certainly buy his next book in an instant. Even through the SFBC if I have to.

  • The Edible Man, Anne Kingston

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    MacFarlane Walter & Ross, 1994, 365 pages, C$26.95 hc, ISBN 0-921912-72-2

    My fascination with all things related to Loblaws grocery stores will be difficult to understand by non-Canadians (or even, I suspect, non-Ontarians). Suffice to say that Loblaws is the provincial champ when it comes to food retailing. It provides a lot of good food at good prices, and that’s nothing to dismiss even if you’re one of those who swears by farmer’s markets, health co-ops and ethnic groceries. For nerds like me for whom the food-gathering experience is torture, Loblaws has simplified the process (through wide aisles, bulk packaging and tons of frozen dinners) to such an extent that shopping anywhere else is a trip back in hell.

    But that’s just me. Ask anyone else in Ontario, though, and they’re likely to mention the “Insider’s Report” ads and the distinctive “President’s Choice” products that are produced exclusively for Loblaws. In a world dominated by brands like Coca Cola, Heinz, Kraft, Christie’s or Nestlé, Loblaws has managed to build an in-store brand that offers products equal or superior to those sold everywhere else. The only way to get those “President’s Choice” products, naturally, is to go to Loblaws or one of their affiliates. Slick.

    This state of affairs is familiar to Ontarians, but it wasn’t always so, nor is it still a phenomenon outside the province. The Edible Man (subtitled “Dave Nichol, President’s Choice and the Making of a Popular Taste”) explains why, as it tracks not just the life of Dave Nichol (the putative “President” of the brand), but also the history of Loblaws, and tangential issues such as the rise and fall of consumer environmentalism, the education of taste, the war between national brands and in-house brands, the mechanics of cookies, the challenges in producing Italian food for dogs (no, really) and the introduction of low-cost beer in Canada.

    The rise of Loblaws as a major food empire in Ontario (along with Nichol’s role in this renewal) is a fascinating story and writer Anne Kingston does her best to extract all facets of it. While you may expect, from the title, a simple biography of Nichol, the real story is in food retailing. Fascinating anecdotes about the mechanics of food mass-production pepper the narrative, exposing readers to vitally important issues they may never have considered. (How much time do you spend thinking about what you eat? How much time should you spend thinking about what you eat?)

    In this, Dave Nichol emerges as a visionary with a truckload of faults. Contrary to the impression suggested by the chatty “Insider’s Reports” and the personality-centred “President’s Choice” promotional material (complete with his dogs and personal opinions about the nation), Nichol doesn’t have much affection for the “Unwashed Masses”. Gradually trained in fine cuisine from decidedly non-aristocratic origins, Nichol made himself an elitist arbiter of good taste in all facets of his life. Good news for customers, bad news for his employees: Tales of Nichol’s temper are also sprinkled throughout the book, reinforcing the impression of a tyrant who got results. For an authorized biography (Nichol figures prominently in the acknowledgements), this is an unusually honest one, even though one suspects that elitists do, in fact, like to be recognized as such. (Nichol’s lack of enthusiasm for ethnic food, however, is an interesting commentary on his so-called fine taste.)

    As a non-fiction book, this is a good one; issues are explained clearly, all the principal players seem to have been interviewed directly and if the structure is often erratic, the tangents are fascinating. All is brought together by a good index. Whether it’s used for reference or for pleasure reading, The Edible Man is one tasty non-fiction book.

    As is often the case with books almost a decade old, an update would be sorely needed. Nichol’s departure, which closed the book, wasn’t exactly the end of the line as far as his involvement with Loblaws was concerned: His face, his “Insider’s Report” and, obviously, his “President’s Choice” products continue to be facets of circa-2003 Loblaws store. Cott is still going strong as a generic soft-drink company after a disastrous diversification in the mid-nineties: it only recovered after the death of its founder (something one could predict from reading The Edible Man). Deals with retailers in Quebec have allowed Loblaws to expand in this market. After the abrupt end of his Cott-sponsored new business endeavours in the mid-nineties, Dave’s biggest post-Loblaws success to date has been a line of beers, an ironic fate for a man who didn’t even like this very proletarian drink…

  • The Perseids and Other Stories, Robert Charles Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 224 pages, C$17.95 tpb, ISBN 0-312-87524-X

    From a sequence of unremarkable early novels re-using the traditional tropes of Science Fiction in indifferent fashions, Robert Charles Wilson has matured in a far more interesting SF writer. Staring from The Harvest, continuing with Mysterium and then on to his “Tor books” (Bios, Darwinia, The Chronoliths), Wilson has become steadily more ambitious and the impact of his novels has increased along with the author’s improving skills.

    Now, Tor has confirmed their faith in Wilson by publishing this collection of his short stories. The surprise isn’t that the book is a good one (any Wilson fan could have predicted this), but how much, even as Wilson sets out to write science-fiction, the cumulative impact of these stories is much, much closer to horror.

    There are nine stories in The Perseids, three of them written specially for this collection and the other spanning a a publication period running from 1995 to 1999. For American readers, this collection fulfils an essential purpose in bringing together stories that hadn’t previously been available south of the border: Four stories had previously appeared in Canadian SF/Horror anthologies whose American distribution was, at best, lacking. There is one Aurora-winning short story in the bunch, along with the Hugo and Nebula-nominated “Divided by Infinity”.

    While Wilson claims that all the stories are loosely related by a common link (the presence, explicit or not, of a used bookstore called “Finders”), the links are very loose, with a multiplicity of dark, strange creatures inhabiting the crevices of our reality. You could make a better case that the stories are united by their chilling impact; while billed as SF, The Perseids is closer to a horror anthology, as every story has an uneasy edge to it, usually topped by a glimpse behind the comfortable illusion of our reality. There are other similitudes, mind you: most stories feature lonely, unapproachable protagonists (usually men, usually bouncing back from failed relationships), a fascination for the esoteric and frequent acknowledgements to science-fiction itself. As acknowledged by the ominous cover montage, the city Toronto itself usually prefigures as a constant background to the stories.

    Of the nine stories, the best may very well be the Hugo-nominated “Divided by Infinity”, which could previously be found in the original Tor anthology Starlight 2. It offers a nifty literary “what if?”, follows it up with a Big Catastrophe and concludes with a cute SF twist that pushes quite a few assumptions to the limit. Also very strong is the Aurora-nominated title story, which mixes occult knowledge with, again, a bit of SFictional existential horror to memorable impact.

    Conversely, I wasn’t so taken with either “The Observer” (an alien abduction story with some neat historical cameos) or the concluding “Pearl Baby” (which didn’t have much of a point despite tying together many of the sub-threads of the book), but it’s worth noting that either of those stories remained far more interesting and accessible than most of the stories on this year’s Hugo ballot.

    Another of The Perseids‘s wonders is that, even despite the dour protagonists and the spine-chilling conclusions, it’s never a depressing book. The horrors are offset by the magnitude of their revelations, almost as if SF’s sense of wonder could compensate for the terror of the unknown forces. It also helps that Wilson’s style is never less than limpid, with just enough style to add to the prose without distracting from the story itself.

    In short, there’s a lot to like in The Perseids regardless of whether you’re already a fan of Wilson’s fiction or not. It’s certainly one of his strongest books, free of the curious structural problems that plagued books like Darwinia and Bios. The stories all pack an interesting wonder or two, while acknowledging their debt to previous science-fiction (essentially; playing to the crowd). Torontonians should be more pleased than most to see how their city prefigures in the collection (sometimes as a part of the story itself, such as in “The Inner Inner City”) while everyone else, regardless of their origins, should get a kick out of a snappy, solid anthology.

  • Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2003, 208 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-765-30436-8

    Finally. Someone is getting it.

    The late nineties were a time of unprecedented social change as driven by new technology. The Internet barged in, people reacted, adapted, lived on. Textbook techno-revolution as defined by Science Fiction. You would have thought that SF would have thrived, expanded, crowed a little, gained new respect and built on the wave.

    Pfah. Insert sounds of crickets. SF stood still, closed its eyes and hoped no one noticed it was still recycling its own past glories. Meanwhile, I was going nuts trying to find The Good Stuff, the real cutting-edge SF that went past First SF’s increasingly creaky futures. Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson and Greg Egan rock my world at every new book. But they alone can’t sustain an avid reader like myself. Where are the other new SF writers? Why can’t anyone else do something as simple as consider the lessons of the Internet boom and apply them to the coming spintronic, biotech and nanotech revolutions? Why is it that “Wired” is more interesting than “Asimov’s”?

    With his first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow vault onto the stage as an amazingly confident SF writer, someone born of both SF fandom and the pressure-cooker of high technology. With his book, he bitch-slaps most of the sleepy SF mid-list, teaches the genre a new trick or two and (in passing) reaffirms my belief in Science Fiction as a literature with a future.

    Reading the most optimistic speculations of the digerati, it would often seems as if humanity is doomed to utopia. What with nanotech ending material scarcity, biotech leading the way toward immortality and computers linking us all while putting libraries of libraries at our fingertips, you will have to work hard at being physically needy in the none-too-distant future. Throw in space exploration, personality uploads/downloads, cryogenics plus a reputation economy based on “whuffies” and you’ve fulfilled Wired’s checklist for the future. When people are free to live long enough to compose symphonies, learn dozen of languages, get multiple post-graduate degree and do pretty much what they want without fear of death as more than an inconvenience, what is the difference between such a society and paradise as defined by the Internet revolution?

    That’s where Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom begins. It’s no accident if the cover blurbs are from luminaries from the infotech and SF field: Sterling, Rushkoff, O’Reilly, Kapor, Lessig and Rucker all provide tantalizing praise about the novel and it actually does live up to its advance reputation: This is prime twenty-first century Science-Fiction, staking a claim to our new futures rather than the recycled day-dreams of the old SF. As our protagonist Julius navigates the chaotic (but functional) ad-hocracies of the Bitchun Society and sees his whuffie level fluctuate along with his attempts to preserve Disney World in its original TwenCen glory, the electric newness of Doctorow’s prose becomes contagious. You do not read it as much as it infects you.

    Though it may be only 208 pages long, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is one heck of a book crammed with an overdose of ideas. Written in a compulsively absorbing style that combines the eyeball kicks and the irreverence of the latest prose punks (Palahniuk, Stephenson, Sterling… you know: the good ones), Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom flattens the competition and delivers on the promises of Science Fiction. You do not merely want to live in this future; you want to create it.

    But, perhaps more importantly for genre readers, this is a novel that finally takes the extrapolation crown from the socio-technological crowd and brings it back (if only for a book) in science-fiction. This is what SF should have transformed itself into, rather than keep on refining the same old shtick over and over again. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is not a complicated book (the ending is even a curious let-down), but it has a vitality of its own. Reading it is a breath of fresh air after so many dull stories that all feel the same. Doctorow manages, with this novel, to land at once on my “to buy!” list of authors: He, like few others, represents the future of SF.

    You can see for yourself at http://craphound.com/down/ where the whole novel is freely available on-line for your reading pleasure… Read the thing, forward the URL, pre-order the paperback for your paper library and wait for his next book… if you can.

  • Designing with Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    New Riders, 2003, 436 pages, C$54.99 tpb, ISBN 0-7357-1201-8

    In my earlier review of Jeffrey Zeldman’s first book, Taking Your Talent to the Web, I made no secret of my admiration for his design philosophy and his influence on my own web design style. I suppose that this type of author/reader relationship isn’t uncommon in specialized trades, nor will it diminish in this age of daily blogs and direct publishing.

    Through the early part of 2003, readers of zeldman.com witnessed a period of bi-weekly updates during which Zeldman worked on his book, finishing chapters on a daily basis and promising us a return to normalcy soon enough. Now the book in on shelves and it’s pretty much what Zeldman devotees (does this sound like a cult, yet? Zellld-maaan…) wanted and what non-Zeldfans need.

    Designing with Web Standards is about many things, but it’s mostly about the web’s increasing maturity as a publishing media. The wild days of frantic exploration are over, web design is experiencing an temporary lull and both of these are good things: Now that we’ve seen the possibilities, the standardization can begin, and the result will be a better web experience for the vast majority. In this chatty non-fiction book that reads like a fireside talk and belongs on your reference shelf, Zeldman shows everyone how to learn to love web standards.

    The first part of the book is an idealistic advocacy piece in favour of those standards. Nearly all web sites are obsolete if you take the long view, argues Zeldman. Those patched-up hacks and unstructured presentation markup tags will look increasingly creaky in five, ten or twenty years. (Anyone who assumes that the sites will not survive this long obviously wasn’t paying attention during the Y2K frenzy.) As good web designers, professional or amateur, it’s our responsibility to do everything within our power, right now, to build solid web sites that won’t be obsolete on their launch day. Zeldman’s ideals are bigger than current reality and that’s fine. No one can know the future, but current web standards are our best guide to ensure we won’t be caught unprepared.

    For regular readers of zeldman.com, this is hardly news. But the book can now be used as a “respectable paper reference” for pointy-haired bosses left cold by URLs. Indeed, I expect this first section of the book to be photocopied and sent to web project managers across the nation: Zeldman is a persuasive writer, and it’s hard to remain unconvinced of the goodness of XHTML/CSS and DOM/ECMAScript in building web sites after the first fifty pages.

    What follows is a gradual shift toward practical usage of XHTML/CSS in building sites. It’s a painless introduction to CSS for web designers, and while it’s not very complete (Zeldman himself acknowledges the deficiencies and suggests Eric Meyer’s books as more comprehensive references), it’s useful in how it weaves this in Zeldman’s core thesis of web standardization. This exercise culminates in a step-by-step look at the construction of a real, web-standards-compliant web site. This section of the book, I suspect, will be invaluable to apprentice web designers as we’re treated to a look inside the mind of a professional web designer during a real-world project, from concept to debugging.

    Web design doesn’t stop when the first page renders in the first browser, of course: The third part of the book delves deeep into bugs, workaround, real-world compromises and other stuff that makes web designers earn their fee. Most of this material is adapted from Zeldman’s blog, making it available (and indexed!) in a handy paper package.

    All of this could be quite dull if it wasn’t for Zeldman’s world-renowned prose, surely the easiest web technical read in recent memory. There’s a punch-line on every page —and useful information too! Designing with Web Standards has the continued appeal of a Dave Barry column, backed with invaluable real-world information you can depend upon. As a book, it’s in many ways a recycling of Zeldman’s daily blog musings, but when the level of quality remains so high, it’s his on-line readers who are getting a bargain. If you’re a professional web developer, there’s no real excuse to avoid reading Designing with Web Standards. Not if you want to remain in this crazy-fun business for more than a few years, that is.

  • Life’s Lottery, Kim Newman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster UK, 1999, 488 pages, C$42.00 hc, ISBN 0-684-84016-2

    You’re at a book sale. You see a new book by Kim Newman. You’re intrigued, because Newman has produced exceptional work before (the Anno Dracula trilogy, etc.) and you’re curious to see what else he’s written since then. Reading the book jacket copy, you’re even more intrigued, because the book seems to be a “choose your own adventure” type of novel. How quaint! Good chunks of your early teenhood were spent “playing” with such books. Before you moved on to other things. You wonder what a gifted writer would be able to do with that format. The book, a British first edition hardcover, is cheap; you buy it.

    Months later, you fish the book out of your “to read” pile and dive in. From the onset, this is clearly not a juvenile piece of fiction. The first chapter is laced with allusions to free will, choice and constant death. You’re Keith Marion, a middle-class English boy. This book is your life. Your lives, rather. By the end of the second chapter, you’re already faced with a choice. A seemingly innocuous question which will determine your path through life. Answer one way, go to Chapter 2, and you may live to know romantic entanglements, success beyond measure and bizarre life replays. Answer another, go to chapter 3, and your life will be dedicated to revenge.

    You answer and read about the consequences. But more choices are available to you. By now, you have remembered your teenhood “interactive novels” routine and started mapping your choices using pen and paper. Soon, you’re paging through the book forward and back, going from chapter to chapter to choose how the story will end. After a few chapters, you meet a painful death. You go back up a node in the tree of fate and try again. And so on. You die often, but just as often you’re left to contemplate unpleasant “and so on” lives of fixed patterns.

    This may have started by reminding you of your teenage years, but Life’s Lottery is different. Unlike the simple mostly-linear branchings of those early novels, Life Lottery pulls no stops in presenting radically different lives for Keith Marion. Pretty soon, your first sheet of paper is full and you must use another one to chart the choices available to you. Your life (or is it Keith’s life?) can be a mystery, or a thriller, or a romantic drama, or science-fiction. Characters you think you know in one way can reappear in other lives in various roles, from friend to villain, wife to murderess.

    You realize that Keith’s life may be open to choices, but your perception of the book is shaped by your own reading. You may read all possible permutations, but it’s still going to be affected by your first run-through. Some elements are explained here, but not there. Mary will always be a dangerous murderess first, because you first saw her as a danger, whereas another initial path may have made her seem more pleasant.

    Without meaning to, you’re caught up in the book. You read it in two days, playing with the stories as much as Newman is playing with you. There are incredible tricks in the novel, from “replays” to parallel fates to false choices to delicious hints of deep-seated horror underlying the concept. You develop an understanding of the story that resembles a fractal, or a hologram; meta-personalities emerge.

    The novel also starts working on you. Forces you to consider your life and the choice you’ve made. You think this is one of the best things you’ve read in a while. Certainly one of the most original books in your collection. You finish the book, but the book isn’t finished with you.

    You go on-line and seek other reactions. You’re not alone. You learn that the book was never republished in America. You learn that the narrator of the novel is featured in another novel by Newman. You find that other readers were similarly affected by the book.

    Something still nags at you. You pull together your complete map of the book and start striking numbers off a list of numbers from 1 to 300. Something is left; a hidden path inside Keith’s lives, an Easter egg. You read the sequence and discover a wonderful framing sequence that (somewhat) ties it together. You consider whether this harms or strengthens the novel, and come to love it without reservations. You wonder if you should include the chapters number sequence of this hidden scenario in your review.

    You finally decide against it. Some choices should be left to others.

  • Kiln People, David Brin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2002, 569 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34261-8

    The golem has a long and distinguished history in fantastic literature, from the Bible onward, up to the Capek’s first “robots”, men of metallic clay designed to do the work of humans. David Brin’s Kiln People is a playful update on this concept, wrapped in a futuristic thriller and smoothed over with clear prose.

    In the future, there will be dittos, states Brin as a starting premise. Clay replicas of people, temporarily imprinted with their memories and personalities for up to 24 hours until the chemical dissolution of the ditto. Re-assimilation of ditto memories is possible, but remains optional. Why spend a day cleaning up the house when you can simply replicate a ditto for this express purpose, then re-integrate their memories just to make sure you remember where you’ve filed everything? Why risk policemen’s lives when you can just use dittos instead? Why subject your permanent body to sexual, chemical or physical abuse when you can send it to party all night long and then re-integrate their memories at dawn?

    Mega “What If?”! The possibilities are limitless, and that’s part of what makes the first half of Kiln People so compelling: This is a big Science-Fiction novel with a brand-new premise (does it sound like Laura J. Mixon’s Proxies, though?) and the guts to take a hard look at the possibilities of the thing. For those who still cling to the comfortable notion that SF should be a literature of ideas, well, look not further than this book to make you fall in love with the genre all over again. Brin easily integrates plenty of neat derived possibilities and runs with them through the course of the novel.

    There is a plot to tie everything together, and (perhaps unfortunately), it ends up being a complex, heavy-duty story of familial obsessions, criminal conspiracies, doomsday devices and fancy detection. The hero of the piece is one Albert Morris, private investigator extraordinaire with an uncanny ability to make very faithful dittos. (Most people have trouble creating completely-faithful versions of themselves, and occasionally create runaway dittos that don’t identify with their creators.) In the course of his work, RealAl often generates clay duplicates of himself, sending them in dangerous or boring situations, always trying to nab crooks and corporate criminals. But on one particular day where he decides to generate four dittos to make care of ongoing business, well, let’s just say that a lot of very bad things happen at once to all of him…

    Fans of the author won’t be dissatisfied by this effort, Brin’s first stand-alone adult novel since 1993’s Glory Season. His trademark blend of deep extrapolation, cheerful optimism and good humour is on full display here, in a novel that is more than worthy of attention. Those who have read Brin’s non-fiction work The Transparent Society can expect some further discussion of privacy and accountability. Stylistically, the challenges in representing five different first-person variants of the same characters are significant. And yet it’s one of Brin’s greatest successes that the viewpoint-hopping is handled almost seamlessly. (Readers with a low tolerance for puns or cliffhanger chapters may not be overly pleased, though.)

    As the novel advances, its challenges become even greater and Brin stumbles a bit. The carefully-constructed rules of dittotech are, as expected, bent and then broken by new technology. (Alas, a suggestion that dittos have their own subculture hidden from the real humans is sort of left unexplored) The progressive slide of the novel from light-hearted mystery to deeper metaphysical territory isn’t completely unexpected, but it’s a thematic departure from the initial feel of the story. It nevertheless evolves into an interesting dissection of identity and even of humanity.

    Add to that the lighthearted tone, and you’ve got an old-school pure-SF novel that works on several levels at once, and provides a great reading experience on top of everything else. I don’t ask for much more than that in my SF diet, and that’s why I’m pleased to see that Kiln People made it on the 2003 Hugo ballot for best novel of the year. It certainly has my vote.

  • The Lessons of Terror, Caleb Carr

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 2002, 272 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 0-375-50843-0

    The events of September 11, 2001 had such a deep impact, in part, because they were a relatively new phenomenon. Isolated from the rest of the world by two oceans, America had seldom known the reality of terrorism. After a brief period in the seventies when airliner hijackings were the rage, terrorists seemed on their way to become an amusing shorthand for action movie villains. But surely not an actual threat, right?

    That notion collapsed along with the World Trade Center. Suddenly, Americans started to ponder important questions: Why did this happen? How do you ensure that this doesn’t happen again? In The Lessons of Terror, Caleb Carr defines terrorism, takes a look at the history of the concept and suggests a way out of terror.

    You’ve heard his name before: Among other things, Carr wrote two well-received historical thrillers (The Alienist and a follow-up, The Angel of Darkness) and one science-fiction novel (Killing Time)… which wasn’t so well-received. But Carr’s first advocation was military history and so The Lessons of Terror is a bit of a professional book for him, an historical exploration of past events in order to better understand the mechanics of terrorism.

    Far from being limited to the stereotypical bomb-packing religious fundamentalists, terrorism -according to Carr— is nothing less than the use of violence against civilian populations in order to exert pressure on a political entity. As he demonstrates, terrorism defined as such has a long history, one that has an intricate relationship with more traditional military history. The Roman empire, for instance, waged war against enemy garrisons, but then often extended the benefits of Roman citizenship to the conquered populations. When it lost sight of this good treatment of civilians, well, Carthage burned and the empire later fell, victimized by internal rebellions and stuck in a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks.

    The Lessons of Terror is largely a treatise on the history of war and its impact on civilians. It stems from terror, but touches upon subjects like the justification for war, the innocence of civilian populations, military discipline and guerrilla warfare. Carr’s (oft-repeated) main theory is that terror never succeeds: Through more than two thousand years of military history, everyone who has resorted to terror tactics has inevitably been defeated, sooner or later. It’s an encouraging statement when applied to enemies (given that the only rational solution to terrorism is to make it obvious that it’s a self-defeating tactic) but also a troubling one considering any response to terrorism; in fighting against it, the worst method is to adopt its tactics -something well worth remembering these days.

    The Lessons of Terror is billed as a military history book, but I suspect that it’s closer to a mass-market vulgarization than to a serious treatise: while the depth of Carr’s knowledge of history is impressive to laymen, the argumentation, at times, seems to rely a lot on definitive adjectives rather than a complete train of thought. For us dumb readers, it’s easy to be swayed by repetitions of “terror never works”, but not as obvious to find the crucial missing information that may argue against his thesis. One suspects that, in some ways, this is “the feel-good military history book of the year!”

    At the same time, there is no doubt that this is a book that aims for controversy. While I was rather distressed by Carr’s constant put-down of all things French at first, I felt much better when it became obvious that he’s an equal-opportunity agent provocateur: His casual inclusion of key American figures (Sherman, Jackson, Kissinger, Nixon, etc.) in his gallery of terrorists is a nice little tweak to just about everyone out there, and his sceptical view of American foreign policy is bound to get a rise from most quarters. Not to mention his badly-integrated screed against the American intelligence community.

    While I’d be ill-informed to say whether The Lessons of Terror are truly those derived by Carr, there’s no doubt that this is an entertaining, detailed and argumentative treatise well worth reading. A short book packed with a steady stream of provocative ideas, it’s as infuriating as it is fascinating. At a time where too many knee-jerk reaction to terror are being treated as sane threat responses, it’s heartening to find that someone, at least, is willing to take a longer view of the situation. When current events serve us an unexpected curve-ball, it’s reassuring to think that, on some level, it’s merely another repetition of history. There is nothing new; just unfamiliar combinations.

  • Perdido Street Station, China Miéville

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2000, 710 pages, C$27.00 tpb, ISBN 0-345-44302-0

    I don’t read a lot of fantasy, in part due to a feeling that it doesn’t have much to offer: locked-in traditional high fantasy is almost as rigidly defined as today’s contemporary world, and that’s a straight trip to boredom. Granted, this is less a reflection on epic fantasy than it is a reproach to the writers unwilling to re-invent a genre fatally tainted by Tolkien.

    But wait! China Miéville is a writer willing to shake it up and Perdido Street Station is the novel I’ve been waiting for. A smart blend of science-fiction and fantasy in an environment quite unlike anything ever written before, this is the kind of book that leaves a deep impression on neophytes and jaded cynics alike.

    Some novels are about characters and some are about stories, but this one is about a city: New Crobuzon. Set in an imaginary universe where kinds of magic work nearly as well as Victorian-era technology, New Crobuzon is a vast playground, a place where rivers converge, races commingle and all railways end at the gigantic Perdido Street Station.

    One character will introduce us to the city: Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, an eccentric human with an insectoid girlfriend and an interest in a magical science called Crisis Theory. His reputation has already travelled some way and so one day he is accosted by a stranger, a mangled bird-man who has crossed half a world in order to be able to fly again. Helped along by a generous quantity of gold, Isaac soon finds himself tasked with re-creating the gift of flight. In a universe equally shaped by science and technology, this would seem to be an easy task. The only problem would be to pick only one method. But Isaac is more meticulous, and before long he’s collecting all types of creature in order to study how they fly, and how he may be able to re-create the effect.

    If Perdido Street Station has one flaw, it’s that the early part of the novel is riddled with coincidences. Isaac’s call for creatures just happens to net him a caterpillar than just happens to feed on something that her girlfriend’s manager just happens to have when he visits, and naturally his girlfriend just happens to receive a commission from someone who may know a lot more about this situation, but then Isaac just happens to be contacted by something that just happens to know of a betrayal… and so on.

    But whereas in other novels the heavy hand of authorial influence would be too obvious for comfort, it doesn’t seem to matter all that much in Perdido Street Station. This, after all, is a novel of discovery, a novel of a place rather than of plot. Not that the plot doesn’t start moving after a lengthy set-up: Pretty soon, thanks to some unfortunate events, New Crobuzon is plunged in nightmarish terror and its denizens race feverishly to find a solution. Their appeals to the lowest powers are rejected (!) and so they must appeal to an even stranger force… even as Isaac discovers an occult conspiracy he did not suspect.

    The delights of this novel are many, but few are as satisfying as the gradual discovery of the city and its inhabitants. Cactus-people, automatons, terrible dream-suckers, a dimension-shifting entity called the Weaver, insect humanoids and scores of other creatures all figure in Perdido Street Station, splendidly shown by Miéville as he delights in showing off the wonder of his world. There is a lot of material in those 710 pages.

    In some ways, this is like a dream setting for a role-playing game. In others, it’s a pleasure to see Miéville introduce all of these elements, then use them all in the road leading to the spectacular climax of the piece. There are striking images throughout the novel, whether it’s the description of the city, scenes where our characters travel through dimensions or when they witness, helplessly, creatures feeding on a victim’s mind.

    This, by almost any measure, is a major novel. Written with skill and reasonable clarity, it cuts right to the heart of fantasy to show us an original world. Characters are well-drawn, wonders are unleashed at regular intervals. There is deep horror, unconventional twists of fate, satisfying developments and heart-breaking conclusions. Modern and classical at once, Perdido Street Station combines the technological love of SF with the possibilities of fantasy and the unnerving tension of horror to deliver an experience unlike any other. Make a place in your reading stack for this book; it’s more than worth it.

  • In Enemy Hands (Honor Harrington 7), David Weber

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1997, 544 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-57770-0

    We readers are a sadistic bunch. Oh, we seem mild-mannered enough, sitting there with a book in our hands, the occasional smirk on our lips. But in our heads, ah, it’s a completely different attitude. We like characters, but we want a reason to like them. We want to see how they react when rocks are thrown at them. We’re not interested in some happy-but-dull guy without a care in the world; we want to see explosive action, heart-wrenching drama, death-defying adventure and against-all-odds comebacks. Make no mistake; everyone loves a happy ending, but such endings are meaningless without some prior suffering.

    David Weber certainly belongs to the rock-throwing school of characterization. His flagship heroine, Honor Harrington, is a character defined by crises. In novel after novel, she’s thrown in impossible situations, but always emerges triumphant as both an officer and a lady.

    Still, apart from the occasional curve ball in volume 4 and 5, Honor has always done pretty well in military engagements. Hadn’t lost a fight despite some tense moments. This changes in this seventh volume of the Harrington saga: In Enemy Hands. For the Harrington fan, three noteworthy things happen in this novel.

    First, the Admiral of White Haven is gets a sudden crush on Honor. Much eeewing ensues as readers realize that he’s a ninety-years old admiral of the fleet married to a crippled ex-actress and she’s a forty-year old captain with only one previous lover to her credit. Further eeewing ensues as we realize that Weber almost never does anything for kicks or occasional passing mentions, which means it’ll probably be a more-or-less permanent fixture of the series until the death of one of them. Egawd. Now that’s a promising thought for the next novels. (Almost as promising is the mention of the treecats engaging in colonial expansion, ensuring that we’ll see much more of them in books to come.)

    Second: the ongoing Manticore/Haven war is not going well for the Manticoran empire. Despite their superior educational system, superior technology, superior moral fortitude and, well, overall superiority to those evil Havenite socialists (whose name are more French than ever, despite their Soviet-style regime), the Manticorans are not making any significant progress in the war, which threatens to turn into a contest of attrition. And that’s a type of the battle the Manticorans can’t win. Everyone is getting a little bit desperate, and that, in no small part, is why Honor is brought back in full service.

    Finally, —and this is the biggie that relegates even the White Haven romance to the background—, something new and delightful happens to Honor at mid-book this time around: She loses. She surrenders. She’s taken prisoner. She’s stuffed in a vessel by a power-mad Havenite, tortured (along with her treecat), abused, judged guilty of whatever crime is required to kill her and sent to her execution. Woo!

    That’s when the readers’ sadism come in: After books of successful space battles in which Honor wins by the tiniest margins, it’s somewhat of a welcome change to see her fail at something, for once. By this time in the series, she’s such a super-woman character that a little reader backlash is almost inevitable. For the first time since her Grayson exile, the novel doesn’t follow the usual template.

    Unfortunately, the price to pay for this new development is to spend far more time with the Havenite antagonists and as usual any time spent away from Honor is usually time wasted. (There is, however, a neat subplot involving Officer Harkness.) In Enemy Hands is never terribly dull (Weber’s writing style is brisk enough to keep us interested, no matter what), but it’s hard to avoid the thought that in terms of density of action, Weber’s last few Harrington books are suffering from a great deal of over-writing.

    Oh well: It’s not as if we can stop now. As far as this volume’s conclusion is concerned, what you think will happen, happens. By the end of the book (the clearest cliffhanger the series ever had), the situation is still critical (Baen has to sell the next novel, after all) but Honor has once again given one big black eye to Haven. On to the next story!

  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Volume 1), Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    America’s Best Comics/DC Comics, 2002, 192 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 1-56389-858-6

    One of these days, I will write about copyright and the public domain and how corporations are holding real human intellectual achievements for ransom in exchange for imaginary monetary gains. I will discuss how our culture feeds on itself and how unlimited copyrights are choking vitality out of it. And whenever I do, I will reference Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen at length.

    But not today, because I want to spend some time just discussing Moore’s remarkable work. It’s not the first of his stories to find its way on my bookshelves (already furnished with a copy of Watchmen and V for Vendetta), but it’s well worth some attention even for non-comics fans. A steampunk fantasy in which some of the best-known fictional heroes of the Victorian era are brought together to fight threats to the British empire, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is indeed an extraordinary piece of work mixing superhero fantasy, literary allusions and historical flair.

    On the eve of the release of the July 2003 movie adaptation, I scoured local comic shops and managed to get the last available copy in the Ottawa area, fresh out of the “new arrivals” box. The trade paperback edition of the first series (a second is currently being published, with a third one announced) contains all six episodes of the story, plus miscellaneous art and a collected “serial” short story written by Moore in the style of H. Rider Haggard.

    Why Haggard? Maybe because he’s the author of the Alan Quatermain stories, and Quatermain is one of the five “extraordinary gentlemen” of the title. Completing the cast are Mina Harker, Captain Nemo (Woo! My favourite!), Doctor Jekyll (including Doctor Hyde) and the invisible man. All of which are safely out of copyright by now, hence available for play. (Allusions to their contemporary detective Sherlock Holmes are also sprinkled through, though by 1898, Holmes is still presumed dead from his Reichenbach Falls showdown. One also suspects that Moore has steered away from Holmes in reaction to the endless Holmes pastiches found elsewhere in steampunk.)

    The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen essentially reprises superhero comic book fantasies: the story is strictly comic-book stuff, complete with a climactic battle aboard a flying fortress. But superhero fantasies have rarely been this emotionally extreme. This is from a script by Alan Moore: it’s not for kids. The Invisible Man is an amoral psychopath and a serial rapist capable of casual murder. Mr. Hyde doesn’t appear to be any better. Alan Quatermain is introduced while in a deep heroin-induced stupor and spends most of the story re-learning how to be heroic. Even Nemo has a rich past as a pirate. All of which makes for a fascinating group dynamic, with portentous implication for their next adventures. (Indeed, I’m told that one particular conflict is settled in a grisly fashion in Volume Two.)

    But the real reason to read this graphic novel is in the intricate historical and literary allusions. Moore has performed some heavy-duty research to enhance the credibility of his imagined universe and it shows. From the second page onward, we’re treated to a richly-detailed alternate-universe Victorian England, complete with a bridge across the Channel, cavorite, the Nautilus, Moriarty and references to just about every single known (or less-known) Victorian-era character. This is one comic book worth re-reading, certainly with a concordance in hand. (Check out Jess Nevins’ Heroes & Monsters, an earlier version of which can be found on-line.)

    It all amounts to one impressive graphic novel. While I’m not a fan of Moore’s ultra-violent sensibilities nor of Kevin O’Neill’s flat and angular artwork (which, at least, has the merit of looking like a hypothetical Victorian-era comic book), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is definitely something else, a work of brilliance that stands apart from just about anything else you’ve read before. The historical tone is nearly perfect, and the sense of playful storytelling is contagious.

    It’s not a surprise to find out that the 2003 film is nothing like the graphic novel. A poor re-imagining without any of the depth in Moore’s writing, the film aims for cheap thrills over intellectual satisfaction. Worse; in botching a good concept and delivering a flat adventure film, it ends up being a less interesting, less exciting work than the original material. You don’t need my recommendation to grab a copy of the graphic novel; just do, already.

  • American Gods, Neil Gaiman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Torch, 2001, 592 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-78903-5

    This is a protest review.

    My formative years in reading Science-Fiction were shaped by a checklist of Hugo-winning novels. Whatever won, I read and in doing so, gained an appreciation for most of SF’s greatest works. Hence my somewhat sentimental belief that Hugos should be given to… wait for it… the best science-fiction novel of the year. Not horror. Not fantasy. Not pseudo-literary pretentious crap. True, honest, unabashed science-fiction.

    In the past few years, I have often been disappointed in the collective judgement of Hugo voters. (Forever Peace? What the hell were they thinking?) It got worse in the past two years: Harry Potter? Why? Aren’t there World Fantasy Awards for this kind of stuff? I love the little wizard, but he’s clearly not starring in SF novels.

    Then came American Gods. Folks, Neil Gaiman may be a god amongst writers, but this stuff isn’t SF. And yet, grudgingly, I came to accept (after a lengthy period of denial, anger, depression and bargaining) that sooner or later I’d have to read the novel for completion’s sake. So I held my nose, bought the paperback (I may be a spiteful purist, but I’m not a cheap spiteful purist) and read the darn thing.

    It’s not a bad book at all.

    But it’s not Science Fiction.

    Oh, one almost hesitate at times. The story involves a gigantic battle between the gods (who are, incidentally, living among us under various disguises), pitting old deities against newer ones. Upon his release from prison, protagonist “Shadow” is hired as an assistant by one of the most influential gods and gets to see most of the struggle. Where American Gods is meaningful to the Hugos is in its all-too-brief depiction of the modern gods. We get a fleeting glimpse of technology replacing mysticism, but also of belief carrying over. When people stop praying, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re less superstitious; who hasn’t felt a little frisson of simple belief when confronted to the incomprehensibility of modern technology? Don’t we worship what we don’t understand? For that matter, what is Science Fiction’s responsibility in creating those new gods/archetypes (aliens, AIs, cyberpunks or time-travellers) taking over the older ones?

    Alas, that particular SF novel remains to be written, for Gaiman seems far more interested in dealing with the old gods in all of their bloodthirsty furor. The “opposing side” of technoweenies and Men in Black is teasingly mentioned when strictly necessary, creating unfulfilled expectations. While strictly speaking an urban contemporary fantasy novel, American Gods is too enamoured with old folklore to let go. This causes unnecessary lengths (the various passages describing the arrival of gods in America struck me as being particularly dull) and also locks the novel in an old-fashioned fantastic mentality. A science-fiction novel might have explored the relative merits of those newer gods and conveyed a more contemporary feel. (along with a lesson in memetic evolution, I bet)

    We can only assume that this wasn’t Gaiman’s intention. But whenever I could let go of those assumptions and enjoy the story for what it was, American Gods proved to be enjoyable on its own terms. The protagonist is enough of a blank slate to be interesting (curiously enough) and Gaiman is adept at extracting some wonder out of today’s world. The writing is usually crisp and clear —with some intentional exceptions. At times scary and hilarious, profound without being inaccessible, this is an epic novel with a off-beat tone and a lot of affection for modern-day ordinary America.

    In short, American Gods is a perfectly respectable piece of contemporary fantasy. I certainly don’t regret reading it and you can now even consider me as being mildly interested in Gaiman’s work. But—and you can certainly see this coming—it’s not science-fiction and I certainly regret its selection as the winner of the 2002 Best Novel Hugo Award. Science Fiction, dammit! I protest!

  • Darwin’s Blade, Dan Simmons

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2000, 368 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-380-97369-3

    If you’ve been browsing the web for longer than six months, chances are that you’ve heard of the Darwin Awards, those dubious honorifics posthumously given “those who improve our gene pool… by removing themselves from it” (see their web site at www.darwinawards.com) or, more prosaically, to people so stupid they deserved to die. Darwin Awards lists get forwarded through the Internet regularly, cramming stories of fatal mishaps in countless email boxes at depressingly predictable intervals. (There is an interesting lack of self-awareness in blindly forwarding stories of stupid behaviour to everyone on your contact list, but I digress.)

    Darwin’s Blade begins with a fictionalization of what may be the Darwin Awards’ most famous stupidity-induced death. I won’t spoil it, but this bizarre accident manages to showcase the deductive skills of one Darwin (“Dar”) Minor, an accident investigator with far more skills than one may suspect. Chapters later, as Darwin out-drives a pair of Russian thugs, he finds himself thick in the middle of a sordid insurance-scamming business where families die and billions of dollars are defrauded. Firefights, dogfights, sniping, romance and more wacky insurance cases are quick to follow.

    Dan Simmons hops from genre to genre with great skill and success: Hyperion and its sequels rocked the science-fiction world and Summer of Night blew away more than one horror reader. Now, Darwin’s Blade is Simmons’ entry in the (techno)thriller genre. The action moves furiously from one thing to another, there is a pleasant density of technical details for just about every new gadget, military matters are mixed with detective work and the action ratchets up to (no kidding) a mano-a-mano duel in the middle of a grassy plain. Mixing high technology with primitive human stupidity, Darwin’s Blade is one tasty book for readers with a penchant for thrillers about unusual knowledge. As with his previous novels, Simmons has studied a genre and understood what readers want. Also obvious is Simmons’ penchant for recycling: Darwin’s Blade immediately evokes the similar accident-investigator story “Entropy’s Bed at Midnight” (from Lovedeath) and at one point echoes an idea from his short-short horror story “Two Minutes Forty-Five Seconds” (in Prayers to Broken Stones).

    Like most thrillers, the appeal of Darwin’s Blade depends a lot on its protagonist. In Darwin Minor, we’ve certainly met a capable hero, perhaps even a little bit much so. For he’s not simply a top-rated accident investigator (one whose eponymous aphorism states that “the simplest solution is usually stupidity.”) Oh no; Excellent driver, PhD-holder (in nuclear physics, no less), Vietnam veteran Marine, expert sniper, champ sail-glider, world-class chess player, literature-lover, Darwin Minor packs enough interests to fill a full trilogy. But in what may be one of Darwin’s Blade most amusing flaw, his multiple talents are uncovered as the story requires them. By the time a flashback describes how a 19-year-old Darwin, already PhD in Nuclear Physics, defends a Vietnamese nuclear power plant against attack without it having a link to his academic background, well, it’s not hard to feel as if Simmons has crammed one too many talents in his stoic hero. Fortunately, there is a point to all of those skills besides the demands of the plot… but it’s made a bit too late to comfort the least indulgent readers.

    The other not-quite-so-amusing flaw of the novel may be glaring to some and transparent to others, depending on their degree of familiarity with, yes, the Darwin Awards. Many well-known stories are simply transplanted in Darwin’s Blade with scarcely any winks to the knowledgeable audience. Besides the first few pages, the worst instance of this takes place at the end of Chapter 14, where the punchline of the whole sequence is obvious as soon as we read the words “chicken cannon”. Nearly everyone who knows what a chicken cannon is and how it’s used is also familiar with the one single famous anecdote about it. Unfortunately, Simmons takes five pages to spell it out.

    But no matter: those quirks aside, super-protagonist Darwin Minor is one heck of a hero and the density of ideas, concepts and gadgets in Darwin’s Blade more than outweighs the faults it may have. Thanks to Simmons’ delicious prose and efficient plotting, the book roars along with the speed of an Acura NSX and delivers plenty of fun thrills despite the occasional disbelieving giggle or two. Simmons fans should be comforted; the man has successfully genre-hopped again.

  • Psychohistorical Crisis, Donald Kingsbury

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 727 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-765-34195-6

    Even more than fifty years after their original publication, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy stands as one of Science-fiction’s enduring classics. While the book’s narrative qualities now seem charmingly quaint at best, the strength of the trilogy’s main conceit has survived the ages: What if we could develop a hard science (say, psychohistory) that could accurately predict the behaviour of large human groups? What if this knowledge was used to prevent (or attenuate) major social catastrophes?

    The implications of this concept have been mulled over at lengths by fans since then, but even Asimov’s subsequent exploration of the Foundation Universe (with some half-dozen sequels, plus an “authorized” posthumous trilogy by Bear, Brin and Benford) hasn’t slowed the speculation. Now, with an entire 750-pages “unauthorized” sequel thousands of years after the events of Asimov’s trilogy, Donald Kingsbury acquires some serious street creds as the most obsessed Foundation fan ever.

    That, in case you’re still wondering, is a good thing. Kinsbury adjusts some of Asimov’s most unlikely missteps (the Mule’s psi powers are ingeniously retro-explained as a direct mind-link, with stupendous implications for the plotting of the novel), forgets all about that Robots and Empire nonsense added in the last few books and presents a galaxy-spanning sequel. He also questions the very foundations (har-har) of Asimov’s premise, and what it means for the average human living in that universe.

    I have noted, in my previous review of the Foundation trilogy, how psychohistory (and most of Asimov’s later retrofits) could lead to an absolute power fantasy in which total control was exerted to control humanity’s fate. I certainly wasn’t the only one to make the remark (it even figures as a major plot point of Asimov’s last Foundation novels), and it’s only one of the kernels from which Kingsbury spins his tale.

    It starts with a bang, as our protagonist -”Eron Osa”- is found guilty of unspoken (presumably unspeakable) crimes. Before his eyes, his “fam” (an artificial brain almost essential to advanced thinking) is destroyed as punishment. Eron is then released in the city, left to contemplate his new dumber existence. He doesn’t remember his crime —nor most of his life. The fam’s destruction took along his skills, his memories and all knowledge of his actions. Who is he? What has he done?

    It’s an intriguing mystery and the first fifty pages of Psychohistorical Crisis are dynamite science-fiction. The thrill of discovering Kingsbury’s take on Asimov’s universe is deftly mixed with the initial mystery and the dense idea-rich prose. For readers weaned on the Foundation series, nostalgic about classical SF and anxious for the Next Big SF Novel, Psychohistorical Crisis is almost too good to be true; a high-powered update on one of SF’s most celebrated creation.

    Almost inevitably, the feeling passes; the novel is very long, after all. The mystery of what Eron did isn’t forgotten as much as it’s explained in excruciating detail -though a book-length flashback describing his life! While the story is stuffed with wonders and supplemented with plenty of interesting intellectual digressions, the initial rush of the novel is lost, and so is the snappiness of the pacing. There’s not a lot of conventional action (our characters think a lot), but then again the whole Foundation series has always been a celebration in intellectual contemplation.

    It recovers somewhat by the end of the book as plot lines converge toward the titular crisis and the mystery of Eron’s crime is made clear. Yes, the rambling pacing could have been improved and most of Kingsbury’s digressions could have been edited out. (The novel itself is longer than the original trilogy) But with Psychohistorical Crisis, Kingsbury finally delivers on the follow-up novel we’ve been waiting for ever since 1982’s Courtship Rite (No, The Moon Goddess and the Son doesn’t count): a thick, rich, almost embarrassingly good Science-fiction novel versed both in the traditions of the genre and the latest scientific thinking. It’s at once comfortable and daring, with the potential to snag fans of everyone in between Isaac Asimov and Cory Doctorow. While the self-conscious plotting of the book cannot live up to its initial expectations, it does deliver something as good. Delicious… and filling!

  • The Spheres of Heaven, Charles Sheffield

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 2001, 440 pages, C$35.50 hc, ISBN 0-671-31969-8

    Recently, as I was discussing the current state of Science-fiction with a far more more learned acquaintance, I found myself admitting that I’ve run out of patience with “ordinary” SF. The genre has limitless possibilities and the universe as a canvas: Why is it that writers are content in recycling stock premises, tired conventions and material we’ve already read countless times? Let’s forget the past fifty years and move forward, people! Our future has changed since 1980!

    Alas, Charles Sheffield’s The Spheres of Heaven isn’t new SF. At all. Not only is it a sequel (it can be read independently from The Mind Pool, but it’s still a sequel), but its imagined universe smells suspiciously familiar. Interstellar travel is handled by “Link” gates, but they are not accessible to us: Humanity is locked out of the galaxy by alien races fearful of our potential for violence. The Solar System is colonized from Mercury to the Oort Cloud, but after twenty years of isolation, there’s a strong sense of stagnation. But here come the aliens, and they need good-old human audacity to solve a prickly problem involving a new Link and disappearing ships.

    That’s the setup. Alas, it takes nearly two hundred pages to do anything with it. And what’s explored isn’t the tension between violence and stagnation, but yet another dull story of first contact with conquest-thirsty aliens from another dimension.

    Excuse me as I yawn.

    It could have been interesting had the writing been up to the task. But Sheffield’s never been a character-driven author nor a master stylist. If you strip away his ideas, you usually end up with a dull novel indeed, and this is the fate that awaits The Spheres of Heaven. It’s lifeless and just takes forever to rev up. From the exploration of the alien environment to the formation of protagonist Chan Dalton’s team, The Spheres of Heaven seems padded and then dull: To put it simply, too many words are used for the density of action described.

    It doesn’t help that the novel constantly focuses on the wrong things. At the beginning of the novel, the accretion of Dalton’s team is fascinating, yet Sheffield insists on cutting away at every other chapter. Then Sheffield does the unforgivable: why assemble such a crack team of fascinating specialists if you’re not going to do anything with them? Later, Friday Indigo’s trip becomes another central focus, leading to another loss of tension in the narrative.

    Another problem with The Spheres of Heaven is how it often reads like a novel for teenagers, retrofitted to appeal to adults. (Sheffield has written teen novels for Tor, so that may not be a completely ridiculous theory). Sure, the characters have sex lives and are often ex-addicts, but the overall plotting and execution seems to appeal to unsophisticated SF readers. Details such as the composition of the strange watery environment in which environment our characters are stuck takes forever to explain when even the most casual reader thinks “Heavy water!”

    Idea-wise, there’s not much to digest in The Spheres of Heaven. We’ve seen most of it elsewhere, and usually better-used. Dimension-hopping’s been done before. So have expansionist aliens, human quarantine, first contact and/or exploration of strange environments. (And I say this without having read the previous book!)

    It’s a shame, really, because Sheffield has been capable of far better things. But The Spheres of Heaven has all the hallmarks of a slap-dash hack job, the type of book written for quick bucks and paid by the word. Even Sheffield enthusiasts may have a hard time finishing this one. It’s not appallingly bad (certainly, we’ve seen worse, even from this author), but it has no compelling features either. Sense my lack of patience, will you?