Book Review

Rule 34, Charles Stross

Rule 34, Charles Stross

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Ace, 2011, 358 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-441-02034-8

Every new Charles Stross novel is an event in the world of Science Fiction, and rarely more so than when he turns his attention to near-future speculation.  As is obvious to anyone reading his blog, Stross is a pretty good techno-social pundit, and his willingness to play around with big concepts advantages him when he tackles near-future scenarios.  In Halting State, he imagined a wild conceptual rollercoaster where crime and technology intersected in late-2010s Scotland.  Now, with Rule 34, he revisits the same notional playground and dares ask what’s the future of deviance at a time where ideas spread nearly instantly, and where no idea is so outlandish that it can’t be shared by a group of like-minded people.

The “Rule 34” of the title is familiar to anyone who’s spent time on internet discussion forums: “If it exists, there is porn of it”, which I have always interpreted to be not a warning or a promise, but an acknowledgement that humans, especially as a group, are an imaginative species when it comes to their base desires.  Stross’ application of the concept is to imagine a team of police officers monitoring the internet to catch wind of new dangerous ideas before they have to deal with them on their own turf.  After all, If the newest craze spreading through internet hoodlums is llama-stomping, it far better for the police to be prepared than caught surprised.  (Right on cue as I edit this review, Ottawa feels its first “flash rob”.)

But there’s a lot more to Rule 34 than police using web browsers: It’s an excuse for Stross to start thinking about the near-future of crime and law-enforcement.  Much as Halting State thought about the intersection of crime, games and national security, this follow-up has a bit to say about what happens when crime is run along business principles, when police work becomes enmeshed into the cultural matrix and what the future of “perversion” can be.  (I’m overselling this by talking about “the future of perversion”, but none of the three main characters is traditionally heteronormative, and the deviance to be contained has more to do with consent that sexual orientation.  This, to Stross fans, will be strictly routine.)  As with Halting State, Rule 34 feels stuffed with neat ideas that will pop up elsewhere in the Science Fiction genre within a few years: Stross is, as usual, five minutes ahead of everyone else, and this novel does little to tarnish his current credentials as SF’s essential writer.

But if techno-social extrapolation is Stross’ best-known virtue, Rule 34 shows that he’s constantly underrated when it comes to style.  Like its predecessor, Rule 34 is written in present-tense second-person point-of-view.  The rationale for doing this isn’t as strong as in Halting State (where it could be interpreted as a take-off on the narrative voice of game tutorials), but it does lead to a crunchy game of “Who is narrating this?” toward the end of the volume as the mysteries of the plot are teasingly brought closer.  This time, Stross seems to be having a bit of fun in the narration, and never quite as much as when a particularly spirited piece of writing explains the new shape of the world in a preposterously entertaining fashion.  It used to be that you could rely upon the SF writers with the best ideas to be only marginally competent in writing prose.  Rule 34 shows that Stross is able to combine the ideas with vastly entertaining writing.  It’s still mind you, aimed straight at the techno-nerd segment able to process multiple simultaneous streams of information (chunks of the novel are best appreciated if you can get all of the references to web memes, recent political/criminal/financial history, or simply the info-SF mindset.) but it still, at times, approaches a bravura performance: As he slowly enters his second decade of professional publishing, Stross is getting better and better at delivering the kind of satisfying SF reading experience that genre readers are asking for.  It’s also, in the typical Strossian tradition, both very funny and very scary at once.

A first-rate SF novel, cutting-edge even by 2011’s most rigorous standards, Rule 34 is about as good as the genre can be at the moment, avoiding the prevailing doom-and-gloom atmosphere while presenting a challenging view of the near future.  It’s exhilarating, satisfying and entertaining at once, and it seems likely to rocket up the list of the Hugo Award nominations next year.

The Lost City of Z, David Grann

The Lost City of Z, David Grann

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Doubleday, 2009, 339 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-51353-1

To the average modern citizen, the world is known, mapped and defined.  The mountains have been climbed, the poles have been reached, the forests have been photographed from above and the dragons have been banished off the charts.  There are no pockets of adventure left, as most of the world is reachable within 48 hours if you have a reasonable amount of money.  There are no undiscovered tribes, no mysteriously vanished cities of gold, no fantastic journeys left to discover.

I’m not mourning for the loss: I like my globe stable and predictable, and the fact that I can go anywhere in the world with enough money and a bit of preparation is a feature as far as I’m concerned.  Especially considering the alternative, which comes naturally after reading David Grann’s The Lost City of Z.  The non-fiction book is a dual narrative covering the life and mysterious disappearance of Victorian-era explorer Percy Fawcett, and Grann’s contemporary quest to find out the truth about Fawcett’s last Amazon expedition.  Whereas Fawcett’s life is filled with accounts of deadly treks in undiscovered lands, Grann’s own adventures take him to archives, walking down a well-traveled path of similarly fascinated enthusiasts wondering what happened to Fawcett after mysteriously vanishing in the jungle.

Perhaps the best thing about The Lost City of Z is the way is brings alive the mystery and romance of the post-Victorian-era of exploration; a time when the last frontiers of the world were being mapped, but also a time when rich bored Englishmen could go to the National Geographic Society to follow a few courses on exploration, and then take it upon themselves to expand the knowledge of a British Empire that was already visibly retreating.  Percy Fawcett was one of those gentlemen-adventurers, relying on other people’s fortune to put together expeditions with the explicit goal of mapping what hasn’t yet been explored.  Gunn does a fine job at explaining the psychology of this curious character, whose action-filled life went on, indirectly, to influence the creation of Indiana Jones.  Fawcett had an eventful love life, quite possibly acted as a spy for the British secret service while in the field (apparently, the explorer training was similar to a spy’s curriculum) and led a number of difficult expeditions in the Amazon before the fateful 1925 trek from which he never returned.

At the same time, we learn a lot about the Amazon jungle.  Arguably too much, as the various deadly horrors of the environment are described at length through the explorer’s journals.  Fawcett was unbelievably resilient, his body shrugging off hardships that ended up killing a significant number of the men traveling with him.  One of the most surprising pieces of information in The Lost City of Z is that the jungle isn’t a particularly good place to feed oneself: much of the ecosystem being located high above in the tree canopy, the explorers found that floor of the jungle could be barren of life-sustaining nutrients.  And that’s without describing the various exotic insects found along the way…

The contemporary counterpoint to Fawcett’s last expedition is Grann’s twenty-first century’s pursuit of the truth.  Fawcett’s disappearance has led to decades of efforts by amateurs looking to retrace the explorer’s steps, to a point where their numbers exasperated National Geographic Society archivists answering requests for the same documents.  Fortunately, Grann is able to get access to the Fawcett family archives and his ultimate visit to the area where Fawcett disappeared is informed by a close look at rumours of his possessions being traded years afterward.  What he finds out doesn’t completely solve the mystery, but it clears it to the point where the rest is just details; Fawcett most likely wandered into an unfriendly tribe’s territory and… do we really want to know more?

His legacy, ultimately, is still being felt.  His search for the mythic city of “Z” is now starting to be confirmed thanks to satellite imagery and a better understanding of how the jungle could sustain a human presence.  If the Amazon has retreated (Grann suggests that many of the areas that Fawcett explored are now clear-cut expanses of agricultural fields), it has also revealed its secrets and helped modern anthropologists discover new facets of the world as it once existed.  The book ends by disproving the notion that the world has already been mapped to completion: there are clearly still new things to discover… even today.

Ex Machina, Brian K. Vaughan & Tony Harris

Ex Machina, Brian K. Vaughan & Tony Harris

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Originally published as a series of fifty-four issues by DC/Wildstorm from 2004 to 2010; republished as a five volume series of hardcover by Wildstorm from 2008 to 2011.

I picked up Ex Machina in part because it seemed to do what I want to see more often in superhero comics: Using its conventions as a mean to talk about something else; paying attention to the real world; and, perhaps more importantly, ending.  The average superhero title exists in a state of meta-stability, not daring to change its basic premise too much lest the core of the character becomes unsalable.  That’s how you end up with meaningless decades-long melodramas starring hundreds and comic-book tropes that have less and less relevance to ourselves.

But Ex Machina, like my beloved Transmetropolitan, takes place in a completely separate universe untainted by other superheroes and was always planned to end after a set number of issues.  It diverges from our reality on October 18, 1999, as Mitchell Hundred, an engineer working for the city of New York, is wounded in an explosion while working on the Brooklyn Bridge.  Recovering, he discovers that he now has an ability to talk to machines and make them do his bidding.  Conditioned by years of reading comic-books and encouraged by his new ability to build advanced technology, he decides to become a superhero and, over the next few years, becomes “The Great Machine”, fighting crime (not always successfully) around New York City.  After revealing his identity and announcing his intention to run for mayor, his last achievement as a super-hero is to save one of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001.

Ex Machina begins after 2005, as Hundred narrates the events of his tenure as mayor.  The series being one big flashback, it skips and hops in-between all eras of Hundred’s life in an effort to tell his story with maximum drama.  The nice thing about having an ex-superhero mayor protagonist, at least for series writer Brian K. Vaughan, is that he gets to fill his 50 issues with issues both political and science-fictional.  Hundred’s powers come from somewhere, and this mystery hangs over the entire series as a question to be answered.  Meanwhile, Hundred presides over America’s largest city at a time where terrorist threats and new social issues combine to make his tenure uniquely complex.  The series veers in-between issues both realistic and fantastic, trying to give equally satisfying time to both.

It doesn’t always work, especially when the series forgets its super-heroic premise to discuss social issues.  The entire series may look impressive when collected in hardcover tomes, but it’s still constrained by the parameters of American political discussions.  While Vaughan may try to claim an affiliation to the moderate centre, this doesn’t always translate to “moderate center” by non-American standards.  Furthermore, some story arcs are meant to serve “very special lessons” that are only ground-breaking within the narrow realm of comic books.  Is Ex Machina better than other comic books when it comes to political credibility?  Yes.  Is it good enough to sustain the scrutiny of political junkies?  Not quite.

The series also seems unwilling to resolve some of its own issues; mentions of Mitchell being sexually ambivalent, pot-smoking, potentially traumatized by the deaths of people near and dear to him eventually resolve to… nothing much.  It’s not an indefensible choice, given how clearly the last issue presents him as someone so convinced by his own obsession that he seems willing to sacrifice everyone around him to his ultimate (admittedly altruistic) goal.  But something got lost in-between the planning of the series and its final execution.  The pacing of the super-heroic mystery component of the narrative seems to be deliberately held back until the last volume, the character’s lack of curiosity betraying the writer’s uneven pacing.

From an artistic standpoint, I have always disliked the coloring of the series, which takes Tony Harris’ realistic art style and gives it a garish palette… but at this point, I’m just kvetching, because Ex Machina remains a modest success.

It’s not a series I’d recommend without reservations, but it’s a good example of an ambitious project, decently executed.  I may quibble with the series’ empty moments or the unadventurous nature of its political content as perceived from abroad, but by the stunted standards of the superhero comic book genre, it’s far ahead of its competition and helps the sub-genre perceive possibilities that may not have been as obvious before.  It’s also good where it counts, which is to say to provide an ending that definitely closes the series while leaving a big intriguing question mark over what else may happen to Hundred after the last page of the series.  Closed-ending science-fiction comic book series aren’t that plentiful; I should be grateful that this one is there to do most of it right.

Blank Spots on the Map, Trevor Paglen

Blank Spots on the Map, Trevor Paglen

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Dutton, 2009, 324 pages, C$28.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-525-95101-8

One of the bad mental habits I still carry over from my teenage years is the idea that secrets are cool.  Not your average run-of-the-mill who’s-sleeping-with-whom secrets: I mean the big stuff.  State secrets: Spying stories, classified planes and undocumented satellites, undisclosed locations and military plans the general population isn’t meant to know.  Call it a left-over from an overdose of military techno-thrillers in my formative years.

The problem, as Trevor Paglen keeps demonstrating in Blank Spots on the Map, is that secrets are not compatible with a well-working democratic state.  His book is an exploration of “the dark geography of the Pentagon’s secret world” or, in other words, an attempt to locate the secrets of the US government.  A geographer by trade, Paglen approaches this fuzzy subject with a cartographer’s metaphor.  If secrets are what the public can’t see, then it follows that official maps of the world have blank areas: Identify those areas, and you will be able to deduce much about the secret being kept.

The application of this principle can be as obvious as scouring satellite maps to look for unusual blanks, or evidence of photo manipulation.  In the first chapter, Paglen describes his uneasy relationship with a few colleagues in his own building, including famed “Torture memo” author John Yoo.  (It may be useful to recall how Paglen was, in co-authoring Torture Taxi, one of the first writers to tackle the topic of extraordinary rendition).  But he soon starts traveling in order to find more evidence of missing spots on the map.  He quickly ends up at Las Vegas’ McCarran airport, using binoculars from a hotel room in an attempt to identify airplanes that exist outside official flight plans.  Those planes, explains Paglen, are buses to the dark side: They carry federal workers from their official civilian existence to their secret bases of employment.  Study them, and you can gain clues as to the size of the secret world clustered around Las Vegas.

Other on-the-ground original reporting follows in succession.  In Chapter Five (“Classified Resumés”), Paglen peers at official personnel web pages to find evidence of secret airplane projects, inferring from the pilots’ skills the nature of the covert program that exists between the lines of their official employment.  He finds partial confirmation for his deductions in a 2004 “Out of the black… into the blue” event in which three secret planes were revealed to the world.  After considering the legacy of the Manhattan project, Paglen then heads over to Toronto, where we meets with an astronomer who has specialized in finding satellites that some countries don’t want to acknowledge.  (Some of those satellites may even be manoeuvring to avoid the gaze of amateur astronomers.)

But while secret planes and orbit-changing satellites may be great fun and games, the second half of Blank Spots on the Map brings home the book’s thesis.  It doesn’t take a long time for Paglen to identify the corrosive effect of secrecy on the rule of law: to protect secrets, it’s almost axiomatic that the government would turn to more secrets, up to and including denying evidence of wrongdoing behind these secrets.  As an example, Paglen uncovers evidence of workers being denied care because the facilities in which they were poisoned didn’t exist…

And that’s even without getting into the colossal torrent of money flowing into secret projects, evading public accountability as soon as the funding is earmarked as classified.  What happens behind closed doors?  How do we make sure the money is properly accounted for?  This lack of transparency, coupled with the increased privatization of the American classified community (in which expensive contractors routinely outnumber their federally-employed colleagues), makes it practically impossible to keep a true accounting of the government’s operations.  What if some operations go farther than the official intent?  A quick detour in Honduras reminds us that this has happened before; a further detour through Kabul reminds us that it is most likely still happening.

While not all of Blank Spots on the Map is gripping or even clear to follow (some passages are rushed; other feel as if they restate the obvious), the book as a whole offers a compelling mixture of original reporting and a sometimes-surprising look at the American secrets business.  If nothing else, it does manage to strip away much of the jejune charm of secrecy, and tilt the balance toward openness and transparency.

Inside the White House, Ronald Kessler

Inside the White House, Ronald Kessler

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Pocket, 1995, 302 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 0-671-87920-0

Sometimes, a book reviewer’s first priority is a warning: That book you’re picking up is not the book you think you’re going to get.  While I don’t think that warning people about a non-fiction book sixteen years and three presidents later counts as a valuable customer service, it’s a bit of a red flag regarding the author… which may be useful given that he’s still out there writing similar things.

A quick glance at Ronald Kessler’s Inside the White House promises a look at “the hidden lives of the modern presidents and the secrets of the world’s most powerful institutions”.  This may lead you to expect a flint-eyed examination of how the White House operates, perhaps a journalistic description of day-to-day operations within the building, maybe even a few anecdotes regarding the past few presidents.  So be prepared for a highly partisan collage of presidential gossip, complaints about the White House’s budget and a cursory look at the isolation of presidents from everyday life.

Don’t worry if Kessler uses the term “White House” very loosely: As it quickly becomes clear, Kessler’s really writing a high-end gossip rag about presidents from Johnson to Clinton.  The reported rumours start early and low on the first page, the second sentence including the words “…having sex on a sofa in the Oval Office, with one of the handful of gorgeous young secretaries…”  Things don’t necessarily get more graceful after that, with Kennedy’s extramarital affairs trotted out once more alongside Johnson’s similar exploits.  From affairs to blatant exploitation of the public purse and presidential misconduct including gratuitous abuse of staff, Kessler trots out decade-old gossip in lieu of reporting.

It certainly doesn’t stop there: If you believe everything included here, every president since then has been an awful human being, their personal weaknesses magnified by absolute power.  Interviewing (on record!) staff members from previous White Houses and more vaguely sourced current ones, Kessler cherry-picks decades of history for purely titillating anecdotes about runaway presidential children, ungrateful spouses, thefts, paranoia and worse (or better: If ever you’ve been looking for reference material regarding presidential flatulence, then your quest ends here).  Much of it sounded familiar until I realized that Kessler re-used much of the same material in writing the similar 2009 book In the President’s Secret Service.

It’s all entertaining, and if you want to be particularly nice to the end result, all of it ends up reinforcing Kessler’s overall theme of a White House disconnected from the rest of the nation.  The Presidency has become a quasi-imperial position because the American public demands it (would the nation tolerate presidents having to take time away from running the nation to wash dishes or make grocery runs?), but the price to pay is that the occupant of the White House always loses touch with life as lived by most Americans.  The vast excesses available to presidents end up letting their worst instincts run wild.

There’s more substantial material in Inside the White House about the carefully-obfuscated costs of running the White House.  Thanks to decades of presidential manoeuvres, the true operating costs of the White House are dispersed in-between dozen organizations, never acknowledged in full lest their magnitude become apparent to the taxpayers.  As a result, financial accountability is low; mini-empires grow unchecked; everyone tries to get assigned a prestigious “White House job” and few people ever fully understand how it all works.

But that’s pretty much all there is to say about the substantial content in Inside the White House.  The gossip takes up much of the rest, and through accumulation it’s hard not to notice that Kessler is a lot kinder to Republicans than Democrats.  Republicans Ford, Reagan and Bush (the first) practically come across as saints compared to their Democratic counterparts, but the hilarious part of the book begins once Clinton takes power: Suddenly, Kessler doesn’t hide behind quotes from interview subjects to attack the president: Words like “childish” and “rudely” and “indolence” suddenly find their way in the main body of the text and Kessler, afflicted by a bad case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome, whips himself up in a fury describing incidents that seem well in-line with what other presidents have done.  No surprise if a quick look at Kessler’s Wikipedia page shows a writer now associated with right-wing sites, and known for erroneous reports about Barack Obama.  (With a special bonus as Kessler attempted to remove mentions of the controversy from his Wikipedia page)  Partisan writer writes partisan account of presidents?  What a surprise!

The result, alas, isn’t a serious piece of journalism as much as it’s an opinion piece wrapped in anecdotes with dubious credibility.  While I’m impressed that some of the more outrageous statements in the book are directly sourced to interviewees, I’m not exactly convinced that they amount to a significant indictment of those who stayed at the White House over the past fifty years.  Once Kessler’s partisan nature becomes obvious, his indignation becomes less convincing, and readers may start thirsting for a better spokesperson in matters of presidential accountability.  There’s an interesting thesis in Inside the White House that few people will dismiss: too bad that its execution undermines it.

On the other hand, if what you want is a National Enquirer book-length special about American presidents…

Resurrection, Steve Alten

Resurrection, Steve Alten

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Forge, 2006 reprint of 2004 original, 523 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-57957-7

There are authors out there who are reliable, stable and predictable.  Not in the bad sense of the word, mind you: Their name is a badge of quality and consistency, a virtual guarantee that what you’re going to get is exactly what you expect.  Michael Connelly, Lee Child and Carl Hiaasen all come to mind as such models of reliability.

Then there’s Steve Alten, who has become increasingly unpredictable since his impressive debut with Meg, back in 1997.  His subsequent biography has been… eclectic.  Sequels to Meg (five of them by 2011) drove the exact same premise into the ground and kept stomping.  Other standalone novels ranged from a vigorous (but slightly crazy) military techno-thriller with Goliath, to conspiracy-drenched agitprop in The Shell Game.  More rarely, there’s just dullness, such as the Loch Ness monster-themed The Loch.

And then there’s his Domain trilogy.  I wasn’t aware that Resurrection was the second volume of that series when I picked it up: I thought it was another standalone novel.  Imagine my growing surprise when I realized the amount of backstory required to end up where Resurrection starts: After averting a worldwide nuclear war in 2012, our heroine gives birth to twin boys, fulfilling a copious heaping of Mayan mythology.  This being said, backstory is the least of Resurrection’s insane charm as the novel fast-forwards through the next twenty years of its deliriously imagined future: In-between an abused girl growing up to become the Antichrist (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), famous people who are somehow able to become equally famous under different identities, Alten’s shameless grab for all the mythologies and pseudoscience he can find, ridiculous future world-building, wild presidential assassination attempts, and hiccupping plotting spread over decades, Resurrection stays away from basic credibility, which is probably wise when you have a sequel to a near-catastrophe of global proportion.

The accumulation of quirks and the progressive transition of the novel from fanciful techno-thriller to full-on science-fiction is interesting, mind you… but not in a conventional or even respectable sense.  As the incongruities, half-baked ideas and caricatures accumulated (the sultry villainess alone seems taken straight out of the Big Book of Evil), I found myself firmly hooked, but only to find out what else Alten was going to introduce to much fanfare.  It finally dawned on me that Resurrection is unintentional crackfic, the term most enlightened readers will use in describing something so obviously outlandish that it flips into meta-fictional comedy.  In this light, Resurrection isn’t borderline incompetent fiction as much as it’s an experience that must be read to be believed.

It would work better, admittedly, if Alten showed the slightest bit of self-awareness as to the ludicrousness of his premise.  But as the novel sinks deeper into disparate mythologies, pop mysticism and magical combats featuring resurrected protagonists in alternate realities (or is it far-flung time travel?  Oh, who cares…), the signs also accumulate that Alten’s being undisciplined.  Not being a genre SF writer, he has no natural instinct nor any coherent framework for his extrapolated future: Scene after scene enthusiastically dumps exposition because he thinks it’s cool, not because it’s in any way needed.  There are digressions about entirely-fictional sport team leagues, and more curiously an entire narrative recap of the American space program up to now… even as the novel is set a few decades in the future.  This is just sloppy stuff no matter how you look at it; fortunately, it’s in the middle of a madcap attempt at writing a large-scale thriller with no sense of focus.  It’s not even done particularly well –unlike Dan Brown’s novels, which have an undeniable forward sense of narration, Resurrection sorts of sprints, sputters and retreats at random intervals.

Resurrection works in ways that are orthogonal to the typical rewards of well-written fiction.  The best way to make sense of it is to abandon reason entirely.  That is, its appeal is bound to be largely idiosyncratic, reaching self-satisfied hipster readers with qualities that the author, I suspect, never intended.  It’s probably the craziest novel I’ve read from Alten; given the unevenness of his bibliography so far, I’m impressed but I can’t say I’m surprised.

Impact, Douglas Preston

Impact, Douglas Preston

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Forge, 2009, 364 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1768-1

Now that the Preston/Child writing duo has had time to work on their own novels in addition to their collaborations, we’re getting an opportunity to see what are the strengths and weaknesses of either writer.  Lincoln Child, judging from his solo novels from Utopia to Terminal Freeze, is supremely gifted at making up interesting premises.  Unfortunately, his novels have a tendency to turn into far more pedestrian genre exercises by their middle third, and end on intensely familiar notes to either techno-thriller (“The AI did it!”) or Science Fiction (“Aliens!”) fans.  Meanwhile, Douglas Preston seems a bit more versatile, and in-between The Codex to Blasphemy seems interested in a broader range of narrative structures.  Adventure ranks high in his plotting techniques, and if his premises are a bit less clear-cut than his colleague’s own novels, he seems a bit better at sustaining narrative tension throughout.

Impact is clearly another novel from the Child/Preston stable: It’s easily readable, generously paced with action sequences, mysterious from the get-go and seasoned with a blend of technical details.  It’s also structurally flawed, can’t let go of recurring characters and badly inserts SF ideas within a traditional thriller template.

It starts with the titular impact: In costal Maine, a brilliant young woman wasting her potential as a waitress uses elementary astrophysics and her knowledge of the area to deduce that the rock landed on a nearby isolated island, and that there’s money to be made in bringing back a meteorite.  She sets off with a friend and her father’s boat, but not before annoying a young man persuaded that she’s his girlfriend.  In a completely unrelated development, a scientist working in California gets wind of a surprising scientific discovery involving Mars and people who are willing to kill in order to keep it a secret.  Finally, in yet a third completely unrelated subplot, Preston series regular (and all-rounded special operative) Wyman Ford is asked to go investigate a source of mysterious gems in Cambodia.

Those three threads eventually converge, but not as cleanly as you may expect from a top-notch thriller novelist.  It’s one of Impact’s many flaws that the novel is inelegantly split in two parts spaced by weeks, upsetting the kind of tight dramatic unity that we’d expect from a thriller.  Furthermore, it doesn’t help that one of the three initial subplots is quickly cut short, or that there is not real reason to bring back Wyman Ford after the world-changing events of Blasphemy when just about any competent protagonist could have done the job.

(It’s a pet peeve of mine that the thriller genre is rarely suited to series: to be meaningful, thrillers developments should have consequences.  You can’t threaten the world with nuclear war every novel of the series, for instance, and the high-impact shenanigans at the end of high-stakes thrillers should leave a mark on the characters, and often the world at large.  What bad thriller continuity series does is press the reset button, not even acknowledging that what was important in the previous book is still important now.  Wynan Ford’s previous adventure Blasphemy ended with a global revelation that isn’t even mentioned here.  There’s an even bigger global revelation in Impact, and I’m practically certain that one of Preston’s next novel will once again feature Ford, and once again ignore Impact’s impact.)

While Impact does introduce a sympathetic heroine with Abbey and has the good idea of pairing her up with Ford, the novel seems too loose to be fully satisfying.  The subplots go here and there (Ford’s trip to Cambodia start out promisingly, then peters off in traditional heroics), the book can’t make up its mind whether it’s best suited to the rocky grit of New England or techno-scientific brinksmanship in Washington DC.  The last quarter of the novel features world-changing SF concepts, but Preston shies away from exploring their consequences in favour of well-worn thriller tricks.

It results in a disappointing novel, full of promise but let down by a loose, almost chaotic execution.  Impact has lengthy periods of boredom in-between the interesting ideas, and it always feels as if there’s something not quite right in the way those ideas and concepts are developed.  Science Fiction fans may have a worst time with the books than those who aren’t as used to SF conventions: Like many authors working outside the SF genre, Preston doesn’t quite understand how to develop premises with world-changing potential, and maddeningly focuses on the wrong end of the story in an effort to hold the hands of his general readership.  Even Preston’s usual audience may not feel that this is his best work.

Mogworld, Yahtzee Croshaw

Mogworld, Yahtzee Croshaw

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Dark Horse, 2010, 413 pages, $7.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-1-59582-529-2

Our latest instalment in the “books I’m reviewing because they give me an excuse to talk about online stuff that I like” is Yahtzee Croshaw’s Mogworld, a humorous fantasy novel written by the creator of the Zero Punctuation weekly videogame reviews series.  Executed as five-minute video-clips, Zero Punctuation distinguishes itself through an uncompromising sense of humour, a blistering pace, a cynical outlook on the nature of contemporary game development and an iconic visual style.  While Mogworld can’t match the yellow visuals and punctuation-less vocal throughput of the videos, it does combine humour and a solid understanding of modern gaming narrative conventions to deliver a satisfying fantasy comedy.

The fact that the narrator (Jim, he of limited wizardry capabilities) dies at the end of the first chapter isn’t much of an impediment to adventure –especially when he’s resurrected at the beginning of Chapter Two.  And again a few more times in the next few pages.  Curiously enough, he seems to be resurrected every time he should stay dead, along with everyone else in that world.  From that point on, Jim’s main goal in life is to die as permanently as possible.  In his quest, he’ll end up making unlikely friends, traveling widely and discovering the true nature of his world.

While Mogworld  waits a bit more than a hundred and fifty pages to reveal a connection between Jim’s problem and the issues faced by programmers working on a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), the back cover readily reveals it, so I’m not about to consider it a spoiler.  In fact, Mogworld may work better if the reader understands from the get-go that Jim is a sentient character in a MMORPG: Part of the books’s charm is the way it plays the narrative conventions of a novel against those of a role-playing game: There is a lot of dramatic irony between what the character finds out and what we, as denizen of the twenty-first century, already know.  In-passing, Croshaw gets to comment on the inherent power fantasies of MMORPGs and the storytelling compromises in trying to provide satisfying narratives to multiple players.

Does that mean that you already have to be a level-60+ World of Warcraft addict to enjoy Mogworld?  Absolutely not: Heck, I have never played an MMPORG.  In writing his debut novel, Croshaw shows a deft touch in balancing fantasy elements with humour so that fantasy genre readers can get to enjoy the story.  The obvious touchstone of comic fantasy is Terry Pratchett, and so it’s almost obligatory to say that Mogworld does remind me of middle-period Pratchett novels in sending up fantasy conventions through judicious use of very dry British humour.

What’s more interesting from my reviewer’s point of view, however, is the kind of conceptual generational shift that fantasy novels such as Mogworld represent.  It’s no secret that fantasy videogames trace their origins in fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, themselves heavily influenced by fantasy literature.  Now here’s fantasy fiction influenced from fantasy videogames, which either completes the self-referential circle if you’re the fatalistic kind of pundit, or contributes to a renewal of fantasy tropes and archetype if you’re somewhat more hopeful about genre fiction.  It will make optimists happy to note that Mogworld is the first prose novel published by comic-book publisher Dark Horse Books and, as such, represents a modest expansion of the market.  I suspect that Mogworld will be read by a lot more gamers than traditional fantasy readers, which is another interesting development by itself.

Fortunately, the result itself is worth a read: Jim’s adventures are entertaining, and while the novel is meant to be funny, it’s not entirely too silly to lose its dramatic potential.  There are a few good scenes, ideas and trope inversion in the book (it’s no accident if there’s a TV-Tropes page dedicated to Mogworld; warning, spoilers!) and the reading experience is pleasant.  There’s even a little bit of real-world relevance in looking at how MMORPGs are created.  Now, what about a second novel?

Faster, James Gleick

Faster, James Gleick

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Vintage, 2000 reprint of 1999 original, 330 pages, C$21.00 pb, ISBN 0-679-77548-X

I am one of the people James Gleick complains about in Faster.  I am the guy who walks past other people on the sidewalk.  I am the guy who fumes whenever cars drive just under the speed limit.  I am the guy who gets annoyed whenever other people don’t pay attention, dawdle, can’t decide or otherwise start messing with my own hyper-efficient schedule.  I am, in other words, part of the problem that Gleick describes when he talks about “the acceleration of just about everything”.

Now, keep in mind Faster‘s copyright date of 1999, right at the peak of the dot-com boom; a short era during which “dot-com time” came to shake what was people’s sense of time.  Suddenly, the online world changed every six months; companies doubled in 60 days, crashed and burned in 18 months.  And things kept accelerating, at least until the dot-bomb recession of 2000-2001.  Faster is very much a book of its era, a horrified contemplation of how fast things can possibly go, alongside doubt that anyone but a few inhuman freaks will be able to hold on to the monster we have collectively created.

As such, most of Faster feels very familiar.  Gleick, the author of such seminal science vulgarization books as Genius and Chaos here turns his attention to a mixture of historical explanation, technical vulgarization and cultural criticism.  In a nutshell: Here’s why/how things went from slow to fast; here’s how fast they really are at the moment; here’s why this is a problem.  Fast food!  Workaholics!  Over-optimized airline schedules!  24-hour news cycle!  Multitasking! Quick-cutting!  MTV!  After a while, it becomes easier to portray Gleick as the stereotypical old man shouting at the kids, not just because they’re on his lawn, but because they can get off of it faster than he can shake his cane at them.  (Also; grandpa, there are better examples of action moviemaking than Sphere.)

The irony here is that Gleick is not wrong, nor has his kvetching been disproven by the past twelve years.  The world has indeed become much faster, and on a very personal level: You just have to contemplate Twitter or the Facebook news feed to find out that near-real-time publishing to the masses has become ubiquitous: It just takes a moderately-good smartphone with an average data plan to consume and broadcast the most trivial details of our lives.  Meanwhile, the big boys of corporate media have grown even savvier in getting their product to the consumer even faster: As of 2011, DVDs are available not much more than three months after theatrical release; eBooks are launched simultaneously with their paper equivalents (otherwise customers complain loudly on Amazon); most music is sold instantly through digital channels (goodbye music stores); news stories are filed and dissected in minutes… and wristwatches (a subject of one of Faster’s early chapters) are now fashion accessories, because there are now built-in clocks in just about any electronic device that surrounds us.  Our culture digests ideas, fads and memes in weeks (Rebecca Black’s “Friday” was released when I read Faster, almost still hip when I wrote this review a month later, but passé to the point of nostalgia by the time I edited it three further months later) and visibly shows signs of impatience whenever it has to wait.  We have become Faster’s worst nightmare.

And yet we still deal with it.  One thing that Faster doesn’t do very well is in pointing out that it’s still relatively easy to punch out of the schedule whenever convenient.  Journalists and politicians may be stuck feeding the news channels, but the rest of us can lay low for a few days and stop paying attention to what’s not part of our lives.  Facebook’s reported recent loss in popularity hints at a truth that Social Media apologists and James Gleick alike aren’t happy to acknowledge: That once past the newness effect, everyone self-selects their pace of life.  After a few days/weeks/months/years, many people move on from their blog postings, twittering or facebook updates: What remains at the slower core is the kernel of what we are.

But as much fun as it is to critique the social critique, there is plenty to like about Faster: The early part of the book has some fascinating material regarding how the notion of globalized time came to be (every American town had its own clock before railways required some standardization), and a chapter on airline scheduling makes the good point that the more efficient a system is, the more it is vulnerable to even small problems –they cascade into big problem due to the lack of slack built in the system.  There are good digressions here and there, such as the sequence in which Gleick pushes the clichéd “Americans spend X minutes every day doing…” statistics into an absurdist dead-end, and a demonstration of “The Strong Law of Small numbers” (ie; there aren’t enough small numbers to be useful.)

I does help that even if Gleick may be a curmudgeon in training, he’s a dependably readable writer.  Faster is entertaining even when its relationship with reality turns a bit suspect; its thesis may be equal part dubious and paranoid, it’s still largely correct.  I do miss the more scientifically-minded topics of Chaos and Genius compared to this more free-flowing cultural/technical critique, but if Faster is a bit of a disappointment, it still has enough good material for compelling cocktail party chatter.

Color and Light, James Gurney

Color and Light, James Gurney

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Andrews McMeel, 2010, 224 pages, C$28.99 tp, ISBN 978-0-7407-9771-2

You’d have a hard time guessing from these reviews, but I do buy and enjoy a lot of Science Fiction and Fantasy art books.  One of my most cherished sections of my library is the one where Michael Whelan art collections sit next to those by Donato Giancola, Chris Foss, Stephan Martinière and a few others.  But enjoying those books is simple; reviewing them isn’t when an appreciation of most of them boil down to “pretty pictures; skilled artists; will buy next volume”.  I get bored just thinking about writing 500 words to explain that.

But James Gurney’s Color and Light is something different.  Billed as “A guide for the Realist Painter”, it’s a book-length tutorial by the creator of the SF/fantasy series Dinotopia.  Aimed primarily at visual artists, it studies topics of colour and light using examples from Gurney’s career, either produced for the commercial market or as a personal study.  Far from a basic “Here’s how to paint” manual, Color and Light tackles questions that even season artists will struggle to master.  A sampling of page headings: Overcast Light, The Mud Debate, Is Moonlight Blue?, Subsurface Scattering; The Hair Secret, Golden Hour Lighting; Snow and Ice; Mountain Streams…

For artists, this isn’t Gurney’s first instructional book: In 2009, Andrews McMeel published Imaginative Realism, a similar book that provided artists with a toolset on “How to Paint What doesn’t Exist”.  It covered ways to adapt the familiar into the unknown nature of fantasy illustration, but also discussed topics such as visual composition.  Color and Light is a natural follow-up to Imaginative Realism, describing in more details an essential set of visual skills.  An interesting part of the book’s approach is how it uses modern tools such as digital photography in order to explain traditional canvas-based techniques.

Not being an artist, I can only guess as to the true worth of what Gurney outlines here.  What I can say is that Color and Light feels like a backstage peek at the mind of painters as they learn to see the world with far fewer assumptions as the rest of us lay viewers.  The book deconstructs elements of color and lighting in order to highlight the subtle ways that reality influences our perception, our understanding of what we see, and even our moods.  Some professional artists may have a near-unconscious understanding of topics such as pigmentation, lightfastness and caustics, but for non-artistic laymen such as myself, Gurney’s explanations hint at the depth of accumulated knowledge that come to rest behind the eyes of a painter.  Part of Color and Light’s impact is in presenting enormously complex topics in a manner that is simple to understand, yet complete enough to suggest the hidden depths of the idea.

This being said, you can appreciate Color and Light as an art-book if you want to.  There’s some great art on nearly every page, as Gurney uses examples from his own professional and personal work to illustrate the topic at hand.  Much of it comes from Dinotopia, of course, but a lot of them are from Gurney’s personal work and sketches, sometimes reflecting where he traveled around the world.  It is, in its own way, an impressive testimony not only to Gurney’s technical credentials as he meticulously explains art history and techniques to readers, but also a demonstration of his willingness to constantly improve his own understanding of the art and distil his wisdom in a few hundred pages.  I don’t think any professional ever sets out to coast on what they know for the rest of their career, but Gurney demonstrates the opposite, and how he is, even at the height of his own personal success, still trying new things, still daring to expose himself to criticism by putting together an instructional book.

For those who are curious to see what Gurney is now working on, you can always follow his daily blog for regular updates, artwork and ideas.  Also get ahold of Color and Light, preferably alongside Imaginative Realism: Beyond being a good look at Gurney’s career so far, it’s an astonishing peek at the mind of a working artist, and the compromises with which they work in nearly every piece.  It’s not just an art book worth buying, not just an art book worth studying, it’s an art book worth reading.

Wampeters, Foma & Grandfaloons, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Wampeters, Foma & Grandfaloons, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Delacorte, 1974, 285 pages, $??.?? hc, ISBN 0-440-08717-1

In the big list of things I still have to do, “Read more Kurt Vonnegut” remains essential.  While Vonnegut is best-known for his fiction, his public persona is equally well-defined by the non-fiction he has written over his long career.  Published in 1974, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons collects some of Vonnegut’s non-fiction pieces dating from 1965 to 1974.  This period is significant in that it marked a significant transition for the author: Two of his best-known novels, Slaughterhouse Five (1969) and Breakfast of Champions (1973), were published during this period, and his profile appreciated accordingly.  Read the collection carefully, and you can almost see the transition, as Vonnegut goes from writing semi-journalism pieces, to opining professionally, to becoming the subject of lengthy interviews.

An unusually interesting preface presents Vonnegut at his best: self-reflective to the point of self-deprecation, expressing complex ideas with short sentences and simple vocabulary.  It’s easy to become a Vonnegut fan when he seems determined to undermine the false elevation of the writer in the reader’s mind.  I suppose that this, in large part, also accounts for Vonnegut’s reputation as a humanist.

For Science Fiction fans with lengthy memories, the book opens big with a short piece examining Vonnegut’s relationship with the SF genre as of 1965: Vonnegut found himself identified with the genre through what he wrote rather than his intentions.  (“I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer” [P.1]) Having no association with the SF community, he spends much of the essay looking at the genre from a bemused observer’s point of view, eventually concluding that the genre is infantile, self-centered and doomed to disappear, since “all lodges [dissolve], sooner or later.” [p.5] SF fans will find it hard not to cringe at the accuracy of the statement.  (Amusingly, the book also collects “Fortitude”, which is nothing but a Science Fiction play in one act.  Vonnegut himself published in acknowledged SF magazines early in his career, making some bewildered statements seem disingenuous.)  Curiously, this essay is seldom acknowledged in SF circles.

But then again, I do live a sheltered existence, and it’s pieces like “Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway” that make me wonder at how much of the world I still don’t know.  The Inland Waterway, or more accurately “Intracostal Waterway”, is a set of waterways allowing boaters along the eastern and southern American seaboard to navigate from New Jersey to Texas without having to brave the open sea.  Vonnegut used it to travel from Massachusetts to Florida aboard the Kennedy family yacht, and reports his impressions in a series of short, simple vignettes that give a feel for an entirely different world than highway driving.  Digging a bit deeper, I was even more surprised to find out that the Intracostal Waterway links to a nautical route called “The Great Loop”, a component of which passes not a kilometer away from my house.  So, yeah; I live next to a water highway leading straight to Florida.  That’s not exactly the kind of discovery I expected when I picked up Wampeters, Foma & Grandfaloons at a used book sale, but I’ll take it.

Other pieces mix reporting with opinion.  “Teaching the Unteachable” is an acid look at the racket of university writing workshops; “Yes, We Have No Nirvanas” is a half-serene, half-sceptical profile of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; “There’s a Maniac Loose Out There” offers an impressionistic account of Cape Cod dealing with a serial killer, somewhat reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson (whose Fear and Loathing: On the campaign Trail ’72 is favourably reviewed later in the book); “The Mysterious Madame Blavatsky” is a portrait of the historical celebrity, whereas, more grimly, “Biafra: A People Betrayed” offers impression on the war-torn African country.

But reporting isn’t Vonnegut’s strength as much as his commentary is.  America from 1965 to 1974 was a cauldron of controversies and revolution, and Vonnegut was there to comment upon the events.  Various pieces consider the American Space Program as an expensive fireworks show, bombing in Vietnam as ineffective torture and American politics as set-dressing for a war of the winners against the losers.  Various addresses to various audiences offer Vonnegut speaking directly to his audience.  The book ends on a lengthy and revealing Playboy interview discussing his inspirations, history, writing methods and progressive prominence as a writer.

The result, as you may expect, is a quirky packaging of pieces that show Vonnegut during one of his most vital periods.  It’s a great way to get acquainted with Vonnegut’s voice, even though I suspect that fans of the author will get the most out of it.  It’s funny; it’s deceptively easy to read and it combines sympathy with cynicism in a way that only Vonnegut could achieve.

The Nasty Bits, Anthony Bourdain

The Nasty Bits, Anthony Bourdain

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Bloomsbury, 2007 reprint of 2006 original, 288 pages, C$16.50 tp, ISBN-978-1-59691-360-8

In my continued quest to read all of Anthony Bourdain’s written output, I am now left to digest the “collected varietal cuts, usable trim, scraps and bones” of his career so far.  Or, in more prosaic terms, a collection of various pieces written following the runaway success of Kitchen Confidential and his rise as a celebrity food writer.  The Nasty Bits brings together 36 non-fiction pieces, accompanied by a fiction novelette and an essential appendix that comments on the various pieces.  The non-fiction content is subdivided in thematic seconds meant to evoke the five basic tastes, but the real flavour here is Bourdain’s punk-rock approach to food and travel writing.

A standout piece, for instance, is “Food and Loathing in Las Vegas”, a Hunter S. Thompson-inspired piece in which Bourdain describes his first visit to the new Las Vegas food scene.  As entertaining commentary wrapped in semi-fictional homage to its source material, it’s a laugh –and prior to Bourdain’s influence, it’s not always the kind of writing you could find in food/travel magazines.  Much of The Nasty Bits is unpretentious travel writing liberally seasoned with descriptions of good food: Bourdain’s prose is seldom less than fascinating, and he’s got a knack for living interesting experiences.  They don’t all have to involve eating strange new bugs in third-world countries: In “The Love Boat”, Bourdain tries to survive on a posh cruise liner with an in-cabin kitchenette and an on-board gourmet grocer: It’s a look at high-end decadent living from a reformed line cook, and it’s about as interesting a confrontation of world-views as you can imagine.  (More importantly, Bourdain manages to cook a perfect risotto with what he’s given on-board.)

Other pieces stand out for less-charming reasons.  Bourdain’s never been shy to criticize what he sees as being wrong with food culture, and in “Woody Harrelson: A Culinary Muse” takes aim at the actor for insisting on a vegan diet and ignoring what local food culture had to offer while traveling abroad.  Such openness to world cuisine (and Asian food in general) is a hallmark of Bourdain’s writing, and several other pieces document his growing fascination with the world of gastronomic possibilities.  An interesting pair of pieces in this regard are “Notes from the Road” and “Die, Die Must Try”, presenting Bourdain’s brutal first visit to Singapore and a far friendlier follow-up.

Such growth as a person and as a writer is an essential part of The Nasty Bits, allowing us to follow Bourdain’s quick evolution as Kitchen Confidential, then his TV shows, gradually opened more possibilities for him.  From a humble cook with a troubled past to a world-traveling food writer, Bourdain has grown up in public in the six years between Kitchen Confidential and The Nasty Bits, and this evolution is reflected here in many ways, between pieces but also in the second thoughts that ends the book.  In “Sleaze Gone By”, he wears his scrappy New York formative influences like a badge of honour in recalling with some fondness the rougher pre-Giuliani neighbourhoods he used to frequent.  But significantly, the back of the book commentary takes it back: “A pretty glib, wildly over-romanticized look at the New York City of my misspent youth.” [P.285])

Some other pieces stand out because of their unusual subject matter.  In “Warning Signs”, Bourdain describes a well-known London steakhouse chain and itemizes ten reasons why the place ought to be closed down; “The Good, Old Stuff” discusses how several restaurants still serve unfashionable food straight from decades past; “Viva Mexico! Viva Ecuador” pays tribute to the hard-working immigrants toiling away in American kitchens; “When the Cooking’s Over” discusses what chefs do after their shift is done, with several examples in various cities; “The Cook’s Companion” provides an essential bibliography of great writing about the real life of restaurants; and “System D” borrows from the French to explain one of the essential traits of any competent kitchen worker.

A special mention should also be made of “A Chef’s Christmas”, which showcases Bourdain’s fiction credentials to a wider audience.  The piece itself isn’t particularly refined (it self-consciously relies on a rich deus ex snowstorm to provide a happy ending, and seems to hop in-between half a dozen characters’ viewpoint almost at random in only thirty pages.) but it’s an entertaining change of pace from the non-fiction pieces and as witty as Bourdain can be.

All of it amounts to a collection that Bourdain fans will find essential.  The Nasty Bits is not the best introduction to Bourdain’s work (For that, try Kitchen Confidential, or the No Reservation TV series), but it’s a good satisfying read.

The Perfect Thing, Steven Levy

The Perfect Thing, Steven Levy

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Simon & Schuster, 2006, 284 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-7432-8522-3

I am not an Apple fanboy.  In the great PC/Mac debate, I will forever be against the paternalistic walled-ecosystem paradigm represented by Apple.  I held out as long as I could before buying an iPod Touch, and it was only because I had to admit that it was the best PDA available on the market.  But you know what?  I love my iPod.  I jailbreak it as soon as I can as a matter of principle (I feel entitled to access the file system of every computer I own), but I love it.  It does what I expect of it, and quite a bit more.  I started ripping MP3s in 1999 and have owned a variety of MP3-playing devices from the RioVolt SP250 to the Palm Tungsten T2, but my iPod Touch 2G (and now, 4G) has easily been the best.

Such a sentiment is widespread enough that it is the bedrock of Steven Levy’s The Perfect Thing, a book dedicated to what was then the iPod in its classic scroll-wheel form.  (Not even the touch version, introduced a year after the book.)  Levy, a technology journalist with an interest in cultural issues, makes a convincing case that the iPod represents a fundamental shift in our relationship with music, and doesn’t miss a facet of the iPod culture in the way he studies the history and development of the iPod, its impact on music listening and its consequences on our own individuality.

Levy is so fascinated by the concept of “Shuffling”, in fact, that The Perfect Thing comes in numerous versions, with autonomous middle chapters “shuffled” in a different order from one copy to the other.  (We are wisely warned of this in the book’s opening “Author’s Note”.)  However novel, this idea ends up being a clumsy experiment.  As a reader, I believe in the development of ideas, in arguments building atop each other, in context being established before an explanation of consequences.  However independent Levy has designed his chapters, some of them still read as out of order in my copy of The Perfect Thing: The “Apple” chapter describing Apple and Steve Jobs come late in the book, setting up Job’s formidable reputation too late to be effective; tragically, it follows the Origins chapter that details how Jobs’ incessant attention to detail was a major factor in the iPod’s polish.  Some chapters about the second-order effect of the iPod’s feature are at the beginning of my copy of the book, which takes away from the development of Levy’s thesis.  So, conclusion: no shuffling in books, okay?

This nit put aside, The Perfect Thing is, even five years and two technological generations later, still one of the ultimate books about the iPod.  It’s filled with interesting, even little-known information.  It draws conclusions about the behaviour of iPod users that have been validated by the time since then.  In fact, I suspect that the book is so good that it makes assumptions that are completely self-obvious now.  One of the most interesting things about consumer electronic progress is the way their constant daily use quickly overwrites our memories of how things used to be.  Say that the iPod was not for sale until the end of 2001 and your audience will furrow their brows and say “Really?” The iPad?  Introduced in April 2010, not even 18 months ago as I edit this review.  The iPod and its inspired competitors have been a part of our daily lives for so long that it’s hard to remember previous modes of music consumption.  Shuffle, as Levy loves to point out, is an almost-entirely digital-music concept: Before then, you were lucky (and well-off) if you owned a CD jukebox that could slowly shuffle between five or ten CDs.  Otherwise, it was a strictly linear listening experience, even if you were a mix-tape whiz.  (I had to laugh in recognition when Levy described how memories of one song could blend with the memory of the transition between the previous and next song on the same disc)

The chapter on the development of the iPod is a crystal-clear example of good tech journalism, and it’s an eloquent testimony about the need for end-user polishing in the development cycle.  Levy builds the product’s features into a platform that changes the way people think of themselves and others (especially if music is an important part of their self-identity), the way Apple have taken existing technological trends to fashion a workable ecosystem for media delivery (something that’s even truer now than in 2006) and the self-expression possibilities of the podcast, something now obvious that wasn’t even practical to any but a privileged few a decade ago.

The proof of The Perfect Thing’s thesis and conclusions could be found all around me as I enjoyed reading the book on my daily bus commute.  It took me six rides to read the book, and every single time, in the small universe of the twenty people lodged at the back of the bus where I sit, I could never see fewer than two (and often as high as seven) personal devices either branded Apple or inspired by it.  The iPod is indeed the perfect thing of our time.

More Digressions, Peter David

More Digressions, Peter David

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Mad Norwegian Press, 2009, 408 pages, $24.95 tp, ISBN 978-193523400-5

I don’t know much about the mainstream superhero-oriented comic book industry, but I do know that Peter David is one of the most entertaining “Writer of Stuff” (his own tagline) out there.  Some writers’ bibliography read like a short list of novels published at yearly intervals.  Peter’s own bibliography reads like a multimedia tour through the last twenty years of American pop culture: Aside from his own original work, his tie-in work ranges from Star Trek novels, ten superhero movie novelizations, a Babylon5 TV scripts, scripting runs on superhero comics such as Spider-Man, The Hulk and Supergirl… and much, much more.

Tying much of this work together are the regular “But I Digress” columns published in the Comics Buyer’s Guide.  Given full blessings to write about whatever he wants, Peter uses his column to discuss his life, his work, the state of the comics industry and the world at large.  I had exceptionally fond memories of the first But I Digress collection published in 1994, so it wasn’t much of a sell to make me pick up this follow-up once I was made aware that it existed.

Collecting material published between 2001 and 2008 (leaving an uncollected gap between 1994 and 2001), More Digressions is exactly what it says on the cover: “a new collection of ‘But I Digress’ columns”.  Roughly arranged in thematic sections with titles such as “Life. Don’t Talk to Me about Life”, “The Business of Comics”, “BFFs” and “Fandomonium”, the essays cover much of David’s life and work during the past decade.  David being outspoken even on the calmest of days, it’s no surprise if the book also ends up being a collection of arguments, controversies, daring proposals and public score-settling.

The first thing I realized reading More Digressions was that I had little business reading the book.  Let’s face it: the American superhero comics industry is so insular that keeping track of its mythology is a full-time hobby.  The columns collected here were published in a trade publication, aimed at readers who were fully aware of the slightest twitches and grunts of the various publishers and series.  For a very casual fan like me, parts of More Digression read like intense but meaningless squabbles about subjects that must be really important to the people involved in the discussions, but close to meaningless for anyone who’s not a comic-book store regular.  The learning curve here was steep, and I have to admit that Wikipedia helped a lot.  (Even more casual readers who feel that a book should not require Wikipedia as a reading companion may have a point, but then again every book has a specific target audience.)

Still, knowledge is one thing, and attitude is another.  From afar, reading David talk about the comic book industry and its fandom can be cause for bafflement and concern.  The comics industry is currently in crisis: it’s suffering from the rise of the paperback collection as a preferred buying format, it’s under siege from those who want to “widen” the material to appeal to the audiences hooked by Hollywood superhero movies, and it’s reaping the results of decades’ worth of catering to an obsessive 18-to-34 geeky male audience.  For creators such as David, this situation has translated into two recurring motifs: the sometimes counterproductive marketing strategies of the industry, and the rabid self-entitlement of the fans.  Reading about the dysfunctional nature of the industry and stories of fannish abuse, I felt more compelled than ever to stay as far away from the craziness of superhero comics fandom.

Of course, this is the comics universe as seen from Peter David, and that he’s perfectly entitled to be critical in his own column.  Plus, More Digression isn’t all about the business and fandom of comics: His essays about his own life and creative process are a good read, and in talking about his best friends, we get a look at such notables as Harlan Ellison (who contributes a typically self-absorbed introduction to the book), George Takei or Neil Gaiman –further proof of David’s interesting life.

More Digressions is a collection of opinions and recollections, and it’s normal that not everything works at the same level, or reaches the same interest.  I found some columns weaker than others, including a naïve take on racism that had me wincing at the lessons from the painful RaceFail debate that shook the online SF community in early 2009.  But it is Peter David’s soapbox, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff here for whoever can follow along, forgive some self-justifying entries and ignore minor trade squabbles since then forgotten.  It’s a portrait of a unique columnist, and an unvarnished look at a sometimes-demented subculture.  It’s not for everyone, but it’s exactly what it tries to be.

The Business of Science-Fiction, Mike Resnick & Barry N. Malzberg

The Business of Science-Fiction, Mike Resnick & Barry N. Malzberg

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

McFarland, 2010, 269 pages, ~C$35.00 tp, ISBN 978-0-7864-4797-8

Reading books about how to write are one of my not-so-secret vices.  Jaded by endless convention panels repeating the same advice, I don’t read them to learn how to write as much as to learn how other writers write.  A good how-to-write book is usually a window into an author’s career, or an inside look in the publishing business.  The best of such books will tell stories, teach real-world pitfalls and be entertaining as well.

The Business of Science-Fiction is a collection of twenty-six columns published in the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s (SFWA) trade journal “The Bulletin”.  SFWA is where speculative fiction writers go to talk shop, and it’s hard to get closer to the SF&F genre than to read its internal house publication.  For more than a decade, Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg have been jointly writing a column on various aspects of SF writing and publishing.  Those columns take the form of exchanges between the two of them; Resnick usually plays the role of the optimist, with Malzberg’s gloomy outlook balancing the dialogue.

To SF fans with short memories, Resnick and Malzberg may not be the obvious choices to write authoritative columns on the current state of SF writing.  While Resnick regularly gets nominated for the shorter Hugo Award categories, it’s usually for cloying stories that seem designed to appeal to SF fans’ sense of nostalgia rather than try anything new.  Meanwhile, Malzberg’s heyday as an author dates back to the seventies, without much of a public profile since then.

But that’s being myopic.  Resnick has been tremendously influential in discovering and encouraging newer writers.  If his own fiction is a bit bland, it’s usually solidly bolted together and as we discover through the columns, he has proven uncommonly effective at reselling his stories to markets other than first-run English-language paper publication.  Few other writers in the genre are as knowledgeable about the business aspect of Science-Fiction.  Meanwhile, Malzberg has developed a reputation as a cranky historian of the field: His Breakfast in the Ruins non-fiction collection brought together a number of highly astute pieces about the state of Science-Fiction over the past decades.  Reading the columns, it’s difficult not to be impressed by the depth of his historical knowledge of the field.  More crucially, readers may not see his continuing work for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, which has let him keep an insider’s view of the business throughout the years.

The columns collected in The Business of Science-Fiction, taken together, show a snapshot of the changing publishing industry in the first decade of the twenty-first century.  Resnick and Malzberg discuss the state of the business with the benefit of long memories, but they don’t forget to question themselves in trying to figure out what is changing along the way.  They can also, writing for a professional audience, allow themselves to discuss “the next question” and pick up arguments aimed at professional writers rather than beginners.  The references they make to SF publishing’s long history are filled with interesting details, and the advice they provide feels fresh and uncompromising.  (SF convention organizers won’t like reading what they say about whether authors should attend conventions.)  The dialogue format can be entertaining to read, especially when both of them are aware of the role they have picked for themselves.  (Both refer to Malzberg as “Eeyore” more than once.)

Given that this is a re-packaging of existing content, it’s no surprise if some material and stories echo throughout the book, or that it’s not a good idea to read more than a few of the 4,000-word columns at a time.  Academic publisher McFarland has done a fine job putting the collection together, not the least feature being a complete index at the end of the book.  What’s missing, unfortunately, are dates of publication attached to each column: In discussing rapidly-changing topics such as e-books or the Google Settlement, for instance, it’s vital to know whether these are facts and opinions from 2003 or 2008.  I also can’t help but be amused at the cover design, which takes some Shutterstock stock art to suggest a dialogue between the two authors: Having seen both Resnick and Malzberg in real life more than once, it’s obvious to me that neither of the silhouetted figures are even close to them in physical appearance.

But the book does live up to its subtitle as “Two Insiders Discuss Writing and Publish”, and the quality of the advice here is good enough to justify its Hugo nomination in the non-fiction category.  Both are charming and witty to read in print, and the advice has some real-world relevance.  What more would you want from a how-to-write book?