Book Review

  • Design for Communities, Derek Powazek

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    New Riders, 2001, 307 pages, C$44.95 tpb, ISBN 0-7357-1075-9

    As a web designer, I know how easy it is to focus on the information structure, the XHTML coding, the CSS graphical design or the hardware needed to run a successful web site, while ignoring the users who will visit the site. (Or even worse; thinking of them merely as automaton visitors that have to be scientifically managed using “usability guidelines”.) I can testify that coding even a mid-sized web site by oneself can be such a huge task that any simplification is welcome.

    At the same time, there is a tendency -among organizations and individuals alike- to think of a web site as merely a repository of information. That’s a good first step, and sometime all you need… but what sets the web apart from anything else that’s existed before is the capability for interaction between creator and visitors, or between visitors themselves. Indeed, you could argue that some of the most successful web sites are made by visitors rather than the administrators.

    But there’s a very good reason to avoid considering web sites as community tools. It’s far more complex, on a technical level, than simply putting up static XHTML pages. It’s also vastly more complicated to deal with unpredictable humans when they have a hand in the creation of content. For every five well-behaved net.citizen, there’s at least one net.vandal who loves nothing better than the anonymity of the web to be able to send bricks through your virtual storefront. Dealing with those idiots isn’t the only challenges of community web sites; administrators also have to define the tone of their community, attract enough users to sustain a critical mass of discussion, nurture their shared conventions, avoid growing too quickly and manage flame wars… the list just goes on. Woe on anyone venturing forth in this area without strong guidance.

    Early web pioneers had to learn it all on the job, through mistakes and the wonders of naturally-evolving systems. But not anymore, thanks to people like Derek Powazek and his wonderful book Design for Communities. Anyone thinking about going beyond simple contact forms to a more sophisticated form of web community interaction should put this book high on their must-read list. Not only is it fascinating reading on its own, but it contains enough hard-won advice to save you months of development time.

    Powazek quickly establishes himself as a likeable host in the book’s first few pages, and this shining personality is one of the things that make Design for Communities worthwhile and so compulsively readable. He integrates the “website by other people” concept a step further in his writing by including great interviews with other web community builders at the end of each chapter (for instance, a discussion with Slashdot.org’s Rob Malda is featured at the end of chapter 6, “Moderation, Karma and Flame Bait”) Communities are about identity and personality, and Design for Communities has a voice of its own. There’s almost no technical jargon in this book and that’s a good thing: you’re building for a community and not from technology.

    Chapter after chapter examines not only the design issues in allowing user interaction on a site, but also how to set rules, enforce policies, why barriers to entry are useful, how communities can become highly intimate, how to set up mailing lists and how even commercial entities can create highly successful communities. I was most impressed by Chapter 11, ironically (or not) about how to gracefully manage the end of a community site. Thoughtful!

    At the end of Design for Communities, I felt as if I’d learned an awful lot of stuff in a very short while. In fact, I’d learned enough to decide that I wasn’t yet ready to implement such tools on any of my sites yet. But maybe you’ll decide otherwise (or have already done so), and in this case, there isn’t a better work out there than this book to guide you through the pitfalls of web communities. As web presences become more commonplace, I suspect that many organizations and individuals will start looking at the Next Big Thing for their web site, and communities could be one of those things. In a field where books expire before they roll off the printing presses, it’s doubtful that Design for Communities will be obsolete any time soon.

  • Killing Time, Caleb Carr

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 2000, 335 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61095-X

    We hard-core Science-Fiction geeks have a favorite past-time whenever an author best-known in another genre decides to write a genre novel; it’s called “trashing the book.” The rationale for indulging in such an immature pursuit goes a little like this: Despite decades of excellent stories, the mainstream “establishment” still poo-poohs SF. Occasionally, a member of the “establishment” decides that s/he wants to write a science-fiction story, but -ah-ha!- it’s “much too good to be called SF”. The problem is that in most cases, these authors don’t have any of the intellectual rigor expected of SF writers and make atrocious mistakes in logic, science and plausibility. Then they usually answer any criticism by saying “So what? It’s sci-fi.”

    So fans usually strike back by tearing apart the novel. It’s good fun, it’s a group-affirming past-time at conventions and as long as nobody else has to listen to us, it hurts no one. So feel free to skip to the next review if you feel like it.

    Caleb Carr’s main claim to fame (so far) is a pair of historical crime fiction novels set in late 19th-century New York. The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness have been justifiably lauded by critics for a certain originality (applying modern criminal procedural knowledge at the earliest possible time where it was possible to do so, not unlike Foucault’s The Name of the Rose) and a definite storytelling competence. Carr -a trained historian- has no SF background, nor has he ever attended a science-fiction convention. In short, he is Not One Of Us, and as such is a perfect mainstream target for SF geeks. Killing Time itself was published by the general fiction arm of Warner publishing (not the SF “Aspect” imprint) and the blurbs included in front of the paperback edition are all from mainstream publications (George, USA Today, Baltimore Sun, etc.)

    Certainly, Carr doesn’t do himself any favor by writing a novel in which the first two pages are a broad denunciation of the Information Age, complete with the catchphrase “Information is not Knowledge”. If there’s one viewpoint certain to infuriate a whole generation of SF addicts weaned on cyberpunk’s “Information wants to be free” and the anti-Frankenstein “There are no things humankind isn’t meant to know”, well, I can’t think of a better one.

    So Killing Time begins. From a straight-SF viewpoint, it doesn’t get much better; Carr’s first-person narration details how one Gideon Wolfe (presumably a criminalist/psychologist, though his talents don’t play much role in the following story) is taken away from his comfortable 2023 upper-class lifestyle by a band of traveling anarchists who have vowed to destroy the Information Age. Curious echoes of “funny SF” tales such as Matt Ruff’s Sewer, Gas & Electric resonate here, but Carr seems intent on playing it completely straight. Alas, even the characters seem stenciled from SF’s worst stock clichés: the disabled mad scientist, the beautiful female assassin, the sex-starved geek, etc.

    It’s not as if there aren’t any ideas at all, mind you. Carr’s novel is an extrapolation on the means at our disposal now for faking the truth. The problem here is that these ideas don’t mesh in a coherent whole, nor do they seem organic to the plot. We are eventually asked to believe in a genius who can single-handedly build machines defying our conception of space and time. We are also asked to believe in a future where no one double-checks information against multiple established sources.

    It’s not as if the novel doesn’t have substantial non-SF flaws either; Killing Time‘s pace is firmly set at “breakneck”, almost as if Carr was afraid of us asking too many questions. The protagonist seems content to be a passive onlooker throughout most of the book, being hijacked and led from one situation to another. Even for such a short book (less than 350 pages in large typeface), there isn’t much of a story here.

    But, even then, Killing Time isn’t a complete disaster. Carr’s attitude is different from the usual SF assumptions, and that may be a welcome diversion for some. The speed at which the book can be read ensures that not many readers will waste too much time on it. Plus, whoever does read Killing Time will have a lot of fun at the next SF convention, whenever the subject of mainstream authors barging in the genre eventually comes up. Everyone wins!

  • Blood of Others, Rick Mofina

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pinnacle, 2002, 466 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7860-1267-6

    (Obligatory disclaimer; adjust the following review according to my acknowledged favorable bias for A> local authors and B> authors I’ve met.)

    Fans of Rick Mofina, rejoice; the Ottawa-area thriller writer shows no sign of slowing down, turning in his third novel in three years. After the unconventional Cold Fear this novel is somewhat of a return to the settings, characters and conventional structure of his first book, If Angels Fall.

    For one thing, Blood of Others is mostly located back in San Francisco, where the events of the first novel took place. For another, Blood of Others features the protagonists of Mofina’s first novel in a rather more active role than in Cold Fear.

    As the story begins, a few months have gone by since the events of the previous novel, but things look a lit like they did two novels ago; Walt Skydowski is still the same irascible super-cop, though he’s making progress on the dating front. Tom Reed is still an overworked, underappreciated journalist, hated by his bad boss, hounded by his wife and once again on the prowl for a good story. He’s about to get a big one; the spectacularly ghoulish display of a murder victim leads him to an informant who claims to have seen the victim enter a police car on the day of the murder. Clearly, something is up and neither Tom nor Walt have any idea what they’re up against. Fortunately, another character looks as if he does, and by the end of the book, we can only wonder if the next novel won’t feature a third major recurring character…

    It’s risky to talk about “an author’s favorite themes” after only three books, but risk has never stopped this particular reviewer in the past. Truth is, anyway, that several familiar elements do re-occur. The antagonism between the media and the police is still very present and personified by Tom and Walt’s antagonistic relationship. On the other hand, Tom’s complicated work/life balance is getting overused as a dramatic device. It would be about time for him to have a good boss and be able to write his articles without antagonizing his whole family. Maybe in time for the next novel!

    Still, there’s no denying that Mofina is becoming better and better. The overall pacing of Blood of Others is generally more sustained than that of its predecessor, and the hair-raising finale is appropriately located at a San Francisco landmark. I wasn’t overly impressed by the antagonist in this volume, but then again I’m liable to unfavorably prejudiced whenever a character like that turns out to be a raving psychopath. (There’s also the whole bad-internet-bad! angle, but I need to lighten up about such things) Still, I wonder if the little time-bomb buried at the end of the epilogue will be used in Mofina’s next novels in the Reed/Skydowski cycle. Tick-tick-tick-tick…

    In the meantime, have fun with Mofina’s first three novels. I’m impressed enough to put him on my short to-buy list, though I’ll be the first to admit that his stuff fits squarely in the crime-fiction mid-list, there isn’t anything wrong with that. At least you can rest assured of a good read; Mofina writes clearly and concisely and with more than enough suspense to keep you intrigued. A promising initial trilogy from a writer to watch.

  • Callahan’s Key, Spider Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2000, 335 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-58060-4

    I have detailed, in previous reviews, my various annoyances with Spider Robinson’s unique brand of fiction. With Callahan’s Key, Robinson has come up with a novel that is almost indistinguishable from the previous two or three books in the “Callahan’s” series. So why have I liked it so much?

    This latest installment begins on one of the darkest winter days of early 1989, as narrator/protagonist Jake Stonebender suffers through the indignities of yet another Long island snowstorm. Things look grim, but before long, the usual gang of very exceptional friends shows up and convinces Jake to A> move to Key West, Florida and B> save the universe. Not merely the world, mind you, but the universe. The gang reacts in their usual blasé fashion. (“God damn it. AGAIN?” [P.7] Also see P. 181 and 201 of the paperback edition.)

    There remains the slight matter of moving some hundred-odd (very odd) people from upstate New York to Key West. Doing so will require some ingenuity, work and more than a dozen yellow school buses. Most of the novel’s first half is spent following Jake and the gang as they first plan and then go on the road trip to end all road trips. Several cool not-so-tourist attractions are visited. A few puns are slung. Authority is defied. A shuttle is launched. A good time is had by all. This first half is by far the most enjoyable; the process of mass-moving from New York State to Florida is far more relevant to us than the process of saving the universe.

    Then we’re due for the gang’s arrival in the Keys, where even their full-blown exceptional nature is unremarkable. There remains the slight matter of saving the universe, but as we all know, that part proves to be a cinch. No matter; you know you’ll devour it at once.

    No, there isn’t much that’s new or even original at Callahan’s. Robinson has found himself a comfortable niche, and as long as he continues to deliver the goods, he’s not tinkering with the formula. Regulars will appreciate the tall stories, the anti-establishment tone, the puns and of course the feeling that every one is welcome at Callahan’s.

    Callahan’s Key is still one of the best entries in the series, though, what with its unusual travelogue that takes the bar away from the characters, somewhat. Robinson doesn’t waste as much time setting up elaborate puns and his description of a shuttle launch seems as moving as the event itself. The book isn’t nearly as weepy as its immediate prequel. There’s also a good role for Nicola Tesla, one of my own favorite historical character, with a wonderful explanation of the man’s latter-year slide in crackpot-hood. (Think Siberia, 1908 and slap yourself for not thinking of it earlier. [Chapter 13])

    I still hold on to most of my reservations about Robinson’s shtick, mind you. His cast of characters is, by now, ridiculously powerful (and bulletproof). Group telepathy seems to be the ultimate answer to a remarkable number of things. He still displays a remarkable intolerance for “bureaucrats and Pentagon dolt-heads” (someone should sit with him and explain the nobility of public service, as well as how We Are Not A Monolith, Damnit.) Robinson also overplays to his crowd (we’re go smart, so advanced, so civilized, etc.), but whoever is still reading the Callahan’s series after nearly ten volumes shouldn’t be surprised at most of this stuff.

    So why do I keep counting myself as one of them? Well, one of the surprises of Callahan’s Key was finding out that I actually enjoyed reading about Robinson’s merry band of iconoclasts. While Robinson and I obviously come from different backgrounds and would probably start arguing the minute we met (not that this would be a bad thing, mind you), the truth is that coming back to Callahan’s universe almost felt like going someplace familiar. I suspect that a large part of Callahan’s appeal is in offering an idealized representation of a place where all are welcome regardless of prejudice, as long as you enjoy good company, good ale and good songs. I think we’re all looking for something like that. Hurrah to Robinson for providing it, even in a diluted fictional form!

  • Fresh Styles for Web Designers, Curt Cloninger

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    New Riders, 2002, 211 pages, C$52.95 tpb, ISBN 0-7357-1074-0

    I’m not sure why or how, but I have long been fascinated by design. Whether graphical design, web design or pure design (ie; the thousand ways to make a chair), I can be endlessly entertained by the intricacies of putting a detail here rather than there and the effect this can have on an overall piece. (Actually, I lied about not have any idea about the source of my design fascination: I suspect that it stems from my problem-solving fetish, which is a large part of what design is all about.)

    Alas, as a quick look at my web site will reveal, I’m not a very good designer myself. I don’t have much imagination, and what I do best is either do a lot with nothing or slavishly copy whatever’s been done before. “Efficient” is one way of characterizing my work. “Boring” is another.

    Still, I approached Curt Cloninger’s Fresh Styles for Web Designers with something approximating glee. I looked forward to reading it with the same feeling I have whenever I’m about to read a crunchy good SF novel from a reliable author. Simply paging through the book was difficult, as I wanted to just dive in and read everything at once.

    Fresh Styles is a book-length expansion on an article available at http://www.lab404.com/dan/, a list of twelve new “cutting edge” styles to help designers break out of the curiously similar web sites you can find just about everywhere on the web. Cloninger doesn’t pay much heed to usability concerns here, usually justifying his position by the idea that personal sites can afford to be slightly user-unfriendly, and some commercial sites do, in fact, demand a slightly edgier look. In any case, anyone looking for usability design tips should read another book.

    So Fresh Styles details ten new and unusual styles one could conceivably adopt and modify for one’s own purposes. The styles range from soft and cuddly to harsh and industrial, with everything from simple and minimal to complex and dirty in between. Though there is some technical advice here and there, this is more of an inspirational book than an instructional one. Indeed, it helped me come to grip with my own style, which I’ve come to recognize as an inept take on HTMinimaLism (“Say it! Say it loud! I’m an HTMinimaList and I’m proud!”)

    Overall, this is a fun and inspiring tour: The design styles covered by Cloninger are indeed fresh (on or off the web) and he does explain a few of the techniques used in creating these styles, in addition to the philosophy (or desired effect) behind them. The book offers proof that everything old can be new again, and a simple exploration of past design trends can be applied in a fresh way to a new medium. The book is abundantly illustrated, so there are quite a few examples for the reader to enjoy.

    Maybe not enough of them, though. In fact, my single biggest criticism of the book is flattering; I would have appreciated more stuff. For wannabee designers such as myself who excel in replicating styles, it’s also a bit of a bother that Cloninger doesn’t spend more time qualifying and explaining why and how to realize a design. One (or two) site does not a movement make! But that’s unlikely to bother more seasoned designers who will use the book as a springboard toward something wholly different.

    Considering the book from a wider perspective, it can also stand in as a quick tour of the web circa late 2001, at a point where the medium began to acquire an artistic maturity of its own. It’s easy to be respectable when there’s VC money around, but once the big bucks and the glamour’s been stockbrokered away, that’s when the medium’s resilience shows through. The design philosophies in Fresh Styles are demonstrations that, yes, the web is a bold and new medium that just won’t go away, and might actually thrive best once the dot-com hype has died down.

    But more prosaically, Fresh Styles is an all-too-rare glimpse in the mind of working design professionals, beyond the dirt-common “design” manuals that are really HTML coding primers. I’m glad this book exists, and I’m even happier that I’ve read it. Now I want a sequel with more styles, more details and more design considerations. As soon as possible!

  • The Coming, Joe Haldeman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2000, 218 pages, C$??.?? hc, ISBN 0-441-00769-4

    (Read in French as Le Message, translated by Michel Pagel)

    Is it just me, or have Joe Haldeman’s latest few books been uniformly disappointing? Forever Peace unexplainably won the Hugo award despite reading like a first novel from a none-too-gifted neophyte. Forever Free was one of the worst SF novels of the past few years. If you want to be generous, you can say that lately, Haldeman has been churning books whose first half may seem promising, but whose ultimate effect is disappointing.

    He doesn’t break out of this rut with The Coming, a short novel that nominally deals with that most familiar SF situation; first contact.

    Oh, it’s not your usual average SF novel; from the first few pages, it’s easy to be fascinated by the narration, which flows almost seamlessly from one character to another in a manner reminiscent of the first few minutes of Brian de Palma’s film SNAKE EYES. As characters intersect on the First of October 2054, our viewpoint shifts, efficiently establishing a series of back-stories in a small academic Florida town.

    Haldeman’s usual brand of cynicism soon takes over, and we’re once more thrown in a mildly dystopian future: Corruption is everywhere, politicians are stupid (and dangerous), the environment is screwed, homosexuality has been outlawed (even though the market for VR pornography seems to be almost mainstream; hmmm?), Europe is on its way to another major war and, generally speaking, you wouldn’t want to live there.

    In the middle of all that comes a message from a source obviously not of this Earth. The message? “WE’RE COMING”. Earth has until January first to get ready. So, what is it? Aliens, a hoax or something else?

    The “something else” proves to be easily guessable and rather underwhelming. But that’s not the single biggest failing of The Coming, which is too often undistinguishable from the most ordinary crime thriller. Haldeman pads a novella with subplots that are scarcely relevant to the main theme or the Science-Fiction genre and the overall effect feels dull and disconnected.

    As the first day ends and a short summary of the rest of October 2054 is fed to us, the cycle repeats itself for the second third of the book (November first) and then the third (December first, with some space left over for January first). Haldeman’s viewpoint-changing conceit, however, is less rigorous in the latter parts of the book, with a jarring effect on the unity of the book. The sense of rolling urgency created by the switching viewpoint is also lessened by the discontinuities. It’s so much fun to see an author try an original stylistic device that’s it’s a let-down to see him stop whenever he feels like it.

    The other fascinating thing about the style of the book is how we eventually witness catastrophic events through media screens and the viewpoint of people scarcely connected to the action. Overall, I’m rather satisfied by Haldeman’s stylistic experiment in The Coming, if rather less impressed by what he does with it and how much potential he squanders on useless trivia, or completely gratuitous (and unpleasant) scenes. It doesn’t help that some plotlines are simply abandoned in the latter third of the book without much of an explanation. Coupled with the stupid rushed ending of Forever Free, it suggests that Haldeman’s writing is becoming seriously affected by his need to pay the mortgage.

    On the other hand, well, it’s a quick read and a short book, most probably available from your local library. If ever you’re in need of something quick to read, it might just be what you’re looking for. Like many of Haldeman’s latest few books, it might not be good or satisfying or pleasant, but it’s certainly interesting and fascinating to dissect afterward.

  • Flavor or the Month, Olivia Goldsmith

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1993, 880 pages, C$8.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-79450-7

    One of my favorite new words these days is “bonkbuster”, a term used to describe a novel consciously written to have wide commercial appeal and/through a lot of sex in it. As “blockbusters with a lot of bonking in them” go, I don’t think you can go wrong with Olivia Goldsmith’s Flavor of the Month. It’s pure titillating trash from a clever writer, and it makes no apologies for what it is. And, goodness, sometime it’s just so much fun to read novels like that.

    Consciously eschewing literary respectability, Goldsmith focuses her novel on a trio of actresses who will eventually come together in America’s #1 television show. The narrative is told “as if” from one of the nation’s foremost scandal-peddler (think Kitty Kelly, herself referenced on the novel’s first page) in some alternate version of 1993’s America. (Naturally, all characters, executives, studios and movies are fictive and should not be meant to represent real-life equivalents, mostly because their fictional equivalents are so much more interesting.)

    In short order, we’re introduced to three very different lead actresses: Sweet dumb Texas blonde Sharleen, bitchy rich L.A. brunette Lila and poor homely red-headed New Yorker Mary Jane. Of the three, it is Mary Jane who emerges as our lead protagonist and the moral center around which the rest of the novel will revolve. She is also the one who -initially, anyway- has to change herself the most in order to attain the pinnacle of fame; thanks to an unexpected influx of money, a bad break-up and some old-fashioned determination, Mary Jane undergoes extensive cosmetic surgery, learns some independence and loses a significant fraction of her body weight. When she emerges from the whole process, she’s beautiful, younger and is known by another name. Loosened in L.A. with more than thirty years’ worth of bitterness in an identity ten officially years younger, she quickly becomes the flavor of the month of the town… but will it last?

    I won’t spoil it, but Goldsmith certainly appears to be an extremely moralist novelist. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; after countless so-called “sophisticated” novels in which everything is painted in various shades of ethical grays, it’s refreshing to read a novel in which characters get what they so richly deserve, whatever their moral alignment. Several members of this novel’s cast go from pleasant to unpleasant and blow their last chance at redemption; Goldsmith’s justice is terrible and often none too swift.

    Flavor of the Month takes on the whole celebrity/beauty industry with acceptable gusto. Don’t expect a profound statement on the superficiality of today’s entertainment culture, but do be prepared for a few insightful observations here and there. Goldmsith is a professional at her craft, and she know which levers to use in order to get a rise from her readers and when enough’s enough.

    Speaking of arousing readers’ interest, there are certainly enough titillating sex scenes, scandalous behavior and lurid details to satisfy even the most sun-burnt beach reader. Above all, Flavor of the Month is a fun novel, and the speed at which anyone will be able to read this hefty tome speaks for itself. It’s delicious, hypnotic, compelling, often hilarious and wildly catty. Though the 1993 details are starting to be dated (some of the celebrity references almost require a companion guide to understand nowadays, so transient is celebrity pop culture), there’s no denying that Flavor of the Month is exactly what you want if ever you need a big thick diversion.

    I don’t think I’m the target readership of Goldmisth’s oeuvre, but after The Bestseller and this, I’m more than ready to become a regular reader of hers. It’s fluff, but it’s smooth fluff with a pleasant degree of cleverness. Perfect summer reading!

    [January 2004: In an absolutely mind-boggling ironic twist that wouldn’t be out of place in her novels, Olivia Goldsmith died of complications following… plastic surgery. Strange but true; the type of anecdotes in which the death of an author acts as a cornerstone for an entire career. Her first novel, after all, was The First Wives’ Club…]

  • Cold Fear, Rick Mofina

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pinnacle, 2001, 476 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7860-1266-8

    (Necessary disclaimer: Please adjust review according to my known bias toward A> Authors I have met and B> Authors who live in the Ottawa area.)

    In his first novel, If Angels Fall, Rick Mofina proved he could take a familiar story and tell it well enough to warrant compulsive reading. In Cold Fear, he tries something more original and succeeds despite a plot that takes a while before truly beginning.

    It starts, trivially enough, with a family quarrel deep in Glacier National Park. The little girl of the family is frightened enough to run away from the camp site and gets lost. Her disappearance is signaled to authorities, park-wide searching begins and the police is called in to investigate the parent. It seems that in situations like these, it’s not impossible that the parents of the “lost” children are, in fact, responsible for their disappearances.

    Already, we can see two recurring themes from Mofina’s first book; children in danger and perfectly comprehensible misunderstandings between parties involved. If Angels Fall depicted the hunt for a child kidnapper and honestly highlighted tensions between the police and the media. This time around, there the third party represented by the parents, and of course the little girl. As the omniscient reader, we’re privy to the truth, but our characters are not, and Mofina milks a lot of tension between the inevitable clashes between these naturally opposed parties.

    It gets worse (or better, for us readers) when the true plot of the novel emerges in the latter half, introducing yet another party, a criminal presence whose shadow looms large on the proceedings even more than a quarter-century after an horrific event. Stuff happens in a delightfully chaotic way and very soon everyone converges toward a dramatic climax that feels quite contrived, but satisfying nonetheless.

    For fans of If Angels Fall, Cold Fear does stand alone given that the two protagonists of the first book are here reduced to glorified cameos. Even then, alas, there are quite a few spoilers for the previous novel in the brief time both characters are present… so you might avoid this book anyway if you plan on reading Mofina’s first novel anytime soon. One returning protagonist at least has the glamorous role of setting in motion the media circus that comes to dominate the last third of the novel. I was particularly impressed by Chapter Fifty-Seven, which succinctly describes how an exclusive scoop can dominate a nation’s thoughtspace in a few hours. It’s a great piece of writing by an author who knows these things.

    While the rest of the novel is not as spectacular, the prose is no slouch as far as interest is concerned; you can easily zip through Mofina’s book, compelled by the steadily engrossing plotting, good characters and the easy prose. This is crime fiction in its most readable state.

    In short, there isn’t much to complain about Rick Mofina’s Cold Fear. The child-in-peril is a good hook to interest readers, and the rest of the novel propels itself forward with great ease. It’s a assured piece of fiction by a writer who seems more than capable of holding his own in the crowded crime fiction category. I’m not an entirely unbiased reader when in comes to Rick Mofina, but why don’t you check out one of his books at the local library?

  • Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content From Presentation, Owen Briggs, Steven Champeon, Eric Costello & Matt Patterson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Glasshaus, 2002, 289 pages, C$54.99 tpb, ISBN 1-904151-04-3

    Friends and family have known for a long time that I’m not a completely normal person, but even they started to worry when I started raving about how much fun it was to read a technical CSS manual. Granted, in the past few weeks I’ve become more and more prone to irrational bursts of excitement for highly technical books in the field of web design, but even I have to admit at being disturbed by realizing that I was actually curling up with a CSS handbook as “fun reading.”

    The CSS handbook in question was Glasshaus’s Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content From Presentation, a sober-looking reference book about the emerging standard of, yes, Cascading Style Sheets.

    From the onset, any web reference book must justify its existence, moreso than any other type of technical book; given the web, wouldn’t it be more responsible to publish the stuff in HTML rather than kill trees for it? Don’t we already have far too much paper in our offices?

    The first and foremost reason justifying paper web books is that people do expect to buy books, even as they have come to regard HTML content as something that should be free. For authors, that alone makes it worthwhile to write a book or two; the thought that some faithful web readers (such as myself, I suppose) might plunk down a few bucks to read real physical words must be very tempting. I suppose that posterity might have something to do with it too.

    But beyond these considerations, one must admit that there is indeed a place for paper documentation even in the most cyber-connected of fields. It’s still not a terribly pleasant thing to read long narratives on screen, it can be a pain to switch between multiple windows on-screen and it’s simply not practical to bring a computer to read, say, on the bus. Or on the couch. Or in the bathroom.

    So CSS: SCFP is optimized in function of what would best fit on paper. It provides ample contextual information to instruct us in the not-so-subtle reasons why web content should be separated from its presentation as well as the historical and technological reasons driving this innovation. As narrative, it’s a joy to read in paper format, at our leisure. The author make a reasonable case for re-thinking the way we conceive web pages, and this change of perspective alone -stemming from the proper use of CSS- will enrich and enhance any web developer’s subsequent projects.

    This is followed by a series of entertaining and informative tutorials that you can either read along, or practice at your computer. This is an efficient way to train, as there is a clear difference between paper-theory and electronic-practice. The “Boxes, boxes, boxes” chapter itself might actually be worth the price of the book for all CSS-developers that are serious about doing table-less design.

    The third section might also prove to be invaluable, as it gives some hard-won advice on how to deal with outdated browsers. This section might be the most immediately useful, but I think that it will also be the one that will be most quickly made obsolete. Web-things changing so quickly, it’s also the least relevant part of the book even as it hits the streets. One can even feel the size restrictions imposed by the editor as the authors refer us to web sites for more updated information.

    Still, CSS: SCFP is a great book for web design professionals looking for more in-depth information. I don’t think there’s anything in here that can’t be found on-line somewhere, but the tutorials are unusually clear and grouped together in one handy package. The first contextual part of the book is inspirational enough to warrant frequent re-reads. As a tree-killing object, this book makes its existence worthwhile.

    In fact, I’d be so bold as to suggest that so far, CSS: SCFP is the only essential paper CSS reference you need. It’s a book designed with some thought, containing all the information that deserves to be printed on paper. Sure, fine, it doesn’t contain a complete listing of all CSS-2 properties, but frankly you might as well bookmark the W3C specs and use that as a reference tool. This book contains context, invaluable tutorials and enough handy hints to deserve a place on your physical bookmarks shelf.

    Now, if you’ll excuse me, writing about this book has made me want to read all over again.

  • Falling Stars, Michael J. Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 492 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56184-8

    It took four volumes, more than two thousand pages and five years of waiting, but Flynn’s Firestar saga is finally complete. A long, often boring but ultimately satisfying saga, Flynn’s series now forms the unified whole it’s supposed to be. It was about time he completed it too, given the slide of the first volume’s 1999-2000 segment in alternate history.

    I wasn’t personally too fond of Flynn’s series of book. I thought the first volume, Firestar (1996), was a long, depressing and ultimately meaningless near-future piece. I was much kinder on the second book, 1998’s Rogue Star, which finally started using all the pieces set up in the first volume to build something interesting. The fact that the story started diverging from its hard-SF all-cards-on-table origins to something affected by an unpredictable curveball was also quite intriguing (though in retrospect it makes perfect sense.) Things were back to full disappointment with Lodestar (2000), a slimmer volume that nevertheless felt interminable given its irrelevant nature. Much time and reader goodwill was wasted by the useless side-trip of the third volume, which eventually proves to be useless as the fourth volume concludes.

    A large part of Falling Stars‘s appeal is that this is sold as the final volume of the series. At last, the complex relationships between the hundred-odd characters of the series come to fruition, with heroic sacrifices, long-awaited reunions and the passing of the torch to a new generation. Several of the unpleasant characters introduced in previous volumes finally turn out to be not so bad after all, earning a redemption of sort. After sitting though endless hundred pages of setups, we finally get the pay-offs.

    I may be slightly more sarcastic than I deserve to be; the Firestar series’ tone is firmly realistic, with a careful attention given to the nuts and bolts of complex space endeavors. Describing the intricate details and weaving the character’s evolving relationships takes time, but the overall impression is vastly more believable than the usual SF tale. It’s sad, then, to find out that some shortcuts used by Flynn in the first volume (such as having a good bunch of his important characters attend the same high school) come back to haunt and dog his realism. Why spend pages describing financial back-room dealings if the oh-so-diversely-exceptional protagonists can just kick back and chat about high-school while saving the world?

    Even then, I think that the Firestar series represents a significant step forward for Michael Flynn as a writer. He’s no literary superstar, and indeed the stop-and-go-and-stop pacing of his series proves that he has a lot to learn about structure, but it’s a fair assessment that thanks to this saga, his stature as a hard-SF writer has grown enormously. Now that he’s gotten this didactic 2000+ pages story out there, maybe he’ll feel more comfortable in attempting something snappier as his next effort. (Naturally, the dangling ends left at the end of the fourth volume -yes, there are more than a few-, imply that Flynn might discreetly slip in a fifth volume while we’re not looking.)

    Alas, we now come to the essential question any reviewer has to answer at the end of a series; is it worth reading? Clearly, I’m happy to be done with the series myself. I’d still hesitate, however, to recommend the four books to a neophyte reader. There’s simply too much dead time in the first and third volume to be fully worth it. The series does work as sort of a multi-decade “family” saga, so if you like that particular genre, you might get more enjoyment out of the series than I did. If you’re pressed for time, you might start reading the second book, the epilogue of the third, the last and still get most of what you need to know. Maybe, one day, a competent editor will cut whatever needs to be cut and produce a satisfying duology. Until then, you’ll have to be a Flynn aficionado, a near-future hard-SF nut or an unusually indulgent reader to plunge head-first in this series.

  • The Hook, Donald E. Westlake

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Mysterious Press, 2000, 280 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-89296-588-6

    If there’s one field that writers know pretty well, it’s publishing. No surprise there: It’s their job, really. But knowing it well doesn’t mean liking it… From time to time, it’s not uncommon to see a few authors turn their vengeful pens toward New York and have a little fun. Like screenwriters scorned by Hollywood, bitter authors can be quite mean when they allow themselves to be (pure passive-aggressive build-up, methinks) and the results can be spectacular.

    Okay, okay, so “spectacular” isn’t the first word to come to mind whenever one thinks about Donald E. Westlake’s quiet and nasty tale The Hook. But in its own way, it’s a savage parody-through-extremes of problems facing authors today and how two sufficiently desperate writers might be pushed to wholly unsuitable acts in order to escape them.

    The hook -or initial appeal of this novel- is in telling how a chance encounter between two old friends results in a curious bargain. One is a best-selling writer with an impregnable writer’s block. The other is an inspired writer who doesn’t sell. Their mutual problems naturally suggest an acceptable solution. But there’s only one detail; the soon-to-be-ghostwriter must murder the bestselling author’s soon-to-be-ex-wife.

    I know, I know; I didn’t find it any more credible than you do. But I believe that every writer must be given some indulgence when it comes to an initial setup and so I let it go. This being said, it didn’t help that the wife of the would-be murdered essentially says “oh, that’s nice” and agrees with her husband’s intentions.

    The actual crime, when it happens, is brutal and swift, as unexpected as it is fatal. Maybe the most shocking thing, though, is how well the murderer recovers afterward, easily rationalizing it and pocketing the check.

    Indeed, the whole novel does seem to whistle back from the abyss and settle down in a far more pedestrian narrative about publishing, ghostwriting and life in New York. The most affected character comes to be the best-selling writer, who has more and more difficulty dealing with his false new success even as his writer’s block worsens. The Hook is blackly comic in its insider’s view of late-nineties publishing, where the computers can kill an author’s career through simple pre-order calculations and where pseudonyms are the only way out of a vicious circle.

    You might be forgiven for almost forgetting about the crime; but at least one of our characters doesn’t, and that leads us directly to a conclusion that doesn’t reveal its true viciousness until the very last line.

    At first, I had serious misgivings about that ending: “Aww, that sucks, that’s mean, that’s just not right, why’d you do that”, etc. But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself accepting, and then grinning at the appropriateness of it. The Hook isn’t, as much as we might be lulled into it, a fun little inside joke on writers. At heart (at its dark, beating, diseased heart…), The Hook remains a dark crime story, and you might even argue that the entire second half is meant to lull you into a false sense of security. It actually works better as, um, a hooking conclusion than if the entire novel had been a parade of ever-gruesome serial murders.

    It’s a short book, too short to be worthwhile in hardcover but well worth the (short) reading time on the beach. The Hook‘s take on the realities of modern writing and publishing is depressing, but darkly amusing and pretext to some really good insider’s dirt on the mechanics of the industry. Avid readers (is there a mystery genre fan who isn’t an avid reader?) will gobble it up.

    If all else fails, consider the cover illustration of the book, a stack of books by Donald E. Westlake all titled The Hook. It gets funnier, of course, when you know that Donald E. Westlake is no stranger to multiple pseudonyms himself…

  • Stranger Than Fiction: A book of literary lists, Aubrey Dillon Malone

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Contemporary Books, 2000, 314 pages, C$23.95 hc, ISBN 0-8092-9904-6

    Writers are a strange breed.

    Even accounting for the usual diversity of characters, temperaments and manias distributed more-or-less evenly across the human bell curve, writers have long been considered among the most eccentric specimen of our species. Part of this reputation is due to the demands of the job: not many entirely sane people can sit down and string words together for months in order to produce a text of respectable length. Most authors are not mad, but most of them are abnormal.

    But then again, like modern-day bloggers, writers have long been in a privileged position to chronicle their own eccentricities and those of their other writer acquaintances. Other professions such as, say, tailors, might have been collectively just as bizarre, but haven’t had the chance to accumulate a written pedigree for hundreds of years.

    In any case, Aubrey Dillon Malone’s Stranger Than Fiction will quickly convince you, if that remained to be done, that writers are indeed a strange caste. This little-known quasi-novelty book is a collection of thematic lists about writers and their habits, from “Five writers involved in tragic accidents” to “Five writers who were vegetarians”. It doesn’t stop there, of course: “Fifteen writers who were spies”, “Thirty authors’ famous last words”, “Ten writers put to death by the state”, “Five writers’ phobias”, “Ten Shakespearian insults”, the all-time classic “Ten writers who went insane” and much, much more…

    Writer/journalist Malone has done an admirable, often hilarious job at compiling some of these lists. Often ribald -if not downright obscene-, Stranger Than Fiction pulls no punches and digs deep in literature’s dirty closets. There is trivia here for everyone, and enough quotable material to make you a certifiable bore at your next office party. It’s not a unique book (as I write this, I’m midway through Robert Hendrickson’s similar collection The Woodsworth Book of Literary Anecdotes, though Stranger Than Fiction was far more entertaining than Hendrickson’s uneven collection.) but it’s a good one, with something like 300 lists in one handy paperback-sized hardcover.

    My main quibble stems from ignorance: I’m a child of the sci-fi ghetto and so my grasp of classical literature isn’t as good as it should be. I was rather embarrassed to learn things I should have known about a few very-well-known writers. Still, it’s a fair criticism to remark that Stranger Than Fiction is concentrated mostly on the “respectable” English canon, with often perfunctory attention to other literatures. As a confirmed SF buff, I can proudly claim that our writers are as interesting as the mainstream ones. Yet Robert A. Heinlein and Philip K. Dick are conspicuously absent, while Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke share a paltry three mentions. (On the other hand, have I mentioned the great index-by-authors? Yep; you can use this book as reference!)

    Stranger Than Fiction is, in many ways, a tribute to the quirkiness of writers, those magnificent madmen (and madwomen too!) without whom our shelves would be so much poorer. It’s a crash-course in English literature, an amusing entertainment, a great source of anecdotes and a pretty nifty discussion piece by itself. It would make a great gift for any avid reader in your neighborhood.

  • The Angel of Darkness, Caleb Carr

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1997, 752 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-42763-7

    For an author, one danger in writing a distinctive best-seller is to try to do the same thing again without innovation. Caleb Carr’s first novel, The Alienist, was a crime thriller set in late nineteenth century New York, featuring a bunch of characters doing their damnedest to catch a serial killer using revolutionary methods who just happen to be similar to the ones used today. In The Angel of Darkness, the surviving characters of the first novel are back once more to track down another killer using quasi-anachronistic methods.

    But don’t be scared away; not only are there significant differences between this novel and the first one, The Angel of Darkness is so much fun that everyone who liked The Alienist will want to take a look at the sequel.

    The biggest change in tone is that the narrator of this follow-up isn’t the cultivated journalist John Moore, but the reformed street urchin Stevie Taggert. It’s an odd choice, but a logical one given Stevie’s role is the follow-up. Stevie might not be as cynical or polished, but he’s in the middle of the story, which isn’t the case with Moore this time.

    Here, the team is hot on the trail of a child kidnapper who is eventually revealed to be a far more sinister figure. The quest takes our heroes upstate, away from Manhattan and deep in rural country where the rules are completely different. Along the way, they will also have to face some courtroom drama, some late large-scale brawling and a few new characters.

    What remains is Carr’s impeccable flair for recreating the atmosphere of the time and presumably exact historical references. The prose style is polished but unusually readable; even though the book clocks in at an impressive 750+ pages, it’s good enough that you won’t mind the occasional lengths and the lopsided drama which peaks well before the conclusion. The constant references (by way of narrator’s hindsight) to terrible events about to happen are simultaneously annoying, ominous and charming.

    The genius of The Alienist was to bring modern procedural police methods to one of the earliest possible times when it was possible to conceive and use such things, making it both a genre novel and a genre commentary. The same also applies to the second novel, as our protagonists use controversial profiling techniques and new detection techniques. Even The Alienist‘s occasional usage of historical cameos is also repeated, most notably with the inspired presence of a famous historical character as a courtroom antagonist. There’s a lot of intellectual material to digest, from sexual roles a century ago to a bit of international politics.

    The villain alone is a piece of work, a complex character whose multiple facets are fiendishly effective against our protagonists. Though one feels as if a touch too much life-history has been packed in only a few years, there’s no denying that the antagonist is more interesting than the garden-variety serial killer who starred in The Alienist.

    There’s too much familiarity with the characters exhibited here to suggest that The Angel of Darkness is a book that stands alone without the benefits of having read the prequel. But as much as The Alienist is a recommended read, The Angel of Darkness also ranks as more than a worthwhile follow-up. It’s difficult to think of a satisfied fan of the first volume who’d dislike this one.

  • Winning the Loser’s Game (Third Edition), Charles D. Ellis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    McGraw-Hill, 1997, 142 pages, US$24.95 hc, ISBN 0-07-022010-7

    I have long been fascinated by money, and mot merely for the obvious reasons. In a world where money has been standardized as a universal exchange medium, economics are rivaling in importance with political science and sociology as a way to understand why society behaves the way it does. Where does money come from? Where does it go? Where does it accumulate? Can it be seen as a fluid or maybe even a force? How do you even begin to understand the complexities of money flow?

    Then again, as with every good citizen/consumer of our oh-so-wonderful capitalistic societies, understanding how to make money ranks only slightly below how to eat and obey traffic laws. There’s enough ranting about early retirement to make it imperative to learn how to accumulate enough money to -ironically enough- not work for the rest of your life.

    Charles D. Ellis’ Winning the Loser’s Game is a splendid investment manual, a reasoned treatise that may make almost too much sense for everyone. It’s a small book, but every single page is worth its weight in greenbacks. You don’t need to be a genius to understand this book, and the advice it provides seems appropriate for everyone. I can’t know whether it’s the ultimate investment theory, but at the moment it’s just perfect for my own level of financial savvy.

    Ellis starts by explaining the realities of modern investment. It’s not a domain where a genius can simply outperform everyone: it’s a field where thousands of equally-capable professionals are all second-guessing each other. (The metaphor here is amateur’s sport (where one tends to be scored against through luck or incompetence) versus professional sports (where players will score points, often deliberately exploiting opponent’s mistakes). Over the long run, everyone will do equally well, except for obvious mistakes. In this context, time-investing (buying low, selling high such as in commodities trading) won’t work, and neither will any scheme trying to “beat the market”. The only way is to stay in the game long enough and to avoid obvious mistakes such as panic-selling or impulsive trading.

    Winning the Loser’s Game appeals to me because it’s the ultimate antithesis of those doubtful make-money-fast “magic recipes”. It tells you to invest and forget. It explains to you through statistics why stocks aren’t such a bad idea in the long run. It drills in the notion that risk is, well, risk: higher margins to gain, higher chances to lose. It busts a few myths and teaches you the counter-intuitive logic of investing. It’s reasonable, makes as many warnings as recommendations and it written in a limpid style. Let me repeat that: A limpid style. I’ve seldom encountered a most compulsively-readable financial treatise.

    Naturally, one could make a case that in preaching faith in the overarching system and promoting long-term stock investments, Winning the Loser’s Game is a self-fulfilling instrument of capitalist thinking. If everyone followed the advice of the book, everyone would be a winner. Well, yeah. Duh.

    But Winning the Loser’s Game isn’t the soulless capitalistic textbook you might expect. Ellis spends some time discussing the significant disadvantages of leaving too much money to your children, and heavily promotes the virtues of philanthropy. It also helps that Ellis regards unethical business practices as anathema to good investment; even anti-business activists might have a hard time disagreeing with this book, if they would stoop so low as to read it.

    As for me, well, reading Winning the Loser’s Game is like attending a lecture from an advanced economics course. I’m left with nearly as many questions as before, but they’re -I think- entirely more sophisticated questions. I intend to keep the book handy and refer to it once my mortgage is paid and I get into the “Loser’s Game” myself. Hey, I’m still a third of a century away from retirement; I can take the long view he’s espousing.

  • Bug Park, James P. Hogan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1997, 405 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-87874-3

    There is something comfortingly pleasant about reading a novel by a professional SF writer. The most reliable of them know enough about satisfying the readers that even the most hackneyed premise can be brought to life with mildly interesting characters and sustained plotting.

    There’s not much that’s innovative about James P. Hogan’s Bug Park. In fact, you might even call it retrograde: After reading so much about nanotechnology, going “back” to insect-sized micro-technology doesn’t seem to be all that exciting.

    And yet… micro-technology is easier to conceptualize that nanotech. You can at least imagine some direct interaction between humans and machinery at those scales. The visual kick in seeing micro-machines meddling around with insects is also suitably cinematic, enough to excite even mildly jaded readers.

    Mix the promise of such technology with teenage protagonists and you have the making of a rather interesting SF novel for teen audiences. Even though obviously aimed at teens, Bug Park was published by Baen exactly as one of their more mainstream novel. Still, at the heart of the book lies a teen’s novel.

    It features kids as protagonists, rich bored teenagers with advanced skills in micro-robotics, which is probably linked to their parent’s business interest in such things. But no matter; When Kevin and Taki get to work on something, those teen hackers can do anything. While their interest in micro-robotics is initially driven towards a “Bug Park”, their capabilities will become handy when they discover a plot afoot to kill Kevin’ father and take over his company.

    As you might expect, most of Bug Park is a series of adventures in which our teenage protagonists get to use cutting-edge big-sized machines in order to foil evil plans. It works well, as a matter of fact: Thanks to Hogan’s lean prose, there aren’t any problem sin picturing the micro antics, from fancy spying to intricate sabotage… without forgetting epic half-inch fights. Hogan manages to transform backyards into battlegrounds! It doesn’t take much to imagine this as a film, somewhere between SPY KIDS, JURASSIC PARK and HONEY I SHRUNK THE KIDS. Except with better special effect.

    Hogan’s science is reasonably exact, though readers who know about his penchant for weird science will smile knowingly at his short diatribe against the “establishment science’s” theory of relativity. Fortunately, he stops there and leaves his usual pseudo-scientific rants for other novels.

    There isn’t much that’s spectacular in Bug Park, but even then the book works adequately well for readers of all ages. Teen might like it a bit more given the lead characters, but the rest is a serviceable fun SF adventure. Give it a try if you want to; it’s not essential, but it passes the time.