Book Review

  • Manifold: Space, Stephen Baxter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2001, 452 pages, C$36.00 hc, ISBN 0-345-43077-8

    The possibility of extra-terrestrial intelligence has fascinated science-fiction writers even since H.G. Wells’ novels, and probably even before then. Certainly, when considering current scientific knowledge, there is nothing particularly surprising in that what happened once on Earth may certainly happen elsewhere. Combine that to the multiplicity of planets in the Milky Way alone, and the probability of extra-terrestrial intelligence becomes not merely conjecture, but quasi-certitude.

    There is one problem, though; even though we have looked hard for any trace of extra-terrestrial life, the vexing reality is that we have been unable to see, from our limited perspective, any trace of ET intelligence. No unambiguous visual sign. No radio signals. No markers on Earth or on the moon. Nothing. Given the galaxy’s numerous planets and lengthy life-span, any civilization breaking through should be able to conquer the galaxy in a matter of millennia. Why aren’t we seeing anything of the sort?

    This question (the Fermi paradox, from Enrico Fermi’s famous axiom “Where are they? If they existed, they would be here.”) has fascinated many, but Stephen Baxter has devoted an entire trilogy at trying to figure out plausible reasons why we might not be seeing anyone else at the moment. We should use the word “trilogy” loosely, though, as the Manifold series re-uses the same protagonist (Reid Malenfant) and some recurring characters in wholly different universes where even the nature of reality might be different.

    In Manifold: Time, Baxter showed a universe where humanity was alone, and the steps they took in order to correct in situation. In Manifold: Space, there are aliens everywhere. And they’re not really friendly.

    To some degree, Baxter’s logical train of thought brings him to the same conclusions than Greg Bear (The Forge of God) and Charles Pellegrino (The Killing Star, etc.): Natural competition for resources, the awesome powers of extra-solar civilizations and plain simple fear all lead to a winner-takes-all mentality. To put it bluntly, whoever wipes out everyone else will win.

    Manifold: Space comes from the British tradition of SF, and it’s far from being a cheery book. Speaking as a colonial, the Brits know a thing or two about losing an empire, and this melancholy permeates Space like a stain. As Malenfant’s travels take him further and further is the far-future, we get a long-scope view of human evolution, with all its foibles Humanity either destroys itself or is wiped out by external forces a few times in this novel, and the effect isn’t a lot of fun. Interestingly enough, we get a better appreciation for the awesome power of time in this novel rather than in Manifold: Time.

    If you want to continue comparing this novel to its predecessor, the resemblances are interesting: Both novels are obvious work of ideas, not characters: Malenfant is borderline-unlikable, and the other characters are cyphers more than anything else. Both books also share a curious structure in which the biggest punches are to be found at the middle, and not the end of the narrative, which gradually loses power as it advances and diverts itself in meaningless side-shows.

    But the novel’s impact stands out, mostly as a boffo twelve-pack of hard-SF Big Ideas. Anyone with an interest in the Fermi Paradox will love Baxter’s speculations, even though it’s hard to get away from other SF authors’ thinking on the subject. Manifold: Space could have used some extra trimming (the whole natural-nuclear-reactor subplot plot branch struck me as a let-down), but I don’t think that any hard-SF fan will seriously regret reading the whole book. It’s decent high-powered idea-driven speculative fiction and a decent companion volume to Manifold: Time. Good stuff for hard-SF enthusiasts.

  • Atlas Shrugged (35th anniversary edition), Ayn Rand

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Signet, 1957 (1992 reprint), 1057 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-17192-6

    I know that, no matter what, I won’t be satisfied with this review.

    Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is bigger than most of the books I usually review. Not merely in a purely physical sense, but also in terms of ideas, reputation and social significance. It champions unusual ideas in a vigorous fashion. It has been credited with the creation of a cult/philosophy. It’s been hailed by various commentators either as a masterpiece or pure trash. Some call it their favorite book. Others think it’s simply obnoxious. You can find endless debates (some of theme quite ridiculously profound) everywhere on the world wide web. (noblesoul.com/orc/ is a great place to start. That they link to this review only adds to my own good opinion of the site.)

    Trying to fit my own feelings about the book in 650 words, when considering the rich decade-old debate already surrounding the book, is somewhat intimidating. But I’ll give it a good try.

    Atlas Shrugged starts as hard-core industrial fiction detailing the tribulations of a railroad company. All is not well in that world, though, as lassitude and plain apathy seems to corrupt society from within. Our heroine Dagny Taggart does her best to succeed, but she ultimately comes to realize that someone, behind the scenes, is doing his best to stop the motor of the world. “Who is John Galt?” indeed.

    It doesn’t take a long time to figure out that Atlas Shrugged is not only science-fiction (it is!), but that it takes place in an alternate pocket universe with scant relation to ours. The curiously Soviet industrial feel of the book, with its pronounced brushed-steel aesthetics, is a dead giveaway. So are the ridiculously convoluted relationships between the thirty or so characters populating the book. Yes, Atlas Shrugged is one of those imagined worlds where everyone knows each other. (This becomes very handy whenever Rand gets around to postulating her main conceit, which depends on a few dozen people around the country.) The psychology of any of the characters is also incompatible with our reality, from the impossibly virtuous protagonists to the cackling villains. The antagonists of Atlas Shrugged are so impossibly evil and idiotic that you can only wonder at how they’re supposed to form an effective force. Rand stacks the deck a wee bit too much in her favor to make an impact. It just ends up being laughable.

    And frankly, once I started giggling at Atlas Shrugged, it proved very difficult to stop. Strip the empress of her clothes, and Rand becomes a humorist. Brain-damaged characters spouting contrived slogans in a made-up universe; funny! Chapter VII “This is John Galt Speaking”, a fifty-page monologue clumsily stuck in the narrative; hilarious! The conviction by which Rand’s protagonists are so certain of what they’re doing; riotous!

    As you may gather, I wasn’t completely convinced by Rand’s philosophy, or even her narrative. It surprised me somewhat; as someone routinely accused of having too much faith in other people’s rationality, I should be a prime candidate for Rand’s “Objectivist” philosophy.

    Instead, it strikes me as a dubious “rational” justification for acting like a selfish child. Calling other people “leeches” isn’t much of an argument. Superficially, Objectivism looks like an excuse for doing whatever you want without regard to other people. And that’s just, well, irrational. Some college students might love it, though…

    Still, I don’t regret reading Atlas Shrugged. It is sort of an imposed event for serious readers, a good philosophy primer (if only on why you don’t agree) and an interesting book any way you look at it. Even despite the infamous monologue and the insufferable lengths, it was rather pleasant to read, and certainly managed to hold my attention. But then again, I did giggle a lot: “‘Who are you?’ screamed some terror-blinded voice. / ‘Ragnar Danneskjöld!’ “

    • Price of the paperback: .50c at a garage sale.
    • Time to read the book: Two weeks.
    • Being amused by Objectivism: Priceless!

  • 1632, Eric Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 2000, 597 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-31972-8

    (read as an e-book, freely available from www.baen.com)

    I have always been, still am and will forever remain a paper-book geek.

    Still, there’s always some room for experimentation. When I got to test a Palm Pilot for the office, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to do a reality-check on the whole e-book concept. What can I say; I was skeptical. In order to ensure validity between this experiment and my usual reading regimen, I went to a well-known publisher (Baen) and downloaded the freely-available electronic version of one of their books. No sir, no vanity-press e-book amateur drivel for me!

    Thus equipped, I started reading on the tiny 150×150 screen of my Palm Pilot… and it proved to be a reading experience more or less undistinguishable from the paper page thing. Sometimes even better; the Palm Mobipocket Reader software has its faults, but the instant-bookmark setup is a boon, and so is the backlit screen. Not to mention that a Palm Pilot can be, with some slight contortions, be read with only one hand, which is difficult to do with a paperback without breaking the spine of it. Works for me.

    What about the novel itself, then?

    It appears that I was lucky with my selection: Eric Flint’s 1632 is a terrific adventure book, an SF update of those Robinsonade stories I gleefully read throughout my teenage years.

    Flint barely tries to justify his setup: thanks to an alien “time shard”, the West Virginia town of Grantville (mostly populated with hardy coal miners) is transported back to 17th-century Germany, smack in the middle of belligerent empires during the Thirty Years’ War. After a few moments of astonishment, the local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America chooses the side of good old-fashioned American freedom and justice. A machine-gun-powered Second American Revolution gets underway… in the heart of Europe.

    As a non-American, it’s a bit difficult not to smile at such “America Über Alles” stories, but if my American readers can forgive the smirk, the truth is that 1632 remains one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read lately. (Naturally, the fact that I read it “on a break” from the middle of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged may have helped.) Flint is a gifted novelist, and the cast of characters he assembles for 1632 is well-worth cheering for. Mine workers, teachers, teenagers and farmers unite to show barbarians a lesson, and frankly, our time couldn’t send better representatives to the renaissance than a bunch of blue-collar workers. Once the initial confusion evaporates, Grantville has to figure out how to survive gracefully in a world without modern conveniences. Meanwhile, forces amass to attack the town, romance buds and a government is formed. It’s all quite fascinating, and a lot of fun whenever contemporary gadgets are unleashed on woefully ill-equipped armies. Flint isn’t a stupid writer, and the aura of realism that emanates from the accumulation of details goes a long way towards forgiving the rather easy premise.

    The writing style is brisk and limpid: Flint has an eye for good scenes and sympathetic characters. The only limp passages take place whenever we get away from the Americans for some insipid court intrigue. The rest is all gravy. I found myself reading passages of the book away from my daily bus commute, which is where I had told myself I’d read 1632.

    …and that brings us back to the e-book experience. After 1632, I have no doubt that the concept is viable from the reader’s point of view. I would have enjoyed the novel on paper or on-screen, and so reading it on the Palm Pilot made no difference. I’m not so convinced, however, that the e-book is a viable business model. A few days after finishing 1632, I eventually made my way to the local SF bookstore and bought a copy for my library, an act which may be seen as both damning and praising the whole e-book concept. In the end, I may remain firmly committed to dead-tree bricks but I won’t give out that skeptical frown anymore whenever I hear someone rant about electronic books.

  • Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Steve Krug

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    New Riders, 2000, 195 pages, C$52.95 tpb, ISBN 0-7897-2310-7

    Good web design is a blend of science, art and experience that isn’t properly appreciated by most people, including many web designers themselves. Not only do web sites have to look good and use technology effectively, they also have to serve some of the most bug-ridden hardware ever conceived: humans.

    Web design is merely the latest offshoot of usability, a field with a long and illustrious history. Ever since someone has mass-marketed something for others, human/machine interaction, ergonomics, interface conception and pleasant design have found an essential place in industry. The challenge of the web is that now everyone with a text editor and an image-manipulation program has to care about usability. But whereas car manufacturer wouldn’t dream of releasing a car without expensive input from ergonomics specialists, companies often unaccountably entrust their financial future to HTML weenies without an inkling of interest in human factors.

    Web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen has made a name for himself by becoming an expert at pointing out other people’s web boo-boos. His best-known book, Designing Web Usability is well-worth its cover price for any serious webmaster. But he’s not the only guru in cybertown, and that’s why Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think! is definitely worth a look.

    From the deliberately provocative title onward, Krug’s book is refreshingly breezy. Light, funny and to the point, Don’t Make Me Think! is, as the sub-title indicates, a non-nonsense primer. Written by a professional for a wide audience, Think! is neither too technical nor too abstract, striking a balance between all the different parties -and requirements- involved in building a good web site. The top-level view of web design is also a refreshing change after once too many nuts-and-bolts HTML reference guides.

    It’s a short book (under 200 pages!), but don’t be fooled by the size: Every page counts and Krug practices his own precepts (“Happy talk must die”, “Omit -needless- words”, etc.) with ruthless efficiency. Don’t Make me Think! is cleverly illustrated and the book’s layout is exemplary in a technical field where embarrassing mistakes have been committed in the past. (Again, refer to Nielsen’s book) This is a book written and designed in such a way that you’ll rush through an initial read, but re-read again and again in order to refresh your memory.

    Krug’s main bugaboos are worth repeating; Don’t make users think (guide their eyes, guide their minds and eventually they will discover the rest for themselves), be succinct (cut every word that doesn’t deserve to be there), include good navigation (often simply offering multiple ways of getting to what they want) and test-test-test! (Even cheap user testing -explained here- is better than no testing at all)

    There is a lot for everyone in Don’t Make me Think!, from the technician to the CEO. Usability testing won’t be of interest to the techy-in-a-cubicle, but the how-users-think should be sufficient to avoid the worst mistakes. As if to assuage guilt, Krug gently uses real-world examples in how good designs can be improved even further.

    Combining great advice with a compulsively-readable writing style, Don’t Make Me Think! ranks up there with Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability as one of the few dead-paper resources worth owning by pro web designers. Read it once, and then keep it close.

  • The Art & Science of Web Design, Jeffrey Veen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    New Riders, 2001, 259 pages, C$67.95 tpb, ISBN 0-7897-2370-0

    As a technical professional with a deep interest in web design, I was pleased, over the last year, to see the emergence of a new type of how-to books. More focused on the theory and bigger issues of web publishing than hands-on coding concerns, these books exemplify the emerging maturity of the web. Whereas before the field was moving too quickly and hapzardly to allow for any formal (written) literature, the recent stabilization of standards and depth of past case studies is having an impact.

    Jeffrey Veen is one of those old-timers with a lot of experience to share. He’s been working for Wired Digital, involved in web standards work and is generally recognized as pretty hot stuff in web design communities. Now he’s ready to spill the beans and share his experience in The Art & Science of Web Design.

    It’s a heterogeneous book divided in eight sections that can be read more or less independently. Rather than to generalize excessively, I’ll cover the book section by section, and so…

    [1]: Foundations starts the book with a conceptual bang. In less than thirty pages, Veen provides a historical context for the web, as well as a solid theory on why and how to develop the web. This is easily the book’s highlight, with its emphasis on bigger issues rather than nitty-gritty.

    [2]: Interface Consistency is a case study of other sites, and a powerful theoretical argument in favor of navigational standards. This section is complementary to the work of Jakob Nielsen. Again, it’s wonderful stuff if you like to think on a higher plane of design.

    [3]: Structure is another good theoretical primer on how to organize information, how to differentiate between various organizational schemes and why some are more appropriate than others.

    [4]: Behavior starts promisingly enough with a good argument in favor of rule-based design, but slowly peters out with an interesting but incongruous technical demo of a headline-resizing piece of code.

    [5]: Browsers helps to understand the awesome responsibility of web designers in accomodating users through their browsers. A good technical overview, maybe a bit too short.

    [6]: Speed is an argument for clever simplicity, well-needed at a time where designers tend to assume high bandwidth for everyone.

    [7]: Advertising is a short but interesting primer on how to advertise -and to accomodate advertising- on the web.

    [8]: Object-oriented Publishing is somewhat of a let-down as a final chapter, being mostly a case study of one sample web site presumably done by Veen. It lacks the oomph required to send off such a book and also piles up a lot of technicalities at once.

    Overall, though, I was impressed by Veen’s chatty style and overall grasp of the bigger picture of web design. There was a lot in there that I already knew, but reminders always help, and they’re not overly annoying when they’re backed-up by good arguments.

    I wasn’t so fond of the book’s latter half, which seemed out-of-place in a paper-media reference work. If I want Javascript code that will resize my headlines based on their length, I’ll head out to a web site. It doesn’t belong with the theoretical information that should be contained in a book destined to remain on my professional reference shelf. It’s almost as if past the first few chapters, Veen had to use filler in order to satisfy a publishing contract…

    In the same vein, it’s hard to say who’s the target audience for the book. Its scattershot approach make it more efficient as a periodical refresher than a reference source. It’s mixture of theory and coding puts in in reach of both managers and tech weenie; maybe it’ll help both realms understand each other, or maybe it’ll confuse them forever. It’s a worthwhile read, sure, but unfortunately it’s also unsatisfying. A lot of good stuff, improperly tied in together. Maybe it’ll all be fixed in the upgrade…

  • Manifold: Time, Stephen Baxter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2000, 440 pages, C$34.00 hc, ISBN 0-345-43075-1

    Stephen Baxter is a hard-SF author with quite a few outstanding deficiencies, but one thing he’ll never be accused of is lacking ambition. In his previous novels, he imagined an alternate manned expedition to Mars (Voyage), wrote a sequel to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (The Time Ships) and collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke on a novel about the end of privacy and history (The Light of Other Days).

    It’s an impressive résumé, but with the first volume of the Manifold Trilogy, Baxter demonstrates that he’s not going to stop there. Manifold: Time‘s plot focuses on Reid Malenfant, a business tycoon with a fascination for space exploration. In only a few pages, Baxter takes us back to a familiar hard-SF situation: Feeling betrayed by NASA, a rich entrepreneur tries to establish a private space program but is hampered by the overregulated government agencies. It’s all very comfortable.

    But soon afterward, the novel takes a turn towards originality. Our protagonist is warned that the human race will end in two hundred years. A space mission is to be manned by a squid. Hyper-intelligent children are popping up everywhere on the globe. As if that wasn’t enough, an attempt to receive messages from the future actually succeeds. It heavy stuff, instantly addictive for anyone -you know you you are- looking for their next big crunchy hard-SF novel. There are physics lectures, lumps of explanatory narrative, evil Luddites, a reformat-the-universe ending and other genre staples.

    It all ties in together, in what is occasionally a very loose fashion. Manifold: Time is a fascinating novel, but I don’t think you can say it’s a tightly-focused one. For one thing, I happen to think that the intellectual climax of the book happens mid-way through, as the protagonists get a glimpse at the future of the galaxy. Promising elements that could yield another book’s worth of material -the biggest single example being the squids- are dropped unceremoniously as the novel advances.

    For another, Manifold: Time relies heavily on frustrating clichés of the genre. Reid Malenfant is one; while I can appreciate SF’s need for multicompetent Heinleinian characters, Malenfant isn’t particularly well developed beyond being an icon of how determination can be a palliative for a bunch of skills. He’s a bit too caricatural to work well in this environment, and has done too much in his life to be believable in the context of the novel.

    Baxter, like many of his hard-SF colleagues, doesn’t really believe in the goodness of humankind, and once again manipulates his vision of humanity to irrational extremes. In this novel, hyper-intelligent children are beaten up, thrown away and forgotten, then threatened and nuked by governments. It smacks of personal trauma (Was Baxter beaten up for being too smart in grade school? Magic Eight-Ball says yes.) but as for myself I’m getting tired of seeing religious nuts and irrational cults spring up in reaction to change in every single g’damn hard-SF novel. On a related point, I found the mass social reaction to the Carter catastrophe to be far too extreme and simplistic. Humans have an unlimited capacity for self-denial and I happen to think that we’ve immunized ourselves to “end of the world” scenarios with Y2K event and such.

    But never mind my last little rant. Truth be told, I had a lot of page-turning fun while reading Manifold: Time, and I will be reading the next volume in the series shortly. It’s easy to target Baxter for his usual tics and problems, but on the other hand, it must be pointed out that there’s a lot of good fun extrapolation elsewhere in the book. I may not believe in the Carter Catastrophe at all, even from a statistical standpoint, but it does bring a delicious urgency to the novel up to its spectacular finish.

  • Hello, He Lied, Lynda Obst

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little Brown, 1996, 246 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-316-62211-7

    We’ve seen quite a few books about Hollywood actors. We’ve seen an substantial number of books on Hollywood directors. Screenwriters take delight in writing books about themselves. The only “big” credits we seldom read about are producers.

    (With one important exception: The flashy crash-and-burn career of Don Simpson -TOP GUN, FLASHDANCE, etc…- has resulted in one chainsaw biography (Charles Fleming’s High Concept), but there was nothing typical about the drug-fuelled life of excess he led, nor anything ordinary in his producing career.)

    This paucity may be justifiable. Producers don’t have a set job description: They buy scripts, finesse stars until they extract a commitment, put together an offer for studios, arrange for financing, supervise operations on the set, arrange marketing campaigns, try to ensure awards for their movies… it just goes on and on. Maybe producers just don’t have enough time for writing books about what they do.

    Now, at least one producer has slowed down and published an autobiographical account of her own experience in Hollywood. Lynda Obst’s account is in many ways a disappointing account of what a typical producer does, but at least it’s better than nothing.

    After a perfunctory introduction that explains how she came to land in Hollywood (in short; her then-husband moved), Obst starts to explain the pre-movie life of producers. It may very well be the most heart-wrenching thing I’ve read about Hollywood this year. Turns out that the life of a producer is enough to make a casual cinephile wonder in awe at how anything gets done in Hollywood. Producers will buy scripts, try to interest stars, go in meetings with studio head, try to satisfy large groups of people and get them to agree to spend million of dollars on creative projects. The tiniest things can cause a deal to collapse, sending everyone back to square one. When you factor in the fact that everyone is on tight schedules, well, things have a tendency to become very complicated. Obst’s frustrating experience with the OUTBREAK project is enough to make you swear off ever moving to California.

    All of the above has to be accomplished in cooperation with people with more power than intelligence, using a highly sophisticated set of social codes and ritualized small-talk. Obst thinks she’s being witty in describing how things get done in Hollywood, but for any outside reading up, it’s just disheartening; if government was run like this, there would be a revolution in a matter of days. (Oh, wait…)

    The rest of the book is a mixed bag: Obst includes a chapter on the place of “Chix in Flicks” that, again, is as depressing as it’s self-serving. It’s immediately followed by a chapter about life on location, which is actually funny and informative; I don’t recall reading about these things elsewhere, and that’s worth something.

    As far as the whole book goes, though, it’s not a completely satisfying reading experience. Throughout the book, Obst includes segments and anecdotes she obviously finds funny. Alas, you must have to be an insider in the industry to be amused, because everything comes across as markedly less amusing that she must think it is. A few anecdotes fall completely flat. Others simply don’t make sense. Sign of the author’s place in the Hollywood food chain, there isn’t much here that’s self-critical or even highly critical of the industry. You’d think that a really shrewd observer could be able to step back and point out the problems… but Obst actually seems to enjoy all of the insanity. Furthermore, would it be cynical to point out that Obst’s Hollywood oeuvre isn’t anything worth crowing about? It’s not as if her movies (BAD GIRLS? ONE FINE DAY? Even THE FISHER KING?) are exceptional or uniformly better than others…

    Still, Hello, he Lied is an interesting book. It focused on an under-appreciated role in the Hollywood machine and might even serve to illuminate the dark recesses of the industry. It’s not much of a funny book, as much because of its stylistic shortcomings as for its discouraging subject matter. I just wish there was a better book on the subject.

  • Food, Susan Powter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1995, 542 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-56756-X

    Food is a deceptively simple title for such a complex book. Everyone needs to eat. Whole industries have been created around one of humankind’s most basic desire. Heck, there’s even an industry with the goal of teaching people how to eat less.

    Susan Powter’s follow-up to Stop the Insanity! remains primarily an unusually-detailed diet book, but that doesn’t stop it from providing the reader with a holistic look at food; what it is, how it comes to be in supermarkets, how it’s sold to us and how we use it as much more than simple fuel. Though it would be dangerous to suggest Food as an “ultimate” book on nutrition, it’s certainly provocative enough to strike fear, doubt and uncertainty in even the most convinced couch potatoes.

    It’s not as if Powter doesn’t know what she’s talking about, couch-potato-wise: As she relates to us again, and again, and again, a series of emotional disasters made her bloat up to 260 pounds before she got a grip and made herself melt back down to her current 130-odd pounds. Susan Powter’s relationship to food is more complex than most of us but don’t worry; by the end of the book (heck, by the end of page 25) you’ll be told her whole story in excruciating detail. Over and over again.

    We’ll come back to Powter’s particular manias in a short while, but let’s mention right away that Food is akin to the most unpleasant dietician you’ll ever meet. Organized in three part, Food gradually hammers down the usual American diet until nothing is left beyond tofu and organically-grown vegetables. “Stage One” is simple enough; spell “less fat” and you’ve mastered the essential of it. It’s not so simple, of course; Powter explains in tedious detail the “fat formula”, the wily ways of the fat industry and the insidious lure of fast food. There are recipes, calories tables and checklists: Food can be used as a reference book. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, which if course doesn’t mean you’ll be any more receptive to it.

    Don’t worry yet; it gets worse. In “Stage Two”, Powter goes beyond the Fat paradigm and takes a chainsaw to the dairy industry, protein, sugar, chicken and everything else that makes eating good and just. If you’re not depressed by the end of that section, you haven’t been paying attention.

    I’m not sure if it gets worse in “Stage Three”, where Powter turns her attention to chemicals, psychological issues related to food and other jolly topics. On one hand, the eat-well message gets more and more rigorous; on the other, Powter’s own tics and motifs become so intrusive as to trivialize what she’s saying.

    Part of it is the Powter writing style; chatty, breathless as well as HEAVY ON CAPITAL LETTER AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!! It’s accessible, but best absorbed in small doses; otherwise, it’s like being stuck with a nagging shrew. What doesn’t help are the constant (and I mean constant) references to Powter’s life history, which eventually smacks of deeper problems than simply food addiction. (This isn’t as much of a catty comment as you might think; Powter herself acknowledges this, though it doesn’t make it any less annoying.)

    It’s difficult to describe the ultimate impact of the book. On one level, yes, it’s hard to continue eating in the same way after reading the catalogue of potential horrors trotted out in Food. Most of her recommendations make a lot of sense. Heck, I even find myself somewhat sympathetic to casual vegetarians, which is something I never thought I’d write in a public forum.

    On the other hand, I’m not seeing any behaviour modification in my own life after Food: You’ll only pry my red meat out of my cold dead mouth. (A potentially ironic statement, that!) Food is also, despite the breezy humorous tone, a deeply depressing book; post-Powter, food becomes not an obligation or a pleasure, but a chore and a highly complex chore at that.

    Given the massive amounts of partisan disinformation in the food arena, it’s dangerous to suggest that there’s an ultimate source of information out there. Powter’s Food certainly isn’t, though it’s an exemplary piece of argumentation. If nothing else, that’s a good start.

  • The Secret of Life, Paul McAuley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 413 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-765-30080-X

    Paul McAuley’s previous novels had all left me mostly indifferent. I’d sit there at the word processor after reading them, trying in vain to find something interesting to say about them. It never happened—hence the absence of McAauley reviews elsewhere on this site. I could recognize a certain level of quality in his work, but it never translated in a strong positive or negative reaction. Pasquale’s Angels had an interesting uchronic premise but an overly florid execution. Fairyland had a good grasp of biological hard-SF, but a plot that floundered in nothingness. I couldn’t muster any interest in checking out his other novels.

    The Secret of Life is the kind of breakout book that makes me want to re-evaluate an author’s entire output. Like Kim Stanley Robinson, McAuley had to return to Mars in order to produce an accessible top-notch SF novel. (Like Robinson’s Icehenge, McAuley had set one previous story there, Red Dust)

    As with many recent SF novels, The Secret of Life presents a future where corporations trump government regulations and are well on their way to become the dominant political power. In the opening pages, an espionage operation goes wrong and dangerous alien micro-organisms are spilled in the Pacific Ocean. Months later, the micro-organisms have grown into a dangerous slick that is posing a significant ecological danger. Though she doesn’t know it yet, our heroine Mariella Anders is going to be drafted in an expedition of essential importance.

    Not that you’d want to entrust anything of importance to her; Mariella is a brainy but rebellious scientist, given to body piercing, casual sex and generally bad attitude. Her résumé is impressive but her asocial tendencies are worrisome. Still, some people think that she’s the best candidate for an emergency mission to Mars in order to spy on a recent Chinese discovery. Corralled in restrictive non-disclosure agreements, forced to work with her scientific nemesis, Mariella goes to Mars halfway screaming and kicking. Contrived? Well, yes, but not as much as what pleasantly follows. Her subsequent adventures will make her an interplanetary fugitive, hunted down by federal and corporate forces as she’s trying to piece together a fundamental scientific mystery.

    Clocking in at more than 400 pages of finely-detailed hard-SF extrapolation, The Secret of Life is amply worth its paperback cover price for readers thirsting for authentic science-fiction. McAuley was a professional research biologist and his latest novel is packed with the kind of insider detail that contributes so much to convincing SF. As biology becomes the primary science of the twenty-first century, it’s about time that SF moves beyond physics as its intellectual field of choice.

    What makes The Secret of Life so much fun is, in the end, how clearly it’s written. Despite the heavy dose of hard-science, it reads with the narrative power of a thriller. Granted, it’s a touch too leisurely to be entirely compelling (whole sections of the novel could have been condensed without too much impact), but it’s much more effective than McAuley’s previous novels. (Amusingly enough, there’s even a reference to Fairlyand‘s main character, though it’s unclear whether The Secret of Life is taking place in the same universe as the previous novel.)

    An unexpected element of The Secret of Life is the political message against corporate science and for open research. As real-world research becomes more expensive and hence increasingly affected by monetary concerns, it’s about time that open science becomes a major thematic component of SF. The Secret of Life isn’t the first book to do so, but it’s one of the first to make it an integral part of the narrative. McAuley can now claim to write truly mature SF in a vein similar to the latest works by Bruce Sterling and Kim Stanley Robinson. (There’s also an extended “ultimate hack” sequence that is reminiscent of a similar awe-inspiring segment in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, though in molecular biology rather than computer science.)

    The Secret of Life is not only one of the major SF novels of 2001, but it’s also a breakthrough for McAuley, who finally manages to combine his scientific expertise and writing talents with an accessible elegance that will win him many more readers. I should know; I’ll be one of them.

  • For the Defense, William Harrington

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pinnacle, 1988, 508 pages, C$5.95 mmpb, ISBN 1-55817-303-X

    Let us be brutally frank: Pinnacle Fiction has never been known as an editor of fine literature. As far as publishers go, it’s definitely a second-tier house, known nationally but not with the name-recognition of Bantam, Pocket or the other big-names. At least it’s a real publisher and not a vanity press. Still, you’d be hard-pressed to recall at least one author published by them.

    Even as an avid reader, my database lists only three of their titles, all very average genre fiction book. For the Defense is a surprising little exception to the norm, an enjoyable piece of legal fiction as gripping and amusing as anything I’ve read in the genre lately.

    It has the good fortune of starring a bigger-than-life heroine. As the novel begins, Cosima Bernardin is a young lawyer in a high-powered New York legal firm. She’s got everything lined up to succeed. In the first chapter, though, she’s asked to cede control of her most visible client -a rock group- to her senior partners. She not only refuses, but quits and decides to establish her own law firm in direct competition with her old colleagues. A few plucky lawyers join her fight, and For the Defense is the story of that David-versus-Goliath fight.

    Everyone is sucker for such a story, but For the Defense wouldn’t be half the novel it is if it wasn’t for the gallery of fun characters introduced in its pages. Even weeks after reading the book, some of the minor characters resonate more strongly than the protagonists of other novels read subsequently. Cosima herself is a wonderful heroine; a female protagonist with a good control on her destiny, unbounded ambition and considerable skills.

    She’s surrounded by rock stars, a ballerina, a frightfully powerful father, a senator sister, actors and actresses as well as other lawyers. There’s a lot of casual sex in this novel; Cosima herself sleeps around with a few men during the course of the novel, but to Harrington’s credit this never seems like an exploitative technique. (You know, like those so-called “feminist” male authors who just really like to play around with a wish-fulfilling promiscuous heroine.)

    Harrington’s writing is crisp, clean and compulsively readable. Cosima’s legal cases overlap and compete for her attention, but our own attention remains rigidly focused on what she’s doing. I was particularly impressed by For the Defense‘s ability to juggle multiple storyline, some of them impacting other, and some of them remaining stubbornly separate.

    I was also impressed by the versimilitude of the legal manoeuvring in the novel. From the author’s note (“I have the privilege of being a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.”), we can assume that Harrington is a professional of the field, and his experience in such matters really shine through, as is his talent to vulgarize complex notions.

    Most of all, even though this is “merely” trashy genre fun, there is a definite pleasure in reading such novels from time to time; protagonists all get what they deserve, and that goes for antagonists too. For the Defense‘s universe is a richly moral one, and a contemporarily moral one too. Casual sex is acceptable, but sexism definitely isn’t!

    A compelling heroine, memorable characters, a boffo against-all-odds premise, convincing background details, clear writing… is there anything else we’d want from a genre novel? I don’t think so, and that’s why I recommend For the Defense if ever you can find it.

  • The Chronoliths, Robert Charles Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2001, 301 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87384-0

    Any reader who’s been following the career of Robert Charles Wilson has been surprised more than once before. Wilson has transformed himself from a mid-level SF writer heavily relying on stock premises (Gypsies, The Divide) to someone capable of moderately entertaining riffs on familiar concepts (The Harvest, Mysterium) to more original novels hampered by significant problems (Darwinia, Bios). Now here comes Wilson’s most original and most satisfying novel yet, The Chronoliths.

    It certainly begins with a bang, as a monolith materializes in the middle of Thailand and further examination reveals that it’s a memorial to a military victory… twenty years in the future. No one can figure out how it got there and what it’s made of. Before long, though, other monoliths are appearing, celebrating other victories, always twenty years in the future.

    The novel also begins with an emotional bang of sort for our narrator Scott Warden, whose carefree manners finally catch up to him, resulting in a serious debilitating injury for his daughter and the dissolution of his marriage. As the narrative advances, Warden will find himself increasingly enmeshed in the mystery of the Chronoliths, with significant impact on his family and friends.

    There is no better way to hook a reader than with a fascinating mystery, and so The Chronoliths revolves around a big secret; the origins of the huge blue monuments that appear out of nowhere, creating considerable destruction over a large area. (It doesn’t help when they appear in densely-populated areas) Wilson plays well and plays fair with readers’ expectations, and the overall resolution of the enigma is rushed but satisfying. As with some of the finest time-travel thrillers, there is a delicious sense of impending doom, and the curious structure of the story essentially pre-loads the narrative with the dramatic confrontations that make the flashiest parts of the story irrelevant and so left to a few throwaway lines. Don’t be mystified; just read the book and you’ll be satisfied at how well it unconventionally comes together.

    It helps, of course, that Wilson knows how to write polished, limpid prose. Warden’s narration is easy to read, peppered with tense moments and filled with telling details. This is a book you can reasonably read in a single day; chances are that you’ll be so absorbed in the narrative that the though of doing anything else will seem absurd.

    For a writer who has only broken out of contemporary narratives with his last book (Bios, which took place in an appreciably distant future), Wilson does a fine job at setting up his future. The Chronoliths takes place over a touch more than a decade and its sense of social evolution is quite intriguing. After The Chronoliths, Bios seems even more of a successful writing experiment to help Wilson break out in new directions.

    You could quibble with the ubiquitous presence of the narrator in the various events of the Chronolith saga, but amusingly enough, Wilson anticipates the objection with some hand-waving about how everything links together in mysterious ways (In fact, the novel’s second paragraph is “Nothing is coincidental. I know that now.”) Cute. Works for me.

    Add the cool cover illustration by Jim Burns and you’ve got one of the finest SF novels of 2001. Wilson’s continued growth as a writer has finally produced a great SF novel without the caveats of his previous work. The Chronoliths is a best-of-career high for him, and a most encouraging portent of things to come. If you still haven’t read anything by Robert Charles Wilson, this is the place to start. If you’re already a fan, well, go forth and get it, already!

  • Unearthing Atlantis, Charles Pellegrino

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1991 (2001 reprint), 355 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-81044-1

    The legend of Atlantis has fascinated many over centuries, all the way from Plato to us. Could it be possible for an advanced civilisation to disappear, just like that? Through the rumors, the stories, the myth, what is the true story that inspired Atlantis, if there was one? Are there any lessons to be learned from the fall of Atlantis?

    In Unearthing Atlantis, Charles Pellegrino applies his considerable archaeological experience, writing talent and gift for vulgarization to give us an overview of what we think we know, at this moment, about the Minoan civilization, the buried city of Thera and how it all ties into the myth of Atlantis.

    It doesn’t stop there, of course. Pellegrino is pathologically incapable of sticking to one subject and Unearthing Atlantis takes delight in rummaging through Science’s entire bag of tricks. A gifted polymath, Pellegrino can discourse as easily on anti-matter rockets, archaeology or palaeontology. The result is unique, and a testimony to how much fun the pure acquisition of knowledge can be, both for the scientists and the average readers.

    This, unfortunately, can have an unfortunate scattering effect on the unity of the book’s structure. Unearthing Atlantis goes one way, then another and then in yet another direction. Fans of the author’s previous books already know this, but this can be disconcerting for a new reader. Fortunately, a complete index will help if you want to track down specific passages quickly.

    It’s not as if your attention will wander, even if Pellegrino’s narrative does: the stories he has to tell are fascinating. From the memorable bio portrait of the driven archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos to the “time gate” (an intellectual device possibly borrowed from Pellegrino’s own scarce Time Gate book, which I haven’t yet read.), here’s a vulgarizator who knows how to communicate the passion of science and the excitement of discovery.

    Pellegrino fans will appreciate that this book once more ties into his pet obsessions to a degree or another—most notably the Titanic wreck. This 2001 re-edition of Unearthing Atlantis is touted on the author’s web site as the “uncensored version”, which probably refers to the carbon-dating controversy in Chapter 11. (I believe that it is in Return to Sodom and Gomorrah that Pellegrino explains the highly adverse reaction of Egyptologists to even the suggestion that some of their canon might not match with independent carbon dating.) Fun personal anecdotes pepper the narrative, from Pellegrino’s run-in with Prince Charles’ security forces (an event casually mentioned in his novel Flying to Valhalla) to an amusing desert drama:

    ”…one Egyptian scholar became so disturbed by news that some of her pottery dates may have to be rewritten that she began to confide in me some chillingly detailed suicide fantasies. Since I was depending on this woman to get me out of the desert alive, I decided not to press the issue. As far as I can recall, she is the only person ever to have succeeded in shutting me up.” [P.265]

    In short, it’s another wonderful book by Pellegrino and a perfect example of good scientific vulgarization. Even as far as Atlantis is concerned, Pellegrino is careful to play down evidence of catastrophic destruction in the end of the Minoan civilization, noting that the empire was already showing signs of collapse.

    Still, it’s a lot of fun to speculate about a relatively advanced civilization, ready to spring forward yet destroyed by a freak geological event. Otherwise, how different would have been history? Might we already be standing on an extra-solar planet by now? Maybe. Who knows? With enough “What if?”s, it’s easy to make the legend of Atlantis stretch all the way from the past to our future.

  • Into the Storm, Tom Clancy & General Fred Franks Jr.

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 1997, 531 pages, C$37.50 hc, ISBN 0-399-14236-3

    I’ve said it before, but it’s an axiom worth reprinting again: Publishing is a funny business. You can sell a lot of unlikely books if you have the right hook, and the quality of the product rarely has anything to do with the end result. Neither does reader enjoyment; you can slide and dice the numbers any way you want, but there aren’t very many rational answers for the wild best-selling success of Stephen Hawkins’ math-heavy A Brief History. Many have uncharitably suggested that it was a book that was more interesting to display than to read, and that’s not far from the truth. Not many people have read A Brief History of Time all the way through, but many poseurs proudly include it in their personal library.

    In much the same vein, General Fred Franks’ Into the Storm could have easily been yet another of those dry military history textbooks: Published by a specialized printing press, advertised in a few small magazines, bought by a few hundred universities and overwhelmingly invisible to the general public. Regardless of the quality of the work, this would have been a hard-core military book for a small audience of military buffs. Or, even worse, an unpublished manuscript.

    But in our universe, Tom Clancy stepped in.

    Or, should I say, best-selling techno-thriller author Tom Clancy stepped in. He (or someone else) thought it might be a good idea to co-author a series of non-fiction books with professional military personnel. Into the Storm is, reportedly, the first book in this series.

    In a sense, everyone should come away happy from this experience. Clancy gets to work with interesting people and acquires a considerable amount of credibility as an expert in the field. The co-authors get an experienced wordsmith and vulgarizator. Oh, and a best-seller is certain.

    And that’s the really surprising thing about Into the Storm. It’s a jargon-heavy pure military text. It describes the history of mechanized infantry from the Vietnam War to the Gulf War. It describes, in overwhelming detail, how ground troops prepared and fought in the Gulf War. It’s a biography of General Fred Franks. It’s a summary of fifteen years’ worth of changes in the US Army. It’s a primer on how to fight a modern war with modern weapons. In short, it’s not beach reading. And yet it was published, massively marketed and probably bought by thousands of readers who were probably expecting another Clancy pot-boiler. Gotcha!

    It’s not even a bad book, though it definitely has its limitations. For even the moderately knowledgeable military buff, it’s often dry reading. While the details are exhaustive, they’re usually not presented in a compelling way; there’s a limit to how excitingly you can describe transit operations and force preparation. Some of it is even dull beyond belief. You almost have to be a professional military analyst to enjoy the full book. There’s also an additional annoyance in that Franks seems to be using passages of Into the Storm to answer Norman Schwarzkopf’s criticism in his autobiography It Doesn’t Take a Hero. Naturally, readers who aren’t familiar with the previous book might not care at all.

    But don’t let that blind you to the interesting sections of Into the Storm. At its best, it’s a clear description of the overhaul of the US Army after the scars left by Vietnam. It’s a rather good autobiography of a professional military man. It’s occasionally a good description of the Gulf War. From time to time, you’ll even uncover a nugget or two of fascinating military trivia. Its grasp of the real-world military chain of command and logistics is also unparalleled in widely-available literature.

    But if you’re not a dedicated military buff, goodness, don’t pick up Into the Storm expecting another easy read by Mr. Clancy. It all too often happens that the publishing industry fools relatively smart people in buying total crap, but in this case it’s fascinating to see the complete opposite—the marketing industry managing to convince a large audience to buy over their heads. Now that Into the Storm has hit the remainder stacks, you can find out for yourself if you’ve got the mettle for 500+ pages of hard-core military jargon.

  • Cradle of Saturn, James P. Hogan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1999, 421 pages, C$35.50 hc, ISBN 0-671-57813-8

    James P. Hogan has always been a very peculiar writer, constantly dogging boffo premises with botched characters and limp execution. In a sense, he’s the incarnation of everything that’s good and bad about hard Science-Fiction with his unique extrapolation of original ideas mixed with an appalling inability to write. Cradle of Saturn is a frustrating novel that’s highly representative of his body of work.

    In a few words, Cradle of Saturn is yet another novel of implacable celestial catastrophe. The late nineties -driven by pre-millennial fever, the intellectual impact of the Schumacher-Levy comet on Jupiter or simply synchronicity- were filled of such stories on a variety of media: ARMAGEDDON, DEEP IMPACT, the TV miniseries “Asteroid”, Yvonne Navaro’s ludicrous Final Impact, etc… It wouldn’t be fair to criticize Hogan, however, for being unoriginal given the mood of the times. (He himself even bemoans his unfortunate timing on his web site)

    For one thing, he’s far more innovative in his choice of celestial body: Rather than hand-wave a collision between two rocks in the asteroid belt, Hogan postulates as-yet unknown planetary mechanism to extract a planetoid out of Jupiter. (the moniker “Athena” is inevitable) Before anyone can say “Uh-oh, not again”, Athena is lined up in a game of planetary snooker to send Earth in the corner pocket.

    The first half of Cradle of Saturn is its most embarrassing from a literary point of view. Characters have little meetings to hurls reams of expeditionary material at each other, nods gravely and then rush off to other expeditionary meetings. Our hero, Landen Keene, is a maverick engineer who only wants to build cool rockets without being hampered by a stunningly unimaginative government. (Stop me if you’ve read that one before.) For some strange reason, though, he seems to be surrounded by people who think that conventional scientific dogma is wrong on a number of subject. And for some other reason, the rest of the scientific community is a bunch of retarded morons who’ll do their best to ignore new evidence.

    Aside from the cliché characters, the cheap and constant “they laughed at Galileo!” discourse and the atrocious integration of cool ideas in a weak narrative, this half of the novel is actually quite interesting. Hogan’s science is far-fetched, but unusual enough to make us pay attention. His rant on the improbability of dinosaurs alone will be enough to make even the hardened skeptics very curious about alternate explanations. But the real argument of the book is about celestial mechanics, the formation of planets, the impact of near-misses on the atmosphere, the strangeness of our universe and scientific evidence hidden deep in our myths and religious texts.

    By now, readers familiar with recent pseudo-science might recall a similar theme of thought in Immanuel Velikovsky’s widely-debunked work. (Worlds in Collision, a staple of the sixties’ new-age fad) Given Hogan’s fascination for weird science (again, please refer to his web site), it’s unsurprising that he’d set up a premise suitable for a rematch. His arguments are vigorous and clever. He even conspicuously avoids any mention of Velikovsky apart from the novel’s dedication and stacks the deck with convincing fictional arguments. SF is a rational game of “what-if?” and Hogan plays it very well. Experience Hard-SF readers will read this section with glee and ignore the flaws.

    The second half of the novel, alas, isn’t nearly as good. Athena hits, most people dies and our heroes are on a mission to escape Earth. While one can temporarily forget the inherent elitism in letting most of the planet die to save a few valorous heroes, the problem is that when he’s not being intellectually stimulating, Hogan doesn’t have a whole set of narrative skills to work with. The latter action-oriented half of Cradle of Saturn is trite, long and boring. Rather than end on a triumphant success, Hogan’s novel ends on an mixed note of shameful escape and exasperating hypocrisy.

    Hard-SF fans might want to tolerate the flaws and savour the ideas. Others should be warned that there are more satisfying novels out there.

    [July 1998: James P. Hogan fans (and non-fans) already know that he’s not a very accomplished stylist. They might have a surprise with Realtime Interrupt, which is easily his best book yet. A tale of virtual realities that brings back memories of quasi-Dick-ian paranoia, Realtime Interrupt also takes the time to mull over various aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Corporate infighting is mixed up with mature romance and the result is slow to revv up, but worth the wait. It’s a shame that most of the first half of the book is fairly obvious to even the average reader; the last third gets better as it goes on. The climax is vivid. Readers disappointed by Hogan in various outings might want to check this one out.]

  • The Judgement, William J. Coughlin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1997, 424 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-96244-4

    A courtroom drama element which drives me nuts is how attorneys can spend months of their time on single cases. How their lives can revolve around a single client from sunup to sundown. While this may very well be true for corporate lawyers or Johnnie Cochran Jr., most lawyers are usually stuck dividing their time between multiple competing priorities.

    While I’ll be the first to acknowledge that my reference pool in crime fiction is very shallow, William J. Coughlin’s The Judgement is the first novel I’ve read that convincingly represent the life of a small-town attorney in what seems to be a convincingly realistic fashion, complete with glamorous and boring clients, big and small cases. Heck, The Judgement even features two strong parallel cases that don’t even relate to each other!

    It is first and foremost a novel of character. The narrator, Charley Sloan is an ex-big-shot attorney. Once one of Detroit’s judicial stars, Sloan hit the bottle once too often and found himself sliding down the social scale. Now, years later, he has re-established himself in a small town, away from the spotlights and comfortably sober. As The Judgement begins, Sloan is happy, solvent and engaged in a good relationship, yet slightly bored. Excitement walks in his office in the form of Mark Conroy, a top Detroit policeman under fire from accusations of corruption. Sloan is warned that high-level political corruption might be involved. He takes the challenge. In the next pages, he’ll be bugged, threatened and bribed to drop the case.

    His biggest challenge, however, comes from another direction: In his small quiet town, a serial murderer strikes, and young children are the target. His girlfriend is on the case, but it’s Sloan who will be most affected.

    In addition to these two cases, Sloan has to account, as a small-town attorney, of a variety of other cases, serious and not-so-serious. His narration is clear, amusing but not without tense segments. Sloan gets to interrogate witnesses, hack the law, call in a few favours and generally give us a good time.

    The Judgement is an admirable crime thriller, told with crisp economy and considerable skill. The story moves well and makes for compulsive reading. The whodunit is not particularly difficult to figure out, but don’t worry: The book’s most memorable moments are character-driven, whether it’s quirky supporting characters or a personal depiction of a major lapse back in addiction. If nothing else, The Judgement gives a convincing look in the inner working and meaning of addiction support group. Among other things.

    Interestingly enough, while fact-checking this review on Amazon’s entry for this novel, I found a note by someone claiming to be Coughlin’s son, alleging that The Judgement was posthumously written by a ghostwriter and not by Coughlin, who died before the book was published. Internal evidence shows that the novel itself is copyrighted “1997, Ruth Coughlin”, but further Internet searches don’t show any other supporting material. While I’m not discounting the statement, it doesn’t really matter; The Judgement is a fine novel, ghost-written or not. Worth a read, anyway.