Book Review

  • The Big Book of Scandal!, Jonathan Vankin et al.

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Paradox Press, 1997, 191 pages, C$20.95 tpb, ISBN 1-56389-358-4

    Once in a while, the vagaries of fate shine upon the jaded book reviewer and a chance encounter with an oddball title proves to be a ray of light in an otherwise dreary reading regimen. For your faithful critic, the latest of those serendipitous accidents is Paradox Press’s The Big Book of Scandal!, a wonderful comic book that stand high above most of the non-fiction read recently.

    The Big Book of Scandal! is a collection of fifty-odd comic strips (ranging from one to six pages), each telling one of the twentieth century’s best-known scandals. (Or, in the case of the O.J. Simpson trial, a twelve-page two-parter describing the period before and during the trial) Each comic strip is drawn by a different artist, but all are written by the same Jonathan Vankin, who does an impressive job of condensing together oodles of material in one accessible but reasonably exact account. The account of the Irangate scandal, for instance, does a splendid job at explaining a remarkably complex business in an entertaining fashion.

    After a succinct but clever introduction, The Big Book of Scandals! starts off amusingly enough with a section on Hollywood scandals. The standout piece here is “The Scandal that Sank a Studio”, a wonderful and hilarious six-page exposé on the disastrous making of Elizabeth Taylor’s CLEOPATRA. Other good pieces talk about Ingrid Bergman, Elvis Presley, Woody Allen, Heidi Fleiss and the “Hollywood Bad Boys”. Most of these stories are good shadenfreude material, especially given the personal -often scabrous- nature of the scandals. Good fun, really.

    An edge of bitterness begins to creep in the second section, in which we cover miscellaneous celebrity scandals. Tonya Harding, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, the English Monarchy and Michael Jackson all get their dues—plus the inevitable O.J. Simpson. Here, financial impropriety vie with more scabrous indiscretions as the source of scandals. While it may be entertaining to read about a preacher being caught paying prostitutes, it’s not as funny to read about them bilking thousands of people out of their money. And it definitely rankles to see someone famous walk away with murder. (This Factoid book might be “100% true”, but don’t make the mistake to assume that it’s 100% biais-free!)

    As the book progresses in its third section about crooked politicians, the light humor of the book’s first half is gradually replaced by a merciless sarcasm. While a Hollywood star caught with his pants down might be cause for a prude chuckle, politicians are messing around on the taxpayer’s dime and the public’s trust. Vankin’s treatment of Watergate, Irangate, the Anita Hill episode, the Kennedy Legacy or the S&L Bailout are straight-out chainsaw jobs, clearly explaining exactly what was so wrong about them. The biting humor only drives the stake even further.

    But wait; the worse is yet to come. “Dirty Business” is the angriest part of the book, detailing such scandals as John DeLorean, Michael Milken, Robert Maxwell, Lockheed, Ford Pintos, Love Canal and Thalidomide. Some of it so dirty that you’ll end up thinking that a bullet through the head of some of these people might be too generous, whereas a daily knee-capping might be just about adequate. Here, the comic form pushes exactly the right buttons in order to make us sit up and take notice. The Thalidomide segment is a model of clear and direct vulgarization, complete with a forgotten hero (Dr. Frances Kelsey) and criminal corporate behavior.

    Any book which causes a strong emotional reaction has to be commended: The Big Book of Scandals! sneaks up on you with laughter and then hits you with pure rage. The art is excellent (with particular kudos to artist Lennie Mace for the Thalidomide segment) and the writing is a marvel of concision. The Big Book of Scandal! is well worth tracking down.

    Finally, g’darn it, don’t be prejudiced about a “comic book”: In a month where I’ve read such diverse graphical works as Ghost World, Crisis on Infinite Earth and Alien: Stalker, The Big Book of Scandal not only shows that a “comic book” can be as good as equivalent pure-text non-fiction, but can even be better.

  • The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Reading Group, Patrick Sauer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Alpha, 2000, 359 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-02-863654-6

    Even though I’ve been avidly lurking in bookstores for most of my adult life, I still consistently manage to be delighted at some of the oddball books I can find. A trip through the cookbook section will reveal untapped areas of taste (and ever-narrower demographic segments) I never suspected. The self-help section will reveal serious widespread emotional problems I hadn’t even imagined. The biography section will make me discover hitherto-unknown famous persons. There’s always something new and interesting in bookstores. If ever I win the lottery, keep the million dollars; I want an unlimited expense account at Chapters.

    Can you say “bilbiofreak”? I knew you could.

    In many ways, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Reading Group is a book that I couldn’t resist. No, I have no intention of starting (or even joining) a reading group, but the very idea that such a book deserved to exist was simply too delicious to pass up. Plus, hey, it was heavily discounted.

    The first chapter of this Idiot’s Guide quickly establishes that the book has been written in an alternate universe. (“Does it seem that every time you turn around lately, another friend or acquaintance has joined a reading group? Everyone seems to be in on it.” [P.1]) This isn’t necessarily a bad thing -even though I’d like to emigrate there- given that Sauer seems to be writing in terms of “the ideal reading group” rather than our own humdrum lives. Is the CIGSRG escapist literature? Maybe.

    It certainly sounds so when you start reading some of Sauer’s recommended titles for reading. All the classics are there, and then some. He doesn’t recommend very many books published in the past twenty years, though. As pointed out in Chapter 10, gender balance isn’t something you’ll find in reading groups, which tend to skew heavily towards women for a variety of reasons. The net effect, for a Techno/SF genre geek like me is a selection of recommended books that I find respectable, if utterly boring. Sauer even muddles in my genres of predilection in Chapter 16 (The title of the chapter being, I kid you not, “Oh, the Horror… the Horror”) and the selection in my well-known SF arena is rather dry and stuffy; I count only one novel (out of 19) from the nineties, and that’s Michael Crichton’s 1990 Jurassic Park. The rest is remarkably er… unexciting.

    In producing a respectable book for everyone, Sauer might be a touch too conservative. While I can’t expect him to recommend Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club to everyone (I would, but then again that’s just me), his overall choices tend to promote elusive canon-quality rather than enjoyment, which would seem to be a crucial element in a book club for non-readers. On the other hand, it’s hard to read the CIGSRG without wanting to run to the library to borrow books yet unread. Plus, who can reasonably argue against reading the classics?

    Sauer definitely fares better when detailing the mechanics of starting a book club. How to recruit members, how to organize meetings, how to deal with difficult members and situations are all covered in witty detail. Heck, the chapter on why to join a book club alone (“Chapter 1: To Read of not to Read?”) reaffirmed my own bibliomaniac tendencies. I’m not so sure about his main sales pitch (“Reading Groups: Singles Bars for the Next Century”), especially given the shocking lack of social tips about intra-group dating!

    Well, never mind that. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Reading Group is definitely a curious book, with many uses and purposes besides the titular activity. As a reading recommendation list, it’s not everything for everyone, but it should help broaden most literary horizons. It’s mostly a book for book-lovers. You know who you are.

  • The Frank Collection, Jane and Howard Frank

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Paper Tiger, 1999, 112 pages, C$36.95 tpb, ISBN 1-85585-732-4

    I firmly believe that everyone should allow themselves one good expensive obsession. While you’re welcome to pick up heroin addiction if that strikes your fancy, my own Expensive Obsession is SF/Fantasy art books. At my own modest level of income, the decision to drop $35 or (much) more on art books is not inconsequent, hence my own measure of “Expensive”. The important part, though, is that these books please me. They’re gorgeous to look at, they make interesting conversation pieces, they don’t devalue much… in short they’re close to the ideal art investment for someone in my income bracket. In the past ten years, I’ve acquired nearly twenty-five of these books (Whelan, Burns, Eggleton, etc…), and I’m not planning on stopping any time soon.

    My own efforts are very modest, though, compared to Jane and Howard Frank. They collect the artwork itself! As explained in the introduction to The Frank Collection art-book, this husband-and-wife team was able to transform a common fascination for SF&F artwork in an impressive collection, currently exhibited in their gigantic multi-level house. This art-book is a sampler of the wonders of SF&F art, a personal testimony on the joys of art collecting and a tour through one house whose decor belongs in glossy magazines.

    It’s obvious, page after page, how much the Howards love SF&F art. They speak with reverence about famous genre artists and how lucky they were to be able to buy one of their pieces for their collection. They offer anecdotes on how they acquired some paintings, and some all-too-rare commentary on specific artworks. The after-word even discusses their conception of “stewardship” for artwork, in that they don’t own a painting as much as they have custody of it for a while. You can easily see the Franks as modern art patrons, an impression confirmed by learning in the second half of the book that they are now privately commissioning artwork! It’s a fascinating progression, from simple fans to active contributor to the state of the art.

    An average chump like me can only gawk at some of the incredible art that the Franks have assembled together. Covers of books that I own, covers I have seen re-printed in other art-books, classic covers from Golden-Era magazines… the Franks have it all. The only proper response is to be amazed. (You might ask where the money comes from, but there are a few mentions of Frank being an electronics business owner.)

    With this richness of content, it’s only normal to complain that the book is a bit on the thin side. A more serious complaint, however, is that we get only six pictures of the inside of their house. I suppose that security concerns might have deterred them from including more, but really, given that they spend a suitable fraction of their narrative speaking about how good this or that picture looks when place a certain way, well, it would be decent for them to give us a glimpse of the arrangement. After all, we can see more of their artwork reprinted elsewhere… but this is the book about their house and their collection.

    Still, I’m most grateful for The Frank Collection. Not only at the chance for a glimpse at this “showcase of the world’s finest fantastic art”, but also at the mind of two people who are undoubtedly the world’s best collectors of SF&F art. Their enthusiasm is palpable. On some level, they sort of validate by own fixation for the field, even in a diluted form.

    And that’s not even considering the perverse value of being able to point to other people with a far more expensive Expensive Obsession.

  • The Price of Power, James W. Huston

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1999, 503 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-73160-6

    I suppose that it was just a matter of time until someone thought about producing a hybrid thriller including elements of both military fiction and courtroom drama. You may pick James W. Huston’s The Price of Power expecting a political thriller (it’s certainly marketed as such), but it proves to be something a bit more diverse than that.

    The story picks up in media res, as terrorists take a family hostage and an admiral is put in handcuffs. I hadn’t read Huston’s previous Balance of Power, so the initial setup seems awfully busy. “Hey, there’s another book’s worth of stuff in there” I thought, before figuring out that there was indeed another book out there. Ironically, some of the previous novel’s material seems a bit forced when you don’t have the context, such as the physical wounds suffered by the protagonist.

    The plot that gradually emerges is a power contest between Congress and the President, one that will be fought through two separate court battles. The President is impeached, a court martial takes place, marines are asked to stand by and terrorists attack.

    It wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable if it wasn’t for Jim Dillon, our endearingly clever protagonist. He’s the type of smart-alecky hero who would be insufferable in real-life, but infuses this novel with enough interest to see us through. Dillon is a legal hacker of sorts; he manages to find hidden tricks in the U.S. Constitution and exploits them to maximum effect. The Price of Power is a journey of sort for him; he’ll quit his job and go out on a limb to do what he thinks is right, possibly losing everything in the process. Though happenstance, he will find himself prosecuting one of the biggest constitutional cases in the history of the United States. Not only does he come out of his with his honour intact, but he even manages to get the girl in the process!

    Dillon is one of the reasons why, in the end, the legal manoeuvrings in The Price of Power end up being much more interesting than the actual military firefights. All the SEALs fighting for America in this novel are as professional as we’d like them to be, but that doesn’t leave a lot of place for drama. Dillon, on the other hand, is a young man clearly out of his element. While the SEALs are pretty much going to win no matter what when faced with disorganized terrorist forces, Dillon can only depend on his cleverness and legal skills to find the quick trick to save his case. His adversaries are far more dangerous… and then there’s something about courtrooms that just compels dramatic interest. Whatever the reason, The Price of Power finds its groove in the legal suspense, not the military action. Some of the latter could have been cut without undue harm to the novel.

    It helps considerably that Huston’s writing is clear and to the point. What doesn’t work as well is part of his overall premise. Sure, the President of the United States has the responsibility to protect the citizens of his country against all dangers, but does that mean he can be impeached if he refuses to use military force? It sounds a lot like right-wing rhetoric and probably is, but Huston does only a fair job at exploring these issues. Some of it simply sounds silly: “Are you a pacifist, Mr. President?”

    No matter; I found myself unexpectedly captivated by Jim Dillon and The Price of Power, reading a bit too late in the night just to see what would happen next. While it would be a bit much to claim that The Price of Power is anything more than simply a good thriller, it does deliver the goods splendidly. It wouldn’t do to ask much more than that.

    [November 2002: Balance of Power is indeed the setup. Though it’s not mandatory reading, it does add a lot to the story and proves to be a quick enjoyable read, even to those who have read the second volume. Ironically enough, the flaws and strength of the first volume are almost identical to its sequel: Great protagonist, excellent legal hacking, but boy do things get boring whenever we’re dealing with the military side of things.]

  • Gideon, Russell Andrews (Peter Gethers & David Handler)

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1999, 466 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-43478-1

    By now, the beginning of the 21st century, the formula of the typical thriller is well-known and highly unlikely to change: One lone man gradually discovers a terrible secret for which unknown forces are prepared to kill. The hero is cut off from his usual sources of support, often framed for crimes he didn’t commit, sent in hiding where he will discover unlikely allies and eventually manages to blow open the lid of a grandiose conspiracy. It’s a formula that has been proved over and oven again. When it’s well-done, it can hold the attention of even the most jaded writers.

    Such is the case with Gideon, a standard thriller that succeeds on the strength of a pair of sympathetic characters, some unexpected twists, a semi-realistic conclusion and solid writing.

    The narrative begins with pure wish-fulfillment for many struggling authors: Protagonist Carl Granville, a novice novelist, is secretively commissioned by a high-powered editor to write a romanced political biography. What he finds is shocking, a tale of infanticide that seems to implicate a high-ranking member of the American government. For Carl, it’s a good job. But it soon turns ugly as his editor and his girlfriend are both killed. His attempts to track down the publisher of his phantom book are unsuccessful. Pretty soon, he’s framed for both murders and sent on the run in an effort to find out the truth.

    There isn’t much there that’ new or innovative, but the devil is in the details, and most of Gideon’s appeal rests on the actual nuts-and-bolts of the novel. Carl is fully realized as a completely sympathetic character. Unlike so many thriller heroes who “just happen” to have SEAL training, Carl has believable strength and endearing weaknesses. He doesn’t act too much like an idiot (a typical flaw in thriller protagonists) and is adequately bewildered whenever strange things happen to him. In short, he’s a perfect stand-in for most readers.

    There are a few interesting twists, of course, such as the early death of a few supporting characters we might have expected to stick around longer. For some reason, the authors manage to inject some energy in well-known stock situations. The protagonist’s quest for truth often looks like a series of audacious long-shots, but he manages to overcome all obstacles with cleverness and luck. One particularly tense scene in a Mississippi-area forest had me wondering “How is he ever going to get out of that one?”

    Alas, the villains aren’t nearly as good: Oh, they’re menacing all right—they kill with relish and expertise. But in the end, they’re just the usual evil rich businessmen, sadistic henchmen and power-hungry politicians. In fact, the most memorable thing about any of the villains is the ridiculously contrived identity of one of them, the type of thing that makes one sigh in exasperation at the unnecessary twist.

    One thing that “Andrews” does manage to handle quite well is the resolution of the intrigue. Most conspiracy thrillers would like you believe that going to the media with irrefutable proof, killing the leader or exacting a taped confession would stop everything right then and there. Gideon is a bit more realistic, with a carefully orchestrated campaign to stop everything, counter-offers and stoic villains. That part of the book rang truer than most thrillers.

    In the end, Gideon doesn’t aspire at being much more than good beach reading but it does so with an impressive mastery of stock elements. Aspiring readers should take note of how careful execution and a sympathetic protagonist can satisfy despite a conventional dramatic arc. As for the rest of us readers, well, there are tons of worse books out there… standard thriller formula or not.

  • Timeline, Michael Crichton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Knopf, 1999, 450 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-679-44481-5

    After a few years as an amateur book reviewer, I have come to approach any new Crichton book with something approaching masochistic glee. He’s a complex author with complex recurring faults. His novels have rich strengths, rich weaknesses and equally rich thematic characteristics. That makes him endearing to any critical reader usually stuck with bland material. Show me a book reviewer who doesn’t want to discuss Crichton’s hypocritical love/hate relationship with technology, and I’ll show you a book reviewer who’s lost all joy in his job.

    His latest opus, Timeline, is somewhat of a slight departure for him. In some ways, it’s a return to more explicit science-fiction after his usual thriller / technothriller mode. After a lengthy hundred-page prologue, (in which far too many useless characters are introduced) our protagonists step in a time machine and go back to the fourteenth century in quest of their disappeared mentor. Things go badly with a ridiculous speed and soon, it looks as if our bunch of intrepid explorers is stuck in the late dark ages.

    Anyone thinking “gee, that sounds like an excuse for a medieval thriller” is right. By throwing our wholesome American characters in a strange environment, Crichton is not only using one of SF’s standard devices, but also giving more meaning than an environment used without comparative markers. The protagonists stand in for the readers in pointing out the most remarkable differences between the two time periods. And it is a very dangerous time, with enough opportunities for senseless disembowelment to scare off even the most bloodthirsty among us.

    It works, like most Crichton novels usually do. The writing style is clean and uncluttered, with enough meaningless techno-babble to convince the majority of readers. The narrative has occasional lengthy moments, but Crichton packs most of the book with armoured battles, nick-of-time escapes, hidden passageways, surprising betrayals and all that good stuff. It’s a good read. Crichton, as usual, loves to show us how smart he is: the book can easily stand-in as a primer on current medieval research.

    The problem is that as soon as you start thinking about the scientific wrapper of the book, things stop making sense. Crichton spends a lot of time throwing up sand in the air explaining why it’s not possible to change the past, but most of his arguments essentially go back to wishful thinking. It makes even less sense, of course when the characters actually do end up changing history, even despite the “parallel universe” yadda-yadda.

    Experienced SF fans will go nuts pointing out the areas where Crichton clearly means much more than he realizes. He will, for instance, “scan” everyone in a Really Big Computer, but fail to recognize that this way, a backup of the person is created. He will mumble something about relying on other universes to do tricks they can’t comprehend, but fail to recognize that there’s an every bigger story there. He doesn’t follow through his most interesting speculations, that’s simply frustrating. (Take the opening chapter, for instance; the way in which the scientist ends up in the desert is never explained.) That’s when he doesn’t simply set up blindingly obvious setups, during which any halfway attentive reader can feel ahead of the curve.

    One thing he does do well is to create a certain atmosphere of dread. His techno-thriller background makes him unusually adept at considering technology like a big box of dangers. This attitude makes his setup all the more interesting, as it’s a virtual certainty that something awful will certainly go wrong. Compare and contrast with the usual happy-go-lucky scientific endeavours in hard-SF for an interesting subject of discussion.

    It’s details like this that still compel me to read Crichton’s work. Notwithstanding the occasional stinker (The Lost World), most of his books are undeniably compelling page-turners. But when he screws up, he usually does so in an interesting fashion. He might be one of the most mechanical and hypocritical writer in the best-selling business today (witness his anti-technological, anti-corporate discourse, which feels more and more carefully calculated for popular success than in any way heartfelt), but he’s rarely dull. And that, let me tell you, has a quality of its own when you slog through a dozen novels a month.

  • Lifeline, Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1990, 460 pages, C$5.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-28787-7

    Popular fiction often depends on a common, unspoken set of assumptions. Most readers never notice them until they’re stripped away. While Anderson and Beason’s Lifeline is far from being an atypical piece of hard-SF, prepare to be surprised at some of the early plot twists. This is a novel that doesn’t start by playing nice.

    One of those expectations is that heroes should behave, well, heroically. A second should be that “our side” (ie; usually Americans) should also be virtuous. Yet another would be that everything means something; audacious stunts should pay off.

    In the opening pages of Lifeline, the hammer falls repeatedly.

    The narrative starts with a global thermonuclear war. But don’t worry; this will be the least of our problems. Indeed, the novel merely uses the death of a few hundred million people as an excuse to set up a survival story in Earth orbit; cut off from the home planet for the foreseeable future, the four human settlements in space have to co-operate in order to survive. Each has something that the others need. Are they going to be able to settle their differences in time?

    It won’t be a simple endeavour. Aboard the Corporate American station Orbitech, one manager panics, grabs his sick daughter and hijacks a space shuttle. His destination? The Moonbase—which is incidentally headed by a weak director more interested in science than administration. The manager’s attempt fails; the shuttle crashes, destroying it and killing the pilot. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough of a guilt trip, his daughter is also killed in the crash.

    The unpleasantness doesn’t stop there, as the Soviet Station Kibalchich sets in motion a doomsday weapon plan. Aboard the Philippine Aguinaldo station, there’s enough biotechnology to feed the two other stations, if only some politicians didn’t feel it was pay-back time for decades of superpower oppression. (Oh, and a technician is killed when one of the protagonist makes a stupid mistake. Lifeline is an equal-opportunity narrative guilt machine.)

    Naturally, it gets better. Faced with starvation, Orbitech’s deputy director spaces a hundred of the most inefficient people. Later, a mob of survivors knifes the director of the station in the cafeteria. Don’t worry; there’s a public execution later on.

    All of this happens in the first hundred pages of the book, which sets up quite a tone for the rest of the book. It lets up somewhat (another accidental death seemingly caused by one protagonist is explained to be no fault of his own) but the uneasy feeling remains through the whole book.

    Which is a good thing, because otherwise there wouldn’t be much that’s memorable in Lifeline. It’s competent Hard-SF, with sophisticated technical details, adequate characters and average plotting. True to the ethos of Hard-SF, it basically puts the protagonist against a huge problem, then makes it worse until they find the mixture of technological gadgetry and audacious recklessness that will make everything all right.

    On a geopolitical level -never the strength of Hard-SF writers, but I digress-, the presence of the Philippines in space isn’t particularly convincing, even as a token of bribery from the Americans to a vacillating ally. You’d think that space would be at such a premium, and at such value, that America would rather give up a few of the Marshall Islands before handing over a space station.

    Bah, never mind that; Lifeline is a good fast read, but it’s nothing special nor particularly original. That is, if you discount the general nastiness of the first third of the book, where a nuclear war seems to be the least disturbing element of the story.

    First published in 1990, chances are good that Lifeline is now comfortably out of print. It’s not particularly worth hunting down, but it can hit the spot if ever you crave hard-SF with a slightly bitter edge.

  • Her Name, Titanic, Charles Pellegrino

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1988 (1990 reprint), 283 pages, C$8.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-70892-2

    Regular readers of these reviews will certainly remember my overall affection for the work of Charles Pellegrino. Here’s one author who, in my humble opinion, has rarely done wrong. (Notwithstanding his curiously inept Star Trek novel) Over the past few years, I have read one Pellegrino book after another, always managing to avoid his best-known work, Her Name, Titanic.

    After reading the “sequel”, Ghosts of the Titanic, this seemed like an increasingly ridiculous situation. Fortunately, I was able to secure a copy of his 1988 bestseller and dug in, knowing that I’d get my time’s worth of pure enjoyment.

    Once again, I wasn’t disappointed. Her Name, Titanic is fully the equal of Pellegrino’s other non-fiction books. Ghosts of the Titanic had a scattershot approach to the subject, leading me to speculate a more strictly chronological run-through of the voyage for the first volume. Fortunately, this isn’t so.

    In fact, if you want an overview of the events surrounding the Titanic, you’d be better off watching the film. (Though the graphic inset between pages 92-93 will do just fine) Her Name, Titanic is as much about the 1985 re-discovery of the sunken relic as it is about the 1912 catastrophe. We’ll spend as much time with Robert Ballard and the Argo as with the ill-fated passengers of the ocean liner.

    Perhaps more interestingly, we’ll spend all of this time with Charles Pellegrino himself. Her Name, Titanic is the centerpiece of his literary output; all of his other books refer to it in one way or another. (This is unfair actually; all of Pellegrino’s books refer to each other in what are often very, very twisted ways.) His books are unlike any others in that they present a glimpse in the scientific strangeness that’s just lurking beneath the surface of our humdrum lives. History isn’t something that happens in the past for Pellegrino; he’ll uncover jaw-dropping links between seemingly disparate events and present them with a passion that will leave you breathless. His writing style is very deliberately dramatic, though never without a deeply respectful quality. You might not be moved to tears by Her Name, Titanic, but don’t be surprised to find a few lumps in your throat.

    The tangents explored by Pellegrino as almost as fascinating as the events themselves. Pellegrino is a man of eclectic interests, and he effortlessly links the Titanic to World War One, to the Challenger Shuttle disaster, to the life of Bob Ballard, to Apollo 11, to obsession. He admits in the introduction that he’s become obsessed with the ship, and this is, perhaps most of all, a book about this obsession. (Indeed, one of the most memorable passages of the book is a conversation with members of the Alvin crew who don’t share this obsession; “It was a job and we did it the best we could.” [P.221]

    But don’t worry; by the end of the book, you’ll share Pellegrino’s fascination; I certainly did. His effective writing style, love for oddball details, ability to effectively present important information and keenness of mind will have you reading well after the point when you should reasonably stop. Heavens help you if you have the sequel nearby after you’re done with Her Name, Titanic, because you won’t be able to stop. Any Titanic buff pretty much has to read this one, and even casual reader will want to grab this book. It’s powerful writing, and memorable reading.

  • Ventus, Karl Schroeder

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 662 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-57635-7

    Some human endeavours are harder than others. While no one will ever confuse writing a novel with performing brain surgery, writing a mathematic Ph.D. thesis or even raising a child, no one will ever say that writing a good professional novel is easy. You have to balance narrative exposition with careful character development, dramatic tension and basic writing abilities. Analyse any random 600-pages novel and you’ll quickly find a bunch of interlocking factors in a framework so large that it’s almost a wonder to realize that people actually pull this off.

    Science-fiction writers must be even more masochistic than most other novelist. To the already mind-boggling demands of novel-writing, they add the necessity to construct a wholly fictional world and present it to the reader in a seamless fashion. Oh, and explain new complex concepts to the average readers. Why would anyone willingly choose that job?

    Karl Schroeder did. Ventus isn’t his first novel (he co-wrote The Claus Effect with David Nickle), but it’s certainly the one which will make the SF world stand up and take notice of his potential. It’s a massive, epic story about a planet with many secrets, spanning dozen of very different characters and a conflict with galactic repercussions.

    Yet we begin this hard-SF story in a fashion that is almost identical to most fantasy trilogies. Young Jordan Mason is an apprentice on a vast estate. While the first chapter hints strongly at a SFictional tone -what with an attack by a silver mechal life form-, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything radically different between him and some medieval squire. Gunpowder has been invented, but what’s this about flying creatures attacking any higher technology?

    As the story unfolds, both Mason and the reader discover that the ground beneath their feet isn’t nearly as stable -nor natural- as it may first seems. Jordan is almost kidnapped by strangers, thrust in complex political games and eventually made to realize an awesome untapped power. Before the book is through, we’ll visit a fantastically advanced Earth, be privy to scenes of devastating scope and -maybe more importantly- witness the emotional evolution of a cast of characters.

    Ventus is a big, satisfying book, the kind that’s made for you, a comfy chair, plenty of hot chocolate and a long Sunday in front of a fireplace. It takes a while, more than a long while, to get going, but once it ignites, it’s a highly enjoyable read. Most notable is the changing nature of the characters; those who seems initially reliable end up as raving psychopaths and those who seems singularly inept ends up controlling everything. Then there’s the impressive feat of managing more than a dozen major characters without fumbling too much. Ventus doesn’t feel like a first novel; you’d be hard-pressed to consider it as being anything less than a great work by a professional author at the height of his powers. You’ll love the SF elements and the characters.

    The science-fantasy aspect of the tale is annoying at first, but makes increasing sense as the underpinning of Ventus is explained. After that realisation, one can only be impressed at how well the tale unfolds, how the technological/scientific themes are well-exploited in order to give meaning to the story. The narrative even introduces interesting philosophical elements late in the story without undue effort. It’s also one of the smoothest blend of science and characterization to come along in recent memories.

    After the impressive Ventus, it’s hard to wait until Schroeder’s next novel. Canada has produced several impressive SF writers in the past few years, but few seem to be audacious enough to turn out stories with the epic scope of Ventus. Schroeder seems, with his first solo novel, to aim for a spot aside Vernor Vinge and L.E. Modesitt Jr. If everything goes right, get ready for a memorable career.

  • I. Asimov, Isaac Asimov

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 1994, 562 pages, C$32.50 hc, ISBN 0-385-41701-2

    Any discussion of Isaac Asimov, the writer, must inevitably dwell on how prolific he was. In roughly fifty years, he wrote more than 470 books (yes, more books than most people will ever read in their lifetime!), and that’s not counting the various articles, speeches and assorted miscellanea he also penned during his career.

    Asimov died in 1992, but it took a few more years to publish everything he was working on at the time. One of those projects was an autobiography, I. Asimov, in which he more or less summed up his life. Incredibly enough, this wasn’t even a first autobiography for him: In 1979 and 1980, he wrote In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt. While I. Asimov acknowledges these previous autobiographies, it’s also a stand-alone work. (As Asimov explains in the introduction, the first two volumes have long been out of print) Anyone interested in the writer’s life should pick up this work; it’s pretty much “the ultimate Asimov.”

    Hefting in at more than 550 pages, this book is divided in 166 short thematic chapters arranged in rough chronological order; while he’ll occasionally break his narrative to describe his relationship with other persons or to give a general opinion about a given subject, most of the book proceeds from childhood to education to early adult life to late adult life to semi-retirement. Each chapter clearly announces the subject, and even though there’s no index (argh), the table of content should be sufficient for most casual reference use. A 1994 bibliography completes I. Asimov.

    As far as autobiographies go, this one is quite satisfying. The scope of it is ideal, of course. There isn’t much to Asimov that’s left unexamined by the time we read Janet Asimov’s epilogue. The writing style is compulsively readable, with a good mix of humour and information, of dry self-depreciation and proper acknowledgement of his strengths. You can easily get through this tome in a few days.

    Asimov is also surprisingly candid, maybe a bit more than some fans might have expected. He makes no excuses, for instance, of his rather libertine attitude towards affairs during his first marriage. He can be quite cutting regarding whom he considers idiots. The failure of his first marriage is described quickly, as is his disappointment in his son (who he describes as a “gentleman of leisure.” [P.176]) (At least Asimov didn’t live to see him implicated in a child-pr0n scandal in 1998. Oh, the things we learn while fact-checking on Google…)

    But don’t assume that these few issues are emblematic of the rest of the book. When Asimov loves, he loves a lot. It’s impossible to close the book and remain un-moved by his pure love of writing. (See his notes on his divorce, P.336) His own pleasure in public speaking is also obvious, and even quite charming; he was good at it and took considerable pleasure in delivering the goods as needed, even without notes or time-pieces. His devotion to his daughter Robin is touching, and his love for his second wife Janet is the source of considerable emotion late in the book.

    Isaac Asimov has not in good health for the last decade of his life, and the last fourth of I. Asimov reflects the tragic dignity in which he left. The whole book itself was written with the mindset that it would be Asimov’s final word on himself, and by the end, it’s hard to escape impending death. The last few pages are especially poignant, as we’re left to contemplate what such a first-rate mind could have done had it been allowed five, fifty, five hundred more years. Alas, Asimov is gone, and there won’t be anyone else like him. Ever.

    While Asimov may take delight in presenting himself as the humble son of an immigrant shop-keeper and in assuring us that nothing spectacular ever happened in his life, he misses the point: Asimov himself is the highlight of I. Asimov, not his life history. For any fan of the author, casual or obsessive, this is the definitive book so far.

  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Raincoast, 1997 (2001 reprint), 223 pages, C$9.95 tpb, ISBN 1-55192-398-X

    “Well, I’m surprised to see that you’ve condescended to read Harry Potter” said my uncle’s girlfriend when she saw me with the first volume in hand.

    The only really surprising thing is how long it’s taken me to actually read the darn thing.

    I’ve always been deeply suspicious of the popular intellectual snobbery that states that “if it’s popular, it can’t be good”. Without citing too many examples, there are times where something is famous because it’s good. It might not be better than your favorite obscure painting/movie/author, but that in itself isn’t a reason to criticize anything wildly fashionable.

    I first wanted to read Harry Potter a long time ago. I downloaded the pirated electronic versions of the whole series late in 2000, only to realize that I just don’t read novels on screen; my reader’s reflexes are still hard-wired to paper, ink and glue. My sister bought and read the first two volumes. Ages passed. A movie got made. I borrowed the first volume from my sister, then consciously put it away and enjoyed the movie on its own terms. A few more weeks passed and then I decided to celebrate the end of 2001 with a good fluffy read.

    I enjoyed almost every page of it.

    Before gushing, though, allow me to say that there are two criticisms I can heap upon J.K. Rowling and the first Harry Potter novel.

    First, how deliberate it all seems. Let’s see: to ensnare kids, what better than a misunderstood, under-appreciated hero who really has exceptional magical powers and whose parents are really powerful magicians? You couldn’t design a better hook on purpose, much like Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game seemed mathematically designed to hook young teenagers with pretty much the same levers.

    Second; how conventional it all is. Tales of magical academies and of young magicians have been written before. Some of them quite good. Almost every gadget used in The Philosopher’s Stone has been invented elsewhere, used elsewhere and seen elsewhere. There isn’t a lot of new, inventive fantasy material in Harry Potter. (So far.)

    But guess what? None of these two objections matter very much to the base reader that I am. What is far more important is how clearly Rowling writes, how well she builds her characters and how many little flourishes she manages to pack on every page of her novel.

    I attended the World Fantasy Convention in early November 2001, and the slightly dismissive tone in which Harry Potter was discussed struck me as unfair. While elements of the Pottermania leave me nonplussed (the fourth volume shouldn’t have won the Hugo, for instance), a lot of it struck me as simple sour grapes at someone outside the genre reaping all the attention and the money.

    The first volume of the series, whatever the objections of the fantasy litterati are, is a wonderful little book that didn’t feel at all like a kid’s novel. I’ve always been a sucker for the “academy” type of novel, from Starship Troopers to, say, Gravity Dreams, and The Philosopher’s Stone ranks among the best of them. It takes conventional elements of magical training and cleverly stuffs them in the British educational system. Simple and obvious, but not so obvious that it’s cliché. And, like it or not, Rowling’s produced a fantasy novel that is immeasurably more enjoyable than at least 90% of what’s published in “adult” fantasy today.

    While I’m not completely bowled over, I still feel that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is a great little book that will make you -even you!- fall in love with reading all over again. Embrace Pottermania. In this case, what’s popular is what’s good.

    (A few words about the movie vs the book: Amazing fidelity, though the book “feels” more adequately paced. The novel also provides more details on Harry’s family life, Hagrid’s past and one or two extra challenges before the end, not to mention a second Quiddich game.)

  • One Point Safe, Andrew & Leslie Cockburn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Anchor, 1997, 288 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-48560-3

    In 1997, then brand-new studio Dreamworks released its first film, a techno-thriller called THE PEACEMAKER. It starred Nicole Kidman and George Clooney and dealt with their efforts to retrieve a few nuclear bombs stolen by a terrorist. Unfortunately, the film received a mixed critical reception and quickly sank at the box-office, pulling in only $41 million US and quickly fading in memories.

    Too bad; I enjoyed the film a lot, finding it to be one of the only good techno-thriller of the late nineties. It seemed reasonably authentic and adequately detailed; the film is still the only one I recall in which the protagonists realistically disarmed a nuclear weapon. Small surprise to learn -later- that it was based on Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s One Point Safe, a non-fiction book about the nuclear dangers to come out of the ex-USSR. Both writers were even credited as the co-producers of the movie and penned the original story.

    What you can’t know until you read the source book is how the reality is presented as being far more chilling that the fiction.

    One Point Safe begins with a bang, as it describes how a team of German terrorists tried to steal a tactical nuclear weapon from an American base in 1977. Their assault was thwarted by the failure of their diversion, but as the authors write, “No longer was it a question ‘if’ terrorists wanted to steal a nuclear weapon.” [P.6]

    It gets worse. Much worse, as the Cockburns delve deeper in the wreckage of the ex-Soviet Union. In a few chapters, they describe the awful conditions to which the once-proud Soviet military has been reduced to. Officers in charge of nuclear weapons now starving, multi-megaton storage facilities rusting out of neglect. Plutonium depots left un-garded. The problem with the collapse of an empire is that after the collapse, all the nasty stuff is still there even if the people aren’t.

    The crux of One Point Safe is to show the various nuclear dangers in this post-cold-war era. The guards are gone, corrupt or criminal, but their deadly possessions remain. So the Cockburns describe actual cases of radioactive material theft, the lax security measures in Russian weapons depots, the new ultra-capitalistic Russians trying to make money off the Soviet arsenal and how nuclear non-proliferation agreements aren’t worth much when transgressions mean eating again.

    Things aren’t necessarily better in the United States. The Cockburns take an almost sadistic delight in describing a botched anti-terrorism exercise gone hilariously wrong. “Mirage Gold” becomes a parade of mistakes, and latter exercises designed to intercept nuclear smuggling aren’t any more successful. Those mistakes are compensated, somewhat, by a few intelligence coups, such as the American purchase of important quantities of plutonium from Russia. Once such operation, codenamed Sapphire, is a marvel of logistics meticulously described by the Cockburns.

    Still, as the book advances, you can’t help but feel increasingly spooked by the missing “backpack nukes”, the widespread corruption, the “accidentally discovered” smuggling rings, the open borders, the broken Russian chain-of-command and, oh, the narrowly-avoided nuclear war of 1995.

    All of which raises the question, of course, of the veracity of One Point Safe. Certainly, the tone is cheerfully sentionalistic. Online ( www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1998/jf98/jf98arkin.html ), you can find a letter from an atomic scientist protesting the alarmist tone of the Cockburns. Indeed, they probably overstate their case. But even if half of what they say is true… In any case, it makes for exciting reading.

    Beyond the compulsive narrative drive of this book, you can also look at One Point Safe for one of the clearest description of how executive policy is formed, as a team of analysts tries to convince the Clinton administration to do something about the Russian situation.

    In short, One Point Safe is a meanly effective read. Sensationalist but always effective, this non-fiction account will make you cringe and hope that the intelligence community is doing its work. Because otherwise…

  • Our Dumb Century, The Onion

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Three Rivers Press, 1999, 164 pages, C$24.00 tpb, ISBN 0-609-80461-8

    It always amazes me whenever someone opines that history is boring. To hear them talk, history’s just a dull recitation of dates, names and events. Don’t they realize that history can explain everything that happens today? Don’t they know that the best stories ever published don’t even equal some of the amazing stuff that has truly happened in the past? Don’t they even remember Santayana’s admonition?

    Maybe all that’s missing is a gifted vulgarizer, someone to make the study of history amusing, accessible and worthwhile. I don’t think that this is what the staff of The Onion had in mind when they set out to put together Our Dumb Century, but the result certainly makes history a lot of fun again.

    You might or might not already be familiar with the web humor magazine The Onion ( http://www.theonion.com/ ), but it doesn’t really matter; all you need to know is that Our Dumb Century‘s shtick is to “reprint” a hundred year’s worth of front pages from the Onion as a retrospective of the century. None of it is available on the web site.

    Of course it’s all made up. Headlines like 1917’s “Pretentious, Goateed Coffeehouse Types Seize Power in Russia” or 1953’s “A-Bomb May Have Awakened Gigantic Radioactive Monsters, Experts Say” should be a giveaway. But the most amazing thing about Our Dumb Century (past the funny stuff, of course) is how real it looks. The front pages from the beginning of the century look exactly like the old newspapers did, with shaky typography, badly-reproduced graphics and overstuffed layout. The graphical team responsible for the design of the book truly did their homework, and visually, there isn’t a single detail that looks out of place. It’s one of the small pleasures of the book to flip from page to page and see the evolution of “The Onion” through the century.

    All of which is considerably reinforced by the pitch-perfect style of the writing. The Onion’s writers have convincingly re-created the characteristic tone of reporting through the century, through the biased, wordy style of the 1900s to the carefully antiseptic prose of the 1990s. It may or may not be exact, but it adds a lot to the impact of the jokes.

    And what jokes they are: From 1900’s “Death-by-Corset Stabilizes at One in Six” to 2000’s “Christian Right Ascends To Heaven”, Our Dumb Century offers a century’s (and 164 pages’) worth of satire. Every page is shock-full of stuff in 8-point type, with enough nastily funny headlines to make you groan in pure sadistic delight. (How about 1963’s “Kennedy Slain By CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemason: President Shot 129 Times from 43 Different Angles” or 1937’s “German Jews Concerned about Hitler’s ‘Kill All Jews’ Proposal”?)

    Naturally, this isn’t for everyone. The level of sadistic irony can be shocking (1976: “Cambodia to Switch to Skull-Based Economy”), as can be the intentional profanity (July 21, 1969. ’nuff said.)

    Historical figures are in for a thorough irreverent thrashing, of course. There’s an alternate-universe arrest/getaway/manhunt/shootout involving Nixon (1974), a few good slams at FDR (1933: “President confronts depression with ‘Big Deal’ Plan: ‘Big Deal, I’m Rich’ Roosevelt Says”) and welcome nastiness about various great villains of our century (1977: “Idi Amin Praises Former Ugandan Defense Minister as ‘Delicious’”)

    A sense of history is, of course, as useful as a sense of humor, but while Our Dumb Century can motivate anyone to learn a bit more, it’s unclear whether a sense of humor can be developed. For those with some knowledge of the past hundred years, though, the payoff is enormous. The staff of The Onion laughs at an astonishing variety of subjects, from arts to politics, military affairs to fashion fads and you never know when your favorite areas of interest might pop up.

    The only flaw of the book that I could find was a loss of historical perspective over the last 30 pages of the book in favor of lighter pop-culture references. Maybe inevitable given the lack of perspective… or accurate given the real nineties.

    Not only is Our Dumb Century an instant classic and one of the funniest books of the twentieth century, but it’s also one of the best gift ideas I’ve ever seen for smart people. Buy a crate, encourage The Onion, distribute at will and get compliments on your impeccable taste. Easy!

  • H.M.S. Unseen, Patrick Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper, 1999, 526 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-109801-9

    There are times where I seriously wonder if reading more than 170 books a year is somehow rotting my mind. Why else to explain peculiar attachment to authors I don’t care about? H.M.S. Unseen is Patrick Robinson’s third novel and freakishly obsessive readers of my reviews will remember that I haven’t liked either Nimitz Class or Kilo Class very much. Robinson writes badly, has no gift for effective characterization, doesn’t know how to structure his stories and has a rather curious sense of global geopolitics. I might have picked up H.M.S. Unseen with the hope that he has improved, but he really hasn’t.

    The story is a loose follow-up to Nimitz Class in that the terribly anticlimactic death of the first novel’s antagonist is revealed to be the sham we suspected all along. Ben Adnam is back in action, but maybe not as smoothly as he wants to: The first few dozen pages of H.M.S. Unseen describe how the Iraqi government decides to get rid of their most troublesome agent, and how Adman escapes through marshes and deserts to join Iran’s government. His proposition? To exact revenge, he will frame Iraq for a series of devastating terrorist attacks.

    I’d say “so far so good” if it was the case, but it isn’t. Early on, all of Robinson’s usual faults come back to haunt us. He can’t write. Still. Clumsy exposition drowns out dialogue to such an extent that there isn’t any dialogue left. His sense of dramatic structure is shaky at best; events happen out of nowhere without preparation and then he’ll spend dozens of pages on the most insignificant details before kicking the plot in an entirely different direction again. The downing of the experimental plane is a perfect case in point; what could have been milked for drama simply becomes another plot point without too much importance. But, oh, Adnam’s Scottish escape becomes a marathon of tiny details we couldn’t possibly care about, given that we know he will do it.

    After three connected novels, I still can’t care about one single character in Robinson’s oeuvre. He tries to make an antihero of his terrorist villain, but it comes across as just… insipid. Late in the book, he tried to make me pity the antagonist (aw, looove… and it just so happens that the girl is now married to the protagonist of the first two novels!), but my only wish remained for the bad guy to irrevocably die so that I could move on to other things.

    More and more, it looks like Robinson simply has no clue about what makes a good technothriller, whether it’s the tiny (oh; the writing, maybe?) or the grand. On an overarching level, I just can’t believe in what Robinson does. Late in HMS Unseen, for instance, Adman encourages the United States to destroy -with cruise missiles!- a large dam in Iraq, killing thousands of civilians, setting back Iraq a few decades in hydro-electrical capacity and, oh, provoking a major international incident in the process. (The characters pooh-pooh such objections as “we’ll be caught!”) Utterly unbelievable, especially in a context where the States are already being unjustly blamed for “hundred of children dying every day because of sanctions”. Now imagine actually destroying a dam. I was practically screaming at the novel “No, you moron! Leave the civilian targets alone!” No such luck.

    The structure of the novel is even more insipid, bouncing from situation to situation without a sense of heightened stakes. The final few pages are emblematic of the problem, as the villain is dispatched almost with a yawn and a wave of the hand. Almost as if by then, Robinson hated his novel as much as I did.

    Still, you got to hand it to the guy. To be able to publish three awful novels in a row (and to get me to read’em) takes a special skill. You know what? I’m almost certain I’ll read his fourth. I might spend my time cursing at it and muttering dark promises of retribution, but at least it’ll be more entertaining than reading, say, yet another dull and tired Dale Brown B-52 fantasy.

    Egad. Maybe I am brain-damaged after all.

  • Marrow, Robert Reed

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 502 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56657-2

    Readers of these reviews won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t necessarily review everything that I read. Aside from my technical/reference reading, there are a considerable number of books that are either too inconsequential or too boring to review at length. Over any given period, I will review one book in three or four that I read.

    While it’s relatively easy to praise or condemn a book, it’s much harder to find ~650 words about a book that didn’t even register in the first place. Unfortunately, I also try to review every recent SF book that I buy, if only to justify my SF purchases. With Robert Reed’s Marrow, I find myself with a conflict. I want to review it because it’s recent SF. Yet I don’t want to review it because it’s such a blah book.

    It’s long. It takes place over thousands of years. It features only a dozen characters, and not many of those are of any interest. For ten Canadian dollars, you can get a much better book.

    And yet… here goes:

    Let’s start with the premise, arguably the best thing about Marrow: It all takes place in a big alien ship. A really big alien ship. I don’t exactly recall the dimensions, nor can I be bothered to dig them up, but it’s such a big alien ship that humans eventually discover a Mars-sized planet deep inside after a few hundred thousand years of occupation. Mars-sized. And they’d sort of never found it before. Big alien ship.

    Due to life-extension technology, the lifespan of our characters is virtually infinite barring any unfortunate accidents. This has two important consequences on the plot of the novel. First, these characters think nothing of waiting a few hundred years before doing something. Second, we can never be totally sure they’re dead until their individual atoms are fissioned. There are more fakeouts in Marrow than there are in an entire season of your favorite soap-opera.

    The plot involves a few hundred senior ship officers being stranded on the Mars-like planet as no-one ever goes to look for them. Thousands of years (and hundreds of pages) pass. They eventually manage to re-create a complete industrial civilization and go back to the ship, only to discover a dastardly plot to take over the ship. There’s a war in which millions of sentient beings die. There is an ending of sort. The end.

    Now milk out all the drama out of the above, add in some spurious pseudo-melodrama and let fester for five hundred pages. Your result will look a lot like Marrow; good potential, but it’s just not a lot of fun. I was lucky enough to be stuck witnessing a day-long management conference with the book as my only friend. It was probably the most efficient way to make me read a book I didn’t care too much about.

    And that, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about Marrow: I didn’t care too much about it. Certainly didn’t love it, but neither did it actively start annoying me. It just… was.

    Unfortunately, that means that your hard-won entertainment dollars (and your even more precious entertainment-time) can be spent more efficiently elsewhere. Bruce Sterling. Learning Spanish. A yo-yo. Heck, even a Hollywood movie. Oh, Reed completists will presumably love it, if they exists. Some SF critics may be tempted to read it if only to find out how some exciting ideas can be ruined by tepid writing. Many of us, though, may very well just not care. Too bad.