Book Review

  • Halfway Human, Carolyn Ives Gilman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon EOS, 1998, 472 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-79799-2

    I usually try to stay away from novels nominated for the Lamba prize. This award, given each year to “the science-fiction or fantasy work that has most successfully investigated gender issues” usually seeks to reward works dealing with themes and issues about which I couldn’t care less. As they say, message fiction tends to be interesting only when it’s vehiculing your message; as a white heterosexual male, I don’t have a lot to say about gender or gay issues.

    But I nevertheless ended up with Halfway Human in my reading pile, halfway dreading the prospect of yet another boring The Left Hand of Darkness knock-off. Certainly the back cover doesn’t inspire confidence, talking about “Tedla is neither he nor she… an asexual class of ‘blands’… shocking truths hidden inside this sexless, tormented creature.”

    If I hadn’t already paid good money for the book, I most probably would have put it back on the shelf.

    And while that wouldn’t have been a tragedy, it would have been missing out on a decent SF novel. While Halfway Human obviously carries a message, it’s not out to stamp it on everyone’s foreheads. It’s all too easy to be carried away by the storyline and stop trying to decode what’s the real underlying theme.

    Most of the novel takes the form of a first-person narrative in which Tedla, our friendly bland protagonist, tells of his short and so far unhappy life. Colonized by humans and then cut off from galactic civilization for decades, Tedla’s homeworld has -we progressively learn- canalized its explosive population growth in the eugenic selection of males and females, assigning the remainder of the teen population to blandness—a servant class. While overly sentimental and predictably dark, it’s a good story verging on the fascinating.

    The other half of the plotline is concerned with a xenosociologist named Val, who comes into contact with a suicidal Tedla, interviews it -hence the first-person segments- and eventually tries to save it from the authorities who would like nothing so much as to ship Tedla homeside to keep their eugenic practices secret.

    The human society described in Halfway Human is separately fascinating because of its rigid control over information, where copyrights can be a prized heirdom, architectural style can be licensed, information is the only commodity that is worth its transport costs and a researcher has to be rich or employed by a gigantic corporation in order to be able to access the required literature. To myself, obsessed of late by the increasingly dangerous legal precedents in the field of intellectual property, this facet of the novel proved to be a chilling warning and an unexpected delight.

    But the core of the book, make no mistake, is with Tedla and its story. Unlike most Lambda-running fiction, Halfway Human is told in a crisp, direct, accessible style that did much to raise my opinion of the book. Gilman also remains faithful to her characters; no sudden change of heart, unexpected romances or sudden gender-switch in store here. This being said, the ending is a bit of a cheat, though almost any trick is acceptable when a happy ending is concerned.

    In short, Halfway Human is a good SF paperback novel. Not spectacular, a bit too long to be really effective but clear and steadily interesting, Carolyn Ives Gilman could have done worse as a first novel. Now let’s see how her second one will turn out.

  • The Ice Limit, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 2000, 449 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-52587-1

    This is a novel about a rock. Not just any ordinary rock, mind you: For one thing, this one weighs a few thousand tons. For another, it’s most probably not from around here, being exceptionally dense, of blood-red color and unbreakable by conventional means. It’s also located on Isla Desolacion, a forsaken island in Argentinean territory. For most of these reason, this is an exceptionally valuable rock, and our billionaire-protagonist wants it for his museum. One last detail: That rock has the unfortunate tendency to zap lighting bolts into people.

    Even if you don’t really like Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s thrillers, you’ve got to hand it to them; they know how to come up with an irresistible premise. From the monster-loose-in-the-museum premise of The Relic to the monsters-loose-under-New-York story in Reliquary, they’ve upped the ante with each successive novel. If the expression “hack writers” didn’t have such unpleasant connotation, that’s what we could call them; they write to mass-market specifications, turning out perfectly competent thrillers with adequate characters, fluid writing, good technical details and a structure calculated to deliver steadily more shocking jolts. Hey, it’s a bestselling living.

    As it is, the plot of The Ice Limit is immediately gripping. A meteorite-hunter is hired by a billionaire in order to head an expedition to bring back The Rock to the United States. Given the unusual nature of the object, the novel then introduces one very unusual team, a wonderfully reclusive engineering business (ESS) specialized in huge-scale projects, from volcano manipulation to the re-creation of JFK’s real death. ESS is The Ice Limit‘s real delight, such an intriguing creation that I could easily a series of stories built around that company. But then again, I’ve always been a sucker for engineering fiction.

    In any case, the plan to bring back The Rock quickly sets into motion. A boat is built, then heavily modified and disguised by ILM. a sexy female scientist is introduced. Argentinean officials have to be bribed, except one who vows a terrible revenge. The teams arrives at Isla Desolation.

    More people die. Secrets are uncovered. More people die.

    It’s been said before, but a fundamental difference between techno-thrillers and science-fiction is how the author reacts to change. Science-Fiction usually adopts the attitude that “the genie is out of the bottle” and that we’d better adapt to change because change isn’t going away. Techno-thrillers, on the other hand, often shoo away the upsetting change, burying, destroying, ignoring it in the hope that the day after, everything comes back to normal.

    And, unfortunately, -without going in details-, that’s pretty much what happens in The Ice Limit, which nearly ends up being one of the most depressing thrillers I’ve read in a while. The massive body count and ultimate futility of the exercise brings to mind authors handshaking over an agreement that “some things are not meant to be known by humankind”—and that hardheaded engineers are doomed. This attitude is partially redeemed (saving the book from an awful ending) by a last-minute twist that will be familiar with the weirder speculations of British scientist Fred Hoyle. (How’s that for a literate spoiler? Don’t think too much about it.)

    Fortunately, the rest of the book is pretty good, and compulsively readable. The characters do the job for which they were created, and The Rock ensures a massive presence over the whole story. The engineering firm, as mentioned previously, is a wonderful creation I’d like to see elsewhere. It’s unfortunate that the end sucks off a lot of the novel’s energy, but feel free to skip the last fifty pages and imagine a better ending for yourself. At least that’ll entertain you until Preston and Child deliver their next thriller.

  • Matter’s End, Gregory Benford

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1994, 294 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-56898-1

    Gregory Benford’s novel-length fiction can be distinguished by two characteristics: For one thing, it’s usually packed with scientific details, lengthy explanations, a deep understanding and love of the scientific method. Through books like Cosm and Timescape, Benford has produced some quintessential science-fiction whose realism was only exceeded by masterful writing.

    Which, alas brings us to a second distinguishing characteristic: About half of Benford’s novels are overlong borefests, whose few good ideas are drowned in pretentious writing, overlong plotting and a complete lack of interest. Exhibit A for the prosecution’s case is the “Galactic Center” series, which ably spreads a novel or two’s worth of interest over seven lifeless volumes. Exhibit B is The Stars in Shroud, an admittedly early novel which distinctly has no interest whatsoever.

    Fortunately, Matter’s End is a short story collection, which effectively diminishes any length concern. The first surprise is to be found in the table of content, where 21 stories jostle to be included in 290-odd pages. Discounting the two longest stories, we’re left with 19 stories over less than two hundred pages, an average of less than a dozen pages per story.

    The variety of the style exhibited by Benford is impressive. Beyond the usual past-tense-straight-narrative, there’s a sale pitch (“Freezeframe”), first-person narration (“Mozart on Morphine”), exam questions (“Calibrations and Exercises”), a mission report (“Side Effect”), tips and hints (“Time Guide”), a radio news transcript (“The bigger one”) and one stream-of-consciousness (?) thrown in for good measure (“Slices”).

    The genre of the stories is usually science-fiction, though maybe not as hard as you may think. There’s a smattering of fantasy, some humoristical SF but mostly, some bread-and-butter SF not especially distinguished by hard scientific content. As a collection, it’s easy to get into and easy to continue reading.

    There are a few duds, mind you. Both novelettes are overlong: if “Matter’s End” eventually comes into its own a few pages before the end, “Sleepstory” made me go “Is that it?” Given that this is a collection that spans nearly thirty years of Benford’s career, it’s almost natural that his earliest stories tend to be weaker. “Stand-in” seems particularly pointless, a fate shared with “Nobody lives on Burton Street” and “We could do worse”, though the last two are also stuck in the bad pessimistic late-sixties mindframe. Finally, “Shakers of the Earth” demonstrates an occupational hazard of being an SF writer; Once you’ve seen JURASSIC PARK, it’s hard to be wowed by a 1980 story featuring -gosh!- resurrected dinosaurs. But even Benford acknowledges this last one in his afterword.

    Fortunately, the rest of the collection holds up very well. I can’t understand why “Calibrations and Exercises” hasn’t become an SF short story classic. “Freezeframe” and “Proselytes” exemplify Benford’s best witty and succinct style, by making a strong point and immediately ending the story. “Centigrade 233” is a good exploration of the social role of SF, though don’t think too hard about the title or you’ll end up guessing the end. Those who read science-fiction to find truth about science and scientists should be pleased by the title story and “Mozart on Morphine”. It’s always a pleasure to read material by a professional who knows what he’s doing.

    In this afterword, Benford makes the point that for writers, short stories are fun. And if “fun” has not exactly been one of Benford’s dominant characteristic in his novels, he’s obviously on a looser leash here. The result is a decent anthology of short SF fiction, well worth the read for genre fans, even for those who find the author to be very uneven. So’s this collection, but at least it’s unevenness on a faster scale.

  • The Dragon Never Sleeps, Glen Cook

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Popular library, 1988, 500 pages, C$4.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-445-20349-8

    It’s the sacred duty of every conscientious book reviewer to steer other readers toward books they might otherwise have missed. This duty becomes even worse, attaining messianic proportions, whenever the reviewer has also missed the book when it first come around.

    And, boy oh boy, has everyone missed The Dragon Never Sleeps. Prior to recently reading a great review of it in a magazine (a review of the French translation of the book, no less!), I had never even heard of the novel, and in fact still associated Glen Cook only with that “Black Company” fantasy series.

    Fortunately, the local Ottawa Public Library had a copy of Cook’s The Dragon Never Sleeps on its shelves (along with a few other books, which finally made me realize this was the same Glen Cook of the “Wizard” fantasy/comp.sci. series) so I could comfortably check for myself whether that rave was deserved or not.

    In short; Bring back the book in print right now, it’ll sell thousands.

    Any attempt at a plot resume would be cause for headaches for both reviewer and reader, involving such classic space-operatic props as family clans, galaxy-spanning empires, aliens, space battles, clones and political intrigue. Add a dastardly plan to destroy the galactic social order, gigantic space stations, decantable military personnel, some weird sex and age-old secrets and you’re in intensely familiar territory.

    But it’s all handled so well that you’d swear you’re reading new-millenial SF with its methodical re-use of all possible established conventions, with an extra helping of rational weirdness. The novel hasn’t aged a bit, an iota, a single little particle since 1988. Read it today, and you’ll think of Banks, Alastair Reynolds or Stephen Baxter. It’s quite a remarkable feat.

    Granted, this isn’t an easy novel to digest. The cloned versions of four characters alone almost add up to half the Dramatis Personae, and they’re seldom differentiated. It’s a fun novel to read, but it’s also devastatingly easy to miss a few crucial lines. The narrative is so dense that the information most probably won’t ever be repeated. And yet, unlike some other hard-to-read novels you might have tried, the style is not difficult or complex; it’s the sheer density of plotting that will trip you up.

    The first hundred pages won’t help, as you’re boldly thrown in a brand-new universe that doesn’t have a previous trilogy as a world-building crutch; you’ll have to assimilate all information on the fly, even as complex events are already set into motion. At least you won’t be able to predict what’s going to happen: The body count starts early and rarely eases up. It would be a sacrilege -and an undeserved marketing blurb- to compare The Dragon Never Sleeps to Dune, but… there are similarities.

    It all adds up to a darn good space opera. Vivid space battles are sprinkled throughout the book. Breathtaking betrayals abound. Grand concepts are revealed. Big fun for all, as long as you’re still following what’s happening. Plus, hey, it’s got a trilogy’s worth of material between two covers; you have to like that!

    In short, I liked it a lot, and if you can find the book, I don’t doubt that you’ll enjoy it too. It should be reprinted soon, if Cook’s current popularity -and vocal fan-base- is any indication. A little gem overlooked by most critics upon its release, The Dragon Never Sleeps deserves a good look. Certainly, I plan on re-reading it in a few years, just because I’ve got the feeling I’ve missed out on so much!

  • Wasn’t the future wonderful?, Tim Onosko

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dutton Paperback, 1979, 188 pages, C$12.95 tpb, ISBN 0-525-47551-6

    Save for the occasional odd SF paperback, most of the books reviewed in these chronicles are easily available from libraries or used bookstores. Anything that makes it up to frosty Ottawa, Ontario can probably be acquired anywhere else in North America, so I feel safe in not boring my readers with arcane material or, worse, whipping them up in a frenzy about some obscure book they’ll never find.

    So it pains me to have to rave about a full-page coffee-table paperback published in the late seventies. Most certainly long out of print, presumably unfindable by casual readers, Wasn’t the Future Wonderful? is nevertheless a must-read, a definite curio for anyone interested in social change, science-fiction, history, futurism or what I’d call innovation management.

    Subtitled A View of Trends and Technology from the 1930s, Wasn’t the Future Wonderful? is simply a collection of the most outrageous articles published by “Popular Mechanics”-type magazines during the 1930s, wrapped in an introduction and a few follow-up notes.

    It doesn’t sound like much, a reprint of musty old mags, but when you encounter such grandiose headlines as “Explaining technocracy: A revolution without bloodshed”, “Airport in the Heart of a City Provided by Logical Design”, “Big Cities to Have COOLED Sidewalks”, “The Great Wall of China to be Motor Highway” or “Science Shows NOISE Causes Indigestion”, there’s bound to be more than nostalgic interest.

    Each article is accompanied by superb illustrations that are often more interesting than the articles themselves. As only full plates are reprinted, some pages -such as an article by the great Nikola Tesla himself- are adorned by flavor-of-the-time advertisements. Tires for $2!

    In any case, it’s certainly fascinating to peer at what the forward-thinkers of the 1930s were planning for the future. Granted, many things came to pass (like television), but in almost all cases, the end result was realized using much different means, and with far different consequences, than the idealized version.

    But it’s for the futures that never happened that Wasn’t the Future Wonderful? becomes fascinating. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the fields of large-scale engineering, where dozens of gargantuan schemes (an air-protection installation inside London, a fighter-jet skyscraper dwarfing the Eiffel tower, six-level highways, plans to radically modify intersections, etc…) are proposed without any regard as to who would want such a thing. Wasn’t the Future Wonderful? then becomes an exercise in how -or why- some things just aren’t practical.

    Granted, Popular Mechanics probably wasn’t the orthodox view of the nineteen thirties, but was it so different from today’s “Major new breakthrough!” articles published on a daily basis in our newspapers? Predictions might be more restrained, more subtle today, but it doesn’t mean they’re better, or more accurate.

    The book concludes with a wonderful article entitled “Most Scientific Fiction CAN’T COME TRUE”, in which such wacko schemes as teleportation, travels to the moon or radio signals to Mars are relentlessly debunked. I hope they’re as right about teleportation as everything else.

    In any case, Wasn’t the future wonderful? is a wonderful book, filled with surprises and unusually good at giving a sense of technical perspective. Teachers could use it to develop scientific literacy. SF Writers could use it as a guide to non-silly prediction. Artists could use it to acquire a sense of realistic craziness. Everyone else can use it to spark discussion, jog those little gray cells or simply have a good time. It’s a fun book. Bring it back in print!

  • The Genesis Code, John Case [Pseudonym]

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1997, 467 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-42231-7

    I love thrillers. I read dozens of ’em per year. Naturally, I now demand more that the simple obvious plots to get me interested. The days when I could get excited about a simple governmental conspiracy are long past, unfortunately; now, if it doesn’t involve at least the mafia, the Girl Scouts and the flat-earth society, I don’t even bother reading past page 100.

    I jest, and yet I find some plots, character and situation too clichéd to be tolerable. I demand to be surprised by the author, even at the expense of realism if appropriate. If I can predict the course of a novel when I’m not even halfway through, it means someone’s not doing his job, and even though I could be wrong, I don’t think it’s me.

    So, whenever The Genesis Code opens up with an Italian priest going gonzo after hearing a confession from a highly-rated doctor, it doesn’t even take the DNA helix on the cover to figure out where this is going. Whenever the said doctor exhibits an interest in genetics and religious artifacts, it only confirms suspicions. By the time a link is uncovered between deceased women and a cute kid comes in, it’s a lot like being hit in the head repeatedly by clue-by-fours.

    Unfortunately, exhibiting all the gosh-wowedness of a first-time novelist, “John Case” (it’s a pseudonym) keeps hammering it up until the last sentence, which laboriously demonstrate what we’d been expecting for a while. In terms of surprises and originality, The Genesis Code rates as a solid, tedious dud. I’ve seen the idea explained more interestingly in several science-fiction short stories. Often.

    The flaws don’t stop there; the plot is constructed in such a way that one major character really only comes into the novel in the last third, feeling somewhat like an intruder. Many scenes drag on for far too long. The bad guys are unkillable. There’s a cute kid.

    But despite everything, The Genesis Code remains a modest success, mostly because it does what it does in a reasonably efficient fashion. The pacing moves quickly past its lulls and the writing style is all very readable. The characters are adequately defined. I was quite taken with the description of an order of elite, unstoppable Catholic assassins even though that particular concept, again, isn’t totally new.

    And in the end, it’s the old things well-described that make up most of The Genesis Code‘s definitive interest. We’re told that “John Case” is a pseudonym for an investigative journalist (though, from the laudatory passage on tabloid newspapers -see P.348 and P.362-, we can safely guess that he’s not exactly working at the Washington Post.) and his professionnalism shows in the amount of well-presented details that bolster the credibility of the novel’s mechanics. The protagonist is a security consultant, and his action do reflect this mindset, as does his investigative methodology. The more scientific/technical details also seem credible.

    Even though you might guess the end fifty pages in and see many passages as being needlessly long, there’s seldom a reason to stop reading. Granted, this doesn’t make The Genesis Code a remarkable thriller, but at the very least it won’t you make curse the (short) time you’ll spend reading it. And, who knows, maybe you won’t be jaded enough to guess the ending after a few pages.

  • Nobel Dreams, Gary Taubes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 1986, 261 pages, C$25.00 hc, ISBN 0-394-54503-6

    Popular clichés are prompt to paint scientists as emotionless creatures purely concerned by the pursuit of knowledge, so intellectually driven that they can make abstraction of the petty human emotions shared by The Rest Of Us.

    That, of course, is wrong. Scientists are human beings like everyone else, and the intellectual drone only existed in movies (if he wasn’t mad, like most other movie scientists). They laugh, scream and shout just as much as you and I, and matters get less and less purely intellectual when you try to stuff hundreds of scientists at the same place.

    Even though now somewhat dated, there are few books that do a better job at representing conflicts between scientists than Nobel Dreams, a nonfiction book about a quest for subatomic particles, a huge subterranean ring in Geneva and a scientist named Carlos Rubbia.

    The root of Nobel Dreams‘s interest lies in the intrinsic nature of a type of scientific experiments grouped under the term “Big Science”. Contrarily to scientific endeavours that can be accomplished by a single researcher or a small group of experimenters, Big Science requires massive equipments, large teams and carefully orchestrated logistics. It’s not only hugely expensive, but it requires a massive administrative and logistical effort. Particle research, because of the enormous energies it requires to operate, has been a Big Science poster child since World War II (which featured the most emblematic Big Science effort ever in project Manhattan) and Nobel Dreams is partly an examination of such an experiment and the groundwork required for a Nobel-prize-winning success.

    To this end, science journalist Gary Taubes spent time in CERN, the European high-energy physics center, getting to know the personalities and issues involved in the discovery of the W and Z particle. All of it would have been a drier, less interesting exposé if it hadn’t been for the lighting-rod personality of Carlos Rubbia, a formidable scientist with a massive ego and an abrasive personality. Reading Nobel Dreams, we get a taste of the implacable politics inherent in running Big Science experiments, where scientific concerns take a back seat to power imperatives. Running those experiment takes money -the root of all that’s interesting- and considerable charisma, especially when dealing with a multi-national workforces composed of highly skilled, highly obstinate theorists and experimenters.

    It’s a story of beating-the-other-team, of personal friction and petty vindictiveness. It’s a story of brilliance and arrogance, of self-sacrifice and personal vanity. It’s a story of victory (the W and the Z) and defeat (the latter, less successful, experiments to prove super-symmetry). But over all, it’s a great bunch of stories about a set of jobs that aren’t very well understood by a great many people.

    There are, inevitably, flaws: While Taubes makes a great effort at vulgarizing his subject, there are still a few thick patches of jargon. Worse; even though the structure of the book is rather clear, it doesn’t include an index, making it nearly useless for references purposes. And, predictably enough for a book already fifteen years old, it’s difficult for laymen to know whether the suppositions advanced in Nobel Dreams are still valid, and if the people involved went on to other better things.

    (Well, was difficult to know earlier. Today, with the magic of the Internet search engines, it’s relatively easy to find out that Gary Taubes is still writing acclaimed scientific vulgarization, that the Higgs hasn’t yet been conclusively identified and that Carlos Rubbia hasn’t disappeared from the planet even though he most definitely hasn’t won a second Nobel. It’s also really easy to find out that Nobel Dreams itself has earned a good reputation in the field of science nonfiction.)

    In any case, the true value of Nobel Dreams is to uncover some of the less idealistic side of science; how humans, with all their faults, are still very much at the heart of science. And that, even while reading about despicable behaviour, is still a very comforting thought.

  • Lodestar, Michael Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 365 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86137-0

    I like to think that there’s an unspoken contract between author and reader, going well beyond any financial transaction possibly taking place. While the reader is willing to give out several hours’ worth of time and concentration, the author, in return, has to ensure that our investment is well spent. The book has to be entertaining, enlightening, educative or engaging, and preferably all that at once. See it as a coldly Return-On-Investment equation influenced by our materialistic culture or not, but most of us would rather read good books than bad.

    This unspoken bond becomes more important as the length of the story increases. A bad short story remains a bad short story, but at least the most you’ll spend on it is a few minutes. But a bad trilogy will set your reading back for weeks, and the complete run of the Dune series will take a few months to even the fastest readers, with ever-diminishing returns.

    The first book in Michael Flynn’s as-of-yet-untitled future history, Firestar, was a lengthy bore for several reasons, running from rampant naive libertarianism to endless setups to a comatic pace to unlikeable characters. Some liked it, but others just wished it went somewhere.

    The second volume, Rogue Star, was much better. A nice pure-SF curveball coupled to some long-awaited payoffs and a more involving story all contributed at a much stronger volume. Even the characters seemed to do something interesting… and it all lead to a spiffy conclusion.

    The third volume of the story (which doesn’t seem to be a trilogy) is a stunningly dull return to the first volume’s flaws, except that this time we can’t very well blame it on the need to define the characters.

    A lot of the book’s 350+ pages is taken with a cyber-war that is not only long and tired, but also useless as most information gleaned during this episode could easily be revealed far more efficiently. The redundancy of this scenario, and the laboriousness with which most points are made, is emblematic of Flynn’s approach to the series. Whereas a snappy writer could have compressed the first volume to a few paragraphs and trimmed at least half the second volume, Flynn is just content with writing on and on and on. Lodestar could be resumed in a chapters and few would see the difference.

    But no. Flynn is writing a future history, with all the extra smothering of extra realism-through-exhaustion that implies. He did his research, it shows, and the reader suffers from it.

    It’s not as if I don’t want this story to be told; I think that Flynn is on to something, that his hundred-odd cast of characters and his willingness to detail everything is admirable. But he needs not only an editor with a chainsaw, but also a keyboard that sends electric shocks at each page break. As it stands, Lodestar is a pure waste of time, a sideway trip that doesn’t really advance the overall story.

    (Nowhere is this better illustrated by the cover art, which represents a foreshadowing dream sequence near the end of the book, itself a preview for the fourth (fifth?) book in the series. If, like me, you saw the cover and intuited a sizeable jump between the second and third volume, then wait for the next one to come out.)

    If ever you find yourself in a bookstore with your hands on Lodestar and an irresistible urge to find out what happens next in the series, read the very good epilogue, which tells you everything you need to know about the book. Then proceed directly to the next book.

    If you haven’t started the series, don’t. Not only will you waste your time, but it looks as Firestar will be obsolete before the last volume is published.

    It might be that Flynn needs money. It might be that we’re in for the “Trek-Movie curse” of odd-volumes-suck, even-volumes-rock. It might be that Flynn simply doesn’t care. But it’s certainly a breach of the unspoken contract between author and reader to read 350+ pages in a series book… to find out that nothing really happens.

  • The Fifth Horseman, Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1980, 478 pages, C$15.00 hc, ISBN 0-671-24316-0

    Regular readers of these reviews know that I’m a big fan of techno-thrillers. I usually associate this fondness to the same impulses that push me toward hard-Science Fiction and nonfiction books; a craving to understand the world, and to play with rigorous “what-if” scenarios.

    Techno-thrillers were formally defined as a genre by the mega-success of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, which not only told an engrossing yarn of intrigue and action, but did so with a quasi-documentary style that took delight in pointing out fascinating facts to the reader even as the story went along. It wasn’t the first techno-thriller, nor even the first bestselling techno-thriller, but it became something of a publishing watershed.

    Historians of the genre, even casual ones like myself, can take delight in unearthing earlier works in the same genre. Michael Crichton’s first thrillers (The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man, most famously) certainly fit the mold, as do other popular novels of the Seventies.

    While, technically speaking, The Fifth Horseman misses the Seventies by only a few months, there’s no doubt that it’s a strong contender as a primary source of influence for the genre. It’s got everything that latter techno-thriller would use; a dastardly terrorist plot concocted by an enemy leader; military hardware; international scope; police procedural work; a whole stable of characters at all levels of society; ever-decreasing odds; nick-of-time escapes; limpid writing; and, perhaps most distinctly, a love and flair for details. Israeli airplanes don’t simply depart to bomb an enemy country: We follow the whole process, from political decision-making to locked vaults with activation codes to pilot scramble to the actual flying. Improperly handled, if makes for lethargic writing, but properly used -like here- it brings extra levels of suspense and verisimilitude to the story.

    This extends to using real characters as cameos or antagonists. While most current writers would be content with using a faceless dictator from some unnamed country, Lapierrre and Collins don’t shy away from naming Qaddafi as the bad guy, even providing substantial dialogue, psychological profiling and internal monologue!

    Oh, the book isn’t a complete success: The characters aren’t equally interesting (for each dynamic mayor Abe Stern or street-smart policeman Angelo Rocchia, there’s a useless Whalid Dajani or weaselly Patrick Cornedeau.) and not every subplot is equally interesting. (The French subplots, for instance, were probably more useful to Dominique Lapierre than to readers of the past twenty years.) The readership of 1980 being relatively unfamiliar with techno-thriller conventions, there is maybe a tad too much explaining. And when you compare The Fifth Horseman‘s relatively simple find-the-bomb plot with the sophistication of some of the latter techno-thrillers, it’s hard to be impressed.

    But keep in mind that the book already has a fifth of a century, and that it remarkably hasn’t aged a lot since. The decision to focus on a terrorist threat rather than a Cold War intrigue helps a lot, as is the nature of the threat; somehow, even though the equipment currently used by NEST is probably far more sophisticated, I don’t think that finding a nuclear bomb in New York today would be any easier today…

    All in all, The Fifth Horseman still works well, and not only as a historical curio. It was a good thriller and remains so today. Students and fans of the genre will get an extra value out of reading it, but casual reader shouldn’t feel cheated either.

  • Merc: The Professional, Frank Camper

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1989, 304 pages, C$4.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-20215-9

    Anyone remotely familiar with the circulation figures and overall tone of such magazines as Soldier of Fortune knows that there is a substantial reservoir of untapped bloodthirst in America. Quiet suburban males who wouldn’t otherwise even raise their voices vicariously live off other people’s heroism. Hey, I should know; I’m one of them.

    So, predictably, a whole industry has sprung up to answer this demand. Military thrillers aren’t strong enough; now we’ve got first-person accounts of dangerous paramilitary operation, mercenary memoirs, real-life secret service exposés and such.

    Frank Camper has produced his share of such books, but Merc: The Professional is pretty much an autobiography describing his “moments in action” from 1968 to 1987. In the first chapter, Camper repeatedly escapes US military forces; in the last, he’s thrown in jail for terrorism.

    In-between, he get a rather impressive account of an interesting life. After a tour in Vietnam, an administrative error that led to his disenchantment with the military, several escapes and apprehensions from various military prisons and some time spent as a US Ranger, Camper quits the force and decides to go freelance. He will spend some time training local terrorists (while working for the FBI), being a pro car racing mechanic (they win the 24-hour Daytona) and working/fighting in the middle-east (making regular reports to the Mossad). In 1980, he establishes a Mercenary school near Birmingham, with a predictable amount of concern from authorities.

    After that, Camper’s life history becomes even more fantastic. Beyond the fascinating operational details about Merc school, he makes contacts and is asked to conduct missions in just about every single hot spot around the world. From Miami to El Salvador, Belize, Guatemala, Lebanon, Panama, Nicaragua and Mexico, Camper travels widely and, if you believe him, has a minor role in everything from Sikh terrorist plots to assassinate Indira Gandhi to the Irangate itself. (But never fear; he always inform the official US authorities if what he is asked to do is suspicious. Naturally, that’s never quite as simple as having friends in high places.)

    All of this will eventually catch up to him, and in 1987, he gets thrown in jail, unfairly isolated, disavowed by the government and all that good stuff. You can’t imagine anything better. It’s written in a dense but eminently readable style, with plenty of slam-bang action and cool little details that demonstrate a good understanding of what he’s writing about. The events described strike by their excitement and their mundane nature, establishing a perfectly realistic tone of real-life stories.

    That is, if you want to believe him.

    Oh, there is no doubt that Camper has done most of the things he did; he reprints newspaper articles, makes generally verifiable claims and doesn’t seem to contradict himself or make technical errors. He has since become a reasonably prolific author, with now half a dozen books to his credit. He’s making loads of money with his security consulting firm. He’s appeared on 60 Minutes.

    But he’s also in the business to sell; himself, his adventures and his books. Frank Camper is frequently mentioned in conspiracy theory circles, being the author of a book, The MK/Ultra Secret, in which he suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been brainwashed by CIA mind control techniques and… Well, you get the picture.

    As usual, these types of gung-ho tell-all autobiographies are rather enjoyable provided they’re taken with a large spoonful of salt (also see Richard Marcinko’s Rogue Warrior). The style, stories and overall dramatic arc of the book makes it worthwhile reading if nothing else. As for the veracity of it all, well, it’s an ideal way to practice your investigative journalism skills…

    [June 2003 note: This review generated two messages this month, with an interesting impact on the above review. The first message asked me if I knew of Frank Camper’s whereabout. After admitting that I didn’t know (I’m just a chump who bought the book at a charity sale, after all), I searched for Camper on the web and found out that the man essentially disappeared from view in 1997. This made me rather less skeptical of Camper’s claims and far more interested in what happened to him. Then, as if to confirm my lessening skepticism, I received a message from a graduate of Frank Camper’s Mercenary School who established to my satisfaction that the school was indeed what Camper claimed it to be. If you know of Camper’s current location or if you want to know more about the school, please head over to The Mercenary School Graduates Website! As for me, well, I’ll eat a little crow.]

    [April 2004 note: Over the past few years, several other people have written to me about Frank Camper, and all of them have one point in common: They assure me that the book is the real story. Further corroborative evidence and updates also suggests that Camper was, indeed, all that he claimed to be. Now I’m just a chump who doesn’t know much about these things, but I’m happy to admit that my initial impression was wrong, and that Merc: The Professional is well worth reading… as a pure documentary.]

    [August 2006 note: A pseudonymous correspondent contacted me to let me know that Frank Camper is alive and well and living in Alabama. I wish him the best of luck!]

    [August 2007 note: A correspondent sent me very interesting information regarding the positive impact that Frank Camper’s training camp had on US police forces tactics against armed gangs. Most impressive.]

  • Zeitgeist, Bruce Sterling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 2000, 293 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-553-10493-4

    Reading a new Bruce Sterling book is the closest that SF readers can come to have a “satisfaction-guaranteed” experience. If you’ve liked Sterling in the past, he’s constantly improving himself, and even if you’d don’t really like his stuff, there are usually enough interesting elements to still make it all worthwhile.

    In his latest novel Zeitgeist, SF’s premier world-traveller returns to the unclean, exotic edges of Western civilization, sort of a flashback to Europe after the American Distraction. This time, East European technicians meet Middle-eastern mafia meet American promoter meet… well, just about everyone. Leggy Starlitz, from the short story “The Littlest Jackal” in A Good Old-Fashioned Future, returns as the manager of a musical group suddenly faced with the prospect of middle-age when his daughter is dumped on him by one of her mothers.

    The time is 1999, but don’t expect anything like SF nor historical fiction, because Zeitgeist might best be assimilated to a magical melting pot when everything ends up as a contemporary world fantasy, with supernatural powers, time-shifting people, literal regurgitation of metaphors and more than a little meta-fictional content. (Sterling says of Zeitgeist that it’s “technological fantasy”) How else to interpret Princess Di in a suitcase?

    Parts of the book feature (but never revolve around) a pseudo-musical group named G-7, featuring interchangeable girls from every country of the group. Naturally, as Canadian, I was amused at the references to the “tartan-clad, toque-wearing Canadian One [who] spoke a little French, which naturally endeared her to the French One. [She] was polite, modest, and self-effacing, practically invisible in the group’s affair [and] very pleased to be consulted.” [P.47] Heh, eh? Most of the book is like that, with its self-assured, world-weary hipster style that make it all look effortless.

    Not certainly not mindless, because even with this, maybe Sterling’s lesser book since Heavy Weather, it’s still a wonderful read. Obviously, coming from Sterling, it’s all very smart and often devastatingly funny. Leggy Starlitz is obsessed with his place in “the master narrative”, and the only thing funnier than someone obsessing about that is a character obsessing about it. The final “deus ex machina” ending is a sustained howler, one of the most unique moments to be found in recent fiction. (It’s almost as if Chris Carter stepped into a typical X-Files episode and slapped some sense in the characters while saying they’re more right than they can even imagine, just not in the right way.) This Zeitgeist is fluid, and that’s the fun of it.

    The flaw of the book is contained in its brilliance; the very danger that this accumulation of smart jokes, witty conversations and this-side-of-weird elements might accumulate to create a future-shock of Wired-speak and promote the moment at the expense of the book’s overall plot. There’s never a dull moment, but there are a few long stretches.

    But as you may gather, it doesn’t matter very much. With Zeitgeist, Sterling only solidifies his enviable position as one of the field’s best authors. He gets away with stuff that would doom a lesser writer; the convergence of genres, the throwaway gags and outrageous meta-fictional content are not only a lot of fun, but they also feel included for a reason. Good reading for everyone; check it out at the library.

  • The Alternative Detective, Robert Sheckley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1993, 255 pages, C$19.95 tpb, ISBN 0-312-85381-5

    Evoke the name Robert Sheckley to a sufficiently knowledgeable Science-Fiction fan, and (s)he’s most likely to evoke memories of Sheckley’s earlier short stories. During the fifties and sixties, Sheckley was the funny SF writer, producing a string of amusing stories lashing out at American culture through standards SF devices. His fiction would clearly lead to material such as Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

    Though his production has diminished considerably in the past few years, any new novel from him -even, as it is, in the mystery genre- should be cause for rejoicing. The first edition of The Alternative Detective having passed unnoticed in 1993, Forge republished the book in 1997 to coincide with the release of the second (and third?) novel in this contemporary mystery series.

    If The Alternative Detective is any indication, I’m not surprised that the series hasn’t known wide acclaim. It’s not that it’s a bad book as much as it’s not overly good.

    The first surprise of The Alternative Detective is how ordinary it all is, even despite its best intentions. Narrator Hobokan Draconian is an ex-hippie with a network of contacts in Europe (a product of his years in Ibiza), a wife he’s encouraging to shack up with another man and other assorted quirks. But in a genre that relies so much on good narration, Hob Draconian barely registers on the fun scale. The comic eye that Sheckley exhibited in his short stories is nowhere to be found here; instead, we have to settle for some vaguely amusing narration that tries hard but never sparks.

    It doesn’t help that there are at least two hallucinatory sequences that don’t really serve any further purpose. A gourmet chef making the rounds in a French prison is good for a chuckle or two, but it’s hard to be overly forgiving when it’s so artificially inserted —and so summarily dispensed with: “You must have been hallucinating!” [P.172]

    “Even though Hob ends up in plenty of clichéd private-detective situations, he can always find something funny to say about them, and some ingenious ways to weasel out of them.” breathlessly promises the back-cover blurb, conveniently forgetting to add an exclamation point. (!) Alas, Sheckley’s 1993 state-of-the-art postmodern detective simply takes a lot of naps and often quits cases before they’re through.

    It’s not as if there aren’t a few fun touches; funny cab rides with poodles and inexperienced abductors, a reality-obsessed film director; a satisfying description of Ibiza; a sympathetic French cop; a mime friend… but all of those are presented with banality and a decidedly curious lack of impact.

    But, maybe worse for the ultimate impact of the book is that Sheckley has dispensed with pop fiction’s Number One Commandment: The Protagonist Shall Do Something. Instead, Draconian is essentially pushed and pulled in various directions until the climax, where again he is brought to a place where all the parties settle their differences without his intervention. Draconian is about as useful as Watson without Holmes, almost as if Sheckley couldn’t be bothered to make an active participant out of the viewpoint narrator. Postmodern? Alternative? How about unsatisfying?

    This structural failure, coupled with the pedestrian beat of the narration, suggests that readers would be best advised to spend their valuable entertainment time elsewhere. Why not check out one of Sheckley’s short story collections instead?

  • By Any Other Name, Spider Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 2001, 429 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-31974-4

    Ah, Spider Robinson…

    I’ve never met the man, but I’ve heard he’s a pretty likable person. Entertainer extraordinaire, quick with witty banter and overall quite a number, a trusted source called him “something else entirely” which, as non-qualifiers go, is pretty good.

    But I’ve read a lot of material from him (roughly a dozen books now) and I can say, without casting any sort of judgement on him, that we don’t agree on a bunch of subjects. No surprise there; Robinson practically prides himself of being a product of the counter-culture, an ex-hippie with a high tolerance for sex, drugs and good rock’n’roll. Take away this love for rock’n’roll, and there aren’t a whole lot of common points left with a catholic-raised French-Canadian like myself.

    Chances are that Spider Robinson would like it that way. His fiction contains a major motif of questioning the social status-quo, upsetting our assumptions and generally promoting a gentler, more humanistic future. Now, I find his ideals somewhat unrealistic, uncomfortable and even a bit silly… which is probably his point, exactly.

    And yet, if I don’t agree with him, why is it that I keep on reading whatever he writes? His two latest collections offer an ideal opportunity to reflect on the subject, especially when I’ve spend a good 20$ acquiring them both.

    It would be easier to rationalize if Robinson was an infallible writer, someone whose each and every story was a gem. But the truth is that, while he’s technically very good, he’s not perfect. There are duds, most often stories who go on for far longer than they should (“By any Other Name”, “Nobody Likes to be Lonely”, “When No Man Pursueth”). His reliance on shock tactics also gets real old real fast… and if the tactic doesn’t work, his story often ends up stuck to it.

    His humanistic approach also makes him predictable. When, for instance, a hired killer is sent after his target in his fiction, you can be sure that he’ll end up changing his mind before committing the deed, or else do it “out of compassion”. See “The Magnificent Conspiracy”, “Satan’s Children” or “By Any Other Name” for examples. He’ll also drive you crazy with authorial interference. His SF-educated protagonist are so freakin’ intuitive that they’ll make astonishing leaps of logic, drawing “proofs” from suppositions that would deter the National Enquirer and somehow coming up with the correct answer each time. I suppose it’s a change from idiot characters, but it’s a very showy, heavy-handed, self-conscious process, especially in a collection. See “Orphans of Eden”, “-and subsequent construction”, “Tin Ear” and several stories in the Callahan sequence.

    But despite everything, it must be said that when Spider Robinson is on, he is on. It’s difficult to disrespect him because, despite every twisted logic, blatant provocation and overindulgence, he plays the SF game like it’s meant to be played. He is a writer with a deep respect and understanding of where SF comes from, and his fiction shows it. He might hold opposite viewpoints to yours, but it’s difficult to state that he is undoubtedly wrong. If you do, it’ll be after a deep and thorough examination of the issue.

    And that might be the key to why I’m still buying his books. Beyond the easy style, the witty dialogue and the good plotting, the intellectual appeal of his work is compelling. I have yet to meet a science-fiction fan who doesn’t enjoy a good argument, and for all his faults, Spider Robinson knows how to argue. He pounces on his readership while respecting and understanding them. Preaching to the choir while whipping them into shape. In some ways, he’s the ultimate SF writer.

  • Judgment of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959, Kim Newman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Carroll & Graf, 1998, 291 pages, C$35.50 hc, ISBN 0-786-70558-2

    Kim Newman’s 1992 novel Anno Dracula was, in many respect, a remarkable book. A perfect fin-de-siècle novel, it summed up the vampire genre of horror by combining it to alternate history, along with a lot of fun and potent horror scenes. What if the Dracula of Bram Stoker had escaped his hunters and lived on to marry, through imperial connections, Queen Victoria? What if that ascendancy had pushed vampirism in the open, creating a worldwide rift between the dead and the living? What if our history had been altered by the presence of this new type of humanity? Any way you looked at it, Anno Dracula was a masterpiece, an instant classic and an all-around wonderful book.

    Naturally, it had to spawn sequels. Even though, according to a recent interview with Newman, a fourth book in the series should be published before the end of 2001, The Bloody Red Baron and Judgment of Tears complete what is essentially a trilogy of books about Dracula and his human nemesis Charles Beauregard. No, it doesn’t end like you’d expect it to; the Anno Dracula series is too smart to allow that.

    After Victorian England, The Bloody Red Baron takes us to the trenches of World War One, where vampires fight on both sides, but the German vampires are predictably far more evil that their Allied counterpart. Here, an older Beauregard asks a capable younger agent, Edwin Winthrop, to investigate mysterious happenings related to the enemy fighter pilots. Of course, it’ll end up being somewhat significant.

    The Bloody Red Baron reuses all the elements that made the success of the first volume, and if the brilliant originality is lessened, the sequel is clearer, more exciting and definitely as compulsively entertaining. Like all great follow-ups, it allows us to revisit characters and find out what happened to them in the interval, whether they’ve weathered their years well or not. (In Newman’s all-inclusive theory of vampirism, this is crucial, as “newborns” don’t have a very good chance of outliving their natural lifespans.) The biggest problem of the book comes at the very end, when we are to envision an endless series of stories without resolution of the Dracula/Beauregard conflict.

    That worry is definitely put to rest in Judgment of Tears, which skips over the obvious WW2 setting to settle in La Dolce Vita’s 1959 Rome. This time, we get a resolution to both Beauregard and Dracula, as well as a none-too-comfortable expansion of the supernatural mythos. Suddenly, vampires aren’t the only fantastical creatures around, and then the book stops, almost as if it had just realized that it might be opening up too much of an X-Files-sized can of glowing mutated worms to continue. Hey, even die-hard vampire-haters might find themselves cheering for these undeads this time around.

    On the other hand, Judgement of Tears is even more fun to read, almost daring us to laugh despite dramatic moments. The density of famous cameos is impressive, from Patricia Higley’s Tom Ripley to Lovecraft’s Herbert West to an italian named Marcello. The presence of an English secret agent named Bond is excuse enough to include spy movie theatrics. All your favourite scenes are there save for the outrageous gambling: Seduction/Assassination, Car chase, even the visit to the villain’s lair. At the same time, yes, there’s important serious stuff… but not only that.

    Anyone who loved Anno Dracula will like the two follow-ups. While they’re not as impressive as the first one, they’re very good sequels and should quench the thirst of anyone who wonders whatever happened to the characters of the first book. And, needless to say, the whole trilogy is so much smarter than most of the horror dreck currently on the stands that it would be nearly a crime to give them a pass. Great stuff.