Book Review

  • Bordering on Aggression, Floyd W. Rudmin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Voyageur, 1993, 192 pages, C$14.95 tpb, ISBN 0-921842-09-0

    An American invasion of Canada has long been a favorite topic for humor writers. While no one would seriously question the military superiority of the United States of America versus Canada’s mostly figurative military forces, it’s hard to imagine why the Americans would do such a thing. Canada and the States have been good buddy-friend nations for so long that the mere thought of a war between the two countries is enough to elicit giggles. US invading Canada (or the reverse) spawned one comedy film, CANADIAN BACON, and at least a few hundred “humorous” web pages.

    But Floyd W. Rudmin is dead serious when he discusses the subject in Bordering on Aggression, a book examining motives, plans and means by which the US could, if it was so inclined, take military control of Canada.

    The first myth that Rudmin destroys is the so-called long-standing friendship between the two countries. As most alert Canadian high-schoolers remember from their history course, Americans invaded Canadian soil in 1812 and again decades later during the Fenian insurrections. But Rudmin digs deeper in American military archives and starts uncovering detailed invasion plans all the way through middle twentieth century, the latest date at which such documents were declassified.

    Why invade Canada? Well, if ever the northern neighbours get a bit uppity about selling their natural resources at a fair price, then the US might take away what it needs. If that’s too unsubtle for you, just consider that in the event of Quebec independence, the US might take steps in order to protect its borders by pre-emptively securing trouble areas. If that wasn’t enough, just consider the old Manifest Destiny doctrine…

    Paranoid? Rudmin would rather maintain that he’s well informed. A large section of Bordering on Aggression details the military build-up at Fort Drum, ideally positioned to unleash a strike at the Canadian heartland. Rudmin argues at length that the official mission of the base makes no sense but is ideally suited to Canadian invasion.

    A lot of what Rudmin advances does fall under the “contingency” header. Somehow, I’d worry more about a US military that does not plan for all situations, including trouble in Canada. But, as could be expected, Rudmin maintains that US preparations go well beyond simply planning…

    While the above premise may still sound completely implausible, the book does a good job of developping the concept. Rudmin has included many sources and even though his sensationalistic bias is obvious, he should be able to instill a flicker of doubt in any reader’s mind. He’s most adept at anticipating criticism, though: He begins the book by warning us against the giggle factor inherent in discussing the subject, later stating flatly that “ridicule has historically been the technique favoured to dismiss concern” [P.179] Rudmin’s insistence to protect himself against almost all objections often make his argumentation seem somewhat defensive, but it also defuses many of the point that smart-alecky reviewers such as myself might be tempted to make.

    Even the ultimate concern is addressed: While most Canadian would welcome the news of American military preparations with a fatalistic shrug (“What can we do anyway?”), Rudmin cleverly concludes his book by suggesting that all Canadians learn Civilian Nonviolent Defence, a set of passive strategies designed to promote civil disobedience and economic sabotage. Rudmin suggests that such strategies worked previously in Denmark, India and Eastern Europe, so why not do the only sensible thing left to us? It’s an intriguing conclusion to an interesting book.

    Even if you’re not overly swept away by Rudmin’s thesis, the book appears too well-researched to be dismissed easily, and in any case makes several interesting points, independent to its main argument. The historical sections by themselves are fascinating. Worth a critical look.

  • Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2000, 476 pages, C$22.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-06876-0

    Any novel with the gall of putting “The first great science fiction novel of the century” on the cover upon publication in January 2000 is setting itself up for huge expectations. Things get more interesting when you realize that it’s a first novel for British SF writer Reynolds. Portentous announcement, or mere marketing hyperbole? Let’s find out.

    The first hundred pages of the novel are both promising and disquieting. While Reynolds shows a comforting writing ability and packs a high density of concepts in a few pages, he deals with at least three different story at several different times. Though things eventually converge, they are cause for some confusion, especially when the narrative jumps in time.

    Eventually, though, a story emerges, one of a dedicated (maybe mad) scientist named Dan Sylveste, who is much, much more important than he initially seems to be… or at least that’s why an elite assassin and a spaceship crew are willing to cross light-years and realtime decades in order to get him. Of course, Revelation Space wouldn’t be a grandiose space-opera without a few alien races, terrible galactic dangers and shattering betrayals. Those come in time.

    Fortunately for its own good, the book’s pace accelerates in time, and while it might take some work to get going through the first half, the rest of the book is as compulsively readable as anything published in the genre. Even clocking at nearly 500 dense pages, Revelation Space almost feels too short at times. The intricate detail in no way detracts from the pleasure of reading once all the necessary pieces have been assimilated by the reader. There is a lot of setup, but also a lot of sustained payoff. (Though the action often skips too quickly over dramatic moments, then settles down for long stretches of exposition. First novel technical faults.) Interactions between the characters are complex and multi-layered, often changing dramatically over time. Gadget freaks will find a lot of those, and even more socio-technical concepts scattered here and there.

    This might be Reynolds’ first novel, but he already shows most of the skills required to compete with some of his best contemporaries. Indeed, Revelation Space has much of the same feel than recent novels from the Brit school of Hard-SF as practiced by such authors as MacLeod, Baxter, MacDonald or Banks. No wonder if many formerly-disappointed fans are coming back to the genre because of these writers: It’s nothing short of a revitalization of the smart space opera / Hard-SF sub-genre that they’re bringing forth.

    As an SF novel, Revelation Space is very very good. Good enough to be, yes, “the first great science fiction novel of the century.” As a first novel, it’s so accomplished that it’s almost scary. I was lucky enough to find a British edition only a few months after its initial release in England and well before its release in North America. You’ve been warned; don’t miss it.

  • Gravity Dreams, L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1999, 468 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56661-0

    In his previous novel Adiamante, R.L. Modesitt Jr. proved his talent for taking a standard space-opera premise and turning it into an unusually thoughtful piece of true science-fiction. Readers enthralled by that novel were more fascinated by social moral dilemmas than with the inevitable pyrotechnics. One reviewer coined (or re-used) the term “intellectual suspense” in reviewing Adiamante, and it still stands as one of the best general descriptors of Modesitt’s fiction.

    With Gravity Dreams, he applies the same willingness to peer behind some of SF’s standard gadgets to draw a wide-scale portrait of a new society built on better foundations than ours. If the plot is less satisfying than Adiamante, the book is nevertheless an improvement over his previous effort.

    To immerse the reader in thirty-first century Earth, Modesitt begins by using the time-honored device of the innocent. Few would call Tyndel, Gravity Dreams‘s protagonist, an innocent in the confines of his native society. He is initially, after all, an apprentice Dzin master, a teacher/mentor of the fundamentalist state religion.

    But keeping him in this state would make a rather boring novel. So Tyndel (through a somewhat bizarre set of events) is exiled outside his community to the neighboring Lyncol, a high-tech society that looks upon Tyndel’s community as charmingly quaint. Unfortunately for him, his rescue from Dzin required expensive treatment, which he will have to repay.

    Before he can even properly learn the rules of his new environment, Tyndel is exiled again, this time as a laborer in a distant space station. Don’t worry, he’ll eventually learn to cope. The novel is obviously a bildungsroman in which the author can indoctrinate both protagonist and readers to cool new social ideas.

    I may sound flippant, but the truth is that I enjoyed Gravity Dreams a lot, especially the ideas that are brought forth by Modesitt. None-too-convincingly disguising his libertarian sympathies, Modesitt writes of a society where widespread nanotechnology has brought forth a non-negotiable need for personal responsibility. A large portion of Gravity Dreams‘s thematic strength is built on an exploration of a society that expects responsibility from truly adult citizens.

    Tangentially, that strikes me as one of SF’s next big themes. With emerging technologies putting ever-more powerful capabilities at the grasp of everyone, the need for everyone to behave responsibly. Call it the “polite society” argument of gun enthusiasts. Unfortunately, recent history has proven that there’s still a long way to go before reaching this point, as numerous cases of vandalism, real or virtual (think spamming, online harassment or website defacement), continue to make headlines. Like it or not, increased power without increased accountability cannot depend on the assumption of good behavior.

    While the above may not be explicitly mentioned in the book, it is the type of reflections inspired by Gravity Dreams, a novel that could have been a perfectly good space-opera without depth. Ironically, the most plot-driven moments of Gravity Dreams (with its late-coming revelation of interstellar Dangers That Must Be Conquered) are the weakest parts of the narrative, paling in comparison with Tyndal’s training and relationship issues.

    Moral lessons served as entertainment aren’t rare, of course, but it’s always pleasing to see a result so professionally realized. Instead of turning in run-of-the-mill space adventures, Modesitt chooses to inspire as much as he entertains, and the result is not only one of the best SF novels of 1999, but also another proof that Modesitt is one of our best SF writers around.

  • Back to the Moon, Homer J. Hickam

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Island, 1999, 494 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-23538-3

    There are thrillers and then there are superthrillers.

    Thrillers are usually adequate beach reading, stories of evil conspiracies, military skirmishes or criminal affairs. They feature ordinary characters, plot puppets moved by an author writing as fast as he can to ship off the manuscript to his editor and make up payments on his mortgage. Thrillers are entertaining, but not much more; most of them will be undistinguishable only a few weeks after closing the last page. Thrillers abound on the shelves of your local bookstore; just pick’em up and you get instant entertainment.

    Superthrillers, on the other hand, are another thing entirely. They are, most noticeably, bigger. Bigger in terms of scope and ambition, not necessarily in terms of stakes or length. They go to fascinating places we’ve never seen before, display prodigious amounts of well-integrated details, involve original gadgets and ideas, feature Cool Scenes and end on a succession of ever-more exciting thrills. Super-thrillers are thrillers that are a magnitude over and above what we can expect from a normal thriller. And Back to the Moon fits this description perfectly.

    Oh, it doesn’t start that way. The first hundred pages are fun but oddly reminiscent of other thrillers, as it looks like terrorists are getting ready to take over a shuttle flight. The fun starts when things go wrong and the “terrorists” explain their mission and their motives.

    Like other superthrillers, Back to the Moon takes risks that might doom it to failure. It uses Cold War weaponry hidden at an unlikely place, a last-minute revelation, a secret conspiracy to control nations and reckless opponents willing to combine unlimited means with inexistent morals to stop the protagonist. Not all of these work perfectly (one last-minute revelation smacks of desperation; the secret conspiracy seems stolen from the X-Files) but they do bring extra interest to a novel that already have more than enough to sustain a quick read.

    When Back to the Moon works, it works extremely well. The various battles keep on getting better and better, the power alliances keep shifting and reforming in every-threatening configurations, the hardware is ingenious, the technical details are convincing without being overwhelming and the characters are well-defined. In fact, the novel even manages to create an impressive sentimental moment three-quarter way through. It had been a long while since I’ve had a lump in my throat while reading a thriller.

    This confessed, it must be said that Return to the Moon will work best on an readership of space nuts, technical enthusiasts and science-fiction fans. The same audience that loved the film OCTOBER SKY (itself a dramatization of Hickam’s teenhood autobiography Rocket Boys) will respond most favorably to the novel’s none-too-subtle pro-space propaganda.

    But keeping aside the thematic goals of the novel, Return to the Moon delivers the goods in terms of entertainment. Readers lucky enough to get a copy of this book will turn the pages faster and faster as the action heats up. Homer J. Hickam vaults within the ranks of the best thriller writers with his first novel, and his next is eagerly awaited.

  • Fatal Terrain, Dale Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 1997, 448 pages, C$33.95 hc, ISBN 0-399-14241-X

    When do you say enough is enough?

    When do you start giving up on formerly-good authors, despite repeated substandard works, an overall feel of staleness and, frankly, a lack of fun in their latest novels? What’s “giving them another chance”; buying in used bookshops, tracking down cheap paperback copies, loaning at the library?

    Dale Brown drove me to these questions with Fatal Terrain, the limp follow-up to Shadows of Steel, an already lifeless military thriller several notches below his earlier efforts. As Brown desperately tried to interest me in Chinese politics, I felt more fascinated by the mechanisms driving a formerly exciting author to mediocre output than with the actual plot of the novel.

    So here is, in a few easy steps according to the Dale Brown corpus, how to become a has-been author.

    One: Start your career with a few good books. That’s essential to become a disappointment, otherwise you’re just a mediocre author who keeps on churning trash. Dale Brown started his career with gripping high-concept novels such as Silver Tower, Hammerheads and what probably remains his career high, Day of the Cheetah. Good fun, fast reads, good characters. At that point, the sky wasn’t even the limit for Brown.

    Two: Settle in a routine. If you managed to invent a few original gadgets and characters, just keep re-using them until you’ve squeezed out all interest, and then keep using them some more. Brown had an fascinating gadget in his first novel; a high-tech, refurbished B-52 capable of almost all military feats. (A natural wish for an ex-B-52 crewmember like Brown) While its use was integral to Flight of the Old Dog and justified in Night of the Hawk, it became ridiculous to see Brown apply his “magic toy” over and over again in his latest novels. Snap out of it, Dale, and that also stands for the characters you so lovingly fleshed out in the first novels: Now that the readers know everything about them, stop propping them up one more time whether it’s credible or not.

    Three: Try to adjust your universe to fit the real-world. This works especially well if your earlier novels are wildly implausible. In Day of the Cheetah, a Soviet traitor pilot hijacks a thought-driven experimental plane and flies it to a Central-America country that is subsequently bombed by the Americans… in 1996. That’s fine when your novel dates from 1988, but not as fine when your latest novel maintains that it all happened, while trying to integrate increasingly realistic real-world elements in the plotline… The Brownverse should diverge, not converge with the real world. (Also see the latest works of Tom Clancy for a further example.)

    Four: Downgrade your writing and make it less interesting and far more verbose while ignoring sustained plotting. Whereas Brown’s earlier novels were snappy, exciting, well-paced entertainment, his latest novels seem built around two or three key action scenes each requiring dozens of pages of laborious setup. Whereas his earlier novels moved quickly to the action, his latest are dogged down with useless techno-speak in an unconvincing effort to add more realism. It’s not only tedious, it’s exasperating.

    Five: Stick with one plot, book after book. So… hmm… American interests are threatened and foreign forces led by evil generals attack and all hope is lost until one lone high-tech plane comes in and bombs them all away! Sounded good for Flight of the Old Dog. Sounded increasingly worse for Skymasters, Chains of Command, Shadows of Steel and now his latest.

    Fatal Terrain is the culmination of these threads, a limp “thriller” that spends too much time setting up and justifying battles than actually describing them. Only a significant character point and one neat concept (the underground airfields) save the book from total failure. As it is, the only thing driving me to read Brown’s subsequent book, The Tin Man, is the promise that it’s based on something totally different. Hey, wish me luck.

  • The Armageddon Rag, George R.R. Martin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1983, 399 pages, C$19.95 hc, ISBN 0-671-47526-6

    To youngsters like myself, born in the latter quarter of this century, the mindset and attitudes of the “sixties” are either ridiculous or alien. Granted, an impressive fraction of the values pioneered in that decade has endured and even entered mainstream society (often through unusual means, such as the philosophies underlying the Internet as we know it), but digging back through the easy clichés of the period, we find a movement that simply appears too strange to have been real. Free sex, communes, political riots, anticipation of a revolution, drug advocacy… no wonder the United States were so screwed up during these years.

    Those were excessive years, and the return to the norm has been harder on some than most. Still, unless someone explains those years to us, the younger generation will miss out on a decade of experiences that could be useful to learn.

    That’s what George R.R. Martin does in The Armageddon Rag, cleverly disguising it as a crime thriller with supernatural overtones. You may be fooled into thinking that it’s just a very good novel set in the early-eighties music industry, but it’s really a recapitulation of a generation, with some nostalgia and a lot of style.

    The Armageddon Rag begins by hooking us as a good crime thriller: Sandy Blair, novelist in creative crisis, receives a phone call about the death of a rock promoter. But not just any promoter; the ex-manager of the Nazgûl, the best rock band of the sixties. And not just any death, but a gruesome murder with plenty of evidence to suggest that it was done by someone with a thorough knowledge of the band…

    Before long, Sandy has chucked it all: The expensive Manhattannite girlfriend, the assorted apartment and the creative crisis, all for an article on the murder. But as he progresses further, not only does the events surrounding the murder get stranger and stranger, but Sandy is drawn further back in his own past sixties, filled as they were by rebellion, violence and barely suppressed pain.

    All and all, the plot is a rather good excuse to systematically revisit the sixties through various archetypical characters. Sandy himself is the observer turned pro, the ex-journalist now novelist. Other friends haven’t fared so well: One revolutionary turned ad executive, another still living in an increasingly silly commune, another stuck in mental constructs far more restrictive, another turned college teacher, another (draft dodger) now claimed mentally ill by his domineering father… All facets of the children of the sixties, morphed by latter events.

    Before long, we’re (maybe) deep in a supernatural plot to unleash demonic forces on the world. Or maybe not; it’s that type of novel. But the ambiguity isn’t too terribly frustrating.

    It’s all quite fascinating, and unusually readable too. Martin is, after all, a Nebula and Hugo-winning pro, and The Armageddon Rag sucks you right in, holds you tightly thanks to some good plotting and doesn’t disappoint through the ending. Characters are sharply defined, the style is brisk and the details are telling. The music-related details are well done, bringing in evocative rock concert descriptions, believable lyrics and an overall feeling of authenticity.

    Best of all, The Armageddon Rag doesn’t really show its age, whether it’s thirteen years after initial publication or thirty years after the main period of interest. Musically, it’s easy for a modern reader to imagine Nazgûl as sounding more or less like Rage Against the Machine on a good day. As far as the “spirit of the sixties” is concerned, it works rather well at presenting a particular point in time and the mindset associated with it, even though the concept of a “revolution” nowadays will be cause for more giggles than nods of approval.

    It’s hard not to like this novel, both for what’s it’s saying and how it’s saying it. It’s a gripping read, and should appeal to a wide readership, whether or not the individuals were there during the sixties or not. Rock and roll will never die!

  • 01-01-00®, R.J. Pineiro

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1999, 406 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-56871-0

    Being a book reviewer is best left to the intrepid. While the best part of the job is being able to rave about an under-appreciated gem, there are other, less pleasant aspects to the profession. Horrors lurk in libraries, unimaginable atrocities waiting to pounce on the unsuspecting readers. It’s my job, as a reviewing-kind-of-guy, to warn you against these… things. Make no mistake, the life of a reviewer is always intense!

    So today, I have to warn you against 01-01-00®. To be fair, any sufficiently attentive buyer won’t need the advice of book reviewers to put down the book and run away. The title alone contains two serious danger signals.

    The first one is, of course, the reference to Y2K. (Pineiro’s previous book, unimaginatively enough, was also called Y2K.) It’s already hard to recall, but the late nineties were filled with schlocko thrillers built on the semi-mystical century switch, with almost uniformly atrocious results. I suppose we should be grateful for that opportunity to come up with a technological rationalization for the end-of-the-world boogieman, but somehow I can’t bring myself to it. At least we’ve had the opportunity to knock down (with a mallet) every seal-cub-like author who hasn’t resisted the lure of the buzzword. Like Mr. Pineiro. Onward.

    The second warning signal contained in the title is the ® so thoughtfully appended to 01-01-00®. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that artistic endeavors should be as far apart from marketing as possible. By the time a title is registered, it’s time to pack it up and go home. (Are you listening, Clive “Dirk Pitt®” Cussler?) Digging deeper in the novel’s foreword, it turns out that 01-01-00® is a registered trademark to another guy, who ended up licensing it to Pineiro. Or the reverse. Or the inverse. Whatever. If you think that ®egiste®ing an a®®angement of bina®y symbols and dashes is a good idea, then 01-01-00® and you dese®ve each othe®.

    It gets worse as the novel opens. A hacker brings down Washington’s traffic system, causing (very indirectly) a speeding mother to have an car accident, fall down a cliff and kill the rest of her family. Bad driving? Yep. Bad luck? Sure, but when said mother becomes a super-computer-cop for the express single purpose to catch the hacker who did that to her, well, that’s got to rank fairly high in the top-ten misguided character motivation list.

    Such psychological howlers are common throughout the book, with perhaps the best one left for the end: The protagonist gets a moment of “total empathy” with the world, and sees “how a vagrant killed himself following [her] stoplight speech about getting a job and not being a bum.” [P.397] Obviously, Pineiro doesn’t have much of a clue about the psychology of the homeless, or vastly overestimates the persuasive powers of his heroine.

    I’ll leave out the technological funnies inserted here and there; that’s too much of an easy target. I’ll just point out that in 01-01-00® Pineiro mixes aliens, Y2K bug, emasculated terrorists, new-age feel-good philosophy, all-powerful computer viruses, perfunctory romance and the Mayan calendar with barely an self-critical eye toward all of it, or even a cursory nod toward Pope Gregor’s calendar reforms.

    Bad doesn’t begin to cover it, but “boring when not funny” will do the job. As a book critic, I have to slog through all of this crap so that you don’t have to, so if ever I am to do a single good action with these reviews, please don’t read 01-01-00®. Ever. Trash it if it’s in your to-read pile and don’t ever buy it if it’s not.

    Chances are that most copies have been pulped anyway. Who the hell wants to read a Y2K book now?

  • The Light of Other Days, Arthur C. Clarke & Stephen Baxter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 316 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-87199-6

    I sense a trend. And, for once, it’s a good one.

    Over the years, Arthur C. Clarke has collaborated with quite a few authors. Gregory Benford wrote a “sequel” to Clarke’s The City and the Stars (a classic that shouldn’t be “improved” by any means!) and it stank deeply. Clarke and Gentry Lee collaborated on a novel, Cradle, that left most indifferent. Lee then wrote a “sequel” to Clarke’s Rendez-vous with Rama (a classic that could use some work, but not by hacks like Lee) and the result was a bloated trilogy that wasn’t very good either. Mike McQuay expanded a Clarke outline in the novel Richter 10 and the result, while better, wasn’t all that good.

    At that point in time, most SF critics individually came up with the “Clarke Collaboration Theorem”, which in simple term stated “all Clarke collaborations suck”.

    But then came along The Trigger, written in collaboration with Michael Kube-McDowell (ie; Clarke wrote a two-thousand word outline which was expanded to novel length by Kube-McDowell) and the result was surprisingly good if you weren’t a gun nut.

    SF critics put the Clarke Collaboration Theorem on hold.

    Now they’re ready to retire it for good as The Light of Other Days arrives in bookstores. While it doesn’t have a very different plot outline that the one already seen in The Trigger (indeed, the structure of both novels almost seem carbon-copied from one another) and is rather pathetic in terms of literary value, it’s a great read filled with ingenious ideas, a breathtaking conclusion and pure fun from cover to cover.

    In other words, it does not suck.

    The Light of Other Days‘s premise is not particularly original: Isaac Asimov’s classic story The Dead Past also posited the existence of a “remote viewer”, a machine that allowed you to see any scene from history from any point of view. (Indeed, Clarke and Baxter cite a few examples in the afterword without citing the Asimov text, which is rather unsettling given the popularity of the story and Clarke’s friendship with Asimov)

    But, as always, it’s all in the treatment. Whereas Asimov’s story ended on the predicted doom of humanity through the end of privacy, Clarke/Baxter use this as a stepping-stone to more interesting things. As the capacity to see anywhere in history through the “WormCam” spreads through the population, investigative exploration of history takes off, religions are destroyed (hey, it’s a Clarke novel), historical figures are demolished or enhanced. Of course, there’s the end of privacy, last dying gasps of governments, general paranoia, new and exotic forms of perversions but guess what? Humanity endures, and how well it endures forms the strong conclusion of the novel, which manages to bring in the Eschaton without looking too silly doing it. Impressive stuff, any way you look at it.

    As with The Trigger, the fun of this collaboration lies in the intellectual debate surrounding the WormCam. Ideas, concepts, extrapolations are described, sometime sketchily, but in such numbers that the ultimate effect on the reader is quite impressive. As in The Trigger, the novel loses strength whenever it tries to insert more classical plot conflicts in-between all the fascinating ideas. A gunshot-and-traitors conclusion is there to tie up some loose ends, but not to knock the socks off the readers; that’s the following chapter.

    The overall result, again like The Trigger, is a compulsively readable (can be finished in less than a day) novel of ideas that faithfully follows the SF ethos of unflinching extrapolation. Due to the large historical component of the book, this might even be a good crossover novel for people not overly familiar with Science-Fiction.

    And it destroys the Clarke Collaboration Theorem, which is a welcome piece of news indeed.

  • Beyond Recall, Stephen Kyle

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Vision, 2000, 438 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-60809-2

    Thriller readers are most often presented with grotesquely non-negotiable alternatives. Evil terrorists versus pure peacekeepers. Democracy versus dictatorship. Blood-giving heroes versus puppy-kicking villains. Some will say that it’s typical of the American binary mindset: It’s much easier to make choices when you demonize the alternative, as it all too often happens during American elections.

    On the other hand, such easy choices usually mean more straightforward entertainment. What would QUAKE be if you could choose to negotiate with your opponents? What if the terrorists in the latest Hollywood blockbusters were working toward a laudable goal? (To be fair, THE ROCK did this… only to turn around at a critical moment and have some terrorists “go renegade” on their leader, thereby re-establishing comfortable polarity) What if, instead of simple entertainment, we had flawed heroes and virtuous villains, setting up true drama in the process? With Beyond Recall, “simple thriller” readers get the chance to find out if such departures from the norm offer something more than the usual black-versus-white mentality of genre entertainment.

    The premise is apparently simple: terrorists threaten to unleash a biologically-engineered plague on the United States if their demand are not meant. But the complications begin as soon as you look into it a bit further: The plague will target only women. The demands are to set up a multi-billion fund for the education of third-world women. The terrorists’ ultimate goal? To halt ecological damage through population control, one way of the other: Educate the women (a proven way to lower population growth and raise standards of living) or sharply reduce the reproductive capacity of the consuming nations.

    Already, we’re presented with a moral dilemma: Though the ends are good, the method isn’t. And as the United States do not negotiate with terrorists, there’s a significant potential for mutually assured incomprehension.

    Beyond Recall‘s basic premise is fascinating. Things don’t go as well as the various characters are introduced. To heighten drama, author Stephen Kyle basically interrelates everyone involved: The chief terrorist is the White House advisor on bio-terrorist matter but also the mother of a lobbyist who’s married to the FBI’s main man of the affair. Meanwhile, the chief terrorist is the ex-lover of the only doctor able to build an antidotes except that the doctor’s wife was one of the first victims of the virus’ test run… I’m not making any of this up.

    The melodramatic (and somewhat ridiculous) interrelation between characters easily destroys most of the novel’s power though soap-operatic plot dynamics and god-awful resolutions. By the epilogue of the novel, the good doctor is doing the wild thang(s) with the lobbyist, which practically smacks of incest or, at the very least, of Hollywood-style old-man/young-girl power fantasies. Creepy, and maybe more than the premise.

    When the novel fails at that level, it doesn’t take much to make it fail at other levels too. The pacing is deficient in the second half of the book. Kyle also blurs the distinction so much between good guys and bad guys (the President is painted as an angry idiot, the FBI agent as a bad guy for no real reason than he’s opposed to the chief terrorist which is set up as the protagonist, etc…) that readers might just give trying to find someone to cheer for. It’s all quite unbelievable, and that’s ultimately the impression left by the book.

    If you’re going to blur good and evil, it takes a lot of skill to keep the reader going without clear reasons to cheer or jeer, and I frankly don’t think that Kyle is experienced enough. No reason to condemn the author in perpetuity; it’s still his first novel, after all. (And, heck, he’s a fellow Ontarian writer, so he deserves a little home-grown respect) But he still fails to deliver on an intriguing premise for reasons not entirely related to the premise itself. Veteran thriller readers might find Beyond Recall an intriguing experiment because of its failing, but readers looking for some comfortable summer beach reading are advised to skip this one.

  • The Bear and the Dragon, Tom Clancy

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Putnam, 2000, 1028 pages, C$39.99 hc, ISBN 0-399-14563-X

    Well, America’s master techno-thriller writer is back with a new book, and the overall feeling is one of… déjà-vu.

    Tom Clancy fans will remember that the last “Jack Ryan” novel, Executive Orders starred Ryan as the President of the United States, confronted with multiple crises, both internal and external. It all got solved neatly by huge military battles and other assorted action scenes. America was safe once again, and everyone went to sleep satisfied until the next Clancy novel.

    This time around, we get more of the same. Except much more of the same. Ryan is still president, except he’s been legitimately elected and now has a mandate to preserve American hegemony. The evil bastards threatening said hegemony are still these cackling Chinese baddies, given that the cackling Russian baddies have retired and are now America’s partners. All of these alliances will come into play as huge resources are discovered in Siberia and China is forced to choose between bankruptcy and invasion.

    A big China/Russia war has often been mentioned as a potential threat in military techno-thrillers, but rarely represented (only Slater’s WWIII series has done so, if I remember correctly) because it raises so many random factor (such as historical rivalries, alien mindsets and, oh, nuclear weapons on both sides) that any lesser writer can only feel daunted at the prospect.

    Not Tom Clancy, obviously. With The Bear and the Dragon, he tests the patience of readers across the world as he clocks it at 1028 pages, his biggest novel ever and a serious contender for heftiest non-fantasy bestseller of the year. Filled with extravagantly presented plotting, multi-page technical details, chapters of back-story and a surprising grasp of political complexity, The Bear and the Dragon exasperates as it fascinates. Half the novel is figuring out when all these interlocking plotlines will intersect, and the other half is spent admiring how neatly everything fits together. Like it or not, the depth of The Bear and the Dragon makes any other political technothriller seem naive and superficial. If anything, the description of the presidency even feels more accurate here than in Executive Orders. There’s even a stronger conclusion, though it’s considerably diluted by the sheer number of pages setting it up.

    A large number of Clancy’s surviving characters from previous novels come back in this one. Fine if you remember all these people; less if you don’t. At this point in time, the Clancyverse is so cumbersome that novices are advised not to apply.

    It’s a bit irrelevant whether the novel is good or bad: Fans will love it, and non-fans won’t. As a Clancy devotee, I liked it, but as a base reader, I’m pining for the moment where Clancy’s current editor will explode from overwork and his replacement will force the author to write shorter, tighter novels. It’s common wisdom that Clancy’s earlier novels (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games) are his best, and that’s in no small part due to the better action/pages ratio. Heck, with Red Storm Rising, he did World War Three in fewer pages than the skirmish in The Bear and the Dragon!

    But such a radical shift is unlikely to happen. If anything, I don’t even think that Clancy has an editor any more. (One particularly annoying tic in The Bear and the Dragon is a tendency to repeat every good line at least twice during the novel. They probably hired multiple copy editors to bring in the book under deadline, and they didn’t consult.)

    In the meantime, you can get The Bear and the Dragon in hardcover for not even 4c a page. If nothing else, you’ll gain in volume what you don’t in page-per-page quality.

  • Last Chance to See, Douglas Adams and Mark Cawradine

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Stoddart, 1990, 208 pages, C$??.?? hc, ISBN 0-7737-2454-0

    British writer Douglas Adams has already earned a place in SF’s hall of fame with a series of zany SF comedies beginning with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Depending heavily on a keep sense of the absurd and a deep knowledge of genre conventions, the series has known enormous success, and rumors of a cinematic adaptation have been going on for at least twenty years.

    This has made Adams simultaneously rich and annoyed. Sure, now he’s worth millions due to enormous sales. On the other hand, it must be tough to deal with those hordes of fans constantly demanding a sequel to the Hitchhiker’s series. (Some conspiracy theorist insist that the fifth and so far final book of the series, 1992’s Mostly Harmless, was deliberately awful and depressing to ensure that no one will even demand another sequel.)

    With Last Chance to See, Adams gets as far away from interstellar adventures as possible, yet wisely keeps all the elements that have made the success of his best-known works.

    Last Chance to See is about animal species being driven to extinction. With a subject like that, you’d be forgiven to expect preachy moralism and dramatic didactism. But that isn’t Adams’ style: He makes the unusual choice to go for comedic earnestness. In short, he considers Earth as a foreign planet.

    Fortunately, he’s got a lot of material to work with: As most endangered species are located in hard-to-reach places far from civilization, the travel accommodations of Adams and straight-man zoologist Mark Cawradine often make up for quasi-alien strangeness. Not everyone around the world believes in punctuality, honesty, integrity or even safety. To see our intrepid -but incurably British- travelers deal with the travel difficulties is one of the highlights of the book.

    And this is a book with so many highlights, so many delights, so many laugh-aloud moments that it’s hard to isolate favorite excerpts. Adams plays a perfect buffoon, and makes of co-writer Cawradine a splendid foil. Their comedy duo adds a lot to a book that’s already quite enjoyable as it is. I defy anyone to come up with many other examples of such compulsively readable travel journalism. Not only won’t you be able to put it down, but you’ll also want to give copies to your friends.

    But don’t get the impression that even though the book is a laugh riot, that it’s completely without deeper meaning. If anything else, the comedy makes the pathos even more poignant, giving to the book an air of playing a funny violin air as a library is burning. Adams’s talent at perception reversion through absurdity illustrates splendidly the oft-unbelievable ironies of the world. It’s not hard to imagine Adams as an alien journalist commenting upon the world. But they again, he’s had plenty of practice at that.

    Simultaneously moving and unbelievably funny, Last Chance to See is a curiosity, a moralistic book that can be enjoyed without guilt, and a goofy style that’s nevertheless devastatingly intelligent. It’s going to hold up very well to a re-reading in some time. You might have a hard time finding a copy, but it will be worth it. It would be even better if some publisher re-edited the book with an updated epilogue.

    If Douglas Adams wants to give up SF comedy for non-fiction on a regular basis, consider me subscribed.

  • Death du Jour, Kathy Reichs

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1999, 451 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-01137-5

    It has to be difficult, being a mystery fiction author. Not only do your stories have to be sufficiently easy to read on the bus (where, I’d wager, most of America’s crime-fiction reading takes place), but it’s got to be sufficiently complex as to not disappoint die-hard fans of the genre. Add to that the usual trappings of a writer’s life (like, oh, finding inspiration, finding the time to write, finding an audience and keeping all of those) and you really feel sorry when a novel somehow doesn’t match expectations. Such is the case with Kathy Reich’s second novel, Death du Jour.

    As a French-Canadian, I have a natural liking for Reichs’s series of novels featuring Temperance Brennan, an American forensic anthropologist working in Quebec. Most of Brennan’s adventures take place in or around Montreal, the other characters are often francophones and the Quebec-related details are usually adequate. Brennan (and Reichs) being outsiders in “my” culture, they can bring a different perspective that’s always interesting. I can never quite escape the feeling of “animal in a zoo”, but that’s not so bad.

    The first novel, Deja Dead, was decent, though it nearly approached cliché in its depiction of yet another crazed serial killer and the spunky female protagonist that tracked him. (Readers across North America yawned in unison when the two finally fought each other in the heroine’s apartment at the end of the book. Deja vu, all right! Pundits bitch about the effect of movies on people, but I bet they never mean that.)

    At least Death du jour avoids dealing with yet another another crazed serial killer by focusing on… something else. Though initially about a set of corpses discovered in a burned-up house, it’s quickly obvious that Reichs’s second novel will be about crazed killer sects. How quickly obvious will depend on your knowledge of Quebec criminal history and general crime-fiction. On that, in turn, will hinge your appreciation of the novel.

    Allow me to explain: Quebec is such a small province (7 million people, roughly half that around Montreal… that’s even less that only the city of New York!) that major criminal matters tends to be infrequent, and well-publicized when they do happen. Hence the publicity made around “L’ordre du Temple Solaire”, a cult that ultimately self-destructed by mass suicide, in Quebec and in Switzerland. The fallout of this affair, a mysterious fire that took a few more victims, made news for a week or so.

    Guess what happens in Death du Jour? Granted, not everyone will make the links, but those who do will have to tolerate another hundred pages as the cult angle becomes clear.

    Worse is Reichs’ frequent use of interconnections between the novel’s characters. A randomly-chosen university professor is tied with a cult leader and with a student whose friends are coincidentally discovered murdered and so on and so forth. Those who hate coincidences in novels should stay clear of this one, where it smacks of bad plotting.

    The complete cluelessness of the characters is another sore point, as they fail to links event that are nevertheless obvious to the reader. It doesn’t help that Reichs’s is downright lazy in her plotting: When Brennan’s sister attends “a lifestyle seminar” in the middle of a cult-driven novel, you don’t have to be a genius to know what’s going to happen.

    Oh, and the climax takes place during The Ice Storm of 1998. Isn’t stealing from The Montreal Gazette wonderful?

    Reader reactions will vary depending on their tolerances for such writing laziness. Even though I really wanted to give a chance to Death du Jour, there were simply too many annoyances to give it anything better than a disappointing grade.

  • Cave of Stars, George Zebrowski

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Prism, 1999, 276 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-06-105299-X

    It often happens, especially in Science-Fiction, that a book that starts off in an entertaining, dynamic, innovative fashion runs out of steam midway through, falling back on stock situations to resolve an intriguing premise. Not every writer can sustain far-out speculation and appropriate style for 300+ plus pages. Then there’s the Hailey syndrome (from Arthur Hailey, the author of contemporary docu-fiction such as Airport, Hotel and The Moneychangers) in which the author spends almost half the book exploring a neat setting, even or concept, only to wrap a quick, trivial and unsatisfying story at the end to justify the “fiction” label.

    It’s far less common, however, to encounter a novel that starts out in a dull and tepid fashion, only to become steadily more interesting as it goes along. Given that the first few pages of a novel are supposed to hook the reader and give his the impetus to read the whole book, authors often consciously take care to punch up the introduction.

    Not with George Zebrowski. Cave of Stars begins as so many bad SF novel begin: A few scenes on a distant human colony, sketching a rigidly conservative society whose power is wielded by priests all the way up to the emperor/pope. Stock characters are also introduced; the star-crossed couple from different social levels, the assistant to the emperor, etc… Not a very good start, because we’ve seen all of this before, and usually handled in a more entertaining fashion. It’s dull, it’s boring, it doesn’t show any sign of improving over the first thirty pages. If anyone quits reading at this point, it’s perfectly understandable.

    But stick around; in a short while, a massive space colony (a macrolife habitat from Zebrowski’s previous novel Macrolife) arrives in the vicinity of the colony and makes contact. They bring new technology that worry the religious elite. Among them; a cure for mortality, which immediately interests the pope who seeks it for himself. His petition is refused, which provokes an answer so terrible that it alters the whole course of the novel to something you really haven’t seen before.

    It takes time, but Cave of Stars really cooks past the novel’s halfway point. As if the weak planetary romance of the first few pages was only a setup for one of Zebrowski’s big “What if?” concept. The writing becomes clearer, the goals more sharply defined and the narrative tension definitely heightened.

    By the end, Cave of Stars doesn’t somehow become so good that it overwrites the bad impression left by its weak beginning, but it becomes a decently entertaining novel. (It’s not as if the latter part is so good; some choices are definitely bizarre, and the ending is a half-downer. It’s obvious that this is an author-driven novel as compared to a character-driven novel, and the result is a bit too forced to feel entirely natural).

    As a side-show to Macrolife it’s actually better than the middle portion of Zebrowski’s 1979 novel. (Which was, as stated in my previous review, so idea-packed that the rotten fictive aspect of the novel didn’t really matter.) As a stand-alone SF novel, it comes out as being average, dogged by its beginning and ill-defined characters but partially redeemed by a steadily interesting plot. Goes straight in the “if there’s nothing else to read” pile.

  • Blood Moon, Sharman DiVono

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    DAW, 1999, 441 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-88677-853-0

    In 1997, the movie EVENT HORIZON arrived in theaters… only to disappear almost immediately, unseen by most moviegoers and destroyed by critics, who saw in it yet another slasher film crossed with yet another ALIEN clone. Not a bad description, really; In the film, a rescue crew sent to investigate the mysterious appearance of an experimental ship discovers evidence of supernatural influence in the original crew’s demise.

    I was one of the lucky few who saw EVENT HORIZON in theaters, and somehow loved the film unconditionally. For some reason, it worked very well on me and even today, you can get me going on a ten-minute monologue on the rationality-versus-superstition motif in EVENT HORIZON and how, with a few tweaks, EVENT HORIZON could have been a modern SF/horror classic. It remains one of the few horror films which made me lose some sleep, though I was kept awake more by the potential of the film than its execution. And the same elements that attracted me to EVENT HORIZON are probably those which compelled me to read Blood Moon.

    The novel wastes no time in starting in full-blown hard-SF mode. As a rescue team lands on the moon, the reader is subjected to a barrage of acronyms, technical details, techno-speak and steel-gray descriptions. In this context, the initial horrors contained in Moonbase (where, is it useful to add, a previous astronaut team has abruptly ceased all communications with the home planet) seems all the more shocking. Graffitis everywhere in dried blood (“Food for the Moon” plus a few extra occult signs and obscenities), trashed equipment and no sign of anyone are the initial jolts. Worse is the presence of swarms of flies, not only because of their unpleasant associations with devil imagery (Beelzebub by any other name) but mostly because of their invasion of a traditionally antiseptic environment.

    Things go from bad to worse, as a survivor dies of fright upon seeing the rescue team, and the only last live member of the previous team is stark raving mad. The novel then shifts in procedural mode, as everyone, on the Moon or on Earth, tries to figure out what’s happening.

    Things get weirder after that, as we’re constantly see-sawing between rationality and pure horror in trying to reconstruct the last moments of the previous expedition. DiVono drags things out for too long, unfortunately, and the novel could have used tighter editing. No less than two romantic subplots seem tacked-on for no useful reason, and the continuing lack of commitment to either hard-SF procedure or occult manifestations eventually grates when carried on for this long. Most characters are indistinct and there aren’t as many “cool scenes” as you would expect from the above premise. Fortunately, the conclusion is rather good (not to mention fascinating in its cosmological implications), which goes a long to redeem the novel.

    (Alas, there are also a few errors. From a cursory reading, at least three minor mistakes really stand out: The moon isn’t a planet, mass is not equivalent to weight (which is why a hammer does not have to be heavier on the moon) and it is the Apollo 1 astronauts which died in their capsule, not Apollo 7, though you can probably chalk the last one to the copy editor. None of these mistakes really affect the plot, but -hey-, if you’re going to play the hard-SF game, you might as well play it right!)

    But ultimately, none of these problems detract from the sheer curiosity of a book willing to try to merge hard-SF and horror. Good or bad, it doesn’t really matter when it’s so interesting. In a time where publishing genres are merging, fusing and borrowing from each other, Blood Moon stands as a particularly absorbing and unusual offering. Base readers will love the entertainment and serious SF scholars will delight in its meta-fictional significance, but Blood Moon is worth a read one way or the other.

    Too bad it’s not all that scary. But then again you can’t put a shrieking violins soundtrack in a book.

  • Calculating God, Robert J. Sawyer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 334 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86713-1

    The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest for issues related to religion and science. Mostly fuelled by the evolution versus creationism debate, these questions more or less seek to explore the relationship between faith and proof, or the place of religion in a secular western civilization obviously ruled by the objective standards of science.

    Few authors have dealt with this theme as often as Canadian SF writer Robert J. Sawyer. His novels have often featured, either as vignettes, sequences or significant subplots, faith issues. (With an appropriateness that is often disputable.) With Calculating God, his twelfth book in eleven years, Sawyer finally devotes a whole book to the issue and, hopefully, gets it out of his system for some time.

    It’s a measure of how theme-oriented Calculating God is that the thin plot begins like what may sound like a really bad joke: See, this alien lands at the Royal Ontario Museum and asks to see a paleontologist… Fortunately, things get more serious shortly after that, as it becomes apparent that the alien is there to investigate human studies of the archaeological record. Seems that the aliens, themselves believers, have noticed a troubling pattern in extinction events, and they want us to confirm it… which we do with our own extinction events.

    Sawyer cheats and stacks the deck in his faith-vs-science debate by positing an alien Theory of Everything that denies the luxury of the anthropic principle. (ie; the “isn’t it infinitely improbable that we’re here?” creationist argument is usually answered by the “we’re here to see it, otherwise no one would care”.) What if, in other words, we had increasingly convincing proof of the existence of God?

    Make no mistake; this polite, reserved, even restrained novel is supposed to make you think! It covers a vivid intellectual argument, presented rigorously and treated fairly. (How Canadian!) Don’t assume, however, that this is pro-creationist propaganda: Sawyer knows his stuff, obviously can’t justify creationists and never questions the basic foundations of evolution. His argument runs deeper than that, going beyond the simple superficial debate created by creationism.

    In a speech delivered to the First Canadian Conference on Science and SF in Ottawa in October 2000, Sawyer argued that the new role of SF would be to promote rationalism, and Calculating God is a model for this type of new SF. While pro-God, Sawyer’s novel isn’t exactly pro-religion, but it is in fact pro-faith. If that’s not middle-ground enough to make you think, what is?

    In strict fictional terms, there isn’t much to see in Calculating God. The plot is an excuse to bring forth a debate and assorted arguments. The protagonist the same middle-aged scientist that has starred in the majority of Sawyer’s novels. The writing is limpid but not exceptionally polished. The introduction of stock terrorist caricatures near the end detracts from the novel’s intellectual suspense. The conclusion goes nowhere, aiming at a transcendental conclusion but ending as a muddled, perfunctory end.

    But literary worth is not the point. The point is the debate, the respectful exploration of the boundaries between faith and logic. As a non-believer (most of the time), I wasn’t really convinced by Calculating God, but I wasn’t insulted or disappointed. That’s an unusually meritorious achievement for Sawyer, to manage to please and respect both believers and atheist. (One could make an argument that it took a Canadian to be able to be so vigorously non-threatening, but I’ll refrain for the moment.) In any case, Calculating God is a keeper, another good example of modern SF that faithfully (ho-ho) upholds the golden intellectual standards of the genre.