Book Review

  • 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.

  • The Return, Buzz Aldrin & John Barnes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Forge, 2000, 352 pages, C$32.00 hc, ISBN 0-312-87424-3

    Note from your reviewer: In these chronicles, I usually try to review every single new SF book I read. Alas, The Return is the type of satisfying thriller that doesn’t really warrant much extended critical thought. So, to get me out of my writing block loop, allow me to meta-review the five reviews currently up on Amazon.com.

    Amazon.com: Old-school moonwalker Buzz Aldrin teams up again with former Hugo and Nebula Awards nominee John Barnes (…)

    Barnes hasn’t, unfortunately, fulfilled much of the promise he had shown earlier with such books as the massive Mother of Storms, the excellent A MIllion Open Doors, the juvenile Orbital Resonance or even his two first undistinguished novels that seemed to prefigure a strong socio-SF writer. His last few books have been a depressing sequel, a men’s adventure trilogy, an anthology and two unconvincing novels (Finity and Candle, both severely evaluated by critics.)

    (…) the duo’s previous effort, 1996’s Encounter with Tiber (…)

    To be fair, The Return is a lot more fun that Encounter with Tiber. Shorter, snappier, more interesting.

    Part thriller, part infomercial for the Aldrin space manifesto,

    …which only matters if you known about Aldrin’s commercial interests.

    The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Jonas: The Return offers dovetailing accounts of a space emergency and rescue by three narrators … who sound like the same person.

    Ouch! True, though.

    f. from Massachusetts, USA: I enjoyed the beginning of this book. It started with a bang, and then just sort of fizzled out for me. The background, the launch and the “accident” I found interesting. It was the tedium of the aftermath that I found dull. The lawsuits, the guilt, the lawyers, that followed…yawn.

    Oooohhh, there we disagree. The first chapters is nearly perfunctory; it brings the characters to the interesting situation. And this interesting situation is how, realistically, a private business would have to deal with disaster in space. That means media, lawsuits and lawyers. For all its faults, The Return has an air of realism that’s very well done.

    (On the other hand, the book gets more an more far-fetched as it goes along and ventures from SF to techno-thriller.)

    D.W from Rochester, New York: The first chapter of this book is AWFUL: a press conference with a smug first-person narrator just cramming back story down our throats.

    Well… as I was saying…

    After that, though, it really does get moving nicely, and by the end you do share Aldrin’s enthusiasm for getting us back into space.

    Absolutely. There is no question that The Return is pro-space propaganda, and it does work quite well. There is a point in the novel where they essentially take away space’s practical benefit to modern society, and the desperation of everyone is real.

    (…) and perhaps the most beautiful book I’ve seen in a while, with a translucent dust-jacket overtop of a glossy hard cover.

    Eeek! No way! The dust jacket is translucent plastic, true, but the design is atrocious and, believe it or not, all the price, blurb, UPC information plus the author and title is only on the dust jacket. There is nothing on the glossy-bound book itself but an illustration! That, to me, is an unacceptable betrayal of the role of a dust jacket—to separate marketing from book, leaving title and author for “serious” library-builders. I can’t imagine the pain of shelving dust-jacket-free copies of this book. I really hope this doesn’t become a trend.

    E.L. from West Palm Beach, FL: THE RETURN covers techno thriller territory familiar for readers of ENCOUNTER WITH TIBER.

    Well, apart from the interstellar flights and the aliens…

    D.S from Los Angeles California: The story tends to wander between courtroom intrigue, nostalgic family drama and techno thriller. (…) It is a fast and easy read at times exciting with the technical side explained in simple terms. A pleasant way to spend some summer reading time.

    There really isn’t much more to say after that.

    So what have we learned from this meta-reviewing exercise?

    1. Amazon.com readers know what they’re talking about. Usually.
    2. You can totally distort someone’s opinion with careful editing.
    3. Modern SF reviewers can steal stuff like never before
    4. The Return: Worth a look, but nothing overly impressive.

  • A Fall of Moondust, Arthur C. Clarke

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Signet, 1961, 215 pages, C$1.50 mmpb, ISBN Unavailable

    The nice thing about having read a lot as a teenager is that I may keep fond memories of a particular book while forgetting all the details. In the case of A Fall of Moondust (the only Arthur C. Clarke novel in my high school’s library. No, it wasn’t a particularly good library.), I could only remember a fairly good book that ended in mid-story. So, almost ten years later, I couldn’t pass up the chance to pick a good Signet paperback edition of the novel.

    I half-expected to be disappointed. A decade -and probably a thousand SF books- older and more jaded, would it be possible for me to have as much fun as the first time around? Clarke is known for books that appeal enormously to teens, but would I be able to enjoy his particularly mechanistic approach to characterization another time?

    Well, either I haven’t matured all that much, or Clarke has truly written a really good book. I ended up compulsively reading A Fall of Moondust with, I think, even more enjoyment now than ten years ago.

    Written at a time where humans had barely entered the space age, and fully eight years before we went to the Moon, A Fall of Moondust posits the existence of a vast lunar “sea” of very fine dust with liquid-like properties. Humans being notoriously unable to avoid opportunities of the sort, one tourist business starts offering guided tours of the sea using a specialized dust-surfing craft. Obviously, something must go wrong, and that’s why the Selene crashes and sinks under the dust sea with a full load of passengers on board. Search-and-Rescue efforts are mounted, as every passenger has a secret or two to hide.

    Simple plot, but as always with Clarke, it’s the simplicity, the technical details, the oddball throwaway lines and the understated good humor of the book that make it all worthwhile. A Fall of Moondust isn’t fancy, but you don’t need to be complex in order to build a novel of humans against desperate odds. The crystal-clear writing style is a joy to read. No useless character traits murky up the narrative. As the average length of the SF novel has risen to a point where shorter novels are a tough sell (see my review of Robert Charles Wilson’s Bios), A Fall of Moondust is just the right length for a good read.

    Which brings us to my second surprise: After realizing that the book was as good as I remembered, I found out that there was even more goodness that I remembered! Turns out that my high school’s French paperback edition ended right after the ship is located, but before the rescue efforts got underway. French cheapness or incompetent editing? You decide.

    But the net effect was akin to a friend of mine’s fantasy that good books should self-expand to include even more goodness. Suddenly, there was even more fun and entertainment from Clarke! A thrilling rescue sequence! And a complete ending! Can you ask anything more of an updated teenhood memory?

    More maturely, it’s interesting to note how gracefully A Fall of Moondust has aged. The technical details are surprisingly good (once you assume the ocean-of-moondust bit) and the pacing is as snappy as ever. Clarke even throws in ultra-modern disparaging references to the nature of visual media news. Yes, the characters and the plotting are a bit plodding, but don’t interpret that as “substandard”; the relevant members of the Selene catastrophe are adequately presented and somewhat sympathetic despite their rough edges. Funny how hard-SF’s weaknesses can become advantages; you can read SF from the seventies and even if it’s twenty years closer, the no-less-caricatural “new wave” approach to characterization seems more ridiculous than Clarke’s no-nonsense approach.

    The result, at least, is clear: A Fall of Moondust is well-worth a re-visit for those who read it at least a decade ago, and pretty much a must-read for the others. Classic Hard-SF doesn’t really get any better than this.

  • The Trigger, Arthur C. Clarke & Michael Kube-McDowell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1999, 447 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-553-10458-6

    According to some SF commentators, your reviewer included, science-fiction is about the effects of change on human behavior. That change is usually linked to scientific and technological innovation is unavoidable, but not essential. This definition of SF isn’t perfect (nor accepted by all), but it allows to define an idea-space in which SF can distinguish itself from all other types of fiction.

    At the same time, it allows “pure-SF” fans to distance themselves from the unimaginative drivel that passes itself as SF in the media and in the general population’s worst stereotypes about the genre. In media terms, STAR WARS isn’t SF (it’s fantasy in futuristic trappings) and most of STAR TREK isn’t SF (it’s adventure/soap opera in space) while GATTACA is SF (studying biotechnology-induced changes in humanity) and DARK CITY is SF (musing on artificial manipulation of memory on a society). Science-Fiction should be conceptually solid, imaginative, preferably controversial.

    Needless to say, unimaginative adventures-with-laser-guns are far more common than “true SF”, nowadays as yesterday. But fans of the pure stuff can now run to their bookstores, because a new must-read is in town.

    The Trigger is a “What if?” novel of the first order: What if someone came up with a foolproof way to remotely detonate all nitrate-based explosives? Practically speaking, this would blow up -at a distance- most munitions and explosives in common usage. The perfect gun control tool.

    Had The Trigger been written in any other civilized country in the world, the results would have been interesting, but not much more. Of course, this being published in the United States (let’s not fool ourselves in thinking that English-born Sri Lanka resident Arthur C. Clarke has anything more to do with the book than collaborating to the outline), The Trigger has to face America’s centuries-old fascination with guns, conspiracies and government.

    The results are fascinating. The impacts of The Trigger are examined and explained in great detail, as the discovery is handed from the scientific to the political and military community. Everyone who comes in contact with The Trigger immediately wish it would disappear, but everyone has to face the fact that it’s here to stay, and accommodations must be made in order to ensure its rational use. Gun Lobbies inevitably get into the act, lawsuits fly, private corporations rush Triggers to the market and private citizen watch it all happen with increasing discomfort. Top-notch extrapolation all around, along with some preachiness. Certainly not subtle, but nevertheless compulsively readable.

    There are a few problems, though. The characters of the first half essentially disappear in the latter part of the book. Then the ending falls apart as one character is killed in a rather useless fashion, and another has to face enemies closer to caricature. A shame, because up to that point, The Trigger had labored hard to present “the opposing side” as basically decent people. After the intellectual complexity of the first 400 pages, it’s a let-down to see the climax being nothing but an action-adventure bit facing stock villains. A chilling afterword kind of makes up for it. (Though, given the conceptual breakthrough at mid-novel, one would expect this type of discovery -not to mention bigger, better innovations- to be made much earlier than twenty years later!)

    But it doesn’t really matter. With The Trigger, Kube-McDowell has achieved something quite remarkable: Break the “Clark Collaboration Rule” (which used to state that every novel written in collaboration with Clarke does suck.) and produce a novel that stands alone in its own right. The Trigger is, in general, everything that SF should be: It postulates a radical technological change, follows its controversial social implications and does so in an magnificently entertaining fashion. Don’t miss it.

  • Forever Free, Joe Haldeman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1999, 277 pages, C$30.99 hc, ISBN 0-441-00697-3

    WARNING: Contains necessary spoilers in discussing the book’s failures.

    Fame can do strange things to both performer and audience. An artist whose reputation comes chiefly from hard work and constant professionalism can suddenly find himself able to turn out mediocre work with impunity, as the audience uses earlier works as an excuse to be lenient on newer material. Both sides lose out, because the the artist doesn’t perfect the work, and the audience gets results of inferior quality. In the book industry, best-selling authors can become “editor-proof”, when no one will take take them to task for overwritten books, weak prose or ordinary execution.

    For instance, Haldeman’s thematically-linked Forever Peace won raves and a Hugo despite being a novel that read more like a moderately-competent first-time author’s work than a novel by a veteran of the genre.

    Similarly, It’s easy to pinpoint Forever Free‘s problems, but it gets difficult to ponder why Joe Haldeman wrote the book that way. Especially when it’s the sequel to one of the most famous SF novels ever.

    You may remember The Forever War: Published in 1974 as a Vietnam veteran’s answer to Robert A. Heinlein’s militaristic Starship Troopers (itself a classic), it went on to sell thousands of copies, win both the Hugo and the Nebula awards as well as gain a central position in the genre’s collective memory. The Forever War described the military experience of William Mandella, a physicist-cum-soldier in a war waged during millennia, thanks to light-speed delays. At the end of the first volume, Mandella found himself home with his girlfriend, ready to settle down as Humanity allied itself mentally with the once-enemy alien race.

    As Forever Free begins, Mandella is restless: His two children are grown-up and he’s trying to find a way to prove that his type of human is better than Man, the collective entity now representing most of humanity. His best plan? Hijack a starship and make a one-way trip far in the future to see how it all turns out. Stuff happens and things don’t go as planned.

    More specifically; they limp home twenty-five years later to find out that everyone has disappeared. They investigate and get weird results.

    “How weird” is exactly the problem with Forever Free. While The Forever War (and the first half of Forever Free) is strictly enjoyable hard-SF of the most rigid order (the whole premise of both depends on the absence of Faster-than-light travel), the last pages of Forever Free lazily throw up a completely useless race of shapeshifters (“We’ve been around on Earth for hundred of thousands of your years,” they say offhandedly) and an apparition by God that would be more at home in a Monty Python sketch than in here. (“Oh, you were an experiment, and it’s now time to put away my stuff. Since you insist, I won’t delete you. Oh, I’ve changed to laws of physics while I was at it. Toodles. “) The central mystery of the book isn’t as much solved as it is basically declared irrelevant.

    Needless to say, the result is so outlandish that some readers are likely to give up in disgust a novel that that been perfectly good up to that point.

    Which naturally raises the question; why was it written this way? I offer a few explanations, none of them really satisfying:

    • “Ha! I’ll write you a sequel, you bastard readers! You keep pestering me for a sequel to a twenty-five year-old classic that stands on its own? I’ll give you a frickin’ sequel.” (Also suspected to be the Thomas Harris Hannibal syndrome)
    • “Oh, no! Five days to go on my deadline, or I lose my fat advance! Gotta wrap this up quick!”
    • “It’s like, man, I’ll put my stuff about Goddd and the universe and stuff. It’ll be sooo deeep and stuff. Man, pass the joint again.”
    • “The metaphorical encounters the literal in an effort to make the reader experience the same sense of alienation as the principal characters, which nicely fits into the post-modernist ethos of nihilism-”
    • “Oh gee, I screwed up this one.”

    Pick one… but don’t pick this book in bookstores, and wait for your library copy if you really insist to see what the fuss is about.