Book Review

  • Dinosaur Summer, Greg Bear

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Books, 1998, 325 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-52098-5

    There are probably no other working SF authors as frustrating as Greg Bear.

    One part of his bibliography includes such masterpieces as Blood Music, Eon, The Forge of God or Moving Mars; Hugo-winning, hugely acclaimed novels of hard-SF with good characters and exciting prose.

    The other part of Bear includes simple-but-boring novels like Strength of Stones and a slew of rather unmemorable novels written and published between 1975 and 1985. Even some highly ambitious latter works (Queen of Angels, Slant, Anvil of Stars) have significant flaws that have alienated many readers.

    So, every new Bear novel is cause for suspense: Will it be a “Good Bear” novel or a “Boring Bear” novel? With Dinosaur Summer, bets seemed even more uncertain than usual: Even though the concept of writing a sequel to Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic The Lost World seemed iffy to modern SF readers, the original was so darn fun that one would have to work hard not to keep this same charming sense of excitement.

    Unfortunately, Greg Bear fumbles it.

    For one thing, he makes the mistake of making this an explicit “Young Adult” book by featuring a teenage protagonist. Letting aside my belief that the “Young Adult” market segment is a useless but lucrative market created by publishers for parents and libraries who should know better than to spoon-fed Holy Reading to teenager, I’ll simply note that most of my favorite novels, as a teen, simply delivered a good rousing story. The age of the protagonist had nothing to do with it.

    But let’s leave some room for doubt. After all, Dinosaur Summer has marketed as a regular SF book, without any particular trappings of the “Young Adult” demographic segment.

    It still doesn’t excuse a criminal waste of the reader’s time. Whereas The Lost World expedited its characters in harm’s way in almost no time, Dinosaur Summer ambles on like its namesakes and finally gets its first true thrilling “action” scene barely past the book’s midpoint. Worse, the writing style is almost complacently long-winded, with the predictable result that the reader’s attention is bound to wander off long before anything of interest happens. Dinosaur Summer is conceived as kind of an alternate history, with oodles of in-jokes you’ll probably miss if you blink. Okay, so Harry Harrihausen is a major character. That’s a good homage, and a pretty fun thing for him, but I don’t really get anything out of it. Samewise for everything else.

    It would seem to be an elementary requirement to include some adventure in an adventure book. Dinosaur Summer has some, mostly of the expected form of run-away-from-dinosaurs, but it comes too late, and repeats itself too often to be considered effective. Bear has done a good job in extrapolating a complete Plateau ecology, but doesn’t do much of interest with it. There’s some truly weird stuff about prophetic dreams and such, but by that time, the actual reading of the book had begun to take on nightmarish qualities. (“When will it end?”, etc…)

    Special mention should be made, however, of the rather good interior illustrations by Tony DiTerlizzi, who does a lot to save the book from total collapse.

    Still, it’s hard to see who would be interested in Dinosaur Summer. From the weak premise to the botched executions, this novel doesn’t sustain any interest. The dry, uninvolving style tries too hard to wring out some charm from its surrounding and obviously doesn’t succeed at the task.

    There is no doubt that Greg Bear can do much, much better than this. In the meantime, Dinosaur Summer will have to be classified as one of his weakest novels. Readers looking for a dash of adventure are advised to track down a copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original The Lost World.

  • Stardance, Spider and Jeanne Robinson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1977, 278 pages, C$2.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-18367-7

    Spider Robinson. There’s no one else like him in science-fiction.

    Whereas SF has traditionally been logical, mechanistic, goal-driven, conservative and scrupulously clean, Spider Robinson comes from a background that’s far away from the scientific education shared by many of hard-SF’s core membership. He has described in interviews how he had his big break in SF as his regular job was to guard a sewer plant at night. He’s stayed on both coasts of Canada, first Nova Scotia then British Columbia. He’s had some association with communes, is an outspoken drug advocate and looks exactly like one would stereotypically imagine a hippie.

    His novels reflect his background, being almost pathologically filled with motifs of universal love, friendship and happiness. His characters -usually narrators; his novel are almost always told from the first person point of view- are charmingly imperfect, yet paradoxally far more tolerant and self-describingly morally superior to your usual human. Most of his stories include one or several rants about how (pick one) intolerance, sexual monogamy, fear of communicating, racism, sexism, narrow-mindedness or other “so-typical” human traits are generally messing up the world.

    Stardance isn’t really any exception. An expanded version of Hugo and Nebula-winning novella of the same name, Stardance is narrated by Charlie, an ex-dancer made audiovisual technician by an untimely accident. He meets Shara, a dancer too big for one-gee work who finally decides to invent zero-gee dance. Suddenly, aliens appear and Shara’s super-dance convinces them not to destroy the Earth. End of original novella and the first third of the novel.

    I’m being needlessly flippant; Robinson’s greatest strength is how he can write about almost anything and make interesting through the narration. An easy prose style with carefully-chosen details and heaps of humour make up for many structural weaknesses. Even though the magically-dancing-the-aliens-away bit isn’t truly credible in itself, the novel does a good job at suspending our disbelief at this point.

    The rest of the novel follows Charlie as he sets up a zero-gee dancing school and gets whisked away to Jupiter for another race-saving dance session. (STARDANCE II: ELECTRIC BUGALOO!) It’s a hugely readable tale, reasonably well-paced and populated with interesting characters. His zero-gee assumptions are curious, but then again Robinson isn’t a Hard-SF writer.

    Even then, however, the book remains slightly annoying. It took me some time to figure out what it was, but when I did, it struck me that this flaw of Robinson’s work could be applied to his whole work.

    If you accept the theory that Spider Robinson is SF’s hippie representative, it makes sense to assume that his work will promote the ideals of this culture. Check: His whole Callahan series, for instance, creates a family-slash-support-group through a bar where everyone knows everyone’s name. Time Killer spend way too many pages promoting an idealistic view of a 1973 commune.

    However, this message of peace-love-happiness carries a none-too-explicit counter message: If you can’t love everyone else, if you can’t realize that serial monogamy is selfish and bad, if you can’t tolerate everyone then you’re scum, you’re despicable, you’re not invited to Spider Robinson’s parties and frankly, you’re not even worthy of calling yourself human. Bang. Like that. In other words, there’s a current of intolerance-for-the-intolerant that runs in all of Robinson’s fiction. It’s made worse by the holier-than-thou stand he himself takes on the subject. Liberals may grind their teeth at conservative novels, but at least conservatives don’t make any attempt to pretend they love everyone!

    Stardance goes through the same motions by clearly highlighting that zero-gee isn’t for everyone, and that only superior adaptable humans deserve to be in zero-gee. (His last-minute amendments are bunk.) Everyone else goes back in the gene pool. How tolerant…

    (In some future review, I’ll take on another Spider Robinson annoyance of mine; how individualism isn’t worth a damn for him.)

  • Chariots for Apollo, Charles R. Pellegrino & Joshua Stoff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1985 (1998 reprint), 320 pages, C$19.50 tpb, ISBN 0-380-80261-9

    Looking back over a span of thirty years, humankind’s effort to land a few of its own on the Moon seems nothing short of incredible. To think that “these people” in “that time” could do such miracles with “their technology” borders on the miraculous. Whereas today’s space program is moribund, dogged by budget cuts, drastically reduced ambitions and a surplus of overcautiousness, the effort to go to the moon shines on as a pinnacle of human ingenuity and doggedness.

    A good way to re-live this whole era is to grab a copy of Charles Pellegrino and Joshua Stoff’s Chariots for Apollo. This book, originally published in 1985 (“immediately going out of print with the Challenger explosion” [P.xiv] reminisce the authors) has recently been re-edited in trade paperback format by Avon books, and readers will find that the book has lost none of its interest. Indeed, given that fifteen more years have passed since the oft-overlooked first edition, most will appreciate this “new” book that has the advantage of hindsight and a “what-happened-to-them” afterword. Part time-capsule (several of the people interviewed for the book have died since 1985) and part historical work, Chariots of Apollo does an exceptional job at representing the low and high dramas of the Apollo era.

    Most histories of the space program will spend time in explaining the basics, or will focus on a historical heroic-figure approach. Pellegrino and Stoff are writing for a different audience: One that pretty much already knows, in general terms, what happened during that time. Furthermore, the authors admit in the prologue in focusing their attention on the overlooked heroes of the space program: The engineers and low-level technicians who actually designed and built the machines that carried Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon. Chariots for Apollo is a homage to the thousands of ordinary people doing an ordinary job in order to fulfill an extraordinary goal; put humankind on the moon.

    More specifically, it focuses on the people who designed, built and tested the Lunar Expedition Module (LEM), the tiny, brittle, crucial piece of machinery that covered the last few miles between Earth and the Moon. It has become an iconic piece of machinery, with its spider-like shape that is immediately recognizable even today. Chariots for Apollo, as the title indicates, spends a lot of time behind the scenes at Grumman, describing the laborious process which lead to the construction of the LEMs.

    There are anecdotes aplenty. From the ultra-meticulous security/safety procedures (despite which a twenty-four-foot extension cord was lost in the LEM clean room…) (despite which a squirrel found its way in the clean room and had to be shot-gunned) (despite which LEMs were physically turned upside-down to allow loose part to fall out) to oodles of near-dangerous incidents that were solved in the nick of time. (Only on Apollo 11: the glycenol lubricant crystallized in orange slush, soldering repairs had to be made on LM fuel lines days before the launch, the LEM nearly blew up from unanticipated fuel pressure seconds after landing, Armstrong accidentally broke the ignition arming switch…) The book is filled with details that even moderate space buffs like your reviewer have never seen anywhere else.

    The result is a beautifully written book, filled with fascinating details and honest human-interest stories (like the various mementoes put on the ship by construction personnel) that warmly illustrate the magnitude of humanity’s achievement in going on the moon. Maybe a bit short, and not comprehensive enough. (it is rather too focused on the LEM given the richness of related content and the misleading cover) A bit melodramatic too, but that makes for vivid reading. Like most of Charles Pellegrino’s books, this one is worth grabbing on sight.

    Solid reading about the moon program which will leave you with plenty of questions to learn more, and one overriding concern: When are we going back there?

  • The Cassini Division, Ken MacLeod

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Orbit, 1998, 240 pages, C$18.95 tpb, ISBN 1-85723-730-7

    It’s so difficult to write a good, original SF novel that writers who do manage it consistently deserve to be treasured. Why spend your time trying to figure out new and original futures when you can just file off the serial numbers of the STAR TREK universe and set a novel in this context? Why bother researching new emerging technologies when you can just randomly use buzzwords like nanotech, hyperspace and transhumanity?

    Ken MacLeod is a young hot British author who’s quickly acquiring a reputation of being at the front of the SF idea-generator pack. With now four novels to his name, he’s only now beginning to make major impact on the American scene. His third book, The Cassini Division was the first to cross the Atlantic and be published by a major American SF publisher. Why the delay? Having read MacLeod’s first, The Star Fraction, I’d argue that it’s all about politics.

    Most American SF readers -myself included- are simply not used to see complex political issues in science-fiction. When political issues are raised, they’re usually of a progressive/regressive nature: Should progress be unimpeded or not? Only a few writers -Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, L. Neil Smith, etc…- have gone beyond the simple regressive/progressive polarity that seems to dominate current American politics.

    MacLeod’s novels are different. They take place in a common future where the predominant system is Communist/Socialist, make references to bad historical periods of American/UN empires, feature capitalism as almost a social disease, etc… Annoying stuff for the average American reader, which explains why MacLeod’s first novels never made it to our shores. Truth be told, The Cassini Division is his first novel to “overcome” MacLeod’s political preoccupations and deliver a good story.

    His first novel, The Star Fraction, -available in America in a few select libraries- puts its complex politics above the plotting (which roughly concerned the making of a revolution in a chaotic feel-bad future) and suffered considerably from it. As an SF novel, it was pretty much an average effort, good enough to be a keeper but not going much further beyond that unless your politics happened to match with MacLeod’s own Socialist convictions.

    The Cassini Division is better. It takes place farther in the future (diminishing the “oh, come on!” factor) is driven by a richer plot (briefly; humans against posthumans) and is strictly more enjoyable to read than its predecessors. There’s some satiric capitalist-bashing in here too, but the goofball treatment doesn’t grate at in The Star Fraction.

    More importantly, The Cassini Division feels like fresh SF. The buzzwords are handled competently, the gadgets are new, plausible and interesting, the atmosphere of a new and interesting future is well-handled and the first-person narration is compulsively readable. It’s one of the few SF books of 1998 that deserve an eventual thorough re-read. Not many new novels on the market can claim to score points in all these categories. On the other hand, the zap conclusion will annoy more than a few readers.

    Naturally, the above caveat about politics may very well not apply to readers who are older, wiser, or simply closer to MacLeod’s political opinions. As for the remainder, well, a little argumentation is almost invariably good for the brain. And frankly, this might be the highest -as well as the most truthful- compliment one can say about The Cassini Division: Not only is it fun, but it’s also pretty good for the brain.

  • Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet, Michael Wolff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1998, 268 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-684-84881-3

    The Internet. There’s never been anything like it before, and chances are that there will never be anything like its first years again. From a technical point of view, the Internet is a one-shot result of events that somehow all coalesced in the mid-to-late nineties: The introduction of personal computers, the state of research in high-speed communication, the slow interlinking of the research backbone, the arrival of several media players, the rise of AOL, the availability of the development tools and concepts, the very basic Internet paradigm of distributed decentralization… all contributed at the explosive growth of the network.

    Who says explosive growth usually means money. And money is a very strange thing. Our current economy is really a common hallucination, where even a rumour of bad news can quickly become a true catastrophe for those involved. In this context, the Internet -touted as “the next big big thing, bigger than TV”- was seemingly designed to send investors rushing to entrepreneurs. And vice-versa.

    In Burn Rate, Michael Wolff gives a first-person testimony of the net’s early mass-media days -roughly 1996-1997-, when giants like Warner cautiously investigated what the fuss was all about, when naïve investors threw money at everything “new media” and when no one had a clue what they were doing. Same thing as today, right?

    Yes and no.

    Yes, it’s obvious that things have changed. Two years is a full generation on the web, and there’s definitely a certain air of staleness in what’s described in Burn Rate. Warner’s glorious “Pathfinder” site has been revealed for the Bad Idea it was, NetGuide is D-E-A-D dead and mergers have rocked the chaotic webscape even more. Many of the proposed business models, operating paradigms and development ideas in Burn Rate have been mutated, integrated or discarded, but are certainly not current any more.

    And yet… no, things haven’t changed. Investors still rush to “dot-com” sites (though as of this writing, a “market correction” is taking place), Venture Capitalists still hope to create the Next Big Thing on the Internet, the Web looks more like 1997 than 1997’s web looked like 1996 (there’s been a stabilization of standards) and people still don’t know what they’re doing, even though the best of them now have a clue what the Internet is all about.

    As a result, the book already reads as a quasi-anthropological glimpse in the net’s early days, and it remains to be seen if it can successfully transform itself from current business affairs to a historical document. If it does, it will be in no small part due to Wolff’s writing style, which possesses a certain humour and a telling eye for details. (The first chapter on Capital-raising conferences is an eye-opener) The book may drag in mid-read, after the initial strangeness and before Wolff’s ultimate downfall, but it can be read briskly. A good editor may have removed some meaningless name-dropping. Fortunately, the tale gets better as it ends, given Wolff’s curious position between creditors and debtors; a man forced to give up his own company after an alliance with a devilish investor.

    A few readers may detect an edge of bitterness in Wolff’s narrative, and with good reason: Even though the man is now comfortably wealthy, he nevertheless failed to grab on the big Net rush of the late nineties, and saw the parade pass him by. Fortunately, he jotted down his impressions, and the result is a funny business tragedy described in a physical object that will probably remain in business school libraries for years to come. Who knew the Internet could produce such a thing?

    Note: For such a “Webbish” book, Burn Rate‘s web site… well… sucks. Besides a “more complete” index (uh-huh…), there’s not much more here than standard brochureware, with carefully selected laudatory quotes, quotes from the book and the usual marketing drivelspeak. It’s also one of the ugliest web site I’ve seen in a long time… but don’t take my word for it, and check it out at http://www.burnrate.com/

  • Starfish, Peter Watts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1998, 374 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-812-57585-7

    The sub-genre of aquatic Science-Fiction has been dominated, for years, by Arthur C. Clarke, who parlayed a scuba-diving obsession into at least two fine novels of futuristic sea adventures, The Deep Range (harvesting whales for food) and The Ghost from the Grand Banks (raising the Titanic). That’s in addition to several other stories, subplots and non-fiction writing about the subject. Anyone even daring to cover the same ground better pay homage to the master, or else.

    That’s exactly what Toronto resident Peter Watts does in “A Niche”, the short story that formed the basis for Starfish: One of the protagonists is named Clarke. (The other; Ballard) “A Niche” ends up being the first chapter of Starfish, and the novel follows what happens after the events of the short story. “A Niche” was rather good (it was notably featured in Northern Star, a best-of anthology of Canadian short SF) and so is Starfish, despite a few problems.

    The biggest of those is probably the premise. Some things work in short stories and simply don’t translate well to bigger lengths. The concept of using mentally unstable persons as deep-sea explorers is one of these things. Suspension of disbelief is easy to sustain over twenty pages (oh, another wacky SF concept!)… but three hundred? Does anyone really think that a multi-billion mega-corporation would willingly entrust important projects to crazy personnel on the dubious premise that “an environment that drive the sane insane might drive the insane sane again?” Is anyone in the audience truly surprised when people start cracking up under all sort of pressures, both physical and psychological? Is it any wonder if none of the characters is overly sympathetic to the reader?

    Okay. Never mind that. Suspend disbelief and proceed.

    …only to be stopped again by some major structural problems. The book suffers from its origin in that the major character of the short story -Lenie Clarke- is probably not the best viewpoint characters for the full-length story. That character would probably be the “sane” psychologist Yves Scanlon, but he doesn’t arrive on-site until the novel is well in its second act. Before that, the viewpoint keeps shifting between characters who often disappear before mid-novel, creating an unfocused impression that really doesn’t help the novel get underway. Have I mentioned that for the first half of the book there’s no one even remotely worth cheering for?

    In fact, most of my good opinion of the novel comes from the last fifty pages or so, when new exciting elements (like Βehemoth) are introduced and developed as a credible plot thread. Suddenly, most of what comes before is negated or trivialized. This is good at first (it basically saves the novel), but rather unsatisfactory on further reflection. In fact, the Βehemoth plot element is so good that its late inclusion smacks of sloppy editorial guidance; why couldn’t the novel be re-conceptualized around this?

    But, as ever, let’s not be overly critical of what is, after all, a first novel. It would be unfair to forget the obvious strengths of the novel; a daring sense of originality which is admirable even when it misfires; a good grasp of unusual characters; some really good ideas that could have benefited from much more development; an obvious willingness to do keep the science exact and to present the best parts to the audience and, perhaps most importantly, a readable style that should work wonders in a different context.

    Starfish isn’t without problems, small and large, but it’s certainly a worthwhile read and a promising first novel from someone who should deliver good things in latter books. It follows in the aquatic footsteps of Arthur C. Clarke and doesn’t seem out of place in the company of the SF grandmaster. That’s not bad at all.

    Possibilities for a sequel? Get more information on that, and Peter Watts at http://www.globalserve.net/~pwatts/

  • Survivor, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    W.W. Norton, 1999, 289 pages, C$33.99 hc, ISBN 0-393-04702-4

    Okay, so your first novel, Fight Club, is an angry Gen-X declaration of war against the Baby-Boomers. It’s written in a dense, hyper-charged style that sends critics back to their thesauri for “genius” synonyms. It becomes an underground hit. It’s bought by a major Hollywood studio, adapted by a hot new screenwriter who doesn’t butcher the material and directed by one of the decade’s hottest talents. The final film is praised by younger critics, frightens every one over forty and stars Brad Pitt, fer chrissakes! What do you do for a follow-up?

    Something different, but not that different.

    Start with a great premise: The narrative is presented as being a recording inside the black box (orange, really) of a 747 about to crash in the Australian outback from lack of fuel. To reinforce the point, the pagination in Survivor run backward, from 289 to 1. The narrator, Tender Branson, is alone on the plane. All the passengers have disembarked, and the pilot has long since parachuted to the ground. Now, as Tender awaits the inevitable crash, he intends to tell how he arrived at this point.

    Continue with a memorable protagonist: Before his short career as airplanes hijacker, Tender Branson was a domestic servant. Before that, he was a member of a cult. After that, he was a media messiah. Wait. Rewind. Tender’s cult childhood has prepared him to be the best domestic servant there was. But after the whole cult suddenly self-destructs, the Government assigns a case worker to prevent Tender from killing himself like the other exiled members of the community are doing. As things evolve and his remaining fellow ex-cultists all commit suicide (or are they really?), Tender finds himself the last surviving member. Fame is only one step away, and that’s how Tender finds himself wreaking chaos at the Super Bowl half-time show. No, wait. Darn. That’s too much stuff to compress in one single paragraph.

    Wrap up everything in wacky details: The world of Tender Branson is a funhouse parody of ours, with mass suicide cults and moody clairvoyants that are also sterile surrogate mothers and underground suicide lines to pick up chicks and big murderous brothers and case workers more screwed up than their clients and prepackaged celebrities and pornography landfills and tricks to get almost any stains out of almost any material. Go ahead; ask him how.

    And polish off with a sheen of style: Fight Club would be a daunting act for anyone to follow, and indeed Chuck Palahniuk’s second novel is far less memorable that his debut, but Survivor is still a blast. Palahniuk’s style is a mix of catchy quotes (“the only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage” repeats the jacket blurb.), a mass of technical details to provide unarguable authenticity, a compulsively readable narration and some truly off-the-wall concepts. Not to mention the wacky humour: Survivor is surprisingly funny, with plenty of laugh-aloud moments that will positively bother your fellow bus passengers. (The media messiah chapters or Survivor reminded your reviewer of Mark Leyner’s underrated Et Tu, Babe? in sheer manic satire of egomanical celebrities.) Palahniuk’s vision of the world is almost positively science-fictional in nature, mocking today’s obsessions by extrapolating trends to their logical outcomes. As with Fight Club, one finishes Survivor with a sense of giddy exhaustion, a whirlwind trip through an imagination littered with land-mines.

    So lead your readers to a conclusion: Survivor is a worthy follow-up to Fight Club. Less angry, less unique, but sufficiently enjoyable in its own right. The latest rumors assign Jim Carrey and Jerry Bruckheimer as protagonist and producer of the upcoming film adaptation. Isn’t that weird enough for a weird enough book?

    An important note: The ending is not what it seems. Check out the Official Chuck Palahniuk page at http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/ for more details.

  • Choosers of the Slain, James H. Cobb

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1996, 338 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-16053-X

    The publishing industry seems to work in booms and busts. One year, fat fantasy trilogies are the rage; others, procedural murder mysteries are what gets bought. These cycles usually dramatically affect the midlist catalogue, causing good times and bad times. Die-hard fans of one particular sub-genre may pine for “golden years” when their chosen genre was all the rage.

    Among techno-thriller fans, this period is roughly between 1988 and 1992 (ironically enough; the last years of the Cold War), where big complex novels of imaginary wars underwent their apogee in terms of publishing attention. During that time, Tom Clancy wrote The Cardinal of the Kremlin and Clear and Present Danger, Dale Brown Day of the Cheetah, Larry Bond Vortex, with other authors like Harold Coyle, Payne Harrison and Joe Weber producing their best novels.

    Now, Clancy feels bloated, Brown has lost its freshness, Harrison has turned UFO-nutso and Bond, Coyle and Weber have moved on to historical novels or -gack- plain thrillers. It’s easy to say that the technothriller boom of the early has come and gone. But that’s a simplistic view of things, because no publishing sub-genre ever dies; it may go underground, sustain less authors, but if you look hard enough, nothing ever prevents you from finding a steady trickle of good technothrillers in the late nineties.

    James H. Cobb’s first novel, Choosers of the Slain, is a perfect example of the kind of totally enjoyable technothriller to come by in the “lean” years of the technothriller. It’s short, snappy, to the point, completely fluent in the conventions of the genre and genuinely thrilling. As with most memorable techno-thrillers, the setting has been chosen with maximum impact in order to provide chills to the reader: Antarctica.

    This isn’t the first time that the Southern latitudes have been mined by technothrillers authors. Payne Harrison’s superlative Thunder of Erebus used the setting to maximum effect, producing a novel as exciting as it was memorable. More recently (ah-ha, another good late-nineties technothriller!), Judith and Steven Garfield-Reeves’ 1998 Icefire used Antarctica’s ice shelf as a pivotal plot device for a globe-spanning techno-thriller.

    But Cobb brings new things to Antarctica, the most striking of them being a female military protagonist, USS Cunningham Commander Amanda Garrett. It is she who will have to hold sentry for the US Government, as a blockade is imposed on Argentina for the invasion of British bases on the south continent. While Argentineans prepare intimidation manoeuvres and, later on, all-out attacks on her stealth destroyer, Garrett also finds herself attracted to another member of the crew… already proving herself to be a notch above her automaton cardboard counterparts in most other technothrillers. Neither superwoman nor feminist poster heroine, Garrett is entirely believable, and it’s to Cobb’s credit that he’s able to sustain her presence without resorting to easy clichés. Support human characters; buy the book!

    Most importantly, Choosers of the Slain has everything you’d like in a technothriller: Great title, believable premise, sympathetic supporting protagonists, very cool gadgets, historical depth, optimized length (neither too short nor too g’darn long), spectacular combat scenes and limpid writing. It has its flaws (the romantic subplot grates somewhat, though it must be noted that this isn’t the immediate down-and-dirty affair you’d expect, but a rather restrained, even mature, series of quiet scenes), but usually it’s simply a lot of fun.

    Cobb proves that the legacy of the technothriller’s heydays is still alive and well. Choosers of the Slain is the first book in a series and bodes well for the other volumes. (The equally enjoyable Sea Strike is available in paperback, with another announced later in 2000) In the meantime, techno-thrillers fans will be able to get their escapist fix and discover a new hot author to replace the fallen ones.

  • Teranesia, Greg Egan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 1999, 249 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-06855-8

    Greg Egan is back, and this time he’s offering something different.

    Egan has made his enviable reputation in the Science-Fiction field (“One of the genre’s great ideas men” —The Times) by delivering stories and novels with an unusually high concept density. It also helps that he’s a hard-SF writer of the old school: All of his stories are built around one cool idea and the question “What if…?”

    On the other hand, most critics have been prompt to mention that Egan isn’t a good stylist, doesn’t build compelling characters or writes lamentable dialogue. (To be fair, there’s some truth to this: Egan often comes up in English-French translation discussions, as a case example of the trade-offs needed to remain faithful to the source material; most translators just itch to “improve” his prose style.)

    Egan’s previous 1998 novel, Diaspora, was a dense, fiercely original, quasi-unreadable work of impressive vision and frustrating writing. Any SF writer could justifiably take a break after such an effort. Most readers, however, won’t expect the complete shift taken with Teranesia.

    It starts with a lengthy prologue in which we’re introduced to Prabir Suresh, a nine-year-old boy living with his sister and his parent scientists alone on Teranesia, an isolated Indonesian island. Stuff happens and Prabir is forced to seek refuge in Canada along with his sister. Years later, Prabir finds himself drawn once again to Teranesia, lured by reports of unexplainable mutations.

    The first surprise of Teranesia is its pacing. Unlike the often-frenetic movement that characterized the first few pages of his first novels, like the breathtaking “digitalization” scene that opens Permutation City or the mesmerizing after-death-confession of Distress, Teranesia leisurely establishes Prabir’s character before doing anything else. It’s unusual for Egan, and not really practical in hooking the reader’s attention.

    The leisurely pace is maintained though most of the book, but the book’s appeal picks up once the narrative moves to Toronto, just in time for vicious (and overdone, yet hysterically funny) attacks on new-age / feminist / post-modernist / anti-science rhetoric. If you pay attention, you’ll notice by this point that the prose is more pondered, the characters more fleshed out than in Egan’s previous work. There aren’t as many idea, though, even if Egan fans will recognize most of the landscape. In representing a non-Anglocentric near-future scenario, Egan evokes memories of recent works by Bruce Sterling.

    The late explosion of concepts, when it comes, is a lot of fun though there’s a feeling that they arrive a little too late for full satisfaction. The unfinished ending (“AND WHAT HAPPENS *NEXT*??”) is also disappointing, -yet a cut above Egan’s usual reformat-the-universe conclusions- and adds to the feeling that for a writer who ventured in post-human territory as often as Egan, he’s taking a curiously reactionary position…

    The result is kind of a new Egan, one that seemingly set out to write an easygoing novel to address most of his perceived weaknesses: the prose, the characters, the ending… While Teranesia doesn’t fully live up to Egan’s previous body of work, it’s a novel that shows promise for the author’s next books. It’s probably not coincidental that Teranesia is also the author’s most accessible novel. It’s always interesting to see an author grow…

  • Cosm, Gregory Benford

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon EOS, 1998, 374 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-380-79052-1

    Even though “Science” is fully half of science-fiction, its representation in most SF stories is simply appalling. One cannot count the number of cheap stories in which The Answers seem to be held by one clever fellow who can also whip up a universe-saving device in five minutes and still get the girl. (Watch INDEPENDENCE DAY again. Discuss your disgust.)

    Real-world science truly doesn’t work that way. Answers are found after messy, meticulous trial-and-error procedures that don’t result in flashes of insight as much as in slow theoretical elaboration. And that’s still in the lab, because outside the lab lies even more drudgery; endless paperwork to apply for research grants, constant academic or corporate social infighting, political pressures… The appalling state of today’s science is matched only by our disgusting lack of knowledge about it.

    All of this must have crossed Gregory Benford’s mind as he sat down to write Cosm, his latest science-fiction novel. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, so he presumably knows what near-future hard science-fiction is all about.

    At first glance, there’s not much excitement in Cosm‘s premise: Almost by accident, an ordinary scientist creates a shiny meter-wide sphere in a particle accelerator experiment that goes wrong. She keeps the sphere and starts studying it. No big pyrotechnic displays, no mind-blowing SF concepts.

    And, for most of the book, that’s where things stay. The sphere proves to be an interesting phenomenon, but not one that has the inherent potential to arouse the jaded reader’s interest.

    Most of the novel’s impact comes from other strengths, such as its insider’s glimpse into contemporary science. The political battles, dirty academic tricks and real-world concerns of most working scientists are faithfully described.

    Second is the attention that Benford brings to his protagonist. Alicia Butterworth is, simply put, one of the most impressively realized characters in recent SF. She’s not a beauty queen (far from it), she’s not a terribly charming person (her dismal dating record proves it), she’s not supernaturally smart (part of her appeal is that she’s an average scientist) and she realistically suffers from the twin handicaps of being both black and female in a white male environment. Her struggles and triumphs are made more real by being solidly anchored in the real world.

    The result is, without question, Benford’s best book. The prose is lively and compulsively readable, the pacing holds up, the supporting characters are well-defined, the book is peppered with great throwaway lines and as a result, the book nearly reads itself in less time than you’d think. Good scenes, believable dialogue, a few physics jokes and a lot of nifty personal insight: Cosm raises the bar for the rest of Hard-SF. Through exceptional writing, the appeal of the book goes well beyond SF territory, though fans of the genre will not feel any dumbing-down of the material.

    There are still a few rough spots whenever it’s time to place all the events in a greater context, like some knee-jerk media-bashing, and simplistic fundamentalist overreaction. (Though this leads to a typical kidnapping scenario that, for once, plays as if a smart kidnapee was involved.) General-interest readers might quibble that the science stuff is overwhelming (sheesh; a few graphs and everyone screams bloody murder!) and that the pacing is dull. Nothing that we’re not led to expect, really.

    But with Cosm, Gregory Benford turns out the novel we’ve been waiting to read from him: A purely hard-SF tale that’s at the same time written with zest and a whole lot of skill. Recommended reading.

  • Spyworld, Mike Frost and Michel Gratton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Seal/Bantam, 1995, 275 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7704-2707-3

    If you’re like me, you tend to assume that the vast majority of modern spying is handled by the Americans. Dozens, hundreds of spy movies and semi-fiction technothrillers, most of them produced in the United States, have conditioned us to accept the FBI, CIA and NSA as undisputed masters of electronic spying. Compared to them, the very though of, say, Canadians trying out their luck at espionage is somehow completely ridiculous.

    And yet, even masters need their apprentices. Mike Frost was one of them, an employee of Canada’s NSA-equivalent, the Communication Security Establishment (CSE). From the early seventies to 1990, Frost was at the forefront of Canada’s electronic spying initiative. As he makes it clear, it was all sponsored, equipped and suggested by the Americans… though the apprentice would eventually surprise the master.

    Electronic spying isn’t exciting in a cinematographic fashion. Instead of seducing enemy agents, photographing secret documents and shooting oneself out of trouble, it basically means intercepting, decoding and analyzing radio communications. All of which can be safely conducted from a more-or-less safe location, like an embassy.

    But even if physical danger isn’t a factor, the international spying game has its own sets of rules, where embarrassment can be the ultimate failure. It’s simply not done to pack up electronic equipment and set it up in the embassy. Things have to be done stealthily as so not to awaken doubts, even among the embassy personnel itself.

    Frost, along with collaborator Michel Gratton, clearly traces the evolution of Canadian electronic spying efforts, from amateurishness in Moscow (lack of preparation leading to funny anecdotes concerning the shipping of the electronic equipment, including sending a high-powered drill to pierce a safe, cutting up a five-foot dish antennae in shippable pieces and taking chances with an underpowered elevator.) to stealing profitable trade secrets from the Chinese.

    This is heavy-duty modern spying, and each step of the way is meticulously detailed. Embassy selection, equipment installation, personnel training and data transmission are all crucial steps, described in here. And it all feels real, without too much sensationalism or outlandish claims.

    Well, almost without too many outlandish claims. Like most general-interest books about the spying business, Spyworld raises issues of domestic privacy and government powers in communication interception. Should the CSE have the power to intercept domestic communications? Should it be overseen by a committee of elected officials? Unfortunately, these questions are nothing new; the book is more effective in demonstrating the powers of contemporary spying capacities than in explicitly decrying its possible excesses.

    In any case, the end result is a non-fiction account that’s interesting, not too technically obscure, with some great anecdotes and which lifts a small corner of the veil over some very real spying practices. Not a bad read, if only for a few moments of national pride.

  • Day of Wrath, Larry Bond

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Books, 1998, 481 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 0-446-51677-5

    Almost every avid reader has a “buy-on-sight” list of especially meritorious authors whose books are of such invariable good quality that they warrant the 35$ gamble of a brand-new hardcover. Mine is composed of people like Tom Clancy, Greg Egan, Bruce Sterling, John Varley, Neal Stephenson… all of which can be depended upon for conceptually solid, physically thick pieces of entertainment.

    Larry Bond holds the distinction of having been taken off my “buy-on-sight” author list after his 1996 book The Enemy Within. His first three books -four if you include his WW3 super-thriller collaboration with Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising– were grand spectacles of future war, hugely complex tales of nations run amok and superb set-pieces played upon technical, political and military battlefields. Red Phoenix, Vortex and Cauldron were deeply impressive techno-thrillers, brimming with unexpected rewards at more than 500 pages each. Cauldron was bought-on-sight.

    So was The Enemy Within. But upon reading this limp thriller devoid of the sweeping scope of his earlier books, I was not tempted by the sequel, Day of Wrath. Two years later, Day of Wrath is available at dirt-cheap prices in used bookstores, and that’s where Larry Bond and I meet again.

    After reading his latest effort, Larry Bond stays off my A-list.

    The problem is the same than with The Enemy Within: Is that it? Bond had proven his ability to send thousands of men in mega-battles, moving pieces off gigantic chessboards, meticulously describing capacities and weaknesses of high-tech hardware and in seamlessly integrating multiple protagonists.

    Nothing of that sort in his “thriller” phase. Both The Enemy Within and Day of Wrath concentrate on a couple of protagonists: Colonel Peter Thorn and Agents Helen Gray. And despite the focus, these two characters combined can’t equal the interest of any of the bit-players in Bond’s previous novels.

    Day of Wrath is bland. Predictable. Implausible. Déjà-vu. Limp. Nothing special. Once again, a gna-ha-ha grandmaster of evil hates the Americans for some trivial childhood trauma and badly wants to attack the United States. Once again, his diabolic plans are foiled by Thorn and Grey. Nothing we haven’t seen before, even in the details.

    To be fair, Day of Wrath isn’t all that badly written in the confines of the thriller genre. The novel is obviously padded -did we have to frolic across most of Europe?- but I guess that intentionally done in an effort to satisfy beach readers. At least there is a heightening of tension by the end of the book -cruise missiles aimed at Washington are good at that-, though you’ll have to wade through a lot of Commando-type silliness (Two humans! Against a compound filled with world-class terrorists!) in order to get to this point.

    But even an okay thriller doesn’t begin to match the level of Bond’s earlier super-thrillers. Reading the cover blurbs for the paperback edition of Day of Wrath -and assorted comments from Amazon.com customers-, I’m amazed at how some readers seem to think that Bond has “matured out of the technothriller” genre, as if he did better stuff now than before.

    Let me set those fools straight: Bond has declined. He isn’t as much fun to read as he was before. It’s not only the stories themselves, but also the details, the plotting, the characters that are worse than before. It’s not as if we could blame a lack of time; he’s still publishing at two-years intervals. It’s not as if we could blame publishing pressures: Stephen Coonts and James H. Cobb are still publishing decent future-war novels.

    It’s almost as if we have to blame Larry Bond. (“Your name is Bond, *Larry* Bond”.) Well so be it; he stays off my buy-on-sight list.

  • Renegades of the Empire, Michael Drummond

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Crown Publishers, 1999, 297 pages, C$38.00 hc, ISBN 0-609-60416-3

    Microsoft has grown, in little more than twenty years, from a small unknown company working in a promising but modest field to a symbol of American Business. Through a lot of luck, at least one good decision, questionable market practices and some high-powered brainpower, Microsoft has not only made a lot of money, but had a significant impact on the evolution of contemporary computing. Computer experts curse Microsoft, but that’s irrelevant, because the general public *knows* Microsoft.

    As such, it’s almost a given that several books a year are published about Microsoft. Despite ironclad nondisclosure clauses inserted in almost all Microsoft contracts, one can get a pretty good picture of the company’s internal practices through the mass of information published about it.

    In this context, Renegades of the Empire is both an interesting read and a disappointment. It stated purpose, at least on its jacket blurb, is to provide an insider’s view of how three lone coders defied the rules of the company, developed a new ground-breaking technology and got it accepted by high management. Fine and well, except that this story, the “DirectX” episode, ends barely a hundred pages in the book. Then it’s on to the “Chromeffects” follow-up, some coverage of Microsoft in court, and such.

    The true value of the book is in describing the way projects grow or wither inside Microsoft. A company made of largely genius-level employees cannot work in the same fashion as the rest of American businesses, and so we get an insider’s view of a company where going on vacation might mean finding your best colleagues gone by the time you come back. A company where big-boss BillG might argue with underlings just to see if they can hold under the pressure. A company where throwing books and walking around in Viking regalia might prove your point.

    Renegades of the Empire is filled with anecdotes, from wild staff parties (to the tune of a few hundred thousand dollars) to renegade demos to outside developers (“I know what you think of Microsoft” says the presenter, as an on-screen graphic behind him shows the Windows 3.1 logo being shot-gunned.) to how one of the book’s protagonist fired off a raucous memo that did exactly what he wanted —get him fired.

    But ultimately, the book loses a lot of steam at it goes along. The rebellious streak of the three heroes worked well on DirectX, but even as of this writing, Chromeffects seems moribund at best. Not exactly an happy ending here. This lack of resolution looms over the last half of the book, and might account for the diminishing interest of the book.

    Fortunately, Drummond is an able vulgarizer; not only does the technical part make sense to a layperson, but they also make sense to technical people, which is essential to the text’s credibility.

    In a domain almost exclusively ruled by instant dispatches on the Internet, a book allows the luxury of lengthy exploration and analysis, as well as a more coherent version of events that is muted when reporting immediate events. Renegades of the Empire contextualizes various events (like the Department of Justice investigation, unfortunately still ongoing as this review is written) in a coherent whole. On the other hand, this synthesis is less than successful given the unfinished state of what’s described in the account. Was Renegades of the Empire published too soon? Maybe.

    And how does Microsoft fare in all this, a so-called insider’s account from a third-party publisher? Quite well, actually. The Darwinian business practices at Microsoft are described as kind of a symbol of American innovation. There’s a telling quote where Bill Gates complain that Americans can’t stand help but be suspicious of absolute business success. Microsoft does makes mistakes -after all, that’s why the book title contains the word “renegades”-, but is able to learn from its mistakes.

    And that, industry veterans will tell you, is Microsoft’s most valuable asset.

  • Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Owl Books, 1996, 208 pages, C$19.50 tpb, ISBN 0-8050-6297-1

    Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden.

    The barrel of the gun pressed against the back of my throat, Tyler says, “We really won’t die.”

    And so begins Chuck Palahniuk’s exceptional first novel Fight Club. If the above lines don’t already send you rushing off to the bookstore, keep reading.

    Most readers, including myself, first heard about Fight Club from David Fincher’s 1999 film, which starred Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. I was lucky enough to see the film at an advance screening, and cherish the memory of a darkly funny, nihilistic yet curiously uplifting piece of cinema. I awarded it the top spot on my “Best of 1999” list, and naturally began to hunt down the novel on which the film was based.

    Consciously or not, -after all, this is a story partly about anti-consumerism- Owl Book didn’t re-release Fight Club in sync with the film. I had to wait three months until I finally saw it in local bookstores. I hesitated a few seconds, started to read a few lines to pass the time and soon found myself beginning the second chapter without missing a beat. You can’t ignore a book that pulls you in like that. So, faithful to Tyler Durden’s subversive spirit, I paid by credit card… while also buying a book about Jerry Springer. I can already imagine the face of the government analyst sifting through bookstore credit records: “Oh no, an anarchist who’s also stupid enough to like Springer!”

    Reading Fight Club is nearly as memorable as seeing the film, and takes about as much time: At 207 pages, this isn’t a big novel, and yet it feels as substantial as a full 500-pager for the sheer density of good material. Palahniuk writes with panache, but also with concision and the ratio of quotes-to-pages is truly astonishing.

    Must most of all, Fight Club is an *angry* book. Far angrier than the sweetened-up version shown on screen. Critical reception for Fincher’s FIGHT CLUB was polarized, with younger critics praising it and older critics hating the “violence” of the film. Well, these older critics obviously shouldn’t even touch the book, because it’s ten times worse. While the film has a body count of exactly one, the book makes no distinction between civilian and enemy, praises guns and exercises no restraint. From page two onward (“shag carpet of people”), Fight Club is one of the meanest books I’ve read.

    I was in the mood to destroy… everything beautiful I couldn’t have. Burn the Amazon rain forest. Open the dump valves on supertankers. Put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda. Don’t think of this as extinction. This of this as downsizing. For years, humans had screwed up this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I wanted to burn the Louvre. This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead. [P.122-124]

    It gets worse. So much worse, actually, that even though there’s immense cathartic satisfaction in reading Fight Club, it’s not as comfortable an experience as what I now think of as the “sweet Hollywood version.” The endings are also considerably different: the book packs in an extra punch or two.

    Edgy? Certainly, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Worthwhile? Absolutely, especially if you’re a twenty/thirtysomething male. See the film then read the book? Yes, in this order.

    (One final note: Screenwriter Jim Uhls’ work in adapting Fight Club for the silver screen is absolutely phenomenal, carrying memorable quotes and scenes, adding more material in the same vein and toning it down just enough to make it palatable to audiences. Would have been well-worth an Oscar nomination.)

  • Visions, Michio Kaku

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Anchor, 1997, 403 pages, C$19.95 tpb, ISBN 0-385-48499-2

    Science-as-solution has taken a beating over the last century. While pundits of the Victorian era could confidently claim that “Science will solve everything!”, they were too close to the soot and grime of Industrial-era London to know better. We have the benefit of hindsight, and names like Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Challenger and Thalidomide to remind us of what happens when mistakes happen.

    In this context, it’s a bit adventurous to write a book with a subtitle like “how science will revolutionize the 21st century”. Even though Americans haven’t lost their lust for new technology (as exemplified by the five years it took for the Internet to enter mainstream status), surely we’ve seen the end of the “scientific revolutions”, haven’t we? It’s not as if there are sizeable dragons to be explained away yet, right? Aren’t we reaching the end of science?

    Ironically, this “end of science” argument closes Charles Sheffield’s book Borderlands of Science, a similarly-themed overview of the limits of today’s science. Kaku begins with this questions, answering it with a compelling argument: While it is true that we are reaching the limits of the Age of Understanding -a Theory of Everything is even in sight-, we are only beginning the Age of Mastery, where we’ll apply our pure knowledge in increasingly practical ways.

    This Age of Mastery, according to Kaku, will spring from three different sources: the Quantum revolution, computer revolution and biomolecular revolution.

    Readers already familiar with the field of scientific vulgarization probably already recognize Michio Kaku’s name from his previous book, the superb Hyperspace, which managed to teach superstring theory in an entertaining fashion. Vision doesn’t equal the sheer fun of the previous book, but stand alone as a successful attempt to survey today’s science and to predict where it will lead us in 2050 and beyond. Obviously, no single person can make such a judgement. Sheffield’s Borderlands of Science was a half-failure because he didn’t have the necessary knowledge to make accurate projections beyond the realm of physics. Kaku sidesteps the difficulty by donning a reporter’s hat and interviewing specialists outside his own sphere of competence. The result is a book that does feel like an overlong TV documentary at times, but that also covers most of the important subjects.

    And so we go from ubiquitous PCs to global communications to artificial intelligence to beyond silicon to DNA decoding to genetic therapy to molecular medicine to longevity to genetic engineering to interstellar colonization. All subjects are examined in three different time frames: From here to 2020, from 2020 to 2050 and beyond 2050. Each major theme is followed by a counterpoint chapter which questions the pro-scientific assumptions of the previous chapters. If Visions somehow isn’t complete, well, it sure does feel complete.

    As with any overview, there are rough patches. Ironically, the single major strength of Hyperspace, a sense-of-wonder at new theories, simply isn’t present in Visions, which for the most part presents material that’s quite familiar to anyone following technology news: Nanotechnology and immortality and semi-sentient computers have been discussed to death in Science-Fiction and socio-technological forums; while their inclusion is essential to Visions, they’re not new or especially mind-bending.

    But it doesn’t really matter: Visions packages a really thorough mini-guide to science in a few hundred pages, and does so with a good sense of organization, plenty of sources, a good index and a very accessible writing style. Best read by individuals not currently aware of the cutting-edge fields of research, but also enjoyable by anyone else. Good stuff.

    Still, I wonder how well it’ll read ten, twenty-five years from now… at the current pace of research, it almost looks as if we might be well beyond his most optimistic projections by then!