Reviews

  • Monolith (1993)

    Monolith (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 1997) Bad and stupid SF thriller, starring then-unknown Bill Paxton and Lindsay Cromwell (“Who?” “The blonde psychologist in Op-Center!” “Ah!”). The setup is intriguing (a female Russian scientist shoots a young boy) but the script quickly dissolves in a series of routine “alien cover-up” scenes. So routine that the plot seems to have been forgotten in the writer’s head. Remarkable mostly for the total absence of monoliths in the movie, despite the title. The conclusion is brain-damagingly stupid. Avoid.

  • Liar Liar (1997)

    Liar Liar (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 1997) Jim Carrey is great as a lawyer unable to lie during a full day. Never mind the ambiguous script, the disappointing finale and the sugar-coated messages, this is one of the best comedies of the year. I don’t think that Carrey is the ultimate comedian, but he has charm, and the movie would be much poorer without him. There are more than a few good jokes other than Carrey’s antics, which probably accounts for the movie’s long-running success.

  • Kôkaku Kidôtai [Ghost In The Shell] (1995)

    Kôkaku Kidôtai [Ghost In The Shell] (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On VHS, April 1997) Great anime movie, based on an equally superb manga. It’s far from being perfect (variable quality of animation, a lot of overlong scenes, classic “anime” annoyances) but it’s the best -and the smartest!- SF movie I’ve seen in a while. The plot is something between Nikita and Blade Runner: Female killer android searches for her identity. This movie passes my criteria for good media SF: I could imagine reading this as a short story.

  • The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Prism, 1995, 520 pages, C$8.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-06-105648-0

    Ah, new bookstores… For the average bibliophile, few things are as pleasant in life than discovering a new bookstore. In the Ottawa area, we’ve been lucky lately (despite the closing of the House of Speculative Fiction): Both a downtown mega-bookstore (Chapters) and a new SF bookstore (Basilisk Dreams Books) have opened in the last six months or so.

    But this isn’t a review of a bookstore… To make a long and potentially boring story short, let’s just say that my first trip to resulted in the purchase of a long-awaited book: The Time Ships. Curiously enough, this particular edition isn’t supposed to be published in Canada… Indeed, the jacket copy lists only one (American) price. Bad move from Harper Prism, or restrictive rights agreements?

    Still, you can’t keep an SF reader away from a good book. My reasons to be curious about The Time Ships were diverse: It was a 1996 Hugo Nominee. It wasn’t available at the library. It wasn’t available at any other bookstore. AND, it’s the first “approved” sequel to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.

    Now, understand that I’m no particular fan of Wells. His prose style was fine for the turn of the century, but today… it’s a bit full of cobwebs. But even then, one cannot help to admire the legacy left by a few novels and shorter stories. Wells tackled on themes as invisibility, time-travel and alien invasions a full century before INDEPENDENCE DAY… with considerably more intelligence. But that’s another essay.

    The Time Ships picks up where Wells’ story ended: The Time Traveller resolves to go back to the Eloi/Morlock world. Of course, things aren’t that simple, and five hundred pages of various adventures follow. We get far-future extrapolation, an alternate history, a robinsonade and another far-future big-canvas scenario. To say more would be a spoiler.

    The book is told “a la Wells”, which is to say, using a pseudo-Victorian style. I wasn’t too enthused about that, but I was surprised at how readable the whole book was. This, incidentally, also makes The Time Ships surprisingly accessible to any reader unfamiliar with science-fiction: The complicated concepts of alternate worlds, time-travel, etc… are explained to them as they are explained to our time-travelling (Victorian) hero. We sometimes get the false impression that this is a book Wells could have written himself.

    But Baxter did write the book, and should be deservedly proud of it: He tackles on big subjects here and succeeds more than he fails. I felt the book was more interesting when he veered off Wells’ ideas than when he followed the first book’s story, but that’s a highly subjective opinion.

    The Hugo nomination for this book was warranted. Whether it should have won is another matter entirely, which I won’t discuss here… But this is still a superior read: Grab it, read it. Baxter is now on my “to catch up on!” list.

  • The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    DTP, 1975, 805 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-440-53981-1

    I read Gravity’s Rainbow, once.

    It sounds like a shameful admission, and that’s not far from the truth. Even years after the horrendous experience, I still remember the darn book’s page count (760) since I glanced at it every four pages or so. I never read something I understood less (except, maybe, for my calculus manuals… but I digress). There are a few other anecdotes relating to this book. (Like how I managed to read it at a traditional canadian maple-syrup party and (the day after) right in the middle of a family emergency.) But that’s another story for another time.

    Suffice to say that I approached The Illuminatus! Trilogy with a similar state of mind: Was this going to be another postmodern 800-pages muddle? Would I be able to enjoy anything?

    The answers were… surprising. I don’t usually like literary experiments, and still shudder at the memory of Gravity’s Rainbow. But The Illuminatus Trilogy is different.

    For one thing, there is actually a story in here. It’s over-convoluted, way too long and stuffy like you wouldn’t believe, but it’s still a story. Never mind that most of the book doesn’t “happen” in chronological order, there’s a more-or-less defined beginning and end here. (The middle is all over the place).

    That story, to put it simply, is the exposition of all the conspiracies that control society. From the Kennedy assassinations to the pyramid on the american $1 bill (which, speaking as a Canadian, still freaks me out) everything can be traced to one controlling group: The Illuminatus! Of course, the “truth” (if there is such a thing) is far less simple. If the Mafia part, over, under or a creation of the Illuminatus? Or is it the other way around? At one point in the novel, there are about three thousand groups that may or may not be in conflict and simultaneously part of the same organisation. If that’s confusing, don’t worry: It’s part of the enjoyment one gets from the trilogy.

    To paraphrase one of the cover blurbs; you won’t know what’s happening, but you’ll have too much fun to notice. For fun is what’s included in The Illuminatus! Trilogy that’s missing from the other literary “stuff”. Whether you’re looking for gratuitous sex scenes (there are many, but -unfortunately!- less of them as the book advances), “cameos” by celebrities (Adolph Hitler, H.P. Lovecraft and Buckminster Fuller, to name a few), dramatic ironies (heh-heh-heh) or plain jokes (My favourite: “He worked with Smith-1, Smith-2 and Smith-3, three identical siamese triplets. Their father was a mathematician, so he indexed rather than named them.”)

    Never mind that everything is outright incoherent fantasy. Forget that the book would have been immensely clearer with blank lines between sections. Pass over the 70-some pages of appendices. Drive the insane pseudo-erudite details out of your mind… This is fun stuff, for mature reader. “Mature” here being ability to digest twenty-odd plots occurring simultaneously at different points in time…

    Unavoidable flaws are evident: There is a very “early seventies” feel to the trilogy, not surprising given the copyright date. Also, I felt that the ending is a bit drawn-out… but a re-reading might correct this impression.

    Nevertheless, high conditional marks for The Illuminatus! Trilogy. If only for the explanation of why the Pentagon is built that way… Just don’t forget: They might be controlling you, right now!

  • Virtual Destruction, Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1996, 327 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-00308-7

    There are times where I really wish for honesty in advertising. Or at least in cover blurbs. Even though Virtual Destruction isn’t as bad as some horrendously misleading cover copy I’ve seen, it still angers me to see bad labelling like this-

    but perhaps the only problem is in my own mind. You see, no one will contest the affirmation that Virtual Destruction is Science-Fiction. To wit:

    At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, scientists (ie: computer nerds) are putting the last touches on a revolutionary technology: Virtual Reality. But as the date of an important demonstration approaches, the project leader is found in the VR room, dead. Is it a murder, or not? And who did it?

    Much like the likeable Walter Jon Williams thriller Days of Atonement, Virtual Destruction uses a near-future locale as background to a “murder mystery”. But whereas Days of Atonement had a resolution that hinged specifically on science-fiction, Virtual Destruction mostly uses VR as a prop… the real guts of the novel are elsewhere.

    There are other problems too. While Days of Atonement was a solid thriller that stood on its own from beginning to end, I got the impression that Virtual Destruction was nothing more than the start of the “Craig Kreident, High-Tech FBI Agent” series. While Kreident is an enormously pleasant protagonist, he’s not as well developed as his Days of Atonement counterpart. This is probably intentional, since series hero can’t have all the stuffing knocked out of them in volume one, hmm?

    I will be forthright in saying that I do not enjoy reading about retarded (or even “dim”) characters, of which there are two in Virtual Destruction and whose plight is milked for maximum pathos. But that’s just me.

    In the end, Virtual Destruction might be better suited to another category: “Best Sellers”. Like it or not, I interpret Virtual Destruction as an attempt from Anderson and Beason to write accessible, wide-span yarns like Crichton, Cussler and the like.

    It’s a successful attempt, mostly. As said before, the character of Agent Kreident is sufficiently sympathetic to engage the reader. The prose style is fast and readable. The SF trappings are meticulously described, and there’s an impression of authenticity from the novel.

    The resolution, for reasons that will remain a spoiler, is a letdown on several fronts. Some plot threads are dropped without adequate resolution. I liked the fact that one potential flaw was turned into a virtue by one plot resolution. On the other hand, a certain scene intended to be powerful came up as flat because… get this… virtual means not real!

    The biggest flaw of this novel is that it’s surprisingly fluffy. Light, escapist, bestselling entertainment. That’s not a bad thing per se… if you’ve got the right expectations.

    Still, it’s better than the usual Crichton.

    [Jan’98: There is indeed going to be a “Craig Kreident” series of Techno-Thrillers. I intend to read’em as soon as they come out at my local library.]

  • Otherness, David Brin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1994, 357 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-29528-4

    David Brin is one of my favourite writers, ever. His fiction is full of technological optimism, cautious but determined environmentalist, good old Campellian human chauvinism and rockin’ action. More than anything else, Brin reminds me of early Niven stories, where the galactic void was the limit, characters dared to go beyond it and ideas flowed freely. He may not write the most polished prose ever, but Brin never loses sight of the reason readers buy his books: To be entertained. For that reason alone, a single of Brin’s short stories is worth more to me than truckloads of stuffy self-conscious literary dreck. (Okay, so I’m hyperbolating again. Shoot me.)

    The River of Time, his first short story collection, was probably the best single-author short story collection I’ve ever read, the only other contender being Greg Egan’s Axiomatic. So, it’s really unexcusable that I waited so much time to read Otherness, more than three years after it came out on the market.

    The bad news is that it’s less overwhelmingly impressive as The River of Time. The good news is that it’s still a Brin anthology; fun and fascination available for all.

    This isn’t your usual “bag’o’stories” collection: The book is divided in five thematic sections, from “Transitions” to “Otherness”. Included in the mix are story notes (unusually placed in the middle of the section) and short essays mostly concerned about the theme of “Otherness”.

    What is that Otherness thing Brin seems to be so enthusiastic about? Well, it’s a bit like this: Only in the Western world today, do we have an obsession at proving that we are wrong: Youth questions authority, historian question traditional interpretation of history, children are expected to be better (ie: not do what their parents did wrong), people often using the expression “But I might be wrong”, outright glorification of other cultures, etc… This is socially unprecedented, and a good thing, says Brin in a much better way than I can. The essay in which this principle is first explained is hilarious and profoundly fascinating. Recommended reading.

    The rest of the book is mostly entertaining. The only dull section is “Cosmos”, where literary tricks take the initiative, and the story suffers. “What continues, what fails…” has a fantastic premise but an overlong execution that still didn’t grab me, even the second time around.

    A seemingly disproportionate amount of stories deal with motherhood (At least four of them), an unusual theme for a male author. A typically Campbellian “human-uber-alles” story, “The Warm Space” is also the weakest of the volume. I particularly enjoyed “Those Eyes” (a story) and “What to say to an UFO” (an essay) for the coldly rationalistic perspective of the UFO hysteria. “Detritus Affected” was very interesting up to the ending, which is absent.

    Overall, a pleasant but not really spectacular anthology. The cover illustration by Donato is lovely, and the whole anthology can be read in a short amount of time. Not to be missed by any Brin fan.

  • Infectress, Tom Cool

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1997, 370 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-87763-1

    Briefly: I like techno-thrillers and I love Hard SF, so it’s not a surprise if I’ve found Infectress to be such a pleasant read. Fast-paced action, adequate characters, a strong grasp of the SF devices and clever little touches makes this one of the best first novels I’ve read lately.

    Baen books has a tradition of publishing novels more concerned about plasma guns than deep philosophical insights. I happen to like good action/adventure SF, so I’m always curious about the latest Baen offerings. Whatever high literary standards SF aspires to, there’s not denying that the genre’s true genesis comes from the pulse-pounding pulp-ish plots. Infectress probably won’t convert anyone already sold out to the “fine literature” crowd, but is solid entertainment for those who crave a few explosions in their fiction. Thriller fans will feel right at home with this smart tale of terrorism, secret agents and high-tech police work.

    Infectress focuses on the character of Arabella, more commonly known as “Infectress”, a high-tech terrorist with a long history of bloody violence. On the other side of the plot, Scott McMichaels: Brilliant AI designer, he’s just created META: “the world’s true artificial intelligence.” When Infectress needs a lot of help for a little bio-toy of hers, you can be darn sure the three (four?) main characters are going to meet somewhere.

    The problem with techno-thrillers has always been that they’re SF books done wrong: The technology is seen as so unsettling than in most cases, it’s forgotten/destroyed/censored by the end of the book. So it’s a bit of relief to see Infectress as an SF book that finally does a techno-thriller right: The action is there along with the technical details, the plot-driven story, the competent Heinleinian characters and the pro-military attitude.

    This last characteristic is natural, since author Tom Cool is, says the tantalizing blurb, “a serving U.S. naval officer.” It’s refreshing to see a novel where the government and military forces both know their stuff, and aren’t there for yet another X-Files-type coverup.

    The back-cover blurb goes on to say that Cool is “patently the most gifted naval officer to write science fiction since Robert A. Heinlein”. While this may be very true from a strict tautological viewpoint, (How many naval officers write SF?) there are at least grounds for comparison: Cool acknowledges Heinlein (even citing The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, P.82) and has a no-nonsense, practical style that echoes of the Early Heinlein. This book was pure candy to me; once started, it was difficult to stop reading. This is one book that I regret borrowing at my library… I’d rather keep it in my collection…. right besides the books of that other Tom C….

    [January 1998: Bought it. Still fun to browse through.]

    To be sure, this isn’t a perfect book. Some parts don’t quite mesh with the others (a philosophical discussion between two AI fragments is interesting, but a bit out-of-place.) and some plot points are predictable to the veteran espionage/thriller enthusiast. The villains were slightly over-the-top, but that’s part of the fun. I’m still not sure about Stephen Hickman’s cover illustration: It’s pretty, but…?

    [January 1998: The cover ended up 4th in my “Best Cover Poll’97”…]

    Despite all its good intentions, Infectress doesn’t have the extra “oomph” to propel it from simple action thriller to award-winning material. But the fact that it’s that close that’s heartening: The only thing more impressive than Infectress is its author. Tom Cool shows that he’s computer-literate, aware of the SF genre rules and able to write the kind of uncomplicated prose that a wide range of readers appreciate. It remains to be seen whether his next efforts will be as successful, but I’ll be reading whatever he wishes to write next with rapt attention. To quote the back cover blurb again: Commander Cool, we salute you!

  • The Fortunate Fall, Raphael Carter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 1996, 288 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86034-X

    The adventure of discovery! The thrill of the new! The excitement of excellence! The perils of plunking down a sizable chunk of real money for a hardcover!

    Who would want to go bungee-jumping when such thrills are so readily available to the average reader? Why go white-river rafting when a trip to the local bookstore can provide such exciting minutes of agonizing decisions?

    Just in case you’re wondering, I’m talking about the rewards of reading first novels. This is where the local library comes in handy: At the worst, you’ll waste only time, not time AND money.

    Which brings us to the subject of this review, a perfectly acceptable offering by Minneapolis, Minnesota resident Raphael Carter: The Fortunate Fall (In case you’re wondering who Carter is, you’re not alone, and not about to be satiated by the author’s blurb, which was reproduced here in its informative integrality.)

    In a publishing world where every first novel is “the best book I’ve read in my life” or “the best look at postmodernist whatever since…”, It’s refreshing to find a first work that lives up to most of the quotes on the cover: There was no “better first novel published in 1996,” so Emma Bull won’t have to “eat [her] hard drive.”

    The elements of the plot aren’t exactly new: Human cameras have been around for a while in SF (most famously in Gibson’s Count Zero) and avid readers of recent works in the genre will have a certain kick comparing this book to Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire. (both taking place mostly in a complexly fractalized near-future Europe and sporting female protagonists named Maya)

    But Carter manages to do some impressive things with the concept: One camera must work with a Screener, which filters most of the unwanted peripheral sensations. The novel begins as Maya Andreyeva has to switch Screeners, only to end up with a female partner (an unusual occurrence.) Soon, Maya is dealing with a political coverup, an incarceration, long-distance love with her Screener and the biggest scoop of her life.

    But never mind the plot. As with many new authors, it’s the details that are fascinating. Maya’s “objective” reality doesn’t exist any more. She is so wired that she can choose to see images, experience sensations… Perhaps the best passage in the novel is early on, when she tries to convince her rental automobile that the alcohol she’s taking is for medicinal purposes. (nanobots refuelling, actually) The car doesn’t see it the same way, and soon tries to stop, since drinking and driving are incompatible. The situation is resolved by the almost-literal appearance of Maya’s Screener and an instance of creating reprogramming.

    It may sound boring, but Carter recounts it far better than I have. Surprisingly, his style is distinctive without being overwhelming. The prose is mostly uncluttered but assured, wry, confident… cool. If only for this quality, Carter has managed to get a “To Watch” rating on my mental Author Scoreboard. Unlike many new authors, Carter doesn’t have the impulse to show us how smart he is at the expense of good storytelling.

    Yet, Carter’s work is smart. He mixes sociological insights with musings about the nature of love, life and everything… It’s an interesting mélange. The books succeeds more than it falters, and one couldn’t ask more.

    I was a bit disappointed by the conclusion, where we go back to the time-honoured tradition of having the villain talk about his evil plan in front of billion of people (but this is excusable, since Maya is a camera, duh!) The finale is… interesting.

    The book is full of “good bits”; the already-mentioned car argument, Maya’s interrogations by two “policemen”… but the background details are also interesting without being flashy: North America is a backward (“I could always emigrate [there] and spend my live seeing nothing more technologically advanced than a pitchfork”) continent, but Africa has brilliantly combined ancient traditions with high-technology.

    The medium length of the book and the easygoing prose makes the readers breeze through the novel. I do get the feeling that this is one book I won’t avoid re-reading in a few years.

    This is Good Stuff. Just when our bookstore’s shelves are covered with TV tie-ins and derivative trash, it’s refreshing to see original material like this. Kudos to The Fortunate Fall, its readers, Tor Books and Raphael Carter.

    Besides, paperback books are way cheaper than bungee-jumping. And you can read The Fortunate Fall in the bathroom, instead of going to the bathroom before your unfortunate fall—

    okay, so you got the point.

  • Dragon’s Egg, Robert L. Forward

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 1984, 309 pages, C$2.75 mmpb, ISBN 0-345028349-X

    (Or: Too much of a good thing. WAY too much of a good thing…)

    I adore Hard SF.

    You see, SF for me stands for Science-Fiction, not the recent wishy-washy labels “Speculative Fiction”, “Sociological Fantasy”, “San Francisco” or even (the pain!) the all-inclusive “Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Horror and all kind of stuff we just call SF because we really don’t have the IQ to know better.”

    (It’s all a plot, I tell you: People without the technical qualification came in, found that they couldn’t compete with Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke on their own terms and resolved to change the rules of the game so they wouldn’t get beaten up so badly. Tie this with the decline of the American Empire and receive 5,000 bonus points.)

    Generally, the harder the SF, the better I like it. It’s no accident that my favourite books last year were Red Mars, The Ascent of Wonder and Tau Zero, all heavily-hard SF. Pushed at the extremes, I’ll grab a science non-fiction book rather more quickly than a non-science fiction book.

    (This is the point that I choose to remark that not everyone is mentally equipped to follow science non-fiction books… heh-heh-heh.)

    I remember reading a Robert L Forward novel (Timemaster) a few years ago, and being embarrassed at the characterisation, which is quite a feat for someone who’s proud of being style-deaf. On a whim, I picked up Dragon’s Egg, resolved to find out if Forward was really as bad as I remembered.

    He is. In the words of David Pringle’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of SF: “ill-written novels” Forward is a terrific idea generator, but can’t dramatize them for beans. In the tradition of the worst B movies, some of the dialogue is so bad, it’s hilarious. Here’s an instance, chosen at random: [Page 32 of the paperback edition]

    “The pulses could be high frequency bursts that are higher than the nominal design frequency for the low frequency radio antennas,” he said. “Can you calculate the antenna pattern for a higher frequency?”

    And this is one of the better ones. I am not making this up.

    Yet, it would be too easy to blast this novel on poor drama, laughable dialogue and cardboard characters. These three literary qualities are not why this novel was published. And allowances must be made, for Dragon’s Egg was Forward’s first novel.

    What is impressive about this book is the rigorous scientific extrapolation underlying the story: A race of sentient beings evolve on the crust of a neutron star, where gravities and magnetic fields are enormously more powerful than on earth. These beings, called Cheelas, live about ten thousand times more rapidly than humans. During one human hour, 5 cheela generations pass…

    As it happens, one human scientific mission is there just at the good time and place to give a little help to the cheela. In twenty-four hours, they go from roman-type empire to FTL flight…

    Most of the book is very, very boring. This is one of those few novels where the alien passages feel more natural than the human scenes. (See my gripes about dialogue: I can believe in aliens talking that way, but humans??? Nah….) But the scientific stuff is fascinating, and the last few pages are gripping; pure hard-SF candy for the mind.

    It won’t surprise anyone that there’s a technical appendix at the end. Also not surprising is the usefulness of such an appendix. In a hurry, just read it and skim the remainder of the novel.

    This surely isn’t a book for everyone. I had a few problems following the most abstract concepts, and I can’t expect everyone to slug through two hundred pages of polysyllabic words for a few pages of sensawunder and a technical appendix.

    But if you’re able to handle it, go ahead…

  • Bestsellers Guaranteed, Joe R. Lansdale

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 1993, 207 pages, C$5.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-441-05502-8

    Stephen King makes me laugh.

    And I do mean this literally: I have a very high resistance to horror nowadays, and tend to laugh like a madman at supposedly “scary” movies. Part of the problem is a self-avowed tendency to make fun of everything video ala MST3K. But in the case of horror, the source material doesn’t help either: the transparency of the typical horror plot is the epitome of cookie-cutting: An evil concept, a troubled protagonist, a kill-the-sinners mentality. This is essentially King’s weakness: One can easily peer into the intentions of his fiction without going too deeply in the structure.

    Apologies if I’m getting too academic, but the bottom line is simply that Stephen King doesn’t scare me, as much of the horror floating around these days.

    This being said, I picked up Bestsellers Guaranteed for the wrong reasons: It was cheap, it had a wacky cover (librarian-type dragon lying on a pile of books) and the back-cover blurb was even wackier (Sample: “BOB THE DINOSAUR GOES TO DISNEYLAND: An inflatable toy dinosaur takes a dream vacation… that’s full of hot air.”)

    If you don’t mind, I’ll take this occasion to present my “all-time most misrepresentative cover” award to Ace, for putting humorous jacket copy on a dark horror collection.

    For this book is almost all-horror. Not the evil-thing-eats-them-all-up kind of horror, but the true, evil, dark stuff that will make you squirm and wince even though you can’t stop reading. I wasn’t creeped out by straight razors before, but now…

    People gets eaten up a lot here, but they also get beheaded, chomped, sliced, quartered, stuffed, bludgeoned… Scary stuff, less predictable than King, and written in style, too! Despite -or maybe because- the subject matter, this book was read very, very quickly.

    This is pure, undiluted good stuff. I was horrified, terrorized and grossed-out (for you who remember Stephen King’s degrees of horror). Joe Lansdale is an author with edges, a lot of them.

    A last word of advice for just about everyone: Read the book during a day with plenty of sunlight, okay?

  • Glory Season, David Brin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1993, 772 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-553-56767-5

    Some critics say that the difference between literature and the remainder of the “fiction” section is that literature is dedicated to a thoughtful exploration of the human mind. This, they tell us, is why SF will never be anything more than a glorified escapist genre for people who can’t handle the real world.

    The appropriate response to these idiots is to pity them, for they are well and truly living in a world of their own.

    Any half-decent SF fan already knows the answer to that accusation. But how to tell them that SF is uniquely positioned to examine the real issues that concern the human heart? What tool but SF lets authors examine the relationship between the flesh and the mind? (cyberpunk) The human and his times? (time travel) Man and his environment? (ecological/space stories) The person and the sex? (Gender explorations)

    The last category is, to put it bluntly, a pack of troubles. Gender exploration is usually slanted toward feminist fiction (since that’s the underdog) and outright propaganda. Some of it is good (The Maerland Chronicles/In the Mother’s Land, Elisabeth Vonarburg), some of it is stuffy and boring (The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin) and some of it is plainly, embarrassingly bad (Ammonite, Nicola Griffith).

    Another addition to the pack is David Brin’s Glory Season.

    Now, understand that I like David Brin. His viewpoint is one of boundless technological optimism, which happens to be my favourite philosophy too. Almost everything he writes is thoughtful, inventive, entertaining and utterly readable. Glory Season is a mixed bag, but still upholds most of Brin’s usual qualities.

    Glory Season weighs in at nearly 800 pages, and stars Maia, a young woman living on Stratos, a planet long divorced from the human confederation. Stratos’ society is mostly composed of females: Males are the disadvantaged sex. Two “kinds” of females exist on this planet: clones and the more Earth-familiar vars. (At this point, things get a bit complicated and Brin explains them better than myself anyway.)

    At the beginning of the book, Maia leaves her home to make her fortune in the world. With her is Leie, her twin-sister. Not quite a var but not really a clone, Maia thinks she can make her fortune on Stratos… And the adventure begins. Maia’s story is intercut with “didactic interludes”, excepts of diaries and works about Stratos’ history. Like the “Ancillary Documentation” in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Gap series, these bits are tasty, interesting, and don’t really detract from the flow of the story.

    And lest anyone be confused, this is a story. Brin never loses sight of the reason people buy his books: Entertainment. Maia will be participant in gunfights, revolutions, betrayals and the usual gamut of adventure fiction situations. To be fair, this is perhaps the weakest aspect of Glory Season: The fast-paced adventures of Maia are sometimes a bit too fast-paced to sustain interest. A quieter, shorter novel could have been better.

    Fortunately, Maia’s an interesting protagonist and her coming-of-age is as fascinating as the society surrounding her. The ending is a bit abrupt, but still wrap most things up. It’s evident that Brin has spent a great deal of time thinking about the issues presented in this novel. Fans won’t be disappointed.

    Neither conclusive nor embarrassing, Glory Season is a blend of adventure and extrapolation that’s perhaps not dense enough. Nevertheless, still a solid novel from David Brin.

  • The Talisman, Stephen King & Peter Straub

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1984, 768 pages, C$8.75 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-10533-4

    People often ask me why I read so much Science-Fiction. Frankly, that’s a very good question that I haven’t got around answering yet. Oh, sure, there are the usual excuses: I grew up with it, I watched Star Trek for as long as I remember, I’ve always been interested in space, science and stuff, etc… Nevertheless, the best answer may still be that, frankly, what else would I want to read?

    Other genres are boring or limited in numbers: Techno-Thrillers are fun but few, romance isn’t my cup of tea, mysteries are (usually) mind-fluff, general literature meaningless AND boring, horror usually cliched and fantasy-

    I don’t usually read much Fantasy, and The Talisman reminds me why.

    Begin by ignoring the names on the cover. Sure, Stephen King and Peter Straub are two terrific horror writers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that The Talisman is horror.

    It smells like fantasy, looks like fantasy and reads like fantasy. To wit:

    A young boy, wise beyond his years, discovers that he can access a parallel world. His mother’s analogue in this world is a queen, and he must cross America to retrieve a talisman that will heal both versions of his mother. Opposing him are a powerful dark prince and his real-world analogue, a lawyer.

    If that’s not the essential Fantasy Plot, what is?

    Surely, there are enough dark critters and evil persons to transform this in a dark fantasy, but it’s still the usual plot taking place.

    Like most novels by King -even though I suspect Straub might have written most of the book- this book is pleasantly readable… if such a word can be applied to dark fantasy. Characters are well-presented, the adventures of the hero are told reasonably well.

    There are a few deviations from the standard plot, mostly dealing with the dual-universe nature of the story, but the thrust of the novel remains the same as countless fantasy trilogies before it. And I can’t help but be ambivalent about a novel that is explicitly aware of hard-SF, yet grossly contradicts its own rules. Oh, and the finale is interminable.

    I’ve heard people say this is the best book they’re ever read. On the other hand, some people have called this the worst Stephen King book, ever. As usual, the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. In short: Average.

  • The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction, Ed. David Pringle

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Carlton Books, 1995, 309 pages, C$40.00 hc, ISBN 1-85868-188-X

    I recently detailed in these virtual pages my acquisition of The Science-Fiction Encyclopedia and The Visual Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction. To refresh some readers’ memories, my impression was unarguably positive. After all, how can you argue against 1,300 pages in one case and a page-full of photographic credits in the other?

    Well, call me jaded, but the 304 pages and page-full of illustration credits of David Pringle’s The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science-Fiction (subtitled The Definitive Illustrated Guide) aren’t quite as impressive…

    The basic problem is how to present the subject, especially when it’s as diverse as SF. Do you go for the connoisseur, the fan or the general public? Talk about books nobody read any more or go for the quicker, stupider movies? To that, add the challenge of presenting visuals properly: By theme, date, subject, illustrator?

    The choices made by the staff of TUEoSF are clear: They’re going for the general public and more accurately, the British general public. The cover illustration features the scantily-clad robot from METROPOLIS. The back cover has Jane Fonda as a suitably curvaceous Barbarella, Akira, Arnold S. as The Terminator and the ship from “2001”. That should give you an idea of the book’s media-oriented content.

    For better and for worse, SF is now a genre most readily identified with television and movies. A large part of the encyclopedia reflects this. Of the eight sections, one 60-page segment is about movies, another 50 pages discuss TV and radio series. Other notable sections deal with Themes (40 pages), “creators” (writers and directors, 70 pages) and “Heroes and Villains” (45 pages) The last section is especially puzzling, since it’s not very useful as reference and pretty much unreadable to anyone not familiar with the books and movies discussed.

    The British emphasis has its moments: The dry humour that permeates the book (a contribution of David Langford, perhaps?) is often disrespectful, irreverent and -yes- amusing, provided you’re in the appropriate mood. Unfortunately, it also means that UK authors get more than their fair share of representation: Two-shot Brit wonders are discussed while more prolific North-American authors are ignored. (Some nice photos, though)

    Also notable for fan-boys like me are the positive comments about Babylon-5. (Even discussing the suspicious similarity with DS9, but underlining the fact that B5 was pitched to Paramount first…)

    The commentary is excellent, even if the categories are suspicious. Interestingly, more than a few relevant comments about TV-SF later appeared in an article written for the very scholarly magazine “Science-Fiction Studies” by none other than Brain Stableford… who’s a collaborator to this book. (Amazing coincidence, don’t you think?)

    But for your money, keep an eye on the Clute books. They’re more complete, much more informative and contain about as much illustrations that this book.

  • Courtship Rite, Donald Kingsbury

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 1982, 409 pages, C$4.50 mmpb, ISBN 0-671-46089-7

    If you should be so lucky as to meet Donald Kingsbury in person, you will be impressed. With his 6-foot+ frame, unkempt white hair and long-winded interventions, he’ll towers above you physically and intellectually. He’s the perfect picture of a British intellectual. He’d make a perfect mad scientist. Instead, he turned to Science-Fiction.

    My first Kingsbury fiction was the excellent “To Bring in the Steel” in the Hard-SF anthology The Ascent of Wonder. A good hard-SF tale, it also delved unusually deep into the psyche of its characters. “A mix of Herbert and Heinlein,” I thought at the time.

    With Courtship Rite, the comparison with Herbert seems more and more adequate:  it’s a planetary romance of the best, most intricate sort… just as Dune was.

    On the planet of Geta, several centuries in the future, a human civilisation has evolved after quite a few centuries of isolation from Earth. Geta is a desert: arid, harsh, barren. Most of the plants are poisonous. The human society has adapted in consequence: Cannibalism is the only source of meat, marriages involve multiple partners, people “decorate” themselves with scars and complex rituals dictate courtship, death, love… This isn’t a “nice” society, nor an easy book to digest. The technological level is barely above medieval despite the advanced genetic knowledge and some scenes are simply brutal.

    The story itself is ho-hum: Boys love girl, but chief orders them to marry barbarian princess. Boys stage Ritual of Death to see if she’s worthy and the story goes on from there. What follows is war, pain, death, a more-or-less happy ending, several levels of intersecting intrigue and a fascinating social exploration. The book is immensely detailed, yet effortlessly so: Kingsbury obviously knows Geta like he lived there.

    For Courtship Rite is the social equivalent of Hard-SF tales. Geta’s society is meticulously described by affection and -yes- admiration. I was impressed by the originality and completeness of the vision. In many ways, this book is a trip on another planet.

    The characters are exceptionally well-drawn. This is a superior planetary romance, on both sense of the term: A smart SF Harlequin book… (albeit an unusually sadistic one) Kingsbury had put a lot of care in his characters and it shows. Whatever the story is, you care for them. What’s more, I got the unusual feeling that the latter part of the book was moved along by the characters; excellent. Each of the book’s 66 chapters is headed by an original epigram -another touch of Dune– and some of them are true gems.

    It’s a magnificent tapestry, a very dense, well-written book. I recommend spending a little more time on this book. I didn’t and frankly, I now regret it. A re-reading in a few year will be much more satisfying. It has the depth of Dune, if maybe not the strong narrative drive: The story is uneven and takes more than a while to rev up to speed. Add to that a few technological inconsistencies (the genetic vs mechanical knowledge) and the overall effect is diminished, but still impressive.

    Still, it’s a very good read. It’s no wonder it was nominated for the 1982 Hugos. If you can find it in used libraries, don’t hesitate to pick it up. This isn’t for everyone, would make a rotten miniseries, will certainly shock most SF readers in places (even the most jaded) but is worth of attention by mature SF readers.