association-list

So. I’ve been work­ing on other things lately, hence the scarcity of blog­ging, and this book­shelf update will be a short one. I’ve just fin­ished a couple of books, and I thought that I would men­tion them, just to get the fin­gers moving

Car­ni­val by Eliz­a­beth Bear.

I liked Blood and Iron and The Chains That you Refuse, but I have to admit that I stalled out on World­wired. I’ll finish it even­tu­ally, but in the mean­time, I decided to pick up Car­ni­val, to see what Bear can do in a more free-​​wheeling science-​​fictional mode. The set­ting is in a pretty grim far future, where AI over­lords unleashed by the far left have turned Earth into a pretty nasty place to live, where the unfit are Assessed, which is to say, instantly killed and recy­cled by their implants. All of this is some­what periph­eral to the action, though, at least as it con­cerns the story as it hap­pens. It speaks pretty deeply to the character’s moti­va­tions, but it isn’t really the inter­est­ing part of the story, so I won’t much dis­cuss it here.

The meat of the action involves two long-​​separated lovers, two homo­sex­ual males with names so dis­tress­ingly long that I imag­ine Bear just typed VK and MKJ and searched and replaced them when it was time to submit the man­u­script. They’re sent there on a mis­sion by the powers that be on Earth to the deeply self-​​consciously named New-​​Amazonia, where women rule, men are chat­tel, etc. The world-​​building is pretty intense in places, but it’s some­what uneven. Since our per­spec­tive is mostly (there’s a third, native, view­point char­ac­ter, but she doesn’t get as much time at the fore) out­sider, we don’t get a whole lot of a feel as for what it’s like to be one of these people, with their starkly dif­fer­ent mores and strange cul­ture, and the car­ni­val that names the book is strangely dis­tant, essen­tially Mardi-​​Gras, and we never really get a feel for it. Those caveats aside, the main char­ac­ters and what they’re doing are richly drawn and sharply plot­ted, and the sex scenes are lightly han­dled enough that they won’t squick anyone who doesn’t already have deeply seated issues. I thought that the ending was a little rushed, but over­all I would rec­om­mend the book, and con­tinue to look for­ward to Bear’s forth­com­ing work.

The Android’s Dream, by John Scalzi.

I enjoy Scalzi’s work, to an extent, although I think that his main line of novels lack some of the moral heft that I feel they should have, con­sid­er­ing their sub­ject matter. Also, I admit to some big­otry for SF that’s over-​​focused on plan­ets, as Scalzi’s tends to be. But that’s nei­ther here nor there. They’re quick and fun and breezily writ­ten with a sharp eye for human foibles and the humor inher­ent even in dark moments, of which there is no lack.

This book was lighter even than most of his others, though, and I came away a little bit unsat­is­fied. There were a few rea­sons, one of which is that the book hinges pretty strongly on some unlikely ele­ments, like a race that relies on top down com­puter con­trol of every little thing allow­ing another species entirely to design them a com­puter system to help do that work, and no one ever trying to hack or sub­vert it, or even get overly famil­iar with it. I didn’t really ring true. Also, the idea that in hun­dreds of thou­sands of years of galac­tic his­tory, the idea that no one, ever, before human­ity, would bother to try sim­u­lat­ing a brain on a com­puter, it kind of absurd. Most of this takes place off-​​screen, so it doesn’t directly detract from the book, but they subtly under­mine the impact of the res­o­lu­tion, which counts against it in the end.

The book is short, which I applaud in a non-​​snarky way, and it stands alone, which is also admirable. The char­ac­ters are fun and inter­est­ing, although the main char­ac­ter is too much the self-​​effacing com­pe­tent man to ever really come into his own as a char­ac­ter. The book moves along briskly, touch­ing lightly on the emo­tional res­o­nances of war and people’s gen­eral inabil­ity to deal with it after the fact. Over­all, it’s more fun than any­thing else, and it doesn’t strive to be much else than fun. You could fault it for that lack of striv­ing, I guess, but it would make you ill tem­pered and blind to many things.

The Jen­nifer Morgue, by Char­lie Stross.

Another one in the tra­di­tion of The Atroc­ity Archives, this time a take of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. Unfor­tu­nately, per­haps since the Flem­ing books are worse than the source mate­r­ial for the books that inspired Archives, this book, while inter­est­ing, hews per­haps too close, and gets too self-​​referential, which takes some­thing out of the enjoy­ment, in the end. If you’ve read Archives (I sug­gest that you do, if you haven’t), you might be dis­ap­pointed by this one, as I was, a little. Still fun, but I have the feel­ing that Char­lie has a crack­er­jack book in this series that will out-​​shine these first two entries by an order of mag­ni­tude. Char­lie is pretty good at his worst, and aston­ish­ing at his best. This is a pretty good book, which means that I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t really live up to the unfil­tered Stross expe­ri­ence which I’ve come to expect.

Latro in the Mist & Sol­dier of Sidon, by Gene Wolfe.

Oh wow. I don’t know if I’ve men­tioned it, but Gene Wolfe is far and away one of my favorite authors. It is unlikely that I will ever escape from his influ­ence in my own writ­ing, although I could never hope to pro­duce things as pow­er­ful. In these books, Wolfe fol­lows a Roman sol­dier in Greece and later, Egypt, who has suf­fered a head wound and cannot remem­ber for more than twenty four hours at a time. Thus he must write down every­thing in order that he might remem­ber. The metafic­tional con­ceit here is that Wolfe has been given the scrolls by a friend to trans­late them, some­thing sim­i­lar to the meta­nar­ra­tive that enclosed the Book of the New Sun, although in those books, the nar­ra­tor, Sev­er­ian, has eidetic memory. There are a great many things that I would like to say here, but there’s so much to unpack, just from the one set of books, much less the two of them taken together. I might be here all night, and there are other things that I need to do. Just go out any buy them. Wolfe is our great­est author. You should have read them already. I should have read them already, but it’s better late than never. You might hold off on Sidon if you’re averse to a story left unfin­ished. The writ­ing is bru­tally beau­ti­ful, no one makes it felt like Wolfe.