association-list

Yet another Stra­han edited short story col­lec­tion. Since it’s a col­lec­tion, a list:

• The Lana­gan story here is vis­ceral and voicy and won­der­ful, for all that it leans ever so hard on its source mate­r­ial. People unfa­mil­iar the leg­ends old tes­ta­ment might be a little confused.
• I am glad to see new work from Tony Daniel. I wish there were more.
• The Schroeder story points to excit­ing new places for his Virga stuff, even if it isn’t his best work (he always feels a little con­strained in shorts).
• The Baxter reminds me a lot of a Ben­ford story about almost the same thing that I read just a few years ago, but I can’t remem­ber the name of it.
• WTF is going on with the end of the Reynolds story? Also if I have to read another story about a galac­tic empire held together only by a human male of exceed­ing grace and wisdom (I’m look­ing at you too, Mr. Scholes) I am going to vomit.
• Need to track down more stuff by Daryl Gregory.
• I am not smart enough for per­haps 40% of Jeff Ford’s sto­ries. This is one of those.
• Tighten, Moles, tighten! So very close, though.
• Ted Chiang makes peace with entropy.

Lots of good stuff here. An improve­ment, I think, on the first one. I have noth­ing to add to the gender bal­ance thing at this late date.

I really wanted to like this more than I did. Williams’ far-​​future Mars/​Earth sto­ries and novel are the work of hers I like the most, in tone and theme, but this book seemed very much rushed, on a number of axes. The first part of the novel — which has been exten­sively sketched out in short sto­ries over the last couple of years — is pretty strong. But at some point the writ­ing gets ahead of the plan­ning, and it all falls apart. The qual­ity of the edit­ing and copy edit­ing also drop off in the latter half of the novel.

This is a shame, as this could have been a very fine book with a little bit more time to bake and some of the glitches ironed out. Hope­fully if it gets a US release it’ll get another working-​​over to put a final coat of polish on it.

A book with a very long sub­ti­tle, which kind of gives you a hint as to what’s coming. A lot of words are used to tell a story that really doesn’t need all, or even maybe most of them. Inter­est­ing work from a new writer, but ulti­mately cannot seal the deal because the built world here is too close to our own, and too seri­ous, to gen­er­ally end up taking a back seat to the emo­tional strug­gles of the car­toon­ish and deeply simple cen­tral char­ac­ter. You’re also spat­tered begin­ning to end with little tan­gent info­dumps that trade heav­ily in often second-​​hand relic Amer­i­cana. Over­all, it adds up to not very much that adds to the main nar­ra­tive. Amer­ica is sim­pli­fied and it’s the sim­pli­fied Amer­ica that’s val­orized and cas­ti­gated and rev­er­en­tially mocked, so too much of it seems to miss. It’s a book that seems to think too much of its movers and shak­ers and too little of the common people. It is also in love with its some­what abstracted voice despite the fact that the voice very often robs the events of book of any imme­di­acy they might oth­er­wise have. There is a lot of music in the book, but little of it works with the text, either being buried in the info­dumps where you’re already bored and want to go back to the story now or they’re just tacked on, like the author just real­ized that he hasn’t men­tioned any­thing musi­cal in two pages.

It’s almost a tic. Frustrating.

There are a lot of good parts here. I think that Slat­tery could pro­duce some really inter­est­ing mate­r­ial if he man­ages to get all of the ele­ments march­ing in line.

First book of the new year. I’m going to post them all, just so I can keep track of how much I’m read­ing and what’s actu­ally get­ting read.

This is the second book in the Aleut­ian tril­ogy, and I read it because I read Spirit: the Princess of Lengthy Sub­ti­tle in PDF over the christ­mas break. Spirit has great world­build­ing and a won­der­ful sense of place, at least until you get back to Sper­anza and are in full enig­matic super­woman Count of Monte Christo mode. Losing Bibi as a cen­tral char­ac­ter is a near-​​fatal blow to the novel.

North Wind is a much ear­lier book. Inter­est­ingly many of its fail­ures in the other direc­tion, as she some­how makes the weird, fated, fizzle-​​ending plot work, mostly on the strength of the char­ac­ters, but you never get a good sense of where you are, or what is hap­pen­ing there. A very per­sonal novel for its set­ting, which is in the middle of a world-​​wide low-​​intensity conflict.