association-list

Green follows the general trend of Jay’s work over the last several books, as his technical chops continue to improve. This is a solid offering with a strong first person voice. That it didn’t really push my buttons is more on me than on the author. The author more or less did what he was setting out to do, but most of what was being done I didn’t really care about. I’d have preferred it if there were less time spend in the narrator’s childhood and less in her head, but it would not have been the same book at all if those things were true.

I thought that the related story here was stronger, but both are worth reading.

An interesting book that attempts to tie overeating to addictive behavior in general. All of it more or less makes sense to me, especially comparing my experiences with weight control and quitting smoking. Contrary to Cory Doctorow’s suggestion here, there was a lot of interesting advice in the book. I suspect that part of Cory’s reaction was simply that the advice given (mostly CBT mindfulness/thought-pattern-changing stuff along with planning/portion suggestions) is simply that there is no silver bullet, even when you understand the psychology of the interaction to a certain degree. But if you’re looking for brain hacks, here’s an idea: as soon as you’re served at a resturant, ask for a to-go container, and immediately pack away everything over your immediate requirements, then put your leftovers out of the way somewhere. This seems less rude and wasteful than returning the portion that you don’t plan or need to eat.

Interestingly, Kessler pulls his punches overmuch. He’s a technocrat, of course, and does come across with some policy proposals, many of which are already winding their ways through the halls of power (Kessler, after all, was a key Washington player in much of the damage done to big tobacco in the last two decades). He stops, however, before coming out and saying something that really needs to be said. Most restaurant food, especially the food sold by the big chains, is more or less toxic sludge, and should be avoided until such a time as these businesses recommit themselves to producing actual food that is rarely more than one or two steps removed from its source. He dwells for much of the time on restaurants, but the same thing could be said for much of the processed food that’s available in supermarkets, or delivered at many of the coffee shops and chain bakeries around the country.

One last problem that Kessler ignores is that many middle-American cities are food deserts. When I go home to Tulsa, for example, I seem to find it inordinately difficult to find a restaurant that isn’t incorporated in Delaware. The supermarkets are a little better, but not that much, as processed food seems to take up more and more shelf space each year, but that’s more of a nationwide problem than one that’s specific to the midwest. The problem of processed foods in the markets is less tractable than that of the restaurants; food is already labeled with the number of calories it contains, yet people buy it and overeat anyways. Perhaps the best technocratic solution to this issue would be to eliminate feedlot animal production and grain subsidies that make the processed foods so much cheaper than their constituent parts bought individually at reasonable levels of quality.

A good first novel here. Already Teppo has a good grasp of pacing and development and has created a dark, consistent sub-creation that manages to make its magic feel magical without ever feeling like it’s being made for the convenience of the plot. There’s actually some mostly-believable character development which comes from within the character and his motivations, rather than being externally imposed, which is rare in noir/cyberpunk inflected narratives. That said, there are flaws, which fall into two broad groups. I wrote the list below in an email to a friend (edited to make me look better/smarter):

1. basically no women in it at all. the semi-love/hate interest gets all of five pages of screen time, which is mostly Markham emoting.
2. although he’s not entirely cookie cutter, there’s still a lot of generic noir protagonist there.
3. most of the other characters lack a voice. everyone sounds like Markham in dialog.
4. sentence-level craft is uneven, weaker in the beginning of the book. it’s first-novelitis to a certain extent, but I almost threw the book across the room when I ran across the groaner ‘metal whale’ purple blob of a simile in the ferry chapter.
5. we’re subjected to not one, but TWO Obligatory card by card Tarot interpretations that are the bane of so many fantasies involving hermetic magic and the occult. to make matters worse, they seem to take up at least five-seven pages each (at least in my memory). by making your foreshadowing into a cutesy game, you cheapen it. I’d have strongly suggested compressing or cutting both.
6. really, I am kind of done with cyberpunk’s noirish offspring. that may be a personal thing.
7. seattle and portland seem lonely. non-named characters who aren’t going to be magicked horribly or aren’t waitresses don’t get a lot of mention past the beginning of the book.

So there are some personal quibbles in there. I’ve never been a big fan of noir stuff, and have always considered it to be something of a baleful influence on post-cyberpunk SF, mostly for reasons involving the character’s intermittent lack of agency and often drastically unrealistic dystopias in which it is usually set. Almost all of the other things that I had issues with were, now that I’ve had a couple of days to think about it, failures with the book’s voice. Here too, as in KoNLG (see last post), we have a number of severe issues flowing from issues with the first person singular. It’s very hard to get right, as I’ve said. Here, the strain is less on the reader as the narrator is endlessly blindsided, as much as it’s a question of tone in a number of places. Scene description is all over the place in terms of level and intent, in ways that would often be fine with some external narrator (omniscient or personal) or a first person narrator more anchored further in history, as opposed to this narrator, where the only thing separating past and present first person singular is the verb endings. Also I would like to make a rule: In a book written in the first person, you get ONE (1) scene transition ushered in by unconsciousness. Per-instance penalties to follow when I think of something dire enough. Points 1, 2, 3, & 7 I would ascribe to these sorts of issues, rather than any failure on the part of the writing (other than I suppose the structural failure of choosing FPS and not quite being able to make it work for the whole book).

I seem to spend a lot of time in these reviews talking about how I still think the book is good and worth reading despite the fact that I’ve just dwelled at length on its flaws. Mostly, this is because I am a horrible, negative person, but partially it is because while I do often like the books, I spend a lot of time thinking about what would make them better, in hopes of being able to do the same with my own writing. I realize that this may not endear me to writers who’re talked about here, but hopefully one day they’ll have the opportunity to return the favor. I promise to weep piteously and upload it to youtube.

This book starts on an interesting note and never lets the fact that it’s aimed at young adults drive it away from experimentation or interesting writing. While the font stuff is occasionally irritating, it never really gets in the way, and there are some moments of stunning book design that it affords. This carries you quickly through the first two thirds or three quarters of the book. Eventually, however, the limitations of the very narrow first person viewpoint of a fifteen year-old boy start to become a drag on the book. Getting first person present singular right is a delicate balancing act as regards revealing and concealing information, and it seems to me that in the interest of getting to heart of his character’s confusion, the author allows the narrative to blindside the narrator far too often, so that the ending is very much like getting beaten over the head in a lot of places. That isn’t to say that the ending is bad, just that it doesn’t match the early sections of the book. It also spends a little too much time doing Disaster Porn.

It seems like I’ve read a couple of books between Lamentation in late March and this one in late June, but I honestly couldn’t tell you what they are. I’ll update later out of order if I remember.

I don’t want to tell anyone not to read this book, because I think that it’s worthy, that it is a novel written with serious intent by an able writer, that it tries to do something that stretches both the genre and the skills of the author. Unfortunately I don’t think that it worked. It’s Miéville’s best-written book, but in a way that evens out the excesses of prior works. As such, you avoid the awkwardnesses of prior works, but also you lose out on the sheer impact of invention and strangeness that awkwardness occasionally lent to his earlier works. The biggest problem, I suppose, is that the central conceit ultimately falls down in the end. No reason is given and no mechanism for the power of Breach is ever explained. While I am usually all for this sort of thing and think that one of the main failings of fantasy as a genre is that it over-explains and over-systematizes, we have a strange problem here. Breach is too much shown to be real to be a metaphor for the mechanisms of urban separation given shadowy flesh, and too powerful to simply be taken at fantastical face value. There are a few hints here and there that there is something else going on there, but then almost end up looking like continuity mistakes, artifacts of a draft where Breach was a fantastical mechanism accidentally left in during the transformation to a draft where Breach is a eidolon of separation. This ambiguity of strategy makes it feel like Breach, which ultimately is the spine of the separation of the City and the City, which is in turn the heart of the book, feel unfinished.

Again, I urge you to read it. It has many lovely moments and is a good, solid read. Even with the problematic ending, it’s an attempt to stretch the genre further, and we should laud its ambition rather than scorn its failures.

Read this a while ago. Good, solid examples of the putative genre, and mostly good stories. Glancing over the table of contents, nothing stands right out, but there are many worse uses of your time than to dig through this one.