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.