association-list

A little bit late to the party on this one, but I picked it up off of someone’s shelf and thought that it was inter­est­ing enough to keep read­ing, mostly on the strength of the voice. While I think that Savage has his heart in the right place, and that the moral scolds he seeks to address are worthy of swat­ting down, I am not sure that this book finds the best way to do it. People com­plain­ing about how right now is worse than the good old days is a seem­ingly uni­ver­sal human trait. A cer­tain type of person is always going to be doing it at any given point in his­tory. For some reason, today’s media gives these people a lot more air than they used to, but it’s hardly some­thing novel. I sus­pect that attack­ing any one instance is doomed to fail­ure, because even if you win, another person with a slightly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, pos­si­bly even on your intel­lec­tual side, will take up the torch soon enough. It seems to me that a better strat­egy over the long term is to figure out a way to give just as much air to people like Savage, who think that the cur­rent is a great place to be living, as to people like Bork, who’d rather live in some mist­ily ide­al­ized past where the person and their kind had more power.

It’s enter­tain­ing enough, but ulti­mately a bit fluffy, at least at this late date, where much of the imper­a­tive has worn off.

“Tiny Feast” by Chris Adrian.

I missed the first week and some spir­ited dis­cus­sion of a fairly weak story, so it may be that this story, weak in another way, might spur some sim­i­larly inter­est­ing discussion.

I thought that this one was well writ­ten, but oth­er­wise failed on most other levels. I have to admit some bias, in that I have essen­tially no inter­est in fan­tasy specif­i­cally fea­tur­ing fairies. It’s a trope at this point that has been so bru­tally overused that it’s hard to imag­ine it having any sort of res­o­nance with anyone at this point. I real­ize that my point of view clearly isn’t shared, so I’ll try to put it aside. The story imag­ines one of the changelings taken by the fairy court, Oberon and Tita­nia and the whole lot, get­ting leukemia and going into treat­ment. In terms of play­ing the con­flict in a humor­ously dead­pan way and depict­ing the process in an accu­rate way, the author gets high marks, but as a story it never really gets any­where, or says any­thing, or really has any char­ac­ters. Any one of those could be fine, of course, but at some point the story just falls down, when you decline to pro­vide your read­ers with any reason to care.

If we’re to read this straight, Oberon and Tita­nia are fairies and so at least some­what alien and dis­tanced from human con­cerns. It’s never clear why either of them should care about this par­tic­u­lar changeling over any other, other than he’s sick. The author never both­ers to make them human char­ac­ters, nor does he manage to make them con­vinc­ingly alien. They speak on one hand from a desire for the story to move for­ward, and on the other from a desire by the author to make the story humorous.

Over the course of the sto­ries, inter­ac­tions are detailed, scenes are set, jokes are con­structed and deliv­ered. The boy sick­ens, recov­ers, sick­ens more, and dies. Noth­ing else actu­ally hap­pens. No point is deliv­ered, nor is one pos­si­ble to infer, given the half-​​assed inhu­man­ity of the characters.

It strikes me that the author had a neat idea for a story, then didn’t real­ize that his con­ceit didn’t have legs enough to stand alone at such length. Maybe he had some inkling, hence the jok­i­ness, the places where it’s over­writ­ten. Halfway to Rem­brandt Comic Book ter­ri­tory, more or less. Still, in the end, it stacks up to more or less noth­ing inter­est­ing, and the author, while clever and skilled, simply isn’t writ­ing at the level where you’ll stick around to listen to him talk­ing about any­thing, just because the prose is so good.

And so we reach the end with­out me having said much inter­est­ing or clever, but I feel that the con­ceit here doesn’t stand up to crit­i­cism any better than it stands up to read­ing; that it is, in fact, a con­ceit and only pro­vides the critic with his thinnest gruel, styl­is­tic analy­sis. I am hoping that I’m miss­ing some­thing, and that some of the other com­menters will pro­vide a view of the story that illu­mi­nates a more inter­est­ing angle from which to view the story.

I just fin­ished this this morn­ing, and I’m still not sure what I think about it. It felt kind of tossed off and uncon­vinc­ing. It has a lot of sim­i­lar prob­lems to Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, in that if you spend a lot of time read­ing either of their blogs, a lot of the argu­ments, world-​​building and asides are old hat, since you’ve read them all before as the author first wrote them on their blog. Oth­er­wise, it was some­thing of an over-​​complicated caper tale, with all of the com­pli­cated twists that can happen in a SF novel where iden­tity is more fun­gi­ble than what might be in a stan­dard mimetic novel. Which is all fine, as far as it goes, but it is not my favorite of Stross’ novels.

Candy! Good candy. I read both of these in two days. I’m not sure what I have to say about them. They’re fun, soap-​​opera type sto­ries. Inter­est­ing, but not incred­i­bly deep. From what I under­stand, these may be the last books in the series, because Tim’s editor at Del Ray got let go in the recent tur­bu­lence. He’s con­tin­u­ing work­ing on some user-​​supported pre­quel stuff here. Hope­fully, he’ll find another pub­lisher so he can con­tinue the series.

Like most detec­tive sto­ries, the rev­e­la­tion at the ending can never quite live up to the ten­sion gen­er­ated by the nar­ra­tive prior, and the whole thing sags and col­lapses like a cut string. That said, I felt like this was one of the more sat­is­fy­ing books of Lethem’s that I’d read, mostly on the strength and inven­tive­ness of the prose. Lethem does an absolutely won­der­ful job con­vinc­ingly limn­ing the inte­rior state of his Touret­tic pro­tag­o­nist, and the writ­ing, never less than good, at times rises to bril­liance. I’m glad that I finally got around to read­ing this, and it was more than good enough to over­whelm my gen­eral dis­taste for mys­ter­ies and crime fic­tion in general.