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.