I don’t really have a lot to say about this book that hasn’t been said more elegantly elsewhere. I liked it, but that was mostly on the strength of Charlie’s engagement with nascent technology and the things that one might do with it, and the feverish density of ideas which he manages to put across. This mostly got me over the indifferent characterization and warmed-over plot. I really liked it when Stross wrote about things other than spies, but I sympathize with the difficulty of trying to write a positive near future scenario with a world impacting plot that doesn’t involve geopolitical intrigue somehow.

That said, reading other people’s reviews and talking to people about his books, I’ve realized that I have problems with Strossian plots that other people do not have, and this one especially. As a coder, I have a lot of trouble just sort of accepting the technobabble at face value.

Don’t get me wrong. Most people in SF and in fiction in general don’t engage with computers and networking or their potential well at all. I am glad that someone is doing it, and generally doing it so well. Stross’ speculations are fascinating, and honestly I would buy a book that was just him blue-skying about the next twenty-five years of IT and computing. At the moment, no one is writing more interesting SF about near future technology. So most people should just stop here. It’s a good book, although not his strongest work. The following is most likely going to be the computer person equivalent of an undersexed physics post-grad picking apart a space opera for inconsistencies. But what is the internet for if not to embarrass ourselves in public?

I’ll address my pedantic concerns from least to greatest. There will be many spoilers.

• The glasses bothered me. They are essentially magic, in a book set ten years in the future. From his glancing description, they would require major breakthroughs in at least three and more likely five fields: Battery energy densities, computer vision, and materials science for starters, and possibly processor design and low-power, high-bandwidth wireless as well. Just ten years out for all of this? I would bet that we’ll have something like these ten years from now, but they’ll almost certainly be tethered to something in your pocket for power and processing. I would love to be wrong, though. Fucking batteries. The computer vision aspect is the one that I really doubt will happen, though.

• The Zone, the distributed platform upon which the gaming system in book runs, seems to me to be less overambitious so much as just really inefficient. You’d need to over-provision so much in terms of storage and processing power that surely it would be cheaper to rent VMs in local colos and not have to worry about all of the client security issues. I am guessing that you’d need at least ten times as much horsepower to do it in an entirely distributed fashion, and ultimately quality of service would suffer. I just can’t imagine it working, even with symmetric 1Mbps broadband to the pocket and mobile phones that are sixty times faster than those today, assuming that Moore’s law hasn’t bottomed out by then.
  
  Note that I don’t think that it’s impossible, I just don’t think that it’s as much of a moneymaker as being able to charge a slightly higher price but be able to guarantee levels of service and responsiveness. The real gating factors for these games are the graphics and the bandwidth, it’d be cheaper and safer just for someone to start a company that seeded cheap, trusted simulation nodes all around the world in colos with massive bandwidth, expanding and collapsing how many nodes each sim was running on based on demand, and charging for runtime only, especially with the large amount of shared code infrastructure that he seems to imply. You wouldn’t get the automatic scale-up in power that you would get as consumers gradually replaced their phones, but I think that the higher availability of servers and the ability to actually target how much horsepower you’d need would more than make up for it.
  
  Tangentially, distributed file systems and databases are of a much harder class of problem than distributed simulation with untrusted processing nodes, but someone might figure that out at any point, so it’s not really fair to bet against it.

• Another thing that bothered me about the zone was the common platform that allowed people to migrate avatars and items between games. But then I read an article about that today on Raph Koster’s site, so what do I know. We’re pretty close to the point at which large scale semi-distributed simulation stuff is middleware, and I doubt that it’ll be long before some startup starts capturing major market share by offering common infrastructure for MMOGs and Virtual Worlds and the big companies stop bothering to roll their own. I just didn’t think that the companies would go for sharing or easy migration, but perhaps I have too little faith.

• Perhaps I misunderstood the Scottish network infrastructure that he described, but a national, wired internet backbone that could be compromised by the exposure of a single one time pad? Huh? I know that Stross knows better than this. Unfortunately, major parts of the plot pivot on this, which made it kind of troublesome for me. I’ll have to take another look to make sure that I have it right.

• The last thing that bothered me was most crucial, I think, to the plot, as it’s what gets the whole ball rolling. The vaunted MMORPG Bank Heist. If someone has already owned the game to the point that they can call up the bank accounts of random players, why the hell do they need to announce this? Presumably one could just vanish all of those items from people’s bank accounts without ever having to bother entering the bank at all. Also, putting a bank in a PvP zone generally doesn’t happen. Additionally, making the bank structure assaultable by people in the game is a much higher level of simulational fidelity than most game developers would bother with.

So there you have it. I have bored even myself. Four or so ideas out of a couple of hundred that seemed sound to me. Unfortunately, some of them are quite important to the plot. I’m just anticipating talking to some people about the book and coming up with an entirely disjunct set of issues to talk about than someone non-technical.

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, by Daniel Brook

This book is quite likely to make you angry. Angry, if you’re a conservative, at a white, yale-educated author whining about how in order to make ends meet, living in a big city, he has to either suffer or ’sell out’. If you’re a liberal, it’ll make you angry at how bleak the picture he paints is, how completely the right has won certain rhetorical battles. I, personally, am in the latter camp, as disclaimer. Also, I’m more or less a part of the class that he’s talking about, as I went to a good school and have a good job and still can’t afford a house in the place where I want to live.

The book is essentially a paean to the era of progressive taxation and new deal social policies that the right in America has been dismantling for the last forty years or so. I don’t know the history as well as I’d like, so there’s a lot here that I have to take on faith. But the primary argument, that a tax structure that shrinks the middle class is bad for the country. This is not something that we should be aiming for (disclaimer, the EPI is a lefty think tank, take with salt, but I imagine those numbers are kinda hard to fudge). I’ll admit that I was sold on the argument before I picked up the book, since housing prices in San Francisco, where I live, seem to average around 5-700,000 USD for studios, lofts, and one bedroom apartments. I might be able to afford one, because I’ve been very, very lucky, but I’m fairly sure that no one I consider part of my peer group, other than the people I work with, will be able to.

The book is light, and in a lot of places would be bolstered by having better direct access to the statistics involved. It’s written like it’s intended to be made into a documentary. Its primary weakness, however, is linked to its main point, which is that if the children of the upper middle class can’t make it trying to do good, then almost no one can. Unfortunately, it’s too easy to get hung up on the fact that it is about the children of the upper middle class, Ivy Leaguers and graduate students. This is not actually a weakness of the argument, which still holds water, but a weakness to attack. These people (we people?) are not, by definition, a deprived minority. Any complaints that we make are easily attackable by our ideological enemies as the whining of people who want it even easier than we’ve had it. That we deserve to be able to remain middle class because that is where we were born.

This isn’t, of course, the argument that Brook is making, but it’s the easy perception and the standard line of attack. As of the moment, the book has 14 Amazon reviews, six with five stars, one with four, none with three, one with two, and six with one. I am willing to bet, however, that these ratings track the reviewer’s political affiliation more than they track age or socioeconomic class. Most of the negative ones essentially run, “Shut the fuck up and get a real job, you whiner.” Few of them dispute and of the arguments put forth, and when they do, they don’t attack the argument, they attack Mr. Brook, with standard aphorisms of the right; “You’ll understand when you get older.”, “Stop looking for a free ride and work for a living.”, etc.

Let me spell this out for anyone else who reviews this book. This is not a book about Mr. Brook’s or his classmate’s entitlement to a middle class lifestyle. It’s a book about how Reagan- and Goldwater-ite conservative policies on taxation have made the rich richer and have done nothing for the middle class. How if the rich continue to get richer, no one but the rich will be able to live in our most vibrant cities. How an unregulated market for housing and education squeezes out opportunities for the rest of us.

The book is only about the children of the upper middle class because it’s something that’s finally reaching us. It’s already gotten everyone else. We’re not the canaries, not even the miners, we’re the first shift bosses to succumb. If it’s made it this far, what’s next?

So, read the book. Think about it some. Take a trip to some of the other advanced democracies in the world, assuming that you can afford it, and that you can get the time off to go. Talk to some people there, tell them that you’re from Canada, if telling them you’re from the USA is coloring the discussion too much. Take a step out from behind the American exceptionalism that has been so carefully inculcated in you and me and realize that while it’s nice here, if you’re lucky, you most often don’t have to be lucky for it to be nice in one of the other advanced nations, where you wouldn’t be saddled by college debt, you wouldn’t have to constantly worry about what neighborhood you live in to make sure that your kids don’t go to a shitty school, you don’t have to work sixty or more hours a week to own a house.

Mr. Brook isn’t saying that he and his generation don’t want to work, or that they just want something to be given. He just wants to see them, us, be able to work to enrich our own lives, rather than the lives of the people who employ us. To be able to work hard for the things that matter, rather than having to make a choice between our lives and our ethics.

To raise the tone to an incendiary level and to clearly step outside of the argument made by this book. I’d like to put forth the thesis that conservative, regressive tax policies are are aimed at creating a semi-hereditary upper class, an ever less permeable nobility. This is something that, as Americans, as people true to the spirit of the Constitution, we should be fighting tooth and nail. Now stop whining, suck it up, and go out there and vote for someone who’ll raise your damned taxes and spend them on equality and the health and welfare of the people of this country.

That’s the title of a new David Levine story in April’s F&SF. I thought that his Hugo winner Tk’Tk’Tk was OK, but not mind blowing, but this one is really quite good. A an episodic story, told going backwards in time, wound around a string of just so stories about a spacer called Titanium Mike. I’ve just finished reading it, so I’m still not really sure why, but it really resonated with me. I think that I’m starting to understand what all the fuss is about.

Not quite an exhaustive listing of the fiction that I’ve been reading recently, but for the most part it’s been re-reads lately, in addition to a lot of writing. Coming up on the first draft of the book and knocked out a good third of a new story yesterday. Near term schedule for writing, for the truly bored amongst you:

• Finish the first draft before my brother’s wedding in late June. This is ambitious, but I think that I can get it done, and I’d like to have nothing hanging over my head for that.
• Let the book sit for a month before revising. In that time period, I’m going to work more on the supporting stories and start polishing them for publication and then sending them out. I plan on starting to send these out in July.
• One all of the supporting stories are ready for market and making the rounds, revision starts on the novel. Hoping to have this hitting agent’s desks around late September, but we’ll see how long it takes. I’ve never been an expert at revision, nor have I ever revised something this long before. We’ll see how long it takes.
• Once it’s polished and ready to go, more supporting stories and a start on the next book, which I’m sure that I’ll talk about more when the writing starts.

Now, to the books.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald.

Every time I read something by McDonald, I’m kind of shocked that he isn’t better known. That said, River of Gods was a huge, dense book, and that might have scared a lot of people off. Brasyl, however, is not nearly so long, and every bit as good, if not better. Not being Brazilian, I can’t tell you how close he’s gotten to the feeling of the place, but as a reader I now feel like I’ve been there. The sense of atmosphere is incredible and the pacing and characterization in the book are spot on.

Now, I rarely say things like this, being a fan of brevity, but I really felt that the book would have benefitted from being just a bit longer. This is only partially because the rest of it is so good that I didn’t want it to end. We’re well set up for a sequel of some sort, but another ten thousand words could easily have dispensed with the need for one, I think. McDonald is a writer who’s heavily influenced by music, I think, and one thing that he’s taken home from that influence is the concept of dynamics. He’s more than capable, I feel, of stuffing every page with pyrotechnics, but he refrains, making parts of the novel quiet, other parts loud, some fast, some slow, and he does this quite intentionally and to wonderful effect.

Although I’ve been somewhat underwhelmed by Pyr’s efforts so far, they’ve at least earned by admiration by bringing McDonald back to the U.S., and I think that this is possibly the best book that they’ve put out so far. I’ll be looking to see this one on the award ballots next year, and I’ll be very disappointed if it isn’t there, but with the way that they’ve been going lately, it’s almost hard to take them seriously.

The Last Colony by John Scalzi.

The last book in his series concerning John ‘Competent’ Perry, The Last Colony follows up reasonably quickly after the conclusion of the other two, but not so closely that I’ll be incomprehensible to someone who hasn’t read either of the others. Like his hero, Scalzi is competent, charming, and funny. Unfortunately, that’s about all there is to the book. As much as I applaud his concept of ‘gateway SF’, I can’t help but think that this isn’t quite it, or at least isn’t the gateway that isn’t originally meant. Instead of bringing new readers to the table, I think that these books are more likely to serve as a entree to those readers who haven’t read anything published by an author who wasn’t writing prior to the New Wave.

I’m not sure what I think about that, really. I’m not sure more backwards-looking SF is really what we need from someone new. We have enough extant genre mandarins doing that already, and I’d be nice to see people trying to take things in a new direction. Especially American authors. It isn’t for nothing that three of the books on this list are from the UK. What I would really like to see is something from Scalzi that is forward looking but retains his energy, optimism, and humor. Scalzi is well on his way to making a name for himself, and I’d like to see him stretch a little, rather than continuing to address the established base. To write some true gateway SF.

The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod.

I only finished this a couple of days ago, and I’m still not sure what to think about it. For the most part it’s a fascinating read, full of MacLeod’s usual assurance and poise, and then at the end it yanks the rug out from under the characters and the reader so violently that no one is quite sure what happened. And then it ends. I have to admit that I felt a little bit like I’d been mugged after I turned the final page. I might have to revisit this one, after some time to think it over and re-read it. Fascinating work, but I’m still not sure what the point was, and if the author was telling us the right story.

Bone Song by John Meaney.

I have to admit that I’m still a bit confused by John Meaney. The books that he writes are interesting, sometimes even compelling, but all too often are crippled by his reliance on stale genre tropes and otaku-style interest in certain topics. If he writes one more scene about his characters going running, I think that I’m going to scream. At least in this one he mostly abstains from the dull martial arts stuff and orientophilia. What we get in it’s place is a more or less standard hard-boiled science fiction novel that’s been search and replaced into a somewhat more ornate and dark fantasy novel.

There are some good spots, some effectively written scenes of fantasy and horror, but ultimately the novel is hamstrung by two glaring flaws, in addition to a host of irritants that otherwise could be glossed over. The first is the entirely unbelievable romance at the core of the story. It honestly has no legs and adds absolutely nothing to the story other than a hook with which the author can, quite unsuccessfully, tug at our heartstrings at the very end of the book. It should have been cut, full stop. It’s fine to have those characters sleep with one another and then deal with the weird fallout of that.

The other is the irritating assumption that all polities, everywhere, are going to be too corrupt for Good Cops On The Side of Right and Good to do their jobs without taking the law into their own hands. I’m generally annoyed by tough-guy characters like the protagonist of this book, but to use them in this day and age with scarcely a nod to the long and unglamorous history of them in genre literature is a mistake. To his credit, Meaney makes most of the things that they do in this vein mistakes, but it still detracts from the supposedly moral center of the novel.

This looks to be the start of a series. I’m not sure that I’ll read the next one, unless the premise is more intriguing than that of this novel. I was hoping that the shift in genre might jar something interesting loose, but it’s more or less like the old stuff with a differently colored coat of paint.

Since I stayed home over the holidays, I got a lot of quiet time alone to read, which was nice. I also got to spend a lot of quality time with the cat, since just about no one else was in town or available. Oh well. Three books over the four day weekend, and one the week before, plus some commentary on Battlestar Galactica. Or at least that was the plan before a lack of time caused me to put this off for another week. So, add four books to the total, and since I’m cleaning the house today, I’ll inventory the to-read counts. Had I my camera, there would be pictures of the looming piles.

In other news, I’ve finished a couple of stories in the last two months, and the revision of said stories, while slow, is continuing, and I expect to start sending them off soon. Once they’re done, I intend to start on the book that they sketch the edges of, and will post some of the more interesting portions of it here, most likely.

Bookshelf Update:

Unread:

• Hardcover: 6

• Trade Paper: 22

• Mass Market: 15

• Total: 42

Partially Read:

• Hardcover: 3

• Trade Paper: 16

• Mass Market: 9

• Total: 28

Grand Total: 71

Ouch. Looking at the books in the pile, and at the turnover, I realize that for the most part a lot of these are books that I thought that I should read, but that never really captured my imagination. There has been plenty of time for me to read more of these (although not so much lately), but some of them just aren’t getting read because for all that they seemed interesting when I bought them, they are continually supplanted by other books that I’m more interested in reading.

I find that most books that I buy are read within a week or two of getting them. If they are not read by then there is fairly little chance that I’ll get to them anytime soon. Or at least, that’s the overall pattern, although there are notable exceptions. Since I’m bored and wondering how many I’ve read and desperately avoiding doing the housework, I’m going to count up the books that I have here and have read. Note that this isn’t the entirety of the books that I’ve read, since I’ve lost and sold and given some away or read it at the library, of course, nor could I bring all the books that I own out here to SF. It’s a lot of them, though, including almost all of the books that I’ve read in the last three years. The count is rough because there are a few (less than 20) books in there that I have not read and don’t really intend to read, at least not in the conventional sense. They’re mostly reference, and a few things from school.

Read:

• Hardcover: 62

• Trade Paper: 93

• Mass Market: 180

• Total: 335

Grand, Grand Total: 406

Read Percentage: 82.3%

Short Reviews:

Nova Swing by M. John Harrison.

I think that either you love Harrison or you hate him. He’s all about losers, people that you hate a lot, or at least don’t care about much, but at least they’re intriguing, in some way. One day I will find the right words to describe Harrison’s prose style, but I’m not really up to the task right now. Regardless, the writing here is achingly good. I am not entirely sure that I would want to write like Harrison, but I am certainly glad that he is there to do it.

You should likely start with his novel Light before you read this one, or you might be totally lost. Which might be the point, or maybe not. A good deal of the novel is about uncertainty in any case, and there are no characters carried over. If you like this one you should read Light, in any case.

The Ordinary by Jim Grimsley.

I am not certain what I think of this book now, since I just lately finished it. It’s certainly well written but the prose is short of exceptional. While the plotting is certainly intriguing, there are some deep structural problems that I had a hard time getting over. Most of the second half of the book is taken up with what might be called ‘revelation time, where the author spends a lot of space spelling out a lot of facts about the universe that he’s constructed and moving the plot forward almost not at all. This might have been a more forgivable flaw in a longer book, or one with more languid initial pacing, but unfortunately this is a short book that starts quickly and expects a good deal of figuring out from the reader. That is pauses so long for even a quite crucial scene is irritating at the least, and that he does is twice (the scene is done from two sides, but not identically), even more so.

That he then couples this with a pulled punch ending, adds the injury to it. I liked the book, but the point at which he leaves the story off is almost unforgivable. A sequel has just come out, and it might be easier to recommend them as a pair. We’ll have to see. For all of its flaws, it’s an engaging book, and the extra time that he spends at the expense of the plot is spent in well done character building. I’ll pick the new one up one of these days and let you know.

Also, in light of the furore over the fact that Bear’s Carnival contained even a tiny bit of it, I feel that I must inform some of my more faint-hearted readers that this book contains tiny bits of ‘teh gay’ and that if you read it it might get all over you. However, it primarily concerns lesbians, so I’m sure that people will be much less bothered.

The Mark of Ran by Paul Kearney.

This short little fantasy suffers from some of the same problems as the above, but at least you get a good sea battle at the end, something that’s been seemingly promised from the first couple of chapters. There are some good things and bad things about it, but it’s mostly good. Much in the same vein as but sadly somewhat inferior to the work of Steven Erikson. That said, it’s a quick, light book to read, and I’m hoping that the second volume of the story picks it up a lot. As this, this first of a trilogy, as I understand it, suffers a but from first child syndrome, over-heavy with world-building and character development and just finally gets into the plot right before it ends. This will be something that I’ll have to revisit once I’ve read the second volume (I’m honestly tempted to call it the second section).

Polity Agent by Neal Asher.

I’ve just noticed that of the four books that I’m talking about here, only one of them could possibly stand alone. It is not this book. Asher is essentially writing one novel that’s about two million words long. I have no problems with this, as it’s incredibly entertaining, and I think that you should read them all, as much as that is possible, since Tor skipped publishing Line of Polity and may or may not publish this one. I would recommend either going to amazon.ca or to your local specialty store, assuming that you have one.

One thing that bothers me these days, though, is that certain lengths are considered uncommercial. It’s no real secret that short fiction is a slow way to starve. Unfortunately, if you’re truly gifted at the form of the short novel, you’d better have a day job, because you’re going to starve quickly, as you’re too long for the magazines and too short for the main publishers, unless you’re a huge, huge name and people will publish anything that you write just because they know people would buy your spit on paper. Unfortunately this leads to a lot of weird things happening. The worst of it, I think, is that novels that are uncommercially short are padded out, often to great diminution of their effect. But then there are the longer novels that are, at the other end of the scale, cut into smaller parts so that that they can physically be published.

Majestrum by Matthew Hughes

Those of you who are fans of Matt Hughes’ work from F&SF no doubt will already be familiar with Hengis Hapthorne, the Holmes-like ‘freelance discriminator’ who features heavily within what is the more interesting thread of those stories. In this, the first full-length book featuring that character, we get to see that Hughes and his characters, who can seem cartoonish at times, are capable of holding forth at greater length and still maintaining the light tone and humor of the stories, while infusing the characters and their environment with additional depth and interest. Nor, it seems, is Hughes limited only to humor, for we get to see this deeply self-absorbed character confronted by his limitations and faced by a strange form of his own mortality. It’s well handled, and it’s nice to see that the character has more than one note.

Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds

Reynolds, in my opinion, is one of the more interesting writers of short fiction around, and I find that, despite his claims that he doesn’t work well at shorter lengths, that his short fiction is more effective, at least in terms of my enjoyment of his work, than his longer work. That holds true especially here, in a collection of much of his strongest short work that doesn’t take place in the Revelation Space universe. Highlights include “Spirey and the Queen”, “Hideaway”, and “Beyond the Aquila Rift”. This book just gives us all the more reason to lament the fact that an author can make no more than a tiny fraction of their living from writing short fiction. If it paid a little more, we might see more books like this one.

Child of Fortune by Norman Spinrad

I’m not entirely sure what to think of th this one. I’m a huge fan of Bug Jack Barron, and Spinrad is one of the most interesting stylists that SF has yet produced. That said, I think that this book was meant to be shocking, and unfortunately it fails at this today, although it may not have when the book was first released. For the most part, the book focuses on sex, almost exclusively heteronormative, and it does so at the expense of its setting. The language used is quite interesting and inventive, and some of the set-pieces are pretty magnificent, but the characters and the plot suffer a bit in comparison. There’s just not all that much going on there, and the additional difficulty imposed by the stylistic experimentation and visualizing some quite strange environments ends up being tiring rather than fascinating, because you don’t have the engine of a strong plot to propel you along.

The Man from the Diogenes Club by Kim Newman

I have to admit, I was a little doubtful coming in to this one. First off, the cover is, well, more than a little bit gaudy, and I’d never read anything else by Newman (although I have met him, and he’s quite a nice and good humored person, from what I could tell). But it’s from MonkeyBrain, and I trust Chris’ taste, generally. Thankfully, any apprehensions that I might have had were entirely unfounded. This is a great book and it’s a whole lot of fun. It’s also carried off with a great deal more stylistic panache than one would infer from the seeming wonkyness of the conceit. A collection of short stories revolving around psychic and disco fashion maven Richard Jepeson, the whole thing could be shallow and played for laughs, but Newman infuses the characters with feeling and depth that could easily have been left out if these stories had been written simply as a lark. The only issue that I had with these stories was that, as an American reader, with no deep knowledge of British popular culture, I constantly had the nagging feeling that I was missing quite a bit of the cultural references being made. I did not discover until after I had finished half the book that there was a generous glossary and explication of many of these references at the end of the book, which I found helpful and would recommend reading through first, if only so you don’t have to go to the back every time you get the feeling that you’re lost. Overall, this stuff was incredibly enjoyable and I’ll certainly be seeking out more of Newman’s work in the future.

Battlestar Galactica Start to ep 2×08

I’ve stopped watching this show. I don’t know whether it’s the Star Trek science, the hot topcism, or the irritatingly inconsistent way the characters seem to be written, but this show just doesn’t seem to be very good. The Gaius Baltar character is especially annoying. I think that the show might have worked better with some more serious constraints, like a statement at the outset that said the producers of the show would see the characters on Earth or dead in three seasons. That way you might get less of the sense of meandering that this series gives off. I don’t hate it, and there are many good moments, but I just can’t keep watching a show that has me stopping a few times an episode to cringe at how astoundingly bad the last couple of minutes were. Also, I know that they’re not going to give it the ending that I want already, so… meh (I don’t say that selfishly, as in I only want endings that I like or can predict, but I can already see it ending like so many of the other genre shows, drawing it out too long and slowly losing viewers until they have to finish the show in an unsatisfying hurry).

So. I’ve been working on other things lately, hence the scarcity of blogging, and this bookshelf update will be a short one. I’ve just finished a couple of books, and I thought that I would mention them, just to get the fingers moving

Carnival by Elizabeth Bear.

I liked Blood and Iron and The Chains That you Refuse, but I have to admit that I stalled out on Worldwired. I’ll finish it eventually, but in the meantime, I decided to pick up Carnival, to see what Bear can do in a more free-wheeling science-fictional mode. The setting is in a pretty grim far future, where AI overlords unleashed by the far left have turned Earth into a pretty nasty place to live, where the unfit are Assessed, which is to say, instantly killed and recycled by their implants. All of this is somewhat peripheral to the action, though, at least as it concerns the story as it happens. It speaks pretty deeply to the character’s motivations, but it isn’t really the interesting part of the story, so I won’t much discuss it here.

The meat of the action involves two long-separated lovers, two homosexual males with names so distressingly long that I imagine Bear just typed VK and MKJ and searched and replaced them when it was time to submit the manuscript. They’re sent there on a mission by the powers that be on Earth to the deeply self-consciously named New-Amazonia, where women rule, men are chattel, etc. The world-building is pretty intense in places, but it’s somewhat uneven. Since our perspective is mostly (there’s a third, native, viewpoint character, but she doesn’t get as much time at the fore) outsider, we don’t get a whole lot of a feel as for what it’s like to be one of these people, with their starkly different mores and strange culture, and the carnival that names the book is strangely distant, essentially Mardi-Gras, and we never really get a feel for it. Those caveats aside, the main characters and what they’re doing are richly drawn and sharply plotted, and the sex scenes are lightly handled enough that they won’t squick anyone who doesn’t already have deeply seated issues. I thought that the ending was a little rushed, but overall I would recommend the book, and continue to look forward to Bear’s forthcoming work.

The Android’s Dream, by John Scalzi.

I enjoy Scalzi’s work, to an extent, although I think that his main line of novels lack some of the moral heft that I feel they should have, considering their subject matter. Also, I admit to some bigotry for SF that’s over-focused on planets, as Scalzi’s tends to be. But that’s neither here nor there. They’re quick and fun and breezily written with a sharp eye for human foibles and the humor inherent even in dark moments, of which there is no lack.

This book was lighter even than most of his others, though, and I came away a little bit unsatisfied. There were a few reasons, one of which is that the book hinges pretty strongly on some unlikely elements, like a race that relies on top down computer control of every little thing allowing another species entirely to design them a computer system to help do that work, and no one ever trying to hack or subvert it, or even get overly familiar with it. I didn’t really ring true. Also, the idea that in hundreds of thousands of years of galactic history, the idea that no one, ever, before humanity, would bother to try simulating a brain on a computer, it kind of absurd. Most of this takes place off-screen, so it doesn’t directly detract from the book, but they subtly undermine the impact of the resolution, which counts against it in the end.

The book is short, which I applaud in a non-snarky way, and it stands alone, which is also admirable. The characters are fun and interesting, although the main character is too much the self-effacing competent man to ever really come into his own as a character. The book moves along briskly, touching lightly on the emotional resonances of war and people’s general inability to deal with it after the fact. Overall, it’s more fun than anything else, and it doesn’t strive to be much else than fun. You could fault it for that lack of striving, I guess, but it would make you ill tempered and blind to many things.

The Jennifer Morgue, by Charlie Stross.

Another one in the tradition of The Atrocity Archives, this time a take of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. Unfortunately, perhaps since the Fleming books are worse than the source material for the books that inspired Archives, this book, while interesting, hews perhaps too close, and gets too self-referential, which takes something out of the enjoyment, in the end. If you’ve read Archives (I suggest that you do, if you haven’t), you might be disappointed by this one, as I was, a little. Still fun, but I have the feeling that Charlie has a crackerjack book in this series that will out-shine these first two entries by an order of magnitude. Charlie is pretty good at his worst, and astonishing at his best. This is a pretty good book, which means that I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t really live up to the unfiltered Stross experience which I’ve come to expect.

Latro in the Mist & Soldier of Sidon, by Gene Wolfe.

Oh wow. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but Gene Wolfe is far and away one of my favorite authors. It is unlikely that I will ever escape from his influence in my own writing, although I could never hope to produce things as powerful. In these books, Wolfe follows a Roman soldier in Greece and later, Egypt, who has suffered a head wound and cannot remember for more than twenty four hours at a time. Thus he must write down everything in order that he might remember. The metafictional conceit here is that Wolfe has been given the scrolls by a friend to translate them, something similar to the metanarrative that enclosed the Book of the New Sun, although in those books, the narrator, Severian, has eidetic memory. There are a great many things that I would like to say here, but there’s so much to unpack, just from the one set of books, much less the two of them taken together. I might be here all night, and there are other things that I need to do. Just go out any buy them. Wolfe is our greatest author. You should have read them already. I should have read them already, but it’s better late than never. You might hold off on Sidon if you’re averse to a story left unfinished. The writing is brutally beautiful, no one makes it felt like Wolfe.

Quiet lately. Rather busy at work, plus trips home and being busy with other writing projects.

In other news, a few words on books that I’ve finished recently.

Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson.

Though Elantris was a promising debut, this novel doesn’t step it up as much as one might wish. Although it’s pretty nice in that it is another stand-alone book, for which I think Mr. Sanderson should be applauded, the writing hasn’t grown quite as much as one might wish, and there is also second degree abuse of the word ‘maladroit’. It also doesn’t properly address my complaints about the exceptionalism inherent in modern fantasy. My big gripe with the book is that, although it has its heart in the right place, with the people and all, it doesn’t really interact with them very much. Even the main character, supposedly drawn from the lowest of the low, seems exceptionally clever and not beaten down as the skaa, the proles of this particular word are called, would seem to be, and they’re more or less disposable and interchangeable throughout the course of the narrative. There is a touch of the revolutionary vanguard party ideology going on here, that’s something that I’ve never been able to identify with, although your mileage may vary, depending on your political stripe and tolerance for that sort of thing. However, Sanderson continues to produce books that stand head and shoulders above standard extruded fantasy product and take on the standard tropes of the genre with no small amount of rigor and inventiveness.

Trial of Flowers by Jay Lake.

I got ahold of a galley of this one, which is coming out soonish. It starts out in the vein of novels like The Etched City (which I loved) and Veniss Underground (which I thought was interesting, but flawed), but lacks the ultimate sense of hopelessness that many of the novels of that ilk are afflicted by, and I think is made better thereby. It’s refreshing to see a blend of the world-weary and disaffected characters most traditional to the ‘new weird’ movement fused with some of the grand, sweeping structural elements of traditional fantasy without being overconsious of the effect, and I think that this is where the great strength of this novel lies. Deeper but more distant than work by Mieville, who I would hold up as the modern exemplar, I think that a lot of people will like this one, and also that it heralds big things for Mr. Lake.

The Demon and The City, by Liz Williams.

I really shouldn’t even have to say anything here. The Chen novels just get more interesting in this iteration, and Williams just gets better and better. All told, I have to admit that I slightly prefer her ‘pure’ science fiction stuff, but these novels are a lot of fun, and I think that they’re much more accessible to a general audience.

Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko.

I thought that the film was decent, but I liked the book(s) quite a bit better. The movies changed the story around to create resonances that I don’t think really needed to be created, and I think that the lost a lot without the conflicted voice of the narrator. The ending feels a little like a cheat, but the setting is interesting, and I hope that this one does well enough to get more Russian contemporary fiction and genre stuff coming out in English.

The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman.

Um. Wow. I just finished this and I will admit to being more than a little overwhelmed. Ryman is, in my opinion, one of the top three prose stylists working in the genre at the moment. My inner science geek is appalled, at times, with the treatment of some of the science, but that’s about the only criticism that I can level at this particular work. The world depicted is simultaneously intricately surreal and utterly quotidian, and I would describe it, at the risk of sounding Cluteian, as a fictive world with the heft of the Real. There are some disturbing elements and some absolutely harrowing sequences. The book really sucks you in to the point where it’s painful to read some of it, but you cannot stop. I haven’t read all of Ryman’s novels, but with every one I am more and more impressed.

Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder.

Two words, people: Air Pirates. This book, which is a smart little novel in the vein of the old pulp adventures updated for contemporary sensibilities, much like Paragaea, by Chris Roberson. It also has one of the cooler science-fictional conceits that I’ve come across recently: The entire novel takes place in a world sized ball of air lit by giant fusion radiators that the people call the suns. The entire thing is convincingly well thought out, but Schroeder never lets the world building get in the way of the action or the driving plot. I quite like Karl Schroeder, and although this is one of his lighter books, I recommend it highly. Fun fun fun, and have the inkling that this particular series is really going to go places.

Blindsight by Peter Watts.

As I’ve said before, this one is a book that you need to read to even pretend that you know where science fiction is in this day and age. There’s likely already enough breathless prose out there describing it, so I won’t add much but to say that it’s a fascinating example of how to make deeply, deeply flawed characters engaging and compelling. Hell, in this one, the characters are barely human (and not, in some cases) but you can’t really put it down. It is not a book without flaws, but it works in the “if you’re not failing you aren’t trying hard enough” kind of sense. Watts might not have reached his goals here, but with the aim of the novel being hitting the ball somewhere into the next state, I think that everyone could be content with just a grand slam home run.

The Machine’s Child by Kage Baker.

I have to admit that this book annoyed me somewhat, as the Company sequence is still not over, and this book does little but set up the pieces for the grand finale. It seems to be that it’s going to end with an incredible bang (supposedly in the next and last book), but we’re still not there yet, so there isn’t a lot to say.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr.

This book makes me angry because I’d barely heard of Tiptree before I picked it up. I have tons and tons of old year’s bests and collections from the period in which she was writing, but I don’t think that I’d read a single story from this collection before, and that’s a crying shame. Many of the stories in here are totally amazing and deeply depressing. You will not find anything nice said about human nature, but you will find some really excellent prose, and the titles! Wow. You owe it to yourself to find a copy of this and read it. It is one of the building blocks upon which modern science fiction is built (indeed, William Gibson owes Tiptree a particularly large debt, only subtly acknowledged, as far as I know), and it’s terrible that her work is more or less unknown to the modern reader (at least of my age group). Hopefully the new biography will belatedly bring her more readers.

Scar Night by Alan Campbell.

There was a lot of pre-release buzz for this one, but it doesn’t really live up to it, in my opinion. It’s a first novel, plain and simple, and doesn’t nearly have the depth or density or reach of China Mieville’s similar and, honestly, much better, work. Still, it isn’t terrible and it doesn’t rule out Campbell’s work becoming of more interest in the future, although if I were Campbell, I would ignore the fact that the book claims to be book one of a series and write about somewhere else for a while.

Memory by Linda Nagata.

I’m not all that familiar with Nagata’s books. This one isn’t terrible, but it’s light reading. There’s some interesting stuff here, but for all that the ending costs a lot, you don’t really know all that much more when it ends than when it begins (I have a feeling that it was meant to be book one of a series that didn’t get written), and I don’t think that the losses, at least at the end, are deeply felt or affect the characters very much. The world where the novel takes place is pretty interesting, and I feel like it would be pretty interesting to learn about what’s really going on there, but you don’t get there in this book.

End of the World Blues by John Courtenay Grimwood.

In this one, Grimwood continues being uneven. Stamping Butterflies was great, 9tail Fox interesting but less great, and this one falls into the latter category. You’re never quite sure what’s really going on or what the significance of the far future story thread is, and it never gets explained, or at least explained well enough to make me care. The best thing about this novel is the characterization of the near-future thread’s protagonist, a broken, conflicted loser who’s made some really nasty mistakes in the past. For all that he fails to become completely real at times, his story is interesting and carries you through the book well enough. I just feel that Grimwood romanticizes the outsider/pseudo-psychopathic male a bit too much. He has the chops to tell us a really interesting story, and he’s getting there. I’m betting that in a book or two he’s going to make a breakthrough and write something that’s huge and possibly quite important. I’m really looking forward to reading it, when it finally arrives.

Things that I’ve read recently, and some brief reactions:

• Asimov’s August ‘06. Some good stuff, some interesting stuff, some irritating stuff. I’ve an extended post in the pipeline that I will post soon if I can ever get over this problem with posts just stalling out on me (five or six of them now. It’s getting to be a problem).

• Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. (NB: I tried to write this spoilerless, but found myself having to leave out too many things that I wanted to write about. So, heavy spoilers. If you like fantasy, skip this paragraph then go read it, and come back). This was pretty good, especially for a first novel. I found it enjoyable, but there were a couple of things that kept bothering me throughout (note that these are no indication that you shouldn’t read it, as it’s a fun story). Firstly, there are some things that grate against my personal preferences, mostly with regard to the treatment of religion in the setting. These won’t bother most people, so I won’t dwell on them further. Secondly, there’s a fair amount of idiot plot going on here to delay certain events until they’re supposed to happen, when, very often, it would make more sense and feel more natural if they were to happen earlier in the story. Also, there are a couple of revelations that just don’t really make any sense. Not big ones, but they aren’t well telegraphed enough, and it just sort of feels like they were pulled out of a hat to tie things together and make certain characters more monstrous than they are or to give them more things to fight against. I think that in particular the handling of the adjunct priest Dilaf could have been done more effectively, had he remained a more human kind of monster. Thirdly, while there is a good amount of remediation of the standard fantasy tropes of the noble prince and the fair (but bold and intelligent) princess, the common people here are treated too much like counters. You never see their faces, so it’s sometimes hard to care which group of noble assholes gets the prize. Also, the whole city of Elantris seems like a bit of a spoiler for people. I mean, it a bunch of random people just turn into magical gods every once in a while, I’d think that enough wives and children would get left behind so that someone would either figure out how to get everyone in on it, or get rid of it completely. I find it hard to stomach that the Elantreans are awesome just for handing out food and healing people. Finally, the solution to the magical problems posed in the beginning of the novel feels kind of weak to me, as the idea that none of the (well educated, immensely powerful, near-immortal) Elantreans would know how to fix the problem (yes, I know that they get slaughtered, but I doubt that the violence would be so complete that no one who knew the origins of the magic and was capable of figuring out how to fix it would have survived) would have been able to fix it.

• Lethe by Tricia Sullivan. I haaaate Tricia Sullivan. I just want you all to know that. I hate her because she wrote this one when she was younger than I am now and it’s very, very well done, if a bit clumsy in places. It’s a horrible fucking criminal shame that Sullivan isn’t one of our best known authors. This one’s out of print, I think, but shouldn’t be impossible to find used.

• The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny. Like most of Zelazny, in my experience, tremendously uneven. At his best, Zelazny is brilliant, but at his worst, he’s just barely adequate. I’m finding this one a bit slow going because of that. The bad stories are hard to get through, but the incredible ones make it worth it.

• Look to Windward and Consider Phlebas, parts of State of the Art all by Iain (M.) Banks. Rereads, all of them. I have a long, rambling post about the Culture, the statement that Banks seems to be making with it, the contours of the entire loose series, and some wondering why Banks isn’t very famous in the US, despite being a best seller in the UK. If I can ever finish it and clean it up, I might post it here.

I’m sure I’m forgetting about some other stuff. Four months of Asimov’s down and five months to go (counting the double issues as two months). I think that I’m short a month on the to-read stack, but that’s likely because the place where I have them stacked is on one of my cat’s high speed paths across my room and so it’s likely under my bed or something.

Also, I’m opening comments, as an experiment, so say hello, if you want to.

Unannounced vacation. I went on RAGBRAI with some friends, so I was gone for a week. This has taught me a couple of things:

• I need better sun block. The crap that I was using has left me covered in pimples and rashes and supremely unhappy, plus I still got burnt a little, though it’s not as bad as it could be.

• For anything above 20 miles, I really need to do something about my handlebars. I think that I’m going to have to get a new stem to raise them up a little and move them closer. A lot of hand pain was experienced.

• I think that I’m going to pony up for a Brooks B.17 leather saddle. People were singing their praises, and my saddle isn’t all that comfortable past 30 miles or so.

• I need some new pedals, again for the greater distances. I think that I’m going to get a new commuter bike and transfer the egg beaters to that one and then get some quattros to go on the road bike.

• I need better bike luggage. I think that I’m going to put a rack on both bikes and get some panniers (something big enough at least to take my laptop and a change of clothes and shoes). It’s all well and good to haul stuff to work in my bag, but there’s really something to be said for real luggage for anything longer than a couple of miles.

Anyway, enough bike dorkery. I did do some reading on the trip, and I thought that I’d spend some time going over that. I took a lot more things along than I was able to get through, but then, I thought that I was going to be able to read at night and there just wasn’t the time or the energy for that. On the plane to and from, I got through Mr. Dozois’ 23rd annual collection of the year’s best science fiction short stories. I really do love short fiction, though I don’t really read enough of it. I need to catch up on all of the stuff that I haven’t read, but then, I have something like 30 unread novels waiting as well, so we’ll see what kind of time I can make for all of it. In any case, a few comments on each of the stories contained (those that I’ve read, at least), to give you a bit of the flavor so that you go out and buy it now like you already should have.

Actually, after about half an hour of writing a little bit about each one, I find that I’m bored with the project. Here’s a short list of the really, really good stories from it that you really shouldn’t miss (because I am a painfully lazy slackass):

• “Camouflage”, by Robert Reed.
  A Great Ship story. I really like Reed’s stuff.

• “A Case of Consilience”, by Ken MacLeod.

• “Little Faces”, by Vonda McIntyre.
  Quite weird. Gracefully establishes a very strange setting with characters who aren’t really anything like human, but gets you emotionally involved in any case.

• “Deus Ex Homine”, by Hannu Rajaniemi.
  I’d never heard of the author before I picked up the Nova Scotia anthology earlier this year. I really liked this one. Looking forward to hearing more from the author.

• “Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck”, by Neal Asher.
  A Polity short story, with a gabbleduck far from home. Every time I read an Asher novel, I keep reading the word gabberduck, which gives me the mental image of some coked out late 90s English raver type wearing a duck hat. I think that this dampens some of the terror, at least for me, some of the terror that Mr. Asher means the gabbleduck to inspire.

• “Beyond the Aquila Rift” & “Zima Blue”, by Alastair Reynolds.
  Both of his short stories in this collection are, to me, indications that Reynolds might be pushing to hard with the novels. He’s still really good at the short form, which makes me think that if he focused on writing shorter, more economical novels, instead of the massive tomes that he’s been pushing out once per year lately (I’m sure that’s publisher pressure more than choice, though), he’d be writing books that I’d be more interested in reading.

• “The Clockwork Atom Bomb”, by Dominic Green.
  Never heard of the author before, but this is an interesting one, about weapons inspector/disarmament expert type handling some really nasty relic weapons.

• “Gold Mountain”, by Chris Roberson.
  Another entry in his series of stories (leading to a novel, I think) about a world where China never turns inwards, but becomes the leader of the civilized world, about the construction of a space elevator using American and other foreign labor around the same time that in our world the railroads were getting built. All about the human aspects, though as what they’re building really wouldn’t have mattered all that much. Affecting.

• “The Fulcrum”, by Gwyneth Jones.
  Jones is almost channeling M. John Harrison here, but doing so in her own inimitable style. Mayhem, weirdness, hateful characters and utter despair in the outer reaches of the solar system.

• “Two Dreams on Trains”, by Elizabeth Bear.
  An really great far future snippet about art and the lengths to which we’ll go to express ourselves.

• “Burn”, by James Patrick Kelly.
  I bought this a while ago as a stand alone novella. It has its weaknesses, but it’s a very good story about the choice to remain human in a universe that has definitely moved right on.

Also read Warpath by Tony Daniel. I really like his short stories and the two other novels of his that I’ve read, Metaplanetary and Superluminal. This is his first novel, and it shows in a lot of ways. I doesn’t have a lot of the confidence and panache that he developed later on, and the pacing is quite uneven. Still, entertaining if you’re a fan. The cover and back copy (and the title! I think that the one word title fad has done on long enough [as an aside, Haldeman’s Camouflage was originally called Sea Change, and was changed for the same reasons. I think that was lessened a little by that alteration, but then, I’m one of those weird people who think that titles matter]) are pretty dire. Ahh, the late 80s and early 90s. Things are getting better, but it’s very, very slow. Anyway, if you’re a Daniel fan, pick it up, although you’re unlikely to find it unless you have a really good used bookstore or you look online. If you’re Tony Daniel, write some more stuff! Looking on the internet, it seems that all of his projects are stalled at the moment, which is assy. I really liked the first two, and would love to see at least some short fiction, but it seems like the man dropped off the face of the Earth in 2003 or so. I hope that he makes a triumphant return at some point. It’d be kinda sad if he didn’t, as he was one of the more interesting up and comers of the last few years.

In other news, it looks like Elizabeth Bear saw my little capsule review of her last couple of books. Again, I really should write something longer, at least about Blood & Iron. It really is quite good.

I have to preface this by admitting that I’m a Stross fanboy. As much as I love well written prose and poetic turns of phrase and those perfect, telling details, I’m also a sucker for Big Think SF, even when it isn’t carried in the most excellet prose possible. Not that Stross isn’t a good wordsmith. He’s too smart to write badly, but if there’s music there, it’s the harsh, angular music of out of control technology, the strange beauty of found sound and ripping synthetic bass. That said, this is his fourth written-to-be-a-novel novel, and he’s improving each time. I don’t think that he’ll ever be a Wolfe or a Swanwick, but he’s getting much better as time goes on, and I have confidence that these big ideas will eventually be contained within some powerful prose.

This novel starts off with a massive infusion of the strange. A post-person, prosaically named Robin, comes out of memory redaction confused and lost, more missing than someone would usually go for when they need a new start on things. It seems that there’s been a war, and that people all over are forgetting things the only way they know how, which is having big chunks of the war edited out of their minds. The setup seems a bit idiot-plot to me, they early romance too easy and the fact that people are trying to forget a war where their memories were mauled against their will by editing their own memories is strange to me. I’d personally think that a cult of sacrosanct personalities would spring up, trapping people with orthohuman mental architectures to stagnate under the tonnage of their accumulated memories for centuries to come, but I’m not the one writing it and that’s not what the story is about.

So. There’s a story here, where Robin gets caught up in an experiment gone wrong, or rather an experiment aimed wrong gone right. He becomes she becomes Reeve, and things just get stranger from there. We get the whole war in these lovely flashbacks throughout the book. Stross seemingly paid a lot of attention to structure and voice in this, as he would have to because it is not a human novel, as we think of them. The voice changes here and there as the personality of the teller is changed by the body that he/she wears and by some externalities that I’ll not ruin for you. Suffice it to say that it’s very interesting and quite odd in places. You often hear sensawunda mentioned when people are talking about Stross and his stories and books, and this is not done for no reason. He’s very, very good at managing to tell interesting stories about people whose experience we can barely comprehend, since they’re so far out of the standard human experience, which is something that I always enjoy. There’s a thought through quality to it as well, which is something that I really appreciate, even if I don’t strictly require it. He’s put a lot of thought into these things, and it pays off. The book veers from deadly serious to quite funny, often in the space of a sentence or two, but at least Stross has the sense to have his characters tell bad jokes when there’s something really awful going on, to highlight the fact that levity cannot defeat all.

I was following Stross’ blog at the time he was writing this novel, and he knocked the damn thing out in less than a month. I bet his hands hurt after that one. But it also means that there’s a continutity of thought and purpose here that’s lacking from Accelerando, his other outing in this future history. Not that anything can hang together when you’re not sure that the narrator is the same from scene to scene, since identity is so utterly mutable. I think that it also makes for a more cohesive novel, since Stross was likely able to stuff the entire thing inside of his head, so the interconnections are denser and more intricate. There’s a lot going on here, and he more or less manages to keep all of the balls in the air. It doesn’t say as much as Accelerando tried to, but it says what it says better. Of all of his novels so far, I think that this one is the most successful, barring The Atrocity Archive, which isn’t a novel, by length, but is pretty wonderful and funny and has just come out recently in trade paperback and you should get that too.