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.

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.