association-list

This week’s short story club story is The Shangri-La Affair by Lavie Tidhar, who I’d never heard of before.

It’s really quite good.

I was struck from the first by the confidence of the narrative voice. The story follows an unnamed protagonist from a quite close third-person perspective through a future war in South-East Asia, concerning a particular MacGuffin in the form of a peace plague (the Shangri-La of the title), virally transmissable fellow-feeling that stops hostilities in their tracks. We only get to see its effects for a moment before everything is blown to atoms by the unseen backers of our nameless viewpoint character. The story’s prime emotional conflict is his struggle between destroying the peace plague and letting it spread. Finally, he decides that peace not chosen is no peace worth having. This struggle would have more resonance if we had some theory as to how the peace plague works. If the reader were allowed another viewpoint on whether or not the plague nullifies free will, it very well might deepen the effect of his choice. The doubt it still there, but I think that it’d be better if it were made a bit more explicit.

The story isn’t perfect, of course. There are only token female characters and the people that we encounter for the most part are generic Men of Action and Consequence. The plot is at least four decades old and the tone is taken straight from smeary spy novels set in warzones far away from the home front, without any real engagement with the consequences of the war on the people who live there. What virtue the piece has lies in the cleverness of its synthesis of these elements, and I think that it succeeds very well (that said, I tend towards synthesis ( see update below ) in my tastes, perhaps to a fault, Gene Wolfe and Michael Swanwick being favorites of mine).

Since reading it, I’ve gone on something of a Tidhar binge, and what is out there on line really strikes me as quality stuff, some of it better, I think, than this particular piece, 304 Adolf Hitler Strasse over at Clarkesworld being the best of the stuff online, in my opinion, at least that I’ve found. I also went out and bought HebrewPunk and ordered The Bookman, so I may be in the throes of an irrational enthusiasm. Looking forward to what he produces in the future.

UPDATE: see here for a clarification of the terminology that I’m using above.

I’ve read ten or so books since the last posting, but honestly I’ve had a run of bad luck and am finding that I don’t have a whole lot to say about any of them that’s particularly positive. I’m not entirely sure that this is helpful to anyone, and since this list was for my own edification, I don’t think that it’s much worth continuing on with. I’ll continue to post about books that I like, but since I am grumpy and they’re fairly rare, I doubt that there will be much here for the next little while, until I think of something else to drive commentary and content.

Any time the spokesperson for a company asserts, in a congressional hearing or via a lobbyist, that a new regulation would “destroy” or otherwise negatively impact their business, there should be a consequence. They should have to prove, using real data to be made public, how and by how much this regulation would impact their business. Thereafter, their books would be audited to ascertain that they’re telling the truth, and the audit’s findings will be made public as part of the congressional record. Speakers who’re proven to have lied or distorted the situation would then have their testimony struck from the record.

Alternatively, one could make this a standard gateway for sending company officers or others to comment on new regulation, with only the granting or denial of permission to comment as part of the public record.

I really like Karl Schroeder’s books so far. Meaty SF think-heavy books that never shrink from engaging with the human characters at their hearts. That said, I have some quibbles with the Virga books. While the central idea is a great one, and it is explored in relentlessly interesting ways, I can’t help but think here that there are too things competing for space in what are, after all, relatively short novels. The first three books were pretty light, action-adventure novels that took us on a tour through Virga while including real human drama and the ugly choices that people are forced to make by circumstances. Since they were at ground level, playing out, for the most part, far from the character’s home, there’s fairly little engagement with societal construction, and that’s fine, because we never really stick any place for long enough for the reader to start wondering how it would all work.

In The Sunless Countries, Schroeder goes darker and attempts to engage with some serious, fascinating societal issues (absolute democratic rule when the public is ill-informed, the hijacking of a polity by neo-fascists), all the while keeping up the adventurous pace and rip roaring action and giving us more Virga wide-screen SFX and taking us out of Virga for the first time and and and. This could really work well, but the downfall of the novel is that Schroeder sticks to the format of the other Virga novels. That is, it is somewhat short (maybe 100-110k words?) and primarily follows the viewpoint of a single character. It’s rare that you’ll find me arguing that a novel should be longer. I’m generally exasperated by the level of padding required to get a book out to the 200k-ish words that seem to be required these days. But this is a book that could really use it. Using both Hayden and Leal as viewpoint characters, actually following Leal outside of Virga, rather than having her briefly recount her adventures, spending more time with the failure of the Eternist takeover, making the ending less abrupt, etc. Another 100 pages at least are justified here, and the last quarter of the book suffers a lot for their absence. Everything feels second-hand and rushed, and it skews the pacing of the novel something awful. You spend a great deal of the end of the novel inhabiting the perspective of someone in a locked room while a naval battle goes on outside.

I enjoyed the book a lot, and the setup at the end could potentially lead some interesting places, but I hope that Schroeder will manage to rush the ending less next time, which might mean bending the structure more than he’d like. As the book stands, it’s a tantalizing hint of the book that it could have been; great fun, but not all that it could quite plainly be.

see here

Not a lot to say about this one. I hate time travel stories, and this one is a particularly odious example of the breed. Too many time travel stories go into puzzle mode, and so too here. The writing is all right, but the characterization is of necessity a bit thin. As a disclaimer, it takes Gene Wolfe level talent to get me interested in this sort of thing, so my opinion is best ignored here.

This book was more or less OK. It strikes me that it’s a little bit too by-the-numbers to really enjoy, but that it’s a competent instantiation of its particular formula, and thus (since it’s a good formula, generally) pleasant enough. I don’t mean to damn with faint praise here. This is a good, polished book for a first novel, and squarely hitting the middle of the road on one’s first outing is impressive. My primary technical complaint, I suppose, is that Downum is perhaps too eager to prove that her viewpoint character isn’t a Mary Sue, that this isn’t just a particularly good transcription of a D&D game, and in so doing largely robs her protagonist, Issyt of any agency in the resolution of the story. There are other characters with more agency than the viewpoint character, but by the end you start to wonder why Issyt (how do you pronounce that, anyway?) has any screen time at all. The one thing that she does in this story could have been just as easily done as a quick insert of backstory in the next novel where she encounters the other character in question. Perhaps the main problem I had with the novel was a lack of economy. Pages and pages were wasted kicking the crap out of the interfering foreigner, and too little time was spent with the local characters who actually make the story go. It’s understandable that the author wants to spend time with her primary character, but she should likely be given more to do in future novels (that said, it’d be an interesting experiment in form if someone were to do a series like this that never featured its nominal protagonist as a primary viewpoint character).

Not a lot to say about this one. It was a book. A book that was too YA for me, too obvious in its setup for its sequels, too uneven in its pacing, too unstinting with its gifts of sentience to almost every thing in the novel. For all that, the writing is consistently pretty good, and there are some playful sections where the writer takes interesting liberties with the voice of the book, and that liven it up. Ultimately, though, there’s just too much going on here all the time, as if the author is worried that if he doesn’t get all of the setup in for the next fifteen books or something he won’t be able to write them, or at least look clever when they come out. Additionally, the book seems to have a hard time deciding whether it wants each portion to be allegorical or taken as a secondary-world construction. Still, the prose is decent, the author’s heart is in the right place, and there really are interesting things happening here, even if there are too many of them and they’re happening too slowly. Did I mention that the pacing was absurdly uneven?

I think my strategy here will be to check out the author’s second series, if there is one. He’s got a lot of raw talent, but the story he’s telling here combined with the roughness of execution makes me think that I’ll skip the rest of this one.

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.