The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

John Scalzi is an excellent writer. This is eminently readable and highly enjoyable.

In this sequel to Old Man's War, we spend our time with the special forces. A military scientist has betrayed humanity and gone to work with an alliance of species that are planning an attack on the human worlds. When the plan to copy the traitor and ask the memory-enhanced clone does not work, he is placed in combat where he can be useful or die trying. Then memories begin to emerge.

The main note is quality of writing. It is just a pleasure to read John Scalzi, an effortless flight through carefully crafted work. He does well in friendship and introspection, he does well in sex and violence. There is variety in settings and activities, and it is all good.

The variety is baked right in. As in Old Man's War, thousands of worlds are just a skip drive jump away, in addition to training, different operations, and squad "turnover" in a wartime military story. Things move, things change, and the writing remains excellent.

There is some introspection time to consider the implications of the plot background. I am being intentionally vague to avoid spoiling the first book, but I have already said that our protagonist is a man-made human. That is important, as is being made with a built-in brain-computer interface. The latter is addressed in Old Man's War and gets more attention here.

The book falls short in being conservative about the implications. The story remains human, which is good storytelling but sells its characters short. When it is explicit that we have a transhuman cast, keeping the thought and discussion on a human scale is a disappointment. There are early indications that things are working at a different speed on a different scale, but then nothing comes of it, and the characters default to human behavioral norms despite being raised without them.

I can understand wanting to be human because of having been created as a non-human Other. Maybe that is meant to be implicit, but multiple characters explicitly reject it, and I expect them to act more fully on being high-bandwidth digital telepaths with hive mind potential. Little else is done with that idea after the revelation that it makes for really great sex.

My other criticism is that our returning character from Old Man's War does not add much from the original. This was the case in Marooned in Realtime as well: the character is there in name, and it is the same character, but it fails to build. That is great for someone entering on this book without having read the first, but the setting does build on the previous book, so we have character re-use without character advancement. This would be less notable if the point of view did not shift to that character at times; if we stuck with our protagonist exclusively, the inability to see inside others' heads would resolve that. Except that they can see inside each others' heads.

Moving past criticism, we have the neutral point that some pieces are obvious tropes or adaptations. Mr. Scalzi cites some of them himself, such as borrowing "uplift." Bad artists borrow, good artists steal. You can also see the sci fi fandom and geekery as the characters enjoy our modern books. They suggest that sci fi died as a genre once space travel was possible and they saw what the universe was like, but it reads suspiciously like a list of the author's favorite books. Other tropes exist, such as the trick from training that becomes critical later, although with a few variations.

Wait, no, one more criticism stemming from "they saw what the universe was like." I have mentioned in other books the difficulty of remaining just a little transhuman for hundreds of years. Maybe adding hundreds of enemy species puts economic pressure that slows that, but it should certainly add distance in other directions. The book addresses my point from last time, why not use all/mostly special forces, but "they creep us out" does not outweigh the cost and effectiveness benefits when at war with 90% of the galaxy. (If anything, the costs for special forces are even lower than implied in the first book.) Humanity would have been wiped out, and a species that engages in preemptive intergalactic terrorism hardly seems like it would have any scruples against tactics that undermine its own humanity. On the other hand, humanity is doing a middling job of not bullying the dragon, and I am waiting for the story about a special forces rebellion.

That there are details to think and argue about is a good thing. Many stories require suspension of disbelief such that you must forgive pretty much everything to get started. It takes this level of coherence for thoughts deeper than the awesomeness of laser swords. In a thinking person's action-adventure story, we think. And maybe the next explanation will patch it instead of opening new questions.

Although, new questions are great sequel hooks. A few of the characters note problems, like Eurocentrism given the rest of the setting, and I am willing to give John Scalzi the benefit of the doubt that he has thought through some things (rather than just lampshade hanging).

While I may argue some plot points (and the author has already won, so who cares?), and that only happens when the plot is good and thoughtful enough to be worth arguing, the writing is less subject to criticism. John Scalzi does a great job bouncing from familial love to the horrors of war. We have philosophical discussion next to comic relief in a way that works.

Pretty much everything works. He is just that good. I still think of John Scalzi as one of the new lights in science fiction, and he is perhaps the brightest.

Amazon link

Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge

Across Realtime, book two

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

This is famously a book about people who missed The Singularity. I did not expect it to be a murder mystery.

The human era is long past. There were billions of people, all of whom disappeared in what was the ascension, suicide, or murder of the human race. Whatever it was, about 300 people missed it, shunted outside time for various reasons. Millions of years later, the last group is awakening, joining the others who have mostly waited in stasis for the rest of humanity to emerge. This is the human race's last chance to start over, with just enough people to ensure genetic diversity, with just enough technology to get everything started before the high-tech equipment wears out. The plan has a narrow margin of error, and it never accounted for having a murderer amongst the survivors.

This has layers of mystery. On a grand scale, what happened to the human race? There are competing perspectives about self-immolation, self-improvement, and alien attacks. On the plot-driving scale, who is the murderer? Linking the two, what is the hidden enemy trying to accomplish? We have what may be a holocaust in the distant past, a very recent single killing, and a potential completion of the human genocide.

Our protagonist has his own version of this running. He never intended to leap into the future. He was a police investigator not long before the human Singularity/Extermination, when a suspect sent him 100 years into the future. For his family, that was like killing him; for him, that was like killing everyone he ever knew; as a large side effect, the entire species disappeared in the interim, really eliminating everything. The standard punishment for such a time displacement was sending the criminal forward slightly further, with a note left for the victim so he can do as he sees fit. The protagonist's rescuers picked up that guy too, and hid his identity in the interest of saving as many people as possible. 300 humans left, and one of them took away everything he ever had.

If The Singularity is an unfamiliar term, Google can assist, or just read the book. The idea is that humanity develops into something post-human, most likely due to intelligence-enhancing technology. Once you can improve your brain, you become smart enough to improve your brain further, and so on. As this accelerates, you can quickly become something incomprehensible to a present-day human. Along the way, you probably develop the power to wipe yourselves out as a byproduct. Good luck!

For those stranded, time and preparation make a big difference. If you intentionally jumped forward, you brought the best your time had to offer; if you were shanghaied, you brought whatever you had with you. If you left a year or two later, your technology was more advanced, with that nearly inhuman speed of improvement. You have a different scale of operation when you have thought-controlled robots and anti-gravity units, as opposed to the best technology that 1982 had to offer.

Of course, everything wears out eventually. I could not replace this computer myself. This creates a hard deadline for getting the species going again: how many years will the current equipment last, especially when it needs to support 300 people, many of whom never planned to leap into the future.

Shall we return to the murder mystery? All the "high tech" humans are suspects, so they turn to our protagonist, from a slightly earlier age. Someone had a reason to kill, and they may by trying to kill or conquer the rest of the human race. And s/he is one of a small group that lives among you, probably with the technology to nuke things, definitely with the competence to sabotage hyper-advanced computer systems.

This interaction of low and high tech, and the differing perspectives of individuals and groups, drives the setting. It also creates a problem for the narrative itself, because we are following an investigator who is not technologically capable of understanding his quarry, and there is no reason to think that the killer is any more comprehensible. Give someone the medical technology to live for hundreds or thousands of years, the computer technology to vastly expand their memory and thought speed, and a time-skipping device so that they can operate gradually over a multi-million-year timeframe. Can you even guess what that might do to your worldview? Our protagonist is a normal investigator, no different from a modern-age human, who is somehow using his intuition and person-reading skills to deduce motives and who is lying. This is like your pet trying to out-think you. Granted, I sometimes have trouble getting my cat into her carrier, but I'm pretty sure I'll always win in the long run.

Although I notice that I feed her and clean her litter, and she sleeps on the couch while I am at work. Hmm.

I have dealt more with the technological side than the personal side here. Vernor Vinge is good as ever on how the two interact, but the breadth of the story makes the depth of characterization more shallow than usual. We spend a lot of time in our protagonist's skull, and we have some interesting supporting cast, but there are many suspects and more people beyond them to understand. A low-tech faction may be addressed as a group, and its members may not be suspects, but we must consider its leadership, internal strife, disputes with other groups, plans for the surviving humans, and how it fits in others' plans and disputes. Even with a surprisingly small number of high-tech suspects, there is a lot of ground to cover, to say nothing of developing the world of the distant future.

We mostly see humanity from a good distance up, rather than a few people up close. It works fine at that level, although I suspect you would want more if you were really trying to solve a murder. It is hard to get to know people at that distance.

Finally, things pick up at the end. It never becomes hard-boiled, but there is action once events spiral towards their close. Given the high-tech humans' scale of operation, where each can conveniently carry around the equivalent of entire nuclear arsenals, that can be quite a spectacle, yet this becomes to most personal and small-scale part of the book. If the explosion is close enough for you to see much, you will probably be dead before you get to enjoy it, so combat is kept at a safe distance as much as possible.

The big reveal is a bit cliche. The book lampshades it, pointing out why the cliche is usually a bad idea, but a double-subversion becomes playing it straight. I would like to comment on the lady's impressive turn, but if I have gotten this far with no Peace War spoilers, I can close without spoiling this book.

Amazon link

This was supposed to have been posted months ago. I somehow moved it to my "posted" pile without ever posting it.

The Ruins by Scott Smith

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

This is a circumscribed 3. I would not recommend it to most people, but there is definitely an audience that would enjoy it.

Six young adults on vacation take a day trip to an archeological dig at the vine-covered ruins of a Mayan mining camp. As you might expect from a horror novel, now that they have entered The Ruins, they may never leave.

The dominant mood is dread. It is a slow-moving story with little going on and few moving pieces. Until events come together all at once, the pattern is to dwell upon each significant event at length. Ponder bad things that have happened, ponder greater problems still to come. It is all about anticipation, waiting for the blow to come. The themes are of seclusion and predation.

If that sounds good, and you like your horror with more brooding and less slashing, this could be for you. I imagine that the film version has a faster pace, since each fifty-page chunk of story would translate to about nine minutes on the screen. Unless my reading speed has improved recently, this is a surprisingly fast read for 500 densely printed pages, where the pace of page-turning offsets the languid storytelling.

So you know what type of horror you are getting into, and this hardly counts as a spoiler given the (original) cover and how early it comes up, the vine is the enemy. The dominant problem is basic outdoor survival on a barren hilltop, but the vine is the reason and increasingly the direct antagonist. The paragraph after next will contain some mild spoilers, so this could be a good stopping point if you plan to read/watch it.

The human element is very good. The limited third-person perspective flips between four characters, and while we have fifty pages of introduction and fifty pages of getting to the ruins, we do not really know them until we see them interact under pressure. All six contribute to the problems in their own ways, with a spread of personalities that one character notes as just perfect for a movie cast. Since we spend most of our time inside their heads, instead of having events, we get a good sense of them. The exception is Mathias, a character who seems to exist as a plot device, silent mirror, and extra pair of hands.

The story would work better if it remained low-key. There are few things besides our cast: a hill, a hole, two tents, and a tangle of vine. Having the vine be an aggressive, predatory kudzu with acidic sap was quite enough. It was not necessary to add other abilities to it, and making it multi-lingual and creative was not the most absurd. Seriously, apple pie? Maybe this is my hard sci fi background, but I find more horror in an impersonal and implacable destroyer than an actively malignant one. The man against nature story is turned into one with a villain, and again back to that character's comments, just perfect for a movie. Asimov's impersonal forces do not necessarily film well.

On a minor note, the book was written just before the tipping point in the cellular communication revolution. This means that the characters refer to cell phones with the now-implausible addition that no one brought one. It seems like an easy problem to resolve, declare there to be no signal in the Mayan jungle. If anyone wants to chat about how you get around the plot problem caused by this or my previous suggestion, we can take those spoilers to the comments.

Finally, Mathias has a good point late in the book: how and how long has this gone on without anyone noticing? I do not know how the Mexican government reacts to people disappearing in the jungle, but there is an implication that the ruins have had many victims. There will be a serious investigation at some point, with all that implies, and there probably should have been one already. The characters have some thoughts on the matter, but the book seems to be relying on distance and a sense of foreignness.

Amazon link

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

Rating - 4: worth reading multiple times (buy it)

In value per unit time, this book approaches Stargirl, which is the reigning champion for rewarding your reading time. The tone and storytelling have a similar feel.

In the lightly transhuman future, death and need are solved problems, leaving interest and desire. The Whuffie is a reputational currency that measures how much others respect you and are interested in what you have done. In Disney World, the battle of popularity rages between a traditional park and a virtual reality seeking to replace it. Even when death is a temporary inconvenience, is the Hall of Presidents worth killing for?

The plot really is a battle about innovation in theme park rides, which probably sounds strange and trivial, which it is. The real story is about the people involved in that struggle and the society they represent.

The real story is about hope and despair, with surprisingly deep but light despair that moves quickly and keeps going. Hope emerges to give us new opportunities to go a little deeper. You need those little plateaus and occasional lifts on the path to hitting bottom.

I mentioned Stargirl, which takes a similar idea of great promise and then shows it bottoming out. This starts lower and goes deeper. It opens with the protagonist's best friend contemplating suicide. Our protagonist is on the side of the traditionalists, such as they are, trying to preserve something in the face of popular innovation. This is the tale of a running, losing battle, with many creative applications of It Got Worse.

The Bitchun philosophy is not entirely specified. It involves freedom, rule by popular affirmation, ad hoc organization, and moving beyond death and material want. Combining that with the Whuffie makes the world more or less like high school on a grand scale, where your value as a human being is determined by your number of friends and fans on Facebook. If you are unpopular enough, someone can just drive your car off; it is not stealing if he can do something more popular with it.

That moderates and exacerbates the despair. The battle is that fierce because the stakes are that small. The worst case scenario is eternal life without fear of want, but people can still hurt each other in a variety of ways. Because people are like that.

The writing moves. It may take a little while to get into the concepts like backing up your brain in case you need to copy it to a cloned body, but the level of writing should be accessible to teens and up. You will rock through this book even if you are not a fast reader, and it produces its value for you quickly without making the prose a barrier. More authors need to write for painless reading.

How do we keep things painless with an aura of despair? It does not wallow. The bits of hope help, but the pacing and attitude do a lot. Also, if we can clone people and copy their brains, we can have mood-altering chemicals that keep us active and positive even while recognizing just how badly things are going. It is realistic without being pessimistic.

Our protagonist is surprisingly reliable despite literally having his brain break. You can tell that he is not at his best, that he is making mistakes, that a lot is going wrong on his end, but he is still portraying events accurately and giving us a solid view on the world (see also: All the King's Men). He is watching himself be out-maneuvered with great clarity.

I do not think I am selling it well. This is not one of those books that exists just to torture the protagonist. The problems exist for reasons, both for the plot and for the character development. There is a central tension that displays the protagonist's nobility and foolishness, with a recurring theme that explains the mistake-in-progress while making it a highly sympathetic thing to do.

I am someone who cannot watch sitcoms because of shying away from even embarrassing characters, so I should hate a story that paints high school-style popularity on a grand scale, but the telling and the pacing make it an excellent presentation with lots of value. So many stories make the reader suffer along with the character, but in this case, the author refuses to punish the reader, and you seem to lift the characters up from their despair rather than having them drag you down.

Also, to borrow a line from Heinlein, it is the anticipation of pain that causes suffering more than the pain itself. Despite my telling you, and despite the book's telling you just before it happens, you will still not see it coming when many of the problems hit. The writing and plot remain fresh and exciting.

Pausing my recommendation of the book, I am now going to criticize. As I said, the story has some weaknesses, largely due to the fridge logic of the various ideas it tosses around. Perhaps I should say that the setting as a whole does, although some of them might be intentional.

First, note the triviality of what is going on. Theme parks are serious business. We have ended all death and want so that people can make theme park rides the most important things in their lives? Is it more pitiful if our characters are typical, and all society has focused itself on this kind of thing, or if they are an obsessed minority fighting a meaningless battle on the fringes of nirvana. They are like Caroline, whose reaction to infinite opportunity is to find new ways to hurt herself.

Second, they have been slightly transhuman for a very long time. How can any society like this remain stable for longer than most current countries? How can humans mesh with their technology and shed their limits but remain so small? As I said, this might be intentional, when you consider what happened to the people who did not partake of immortality via brain backup. They died. These are the people left behind after others have pursued a truly post-human path, left behind like the dead. While they are comprehensible to us, the current humans, the fully upgraded must view them as monkeys who decided never to leave the trees.

Third, popularity as currency has some problems. A few are noted, and I might just point to the standard functions of money. The Whuffie is a fine medium of exchange, but it seems a fuzzy unit of account, and its utter failure as a store of value is repeatedly a major plot point. Reputational currency is a neat idea that may have some promise, but the Whuffie seems to break down if you poke at it too hard.

Fourth, why a theme park? As stated, the virtual reality efforts could be sent anywhere via the internet, and that must be worth more Whuffie.

I might normally savage a book for driving its plot by having its protagonist make bad decisions. Nope, even the worst decisions here make sufficient sense in the characters' context. He is flawed but not an utter idiot.

I also have no objection to the intentionally inflammatory elements, which are fairly tame and conservative. The setting is mildly transhuman, so some people make merry with their body configurations. Toss in some extra joints, limbs, feathers, whatever. Except for a few popular cosmetic bits, this is mostly portrayed as rare and weird. It becomes easy to look conservative after the complete upheaval of society.

Based on your notions of personal identity and continuity, you may have problems with the brain backup bit. This is brushed against in passing. If you would still think of it as "you" if we copied your brain into a new body then killed the original body, this is the perfect society in which you could be immortal (although, strangely, there are no cases mentioned of people multiplying themselves without offing the original). If that sounds wrong, and it would just create someone new who would think of him/herself as you, then this could be a continuous tale of horror as there are people who would "move to" a backup body to avoid the inconvenience of a cold. But, as our story notes, people who had those problems just died without leaving backup copies to annoy those whose identities persisted. Cheers!

I am not sure how the book will hold up to repeated reading, since the surprises will not be surprising. The quality of storytelling will remain the same, however, and the rapidity of reading will keep it worthwhile even if the marginal value decreases. Our protagonist makes a point that the best art (he is thinking of the Haunted Mansion at the time) gains value with repeated exposure, as you notice new details and experience it more fully. I will let you know how that goes in some number of years.

Amazon link

Or there are lots of free, legal copies online.

Flesh by Philip José Farmer

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

This was on a list of 100 must-read science fiction books. It's crap.

The starship returned from its 800 year journey of exploration to find Earth degenerated. Environmental catastrophe had devastated the population, now reduced to medieval conditions and fractured societies devoted to fertility cults. Captain Stagg is adopted as the Sunhero, king of Deecee, with surgically grafted antlers making him the Horned King who is compelled to lead the rites.

The premise has promise. We see men fallen back to Earth, finding their society destroyed. Their captain gets swept up and forced to become part of the festivities; Earth managed to keep some biological skills, and Stagg's antlers pump him full of chemicals giving him the ability and drive to impregnate a hundred women a night for the fertility festivals.

Did I play that bit too softly in the plot summary? Think pagan fertility rites on the scale of thousands of people.

The prelude is worth reading. It stands on its own as a short story of a deeply carnal post-apocalyptic America. It gives you enough explanation to understand what is happening, and it creates a grand spectacle with a story wrapped in. Chapter V is worth reading. It gives you the next morning, when the captain is in the depths of suicidal despair after the previous night's rush of chemicals has worn off. He can remember everything he did, could not even try to prevent himself from wanting to do. And it gives you the course of his day as the chemicals again take hold, the exultation of being a Dionysian demigod with the promise of the cycle to continue. If you know anything about societies that anointed sun god kings from their best and brightest, you know the destination of all this.

The rest of the book is bad enough to keep it from being a 2.5. The B story is the rest of the crew, all of whom seem to be stock characters out of place in something trying to be a mature book. Maybe they were fresher in the 1960s, but the effect is of playing Star Trek straight in a setting that crosses the Twilight Zone with porn. Dealing with the psychological horror of being a hostage to alien desires does not mix well with Daring Spaceman Spiff. Maybe the contrast is intentional, but there is no sense of awareness.

The B story does have the merit of recognizing the problem of coming back to a society no longer your own. Some crew members face culture shock, as they were Daring Spacemen Spiffs against alien threats but found the same thing back home. What do you do when there is no home to go home to?

How do you send someone into space without thinking about how much things change over 800 years? We can hope that they had some unmentioned briefings on how to deal with the shock of returning to a vastly advanced Earth. Think about what Earth was like in 1200, and how much it will have changed since 2800. And you are underestimating that change, since the rate of change has increased.

Both plots become adventure stories that eventually meet in an ending that could best be described as "crimes against what is left of humanity," with a bit of literal deus ex machina. Along the way, we see the critical importance of a violent version of baseball, visit the nation of burkas and gay camp, and find other mixes of religion and sexual abuse.

If you have the strength of will to read just the prelude and one chapter, I can recommend this to you. That might encourage you to read more, however, so I cannot.

The link below is to Strange Relations, a collected edition with Flesh included. The cover bears note. In any other collection, it might be a contemptible cover to have nothing but a naked couple embracing, where she is a green-skinned space babe. Here, it makes perfect sense.

Amazon link

Prime Evil edited by Douglas Winter

Rating - 2.5: parts of it are worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Why an obscure collection of horror short stories from twenty years ago? A story from it was recommended as high octane nightmare fuel. Sadly, the collection fails to deliver.

This is a collection of horror short stories from 1988. Stephen King and Clive Barker are contributors.

Three stories are pretty good, worth reading if you get the chance. The rest are unexceptional. I will address them generally rather than discussing each.

The editor's introduction is a rumination on the state of the genre in the late '80s. I doubt that it holds anything new for horror aficionados, but it is an interesting perspective for the casual reader. It ponders some common sub-categories, such as vampire and werewolf stories, and their traditions from foundational works to recent books and films. (I had never thought of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a werewolf story, but it makes perfect sense once you point it out.) We look back two decades later on a view from the waning days of slasher films, before Scream ended the slasher era and films took a detour into torture porn.

This collection, of all things, made me realize how much I have underestimated the residual sexism in our society. Contrasting The Stepford Wives with its film remake three decades later, its fears relating to feminism and femininity had transitioned from horror to comedy. It might as well have been Anchorman. Now I see this, written around the halfway point between Stepford and today, and nothing had changed. In the first set of stories, the men exhibit the casual misogyny and dismissiveness that would immediately mark an unsympathetic villain or a fool today. Two of the three stories revolve around women entering male-dominated workplaces. At least the women are not made villains for it, which could suggest author support for male-centered status panic, but treating women as interlopers and objects is depicted as common and understandable, not embarrassingly sub-human. Here's a horror story: this memetic poison is still in the body politic, and people who took it with their mothers' milk are still running things. There are greater horrors on the news than in this collection.

I picked up the book for "Orange Is for Anguish, Blue for Insanity" by David Morrell. I missed a bit of the value, as the recommendation included a spoiler I will omit. The editor classifies it under "secrets," and that is wholly appropriate. It is a well-crafted variation on a familiar story, the Lovecraftian recreation of another's search for secret knowledge. Our protagonist searches for what happened to his friend, while his friend searches for what happened to an artist. There is some indication that everyone involved knows what a really bad idea this is.

It has two variations on the theme of secrets and perception. First is the epiphany that lets you see what lies beneath the puzzle you hardly realized was there. Second is that once you have seen, you can never go back. There are some revelations that irrevocably change how you see the world. Being the kind of story it is, this is a rather dark, literal take on those ideas. You might pick that up from the early mention of people stabbing their eyes out.

Whitley Strieber's "The Pool" is a short read that earns its page count. The author seems to intend it as an alien contact story that muses on understanding and loss, Childhood's End in 10 pages. Given a different interpretation of the author of Communion (intended as non-fiction), one might take it as a musing on insanity and loss.

Several stories do or could be interpreted to play off the question of whether the story involves insanity or the supernatural. Stephen King tosses out (with little discussion) whether an actual vampire would be scarier than a serial killer who was playing at being one. About half the book does it to some degree, and I will leave it at that to avoid spoiling how each resolves the question.

Jack Cade's "By Reason of Darkness" mixes that with a good war story. War stories are often written as adventure, when horror seems so much more appropriate, doesn't it? The sections on war expertly dance across the myriad horrors of war, starting with sterile long-range bombing, passing through the visceral atrocities of the battlefields, and ending with post-traumatic stress disorder and all the cruelties of Catch-22 bureaucracy. The present-day story is not on-par with the flashbacks until the last scenes make it pay off. Before this, I had only 30 pages of story to recommend, so the book's 2.5 comes on the strength of this 50-pager.

Does a story about child sexual abuse count as horror? It's more of a constant stream of trauma.

M. John Harrison gets a mention for the most promising failure. While several of the stories brought nothing to the table, "The Great God Pan" creates a great aura of menace but never addresses what is going on. We get one image, and the rest is people refusing to discuss it. Letting the reader fill in the details is common, but you need more of an outline than "something potentially undesirable may have happened." On the plus side, the one image is sufficiently creepy, and the dialogue does a great job of having people speak past and around each other in a realistic way. It is this way of refusing discussion amidst vague hints that gives the story menace, but nothing ever solidifies. I am told there is a longer version out there, maybe that would better satisfy me. "Jane" by Marc Laidlaw had a stronger, starker take on this approach with a bit more showing (but still no explanation).

As a final recurring theme, how many writer characters can we stuff into one book? We have a newspaper writer, an editor and bookstore owner, an art historian plus compulsive diarists, a novelist, a storyteller, a children's author, and an unpublished novelist. Dennis Etchison wins the self-referential prize for being a television writer writing about television writers writing about a movie script. Two-thirds of the stories have writers as main characters. Dealing with our own personal traumas?

Amazon link

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

Rating - 3: worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

I keep seeing this described as Ocean's Eleven in a fantasy setting. I have not seen Ocean's Eleven, so I will need to ramble as usual.

Locke Lamora cons fortunes from the nobles with a smile and a false identity. He and his Gentleman Bastards live in something like fantasy Venice, and their latest scheme could double their fortune. While this one unfolds, we tour through their history, and trouble in the criminal underworld threatens to disrupt neatly laid plans.

Note first that there are few fantastic elements in the setting. They see a lot of use, because they are used broadly, but only a few things separate Camorr from a completely mundane world. First, the city is built around the elderglass ruins of whatever race preceded humanity. There are grand, indestructible crystal towers, along with bridges and other applications marvelous and mundane. Second, various minor effects are classified as "alchemy," mostly in lighting and botany. The city has light globes instead of torches and lanterns, and plants might produce liquor or have unusual sizes, appearances, and flavors. Pack animals in the city are alchemically lobotomized to make them Gentle. Third, there is one order of sorcerers in the world. Their services are exceedingly expensive, and so minor or rare, but they are subtle and powerful.

The story starts a bit slowly. We open on Oliver Twist, as Locke's childhood exploits are being recounted between two old hands. He is being sold from an aged master of child thieves to a con man who could better use (and stand) the audacious orphan. The opening is also darker than what follows, with death, hardship, and coarse language.

This sets the darkness of the background, while Locke is a bright foreground. He is bold in a drab and murky world. Locke runs on refuge in audacity and Bavarian fire drills, so forgive me if I overuse "audacious" today. That really is his modus operandi: walk in like you own the place, take what you want, and make it so big that either no one doubts or they fear the consequences if they show doubt. Why try to purloin a few silver when you can ride away with a cart full of gold? If anyone does try to call you on it, point it out first, because what kind of thief would tell you he is robbing you?

This leads to slightly over the top fun. The schemes must be too big to be doubted. The preparations for that are equally elaborate, as in stage magic: massive work to create a small effect that looks effortless and natural. Not only do you not know where to look, but if you did, you would never think of going to such lengths. The only place where this goes too far ("all this for that?") is when we see how far Locke will go for a new suit, which struck me as a failed Crowning Moment of Awesome. Or maybe you will love that in a Jack Sparrow sense.

For me, the best part of this comes when detailing the central heist. The plan has a few levels, and it keeps getting better as more of it comes to light. The chronological order is staggered so that we can drop back a bit and see what lies behind what just happened, until we are fully caught up and the action can proceed.

Even then, the flashbacks to the early days of the Gentleman Bastards are frequent. These are set as their own chapters, and each is relevant to what is happening in the main story. The explanation may come slightly after, or it may take until the end of a chapter or arc to see where the last flashback fits in, but the placement is always good. My only argument with them is that I thought the line should have been, "I just have to hold on until Jean gets here." Sorry, I know that has no meaning to those of you who have not already read it, but it becomes a plot point.

A beauty of writing this is that I have been, and will be, dropping plot points and spoilers without noting them because they will not be meaningful until you have read the book. If Bob has been pretending to be Charlie, I can talk about Bob all I want and not a thing will be spoiled when Charlie finally reveals who he has been all along. And boy, will you be surprised when you find out there is a real Charlie, ha! There are layered cons and deceptions in a Thirty Xanatos Pileup, so I can say anything and you will not know if I am giving you the cover story, the backup lies, the real story, or something I made up. Hey, Locke's right, this is fun!

Thanks to Scott Lynch for writing it that way. He makes use of it a bit himself in the book.

Helping that along is a B-plot that more or less literally tries to murder the A-plot and take its place, or perhaps reveal itself as having been the A-plot all along. Yes, the plot lines are conning each other the same way the characters are. I like that.

Capa Raza emerges as a villain, but the emotional stakes are lowered by the lack of righteous indignation. Robbing and murdering thieves and murderers is just more turnabout, the game they play with their lives, not something you can really hold against the bad guys when the good guys' friends and allies torture innocent people to death. Sure there are degrees, and the Gentleman Bastards try to hold themselves above it by being just thieves (not murderers) and playing Robin Hood (without the "giving to the poor" bit, which fits the original story anyway), but there are still a lot of innocents being caught in the wake. Raza steps it up, but he is rarely much worse than those around him. He just happens to target the protagonist.

On a different piece of fridge logic, I would like to point out that currency deflation is not wealth destruction. The thieves' death offerings destroy coinage, not the things that coins can buy. If you throw a thousand gold coins in a pit, the world has not lost any buildings or loaves of bread. You have just surrendered your claim on a share of it. No, I do not expect a novel to go into this, any more than I expect inflationary discussion after heroes claim a dragon's hoard.

Returning to our cast, the characters are enjoyable and done well in both bold and fine strokes. Characters are clear in their first presentation and acquire better definition as they are relevant to the plot.

Locke is audacious (yet again) and very good at what he does. He is charismatic and dexterous. He is also neither a hero nor a fighter, and Scott Lynch is not afraid to throw in a variety of character who can leave him writhing on the ground. Jean is his complement, the pudgy bruiser who excels at math and sewing. He reads historical romances and kills people with axes. Nazca is a good example of a minor character done well, likable and somewhat nuanced, adding to the story without stealing the spotlight.

Our cast displays range as well as depth. There are different kinds of intelligence, different kinds of skill. This is a recurring theme of the flashbacks that makes itself known in the present. Chains assesses their experiences, their areas of expertise, and their combat abilities. Some people are better for some jobs or roles. This is cited repeatedly without becoming overworked. We have a central protagonist without making him the master of all trades, nor reducing his friends to support staff with second-tier abilities, nor making it a team show.

I have more positive things to say, but I am running low on ones I can use without real spoilers. I am still debating whether the rating should be a 4. The writing and plot are of excellent quality, and it would surely be enjoyable to re-read, but much of the joy comes from watching the layers of the onion come apart. It could certainly be worth one re-read, to appreciate the edifice while knowing what lies beneath, noting foreshadowing and how bits of the plots are hiding in plain sight. Like a mystery, however, there is likely not much to gain after that. I will let you know someday, after a re-read.

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The Island of Mad Scientists by Howard Whitehouse

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Abandoned 1/3 of the way through. I expect the storylines to converge later, but the story structure at this point makes it too painful to reach that.

The mad misadventures of Emmaline and Rubberbones continue! Sheltering Princess Purnah from the horrid boarding school from the first book sends our merry band on a journey to Scotland, where the royal academy of mad scientists has set up shop on an island safely away from anything they might blow up. Fleeing the British government has our team split up, bringing in pirates and fake seances, while a nefarious Collector wants to add Emmaline to his dungeon full of promising scientists.

In terms of character and story, this is pretty much the same thing as the previous books. To some extent, that is disappointing on the ground of "been there, done that," but if you more of that, here is more. I liked it the first two times. Princess Purnah is still playing a psychotic River Tam, Professor Bellbuckle is still blowing up whatever he touches, and Rubberbones is still bouncing. Emmaline is not getting a chance to do much, as far as I read.

The villains remain the least interesting part of the series. Normally, a story cannot be smarter/better than its antagonists, but their main purpose in Howard Whitehouse's books seem to be to give the protagonists a playground. This reminds me of the Marx Brothers, who also marched over and danced around their antagonists. The plot is not really the point.

The problem with the story structure is that it comes in one- to two-page increments. We have split the party, with the protagonists in three groups. We also have the antagonists working in three groups. This would be fine, except that the point of view switches between them far too frequently. We see one set of characters, we get a scene and/or a joke, we flip to the next group.

This is storytelling for people who think music videos have too few cuts. It might work fine as bathroom reading, where you want small increments, if you are fine reading the same book gradually over a month or two. I can think of people who might want a book in two-page increments, but not ones who would also stick with that same book through 150 increments. It might also work as a children's show; maybe someone will pick up the rights and make a cartoon. That would be champion.

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Nextwave, Agents Of H.A.T.E. Volume 2: I Kick Your Face by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen

Rating: 2.5 - parts of it are worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

This was disappointing. After the epic awesomeness of the first half, this fails to deliver, with one really good issue of the six.

This volume collects the last six issue of Nextwave: Agents of HATE. They battle the Mindless Ones, SILENT's pet superteams, and the very core of SILENT.

Part of me wants to give this a rating based on Scott Adams' standard for success in comic strips. Working on the assumption that your mileage may vary in humor, he calls it a win if you get one good laugh per week from Dilbert. That works: you are investing about one minute per week, so one win is a fair return. By that standard, if there are a few frames per page of a comic book that work well, it should be a win. But books build upon themselves, even something as episodically silly as Nextwave, and I cannot tell you to buy a comic book because it has three really skippy panels.

That said, let's talk positive.

I complained last time that the art was not allowed to tell the story. Here, they seem far more comfortable letting it bear the burden. Most of the humor and crazy awesomeness in this half of the series comes from visuals. I am still not fond of most of the heroes' face and body work, but the imaginative villains come out well, and their body language carries more.

Issue 7: the summoning of Rorkannu is a great bit of subversive humor. The rest of the comic is poor, except for a few funny bits (Monica and Elsa gabbing about the Avengers, Elsa and Tabitha reacting to Mindless One explosions). I had wondered in the first volume whether The Captain was supposed to look that simian; here, definitely yes. And apparently Aaron plays Inspector Gadget more.

Then it leads into Issue 8, with what is the best part of the arc: the Mindless Ones filling in for humanity. They never speak, so it is entirely visual humor, but it is the best part of the arc.

Issue 8 also features Tabitha being too dumb to spell her own name, which leads to further stupidity on her part in the next arc. Turns out, she was not being ironic last volume with that "counting to 12" thing. With the cartoonish level of stupidity, I expect her to walk off a cliff and not fall because she never studied law. It does lead to the cute moment of panic about French Canadians.

Issue 9 has some fun visuals, getting surprising distance out of just flipping the page over. Elsa continues to win on poses, and I like the villain looks. The missing gay Authority send up was a nice touch, as was Giant-Sam's backstory that could have been a fine paragraph or two rather than two pages of drinking coffee. If you also recognized Forbush Man before he was named, seek help.

Issue 10 defines "your mileage may vary." Half of it is sending characters to their personal hells, with a different art and story style for each. As with Sam, I would have enjoyed Aaron's more as text, and the Captain's is rather poetic. I could leave the rest of it.

Issue 11 is the one that is entirely worth reading. It starts with the best cover, mocking Marvel in several ways while containing good characterization, all in one shot. And then we have six two-page splash pages with a massive, insane battle. It contains no dialogue, just a one-liner per splash, along with battles against gorillas of the demonic, robotic, giant stone, and purple communist persuasions; flying, evil, Roman Stephen Hawking clones with spikes and laser beam eyes; naked ninjas, laser pirates, baby Iron Men, Elvis Modoks; and that is just the first half, before it really gets strange. Crazy awesome has returned.

The whole thing ends on a note that Chris Sims must have loved. I think I heard his squee travel through time. If the revelation of the man behind the man, or the man behind the man behind the man, gives you joy, stellar. Not my particular Continuity Porn, but maybe it is yours. I like the re-characterization of the final foe, but I think the joke works for one page, not half an issue.

So definitely read the fifth issue in this, and skim the rest.

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The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Rating - 3.5: worth reading, parts worth re-reading (borrow or buy it)

The first half is exceptional, the best thing I have read in a long while, with great writing, scenes, and structure. The second half is only good, but still emotionally compelling.

When Clare first met Henry, she was 6 and he was 36. When Henry first met Clare, he was 28 and she was 20. Henry is the titular time traveler, disappearing with no control over when he leaves or where/when he goes. Clare is the titular wife, who was waiting her whole life to meet someone who did not know she was coming. Once they are married, she never knows when he is going.

This is absolutely worthwhile. The first half is a great love story that rediscovers the classic notion of a love that is destined to be, in a way that makes it palatable and reasonable to a jaded modern audience. The second half is a continuous aversion of "happily ever after."

The story structure is disorienting for the characters but mostly linear for the reader. The time-traveler jumps around in time, but most of the events flow in objective chronological order, and the exceptions are usually digressions in which we follow the time-traveler one step into his subjective chronological order. Everything is easy to follow, particularly since we start the first half at its mid-point before heading back to the beginning. After a brief introduction, we see Henry meeting Clare for the first time, then we drop back fourteen years to when Clare first met Henry and work our way forward to her becoming the time-traveler's wife. His future lies behind her, insert your own paradoxical phrasing here.

The structure could have been deliberately unclear and disorienting, but it was not. Some of you may consider that a wasted opportunity, given time travel, but it reduces the load on the reader and gives a good return for your time and effort. You get more back than you put into it.

I am struck by this as a modern take on a past that seems alien to us. If you read old stories about how event x is inevitable, they talk about destiny, duty, social or metaphysical forces that we don't really believe in anymore except as something authors cite to make characters act when they have no reasonable motivation. We have a different device here, characters who know what they will do/choose because they have seen that it has happened. And it works, it is completely compelling and conveys what the old sense of destiny has lost.

Combining that with the story structure, you have an idea of what is going on, what is going to happen, and what has happened, but not so much that there is no point in going on to see it for yourself. You get some explicit foreshadowing, almost all of which flows naturally in the story.

The title is indicative of the characters' roles and relations, more strongly in the first half. This is officially her story, as the title character, but her place is tied to his, possessed. We will follow her as she relates to him. He is the spectacle you came to see, but we will follow him as he relates to her. He appears to her, and we mostly hear about his other travels in vague reference, the same way we hear about the rest of her life. Some other scenes are illustrated, including some that are pure characterization that does not directly build on their relationship, but we mostly see them when they see each other. If they are not both on camera, one is probably head towards or away from the other. After the wedding, that becomes somewhat less prominent, but there is always a sense of motion towards and away from each other.

The characters explicitly reflect on this. Their lives are tied together, and there they are, waiting to see one another across time. Free will is a recurring theme, with the question of how much they can choose when they already know what they will have chosen. They both learn of their marriage before either has a say in it. The sense of destiny is wonderful, comforting, familiar, and constricting.

As we reach the second half, destiny becomes a recurring horror. Access to the future has its benefits, but bad times are coming, repeatedly, continuously, and there is nothing to gained by the knowledge thereof. Henry appears in or leaves from a painful situation, and it cannot be stopped because it has already happened somewhere in the timeline. This is perhaps the only excuse for his finding out when he dies and then not bringing it into the story at all for fifty pages; why bring everyone down?

In a similar problematic note, the second half also spends fifty pages on miscarriage. That is a lot of the book and a lot of miscarriages. It becomes numbing over time, as the characters get hit the same way repeatedly. It feels less like something that happens to them and more like something the author does to them.

Some of Henry's suffering has a similar feel as problems stack up. If he worries about something in the first three-quarters of the book, it will probably happen to him in the last quarter. The obvious foreshadowing comes in the page of random worries about the cage and how he would not be able to get out if he appeared in there. Guess.

The first half has its traumas, and they stand out better in a love story. The second half is trauma, with happy moments that do not stand out as well. There is no moment so good that it cannot be spoiled by being sandwiched between two awful problems, the best of which are when Henry is about to go back in time to cause or experience the problem we just had. Every trip to past happiness is a chance for present suffering (he's gone) or to introduce new problems upon his return. Clare's eighteenth birthday is mentioned in the first half, but saved until the second half ... where it can be matched with another revelation to make things even harder.

You do have fair warning about all this. Henry and Clare both mention in the early years that older Henry and Clare are going through rough times. The problem becomes that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, despite tossing a brief flicker into the last pages.

I seem to be writing much that is negative. This is because the second half suffers by comparison, and it is what you read last. After a wonderful and uplifting early story, you may walk away with a feeling of the inevitability of suffering and loss. Let us end with the beginning.

We begin knowing that things will end well. We have the title, and we have Henry from the future telling young Clare about what is to come, so we know the marriage will happen and we have Henry's belief that this is something to look forward to. It is just a matter of getting there, through whatever problems might arise from life and involuntary time travel. You can probably guess some of the hijinx right now.

The episodes of childhood trauma stand out because it is mostly happy. We see them together, and these are good times for both of them. (Henry seems to have had a less happy childhood than Clare, but we do not see young Henry that often.) Clare grows up as well adjusted as you can when your future husband occasionally appears naked in the meadow.

Their courtship is probably the best of the book. Once Clare and Henry meet in realtime, everything starts coming together. They have moments that Henry alluded to in previous (future) years and the discovery of what they do that has not been scripted for them. It is everything that Clare was looking forward to and everything that Henry never realized he always needed. As we get closer to the mid-point of the book, we are seeing the project come to completion. Clare has been waiting not just for this Henry but for the man he becomes, and we see Henry grow into that.

It is an excellent mix of discovery and the familiar. Some things are known, and they are wonderful. Some things are yet to be written, and they are wonderful too.

My disappointment in the second half was driven by expectations created in the first half. Yes, there is the quality of writing, pacing, and structure, but also the plot themes. They spend the first half on the path to a known future. What happens once they get there? Future Henry did not mention much of that, so they have few boundaries or expectations. How does that feel to move from predestination to freedom? What do you expect to happen once Henry passes the oldest age at which he visited young Clare? Rather than transitioning to scary but exhilarating newness, the book finds stronger, darker bonds for the characters and story.

If that is your thing, great, here you have a very thorough example. If you are a sap like me, it starts to read like kicking them while they are down. The occasional lift is just a chance to toss them down again, while the sad moments in the first half accent how happy so much of it is. Let us conclude with two random notes.

Early on, I was consciously aware of reading a male character written by a female author. There is something about his voice that suggests female projection rather than male introspection. Not that there are no men who would think quite that way, but there it is; either it fades over time, or I just got used to Henry's perspective. A minor character has a similar reaction late in the book.

Second, how about that author avatar? Clare is a red-headed, Catholic visual artist from Port Huron, Michigan, who moves to Chicago and frequents a particular library. Audrey Niffenegger is ... yeah. Odds on whether the author frequents Clare's favorite sushi place? I would guess that Henry inherited her music tastes, or were they adapted from her husband? Just idle speculation there, but Stephenie Meyer has nothing on this lass.

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