John Dies at the End by David Wong

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

Comedy-horror, usually styling more towards penis and poop jokes with monsters, but developing some quality Nightmare Fuel when it pulls things together towards the end.

John and Dave can see things like ghosts and travelers from other dimensions. This makes them targets for extra-dimensional invaders and the go-to guys for whatever weirdness happens in your life. See how they got embroiled in all this insanity when the apocalypse road trips to Vegas, and how it comes looking for them at home afterward.

The book is mostly comedy. Dave is a self-deprecating deadpan snarker. John is clearly insane in a mad world, which sometimes makes him genre savvy. I may keep tossing those TV Tropes links because this is one of those books that points out genre traditions as it uses and subverts them. Dave occasionally comments that reality is just as retarded as John always said it was. So the setting itself is surreal, John tries to be stranger, and Dave tries to insert sanity.

The comedy also involves gross-out and shock, what with the penises and poop. John and Dave write Cracked.com, so this may not shock you. Some things and people explode. A dog's butt gets into the action a surprising number of times. When that will not do, insert insects. Sometimes that is more literal, and insects get inserted into people or tear their way out. You know, standard horror stuff with gore.

Most of it is relatively light-hearted, despite exploding people. It takes a long while for the story to take itself seriously enough to get into serious existential horror. It does not dwell upon that.

It is best not to dwell on it because consistency is not a strong point. Dave describes himself as an unreliable narrator at several points, because he is not above lying to simplify the story. The settings messes with demons, ghosts, and aliens without any apparent need to keep them separate or straight, and the explanations often raise more questions. Like why enemies that effective are not being more effective, or why the past can change but random memories remain. The soy sauce that lets them see other dimensions (that's right) is its own version of this, letting them predict the future or work with perfect knowledge, but completely at random as things still surprise them. The enemy has its own version of this.

Some of this comes from the book's development. It was an online series that was later edited into its present format. I am led to believe that people who followed the development will get much more out of this, although they will have already seen more of it. This is a finished product that adds a coherent structure to what was rambling and free-wheeling. Or so I am told; it joined my reading list sometime between the original printing and when it was picked up by a major publisher.

Much of it is silly fun. At one point, John is attacking monsters with a steel folding chair while delivering action movie one-liners. After they safely get away, he thinks of a few more puns, and he lets more monsters in so he can use them.

The romantic plot is shaky, mostly because it arrives in a single day, movie-style. Quite a bit of the book is in movie style, and the director of Bubba Ho-tep and Phantasm got the movie rights before this edition was published, so it might be worth just waiting for the movie.

The horror elements are generally not scary, unless a description of a monster scares you. Some things will be sufficiently creepy, notably when masses of bugs or meat inhabit the uncanny valley. Some things will lose their coherence if you stop to think about them, which the book conveniently avoids (and keeps moving so you won't). As I said, the later parts get to some existential horror that could be downright disturbing if you pondered them enough. The book rarely dwells on the implications all that much. It can be effective, but it is ultimately out of place in a book that includes a Doom-style first person shooter game scene. As in, they kill something that drops shotgun shells, and a nearby crate has a shotgun in it.

Fun, engaging for a couple of nights, and it should make an entertaining movie.

Amazon link

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

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

When we were deciding whether to nuke Hiroshima, at no point did we consider how many anthills might be destroyed.

A spaceship crashes on a medieval alien world, leaving its human survivors as playing pieces in a war mostly fought with deception. No one there cares that they may have the antidote to a Blight that is consuming the upper portions of the galaxy. A rescue ship races time and the Blight's forces to save the lost children and perhaps everyone.

Vernor Vinge has written a novel of both galactic and personal scale. It combines the fate of the universe with the suffering of a single child. It visits xenopsychology, medieval politics, database network architecture, Usenet, and applied theology. It has incarnate gods and petty tyrants. It shows much breadth in the author.

It is also a novel whose horrors are hidden only by their enormity. It really is a big, uncaring universe. The worst part is not that uncaring natural forces can kill you, nor the occasional hostiles that rampage across your civilization. Worse still is the greater forces that do not much notice or care what happens to beings at your level of existence. They are playing games on a scale beyond your comprehension, and the really nice ones will treat you like a pet or tool. It is a world where a not unfair message recommends, "If someone opens an e-mail from the Big Bad, you should physically destroy the solar system that received it."

Vernor Vinge is best known for the concept of the Singularity, and how do you write science fiction that takes place after it? This novel develops the Zones of Thought: the laws of physics are not constant across the universe. Transcendent intelligence is only possible at the outer edge of the galaxy. As you head towards the galactic core, the effectiveness of thought and movement decline. Well before you reach Earth, faster-than-light travel is not even possible, and beings do not get much smarter than humans. As you approach the core, even human intelligence starts to fail in the Unthinking Deeps.

The Powers are safely away in the outer regions, mostly letting the lesser civilizations exist although able to interfere via a variety of tools. Your options are many when you can casually create intelligent species for your own use. Individuals and species may transcend, moving up and out. The Powers either destroy themselves or proceed onto something even less knowable. This leads to a cycle as species and civilizations arise, develop, transcend, self-destruct, or otherwise muddle through. Others will fill the voids you leave behind, or new civilizations will arise in the fallow soil.

The plot driver involves waking up Something at the edge of transcendence, which then subtly starts laying waste to everything in all directions, destroying or subverting everything it can reach. It is bad when you find the goose that lays the golden eggs and it kills you.

Despite Sauron out there, most of the action is intensely personal. In the Beyond, we follow a librarian, a job that includes a lot of database work and translation in a universe that has million-year-old records from species that no longer exist. She and her three companions are the entire rescue fleet. They have quite a bit of tension on their little ship when they realize that some of them might be controlled by the Powers or the Blight.

The other story, ignoring the potential galactic apocalypse, takes place on one planet, mostly in a couple of buildings. I will not spoil the reveal on how the aliens differ from humans. That is worth reading, and you can figure it out before it is made explicit. The aliens are not a unified people, and the humans are caught in their mostly cold war, one that is about to become hot as they race to take advantage of the spacefarers' technology. It is a story of trust and friendship, of politics and betrayal. The aliens are so Other that words like "I" need some metaphorical translation, yet they are human enough to be fully comprehensible.

We also have some sentient plants with poor short-term memories. Those are different aliens. They have wheeled computer-pots to make up for their biological deficiencies. Given a few billion years and a few billion planets, pretty much every species you can imagine will arise. I mention so that I need not ding Mr. Vinge with my usual critique of making the non-human too human for storytelling purposes.

The mix of the grand scale and the personal touch allows the set-up of a great moment at the climax: will the good guys kill someone they came to rescue, possibly without ever knowing they did? At this point, we already have hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of deaths in the book, and some outside parties brush this off as "local politics." And given the universe in question, that is not entirely unfair. And given that universe, where the good guys can reasonably contemplate preemptive genocide, having a good guy accidentally set a little girl on fire is entirely plausible.

In the end, the heroics involve atrocities that are explicitly stated but not dwelt upon. Instead, the important thing is the personal scale. If your species only lives 100 years, you only live 100 years, whether you spend them near transcendence or on an agrarian colony. The quality of that life is up to you (with some chance of impersonal forces that might destroy your entire solar system without warning), whichever of the Zones of Thought you might occupy.

Vernor Vinge's writing remains excellent. He won a Hugo award for this one. It is a good sign that I keep reviewing his books here, which I would not do were he not enjoyable.

I have commented mostly on the ideas, because they are what interest me most here, which is also why it does not get a 4 rating. Unless you really like everything, odds are that one of the storylines (or contained scenes) will appeal to you most, and you need not re-read everything to get the enjoyment from your favorite parts. I expect to skim past some character development and exposition on the re-read, but then some bits of exposition are highlights of the book.

Like Permutation City, it is a great, foundational novel, but it falls below a 4 by having easily skippable passages or too much length for "you must re-read every word" pay-off. Given the idea density, that perhaps should be a stronger recommendation than a 4, because it can survive even in fragments.

Amazon link