His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem

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

Ants that encounter in their path a dead philosopher may make good use of him.

I find myself tempted by Hofstadter's notion of a story that ends before the book runs out of pages. You cannot end unexpectedly, because the reader can always see how many pages are left, so if you want a real surprise ending, you must tie off the story at some point and then have the text go on in a similar but (to the insightful reader) identifiably different way. Out of 200 pages, the first and last 30 are entirely different things, each in their own way.

A message was detected in the stars, a stream of neutrinos that repeated itself. The government assembled a crack team of scientists to decode the message. This is the story of Prof. Peter Hogarth, a mathematician and contrarian brought to the secluded His Master's Voice project to find new approaches across the specialists' narrow paths of inquiry.

This is a thoughtful book with almost no action to speak of, the kind of thing that even Isaac Asimov might have found uneventful. The subject is scientific inquiry. The object of inquiry has been fixed for billions of years. You will find this on the science fiction shelves, but you will not find any lasers, invading aliens, or trips to other worlds. There are a few discoveries, but the book says from the beginning that the project was ultimately a failure.

This gives me a narrow range of people to whom I could recommend the book. It is Star-Begotten, if it had been better. It is Contact without success or mysticism. It is Spin with no action, less politics, and minimal characterization. It is a book about thinking, in which our narrator is a mathematician (although there is no math in the book). If that does not excite you, feel free to jump ship here.

The opening is a rumination on human psychology and ethics. The narrator effectively describes himself as a sociopath who built an artificial conscience because it seemed like a better idea than pursuing congenital destructive tendencies. He then went on to deconstruct others' scientific and sociological theories, making a career of creative destruction. His self-description might seem monstrous to the intellectual and boring to the less cerebral.

Prof. Hogarth next enters the project. To keep the story from being purely dry contemplation, he spends about the same amount of time considering personalities, politics, and philosophy. He discusses some leaders in the project, mostly with brief portraits while giving his neighbor a long story. He sketches the policy and budget battles beyond and within the project's walls. The characters spend their downtime pondering the implications of it all, from theology to Freud to global apocalypse.

Other than stories, mostly in flashback, the few successes of the project pass as events. They provide things wondrous or horrifying to display and consider, sources of life and death. A more sensationalist light might have made them standard sci fi fare, but this story limits them to the preliminary stages, before anything especially useful can be done with them.

The inquiry fails, the project is abortive, and that tone carries throughout. Some stand, frustrated, needing breakthroughs from others that may never come before their own specialties can be brought to bear. You could summarize some sections as, "We were working out some ideas, and we engaged in some minor mischief while we worked them out." For a short book, it feels slow.

There is a climax of sorts. I classify the ending as a gradual denouement, since the story itself seems done even as "events" trail off. In the end, someone proposes the obvious answer (which would make the entire project pointless), and the later pages spin off into fantastical theorizing with a claimed but never shown mathematical foundation. Flights of fancy dismissed earlier on, perhaps angrily so, are entertained as the project founders.

The more I write here, the less I feel that I can recommend the book. That narrow, intellectual audience remains, although I find the book marginal even placing myself in that group. The return for effort invested is poor, although Mr. Lem's writing is good and the higher points in writing make it worth more. If nothing else, you find few works of fiction where the topic is scientific inquiry, with that inquiry being anything but a fig leaf over an adventure or detective story. The characters are quite happy to discuss the abstract meta-issues of research and the insanity of the species generally.

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Phraseology by Barbara Ann Kipfer

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

It is an amusing book, but I cannot think of any situation in which it would be useful.

"Thousands of bizarre origins, unexpected connections, and fascinating facts about English's best expressions." This book has an alphabetic list of English phrases with a one-sentence comment on each.

Phraseology is categorized as a reference book. You cannot use it for reference. It is not sufficiently exhaustive to have something on every expressions or even all the expressions used in its explanation of other expressions. It has no citations, footnotes, or references, so while you and I may trust Ms. Kipfer, we have no evidence that she did not just make all these up.

The main problem with using it as a reference book, or for anything else, is its randomness. Sometimes it tells you what the phrase means. Sometimes it tells you its origin. Sometimes it explains a connection to something else. Only explaining what it means is likely to be useful, and you probably have better sources for that already (you are on the internet right now).

The random tidbits are only useful if you already know enough to fit them in. One factoid in isolation is useless. If you know enough to use this book, you know enough not to need this book.

A few examples:

"zoot suit is a rhyming formation on suit" : Okay, but what is a zoot suit? Luckily, I already know, but assuming I don't: what sets it apart from other suits? Is it literally a suit or is that just a metaphorical expression? Does the widths of the lapels matter? Why were there riots about them? No, it is just a rhyming formation. (Also, the lack of punctuation and capitalization is in the original, for everything except proper nouns.)

"the bread slots in a toaster are called toast wells" : Potentially useful, but how would you ever come upon this unless you were just reading through the book sequentially? It is not as though you will find an out-of-context reference to "toast wells," and if you did, you would probably have a dictionary that would answer that question as easily.

"a Gibson girl (1901), a woman considered stylish in the late 1890s to early 1900s, was named for Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944), U.S. artist and illustrator, whose main model was his wife, Irene Langhorne" : I have no idea what a Gibson girl is. I now know when they were popular and who they are named after, but I could not point to a Gibson girl on the street. This is one of those isolated facts that is useless unless you already know what the term means, and if you already know what it means, why would you look it up in hopes that this book's one sentence is something new rather than something you already know?

"to eye-bite is to bewitch with a malign influence whatever the eye glances upon" : This is good. This is also a definition, and I have access to many dictionaries.

This book might serve as idle entertainment for intellectuals who want to feel smug about how good their vocabularies are. Now, don't knock intellectual masturbation if you have never tried it, but I cannot recommend a book on that basis.

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Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover

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

This book is entirely successful in doing what it sets out to do. I cannot recommend the book because that path is abhorrent in a variety of ways, but our rating system in no way dings an author for not writing what someone else wanted him to. If this is your kind of thing, this is a great example. It is not even a bad book, just filled with human degradation, suffering, and evil on a visceral, lovingly described level.

On an Earth that has become a caste-driven police state, Hari is a medium-low caste Actor, an entertainer subject to the whims of those who run society. He is also one of the world's biggest celebrities as Caine. There is a parallel Earth, a fantasy world where magic works, and Actors are sent there to have Adventures, which are streamed back to Earth for others to experience on their headsets as if they were having the adventure. Caine is one of the greatest killers in history. Now his estranged wife is stranded on that alternate Earth, and he must kill a god to save her.

I am going to be linking TV Tropes a lot here because the book plays quite a few tropes straight.

Caine himself is a checklist for BadAss. He kills people, a lot of them, usually as part of his job but sometimes more recreationally. Our first scene with Caine has him performing an assassination, and his next scene as Caine starts with him beating someone down with a leg of mutton because the guy gave him lip. He is named Caine, he wears black leather, and he fights with knives. He has a close beard, a running monologue, and a verbal and physical swagger. He tosses off one-liners and puns.

Some of this is entirely justified in that he is an actor. He is intentionally there playing a role, creating a spectacle for the audience back home. Some of it is artifice, and even in-world, Caine is playing it up because his reputation does some of the work for him.

The setting is dark. Let's not sell it short: this is less cheerful than Sold. Yes, the world of the book is darker than one in which a young girl is sold into prostitution and raped several times a day for years. Heroes Die has two worlds, both of which are darker than that.

The tone is surprisingly light at times, clearly an adventure story. That the characters can be comfortable in the world only makes it worse. We have a hero who kills people and starts wars for the entertainment value. We have a tyrant who is running a police state with dozens of lives as collateral damage at each step in his quest to unify the world with him as god-emperor, and he might be doing the right thing.

And then we have Berne. In one of his turns as the point of view character, it is unclear whether he rapes or murders the girl first. He muses about which order would be more enjoyable, and seems to prefer "during."

And then there is the dungeon, which we will not describe here. Here and elsewhere, our author uses the same tactic as Blindness and covers everything in feces to demonstrate degradation. This chapter includes the training class for torturers, with the victim as the point of view character.

The story mixes man-versus-man and man-versus-society, and Hari/Caine gets to be the relative good guy mostly through the device of making men and societies that much worse than the assassin/murderer/entertainer. This device may not work for you, although the atrocities given to the antagonists keeps them firmly on the darker side.

We have a few things that offset this. First, the two female characters come across as virtuous. Caine's estranged wife has her own checklist, with a wand instead of a staff. She is actually doing the right thing, with her flaw being primarily communication issues. The other is a female version of Caine, a more efficient but less visceral killer who manages to be empathetic and self-effacing while not putting blades through people. She is likable as long as you abstract away from her quest to be like our assassin/murderer/entertainer protagonist. Also, she is just that good, which has its own category in virtue ethics.

Second, the indirect characterization violates the direct characterization, to a degree that the characters note it. Everything about Caine's history and narrative say that he is a horrible person in a variety of ways, having killed hundreds by hand and many times more as a result of his actions. He still kills casually and talks about his love of mindless violence. And then he avoids killing people and acts heroically in between. His story arc is to grow into a heroic sociopath or even a jerk with a heart of gold, which, yes, is an upgrade on the scale of morality in this book. That upgrade glosses the extent to which he is still killing people remorselessly (even laughingly) or overshadows it with even worse horrors nearby, although several scenes note the carnage in Caine's wake.

This creates the problem that Caine as described, the killer Badass, is to be a historical figure whose greater villainy lies behind him. Caine as he appears in the story is already on that story arc of personal growth. We hardly see him at that point from which he is supposed to be growing; instead, we are told that he was there, with characters remembering that past rather than showing via flashback. (See also: The Betrothed for a villain who commits no villainy in-story.) Late in the book, we are explicitly told that he is growing as a person, but he starts having already done most of that growing. Show, don't tell, and again the conflict between the direct and indirect characterization.

Also, even with the moral growth arc our hero still willfully causes the death of untold numbers of innocents. So maybe not so arc-y.

The book is over-written in places, particularly the beginning. It is trying too hard to be epic. We make allowances for Caine hamming it up as a larger-than-life Actor, but too many early chapters underline too often just how horribly his heart is broken. New Moon did the same thing better, although I doubt the target audiences for the two books overlap. You cannot make us care about his failed marriage by telling us that he really cares; we need some reason to care about the relationship or to see that it could conceivably have worked out.

I want to say that the worlds described are too horrible to exist, but that is obviously not true. Some aspects are probably unstable, but horrific authoritarian regimes continue into the present day. The loving attention to detail are perhaps a bit much, but not unfair. The torture training class was surprisingly restrained, following the instructor's example: most of it is psychological, with more description and dread than actual infliction of pain.

The writing really comes into its own on "Day Two" with the insertion of banality. After trying so hard to make it all epic, the point of view switches to a petty tyrant, the producer for Caine's Adventures. The details of his wounded pride and corporate ambitions bring everything back down to reality, contrasting the worldwide horrors and connecting them to something more understandable for the reader. They also develop the Earth setting and provide context for the political maneuvering to follow.

Dropping morality or concern about suffering for a moment, it is a heck of a rollicking adventure. Everything you want in a fantasy adventure is there, from magic swords to barehanded brawling with ogres to finding the chink in the invulnerable opponent's armor. You get combat with a hated rival. You have incarnate gods. You have sexual tension to offset the violence. You even get a classic jailbreak from an impenetrable prison. When it is not pausing to contemplate human degradation at length, the story is building up tension then moving at a sprint.

Because it is written as an epic struggle, you get a lot of larger-than-life activity. The god-emperor really is that mighty and charismatic. The villains really are that awful. The combat really is that vicious. Even the scale of pettiness can be grand.

On the other side, there are hints of irony. There are moments of clear perspective amidst the spectacle. The Adventure plays as reality TV, and the narrative voice mocks (and later abuses) the audience for it (and, in a Funny Games moment, you the reader). Characters recognize the immorality of what the Actors do (and then get on with it). The emperor is simultaneously humanity's greatest hope and an unspeakable monster, and this tension is maintained rather than relieved.

Late in the game, Caine begins running a long con. If you read that far, this is not what you came for, and despite Caine's not telling us the whole plan, two things are telegraphed. First, Caine is not quite clever enough to pull it all off with so many pieces on the board, which is probably good because it deviates from Caine's earlier characterization. He is supposed to be the inverse of Locke Lamora. Second, because the plan will fail at a late but critical point, Caine will fall back on his original characterization and win through audacity and up-close violence, his specialties. This is not a spoiler; I am writing this paragraph 100 pages from the end of the book, and you too should be able to predict the outlines of an action movie's climax.

Really, I picked up the book based on one quote, so we will end on it:

"Burn the whole city. That's pretty extreme for the life of one woman."
"Fuck the city. I'd burn the whole world to save her."

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