Zubon Book Reviews

Closed Unit Further Notice

2010-08-19T00:02:00.000-04:00

Thank you.

The Authority, Book 4: Transfer of Power by Mark Millar, Tom Peyer, et al

2010-08-16T00:02:00.003-04:00

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

I am in the uncomfortable position of giving a book my highest rating then telling you not to read it. On the one hand, this book executes a vision and a sense of life brilliantly, in both the details and the bigger picture. For the right audience, these story arcs are masterpieces. On the other hand, it is the comic book equivalent of cutting yourself, and no one should embrace or encourage that sense of life. It is utter debasement that is horrifying in its mix of dwelling in sadism and unreflective acceptance. I do not see how it works for an existing The Authority audience, who presumably joined under Warren Ellis's radically different themes, which presumably contributed to why the series was canceled immediately after this.

This fourth collection of The Authority collects the last two story arcs (eight issues) of the original series. As the cover shows, the big news is The New Authority, a replacement team of Authority knock-offs who are bound to the status quo that the original Authority worked to reform. By what bloody means does this transition take place, and who is this new team, friendlier on the surface but darker within?

The opening paragraph hit my two major points: very well done; why would you do this? This is the opposite of the first volume, taking us from Jenny Sparks's ideal vision and instead wallowing in the destruction of potential. It is dashing human aspiration in favor of pointless cruelty. It is the triumph of hate, in tiers as levels of vindictiveness succeed each other.

The New Authority is very well designed in its similarity and contrast with the original. You can look at each member and see his/her model, but you immediately get the sense of "not quite right." For good or ill, there did not seem to be enough time to develop all the characters, so half of them are exceedingly shallow, some hardly getting a full character trait (Machine, Street). The "ill" is how poorly the characters are developed; the "good" is that it would be more debasing to spend even more time with these people.

The Colonel gets the most characterization. He is a slave, eager to please its master while afraid of being kicked, rejoicing in its power over others and indulging in the carnal pleasures it fears will be taken from it. He is a sadist and a coward and is so beaten down that, given the reins of ultimate power, he could not dream bigger than further entrenching the established powers. He sets the tone for the comic under his leadership the way that Jenny Sparks did under hers.

I am torn on whether the other characterization is poor or if they are just that lousy of people. Probably both, with a bit more of the latter. Teuton is a caricature, Last Call is a more extreme inverse caricature. Rush had a few hints that were interesting enough to make me want more. She was her own sort of inversion, and I think that worked better when it was kept subtle rather than being made explicit towards the end. It was a bonus if you watched the art, and she had expressions other than inchoate rage. Loving The Engineer as I do, I was hoping for more from The Machine or much of anything.

The Retread storyline has too short a time once it comes into its own. As seems appropriate for that dimension, it is a series of swift reversals. A cycle of hatred and vengeance culminates in a sort of reset button. I want to say that it is not a good payout for the storyline, but given the arcs' theme of reinforcing the status quo, it seems entirely appropriate.

Should we contemplate for a moment the resurrection of Jenny Sparks and the implications of what went on around that lamp? No, let us walk away merely noting that much can be said about the transformations going on there.

Particularly from the perspectives of the ones going through them, which leads me to the explicitly debasing part of the series, in which torments are visited upon the original Authority. Each gets his own version, but you will notice that Shen and Angie get much the same treatment. It is probably a blessing that their treatment is passed over far too quickly. Contemplating that one would take the series's darkness beyond black.

The villains disagree about whether the abuse is for the evulz. It pretty clearly must be, even if some are in denial, because it cannot serve as an example for anyone, even the people experiencing it. The victim is mind-controlled and can become aware of what happened only if the control breaks, which is probably a very bad situation for the controllers; the victim is supposed to be dead, so you have limited chances to "make an example" except by showing it to selected targets as an explicit threat. If you want the victim to suffer, you need to leave him/her somehow aware of the debasement as it happens, as was done with Jack. But then, a recurring point is that the villains are thinking small.

If you really want a troubling evening, however, start thinking through what was going on with Angie and Shen. Seek counseling if that is not troubling.

The off-stage ending was a bit weak, as was the Krigstein appearance. Was that attack by future superheroes intended to be his, rather than just forgetting about that thread entirely? The New Authority fought it off well considering how much weaker than the original they appear to be. Considering how effective Midnighter was against them, the government-issue "heroes" were presumably intentionally weaker than the originals, and the ones with stolen powers never got a manual. Seriously, The Doctor can turn people into stone or flocks of birds, and he can commit genocide without breaking a sweat, but The Surgeon steals his powers and says he cannot take Midnighter? Seth's karmic fate was squicky, weak, and entirely inappropriate for re-establishing the "good guys" given the preceding paragraphs.

All I want to say about Seth is that he survived being crashed into a tank of anti-matter. That may strike you as a common comic book event, but consider for a moment a tank of positrons. Anti-matter and matter annihilate each other on contact, converting their entire mass into energy. That e=mc² equation? It applies fully here, so one gram of anti-matter yields about three Hiroshimas. Assuming that Seth has some kind of force field that kept him from becoming the matter half of that anti-matter reaction, he still survived however many kilograms worth of anti-matter detonating around him. I'm surprised the Carrier survived, maybe surprised the planet survived depending on how hefty those tanks are.

On another "thinking small" note, estimates of how much it would cost to produce one gram of anti-matter range from $25 billion to $100 quadrillion. (I'm pulling all these numbers from Wikipedia.) If the Carrier has just the six tanks shown in that frame, with one kilogram per tank, the fuel in that room is worth $150 trillion to $600 quintillion. We would need to think of new economies to make use of that kind of energy. Whatever else you might want from The Authority, even ignoring the value of a dimension-hopping city-sized vessel that enables teleportation as side-effect, that room is worth more. And The New Authority is told to look for fossil fuels in other dimensions. Those people are serious about maintaining the status quo.

The book is expertly done, but the villain protagonists are neither sympathetic nor charismatic, so there is not the drive to read about them. I am not sure if I will be carrying on with the series; the next volume or two seems to be what people think of as The Authority, a mix of darkness, power-tripping, and obscenity. There was supposed to be a Grant Morrison run in the future, but that seems to have gone only two issues.

Amazon link

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

2010-08-12T19:53:00.000-04:00

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

We have had The Authority as a recent series, a re-interpretation of the classic superhero team (mostly DC's JLA). This has similarities, but it focuses on individuals and is in novel form.

This is a superhero story about two outsiders. Doctor Impossible is a mad genius, fighting for world dominance and losing, but this could be the doomsday device that works. Fatale is a new member of the ~~Justice League~~ Champions, which reformed when ~~Superman~~ CoreFire disappeared and ~~Lex Luthor~~ Doctor Impossible broke out of prison. Doctor Impossible struggles with the world but mostly with his own feelings of inadequacy and social exclusion: the world's smartest man is still that high school nerd surrounded by jocks. Fatale has her own inadequacies as the new kid amongst a bunch of demigods, someone who was reconstructed with powers after life's disappointments almost ended in a horrific crash.

Tropers will love this novel. It knows all the conventions of the comic book world and alternates between deconstructing them and playing them straight. ~~Batman~~ Blackwolf is a billionaire genius in black; a master tactician, fighter, and inventor; and mildly autistic, hence the singular focus and deep analysis that puts his entire mind so effectively on a single subject. ~~Wonder Woman~~ Damsel is the alien princess who divorced Blackwolf as the original Champions fell apart. We get a mix of comic book "larger than life" and then reality ensues as people are popping pills, developing cancer from their powers, or aware that they are running around in brightly colored tights.

I am putting too much emphasis on the deconstruction. The book celebrates traditions even as it undermines them, and traditions are reconstructed. There are good reasons for capes and for villain team-ups. Magical and technological powers interact, well or not. Origin stories are key to understanding what makes characters tick.

And, as is appropriate, the origin stories are interlinked, with early implications that there are greater links and hidden mysteries to be revealed in the later chapters. Doctor Impossible says that he created CoreFire, his greatest nemesis. He also went to high school with several of the Champions. One begins to wonder if Fatale's background and shadowy funders will be tied in, because how perfect would it be if Fatale is wearing Blackwolf's technology or Doctor Impossible's?

Doctor Impossible's recurring background story and motivation is high school trauma, transitioning to college trauma, transitioning to acting out on a global scale. In the way that speculative fiction does, it distills many stories and motivations down to their core and then expands it dramatically. High school and superheroics are allegories for each other and for life more generally. Doctor Impossible gives us most of the setting background because he is obsessed with his past: who ignored him in high school, the obsessive research in college (yes, they called him mad at the academy), and the past battles and defeats.

A poignant emotional picture is looking at the lower tier of heroes and villains, mostly the villains, the ones just hanging on to the fringe of the scene. They are too proud or risk-seeking to be part of the mass of humanity, but they are devastatingly aware of how outclassed they are. Superhero stories told from the mere mortal perspective are one thing, in which the heroes are gods or forces of nature, but there is a distance there, a sense that you are looking into another world. Actually having superheroes and supervillains in your work life, where you are expected to face them even though they can literally kill you with their gaze, makes it far more personal, amazing, and horrifying. Doctor Impossible has very respectable powers but retains the shock of facing people who can throw cars and lightning bolts.

Fatale combines those a bit of the second tier with a bit of trauma, hers visible at a distance. She is constantly aware of how much of her is metal, constantly aware that she is a freak in normal society and a nobody in super society. She is on a team with the preeminent superheroes of the age, while the biggest pieces of her self image are (1) broken person, reconstructed with foreign matter; (2) fired government agent; (3) was even less before all that.

It is very much a human drama, with spectacle to make it larger than life. There are careers and couples, enemies and acquaintances. Some people were born lucky, others worked for everything, others have everything working against them, and everyone is suffering in his or her own way if only you could see it. Fatale's perspective is good for that; she is seeing the celebrity superheroes from behind the veil, where you can see past Richard Cory's glitter. She is the least oblivious to everyone else's suffering, so while Doctor Impossible is giving us background, she is giving us insight.

One detail I am very fond of is that Doctor Impossible has "malign hypercognition disorder." He is an evil genius. Is it just an American tendency that we must medicalize everything, give it a name and a diagnosis and some extra syllables? Like the fellow who thought he was just really anxious until he was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder. Oh, there are pills for that.

The continuing high school drama can be a bit much, but it is the heart of Doctor Impossible's character. He is haunted, tormented. No one ever appreciated him, but he shall have his due. When in his villain persona, he likes to shout about how he is a man of Science! and otherwise driven by the compulsions of being a mad supervillain, which he ponders upon occasion. He knows his limitations and actually has a solid grip on reality, but he is driven to pit himself against the world and lose.

We see the spectacle and the self-doubt in a big fight. Both sides' perspectives are that they lost. Doctor Impossible was hit in the face a bunch of times and had to run away. The Champions hit him in the face a bunch of times but he still got away. Life is hard, especially on a global stage.

I like the characterization, but we do not have much in the way of character growth or change. There is a bit, but the cast is as static as the comic book characters that need to keep selling issues on the same shtick ten years from now. They get their moments in the sun, but they mostly remain who they were. We spend so much time learning who all these people are and were that we never get to see them develop further. We get a lot of origin stories.

As is often the case, the ending is the weakest part. The book is 90-95% great, but the climax is followed by an anti-climax and an unsatisfying denouement. Some pieces are introduced or explained a little too late, and some bits are tied off rather than wrapped up. The anti-climax and the denouement are both entirely appropriate for the genre and the characters, but they are not a great pay-off for the build-up.

There are editing errors. Charles Stross explains how these things creep in, but it feels odd when you see the characters say something wrong, not in-character ignorance but likely something left from an earlier draft. For example, Fatale refers to surprising Doctor Impossible at a funeral, which mixes two events. Maybe that fight happened in an earlier draft. There are not many typos, but you notice them in a professional publication.

To end on a positive note, the internal continuity is great. It is something you might expect in a comic book, where items from past years and series are brought into the latest story, but it goes beyond that. You get a mix of Chevhov's Gun and foreshadowing and running jokes. At some point, you realize that something is being telegraphed, not mocked. And then Mr. Grossman brings the pieces together and makes them pay off.

Amazon link

Transmetropolitan, Volume 1: Back on the Street by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson

2010-08-09T23:28:00.001-04:00

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

It pains me to reject Warren Ellis, but I just don't hate everyone else (or myself) enough to really get behind Spider Jerusalem. It is a more colorful but even less hopeful take on cyberpunk.

This volume collects the first six issues of the comic series Transmetropolitan. Spider Jerusalem is Hunter S. Thompson in a cyberpunk setting. He is called out of retirement and back to The City, where he hates everyone and will bring Truth to their addled skulls.

If you're looking for a stylish version of chanting "hate hate hate hate hate," not quite AM or Kefka style, this does it pretty well. The glimmers of hope are mostly strangled, though, and it does not suggest any direction beyond a series of rants.

The first six issues are mostly episodic. I am told that the second year of the series kicks off a long storyline, so maybe it is just being episodic while establishing the setting and characters. We get a Two Minutes' Hate on each issue's theme of the month. Rants cover trendy social movements and iconoclasm, authoritarianism, government, mass media, and religion.

Basically, Spider Jerusalem is a horrible, depraved person using truth as a weapon against more horrible, depraved hypocrites. It is black-and-gray morality, suitable for cyberpunk but very vivid. Spider takes refuge in audacity: cursing up a storm, blowing up buildings, getting his way by punching and shouting, and wielding a bowel disruptor. He chain-smokes between doses of uppers, spends issues nude or in stolen towels, and has a two-faced cat that also smokes and pees on things. It is unclear how often Spider excretes on things himself, since that is not in-frame.

In The City, the politicians are corrupt, the media is corrupt, the businesses are corrupt, you see the pattern here. People tend to be abusers or victims, vicious or apathetic. The setting is also wacky, with one group splicing themselves with alien DNA, several new religions appearing daily, and the ubiquitous three-eyed smiley face.

Spider's assistant is a breath of fresh air. She is a journalism student, former stripper and bodyguard. She seems still on the surface of the muck that Spider dwells in, or at least she is not showing the psychological scars. Of course, moderate that by the setting: her idealism and love come across through coarse discussions of sex and an unhealthy relationship. She is suitably cynical, just not yet fully jaded. She is also the sane one of the pair.

The other moments of light come from Spider's winning. He is insane, audacious, and hate-filled because he is an idealist, believing in capitalized Truth, and that the truth will set you free. And if that truth sets some people free from the tops of tall buildings, they deserved it. And it works; the truth is sufficiently ugly and shocking to pierce the public consciousness and affect the issue of the month. That month; there is no reason to think that things are getting better, or ever could, but there might be a win along the way.

This becomes problematic when placing them alongside each other. On one page, Spider is decrying oppressive violence, while he is taking a rocket launcher to an unsuspecting bar on another. He is a champion of the downtrodden, when not also stepping on them and cursing their apathy and acceptance of their place at the bottom. Touching moments are alloyed with vomit, urine, and the phrase "balls deep." This could be used for an effectively jarring contrast, but here it is just discordant. Spider Jerusalem can be awesome, but he is not a serious person, so he cannot effectively deliver the moral of the story. Such as it is.

The art is wonderful. It is stylish, richly detailed, and perfectly complementary to the text. At times, it could bear a bit more of the story's weight, but Spider loves the sound of his own voice. Costuming is excellent, and it looks like the artist had fun with the assistant's outfits. The backgrounds are very busy and full of details. Ebola cola!

As a detail, I appreciate that the rocket launcher blew out the passenger window while being fired out the driver's window. That's why it doesn't have recoil, folks. Maybe it should have taken out car in the process, but if we accept the bowel-disrupting gun, I'll accept the relatively mild recoil adjustment.

For a bit of trippiness, Patrick Stewart reportedly wanted to produce a live version and offered to voice an audio version. Patrick Stewart plays a cyberpunk Hunter S. Thompson: can you dig it?

Amazon link

Global Frequency, Volume 2: Detonation Radio by Warren Ellis et. al.

2010-07-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

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

You're still on the Global Frequency. Miranda Zero leads 1,001 freaks, geeks, and security risks, a collection of experts that constitute a global rescue organization. They find threats and fix them. The twelve-issue limited series concludes.

Again, the series is entirely episodic, so we have six short stories. The feel is somewhat different because of stories with less dialogue and more visceral trauma. The Global Frequency team does not get away as cleanly; there are more noble sacrifices as part of the heroism.

This half is slightly less episodic because Miranda Zero and Aleph both get their own issues. They are central in their own stories, rather than supporting cast for the guest stars. Miranda is tough and sensible, while Aleph is enormously likable.

One issue is Japanese horror, with perfect tone. Not especially my thing, but crafted well. The big fight issue does not work as well in this half. Instead of a running firefight, it is just a drawn-out melee, without the supporting dialogue. The sci fi issue deals with orbital bombardment, which is a threat most of us don't know to worry about.

It's good. We have fewer fun guest stars than in the first half, but there are a few. We get to build a little with Miranda and Aleph.

I understand that there is a television series in the works again. That could be a fun show, with a big chance for being hit or miss. Unless they are vastly outnumbered, the hits are the important thing.

Amazon link

Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon

2010-07-28T23:25:00.001-04:00

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

I'm low on clever openers this week.

When Ofelia's colony is recalled from its planet, she hides and stays behind. They are not that interested in one old woman, and she is glad to see her demanding family and neighbors go. She has the planet to herself until, years later, another colonization attempt is made, one that disastrously finds intelligent native life. Now the natives are curious about where that original human colony might be.

Ofelia's story happens in four social contexts: with the colony and her family; after the colony, alone; after the second colonization attempt, with the natives; and once humans make third contact with the planet. It creates a sort of full circle.

She is a surprisingly spry septuagenarian. Fortunate too: of all the things that could go wrong when no one is there to help or save you, none of them do. No disease, no accidents, no predators.

Ofelia has a Heinlein-esque streak in her misanthropy. She just wants all these bothersome people and aliens to let her be. Or maybe "curmudgeonly old person" is a natural character archetype, just not usually the protagonist.

Ofelia is a rather unusual protagonist. You do not see many 70+ women starring in science fiction. She shares only strong self-reliance with those Heinlein heroes, instead succeeding through nurturing, care, and the home. We usually see heroes on a journey who will use violence to get the MacGuffin. She does share in that Heinlein anti-authoritarian streak, but at no point does a stand-in for the author have existentially unlikely sex.

Our first section of the story establishes Ofelia in relation to other characters, also showing why she will be happy to get away from them. We then spend the greater part of the story alone with her, watching her work past her self-imposed limitations to live in freedom with no one to judge or command her. The themes are personal, not political.

The writing is good, and Ofelia is an enjoyable character. We lack grand explanations and theories, instead focusing on pragmatics and details. It is a story about people, not ideas.

Her psyche and society are plagued with potentially problematic attitudes. If a science fiction story is not dystopian, it usually is past things like overt sexism, or perhaps it uses anti-alien prejudice as a metaphor. Ofelia's people seem to be from a Latin country where feminism never caught on over the centuries. The third contact group suggests that her culture is not atypical. While outer space has room for all kinds, it is hard to picture a space-faring culture with prejudices that seemed outdated a generation ago.

The science is also potentially problematic. While it is a colony, the technology level is rather low for space-farers, except for a convenient power source that never breaks down on an old woman who could not repair it. Some things exceed the speed of light, others not. Maybe that tech is just really expensive. It has a bit of that Firefly feel, and you wonder about the economics of the situation.

The economics are similar. Why would a corporation want a colony (with no manufacturing base or information science contributions)? What could anyone make that would be worth shipping between solar systems? After you read the ending, pause and think of the time frame, scale of operation, and costs involved in setting up that denouement. No.

The natives are likable, but I am concerned that they are too perfect. Is there any way in which they are not better than humans, either as a species or as individuals presented? The contrast is made explicitly at a few points. From intelligence to government structure to politeness, they seem to be biologically hard-wired to better fulfill every human ideal than humans do. Naivete seems to be their only flaw, and that is overcome in spades.

We have an enjoyable cast with Ofelia and the natives. The natives are only annoying to the extent that they resemble humans, and that is a fixable problem. We can enjoy Ofelia alone, especially in comparison to the departed humans. We do much the same with the quickly learning aliens, compared to humanity or their initial attempts to relate. The returning humans just look worse from every angle. You are not made uncomfortable for rooting against your species.

Ofelia gets to be a bit more nuanced, with problems and mistakes. She is strongly self-critical and points out those problems for the reader. This helps to create roundness of character in what might otherwise be a book of caricatures.

Characters drive the plot more than events do. The high points are character traits not crowning moments of awesome.

If seeing first contact between a female hermit and a race of inquisitive owlbears sounds good, this book is for you. If you need laser swords or an Asimovian theory of psychohistory, this will not fulfill your needs.

Amazon link

Excuse me, we ask one unarmed and unarmored character, did you just take an infant from its nesting mother, said mother being surrounded by its fellow large members of a predator species, and throttle it? That quite likely tops the stupidity of abusing prisoners at a supervillain prison (because those guys never escape nor are prone to vengeance, right).

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer

2010-07-22T00:02:00.001-04:00

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

It is strange to realize that you are past pop science in an area where you have no formal expertise. I knew most of the examples cited in the book and have even read the publications behind some of them. I guess you pick up a fair amount of neuroscience as a regular reader of Less Wrong and Overcoming Bias.

Jonah Lehrer's pop neuroscience book looks at how the emotional and analytical parts of our brains succeed and fail.

Before this gets lost in discussion: it is an enjoyable read and good storytelling. It is good writing. It goes presents potentially difficult material clearly and simply through a frame of stories. The stories and interesting and compelling. Many of my comments relate to the limitations of the science being explained and the presentation thereof, but it is clearly an excellent read.

Here is the deal: you should not read this unless you read all of it. The chapters are potentially misleading in isolation. They neither build on each other linearly nor create stand-alone pieces. Each takes an argument as far as it can in one direction, and the next chapter moderates that by veering in another direction.

While this makes for compelling chapters, it may undermine the learning objectives. This is not a precisely calibrated work that makes sure you get the most accurate impression of the science, with all its limitations and disclaimers. For many readers, that is a plus. If you are interested in the neuroscience itself, rather than simply reading for entertainment, it creates worries about whether you should accept the argument of this chapter wholeheartedly.

You also do not get a neat package at the end. The human brain is not a solved problem, and you will not get a "do A in situation X, B in situation Y" decision tree that will solve all your problems. The end result looks neater than it is, but or author acknowledges the messiness explicitly; there is something that looks like "do A..." with the proviso "and there are a lot of judgment calls in here and no bright lines, good luck folks!"

For example, Mr. Lehrer recommends using your analytical mind for simple choices like which vegetable peeler to buy, where you can add up the most important factor or two. For more complex choices, like buying furniture or a car, you will tend to start adding weight to things that do not matter much and will end up making a worse choice, so be guided by your intuition. But buying strawberry jam is too complex a choice for the analytical mind, so be intuitive there. Unless you don't really care about strawberry jam, in which case analytically pick on the measure or two that matters to you. Or if it is a complex but novel choice, where your intuition has not had much experience, go analytical, although you may need emotional motivation.

It's messy, but it sounds clear-cut at the end of each chapter.

My big disclaimer down, this is very well written. It is an entertaining and engaging read. It tells stories and uses them to organize the narrative. Each chapter has one major story and illustrates the research with smaller examples. There are many good stories about brains that are not working properly, because we can see what makes things work by taking out a piece and seeing what stops working. There are brain injuries that lead to permanent indecision and brain tumors that lead to unbridled lust.

Willpower is a quantifiable mental resource. Brain damage can take it away. There is no separate "mind" that is independent. We can reproducibly change how people think, and it does not need to be as extreme as brain damage. Something as simple as asking someone to memorize seven numbers or think of his/her social security number has predictable effects. Be terrified of the meat-based computer on which you are a program.

Some of these cases dealing with the meat brain point out the limited applicability. One example looks at a shopping experiment and concludes that you can predict whether someone will pick an item or not based on mental activity in a pair of competing brain regions. The reasoning involved is more of rationalization for what your brain has decided pre-rationally. Well then, there is not much you can recommend for me if the thinking part comes after the deciding part. (This assumes that the science in question has been done properly, actually predictively rather than retrospectively creating a formula that "predicts" what already happened. Which also happens.)

Mr. Lehrer frequently contrasts neurology with economics, saying that we are not the rational homo economicus, although the case he makes is closer to economics than he knows. He says that the shopping experiment shows that we are not making a rational benefit-cost analysis, but what he describes the emotional brain doing is just that. The two areas competing are roughly "ooh, shiny, I want that" and "oh, expensive, I want to keep my dollars." If the benefit is greater than the cost, you buy the shiny.

He also frequently contrasts reality with a Platonic ideal of rational thought, which is an easier case to win. The strongest part of this case is arguing for the value of intuition as subconscious calculation. You cannot calculate three-dimensional curved vectors in a second, but you can catch a ball. The hard part is done in bits of your brain that have specialized and stored the results of practice, so you go with what feels obviously right. You do not think of driving as a series of actions like pulling levers and pushing pedals; you just drive to the store, and your higher functions are free to watch for problems like that guy pulling out in front of you, which you may have started reacting to before you consciously noticed it because something felt wrong about how the truck was moving. There are entire sections of your brain attuned to "this is not how it usually goes." Those are of value.

Being familiar with the research our author is citing, I am not the best person to tell you if he is explaining it well. I already know what he is talking about. If he left out something important, I will be less affected, and I might wonder if I am just being picky. For example, I worried that he was spending too much time on the destructive case, tearing down existing theories of mind while I was already on his side about the lack of pure, Platonic reasoning in the human brain.

One aspect missing that I rule "not picky" is how brain scans mislead us. One problem with human cognition is that we are more likely to accept anything if it is prefaced with "brain scans show." Something about the colorful graphics and assurance of science makes people think the argument is better. This book gives us words instead of pretty pictures, which reduces the effect, but basing arguments on brain imaging will create more agreement than the arguments merit, all things being equal. Beyond that, the meaning of the research itself may be overstated. See, for example, a paper that demonstrated statistically significant results from performing a standard psychological test with brain scanning on a dead fish. If your neurological research methods produce results with dead fish, you may need to refine your methods.

I feel odd having been harder on the scientific case here than in Mary Roach's pop science book. In that case, she spent more time telling stories, less making a positive case. Indeed, the problem there was the lack of a case being built at all. Here, I am more worried about the summative argument being compelling but misleading. It is because he has more to critique that I can dig in.

Amazon link

The Authority, Book 3: Earth Inferno and Other Stories by Mark Millar et. al.

2010-07-19T21:27:00.000-04:00

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

This is not very good.

The third collection of The Authority includes the story arc "Earth Inferno" and three single-shot stories.

"Earth Inferno" is average at best. It has some good ideas but does not do much with them.

The political intervention is good, continuing to play out the notion that The Authority does things to change the world beyond fighting supervillains. It had a bit more flair in the Jenny Sparks days, but I cannot say if that is the author or the characters.

The Engineer continues to be good. Mark Millar is good with this character, and you love Angie. She is useful, getting involved and fixing things while demonstrating her new ability to be in more than one place at one time.

The villain is good. He has a look that could be Silver Age silly but instead comes across as dignified and slightly mystical. He exhibits and exults in power and cruelty. The unnecessarily coarse elements added to his background and characterization are appropriate to the comic, if a bit unfortunate in the sense of reveling in being a "mature" comic.

The Earth Inferno itself does not entirely work, and it takes up a lot of time. Maybe it is my own suspension of disbelief that is problematic, but I should not notice it while reading a comic book, and I kept thinking, "the planet does not work that way." If nothing else, trees do not spring from the ground like that. Oh well, it gives The Authority a sort of conflict other than punching people in the face.

The villain is wasted. When you have some explicitly that powerful, making him completely ineffectual is a problem. The book lampshades this by discussing how he lost last time, but he does not need to be at full power to write The Authority out of history. The ending is good, classic with a series-appropriate tie-off, but I expect more from the villain who is literally more powerful than God, whose threat demands the evacuation of a dimension. Introducing red shirts to sacrifice does not make up for anything, and having one of them be more powerful than Apollo/Superman makes one wonder how anyone else survived.

This relates to the continuing problem of power fluctuation. The Doctor can make his enemies out of existence, turning them into ravens or stone or music. He can destroy entire continents. And he can utterly fail at very basic things. And someone with the same power set and more experience can be similarly useless. Oh, and Apollo gets eyebeams to complete the Superman set.

I initially found it problematic that The Doctor is using heroin. If he can do anything he can imagine, he can just alter his mental state directly or cause whatever state he likes to actively exist. But if he really is in-touch with the planet as much as implied, maybe he actively wants to dull his senses and ability to access his abilities. Still, overdosing?

The single stories are just poor. The first is explicitly a big-lipped alligator issue, fighting zombies for no purpose and with no explanation. Bad guys show up, they fight, done. Generic comic book story. The second is weak characterization of The Engineer, yet another version of the difficulties of not being normal. You have seen this better elsewhere, with superheroes or not.

The third is good but a retread. It is Jack Hawksmoor's characterization, touring him through The Authority's first arc as he ruminates. It covers no new ground, but it gives time to reflect, which does not usually appear in The Authority's cinematic style. And, surprise, it was written by Warren Ellis. Well, that explains the quality. It is too short to make the book a 2.5.

With respect to the art: I don't like it. The Doctors work well under this art style, but the rest did not. My main recurring question was, "What happened to Apollo's face?" And it is not even an issue of a differing art style. His face looks differently mutated in many different places. He ranges from Superman noble to clunky brute, and putting one of the worst as a cover picture does not help. Maybe he takes a lot of punches to the face and needs a while to heal.

Amazon link

Global Frequency, Volume 1: Planet Ablaze by Warren Ellis et. al.

2010-07-05T00:02:00.006-04:00

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

This series is entirely episodic, so I will not have much to say.

You're on the global frequency. Miranda Zero has a network of 1,001 specialists around the world. If your phone rings, you are the right person for this job because of your skills and/or location. The fate of the world might be decided in the next hour. Go. This volume collects the first six issues of the twelve-issue series.

Each issue is a different story. The only two recurring characters are Miranda Zero, the leader, and Aleph, the communications hub. We get a new cast, a new problem, and maybe even a new type of story each issue. We have memetic alien invasions, a rampaging cyborg, and a parkour run across London. One issue is a running shoot-out while another has no action at all. This might be hit-or-miss for you, except that Warren Ellis is very good.

The character sketches, to the extent that they exist, are rather good. We have one issue to develop and resolve the story in addition to introducing the entire cast, often while including a briefing on the sci fi element of the month that motivates the story, so there is not a lot of time. Within that, characters manage to become distinctive and interesting. Given the length, we do not have time for characters to become terribly deep. They can be enigmatic in a way meant to suggest hidden depths, but the best characters come across as snarky fun. There might be other kinds of fun possible, but Warren Ellis's writing seems to tend that way.

Artists vary along with the issue, so there is no one thing to comment on there. I cannot tell to what extent the tone of the stories are set by their art, since I have no contrasting version. Perhaps some artists were chosen for particular stories. The styles seem strongly supportive, contributing well. The cyborg story has intensely detailed skin and faces, while the one in Scandinavian snow has thicker lines and a far less action-packed feel than the shoot-out. The art could be allowed to carry a bit more of the weight; even when it is doing the job, it is supported by text, although the shoot-out issue does a great job of advancing the story on two tracks, with the pictures working one and the text another.

Very worth reading. Also bite-sized for your occasional reading convenience.

Amazon link

The Authority, Book 2: Under New Management by Warren Ellis, Bryan Hitch, Mark Millar, and Frank Quitely

2010-06-28T00:02:00.000-04:00

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

More awesome but less good than the previous book.

This volume collects The Authority, issues 9 through 16. The Ellis era concludes when the Earth's creator comes back to clean the place out. Mark Millar's run begins with the battle for Jenny Quantum and the political leadership of the world's nations, fighting against stand-ins for Marvel superheroes.

Structurally, the volumes would have been better split at issue 12. That would have brought all the Warren Ellis issues and Jenny Sparks arcs together. I presume there is some publishing reason to favor 6- or 8-issue collections rather than 12-, but as a reader, 4 or 12 issues would be better in this case. Even for those who do not care about when a writer leaves a comic, there is a clear break in the middle of this volume.

The pacing is right. I complained about that in the first volume, how events were insufficiently decompressed because massive battles were being resolved in single frames or mostly off-page and inferred. The assault on London was good pacing, but the rest of that volume was a bit rushed. This volume gives events time to unfold. Events remain a bit abrupt when the battle moves inside God (not spoiling that further, even if it is already well-known).

The last Ellis arc makes you love The Engineer. Her joie de vivre is uplifting. The first Millar arc starts giving Swift more of a role and personality, having her take over as the team's moral compass (such as it is) and making her more important as Shen (the person) than Swift (the hero). Which makes sense, given how very much she is not one of the team's big guns.

Both arcs in this volume share a problem with conveniently changing power levels. Maybe Jenny Sparks was building up that charge for a while, so we'll give her the epic conclusion. Apollo continues to be the major violator here, with him variably being knocked out in one-shot and then coming back to take out the guy that one-shot him, his entire team, and two other teams, all at once and without running low on power. There is the convenient mechanic of his being solar-powered, so you can always say he had a low charge, but given the difference it makes and how often this comes up, he should not be hanging out with a low charge. Midnighter ranges from "pretty badass" to "successfully fights all the X-Men at once." And The Doctor can somehow be turned off (?!).

On a plot hole/fridge logic note, that bit about The Doctor becomes relevant when he cannot get back to the ship. The ship lets them open doors anywhere on Earth. What, did he open his door a block away from where he wanted to be, walk the rest of the way, then walk back instead of opening a new door there? Bad call; even if he was high at the time, the rest of the team remains coherent.

The evil Avengers are well done. They are ridiculously over the top yet not entirely without subtlety or nuance. They are coarse, crude, cruel, and even more complete monsters than The Authority, which creates a necessary contrast. Their leader is amusingly cranky.

I note that we started each Ellis arc with the villain engaging in some violent atrocity. It sets the stage. The first Millar arc opened with The Authority slaughtering people. Granted, they were the bad guy's military, but it sets a different tone. Also, as with the end of the previous arc, they are clearly no threat to The Authority; if The Authority wants to take down the evil leader, they can teleport past the nation's military or just ignore incoming attacks that they can trivially deflect or dodge.

This volume takes seriously the notion of making the world a better place, not just defending against super-powered threats. "A better place" might vary by the author, but The Authority is getting involved in political affairs. This will bear greater fruit in future volumes.

Finally, we see a bit of their having personal lives. The Authority do not have secret identities, although Angie apparently has an apartment in New York still. Instead, they have their own flying, inter-dimensional city, and they have huge parties. That is one way of keeping things on a grand scale.

Concerning Frank Quitely's art, I rather like the design of the re-done Marvel heroes. That must have been fun to make them different but recognizable.

Amazon link

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya by Nagaru Tanigawa

2010-06-24T15:00:00.000-04:00

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

This came highly recommended, but I am not sure if they meant the original novel (this), the series as a whole, the manga adaptation, the anime... I suppose it is just the cluster of Haruhi Suzumiya.

"I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, sliders, or espers here, come join me. That is all." Haruhi Suzumiya has entered high school and decided that normal humans are boring. There must be more exciting things out there, and she will find them and drag along anyone she needs. What she doesn't know, and what many are desperate to keep her from finding out, is that may control all of reality.

This is strong on characters but light on plot. Every character gets an introduction, speech, and event. And then the book wraps up. This must have been odd at first publication, although perhaps the publisher immediately decided to pick it up as a series. As a single book, it marginally stands on its own because it is a low-investment read, but there is no payoff except for the sights along the journey. It lays groundwork without building to anything.

On that basis, I have trouble recommending it terribly highly as a stand-alone book. I would be recommending it on the strength of the following series, which I have not read. By itself, it shows promise, but it is nothing exceptional.

The characters are fun. Haruhi herself is suggested at having hidden depths without delving them. Otherwise, each cast member gets an archetype and a character trait, done. I like some of them, but it's a shallow thing. Our narrator is less interesting, having nuance but letting himself be swept along by events. He has no sense of agency, just complaints.

Part of the fun is that everyone is just going with it. Sometimes there is a bit of dragging involved, but most of the cast follows along when the adventure of the day is searching the town for mysteries or dressing up in costumes for publicity. The thread of Haruhi's logic is tenuous, but no one wants to snap it.

I'm not sure if that metaphor works, which fits the book. It has odd metaphors, and the narrator points out that he hardly knows what some of them mean. It is gentle absurdism.

The author telegraphs everything but still has it work. You more or less have a checklist of what is to come, which makes you look forward to seeing it rather than spoiling it. That could be done badly, but here you are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The book seems to have been written for a manga/anime adaptation. It references manga. It uses many anime tropes, and it describes things very visually, keeping it easy to depict rather than going for subtlety and depth of thought. Also, there is considerable fan service for text.

If you stop thinking of it as wacky anime, it can be disturbing. Having the fate of the universe rest on the whim of a moody teenage girl would be far more terrifying than our cast lets on. I have seen Haruhi described as pushy or a jerk; I might characterize her as "felonious," considering her actions in the first two chapters could put her in prison for decades and then on the sex offender registry for the rest of her life. She tones it down after the big start.

As a final nit, that is an unusual and very strong take on the anthropic principle. It is usually taken to mean that, given observers, there must be a universe in which they are observing, one that is the sort that gives rise to observers. That is, we exist, therefore we should not be surprised to see a universe that supports our existence. The version presented in the book is more like an argument for the existence of a creator based on fine tuning. While I do not expect great philosophical vigor from a high school student character, I prefer that the book not mislead a high school student audience.

My comments have been mixed because the book's quality is mixed. As a foundation for what is to come, it is good. It goes quickly, summer beach reading perhaps. You get a bit of story here and some idea of what is to come. It just does not stand on its own very well. On that basis, I will be pursuing future volumes.

Amazon link

The Authority, Book 1: Relentless by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch

2010-06-21T00:02:00.001-04:00

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

This may be the start of a Warren Ellis kick.

This volume collects the first eight issues of The Authority (volume one). The Authority is introduced, fights an army of superhuman terrorists from Gamorra, and repels an invasion from Sliding Albion.

The Authority is best known as a violent, offensive analogue to the Justice League, notably with Apollo (Superman) and Midnighter (Batman) as a couple. There are parallels, and there is a bit of the old ultraviolence, but the usual characterization is misleading.

It is true to the extent that The Authority serves as a world-protecting superteam like the Justice League. We have our character parallels as well. The Authority approaches some of the same issues that other big superteams might, and it tends to solve them by killing the people responsible.

It is misleading because you would expect, more or less, JLA plus graphic violence plus cursing. There is a bit of it, but it is not just having the superteam solve the world's problems or re-doing old Justice League stories and showing them solve the problems permanently. The plots are event-driven, based on the attacking forces, but by page count it is substantially character-focused. They are unique characters, not stand-ins for archetypes. And, while you hear about the darkness and cynicism in the series, it is also remarkably idealistic. They are here to improve the world, not just protect it. (This is especially endearing, since most superteams do not even aspire to more than damage control on whatever supervillain pops up next.)

The characters are not the same. Batman is a great planner and technologist; Midnighter hardly wants to be there, and so far he is nothing more than a good hand-to-hand fighter. Apollo shares Superman's idealism, but not his leadership or power level. Jenny Sparks is the team's leader, and she is not Wonder Woman. The Doctor seems like a magical version of Green Lantern, willing into existence whatever he can imagine, but he shows himself to be on another plane entirely. (Okay, Swift is Hawkgirl.)

The team is a mix of veterans and new blood. Some of them are pre-existing characters that I had not met, since I have not read Stormwatch in 15-20 years. Apollo and Midnighter were in semi-retirement. The Engineer (II) and The Doctor (II) are the new versions of characters killed by Stormwatch. Swift mixes veteran knowledge with a bit of idealism, perhaps naivete given the series.

(At this point, I am going to stop worrying about italics to distinguish a team from the comic of the same name. Some of the above could refer to either anyway.)

As I met The Authority, I wanted to hug them. That is objectively the wrong reaction, but they are just so idealistic and hopeful amidst their realism and cynicism. Jenny Sparks put together a team to save the world. The sense at the beginning is that there are no more heroes, no one to protect people; "someone must" is a recurring theme. Jenny Sparks is the Spirit of the 20th Century, born on January 1, 1900, and this series is set at the end of the 20th century. She is short on time, and you can see that she will be fighting for this world until her dying breath. The world is a harsh place and changing it is hard, but it is worth doing. Apollo does not say much, but it is pure Superman: protection, responsibility, "there is no one else."

Apollo is also unhesitatingly violent. His ways are not as graphic as the more visceral fighters, but he has quite a body count. Jack Hawksmoor tends to get that gory violence, since he means it literally when he refers to punching someone in the brain. Midnighter is closer to Batman in a different sense, with few kills but all the cynicism you were expecting.

The Engineer, The Doctor, and Swift get to express the young hero thoughts. The first two are seeing their first engagements, and they are not sure what to do. We are introduced to them through their hesitancy and their creativity. Both express the trade-off in giving up their normal lives for heroics. Swift is the one noticing that they are a violent bunch, wondering how much and whether it is justified. She raises moral questions, but she also provides the resolution: the killing is not as bad as what they are preventing.

So I like the characters. The plots are nothing much. The introductory arc is a straightforward bad guy for them to fight while we meet the characters. The second is more or less the same thing, only with a different bad guy. I liked that the first villain was as pure Yellow Peril as it gets, along with his ridiculously numerous, "they all look alike" troops. It's classic.

I am not a fan of the pacing. This is not a shot at decompressed comics. I like decompressed comics. These are insufficiently decompressed, despite being the trope codifier. The "widescreen" fight scenes are particularly over-clocked, given that they are introducing an entire team, with some completely new characters, and blasting through the cannon fodder faster than we can watch. What just happened in that frame where Apollo took out a half-dozen guys? At least The Doctor works in a visually exceptionally way so that we can follow what he is doing even if he takes out half an army in half a page. This went better in Nextwave.

Similarly, we are not getting substantial characterization on most of the cast. Maybe some of them had it earlier in Stormwatch or get it later, but half the cast seems to be just along for the ride. Why is Apollo there? She asked. Why is Midnighter there? Apollo went. What kind of guy is Midnighter, beyond a badass longcoat? Not stated.

What characterization there is is good. Jenny Sparks is our central character, and she displays a wide range of emotions complete with flashback. The Engineer and The Doctor get a bit, since they are being introduced. The rest of the cast comes across as power sets with a personality trait or two.

The other difficulty is the unclear power level. Apollo is clearly below Superman, which is good because he would otherwise just solve half the world's problems at once and obviate most of the plot. Others are ambiguous. Jenny Sparks looks like just another energy blaster, but then she does things like making giant electric copies of herself, and was she hijacking two planets' airwaves or borrowing The Engineer's tech on that? I don't know if The Spirit of the 20th Century is vastly powerful or just someone with a forceful personality. The Doctor might have trouble with medium-sized groups of enemies, or he might be able to deal with an entire country at once. The Engineer ... is not explored, but she still seems to be figuring out what she can do anyway. And just how strong is Apollo anyway? He can take on entire invasion fleets on his own while low on power, but he might have problems fighting a dozen cannon fodder supers.

And then you have Swift, who can fly. She also has claws. And she is on a team with a sun god, The Spirit of the 20th Century, The God of the Cities, the most powerful shaman in the world, and two cyborg killing machines. Oh, and she is pretty tough. This is also flexible, since she seems variably either about what I described or Apollo without the eyebeams.

The eyebeams surprised The Engineer. Really? Laser/heat/whatever vision is surprising in a superhero setting? Maybe I am just used to Superman, but blowing things up just by looking at them is what these guys can do. And if it ever misses, smack that writer, because laser vision moves at the speed of light, so it literally hits whatever he is looking at.

Rather than ending on kvetching, let's note that Jenny Sparks runs a good team. A series noted for darkness and violence is actually run on hope and potential. The Supergirls sold her short, if anything: she is far more than a protective, maternal figure to her team and the world. She is a superhero, without the need to toss in "as strong as any man" because you never feel the need to compare her to the men. She is forging her own way, with her team, and bringing the world with her.

I note that this is surprisingly idealistic. Later writers, I am told, go beyond black and gray morality to casting The Authority as evil people who happen to fight worse ones. That would explain the reputation of the series. It seems an unfair thing to do to Jenny Sparks's team, as she is such an uplifting figure, but then her century ended a decade ago. It might not be unfair, given the groundwork laid in the second arc, which includes heroic genocide and a villainous plan for planetary rape camps. And the series gets darker from here.

Now I'm curious about Warren Ellis's run on Stormwatch. I hadn't realized he had written that. Ooh, and Freefall's on the team these days.

Amazon link

Crystal Nights And Other Stories by Greg Egan

2010-06-17T18:48:00.000-04:00

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

Six months after I say that I should not read short stories in book form, here I am again. But it's Greg Egan! It also has long-ish short stories, rather than 5-page wonders, so reading one or two a day is a stately pace that finishes the book in a week.

Greg Egan differs from the usual sci fi short story pattern by breaking his stories in half. The normal plan is to take one scientific idea or advance and play through its implications. Mr. Egan starts there but shifts the theme of the story while playing through. One story starts with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics ("MWI") and transitions into child-rearing difficulties. The mid-story switch is not always entirely satisfying, but it efficiently packs in another layer of story without needing more exposition. It is as if the second half is the story he meant to tell, but he felt that he needed the first half to introduce the ideas that led to it. (Kind of like how Ender's Game came to be as an extended introduction to Speaker for the Dead.)

"Lost Continent" is a current events story by sci fi proxy. The allegory felt ham-fisted once it developed enough to be noticeable. The story is about a temporal refugee from the Middle East after agents from centuries ahead arm one side of a religious conflict. Slaughter ensued there, more one-sided than the internecine violence that preceded it, while bureaucracy and despair abound in the refugee camp. It is an evocative way to re-cast issues of Western foreign policy and refugees, but not a must-read. Strong on characters, light on plot.

"Crystal Nights" is a rejoinder to the author's own Permutation City, giving more attention to the morality of evolving a sentient species. Evolution, for those just joining us, is a horrible process involving billions of senseless deaths.

The introduction takes this as a refutation of the Simulation Argument. Mr. Egan denies the premise that our descendants are likely to want to run simulations of human history, because the slaughterbench of history is too horrible for anyone to intentionally put people through it. It is a variation on the Problem of Evil: this world is too horrible to plausibly assert a [x] creator. I do not find Mr. Egan's argument compelling, however, because humans already commit atrocities grand and small on a daily basis. That something "is both silly and odious" does not mean that it will not happen, and we only need two simulations for the majority of sentient lives to have been created in them. "Two" is not a number to be dismissed as "sensationalist nonsense." Multiply the percent of people who don't think simulated intelligences' qualia "count" by the population that will be able to afford to run them by the percent of people who would "shake the ant farm," and we might be living in one of the nicer simulations. Mr. Egan is somehow not seeing this while talking to people who have no problems running programs that would create, abuse, and annihilate trillions of sentient consciousnesses. If you can commit atrocities with the push of a button, some people are going to push that button, even before adding in thoughts like "for a great purpose."

"Crystal Nights" is, however, a good story, light on characters but strong on ideas. It is still stronger on character than the typical Asimov short story.

"Steve Fever" is also mostly an idea story. It involves a young man who gets caught up in nanomachines and the history of how the situation arose. It enacts but does not discuss the same problem that "Crystal Nights" does on a much smaller scale. One could describe one of the major story elements as moving towards immortality through continuous resurrection and self-annihilation, which I do not expect to make any sense if you have not read it. Interesting ideas, but the only interesting story is in the exposition of the backstory. You cannot have most of the page count as dead space in a short story.

"TAP" is a murder mystery that considers the notion of a virtual reality brown note, a bit of code that kills the person experiencing it. The titular TAP is a virtual reality language, a system for expressing entire concepts and experiences with single digital "words." The plot starts with the question of whether a "death word" is possible for TAP and, if so, who might have done it (or did an old woman just have a heart attack). The ideas in play are the politics, sociology, and philosophy of having that kind of digital telepathy. Along with a theme of generational and technological change, a key factor is that TAP expresses both analytically and experientially: you can fully experience the concept/experience encoded in the "word," or you can regard it from the outside, seeing its parts without becoming one of them. I leave the implications to the author and the reader. I note that "TAP" also mentions pay phones. Cell phones were not big in 1995, but having pay phones in this story comically evokes those 1950s sci fi stories with giant computers using paper print-outs and punch cards. The story makes good use of characters, plot, and ideas, but ends with less ado than the build up would suggest.

"Induction" is two short, related stories stapled together. It treats upon technical development and galactic exploration from a concrete, human perspective. More compactly than anything else I have seen from Greg Egan, this highlights the tensions and ambiguities in uploading, which becomes both a way of engaging the galaxy and a reason not to bother. "Hot Rock" touches on this as well.

"Singleton" is the first of three longer (50-page) stories. It takes MWI very seriously and considers the implication that, for every success you have or decision you make, some alternate you fails or fails to live up to his convictions. Everything happens, but you only experience one path. And what is to be done about that? The story transitions to a variant on parenting an oppressed child when the protagonist creates a daughter who exists equally in every Everett branch.

"Oracle" combines the entire book in a way that might not be entirely approachable if you are not familiar with the science involved. Most of these short stories focus on one idea from the philosophy of science or of mind, but this one flirts with everything else in the book. A debate summarizes Gödel, Escher, Bach in 5 pages, which is too short where GEB can be verbose, and both are perhaps too clever for their own good. Our hero is Alan Turing, in a different history where England was kept from destroying him. Our villain is C.S. Lewis, who is a self-righteous, irrationalist monster that preys on children before they are coherent enough to resist delusions (read "TAP" for a parallel thought), later moving to grander tragedies in the name of faith. That can be uncomfortable. A pro-faith reading of the story is possible, in which C.S. Lewis is the hero, but not plausible given the author.

"Border Guards" opens with the book's fourth take on quantum physics, this time using it for soccer via probability amplitude manipulation. I found it absorbing but with low pay-off for consuming a third of the story. The story goes on to refute The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. You may not think of fiction as the sort of thing you can "refute," but there it is.

"Hot Rock" is a surprisingly straightforward science fiction story. After all the quantum mechanics, uploading, machine intelligence, nanotech, here is a standard "explore the new planet" story that takes all those as givens. It is not bad, but it is nothing special or unique, which makes it one of the weaker contributions.

Greg Egan's writing assumes that intelligence is substrate-irrelevant and identity is information theoretical. That is, you can (theoretically) back your brain up to a computer, and that backup copy is still "you." We have stories here where people are digitally transmitted over light years (another tremendous presumption: something you would still call your culture/species will still exist after a 3000-year round trip), and everyone seems comfortable with "reboot from backup" as a worst case scenario. You may recall Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in which restoring someone from a backup is so common that it is used to escape inconveniences like colds. This is a common transhumanist notion, but it must be rather shocking for those who do not share upload-friendly theories of identity. It would be suicide combined with creating your own doppleganger. Because if that copy is not also you, but just someone else who remembers having been you, you still die, even if someone who thinks of himself as you keeps going. Worse, if that copy is just a non-sentient program mocked up to act like you, you don't even have that thinking person left behind. To me, Permutation City is required reading for all intelligent, forward-looking people; for many, uploading is farcical at best and terrifying as a prospect.

Amazon link

Death Note Volume 13: How to Read by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-06-14T00:02:00.004-04:00

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Almost a 2.5, but if you are interested enough to read the parts that are worth reading, you can find more and better online already. Possibly a 2.5 for some audiences, and worth skimming if you can acquire a copy with no additional effort.

This is a companion volume to the Death Note series. It contains plot and character summaries, development background, author interviews, humorous Death Note comic strips that had been published separately, and the pilot issue.

Much of the page count is wasted on anyone who was paying attention while reading. You met these characters, you read the story, you know what happened. You do not need to be told that L has a sweet tooth, Light is arrogant, and Misa is less intelligent than them. You get approximately one sentence of new information per summary section.

May I save you some time on that? Mello's assistant was also in that orphanage with him; they expected his part of the operation to go better. That is not Misa in the epilogue chapter; her death date is listed in the chronology (skipping the obvious spoiler). L lies a lot.

That last one surprised me a bit because deceptions usually seem obvious. We see characters' thoughts and people explain what is going on, but no one points out that when L says, "5% chance," he means, "95% chance." This reverses the normal way of stating odds in fiction, where characters claim to be 99.9999% sure of things that are perhaps a 1 in 10 chance.

The page count is padded by describing and rating every trick in the series, down to Misa changing her outfit (simple but effective). Rating Near's toys or cataloging L's sweets is vaguely amusing. There is a similar run-down on every chapter title, most of which are clear plot references.

I was interested in the art background. I have discussed the character art, but I never remarked on the difference between L as shadowy figure in an empty room and L after he appears in full. The character concept changed. His seems the most flexible, shifting a between shadowy figure, creepy weirdo, childlike savant, and non-standard bishounen. The character art for Near and Mello were reversed early on by editorial decision; interesting.

The art and story background come together in the explanation that, no, it did not mean anything. The story was not plotted in intricate detail a year in advance, there is no intended moral theme, and the symbols just look cool. The artist knew about religious imagery relating to apples and how often they came up in the story, so he placed them prominently in the final cover art; the author used apples because he wanted something red to contrast with the black and white, and he thought apples were kind of cool. The whole thing was just meant as an entertaining story. The closest to a moral is Near's brief speech on how we're all just working through what's right; that and mu.

The best moment in this volume comes from one of its creators watching television. Paraphrase: "The program involved a serious discussion of the philosophy and morality in Death Note. I had no idea what they were talking about. I couldn't follow them."

For almost every female character, there was a note that they wish they had done more with her. They did not mention noticing that as a trend. There were a few versions of "I had no idea what to do with her." Misa comes off surprisingly strongly in their perception, but that seems to focus on her introduction, rather than the shallow tool she quickly became. I had thought to describe her look as Gothic Lolita, but it seemed to be a bit brighter except in her first few depictions; it was gratifying to see the artist's intention as Gothic Lolita but moderated a bit.

The comic shorts were amusing. The characters caricature well.

The pilot issue was disappointing. If I had read that first, I would not have read the series. The improvement between the original idea and the final execution was enormous.

collected edition
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The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne

2010-06-10T19:09:00.000-04:00

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Painful, just painful from the start. Maybe it picks up along the way, but the whole idea of it suggests not. It is pre-modern post-modernism and has stream-of-consciousness writing of the worst kind, and (by design) it never goes anywhere.

Tristram Shandy is writing his memoirs, but he wants you to have the full context and flavor, so he needs to digress for several stories along the way, and from those stories, and into the philosophical or sociological points that come up along the way.

Tristram Shandy has a philosophical paradox named after him. It is one of the paradoxes of infinity. Tristram Shandy is writing a very accurate autobiography, and it takes him a year to write about one day of his life. Writing about that year spent writing would take another 365 years, etc. The paradox is that, given an infinite amount of time, he will finish. Somehow. (Infinity is infinity, so you can write infinite pages about infinite days in infinite years; there is no "bigger" infinity.)

I did not get as far as the meta-writing, when Tristram starts writing about writing. I wearied when he set out, immediately dropped back, and then started wandering along tangents. ADHD does not mix well with stream of consciousness and an old style of stilted diction.

The main problem is the horrible writing. I accept the idea of a story that wanders without ever getting anywhere, but each sentence is a painful step along the way. I presume that there is some mockery of others' style, but this book appears to have outlived them. Maybe he became a better writer over the years, by the time the last chapters were published.

By the premise of the book, it should not build upon itself much, instead just being more randomness in different varieties. The early varieties are horrid, so I am abandoning it early and moving on.

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Death Note Volume 12: Finis by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-06-07T00:02:00.046-04:00

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

Perfect in every particular but not so much as a whole. It brings everything to (approximately) the right ending but not a satisfying climax.

The final confrontation. Exactly as planned.

All the details are right. The big plans come to fruition and are explained in detail. All (but one) of the surviving players are at center stage. Everyone gets to demonstrate his motif, from Near's toys and posture to Light's plotting and megalomania. The villain gets his big speech. The comic relief gets his moment of heroism. The crazed cultist looks Tolkien-esque. The wild card gets played. The dog that did not bark gets the last bite.

All the details are right. When the teams of investigators are arranged in opposition to each other, it is not just that their poses, facial expressions, and layout are classic for "final battle." Look at the shading on the suits, how one side (the mixed-gender side with someone theoretically from the opposite team!) is in identical suits while the other side has no visual unity.

And yet, on the whole, it is not a great ending. It is good and proper, but it does not rise to great. I think there are three problems.

First, I still just don't like Near. Maybe that's petty, but he is a lousy knock-off of L and an egotistical man-child, not to mention someone whose competence, people skills, etc. seem to fluctuate as the plot demands. He is not someone I want at my big finish.

Second, I am not happy with its having come down to a lucky break. Granted, the premise of the series from the beginning was that Light just happened to be the person who picked up the death note, but the game of plans within plans should end based on those plans, not based on the wild card. Of course, all the problems and randomness are things we already knew were uncertain elements; I listed them in the previous volume's review. That they all fell in the same direction is problematic, but then Light sometimes likes to talk about destiny.

The biggest point is the pacing. This is a long climax, taking almost the entire volume. I respect giving the story its due, but each part of the climax gets an entire chapter. That makes for a single scene that just keeps going, and it draws out the moment past the point of savoring to rubbing it in.

Look back to volume 3, the first time we spend too long explaining things we already know just so that everyone gets to hear it aloud. We already know the beginning of Light's plan, although folks may need a reminder after months passed in the original publication. The explanation makes the smallest details explicit, and to put even more text on the screen, it is backed by pages from the death note.

Compare to volume 7, when the other major plan came together. Look at how long that climax takes. We see the plan come together ... and then it happens. We have a moment, not chapter after chapter of it. That may err on the side of too quick, but it is drawn out in the denouement, rather than drawing out the climax itself.

Look back to volume 2, when things were really slow because we spent several chapters drawing out one confrontation. As expected in this series, the final moment here takes 40 seconds of in-story time. That takes 8 pages. Those 8 pages include a flashback, about 150 words of dialogue (with quite a bit of stuttering), another 50 or so of thinking, and 5 silent frames (and many of the non-silent frames had just a few words). I know that a lot can happen in 40 seconds, but not a lot does happen, and it does not vary much from the suffering that preceded it except for the surety of the outcome. And it follows the slow chapters of the climactic scene being drawn out.

Really, an 8-page climax in a comic series is in no way bad. That is a good length, especially when you are not spending it on splash pages of melee combat. But it is the last element of a climax that started six chapters earlier. Stretching it across that many issues violates a standard of the medium.

That might be my imposing American comic standards on manga. Maybe that happens more there, although not in any shonen manga I have read. The film version must cut that down a lot. The anime version could go either way. You cannot draw it out indefinitely on screen (well), but some anime series have intentionally drawn things out to get more episodes, with Dragonball Z being getting jokes about entire episodes with characters standing around speechifying while showing off battle aura. This has a bit of that feel, only with intellect rather than combat. It still feels like people standing around speechifying. You can do great things with people standing around talking, but if it feels like they are speechifying rather than talking, that's bad.

Final art note time! The visuals on Light's megalomania are in full force here. Good time and placement for them, even if they feel like part of the dragging on. More importantly, very small differences in Ryuk's look make a big difference, don't they? He spends most of the series being a monstrously cute puppy dog. Change the lighting, give him some realistic shading rather than cartoon flatness, and oh yeah, he is a god of death.

The art on Light does a lot of work. His facial expressions (and at times his body language) carry the weight where we do not need additional words. Light's expressions have been key at all the important plot moments, and this does not disappoint. He also picks up some of Ryuk's more realistic lighting at the end.

Summative evaluation of the series: worth reading, very good. There are quite a few slow chapters, and that is coming from someone who likes Asimov-ian intellectual writing, but the high points make it worth it. There are great schemes, some great characters, excellent plots. Many high highs, very few low lows, and overall a high average: a success. I plan to pursue it in other media to see how they interpreted it.

collected edition
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Battle Royale by Koushun Takami

2010-06-03T00:02:00.000-04:00

translated by Yuji Oniki

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

This is the 2009 translation, not the original. I am told (though I have never verified) that the first translation was poor and the manga translation was worse. I know enough Japanese to suspect what some phrases were originally, and knowing a bit of Japanese culture provides context, useful in getting the classroom scene or the lovers' suicide.

In a recurring government program, a class of 42 15-year-olds is taken to an island, armed at random, and told to kill each other until there is a sole survivor. Could you kill your best friend?

It starts very strongly, setting up and subverting expectations from the beginning. You should suspect this is an Anyone Can Die story because, by the premise, almost everyone should die. The first death remains surprising. The second is surprising in a different way. The third in another. The fourth less so. It is perhaps more surprising that deaths can be surprising in a book whose premise is "one survivor." Some of the tricks and set-ups are obvious, but the book subverts expectations enough to let it play something perfectly straight and still have it usually work.

The book is at its best when it approaches its concept unflinchingly. Senseless violence, bloody murder, panic and mental breakdown, pointless death that trades youthful potential for oblivion: it is the horror of war on a very small, very personal level. Death comes instantly, lingeringly, surprisingly, and messily. Battle Royale does well with single-shot kills from out of the blue and with sustained fights that tear people up.

It succeeds because it does not treat its subject matter respectfully. It is not something respectable. It should be painful and pointless. Nobility and cravenness both lead to sudden eternal oblivion. While scenes and characters can be heart-warming, there is nothing romantic going on.

The book is at its worst when it feels like an action movie. This is not where the author (translator?) excels, and it breaks with the feel of the surrounding chapters. A tense stand-off between people who cannot trust each other is good; an out-of-control, chaotic fight between panicked parties is good; a big firefight with people surviving explosions and automatic gunfire defuses the horror of the situation, even if it is intended to show off the hero or the villain. The few pages I saw from the manga turned a scene from Stephen King to shounen action, with characters entering the frame by leaping out of the sky. No.

Characters are generally amazingly competent or have a life expectancy of two chapters. Being introduced is a good way to get killed. Having a romantic interest is an even faster way to get killed. If you can survive two chapters, you are probably ridiculously great for a 15-year-old, with training in firearms, martial arts, general athletics and acrobatics, medicine, stunt driving, computers, music, psychology, philosophy, and/or political science (pick 5 per character). You may also be attractive to everyone of the opposite sex (possibly both) and/or have miraculous amounts of ammunition. This gets a bit extreme with a couple of characters.

As a problematic example, I thought of two characters as teleporting scavengers because of their uncanny ability to appear within a minute of any fight to finish off the wounded. The sound of gunshots carries, but the villains are always right there, ready to pounce. Meanwhile, when it is plot-convenient, it takes over an hour to find someone actively signaling his location.

I enjoy books that show mental breakdowns well. As you can imagine, this is a stressful situation, especially once you toss in a couple nights of sleep deprivation. People panic, make bad decisions, and in a couple of cases go delusionally insane. Irrationality, like nobility and cravenness, will get you killed, although it can take others with you in interesting ways.

It is an insane situation. It is horror with nothing supernatural or sci fi, just being thrust into a situation where paranoia, betrayal, and death are the norm. Everyone you know has just been tasked with killing you (and each other) for their own survival. Go!

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I am told that the movie tones down most of the Marty Stu-ness and boils off the political speeches, while embracing the graphic trauma. I look forward to seeing it sometime.

Death Note Volume 11: Kindred Spirit by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-05-31T00:02:00.019-04:00

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

A slow build-up volume.

All the pieces move into position as we approach the final act. Near has it all figured out, but he refuses to act until he has proof of his deductions. Mikami is borne along by faith in his god of death.

Near is finally getting impressive. Some of that is the advantage of being a latecomer, finding everything that previous parties fought and died to uncover. Some of that is his mental skills, notably being able to observe several streams of information simultaneously. And then there is Mikami, who is easy to find because he does not bother to hide.

You have to love that character. Light envisions himself as a god of justice. Mikami just wants to be an agent of justice, joyously deleting the foes of order from existence. He is completely unalloyed. And he is stylish.

This volume has setup chapters, which probably worked well in the original run but are somewhat tedious in the collected edition. The characters are brought into proximity, and Near borrows L's solid steel cajones by calling Light, tipping his hand, and challenging him directly. This gives us a chapter of the "I know that he knows, and he knows that I know he knows, but can he prove..." that has not been fully present since before The Eight. It is good in doses, but an entire chapter of it wears. It is amusing to watch the other characters listening but not getting it.

For that chapter, it is amusing. Then it keeps happening for the entire volume. The characters drop some hints about their plans or point out elements that are important, but keep their cards close to their chests. This gives us several chapters of Light and Near announcing that they have plans then not bothering to tell anyone about them. They also repeatedly explain things that happened on-frame but do not describe their plans and preparations that we did not already see. This is not compelling reading.

It does seem that Light knows more about what Near knows than vice versa, especially since Light sets up disinformation for Near. That can't go well for Near. Light and Near are describing their conflict as if they were having a one-on-one fight, which they are lately, but Mello's absence is conspicuous. Ryuk is the other dog that has not barked for quite a long time.

Near's toys are becoming more amusing. The figurines and finger-puppets are excellent, a wonderful adaptation of a classic motif to Near's style. His other toys continue to be overly visually distracting in a way that L's sweet-tooth was not, but I hope that the illustrator had fun with those over the issues.

Misa: vapid, ill-mannered, ill-used tool. She was more interesting as a wild card. It is sad to think that she was an effective player for a volume or two, only to come to this caricature. They put the entire female cast in a room and failed to pass Bechdel's Rule. Pitiful.

collected edition
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The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

2010-05-27T00:02:00.011-04:00

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

This seemed like a good pick in the midst of the "and Death Note wastes another female character" theme.

"Fashion, feminism, fantasy, and the history of comic book heroines." This is a feminist history of superheroines in comic books.

This is a history of American views of women, a woman's place, and relationships, as seen through the prism of comic books. Which is to say, a series of kicks in the face. You can see the times reflected in entertainment, and they have long been deeply, deeply unhealthy.

Comics have often been about wish fulfillment, and female characters have been the victims of an unfortunate balance between attracting male and female readers, along with competing theories of what those readers want. It is like an instantiation of the virgin-whore complex, with strong, competent, bold characters that are subservient, demure, and never quite as good as their male counterparts.

The early days read like glints of proto-feminism, with heroines that save the day on their own. Then they go back to being the obedient wife or daughter, sometimes with a knowing smirk when someone comments on the heroine's adventures. They are making it in a man's world, but let's keep reminding everyone that it is a man's world.

Wonder Woman is the most famous and most feminist. She is part of DC's iconic Big Three, with Superman and Batman. She actually gets "Woman," not "Girl." She was conceived as a positive, strong role model for girls. And her creators were into bondage and submission, which fits in oddly and probably led to a lot of fetishes. (This is not exactly news or sensationalism; check any Wonder Woman archive.) And then the character spun out of control after World War II, going through many revamps and never seeing much popularity outside the Linda Carter era. Wonder Woman is an iconic image, but while anyone can give you the quick story on Superman or Batman, can you say much about Wonder Woman beyond her costume?

More often, we see the female counterparts of male superheroes, explicitly weaker and subservient. Whereas Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent are disguises for their respective heroes, it is the heroic persona that is a play-act for the heroine, something exciting to do until she find the right man. We see Lois Lane, given second billing in her own series as "Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane," and even at her best depicted as needy, love-struck, bratty, and potentially the most annoying woman in the world. We see frighteningly unhealthy views of romantic relationships and power imbalances, where honesty and mutual respect are the only physically impossible things in comic book land.

It is tragic to see gender views that are so archaic and so recent. People who grew up with these cultural norms are still voting and running the country, and it does not get much more pro-equality on this planet. Worrisome.

The author seems not entirely immune. He refers to someone as "slatternly" unironically. He does a great job of presenting the attitude of an era without condemnation, inviting the reader to contribute his/her own, but he occasionally sounds like he is endorsing a decidedly un-feminist view rather than simply reporting that. It could be an accident of phrasing, or perhaps the poison afflicts even when you know to watch for it.

The book's organization mixes chronological with character-based. It takes a representative character of an era and follows her for a few decades. We see the careers of the heroines of the 40s play out. We see the full run of Sheena, queen of the jungle, then drop back to the 50s for super girlfriends. We see how Supergirl's character varies from her first appearance to her dovetailing with Lindsey Lohan. It is a good organization that shows the changing decades without unduly constricting the telling to simultaneous publications.

I found the organization highly intuitive in its arrangement of heroines. Whenever I thought, "Well what about X?" X appeared in the next chapter. This happened at least three times, so either the author and I are on the same wavelength or there is a natural structure.

I was not always thrilled with the emphasis. I want to believe that the incidents cited in older publications are representative, but I saw some picking and choosing of examples from the time when I was an avid comic reader (although it mostly keeps to the older icons). We might be interested in the worst example or "that one issue where," but do not treat it as the central tendency. Yes, it is easy to find someone online calling She-Hulk "a skank" rather than "a modern, sex-positive feminist," but it is easy to find someone online calling anyone a skank, while my sense of fandom leans towards the latter interpretation.

On the other hand, I know some worse examples in mainstream comics, so the author could have hit a few points harder with "can you believe they..."

The emphasis problem comes down to context. Much is made of the "when she was bad" stories, when the lady has an issue as the villain due to mind control, red kryptonite, super sleepwalking, miscommunication, or whatever. Almost every heroine profile mentions one. This makes up a narrative in which women are agents of deceit and treachery, too corrupted by power. This also ignores the fact that every single comic book character has this story. All of them. If you want to see the male heroes turn on their allies, it will not take you long to find Batman turning on the Justice League, Cyclops shooting people in the head, or Superman doing something insane monthly throughout the Silver Age. The more popular the character is, the more times it will have happened, for issues or years at a time. If it hadn't happened, it would mean the characters were not interesting enough to bother.

This sort of thing creates a focus on the negative, on superheroines' worst eras or features, which leads one to wonder back at the introduction. If female depictions in comics are so horrible, why would one be drawn to them?

The truth is that Sturgeon's Revelation applies universally. Most of everything is dreck, with shining successes worth remembering. Even for those shining successes, there are going to be lots of writers and authors who had bad runs. They may even have ruined a character for years. This is not the exclusive domain of female characters, and it should not be taken to dim the brightest lights.

The book ends on a positive note, but it makes the narrative a bit neat and suggests a narrow view of feminism. The neatness comes from over-imposing a story arc on heroine history, one that started in condescension, muddled through confusion, went through a cheesecake phase, and ends in maternal strength. Youth, adolescence, young womanhood, motherhood. That straightens out a lot of messy and overlapping lines, and it downplays both earlier successes and current weaknesses in the portrayal of female characters. Gail Simone is a shining light as a female comic book writer, but she is not the only one.

That narrow view is the nurturing, maternal one. It is a common feminist theme that women are uniquely strong in a loving way that protects and builds things up rather than fostering violence and aggression, and so on. It is a viable theme, but it tends to take over the character and leave little space between daughter and mother. You get young women who are victims, virgins, or harlots; you get older women who are loving mothers or bitter spinsters. There needs to be a larger space carved out in between for female characters as individuals first, themselves before their relationships. Otherwise we just have a new variation on the virgin-whore complex we started with.

The author is better than I am giving him credit for there. Many things are mentioned but not focused on, and it would take a much higher page count to explore the nuances that interest me. Without drawing much attention to it, Mr. Madrid mentions female leaders for every major superhero team, including the Authority, JLA, JSA, Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four, and Legion of Superheroes. The threads of female leadership are never woven into a chapter addressing how this fits into a narrative where heroines are second-class heroes. Similarly, though I note the maternal ending, the last chapter cites several heroines who are individuals first rather than someone's mother or daughter, and it follows a She-Hulk chapter (and she is certainly not depicted as either). Our author does not call attention to it because it does not fit the narrative.

Let us end on that note that comics, like any medium taken as a whole, is a cacophony rather than a symphony. There are trends and themes, but there is no "comic book industry" that works with a single mind. There are several publishers, and within them many authors going in different directions, sometimes in intentional subversion of any editorial direction. Writing the book demands imposing some structure on it, but at any given time, someone will be coloring outside the lines.

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PS I could have stood a bit more on how the Comics Code Authority imposed the lesser female roles on the industry. With explicit restrictions on how female characters could appear and act, there were limits on their use and an incentive just to leave women out as much as possible. Regulatory agencies, developed under threat of explicit legislative regulation, rarely do much to further art. They also reinforce the existing power structure rather than supporting the development of, in this case, new female voices.

Death Note Volume 10: Deletion by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-05-24T00:02:00.001-04:00

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

Everything runs off the rails and still keeps going. Pick your favorite way this could all go horribly wrong for everyone involved!

Near makes inroads into L's team. Light anoints a new Kira. Mello is stuck on the sidelines.

Visuals get the first note: that is one heck of a cover. The others have had some great character illustrations and images, excellent poster work, but this one captures the moment in the series and the spirit of the whole. The use of lighting and bright colors makes it stand apart from earlier covers, along with the layout and images echoing Christian iconography (with Light as God). And take a closer look at those cherubs.

Near gathers information well. He deduces well, although he seems to be placing a very strong Bayesian prior on L's judgment; usually wise, but perhaps inadvisable given L's experience just before the time skip. Near suddenly develops insight into people, rather than deductive analysis about facts. I am not sure if there was an undertone I missed, if it just never came up, if this is supposed to represent hidden depths, or the author just never considered how his autistic detective might approach human interactions. There might be enough evidence to support his conclusions here, but I also suspect a bit of cheating in that the author and readers know more than Near, so we may not see what he would need to know to make the intuitive jump and catch up with us.

That would be a strange problem for this author, given how much the first half of the series depends on "I know that he knows that I know..." Then again, this is about who knows what, not the recursive psychological games. Someone out there must have tracked who knew what and did Near have enough information to make that deduction fairly.

Near has a moment of quasi-effectiveness here, or at least a good tactic. His gathering his robots as he leaves headquarters is a great visual, more of a child you would want to protect rather than his annoying dithering about with toys in his other scenes.

Mello is stuck investigating. Maybe the author is planning a long game for him, with this entire volume setting it up, but it looks more like showing him doing the right thing and Light still winning.

The theme of the first half is doing things right and still losing. Everyone has plans that they execute properly but are countered in part by their opponents. For Light, that looks a lot like having events spiral out of control even as he is putting things together.

Light is ridiculously lucky, unless we can get some evidence that he knew more about Mikami before. He found the perfect person. I hope that goes badly, as Mikami is too perfect, and Light faces someone who is more of a true believer in Kira than he is. Idealists are dangerous.

I also wonder when Light will have problems with basing executions on media reports. It is not as though he is vetting all his victims thoroughly and giving them a fair trial. There is no chance for appeal or showing an erroneous arrest after you have a heart attack and die. How many innocents has Kira killed? How easy would it be to make a false arrest or accusation and have your victim disappear?

How easy would it be for someone to do that to Light? Similarly, how easy would it be to reveal who L is and that he is hunting Kira?

As I said, pick your favorite way this could all go horribly wrong for everyone involved.

Did Aizawa just quietly become the hero of this series?

Lastly, we have a new role for a prominent female character. In a shocking turn of events, she is an easily manipulated, subservient tool of the main characters.

collected edition
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Death Note Volume 9: Contact by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-05-17T00:02:00.000-04:00

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

Mello is shaping up nicely. Near is not.

Light takes the fight to Mello as Kira advances on the world stage. Near's deductions advance as his sphere of influence is increasingly circumscribed.

I keep expecting more from Near and not getting it. His toys are like L's candy, only far more visible, distracting, and childish. His deductions are on par with L's, maybe better, but he lacks any other skills to make something happen as a result. He does not seem to understand people well enough to engage in Light's manipulations, so much so that his own staff is a jump ahead of him. A character is in a bad way when you note that he lacks L's social skills. He fares poorly as a major player; he would work well as a tool in the service of a major player.

Which he may be becoming due to Mello's effectiveness. Near presents the threat of exposure to L, Kira, and Light; Mello might just kill everyone to prove he can. And maybe he can, once he gets his feet under him, but it remains to be seen how much he can do in the long run.

Near and Mello do interact well. They show an inverse of L and Light's relationship: venomously polite but the only underlying hostility is competitiveness.

For the other contrast, this volume reverses the flow of the previous one, with Light counter-attacking both Mello and Near. Only one completes within the volume, and it is still nice to see someone with contingencies so that not everything goes exactly as planned. They are both annoying twerps of different shades, but they each present some sort of threat to Light.

Mello, despite what you have seen in movies, you should not hold a gun sideways. You may think it makes you look "gangsta," but you should have spent enough time with real criminals not to be doing that. This series shows the very different Japanese attitude towards guns, which are more unusual over there. There is also the police hesitance against overwhelming force combined with a calm assurance of the death penalty.

We have a new, named female character! She then immediately goes to the shower scene as she discusses her comfort with being a tool of the major characters. Oh, well then. Maybe she and Misa could be friends.

collected edition
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Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

2010-05-13T17:48:00.000-04:00

Rating - 4: worth reading more than once (buy it)

Audrey Hepburn was far better than Holly Golightly deserved.

Holly is informally an escort, paying her rent with the $50 "powder room change" her dates provide. She loves to talk and hates to answer questions about herself. She is drifting, glamorously, gloriously, desperately. She is running, sometimes from things, sometimes to others, sometimes just to run.

The plot is inessential. It is convenient, to move mirrors around Holly, but the characters and events are just there to show her off from various angles. The book is more successful in this than the film, which lets the plot get in the way during the second half.

Instead we have a character study in 100 pages. It is a novella that delivers value quickly and consistently. It will support re-reading well because it spends little time on exposition, plot, or anything else you might skim past on a re-read under the rubric of "I already know this." A similarly dense action movie would have an explosion every minute or two.

Actually, the plot is not bad. There are a few events that spur action, a few threads uniting the story across brief episodes in Holly's life. The story is almost entirely character-driven, however, so the events feel like a natural growth from them rather than something the author imposes on them.

Our narrator is a nameless cypher. I have seen him described as an author avatar. I did not pick up a gay vibe on my first read-through; is that a better explanation for Holly's casual nudity in his presence, or just that she gets naked in front of male audiences frequently and considers him harmless? At any rate, he is happy just to bask in her presence and recount it for us.

Holly is an interesting mess. She wants attention, preferably all of it, but definitely on her terms. She wants to tell you things but does not want you to ask about them. She lies casually and may believe any number of her own lies; she becomes a sort of unreliable narrator for the narrator. She is caring, cruel, and callous. She is whimsical. She is cunning but not necessarily bright.

If you noticed that our narrator is not the film's dashing gigolo, you should also pick up that Holly's heart has at best streaks of gold. She is a user and a schemer, happy to hurt for her immediate gain, momentary amusement, or to spite another. She really would be happy if it worked out well for everyone, I'm sure, but she is looking out for number one first.

If only she knew what she wanted. She wants love and a home and happiness. She has no idea how to get them, or why, or how to recognize them, or how to feel safe once she does have them. Holly is a tragic character because she is not a dynamic one. She cannot grow as a person. She is stuck, her head barely above water, making waves so that no passing wave can come along and drown her.

She is a variable character, though not dynamic. She flits. She flirts. She obsesses and moves on. She has repeatedly found her savior and run away (or driven him off).

Some of this is maintained in the film version of the character, although it sweetens her considerably. The film version would never curse or talk about shacking up with a lesbian so she could have a wife to do housework. The film version is still a gold digger but not a strip miner. Book-Holly is goes beyond thoughtless or self-centered.

On that film note, how ridiculous was that ending? Besides making "Fred" a mirror of her first john in what was intended as a romantic scene, you know what happens within a week or a month of the film's ending because you saw it a half-dozen ways within the film. The book does not bother, stays truer to the character, and tells you the ending up front so that you can be content to enjoy the scenery along the way.

Holly is, however, enormously charismatic and apparently fun to be around. It is fun to see her through our narrator's prism. She is a great character, darker and more nuanced than the film version, highly enjoyable in her fits and starts.

My edition came with three short stories. Worthwhile. I feel certain that I have read "A Christmas Memory" before; perhaps it is part of a standard English textbook these days.

Amazon link

Death Note Volume 8: Target by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-05-10T00:02:00.000-04:00

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

Mello is not likable, but he is effective.

L, M, and N, as it were -- machinations promise to get interesting as everyone is trying to kill or catch everyone else while no one really knows who anyone else is. Mello advances while Light and Near are becoming clearer on what the situation is, and then the situation changes from an unexpected direction.

That was vague enough, wasn't it? Our new competitors do not know enough to manipulate the pieces individually, but at least one of them is a great planner, and everyone is being careful.

Near gets more "screen time" and seems about as likable as Mello, although annoying from a different direction. Probably a smart guy but looks down on everyone despite having accomplished absolutely nothing so far. That irritation and condescension seems to be his only character trait. He may eventually become a character, but he is just a story device at present.

Mello may be an annoying twerp, but he is quite canny. He uses others well, keeping danger at a remove or two. He realizes that he does not need to hold the power in his own hands to have control. Impulsive, but he could be the most effective planner so far. I expect him to die soon, or else someone with his drive must take over the entire plot and take over the story in the last act.

He still looks like a girl, but an increasingly crazy one. Everyone gets to look a bit more insane; the plot must be coming along well.

Misa keeps trying to get back into the story. She is ill-used, by Light and the author. But she's trying, darn it. If there is any justice, she will have the appropriate emotional reaction and all Hell will break loose. I do not expect that. She, like the entire female cast except perhaps Rem, is too passive.

It is nice to see Light being out-foxed. Others can make plans as airtight as his, and his can be thwarted by unpredictable circumstances. If Near turns out to be less worthless than he seems to think everyone else is, this could get rather exciting. Or both the new challengers might have nothing in reserve once their initial gambits run out; the series will become tiresome if characters keep appearing, presenting a threat, then dying at the end of the arc.

collected edition
Amazon link

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

2010-05-06T00:02:00.000-04:00

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

Despite foreshadowing, it is not clear for the first half where this book is going. We have some plot markers, but we mostly seem to be following the protagonist through a year of her adolescence. Then the character development arc comes together in the third quarter and the plot in the fourth, and this becomes a great read.

The mysterious notes started appearing right about the time Miranda's best friend abandoned her and her mother found out she was going to be on The $20,000 Pyramid. She gets a new friend, picked up when the snotty rich girl was dramatically de-friending, and then they get a boy friend (potential boyfriend?) and a lunchtime job at a local sandwich shop. But where are these notes coming from and how does the writer know what is going to happen?

Some of us have doubted the wisdom of the Newbery committee over the years, but then we got The Graveyard Book and this back-to-back. It is not quite as exceptional a pairing as Bridge to Terabithia and The Westing Game, but this is a very enjoyable book.

Maybe this is easier to do with an adolescent, but our protagonist is a rounded, dynamic character. Other people are as well, although they may not change so much as Miranda's perspective on them does. In 200 pages for young readers, this book manages more character development and growth than most adult books with 500 pages of dense text.

Miranda's character arc is developing empathy, realizing that others are also suffering and doing the best they can given their circumstances. It is an arc, a gradual movement with epiphanies and setbacks. She sees herself and others trying, sometimes failing, sometimes not really trying because they do not know how to make things right or cannot bring themselves to do it.

The realization that others are seeing the same problems and suffering is profound. It is not unique or original, but it is critically important. Its lack is common enough that Miranda can have that same realization on multiple issues in successive chapters without its seeming repetitive, forced, or messianic. "I could have made this better a long time ago. Why haven't I? Why don't I?"

You could think of the first half of the book as setting up all the ways this realization can take place. It is not; it is a normal set-up of a life, explaining the people and situations around. Our world just happens to be rife with opportunities to notice others. We are introduced to everything through Miranda's eyes, and it seems natural to accept some things as the way they are rather than needing reconsideration or fixing. There are surprises in plain sight, waiting to be noticed.

That leads to the other thing this book does exceptionally: foreshadowing. The notes foretelling the future are blatant and ominous, letting many subtle bits fly under the radar. Ms. Stead puts Chekhov's gun on the mantle and manages to make it look like a decorative piece. When it comes back 100 pages later, you might not realize that you already saw it.

Rather than spoil any of those, let us remark that it pushes the book above a 3 rating because you will want to see how all the pieces came together in retrospect. That will not require re-reading for some points; some of them are explicitly cited. In at least one other case, you get the explanation before it happens, when it does not make sense, and might not notice that events are unfolding exactly as you were told.

I do not go so far as a 4 because the first half is enjoyable but not great, and any decent reading retention will get you all the value. I recommend re-skimming it to see the subtler foreshadowing, but the exposition does not have value independent of the story.

The second half is heartwarming and bittersweet and excellent. I must go get someone else to read this book.

Amazon link

Death Note Volume 7: Zero by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-05-03T00:02:00.063-04:00

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

When these guys get back to the main plot, they're not messing around.

Light's gambit comes together, putting him back in the game against L in a surprisingly strong position. New challengers to Kira arise.

The first arc in this book is excellent, clearly a 4. I said before that we knew where Light's plan had to lead, and it does go there, but the parts left unmentioned take it much further. Light plotted out three volumes worth of the plot beforehand, and it is very impressive to watch it play out in this one. The pawns can see themselves being manipulated, comment on it, then carry out their parts anyway due to the way things are set up.

I love it when a plan comes together.

The book ends on the beginning of a next arc. This is an unfortunate arrangement of the volumes, because it is a horrid stopping place. It is not long enough to establish the new arc, just that a new arc has begun. At this point, Near comes across as an autistic knock-off of L, without enough dialogue to take him anywhere interesting, and the background for Mello does nothing to mitigate the constant urge to smack him.

Mello's art is problematic. It goes beyond androgynous; I did not realize he was male until someone pointed it out. He lacks masculine facial features but has very feminine hair and outfits. He has one pose that looks masculine. Near is more classically cherubic.

The art around the time skip is good. Characters are older but still themselves, most visibly Sayu but most notably Aizawa. The maturation in his look is simple but effective. Death Note uses black backgrounds for the negative space when outside normal time, and this effect stacks up during the time skip; it is a dark time.

Light comes across strongly in both text and visuals. The images of his megalomania are sufficiently overblown, and his facial expressions say what the words need not.

I am still looking for a decent female character. I had brief hopes for Mello, which the character ruined before I realized the gender issue. Sayu may have potential, or not. I don't really have hopes for either except that Mello can become less annoying or else die quickly. Neither seems immediately likely.

collected edition
Amazon link

Blindsight by Peter Watts

2010-04-29T18:32:00.001-04:00

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

"On the Mohs scale of sci-fi hardness, Blindsight is aggregated diamond nanorod." - AngryParsley

The aliens made First Contact via thousands of probes that photographed Earth down to a one-meter resolution. The human response was tiny, specialized, and fast-moving in pursuit. Everyone in the crew of five was something more than human, super-charged by genetics, surgery, and technology. Our protagonist is their Synthesist, a generalist who can explain the specialists to everyone back home; he explains the unusual well because he had to re-learn humans from the ground up after half his brain was removed.

...that distance—-that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—-it's not entirely a bad thing. It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.

The book has a collaboration rather than a tension between plot and ideas. Pondering philsophical, psychological, and scientific concepts is a part of understanding the action, not a distraction from it. It is a great sign for the writing when a discussion of human consciousness can be woven into the climax and add to it.

The book deals heavily with human brains and minds and the alteration thereof. No one in the main cast is an unaltered human; all have varying advantages and disadvantages from their alterations. The linguist is the most notable, constituting half the crew because she has surgically induced multiple personalities that work as a team; it is an upgrade, not a disorder. There is not discussion of what it means to be human so much as laying out some near- or transhuman minds and offering them for your inspection.

There is a progression in the book from humans to aliens to all minds. The beginning focuses on what has happened to humanity over the years, a conglomeration of technical advances that are mostly considered briefly. Humans can be refitted or upgraded, although many have retired and let the computers do all the work. Many uploaded permanently to their own virtual worlds.

The crew makes First Contact with the aliens, which gives us a chance for exploration. They are alien, not humans with rubber foreheads or in monster suits. I will not spoil it.

The interaction of the two lead to consideration of all minds. What does it mean to be human, particularly in a trans-human world? What does it mean to think, to be intelligent or conscious? And does it matter?

The book takes seriously the notion of the Cartesian theater. Do we see things directly, or is there some sort of little man in our heads viewing it all on a television? And then is there a little man in his head, and in his, and so on? The Cartesian theater sounds a lot like nonsense, but broken brains give us evidence that the brain might be processing things that way. The cast exhibits some of the evidence, and other cases are discussed. The titular "blindsight" is the case of receiving input that your conscious brain is not processing but might be available to subconscious or reflexive parts of your brain; your eyes and brain are still seeing but "you" are not.

Does there need to be any sort of "little man" or "I" at all? If you can have intelligence without consciousness, why have consciousness? A universe of computers that do not know they exist would be so much more efficient. (The book also takes seriously the notion of philosophical zombies. Yes, that is an actual academic term in theory of mind.)

Blindsight flirts with theories of consciousness early then backs away until they come to the fore of the plot. If you are reading gradually, you will have time for the information to sink in (or to be forgotten). I will leave it to the book, rather than carrying on. As I said, the philosophical lines grow with the plot, rather than infesting or displacing it, and you will enjoy their emergence.

I like the way that the speech is presented as having been translated. The characters speak in multiple languages, communicate with gestures and syllables, use computer assists, and are otherwise more efficient than baseline human conversation. Our narrator translates this into normal speech for us. The hidden fact of this succeeds better than Asimov's presentation of discussion within the Second Foundation or Scazi's under-use of digital telepathy. Surprisingly, it does not lead to mid-action info dumps, instead keeping things succinct.

The science fiction is very hard. There are 22 pages of notes and references explaining the science behind it. Kudos for putting that at the end rather than trying to shoehorn it into the plot. I saw nothing obviously wrong, although I am not qualified to comment on most of it, and it would take me a good deal of research just to pick out which parts are completely made up rather than based in a live theory.

The character development is foundational to the book. We spend most of our time with five characters, plus a few more in flashbacks. This gives plenty of time to develop them, some more than others. They interact with each other and display their differing views without necessarily sitting down for the info dump formal speech/debate. They are all likable in various ways. It is helpful to have a narrator who professionally sees what people mean, bringing our third person limited narrator slightly closer to an unreliable third person omniscient.

The book considers the borderline between created and "natural," machines and organisms. It considers the edges of consciousness and intelligence. It explicitly references Chinese Boxes and the question of non-intelligent parts in intelligent systems. In addressing intelligent systems, it does not then go on to conscious systems, where Gödel, Escher, Bach ponders whether a hive could be collectively conscious (the way our brain cells are). Pursuing that question may or may not make the ending more cheerful.

The book is often a downer, but there is great enjoyment to be had in the details and in the telling. I will leave you to them.

Amazon link
free download

Google notes this book as the only instance in existence of the phrase "treacly invaginations."

Death Note Volume 6: Give-and-Take by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-04-26T12:02:00.005-04:00

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

I am really enjoying reviewing volumes of a completed series one-by-one, without having read the entire thing. It lets me note items as they arise, rather than trying to view the whole thing in hindsight. I imagine one of my friends who has read/seen the whole series reading these and laughing with the knowledge of what lies ahead. (Just kidding; like anyone reads this.) I must remember to take that "whole series" view at the end.

L's forces split over what path to take in pursuing the new Kira. Misa precipitates a final confrontation.

Is Misa only momentarily effectual, or is this enough of a reunion with Rem to make her an interesting character again? I fear that she will remain a one-note character after a strong introduction.

This volume has similarities to her introduction, bringing a bit of action into the series. It is done more effectively this time, both in terms of characters' competence and the writing for the action sequences.

It is a strong conclusion that brings back elements dropped earlier in the series. It shows that more is going on behind the scenes than the point-of-view characters know (or let on). Good. If L gets to be more of a child, the adults can act more like grown-ups.

It is nice to see plans flawlessly executed despite being spelled out in advance. It is nice to see mistakes being made, to greater or lesser detriment. It is nice to see unexpected elements arising to save the day (or just make it easier). The writing mixes cynicism, optimism, and realism in a refreshing way. We have a series about serial killers that remains remarkably bright and upbeat.

This is perhaps the reason for the injection of comic relief in the previous volume. Before The Eight, no major characters were completely unsympathetic. There is some reason to like even the minor characters. Sure, most of them are trying to kill or imprison each other, but they are upbeat, self-assured, and not needlessly cruel.

Except maybe Light. Two entire volumes stepping away from what a complete psycho he is could be a bit much. It does give us two contrasts, to take my usual theme. This other Kira is not an idealist and has no noble motives. This is the black to Light's gray. Meanwhile, we have white Light, what Light would have been like before crashing into Lord Acton's maxim. He does not see acceptable casualties. That makes Light a more sympathetic character, because he is fundamentally a good person, and it makes his mass murder and self-declared divinity more tragic.

No, the volume does not ponder that. It moves swiftly through The Eight's arc. But given the pace at which I am reading the series, I have time to reflect.

My only visual note is that Wedy gets shiny leather pants. Those pants are her characterization, in case you were hoping for more. Did anything with Misa and Rem or with Light's mother and sister meet Bechdel's Rule? It is probably not a good sign that I cannot remember his sisters name and that I am not sure his mother had a name. Maybe they will come back. You'd think that someone in his household must share some of his potential along with half his genetic code.

The story arc is briefly interesting but not particularly likable. It is a common problem in series that the first part is the best known, and so naturally everything gets compared to Light vs. L. Misa was briefly up to playing on the same field with our main characters, but The Eight were both less interesting and out of place. The entire structure of the story had to change to accommodate them, in return for which the main plot gets a few points of advancement. It ends well, but it was not the best conceivable way to spend two volumes.

collected edition
Amazon link

Midnight at the Well of Souls by Jack Chalker

2010-04-22T17:34:00.000-04:00

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

It starts slowly despite spectacle, picks up in the middle, gets weird, and ends on an extended anti-climax.

Well World is the central control computer for the universe. Hexes across its surface contain microcosms of many worlds, with differing climates and dominant races. Come to Well World and you will be assigned to a new hex in a new body. When dangerous researchers stumble through the Well Gate and seek ultimate control, a motley crew follows them and learns much about themselves.

The introduction is too long. We have a twenty-page prologue before meeting the protagonist, forty pages before reaching the planet where the story takes place, and another thirty pages of exposition before really entering Well World. If this is your first time reading an author, are you willing to give him ninety pages of leeway before getting on with it? Luckily, I am a giving soul.

The plot is not terribly unified. There is the thread that the characters are headed towards reunion and conflict, but the story events are just things that happen to them along the way. They pass through various hexes, discover and face the associated hazards, then move on, usually transformed in some way. Most of the characters do not even know where they are going, except that it is bad.

There is some small amount of character development, but it comes in fits and starts rather than showing growth over time. People change in mind as quickly as in body, and this is a planet where people get transformed whenever the author is bored.

There is some playing with karmic transformations, where what is inside is brought out, penance is imposed on a sinner, or the virtuous are rewarded. Other times the external change precedes the internal, so the change in body provides a change in perspective that leads to a change of mind. (Given that teleportation can accompany transformation, it might also be just the related change in setting that changes minds.) And sometimes the transformation is arbitrary, because hey, centaurs and mermaids!

The scattered plot creates difficulties for character development because we are following too many paths. The characters get scattered to their new bodies, and we spend a chapter or two with each character before unifying them into a smaller number of plot threads. It feels like a series of vignettes, and it was not clear that anything was going to come back together until it became clear that absolutely everything was destined to come together at the same time.

One character gets a turn as the point of view character then has no meaningful role again beyond "mount." Another has a huge character change that is explicitly announced at the end to have had no bearing on events whatsoever. Two theoretically plot-critical characters spend most of the book at center stage without character development, important lines, or much impact on the plot.

When the bad guys get their comeuppance at the end, it is hard to care much. They did some bad things before the main story (or perhaps the entire book) started, but they commit few sins on-page despite being repeatedly described as horrible people. Vengeance against...that guy who has been standing next to the main cast not doing anything for the entire book. Yay?

It does not help to have the protagonist lording his knowledge over everyone else for the last third of the book without explaining anything. It is like a mystery story where the detective finds half the clues "off-camera," then spends most of the book laughing about how no one else can figure it all out. It's not mysterious; it's irritating. Hiding all the explanations until the ending did not improve them.

The ending manages to be an anti-climax despite an appearance by God Himself to explain His creation. We get to the end only to discover that absolutely none of it mattered except for having a couple of people learn that striving is better than sameness. The ending is neither plot- nor character-driven. God takes over at midnight at the Well of Souls, and then we have bonus exposition as denouement. It is perhaps mollifying that you do not care much about the characters by that point anyway.

Before reading this book, I never needed to wonder whether the phrase "antelope-centaur sex" would be interpreted as a centaur having sex with an antelope, as someone having sex with a centaur whose lower body was an antelope rather than a horse, as two of those antelope-centaurs having sex with each other, or as sex involving a centaur who has been turned into an antelope (or vice versa). There are more permutations possible, so you can guess which ones the book chose to explore.

On a visual note, my edition's cover makes the centaur white, despite her being described as chocolate brown. Maybe no one told the illustrator. Maybe they decided that having a black girl on the cover would reduce sales. Maybe they thought interracial romance would offend people reading a book with interspecies romance. They did, however, make sure she was topless.

This book has not been compelling enough to have me read more Well World novels, especially when I'm told that the author descends into depicting his assorted transformation fetishes at the expense of writing quality. I am, however, interested in how someone might play with transformation themes in writing, and Downtiming the Night Side is reportedly his best work, so I should pursue that sometime.

Amazon link

Death Note Volume 5: Whiteout by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-04-19T00:02:00.001-04:00

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

This is the weakest volume so far. It has some value for setting up future events, but you probably would not lose much skipping it. There is enough context and repetition in the series to do so, since the original publication expected you to read it across a span of months not hours.

Light and Misa have been arrested. Light and L are working together to find Kira. Light and L are working together to find a new Kira. I'm not even trying to have this make sense without the context of previous volumes.

This volume is a change in direction, likely just a detour. That is less then thrilling when the main plot is sitting there in the same room, watching the detour happen.

We have an entire issue of Light sitting in a cell and not confessing to being Kira. It is not exciting reading.

We have more comedy added with increasing character development for Matsuda. It is fine as far as it goes, but I appreciate shorter bits of comic relief. We already have Misa, who has been reduced to a one-joke character. This is not the best mix of cerebral plotting and slapstick.

L, in the art and with some good characterization, is becoming more child-like and less creepy. He eats a lot of sweets and has an innocent if tired look. It is an enjoyable approach to a master detective.

Light falls off the map. Much of it is justified, but his character has been gutted for this volume. Even given the justified gutting, I expected him to be more active, less Wesley Crusher. Light's shadow is hanging about the plot, literally chained to L.

The development of the rest of the police cast is good. It took a while for them to be meaningfully distinguishable, and by the end of this volume they are all established characters, even Mogi. This is the most worthwhile part of the volume.

The side story itself is the main problem. It is a long digression from the main plot, with the main plot put on hold and left in plain sight. It is not as good as the main plot. While it is interesting and potentially worthwhile to consider what someone else would do with a death note, I don't know how much I should care about The Eight. It is a clever approach, making a new Kira a (bounded) mystery to the reader and to his associates. It gives us, however, eight people to try to learn and maybe care about in a short period of time, with the expectation that most or all of them are going away very soon. Mix in their exposition, give them time to do anything interesting, and we are running out of pages while still very much aware the main plot is on hold. Collectively, they are an interesting character, but The Eight is eight flat characters, and adding more of those to what had been a tight game of psychological fencing does not enrich the matter.

Aiber is immediately appealing, and his art is enjoyably different from the rest of the cast. We might someday reach a dozen non-Japanese characters. That is the great lesson of The Eight, right? The fate of the world is not always in the hands of gifted Japanese students; sometimes it is in the hands of corrupt Japanese businessmen.

Wedy is yet another disappointing female character. I know this is a boy's manga, but is Rem really as close as we get to a strong female character? Even Misa plus Rem were only mildly competitive in the intellectual games.

The physical moments with Light and L are enjoyable as well. There are a few good plot moments, particularly with the use of Misa and Matsuda. There is some set-up but no pay-off for long plots, so we are stuck with quick tricks.

Blanks do not work that way. The boy is now horribly scarred if not dead. For comedy value, imagine that for the rest of the series.

collected edition
Amazon link

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

2010-04-15T18:34:00.002-04:00

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

This is the first Culture novel. The Culture is one of the acclaimed sci fi series of our time, but most people recommend skipping this one and starting with The Player of Games. Most people are absolutely right. The main plot is interesting, but there is a long side trek and the protagonist is neither likable nor compelling.

A galactic war rages between technologically supreme space hippies (The Culture) and a race of biologically immortal religious warriors (the Idirans). Horza is a shape-shifting spy and assassin in the service of the Idirans, fighting for messy biology over computed perfection. He is called upon when a young Culture Mind falls onto a Planet of the Dead where Horza's race are caretakers but Culture and Idirans alike are forbidden to go.

At least, that is what the book should eventually be about. The first hundred pages feature Horza narrowly surviving four disastrous situations through luck. However much agency our protagonist may be trying to show, he is entirely swept along by events outside his control and saved by outside parties. His shape-shifting abilities are mentioned but irrelevant throughout this, and they only affect a couple of plot points that could be written around. His backstory talks about spying and assassination, but he is not doing that here.

Horza himself is not likable. As his career implies, he is an anti-hero, except for showing no heroism. The closest he comes is not wanting to kill someone; not that he lets the kid live, just that he does not want him dead. His personal interests include brute survival at any cost and discriminating against non-carbon-based lifeforms.

The book and series do not get into it this early, but if you know The Culture, you know that Horza is on the wrong side of this war both morally and practically. The Culture is like a model of how everything could work out right with a society hovering around the technological Singularity. They really would like everyone to live happily and safely with good nutrition and education and a chance to fully explore what life can bring. They are also willing to annihilate entire solar systems that are hostile to them, although they are polite enough to offer evacuation before unleashing the anti-matter. (This book is set while the space hippies are learning how to do that "annihilation" bit, before "never get involved in a land war in Asia" is replaced with "do not fuck with The Culture.")

I usually give a book 20% of its length to prove itself, which was the point where I was going to quit, but a promising bit at 20% and Iain Banks's reputation bought enough trust to get to 30% and then skimming the rest. There are some good scenes later on. An editor who cut 200 or 300 pages from the book could make it worthwhile. If you have good skimming skills, you may be able to extract value from this book efficiently enough to make it a 2.5. While Horza and his human-ish companions are unappealing, it gets good when we have Yalson or a representative from the Idirans or The Culture "on-screen." They interact well with everyone, especially Horza.

I had hoped that something would make me pause and start reading normally. After those first hundred pages, I read as far as the next disaster our protagonist survived through more luck. That one spun into another, and then there were cannibals. A sentient shuttlecraft offered him no-questions-asked rescue, so he murdered the Mind running it and took the shuttle to go murder someone else and take his ship. Then there was a card game where lives were gambled. Taking us to the half-way point, our protagonist killed a bunch of other innocents in an escape, including wrestling for a ship's controls so that he could steer it through a crowd of people between him and the exit. This is a spaceship, recall, so the lucky ones were killed by the impact, with the rest caught in the blast from the ship's fusion drives.

It's nice to have the main plot return about half-way through the book, but why would I want to follow this protagonist? It is not as though he is charismatic or audacious enough to call what he is doing "exploits" or "antics." Most of it is low-grade thuggery, sometimes upgrading to thuggery amidst spectacle. We digress for half the book so that he can connect with a band of even less appealing thug redshirts (think "Krull" only less so). Horza is on a moral crusade against people who want to bring health and prosperity to the universe because they use super-intelligent computers and can be condescending. The murder of the sentient shuttle is a microcosm of the entire thing: in the face of a potentially optimistic and friendly setting, some people want to make it a crapsack world for themselves and everyone in their reach, out of sheer bloody-mindedness.

If I want that, I can go find some rich kids who cut themselves.

Amazon link

Death Note Volume 4: Love by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-04-12T00:02:00.051-04:00

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

I don't see a way to summarize this volume without spoiling the previous one, so let's skip that and comment on the style.

This is the first volume that I am giving a 4 because so many pieces come together well here. In previous volumes, too much time was spent on exposition that did not bear repeating, or the best part of the plot was the twist at the end rather than seeing it happen. Lots of explanation. We get a bit of that with our new character, but it is more indirect characterization. Light and L are already in their elements and performing well, and we get both big plots and little twists. The series has found its stride fully.

Misa is a fun wild card to throw in, especially with Rem as a less "fun" heavy. Given the weakness of the female cast so far, in which the one potentially strong female mostly had the role of "fiancée," I was hoping for something a little more feminist. Maybe later. She is not manipulative enough to hold her own with Light and L, but she makes things both sunnier and more chaotic. I hope she keeps the odd mix of images and character traits; her arc already threatens to make her an entirely flat character.

The art note comes early this time. Misa's visuals are not quite as consistent as they could be (her age seems to shift a bit based on how childish (or not) she needs to be for a scene), but they create a nice counterpoint to Light and L. Misa in disguise is adorable. Her counterpart is Takada, an equal but opposite visual archetype, although the blonde gets the goth visuals that would go usually go with the brunette in American imagery.

Light's eyes again do a great deal of work, particularly when he wonders how horribly Misa is going to destroy him or how he can use her to destroy L. His outraged near-panic is beautiful to behold. His scheming face is just over the top enough to be perfect.

Gelus was too short-lived. I loved his look. Rem, unlike Gelus or Ryuk, actually looks threatening and predatory rather than silly, which is probably a good thing considering his role. Ryuk is just in it for the lulz, Gelus was a puppy, and Rem is an attack dog.

The plots remain excellent, particularly the way that L manages to thrust himself boldly but completely safely into harm's way and disrupt Light's plans. We get to see Misa have her own plans and some others go awry. We see both long games and sudden turns, good stuff.

Since we end mid-scheme, I will end. We know that the scheme must circle around, we just don't know what Light has put in place to make it happen. This whole thing must have been much more suspenseful in the original, when you never knew if there was going to be a "next volume." On the other hand, while the existence of a known end point leaves us with only the question of how we get there, we know that the author cannot string the story out indefinitely in hopes of Dickensian payment-by-volume, and we know that no outside event will come along and ruin the whole affair. Surely good things lie ahead.

collected edition
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House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

2010-04-07T20:19:00.000-04:00

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

Interesting and multi-layered, but of uneven quality as there are multiple stories running at once, and sometimes more gimmicky than good. I recommend The Navidson Record, the film within the book, but not the surrounding stories.

Before the old, blind man died, he wrote (in many fragments) a critical analysis of a documentary that never existed. This is that analysis, decorated with the story of the broken fellow collecting it into a book. And a couple more levels.

The center-most level, The Navidson Record is a great haunted house story. I don't know to what extent that benefits from the pacing created by interspersing the other stories, but it works. It includes the most gimmicky formatting, including a labyrinth of footnotes and some other post-modern fun, but The Navidson Record is good.

I recommend reading it through the first ending or two. The story has several points where it could end, and it would have benefited from picking one of the earlier ones. If you get to the half-way point of the book, at least in my paperback "Remastered Full-Color Edition," you have extracted pretty much all the value from the book. Stop. After that point, there will be no fewer than three breather digressions before the final ending, and the last arc does not add much (except for the really fun post-modern moment of having a character in the movie in the book read and burn the book that contains him).

The manipulation of the page works nicely, as does the story it illustrates. Film it.

The Zampanò commentary level of the story is mixed and often tedious. Where it lays out character motivation and background in narrative form, it adds to the book. Other times it descends into academic nonsense, needless pretentiousness, or lengthy digressions that neither contribute to the story nor provide much interest on their own. To some extent, this is intentional and mocked within the book. That does not make it better or more interesting, although maybe you have read enough film school commentary to enjoy a send-up.

As pointed out in the book, a real commentary would not have this much detail about the film being critiqued. You get the entire Navidson Record, almost down to a shooting script. I expected to see more excised and left completely mysterious to the reader; it is to the story's benefit that it did not, but it makes the Zampanò level more irrelevant. Read the Zampanò parts that add background, skimm past the lengthy digressions (such as on echoes and labyrinths). Yes, that means skip anything ~~in this typeface~~.

The Johnny Truant level is not good. At times it can be entertainingly salacious, but many of the early bits are annoying stream of consciousness rants. It picks up much later, but not enough to justify reading it all; just read Chapter 21, although that may not work as well without context. Your mileage may vary. If you have a horribly broken life and might sympathize with him, try a bit. He starts broken and gets far worse.

On the other hand, Johnny's story in the footnotes includes some great examples of going through panic attacks, told in the first person. If you loved Philip K. Dick's examples, you will enjoy Johnny's as well.

Courier is just not a fun font to read at length.

We have levels of unreliable narrators. Zampanò was blind, so he never saw The Navidson Record, and he might have been insane. The Navidson Record does not exist, even in the fictional setting; Johnny tells us it does not exist, the quoted books (mostly) do not exist, the quoted people never said that (when they exist). Johnny himself is variously a drunk, drug addict, habitual liar, and mental case, when noting having panic attacks and delusions. He also admits that he is not the most competent compiler of Zampanò's work and that he is not above changing it in a momentary fit of pique. Then there is a question of to what extent the documentary is a documentary, rather than in-world fiction, and how much manipulation the photojournalist might have done (either through framing or image manipulation).

And then, of course, the whole thing is a work of fiction that someone made up. At some point in the post-modern dance of many levels, one wonders whether it still matters. Does having that many levels make us stop caring, because it is a lie even within the fiction, or does it free us from caring about what is fiction or true and let us just enjoy it as a story? Fiction does not become less true for being meta-fiction. I wondered if Johnny was going to tell us at some point that he made the whole thing up, that there never was a Zampanò either; that might have been disappointing in a St. Elsewhere sense, but it's still a story either way. So don't worry about whether or not that happens.

The book elegantly finds another solution to Hofstadter's question of ending a book suddenly/surprisingly when the number of remaining pages is clearly visible. First, there are at least three levels of story going on throughout the book, so you can end two of those without warning. Second, the book also uses Hofstadter's idea of carrying on in the same vein after an ending. Post-modern books with odd formatting make that easy, and it gets easier when you start throwing in appendices and an overly long index.

There is another novella at the end. If an epistolary novel from a women in an asylum sounds good, feel free. By that point, I was not interested in another side tale that did not contribute to the core, so I skimmed in increasingly large jumps (except for the explicit puzzle letter; there are less explicit puzzles hidden). It is available separately.

The dedication page is great. Read at least that far. The index is notionally entertaining but not worth actually reading.

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Haunted, the quasi-official soundtrack

Death Note Volume 3: Hard Run by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-03-29T00:02:00.001-04:00

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

This is the weakest volume so far, but the slow points cover necessary territory, and the high points are very good. Some of this volume would work better as pure text rather than manga.

L is observing Light to see if he is Kira. Kira is trying to figure out who L is. It is a game of deduction and reverse psychology until Kira takes the fight to the airwaves.

These reviews are going to become increasingly vague if I am to avoid spoilers. One is unavoidable if I am to mention the middle third of this volume, and discussing the next volume will demand spoiling the big reveal on this one. But hey, at least I am going so far as to mention that it is a big reveal, not having wanted to spoil that much about the last volume.

We start with L and Light jousting remotely. I know that he suspects, but does he suspect that I know that he suspects? Am I acting too much like I don't know that he suspects, thus making him more suspicious? And so on. These issues are interesting but not terribly exciting.

L's next move is small but epic. The best moments in this series are. Look forward to it.

Skipping the spoiler, let's say that it leaves L and Light talking to one another, with L unsure if Light is Kira, Light unsure if L is L, and Light with no idea what L's real name is. If you like the psychological games and seeing how they play out in conversation, great. Personally, I think their discussions would work better without images that spread everything out. There are only a few frames of images that add anything to the restaurant issue.

The images do allow for nice contrasts as you put L and Light next to each other, although it may be too thick at points, especially as it carries on. L looks even creepier in this volume, mixed with an increasingly childlike visage. He is serene and detached. Light can range from bishounen to normal to serial killer. If he had That Look in the first volume, he has a much stronger, violently insane version of it at times here. Hey, look, it's the villain!

Did I miss the box where L mentioned the Kitamuras to Light? It seemed like Light brought that up on his own, kind of a big giveaway. Maybe I'm flaking, maybe it was "off-panel," or maybe it was lost in translation.

I cannot comment on the quality of translation, not having the original (or the language skills), but I notice that the lettering is problematic. The printing is frequently off-center and/or unnecessarily small, leading to word bubbles that are mostly empty with the English crammed against one edge. It does not bespeak great care, and given that half the action in this volume is conversation or thinking, the words are critically important.

In part, that conversation feels slow because it covers territory we already know and that the characters already know, with the point being that not all the characters know what all the other characters know. The levels of "does he know that I know" are interesting the first couple of times, but they can become tiresome. The characters are aware of it, noting that mutually exclusive courses of action could both be suspicious once you start the second-guessing, so it eventually becomes pointless.

Another amusing lampshade hanging comes from the tennis club president. "Is this a sick joke? On top of entering [Tokyo University] with hundred percent scores, they're both great athletes?" No, this series has no hints of Marty Stu at all.

And that ending? Worth the price of admission. It is twice as nice if you flip back to the beginning of issue 20, compare faces, and project forward. Interesting times lie ahead.

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collected edition

It seems that I passed by the famous potato chip scene without even noticing it. I realized in retrospect that that must have been it. I found that anime clip and, yes, that's it. As I have mentioned previously, the anime takes greater pains to be awesome.

Three Men on the Bummel by Jerome K. Jerome

2010-03-24T21:22:00.000-04:00

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

This could be a "buy it" as bathroom reading. It has short, light, loosely connected anecdotes, with no loss incurred if you open it at random or read a few pages sporadically.

J., George, and Harris are back, this time on a bicycle tour of Germany. They struggle with geography, mechanics, the perversity of human nature, and German police.

As in the previous volume, this is a light Victorian comedy comprising a series of humorous instances and observations. It does not have the lulls of Three Men in a Boat while the best scenes are at least as good, so I hereby rule this a better book. Let it henceforth be the more famous of the two.

I don't get to declare things like that, do I? I also cannot levitate. Life is harsh.

While the beginning of Three Men in a Boat (hereafter "Boat") has the most consistently high quality chapters, I was less fond of Bummel's opening. That may be simple personal preference, or maybe that relationship humor was not stale 110 years ago, but I think we have all seen many versions of the standard marriage conflict and hypocrisy comedy. The opening also includes a bit that is a very minor variation on a scene from Boat. It does, however, include a rather good bit about overhauling a bicycle that reads like upgrading a modern computer.

The turning point where things start getting really good is when the narrator explains that he will be avoiding the problems I cited in Boat: scenery, useful information, and a tour guide narrative. There is to be no waxing poetic about the effects of nature on human goodness, nor on which king toured the area centuries ago, nor on the passage by various towns and hamlets. Which is not to say that it does not happen, just that it is tied to a funny bit rather than being a three-page "lull."

It instead focuses on the previous book's strengths: humorous anecdotes, comic scenes, tangential digressions, and wry observations on people, places, and history. Explaining that there will be no useful information leads to a lengthy digression on the narrator's past work in journalism, where truth was the minor party in a partnership with entertainment.

The three do not have a dog along with them this time, so they are forced to encounter other dogs for the animal comedy scenes. People love a bit with a dog. If anything, the dogs are more prominent here, because they take center stage for their scenes rather than being a running joke about a misbehaving mutt.

I find the physical humor in this one more effective. Perhaps it is greater experience with road trips than boat trips. Struggles with a sail do not hit close to home. Jerome K. Jerome's quality of description has also improved over time; compare the hose scene in Bummel with any Thames water issues in Boat, or Bummel's dog-precipitated restaurant brawl with any Montmorency scene in Boat.

Having said this much, I have difficulty summarizing the book or even usefully pointing out sights along the way. The vignettes have a unifying theme but not a narrative, so it is just a series of funny scenes. If one does not work for you, no problem, it will be over in a page or three and the next one might be more to your taste.

I may find more personal appeal in the mockery of Germans because of German ancestors and local towns with German history. Again, it is more familiar humor, although perhaps not for you. The last chapter is really something in retrospect. It treats upon the character of the German people: orderly, deferential to authority, guided in all things by The State. People will do anything the police tell them to, and they make excellent soldiers if you put uniforms on them and march them into some other country. They seem happy and virtuous without any desire to defy regulations or step outside the prescribed order; this should go well, the narrator explains, so long as they have good governors.

There are also some paragraphs about how German feminism and femininity are growing simultaneously, and how this seems the likely driver for change and improvement in German society. My grasp of history suggests that patriarchy was very soon to eclipse that, but it is a nice view from 1900 of how liberating women from the confines of the kitchen and letting them use their minds makes everyone happier. And it manages to toss that it while remaining a light comedy.

free online edition
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Death Note Volume 2: Confluence by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-03-22T00:02:00.015-04:00

The pacing slows down a bit, and I believe the Crowning Moments of Awesome I was promised are in a later volume, but the high points are still great highs. Worth reading just to see a few plans executed with great precision.

The search for Kira stumbles as Light strikes at the police investigating him. L sheds his seclusion to re-organize his remaining footsoldiers. L and Light both look for Kira clues and loose ends, one to unravel them and the other to cut them off.

Light is coming into his own as a villainous magnificent bastard. His manipulations are delicate and devastating. He starts making good on his promises to kill anyone in his way. While he occasionally works on the omelet, Light is spending more of his time enjoying breaking eggs. Because if you want to be a dark god of justice, reveling in your own brilliance and the fall of your enemies is half the fun.

I will not spoil the more brilliant and subtle plot points, nor even gesture towards them (nor to others that are less successful) to avoid tipping you off on where to look.

I was disappointed that Naomi's arc had so much build-up for so little payoff, although its significance could grow in future volumes. Its pacing at center stage is problematic for the manga, combining with the below to make much of this volume a lull. I hope that the anime used it for a tension-packed episode rather than an arc sub-plot. And as I said, future use of the points made here could redeem any problems.

L also gets to take center stage. His time is a mix of very slow action and very quick thought. He is Sherlock Holmes, with keen observation and intuitive leaps. He has an entire team of Watsons to explain things to. Putting him in a more central role lets him develop as a character and have a weight closer to Light's. His big reveal, however, happens parallel to Naomi's arc, so it shares the slow feeling; half this volume takes place on the same day, which means that conversations span multiple issues, and it must have been torture to read that on the original release schedule.

The art on L is creepy. This is a series where a death god hovers behind the protagonist, and he plays as comic relief. The heroic antagonist is the one who looks alien and haunted. The darkness and lines around his eyes are very effective. The way he sits could be insectoid or childish with just a tiny variation, suggesting both. While Light conveys meaning (and dispenses death) with his hands, L's toes are suggestive; if you have seen Firefly, you can imagine why Summer Glau comes to mind when he is being unsettlingly otherworldly. His body language is different in the light than it was as a shadowy specter. He contrasts brilliantly against Light's classic anime bishounen, and all these dark bits create a better contrast when he has a single frame of unalloyed hope and idealism.

Naomi's art is good, a solid female figure that looks good without being unnecessarily sexual or exploitative. The absence of fan service is notable. Light is starting to look more like a serial killer with a few art adjustments. His eyes have less of the megalomania, more of the hunter or the hunted.

He will surely get back around to the megalomania, as we see him setting up future plots and continuing to manipulate a god to his benefit. Notably, one of L's insights is spot on in more ways than he knows: as Kira, Light has a need to show off, to win and to be seen winning. You can see it working against him at points and how it might go badly at others, but you also see him using his childish mistakes to his later advantage.

Does the dramatic need to show him laid low for his pride outweigh his ability as a popular series protagonist to escape problems? Okay, that question was probably a lot more compelling in the original publication, which could have been cut off at any time, when you did not know how many volumes were left, and when you did not have sequels in which the publicized presence or lack of characters would be spoilers. On the other hand, the series has a built-in method of keeping things rolling even if it kills off the entire cast, so the author has at least the option of throwing everything in a new direction at short notice. Personally, I am sticking around for the convoluted schemes, and knowing who wins does not make stories about the strategy and tactics involved any less fascinating. Indeed, individual issues anticipate this by showing you the outcome and then going back to show how they pulled it off.

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collected edition

If I might ask a question of you, Light? A critical part of your plan (not a spoiler, this continues from the previous book) involves depending on a high school girl to keep secret that she went on a date with a cute boy who is also the #1 student in the entire country. You're gambling your life on that, genius? If he neither kills her nor suffers for that, the author is too kind to his protagonist.

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

2010-03-17T20:53:00.001-04:00

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

To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis is definitely a 3.

Three men take a holiday along the Thames. With their careful planning and manly spirit, what could possibly go wrong?

This is a good bit of writing that has the misfortune of being stuck in a story. The tone is excellent, and the little comic scenes are mostly effective. The characters tell charming vignettes that digress heartily. Then the frame story of going down the river re-inserts itself to bore you for a few pages.

If the genre of which this is a sometimes-farce had survived, the plot might have some value to a modern audience. The narrator gives useful (and even possibly true) bits of English history as he goes along the river, along with poetic ruminations upon virtue and the happy life. This, I am told, was a common sort of travel guide of the time, pointing out bits of historical interest along the river. Here, it is not particularly funny, educational, or even good.

The strength of the book is in digression and in the tone. It is a light Victorian comedy in which fools are too full and sure of themselves. The narrative voice makes excellent work of showing the characters for fools while letting them never see themselves that way, although they certainly see it in each other. And then there are some good bits with a troublesome dog. People love a bit with a dog.

You know roughly how this must go from every vacation or road trip film/book you have seen/read. The great preparations are obviously inadequate or actively harmful; they will cause problems in ways foreseeable and surprising. Their resolutions to do X, Y, and Z will be slept through at best, destructively pursued at worst. They will fight, and bet on how many times someone will fall out of the boat. And through all the squabbling and silliness, it will remain light and funny.

I wrote that paragraph before they even got in the boat. Editing before posting, I have not needed to change a single letter.

The digressions are the best part, in which someone will take a paragraph or page to tell a story that might wander away from the point and never look back. There is a four-page tale about a smelly cheese of the narrator's past acquaintance. The comic scenes are less entertaining, unless you are a fan of slapstick and physical humor (in text).

The tone is what sells it all. It develops in a way that is difficult to excerpt briefly. The best bits will mix high speech that goes on for just the right amount of "too long" before crashing on the pithy shoals of its own idiocy. The narrator engages in eloquence about the joys of sleeping on the banks of a river under the moonlight until reminded of the existence of rain; he grumbles about his companion's lack of poetry until everyone agrees that, yes, that would suck. The characters express base motives with the most high-minded language. They rationalize brilliantly. They speak of their love of hard work, how they love to supervise someone doing it and tell him how to do it properly.

It begins strongly, with little interference from the plot. As they spend more time on the river, the author feels it necessary to talk about the river and history and the sights and other stuff you're not here for. In a film version, you would pan the scenery for ten to fifteen seconds and then get on with it; here, we might have six pages about King John blocking us from the next entertaining bit.

I recommend reading the opening then, once they are in the boat, skimming over the weak history and philosophy in favor of the digressions and incidents. Supposedly, they all more or less happened to Jerome K. Jerome and his two companions. The anecdotes remain charming to the end, perhaps enough to rate a 3 despite the travel guide bits that drag down the average.

I am told that the sequel, Three Men on the Bummel, has better comic scenes but was not received as well, in part due to the lack of a narrative thread holding them together. That sounds like exactly what this book needed, and I will pursue it.

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Death Note Volume 1: Boredom by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

2010-03-15T00:02:00.036-04:00

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

I am not necessarily in the best position to judge this book, because I started watching the anime before realizing that animation adds little to a series where the major action is writing in a notebook.

A bored death god tosses his notebook into the human world. If you write someone's name in it, he dies. Light Yagami finds it and decides to rid the world of criminals. He puts himself in a cat-and-mouse game with L, who is leading the investigation into the mysterious mass murderer.

The series works because Light is a megalomaniacal genius. He is a compelling villain protagonist whose idea is not so horrible in its outlines. We just came off a book with the Joker, the walking embodiment of the repeated, continual, inconceivable vast failure of non-capital punishment. Is it so horrible to think that deterrence is possible and desirable? Of course, Light also mentions early on that he also plans to kill off the immoral and those who engage in harassment, and then quickly moves into willingness to kill anyone who stands in his way. The slope is, in fact, pretty slippery.

You can see the ending from here, yes? The other bit that foreshadows nicely is in the art, Light's eyes when he is in Kira mode. He has an enraptured look. He has his vision, and he shall make it so, Hell take anything in his way.

Balancing that, slightly, he is in other ways a good guy. He wants to make the world a better place, he is a serious student, and he helps his little sister with her math homework. He is just the kind of guy you would want around, assuming he is not planning to kill you as part of a scheme.

This book is mostly world-building. We have the characters, their relations, and the basic rules of the game. As it builds, we are starting to see the complex schemes for which the series is well known. There is a plot within a plot which is part of a greater scheme, and presumably the characters already have some form of late-game in mind that they are building towards. I am looking forward to some absurdly layered scheming, and I am told that the next volume hits several high notes in a row.

Because much of the fun is watching the schemes play out, I will not spoil anything. Death Note was originally published in small increments, so you get pay-off quickly in each segment.

The art is a mostly realistic manga style. I do not really have much to say about it -- it is "standard good." The plot is the main driver, so it is in Light's expressions and body language that the art carries weight, primarily in his hands and eyes. And Light is a pretty boy that presumably spawned a thousand fanfics that I don't want to think about just now.

The arrangement differences between the manga and anime are interesting. Some of the events shift around. The anime tries to make it a bit more visual with bodies hitting the ground and writing that strives to be totally awesome. There is nothing huge that I have noticed so far, although a few lines are noticeably missing from the anime. Perhaps the anime is trying to make Light more sympathetic, less obviously dangerously insane. The translations are also different, which is mostly notable with key phrases, such as around the end of the first issue/episode. I am curious about the original Japanese, but not yet motivated enough to pursue, translate on my own, and compare.

I do not think I have sold it strongly enough. If you like cerebral action where the consequences are life and death, sort of an Isaac Asimov story only supernatural and set in a Japanese high school, this is good stuff. If this sounds interesting, you should know that the entire series is made of it.

And kids, don't make your own Death Note at home. Beyond the fact that it will not work, you should find a more original way to be an annoyance. Don't make your middle school administrators look up how the rules apply to your carrying a hit list.

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collected edition

Gotham Central Book Two: Jokers and Madmen by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Michael Lark et. al.

2010-03-11T00:02:00.064-05:00

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

Probably higher average quality than the first book, but the outlier is a poor arc rather than a really great one, so it feels worse.

This is second of three hardcover volumes collecting the comic book series Gotham Central. (See also: Book One: In the Line of Duty) Gotham Central is a police procedural in Batman's town. The Major Crimes Unit (MCU) gets all the big cases, from murder to supervillains.

We open on a rather good breather issue from the perspective of Stacy, MCU's secretary. It is a break after the "Half a Life" arc, it re-establishes characters and relationships, and you just know horrible things are going to happen during or after the moment of light. It is small and personal in the way that this series is at its best.

The featured arc has the Joker being a sniper around Christmas. That feels like a spoiler to me, since the story leaves uses it as a reveal, but there is no way you could reach that point unspoiled. You have the title of the book, the cover art (Joker with a sniper rifle), text everywhere advertising this as the Joker book, etc.

I frequently recite that this is a series about people who are good and truly #%@&ed, and this is the point where it becomes most apparent. The Joker is as bad as Batman's rogues gallery gets. The movie version of him as up-close with knives is solid, but you get a whole other set of problems when you give him a sniper rifle. Death is instant; nothing to be done. You cannot see it coming. It just happens, and maybe it is about to happen to someone else. Then again, it is the Joker, so he may be doing something else entirely. How characters react to the news that it is the Joker is illustrative. Some panic. Some leap to immediate action. Most quietly realize that they are good and truly #%@&ed.

This is also a good arc for playing up the MCU-Batman tension. Det. Driver got to embody that in the first arcs, the difficulty of wanting to solve problems on their own versus needing the Bat to deal with the freaks. Now we have the villain who, more than anyone else, sees it as a game between himself and Batman, with the main cast as audience or pawns.

The third arc mixes personal lives with a villain-free arc. There is a superhero cameo, but it is entirely irrelevant to the story; they must have had a "1 per arc" quota to meet, or perhaps needed someone for the cover. Anyway, the arc is standard police procedural, and it spends too much time unsuccessfully trying to get us to care about yet another set of detectives. The series has a large cast, and I just cannot get emotionally attached to every detective on every shift, no matter how much I may love character development. I get the sense that Vincent has a history from previous comics, and good for (fictional) him that he gets a moment in the spotlight, but I have no reason to believe this guy will ever be important again, so his shadowy history is just a waste of pages to me. The arc is titled "Life is Full of Disappointments," and it does indeed disappoint. As I will get to later, it also features the worst art of the series.

The final arc of the book, "Unresolved," competes well with the Joker's "Soft Targets." It will come down to personal preference, but since I keep citing how much I love the personal, detailed work in the series, I will take this arc over the Joker's terrorist antics. This one obviously has links to the past (fully explained within), and it cashes out the Harvey Bullock comments from the first half of the series. It does everything you want from the series: it has detective work, it deals with their private lives without losing the story thread, it brings in supervillains, it has more mundane human evil and error, and it stands alone while filling a place in a larger mythology. It is just a good piece of work.

Let's talk art. Brian Hurtt does the breather issue in a cartoony but not particularly good style. Sarge is particularly poor. Nate as a blocky football-player type works very nicely. The Stacy artwork is the best, presumably as a result of focusing effort on that character. It reminds me of some early Sam Keith art. Brian Hurtt does, however, do a much better Batman than Michael Lark.

Mr. Lark remains excellent. It is unfortunate that he shares the second arc with another artist, because his strong attention to detail on faces makes it rather jarring when someone else does the faces slightly differently. It is like having two actors play the same part in a single episode. Or maybe Lark did them all and I'm just hallucinating small differences; the pencils switch each arc. All the last book's notes apply, particularly the great faces. I cannot say that I like the color work on the "Soft Targets" arc, with the tendency to do entire pages in a single color scheme; it suggests lighting but often feels washed out, an experiment that did not quite work. If there were slightly more consistency in how rooms were lit, and there is quite a bit, it would be a great effect. As it is, I am not clear if having the political offices look like criminal sites has the obvious potential meaning or is just random.

Also, I liked Stacy better with short hair than with pig-tails. Personal preference. Stacy does not consult me on these things.

Greg Scott's art in "Life Is Full of Disappointments" is unfortunate. It has a blotchy look, demanding that the colorist pick up most of the weight. Next to Lark's finely detailed work, it looks messy, amateurish. It has cartoonish open space without the clear definition that makes the DC Animated Universe style look, and it is not meshing with the noir. The face-work is where the contrast in styles is most apparent; many scenes will have faces that are just a line or two, an indistinct blob. Vincent's face, however, is done well. One bit I particularly like is the gratuitous Huntress cameo. Her mask really looks like a mask that a human being is wearing. Superhero costumes normally look painted on, as if the outfit were a part of the hero. She looks human and slightly ridiculous. It keeps everything grounded.

The last arc is Michael Lark again, this time with Duane Swierczynski. Mr. Swierczynski's art meshes very well with Mr. Lark's. This arc has a better version of the "Soft Targets" use of single tones to light a scene. Given the oranges, I presume that quite a bit of the story happens around dusk, which is an apt metaphorical choice in the art.

Book One: In the Line of Duty

Amazon link

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

2010-03-08T00:02:00.000-05:00

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

Strictly, worth reading multiple times (in part) because you might want to go back and re-read some scenes knowing the final reveal. You can finish that before the book is due, so I am keeping it a 3. How often can you re-read a mystery?

Last night, the widow down the lane committed suicide. Just now, Roger Ackroyd received a letter from her saying who was blackmailing her. Tonight, Roger Ackryod dies. Tomorrow, Hercule Poirot will be on the case.

If you have read anything from Agatha Christie, you should have read something with Poirot in it, so you know roughly how this goes. If you have not, welcome to the world of mysteries, and you might also want to check out that Doyle fellow.

I am loathe to mention much for fear of spoiling anything by accident or implication. It is not an entirely fair mystery, in that the reader does not learn everything he needs to know until immediately before the reveal, and you could argue about at which point in the "Poirot explains everything" chapters you are no longer guessing the answer before the book tells you.

There are many things to explain. One principle of the book is that everyone is hiding something, and everyone really is, to the point of farcically stacked events. How many secret goings-on can happen in one house in one hour? All of them.

You may see that as a brilliant bit of storytelling or as far-fetched. If you have read any Agatha Christie, you know that she is good at what she does, and this is one of her good novels. If you have not, you might want to start with something slightly less innovative but still with Poirot. The ABC Murders perhaps?

Innovative? Yes, to the point where I cannot tell you what I cannot tell you without a potential spoiler. And do not look the book up, because apparently this is one of those endings that people feel free to spoil because the book is old/well-known enough. Just go pick up a copy if you enjoy convoluted murder mysteries.

Amazon link

Gotham Central Book One: In the Line of Duty by Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Michael Lark

2010-03-04T20:07:00.000-05:00

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

I know I have not been following comics closely this past decade, but how did I not hear about this until last month? I hang out with nerds. It is probably the lack of spectacle, but this is at its best when it is not dealing with superheroic comic book fare.

This is first of three hardcover volumes collecting the comic book series Gotham Central. (There is also five-colume paperback version that has a slightly different collection.) Gotham Central is a police procedural in Batman's town. The Major Crimes Unit (MCU) deals with supervillains in addition to murder, rape, and arson.

In an immediately obvious sense, this is a series about people who are good and truly screwed. Batman has one of the best rogues galleries in comics, and some of them regularly give him a run for his money. These are the poor souls who get to deal with them on the day shift, who do all the investigation that Batman taps into when he checks his contacts, who are the redshirts when the villain of the month needs to appear and show what a monster he is. And the Joker has yet to appear.

These are heroes. Gotham has the second most corrupt police force in its setting, and MCU is the home of honest cops, hand-picked by the Commissioner, who deal with the big problems. They have the real world heroics of protecting and serving amidst violent criminals. In the real world, you never know which guy on a traffic stop is going to pull a gun on you; in comic books, the guy might pull a freeze ray, turn into a monster, or decide to kill everyone you know for the lulz. Everyone in the MCU demonstrates a strength of character that superheroes frequently fail to. It is a strength of the writing that you can see them all as good people without making them copies, cliches, or boring white hats. Superheroes need flaws to overcome to keep the story interesting and dynamic; doing your best and doing a good job as a normal human in this setting is sufficiently remarkable.

The stories borrow from Batman's rogues gallery, but it does its best without them. Entire issues pass without them, and you don't miss them, although an extended focus on a personal story made me wonder where the police procedural went for that issue. The villains are there, in the background or waiting in the wings, so you have your comic book spectacle ready. Along the way, the stories can be personal in the way that tights and energy blasts often fail to be, and police work itself is an interesting story. The characters have problems in the (largely corrupt) department, conflicts with each other, a list of cases that need solving, a masked vigilante who shows them up without even trying, and a constant threat of psychopaths that make them need him.

There is honor, there is struggle, and there is loss. I am led to expect much more loss in the future as Things Get Worse. It's Gotham. The big guns have yet to arrive, and there needs to be an arc about how normal people can be just as bad as the worst comic book villain.

There are three arcs in this volume. The first, "In the Line of Duty," has an excellent introduction. The opening scene balances the halves of the story concept (police procedural meets Batman) while setting the tone for the series. While there are many continuity tie-ins, I don't know how many I'm missing, and you can follow everything completely well knowing nothing about Batman. The arc as a whole does not use the Batman elements terribly well; they seem almost grafted on, although Batman himself is used well (exceedingly sparingly). It opens strongly and works well with characters. The rest of the arc does not live up to the promise of the opening pages, but it is a fair start for the series.

The second, "Motive," is the weakest part of the volume. It follows "In the Line of Duty" nicely, and it is a good detective story, but it is nothing particularly special. On its own, it would be fine, but it is overshadowed by its companions.

"Half a Life" is one of the best comic book stories I have read. As I said, it wanders away from the police procedural to focus on a character arc, and it does it very well. The story is about Renee Montoya, framed for murder while her personal life is under attack. Things Get Worse. While playing well with murder and large-ticket villainy, it again excels by focusing on character and making it all very personal. You feel for them, and you can see them feeling for each other. It ends exceedingly strongly, in the same vein, making a powerful moment from two people talking in a car where most comic books would end on a dramatic pose and implicit swelling music in the background.

Volume two of the paperback edition is "Half a Life." I am going to go buy that, since it is clearly a 4. The first half here is worth reading but not something you are required to own.

I have been told that my enthusiasm for this story arc is too great. Oh well. I like Renee Montoya as a character, and she interacts very well with the MCU characters and in her personal life. Her partner gets to shine in her absence, and the new kid at the MCU adds light in a dark story. It drops the superhero genre a bit to cross-over with a different story type; once you have read it, you must admit, you have not seen a (spoiler avoided) story done quite that way.

Don't read the back cover of the book. Whoever wrote the inside jacket copy did it right, but the back cover spoils what I just avoided. Maybe they thought the keyword would help sell more copies.

The drawing style is not one that I usually favor, but Michael Lark has sold me. It is excellent throughout. I like clear lines of the DC Animated Universe, even at the risk of leaking into the heavily manga-influenced style popular these days. Michael Lark instead does great things with lots of short, clipped lines. I worry about the style because I am used to seeing faces just sketched in, without a lot of attention to features. Michael Lark complements the story's attention to detail brilliantly, carrying characterization weight with precise faces and expressions. You are used to actors doing that in police procedural television shows with their body language and reactions; Michael Lark is carrying that entire burden. His characters are subtle and expressive.

As an example of subtlety, note the frame where Renee Montoya realizes what is going on in "Half a Life." You probably did not notice it on the first read-through. Flip back after she announces it out of nowhere. The dialogue on an earlier page gives her the inspiration, and you can see it on her face when she gets it.

The lighting is dark. You should expect that in a Batman-related series. There are many shadows with careful framing. It is on the darker side of realistic, without garish costumes. I expect garish costumes in future volumes, when more superheroes/villains arrive, and they should stand out nicely. Juxtapose the Joker in a purple suit with an otherwise completely realistic setting; he's a loon.

The Batman art itself is rather weak. Mr. Lark was not recruited for his ability to draw the hero iconically, although perhaps that improves over time. It works well when Batman is a shadowy figure, a boot or a cape silhouetted. It works less well when Batman's shadows follow him to center stage, giving a bit of dark blobishness. Some of that might be the color work. The Mr. Freeze art, however, is excellent, combining Mr. Lark's small lines with open spaces for color. It brings in the bold, cartoonish look while keeping him concrete.

I am very much looking forward to the rest of the series, and I am sorry that it ended in less than 1000 pages.

Amazon link

The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories by Horacio Quiroga

2010-02-20T12:08:00.000-05:00

selected and translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

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

Why are so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissue? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

This is a collection of short stories from Horacio Quiroga. I am told that Mr. Quiroga was a foundational figure for short stories in Latin American literature. I suspect he has some better stories out there.

The Vonnegut quote leads because very few of the stories manage to end without death. The rest might end in madness or foolishness, often leading to death. "The Dead Man" dispenses with the foreplay and drops the protagonist on a machete in the first page, following his thoughts as he bleeds out. This sets up a certain expectation which can be played with, because the usual happy ending becomes rather surprising. Once you have set up the capacity for the story to go in either direction, either direction can be a surprise, and this is a good sort of tension to have. (I mis-remembered the Vonnegut quote as attributing the murder rate to short stories, because killing off the character is a dramatic ending; maybe that is somewhere else in Breakfast of Champions.)

Quiroga is not a cheerful author. There is bonus cruelty to go with the foolishness, madness, and death. The longest story, "Anaconda," has the interesting set-up of making poisonous vipers the point-of-view characters, so we have villainous protagonists with the goal of wiping out some humans. Whichever way you consider a "happy ending," one side is going to suffer and die. And this collection does not even have the story I was seeking from the High Octane Nightmare Fuel page.

The collection starts weakly. Maybe "The Feather Pillow" would have affected me more if I used a feather pillow, but the allegory in the story is obvious and the title reveals too much. "Sunstroke" is just pretty weak.

Then you get to the longer, inscrutable "The Pursued," and you see that the author has a special touch. It is not fully developed here, and I don't think the story quite works with its mix of an unreliable narrator talking about someone else's madness in a way that never really arrives, but it is evocative. "The Decapitated Chicken" shows the author coming into his full capacity, and the rest of the collection bears it out, with some stories being better than others.

There are a dozen stories in the collection, and most of them really are short, 10 to 20 pages of easy reading. Quiroga seems to be at his best when killing someone quickly but lingeringly and painfully, perhaps an odd combination but developed well in the length of a short story.

One that especially lingers is "Juan Darién," which spends a lot of time on the torture of a boy when the villagers are somehow convinced that he is a tiger in human form. Of course, given the collection, the irrationality of it does not necessarily make it wrong, and even if they are right, that will not remove the juxtaposition of "ferocious beast" with "innocent victim suffering needlessly."

So it is that kind of collection. These will not brighten your day, unless you find suffering cathartic, but they are well-told.

The English (language) author most like Quiroga is Poe. You have probably guessed why. I was also reminded of Stephen King, not so much because of the content but because of the recurring setting. Almost everything King writes is in a sleepy New England town, and Quiroga's stories keep returning to the banks of the Paraná. Some of them are perhaps less compelling to our audience because we do not have the same worries about jungles, vipers, and tigers. Anaconda is notable for its distinction between vipers (poisonous snakes) and snakes (hunters that crush), where I have never heard an English author care much about the distinction.

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The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

2010-02-06T18:26:00.000-05:00

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

The Forever War really is as good as you have heard, a classic in both war stories and science fiction. I still rate it a 3 on our scale because I cannot see its impact working nearly as well a second time, once you know the whole story. Or maybe it should get a 4 for that reason, that it will have a different impact on later read-throughs; I retain the right to up-rate it later. This is the downside of the ratings scale here.

The war with the Taurans began in 1997, a galaxy-spanning war where the battles can be decades apart as ships travel at relativistic speeds. William Mandella is a conscript in the first ground engagement, starting us off on a war that will last more than a millennium.

If anyone is unfamiliar with what is meant by the idea that some books are in dialogue with each other, read this, Starship Troopers, and Old Man's War. You have some similar base stories that go in very different directions.

In this case, I was born too late to catch some bits as I went along. I was born after the Vietnam War. Once someone mentions it, however, everything falls into place. If anything, putting the story on this scale mutes the emotional trauma because it is just too big to assimilate, and because the scale is small relative to what one might expect over centuries.

A recurring theme, played surprisingly softly, is how the world changes while you are away. Hippies were not around when the Vietnam War started. When you fly away for a century, everything changes, and you arrive after entire social movements have passed. You leave for the war, and your little brother is a man by the time you get back, only here you are just a few years older due to traveling at relativistic speeds. The effort of getting your brain around the change across decades mutes the loss of the little things, at least at this remove. "I missed my brother's high school graduation, not to mention all of his high school years" is one thing; "my brother is now older than me, and he lives on the moon" is another.

I say this is played softly because the characters do not dwell on it much. The society you leave to defend will not exist by the time you get back. This is not just a change in national politics and the president; your birth country is unlikely to exist when you get back more than 100 years later. They mention surprisingly rarely that everyone they know will be dead. As above, you assimilate this (or not) and move on.

It is not as though they have a choice in the matter. They are conscripts. They are at war. Even if there were no enemy soldiers, the environment is enough to kill you. Dwelling on the unfortunate circumstances when you get back will not help with all the unfortunate circumstances you must survive first.

That leads to another recurring bit: live it up while you can. With survival rates being low, there is no point to worrying about the future. You can throw away all your money every shore leave, because it will probably be your last. You probably have no long-term future (don't dwell on that), so making plans for it is pointless, and there are no long-term consequences for anything.

The more I write here, the more surprised I am that veterans come back in as good of mental shape as they do.

If this is your first time seeing real events through a sci fi/fantasy prism, note that the distance helps you reflect on things without that knee-jerk reaction to cheer/condemn Team Red/Blue. This works better at an even further remove, when you cannot see through the allegory immediately.

If you have not picked it up already, this is not going to be an uplifting story. War sucks. The characters are subject to forces (natural, enemy, and allied) that kill almost entirely at random; very few times can you even approach the thought, "s/he deserved that." It is a mass of pointless, random bloodshed. Which seems a fair representation of what a soldier faces.

Since we are seeing the war from the level of the individual soldier, it is living with those random details, and the book does thrive on details. You get to know many of the casualties. When you don't, you still get to count them off one-by-one or see them fall in little packs. It is a tremendous success to be able to simultaneous make it numbing while still making you feel each pinprick.

It is somewhat less successful as a sci fi story because of failures in scaling across hundreds of years. Some large changes come exceedingly quickly, while other bits remain remarkably unchanged a millennium later. Technology advances, and there is an early discussion of being out-teched in the time it takes to travel from your base to the fight, but not as much as you might expect given existing growth rates. This is kept in the background, as it is inessential to the story and the context would become incomprehensible, but it is playing the premise of a millennium-plus war short to have it be even that comprehensible at the end. Even without a Singularity, one expects a bit more over time.

And then there are the common amusements with the science fiction of the era. Everyone smokes. Advances in computers were vastly under-estimated and in the wrong directions. We accept "intergalactic travel in the 1990s" as a basic premise, rather than wondering where our flying cars are. So basically this paragraph is just being a sneering jerk, laughing at the past's vision of the future, and we'll all get together and we are all scheduled to do this repeatedly as the dates of various films and stories arrive. Good times. Hey, look at the size of that computer in the Asimov story, tee hee.

In closing: great book, great story, great details. Read it. I have even left the interesting and/or traumatic details unspoiled for your reading pleasure. Go to, then.

Amazon link

The Nymphos of Rocky Flats by Mario Acevedo

2010-02-04T23:31:00.000-05:00

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

I promised that I would try another Mario Acevedo book, since HarperCollins was kind enough to offer them at a conference. This was milder than Jailbait Zombie, but not compelling enough to make me want to read the others in the series.

"Felix Gomez went to Iraq a soldier. He came back a vampire." Now he's a private detective, visiting Denver to investigate a nymphomania outbreak at a Department of Energy nuclear facility. Women are trying to bed him and men are trying to kill him. Government work is not as quiet as it is made out to be.

It is workmanlike. It is fine. If you like this kind of thing, it is a fair example. It will never be on anyone's must-read list, but it delivers on its premise with average quality. I have yet to read anything from James Patterson, but I am led to believe that this is comparable (probably slightly below, since Mr. Patterson is leading his bracket).

"This kind of thing" here means salacious hard-boiled vampire detective fiction. (I feel like I should have some commas in there, but it is more a concatenation of genres than a list of adjectives.) Middlingly salacious, very hard-boiled, constantly vampire, not terribly detective; the "hard-boiled" overwhelms the "detective."

Despite the title, this is less salacious than Jailbait Zombie. Women shuck clothes fairly frequently, but the violent scenes are more likely to be completed than the sex scenes. Men shuck clothing at least as frequently, particularly but not only Felix. There is a surprisingly high homoerotic quotient, with at least three men and five women offering Felix sex. Well, two of the men leap directly to kissing rather than making a verbal offer, and one of the women does not so much "offer" as "demand at gunpoint."

This book was nicely spoiled by Jailbait Zombie, so reading them in order could be helpful. On the other hand, the plot twists are (respectively) telegraphed, way out there, and mostly unexplained, you can get through almost the entire book before it becomes relevant. The plot is sufficiently coherent, at least as much as any action film, with the same technique of keeping things moving rather than pausing to think about it all. The climaxes are anti-climactic, going with late-game info dumps that take up more time than the associated fight scenes.

The book is not especially smart. (I hit similar points on Jailbait Zombie.) "Vampire" is used as an adjective to hand-wave any exposition of "vampire hypnosis," "vampire senses," "vampire enzymes," "vampire levitation powers," etc. (It is nice to see someone not trying to redefine what a vampire is (beyond letting makeup block sunlight), although there are enough vampire myths that giving someone "standard" vampire powers still makes some abilities seem random.) Plot points are inexplicable or over-explained. There is gratuitous Latin, with the same terms re-defined multiple times in case you forgot. The book seems to assume that the reader is not especially smart, repeatedly summarizing events in case you missed them, and since more or less the same thing happens three times in a row early in the book, you really had to miss them.

This repetition worries me about the continuing series. It is common for the later books in the series to summarize earlier events, for late arrivals or anyone who has forgotten in the years between publication. Jailbait Zombie mentions events from this book several times, not just in case you missed the book, but in case you missed the earlier repetition. This book refreshes your memory several times. I fear the series' becoming a recursive summarization by the time it gets to 8 or 10 volumes, unless it adds a lot of pages. And books that don't think you are smart do not want to threaten you with lots of pages.

That page count is higher than the word count might demand. Where long books try to look slimmer by cramming the pages with small fonts and narrow margins, Nymphos takes the children's book approach with a generous font with plenty of negative space. One way to make it a page-turner: put less on each page so you turn them more quickly.

I met Mario Acevedo. He explained to someone, "This is not great literature." It is meant to be a rollicking romp. If you like this kind of thing, and are not some kind of intellectual snob, you could very well enjoy it. But you probably have a long list of "must reads" before you get to it.

Amazon link

Dungeon Delve by David Noonan, Bill Slavicsek, et al

2010-02-02T21:01:00.000-05:00

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition supplement

Rating - 3: useful for many campaigns

Interesting, challenging encounters designed for plug-and-play in your Dungeons and Dragons campaign. These are designed around the "kick in the door" cinematic style of play that 4th Edition seems to assume, with some small amount of set-up and ideas for expansion. Every level gets a linked set of three fights.

The book has three recommendations for using it. One is the plug-and-play approach I mentioned: pre-made encounters for your campaign, a tool for the experienced dungeonmaster. Second is as DM training, providing modular bits for practice. I am not sanguine about this, because it would be training the DM in the combat-focused approach that reduces the game most of the way back to tabletop wargaming (nothing against wargaming, just that role-playing games have grown in a different direction). Third, as a competitive event where the DM is trying to kill characters with defined obstacles. Could be fun, probably not conducive to a campaign.

Each encounter assumes miniatures. Each recycles some map pieces from D&D modules. Depending on your view, that is a nice bonus or a craven way of trying to extract funds, but the dungeon tiles are reproduced in sufficient detail not to demand additional expenditure. The tiles are arranged so you can plausibly keep the encounters separate, rather than wondering why the orcs in the next room are just listening to you slaughter their friends. You could argue on some, but let's say that stone has great sound-absorbing properties, and it will not matter to you if you are playing kick-in-the-door. The fight is the point, so just set up at the start of it.

The format is standardized, good, and stays out of the way. Each delve is three encounters. Each encounter is two pages. This repeats what I said about the core books: great effort was taken to keep everything visible when you have the book open, rather than flipping between pages. Open the book, there is one fight-unit.

I always support Wayne Reynolds cover art. The female warrior's equipment is perhaps questionable, with the usual fantasy habit of showing off skin in places where heavy armor should not. As usual, the open-bodice breastpiece is defensively sub-optimal. She must be amazingly strong to wield a sword as broad as her thigh in one hand. And about those thighs: are those some kind of metal-banded garter belts holding up the stockings? I love his drawing style, but I question the fantasy depictions of ladies' equipment. The tiefling wizard is showing off his nipples, but his robe was never providing much protection anyway.

The fights are interesting, combining a theme with a bit of variety. Some of the variety is questionable, but you can plead cinematic style. Some of them look inappropriately difficult. I trust the designers on the encounter level math, but they are very fond of ending with party level+3 or +4 fights, and you can construct some very difficult encounters by combining the right creatures that synergize. Flipping through, we have a level 1 party facing 2 level 4 enemies, a level 1 elite, and 8 level 2 minions. That EL3 fight is bad enough to include a sidebar on running away. The level 30 delve ends with a level 30 solo supported by 2 level 27 elites and 3 level 24s, in a room with hazards that only affect the PCs, and the big guy can refill his hit points twice with another feature of the encounter. How about throwing a level 8 elite against a level 3 party, along with his 3 friends (levels 4, 4, and 5)? I was surprised when I found a "solo" enemy that was actually alone, as opposed to one fight that has two of them with support.

Enemies get complete stat blocks, so you will not need to flip through other books. You can run this just fine without owning a Monster Manual. The stat blocks can be a bit hefty, so hopefully the DM is sufficiently experienced by the time s/he gets to bosses that have half a page of abilities. Streamlining that was one of the points of 4th Edition.

The editing could use some work. Some are little things, like spelling or forgetting that they re-named a monster and having its stat block refer to its generic base type. Others look like victims of the editing process that keeps everything on two pages. There is a throne with three gems, each of them with a special function; only two gems are described. One fight refers to a protective aura from the previous room, but the previous room never mentioned it. One room has a trap that is confused about whether it works north-to-south or east-to-west. The environmental hazards of the rooms are most often the culprits; they presumably received less attention than the monsters. It starts to feel like each delve has a landmine for the unwary DM.

On the whole, it has some nice set pieces that I could use or adapt when running a game. It is more flexible than a pre-made adventure, which requires more work if you want context and not just combat, but some question the quality of the context provided in the pre-written modules. Because of editing issues and the need to be aware of a half-dozen things in each fight, such as environmental hazards or bosses with many abilities, these will still require some preparation even if one is just running them as context-free battles. After all, if you are playing these as "kill the character" competitions, you want to win.

Amazon link

His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem

2010-01-25T22:17:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-19T17:50:00.000-05:00

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

2010-01-12T23:14:00.001-05:00

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."

Amazon link

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

2009-12-28T22:35:00.000-05:00

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

Poor Anne Bronte, condemned to the dustbin of history for the affront of saying that abusive alcoholics are poor romantic prospects rather than Byronic bad boys who just need the love of a good woman. She died young, and her sister suppressed her work. Were she alive today, teens would write web pages devoted to hating her for the review of New Moon that you know she would write.

The Nanny Diaries, 1847. Agnes Gray takes a job as a governess, first with spoiled children, later with spoiled teenagers. Those are the kinds of families that can afford to hire governesses for their children. Can she find love or happiness amidst the vapid, young gentry-to-be?

Anne Bronte wrote two books. I should have gone with the other one, because this one is not very good.

To some degree, that reflects my preferences. Much of the story is about the suffering of the innocent protagonist, subject to the whims of her employers and their children. If you enjoy books about bearing pointless cruelty, you will still find better versions elsewhere. The story is standard, the writing is unexceptional, and the characters were reportedly more sympathetic and identifiable at the time.

Teachers might recognize Anges's first job, in which she is expected to produce results from obstinate children while denied both carrots and sticks. She has nothing but persuasion, which she is reprimanded for using, and any success is undermined by the family that wonders why things are not getting better.

I returned, however, with unabashed vigour to my work -- a more arduous task than anyone can imagine, who has not felt something like the misery of being charged with the care and direction of a set of mischievous, turbulent rebels, whom his utmost exertions cannot bind to their duty, while, at the same time, he is responsible for their conduct to a higher power, who exacts from him what cannot be achieved without the aid of the superior's more potent authority, which, either from indolence, or the fear of becoming unpopular with the said rebellious gang, the latter refuses to give. I can conceive of few situations more harassing than that wherein, however you may long for success, however you may labour to fulfill your duty, your efforts are baffled and set at naught by those beneath you, and unjustly censured and misjudged by those above.

The second arc is a Cinderella story, minus the fairy godmother and plus more explicit Christian moralizing than we are used to in romance stories. Anne Bronte was the plain, unassuming daughter of a country curate, so Agnes Gray is the plain, unassuming daughter of a country parson. Agnes falls for a country curate, and her sister marries a country vicar. One suspects a limited frame of reference or scope of imagination, but "write what you know." At any rate, the romantic thoughts are tied to love of kindness, simplicity, and theological vigor. If you have ever been attracted to someone because of his/her strong views on the doctrinal differences between Anglicans and Methodists, this will be right up your alley.

To emphasize that we have a Cinderella story, her two pupils even match the standard wicked step-sisters, one haughty and vain while the other more earthy and dull, conspiring to keep her oppressed at home while they make a play for the prince. The "prince" being an ugly but morally upstanding country curate, the stakes are somewhat lower here, and the story hews closely to the fact that competition is always the most vicious when there is little to go around.

Anne Bronte is noted for the realism of her writing, rather than the romanticism of her sisters, and it shows clearly here. Agnes's life is more or less a continuous stream of minor hardships, the willful and unthinking cruelties of the upper classes upon their servants. They are petty things but great in number and deeply felt. Perhaps we all suppose our lives are epic tales, for Agnes certainly seems to think she feels more deeply than the rest of the species. Again writing semi-autobiographically, Anne Bronte was a governess and used her experiences with pupils, although I cannot comment on any romantic hopes or experiences she may have had on the job.

Agnes is more pathetic than sympathetic. She is passive, devoid of agency and barely daring to speak. She waits for the story to happen to her. She laments her misfortunes while explicitly trying to keep a stiff upper lip. She writes poor poetry. She alludes to having greater depths that she never demonstrates, including one overwrought paragraph where she explains that she could expound her wisdom in matters of the heart except she would not want to risk the boredom and ridicule of an audience that was not up to understanding her. Hmm, this might play well to an audience of love-struck teenage lasses who no one understands.

I could support reading the chapters of her first position, just to see the depiction of the teacher disarmed and then punished for trying to do her job. Delinquents below, enablers above. Agnes says she is trying to inform other governesses, and the depiction is still useful to parents, teachers, etc. Other than that, meh.

On a note of "the past is another country," Agnes starts looking for work because her family is reduced to such poverty that they have only one servant. Yeah. Perhaps the lot of the lower-class servants was less anguished because they did not expect decent treatment, while Agnes suffers from the mismatch.

Amazon link
Free text at Project Gutenberg

Kith by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh

2009-12-21T04:26:00.000-05:00

The Good Neighbors, book 2

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

Low investment, low pay-off, this book marginally clears the bar for "worth it" without making me enthusiastic about the next one the way the first one did.

Rue returns, half-human and half-faerie, with her mother's faerie kin planning something against the human world. Her friends have gone weird and the world threatens to go crazy. She enters the faerie world in search of answers and her mother.

The graphic novel art remains good, although everyone looks a bit feline. If you like pointed ears and claws, this has a lot of them. A couple of the faces could use more differentiation. The story is not much for big spectacles, just character scenes with lots and lots of shadow. Faerie parties are a bit of a spectacle, but that is just a bit more decoration on the humans who already look half-way there.

Characterization is minimal. Bring whatever character affinities you liked from the first book, because each minor character gets just a couple pages in the spotlight. Most of them are broken or breaking in their own personal ways. Everyone's life is problematic, it seems, but I am not given much reason to care about their suffering.

The plot seems mostly to be Rue having culture shock with respect to the faerie world. The lines from before nudge forward, but after mixing in a few new threads, there is not much room to progress. There is a central theme, Aubrey's plot against the city, but that stays surprisingly in the background considering it is the plot driver. The elements of it are in the foreground, but it is as if the book needs to remind us every now and again that there is a unifying theme to these separate scenes.

If I may make a recommendation to both sides of the fight, without spoiling things? When you demonstrably have the means to reverse necessary parts of the enemy's plans, even if you later find that it causes some negative side effects, it could be worth it to do so. And if you are that enemy? It is okay to go a little overboard in case of reversal, or at least bring more sacrificial knives to the big climax when the hero can undo your sacrifices.

It is a dark book about faeries, mixing in more woods and a bit less of the city this time. I missed Birch, a minor character I liked who had four pages this time. Most of the rest of the minor cast left me cold. Obvious potential love interest began working on that potential. It ends surprisingly. Kind of "meh," although I give credit for an ending that highlights possible character depths only suggested before.

Amazon link

Skeleton Crew by Stephen King

2009-12-15T19:55:00.002-05:00

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

I have decided that going through an entire book of them is the wrong way to enjoy short stories. Just in terms of the reading process, there are too many stopping points, hard breaks where giving a story the proper matting makes the book take a very long time. More importantly, it is like taking one scoop of everything from a buffet and then eating spoonfuls blindfolded: lots of different flavors at random, with only a guess when the change is coming. King's metaphor for a short story is a kiss in the dark from a stranger; you can decide for yourself whether you would want to kiss a series of unknown strangers, once each, unseen before or after.

This is a collection of short stories from Stephen King, published between 1968 and 1983. Stephen King, you may know, mostly writes horror stories.

I might have gone with a 2.5, since I can recommend only about 60% of the book, and as they are short stories, the various parts are severable. I will rule, however, that personal taste may play a part in which ones you enjoy, so find your own 60%. I would advise that, if a story does not seem appealing at the beginning, it will probably not be appealing by the end. They are internally consistent, rather than having great swings in quality. I will talk about the ones I would recommend.

The first recommendation must be "The Raft." This is a great story, doing in 30 pages what The Ruins did in 600. It is the same core story, with even some of the same details, only on a raft instead of in ruins. It has 95+% of the good from The Ruins and none of the bad. On our value per unit time scale, this is Stargirl quality or better. Successful short stories are like that.

"The Raft" and "The Mist" share with The Ruins a good approach to character introduction. Set up several characters and relationships before the problems happen. Build in some conflicts, then throw something overwhelming at them to see who overcomes and what shatters. (These being that kind of story, there is more shattering.) It is important to want our characters to succeed or suffer, and it certainly does not work when we are supposed to root for the survival of unlikeable characters (I'm looking at you, "Ruins" movie).

"The Raft," "The Mist," and "Word Processor of the Gods" also succeed where others fail by not trying to explain it. You have an unimaginable horror, just run with it. "The Mist" takes a few guesses at what might have happened out there, but ultimately never tries to resolve it and bring logic to the insanity. If you try to establish internal logic, you are responsible for making it good and thinking through the implications. Doing that well boosts the quality significantly, but doing it badly can drop it further. Mr. King declines to explain, and that works.

"The Jaunt" is mostly explaining, and it works. Seriously, almost the entire story is exposition, building up to a big finish. The strength of the underlying concept and the quote at the end were what made me read the book. High Octane Nightmare Fuel indeed.

Another way in which Mr. King succeeds is in having nothing to explain. Some people are insane or evil. Let them loose and see what happens. He might play with mysterious questions, as in "Nona," but "Cain Rose Up" is just a straightforward story with one dangerous person. "Cain Rose Up" competes strongly with "The Raft" in value per page, a 7-page story with good foreshadowing that delivers strongly at its climax. "The Raft" still wins, because its 30 pages allow for a more satisfying whole, but this is a great brief kiss.

Mr. King does not always succeed in mixing the banal and the surreal. That will include several stories not worth mentioning, such as the two milkman stories that fail where "Cain Rose Up" succeeded. "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" does add the surreal successfully, a non-horror story that dips slowly dips into the fantastic. It is not the best story in the collection, but it builds up slowly and delivers the appropriate conclusion. Twice as long, "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" also does a great job of mixing banality, insanity (alcoholism in this case), and an uncertain dose of magic. Mr. King has a way with somewhat unreliable narrators.

Continuing the non-horror trend (the random spoonfuls on the buffet), "Word Processor of the Gods" is on the edge of horror. Things can go very badly when you play with the monkey's paw. Tipping entirely out of horror and magic, "The Wedding Gig" is the last story I will recommend. I kept expecting the magic and horror, but no, this is an entirely straightforward story involving unfortunate events. It is low key but effective, not as high-reaching as the other stories but successful within its reach.

I notice that I keep using the words "success" and "delivers" in this review. It is the clearest way I have of describing Stephen King's writing style when it works. I have a long list of 2's that are not worth reading because the author tried something he could not pull off. Stephen King writes effectively, delivering on his premises and seeing them through with sufficient thoughtfulness and well-structured storytelling. Some of these stories are very good. Several of the stories that I recommend above, I would not recommend picking up the book just for them, but if you are there, they do everything the author asks them to. That is our other judging criterion: not asking the book to be something else, but seeing whether it succeeds on its own terms. Stephen King is the archetypal novelist of his genre in our time, and he owns his space well.

Amazon link

John Dies at the End by David Wong

2009-11-14T08:08:00.006-05:00

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

2009-11-09T21:36:00.002-05:00

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

The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

2009-10-12T00:02:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-10T23:42:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-05T21:52:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-24T18:07:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-17T21:14:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-12T18:54:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-03T21:17:00.002-04:00

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.

Amazon link

The Island of Mad Scientists by Howard Whitehouse

2009-08-19T19:10:00.001-04:00

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.

Amazon link

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

2009-08-13T00:02:00.001-04:00

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.

Amazon link

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

2009-08-10T19:06:00.001-04:00

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.

Amazon link

Nextwave, Agents Of H.A.T.E. Volume 1: This Is What They Want by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen

2009-08-03T22:16:00.003-04:00

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

Rarely does a work of art so perfectly achieve its goals. Warren Ellis had a vision for Nextwave, and there is no gap between that dream and the reality. This is an awesome comic book, pure mayhem with only the faintest limits of plot, sanity, or structure. If that sounds like the kind of thing you would like, you will really like this excellent execution of the concept. If "awesome comic book" does not sound appealing, sorry, but our ratings system are based on appeal to the target audience. It does not all need to be literature.

This volume collects the first six issue of Nextwave: Agents of HATE. They battle Fing Fang Foom, a giant robot made from a police officer and cars, and HATE itself.

The original Warren Ellis pitch could serve as the review, especially since it so perfectly met this vision. If you stumble upon a copy of Nextwave and are unsure after this review, skip to the last page and read the pitch. Let me quote a different Warren Ellis characterization of the comic:

I took The Authority and I stripped out all the plots, logic, character and sanity. It’s an absolute distillation of the superhero genre. No plot lines, characters, emotions, nothing whatsoever. It’s people posing in the street for no good reason. It is people getting kicked, and then exploding. It is a pure comic book, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. And afterwards, they will explode.

This is Crazy Awesome, bouncing between Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny. The writing has no respect for comic books, itself included. The narration mocks the cast. They have flashbacks to their unfortunate histories, and there are Hitchhiker's Guide-esque digressions about other bits of the world. Much is made of Fing Fang Foom's having underpants. They fight broccoli to the death. There are attack koalas ("sob"). Someone smashes a jeep with a guitar. Holes are kicked in the fourth wall at random. There are self-referential word bubbles. Characters may say their own sound effects. Quotes and examples from the series make no more or less sense in context.

It is wacky fun. I thought, "I might have cared about suspension of disbelief if that happened in another series, but here, eh." Things explode. The heroes snark and don't really like each other. They hit things, which also explode. I disagree with Chris Sims on some reviews, but if kicking people in the face and fighting robot samurai warriors with a shovel sounds good, you will love Nextwave.

I am not 100% sold on the art. Except for some fight scenes, the art mostly illustrates the text, a sub-optimal use of the comic book format. The best comic art lets facial expressions and body language carry some of the narrative weight. ("Show, don't tell.") If nothing else, with this many fights and explosions, you could let the pictures speak for themselves. Nextwave does not seem comfortable with that until the last issues.

The art does poses well. Look for single pictures that would work with no context, the sort that you might put on a poster or use to advertise the comic. These are perfect, and they are not uncommon. Elsa gets the best of it, notably how she poses with weapons. The first two issues have almost the same shot of her with guns crossed. While Tabitha's ability to make things explode by pointing at them is very effective, and visually appealing in the wide shot, Elsa's ability to beat things up with weapons is more visceral and visually appealing in the close shot.

The visuals improve across the issues. The giant robot makes better use of the artist's style than Fing Fang Foom. That is also where we start getting mostly unexplained visuals. The last arc includes Monica's Avengers flashback (excellent) and a manga-style shot of Dirk crying tears of joy about combat. I also like the (mostly lack of) costumes used, and that Avengers moment creates a great contrast between Monica's look then and now. Cosplayers: if you have a trenchcoat, you can do Nextwave.

Amazon link

The Peace War by Vernor Vinge

2009-07-28T18:28:00.003-04:00

Across Realtime, book one

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

I picked this up because it comes before Marooned in Realtime, and I have missed too many Book 1s lately. Early on I wondered, why hasn't anyone recommended this book to me?

The Peace Authority seized control fifty years ago, amidst the War. Their great power was the bobble: reflective, impermeable spheres that could encapsulate anything. They eliminated military hardware, nuclear weapons, the governments that had them, energy sources, and anything else that might have been a threat to peace or the Peace Authority. Under the Authority, as little as possible has changed, with humanity riding horses on a depopulated Earth, where it might be possible to throw off the yoke of the tyrants who rule in the name of Peace.

Vernor Vinge is an excellent writer. Whether or not you enjoy the plot, you must respect someone who can express the exhilaration of learning and discovery. He makes math tutoring sound like an exciting journey. We have all had epiphanies and had new venues opened by learning; he expresses it in a way that is compelling even if the subject matter is not your thing.

But then, I am not math-averse, so don't trust me.

The plot is nothing unusual for hard science fiction. One scientific breakthrough is the backstory, another is the plot driver. Men of the mind lead the revolution, with a few men of action in support. It is a Heinlein story as told by Asimov.

The enemy is given its due. The protagonists have the great brains, but a manipulative, intuitive thinker backed by force provides solid competition. The book would be far weaker without Della Lu.

Her presence outlines the sexism of the setting. Granted, society has fallen back to the late 1800s, not the most feminist time, and a massive depopulation tends to lead to protectiveness of potential mothers. Once you have reduced women to "potential mothers," most of the work is done there. This is not a criticism of the book, which presents this as an unfortunate development, but you notice when the womenfolk get shuttled off so that the men can get down to business. At the end, we have a time-displaced person who does not seem to even consider that she should think down to that level.

Describing the effects of technology is a strong point for Vernor Vinge. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us. He introduces computer-to-brain connections and spends time with various perspectives on computer-assisted thought. There is an excellent contrast between the view of it as man-machine interface and accepting the computing capacity as an extension of the self.

Did I just lose people? Think of something you just do, while other people are aware of it as a process they are doing. You drive effortlessly, while a teenager must actively think about where the pedals and buttons are. You IM or text friends as simply as you would wave to them, while your parents think of those as programs they would need to learn. As with the math lessons earlier, Vernor Vinge shows the inside perspective: what it feels like to be that augmented human.

I comment mostly on the writing because it is the basis on which I recommend the book. The story is not bad, but it is nothing you have not seen before. We have the aged master, the young apprentice, the allies, the infiltrator, the traitor, and the dark lord. While the writing is hard sci fi, the plot would not be much different if they were smuggling a hobbit into Mordor instead of bringing the technological weapon to the enemy's base.

The setting is half-post-apocalyptic. We have a ruined world, a victim of war and plagues. Most modern technology has been suppressed with little innovation, except for low-energy computers. Holograms are possible but expensive, while nighttime lighting is easy but more expensive. Cars and lasers are banned, but horses and guns are around. Despite all this, it feels nothing like Firefly, more like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The beginning is stronger than the end. The early parts are where we get the characterization, while we have mostly plot by the end.

Amazon link

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You by Anita Renfroe

2009-07-13T23:34:00.003-04:00

Rating - 2: not worth reading (skip it)

Erma Bombeck is dead. Updating her material with references to cell phones and the internet does not improve it.

Not a bad book, with a reasonable perspective looking back after three children, but it has all been said before.

Amazon link

Expected publication: September 2009

Harley Quinn: Preludes and Knock-Knock Jokes by Karl Kesel, Terry Dodson, and Rachel Dodson

2009-07-10T01:34:00.002-04:00

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

Kind of cute, but of uneven and not exceptionally high quality. It does not have a lot to recommend it, but if you enjoy this kind of thing, there will be a few things to enjoy.

Harley Quinn: "The Joker's main squeeze, out on her own and out of her mind!" The back cover copy pretty much covers it. She plays with a lot of Batman's rogues gallery, allied or opposed. This collects the seven issues of the Harley Quinn comic book series from 2001.

Harley is a great character, spun for laughs or in the occasional darker version. Here, she stays light even while shooting people. You can forget that she is an insane killer, since the violence tends to look cartoonish when she does horrible things to people. Joker is usually spun in the opposite direction.

Harley does not start in these comics enough for my taste. She shares the spotlight at all times, as if the authors thought she could not carry a comic on her own. Starting with the Joker is obvious, then she immediately tries to be someone else's sidekick, and after deciding to strike out on her own, at least half the page count gets devoted to her henchmen. I hope that later issues let Harley be Harley.

The henchman emphasis can be done well. "A day in the life of a mook" can be a great story, and you can even get a good ongoing series about being a Stormtrooper or other minion. This does not do that, because Harley is jousting with her supporting cast for the spotlight.

She has four Quinntets with a rotating fifth position. Of them, three get one character trait each, and the last is Lewis, probably the best character so far in the series. Lewis is the brains of the mook-dom, and he even gets a bit of characterization. I am hoping that a later issue noted the conflict between his being a sympathetic character and his having gone to work for the Joker. A family man sending money home and making sure his family cashes in on his inevitable demise: fine, but there are far better criminals to work for than the Joker, say the other Gotham criminals who specialize in theft rather than mass murder.

Harley's interaction with Poison Ivy is one of the most commonly used elements of the character, and Ivy shows up in about half the issues. The tension they often have is not here, with Harley in more of a big sister role and both asserting their interests in men. It is a good take on things, with less fan service. It also works with the retcon origin story that explains, amongst other things, how Harley keeps up with the heavy hitters after having been introduced as an insane psychologist.

Let's talk fan service. Harley's outfit is a superhero standard: skin-tight and curve accentuating. For a comic book, her breasts are sane, usually in the C range and rarely swelling for no apparent reason, perhaps still a bit large for a gymnast. I hope she has some support under there, given her tendency to flip around. Oddly, she has a comment about Ivy's having a better figure, when the artists usually draw them with the same body. Someone is very fond of her backside, since she spends an inordinate amount of time bent at a 90+ degree angle. The "slumber party" turns that up a bit: it looks like a normal party, but calling it that fuels fanfic writers who can imagine what happened afterward; they have the entire female villain cast, with the Body Doubles flashing skin everywhere; and there is a scene with a pizza delivery boy. Again, rev up your fanfics, and we will ignore how a delivery boy walked into her hidden lair.

That is not a bad issue, since some of the characters interact well. The first issue, with the Joker, is also strong on characterization, and it introduces the mook banter that will grow later. The Two-Face issue is trash except for a moment when Harley rhapsodizes about romantic insanity. The issue introducing her Quinntets is a rather good one-off with a henchman narrating, mixing fun and darkness in the best combination in this collection. The origin issue is good exposition. The ending double-issue is weak, with a poor Riddler and ... Big Barda, seriously?

There is a B-arc about detectives tracking Harley. It creeps along without going far in these issues. I am not demanding instant gratification, but what makes sense as a background story in a comic does not succeed in a short collected edition. Similarly, the last issue ends at a lead-in to the next issue with no closure to the ongoing arc. As a book, it is horrible structure. I do not know how well a longer collection would have sold, but it might have had better narrative strength.

The seeming need to incorporate so many Batman characters is a weakness. The Penguin appears for two frames. Oracle pops in and pans through the heroic cast. Why Two-Face? Why is the Riddler so horrible? And... Big Barda, seriously? And isn't that like having Harley escape from Thor? They are not exactly on the same power scale.

Let's talk art. There are two styles; comic book standard and the animated series. I like both, and the pages done in the animated style are really great. They do not work together at all. One comic has three pages of animated style in the middle of a fight scene. No. Just no. Because there is more of it, there are more opportunities for the standard style to fail, although the art on Harley is usually very good. I do not like the Joker's look here.

My favorite art pieces: the theme park actors in the first issue; the cover of issue 3; that fan service-y shot greeting the pizza boy (somewhat ridiculous, but really well posed and drawn); Poison Ivy's face at the end of issue 3; the Quinntets' shirt design; pre-Harley Harleen Quinzel; the animated-style fight in issue 6, which would be great if it were not horribly out of place; and any time you put Harley next to big Buster, particularly when they high-five.

Two of my favorite art pieces were two of the things I noted as wrong with the comics. That is emblematic: the best pieces did not fit well in the whole, but there are fun bits.

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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany

2009-07-06T01:05:00.000-04:00

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

Abandoned at 30%. Not interesting enough to compensate for the disorienting style, and not terribly promising in terms of plot anyway.

The main story involves an industrial diplomat who travels between worlds facilitating something unspecific in the galactic economy. It works towards a discussion of one's "ultimate erotic object," and an example thereof for our protagonist.

Instead, I am going to recommend not reading any of that. Instead, read the prologue as a short story. It runs just under 60 pages, and it is a rather good Shoot the Shaggy Dog story that makes great use of its disorienting style, rather than needing to compensate for it.

The shaggy dog lives in the main story. I think it's better if we pretend that does not happen.

The problem of disorienting style: the text makes up new words (fine), but also re-purposes existing words. This could also be fine, but amongst those words are all the gendered terms in the English language. Once you have re-defined pronouns, you have made things unnecessarily difficult. When one of them is re-defined to have an exclusively sexual denotation, you have re-cast the entire species and the way it speaks in a ridiculously sexually focused way. Seriously, all adults are "she," which oh yes goes beyond the human species, except when they are immediately sexually desired, in which case you refer to them as "he"? Oh, and some words get sub-scripted numbers, for reasons suggested but not explained before I gave up.

The disorientation does good things. The book mostly lets the characters exist in their world, rather than speaking to someone in our world. They do not explain things no one would ever explain. They do a little, which weakens it.

Largely, I am not on board for the book's central conceit. I blame the back text of the current edition in part, which is no fault of Samuel Delany's, for portraying the "perfect erotic object" as a universe-shattering revelation. That is, two people are really really compatible in bed. Because sex is Serious Business (world-shattering sex should not bring Yu-Gi-Oh jokes to mind (in a completely clean sense)). The book itself argues against the idea of how significant it is to be 99.9999999% compatible in a universe with 6000+ inhabited planets; with only billions of people on our one planet, one-in-a-million events happen thousands of times a day.

Then there is the sex itself, which smacks a bit too strongly of Author Appeal. And this is in sci fi, where we have already accepted the Heinlein/Clarke view of sex. There is a furtive, dirty sense of engaging the author's proclivities, as in Darwin's Radio. Part of that is my own heterosexual perspective, although I can respect the perfect recounting of the gay male gaze that remarks on the play of shadow on a vein in a scrotum. Not my thing, but if that is your thing, and you are not put off by his being mentally handicapped, this will have some really great imagery for you.

My apologies for that. Also for the number of TV Tropes links, but once the Serious Business page came to mind, everything in the book came through the TV Tropes prism.

For the right audience, what I have written is a very strong endorsement. If I thought of the book as limited to trying to appeal to a narrow audience, I could recommend it on that basis, even not being interested myself. As it is, I think it fails to speak as universally as it hopes to.

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