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|Science Fiction
Sunday, September 11, 2016
SF Book Review, Part 24: The Killer B's
Without going to far into the history of Science Fiction, there was a revival of epic, large-scale Hard SF in the 1980s led by three authors: David Brin, Greg Bear, and Gregory Benford. Dubbed the "Killer B's", they seemingly incorporated the strengths of New Wave authors while returning the genre to its rational, optimistic, Campbellian mode. Less navel-gazing, less counterculture, less dreary pessimism... Interestingly enough, it feels like we could use another such revival these days. Alas, we seem to have descended into an ill-advised political morass, misdiagnosing core SF tenants for political victimhood. It sometimes feels like there's no escape in modern SF (this is probably something worth exploring in its own post sometime, not in a short intro to some reviews)... but luckily, I have plenty of books like these to discover. Three are from the Killer B's, the other two are just from authors whose last name starts with a B (and one isn't even SF!) Cheating? If you say so. Let's stop quibbling and get to the books:
Posted by Mark on September 11, 2016 at 01:44 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Hugo Awards 2016: The Results
The Hugo Award winners were announced last night and I'm having a hard time caring all that much. I've played along with the Hugos for the past few years, but unfortunately, that roughly coincides with the rise of Sad/Rabid Puppy movements and by intention or not, the award and seemingly the entire field has become a politicized morass. Of course, this isn't new and this year fared significantly better than last year's disaster, so let's look closer. (Also of note: the full voting breakdown in case you wanted to figure out how instant-runoff voting works.)
Posted by Mark on August 21, 2016 at 07:11 PM .: Comments (2) | link :.
Sunday, July 31, 2016
2016 Hugo Awards: Semi-Final Ballot
Today is the voting deadline for the Hugo Awards, so here's the final ballot I submitted. I'm only really voting on the fiction categories right now, but I might take a gander at the artists or fan writer categories later if I get time. Overall, this is a significantly better year than last year, though the Short Story category continues to be a drag. Let's get to it:
Best Novel
Predicted Winner: Uprooted although The Fifth Season seems suspiciously popular...
Best Novella
Predicted Winner: Penric's Demon
Best Novelette
Predicted Winner: "And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead" but who knows, this seems more up in the air. Also, I'm terrible at predicting these things. I don't
Best Short Story
Predicted Winner: Cat Pictures Please though No Award has a fair chance here because this ballot was rough.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
So there you have it. I doubt I'l get to any other categories since the deadline is tonight, but this is what I'e entered in. A pretty decent slate of finalists this year, with one category being a real bummer (Short Stories). Looking forward to seeing who wins (assuming we actually have winners this year).
Posted by Mark on July 31, 2016 at 08:33 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, July 24, 2016
2016 Hugo Awards: Novellas
After last year's train wreck of a Novella ballot, I wasn't exactly looking forward to this year's finalists. But it seems my fears were misplaced, as this might be the most solid fiction category of the year. Novellas can be awkward and to be sure, a couple of these don't entirely pull it off, but even those manage better than the other categories.
Posted by Mark on July 24, 2016 at 02:04 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, July 17, 2016
2016 Hugo Awards: Novelettes
Continuing the march through the Hugo finalists, we come to the awkward middle-ground between short stories and novellas that no one else uses but SF people: Novelettes. Fortunately, this is a pretty decent bunch of stories (especially compared to the lackluster short story ballot), even if none of them really stands out as truly exceptional. For me, they are all flawed in one way or another, making it pretty difficult to rank them. As such, this ranking will probably shift over time.
Posted by Mark on July 17, 2016 at 11:59 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, July 10, 2016
The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut's Windlass
Jim Butcher is most famous for chronicling the adventures of that other wizard named Harry in the long running Dresden Files series, but he has been known to branch out into other Fantasy realms from time to time. What was nominated for this year's Hugo Award is one of those departures, a steampunk adventure called The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut's Windlass. I've read four of Butcher's Dresden novels with mixed reactions, and that feeling generally holds here. Steampunk fans may enjoy this heartily, but I found myself struggling through it for some reason that I'm having trouble pinning down. I should really enjoy this novel, but something elusive is holding me back.
Humanity has retreated from a hostile, mist-covered earth into large floating spires ruled by aristocracy. They fly ships harnessing ethereal currents and use magic crystals to power everything. Spire Albion is currently embroiled in a cold war with Spire Aurora, a war that's about to escalate, even as an even greater threat to humanity begins to stir...
Captain Grimm commands a merchant ship (ne privateer) for Spire Albion, but when the ship is hobbled in combat, he must embark on a secret mission at the behest of his Spirearch, Lord Albion himself, in order to secure the necessary repairs. Along for the ride are Gwendolyn Lancaster, hailing from a prominent aristocratic house that is famous for growing those magic crystals in vats. Her cousin Benedict is a warriorborn, human beings hybridized with some feline features to make them more efficient warriors. Bridget Tagwynn is another aristocrat, but her house is not nearly as prominent as the Lancasters. Her talking cat Rowl follows her, acting all haughty and superior (as cats do). Then there are the etherialists, people who can harness ethereal powers for their own purposes, driving them partially mad in the process. Ferus is renowned and powerful, but comes off as an absent-minded, bumbling professor. He mentors Folly, a manic-pixie dream girl whose goofiness manifests as a tendency to address all communication to her crystals (rather than who she is trying to communicate with).
All of these characters are actually pretty well established and likeable, and their relationships work well. There are some mentor-mentee things going on, some romantic inclinations, unlikely friendships, and so on, and it's all effective and entertaining stuff. Grimm is a well-drawn leader and the glue that keeps the group together and focused. As you might tell from my description of Folly above, she initially comes off as a bit cliched, but as time goes on and we spend more time with her, she really comes into her own. There's a villain named Cavendish who is a worthy foe. There are big ship battles that are effective and maybe even realistic. Butcher takes full advantage of the three dimensions, and seems to leverage some of the principles of aerial combat (i.e. higher altitudes have a higher energy potential, a la John Boyd's E-M Theory, or maybe I'm giving too much credit here).
This should work for me, but for some reason, it doesn't. Maybe it's just the steampunk tropes that are giving me the hives. Every once in a while, Butcher will drop a term that is so very steampunk and my reaction was almost always a roll of the eyes. Verminociter? Telescoptic? Oy. But that's just superficial surface stuff, right? The deeper dislike is more difficult to pin down. One of the things I've never particularly enjoyed about Butcher's storytelling is his sense of pacing. He gets repetitive and overly-reliant on exposition, especially in the middle sections of this book. There's great action sequences at the beginning and end of the novel, but the middle section features entirely too much silkweaver (a sorta cross between giant spiders and centipedes). Butcher's brand of fantasy also seems to fall into the whole "escalating magical powers" trap that usually doesn't work for me. A corollary to this is the hero who can take on obscene amounts of punishment in battle and still come through alive and well in the end. This book isn't as bad as some of Butcher's others, but it's still there, and it is one of those things that just makes the book seem longer...
It often feels like we're just spinning our wheels. Eventually everything's set up for the climax, so he kinda gets there... only that isn't really the climax. The conflict between Spires Albion and Aurora has only just begun. There are hints at an even larger threat, an ancient enemy, but they're only hints. We don't really get far into either of these, and yet this book is over 750 pages long. Sometimes you can get away with that, but the airship battles, characters, and their relationships just weren't enough to overcome the bloated exposition and steampunk cliches. I'm not particularly opposed to finding out what happens next, but I can't see myself picking up the next book in the series either (without some sort of outside prompting).
In the larger context of the Hugo novel category, it's perhaps telling that my two favorites are standalone novels (Seveneves and Uprooted), while the two series-starters (this book and The Fifth Season) are clearly my least favorite. Ancillary Mercy kinda squeaks by because it's the end of it's particular story, even if I didn't particularly love it. I've finished off the novelettes and am working through the novellas now, so look for updates on those in the near future.
Posted by Mark on July 10, 2016 at 10:33 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, June 26, 2016
2016 Hugo Awards: Short Stories
Short Stories are tricky beasts. In its ideal form, the short story is a pure distillation of storytelling. No slack, no flab, no digressions, just story. This is hard to do, and lots of stories don't really work (for me, at least). As a result, reading a bunch of short stories together leads to an uneven experience. This goes double for Hugo shortlists, as there's not even a pretense that the stories are related (most collections are from a singular author or cover a theme), and when you add in our current culture wars, things get even more annoying. I've been mildly unimpressed with the last few years worth of Hugo Short Stories, and this year doesn't really change that. I'm not sure if that's just because there are so many short stories and so little agreement during the nominating phase or if it's because there really aren't enough great short stories out there. This year's ballot is mostly Rabid Puppies, with one non-Puppy work that made the ballot as a result of one original nominee bowing out in protest to the slate approach (a shame, since I loved that story). What's more, you can tell from the works themselves which belongs to which camp. There's a bifurcation of preferences that is very stark and obvious. Is that good? I don't know, let's dive in:
Posted by Mark on June 26, 2016 at 12:49 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, June 19, 2016
The Book Queue
It's been a long time since I posted a book queue, so naturally it's been filling up with lots and lots of things that I want to read. For the most part, this is separate from the Hugo Award reading list which I'm also hoping to tackle in the coming few weeks (finishing up novels now, moving to short fiction this week).
Posted by Mark on June 19, 2016 at 08:49 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Hugo Awards: The Fifth Season
The Fifth Season is death... or maybe the end of the world. It's happened before and it's going to happen again, metaphorically and maybe even literally. Spoiler alert, I guess, but the grim nature of N.K. Jemisin's Hugo-finalist novel and the downright misanthropic outlook it gives us on its world are almost immediately apparent. After all, this is a book that opens with a woman grieving for her infant son who had been beaten to death by his father. It's a rough way to start the story, coupled as it is with some deft but also quite dense world building, but don't worry, things get way, way worse as the story proceeds.
The setting is a world with a giant supercontinent that is under constant state of geological distress, occasionally leading to catastrophic Fifth Seasons that humanity barely survives. To help quell the earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis are the orogenes, magic users with seismic powers that are essential to keeping the world alive. For their trouble, they are generally feared and despised by the rest of the population (I kept thinking of X-Men). The plot considers three different orogenes, each at a different point in their life. One is Essun, an older orogene in hiding and also the aforementioned grieving mother who is now determined to seek out her husband (who has also presumably kidnapped their daughter). Then there is Syenite, a cranky but talented orogene sent on a mission with another, very powerful orogene named Alabaster. Finally, there's the child Damaya, who we follow as she's taken from her home to be trained at the Fulcrum and serve at the will of the Empire. Meanwhile,
To some people, this dark (to put it mildly) approach is like catnip. At least, judging from the reviews, that's the case. I found myself floundering a bit at the beginning, at first in a good way. I like the dense worldbulding and the magic system (such as it is) is well thought out and used in clever ways. The characters are well drawn and yet, I didn't particularly like anyone. This can be fine, but they're not particularly interesting either, except insofar as they are instruments of the worldbuilding. The twisted and misanthropic nature of the relationships and institutions don't help. There are no real friendships here, only betrayals. There isn't any love, only lies. Every relationship is a twisted power struggle resulting in exploitation at best and usually outright abuse. Every institution is oppressive and exploitative. The result is misery porn.
Look, I don't need a book to have all the answers or be uniformly upbeat, but this book takes such an extreme and dismal view that it resulted primarily in a sorta detached experience for me. The end of the book even has a revelation or two that are genuinely interesting, but it's all undercut by this relentless horror that only served to desensitize me. It could almost approach self-parody, but it's far to horrifying to ever reach comedic levels. Towards the end of the book, there was a big twist that I find interesting on an intellectual level, but which didn't have nearly the impact it should have because I just didn't care that much about the characters. As a result, the twist felt more like a cheat than a revelation. Progress is made on all of the storylines, but little is resolved in the end, perhaps because this is the start of a series. The final line of the novel holds an interesting promise, but I can't say as though I'm at all interested in revisiting this world or its characters.
In her review at the New York Times, fellow Hugo nominee Naomi Novik praises Jemisin's novel, noting that:
Fantasy novels often provide a degree of escapism: a good thing, for any reader who has something worth escaping. Too often, though, that escape comes through a fictional world that erases rather than solves the more complex problems of our own, reducing difficulty to the level of personal struggle and heroism, turning all obstacles to monsters we can see and touch and kill with a sword. But N.K. Jemisin's intricate and extraordinary world-building starts with oppression...That's an interesting perspective, but from what I can see, Jemisin's pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction. If Fantasy too often errs on the side of optimism, this book perhaps errs too far on the side of pessimism. It's one thing to confront complex problems, but it's another to propose a solution that is the end of the world. That's not a solution that provides hope or inspiration, merely despair. Or maybe I'm just being too literal. Jemisin is certainly a talented author with a good command of language, but this novel never really managed to get over the hump for me. As usual, judging a book from a series presents certain difficulties with how to rank this on the Hugo ballot. Right now, Novik's Uprooted and Stephenson's Seveneves are at the top somewhere, which puts this book about on par with Leckie's Ancillary Mercy (another book that bounced off me).
Posted by Mark on May 29, 2016 at 11:43 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
SF Book Review, Part 23
Just catching up with SF reading, including the tail end of Hugo candidates and some other stuff. One of these actually made the cut for my Hugo ballot, but alas did not become a finalist. Let's hop in:
Posted by Mark on May 22, 2016 at 02:14 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, May 01, 2016
The 2016 Hugo Awards: Initial Thoughts
The 2016 Hugo Award Finalists were announced this week and yes, it's another shit show, but maybe sorta not as bad as last year? I hope? Assorted thoughts below:
Posted by Mark on May 01, 2016 at 02:51 PM .: Comments (2) | link :.
Sunday, April 03, 2016
SF Book Review, Part 22: Ye Olde School SF
One of the things that participating in the Hugo Awards process has evoked in me is a strong desire to read older SF. This often lends a sense of deja vu, as older works are foundational and thus many things you're used to think of as modern are actually quite old hat in the SF world. Sometimes this is a conscious homage, others are more inadvertent (or, at least, unclear). Anywho, I'm once again quite behind in reviewing these books, so here goes nothing:
Posted by Mark on April 03, 2016 at 01:59 PM .: Comments (2) | link :.
Sunday, March 06, 2016
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen
One of the great things about Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels is the sheer variety of genres and stories that she manages to wring out of her universe. It speaks to how well the worldbuilding in the series works, but also to her breadth as a writer. I'm sure you could generally categorize the series as action/adventure in the mold of Horatio Hornblower, but when you start to narrow it down, you find a wide array of sub-genres: military SF, spy thriller, drawing room intrigue, political conspiracy, mystery (of many kinds), legal drama, and even straight up romance. As the series has progressed, she has trended away from the more action oriented aspects and more towards interpersonal dramas and romance. Most of the series is told through the eyes of the pint-sized force-of-nature that is Miles Vorkosigan, though the series (chronologically) began with his mother Cordelia Naismith and father Aral Vorkosigan. It's been 25 years since Cordelia headlined a novel, but she has returned in Bujold's latest novel, Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen. Spoilers, I guess, more from the series rather than just this book, though I guess some of that might pop up too.
Three years after her husband's untimely death, Cordelia Vorkosigan thinks it's time to resign her post as Vicereine of Sergyar and move her life in another direction altogether. Along the way, she ensnares the unsuspecting Admiral Oliver Jole in her schemes, and he suddenly finds himself contemplating possibilities he would never have dreampt up on his own.
This may not sound like much of a plot, and truth be told, there really isn't one. There's no grand political conspiracy driving the events, no dead bodies, no explosions, no Cetagandan invasion fleets, just a rather well executed character piece. This usually isn't my sort of thing, so I think it speaks volumes about Bujold's worldbuilding and capability of producing lovable characters that I really enjoyed the novel. Part of this is certainly that this is something almost completely new to the series. The books it most resembles would be A Civil Campaign and indeed, there are some light parallels between the stories (I'm thinking primarily of an unexpected family visit). But even A Civil Campaign had the structure of an adventure, even if it wasn't strictly so. The centerpiece of that novel was a dinner party for crying out loud. And what's more, it was fantastically exciting. No such disasters here.
There are subtleties here that Bujold has yet to explore in the series. Since most of the series was seen through the eyes of the young, we don't get a lot of insight into what was actually going on with the parent's generation. It turns out there were some, er, interesting relationships being built. This novel reveals many of these things, and concerns itself with the concept of dealing with the grief of losing a loved one. Aral's loss is keenly felt by most of the main players, and Cordelia's plan to course correct her life is her way of acknowledging that she must move on.
For reasons I'll leave unclear, Admiral Jole felt the loss of Aral nearly as much as Cordelia, and her plans have suddenly given his late-life a hope that he never really considered. Jole is not strictly a new character, having been briefly mentioned in several previous novels, but his part was always as a handsome, competent aid to Aral Vorkosigan. As usual, I'm left wondering if Bujold always had this story in mind and was peppering hints to this obscure side character in order to lay groundwork for this story, but this generally speaks to her ability to craft lovable characters.
The pairing is a good one, and it deals with late-life issues in a way that most stories never dare. This being a science fiction universe, a 76 year old woman deciding to change careers and have more kids does not seem so far fetched since she can expect to live to 120 years old. Similarly, a career military man can find other uses for his keen observational skills, and maybe have some kids of his own. Interestingly enough, Bujold is still wringing new and intriguing implications out her concept of a Uterine Replicator, even now, thirty years after she began writing these stories.
The usual coterie of side characters pepper the story, both new and old, and as per usual, they are all delightful. Despite a wide cast of characters, it never falls into an unfocused, episodic trap, and generally remains deceptively compelling.
It's a fascinating book primarily for what it doesn't do. One of the things I cherish about this series of books is how frequently Bujold manages to subvert expectations. I often find myself thinking This can't be right!? Is she really doing this? and then being utterly enthralled as Bujold sooths whatever stupid reservations I may have. I have learned that you must simply go with the flow and trust in Bujuold. In this case, I suspected that we might see some political intrigue or inciting incidents, but as the novel progressed and the story stubbornly refused to indulge my predictions, I started to get a feel for something different and interesting. Like Cordelia and Oliver, you have to be willing to let the story go its own way.
In a recent interview, Bujold noted that sort of difficulty in certain audiences:
Bujold, 66, remarks she was once part of a book club discussion of her fantasy novel, The Curse Of Chalion, with a group of junior high students, "where it gradually became apparent that the hero was far more alien to them by being an old man of 35 - practically like their parents! - than by being a demon-ridden medieval fantasy nobleman."I suspect Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen would garner a similar reaction, though I think ones experience in SF/Fantasy greatly reduces any complaints you might have about the exploration of late-life challenges this novel confronts. After all, if you're willing to consider the implications of a "demon-ridden medieval fantasy nobleman", why not a 76 year old widowed Vicereine and her desire to raise a new family? Or maybe I'm just getting older and wiser...
Posted by Mark on March 06, 2016 at 01:47 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Hugo Award Season 2015
It's that time again. Well, almost. The nomination period for the 2015 Hugo Awards is fast approaching, so I thought I'd get some thoughts on potential nominees down before all the requisite whining and controversy begins in earnest. This marks the third year I've participated, and while I was very gunshy about nominating in the first year, I went far out of my way to find stuff last year, to middling success (i.e. almost none of my nominees became finalists, but a couple things snuck in!) This year, I'm coming in somewhere between that level of effort. I've definitely read a bunch of eligible stuff, but I've only got a handful of definite nominees and I'm not really planning on any Herculean efforts to swell this list. My current nomination ballot, some thoughts on same, and a few things I'd like to read before I finalize my ballot are below. Enjoy:
Best Novel: Zero World, by Jason M. Hough, Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman. I doubt I'll get to all of them, but I should be able to swing at least one before nominations close. Will it make the cut? Only one way to find out.
Best Novella:
Best Short Story:
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Kaedrin Movie Awards will probably not be surprised by this list, but I suppose the one missing entry that might raise some eyebrows would be Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Call it a "snub" if you like, but given the Hugo voters' historical record and generally surprising lack of depth in this category, I opted to highlight some wonderful films that actually need the help. Star Wars will almost certainly make the ballot, along with Mad Max and The Martian. I think Ex Machina has an excellent chance, while Predestination is a true dark horse (perhaps a resurgence of Heinlein fans will get it done?) and What We Do in the Shadows has almost no chance at all. If you're reading this, though, seek all these movies out, they are worthy of your time and nomination.
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: The Chickening, which has virtually no chance of becoming a finalist. It is maybe a bit on the outskirts of fannish interest (being a take on Kubrick's The Shining) and strikingly bizarre, but it is absolutely brilliant. You should totally watch it and then wonder about my mental state afterwards. Seriously though, I found myself reaching for more short films this year than TV episodes (which normally comprise approximately 100% of the finalists). Kung Fury is a hoot, but I suspect not really the Hugo voters' thang. I have mixed feelings about World of Tomorrow and it might not make my final ballot, but then, I'd rather see that there than any number of the usual suspects (and it does seem rather fannish). Game of Thrones is a lock to be a finalist, but they've gotten a lot of Hugo attention the past few years, so maybe it's not necessary this year (but then, who else can stop the Doctor Who juggernaut?)
And that just about covers it for now. I suspect I'll read a few other things before nominations are due, but this is where I'm at now. Suggestions are welcome, though comments are still wonky, so hit me up on twitter @mciocco or @kaedrinbeer (if you're more of a lush) or just send an email to tallman at kaedrin dot com.
Posted by Mark on January 27, 2016 at 05:46 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, January 10, 2016
SF Book Review, Part 21: Hugo Prep Edition
I read a lot of books last year, but I'm way behind in reviewing them, so in an attempt to catch up, here are some thoughts on a few Hugo Award related books. Last year I went out of my way to seek out stuff that would be eligible for the Hugos. This year: not so much. But I've read a few things that could qualify, so here goes:
Posted by Mark on January 10, 2016 at 01:54 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
SF Book Review, Part 20
I've reviewed a bunch of individual books recently, but I am still way behind, so here's the first of several attempts to catch up. With some reservations, I've enjoyed following along with the Hugos the past few years, but I've also noticed that I really enjoy delving into the back catalog, and I'm hoping to do more of this in the near future (rather than desperately reading new releases in the hope that they'd be Hugo-worthy - that was not really that productive for me last year). Today, we'll cover a few books ranging from 10 to 50 or so years old...
Posted by Mark on December 13, 2015 at 02:11 PM .: Comments (2) | link :.
Sunday, November 22, 2015
Ancillary Mercy
With Ancillary Mercy, Anne Leckie has completed a trilogy that began with a lot of promise which was almost immediately squandered with the middle installment in favor of, I don't know, let's just say tea. This is perhaps more harsh than necessary, but I do think this series is indicative of much of the strife going on in SF fandom these days.
The first book in the series, Ancillary Justice, had a lot going for it. A complex, non-linear narrative that deftly employed indirect exposition to establish its worldbuilding (instead of tedious info-dumps). A heady mix of hard and soft SF, including an ambitious exploration of hive minds or shared consciousness. Galaxy-spanning empires, mysterious aliens, all the Space Opera tropes you could ever want. It was distinctly lacking in plot and storytelling, but as the first in a series, it established a lot of potential. Potential which the second book, Ancillary Sword, almost completely jettisoned in favor of a small scale, colonialism parable. This was so unexpected that you kind of have to respect the reversal. The problem for me is that nearly everything I enjoyed about the first book was gone. Instead, we had lots of interpersonal relationships, petty politics, and lots and lots of tea. Endless drinking of tea, the intricacies of good and bad china, even the exploitation of tea plantations.
This third and final book of the trilogy aims to complete the story, and despite hewing much closer to the second book's small-scale approach, it actually manages to stick the landing. But to continue the gymnastics analogy, the series as a whole feels like a routine that started off with ambitious, high-difficulty release moves, flips and twists and whatever, then moved on to boring filler, and finishing with the simplest dismount possible. Again, this might be too harsh, as this book does comport itself quite well, it's just so different than what the first book seemed to promise that I can't help but feel disappointed.
During this year's whole Sad Puppy kerfluffle, I ran across some non-puppy lamenting the puppy line and proclaiming that science fiction was primarily about the "exploration of the human condition", which is funny because I think that is indeed the whole crux of the matter. With this Ancillary series, Leckie is clearly fascinated by the "exploration of the human condition". And of course, there's nothing wrong with that! Much of science fiction does this, and it's a wonderful, time-honored part of the genre. The problem is that the grand majority of art ever produced is about the "exploration of the human condition". That's not what makes science fiction unique, and while Leckie managed to channel some of SF's unique sense of wonder and conceptual breakthrough in the first book, she basically abandoned that pretense in the succeeding novels. Lots of Puppies complained about Ancillary Justice, but I know for a fact that a lot of them enjoyed the novel. I doubt any of them appreciated the sequels. (NB: while I have some leanings towards the type of works Puppies prefer, I am not and have never been a Puppy!)
So what we end up with is a series with some fascinating worldbuilding and SF ideas that are established but not really explored. What seemed like promising lines of thought in the first book come off like window dressing in this final novel. Leckie even acknowledges this shift in-story. In the first book, we find out that the shared consciousness tyrant that rules an empire had actually fragmented into two factions that were secretly at war with one another. Great idea! In Ancillary Mercy, our protagonist Breq flatly opines that she doesn't care what happens, and thus we get no real exploration of what this civil war amidst a hive mind would entail (and no clarification as to how these hive minds actually work, and how such a situation hasn't happened thousands of years earlier). Another example? A mysterious alien race called the Presger have been hinted at throughout the series. It's suggested that they may be the force behind our Tyrant's little civil war. There's this extra-super-fantastic gun that, at first, is simply undetectable. In this final book, it can destroy entire spaceships with a single shot. As deus ex machina, it works, I guess, but it's pretty indicative of how Leckie treats the Presger. They're there for convenience, not for actual insight.
So I've blathered on for several paragraphs and I haven't even talked much about this book. It picks up where the last one left off, with Breq trying to effect repairs of a space station while overseeing the planet's transition from tyranny to more self-determined government or somesuch. She knows that Anaander Mianaai is going to visit to re-establish her rule, and she will probably have to also deal with the Presger, who will no doubt be a little upset that their translator/ambassador was killed in the previous book's shenanigans. Meanwhile, everyone drinks tea out of cheap china because the good china was destroyed in the previous book, but hey, tea is needed.
I know it sounds like I'm being dismissive of the tea stuff, and to a certain extent, I feel justified in that, but it actually doesn't bother me that much. I enjoy the tea minutia more than I would have thought, and as a beverage nerd who enjoys a cup of tea every now and again, it's got its charms.
Anyway, the plot of this one actually works a good deal better than the second book. It's not as episodic, and hangs together better. If you can go with the deus ex machina of the Presger, the story actually works really well. The pacing is still off, and too much time is spent on the seemingly endless parade of officers that have severe emotional problems (seriously, this is the culture that conquered most of the galaxy? How?) For instance, at one point a mysterious ship shows up out of nowhere. It's the new Presger translator/ambassador! She will no doubt be a little miffed that the previous translator was killed! Whatever shall we do? Apparently, we need to sit down and discuss how microagressions make a member of the crew feel. And look, I'm not predisposed to hate that sort of thing, but it kills plot momentum and is one of several such instances. On the other hand, the new Presger translator is, by far, my favorite part of the book. She has a very weird affect about her, coming off as nonplussed and yet somehow wise, and primarily acting as comic relief. Her disaffected demeanor fits well, and is used to good effect throughout the novel, almost making up for contrived role the Presger play in the series.
The conclusion actually works, too. It is, of course, not a conclusion to all that was set up in the first novel and again relies on the deus ex machina of the Presger, but it does resolve the smaller-conflict at the heart of the book in a surprisingly satisfying fashion. At the start, I thought Leckie had written herself into a corner, but she manages a couple of twists and turns that make sense. I left the book feeling pretty happy that I read the series, even if I have my fair share of complaints.
Despite my reservations, this book has been well received critically and fans of the series seem to love it. I have no doubt that it will make next year's Hugo ballot (indeed, even the Sad Puppies are talking about it), even if it will probably not make my ballot. I am actually curious to see if Leckie will revisit this universe, maybe even tackle some of the unrealized potential she so ably established in the first book. I would like to read that, actually.
Posted by Mark on November 22, 2015 at 01:32 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Whither the SF Classics
A couple weeks ago, author Jason Sanford kicked up a fuss about the "fossilization of science fiction and fantasy literature", suggesting amongst other things that "No one still discovers the SF/F genre by reading Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, or Tolkien." Needless to say, this caused a lot of consternation in some quarters, though my guess is that the medium of delivery had a lot to do with the response. Sanford posted all this in a series of Tweets, which by necessity are brief and thus come off as pompous and dismissive. Sanford later posted a clarification on his blog in a much more friendly tone, even if the weight of his argument is the same. Others have taken up the call as well, notably John Scalzi who notes:
The surprise to me is not that today's kids have their own set of favorite authors, in genre and out of it; the surprise to me is honestly that anyone else is surprised by this.And indeed, I'm not surprised by this notion, but it does represent a difference in the SF/F world. I was a teen in the 1990s and read all sorts of stuff from the 1930s-1960s corridor that generally represents the Golden Age, the same way (near as I can tell), teens in the 70s and 80s did. This is literally the first time in history when readers weren't introduced to SF/F via Golden Age authors like Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein (as Scalzi notes, Tolkien probably still reigns in Fantasy). What has changed?
I think a big part of it might have something to do with the on-demand nature of our current media environment. To take an example from another medium, kids growing up in the 70s didn't have much choice as to what movies they watched. It was whatever was playing on TV or the local theater, and a lot of what played was in the public domain. In other words, film nerds in the 70s saw a lot of silent movies by default. I grew up in the 80s, and with the advent of cable, I didn't really see any silent movies until I started actually studying film. I did, however, watch lots of black and white movies or movies from long before I was born, simply because that's what was showing on Cinemax or whatever. You can really see the difference in film critics who grew up in an earlier era, they have a much broader base to draw from when discussing current movies. Nowadays, it's all about what's on Netflix.
Bringing it back to SF/F, I think this is a big part of it. Many folks hit up the classics of SF/F back in the day because they were basically the only thing available. Book stores had tiny SF/F sections and primarily stocked the classics with the occasional new release. These days, kids can snag an ebook or even an audio-book on-demand, and their available choices have exploded in the past couple of decades. SF/F has sorta conquered the world, and is widely available everywhere. Thus the classics, while still available, are getting dwarved by other books.
And this is before you get to all the other options kids have to occupy their attention these days (video games, anime, internet stuff, etc...) There seems to be a dismissive streak running through fandom these days. Perhaps its because there's so much new SF/F flooding the market. There's too much to keep up with; you don't have a choice but to filter in some way.
One thing a lot of people mention when it comes to this is that kids don't like the classics because they can't relate, which seems kind of silly to me. Sure, old books were written in a different context, and there's a lot of weird stuff people were exploring. But for crying out loud, this is Science Fiction we're talking about here! The whole point is to explore alien ideas and blow your mind within the confines of a rationally knowable universe. When people are pining for the Golden Age of science fiction, they're craving that Sense of Wonder we got from Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein. Lots of great science fiction is being written these days, but a surprising amount is dystopian misery porn or boring character studies with a veneer of SF Tropes. This is especially rampant in YA fiction, which is so melancholy that I'm wondering why we're so excited by it. Maybe the reason people keep recommending Heinlein juveniles is because so much of YA fiction is dedicated to gloomy settings and grim despair. There's nothing wrong with that type of story, but is it really surprising that some of us crave Golden Age throwbacks like, say, The Martian?
I suppose the worry is that this represents another cultural battleground where kids don't read the classics because they're trying to establish a "safe space" or some other such nonsense. Again, I find that odd considering the whole point of speculative fiction is to expand your horizons. To a lot of people, reading is a passive activity, but it really isn't. If you're not interrogating what you're reading, you're doing it wrong. This gets us into strange territory though, and we'd have to go about discussing what really makes the SF genre work, which is probably better served in its own post someday.
None of this is malicious or necessarily dangerous, but it is different, and for the first time in 70ish years, kids aren't reading the "classics". One can't help but wonder what that will mean, but I'm not too worried. People like what they like. I don't like the idea of dismissing the classics out of hand, but I wouldn't be surprised or upset if someone got into SF by reading, say, Scalzi or Weir. For instance, I don't think Fantasy is anything but strengthened by the popularity of Harry Potter. The same is probably true with SF, even if I'm not a huge fan of dystopian YA...
Posted by Mark on November 15, 2015 at 11:27 AM .: Comments (4) | link :.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
The End of All Things
When John Scalzi started his little serialized publishing experiment a few years ago with The Human Division, it felt a little like a television series. Each story was self contained and episodic in nature, and Scalzi even went as far as to call each installment an "Episode". The book (unexpectedly and distressingly) even ended on a cliffhanger, and when he announced the sequel, he did so by saying that it had been "renewed for a second season". Well, the new season has finally arrived, in the form of The End of All Things.
To continue the television analogy, though, this is less like a season two and more like a mini-series. The first book/season consisted of thirteen stories/episodes, and they were very episodic in nature. There was a burbling background conflict that wound its way through, like one of those procedural TV shows that has a monster of the week, but an overarching conspiracy that gets mentioned every now and again. This new book/season only consists of 4 novellas (each of which is significantly longer than most of what preceded it), and instead of focusing on self-contained, episodic conflicts, this one focuses pretty intently on bringing that background conspiracy to the forefront in a more longform narrative way. As a result, this feels like a bit of a turn in the series, and lends itself to the mini-series analogy. This is all well and good, and the narrative here is more cohesive than the previous entry, but then, one of the things I loved about the first book was the way some of those standalone stories worked. So yes, this is more cohesive, but not quite as much as a normal novel, which makes it a bit of an oddity. Let's take a look at each episode.
The Life of the Mind is the first story, told by Rafe Daquin, who is basically a brain in a box. He wasn't always that way, but here he tells us the story of how he became that way and what he did about it. It actually explains a lot about the mysterious disappearing ships from the previous book, but it is also the most clumsy story in the series in terms of exposition. Maybe Scalzi was concerned that the head-in-a-box thing would be confusing, but even inexperienced SF readers don't need you to repeat something three times or extrapolate every piece of information. I was a little concerned at the outset of this story because Scalzi's last novel, Lock In, also started with an unnecessary and egregious example of info-dumping. Fortunately, while this grated on me a bit, it wasn't nearly as bad as last time, and I was able to quickly move past it. I liked the character of Rafe and I liked where this novella went.
This Hollow Union is up next, and it follows alien diplomat Hafte Sorvalh as she attempts to keep her Conclave of alien races together while dealing with those pesky human factions. You may remember Sorvalh as the Churro loving diplomat from the previous book, and it was nice to revisit her. While told from a different perspective, this basically continues the narrative set up in The Life of the Mind, in particular the fallout of various information leaks and revelations about third party factions out for their own purposes. It's a little talky, but it reminded me a bit of the previous book's focus on the diplomatic corps and while Lieutenant Harry Wilson shows up at one point, the zaniness factor isn't quite what it was. Since we're finally getting down into the details of the shadowy conspiracy hinted at in the first book, the tone is necessarily more serious here, and Scalzi did manage a few little surprises. All in all, a solid story.
Can Long Endure is told from the perspective of a 4 person CDF squad as they're sent out on riot patrol, keeping the Colonial Union in line (instead of their normal conflicts with alien species). There's some of Scalzi's snappy dialog here, and that part goes pretty well. The story itself is a little repetitive and the ending is a little anti-climactic, but that's kind of expected for the penultimate episode of a series, right? It was my least favorite episode, but even then, it was a good story, well told.
To Stand or Fall brings things to a close on a strong note. Due to its episodic nature, it's hard to call any one character the protagonist of the series, but the one man present throughout almost all the stories would be Lieutenant Harry Wilson. He's a fun character, and breathed fresh life into all the preceding stories whenever he showed up (even if only for a short time). Here, he's the viewpoint character, and while the overarching narrative has become more serious, Wilson's stories always feel breezy and fun. It helps the Scalzi is able to devise a plausible solution to the challenge facing our various factions and heroes (you can nitpick if you like, but I was more than willing to go with it).
As a whole, it all works out, even if it comes off a bit disjointed. That's just a natural result of the whole serialized publishing thing though, and I think the overarching narrative was pretty solid. Personally, though? I think I appreciated some of those lowish-stakes diplomatic missions from the first book a lot more. This sequel reminds me of a TV series that started out episodically, then got bogged down in the mythology and ended up devoting all its attention to the continuity story rather than coming up with a series of small, fun adventures for our heroes. I can't really fault the book for being something different than what I desired though, and it still fares really well in my book. I am on the fence with this one with respect to the Hugos though. None of the stories are really suitable for inclusion in the novella category (The Life of the Mind might be, but the glaring exposition issues make it a tough sell), but the disjointed nature of the narrative also makes best novel a tough sell. On the other hand, I liked this more than most of the stuff on the past two years' worth of novel ballots, so there is that! Of course, we've got plenty of time here, so there's no need to make snap decisions. Let's see how this one ferments in my head over the next few months. All of which is to say, this is a solid successor to The Human Division, and it resolves all the cliffhangery elements of that first book well. The resolution here does not seem to lead to a natural third "season", but who knows? I would certainly like to spend more time with some of these characters...
Posted by Mark on September 13, 2015 at 07:02 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, August 23, 2015
Hugo Awards: The Results
The Hugo Award winners were announced last night, and since I've been following along, I figured I should at least cobble together some thoughts on the subject. Also of note, the full voting breakdown in case you wanted to figure out how instant-runoff voting works. In short, this year's awards were a clusterfuck, and no one's coming away happy. "No Award" happens in several categories, and those voters were clearly the dominant force in the final voting. You can blame this whole thing on the puppies if you like, but to my mind, it's a two way street. Plenty of blame to go around. Action and reaction, it's a thing.
Posted by Mark on August 23, 2015 at 09:35 AM .: Comments (6) | link :.
Sunday, August 09, 2015
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.That's the eye-opening first sentence of Neal Stephenson's latest novel, palindromically titled Seveneves. It speaks to how much science fiction loves the what if mode of storytelling. What if the moon exploded? At first, not a whole lot. The moon splits into 7 big pieces, but thanks to gravity, they're generally in the same location and orbit, exerting the same tidal forces, and so on. That is, until the pieces of the moon start to smash into one another, splitting massive rocks into smaller chunks, leading to an exponentially increasing number of collisions. While we're not really expecting the moon to explode anytime soon, the notion of space debris colliding with other space debris, creating more debris and thus increasing likelihood of further collisions, is something NASA scientists have actually speculated about. In the novel, Stephenson calls this the "White Sky", and the smaller pieces won't stay nicely in orbit like the moon did. Within two years of the moon exploding, the Earth will be assaulted by what Stephenson calls the "Hard Rain" as all of the pieces of the moon fall to earth as bolides, releasing so much energy and heat as to make the Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years.
The human response to this news is to send as much material into orbit as possible. In a way, this is an "ark" story (a common subgenre, though it's also often relegated to backstory), but since Earth orbit is going to be crowded with moon parts, it can't be a single, giant ark. Instead, Stephenson comes up with the concept of a "cloud ark", a series of small, independent arklets that can swarm and maneuver to avoid debris. Various groupings can be made, and there's also a home-base of sorts with the International Space Station, which is somewhat larger than it is today and which is also bolted to a large iron asteroid called Amalthea (which acts as a shield for the ISS). Naturally, the cloud ark cannot accommodate more than a few thousand souls, so there's lots of Earthside wrangling and politics over who is chosen to survive, and who will remain on ground to perish in the hard rain.
You'll notice that I haven't mentioned anything about characters yet, and that's pretty illustrative about how this book reads. There is a very large cast of characters, of course, but the book seems primarily concerned with orbital mechanics and more broad sociological interactions. The depth with which Stephenson explains various elements of humanity's future home in space will no doubt turn casual readers off, but this is par for the Stephenson course. Blog readers know that I'm totally in the bag for this sort of thing, so it didn't really bother me, and while info-dumps can be frustrating when done poorly, Stephenson is a master of incorporating that sort of detail into a larger narrative. Here, the orbital mechanics are mixed fairly successfully with social mechanics and the more divisive political aspects of the cloud ark.
Depending on your point of view, this could be viewed as an intensely pessimistic view of humanity. I was actually reminded of the Battlestar Galactica television series, where people can't seem to agree with each other about anything, even when the entire race is on the brink of extinction. In some ways, it's not quite that pessimistic, and spoilers aho, humanity manages to survive, but not after some pretty harrowing and surprisingly sudden crises. More spoilers forthcoming, but the immediate takeaway is that fans of Stephenson will probably enjoy this, but like most of his novels, you probably have to have a certain mindset to enjoy it...
Individual characters feel more like chess pieces in the story's game. Sure, they have personalities (this comes into play later in the book, moreso than early on) and they're a compelling enough bunch, but their actions are severely constrained by their circumstances. This is, in many ways, the point. Living in space does not allow for many of the habits and practices we're used to here on our cushy planet, after all. Personal space, privacy, and so on are pretty severely limited. Still, the characters feel more like types than individuals. There's a science populizer called "Doc" Dubois Harris who is basically Neil Degrass Tyson. There's a miner turned roboticist named Dinah Macquarie, who is arguably the main character of the first two thirds of the book. We like both of them, and several of their surrounding characters. There's an almost cartoonishly devious political villain that emerges as well, along with her own retinue of followers. We don't like them! And there are dozens of other side characters, some becoming very important, some unceremoniously dispatched in one space disaster or another.
It's a huge novel in nearly every way, including it's physical size (another 800+ page hardcover), but also in terms of its ambition and the way Stephenson tells the story. If you think the first line is cool, the transition about two thirds of the way through the book was another pretty big surprise. At the time, humanity isn't in particularly good shape. They've fractured into two main camps, but few remain alive when they rejoin one another. On the other hand, they've finally reached a relatively safe and stable position in space to build out from, and they have enough technology to ensure the survival of the species... and then Stephenson starts a new chapter with "Five Thousand Years Later" and proceeds from there.
It's a bold choice, one of many in this book. Unfortunately, when you move the action that far forward, there's a lot to catch up with. As mentioned above, Stpehenson is a master of info-dumps, but this section of the book, in which nearly every narrative event is preceded by long and complicated digressions about how this or that piece of new orbital technology works or how this or that aspect of society works (again we get the juxtaposition of orbital and social mechanics frequently here) left even me a little impatient. It doesn't help that the events that drive that future part of the narrative seemed pretty obvious to me from the start (it's based on something from earlier in the book). Still, once the basics are established, the story gets moving on its own terms and ends strong enough.
It's just that you have to get through 5000 years of basics, which takes a while. A lot of Stephenson's ticks are noticeable here (and I don't mean that in a bad way). Stephenson loves to play with familial relationships and often returns to certain types of characters. Here, we get seven different strains of characters, such that when the story is moved 5000 years into the future, even if we don't know the new characters yet, we know their ancestors, and this gives you a little bit of an idea as to who they are. It's not a perfect, one-to-one relationship, the same way that Randy Waterhouse is distinct from Lawrence Waterhouse (in Stephenson's Cryptonomicon), but there's some underlying type that works for them both. Now, it is a bit of a hard sell to say that the 7 distinct genotypes (the eponymous seven "eves") wouldn't have interbred more in the intervening 5000 years (it is implied that this does happen, but it seems infrequent), but I can accept that the storytelling works better when you make such sharp distinctions.
It's funny, but this feels like Stephenson's most cinematic work. Many of these info-dumps and extended discussions of orbital mechanics would be much less daunting if presented visually (the book even includes a few illustrations to help you visualize what he's talking about, but they are few and far between). Alas, I'm guessing such a movie (or, more likely, TV series) would be cost prohibitive because of all the special effects required to blow up the moon, portray the white sky and hard rain, and all the arklets, let alone the far future space habitats and gigantic orbital launch devices, etc... Perhaps someday this could happen, and I think it could perhaps even surpass the book in terms of quality if done right.
I'm a total sucker for Stephenson, so it's not a surprise that I enjoyed this novel. It's not going to unseat Cryptonomicon as my favorite, but it compares favorably to his other work. I have to admit that I don't particularly agree with all of his sociological musings here, but this is interesting, exciting, and ambitious stuff, and I can't fault Stephenson for wanting to explore this fascinating territory. I know that this is an unpopular line of thought with increasingly ideological Science Fiction fans of late, but I'm actually capable of disagreeing with a work that I think is great without actually needing to doubt that greatness. This is bold, adventurous writing, and while there are plenty of valid complaints to be made, I still think this is some of the most interesting SF published in the last few years (it certainly puts the last few Hugo novel ballots to shame). You can bet this will show up on my 2016 Hugo nomination ballot.
Posted by Mark on August 09, 2015 at 11:41 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Hugo Awards: Skin Game
Nominees like this are difficult to judge. It's the 15th installment in Jim Butcher's long-running Dresden Files series of books detailing the exploits of that other wizard named Harry. The series started out as a mashup of fantasy with detective fiction, with Harry Dresden playing the role of a PI with magical powers. He even has a listing in the phone book. Of course, as the series went on, some variation crept in, some are still traditional noirish detective stories, others not quite so formulaic. My experience with the Dresden Files actually began with the short-lived SyFy television series. Not even realizing at the time that it was based on a book series, I actually enjoyed the show quite a bit (for a time, it was on Netflix Instant and Amazon Prime streaming, but it appears that convenience is no more). It's not one of those things that would get cited as part of the hallowed golden age of television we're currently ambling our way through, but it was an entertaining enough series (and without going into personal circumstances at the time, it was exactly what I needed). I wish it lasted more than one season.
A few years later, and a book club run by some coworkers selected the first book in the series, Storm Front, so I figured it was time to check it out. I enjoyed that first book quite a bit, but the bounced right the hell off the second book, Fool Moon, which put me off the series for a while. Last year, after I burned out on SF, I read the third book in the series (looking for something trashy and fun), Grave Peril, and found it better than the second book, but still not quite fulfilling the entertainment quotient provided by the TV show. Then Skin Game gets nominated for the Hugo Awards this year and despite not having read the intervening 11 books, I feel like I need to give it a shot. I was a little hesitant about this because I was reliably informed that the book featured mostly long-standing characters whose personalities and motivations were rooted in earlier books.
This is certainly true, but I found that I was able to follow along well enough given my knowledge of the first three books (and even the TV series, to some extent), and indeed, the central plot here is self-contained enough to be compelling even if there were some personal matters that weren't entirely fleshed out. I'm no expert on urban fantasy or anything, but the series seems to pull from enough folklore that I was generally able to keep up with the proceedings. I ultimately enjoyed the book heartily, and it had enough going for it that I think it compares favorably to the other nominees (such that my initial #2 ranking feels justified).
The book started off a bit on the rough side, with Harry living on the island of Demonreach, acting as a Warden to a sorta magical prison. He's running around the island and jumping over obstacles while screaming "Parkour!" which is pretty painfully silly at first, but sorta rebounds during a few later callbacks (at one point, Butcher even acknowledges how ridiculous it is in the text, which is nice I guess, but doesn't make it any less ridiculous). There's a bunch of stuff going on here that is clearly from earlier novels, but it doesn't take long for things to settle in, as Dresden's Faerie Queen arrives to offer him a job: help fallen angel Nicodemus steal something from the vault of Hades.
It's a heist story, complete with all the tropes, but with a nice magical twist or two thrown in for spice. Assemble the team, devise devious ways around the vault's magical safeguards, deal with some obstacles, prepare for deception and betrayal within the group, and so on. It's a pretty well executed heist tale too, with some neat puzzles, intrigue, double agents, and so on. I'm sure most of the characters on the team were well established in the series, but for the most part, I was able to pick up on the specialists, and the shifting allegiances weren't hard to follow or anything like that. Of course, I recognized Harry's primary allies in Karrin Murphy and Michael Carpenter (and, to a lesser extent, Waldo Butters and Bob the Skull), but most of the other characters were new to me. Again, I didn't have much trouble catching on, and even grew to like a few of the characters.
As with previous books, this one feels a bit bloated, with Butcher never missing an opportunity to expound on this or that magical theory, and while I was able to follow along, there did seem to be a fair amount of what I'll call continuity-service, consisting of references to the fallout of recent books and so on. I've never been a particularly big fan of the way Butcher portray's action in this series either, and that's also the case here, though it is better than I was expecting, and the puzzle-like nature of some aspects of the story are enjoyable. Some of it is just lingered on a little too much.
One of my problems with the earlier entries in the series is the sort of escalation of magical powers that necessarily happens in stories like these, as well as the damage that Harry typically takes on in the course of the story (usually an absurd amount that beggars belief, even assuming some sort of magical healing power). Some of that is certainly here, but there are plenty of times when Harry reasons things out for us and it all makes logical sense, which is more than I can say for some of the early novels. There's even some explanation for why Dresden can take more punishment than normal here, which is appreciated. Butcher also has a tendency to revel in pop culture references a bit, which sometimes works, and sometimes just seems extraneous (I mean, a Black Hole reference? Another situation where Butcher explicitly has a character call out how ridiculous the reference is, which is nice and all, but doesn't make it less ridiculous!)
I really enjoyed the heist aspects though, and there were plenty of well executed twists and turns late in the story that kept things moving at a brisk pace. I particularly enjoyed when Hades singles out Harry (during the heist, of course) to sit down and have a drink. It was probably my favorite part of the book, even if it's a bit hokey. It's my kind of hokey, I guess.
Ultimately, I really enjoyed the book, and I can see why this series is so popular. Not having read the previous 11 books in the series, I have to say that some of that probably sailed over my head, but I seemed able enough to follow along, and was still able to find plenty of enjoyment here. I think my #2 ranking on the ballot is warranted, and will probably remain that way. I'm also resolving to read more from this series, as from what I understand, I'm past the worst bits. Don't hold your breath though, I've got plenty of other stuff to read. This basically concludes my Hugo reading for this year, though I'm sure I'll have something to say when the winners are announced in August...
Posted by Mark on July 29, 2015 at 09:48 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Hugo Awards: Semi-Final Ballot
As the voting deadline approaches, I find myself rushing to finish one book, but have otherwise read what I want to read and pretty much know how my ballot will shake out. I'm pretty much only voting in the fiction categories, avoiding commentary and zine categories like the plague. I might take a look at the artist stuff in the voters packet, but for now, this is what I've got:
Best Novel:
Predicted Winner:The Three-Body Problem (It's not on the Puppy ballots, so it's acceptable for people to vote on it, but the Puppies seem to like it too, so I think it's in good shape)Best Novella:
Predicted Winner: Big Boys Don't Cry (though No Award is a strong contender this year, because controversy)Best Novelette:
Predicted Winner: "The Day the World Turned Upside Down" (though No Award is a strong contender this year, because controversy)Best Short Story:
Predicted Winner: Totaled (though No Award is a strong contender this year, because controversy)Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:
Predicted Winner: The Lego MovieSo there you have it. Not a bad slate overall, and I actually enjoyed it slightly more than last year's slate. What I did not enjoy was all the whinging about Puppies or Noah Ward and so on. Fingers crossed that next year won't be quite so contentious. With the likelyhood that No Award will win some categories this year, I don't see that happening, nor do I see the vitriol subsiding (heck, it hasn't really subsided yet to begin with). I may just end up bailing on the whole enterprise next year and just read stuff I like. What a novel idea.
Posted by Mark on July 26, 2015 at 09:39 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Quasi-Hugo Awards: Terms of Enlistment
The initial Hugo Award finalists for Best Novel included a book called Lines of Departure. It was one of the suggestions from Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies, and once that came to the attention of the author, Marko Kloos, he promptly withdrew his acceptance of the nomination (this withdrawal lead to the inclusion of The Three-Body Problem in the category). As a result, he's one of the few authors to emerge mostly unscathed by the whole affair. The puppies seemed to respect his decision and lots of others vowed to read his books anyway, probably giving him a boost in sales without the vitriolic baggage everyone else is dealing with. For my part, the nominated novel just seemed like it would be cool, so I felt I should check it out regardless of what all the factions of fandom thought. In fact, when nominees were initially announced, this was the one I was most looking forward to... Alas, it's actually the second in a series, so I started with the first novel: Terms of Enlistment.
At its core, it's a solid military science fiction novel, pretty much hitting all the expected tropes. The story is told from the perspective of Andrew Grayson, a welfare rat living in a prison-like tenement in Boston. He's one of the "lucky" few to be accepted for military service, and he jumps at the opportunity of escaping his near-dystopian surroundings without thinking too much about the *ahem* terms of enlistment. Every convention of the subgenre is covered, from saying goodbyes to basic training with its drill sergeants and physical exhaustion, to a shit assignment that turns out to be more prestigious than thought, to (eventually) exploding spaceships and battles on alien planets.
As these things go, it's a pretty well executed version of the common MilSF tropes. This might seem derivative and repetitious to some folks, but I've always been of a mind that a well executed version of a common story has value. What you usually end up with is something akin to SF comfort food, with the occasional feint towards something more transcendent. The start of this novel feels more like the former, but as the story progresses, we start to move towards the latter. We never really get that true transcendence, but this is only the first novel in a series and while it has a decent ending, it's also clearly setting up a rich groundwork for the sequel.
Kloos has nice, clean, concise prose, and he's excellent at describing battles and explosions and whatnot. The characters are generally likable and competent without being ridiculous caricatures. This isn't a particularly deep novel of characterization, but it's pretty good by the standards of MilSF. The worldbuilding seemed a bit hokey at first, but it gets better as it goes on, and the ending throws a nice little wrench into the proceedings, making it a good setup for the following books. Initially, it almost seemed like this would be one of those novels where our protagonist is propelled through a series of episodic adventures that ultimately lead nowhere, but Kloos manages to keep the narrative tight enough that each combat mission leads into the next in an entertaining fashion that keeps the pages turning.
Thematically, it's a bit straightforward until we get to the ending, which presents a tantalizing reversal of a common trope. Lots of MilSF concerns itself with bug hunts and aliens that are insectoid in nature. In this case, it appears that the human beings might be the insects of the universe (er, metaphorically speaking), which is a pretty clever take on a tired theme, and while Kloos is pretty explicit about this theme, he manages to make it feel earned and not hoary.
Ultimately, it's a promising start, and I'm really happy I decided to read these books. As you might be able to tell from the above, it's a novel that starts off extremely derivative and trope-driven, but it eventually starts to take things into more interesting places, hinting at even more to come. I'm very much looking forward to the next installment, which is more than I can probably say about all of the actual nominees for this year's Best Novel. Of course, I still need to read Lines of Departure before commenting on how it would fit into this year's ballot (had it survived the nomination), but I should probably finish off that Dresden book and Seveneves first... In the meantime, if you're looking for a relatively straightforward MilSF novel series that shows some promise at transcending its roots, this is worth a look.
Posted by Mark on July 12, 2015 at 03:45 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, July 05, 2015
Hugo Awards: Novellas
The other shorter-than-a-novel-but-longer-than-a-short-story category, these tend to be longer reads, which is a shame because I didn't particularly care for any of them. It's also one of the weirder categories in that three of the five nominees are from the same author. Two of the stories are also significantly expanded versions of much shorter stories (which, given my complaints below, would probably have been much better for me). None of the nominees are particularly terrible, per say, I just failed to connect with them, and it makes me wish there was a little more variety here. I don't want too dwell on this, so let's just get to it:
Posted by Mark on July 05, 2015 at 03:50 PM .: Comments (2) | link :.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Hugo Awards: Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form
This award is one of the stranger categories for the Hugos. This year, it's something of a respite from the all controversy and vitriol surrounding Puppies and Kittens and all the other nicknames people are handing out with reckless abandon. Which is funny, because as a movie person, I've always found the nominees to this category mediocre at best. It seems that while the electorate can focus on obscure artistic exercises for the fiction awards, they are generally focused on the biggest budget, widest releases from a filmic standpoint.
There are certainly exceptions. The voters seem to enjoy Duncan Jones, giving the low budget Moon the rocket in 2010 and nominating Source Code in 2012 (both flawed films, to be sure, but at least they're unexpected choices). There are a handful of other non-obvious choices (i.e. A Scanner Darkly, District 9, etc...), and a whole boatload of Hollywood pap (i.e. Avatar, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, etc...) There's nothing inherently wrong with big budgets, wide releases, star vehicles, or Hollywood invovlement, to be sure, and there are plenty of fabulous choices in that realm (i.e. Inception, Gravity), but what of the lower budget, obscure, or foreign films that never seem to find their way onto the ballot? I guess I can see why Upstream Color didn't make the ballot last year; it's a pretty inscrutable movie. But then, so was a lot of the nominated fiction! Voters are willing to dig through the heaps for short stories and novelettes, why can't they seem to find things like Detention, Sound of My Voice, Attack the Block, Timecrimes, Triangle, The Man from Earth, and probably a dozen others that are escaping me right now. Sure, many are obscure genre pics, but isn't that the point of the Hugo awards taking on the category? Movies like Avatar get plenty of recognition from the mainstream, why not highlight things that aren't so easy to find, the way we do for fiction?
This year, we have at least two nominees that were deserving (and that didn't have Upstream's impenetrable style), including Coherence (to be fair, there are some eligibility concerns on that one), The One I Love, and maybe even Snowpiercer (a film I kinda hated, but it seems up the voters' alley). Alas, they did not make it, and to be sure, Hollywood had a pretty good year, putting out plenty of genuinely good movies. Indeed, I even nominated 3 of these, so I guess I shouldn't complain! My vote will go something like this (I'm going to be partially quoting myself on some of these, with some added comments more specific to the Hugos)
Posted by Mark on June 28, 2015 at 04:29 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Hugo Awards: Novelettes
Novelettes! Good old novelettes! What do you call something that's longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel? A novella, of course, but that's too easy. Let's invent something between a short story and a novella, and call it a novelette! On the one hand, it is a bit odd that SF/F seems to be the only genre in literature that makes this distinction (something about a legacy of SF's pulpy magazine roots, where different sized works had different pay scales) and it seems rather pointless and confusing for no real reason. On the other hand, it just means we get to read more fiction, which is actually a pretty cool thing. Once again, none of my nominees made the final ballot, but such is the way of short fiction awards. Last year's Novelettes were pretty darn good (with one obvious and notable exception), and it looks like this years will rival that:
Posted by Mark on June 21, 2015 at 08:23 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Hugo Awards: The Dark Between the Stars
Hard as it may be to believe in these Star Wars saturated times, there was a period following Return of the Jedi in which the hallowed franchise faded from the pop culture consciousness. The trilogy had ended and nostalgia had yet to set in. In 1991, three new novels appeared, Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy, which covered the continuing adventures of Luke, Leia, and Han, while peppering in some new folks for added flavor. Music to my teenage kid ears, and I loved those books. The three novels were a massive success and ushered in an age of what became known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe. They were quickly followed by Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy trilogy, a not quite as successful continuation of Zahn's story. Anderson wrote many other Star Wars novels (notably the Young Jedi Knights series), but I was never particularly inspired to explore more because I didn't particularly care for the Jedi Academy books. They were fine, I guess, but lacked the thrilling pop of Zahn's initial entries, and while there were some memorable bits, it lacked the satisfaction I got out of initially rejoining my childhood heroes. I always wondered if that was a function of Anderson's writing, or whether it was because he was saddled with pre-existing conditions and unrealistic expectations... So Kevin J. Anderson is a hugely prolific author that has toiled away for years on licensed works for Star Wars, The X-Files, and Dune, though he occasionally puts forth some original novels as well. It is one of those novels that got nominated for the Hugo Awards this year.
From all outward appearances The Dark Between the Stars is a straightforward Space Opera, complete with requisite fancy starships and big explosions. The first of a planned trilogy (though set in a universe the author previously created), it delivers pretty much exactly what you'd expect: Space Opera comfort food, and little else. This is not meant to be belittling, as I tend to enjoy such exercises when done well (the aforementioned Zahn has long been my crutch for these purposes) and what we have here certainly fits the bill, if not perfectly.
It's filled with typical Space Opera tropes. A cast of thousands, quick chapters cutting back and forth between various plot elements, lots of spaceships, aliens, and explosions, an existential threat, and so on. I gather much of the worldbuilding has occurred in a previous series, but Anderson does a fine job establishing the key players. There's several Roamer clans who are basically industrious space gyspies, and we get a close look at several clans. There's a Confederation of several human factions (including Roamers), lead by a monarchy (we follow their family pretty closely). There's a bizarre mad scientist named Zoe Alakis who researches diseases and develops cures that she does not share with anyone for unknown reasons. There's the Ildirans, an older race of polymorphic aliens that is allied with the humans (not without tension, naturally) and whose history seems to drive much of the story. The Klikiss were an insectoid race that was apparently defeated in the previous series, though there remains a small cache of Klikiss robots that play a role here. The near extinct Verdani that are a telepathic network of trees that humans can use to communicate (among other things). So basically, a lot of plot threads here, and much in the way of history and worldbuilding.
During a joint exploration mission, a Human and Ildiran expedition uncovers hidden Klikiss robots and, more ominously, a dark nebula that appears to envelop and dissipate everything it touches. The Ildirans think this dark between the stars (ding ding!) are the Shana Rei, an ancient, legendary race that seem to personify entropy (the notion of order and thought appear to anger them and even cause them pain). The Shana Rei and Klikiss robots ally to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy. Ildirans and Humans struggle to find weapons with which to fight the chaotic force that seems to be popping up throughout the galaxy and destroying outposts, etc...
As a villain and existential threat, the Shana Rei are interesting at first, though I do believe that Anderson perhaps gives us too much of a glimpse into their world. For creatures that personify entropy and chaos, they seem to spend a fair amount of time talking to the Klikiss robots or creating ships to attack other sentient life (i.e. things that rely on order and sentience in itself). They also don't seem to be successful enough in this book to be truly terrifying. They may have been more effective had we known less about them or their motivations. Similarly, many of the distinct plotlines seem rather tangential to the story. Some do start to converge towards the end of the book, but much is left open ended, leaving this feeling a bit incomplete. As the first in a series, that's not too unexpected, but it also makes this difficult to judge this for the awards.
The biggest problem with this novel is that it reminds much of similar exercises that were just executed better. In particular, I kept thinking of Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Duo, a pair of books I certainly had problems with (notably with their excessive length), but which were far better at creating a truly alien threat and delivering on the terror such a thing represents. Indeed, I think I'd call this book Hamilton-lite. It's not as long (which is good!) and the plot is slightly tighter (not saying much given Hamilton's bloat, but fine!), but the ideas and storytelling aren't quite as big or bold either (that's bad!).
When I was in college, I spent one of my two free electives on a film class. One of the subjects we covered was the Auteur theory, basically the idea that a film's director is the primary author of a movie and that it's their distinct creative vision that we're seeing on screen. For some reason, we watched Thelma & Louise, and my teacher dismissed director Ridley Scott as a mere "craftsman" rather than a true Auteur. But what about Alien, we all ask. She responds by mentioning the other creative talent involved, and mentions that just because Scott is a craftsman doesn't mean he can't produce a brilliant work, just that its brilliance can't be traced back mostly to him. Given that filmmaking is a collaborative endeavor, that's probably a much better way of viewing things anyway. It was an interesting discussion, but I don't want to belabor the point. The idea of a distinction between a true Auteur and a craftsman is what keeps coming to mind when I think of Kevin J. Anderson. I mean, books aren't collaborative in the way movies are, but the distinction between a craftsman and, let's say, a master, is what I'm falling back on here. He's a fine author, his prose gets the job done, and the books I've read by him are enjoyable. I still find them a little too diffuse, a little too derivative. So Anderson is a fine craftsman, and honestly, I could see myself revisiting this universe because I had a decent enough time with it. But he's not a master, and while this represents good old-fashioned SF comfort food, I'm not sure it's well executed enough to be worth the stretch.
The question now becomes where to rank this on my ballot. It's certainly a fun adventure, even if it's not really doing anything new or particularly notable. On the other hand, while something like The Goblin Emperor set its sights high, I don't think it delivered on its potential and was a bit of a slog to get through. I feel similarly to Ancillary Sword, a novel that might be fine on its own, but represents a baffling way to continue a series that started off in a fascinating way. I don't think The Dark Between the Stars is better written that either of those novels, but I did enjoy it more than them and could see myself revisiting the series at some point. At this point, I'm at a loss as to where to place this novel on my ballot. I'm pretty certain that The Three Body Problem will end up at the top, but after that, who knows? I'll just have to see how I feel when the time comes to finalize the ballot, I guess. Up next: Jim Butcher's Skin Game... the 15th in a series of novels where I've only read 3. I obviously don't have time to catch up, but maybe the novel will be standalone enough that I can get through it... In the meantime, those novelettes and novellas won't read themselves.
Posted by Mark on June 14, 2015 at 11:48 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, June 07, 2015
Hugo Awards: Short Stories
My feelings on short stories are decidedly mixed, because most of the short fiction I read is from collections that are, by their very nature, uneven. As with Anthology Films, I generally find myself exhausted by the inconsistency. Also, as someone who tends to gravitate towards actual storytelling rather than character sketches or tone poems (or similar exercises in style), a short story can be quite difficult to execute. A lot must be accomplished in a short time, and a certain economy of language is needed to make it all work. There are some people who are great at this sort of thing, but I find them few and far between, so collections of short stories tend to fall short even if they include stories I love. In my experience, the exceptions tend to be collections from a single author, like Asimov's I, Robot or Barker's Books of Blood. That being said, I've been reading significantly more short fiction lately, primarily because of my participation in the Hugo Awards. I found myself quite disappointed with last year's nominated slate, so I actually went the extra mile this year and read a bunch of stuff so that I could participate in the nomination portion of the process. Of course, none of my nominees actually made the final ballot. Such is the way of the short story award (with so many options, the votes tend to be pretty widely spread out, hence all the consternation about the Puppy slates which probably gave their recommendations undue influence this year). But is the ballot any better this year? Only one way to find out, and here are the results, in handy voting order:
Posted by Mark on June 07, 2015 at 10:48 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
A Non-Hugo Book Queue
As I wind my way through this year's Hugo nominees, I've realized that there are several books coming in the near future that I really, really want to read. It's almost enough to want to opt out of the Hugos (what with all the lame controversy), though I suppose there's a fair chance that two of these will be eligible next year (and one the following year). There's also the fact that I've already read 3 of the Hugo novels and am halfway through another, so I guess that's still on the table. Still, These 4 books make me want to drop everything and read them first:
Posted by Mark on May 13, 2015 at 09:23 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Hugo Awards: The Goblin Emperor
Among high fantasy tropes, the goblin is not a particularly prized character. What you're thinking of when I say "goblin" is probably some combination of attributes from J.R.R. Tolkien's grotesque orcs in Lord of the Rings, the bumbling, low-level scamps from D&D (or, more recently, World of Warcraft), and maybe the terrifying codpiece of David Bowie in Labyrinth (amongst other, even more ridiculous 80s movies). Even more sympathetic portrayals, such as the goblins of Harry Potter, generally portray goblins as mischievous and greedy. For the most part, goblins are evil, villainous monsters that are, nevertheless, little more than cannon fodder in larger conflicts.
Katherine Addison's novel The Goblin Emperor challenges this starting with the title of the novel itself. We're clearly going to delve into the world of goblins here. While I'm not going to claim anything near a comprehensive knowledge of high fantasy, I know enough to be intrigued by the concept, and the possibilities are endless. The novel doesn't quite deliver on that axis of potential, but rather tries for a more subtle novel of characterization. There is, of course, nothing wrong with characterization, but when that's all there is, I'm usually left unsatisfied. This novel makes overtures towards a more gripping story, but generally seems content to stick with its character sketch.
Our protagonist is a reasonably likable fellow, well-mannered, self-aware, and honorable, though in no way perfect. In fact, he's alarmingly passive throughout most of the story, and as our sole viewpoint character, the reader is forced to confront his naivety and ignorance a little too often. I never stopped liking the guy or rooting for him, but did find myself frustrated by the frequent misunderstandings or whining about this or that court intrigue. But I get ahead of myself.
The novel starts of promisingly enough. Maia is the youngest son of the Emperor, but lives in exile because of his half-goblin heritage. The Elven Emperor married Maia's Goblin mother out of political expedience rather than any real desire, so when she died, Maia was sent off to a distant castle under the "care" (i.e. abuse) of his cousin while the Emperor took a more desirable Elven bride. When events conspire to kill the Emperor and his three eldest sons in a freak airship "accident" (i.e. sabotage), Maia quickly learns that he has unexpectedly ascended to the throne by default. The race is on to get to the court and establish himself before the Chancellor and other sycophants jockey themselves into power.
After an immediate charge of energy from these events and the introduction to the world, the novel quickly bogs down into repetitive, tedious, and repetitive meditations on court intrigue and decorum. And honestly, "intrigue" is too exciting a word to use for these machinations. Most readers will pinpoint the troublemakers in an instant, and yet Addison drags out the inevitable coup attempt (spoiler, I guess, but have you ever read a story about a freshly minted Emperor that didn't involve a coup or assassination attempt?) for nearly 2/3 of the novel, and not in a tension-building way either. When it happens, it is less thrilling than it is simply a relief to be reading something entertaining rather than how lightheaded Maia is at the thought of politics or how he grips his chair so hard out of nervousness that he bruises his hands (seriously, that last one happens multiple times). Also, I hope you like the word "Serenity" because that's the honorific bestowed upon the Emperor and thus it appears approximately 2,000 times in the novel. The final third of the novel, at least, delivers on some of the potential suggested earlier in the piece, even if I don't think it wholly compensates for the plodding nature of the story that preceded it...
Of course, part of the point is that the title of Emperor is not a particularly pleasant one. Much is made of Maia's loneliness, and he is, indeed, in a very vulnerable and scary situation. Fourth in line for the throne, he was not prepared for any of this, he has come to the court lacking any real knowledge of politics or etiquette, and he has no friends, no one he can really trust. Even most of his servants, loyal to the previous Emperor, seem to only grudgingly tolerate him at first. I don't generally like whiny characters, but it helps when they have something legitimate to whine about. There is something to be said for a story where the new Emperor learns to win over his detractors and learn how to rule, but as mentioned earlier, Maia seems entirely too passive to really accomplish that. Even his response to the coup attempt is a situation that he barely has any influence on (I was far more impressed by Maia's cousin Idra during this event). He seems to win people over simply by existing, which is not particularly satisfying, especially when it takes so long to occur. Things are looking up a bit in the end, with Maia ham-fistedly dubbed the "bridge builder" because he actually did something decisive (though seriously, that's a pretty clunky metaphor).
There is some exploration of race and class here, and Addison wisely shies away from histrionics on that front, revealing a less overt influence that is perhaps more insidious because of its subtlety. On the other hand, we learn very little about goblins or elves, so while it seems clear that Addison did a fair amount of worldbuilding to make this story work, much of it is not really on display. All of the characters essentially act like human beings, rather than different races. As a human being myself, that's not the worst thing in the world, I guess, but one of the things I like about Fantasy and SF is trying to extrapolate human characteristics in different contexts. This book made me want to either read actual historical accounts of court intrigue, or better fictional versions (the ones that come immediately to mind are Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar as well as her Chalion books, and naturally, Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, all of which I enjoyed a great deal more than The Goblin Emperor).
I'm decidedly mixed on this book. I can appreciate much of what it accomplishes and it is certainly a well written piece of work. It's got a surprisingly pleasant and empathetic protagonist and the final third has an actual plot (if a derivative one) that winds up hopeful in tone and even uplifting rather than the more typical grimmness. It's the dreary, overlong slog in the middle that sunk me and I was never really able to recover. Of the 3 novels on the Hugo ballot that I've read, I'd put this at about on par with Ancillary Sword and far behind The Three Body Problem.
Posted by Mark on May 10, 2015 at 08:50 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Action and Reaction
To paraphrase Newton's third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. It's one of the basic tenets of classical mechanics and it has analogues in other scientific fields. For instance, in chemistry, Le Chatelier's principle indicates how a chemical equilibrium responds to a change in conditions by adjusting itself to account for the difference. In biology, you have Homeostasis. And so on. For the most part, these principles are stable and predictable, but when you raise the complexity, they start to break down.
In physics, Newton's third law appears to fail in situations guided by quantum mechanics. Predictions become probabalistic instead of deterministic. As systems get more complex, their function gets more difficult to predict, and can even start to counteract the effect they were put in place to address. Humorist John Gall generalized Le Chatelier's principle to say that "Any change in the status quo prompts an opposing reaction in the responding system" or, more humorously, "Systems tend to oppose their own proper function."
Examples abound. Over-the-counter nasal docongestant sprays are effective... for about 3 days. After that, the user's continuing stuffiness and congestion are actually caused by the product itself, something called a rebound congestion.
Once you enter even more complex realms like psychology and sociology, forget about it. These systems don't even pretend to be predictable. Take the political movement of Liberalism, as Chris Wenham explains:
Each of the major political movements active today have changed drastically from what they were a few centuries ago. What was called Neoliberalism, for example, whose economic policies of laissez-faire, deregulation, low taxes and restricted monetary supply are now more closely associated with neoconservatism, or just "conservatism" in general. Or how modern Liberals are now said to be in favor of big government and managed economies, while Classical Liberalism, from the time of John Locke and Adam Smith, is about the opposite.The point here, which Wenham observers, is that:
Engineers have long noted a tendency for complex systems to grow and evolve until they perform the opposite of what they were built for.He goes on to comment on a frankly bizarre argument against Intellectual Property that compares it to human slavery, but the general idea of a system that opposes what it was built for is a fascinating one that has a basis in scientific fact, and seems to crop up just about everywhere.
An example of this in sociology is known as the Streisand Effect. This is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to suppress a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely. It is named after Barbra Streisand, who mounted a failed attempt to sue a photographer that had released a collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs (meant to document coastal erosion) that happened to include a photograph of Streisand's beachside house. Before the lawsuit, the photo in question had been downloaded a total of 6 times (2 of which were by Streisand's lawyers). In the month following the lawsuit, the photo was downloaded 420,000 times. And some dude from Techdirt coined the phrase Streisand Effect to illustrate the ironic folly of such situations. Somehow, I don't think this is the outcome Streisand was hoping for.
If you've been following along with the current Hugo Awards imbroglio, you can probably see where I'm going with this. A few years ago, an author named Larry Correia, became convinced that the Hugo Awards had become insular and dominated by a left-wing ideology, along with its associated, depressing literary fiction tropes. So he began an effort to counter this perceived imbalanced in Science Fiction's most prestigious award. He called this campaign Sad Puppies (because depressing SF is a leading cause of puppy related sadness), and so far, we have seen three different iterations of the Sad Puppies campaign.
The first was low key and did not gain much traction, so I will not spend much time on that. The second was significantly more successful... from Correia's point of view. I suppose some background is in order. In 2011, a freshly minted Correia was actually nominated for a Campbell Award for Best New Writer (not technically a Hugo, but administered as part of the same process). Correia recently explained his experience:
So I went out on the internet and started searching my name, trying to find out what the buzz was for the Campbell nominees. I started calling friends who belonged to various writer forums and organizations that I didn't belong to, asking about what people thought of my books in there.Regardless of what you think of Correia or actually believe these things happened to him, I think you can see why he feels the way he does. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Correia launched Sad Puppies with the explicit purpose of getting authors with the "wrong" politics on the ballot so that the world could see the response.
Sad Puppies 2 was pretty successful in that respect. It got 7 nominees on the ballot, including the dread Vox Day (more on him later, but for now all you need to know is that he is a generally despised man in certain segments of fandom, particularly those who vote on Hugos). The interesting thing about this campaign is that Correia's goal was to provoke a negative response. It wasn't about acknowledging writers that wouldn't otherwise get attention, it was about making "literati heads explode" because he wrote a book where FDR was a nominal villain and got it on the Hugo ballot for best novel. The response was predictable: a massive backlash. Action, reaction. Most of the Puppy nominees last year finished low, and one finished below No Award. Correia claims he's happy with the result, because his goal wasn't to actually win a Hugo, just demonstrate that he'd upset people by getting the wrong works shortlisted. A decidedly pyrrhic victory, if you ask me. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy and totally against the spirit of the awards.
A year later, the torch passes to Brad Torgersen, who ran the third Sad Puppies campaign. Unlike the previous campaigns, Torgersen attempted to put a kinder, friendlier face on Sad Puppies. He spoke of diversity and bringing recognition to authors that are usually overlooked. Some of his arguments are more effective than others and I'm sure we could quibble over details, but it seems clear that he's coming from a place of good faith. Unlike Correia before him, he really wanted to get recognition for the nominees, and wanted to give them a chance to win.
Now we come to Vox Day, an infamous personality in the field. I will not go into too many details here because I really don't want to wade through all the unpleasant topics that arise in this discussion, but suffice it to say that he appears to be a very successful troll in the classical sense. It would be amusing if it didn't seem so counterproductive. He's got a knack for very carefully wording statements such that they are easily misquoted out of context and lead to easy conclusions that he's a crazy, evil man. It's a deliberate strategy. Where most people would clarify and caveat statements they know will be controversial, Vox leans into them. In the course of this, I think there are plenty of times in which his statements are perhaps not worded as carefully as he thinks, and thus some rather unpleasant ideas are left hanging like a bad curveball. Action, reaction. People hate the guy. Personally, I know enough about Vox to know that I don't want or need to know more. Please don't construe this explanation as an endorsement of anything he's said (incidentally, this clarification that I just made is precisely the sort of thing that Vox wouldn't do).
Vox Day's appearance on Sad Puppies 2 seemed to be the flashpoint of that campaign and drove a lot of negative response. Perhaps recognizing this, Torgersen deliberately left Vox off the Sad Puppies 3 ballot (also of note, Torgersen left himself off the ballot as well). That doesn't mean that Vox can't play along though. He has a huge following, and posted his own splinter list, called Rabid Puppies, on his blog. The two lists overlap considerably, though Vox had more nominees and a much less friendly tone. For instance, Torgersen called for people to read the works and nominate what they felt was worthy. Vox urged people to "nominate them precisely as they are". And so on.
Sad Puppies 3 and Rabid Puppies have been remarkably successful, taking the grand majority of nominees (especially in the main fiction awards) and in several categories, all the nominees are Puppy works of some kind. The response has been remarkably negative. Action, reaction.
One of those reactions is that several high profile members of fandom have vowed to vote No Award in place of any and all Puppy nominees. This means voting No Award instead of works they liked (this seems especially likely in the Best Dramatic Presentation awards), and it also means not even bothering to read the works in question. Action, reaction.
The more successful the No Award voters are, the worse off we'll be. Vox Day has explicitly mentioned that if No Awards wins in 2015, he'll make sure that No Award wins in 2016. This is a despicable tactic meant to bully people, but then, so is voting No Award without reading the work. Even taking Vox out of the equation, I can't imagine a scenario where No Award winning will produce a good result next year. Somehow, this is not against the rules either, which seems odd (there's a reasonable explanation, but what's being deployed this year is not that). If this happens, we can look forward to years of finger pointing and pointless vitriol debating who killed the Hugos. I, for one, am not looking forward to this.
Every system in play here is caught in a negative feedback loop that is subverting the desired result. The Sad Puppies want recognition for the overlooked, but went about it in a way that alienated too many people to be successful. The Noah Ward voters are trying to register their disgust, but in doing so, seem unlikely to achieve their aims. In the meantime, the ostensibly democratic Hugo process is strained to the point of breaking.
Regardless of your stance on the matter, it would behoove us all to consider how easily our ideal scenarios can boomerang back on us, pushing us into a downward spiral that results in the opposite of what we were seeking in the first place. No one is operating in isolation. Action, reaction. While complex systems can sometimes oppose their own proper function, it doesn't need to be that way. But if we continue on the current path, it will be that way, and I don't think any of us want that.
My approach tends to be one of restraint and forbearance. This will not (and should not) be the same for everyone. If you're a die-hard puppy, more power to you, and vote your conscience. I don't like the slate approach, so please don't coordinate so tightly in the nomination process next year. It won't get you what you desire, it will just piss people off further. We're in an unexpected place right now and can't fault you for being more successful than anyone ever thought, but the important thing is what you do next year. If you're a non-puppy or even if you're a Noah Ward voter, more power to you too. I get the distaste for slates and certainly for Vox and don't blame you for wanting to oppose it all in a vigorous fashion, even if that's not my approach.
All that being said, it's worth considering what your goals are, and evaluating whether your actions will actually get you there. There's been a lot of name calling, accusations of bad faith, conspiracy theories, general vitriol, and even abuse being spewed forth of late. On all fronts. I get it, sometimes that feels good, but at some point, we need to take a closer look at what we're doing. People are talking past each other, and the rest of us are caught in the middle. Some might call this tone policing, but I think it's how things get done.
I will leave you with this anecdote about Charles Darwin's rhetorical strategy (emphasis mine):
Darwin, says Slatkin, was like a salesman who finds lots of little ways to get you to say yes before you're asked to utter the big yes. In this case, Darwin invited people to affirm things they already knew, about a topic much more familiar in their era than in ours: domestic species. Did people observe variation in domestic species? Yes. And as Darwin piles on the examples, the reader says, yes, yes, OK, I get it, of course I see that some pigeons have longer tail feathers. Did people observe inheritance? Yes. And again, as he piles on the examples, the reader says yes, yes, OK, I get it, everyone knows that that the offspring of longer-tail-feather pigeons have longer tail feathers.I've blogged about this before, and as I mentioned then, I think perhaps the author simplifies the inception and development of the idea of evolution, but the point holds. I'm sure Darwin and his supporters were infuriated by the initial response to their ideas, and I'm sure plenty of hateful rhetoric was employed at the time. But Darwin didn't allow it to spiral, he knew evolution was important enough that it would have to be accepted if he communicated it in such a way that people could accept it. I, for one, am glad he did. I don't know that the solution to the challenges facing the Hugo are, but I know it's not vitriol. And I hope it doesn't take 30 years!
Posted by Mark on April 26, 2015 at 10:44 AM .: Comments (3) | link :.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
The Three-Body Problem
The ascension of geek culture in the United States has meant that long marginalized genres like Science Fiction have become more acceptable, or at least tolerated. Ironically, this acknowledgement from the literary mainstream seems to be part of the current culture war, what with Sad Puppies whining about message fiction and anti-puppies trying to counter the surprisingly successful efforts to return SF to the gutter (as it were). While many have cast this as a political issue, and there certainly is a political component, I've always thought that Eric S. Raymond's analysis of the situation, based more on the qualities of literary fiction, was more cogent:
Literary status envy is the condition of people who think that all genre fiction would be improved by adopting the devices and priorities of late 19th- and then 20th-century literary fiction. Such people prize the "novel of character" and stylistic sophistication above all else. They have almost no interest in ideas outside of esthetic theory and a very narrow range of socio-political criticism. They think competent characters and happy endings are jejune, unsophisticated, artistically uninteresting. They love them some angst.Into this weary situation comes The Three-Body Problem, by China's most popular science-fiction writer Liu Cixin (translated by Ken Liu, no relation). In China, the situation is somewhat different. After decades in which Chinese SF was subject to the whims of Communist Party rule, first as a way to "popularizing science for socialist purposes", then as a pariah that was "promoting decadent capitalist elements", it appears that SF is on the rise again. Liu has capitalized on the rising sentiment, and his most popular books are now getting translated and generating buzz amongst SF fandom.
Liu's work is often described in terms of Golden Age SF, and in particular, the work of Arthur C. Clarke. At first, I was not sure if this book would be living up to that promise. There was a great deal of time and attention placed on cultural forces acting on science towards the beginning of the book (in particular, Liu spends a fair amount of time with the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 60s and 70s). Then there are some interesting, but seemingly not SF occurrences, such as a scientist who notices a number in his photographs. It appears to be a countdown, but he cannot account for how the number is appearing or what it is counting down to. There are a host of other, seemingly impossible events. There is a video game that is oddly hallucinatory and difficult to get through. And so on...
It turns out that this is all window dressing. The historical bits set the scene, the seemingly impossible occurrences generate a crisis amongst Earth scientists, and the video game holds the key to explaining what is going on. This episodic and oddly disjointed setup starts to click at some point, and the pieces start to fall together. Sometimes, it's a little clunky or overwrought, but it comes together well in the end.
At its heart, it's a first contact story, and if you're familiar with those, you know that fiction rarely shies away from the inherent possibilities for conflict there. It was again a bit worrying at the start, because one of the main factions on earth are people who want the aliens to come to our planet because they don't think the human race is worthy of existence (or something along those pessimistic lines), but it seems clear that this is not where the series is going, it's just part of a lengthy setup. The aliens themselves are rather interesting, existing in a Tri-Solar system (one of a few references to the titular "three bodies"), a wildly unpredictable state of affairs that has guided their evolution and frequently destroys their civilizations (when, for example, two or three of the suns are in certain configuration, the planet becomes, shall we say, unsuitable to life.)
This is all a bit unconventional from a Western point of view, and why wouldn't it be? It's also one of the things that makes this an interesting book to grapple with. From a plot or character standpoint, it feels a bit lacking, but there are many rich thematic elements that one could explore here. These basically come down to competition and disruption. The conflict between civilizations at this book's core could easily be applied to more mundane struggles, from industrial competition, to the rise of China in relation to the West. Disruption is a key element of business, creating and/or destroying markets, often through the use of technology. It is how people react to such disruptions that are the point, and the rival factions on earth reacting to the coming Aliens is a good example.
There are some fantastical elements that threaten to break it away from SF, especially earlier in the book. As mentioned above, these do come together well enough in the end, though Liu's cleverness is in the way he sets it up. The early, nearly complete lack of realism sets a point of reference such that, when Liu does get around to explaining why these things are happening, it feels acceptable even though it's mostly hokum. Chaos Horizon explains it well:
While some of the scientific sections are sound, others are deliberately exaggerated. Near the end, there's a bravura sequence where an alien civilization "unravels" a proton from 11 dimensions to 1, 2, and 3 dimensions, and then inscribes some sort of computer on that seemingly miniscule space. It's one of the most fascinating pieces of bullshit I've read in years, but it is bullshit nonetheless.Fascinating bullshit, indeed. I was more than willing to go with it.
This being the first book in a trilogy, little is resolved in the end, though it does finish on a positive note and it leaves you wanting more. The next volume is scheduled to be published next year, and I'm greatly looking forward to it, which says a lot.
I read this earlier in the year as part of my Hugo Award coverage. It came out late last year and was steadily building steam, and once it was nominated for a Nebula award, I thought I should check it out. I'm glad I did, and it made my Hugo ballot, but once the official nominees were released (and this book wasn't on their), I kinda scuttled doing a full review. However, since this year's Hugo awards are so weirdly contentious, one of the Best Novel nominees dropped out of the race. I'm not sure if this is unprecedented or not, but it's highly unlikely nonetheless (authors often refuse their nomination, but are given a chance to do so before the finalists are announced - this situation where an author sees the lay of the year's Hugo land and simply opts out was surprising) and many were expecting this to mean that the Best Novel category would only include 4 nominees. After all, adding the next most popular nominee would tell everyone who got the least nominating votes (info that is only published after the awards are handed out) and honestly, given the current situation, this precedent seems ripe for abuse. Nevertheless, the Hugo administrators opted to fill the open slot with The Three-Body Problem (a non-Puppy nominee, though from what I've seen, the Puppies seem to really enjoy this book). From left off the ballot to potential winner, quite a turn of events. Of the two nominees I've read, this is clearly ahead and could possibly take my number 1 vote. It is a bit of an odd duck, but I quite enjoyed it.
Posted by Mark on April 19, 2015 at 07:54 PM .: Comments (4) | link :.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Link Dump: Hugo Reactions
It's been about a week since the Hugo finalists were announced... and there's been way too much commentary to comb through. I'm going to post a few links here, but know that there are others who are doing a far better job summarizing the commentary, and to be quite honest, I'm already burnt out on the politics of the thing. This will most likely be my last post on the subject, though I suspect I'll get pulled back in depending on how recklessly No Award is deployed in the final tally. For the record, I think Sad Puppies 3 was far more successful than anyone thought (which includes them) and as such, I'm going to be somewhat leery of slates in the future (my preference would be for Sad Puppies 4 to simply encourage participation and maybe include an open post about eligible books as opposed to a straight slate). I have a hard time believing most of the conspiracies being thrown around, and am emphatically against the abuse that's been generated (which goes both ways). I don't like guilt by association and generally assume good faith in participants. Many nominees are being thrown under a bus for petty reasons, and that seems silly to me. As always, I plan to read and vote accordingly. Anywho, here are some other folks commenting on the slate.
Posted by Mark on April 12, 2015 at 10:32 AM .: Comments (2) | link :.
Sunday, April 05, 2015
The 2015 Hugo Awards: Initial Thoughts
The nominees for the 2015 Hugo Awards were announced yesterday, and the entire world is losing their shit because the Sad Puppy campaign has pretty much run away with the slate. Assorted thoughts below:
So there you have it. I don't think I'll be spending much time on the whole political war going on with this stuff, but I suspect it will be unavoidable in some places. Expect some link roundups in the near future, followed by reviews. I will still try my best to let the works speak for themselves though. It may be a few weeks before I finish off my current reading, so I probably won't get to any reviews until May-ish.
Posted by Mark on April 05, 2015 at 10:29 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
My 2015 Hugo Award Nominations
The Hugo Award Nomination Period ended last night, and miracle of miracles, I managed to get my ballot in on time. I suppose the value of posting this list after the deadline is questionable, but we're that kind of timely here at Kaedrin (meaning, not timely at all). But I suppose if you're looking to see what I enjoyed from last year's spate of Science Fiction, this is a pretty good place to start. For the most part, this is just an expanded version of the list I posted in January, and that commentary is generally just as relevant here (most of the comments here will be about the additions and possibly some general expectations). Additions are noted with an asterisk (*)
Best Novel:
Best Novelette
Best Short Story:
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:
Best Related Work:
Best Professional Artist:
Best Fan Writer:
And that just about covers it. Official nominations will be announced, as usual, during the inexplicable Easter day timeframe, so look for some comments on the subject then.
Posted by Mark on March 11, 2015 at 11:32 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, March 04, 2015
SF Short Story Review, Part 1
I was pretty disappointed by last year's Hugo slate of short stories, so I wanted to make sure I read enough stories this year to nominate worthwhile stuff. Of course, the short fiction categories are infamously fickle and don't enjoy quite as much in the way of convergence as the novels do (meaning that a very wide array of stories are nominated with little chance of any individual story standing out from the crowd - this is why there often isn't a full ballot nominated, as many of the contenders never reach the 5% threshold needed to make the Hugo ballot). The good news here, though, is that I enjoyed almost all of the stories in this post a lot more than almost any of the stories nominated in short fiction categories last year. Go figure. That being said, I will probably only nominate a couple of these because there's only so many slots...
Posted by Mark on March 04, 2015 at 06:21 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, March 01, 2015
SF Book Review, Part 19
As we near the Hugo nomination deadline, I have been surprisinly lax in my reading. That being said, I have made pretty good progress in terms of reading books I thought might be worthwhile, even if I won't end up nominating most of them. I'm going to make a last minute push for a couple books and/or stories though, so we'll see (nomination deadline is March 10). Here's some stuff I've read recently:
Posted by Mark on March 01, 2015 at 12:58 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, February 08, 2015
Hugo Awards: Puppies Unleashed
As Hugo Awards nomination season hits full swing, the Sad Puppy slates have finally be unleashed. For the uninitiated, the Sad Puppies are a semi-organized response to the notion that recent Hugo slates have trended away from traditional SF, with it's emphasis on sense of wonder and storytelling (the name emerges out of the notion that recent Hugo slates were so depressing that they were making cute puppies sad, or something along those lines). There is an ideological component to the movement as well, and it seems the Right/Libertarian are on the Puppies' side, while Left/SJW are opposed. Or something. In reality, I don't really buy that dichotomy, and that's one of the reasons I can't seem to get on board with the typical responses to the Sad Puppies (for it or against it). To me, it's just another input into the process, which is pretty much how it's supposed to work.
For the record, Brad Torgersen has posted the official Sad Puppy slate over at his blog. Vox Day has posted a variant, which he calls (perhaps unsurprisingly, given his usual tone) Rabid Puppies. There's a pretty large overlap, though enough differences to be annoying. Assorted thoughts and ramblings are below:
Posted by Mark on February 08, 2015 at 08:15 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Hugo Award Season 2014
It's that time of year again. The Hugo Award Nomination Period has begun, and of course, all the requisite whining has begun. People whining about Awards Eligibility Posts, people whining about politics, people whining about the people whining about politics. And wonder of wonders, some people are actually talking about books they like, compiling lists of things to check out before nominations close, or coming up with thorough models to predict who will get a nomination this year. How revolutionary. I'll do my best to focus on same, but I'm sure I'll be sucked into some controversy or other.
Last year, I was a little gunshy about participating in the nomination process. This was mostly due to the fact that I hadn't really read a comprehensive selection of 2013 books or stories. It was also before I realized that some people don't bother reading all the nominees before voting or nominate things for purely ideological reasons. I also realized that I was very nearly one of the two votes that could have put Lauren Beukes's excellent time travel serial killer novel The Shining Girls on the ballot. This year, I won't claim to have read particularly deep into the catalog, but I read more than I did last time and there are definitely some stories I would like to nominate. My current nomination ballot, some thoughts on same, and some things I'd like to read before I finalize my ballot are below. Knock yourself out. Comments are still wonky, so if you have any recommendations, feel free to email me at mciocco at gmail or hit me up on twitter @mciocco (or @kaedrinbeer if you're a lush).
Best Novel:
Best Novelette?
Best Short Story:
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form:
Again, comments are still wonky on here right now, so if you have any recommendations, feel free to email me at mciocco at gmail or hit me up on twitter @mciocco (or @kaedrinbeer if you're a lush).
I think we'll leave it there for now and revisit some other categories or perhaps some stuff I want to read next week. Until then, happy nominating.
Posted by Mark on January 21, 2015 at 11:19 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, December 21, 2014
A few years ago, Neal Stephenson wrote an article in Wired called Innovation Starvation. In it, he laments the decline of the space program ("Where's my donut-shaped space station? Where's my ticket to Mars?") and a general failure of our society to get big things done. He brought up concerns at a conference, and promptly got a finger pointed back at him: if Science Fiction authors weren't so pessimistic, they might have inspired a new generation of folks who actually could get things done. Intrigued, Stephenson set out to correct that imbalance with something called Project Hieroglyph a collaboration between SF authors and real scientists at Arizona State University. There were two major challenges that Stephenson laid out: a moratorium on dystopian futures as well as "technology so advanced that the world it describes bears little or no resemblance to our own world." In short, no "hackers, hyperspace and holocaust". The result of all this is a collection of short stories, also called Hieroglyph, that was recently published. I would probably have read this in any case, but I was also hoping to find some short fiction to nominate for the Hugo Awards. Alas, like most anthologies that I've read, this collection is decidedly hit or miss. Surprisingly, there are quite a few stories that do read like a dystopia, and many seem to have a fundamentally pessimistic idea at their core. This is quite distressing, considering that this collection was supposed to get us away from such things. It's not all bad, of course, and there are several bright spots, but I was overall pretty disappointed.
Posted by Mark on December 21, 2014 at 08:56 AM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, December 07, 2014
SF Book Review, Part 18: First Contact
In recent readings, I seem to have inadvertently stumbled upon a series of First Contact stories. Like any sub-genre, these generally include other sub-genres (notably military SF and Space Opera), but there's actually something of a through line with these three books that I found interesting. I will start with the most famous of the three, an exemplar frequently referenced when discussing First Contact stories:
Posted by Mark on December 07, 2014 at 05:55 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Ancillary Sword
Ann Leckie's debut novel Ancillary Justice was a huge breakout novel that vanquished all comers during awards season. It racked up wins from Locus, the BSFA, the Arthur C. Clarke, Nebula, and Hugo Awards. As you might imagine, the recently published sequel, Ancillary Sword, was eagerly awaited. I enjoyed the first book despite some reservations, so I was really hoping this one would shore up some of the lacking elements of its predecessor. What I got was completely unexpected.
This is a really odd novel. It picks up where the first book left off, with Breq accepting a commission as an officer in Anaander Mianaai's fleet and leading an expedition to... a space station with some minor strategic importance. There she butts heads with the local forces, led by one Captain Hetnys, and otherwise gets embroiled with various bits of local politics.
Like it's predecessor, this book is somewhat lacking in plot, though I will say that it does become somewhat tighter as a result. Unlike it's predecessor, many of the interesting things about the first book have been jettisoned. The complex non-linear narrative is gone. The first book's heady mix of hard and soft SF has shifted much more to the soft SF side. Many of the most intriguing things about the first book, particularly the ambitious exploration of hive minds and what that means for identity, while present, aren't really expanded upon in any real way. When Anaander Mianaai's condition is revealed in the first book, it opened up many tantalizing opportunities... that are almost completely bypassed in this sequel. The mysterious alien presence of the Presger was hinted at in the first book, and while the Presger's ambassador plays a significant role in this book, we still don't really get much in the way of information on the Presger. Even some of the softer ideas, like the way Radch culture doesn't distinguish between the sexes, calling everyone by female pronouns, aren't really expanded on at all. I suppose we get some closer looks at Radch society, but little beyond what we already knew.
It's a decidedly low-key approach that is not entirely unwelcome, but which makes me wonder where Leckie is trying to go with this series. It started off as a series filled with interesting ideas and an epic scope, and yet, it's all shaken down to this rather simple story that doesn't seem to really advance the series all that much. I suppose the implication is that the events of this book are happening all over the Radchaai Empire, which would make sense. And it's not really bad per say, it's just unexpected. Conceptually, I think this is something that could have worked really well, lots of crunchy ideas on a smaller, close-up scale. Alas, all of the interesting ideas originate in the first book and aren't expanded upon very much in this sequel.
The book has a more episodic approach than its predecessor, and many of the individual episodes are quite good. The opening reveals Breq to be a capable leader who immediately recognizes the deception of one of her officers. There's a great sequence where a pissed off Breq goes to the armory for target practice. Since she is a thousand of years old AI, she's pretty good at it, leading to some slackjawed crew members (Seivarden memorably notes: "Fleet Captain is pretty fucking badass.") Some of the incidents at the space station are less successful, though there are plenty of interesting bits about the formality of Radch society. There's a decent enough courtroom drama at one point, and several other interesting tidbits here or there. Leckie's not particularly great at action, but there's not a ton of action here anyway and she gets the job done. Many of the new side characters are pretty fantastic. Alas, when you add it all up, it's merely the sum of its parts, nothing more.
So I have mixed feelings about this. There are many bits to like, and I will say that it seems to be aging well in my head, but I don't think it's quite the equal of its predecessor either. It's almost certainly going to appear on the Hugo ballot next year, but I'm doubting that it will win. One other side note: I listened to this on audio book, and I hated the reader. She was fine most of the time, but for certain characters, particularly the ones we're not supposed to like, she puts on this ridiculous, high pitched, exaggerated cockney accent (I think). That wouldn't be a disaster if she didn't use the exact same voice for multiple characters, and if the story weren't so talky (which it really is, and it gets kinda weird when Breq is speaking with two of the weirdly accented people). Just a fair warning, you'd probably be better off reading this one rather than listening.
Posted by Mark on November 16, 2014 at 08:23 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, November 09, 2014
Lock In
I read a fair amount, but there are only a few authors whose output I eagerly await. Longtime readers already know that Neal Stephenson and Lois McMaster Bujold are the ringleaders, but John Scalzi is also among their ranks. Scalzi rankles a fair amount of folks because of his politics (which have been getting more and more pronounced over time), but in general, I've found his novels to be enjoyable pageturners. Being "easy to read" also rankles a certain element of fandom, those who seek "literary" status as opposed to entertainment and good old fashioned storytelling. Scalzi won a Best Novel Hugo award last year for Redshirts, which produced much teeth-gnashing from a wide range of people. It was an odd novel, but it's one that seems to have aged well in my head (my only issues with it were meta-issues). I suspect I would not have ranked it #1 that year, but like this year's Ancillary Justice win, I can't really fault people from voting for what they like - the Hugo is a populist award, after all. So it's with this baggage that I come to Scalzi's latest novel, Lock In. In short, I found it disappointing. Not bad, per say, but I have trouble mustering up much enthusiasm.
Lock In takes place in the near future, after a global pandemic of something called Haden's Syndrome that mostly presented flu-like symptoms, but for about 1% of the population, resulted in locked-in syndrome. This is a real condition that is thankfully pretty rare, but in the world of the novel, the amount of locked-in patients (called "Hadens" in the book) exploded. The world adapted and developed a whole suite of solutions, including a Haden-only virtual reality space, embedded neural networks, and robot-like machines that can be "driven" by Hadens. This is all worldbuilding though, and the story proper is a pretty straightforward police procedural, following FBI agents Chris Shane (a Haden himself) and Leslie Vann as the investigate a Haden-related death.
Science Fiction is perhaps infamous for its reliance on exposition and info-dumps, but the first chapter of this book is a pretty egregious example. It baldly lays out the worldbuilding, encyclopedia-style, and as near as I can tell, it's completely superfluous. You get a lot of the same information through context as the story unfolds. I may be griping a little too hard about this, but it started me off on the wrong foot, and it took a while to recover.
While I'm complaining about things, Scalzi's politics are showing. Of course, an author's politics are always showing in one way or another, and Scalzi's past novels were no exception, but this time around there are completely unnecessary tangents on things like, for example, gun control. These are disappointing tidbits, but fortunately, they aren't pervasive. On the other hand, Scalzi's concern with gender is much more successful. Agent Vann is great, a smart, tough, hard-drinking veteran agent who reminded me of the well connected smuggler at the heart of Polar City Blues (another SF mystery that, alas, I wound up enjoying more than Lock In). If you are paying attention, (and if you read Scalzi's blog, how could you not pay attention to this stuff?) you'll notice that Chris Shane's gender is not specified. This apparently blew some people's minds, but I was expecting this sort of thing from Scalzi. Of course, it's pretty easy to pull off when your character is represented by a featureless robot 99.9% of the time in the novel, which did make me wonder much more about the lives of Hadens. Again, this is a detective thriller, so there's not a lot of time given to exploring these aspects of a Haden's life, but as tangents go, that would have been a welcome one.
The overall mystery is well done, but nothing particularly special. There aren't any grand revelations, but it's more satisfying than your typical episode of [insert CBS procedural here]. It took me longer than usual to be hooked (perhaps because of that clunky opening chapter), and while Scalzi normally excels at snappy dialogue, it wasn't quite as snappy as his other recent efforts.
I ultimately did enjoy the book, but I found myself nitpicking, which I generally attribute to some deeper dislike (though I'm having trouble pinpointing that). It has been getting pretty good reviews though, so I'm fully expecting that it will be nominated for a Hugo next year (it will not, however, be appearing on my nominating ballot). Apparently Lock In was also optioned for a television show, and a SF police procedural might actually work really well. So I wasn't totally on board with this book, but regardless, I'm very much looking forward to the second Human Division novel (er, collection?), as I really loved the first installment (even if it ended on an unexpected cliffhanger).
Posted by Mark on November 09, 2014 at 08:44 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, September 14, 2014
SF Book Review, Part 17
Since we've come dangerously close to decorative gourd season, motherfuckers, I figure I should knock out a few reviews before the Six Weeks of Halloween horror movie marathon begins in earnest. There's going to be some overlap here with the most recent book queue, but a few other books I've read recently as well.
Posted by Mark on September 14, 2014 at 06:27 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, September 07, 2014
The Wheel of Time: The Great Hunt
When Robert Jordan's entire Wheel of Time series was nominated for a Best Novel Hugo Award this year, I knew I wouldn't have time to read all of the books. While you might think that's due to laziness, it should be noted that the series consists of 14 books, 10,000+ pages, and 4.4+ million words. According to my Goodreads stats, I'm averaging something like 12,000 pages a year, and given the fact that I only had a few months before votes were due, it was basically impossible. Fortunately for me, I didn't particularly care for the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, so reading the entire series became unnecessary. That being said, the publisher, Tor books, was exceedingly generous in making the entire text available in the voters packet, so I thought I'd give the series another chance before voting. I got about halfway through the second book, The Great Hunt, before I had to cast my votes for the Hugo, and I felt good about my ballot. I finished the book not long after, and I must say, it's a big improvement over the first book, even as it suffers from many of the same issues.
The story picks up where we left off, with our heroic band of misfits taking refuge in a town, waiting for a bunch of Aes Sedai to consult on the happenings of the first book. Nynaeve and Egwene plan to accompany them to train as Aes Sedai, while the rest plan to return home. Our nominal protagonist, Rand al'Thor, has definitively been identified as "The Dragon Reborn" (basically a "Chosen One" type of situation), and is thus developing some major trust issues. Not long after the arrival of the Aes Sedai, the city is attacked by Darkfriends, and two powerful artifacts are stolen, including the cursed dagger which is magically linked to Mat, so it seems that our three farmboys are headed off with a large search party to retrieve the stolen treasures. Meanwhile, foreign invaders called the Seanchan have begun to encroach on the border, and there are all sorts of other weird happenings throughout the world.
There are a lot of similarities to the first book here. There's an ancient, powerful artifact that is in danger, there's a bunch of epic journeys, tangential episodic adventures, hearty stews (of course), our band of heroes is separated, and eventually reunited - you know, high fantasy tropes galore. The difference between this book and the previous is that each element here is better done and more memorable. It's still bloated and sloppy, but at least there's some more interesting stuff that's happening. It helps that we already have a pretty good handle on the cast of characters, despite a few new ones, so little time is wasted rehashing what we already know.
The episodic stuff actually works reasonably well. For example, at one point Rand, Loial, and Thurin (the latter being a new character) are separated from the search party and find themselves in a town called Cairhien, where they play something called "The Great Game", an intrigue-charged game of politics and maneuver amongst the various factions of the city (I'm guessing the name here is historically based). For various reasons, Rand appears to be a Lord to the city, so he is expected to play. His instinct is to simply ignore various invites and overtures, but it turns out that this is taken to mean that he is even more important than he appears. His inaction is interpreted to be a rather extreme action. And so on.
Nynaeve and Egwene have a couple interesting episodes as well. Their training with the Aes Sedai leads to a lot of additional knowledge about how things work in that weird magical lawyer/mafia hybrid environment. They meet up with Elayne and Min (both characters had bit parts in the first book, and were a welcome addition here), and have a rather disturbing run-in with the Seanchan later in the book (this is one of the more memorable tangents, actually).
There are plenty of other tangents that perhaps don't work as well as the above examples, but for the most part, the characters are growing. Rand is still a little whiny because he doesn't want to be the Chosen One (a fair complaint, to be sure), but he is also nowhere near as passive or blank as he was in the first book. He has spent some time training as a swordsman, and his chosen one powers are starting to add up (even if he's scared that they will eventually make him crazy). Mat is still a bit of a turd, but he's still cursed, so that's to be expected. Perrin makes himself useful, further developing his latent talent to talk to wolves. Nynaeve and Egwene are both learning a lot, and having to deal with some interesting problems. Moraine and Lan get some more background and motivation. Many of the side characters are further developed. A handful of new characters seem to have some interesting stuff to do.
All of this would still feel rather unsatisfying, except that Jordan manages to bring everything together for a big climax towards the end of the book that is genuinely involving and even exciting. Don't get me wrong, it's still bloated and overlong, but there is an actual payoff at the end of this book that is encouraging. When I finished the first book, I wasn't upset or anything and I had enjoyed myself well enough, but I wasn't that interested in exploring more of the series. This book does indicate that such a thing might actually be possible, and so I'm thus marginally more inclined to pick up book 3 at some point. None of this would have changed the way I voted for the Hugos, of course, but it's still encouraging.
From what I understand, the series bogs down for a while in the middle books, but eventually all the pieces are assembled for the final battle, which sounds like it could be an interesting experience. I'm planning on reading a bunch of 2014 books and stories in preparation for next year's Hugo nomination season, but if I read two books a year... I should be finished sometime around 2020. Er, ok, so maybe not. Still, it's not entirely outside the realm of possibility, which is more than I could say after the first book, and you never know. After all, I already have all the books on my Kindle. Ah well, the Wheel turns...
Posted by Mark on September 07, 2014 at 02:16 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
It has been a few years since Reamde, so I've been getting a bit antsy of late. Neal Stephenson is my favorite author, and I've long since exhausted reading just about everything he's published. I'm always on the lookout for his latest, and I recently discovered this mysterious book called Seveneves. How very palindromic of him. The blurb, which originally showed up in some random upcoming books PDF, goes something like this:
When the moon blows up, the earth's atmosphere is predicted to go through changes that will eventually lead to a Hard Rain, a meteorite storm that could last for thousands of years, rendering the earth's surface uninhabitable. In preparation, the nations of the earth send an ark of humans to an International Space Station. But the Station isn't immune to the galactic catastrophe and many of its people are lost, mostly men. When stability is reached, only seven humans remain, all of them women. Jump forward thirty thousand years. Two peoples exist: those who survived on Earth, living rustic, primitive lives; and those who derived from the Seven Eves of the space station, affluent, sophisticated, organized sects looking to colonize the surface of earth. Stephenson's next novel is an epic potboiler, with political and military intrigue, and plenty to say about evolution, genetic engineering, and civilization as we know it.The PDF sez it's due "Winter 2015", but Amazon and Goodreads have it at 4/14/15. Clocking in at 1056 pages, it appears that Stephenson's ways have not changed much.
Now, it's unclear to me if this book is the first of a series that Stephenson hinted at in a BBC interview last September, or if this was an interim book. Based on the description, I think Seveneves will be different.
"They're historical novels that have a lot to do with scientific and technological themes and how those interact with the characters and civilisation during a particular span of history," he says of the new series, refusing to be specific about the exact period."Something like that", meaning 2015 I guess. Not that I'm complaining, as it looks like we'll be awash in new Stephenson at some point in the near future. In other news, Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future comes out on 9/9/14, and it features a bunch of stories inspired by Stephenson, in particular his desire to see more "positive" science fiction (as opposed to the dystopia or misery porn that seems to infect a lot of modern SF). It includes new stories by Stephenson, Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Elizabeth Bear, and Bruce Sterling (presumably amongst others). I will most certainly be reading it, and will hopefully be able to glean a few Hugo nominatables!
Posted by Mark on August 27, 2014 at 05:49 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Hugo Awards: The Results
The Hugo Award winners were announced late on Sunday, and since I've been following along, I naturally had some thoughts on the winners. Also of interest were the final ballot details, which had some interesting information for statistics wonks... I don't claim to be an expert in such matters, but I still found many details interesting. So without further ado, here are some assorted thoughts on the results:
This basically concludes the 2014 Hugo Awards posting. I will probably write up a quick review of the second Wheel of Time book at some point (I liked it better than the first book, but it's still a bit of a repetitive, bloated, repetitive mess), but otherwise, you should be free of Hugo posts until next year. Stay tuned, lots of other stuff coming, including another patented SLIFR quiz and the quickly approaching Six Weeks of Halloween Horror Movie Marathon...
Posted by Mark on August 20, 2014 at 07:44 PM .: Comments (2) | link :.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Hugo Awards: Miscellaneous Thoughts
Just a few thoughts that I've not crammed into the multitude of other Hugo Award posts I've been making of late.
Posted by Mark on July 30, 2014 at 09:20 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Hugo Awards: Final Ballot
We are coming down the homestretch; the voting deadline is July 31st, and I'm pretty much finished going through the categories I'm going to get to, so here's where things are shaking out:
Best Novel:
Predicted Winner: Ancillary Justice
Best Novella:
Predicted Winner: Six-Gun Snow White
Best Novelette:
Predicted Winner: "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"
Best Short Story:
Predicted Winner: The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: my comments for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.
Predicted Winner: Gravity
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:
Predicted Winner: "Doctor Who" The Day of the Doctor
Best Professional Artist: my comments for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.
Predicted Winner: No idea!
Best Fan Artist: my comments for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.
Predicted Winner: Sarah Webb
Best Fan Writer: my comments for more details. All nominees listed, no need to deploy No Award.
Predicted Winner: Abigail Nussbaum
And that covers all the categories I'll be voting for (there are several others that I just won't get to). All in all, it's been a fun year. I can't say as though I discovered anything that really blew me away, but I'm really happy with this whole experience (the annoyance caused by various controversies notwithstanding). Since my supporting membership qualifies me to vote on next year's awards as well, you can probably expect to see this whole rigmarole again next year. I know, I know, you're already looking forward to it. In the meantime, we'll probably have a couple more posts on general stuff about the Hugos, and I am really curious to see how the voting turns out (sometime in mid-August).
Posted by Mark on July 27, 2014 at 04:08 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Hugo Awards: The No Vote Categories
There sure are a lot of categories for the Hugo Awards (that's 17 categories, if I'm counting correctly). My main focus has been on the fiction awards, but I've obviously been making my way through a lot of the others. That being said, there are some I just won't get to, whether that's because I don't really care about the category or I just don't have the time to make my way through it. So don't expect to see much about these categories:
Posted by Mark on July 23, 2014 at 11:10 PM .: Comments (3) | link :.
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Hugo Awards: Warbound
Warbound is the third book in Larry Correia's Grimnoir Chronicles, and (finally) the one that was nominated for this year's best novel Hugo. Because I tend to take a completist view of this sort of thing, I read the first two novels in the series, Hard Magic and Spellbound, and generally enjoyed them. Correia has mashed up a number of genres - action, noir, fantasy, even a little steampunk, etc... - and made it work. This is no small feat, and I suspect many attempts at this sort of thing do not work anywhere near as well. And Correia is a telented storyteller as well. There are things set up in the first two books that pay off here, indicating a thoughtful approach. Plus, it's just fun. This is a quality that I suspect is lost on a lot of people, but not on me! Even though this particular genre mashup is not exactly in my wheelhouse, I appreciated the series as a whole.
So I basically knew what I was in for in this book, and it delivered on all the promises made by the first two installments. As an individual entry in the series, I'd say it's about on par with the rest of it (perhaps better than the second installment, but only because middle stories in a trilogy tend to be incomplete).
The story picks up right where Spellbound left off. Heavy Jake Sullivan is trying to mobilize a force to face the Pathfinder, a scout for the great Enemy that will devour the world if the Pathfinder is successful. Meanwhile, Faye Vierra is coming to terms with being the spellbound and must seek out help to ensure that she is not corrupted by the power that "curse" has granted her. When Sullivan and Faye find out that the Pathfinder has been more successful than it seemed, the planet is about to be plunged into a great battle against the Enemy. You might even say that Earth was warbound. Heh.
The plot is a bit broken up here, with Faye's story almost completely isolated from Sullivan's, and with some prominent characters from the first two books making an appearance, but otherwise sidelined for most of the book. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's another indication of how loose the series has been. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, and it's clearly not as bloated or flabby as something like The Wheel of Time books that I've read so far, but I do find myself thinking that these books could stand to be a bit shorter.
As per usual, Sullivan and Faye take the brunt of character work, and they're both likable protagonists. Toru is also the type of character that grew on me as time went on. As always, there's a colorful cast of supporting characters, including some new faces (I was a fan of Wells, the alienist - a slightly less creepy version of Hannibal Lecter).
As I mentioned in the previous two reviews, one of my problems with stories about magic is how overpowered the magic becomes as the story progresses. The stakes are continually rising, and because it's magic, it's tempting to just keep making the magic more powerful. For the most part, Correia has pulled it off in this series. In part, this is because he set up some very clear rules, and used logical extensions of those rules to find new powers. By the end of this book, things were getting a bit too overpowered, but then, this is also the last book, so I think some leeway is required. I'm pretty impressed that Correia was able to balance everything out this well.
I guess this is a spoiler, but not really - Faye saves the world (as she did in the first two books), but on a larger scale. Faye is basically the main protagonist, and she's a bit terrifying. This is partly because she is so powerful, but also because she seemingly kills hundreds if not thousands of people throughout the series, but feels not a single pang of guilt towards it. For that matter, Sullivan and the rest of the Grimnoir are similar in that way, so perhaps that's a Correia thing. But in this book, there is at least an acknowledgement that such wanton bloodlust will lead to disaster. Faye is the spellbound, which means that she can absorb the power of magical actives when they die. This is why she is so powerful. But such power can also corrupt, and the previous spellbound became consumed by his quest for power and became a mindless killing machine (basically driving this alternate history's version of WWI) Faye spends a good portion of the novel trying to come to terms with the fact that she could easily be corrupted in that way, and she catches herself thinking things that would lead down that path. I was glad to see this tacit acknowledgement that all this death and destruction wasn't really a desirable thing, even if Correia seems to revel in the violence and action of it all.
And finally, a word on the audiobooks. Even though Baen very thoughtfully included all three novels in the Hugo Voter's Packet, I listened to the audiobook for all of them. As it turns out, the book is read by Bronson Pinchot. Yes, that Bronson Pinchot. And he's really fantastic (supposedly, these books have won him awards), seemingly able to handle a multitude of accents and vocal registers (given the worldwide scope of these stories, there are a lot of foreign accents required). From Audible, it seems he has 144 titles available, which is a pretty impressive body of work.
This wraps up all of the fiction awards that I'm voting for. My ballot for best novel is basically as predicted, with this one falling right smack in the middle, behind Neptune's Brood and Ancillary Justice, but ahead of Parasite (that ending has really curdled in my mind as time goes on) and The Wheel of Time. In the end, I probably wouldn't have read all three of these books if left to my druthers, but I have had no real issue with them either. They're a ton of fun, and I may even be tempted to check out some of Correia's Monster Hunter books if I get in the mood for something like that.
Obligatory note of all the controversy surrounding the nomination of this book. I've already (briefly) discussed it elsewhere, but I tended to concentrate more on reading all the nominees. Now that I've read all of Correia's "Sad Puppy" slate of nominees, I'd say it was a pretty mixed bag in terms of quality. Then again, so were a lot of the nominees overall, but that's just the way of populist awards. I appreciate reading some things outside of my comfort zone, and this was a good way to accomplish that. I get the consternation around this, but I was ultimately pretty happy with this whole experience.
From your perspective, only a few more Hugo posts to go. I am reading The Great Hunt (the second book in the Wheel of Time series), so I'll probably review that when I finish (short story here is that I like this better than the first book, but it's still ridiculous that this series got nominated as a whole. I'm reading this book because Tor very thoughtfully included the entire damn thing in the voter's packet. But according to my kindle, I have about 266 more hours of reading to go before I finish the series, which ain't going to happen by the end of the month). There are definitely some awards that I won't be voting for (how am I supposed to vote for Editors?), and I have some other assorted thoughts about the whole process as well. I'll post my final ballot when I get the chance as well. Then I'll have to find something else to write about, because I'm sure my readers (all three of you!) are getting pretty sick of this Hugo stuff.
Posted by Mark on July 20, 2014 at 07:50 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, July 16, 2014
Hugo Awards: Best Artists
The are two awards for artists in the hugos, one for Pro Artist and one for Fan Artist. The line between these two categories seems to be blurring every day, with some publishers trolling the likes of DeviantArt to get their book covers and whatnot, but there are two categories, and so here we are. The voter's packet comes with sample works for most of the Pro Artists and only a few of the Fan Artists. This is a little strange, as I'm not sure how much to weight the packet works. In general, I tried to base my decisions on what was included in the packet, though I also tried to check out their websites.
For Pro Artist, 5 out of 6 nominees included stuff in the packet, so I'm mostly basing my decisions on that, though I did look at each website as well.
Posted by Mark on July 16, 2014 at 08:40 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, July 13, 2014
Hugo Awards: Best Dramatic Presentations (Long Form and Doctor Who-Form)
So now we're getting into some of the more obscure awards categories, and these seem to be a true outlier, as they cover forms that are well covered outside the Hugos. There are some who don't see the point in these categories because of that, but given how little respect genre filmmaking tends to get, I'm not as gloomy. I love movies, so Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form tends to be a pretty easy one for me. Of course, the issue I have with the category this year is that my preferred #1 pick (Upstream Color) was not nominated (another reason I should have nominated this year)... In any case, here's my tentative ballot. In all honesty, once you get past #1, I could probably swap a lot around depending on how I feel at the time, but this is where I'm at for now:
And now we come to the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, which is also basically known as the "Best Doctor Who episode of the year" award. Year in, year out, this award is dominated by Doctor Who episodes. They usually comprise 3-4 of the nominees, and one of those has won the award 6 out of 8 times. There are 6 nominees this year, and 4 are Doctor Who related (though two of those are more meta-Doctor Who stories than actual Doctor Who episodes). I also fully expect one of these episodes to win.
As someone on the relative outskirts of Doctor Who fandom, this was not a terribly exciting category. I definitely remember watching old-school Doctor Who on PBS when I was a youngin, but the only real episode that I remember was a Tom Baker one called State of Decay, and honestly, I haven't seen it in over 20 years. I have been very slowly working my way through the modern-era series (currently on Season 3), and I am seeing distinct improvements as time goes on (season 1 was a real slog though). So I think I generally had enough context to watch these episodes, even if there were some bits that I was clearly not getting... That being said, here's my tentative ballot:
Posted by Mark on July 13, 2014 at 12:07 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
Hugo Awards: Best Fan Writer
This is a category about writers who publish non-professional work. This can appear in appear in a number of venues, but all of this year's nominees are actually bloggers (there is some consternation about some of these non-fiction categories, as they seem to maintain a lot of legacy publications, like "zines", which have generally moved onto the web these days. Not being that familiar with the history here, I'll refrain from commenting further, except to say that it seems like some reform might be wise at this point). The writer in question may actually be a professional, but the publication cannot be so. For example, John Scalzi (winner of last year's Hugo for Best Novel) won this award a few years ago for his blog.
Other than that, the criteria here is a bit on the vague side. From my perspective, the name of the award indicates that the author should be a fan of something. And since this is about Science Fiction and Fantasy, that fandom should probably relate to works in those fields. This does not preclude them from writing about other things, or from a particular perspective, but one of the things I found this category is that many authors are preoccupied with a single topic that has little to do with actual Science Fiction.
Of course, this notion of reviewing authors who review SF does feel a bit awkward. I am nominally a part of this field, though I'm nowhere near as talented as these authors. But then, I'm not a particularly good fiction author either, and I've got enough hubris to think my opinion matters there, so what the hey? Let's get to it. My ranking as it stands now:
Posted by Mark on July 09, 2014 at 11:42 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, July 06, 2014
Hugo Awards: Novellas
Another category that is dedicated to stories that are not long enough to be considered a "Novel", nor short enough to be a "Short Story" (or, as we must apparently consider in SF, a "Novelette"). As such, these tend to be quick reads, somewhere on the order of 2 hours each (give or take). This year's slate is an odd one. I find myself waffling on how I should rank my votes. This is also a category that makes me wish I submitted a nomination ballot, as I'd really love to be voting for Ian Sales' excellent novella The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, which would be near the top (if not the top) of my ballot. Alas, it was not to be. Here's where I'm at right now, though some of the middle votes may swap around a bit.
Posted by Mark on July 06, 2014 at 07:37 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, July 02, 2014
Link Dump: Hugo Award Fellow Travelers
It turns out that I'm not the only one playing along with this year's Hugo Awards, and since I know none of you are sick of the subject (right? RIGHT!?), I figured you'd want to see what other people think. Where possible, I'm linking to a relevant category on their blog, because some of these folks are prolific and write about many other things...
Update: It seems that CiaraCat had already undertaken to find blogs covering 2014 Hugos, and so I've added a few links to the above (I think our lists are now aligned somewhat)...
Again Update: Moar additions! Thanks to Reading SFF for three of them, and I found another that seems to have ambitious plans, but has not posted much yet...
Posted by Mark on July 02, 2014 at 11:30 PM .: Comments (4) | link :.
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Hugo Awards: Spellbound
Spellbound is the second book in Larry Correia's Grimnoir Chronicles. The third books, Warbound, is nominated for this year's Hugo ballot, so being the completist that I am, I figured I should read these first two books. I enjoyed the first book, Hard Magic, enough that I'm not finding this to be a chore, though I have to admit that I probably wouldn't have been inspired to proceed through these sequels if it weren't for the third one being nominated this year.
After an introduction set at the close of WWI, this book picks up where Hard Magic left off, with the Japanese Imperium having suffered a defeat at the hands of newfound Grimnoir knight Sally Faye Vierra, with assists from Jake Sullivan, and a diverse crew of magical "actives." The American government, led by FDR, is trying to align around how to handle actives, possibly leading to registration and reeducation camps and other such dystopian nightmares (which, as established in the previous book, is how the Soviets and Japanese Imperium are handling the Actives). A sudden uptick in terrorist attacks seems to be driving this strategy, and the Grimnoir are being set up. Even more troubling is that Okubo Tokugawa - the fearsome chairman of the Imperium who was thought dead after the Grimnoir victory at the end of Hard Magic - appears to be alive and well. Oh, and the alien being that everyone derives their magical powers from? It has an Enemy, and the Enemy's scout, called the Pathfinder, is on its way.
So there's a lot going on in this book, and it very much reads as a sorta middle part of a trilogy to me. Hard Magic set up the world and the magic system, but basically told a self-contained story. This book introduces several elements that are unresolved at the end of the book, though it doesn't quite end on a cliffhanger either. Again, this seems to be a common thread amongst trilogies, so who knows where it's going from here. In that way, the plot is a bit more flabby than it was in Hard Magic (which wasn't exactly tight either), but I'm also reasonably confident that Correia will manage to tie things together in the third book.
As I mentioned in my review of Hard Magic, one of the challenges that any book with magic faces is this sort of escalation of power that is needed to continually up the stakes in the story. This worked well enough in Hard Magic, but it did get a bit excessive towards the end of that book. As such, I was a little worried that this book would just keep escalating, but Correia has shown an admirable restraint. What's more, he even manages to explain how and why the escalation of power happened in the first book, and he does so in a way that is natural and satisfying. It's clear that Correia had thought all this through and let that guide the first book without actually explicitly laying out why, for example, Faye has seemingly endless reserves of power. Indeed, after her heroics at the end of Hard Magic, she spends a good portion of this book significantly weaker in power.
I didn't spend any time going over details of the magical system in the previous review, but it's worth discussion a bit here because it does naturally lend itself to the story. Each Active has the ability to pull magical power from an alien being, but they are generally limited to a single ability. So Jake Sullivan has the power to manipulate gravity (increasing, decreasing, or shifting the direction of gravity) and he's referred to as a "Heavy." Faye is a Traveler, and she has the ability to teleport herself and others (she also has the ability to map out the world in her head, so she can avoid teleporting into other objects, etc...) There are Healers, Cogs (who have supernatural intelligence), Brutes (guess!), Voices (they can do Jedi mind trick manipulations), and so on. The Power seems to be in another plane of existence, and its comprised of all sorts of fancy geometric shapes. If you can see the Power, as some folks can (like Sullivan or Chairman Tokugawa), you can copy some of those geometric shapes and leverage the magic those areas represent. These shapes are kinda like spells, and if you carve them onto yourself, you can gain new powers (for example, many have Healing spells on their body). Of course, it's a painful process and one person can only take so many spells...
So this is all well thought out and reasonably well balanced. There are still some situations where the magical powers escalate, but Correia is pretty good at keeping it all grounded and reasonably well balanced. There are powerful villains, and you will fear for our protagonists, but Correia is able to come up with solutions that are reasonably satisfying.
The expansion of story threads has also lead to an expansion of characters. We still have our core Grimnoir Knights from the first book, lead by Sullivan and Faye, but we also get another cell of Grimnoir, some more of the Grimnoir elders, a whole group of villains at the OCI (a government organization that is being set up to take control of U.S. actives), a woman named Hammer (sorta freelance), and even an Iron Guard from the Imperium. For the most part, I was very happy to return to the characters from the first book, and that's usually a good sign. The structure of the magical powers sorta lends itself to a large ensemble, kinda like the X-Men, so it's good to know and like many of these characters.
Ultimately, this was a fine sequel, even if it felt like it was setting up a lot of things that wouldn't be resolved in this book. Correia can spin a good yarn, but I'm find it to be a little too loose. This is probably a matter of preference, and I'm sure there are many who love these characters so much that they want to spend as much time as possible hanging out with them, but I find that these books don't necessarily need to be as long as they are. So what we have here is a well executed sequel, and I am looking forward to seeing how some of these threads are resolved in Warbound, which I am starting this week. Given what I've read so far, I can't really see Warbound taking one of my top two votes, but it's got a pretty darn good chance at snagging that #3 slot in my Best Novel ballot.
In other news, I've knocked down 3 out of 5 Novellas and am hoping to finish that category off this week. After that, I've got to finish Warbound, and then I'm done with the fiction categories. I'm looking at a few of the other categories (Dramatic Presentation, Fan Writer, Zines, etc...) though there are definitely a few categories I don't think I'll be voting on (how does one vote for the "Editor" categories?) So yeah, I hope you're enjoying these Hugo posts, because we've got several more to go!
(Oh, I almost forgot: Obligatory note of all the controversy surrounding the nomination of Correia's book. I've already (briefly) discussed it elsewhere, but for now I'm concentrated on actually reading the books and stuff. I may get around to doing something in more detail about it, but then, I may not, because who cares about that sorta Inside Baseball crap when I could be reading about how Faye is going to kick the crap out of this Enemy Pathfinder thing we keep hearing about?)
Posted by Mark on June 29, 2014 at 08:16 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Hugo Awards: The No Award Conundrum
Since I know you're all curious about the voting system for the Hugo Awards, I thought I'd spend some time babbling about it, just for your edification. Believe it or not, voting systems have a lot of interesting pitfalls, not the least of which is that there isn't a particularly great solution to discerning the preference of a large community of individuals. Every system has its flaws, even something as simple as Plurality voting (i.e. the choice with the most votes wins).
Fortunately for you, I'm not going to babble on about this too much (and you don't want to get me started on the Electoral College, our misunderstood friend), I'll just note that the Hugo Awards uses an Instant Runoff System. In other words, I don't just vote for my favorite novel, I rank all the nominated novels in order of my personal preference. When it comes time to vote, unless there is a clear majority favorite, most winners can't win based solely on the voters who ranked the winner #1. There is an additional wrinkle in that there is an option available in every category called "No Award", which means that you think that no one should be awarded for that category (or that the category should be abolished). There are some finer points to the voting process, and this has already been discussed to death in other venues so I won't belabor the point.
Add in a particularly controversial ballot this year, and I think the voting process is going to play a particularly big role, especially when it comes to the Best Novel ballot. When the awards were announced this year and the entire The Wheel of Time series was nominated for Best Novel, there were a number of people who seemed to think that it was a shoe in to win the award. Given the Hugo Award's populist nature and just how popular The Wheel of Time series is (despite it's length, it's got more readers by at least an order of magnitude), that's probably a fair supposition... except that I think Instant Runoff Voting will squash any hopes that it will win.
While I assume the dedicated fans of the series would vote for it in the #1 position, I suspect few will rank it at #2 or below... and many have already expressed the notion of voting for it below No Award (or, as the link above notes, not include it on the ballot at all). Some will do this because they actually hate the books, but many will be doing this as a sorta protest of the obscure rule that allows multiple books to be nominated as one.
Personally, while I recognize the need for the No Award option (and the ability to leave options off the ballot), I'm also hesitant to deploy it except in extreme circumstances. The No Award option makes me a little uncomfortable. I mean, I am voting, so I'm obviously considering my opinion to be worthwhile, but on the other hand, the No Award option feels sorta petty, except in extreme circumstances. I'm even a little on the fence about the Wheel of Time situation, though I think I'm leaning towards ranking No Award above it because it is ridiculous to nominate a 14 book, 11,000 page, 4.4 million word work for a best novel award. The only other situation I'd consider deploying No Award is when a nominee is not at all Science Fiction or Fantasy. Given the fuzzy nature of genres, it would also have to be an extreme case, but in this year's Novella category, we have a great example: I'm sorry Wakula Springs, but there is nothing even remotely science fiction or fantasy about this story (except insofar as all fiction is a fantasy, I guess). We could quibble about a couple lines in the story, but this is ultimately historical fiction or maybe literary fiction. It's a fine story, but I have no idea what it's doing on the Hugo ballot, except that it was published by Tor (a genre imprint).
So there you have it. I'm still pondering, and obviously I'm not done reading all the stuff, so maybe I'll turn around on the No Award option in some other categories. I'll be sure to post my final ballot once I submit it (probably towards the end of July, which is when the deadline is...)
Posted by Mark on June 25, 2014 at 09:10 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, June 22, 2014
Hugo Awards: Novelettes
As far as I can tell, Science Fiction is the only genre that continues to use Novelettes as a category. For the uninitiated, the Hugo Awards defines a Short Story as less than 7,500 words. A Novelette is between 7,500 words and 17,500 words. A novella is between 17,500 and 40,000 words, and a novel is more than 40,000 words. Everyone else says there are short stories and Novels, with the Novella being anything inbetween (and many awards only feature short fiction and novels, with no space for novellas). Science Fiction, on the other hand, clings to the Novelette. Legend has it that this is a legacy of SF's pulpy magazine roots, where different sized works had different pay scales, which I guess makes sense, but it's otherwise a pretty pointless distinction. That being said, I was much more happy with this year's slate of Novelettes than I was with the Short Stories... There were 5 nominees, and it only took a couple hours to read all of them (on average, somewhere between 30-60 minutes per story), and if you're looking for some quality short fiction, this is a decent place to start. My rankings for the Hugo Voting.
I just finished the second Grimnoir book and am starting on the third (i.e. the actual nominee) this week. I've also started the Novella slate, and should be finishing that off soon enough. If I have time, I will try to tackle the second Wheel of Time book as well. The voting deadline for the Hugos is the end of July, so you will only have to deal with these Hugo posts for about another month or so...
Posted by Mark on June 22, 2014 at 01:37 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Hugo Awards: Short Stories
I have never been a huge fan of short stories. I think the biggest part of that is that I tend to read them in collections of short fiction, which tend to be, by their very nature, uneven. Like anthology films, it's hard for me to take in a bunch of short stories at once, and I usually find myself exhausted by the inconsistency. There are some exceptions, I guess. I've always been a fan of I, Robot, but those stories have a consistent style and throughline that is usually missing in short fiction. I have a fondness for Clive Barker's Books of Blood series of horrific short stories and they are some of the most imaginative writing around, but even those tend to be very uneven (and I suspect many would more readily be classified as a Novelette or Novella). Of course most short fiction is published in magazines (or websites these days) first, and are never meant to be collected together, but I still tend to struggle with them.
I have read occasional short stories here and there on the interwebs, but I've rarely strayed from known authors... which is odd, because you'd think that short stories would be a good way to experiment and try new things without making too much of a commitment to any one story. And while I've struggled with short stories in the past, I've also been getting a little tired of stories that are much longer than they need to be, so maybe it's time for a sea change. So it's a good thing there are a bunch of short fiction categories in the Hugo awards, eh? Well, if the Short Story slate is any indication... I'm not going to get back into short stories after all. This is not a statement of quality, just of my personal taste - these are all well written stories, they're just depressing as all get out, none seem to have much of a plot, and none of them really scratch my speculative fiction itch (indeed, most of them would probably fit more under Fantasy than SF, but even amongst Fantasy, these are a challenging bunch). That being said, I read them all, and will rank them as best I can. There are only 4 nominees (the Hugo rules say that a work cannot be nominated unless it has at least 5% of the votes, and the short story ballot tends to be the most contentious - last year there were only 3 nominees!) and they are all available for free online, but like I said, these weren't really my cup of tea.
Posted by Mark on June 15, 2014 at 08:03 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, June 08, 2014
Hugo Awards: Hard Magic
One of the challenges of an award like the Hugo is how to handle sequels. One of the nominees this year is Warbound, by Larry Correia... but it's the third in a series of books. Do I need to read the first two books in the series in order to give the third a fair shake, or are all bets off when an individual entry gets nominated? Being something of a completist when it comes to questions like this, I decided to start from the beginning. As luck would have it, Hard Magic (the first book in the series) is a fine book, and I've already begun the second book too. It does seem like these books are relatively self-contained though, which is good (I'm still glad I started from the beginning, but I'm guessing you wouldn't have to...)
This series, called the Grimnoir Chronicles, takes place in an alternate history version of the 1930s. It's a universe where magic started appearing in the mid-nineteenth century, and has slowly but surely become more common. Many differing attitudes about "actives" (folks with magical power) exist, from the Japanese Imperium (who kidnap active children and train them in scary "schools") to the German war machine (who leveraged an active to raise zombie armies) to the Americans, who seem to sway back and forth in their democratic ways (this seems to be something that will be tackled in later books, but is introduced here). Jake Sullivan is an active, a war hero and ex-con working for the government. He quickly runs afoul of a secret society called the Grimnoir, actives who seek to ensure that magical powers are used only for good (or something like that), and a plot by the Imperium to assemble a super-science doomsday weapon. Will Sullivan and his plucky allies fend off the dreaded Imperium?
This books is attempting an interesting balancing act, mashing up many different sub-genres, including urban fantasy, pulpy noir, gritty action, and even a bit of steampunk for flair (really just a bunch of dirigibles, but hey, that's steampunky, right?) For the most part, Correia makes this mixture work, which is impressive - this combination of elements was far from a sure thing, but he manages. The only thing I was hoping for that I didn't get much of is some fantastic noir turns of phrase, but then, it's hard to hold something like this up to the standards set by folks like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler (but then, the setting does sorta beg the comparison).
One of the things I find frustrating with fantasy stories is the way magic is handled. All too often, the magic is described in such vague ways and with few limits, leading to an escalation of powers that can get tedious and strain credibility. Correia manages to design a system with some limits and logical extensions, and he does treat the subject consistently, but there is still that escalation of magical powers that gets difficult to swallow. It never gets too ridiculous, and the limitations of the system are clear and well balanced, but it's still magic, so it can also, at times, get to be a bit much. I do wonder how well Correia will be able to swing this in future books, though I guess I'll find out soon enough.
The characters are, for the most part, a compelling bunch. Sullivan makes for a good hero, a huge physical presence who is nevertheless deceptively clever, we discover much about the magical system through his eyes. His gang of allies also has some bright spots, in particular Faye, a young teleporter who has seemingly endless reserves of magical power and a fast thinking mind. This being alternate history, we're also treated to some historical figures like General John "Black Jack" Pershing and John Browning (this works, but I'll also say that Neal Stephenson did it better in Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle). As villains go, the Chairman of the Imperium is imposing and while his powers are seemingly infinite (there's that escalation of magical power I was talking about), Correia comes up with a believable way to "defeat" him (spoiler, I guess!) Sullivan's brother Madi is also a formidable foe (and again, we get some escalation of powers to make him so).
What you end up with is a well executed mashup that is a very fun read. Correia can spin a good yarn, and while I will say that this isn't something I'd have sought out on my own, I'm glad I read it and will have no problem getting through the next two books. I found this one a tad on the long side, but again, I had no major problems getting through it, and it was a lot of fun. Since this isn't actually one of the nominees this year, I shouldn't really be ranking it, but it feels like something that would come in towards the middle of the pack. Assuming there's not a drastic uptick in quality or something in the nominated work, I can't see it unseating my top two votes (which remain Ancillary Justice or Neptune's Brood). Again, this is blatant speculation, but I could see Warbound coming in third (ahead of Parasite and The Wheel of Time). I'm currently reading Spellbound (the second book in this series) and have started reading the other fiction categories (look for a recap of the short story ballot next week).
(Incidentally, I've left out all the controversy surrounding the nomination of Correia's book. I've already discussed it elsewhere, and will probably bring it up again at some point, but for now, I'm concentrated on actually reading the books...)
Posted by Mark on June 08, 2014 at 08:43 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, June 01, 2014
Hugo Awards: Parasite
One of the complaints frequently leveled against the Hugo awards is that the same folks tend to get nominated every year. This makes a certain sort of sense, since the Hugo is a populist award, and a lot of authors tend to put out novels at a roughly once-a-year pace. There is a bit of truth to this, but on the other hand, there are folks who seem to break into this process fairly often. Mira Grant (a pen name of Seanan McGuire) has somewhat recently established herself as an annual resident on the Best Novel ballot, securing nominations for each of the last 4 years (not to mention several nominations in other categories, like novella or novelette, etc...) Alas, the Mira Grant style seems to encompass a zombie sub-genre, with 3 of the last 4 nominations being part of one series of zombie books. This novel, Parasite, is the first in a new series, and while it starts out as a sort a medical thriller, it is basically a zombie story as well.
The story takes place in the near future, about a decade out from now, when genetically modified tapeworms have become a sorta universal healthcare solution. Like any good capitalist solution, there's a planned obsolescence and replacement regime, but the tapeworm also provides a very reliable means of regulating the human body, even going so far as to administer various medications at the appropriate intervals, and other such conveniences. Our protagonist, Sally "Sal" Mitchell, was in a car accident and while initially thought to be brain-dead, she manages to come back with the help of her "Intestinal Bodyguard" (the innocuous name Symbogen has given to this seemingly helpful tapeworm). She has no memory before the accident, and has to relearn basic social skills and knowledge, living a life of a lab rat mixed with socially awkward teen (as the story opens, she's basically 6 years old, though she has the body of an early twenties woman). Of course, all is not what it seems, and we quickly see a series of sleepwalkers that are becoming more and more violent (and frequent) over time.
For the most part, I can see why these Mira Grant novels are so popular. I am pretty emphatically not a zombie story fan, but this novel worked well enough for me. It helps that there is a rational scientific explanation for the zombification process, but on the other hand, many of the supposed revelations in this novel are not all that surprising. I hate to be that guy, you know the one, who claims they predicted the final twist early on in the novel, but this isn't a claim of superiority. I suspect most, if not all, readers would come to the same conclusions much sooner than our hapless protagonists. The ending, in particular, is unsatisfying, settling on a cheap reveal (which, again, is entirely predictable) and sequel setup, rather than an actual resolution. I would assume that Mira Grant's fans are eating this stuff up and eagerly awaiting the next book in the series, but as an awards nominee, it feels rather incomplete.
It is certainly a page turner, which is an accomplishment in itself. The characters are, for the most part, personable and relatable. Sal is a fine protagonist, though because we get the grand majority of the story from her perspective, we perhaps get a bit too much in the way of uncertainty and anxiety. Add in the predictable plot twists (which Sal somehow does not see coming), and you've got a character who is sympathetic, but not all that bright. Her family has some typical hesitations when it comes to her condition, but for the most part, they're fine (until they take a harsh turn later in the book, where Grant relies on miscommunication as a plot device, which always frustrates me). Sal also has pretty much the greatest boyfriend in the history of the planet, fictional or non-fictional. He shows some frustration from time to time, but even those instances are somewhat restrained. Other side character range from the very colorful (the sprightly Tansy) to obviously devious (CEO Dr. Banks).
In the end, this takes the form of a slick medical thriller, with some SF tropes sprinkled in for fun. Again, I Can see why this sort of thing is popular with the Hugo voters, and it is a very easy going read. On the other hand, it is a bit predictable and its ending leaves a bit to be desired. There's a forthcoming volume that is supposed to finish off the story, but I find it hard to judge this book in that it's so clearly not finished. Given recent history, I guess we can expect the next book to be nominated as well, but for now, this is not a book that will unseat Ancillary Justice or Neptune's Brood from the top of my Best Novel voting.
Posted by Mark on June 01, 2014 at 06:55 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Hugo Awards: Neptune's Brood
I didn't need to get very far into the Hugo-nominated Neptune's Brood to come to an initial conclusion that author Charles Stross doesn't like money very much (and the same goes for its corollaries, debt and capitalism). I'm only really calling this out because much has been made during this Hugo season about how SF should or shouldn't be political, how some authors stress ideology over storytelling, and the like. Personally, I think it a little foolish to prescribe what a piece of fiction can and can't do, and this book is probably a good example. I do not take anywhere near the dim view of money, debt, or capitalism that Charlie Stross apparently does, and yet I greatly enjoyed this book. Why? Because Stross thoroughly explored the universe he created, and any questions you might have about the economic conundrums that he devises are answered, and he did it while telling a fun space opera story. Indeed, the ideas of this book come off to me as a grand thought experiment on the expense of interstellar travel, and the various realities any such endeavor would face.
Thousands of years in the future, humanity has gone extinct (multiple times). It turns out that the human body, while well adapted to survive on earth, is not very well adapted for space travel. But our story follows beings that are so closely patterned after humans that they have maintained much of our social and cultural norms, as well as the physical form factors (though those are often adapted to their environments as well, as we see in the course of this story). Reproduction seems much simpler, with children being "instantiated" rather than born, among other such terminology derived from software and hardware, but on the other hand, messy human characteristics like emotions and love still seem to exist. These are post-humans, but ones that are easy to relate to.
Krina Alizond is a "forensic accountant" who has embarked on a decades long study pilgrimage to visit and work with several of her colleagues. As the book opens, she has just found out that one of her colleagues, a distant sib named Ana, has disappeared in mysterious circumstances. It doesn't take long for Krina to get entangled in a similar web as she seeks out her sister and gradually finds out that the subject of their study, various interstellar debt scams, has become somewhat more complicated in that they've stumbled upon the biggest financial scam in the history of the universe. Along for the ride are a small crew of down-on-their-luck religious folk (though their religion appears to surround bringing back "fragile" human beings), a look-alike assassin hot on Krina's tale, privateers chasing Krina's sister's life-insurance policy, and a group of squid-like communists.
The story generally takes the form of a roller-coaster space opera, with occasional interludes of exposition and info-dumping. It's mostly written from the first perspective of Krina, and you could argue that this is a rather clunky way of delivering a lot of exposition, but on the other hand, I rather thought those chapters were among the most interesting in the book.
Much of the detail surrounds the nature of metahumanity's expansion to the stars, how expensive that proposition is, and how that expense is structured. A lot of this falls back on physical realities like the speed of light, and how it takes centuries to reach new star systems and so on and so forth. It turns out that using something as malleable and fragile as "cash" in that context is rather foolish. Stross takes the unglamorous nature of space travel and expansion and combines it with economics, devising a clever ponzi scheme of debt based on something called "Slow Money":
Slow money is a medium of exchange designed to outlast the rise and fall of civilizations. It is the currency of world-builders, running on an engine of debt that can only be repaid by the formation of new interstellar colonies, passing the liability ever onward into the deep future ...For all its benefits, Slow Money does seem to have a lot of structural difficulties. Krina, being a forensic accountant, has studied all sorts of scams and just plain failures (where, for example, one of the three involved parties dies to soon or other such similarities). Her job is often to swoop in and grab unclaimed slow money that has been sitting around for centuries. There's even a fantastic riff on the usual hand-wavey FTL mumbo-jumbo that always shows up in Space Operas. Here, Stross has adapted the Spanish Prisoner scheme to work on an interstellar scale. If FTL travel was invented, it would suddenly make it possible to trade fast money across interstellar distances, thus depreciating all of the slow money out there (and slow money is what the rich and powerful trade in, so you can see why they would want to preserve the status quo). It's impossible to travel faster than light, but that doesn't stop con artists from attempting to defraud folks (only now it's happening across the vast distances of interstellar space).
I won't obsess over all the nooks and crannies of these shenanigans, except to say that I really enjoyed the way Stross was able to structure all of this and build his plot around it. I also enjoyed the way that Stross was able to adhere to known physics of the universe and pull interesting story aspects out of that, rather than just hand waving his way around the science the way a lot of space operas would. One example of that is the concept of Slow Money, but we also touch on things like interstellar warfare ("It is a well-understood truism that interstellar warfare is impossible") and some impressive underwater conceptualization.
From what I've read of the Best Novel ballot thus far, this seems to be vying for my number one vote (along with Ancillary Justice). I have not finished Mira Grant's Parasite and have only just begun Larry Correia's Grimnoir Chronicles, but from what I've read so far, I don't see them overtaking Neptune's Brood or Ancillary Justice.
As for the politics of the story, there were maybe one or two paragraphs in the book where it felt like Stross was simply lecturing for ideology's sake, but even those were generally part of the story he was trying to tell here. If I felt obliged to not read anything I thought I might disagree with (or to denounce such things), I'd find myself reading very little (or enjoying even less of what I read). While an author's politics will no doubt color their work, some authors are more difficult to figure out than others. Stross seems pretty easy to read. While I tended to think of his story as a grand thought experiment, there are definitely times (the aforementioned "lecturing" graphs) when I caught a whiff of something more politically motivated. Other authors may be more difficult to suss out, but even a cursory glance at Charlie's Diary indicates that yes, Charlie and I would probably disagree about a lot of things when it comes to economics. And you know what? That's awesome! No one has all the answers, and the idea that we all thought the same things and didn't question anything would be far more terrifying than the fact that Charlie and I might disagree about something (which is not, in any way, terrifying to me).
This might seem obvious, but the amount of vitriol expended over this year's ballot (from both the right and left) seems rather misplaced. When people talk about politics ruining SF, I don't think they're talking about the fact that, for example, Stross's book takes a dim view of capitalism. They're talking about the way we discuss those views, and the fact that some folks are attempting to game the nominations process (and others, seeing this, are attempting to counter by blanket voting against certain authors and works, etc... without even reading those books). Me, I don't want to politicize my every action, I don't want to let politics determine my every move, and I don't want to do an exhaustive biography of every author I could potentially read to see if their views align with mine. Not only is that unnecessary, it's unhealthy. It's a good thing to have your core, foundational beliefs challenged from time to time. It can be infuriating, but it is often productive. There are extreme cases, times when it becomes impossible to separate the art from the artist (hello Vox Day), but I would argue that those should be rare exceptions. Otherwise, I would have stopped reading this book and missed out on what may be my favorite nominee. I used to think this was an obvious truism, but apparently it's not: it's possible to enjoy or like a book without agreeing with it (or without liking the author as a person, not that we ever really get to know the author). I'm really happy that I read this book, and I'm going to be facing a difficult decision when it comes to voting time...
Posted by Mark on May 25, 2014 at 07:41 PM .: Comments (2) | link :.
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Hugo Awards: The Eye of the World
When I was but a wee nerd of 11 or 12, I had a brief dalliance with Dungeons & Dragons. For whatever reason, I found the High Fantasy stuff fascinating and gobbled up game manuals and started reading The Lord of the Rings. This was before my love of reading really kicked into high gear too, so it was notable that I was reading this stuff on my own. And it wasn't the first time, either. I have fond memories of reading Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books for school, and even wrote a knockoff short story on my Commodore 64 called The Land of Analak (I'm pretty sure I still have a hard copy of this somewhere; I'm also positive that it was terrible.) All of which is to say, I don't know when or even why I fell out of love with High Fantasy, but at some point, Horror and Science Fiction became my reading mainstays, with only the rare Fantasy novel for variety.
As such, if I had picked up the first book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, The Eye of the World, when it was published in 1990 (i.e. right around the height of my exploration of fantasy), I would have probably loved it. Instead, here I am 24 years later, slogging through it because the entirety of The Wheel of Time was nominated for a Best Novel Hugo Award. I've already covered how a 14 book, 11,000+ page, 4 million+ word series of books came to be nominated as a single work (short story: a quirk in Hugo nomination rules says that if no individual work in a series is nominated, the entire series can be nominated once it concludes), so I won't belabor the controversy all that much. Ultimately, it wouldn't even really matter if only the most recent work was nominated, as it would probably be difficult to read without knowing what happened in all the earlier installments.
After finishing this first volume in the series, I will say that there's no way that I will finish the series this year (it's simply too long) and I'm positive that it will not land in the top two slots of my Best Novel ballot. It's not that The Eye of the World (henceforth TEotW) is bad, per say, just that it did not reinvigorate my decades past love of the Fantasy genre. You might think that a bit unfair, but I will say that some recent consumption actually has sparked some interest in exploring more of the genre, notably Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion novels and the Game of Thrones TV series, both of which really grabbed me in ways that TEotW failed to.
In a lot of ways, this book was exactly what I was expecting. Heroes journey, complete with naive farmboy? Check. Mysterious cloaked riders? Check. Obvious Tolkien inspiration? Check. Hearty stew? Check. The number of fantasy cliches this book hits is almost impressive, even to a genre novice. On the other hand, there were plenty of things I wasn't expecting, and there were a bunch of things I did really enjoy.
The story follows the aforementioned naive farmboy Rand al'Thor, who is pretty obviously The Chosen One, despite attempts to obscure that fact by ensnaring 3 naive farmboys (Rand, Mat, and Perrin) in the scheme. Their idyllic little hamlet, Emond's Field, is mysteriously attacked by
At first, I was happy to see that your typical "Chosen One" plot was obscured by the notion of three boys being targeted, but since the story is mostly told through Rand's eyes, it seemed pretty obvious to me that he was The One (there are some other indications of this that I did not pick up on, unless I was doing so unconsciously). At some point on their journey, they do get split up, so there are some other viewpoints, but Rand and Mat are together (and their sections are told from Rand's perspective) and Perrin runs afoul of some wolves, making it pretty clear that he has other latent talents. As a protagonist, Rand is rather bland, which tends to be the case with these hero's journey type stories. A blank slate of a protagonist makes for an easy entry point for readers (and would undoubtedly have ensnared a younger me), though there's not a ton of depth to the character or even much of an arc throughout this book (but then, there are still 13 books to go...) He is mostly passive, scraping by through luck and the goodwill of others.
As characters go, most of the core seem only slightly less bland than Rand. Mat is a bit of a prankster, and gets caught up in some cursed treasure like an idiot. Perrin seems like the strong silent type, and he's got some talent for talking to wolves, which is neat. The aforementioned Aes Sedai is named Moiraine, and she seems more interesting due more to the fact that she's an Aes Sedai than anything else. There is much in the way of rumors and hearsay about Aes Sedai bandied about here, which is actually a rather interesting notion. Most of the time, a story like this would buckle down for gigantic info dumps (of which there are still plenty, don't worry), but what we get here is a more realistic sort of information. Aes Sedai are famous, but their fame seems to be an accumulation of misunderstandings and half-truths. Or something like that. They do not seem to have great reputations, with many warning that accepting the help of an Aes Sedai will open you up to repayment of some kind, like they're some sort of Mafia/Lawyer hybrid. Moiraine is the only Aes Sedai we see a lot of in this story, so perhaps she's an uncommon example, or perhaps she just hasn't dropped the hammer on our unsuspecting farmboys (I was definitely expecting something of the sort in this book, and it did not really come). Moiraine has a warder named Lan that is basically a badass bodyguard, though we find out enough about him to know that he's also a bit of a poet. I suppose you could call Egwene a love interest for Rand, though not much comes of that, and the story instead focuses on her desire for adventure and latent abilities that could allow her to become an Aes Sedai herself. Then there's Nynaeve, who initially seems rather caustic and whiny, but also has some latent magical abilities (there's a lot of that going around in this book). Finally, we've got Thom Merrilin, who is an old "gleeman" (basically a bard or entertainer). He's old, well traveled, and wizened, and has enough experience to help guide our lowly farmboys.
To be honest, my favorite characters tended to be off on the periphery. There's Min, who is basically a fortune teller and seems rather cool (though we get very little of her here). There's a loner named Elyas who can communicate with wolves, and helps awaken the latent ability in Perrin. Rand accidentally meets a princess, some princes, and the queen (and her feared Aes Sedai advisor). I suspect many of these characters would be fleshed out in future installments, and I would be disappointed if they weren't...
In the end, I did enjoy this book. It reads like a slightly more accessible, but bloated Tolkien story. I'm reminded of the Tom Bombadil chapter in Fellowship of the Ring, except that I feel like there were, like, 7 Tom Bombadils that seemed inconsequential for this particular installment, but who will show up later in the series (not that Tom Bombadil shows up much in the rest of LotR, but still). I'm a little unsure how to really think about this book in context of the Hugo awards though. I feel like many of the things I'm holding against it would be resolved later in the series, but on the other hand, the fact that the series is so long is prohibitive in itself. I've mentioned before that I don't necessarily mind long books, even meandering ones, but even I have my limits. While I'm sure much of this stuff will be fleshed out in the sequels, I still can't quite shake the notion that this didn't really need to be as long as it is. But since Tor has decided to include the entire series in the Voters Packet, I will most certainly read more of the series before I vote, but given what I've read so far, I can't see myself getting too carried away with this. I did grow to like this story as I read it, and now that I'm familiar with a lot of the concepts, maybe the future installments will be less jarring. That being said, given its competition in the Best Novel category, I can't see this one winning...
Posted by Mark on May 18, 2014 at 07:23 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, May 04, 2014
SF Book Review, Part 16
So while I start chomping through this year's Hugo Nominees (controversies aside), I figure I'll catch up on some non-Hugo related (er, mostly) reviews.
Posted by Mark on May 04, 2014 at 01:25 PM .: Comments (4) | link :.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Link Dump: Hugo Reactions
The Hugo Award nominations were announced last week, and as you might imagine, there's been a lot of blathering about it on the internets. There always is, but this year is especially heated due to some controversial happenings. I covered some of this in last week's initial thoughts, and while I don't want to dwell on the negative, there have been plenty of discussion this week that's probably worth checking out (after which, I plan to move on to the meat of actually reading and writing about the nominees).
In short, there are three major issues that folks are incensed about. One is that, due to a quirk in the nominations rules, the entire While of Time series of books has been nominated as a whole (that's an 11,000+ page, 4+ million word series). Two is that Larry Correia explicitly sought nominations for himself and some others, with the express notion of making a political point. To my mind, these first boil down to the same problem: The Hugos are a populist award, and thus vulnerable to voting blocs. Both The Wheel of Time and Larry Correia are very popular, and both were the subject of an explicit push for nominations. Many are skeptical of the quality of these popular works, and thus upset that they ended up on the final ballot. For his part, Correia seems to have engaged in this for the express purpose of pissing people off, which is obviously against the spirit of the thing. That being said, the issue here is largely a matter of semantics. There's no evidence of fraud or stuffed ballots or anything like that, just populism, and Correia's posts on the subject mirror a lot of other folks who want to see their favorite things nominated. To my mind, these first two issues are not new at all. Indeed, you could very well argue that the inclusion of Charlie Stross and Mira Grant on the Best Novel shortlist are also populist choices that are more reflective of fandom's love of the authors than the works themselves. Last year's winner was John Scalzi's Redshirts, and many complained that it won more because Scalzi is a popular guy with a high traffic blog than because that was truly the best work of science fiction last year. And so it goes.
If that was all that happened this year, there'd be lots of grumbling and shouting at the sky, but that's always the case (and it probably also applies to other awards too - just look at all the griping the Oscars get every year). But there is a third issue that seems to be severely mucking up the works, and that is the nomination of Vox Day in the Best Novelette category. Once his name shows up, cries of racism/sexism/homophobia become rampant, and to a fair extent, warranted. There will be more detail below, but for now, I'll just say that he seems like an ass and I think it's valid for people to not want to have anything to do with the guy. Personally, I'll be reading his story and judging it accordingly, but I get that some won't be able to separate the story from the man.
With that scene set, let's see what some other folks are talking about:
Posted by Mark on April 27, 2014 at 04:40 PM .: Comments (0) | link :.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
The 2014 Hugo Awards: Initial Thoughts
I started this year with a goal of reading the fiction nominees for the Hugo Awards and casting an official vote. The nominees were just announced yesterday, so it's game on for the Kaedrin Hugo run. Today, we'll give some initial thoughts on the Best Novel slate, as well as some general thoughts on the rest of the nominations. Let's get to it:
Best Novel (1595 nominating ballots)
Posted by Mark on April 20, 2014 at 05:27 PM .: Comments (4) | link :.
Sunday, January 26, 2014
SF Book Review, Part 15
I've fallen a bit behind in reviewing recent SF reading, though a few individual reviews have made their way to the site recently. So before I start my 2013 movie recap (a month late, I know), I figured I'd catch up:
Posted by Mark on January 26, 2014 at 01:33 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Ancillary Justice
Anne Leckie's debut novel, Ancillary Justice, has been garnering much critical praise and awards hype (I suspect it will be a Hugo nominee). It's a space opera tale of betrayal and revenge, though that description doesn't really do it justice. While it does contain typical pot-boilery elements like that, it's also got a lot of ambitious but subtle social explorations embedded in its worldbuilding, as does most of the best science fiction.
The story alternates between past and present threads, weaving the timeframes together in such a way that each informs the other. In the beginning, we are introduced to Breq, a former soldier on a quest for revenge. She's come to an isolated, icy planet in search of the means for her revenge. Through the alternating timelines of each chapter, we learn that Breq used to be a segment in an artificial intelligence that ran a ship called Justice of Toren. There are layers of hierarchy and organization, but basically these ships are comprised of networked groups of Ancillaries, dead human bodies with the AI embedded into them. This is not a conceit or an idea for the sake of ideas; the exploration of this sorta post-human existence is the primary driving force behind the book. In Breq, a single body separated from her whole, we get a unique perspective on this sort of existence.
For her part, Leckie is able to establish all of this without resorting to excessive info-dumps. This is initially disorienting (though not as much as, say, The Quantum Thief), as the thread set in the past sometimes reads like a Pynchon novel, with the one AI's perspective shifting from Ancillary to Ancillary with each new sentence. It's disorienting because they're the same person, but they're thousands or even millions of miles away from each other, but once you get the hang of it, it works (in particular, the naming conventions of the various levels of hierarchy can be confusing at first). Interestingly, the more info-dumpy segments come later in the book, but by that point, you're wrapped up in the story enough that this information is happily received.
So the way the AI ships work is one aspect of the worldbuilding that works very well, but the other aspect is the social one. Being a space opera, we're of course talking about galactic empires and wars and such, but the empire that Leckie has established here is truly a fascinating one. The Radch are the dominant human society in the galaxy, having steadily annexed planet after planet over a 2000 year period. Of course, annexation in this context is a just a pretty word for conquered. The humans on an annexed planet that resist are killed and turned into ancillaries, which are then turned against the people. Comprehensive surveillance at the hands of Ancillaries makes it difficult to resist, but that's just the Radchaai way. Even the soldiers who are doing the annexing, the Radch citizens, do not receive any privacy. This goes on until a planet is pacified, and the Radch sink their hooks into the planets economy, leveraging gains (in both wealth and ancillaries) to annex other worlds. So basically, the Radch are not very pleasant folks. The Radchaii are lead by someone named Anaander Mianaai, who is very much like the artificial consciousness that run Radch ships in that she is comprised of many networked bodies. She's also near immortal and has basically been the Radchaai dictator for 2000 years.
The Radch identify each other mostly through Houses, tribal affiliations that are complicated and corporation-like. One corollary to this is that the Radch do not distinguish between genders, referring to everyone using only female pronouns like "she" and "her" (it is not explained why the female form is chosen over gender neutral ones, like some other authors have used). Breq, our protagonist, is implied to have a female body, but being an artificial intelligence of the Radch, she makes no distinction between male and female for herself or for others. Breq constantly has difficulties identifying gender when she is outside of the Radch empire (as she is in the present-day segments of the story). This aspect of the novel has garnered much praise for its progressive tendencies, though I'm not entirely sure the book means it to be read as a good thing. It certainly does generate some interesting discussion for us readers, but in the context of the book, it's a conceit imposed by a tyrant. Anaander Mianaai is many things, but one thing she will be to the reader is "evil". And the reason for this gender-blindness is simply her will. Just as it's her will to impose comprehensive surveillance on all citizens, or as we discover in the book, to slaughter innocent citizens by the thousands. And this is supposed to be progressive?
It's an interesting perspective, for sure, and while the constant use of female pronouns is initially jarring, it quickly fades away, partially because you get used to it, and partially because the Radch simply don't care and this story doesn't really need it (though it's implied that reproduction happens in a generally traditional manner, with perhaps some SF technological help (which, in itself, implies that the distinction must be made at some point, simply for reproductive purposes)). Still, the more important social structures seem to be the Houses and how they interact. Put simply, there's lots to chew on, and Leckie does seem to be aware of what came before her, as io9 notes:
For people who love science fiction, there are also many little tips of the hat that are pleasing without being intrusive or fan servicey. Breq's division on Justice of Toren are fond of singing, which brings to mind Anne McCaffery's incredible novel of ship consciousness, The Ship Who Sang. And of course the Radch civilization's lack of gender roles is reminiscent of the civilization that Ursula Le Guin describes in The Left Hand of Darkness. But as I was reading, the one comparison I kept making in my mind was to Iain M. Banks, who always reminded us that politics (and people) are far more complicated than most space operas will allow.Incidentally, I'd say this novel blows The Ship Who Sang away when it comes to exploring ship consciousness, but on the other hand, I found Le Guin's novel much more mind-blowing in terms of its gender bending (but then, that's a tough act to follow and not really a fair comparison for this book). And as mentioned recently, I really do need to get up to speed on Ian M. Banks.
So yes, this book has an impressive bit of worldbuilding going on, but it's all revealed slowly through the story, which has plenty of narrative hooks to keep you interested. Mystery, action, typical space opera tropes, an alien race that seems to be truly Alien (capital A, though we've not learned much about them just yet), that ambitious exploration of hive minds, and other ideas that help build and maintain the sensawunda feeling that comes out in the best SF. I really enjoyed the novel, and it's something I'd consider nominating for a Hugo award, if I end up submitting a ballot. As debut novels go, this is an assured effort, and I'm greatly looking forward to the next installment (due in October 2014).
Posted by Mark on January 22, 2014 at 10:57 PM .: Comments (2) | link :.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
A 10 Question Book Meme
SF Signal posted these questions yesterday, and I'm amazingly on the ball here, giving my answers just one day later. Go me.
The last sf/f/h book I read and liked was:
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold. I don't read a lot of Fantasy, but since I've already exhausted all of Bujold's SF, I figured I'd try out some of her Fantasy books rather than suffer through withdrawal pains. It turns out that these Chalion books are really good, too. This is the second in the series, but it's only loosely connected to the first, and the main character here was a bit player in the first book (but she's an excellent protagonist). It's an interesting book, because it's mostly talking and religion, with light action interspersed throughout. Anywho, I really loved it, and will probably be reading the third book in the near future...
The last sf/f/h book I read and wasn't crazy about was:
The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey. A book about a sentient spaceship that wasn't all that bad, but which never really connected with me. Something about the episodic nature of the plot bothered me as well.
The sf/f/h book I am reading now is:
The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu. I only just started this one this morning, one of a few 2013 books I planned on reading in support of my Hugo run this year... So far, so good!
The sf/f/h book(s) I most want to read next is/are:
Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. I've put off reading Banks' Culture series long enough, I think.
An underrated sf/f/h book is:
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. I have no real sense of what is underrated or overrated out there, but this is a book that seems to consistently be left out of "best of" lists and such (for example: the NPR list)
An overrated sf/f/h book is:
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. It's a fine book, to be sure, and I get why everyone loves it, but I never really got into it.
The last sf/f/h book that was recommended to me was:
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I'm usually turned off by dystopian futures, but a friend recommended this and yes, she was right. It's a fun book.
A sf/f/h book I recommended to someone else was:
Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy came up in a discussion about the new movies (incidentally, wouldn't it be awesome if they made movies out of Zahn's books? Alas, I think the most we could expect would be a Thrawn cameo or somesuch.)
A sf/f/h book I have re-read is:
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. I've probably only reread about 4 or 5 books in my life, but I've read Cryptonomicon three times, which is impressive since it's a 900 page face melter. Or something.
A sf/f/h book I want to re-read is:
Almost anything by Lois McMaster Bujold (I'm curious to reread the beginning of the Vorkosigan series again) and Neal Stephenson (in particular, I'd like to dip into The Baroque Cycle again, though that's obviously a daunting task considering the 2700 page length!)
Posted by Mark on January 19, 2014 at 05:28 PM .: link :.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Hugo Award Season 2014
So we've already begun the general award season, with top 10 lists galore peppering social media and publications, and the more formal awards shows are also getting underway (the Golden Globes are tonight, the Oscar nominations will be announced this week, and so on). For science fiction nerds, the Hugo award is generally considered to be the most prestigious, though the Nebula and Clarke awards also garner a lot of attention in certain circles.
Hugo voters must be involved in some way with the Worldcon SF convention that is held every year in a different location (this year is in London). It's a populist award in that anyone can become a voter, they just need to pay for some level of membership. This strikes me as an interesting balance, as the cost of entry should ensure at least some measure of seriousness in the voters. The Nebulas are given by members of the SFWA, which is its own unique perspective, and the Clarke awards are given by a jury (there are other awards, but these seem to be the most respected, and they represent an interesting range of voting rules).
As I mentioned in my 2013 recap, one thing I was thinking of doing this year was to actually join and vote on the Hugos (at the very least, read all the fiction nominees and vote on them, though I'm sure I'll be able to vote on TV and movie awards too). The nomination period has only just recently opened up, but in all honesty, I don't believe I've read enough to give quality nominations. Excuding non-fiction, I've read 6 things that would qualify as a 2013 release, 2 being novellas (or novelettes?) and 1 being The Human Division, which is basically a series of short stories, novelettes, and novellas slapped together into one book. Of the remaining three, two have a pretty good chance of being nominated anyway and the other is arguably not SF/Fantasy (I'd probably put it in horror/thriller/mystery territory). Of those, I'd consider nominating:
In any case, I'm looking forward to participating in the process this year, and it appears that the annual awards grousing has already started, with Adam Roberts taking a two-pronged approach with his usual style and wit:
SF Awards have, as a rule, much to recommend them; but they have two big flaws. One is the loyalty implied in the descriptor 'fan', in which a shitty work by an author of whom (or a shitty episode of a show of which) one is a fan gets your vote because that's what being a fan means -- it means sticking with your team. Ditto: voting for an author rather than voting for a text. Here the niceness or popularity of a given author may overshadow the merits of the books said author has actually produced. ...I think these are both fair points (and they demonstrate why I'm a bit hesitant to submit my nominations), though perhaps Roberts overstates their importance. Of the four nominations I would make, two are by authors I'd never even heard of, one is a relatively obscure piece of self-published short fiction, and the other is, well, John Scalzi (a frequent nominee that I suspect Roberts would point to as someone who gets works nominated because of who he is regardless of the quality of that particular work). But you'll note that I absolutely won't nominate The Human Division for best novel because it doesn't work very well as a novel (nor, I think, is it really supposed to just yet). Scalzi has definitely been nominated a bunch of times where I don't think the work warranted the inclusion (though Redshirts may not have been one of those times (as a winner, I'm not so sure...)). I'm as big a fan of Neal Stephenson as seems possible, but I doubt I'd have nominated Reamde a couple years ago, as it's not really science fiction (debatable, I guess, but that's definitely not the thrust). So yes, I'm a fan, but of the genre as a whole. I have certain preferences and blind spots, just like anyone else, but that's fine when it comes to populist awards, as my votes get smeared across all the other votes.
As for marketing campaigns and self-promotion by savvy authors on the internets, I'm sure there is an element of that in play, but again, I think Roberts overestimates some aspects of this. Scalzi is a pretty interesting example, as he has a huge following online and engages in exactly what Roberts is decrying here. His books seem to sell well and I'm sure the publishers do a fair amount of publicity for them too. Fortunately, Scalzi has responded to Roberts (in a friendly, amicable way) and I find that I have little to add to that. I will note that I would never in a million years have found The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself if Ian Sales had not built up some form of online audience. It's a self-published work with no expensive marketing campaigns or hype, and I think it kind of odd to begrudge him the notion of letting his blog audience know what is eligible (and in what category - I don't even know if The Eye is a novella, novelette, or short story?)
These are, of course, not new complaints. Last year's dustup made some pretty similar points, and the big issue here is that there's not really a way around it. The Hugos are a populist award, so great but obscure stuff might not make the cut. It seems odd to criticize a populist award for nominating popular works, though I guess the Hugo's position as the most respected SF award does warrant more scrutiny. But that's just the way populist awards work, and that's why awards like the Nebula and Clarke exist (each of which, by the way, are far from perfect in themselves). Anytime anyone puts together a best of anything list, there are bound to be dissenters and rules wonks who complain. In some ways, that's part of the fun! I guess we'll revisit this subject after this year's nominees are announced (which should be sometime in early April). I hope to check in before then with what I've been reading (and I'm already behind on that, actually), so stay tuned.
Posted by Mark on January 12, 2014 at 08:30 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
The Year in Books
Another orbital period has passed, which means it's time to recap the year or some such thing. I'm still catching up on movies, and I'll be posting a recap of the year in beer in the next few days too, but let's take a look at my reading for 2013 and see where I'm at. I keep track of my book reading at Goodreads, and they have some fancy statistic generator things (that isn't anywhere near as detailed as I'd like, but hey, I'll take what I can get). Since I've been using the site for a while now, I've got several years worth of stats to compare too.
Let's start with overall books read:
You can also see that I read a small portion of comic book collections and novellas in 2013 as well, but not as many as in 2012. Other stats of note:
So it's been a pretty good year for reading. I certainly didn't get through as much as planned, and I definitely didn't spend as much time reading in 2013, but I think I did pretty well. As for next year, I think I'm going to take a similar approach: read what I want, length be damned. I may also get off my arse and read all the Hugo nominated books this year, something I've always wanted to do. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that I've just read a book that will be nominated in Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, but I'd also like to take a shot at the other (shorter) fiction categories. I'll probably set my sights at a similar 30 books/11,000 pages rate for 2014, but who knows how things will go?
Posted by Mark on January 01, 2014 at 07:21 PM .: link :.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
SF Book Review, Part 14: WoGF Edition
I recently ran across the 2013 Worlds Without End Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge and thought it sounded like fun. The rules are simple: "read 12 books - 1 each by 12 different women authors that you have not read before including 1 random author selection - in 12 months". I've started this a bit later in the year than I'd like, and I'm beding the "that you have not read before" rule a bit on at least one or two selections, but still, I've actually made pretty good progress. Halfway there, actually. Alas, I've found my selections to be a mixed bag.
Posted by Mark on August 18, 2013 at 07:34 PM .: link :.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
The Commonwealth Duo
I have no problems with long books. Even long books that meander down tangents aren't an inherent issue for me. Heck, I can get pretty longwinded myself. My favorite book is Cryptonomicon, a novel filled with so many digressions that I find it hard to even say what it's about. On the other hand, the only reason I can put up with such excess is if I'm engaged. Good characters, good story, interesting ideas, heck, even well written prose can keep me going.
So when I picked up Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton I wasn't immediately turned off by the length or the leisurely pace. On the other hand, clocking in at around a thousand pages, Hamilton had plenty of time to test my patience. It's a bloated book, to say the least. Plus, it's really just the first half of the story and the "sequel", Judas Unchained, is another thousand-plus page novel. In essence, what we have here is a 2000+ page story, split into two books. Again, I have no inherent bias against this sort of length, but in this case, I'm seriously doubting that it needed to be that long. The funny thing is that, over the course of these two books, the story falls together rather nicely. Things mentioned early that may have seemed extraneous generally do play a role later in the story. I ultimately found myself enjoying the series (I certainly would not have completed it otherwise), and there are lots of things I really like about it, but the excessive length was unnecessary.
By way of explanation, let me tell you about how I almost abandoned Pandora's Star. It was only about 100 pages in, and it was our introduction to a character named Justine Burnelli. She's a member of an interstellar dynasty and as we meet her, she's on a "safari" on some planet. She's taking a hyperglider trip across the countryside... and Hamilton lingers on every single detail of the trip, from the tethers on the glider to the flowers on the mountainside, to the tune of about 30 or so pages. Nothing of import actually happens during this trip - she flies over the landscape, that's it. Now, I suppose it does illustrate something about Justine's personality and as a matter of fact, this "hyperglider" thing comes into play later in the story (um, about 2000 pages later). But it's also something that could have been done in about 5 pages.
Now, take that situation and repeat about 100 times (this is no exaggeration, and you could probably jack that number up to 200 or 300), and you'll have an idea of why these two books are so long, and why their length is something of an issue for me. It's not the story that's a problem, it's that Hamilton thinks we need to see every component of every sub-plot. For instance, one of the characters is named Paula Myo. She's basically a galactic detective, and we see her take on a seemingly unrelated case at one point. This is fine in concept - it's an introduction to how formidable she is - but it drags on and on and on for far too long. It turns out that the characters in that case become important later in the story, but the original investigation still didn't warrant as much time as Hamilton spent on them.
Ultimately, after about 500 pages or so, the book does settle into a groove where things actually start happening. And when stuff actually feels important, Hamilton's obsessive focus on detail is much more welcome, if sometimes still a bit overbearing. So there was clearly enough here to keep me going, but I maintain that this could have been at least 25% (if not a full 50% or even more) shorter.
The story begins when an astronomer notices two starts disappeared from the sky in an instant. The speculation is that some advanced society has implemented a Dyson sphere, but why so suddenly? An expedition is put together to answer the myriad questions. Meanwhile, a sorta cult/terrorist group is trying to hunt down an alien called the Starflyer, whom they believe is able to brainwash human beings and thus has been infiltrating the Commonwealth political and economic structures.
As previously mentioned, things start slowly, but eventually pick up. At some point, a war with an alien species (called Primes) breaks out, and that's when things start to get really interesting. The Primes very well realized... and terrifying. Hamilton's detailed style is at its best when he's writing from the Primes' perspective (particularly a Prime known as MorningLightMountain) and when he's detailing battles in this war (and they are epic battles taking place across 20-50 worlds at a time). The Primes are a scary enemy, but their motivations and methods are, well, alien, and Hamilton does a good job exploiting the differences between the Primes and Humans during the battle sequences, as well as overall strategy. The balance of power tips both ways at different times, and it's a war I could see either side (or both sides) losing.
There are far too many characters to summarize right now, even if I focus only on main viewpoint characters. This is definitely a challenge of the book, as you will sometimes go several hundred pages before returning to a given character. Some characters are visited frequently, of course, but others may only have 20-30 pages in the entire two books. Many of them feel rather similar, though I'm not sure if that was intentional or not. There's a weird focus on sex and superficial looks, though again, that might be a reasonable speculation in a universe where comprehensive rejuvenation is available. There were a few characters I actively disliked (notably including a guy named Mark!), but most were approachable enough and easy to spend time with. Sometimes I felt like characters were nothing more than plot delivery devices, but occasionally we get a glimpse into something that humanizes them. I wouldn't call the characters a failing or anything that bad, but they definitely seem to take a back seat to the story and technology.
For the most part, Hamilton touches on every SF trope he can. A galactic civilization called the Commonwealth, with plenty of unique planetary governments. Longevity treatments mean that humans can live indefinitely. Memory inserts and cloning mean that you can be "re-lifed" if you suffer "body-loss". Varying degrees of computer/human interfaces and cyberware. Genetic modifications. All sorts of fancy energy weapons and force fields. FTL travel comes in the form of wormholes. Inside the Commonwealth, these wormholes are set up along with a train system, though once the war starts, spaceships are built. Time travel is even sorta touched on at one point (traveling to the future, so no paradox). He touches on the singularity with a character called the Sentient Intelligence (SI). We run into all sorts of cosmic structures and big pieces of technology like the Dyson spheres. I already mentioned the Primes, but there are several other alien species... In particular, the Silfen are an interesting bunch. They're kinda elf-like and they eschew most technology (and politics/economics, for that matter), choosing instead to wander along their Paths (which are sorta like wormholes, but much less distinct and much more hand-wavey). Other aliens include the High Angel, an alien spaceship that invites anyone who is interested to live in its pods. And there's probably a ton of other stuff I'm leaving out.
Despite Hamilton's tendency to be longwinded, all of this stuff is there for a reason. It all fits together in the end, and each of these technologies plays a role in the story. Even if it didn't need to be this long or include quite so many viewpoint characters, that Hamilton has managed to string all of this together in a way that fits is actually very impressive.
Hamilton's views on technology and its resulting consequences is generally well thought out and logical. While he does touch on a lot of hand-wavey stuff (see list of SF tropes above!), he never takes that too far, and most of it seems to be an approachable extension of current trends. For instance, while he does mention beam weapons and force fields and the like, nuclear bombs are still pretty effective. He speculates about some advancements in that area, but nothing that feels unreasonable. He's set up a truly terrifying alien threat, but he doesn't rely on a deus ex machina to resolve the conflict.
So this is a difficult series for me. On the one hand, it's longer than it needs to be. On the other hand, it's a highly imaginative, epic space opera, and ultimately every engaging to read. In the end, it's something I can recommend for fans of SF who don't mind excessive detail or extremely long books. And if you go into it knowing that the two books are meant to be read as one story, that might make things a little more approachable (I was unaware that the first book would just sorta end without resolving anything, which left a bad taste in my mouth).
Posted by Mark on August 11, 2013 at 12:43 PM .: link :.
Sunday, August 04, 2013
Sunday SF Meme
Well, not this Sunday. That would be silly. SF Signal posted these questions two weeks ago, and I'm posting my responses now, because that's how we do things here at Kaedrin.
My favorite alien invasion book or series is...?
All the examples that are coming to mind seem like borderline cases. Is Ender's Game an alien invasion book? The story is set into motion by an invasion, but you don't actually see it (Ender reviews recordings of it). How about Anathem? That one seems even more borderline (Are they aliens? Are they actually "invading"?), though if it does qualify, it'd probably be my favorite. What can I say, I'm a Neal Stephenson junkie. This... may come up again.
My favorite alternate history book or series is...?
While I can't say as though I've really delved into the alternate history sub-genre, the two books that come to mind immediately are Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. The latter of which has the more clever premise (indeed, it's got an almost recursive structure) and is clearly more influential (it's among the early examples of a "what if the Axis won WWII?" story), but the former is a much more enjoyable read (basically a neo-noir style detective story).
My favorite cyberpunk book or series is...?
Here comes Stephenson again: Snow Crash. Of course, he was sorta taking the piss out of the sub-genre and even kinda killed it, but that's sorta why I like it, as I'm not a huge fan of cyberpunk. William Gibson's Neuromancer is a worthy runner-up here, though it's still not really a novel that I love.
My favorite Dystopian book or series is...?
Another sub-genre I'm not a huge fan of, yet the answer is blindingly obvious: Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell.
My favorite Golden-Age sf book or series is...?
The start of the Golden-Age is pretty easy to pinpoint - when John W. Campbell became the editor for Astounding Science Fiction magazine in the late 1930s. When the Golden-Age ends is more vague. I'll place the line of demarcation at 1960. It's an arbitrary choice, but it seems to work. However, given that constraint, the first book that came to mind (a Heinlein) is no longer eligible! So what I'm left with is a bunch of Asimov, which I do love despite the distinctly wooden nature of his prose, and a bunch of other one-offs. The two that seem to be winning the battle are Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956) and Theodore Sturgeon's More than Human (1953).
My favorite hard sf book or series is...?
My answer here is going to be an author, because I can't think of anyone who writes hard SF at the level of Greg Egan (I'm sure they exist, I just haven't read them). Egan's books make me question whether or not I've ever read hard SF before. So to narrow it down a bit, I'll go with Diaspora. The hardest of SF, with an ambitious and truly astounding scope. (For something a little more approachable, Permutation City works pretty well, while still being "hard").
My favorite military sf book or series is...?
In terms of straight up military SF, I'll go with Old Man's War, by John Scalzi. Though Starship Troopers and The Forever War are clearly more influential and "important", they both have pretty heavy flaws (Heinlein's incessant lecturing, Haldeman's treatment of sexuality). I suppose you could say that Old Man's War is a little on the light and fluffy side, but I think it works pretty well.
My favorite near-future book or series is...?
I want to put Cryptonomicon here because it's Stephenson and my favorite book, but it's only debatably a near-future book (it's unspecified, but the implications are present-day or very-near-future), and even the near-future stuff is only half the book (with the other half being set in WWII). That being said, I'm keeping it here, because why not?
My favorite post-apocalyptic book or series is...?
The two that come immediately to mind are Stephen King's The Stand and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Both books suffer from poor adaptations into film/TV, but are excellent in their own right and well worth reading.
My favorite robot/android book or series is...?
Asimov's Robot Series pretty much takes the cake here. I can think of lots of other books that feature robots, but they're usually just window dressing. Asimov's robots aren't truly about robots either, I guess, but I love the way he starts from basic principles (the three laws of robotics) and sets about subverting them at every turn.
My favorite space opera book or series is...?
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. I was tempted to put this for the military SF question, because there is a fair amount of that going on in the series, but it's really much more of a space opera than a military series (even if there are a lot of military SF elements).
My favorite steampunk book or series is...?
I don't really do steampunk, so I don't really have anything to pull from here. Mulligan!
My favorite superhero book or series is...?
My love of Batman is probably more due to The Animated Series and the movies, but I've read some of the comics too, which is more than can be said for most superheroes.
My favorite time travel book or series is...?
Yikes, a suprising amount of choices here. Asimov's The End of Eternity and Dean Koontz' Lightning (the book that got me into reading when I was a youngin) both spring to mind. Downtiming the Night Side by Jack Chalker takes things in extremely weird directions, but I enjoyed it. There's probably a dozen others I could list (or want to read), as this is a favorite sub-genre.
My favorite young adult sf book or series is...?
My first thought here was Heinlein's juveniles, stuff like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Tunnel in the Sky. Then I remembered Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which is clearly the best choice.
My favorite zombie book or series is...?
I kinda hate zombie stories, so they're not something I really seek out in book form. The closest thing I've read to this would be the aforementioned I Am Legend (which are vampires, but the story contains many tropes that would become common in zombie stories).
The 3 books at the top of my sf/f/h to-be-read pile are...?
Well, it's a long list, but three upcoming books: Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold, Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, and Warhorse by Timothy Zahn.
So that just about covers it. Lessons learned: I have a hard time choosing a favorite novel (most answers above list 2 books, if not more), and I'm not super well read in every sub-genre. Heh.
Update: scepticsmiscellanea gives answers. Warning: We've got another Stephenson/Bujold junkie here, so yeah, some overlap with my answers.
Posted by Mark on August 04, 2013 at 10:51 AM .: link :.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
The Book Queue, 2013 Update
It's only been about 4 months since the last book queue post, but I've already knocked off about half that list (out of 10 posted, 5 books completed, one other started) and while that might not sound like a lot, keep in mind that at least a couple books were behemoths like Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which is a long, dense, philosophical, mathematical text that has been sitting on my shelf unread for about 5 years. And naturally, I've read plenty of things that weren't in the queue, because I'm fickle like that. So sue me.
The notion of only reading long epics is certainly not going to fly all year long, but I still plan on tackling a few massive tomes just to keep frosty. My Goodreads Reading Challenge is currently set at a reasonable 30 books for the year, but according to my stats, I should be just about equaling the number of pages I read last year (when I hit a 50 book goal). So anyways, here are the holdovers from the last list, and some new ones I'll be tackling in this second half of the year.
The four remaining books from my last queue (note: I began Theodore Rex, but have not yet finished)
Posted by Mark on July 14, 2013 at 05:39 PM .: link :.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
SF Book Review, Part 13
I've fallen a bit behind in chronicling my science fiction reading of late, though a few individual reviews have slipped through. Still reading lots of books, though, so it'll be a while before I'm fully caught up. So let's get this party started:
Posted by Mark on June 30, 2013 at 06:18 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
The Human Division
Every once in a while, a publisher has the bright idea to bring back serialized publishing. If it was good enough for Dickens, it's gotta be good enough for Stephen King, amiright? Indeed, King dabbled with the serial novel form a few times in the mid-90s and early 21st century (remember those skimpy The Green Mile installments popping up in book stores?) Others have too, and there's always been stories published in parts via magazines (often expanded when translated to book form, but still). I don't think it's ever truly caught on, but now that we've reached the internet age and digital publishing has established itself, it's just a lot easier and at the end of the day, you don't have 13 tiny books cluttering up your shelves (as I understand it, they generally come grouped together on your ereader).
With all due respect, I don't care for this approach, which is why I waited until John Scalzi's latest novel, The Human Division, had completed its serial run and made it's appearance as a final novel. I don't begrudge Scalzi the whole grand experiment, but I just don't have the temperament to wait a week between chapters (even if the chapters are self-contained, more on this in a bit). I'm the same way with TV shows, though in some cases I catch up with the series and start watching serially from that point on because I'm really enjoying it. So I may have to put up with it sometimes (and in the case of television, I understand the various forces that conspire to keep a serialized structure), but I don't generally like it. But enough kvetching about the method of publishing, let's get to the good stuff.
I really enjoyed the book. It's not perfect, and there is one thing I'm really annoyed by, but it's still a really fun page-turner. By way of introduction, this one is the fifth book that has been set in Scalzi's Old Man's War universe... and by my reckoning, it's the best since the first. Each book in the series has taken a different perspective on the universe. The first book focuses on the military grunts. The second book focuses on The Ghost Brigades, basically the special forces of this particular universe. It was a solid read and exciting and all that, but in my mind it was plagued by a galactic sized plot hole at the center of the story. The Last Colony is the third book, and it examines the colonists (through the eyes of characters from the first two books). It had some loose ends, but I liked it a lot. And the fourth book is Zoe's Tale, basically a retelling of the third book, but from the perspective of the teenage daughter of the colony leaders. That's a tricky approach, but I think Scalzi cleared the bar, even if it suffers from similar loose ends to the third book.
Being a serialized book, The Human Division is a bit more disjointed, but the main narrative thrust of the story is told from the perspective of the Diplomatic Corps. It picks up after the events of The Last Colony and Zoe's Tale, and without giving too much away from those earlier stories, the human factions of the story are taking a decidedly more diplomatic approach than they used to. Most of the stories surround the crew of the Clarke, a small diplomatic vessel manned by what is generally considered to be the "B" Team. They tend to bumble along most of the time, but during periods of extreme stress, they do manage to get things done.
The chapters of the book tend to alternate between tales of the Clarke, and other various one-off stories. The Clarke stories are the best of the lot, at least partly because we get to know those characters the best. Lieutenant Harry Wilson tends to be the one causing the most problems, or rather, discovering most of the problems and devising ingenious solutions. He gets into lots of shenanigans, and it's all great fun. Wilson is actually a character from the first book, and it's always great to return to him. The one-off chapters are a little more hit-or-miss. Some are great, some are just fine. Those "fine" ones (I'm looking at you, "A Voice in the Wilderness") are sometimes almost completely irrelevant to the rest of the story. Most of them seem to center around a sorta shadowy conspiracy that hasn't quite been defined just yet. They're self contained and I liked all of them, but Scalzi doesn't always come back to their characters. Given the episodic nature of the book, it's not really a complaint, and I like it when the author lets the universe breath a little.
Each story is mostly self contained, yielding a feeling very similar to that of a television series (indeed, this seems to be what Scalzi was going for, calling each chapter an "Episode"). There is an overarching plot, mostly centering around that conspiracy, but the focus is more on each individual story and resolving those conflicts. There is some refresher courses on the events of the earlier books in the series (totally understandable), but also a little repetition amongst the episodes themselves, almost as if Scalzi was expecting people to skip around. That's ultimately a very minor flaw though, and each story works pretty well in its own right. They're all filled with Scalzi's trademark witty banter and humor, but also with clever little mysteries or conundrums that spark that sensawunda feeling every now and again. Some of them are bit predictable (Checkov's gun abounds here - if Scalzi mentions a long lost artifact in passing, you can bet that Wilson will probably stumble onto it by accident and almost spark a diplomatic disaster...), but that didn't actually diminish the stories at all (for me, at least).
Also like a TV series, the ending of the book is something of a cliffhanger. The immediate conflict is resolved, but it feels like we've only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ultimate driving forces behind this book. It feels like the end of a season of TV, but that's not necessarily that satisfying either. It's not the worst offender in that respect (more on that in a later post, as I just finished a different book that basically just ran out of pages - apparently I have another 1000 page brick to get through to get any sense of closure at all). Anyways, Scalzi has announced that The Human Division has been renewed for a "Second Season". Again I don't begrudge him his cute experimental serial book as TV series metaphorical setup, but I really hope this second season finishes what has been started here. Scalzi is mildy prolific, so I'm hoping for a quick turnaround on this next season, but even then, we've probably got at least a year before the next book hits (I'm guessing it will be serialized as well).
Ultimately, I still really enjoyed the book and would recommend it. Even though it's probably good as a standalone, it would be worth reading at least the original Old Man's War (or all the other books in the series) first. Despite the cliffhanger, which was a little disappointing, I still like this book overall much better than the other sequels. This is mostly because I'm banking on an actual conclusion in the next installment and I trust that Scalzi can deliver something satisfying. I'd rather not have to wait for it, but such is life!
Posted by Mark on June 19, 2013 at 08:54 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
SF/F/H Book Meme
Via SF Signal and Ian Sales, one of them fancy book memes "for a lazy Saturday" which means that here at Kaedrin, we're doing it on Wednesday, because we're cool like that. 12 questions about science fiction, fantasy, and horror books:
1. The last sf/f/h book I read and enjoyed was:
The last Fantasy I read that I really enjoyed was The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I don't know that it's as enjoyable as her Vorkosigan books, but I found it very approachable and unlike a lot of fantasy. It's not filled with epic battles or action, instead focusing on the kingdom's court politics and the like. There's magic, but it's limited and relatively consistent. This description might make it sound boring, but it's quite exciting. Will certainly look to read the other two in the series, but Fantasy hasn't been a big focus of mine, so I'll also mention the last SF book I read and really enjoyed: Jack Glass, by Adam Roberts, which I found clever and inventive, but still very approachable. I did a full review a couple weeks ago if you want to read more.
2. The last sf/f/h book I read and did not enjoy was:
I didn't hate Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs, but I never really got into it and I wasn't aware that it was the first in a planned series, nor that it would end without any real closure (it's also something I probably wouldn't have read on my own, but it was a book club selection). While I don't have any particular desire to read the next book when it comes out (which does say something, I guess), I didn't really hate the book either... For that, I'd probably go with Fool Moon, by Jim Butcher. I actually like the concept and universe of the Dresden Files series (including the first book, which was solid and fun), but I pretty emphatically disliked this one. I may revisit the series again someday, but this one turned me off of it for a while, at least.
3. A sf/f/h book that I would recommend to new sf/f/h readers is:
The two books that immediately come to mind are Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card and Old Man's War, by John Scalzi. Both focused on military, kinda mirror images of each other, actually, with one focused on training young children to face a threat, and the other focusing on recruiting old people to fight wars. Both have good ideas (the hallmark of good SF), but are also page-turners and relatively short, addictive reads. I know Orson Scott Card has engendered quite a bit of scorn for his unpopular political views, but there's no diatribes against gay marriage in Ender's Game, and it's probably worth catching up with the book before seeing the movie, which will probably be terrible (though who knows, maybe it'll be ok).
4. A sf/f/h book that I would recommend to seasoned sf/f/h readers is:
This is a tough one for me. I'd say that I read a fair amount, but compared to many, I guess you'd say that I'm more lightly seasoned than fully seasoned. I'm at a bit of a loss here. I'm still working my way through the best-of lists and classics of the genre, so I'll just throw the first thing that comes to mind out there, which is Diaspora, by Greg Egan. It's a big, sprawling hard science fiction novel, lots of big, challenging ideas, and Egan's famous focus on really hard SF. Egan is probably more famous for Permutation City (also a very worthy read that I only recently caught up with), but I'm guessing most seasoned SF readers have already tackled that one (which is somewhat more approachable than Diaspora).
5. The sf/f/h book I most want to read next is:
Well, the next book I'll probably read is John Scalzi's just released (well, sorta) The Human Division (which is actually the latest in the aforementioned Old Man's War series). After that, I have several books in the queue, though I'm not sure what I'd hit up.
6. My favorite sf/f/h book series includes:
This is actually a really easy one, seeing as though I just read through Lois McMaster Bujold's entire Vorkosigan Saga (16 books in total, with a few short stories thrown in for good measure) and loved most of them, particularly the 4 book stretch starting with Mirror Dance and concluding with A Civil Campaign (check out my post on the series for more).
7. I will read anything by this sf/f/h author:
This is an easy one: Neal Stephenson. I think that I've read every single thing he's ever published at this point, from the lowliest short story or editorial, to his sprawling masterpieces like Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, and Anathem. Definitely my favorite author, though Bujold has come on strong lately, and I do find myself reading most of what Scalzi publishes these days.
8. The first sf/f/h book I read was:
I'm honestly not positive about this, but I'm going to go with A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle or Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain series, both of which I think read while I was in the sixth grade. I even remember writing a Prydain-inspired story for school called The Land of Analak (or something like that, I'll have to see if I can dig up my copy of that sucker sometime).
9. The sf/f/h book I'm most surprised that more people don't like is:
These questions are getting harder, but one book I find consistently underrepresented in best-of lists is Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, a superb and harrowing entry in the tired first contact subgenre. I don't know why it doesn't get more love.
10. The sf/f/h book I'm surprised so many people do like is:
The problem with this question is that I can think of plenty of books that I don't love that are revered by many, but I can see why they would be so popular too - so it's not exactly surprising that, say, The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin or Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein have big followings. I don't mean to say that I hate those books or that I found nothing of value there, but I didn't really enjoy them. However, I can see their influence all over SF, so it's hard to be surprised that people love them. That being said, I'm going to have to leave them as my answer, because I'm drawing a blank otherwise.
11. The most expensive sf/f/h book I own is:
I have no idea here. I don't have anything notably collectible, maybe a few first edition Hardcovers purchased in the course of regular reading. I suppose the thing that comes closest is Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday The 13th, by Peter Bracke. It's a big, full color book filled with imagery, and I bought it when it was out of print. It's back in print now, but even a new copy is relatively expensive (approx $35). I think I paid somewhere on the order of $50 for a first or second edition copy at some point, so there's that.
12. The number of sf/f/h books I own and have yet to read is:
Surprisingly few, at this point. I'm pretty good about not building up a pile of shame, but a couple years ago, I probably had 10-15 unread books laying around. I knocked most of them out last year and I'm left with a couple Philip K. Dick books I bought during a sale a few months ago. The Kindle has been a great enabler in this respect, as it allows for instant gratification...
Posted by Mark on May 22, 2013 at 08:39 PM .: link :.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Star Trek: TNG Tidbits
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Third Season BD came out recently, replete with bonus materials. Of course, it's obscenely expensive (Star Trek releases have always been so) and probably only purchased by obsessives. Us normal fans just fire up episodes on Netflix pretty easily, but then we miss out on remastered HD visuals and bonus features. Fortunately for us, Hercules from AICN has done a seemingly comprehensive recap of all those special features, and there's lots of behind the scenes gems to be had. The general consensus is that season 3 is where TNG turned the corner from a decent show into a great show, and a lot of these features apparently focus on that. Some interesting tidbits:
* A "technobabble generator" created as a joke by a friend of Shankar became a frequently utilized not-joke writers' room tool.Always funny to hear about the teching the tech tendencies of the writers...
* Moore and Braga lament that "Star Trek: Generations," which they labored on for a year, didn't turn out as well as "All Good Things," which took two weeks to write.Frakes hits the nail on the head with that last one. I mean, I get why it was done (the show must go on, and having Riker off on some other ship would be either contrived or lame), and it made for some good episodes (The Best of Both worlds 2 parter with the Borg being the most obvious), but the character of Riker was such an experience hound, always game for just about anything, that it's hard to believe he would turn down a captaincy.
* Ironically given the subject matter of his first script, Moore was not a fan of children living aboard the Enterprise. He also never understood why a psychotherapist was always sitting on the bridge next to the captain. Moore was also no fan of the replicator, which he believed an enemy of drama.Lots of other interesting stuff in Herc's post...
Posted by Mark on May 12, 2013 at 01:37 PM .: link :.
Sunday, May 05, 2013
Jack Glass
Adam Roberts' novel Jack Glass presents us with a delicious mashup of pulpy SF and golden-age mystery. I am much more familiar with the former than the latter, but that simple description alone was enough to garner interest, and when this won the British Science Fiction Award for best novel, that just made the choice easier. Having read it, I find it mildy disappointing that this didn't make the Hugo shortlist, which is amusing to me, since my first exposure to Adam Roberts was his takedown of the 2009 Hugos... But I digress, back to the novel. The Space Merchants or The Stars My Destination, more like the output of the Futurians than, say, Campbell's stable.
The first section is a prison story, and a rather grim one at that. Roberts does an exceptional job establishing the characters and the setting, an impressive feat considering that there are 7 main characters in this story. The science fictional twist on your average prison story is that this prison is an asteroid. 7 prisoners are dropped off on the asteroid and given minimal supplies and a tiny habitable bubble. If they can survive for 11 years under those conditions, they can go free. Of course, in order to survive, they have to excavate the rock, find water, build out a whole tunnel system, etc... Theoretically, whether the prisoners survive the ordeal or not, the company that imprisoned them is left with an asteroid that can be sold as a dwelling to someone. Escape is impossible, as they're surrounded on all sides by millions of miles of the nothingness of space - like an Alcatraz in space. It's a clever spin on an old story, and Roberts does a great job setting the stakes. Roberts makes deft work of establishing the 7 main characters - 3 typical alpha males, 2 quasi-alphas, 1 doomed and whiny fat dude, and a cripple (which, actually, isn't as big a deal in zero-gravity). This isn't a pleasant story, and the ending is rather far-fetched, but it's a good way of establishing the world this book is set in...
The second section is the country house murder mystery, and this one is told mostly from the perspective of Diana and her sister Eva. They are the daughters of a clan of information gatherers, rather highly placed in the hierarchy of the solar system. One of their servants winds up dead, and Diana, who is a big mystery buff, seeks to find out who did it. When she is informed that it was, in fact, the notorious murderer Jack Glass, she is mightily confused about how he could possibly have achieved that. When rumors that someone has discovered Faster Than Light (FTL) travel appear, things start to get even more hairy for our protagonists.
I was not quite sure what to make of this section for a while. Diana and Eva aren't immediately the most likable characters, though they eventually grow on you. They're both genetically optimized to solve problems. Eva is more into hard sciences and physics, while Diana is more personable. They both seem to have been bred to leverage sleep and dreams to solve their problems, which makes perfect sense, but which I always find a bit annoying because I don't like the untethered nature of prose that describes dreams. This is more my failing than Roberts, though, so take that with a grain of salt.
The third story is a straight up whodunit murder, except that we know that Jack Glass did it. That being said, we have no idea how he did it, and despite there being multiple witnesses and a confined space (another locked room, it seems), no one saw him do it. Confused? Good!
Along the way we've got some interesting speculations on FTL, a clever (if distressing) explanation of the Fermi Paradox, and even some speculation on "Champagne Supernovae" (as Roberts notes in his acknowledgements "'Champagne Supernovae' are a real phenomenon, one that puzzles real astrophysicists, and which are, I'm sorry to say, really named after the Oasis song.") All of this science is covered in plain language and is easily understood while still being clever and intriguing. Roberts clearly gleans the notion that science fiction is a literature of "ideas" and manages to infuse a few surprises into those old hoary tropes like FTL.
All in all, it's a very enjoyable book. A little grim at times, it's nonetheless very well constructed, well written, and clever. And if you're the type to judge a book by its cover, you'll still be in for a treat, as the cover art is fantastic. If any of this sounds interesting, this is most certainly a worthwhile read...
Posted by Mark on May 05, 2013 at 06:52 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself
A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that Ian Sales' novella Adrift on the Sea of Rains won the Short Fiction award at the 2012 British Science Fiction Association Awards. I mentioned that I didn't particularly love it, though I did find it very well written. And of course Ian Sales stumbled onto my post (and my old review), but he just seemed happy that I cared enough to write a review and even offered to send me a review copy of the next novella in the series (called the Apollo Quartet). I declined, opting to simply buy the book, as I know that every sale counts for self-published authors, and this time around, I found that I enjoyed the story much more.
The Apollo Quartet stories are basically alternate history speculations centering around the Apollo program, with some bigger SF tropes added in for flavor. Adrift on the Sea of Rains featured the brilliant premise of a large moon base witnessing the nuclear destruction of Earth. While I wasn't ultimately satisfied with the story, that premise (which I've only really given half of) is fantastic. The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself takes its time getting to the driving forces behind the story, but I ultimately found it a much more rewarding read.
The story follows Brigadier Colonel Bradley Elliott, USAF, as he is sent to investigate the possible disappearance of a human colony on an exoplanet. Twenty years earlier, Elliott was the first man to land on Mars. Something happened during that first trip to Mars that lead the higher ups to bring Elliott out of retirement and send him to investigate the exoplanet, but I won't ruin that excitement, and indeed, I may have already said too much.
I found the entire story much more enjoyable this time around. Elliott makes for a good protagonist, and there's much less angst here than there was in the previous story. Sales certainly knows his stuff, both from a technology standpoint and from a prose style standpoint. Even when he takes a scientific leap, such as the faster-than-light travel system used to travel to the exoplanet (which is 15 light years away), he seems to be able to ground it enough that it doesn't feel like a ridiculous affectation. I still find Sales lack of quotation marks around dialog to be a bit distracting, but it was also less notable here because there is less dialog (that, or I was just more engaged with the story and didn't notice as much).
I did get a little worried at one point when it seemed like the story had ended and a short little glossary came up, but when you get to the end of the glossary, there's an epilogue that contains the real kicker that was a real eye opener. That structure is a bit strange, but then, the glossary contains a lot of interesting info on the alternate history here (for instance, that's where we learn the details about how the Soviets landed on the moon first, thus inspiring the US to go to Mars), and the kicker in the conclusion does take on an added resonance when you've read some of the entries in the glossary. So where Adrift on the Sea of Rains started with a brilliant premise and trailed off (for me, at least), The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself takes a little time to get going, but ends with more satisfaction. I'd certainly recommend The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself if this sounds at all interesting to you (it's not closely tied to Adrift on the Sea of Rains, so no worries starting with the second installment either). Next up in the reading queue, the BSFA Novel award winner, Jack Glass (which has been in the queue for a while, but only recently became available in the US).
Posted by Mark on April 17, 2013 at 09:56 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
2013 Hugos
The nominations for the 2013 Hugo Awards were announced last week. The Hugos, while probably the most recognizable and representative award for science fiction and fantasy fandom, are also still, you know, awards. Like all awards everywhere and for everything, there is an inevitable and usually entertaining backlash consisting of usually pretty high profile folks railing against what they perceive as mediocrity. For a superb example of this sort of thing, see Christopher Priest's takedown of last year's Clarke Award nominees (the Clarke is a British SF&F award, and Priest's polemic hit especially hard since, you know, he's an upstanding author who has won the award in the past). Filled with just the right amount of invective and hyperbole that it's entertaining and funny without seeming like he's just some old crank. Will this year's Hugo backlash fare as well? It's still early in Hugo season, but things have certainly started off with a bang, as Justin from Staffer's Book Reviews asserts that the Hugos are "utter twaddle":
...the Hugo voter has a certain style it looks for in its fiction. Hugo-style, if you will, is like Gangnam-style only without the distracting Korean guy riding a horse, replaced with Charles Stross and Connie Willis on a podium holding a... rocket ship. I admit Gangnam-style doesn't have nearly as much sex appeal. In other words, Hugo nominated books tend to be recognizable. On the one hand because they are mostly written by Stross, Willis, John Scalzi, China Mieville, Robert Charles Wilson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ian MacDonald, and active members of the Live Journal community, but also because they fit a certain motif that's difficult to pin down. I'll fall back on the old pornography argument, "I know it when I see it."So far, so good, and not too critical, though you can see the beginnings of his ultimate problem with the Hugos up there in that first paragraph. After giving two examples of worthy novels that weren't nominated (Elizabeth Bear's Range of Ghosts, and NK Jemisin's The Killing Moon), he starts to get to the heart of the matter.
Books like Bear's and Jemisin's are missing not because they aren't good enough or even because they aren't the kinds of books Hugo voters support, but because of an impenetrable culture of voting habits that precludes them from being part of the discussion. Those habits involve Lois McMaster Bujold, John Scalzi, and (of late) Seanan McGuire who are as likely to be nominated for a Hugo as Barrack Obama is to be heckled at the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo.In essence, anyone who follows the Hugos, even just in the Best Novel category, is bound to notice the same 6-7 names popping up year after year. The aforementioned Stross, Willis, Scalzi, Mieville, Wilson, Bujold, MacDonald, etc... It looks like we can add Seanan McGuire (aka Mira Grant) to the list, as she's made the shortlist for the past three years due to her Newsflesh trilogy of zombie books. And there are plenty of others who don't publish often enough to achieve that sort of repetition. The question that is being raised is not whether or not these are good authors, but whether or not every single work each of these authors produce needs to be nominated. The argument becomes a little more pronounced in some of the other categories, like the Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (i.e. TV shows):
....best dramatic short form can be summarized in one sentence: why does an award exist when 60% of the nominees year in and year out are from one creative enterprise?He's talking about Doctor Who, which has garnered at least 2 and usually 3 nominations per year since it was rebooted in 2006 (and has won the award every year except for one, when the Hugo went to another frequent nominee, Joss Whedon, for his admittedly worthy Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). In fairness, as someone pointed out in the comments, this could very well be due to the way in which television is distributed. The Hugos are, technically, a worldwide award, and Doctor Who is actually distributed pretty well around the world, often airing at the same time or only a week or two later. Other shows air seasons in different years, etc... which makes it hard for some of them to gain traction. Anyway, similar arguments can be made for some of the other categories, some of which don't really change at all from year to year (particularly the "fan" categories, though I get the impression that that is a bit too insular for even me to care about).
It's a fair point. I mean, I know that Neil Gaiman is a good author, do we need to nominate everything the dude does? The post takes a pretty critical eye on recent Kaedrin favorite Lois McMaster Bujold, perhaps unfairly comparing her to Heinlein, but on the other hand, Justin is dead on when he wondered why Cryoburn needed to be nominated. I like the book just fine, but it's pretty clear why it was nominated: it was the first entry in a beloved series in 10 years. People were just so happy to spend some more time with (the admittedly great character of) Miles Vorkosigan that they just went and nominated the book, almost automatically. Again, I enjoyed the book, but I'd put it somewhere towards the middle of the pack of Bujold's work, nowhere close to that amazing late 90s run starting with the Hugo winning Mirror Dance and finishing with the Hugo nominated A Civil Campaign (which had quite stiff competition that year). I think you could make the same argument against this year's nominee, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, though I think that one is a step above Cryoburn.
The problem with all of this, of course, is that there is no real solution. Sometimes an author legitimately goes on a tear of great writing. Justin seems to think highly of Heinlein, who went on his own tear of frequent nominations/wins in the late 50s and early/mid 60s. Will Bujold or Mieville prove to be as influential or long-lasting as Heinlein? Well, that's sorta missing the point, isn't it? I'm sure someone in the 60s was all "Heinlein is a good author, but what about all that weird polyamorous sex crap? Do we need to nominate him every year?"
To be perfectly honest, I don't read enough newly published SF/F to really say that this year's slate is good or bad. I've read two of the nominees: Redshirts and Captain Vorpatril's Alliance. I liked both of these books, and managed to read through them really quickly, but I would not have been surprised at all if they weren't nominated. It's not that they're bad - they're both good - but it's hard not to take Justin's point to heart. Are people nominating these books because they're really the best books, or because Scalzi and Bujold are super popular? Of the other three nominees, the one I'm most likely to read is 2312, by Kim Stanley Robinson (incidentally, this is his 5th nomination), and from what I've seen, I'd probably be better off reading Robinson's Mars trilogy. I'm not going to read Blackout because I'm fucking sick of zombies and it's the third book in a series, and Throne of the Crescent Moon is a fantasy, which is fine, but I'd rather spend my time catching up on other fantasy stuff.
So this post contains a lot of whinging and not a whole lot of real, genuine insight. I'm not really in a position to refute Justin's position, and I can certainly see that he's correct, but on the other hand, I don't know that it's the worst thing evar either. A lot of this seems like shouting at gravity to me. Yeah, you see a lot of the same authors from year to year. This is going to happen on a populist award list, and the authors do change over time. The grand majority of the frequent nominees mentioned in this post emerged in this century, with a few having started in the 1990s. Some (Seanan McGuire) have emerged in the past few years. I would certainly welcome fresh and interesting nominees, but it doesn't really bother me to see the likes of Scalzi and Bujold either. Ultimately, it's all a subjective enterprise, so while it's fun to read cranky responses to the ballot, we should probably keep in mind that just because something you don't like was nominated doesn't mean the whole enterprise is doomed.
And, just for fun, some miscellaneous thoughts on the Hugos:
Posted by Mark on April 03, 2013 at 10:27 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
Locus Online's 20th and 21st Century SF Novel Polls
Back in November, Locus Online conducted a poll for the best science fiction and fantasy of the 20th and 21st Centuries. The results, based on 625 ballots, were tallied and posted just last week. Like all such lists, it's merits are debatable, but I always find them fun and we all know that Americans love lists, so let's get down to brass tacks here.
As I did with NPR's top SF/F list, I'll list them out, bold the ones I've read and maybe throw in some annotations, because I'm a dork like that. I'm focusing on Novels here, but Locus also has novellas, novelettes (why is SF the only one that has these?), and short stories. Also, they broke out SF and Fantasy, so I'm only really focusing on the SF side of things. Ok, enough disclaimers, here's the 20th Century List:
Some assorted comments about the above lists: Female authors not particularly well represented on either list. Kaedrin favorite Lois McMaster Bujold shows up in the voting a lot, but it appears that her Vorkosigan series books caused a lot of split votes, though she did really well on the Fantasy lists (not discussed above). I'm really surprised that Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow only got one paltry vote.
There's a ton of overlap with similar such lists, though there were definitely a few interesting choices that didn't appear on, say, the NPR list. I'd be really curious to see how the 21st century list evolves over time. The 20th century list definitely has a lot of old standbys, but I could see the 21st century list changing a lot as time goes on...
Posted by Mark on January 02, 2013 at 11:21 PM .: link :.
Sunday, December 09, 2012
SF Book Review, Part 12
I've fallen way behind on the SF Book Review train. I've done a few individual reviews, but I've been reading at a pretty fast pace this year. Perhaps part of the reason I haven't done a SF Book Review lately is that... I'm reading less science fiction. For various reasons, I've hit up a bunch of Fantasy, Horror, Crime, and Non-Fiction this year. SF remains my favorite genre, but others keep creeping in the queue, and even this roundup contains stuff that would likely be classified Fantasy. But whatever, here's some quick thoughts on some books I've read recently.
Posted by Mark on December 09, 2012 at 03:25 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Where do you get your ideas?
The answer to this most cliched of interview questions asked of SF authors is, of course, Robert Heinlein. At least for Theodore Sturgeon, it was. In a Guest of Honor speech at a SF convention, Sturgeon recounts an instance of writers block:
I went into a horrible dry spell one time. It was a desperate dry spell and an awful lot depended on me getting writing again. Finally, I wrote to Bob Heinlein. I told him my troubles; that I couldn't write-perhaps it was that I had no ideas in my head that would strike a story. By return airmail-I don't know how he did it-I got back 26 story ideas. Some of them ran for a page and a half; one or two of them were a line or two. I mean, there were story ideas that some writers would give their left ear for. Some of them were merely suggestions; just little hints, things that will spark a writer like, 'Ghost of a little cat patting around eternity looking for a familiar lap to sit in.'And now Letters of Note has reproduced the entire Heinlein letter in question, complete with all 26 ideas and amusing banter ("To have the incomparable and always scintillating Sturgeon ask for ideas is like having the Pacific Ocean ask one to pee in it.") Also, funny how they refer to each other as Bob and Ted. Heh. Anyway, here's some of my favorite story ideas:
a society where there are no criminal offences, just civil offences, i.e., there is a price on everything, you can look it up in the catalog and pay the price. You want to shoot your neighbor? Go ahead and shoot the bastard. He has a definite economic rating; deposit the money with the local clearing house within 24 hrs.; they will pay the widow. Morality would consist in not trying to get away with anything without paying for it. Good manners would consist in so behaving that no one would be willing to pay your listed price to kill you.Heinlein notes that this is more John Campbell-ish than Sturgeon-ish, but this idea is actually quite Heinleinian. The letter was written in 1955, but you can see a lot of these sorta proto-libertarian ideas, even this early in his life. Another idea:
The bloke sells dreams, in pills. Euphoria, along with your fantasy, is guaranteed. The pills are not toxic, nor are they harmful the way narcotics are, but they are habit-forming as the euphoria dreams are much better than reality. Can the Pure Foods & Drugs people act?That one is pure Phillip K. Dick (Heinlein and Sturgeon would probably call him Phil). More ideas:
We know very little about multiple personality, despite the many case records. Suppose a hypnoanalyst makes a deep investigation into a schizoid...and comes up with with the fact that it is a separate and non-crazy personality in the body, distinct from the nominal one, and that this new personality is a refugee from (say) 2100 A.D., when conditions are so intolerable that escape into another body and another time (even this period) is to be preferred, even at the expense of living more or less helplessly in another man's body.Reading a letter like this, while appreciating the generosity, I can't help but think that it's not really the ideas that matter. These are all fantastic ideas and Heinlein is brilliant here, but we all have great ideas. Ideas are important, but perhaps not as important as we like to believe. You still have to deliver on that idea, which is harder than it looks and that's also where the likes of Heinlein and Sturgeon made a name for themselves. Conversely, there are folks who manage to take dumb ideas and make them into something profound. It's all in that process that the magic lies. Ideas are easy. Heck, I have my own SFnal idea about multiple personality syndrome. But do I have the stones to do anything about it? Well, it is NaNoWriMo... Only 2 days left, but who knows?
Posted by Mark on November 28, 2012 at 10:09 PM .: link :.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
The latest entry in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga actually focuses on one of the colorful side characters of Bujold's Vor universe: Ivan Vorpatril. Variously referred to as "That idiot Ivan" (or directly addressed as "Ivan, you idiot!") among other variations, Ivan is often played as a foil for Miles (the central character for this 15 book or so series, though Miles takes a minimal role in this particular installment). In early novels, Ivan is generally portrayed as a lazy but handsome womanizer type, completely harmless and lacking in ambition. One wouldn't think that this would make for a particularly compelling or even sympathetic protagonist, but as the series progresses, you get a better feel for the character and his motivations (or rather, the environment which caused such). Indeed, his laziness is carefully constructed, and probably more work than it would be to actually apply himself.
You see, both Miles and Ivan are technically in line for succession to the Emperor's throne. This sounds fine and dandy, but on Barrayar (the planet these stories revolve around), being a serious contender for the throne makes one a target for assassination plots, conspiracy theorists, political muck-raking, and general misery. Miles, by virtue of his mutated appearance (among other qualities that would take way too long to go into here), is mostly exempted from this pressure, to the point where he has a sorta opposite problem. But Ivan is the tall, dark, and handsome type, the perfect vision of a leader. And in terms of succession, he's basically next in line. If he even hinted at applying himself, he'd probably be portrayed as a potential usurper to the throne by political enemies (of both Ivan's family and the Emperor, or whoever thought they could benefit from some additional instability in the ruling class). If this seems paranoid, well, sure, but we've seen such happenings throughout the series (whether that be actual military coups, or political enemies portraying someone as a potential revolutionary). To forestall such political wrangling (not to mention the aforementioned assassination attempts and whatnot), Ivan has carefully cultivated an air of lazy incompetence so that he could never be taken seriously by any political operatives or revolutionaries or what have you.
As the series progresses and Emperor Gregor ascends to the throne and actually manages to stabilize and grow Barrayar, not to mention take a wife and start popping out kids, the pressure on Ivan is released somewhat. As such, we start to see that he's not as dumb as he appears. I particularly enjoyed his role in A Civil Campaign. At the start of Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, Ivan is living as a comfortable Bachelor, but a certain restlessness has crept in. Enter a friend and Barrayaran intelligence operative with a strange request to look after an attractive young woman who may be in danger, appealing to Ivan's Barrayaran sense of chivalry.
I actually don't want to get into too much detail about the plot. The first act basically plays out like a spy thriller with a dash of romance, while the second act turns into more of a comedy of errors kinda thing (akin to A Civil Campaign), and the third act morphs into a sorta heist story. The first half of the book is great and funny and I found myself wearing a stupid grin and laughing a lot. Things slow down just a bit in the middle as Bujold maneuvers for the final act, which is also quite good. I'd put this somewhere towards the top of the Vor series in terms of enjoyability, certainly better than the last two installments (which were no slouches, to be sure), though not quite reaching the peaks of my favorite novels.
Again, I don't want to give too much away, but Ivan's romantic interest is Tej Arqua, and while their introduction may have been harried and rushed in convenience, they actually do match together rather well. Tej is from a house of Jackson's Hole, which is the Vor universe's sorta free-for-all capitalist planet, with no real rule of law. Her house has just been attacked and split up, with members of her family hiding in exile... which is when Ivan runs into her. Eventually she begins to get a feel for the man and his planet. In line with the above discussion, Tej has Ivan pegged as "...a middling Vor officer of middling responsibilities and middling rank. Just middling along." To which someone replies that such a sentiment is a "charming understatement," while explaining Ivan's family and potential of succession...
Bujold has mentioned that she intends the book to work as a stand-alone to first-time readers, but so much of what I enjoyed about the book came from the fact that I've read all the previous novels. I'm positive that it would work for new readers, but I don't know that you'd get that stupid grin and engage in laugh-out-loud moments like I was if you don't get the background. That being said, I do appreciate that Bujold tends to make her novels stand-alone stories, rather than relying on cliffhangers and multi-book stories (even if there are character arcs that go across multiple books, each book generally tells a self-contained story). I would still recommend that you start the series with Shards of Honor or The Warrior's Apprentice, but all things considered, this one is pretty darn good.
Posted by Mark on November 25, 2012 at 11:04 AM .: link :.
Sunday, July 15, 2012
What is good?
Ian Sales thinks he knows:
I've lost count of the number of times I've been told "good is subjective" or "best is subjective". Every time I hear it, it makes me howl with rage. Because it is wrong.The irony here is that I've lost count of the number of times I've been told that "good is objective". And yet, no one seems to be able to define what constitutes good. Even Ian, despite his adamant stance, describes what is good in entirely subjective terms.
It is not an exact science, and it is subject to changes in taste and/or re-evaluation in light of changes in attitudes and sensibilities. But there are certain key indicators in fiction which can be used to determine the quality of that piece of fiction.Having established that there are key indicators that can be used to determine quality, Sales proceeds to list... approximately none of them. Instead, he talks about "taste" and "changes in attitudes and sensibilities" (both of which are highly subjective). If it's not an "exact science", how is it objective? Isn't this an implicit admission that subjectivity plays a role? He does mention some criteria for bad writing though:
Perhaps it's easier to describe what is bad - if good is subjective, then by definition bad must be too. Except, strangely, everyone seems to agree that the following do indeed indicate that a piece of fiction is bad: cardboard cutout characters, idiot plotting, clumsy prose, tin-earred dialogue, lack of rigour, graceless info-dumping, unoriginality, bad research...The problem with this is that most of his indicators are subjective. Some of them could contain a nugget of objectivity, notably the "bad research" piece, but others are wholly subjective. What exactly constitutes "tin-eared dialogue"? One person's cardboard cutout character is another person's fully realized and empathetic soul.
Perhaps it's my engineering background taking over, but I have a pretty high standard for objectivity. There are many objective measures of a book, but most of those aren't very useful in determining the book's quality. For instance, I can count the number of letters or words in the book. I can track the usage of punctuation or contractions. Those numbers really won't tell me much, though. I can look at word distribution and vocabulary, but then, there are a lot of classics that don't use flowery language. Simplicity sometimes trumps complexity. I can evaluate the grammar using the standards of our language, but by those measures, James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon would probably be labeled "bad" writers. For that matter, so would Ian, who's recent novella Adrift on the Sea of Rains eschews the basic grammatical convention of using quotations for dialogue. But they're not bad writers, in large part because they stray from the standards. Context is important. So that's not really that useful either.
The point of objectivity is to remove personal biases and feelings from the equation. If you can objectively measure a book, then I should be able to do the same - and our results should be identical. If we count the words in a book, we will get the same answer (assuming we count correctly). Similarly, if we're able to objectively measure a book's quality, you and I should come to the same conclusion. Now, Ian Sales has read more books than me. The guy's a writer, and he knows his craft well, so perhaps the two of us won't see eye to eye on a lot of things. But even getting two equivalently experienced people to agree on everything is a fool's errand. Critical reading is important. Not everyone that subverts grammatical conventions is doing so well or for good reason. Sometimes simplicity can be elegant, sometimes it feels clumsy. Works of art need to be put into the cultural and historical context, and thus a work should stand up to some sort of critical examination. But critical is not equivalent to objective.
Now, Ian does have an interesting point here. If what's "good" is subjective, then how is that a valuable statement?
If good is subjective, then awards are completely pointless. And studying literature, well, that's a complete waste of time too. After all, how can you be an expert in a topic in which one individual's value judgment is worth exactly the same another person's? There'd be no such thing as an expert. All books would have exactly the same artistic value.Carried to its logical extreme, the notion that what's "good" is wholly subjective does complicate matters. I don't think I'd go quite as far as Ian did in the above referenced paragraph, but maybe he's on to something.
So far, I have mentioned a bunch of questions that Ian asked, which I will now try to give an answer to:
We can devise whatever measurements we want, we can come up with statistical sampling models that will take into account sales and votes and prizes and awards and academic praise and journal mentions, whatever. I actually find those to be interesting and fun exercises, but they're just that. They ultimately aren't that important to history. I'd bet that the things from our era that are commonly referenced 200 years from now would seem horribly idiosyncratic and disjointed to us...
Sales concludes with this:
If you want to describe a book in entirely subjective terms, then tell people how much you enjoyed it, how much you liked it. That's your own personal reaction to it. It appealed to you, it entertained you. That's the book directly affecting you. Another person may or may not react the same way, the book might or might not do the same to them.He's not wrong about that. Enjoyment is subjective. But if we divorce the concept of "good" from the concept of "enjoyment", what are we left with? It's certainly a useful distinction to make at times. There are many things I "like" that I don't think are particularly "good" on any technical level. I'm not saying that a book has to be "enjoyable" to be "good", but I don't think they're entirely independent either. There are many ways to measure a book. For the most part, in my opinion, the objective ones aren't very useful or predictive by themselves. You could have an amazingly well written book (from a prose standpoint) put into service of a poorly plotted story, and then what? On the other hand, complete subjectivity isn't exactly useful either. You fall into the trap that Ian lays out: if everything is entirely subjective, then there is no value in any of it. That's why we have all these elaborate systems though. We have markets that lead to sales numbers, we have awards (with large or small juries, working together or sometimes independently), we have academics, we have critics, we have blogs, we have reviews, we have friends whose opinions we trust, we have a lot of things we can consider.
In chaos theory, even simple, orderly systems display chaotic elements. Similarly, even the most chaotic natural systems have some sort of order to them. This is, of course, a drastic simplification. One could argue that the universe is headed towards a state of absolute entropy; the heat death of the universe. Regardless of the merits of this metaphor, I feel like the push and pull of objectivity is similar. Objective assessments of novels that are useful will contain some element of subjectivity. Similarly, most subjective assessments will take into account objective measurements. In the end, we do our best with what we've got. That's my opinion, anyway.
Posted by Mark on July 15, 2012 at 07:05 PM .: link :.
Sunday, July 08, 2012
Fahrenheit 451
I recently finished Ray Bradbury's short novel Fahrenheit 451. The title refers to the temperature at which paper ignites, and it tells the story of Guy Montag, a fireman in a world where books and reading are illegal. Ironically, in this book, firemen don't fight fires, they start them. Whenever a stash of books is found, the firemen are called in to burn them. In one memorable and vivid incident, a woman refuses to leave when the firemen show up, preferring to burn with her books. This seems to represent a crisis point for Montag, the point at which he begins to wonder why books must be burned.
There's nothing particularly special about the characters or the plotting of the story, but Bradbury's ideas and style seem to carry the book. Bradbury's delirious prose evokes a lot of emotion and imagery. There's the aforementioned woman burning with her books, but also the sensory overload of the "parlors" (basically a room rigged up with multiple televisions), the snake-like stomach pump, the mechanical hound, and the fire itself, burning through everything. It's not an easy read, perhaps even overly poetic, but in this case it works. The novel is short enough and the ideas behind it are crazy enough that Bradbury's style fits.
It's a dystopia, and like a lot of such stories, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Again, Bradbury's stylistic flourishes are what make it work here. There's a lot of talk about how the book is critical of state-sponsored censorship, and I suppose there's an element of that, but where Bradbury differs from his contemporaries is where the censorship began: as a populist movement. As Montag's (surprisingly well-read) boss Beatty explains:
There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time...It's an intriguing notion. Mass media and conformity extrapolated out to its logical extreme. The dystopia aspect is unrealistic, and yet, the steps it would take to get there are things we see all the time. For a later edition of the book, Bradbury wrote a Coda where he expanded upon some of these ideas:
About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.It's a weird blend that Bradbury conjures with this novel. It's the tyranny of the minority versus the tyranny of the majority, only they're somehow set together into a negative feedback loop until you end up with a book-burning society. Some see the book as a condemnation of communism; railing against conformity in favor of individuality. And that's certainly there, but what Bradbury wrote also condemns democracy and technology as a conduit towards conformity. I don't think he's entirely correct about it. 60 years later, we struggle with different problems... but that sorta misses the point.
Like Orwell's 1984, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a document of its era. I don't find it a realistic portrayal of the world, but that doesn't mean that Bradbury failed. Indeed, it means he succeeded. His tale portrays the nightmares of 1953, a time when radio and television and movies must have had the book on the run. Despite the frequent lament that people today don't read enough, I think we've avoided Bradbury's nightmare, and instead live with our own, perhaps stranger, problems.
Posted by Mark on July 08, 2012 at 06:44 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, July 04, 2012
55 Reading Questions
As memes go, this one is self-explanatory, but I read a lot so it's fun too:
1) Favourite childhood book?
I suppose this depends on where you draw the line of childhood, but the book that comes to mind is Dean Koontz's Lightning. It's the book that I credit with getting me to read for pleasure. I was 13 at the time, and reading was generally something I was forced to do for school, not something I did for fun. But my brother gave me this book once when I was bored and I couldn't put it down. I'd never had an experience like that before, and from that point on, I read as much as I could. If teen years don't count as childhood, another thing that came to mind is Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books, but it's been a solid 20-25 years since I've even seen those things, and I remember very little about them except a character named Taran and the black riders that seem so similar to the Nazgul from LotR...
2) What are you reading right now?
I just finished Fahrenheit 451, part of an effort to familiarize myself with Bradbury's work (this originated back during the NPR SF/F list days when I acknowledged my shame of not having read any Bradbury - it's just a not-so-happy coincidence that I read this book in the wake of Bradbury's passing). I just started reading a collection of short stories by Sharma Shields called Favorite Monster, which, despite having only read a few of the stories, might be the weirdest thing I've read all year.
3) What books do you have on request at the library?
Sadly, I haven't been to the library in many years. I'm not even sure where the closest library is...
4) Bad book habit?
I'm not really sure I have any, save perhaps not reading enough...
5) What do you currently have checked out at the library?
Again, no library usage here.
6) Do you have an e-reader?
Yes, a Kindle Touch that I've used more than expected. In fact, Fahrenheit 451 was the first paper book I've read in several months... Though it was sorta appropriate given the subject matter, it was really just because the physical book was cheaper than the Kindle version (I get that instituting ebooks at a big publishing house is non-trivial, but stuff like this is so non-intuitive and frustrating).
7) Do you prefer to read one book at a time, or several at once?
For the most part, I'm reading one book at a time. I primarily read fiction, but will often have a non-fiction book started as well, and will switch back and forth as my mood dictates or given certain situations (this might be too much information, but I almost always have a book in the bathroom, often a book about homebrewing or beer). In general, though, I will get into one of the two books and burn through to the end.
8) Have your reading habits changed since starting a blog?
I started this blog about 12 years ago at this point, and my reading habits have changed several times in that interval. I will say that I do tend to blog more about what I read these days, that being a good way of arranging my interests in parallel.
9) Least favourite book you read this year (so far)?
A two-way tie between Foreigner, by C. J. Cherryh (my thoughts) and Fool Moon, by Jim Butcher. In both cases, I will probably revisit other works by the author, but I don't have anything planned in the short term...
10) Favourite book you've read this year?
Another two-way tie (but the books are deeply intertwined and part of the same series) between Memory and A Civil Campaign, both by Lois McMaster Bujold. Check out my thoughts on both, along with some other books in the series.
11) How often do you read out of your comfort zone?
Occasionally. A lot of non-fiction is generally outside my comfort zone, and I've been vying away from my normal comfort zone more this year than last year...
12) What is your reading comfort zone?
Science fiction and pop-science non-fiction. Maybe horror and fantasy would also fit, though I don't read a lot of either...
13) Can you read on the bus?
I'm sure I can, but buses around here are generally to be avoided.
14) Favourite place to read?
If it's nice outside, I like to sit on my deck and read, but the grand majority of my reading is done in my living room, on my couch.
15) What is your policy on book lending?
I'm generally pretty open to lending, though it doesn't seem to come up much.
16) Do you ever dog-ear books?
I'm sure this is blasphemy to some folks, but yes, I'm a compulsive dog-earer, especially for non-fiction. However, I'm finding that one of the big advantages of an ereader is the ability to easily highlight passages (and even save some notes about why I'm highlighting the passage).
17) Do you ever write in the margins of your books?
Very rarely did I do this with physical books, though perhaps I did for a few things in college, but I do so more often now that I read ebooks.
18) Not even with text books?
I don't have much occasion to read text books these days, but like I said, when I was in college, I probably did a little of this (but not a ton).
19) What is your favourite language to read in?
English is pretty much the only language I can read. Unless someone is writing novels in javascript now... I feel like an unworthy nerd. I can't even read stuff in Klingon or Dothraki!
20) What makes you love a book?
Interesting ideas, engaging characters, and good storytelling.
21) What will inspire you to recommend a book?
I find recommendations difficult. I rarely give unqualified recommendations, but if I really love a book, I will recommend it. If someone's asking for recommendations, I do my best to tailor my recommendations to their needs and desires, rather than just what I like...
22) Favourite genre?
Science fiction.
23) Genre you rarely read (but wish you did)?
I wish I had a better handle on crime novels. I love crime movies, but have rarely read crime books. It's something I want to become better acquainted with. I'm reasonably familiar with horror literature, but I have not read much in the past few years, nor have I gone as deep as I have with something like SF.
24) Favourite biography?
I don't read many, but Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War was fantastic and would probably be my favorite.
25) Have you ever read a self-help book?
I can't say as though I have, unless you count stuff like Homebrewing books or pop-science books.
26) Favourite cookbook?
I have a couple cookbooks, but they're fairly unremarkable, to the point where naming them my favorite seems like a waste. If homebrewing counts, then How to Brew: Everything You Need To Know To Brew Beer Right The First Time by John J. Palmer is a great introductory text.
27) Most inspirational book you've read this year (fiction or non-fiction)?
Not sure if I really get inspired as this question intends, but pop-science non-fiction always seems to get me fired up. So far this year, I'd say that Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson was probably the one that hit me the best...
28) Favorite reading snack?
Pretzels, but for the most part I'm not eating whist reading. I usually drink tea or water whilst reading though. On rare occasions, I'll crack a sipping beer, like a barleywine or a bourbon-barrel aged stout or something (a good pairing in winter).
29) Name a case in which hype ruined your reading experience.
I don't really see much in the way of hype when it comes to books. Perhaps there are some classics that don't quite live up to their reputation though. A lot of golden-age SF is written in a bit of a flat style, but often the ideas are still well represented, so I'm having trouble thinking of specific examples...
30) How often do you agree with critics about a book?
I can't say as though I read a lot of critics, at least not in the way that I read a lot of film criticism. I suppose I tend to agree with most of what I read, or I can at least understand where someone's coming from when their opinions don't match mine.
31) How do you feel about giving bad/negative reviews?
I don't relish giving bad/negative reviews in the way that some people in the internets do, but if I didn't like a book, I'm going to say so.
32) If you could read in a foreign language, which language would you choose?
An interesting question. The first thing that came to mind was Japanese, but I suppose Russian would be an interesting one too.
33) Most intimidating book you've ever read?
Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon.
34) Most intimidating book you're too nervous to begin?
An interesting question. There are perhaps a few, but the one that springs immediately to mind is James Joyce's Ulysses.
35) Favourite poet?
Not much of a poetry guy, but who doesn't like Robert Frost? Or heck, Shakespeare...
36) How many books do you usually have checked out of the library at any given time?
Again, no real library usage here.
37) How often have you returned books to the library unread?
Again, no real library usage here.
38) Favourite fictional character?
This was a tougher question than I thought, but the obvious answer for the past couple years is Miles Vorkosigan from Lois McMaster Bujold's very long series of books mostly detailing his life and times. After thinking for a moment, I also thought of the Waterhouse and Shaftoe clans from Cryptonomicon, but that's sorta cheating, as there are multiple characters and I love them all...
39) Favourite fictional villain?
And this is even harder than the last question. The first thing that came to mind was Sauron, but that's a boring answer. Unfortunately, not that many other options are forthcoming. How about Grand Admiral Thrawn from Timothy Zahn's Star Wars books? I suppose it's a bit hokey to reference Star Wars books, but Thrawn was a genuinely well thought out villain and a worthy successor to Vader and the Emperor...
40) Books I'm most likely to bring on vacation?
Something that is breezy and easy to read in busy places with lots of distractions like beaches or airports. I once tried to read Umberto Eco on a trip and it was... not quite as rewarding as it would have been if I read it at home in a more controlled environment. On the other hand, Bujold's books were great companions last year, and I'm sure John Scalzi's books would fit the bill as well...
41) The longest I've gone without reading.
I really don't know how to measure this one. I presume we're talking about books here and not newspapers, magazines, websites, etc... but even then, I'm not really sure how to go about quantifying this. There are certainly periods in my life where I didn't read nearly as much as I do now, but I don't really know the longest period of time I've gone between reading books. Let's say a couple weeks?
42) Name a book that you could/would not finish.
It's pretty rare that I don't finish a book, but I never did finish David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. It's something I may go back to, but I got pretty well fed up with the book while reading it. I got almost halfway through it though, which is actually a lot of time and effort to throw away, but I was getting annoyed by the lack of any real point to what I was reading. Oh sure, lots of themes and interesting stuff, but it felt like reading a SNL show filled with disconnected skits, and even when they connected, it wasn't quite enough to make up for all the stuff about drugs and stuff that I didn't particularly care about.
43) What distracts you easily when you're reading?
I was going to say the internet, but really that's my fault, so the real answer to this question is me. I let myself get distracted sometimes, but that's usually indicative of the fact that I'm not enjoying what I'm reading.
44) Favourite film adaptation of a novel?
That's a tough one, as there aren't a lot of situations in which I've both read the novel and seen the movie. The Lord of the Rings movies are certainly a candidate, as they managed something I wasn't sure was possible... Fight Club is a pretty great adaptation. I do love The Shining, despite the fact that it is so very different than the book. I think that's what really makes it work though, as I will often get bored by the book or movie if I've already read/seen the other version of the story.
45) Most disappointing film adaptation?
Another difficult one as there are so many bad adaptations. How the Grinch Stole Christmas comes to mind. David Lunch's Dune is more of an interesting failure than a disappointing one. I definitely want to call out Starship Troopers, as it's one of the least faithful adaptations ever put to film. Regardless of what you may think of Heinlein's right-wing novel (it's not one of my favorites), the film completely changes the direction while keeping the basic structure in place. It's a movie that has inexplicably enjoyed a sorta cult following since it bombed at the box office, and I will admit there is something compelling about the film, but in a bad way. Like watching a trainwreck.
46) The most money I've ever spent in the bookstore at one time?
I can't say as though I've really kept track. I don't tend to buy a lot of books at once though, so I'm guessing it's pretty low. Then again, there's definitely been a holiday season or two when I've bought a lot of books as presents, probably going as high as $100...
47) How often do you skim a book before reading it?
It's pretty rare, though I do like to see how much reading is left before the end of the chapter/section I'm currently reading. This is one thing that does annoy about ereaders, as it's very difficult to do that sort of thing.
48) What would cause you to stop reading a book halfway through?
So the inverse of what I love is a good place to start: Dumb ideas, bad characters that I can't engage with, bad storytelling or plotting. As I mentioned before, it's pretty rare that I stop reading a book though. I can only think of a couple books I've not finished in the past few years.
49) Do you like to keep your books organized?
I have a loose system, but nothing particularly special. I know there are lots of folks who obsess over their bookshelves, but it's not something I've ever really worried about.
50) Do you prefer to keep books or give them away once you've read them?
I generally keep books, but I wouldn't have a problem parting with a lot of them. I'm a bit of a packrat though, so I tend to keep stuff.
51) Are there any books you've been avoiding?
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter has been on my shelf for a while now. I'm sure it's something I'd enjoy, but it's a really long book - 1000+ pages of very dense, complex prose - and I feel like it would kill the momentum I've built up this year in reading...
52) Name a book that made you angry.
I tend to avoid books I think will make me angry, but some non-fiction will make me angry, especially politics or detailing tragic situations in the real world, etc...
53) A book you didn't expect to like but did?
Another tough question, as I don't read a lot of books I don't expect to like. I generally go into a book hoping to like it... That being said, I think I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Ursula K. Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness
54) A book that you expected to like but didn't?
The aforementioned Foreigner, by C. J. Cherryh was the most recent and egregious example of this...
55) Favourite guilt-free, pleasure reading?
I can't say as though I've ever really felt guilty of reading something, though perhaps my recent reading of a couple of Christopher Farnsworth's trashy Vampire spy novels kinda fit.
Well, there you have it. It was a long one, but fun. Feel free to berate me for my answers in the comments and have a happy Independence Day!
Posted by Mark on July 04, 2012 at 07:58 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Peak Performance
A few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article called How David Beats Goliath, and the internets rose up in nerdy fury. Like a lot of Gladwell's work, the article is filled with anecdotes (whatever you may think of Gladwell, he's a master of anecdotes), most of which surround the notion of a full-court press in basketball. I should note at this point that I absolutely loath the sport of basketball, so I don't really know enough about the mechanics of the game to comment on the merits of this strategy. That being said, the general complaint about the article is that Gladwell chose two examples that aren't really representative of the full-court press. The primary example seems to be a 12 year old girls basketball team, coached by an immigrant unfamiliar with the game:
Ranadive was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A's end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent's attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadive thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent's end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?The strategy apparently worked well, to the point where they made it to the national championship tournament:
The opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn't playing fair - that it wasn't right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls, who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned something much more valuable - that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged.Most of the criticism of this missed the forest for the trees. A lot of people nitpicked some specifics, or argued as if Gladwell was advocating for all teams playing a press (when he was really just illustrating a broader point that underdogs don't always need to play by the stronger teams' conventions). One of the most common complaints was that "the press isn't always an advantage" which I'm sure is true, but again, it kinda misses the point that Gladwell was trying to make. Tellingly, most folks didn't argue about Gladwell's wargame anecdote, though you could probably make similar nitpicky arguments.
Anyway, the reason I'm bringing this up three years after the fact is not to completely validate Gladwell's article or hate on his critics. As I've already mentioned, I don't care a whit about basketball, but I do think Gladwell has a more general point that's worth exploring. Oddly enough, after recently finishing the novel Redishirts, I got an itch to revisit some Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and rediscovered one of my favorite episodes. Oh sure, it's not one of the celebrated episodes that make top 10 lists or anything, but I like it nonetheless. It's called Peak Performance, and it's got quite a few parallels to Gladwell's article.
The main plot of the episode has to do with a war simulation exercise in which the Enterprise engages in a mock battle with an inferior ship (with a skeleton crew lead by Commander Riker). There's an obvious parallel here between the episode and Gladwell's article (when asked how a hopelessly undermatched ship can compete with the Enterprise, Worf responds "Guile."), but it's the B plot of the episode that is even more relevant (the main plot goes in a bit of a different direction due to some meddling Ferengi).
The B plot concerns the military strategist named Kolrami. He's acting as an observer of the exercise and he's arrogant, smarmy, and condescending. He's also a master at Strategema, one of Star Trek's many fictional (and nonsensical) games. Riker challenges this guy to a match because he's a glutton for punishment (this really is totally consistent with his character) - he just wants to say that he played the master, even if he lost... which, of course, he does. Later, Dr. Pulaski volunteers Data to play a game, with the thought being that the android would easily dispatch Kolrami, thus knocking him down a peg. But even Data loses.
Data is shaken by the loss. He even removes himself from duty. He expected to do better. According to the rules, he "made no mistakes", and yet he still lost. After analyzing his failure and discussing the matter with the captain (who basically tells Data to shut up and get back to work), Data resumes his duty, eventually even challenging Kolrami to a rematch. But this time, Data alters his premise for playing the game. "Working under the assumption that Kolrami was attempting to win, it is reasonable to assume that expected me to play for the same goal." But Data wasn't playing to win. He was playing for a stalemate. Whenever opportunities for advancement appeared, Data held back, attempting to maintain a balance. He estimated that he should be able to keep the game going indefinitely. Frustrated by Data's stalling, Kolrami forfeits in a huff.
There's an interesting parallel here. Many people took Gladwell's article to mean that he thought the press was a strategy that should be employed by all teams, but that's not really the point. The examples he gave were situations in which the press made sense. Similarly, Data's strategy of playing for stalemate was uniquely suited to him. The reason he managed to win was that he is an android without any feelings. He doesn't get frustrated or bored, and his patience is infinite. So while Kolrami may have technically been a better player, he was no match for Data once Data played to his own strengths.
Obviously, quoting fiction does nothing to bolster Gladwell's argument, but I was struck by the parallels. One of the complaints to Gladwell's article that rang at least a little true was that the article's overarching point was "so broad and obvious as to be not worth writing about at all." I don't know that I fully buy that, as a lot of great writing can ultimately be boiled down to something "broad and obvious", but it's a fair point. On the other hand, even if you think that, I do find that there's value in highlighting examples of how it's done, whether it's a 12 year old girls basketball team, or a fictional android playing a nonsensical (but metaphorically apt) game on a TV show. It seems that human beings sometimes need to be reminded that thinking outside the box is an option.
Posted by Mark on June 27, 2012 at 09:34 PM .: link :.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
In geek parlance, "red shirt" is a reference to red-uniformed Star Trek officers who frequently die during episodes1. They basically represent the writer's ploy to allow Kirk and McCoy to display grandstanding emotions (and Spock to show a lack thereof). I don't know who coined the notion or where (or if the the show intentionally employed this strategy), but 5 minutes of comprehensive research on the internets reveals a 1985 Star Trek novel called Killing Time, in which a character opines "you don't want to wear a red shirt on landing-party duty" (so sez Wikipedia2). That's the earliest reference I could find, but I'm sure this is something that the show's obsessive fanbase has been remarking on since the 1970s. It's a meme that has been frequently referenced and parodied throughout the years. The most obvious is in the movie Galaxy Quest, where the character of Guy Fleegman, "Crewman Number Six", fears for his life due to his character's expendable nature (fortunately, this parody inverts the meme, allowing him to survive). There is even a grand tradition amongst some SF authors to "reward" fans of their work by naming a character after them, then killing them (for example: David Weber).
All of which is to say that the concept behind John Scalzi's latest novel Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas isn't exactly a new one. It is, perhaps, the most thorough deconstruction of the trope - most others are mere references, homages, or simple skits on the matter - but I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. Fortunately, Scalzi is a talented author who knows how to turn the page. Indeed, I finished the book in a mere two sittings. Not quite a record, but close. And it's a solid story, filled with typical Scalzian characters and their snappy dialogue, with a some clever ideas thrown in for good measure. It didn't take me long to become attached to the characters, at which point my over-analysis of the title faded away and I devoured the rest of the book.
The general premise of the novel is that a bunch of characters on a Star-Trek-like ship recognize that people who get roped into away-missions with high profile members of the crew tend to end up dead. Essentially, the redshirts recognize their role in the show, and try to fight back. This stuff manifests itself in a number of ways. One of my favorites being "the box", a magical device used whenever the characters run into an impossible problem. They simply feed the problem into the box, and then when it's dramatically appropriate, it spits out an answer. It's a pretty funny take on Star Trek writers' tendency to tech the tech.
It's a fun book, perhaps more comedy than SF, though fans of Star Trek will probably enjoy it. I'm not entirely sure how well executed some of the mechanics of this whole premise is... For instance, it's not entirely clear when the characters are "on screen" as it were. One of our redshirts speculates that there's a "narrative", you see, and that if you can avoid the narrative, you can avoid an untimely death. There's even a funny sequences meant to illustrate how ridiculous commercial breaks are, but again, the mechanics of this aren't entirely clear. Of course, in an exercise that is so self-aware and meta, that's sorta the point. The TV show these characters are stuck in is clearly pretty bad, so of course a lot of this stuff doesn't make sense... and that's part of the fun of it all... but you could also argue that it's a bit of a cop out. Personally, I feel like such things are worthwhile if they're done well, and for the most part, everything here works even if it doesn't precisely fit.
The story proper is quite entertaining and fun, but it should be noted that it pretty much ends about 2/3 of the way through the novel. The remaining 100 pages or so consist of the sub-titular Three Codas. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this at first. It wasn't really surprising to see the story end when it did, except insofar as I already knew there was still 100 pages or so left. Scalzi even manages to extend the self-referential meta elements beyond the simple redshirt notion, though it's exactly what you'd think when you think about the premise. Anyway, the three short stories are all related to the main narrative, touching on side characters or concepts here and there. The first coda comes off as a little slight, but it ends up being pretty effective. The second coda is actually pretty meaningful and interesting, adding a depth and seriousness the rest of the novel was missing. The third coda builds on that heft while still managing to end on a clever but positive note. There's something a little gimmicky about the codas - they're written in first, second, and third person, for instance - and I can see how some folks wouldn't appreciate them in general, but I thought they were well done and meaningful.
It's strange. I find that the things I don't like about this book, like the title and the structure, are superficial. These meta aspects (not to be confused with the meta nature of the story itself) trouble me more than the actual contents of the book. I don't quite know what to make of this. The title "Redshirts" does perfectly encapsulate what you're in for, but there's something corny about using a decades-old meme as the title for your book3. Fortunately, the actual contents of the book don't strike me that way, so I ultimately enjoyed the book heartily. I don't know that I would entirely agree with Justin's (very funny and entertaining in itself) review that this is "Spoof Trekkie Fiction: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There is" (an oblique reference to Scalzi's recent controversial and ill-fitting metaphor for life as a video game), but there is a distinct Saturday Night Live skit feeling to the premise of the book. But it's a really well done skit, if that's the case, and I'm generally of the mind that such exercises can be fun if executed well, which this is. In the end, I really enjoyed the book, despite any reservations I may have about the title and structure, and would recommend it to just about anyone.
1 - This appears to impact mostly the original Star Trek series and it should be noted that plenty of blue or gold shirted crewmen die on the series as well. Star Trek: The Next Generation (and later shows) tried to invert the meme by placing its main characters mostly into red shirts themselves. Deaths seem less frequent as well, though there is still the occasional unfortunate mishap, and the poor character is sometimes wearing a red shirt. Star Trek is definitely a show in which The Main Characters Do Everything, so when you see some random dude on the away team, chances are that he's in trouble.
2 - Scalzi actually makes a pretty funny, but obvious, dig at Wikipedia in the book. I don't know why I needed to put this in a footnote, but I always find references to Wikipedia and the internet interesting in works of art.
3 - There appears to be a rash4 of this sort of title. Consider another example: Rule 34 by Charlie Stross (Rule 34 of the internet is: If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions. Its awesome, but kinda lame when you name your book after it).
4 - I have recently established that only two examples are needed in order to qualify as a "rash". Which, since I've identified two different rashes in the past week, means that I'm experiencing a rash of rashes. Gross.
Posted by Mark on June 24, 2012 at 03:39 PM .: link :.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga
So I'm finished. I love the series and highly recommend checking it out. The problem is that there's a lot of churn in terms of how to read the series. It's a long series consisting of 13 novels, 3 novellas, and 1 short story (plus a few other outliers), and there's a lot of discussion on ye olde internets about the ideal order to read them. Like the recently discussed Star Wars, there are two obvious orders: internal chronology and in order of publication.
There are some complicating factors that can lead to different (or streamlined) sequences though. First, most of the books center around a character named Miles Vorkosigan, but the first two are told from the perspective of Miles' mother, Cordelia Naismith. Second, the initial installments of the series were written and published out of chronological order, so there are plenty of folks out there who've read the series that way. Third, Borders of freakin' Infinity (more on this below, but it's a collection of novellas that can confuse the order). Fourth, most of the books have been collected together in omnibus editions, which complicates things a bit, but if you want to read the series chronologically, they're actually pretty well organized. Fifth, and the reason I struggle with the whole reading order thing, is that the height of the series starts about 8 or 9 books in... This is not to say that those first 8 books aren't good, just that the series got better than I ever expected around that time with an amazing four book run starting with Mirror Dance and concluding with A Civil Campaign.
Every book in the series tells a discrete story. There are no cliff-hangers, but there are a bunch of character-centric multi-book arcs. Interestingly, the series could be read almost as a series of pairs, and the omnibus editions are mostly built around that notion, with the novellas from Borders of Infinity thrown in for good measure. Aside from attempting to read the second of a pair first, I suspect you could try to get into the series almost anywhere along the way. Before I go further, it might be useful to list out the series, publication dates, and omnibus editions:
So the first thing to note is that Falling Free, while technically part of the series, is an extreme prequel and doesn't really involve any of the characters (it's set 200 years before the rest of the series). As such, it's almost completely independent of the rest of the series. I say "almost" because I've heard it would be good to catch up with this one before Diplomatic Immunity. Also, I neglected to mention a short story called "Dreamweaver's Dilemma" which is apparently also an extreme prequel that's not closely coupled with the rest of the series. Of course, I haven't read either of these, so I can't say for sure (Update: I've since read both, and they are indeed not closely coupled with the rest of the series, I would skip them and come back later). I do plan to catch up with them at some point, but the real meat of the Vorkosigan Saga starts with Shards of Honor.
Shards of Honor is where I started the series, though it appears that many people bypass Shards of Honor and Barrayar, and start directly with The Warrior's Apprentice, which is when Miles first shows up (well, there is a short scene in Barrayar where you see him as a young child, but that's from his mother's perspective...) There are pros and cons to each approach. Starting with Shards of Honor and Barrayar gives you a lot of background on the universe and characters, while The Warrior's Apprentice will get you into the series quicker. Personally, I opted to start with the Cordelia books. I'm something of a completist, but it worked really well for me. The other option is to read the books in order of publication, which will have you ping-ponging from Cordelia stories to Miles stories and back again a few times, as well as being all over the internal chronology... but I'm sure it would work too.
The most confusing thing I encountered in the series, though, is Borders of Infinity. This is a collection of three novellas (including one called "Borders of Infinity", just for added confusion), which in a lot of other arenas, means that you can probably skip them... but I would strongly advise against that, actually. "Mountains of Mourning" is quite possibly the best story in the entire series. "Borders of Infinity" is a really clever prison story, and the events in that story - some of which rubbed me the wrong way at the time - pay off huge in Komarr (I have no idea if that was always Bujold's intention, or if she just thought of it later, but it was a fantastic revelation in any case). "Labyrinth" is the most unusual of the bunch, but it also introduces one of my favorite side characters from the series, Taura. Now, these stories were originally published as part of one collection, but the three stories all take place at varying points of the chronology. The omnibus editions do an admirable job mixing the novellas into the series though, which lessens the confusion quite a bit. The only thing lost, then, is the narrative glue between the stories, but that's only about 5 pages or so (even still, it takes place between Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance, making it a difficult thing to fit in - you won't really miss it). Anyways, there are a bunch of options for Borders of Infinity... it might even make an interesting introduction to the series, though it's always hard for me to judge (I'd still recommend starting with Shards or Warrior's).
Ethan of Athos is another book that is noteworthy for its independence from the rest of the series. Indeed, Miles is barely even mentioned, though one of the series' recurring characters, Elli Quinn, plays a prominent role. It's an interesting story, probably one of the least mainstream of the entire series, but it's also very independent. There are some small references to it in later stories, but nothing big enough to say this needs to be read in order (though, completist as I am, I did). If you're looking to get to the amazing four book run starting at Mirror Dance, you can probably skip this one.
So I think that covers all of the exceptions and divisive parts of the series. There are a lot of books that pair together well, and I think the omnibus editions do an excellent job latching them together. Incidentally, just because something isn't part of an omnibus doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. I think my second favorite story in the series is Memory. Also, just because something is a novella or a short story doesn't mean that it's not worth reading. I've already mentioned that, but it bears repeating. Even "Winterfair Gifts" was a great story (which, I believe, is only really available as part of the omnibus).
This series has probably been my favorite recent discovery. It's a tricky thing, and I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about series like this. I have to wonder how good something like Memory or A Civil Campaign would appear to an outsider who didn't have so much background on the characters or the universe. It certainly worked wonders for me, but it's hard to express that because in order for anyone else to get that feeling, they have to read several books into the series to get there... Tricky. But that's a discussion for another day.
Update: Added Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, some additional notes.
Posted by Mark on June 10, 2012 at 09:02 PM .: link :.
Sunday, May 13, 2012
SF Book Review, Part 11: The Vorkosigan Saga Ends
The last time I wrote about the Vorkosigan Saga books, a commenter noted that the best books were ahead of me, and indeed, I think they were. In fact, the run of books starting with Mirror Dance and concluding with A Civil Campaign is as good as any series I've ever read, and the series as a whole represents quite a feat. It is not so bogged down with continuity that you have to read all of them - most of the novels are complete stories in and of themselves. But on the other hand, when you read them in order (as I have done), a lot of value is added. This makes some of these later books in the series difficult to judge. Memory might be my favorite novel in the series, but is that because of what happens in the novel by itself, or is it reliant on previous installments for that heft? And is that a bad thing? Personally, I don't think so... but it may make an interesting topic for another post.
Below are short reviews of the last five novels of the series (with a bonus short story thrown in for good measure). I've tried to avoid any real talk about the plots of each, but there might be some minor spoilers on a macro level. That being said, I knew a lot of this stuff was coming before I read it, and it did not diminish anything. Half the fun is Bujold's style, which is not ornate or flowery, not showy, but perhaps deceptively effective and downright compelling. These are page turners, but ones of unusual sophistication. While I have finished the series, I don't think this will be the last I blog of it. Indeed, I already have a few ideas for other posts, but they will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, here's some mixed thoughts on the last five books of the series:
Posted by Mark on May 13, 2012 at 04:28 PM .: link :.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
When the whole Kickstarter thing started, I went through a number of phases. First, it's a neat idea and it leverages some of the stuff that makes the internet great. Second, as my systems analyst brain started chewing on it, I had some reservations... but that was shortlived as, third, some really interesting stuff started getting funded. Here are some of the ones I'm looking forward to:
Posted by Mark on April 15, 2012 at 08:28 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Upcoming Books
Because my book queue is not long enough*, it seems some of my favorite SF authors are releasing new novels in 2012. Yay**. Here are the most exciting ones, in order of anticipated publication:
* Sarcasm!
** Not sarcasm!
Posted by Mark on March 28, 2012 at 09:34 PM .: link :.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
SF Book Review, Part 10: The One That Includes Fantasy
While I've done my fair share of Science Fiction reading over the past few years, Fantasy has been relatively absent... I don't really have much against Fantasy or anything, I just tend to prefer Science Fiction, which tends to be more grounded. That being said, I've recently mixed a few fantasy books into my schedule, including some longtime residents of the queue, and I think you can expect to see a little more fantasy appearing soon as well...
Posted by Mark on March 18, 2012 at 07:23 PM .: link :.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
SF Book Review, Part 9: Mistressworks Edition
So last year, someone noticed that the SF Masterworks, a series of books highlighting the classic science fiction novels, was somewhat lacking in female author representation. I'm not a big fan of identity politics and I don't want to take this post in that direction, but one of the good things that came out of the whole meme was a site highlighting people's favorite SF books by female authors called SF Mistressworks. I'm always on the lookout for interesting SF, so I picked a few books from their list and added a few of my own, and so here are the last five female-authored books I've read:
Posted by Mark on January 29, 2012 at 06:25 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
The Book Queue, 2012 Edition
The last list I posted, back in July 2011, had 15 books on it. I've made some excellent process, clearing out almost all of the "Holdovers" from previous lists, including some books that have been sitting on my shelf for literally years. The one remainder from that list is Godel, Escher, Bach, which I chose not to read due to its length (not sure if I'll tackle it this year either, but it will remain in the queue until I do!) I've actually read several books that weren't even in the queue, but I think it's time to regroup and look ahead to what I'll be reading in 2012. The first few books here are holdovers from the previous list, which I didn't read for various reasons.
Posted by Mark on January 11, 2012 at 06:26 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
The Year in Reading
As of this moment (and depending on how you count omnibus editions), I have read 30 books in 2011. There's a pretty good chance that I'll finish my current book by the end of the year as well. If you'll permit some navel gazing, here are some stats about what I've read this year:
Things have slowed down in the latter part of this year, though I think a large part of that is that I've been focusing on longer novels and non-fiction, which obviously take more time. Indeed, if I manage to tackle Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid next year, I expect that will drag down my numbers a bit. Of course, I could hold off on that and slot in 4 short novels in its place, but I should really read GEB, as it's been on my shelf for quite a while... Looking ahead to next year, I'll definitely be finishing off Bujold's Vorkosigan novels, and I was given a Kindle for Christmas, so I'm sure I'll find plenty of things to read there. Perhaps an updated book queue is in order!
Posted by Mark on December 28, 2011 at 07:26 PM .: link :.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Nerding Out on Star Trek
Star Trek has been in the news lately, as J.J. Abrams preps the new movie. It seems that Khan will be the villain again (originally thought to be played by Benicio Del Toro, but that has apparently not happened), though there is also apparently a secondary villain who plays an older mentor to Khan. Or something. It was the obvious choice and I'm interested in seeing what Abrams does with the new movie, but in a lot of ways, it's also a disappointing and lazy choice. Not just because Khan was the villain in the original second Star Trek film either. As Devin Faraci also notes, I think one of the things people forget about is that one of the reasons that film worked so well was that Khan wasn't the obvious choice:
Khan wasn't an obvious choice for the original Star Trek II. Basically Harve Bennett watched every single episode of the original series because he thought Star Trek: The Motion Picture lacked a good villain, and took a shine to Space Seed; while it was always regarded as one of the better episodes of the series, Khan wasn't quite the iconic villain he is today.I think I would have rather seen Abrams go in a completely different direction. Either mining the original series for other obscure characters to update for the big screen, or maybe even - and I know this is crazy talk - creating a new character from scratch. The Star Trek reboot was extremely popular, so they've got a built in audience for this next installment. As long as you can make a trailer with a bunch of lens flares, swish pans, and explosions, people are going to go see the sequel. Why not take a chance? Khan is an iconic villain because of his context - none of which has been built up in this new reboot universe.
Anyway, I got to thinking about the existing movies and just for shits and giggles, I ranked them from favorite to least favorite below. Mostly because this post just wasn't nerdy enough. Here goes:
A sentient nebula chases the ship, which has nowhere to hide, because usually it would be in a nebula. Data adopts a dog, snake, and parrot.Heh, great stuff. Speaking of great stuff, RedLetterMedia has reviews of all the Next Generation movies (in the same style as their brilliant Star Wars prequel reviews) that are certainly worth checking out. Well, I think that covers all the Star Trek nerdery I have right now, so there. I hope you enjoyed it.
Posted by Mark on December 11, 2011 at 07:40 PM .: link :.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
NPR's Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books
I've been meaning to comment on this for a while, but haven't gotten around to it until now. A couple months ago, NPR put out the call for fans to nominate the best science-fiction and fantasy books. Out of several thousand nominations, NPR narrowed the list down to a few hundred, then had another voting period, finally ending up with the top 100 books (or series).
Like most lists, especially crowd-sourced lists like this, there are many quibbles to be had, but it's a pretty decent list. Below, I'll bold the ones I've read and add annotations where I can, then follow up with some comments.
I'm not sure what to make of the disparity between male and female authors on the list. Is it that there are less female authors of SF/F? Or is it that there are less female readers voting? I can think of one glaring omission on the list - The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russel is superb, and would certainly be on my list (I'm pretty sure it was on the shortlist, but got culled when NPR cut down to 100). Thanks to my incessant Bujold reading, 10 of the 23 books I've read so far this year have been written by a woman (though again, most of that is Bujold). I could probably improve that to 50/50 by the end of the year, which would be nice.
And that about covers it. How many have you read?
Update: Forgot to bold one of the books I read, so my count at the end was off. Updated!
Posted by Mark on September 18, 2011 at 08:32 PM .: link :.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
SF Book Review, Part 8: Vorkosigan Edition
I've read the first few books in Lois McMaster Bujold's long-running Vorkosigan Saga and reviewed them in the the last couple SF Book reviews. In short, I've really enjoyed them, and now I've read five more books in the series.
At this point, it's hard to talk about the series without giving a little background info to start with. This, by necessity, means some spoilers, which I'll try to keep at a minimum (if you're sold on the series and want to get started, just skip to the last paragraph of this post). Here goes: In Shards of Honor, Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony meets Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar, and they get married around the time Aral becomes the Regent of Barrayar (the planet is ruled by a military class called the Vor, which consists of an Emperor and a bunch of Counts. A Regent is appointed when the current Emperor is not yet old enough to take the throne). Barrayar is a largely feudal society, so there's lots of Machiavellian scheming going on, and thus Aral's Regency was not unchallenged. An assassination attempt exposed the pregnant Cordelia to a teratogenic gas. All survived, including the fetus, but the baby was born with several birth defects, including most notably brittle bones.
That covers the first two books in the series (in a really frighteningly abrupt manner that leaves a ton of important stuff out!), and in The Warrior's Apprentice we are introduced to Miles Vorkosigan, who has grown up in a world that hates and fears "mutants" like himself. Unable to depend on physical prowess, Miles instead relies on his powers of observation and quick-thinking wit. He doesn't give in to the urge for self-pity, but he isn't one-dimensional caricature of a man driven by demons either. Bujold tends to write his stories from his perspective, so we get lots of visibility to what's going on in his head, and he's always thinking ten steps ahead (as is required of him). In The Warrior's Apprentice, he fails to get into the Barrayaran Military Academy due to his physical infirmities, after which he stumbles into a military conflict involving mercenaries, eventually improvising a mercenary fleet of his own (called the Dendarii Free Mercenaries) and foiling a political plot against his father. His mercenary fleet only knows him as Miles Naismith and does not know of his connections to Barrayar, which is a good thing, because Miles and his father propose making them Barrayar's secret army. Impressed, but given few options, the young Emperor pulls strings to get Miles accepted into the Barrayaran Military academy. Whew. That took longer and was probably more spoilery than I intended, but it gives you the appropriate background (I assure you, Bujold is much better at explaining all this! Read the first three books!)
I heartily recommend the series. If you're interested, I would start with Shards of Honor (or the omnibus edition called Cordelia's Honor, which features Shards of Honor and the hugo-award winning Barrayar) which primarily deals with Miles's parents, or The Warrior's Apprentice (which is probably easier found as part of the omnibus called Young Miles, which features The Warrior's Apprentice, "The Mountains of Mourning" from Borders of Infinity (another Hugo winner), and The Vor Game (yet another Hugo award winner)). Actually, I think those two omnibus editions are an excellent deal, and will give you a significant amount of the series with just two purchases... Well worth it, if you ask me.
Posted by Mark on September 11, 2011 at 08:42 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
First Contact
As it turns out, Aliens from other planets do exist. On the other hand, whether intelligent life exists is apparently still open for debate:
It's not nearly as good as Terry Bisson's classic short story They're Made of Meat, but it shares some similarities.
First Contact from Media Design School on Vimeo.
Posted by Mark on July 20, 2011 at 06:06 PM .: link :.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
The Book Queue
So the last book queue I posted at the beginning of this year had 12 books on it, and I've made great strides against that list. Only 4 remain, and I'm halfway through one of those. I've also read at least 7 other books that weren't on that list (mostly Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga books, of which only the first was on the original list). With only 3 books remaining, I'm looking to fill up the immediate queue again.
The four remaining books from my last queue...
I started Lois McMaster Bujold's long-running series of science fiction novels mostly (but not solely) chronicling the adventures of the physically diminutive but mentally gifted Miles Vorkosigan. So far this year, I've read 7 novels in the (loosely connected) series. I've got a whole stack of other books just waiting on my shelf now too... and Bujold just released a new one last year, so there's always the chance of more books in the future! I don't know if these are the nerdiest books I've ever read, but referring to them as the Vorkosigan Saga certainly makes it seem so... In any case, this is what I've got left in the series. I'm trying not to read too many of these in a row - I can already sense that I'll be a bit bummed when I finish the series because I very much enjoy spending time with these characters: New Stuff
Pretty self explanatory:
Posted by Mark on July 17, 2011 at 01:55 PM .: link :.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Tasting Notes - Part 4
Another edition of Tasting Notes, a series of quick hits on a variety of topics that don't really warrant a full post. So here's what I've been watching/playing/reading/drinking lately:
Posted by Mark on June 26, 2011 at 06:22 PM .: link :.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Fuzzy Nation
In recent years, Hollywood has been remaking or rebooting nearly every property it could get its hands on - including franchises that are only a few years old. Some have speculated an unhealthy obsession with branding and marketing, others just call it a result of Hollywood's creative bankruptcy. This sort of thing happens frequently in other forms of art as well. Indeed, it's a hallmark of Theater - every night, a new remake! You don't hear people complaining about yet another production of Macbeth, do you? And covering songs is quite common as well. In both of those realms, the remakes are outnumbered by original works (well, maybe not in theater), though, which is probably a good thing.
One area that doesn't seem to see too much in the way of remakes is literature. Enter John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation. He calls this novel a "reimagining of the story and events in Little Fuzzy, the 1962 Hugo-nominated novel by H. Beam Piper." Not having read the original, I can't speak to the fidelity or necessity of the remake, but I am confident in calling it a fun, entertaining take on several common SF tropes.
Our tale begins with Jack Holloway, an independent contractor working for ZaraCorp, prospecting and surveying the planet Zara XXIII. ZaraCorp is apparently a company that basically strips down planets for all of their useful materials - metal ores, oil, and a rare mineral called sunstones. Not much time is spent mentioning how planets are discovered, but once they are, a team of specialists attempts to determine if there's any sentient life on those planets, and if there isn't, then ZaraCorp (and/or its competitors) are given a license to "exploit" the planet. Holloway, a former lawyer, has just found a huge cache of valuable sunstones. It will take years to exploit and even Holloway's measly 0.25% share will garner him millions, if not billions of credits.
Not long after that, Holloway goes home and discovers that a small, catlike creature has snuck into his house. These ridiculously cute creatures begin to act suspiciously intelligent (incidentally, while I like the cover art, I have to say that the Fuzzy pictured there does not seem as cute as they do in the book). And from here, I'm guessing you can figure out several of the central conflicts in the book.
I burned through the book in about two sittings, and probably could have read it in one big session if I timed it right. I'm not sure if that's simply to do with the length of the book (it's about 300 pages with relatively large type and spacing) or if it's Scalzi's knack for page-turning storytelling (something I've talked about before). As previously hinted at, there are several common SF tropes at work here (Big mean corporations! Planetary exploitation! Is it sentient?!), and while Scalzi isn't often breaking new ground or even exploring various ideas very deeply, I think there's something to be said for a very well executed trope. There are several times when you can easily predict what will happen next, though Scalzi does manage some genuine twists and turns later in the story. It's clear he's working in pure storytelling mode here, which is perhaps why the pages seemed to turn themselves so quickly.
I do want to single out one aspect of the story that I think is particularly well done, and that's the character of Jack Holloway. The story is told mostly from his perspective, and he's got a certain charisma that makes him a good protagonist, but he's also kind of a selfish prick. I don't want to give anything away, nor do I want to give the wrong impression - he's certainly not an anti-hero or anything, he's just a fully fleshed out character who makes mistakes with the best of us. Flawed characters can be difficult and often present stumbling blocks to otherwise good stories, but I think Scalzi manages to pull this one off well.
Again, I have not read the original Little Fuzzy novel, but I suspect that Scalzi has done it proud. I'm not particularly looking forward to other reimaginings of classic SF, but I think in this case, it worked well, and I actually think that Scalzi's choice, while not totally obscure, was old enough that he may be introducing lots of folks to Piper's original works (I believe there are a few other Fuzzy novels as well). Among Scalzi's novels that I've read, this one is towards the top of the list, though I don't think it's his best work. I do think that most of his novels would make good introductions to the SF genre though, and would recommend them. While Scalzi may be best known for taping bacon to his cat, I would argue that he should be better known for his novels! Fuzzy Nation would be a good place to start.
Posted by Mark on June 12, 2011 at 06:03 PM .: link :.
Sunday, May 08, 2011
SF Book Review, Part 7
Continuing to make some progress through my book queue... and, of course, adding new books to the queue as I go along. This time, it's Lois McMaster Bujold's fault, as I enjoyed Shards of Honor so much that I went out and read the next two books in the (apparently long running and loosely connected) series. I've now got about 10 more of her books in the queue. If the first three are any indication, I'll probably move through them pretty quickly... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I'm going to start with one from the actual queue though: Timothy Zahn's Cobra Trilogy. I've been listing it as one book, but it's technically an omnibus edition of Zahn's first three Cobra novels, and I'll review each separately below. As a side note, Zahn is currently in the process of writing another trilogy set in the same universe (the second novel was published this year, with a third tentatively planned for January 2012) and plans a third trilogy at some point in the unspecified future.
Posted by Mark on May 08, 2011 at 06:52 PM .: link :.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Tasting Notes - Part 3
Another edition of Tasting Notes, a series of quick hits on a variety of topics that don't really warrant a full post. So here's what I've been watching/playing/reading/drinking lately:
Posted by Mark on April 24, 2011 at 06:36 PM .: link :.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Upcoming SF
Because my book queue is not long enough*, it seems some of my favorite SF authors are releasing new novels in 2011. Yay**. Here are the three most exciting ones, in order of anticipated publication:
Also, just a quick administrative note, I'll be traveling this week, so probably no entry on Wednesday. I shall return next Sunday. Have a good week!
* Sarcasm!
** Not sarcasm!
Posted by Mark on April 10, 2011 at 08:35 AM .: link :.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
SF Book Review, Part 6
It's been a while since I followed up on my book queues (and some of the books on here weren't even on the queue, they just jumped to the top of the queue - which is probably why the queue is so long).
Posted by Mark on March 20, 2011 at 07:58 PM .: link :.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
More SF Pet Peeves
Sunday's post on the Unquestioned Assumptions of SF was a little strange as the post I was referencing was really more about pet peeves than unquestioned assumptions, so I figured that I should rename this post to add my own pet peeves to Matt Johnsons's list. So without further ado:
Posted by Mark on September 01, 2010 at 09:27 PM .: link :.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Unquestioned Assumptions
Matthew Johnson lists out several Unquestioned Assumptions of Science Fiction. It's an interesting list, though it suffers from the same problems all lists suffer from: I don't agree with some of them, and I think there are some rather notable omissions. So let's get started:
Posted by Mark on August 29, 2010 at 07:56 PM .: link :.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
SF Book Review, Part 5
Still working my way through the book queue, here are a few SF books I've read recently. [See also: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4]
Posted by Mark on August 22, 2010 at 08:12 PM .: link :.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
The Clockwork Orange Fallacy
I've been reading a science fiction novel called Diaspora, by Greg Egan. The novel is initially set about a thousand years in the future, which is enough time to allow Egan to postulate all sorts of things without really having to explicitly delve into the morality of gene-splicing or consciousness transferral, etc... However, those sorts of questions emerge anyway because we, the readers, are still living our contemporary lives, where these issues are as relevant as ever.
The novel begins in a "Polis", which is basically a network of artificial consciousnesses. Some of these are humans who have uploaded themselves, others are entirely artificial. Alternatively, there were apparently a lot of people who transferred themselves into human-shaped robots called Gleisners. Regular human beings are still around, and they're referred to as "Fleshers" (for obvious reasons). At this point, there are tons of genetically altered humans, to the point where many of the variants can no longer communicate with one another (another class of humans, calling themselves "Bridgers" have been bred specifically to solve the problem of communication). Humans without any sort of genetic tampering are referred to as "Statics", and don't seem to be doing well.
In the story, the industrious but apparently suspicious gleisners have discovered an odd astrophysical event which could prove disasterous to Earth (at least, to its fleshers). Two of the characters go down to the planet to warn the fleshers, but they're met with paranoia and disbelief. One of the characters, Yatima, is a completely random mutation from a polis (he has no "parents", even artificial ones), and he (or, I should say "ve" as they seem to be quasi-asexual, though even the artificial pronouns sometimes seem to have a gender connotation, but that's a different discussion) is having some trouble understanding the objections to his suggestion that anyone who wants to can upload themselves to his Polis. In the scene below, he's speaking with a static human and Francesca, who is a human bridger.
He gazed down at them with a fascinated loathing. 'Why can't you stay inside your citadels of infinite blandness, and leave us in peace? We humans are fallen creatures; we'll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery.'The reference to A Clockwork Orange was interesting, as this isn't a novel that's been filled with pop culture references, but the concept itself is a common theme in SF (and, for that matter, philosophy). It's not hard to see why, especially when it comes to something like a Polis. What does morality mean in a Polis? A consciousness living in a Polis is essentially living in an entirely virtual environment - there are minimal physical limits, property doesn't really exist as a concept, and so on. The inhabitants of any given Polis are modeled after humans, in a fashion, and yet many of our limitations are not applicable. Some polises have a profound respect for the physical world around them. Others have retreated into their virtual reality, some going as far as abandoning the laws of physics altogether in an effort to better understand the elegance of mathematics. Would it be moral to upload yourself into a Polis? Or would that be the cowards way out and represent the evasion of responsibility that free will provides? Would one still have a free will if their consciousness was run by a computer? Once in a Polis, is it necessary to respect the external, natural world? Could anything be gained from retreating into pure mathematics? Egan doesn't quite address these issues directly, but this sort of indirect exploration of technological advancement is one of the things that the genre excels at.
Strangely, one of the things that seems to take on a more dangerous tone in the world of Diaspora is the concept of a meme (for more on this, check out this post by sd). The way ideas are transmitted and replicated among humans isn't especially well understood, but it can certainly be dangerous. Egan is pretty clearly coming down against the humans who don't want to escape to the Polis (to avoid disaster), and he seems to blame their attitude on "a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicators". This sort of thing seems even more dangerous to an artificial consciousness though, and Egan even gives an example. These AI consciousnesses can run a non-sentient program called an "outlook" which will monitor the consciousness and adjust it to maintain a certain set of values (in essence, it's Clockwork Orange software). In the story, one character shows Yatima what's happened to their outlook:
It was an old outlook, buried in the Ashton-Laval library, copied nine centuries before from one of the ancient memetic replicators replicators that had infested the fleshers. It imposed a hermetically sealed package of beliefs about the nature of the self, and the futility of striving ... including explicit renunciations of every mode of reasoning able to illuminate the core belief's failings.I find this sort of thing terrifying. It's almost the AI equivalent to being a zombie. If you take on this outlook, why even bother existing in the first place? I guess ignorance is bliss...
In case you can't tell, I'm very much enjoying Diaspora. I'm still not finished, but I only have a little more than a hundred pages left. It's not much of a page turner, but that's more because I have to stop every now and again to consider various questions that have arisen than lack of quality (though I will note that Egan is probably not a gateway SF author - he certainly doesn't shy away from the technical, even in extremes). I'll probably be posting more when I finish the book...
Posted by Mark on June 27, 2010 at 07:52 PM .: link :.
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