Category: Books

Science fiction, non-fiction, and more

Liz Williams: Banner of Souls

Banner of Souls, by Liz Williams
Banner of Souls

We read Williams’ novel Nine Layers of Sky for our book group a few months ago. I thought it was pretty good, but it hadn’t been my first choice for books by her to read. That was Banner of Souls, and I finally read it recently, and it’s quite a step up from Layers. It fits in with my high-tech, far-future space opera preferences.

In the distant future, human males are extinct, and women reproduce through the use of technology. (This isn’t an essential part of the book – or if it is, it went over my head – but rather a piece of the setting’s color.) Most of Earth is now under water, and is ruled by the Matriarchy from Mars. The third player in the solar system is Nightshade, a renegade colony at the system’s edge which has either been given or developed very high tech called “haunt tech” which allows certain forms of contact with the afterlife. Their tech has also created the Chain, allowing fast travel to certain points in the system, and they are able to create Kami, which are either souls or constructs which can inhabit a living (or dead) body and make it do Nightshade’s bidding.

Dreams-Of-War, a Martian warrior, is sent to Earth, charged with protecting the young girl Lunae, who was created by her Grandmothers to server a special purpose, and who is being nursemaided by Tersus Rhee, a kappa, one of the underclass on Earth. Lunae needs protection because on Nightshade another girl, Yskaterina Iye, has been created and bonded with a demon-like creature and charged with going to Earth to kill Lunae. None of these players knows why Lunae is special, but we learn that she holds the key to the survival of the human race, beyond these sunset years.

Banner of Souls is an unusual mash-up of SF adventure, horror, and dark fantasy, with high-tech armor, resurrected souls, and genetically-engineered monsters. The fantasy is glossed over with a science-fictional description, which works well enough. In its overall tone, the book feels like it’s just a step removed from Alastair Reynolds’ early work, such as Chasm City.

But Banner mainly an adventure story, with a little bit of mystery as to why Lunae is so important and what the big threat to humanity she’s supposed to stop is. Most of the story involves her and her guardians staying one step ahead of Yskaterina, who’s pursuing her own agenda rather than acting as mere assassin. Yskaterina has resources the others can barely imagine, so at first they don’t know what they’re running from, and then they don’t know what they’re really up against.

The characters are entertaining but not the driving factor, either: Dreams-of-War is the most vivid character, a hard-nosed warrior whose mind has been slightly altered to feel protective of Lunae, but who is still cold and uncompromising. What makes her interesting is that she’s highly skilled, but also vulnerable for having too much reliance on her high-tech armor. To the extent that any of the characters have an arc, Dreams-of-War learns to rely on her own smarts and skills and gain a sense of worth through accomplishment rather than accolades, lessons for which she’s ultimately rewarded.

The other main characters are less compelling: Lunae is little more than a cipher, a fairly generic heroine for whom this would be a coming-of-age story except that there’s no real sense of the transition from childhood to adulthood, as she was fairly mature at the beginning, and seems hardly more mature at the end. Yskaterina starts off as an interesting anti-hero type, but becomes more villainous as the story goes on, and ultimately has her story cut short, for a perfectly good reason given where the plot goes (she’s not what she seems), but it still means her character arc doesn’t really work.

The story doesn’t have any deeper meanings behind it, but Williams’ writing pulls off the dark and melancholy atmosphere of the setting quite well. The pacing is on the slow side, but it mostly works in this setting as there are a lot of details in the background worth savoring. Readers who prefer more action-packed fiction might not enjoy it as much.

Banner of Souls falls short of being a great book: The ending is a little too abrupt, and the fates of the characters lacked emotional resonance, for me. But the world building is quite good, and Williams carries off her ideas convincingly. By contrast, Nine Layers of Sky had a more satisfying conclusion, but most of the book lacked the sense of wonder present here. Between the two books, it seems like Williams has all the pieces necessary for a great SF novel, and I wonder if she puts them together in one of her others.

Michael Swanwick: The Dragons of Babel

The Dragons of Babel, by Michael Swanwick
The Dragons
of Babel

I came to this book in a roundabout manner. While I enjoyed Swanwick’s earlier novels In The Drift and Vacuum Flowers, his later ones Stations of the Tide and Jack Faust didn’t do it for me. But Swanwick published excerpts of this book in one of the SF magazines, and I enjoyed both of the ones I read, so I sought this out, only to find out that it took place in the same milieu as his novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (though it’s not a sequel), which I hadn’t read, mainly because I’m not a big fan of elves-and-dragons fantasy. So I read Daughter and thought it was, well, okay, but not great (I reviewed it here). Nonetheless, I picked this one up – and liked it a lot!

The high concept of the setting is that even a medieval fantasy setting would progress and go through the industrial revolution, and by the time of Dragons technology has reached something close to modern standards, with big cities, subways, and modern warfare alongside the fantastic creatures of fantasy. Class differences exist not just among individuals, but among different types of creatures (with elves being at the top, of course). Into this world is born Will, a young elf who is being raised in a woodland village until a dragon (basically a flying tank) from the ongoing war is wounded and crawls into Will’s village and takes over. The creature disrupts Will’s life so severely that he’s forced to leave the town, and he joins a pack of war refugees where he befriends a young girl, Esme, and an old confidence man, Nat. The trio make their way to the city of Babel, where Will joins a revolution, becomes an aide to a politician, and works with Nat to pull off what for Babel might be the ultimate confidence trick.

The Dragons of Babel is a coming-of-age story, of course, and also a traditional fantasy arc wrapped in a rags-to-riches story, but Swanwick crafts it so artfully that the clichés are just the structure on which the story is hung. A structure which is also largely episodic, which is why he could carve out pieces to publish in magazine form, and which also serves to mask the simpler structures.

Individual episodes are arresting. The opening sequence with the dragon is as tragic for Will as it is enabling of his character. He gains confidence by joining the mysterious Lord Weary in his revolution against the ruling powers, by working inside the political machine (the episode “A Small Room in Koboldtown” during this phase is a locked-room murder mystery as it could only happen in a fantasy world), and he has to grow beyond his mentor Nat and confront his own identity in order to reach the culmination of his story.

Swanwick’s writing style always has a hint of mythical wonder about it, but he can get down-to-Earth when he wants to, when he does more often here than in anything else I’ve read by him. Will is a fundamentally grounded, practical character who confronts the fantastic things in his life with level-headedness, even though he’s constantly dreaming of a better life for himself. He bridges the gap between the technological side of his world and the fantasy side, bringing everything together more successfully than in The Iron Dragon’s Daughter.

Altogether, Dragons is perhaps Swanwick’s most nuanced, and maybe best, novel. Swanwick seems to approach each novel differently, so it’s probably too much to hope that his next book will deliver more of the same. But it’s got me interesting in seeing where he goes from here.

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
Walt Disney:
The Triumph of
the American
Imagination

Since my girlfriend is a huge Disneyland fan, I was finally motivated to pick up this biography of the man behind the mouse. I chose this book rather than a smaller volume because I figured if I was going to read a biography of Walt Disney, I’d rather get all the story, rather than something which made me want to go read another book with all the story. And on that score, Gabler mostly delivers.

It’s always a little awkward reading an extended sequence about the childhood of a famous man, since it’s rare that the childhood is truly interesting, but in Disney’s case, his youthful experiences seemed to inform his later life considerably. Gabler traces Disney’s childhood from his pastoral days in the small town of Marceline, to his teen years in Kansas City where he worked almost non-stop to help his hard-luck father keep food on the table. His two pleasures as a teen were drawing, and being a jokester and prankster. Following a turn with the Red Cross after World War I, he went into commercial art, where he soon was exposed to the nascent art of animation, and formed his own studio, which went under, and then he formed another one when he moved to California.

Gabler’s theory is that Disney’s efforts were largely dedicated to two goals: First, to form a community of friends and like-minded individuals to replace the family and friends he’d left behind when he moved to California, and later, to recapture and recreate the idyllic feel of small town America at the turn of the century. So he was driven to form and maintain his animation studio, and later to turn it to produce films and TV shows about the American past as he saw it.

Disney turned out to be at the right place at the right time, of course, innovating in the animation field when it was still brand new. But he was also a strong storytelling, idea man, and frequently had his finger on the pulse of popular culture, even if he didn’t really understand himself how he did it. But he was also a strong control freak, wanting the final word over everything his studio did, obsessively reviewing minute details and sending his staff back to the drawing board, and being unwilling to delegate authority, to the point of reorganizing the company whenever someone else started to accumulate too much power. To the extent that Disney could do it all himself, it worked, but in later years it became clear that much of the company’s success was due to the unheralded employees who worked on the features.

Still, Gabler doesn’t stint on crediting Disney himself and his studio with being innovators in their time, being among the first to adopt color and sound in their cartoons, transforming the prevailing style of animation in the early 30s with “The Three Little Pigs”, turning their properties into marketing gold mines, and of course practically inventing the animated feature film in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as well as being the first Hollywood studio to fully embrace television in the 1950s and to create the modern theme park in Disneyland. In this way, the book reads like an early history of animation in America.

But Gabler also points out Disney’s flaws – and he had many, as a man and a manager, not least his tendency to lose interest in older projects when his studio was still on the hook for them, and turn to newer things while leaving his employees on their own without his guiding hand. Later in life he began to believe his own proverbial press releases, feeling he could change the world when in fact he was not quite an entertainer so much as the man behind the true entertainers (although he still did motivate some true innovations right up to his last years of life).

The book reads fairly quickly, for all that it’s a large tome of a book. It feels well-balanced, although I have little to compare it to. Its biggest failing is that after World War II it goes into less depth than I’d have liked, such as the nuts and bolts of building Disneyland (the opening day was a disaster, but little is said about it), or the studio’s later films. Relatively little about the nature of Disney’s legacy is said, as the book ends shortly after his death.

Nonetheless, it’s an insightful and informative book, and I’d recommend it to learn more about Walt Disney the man, as opposed to the myth behind the giant company.

Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon
The Yiddish
Policemen’s
Union

I’m not generally a fan of literary fiction – I stick to genre fiction for the most part – but I did read Michael Chabon’s celebrated novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay some years back, and I found some parts of it arresting, and other parts of it tedious, topped off with a disappointing ending as the book peters out. For my book club we tackled his novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union this month, and by and large I had the same reactions.

The story is an alternate-worlds story, in which the United Stated created in 1940 a district for Jews to immigrate to in Sitka, Alaska, Israel then falls in 1948, and Sitka grows to four million Jews. However, the district will revert to US territory after 60 years, and the story opens with less than a year before reversion, and the populace of Sitka are contemplating the diaspora facing them. In this milieu, Meyer Landsman is a police detective, formerly very successful, but now living in a fleabag hotel following a divorce from his wife. In this hotel a young man is found murdered, shot in the head execution-style, and despite being ordered not to investigate, Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko look into it anyway. They find that the victim was the son of the leader of the Verbovers, a powerful criminal organization. Despite being suspended following a gun battle, Landsman continues to investigate the case, uncovering a conspiracy and the secrets of several power figures en route to unraveling the mystery.

The centerpiece of the novel is the setting of Sitka, its culture, and the sometimes-whimsical, sometimes-sarcastic sense of humor of many of the characters. Becoming immersed in this culture is the main source of fun in the book, seeing how this marginalized society with a strong criminal element has survived in this remote environment for decades. The aged buildings, the history of the city’s chess club, the island of the Verbovers, and the history of the prominent individuals all contribute to the setting, an impressive and subtle bit of world-building.

The characters of Landsman and Berko are well-drawn. Landsman is the down-trodden noir detective, fighting for what he thinks is right even though he’s not entirely sure what that is anymore, or even whether it matters. Berko is the supportive, sidekick, albeit a big bear of a man who waxes philosophical even as he wears his emotions on his sleeve. These two dwarf all the other characters, although there’s a fair amount of variety here, and the main function of most other characters are as ones for Landsman and Berko to interact with.

The story meanders all over the place, taking some unusual approaches to the standard hard-boiled detective story: Landsman is suspended, yes, but not really for the reasons you’d expect, and he doesn’t assume the role of the outsider as a result because he’s already assumed that role following the collapse of his marriage. Landsman’s peeling back of the conspiracy and uncovering of the identity of the murderer feel anticlimactic: The ultimate goal of the conspiracy, which is focused on the coming diaspora, seems like a dream unfolding because it’s so grand, so improbable, and also left unfinished, being only the first salvo in a longer plan beyond the scope of the book. The murderer’s identity feels like it’s from out of left field, perhaps not entirely irrational, but more like a tying up of a loose end rather than a satisfying resolution of the event which drove the plot. The other subplot is Landsman’s relationship with his ex-wife, Bina, which I think is perhaps the least successful element of the book, as Bina is a pretty thin character, and the culmination of their story doesn’t really feel believable.

I’m conflicted about Chabon’s writing style: I love his ability to define both a setting and characters who fit comfortably within that setting. But his use of language frequently feels too self-consciously arty, and the story meanders around too much, with many flashbacks and digressions, some of which work, some of which don’t. While his command of the overall structure of the story is quite strong, he also sometimes pulls in new elements from seemingly nowhere, such as when Landsman’s late sister becomes a central element of the story more than half-way through, despite having barely been mentioned before then. On balance, I think what keeps the narrative from getting bogged down by all this is the fact that Chabon’s primary style is folksy and humorous, so there’s always the promise of another chuckle a few pages ahead even if the current sequence isn’t so exciting.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union certainly doesn’t live up to the effusive words of praise on the back cover, but it’s still a pretty good book. Chabon’s overall approach is enjoyable enough that I feel like I ought to read more of his stuff. I’m thinking of The Final Solution.

Doctor Who, Season Four

It took us a little while, but this weekend we finished off the fourth season of Doctor Who. As usual, I’ll run down the episodes from best-to-worst (in my opinion, anyway), and then some comments with spoilers:

  • Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead (written by Steven Moffat)
  • Turn Left (Russell T. Davies)
  • Planet of the Ood (Keith Temple)
  • Midnight (Russell T. Davies)
  • The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End (Russell T. Davies)
  • The Doctor’s Daughter (Stephen Greenhorn)
  • The Fires of Pompeii (James Moran)
  • The Unicorn and the Wasp (Gareth Roberts)
  • The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky (Helen Raynor)
  • Partners in Crime (Russell T. Davies)
  • Voyage of the Damned (Russell T. Davies)

Season four got off to a very shaky start indeed, with the Christmas special “Voyage of the Damned”, which was silly, dumb, nonsensical and several other adjectives. A bad episode, as the Christmas specials generally have been. But still, forgivable as it was just a special.

Unfortunately, the season proper got off to a start nearly as poor, with a ridiculous (and rather gross) villain and plot. The redeeming quality of “Partners in Crime” was the whimsical relationship between the Doctor and new companion Donna Noble, with the memorable musical theme for their pairing. But the episode itself bent over way too far to keep the two just missing each other for its first half, and the premise of creating little baby aliens from human fat was disgusting for basically no good reason. Between them, these two episodes made me put off watching the rest of the season for quite a few weeks, because they were both really weak.

Unfortunately this is a consistent problem in Russell T. Davies’ writing: His characterizations are pretty good (occasionally great), but his plotting and premises – even by the loose standards of Doctor Who – tend to be very weak.

The next few episodes are decent “bread-and-butter” episodes: “The Fires of Pompeii” is about as middle-of-the-road an episode as you could get. “Planet of the Ood” is a pretty good thriller. “The Sontaran Strategem/The Poison Sky” is a mediocre invasion-of-Earth yarn. “The Doctor’s Daughter” is a straightforward colonization-gone-wrong yarn, made a little better through the exuberant performance of Georgia Moffett as Jenny, and titular character; however, I guessed the episode’s punchline about 15 minutes in. “The Unicorn and the Wasp” is a far-too-pretentious science fictional mystery featuring Agatha Christie as one of the characters; despite a few good moments, the episode is too ludicrous to hold together.

At this point we’re more than halfway through the season and it’s been a pretty mediocre lot so far. And as a companion Donna has been something of a mixed bag. She’s at her best when she’s acting as a mature, capable woman; as with Martha Jones in season three, at times she’s more mature than the Doctor himself. But her characterization is uneven, as she’s often overwhelmed by events she’s thrown into, which although it’s fairly reasonable that she would be, it’s also ground that feels recently trod-over in the current series. Catherine Tate seems swept away by the eddies of the writing, doing well when given good material, but seeming whiny or annoying with weaker material. Ultimately I blame the writing, as I think it would take an actress of historic talent to forge a consistently great performance out of the character of Donna as portrayed here.

Fortunately, the second half of the season is a marked improvement over the first, unsurprisingly starting with Steven Moffat’s two-part entry, “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead”. It starts off as an effectively eerie horror episode – a global library which is utterly silent and deserted when the Doctor and Donna arrive – and soon become much more with the introduction of archaeologist RIver Song, who knows the Doctor but he doesn’t know her; this is the first time he’s met her, but she’s known his future self for a while. Alex Kingston is terrific as River, and makes me look forward to seeing her (hopefully) in the future, although the way television series work, I’m not holding my breath. The story has the frantic-yet-terrifying feel of some classic episodes, with the characters beating a hasty retreat from their opponents while slowing figuring out (at some cost in body count) what’s going on. If I have a gripe with the episode, it’s the fate of River Song, which although not utterly tragic, is less optimistic than I’d hoped. I like to think that she eventually is reincarnated and is able to live her life and meet the Doctor again. Nonetheless, this two-parter is – as was the case with Moffat’s last two stories – the clear standout of the season.

The season ends with four Davies-written episodes, which isn’t as bad as it might sound. “Midnight” is an effectively creepy locked-room story, more atmosphere than story, about an alien creature that takes over the body of a woman on a broken-down transport in the middle of an unlivable planet’s wilderness. The story’s main flaw is one of motivation – what’s the alien trying to accomplish, and why does it behave as it does once it’s rendered the Doctor powerless? – but as a suspense yarn it’s pretty good.

Donna barely appears in “Midnight”, so conveniently “Turn Left” is all about Donna: An alien fortune teller inflicts her with a creature which causes her to turn right rather than left back when she interviewed with the company where she ended up meeting the Doctor. As a consequence, the Doctor dies because she’s not there for him in “The Runaway Bride”, and terrible things befall the Earth because of his absence. This sets the theme for the season finale: Donna feeling like she’s just an insignificant person, when her presence has changed the world. It’s quite a good episode, although the sense of destiny imparted to Donna feels grafted-on after the way her character’s been handled so far, and again, the fortune teller’s motivations are left unexplained.

The big finish is “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End”, in which the Earth is, well, stolen – by the Daleks, of course. It’s hard to understand why they keep losing when they have the technology to steal planets and keep them out of phase with mainstream time, which is just one of many flaws in the story. But as a Davies story, much of the plot is left unexplained and/or doesn’t make much sense. The theme of the story is that of the Doctor’s large extended family, all of whom (since the series reboot) appear in this episode, usually accompanied by a plot hole or a moment of sheer coincidence. Everyone pulls together to make things turn out okay, and there’s a rather nice sequence of saying farewell to everyone who’s been on the show the last few years, a sort of farewell to Russell Davies’ tenure.

Davies seems to be a sucker for both the Daleks and big, world-changing climaxes, both of which have worn thin their welcome with me over the last few years. He injects Davros, the Daleks’ creator, though other than giving a manic voice to the Daleks’ ambitions he doesn’t contribute much. The episode looks nice – the producers have learned how to apply their special effects budget quite well – and there are many touching moments (and a few clever ones, like when Jackie escapes certain death), but the whole thing feels like it’s trying too hard.

The story ends with a half-human clone of the Doctor, which gives Rose (who’s acquired a lisp since she last appeared) a happy ending with (after a fashion) the man she loves, and with Donna gaining the Doctor’s mind, which overloads her human brain, forcing the Doctor to make her forget all about him and leave her back on Earth. This latter bit seemed not only completely improbable, but largely unnecessary from a story standpoint: Either kill her off cleanly, or find some better way of having her leave the TARDIS. Wiping her memory, too, seems just like cruel writing.

Overall I think the fourth season was a little better than the third season, even though I liked Martha Jones better as a companion than I did Donna. But I’m looking forward to Steven Moffat taking over as head writer. I think he has the right sense of gravitas to give the series some meaning, but hopefully his tighter storytelling will carry over to structure for a whole season, without the kitchier extremes of Russell Davies’ writing.

Oh, and also, we’ll have a new Doctor, as David Tennant is departing along with Davies after this year’s specials. So it’ll be a fresh start. Again.

Star Trek: The Reboot

J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek film is sort of the anti-Battlestar Galactica. BSG took a fairly goofy old TV series and turned it into a serious adventure drama. Star Trek takes what was a serious adventure drama (well, for its time) and turns it into a goofy movie.

Myself, I’m an unreconstructed original series fan, and I happily enjoy those old episodes and the early movies while ignoring almost everything that followed. So I was just hoping for a good movie. Well, it’s got lots of action and plenty of humor, but it also self-consciously compares itself to the original series at every turn, and the story makes basically no sense, while blazing no new ground. So it was a rollicking ride, but ultimately it’s just another action film.

Spoilers ahoy!

Continue reading “Star Trek: The Reboot”

Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
Consider Phlebas

I read several of Banks’ Culture novels earlier in the decade, but I hadn’t read Consider Phlebas, which was the first of them published. We read it for our book discussion group this month, rectifying that oversight.

Consider Phlebas is a grand space opera which introduces us to the universe of the Culture, itself a sweeping civilization maintained by ultraintelligent computers (Minds) which live in harmony with the humanoids and humanoid-level robots (drones) which make up most of the Culture’s trillions of citizens. But we’re introduced to the Culture through the eyes of one of its enemies, Bora Horza Gobuchul. Horza is a Changer, a humanoid who can shift shapes (given time) to imitate other humanoids. He’s also an agent for the Idirans, an alien race of religious fanatics who are at war with the Culture. Horza opposes the Culture because of their reliance on – and perhaps in his eyes servitude to – machines.

Horza is extracted from his current mission at the start of the novel (where he’d been bested by a Culture agent, Perosteck Balveda) and charged with going to Schar’s World to retrieve a Mind which has been marooned there following combat with the Idirans. Unfortunately, Schar’s World is a dead world which has been closed by an even more powerful race, the Dra’Azon, whom the Culture and Idirans are both wary of. The Idirans sent a force there to retrieve the Mind, but it was apparently shot down. Horza had once served there in a neutral base his race maintains, so perhaps the Dra’Azon will let him in.

Even worse for our hero, the Idiran ship where Horza is briefed is attacked before he can set out, and he ends up being marooned and then rescued by the Clear Air Turbulence, with a crew of freebooters led by Captain Kraiklyn, a leader who proves both poorly informed and incompetent. Horza wins his way onto the crew (through combat), and gets involved with a shipmate, Yalson. Kraiklyn’s crew embark on several adventures – with a mounting body count – including an extended stay on Vavach Orbital, a larger-than-Earth-diameter ring which the Culture plans to destroy before the Idirans can take it over. Horza ends up on both the giving and the receiving end of many atrocious acts, but remains fixed on his goal of getting to Schar’s World, where the last third of the book takes place.

The element that all the reviews of Consider Phlebas mention is that it introduces the Culture through the eyes of one of its adversaries. Horza has thrown in his lot with the Idirans because he sees them as being “on the side of life”, whereas he detests the Culture’s melding of man and machine into a larger gestalt, one he perceives as dominated by the machines to the detriment of the humanoids. I wish the book had explored this notion further, since it’s probably the most interesting idea in the novel. But Horza isn’t a very philosophical man, and on this subject he perhaps is motivated not to be, since if the Idirans are the best that “the side of life” can put up against the Culture, one is forced to wonder if Horza isn’t just deluding himself: The Idirans are warlike, dogmatic, and obsessive in their drive to absorb other races into their empire. Horza is getting tired of the war altogether, but one wonders if he hasn’t realized that he’s not on the right side but just can’t admit that to himself.

Unfortunately the book mostly doesn’t concern itself with interesting questions like that either, being mostly a space-operatic show of wonder as Horza takes his tour through what is effectively the leading front of the war: The enormity of Vavach Orbital and what exists inside it, the brutality of the game of Damage that he witnesses while there, the various wonders and dangers that exist on worlds in the vicinity, and the nitty-gritty of the soldiers, including Balveda’s resourcefulness and the brutal single-mindedness (one might say blooddy-mindedness) of the Idirans sent to recover the Mind. Many of these are interesting ideas, but none of them are enough to hang a book on. Indeed, the book feels like it went instantly obsolete in the “sense of wonder” region when Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep came out, and like it’s at best a great-great-grandparent of Alastair Reynolds‘ works. That’s not a good thing for a book barely 20 years old.

But the book doesn’t have a lot going for it besides appeals to the sense of wonder. Horza is an unlikeable protagonist, one who does horrible things and suffers some horrible experiences, and for what? The book’s conclusion is unsatisfactory, with little but misery and death having been inflicted on the characters, and no reward for that suffering. Horza doesn’t even come across as a tragic figure, nor does he really learn anything or impart much of a legacy. It appears this was intentional, as Banks said in an interview (quoted in the Wikipedia article) that it’s very difficult for an individual to change the course of civilizations. That’s all well and good (and even so, this story was terrible at making that point), but an individual can certainly have a profound impact on a smaller scale, especially a few other individuals, but other than bringing death to them (death which it seems likely would have come anyway), Horza doesn’t even do that much.

Banks’ writing is decent enough, although it often feels mechanical, mainly intended to move the characters from one place to another through plot devices (and in a galaxy where everyone’s got high-tech implants of one sort or another, there are always plenty of plot devices to go around). Some of the scenes are fine (such as Horza piloting the CAT out of a Culture GSV), while others are inventive in their way (the colony of cannibals living on an island on the orbital) but I thought they added nothing to the story. It could have been a shorter novel without losing anything.

Consider Phlebas is full of ideas, but the writing, characters, and especially the plotting just aren’t very rewarding. Although the Culture is interesting as a post-singularity civilization, with the unusual twist (which always seems reasonable one to me) of humans and AIs living together, this novel is a poor representative of the premise, because ultimately there just isn’t enough story to make it an enjoyable read.

Related Articles:

Battlestar Galactica: The End

It seems like we just started watching Battlestar Galactica a few months ago – in fact, it was not quite a year ago – but here we are at the end.

The spoiler-free version is this: The series finale was quite good. It pulled together more of the ongoing plot threads than I’d expected, and featured many of the character, action, and philosophical elements which made the series enjoyable. It was annoying that not everything was revealed – or, at least, not to my satisfaction – but on the whole it was a solid conclusion to an ambitious series and a fond farewell to the characters.

The spoiler-filled review is after the cut.

Continue reading “Battlestar Galactica: The End”

Gregory Frost: Shadowbridge & Lord Tophet

  • Shadowbridge

    • by Gregory Frost
    • TPB, Ballantine/Del Rey Books, © 2008, 255 pp, ISBN 0-345-49758-1
  • Lord Tophet

    • TPB, Ballantine/Del Rey Books, © 2008, 222 pp, ISBN 0-345-49759-8
Shadowbridge by Gregory Frost
Shadowbridge
Lord Tophet by Gregory Frost
Lord Tophet

This is a charming novel that was divided into two volumes – presumably by the publisher – but if you just read Shadowbridge you’ll be disappointed at the end, since it’s not a whole story. Fortunately I enjoyed the first half enough to be happy to head right into the second half. That’s a little unusual since I’m not generally a fan of fantasy, but it has elements reminiscent of both Tim Powers and Michael Swanwick, whose works I enjoy.

Shadowbridge is a world of a few small islands and a great many giant bridge spans across its ocean. Thousands of people live on the spans of the bridges, and their origins are lost to antiquity. Their medieval cultures are mixed with fantastic creatures living alongside the humans, demigods walking the world, and the gods dabbling in mortal affairs, especially through the Dragon Bowls on each span through which favors are visited on a few worthies.

Into this world strides Bardsham, the greatest storyteller of his age, through the use of shadow puppets. But that was years ago, and the story opens with his daughter, Leodora, taking up his legacy, with his puppets, and aided by his former assistant, Soter, a drunkard who helps her set up engagements. Leodora performs under the name of Jax to hide her gender, and gathers stories from the spans she visits. In time they’re joined by Diverus, a gifted musician who has been touched by the gods. But Soter is terrified that the horrible fate that was visited on Bardsham and his wife Leandra – Leodora’s parents – will find and doom her as well.

Shadowbridge has a touch of metatextual feeling to it, with regular asides in which a character tells a traditional story from somewhere on the bridge. Each of these stories is itself a rewarding vignette on its own, and it gradually develops that the stories have grains of truth as well as elements that have evolved over the centuries; which pieces are which is left up to the reader, and they give the reader something to mull over while reading the rest of the novel.

The story takes a little while to get going, spending a large chunk of the first volume on Leodora’s childhood, and the tragedies which led her to leave the island on which she grew up to follow in her father’s footsteps. It goes on a little too long for my tastes, though there’s some good stuff in there, especially her earliest years. And then another chunk of time on Diverus’ story, which is more exotic and ominous. But once the backstory is out of the way, things move along quickly, as Soter takes them further and further from Leodora’s childhood home and ultimately back to the span where the key events in Bardsham’s downfall occurred.

The second volume takes place mainly on this ancient span, as Leodora learns how Bardsham was seen by those living there, and also glimpses a mysterious span-beneath-the-span which she suspects has some role to play in the story. This is some of the best stuff in the novel, especially the city below, which has several layers the characters have to peel back. The general setting of Shadowbridge is not quite as exotic as I’d hoped – often it’s just a slightly quirky medieval world – but some of the specific ideas are quite well realized.

Frost has an accessible writing style with which he weaves some evocative tales. As far as the two authors whose work this novel resembles, the setting is more like Swanwick, but the storytelling is more like Powers, albeit not quite so tightly wound around a careful plot. Nonetheless the payoff is satisfying, even if the denouement left me feeling like we don’t really know whether the characters lived happily ever after.

All-in-all Shadowbridge is quite an entertaining novel, and if it’s slightly rough around the edges it makes up for that in pure enjoyment and the cleverness of the individual episodes. I don’t know whether Frost plans to write more books in this setting, but I’d read them if he does.

Tim Powers: The Stress of Her Regard

The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers
The Stress of
Her Regard

One stormy night in 1816, shortly before his wedding, physician Michael Crawford places his wedding ring on a statue, and so becomes ties to one of the nephelim, a race of inhuman vampires who predate humanity on Earth. The morning after his wedding, he wakes to find his bride Julia horrifically torn to bits in their locked room, and he’s forced to flee the life he knew to escape the hangman’s noose. With the aid of poet John Keats, he heads across the English Channel to France where he encounters Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, and becomes deeply embroiled in a fight to fight off the creature which haunts him. He’s pursued by Julia’s twin sister Josephine, who gains a nephelim lover of her own.

Taking place between 1816 and 1822, The Stress of Her Regard is a shadow history centered around the lives of the three romantic poets, all of whom died young and whose families also suffered from early deaths. Powers uses the nephelim to explain both their artistic prowess as well as the grim elements of their lives: The nephelim attach themselves like haunting spirits to humans and (perhaps as a side-effect) imbue them with certain skills and even with long life, but the nephelim are also jealous creatures who try to kill all who are loved by their human beloved.

There are many recurring elements of a Tim Powers novel: The main character is physically mutilated and forced to abandon the life they knew; there’s a leap in time between the first and second halves of the book; and the plot culminates in a mystical ritual which goes wrong somehow (yet often succeeds nonetheless). The main character is usually an everyman – albeit one with some skills of his own – who ends up as the lynchpin character amidst towering (or at least more knowledgeable) figures. All of these elements are present here, and while you could argue that this makes Powers’ books a little repetitive, his intricate plotting and clever twists and turns make each story unique. Clearly he just enjoys writing about certain dramatic situations.

A common theme of Powers’ novels is being torn between the temptations offered by the opposing forces, and one’s own well-being or loved ones. This conflict is as clear here as it’s ever been, with Crawford deeply succumbing to the nephelim’s influence in the first half, and then severely tempted to invite them back – despite the ruin it would deliver on his life and friends – in the second. He sees what the nephelim do to other people, even when – as they do for Byron – they provide a vital piece of meaning in their lives. Crawford goes through hell to get rid of his succubus, but constantly feels the temptation to invite it back, and thus can’t pass judgment on others who succumb. For the love of his friends, he drags himself through further hell in order to help them. Although Powers’ narrative is sometimes verbose enough to take the reader out of the moment, it’s still powerful stuff through the sheer aggregation of tension and emotion.

Stress wraps up with a satisfying climax and touching denouement, bringing the lives of the famous supporting characters to their historical closes. It should please any Powers fan, and is a strong fantasy/suspense tale for anyone else.