Category: Books

Science fiction, non-fiction, and more

Mike Resnick: Santiago

Santiago: A Myth of the Far Future, by Mike Resnick
Santiago

Santiago is my first exposure to Mike Resnick’s writing. I think it first attracted my attention when I read about its sequel, The Return of Santiago, and the notion of a major figure in the political scene whose existence wasn’t actually verified intrigued me. I think I’d expected it to be similar to Jack McDevitt’s novel A Talent For War, which is one of my favorites.

Santiago is told like a folk tale, with each chapter headed by a four-line stanza from a poem written by a far-future scribe recording the figures on the inner frontier of the human Democracy. The inner frontier is just that, full of rogues and scoundrels and bounty hunters. Sebastian Nightingale Cain is one such bounty hunter, who picks up the trail of the notorious criminal Santiago and starts to follow it, with reporter Virtue MacKenzie tagging along hoping to get the story on the mythical figure. Cain wants to head off the Angel, another bounty hunter, who’s also after Santiago. Along the way they meet many colorful figures as they unravel the mystery.

Santiago is low in science-fictional “ideas content”, with only the standard array of faster-than-light starships, laser guns, and other boilerplate science fictional trappings. The story rests entirely on the characters and on the mystery of Santiago, and neither of them really grabbed me. The characters are pretty simplistic, although Cain’s bluster – which he’s earned the right to – is often amusing. I figured out who Santiago would be about half-way through, and was disappointed that that was the extent of the mystery. It’s not so much a bad story as just not a very deep story, and the folk tale storytelling approach isn’t really my cup of tea.

I like McDevitt’s approach to this sort of mystery more (although it has its flaws, too), and the melange of characters is similar to – though not as strong as – the set in the comic book GrimJack (which was originally published around the same time as this volume). Santiago has a certain folksy charm, but it was a little too simplistic for my tastes.

Jay Lake: Mainspring

Mainspring, by Jay Lake
Mainspring

Jay Lake is one of the current generation of SF writers who I heard about through word-of-mouth on the Internet,. Mainspring is his first novel, and also my first exposure to his writing.

It’s a “fantastic alternate world” story, in that it takes place on an Earth where the British Empire is ascendant and America is merely one of its provinces, but where magic is real, and the world is bisected by a giant wall around the equator. Our hero, Hethor Jacques, is a young apprentice clockmaker in New Haven, Connecticut who receives a visitation from the angel Gabriel. Gabriel tells him that the mainspring of the world is winding down, and that he has to find the fabled Key Perilous and wind it up again, a feat the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the days of Christ.

At first unsure that it’s not just a dream, Hethor is convinced by the small silver feather that Gabriel leaves behind, and a visit to his master’s son, and then to a librarian at Yale, convinces him that his vision was real. Unfortunately, it also causes him to run afoul of his father’s dishonest and greedy sons, who force their father to turn him out onto the street. This sets Hethor on a path to Boston to petition the Queen’s representative for help. This, too, goes badly, but is a blessing in disguise as he ends up conscripted to one of Her Majesty’s airships (zeppelins), where he meets Simeon Malgus, who also has some knowledge of the strange doings of the world. The ship travels to the equator to extend the empire’s reach into the wild areas near the wall around the world.

The adventure goes badly for the ship, and Hethor is separated from them and carried to the top of the wall, where the gears on which the Earth travels around the sun are located. He and Malgus travel over the gears into the southern hemisphere where they become separated. But Hethor is taken in by some small aborigines who call themselves the Correct People. He forms a close bond with one of the People, Arellya, and the People accompany Hethor – whom they see as a messenger from God – on his mission as he forges ever southward in search of the Key Perilous and the Mainspring. He is opposed in this by William of Ghent, a sorcerer who served the regent in Boston, who believes that if the mainspring is allowed to wind down then it will signal a new age for mankind in freedom from the whims of heaven.

I generally prefer SF over fantasy, and this story leans more to the fantasy side than I’d expected. But my basic problem is that the story is a straightforward quest/travelogue: Hethor has a mission and he sets out to fulfill it even though he really doesn’t have much idea how to go about it, and this provides the impetus to send him across this quirky world that Lake has created and show us many things about it. Mixed in with this is Hethor’s coming-of-age tale. But despite putting these elements together in a single tale, I don’t think it manages to transcend any of them.

A travelogue is successful only to the extent that the world fascinates. The archetypal fantasy travelogue, of course, is The Lord of the Rings. There’s certainly some interesting stuff in this world, but throughout the story I kept wondering: Why is Earth on a gear? How did civilization evolve so closely with our own despite being separated from the southern hemisphere? What other effects did the bisecting of the Earth have? These questions are outside the scope of the story, but they’re the ones I was most interested in, which meant the travelogue had some big missing pieces for me.

Hethor’s narrative is okay, but doesn’t really distinguish itself in the annals of quest or coming-of-age stories. At first Hethor pursues his quest through some reasonable avenues, seeking out knowledgeable people to help and direct him, but as it progresses once he enters the southern hemisphere his attraction to the south pole doesn’t seem rational, even in the context of the story’s supernatural elements (why the south pole rather than the north?). His progress into manhood is decidedly quirky, especially once he meets Arellya and the Correct People. Lake certainly deserves props for the odd turns the story takes at this point, but overall it wasn’t a remarkable story.

Finally, I felt let down by the conclusion, as Hethor ends up leading a strange life after the conclusion of his quest, leaving everything he’d known behind. In a way it does make sense given where he ended up travelling to, but it wasn’t a very satisfying conclusion to the story.

Stories like this always make me feel like I’m missing some piece of the big picture, suspecting that there’s an allegory that I can’t see. There’s a lot of Christian imagery in Mainspring, and I have negligible understanding of Christianity other than the broad ways in which it’s influenced the culture I live in, so if Lake is trying to make points about Christianity through the story, they went entirely over my head. But if the book is what it appears to be to me, well, Lake shows considerable craftsmanship in his world-building, but the story just wasn’t very interesting to me.

Charles Stross: Saturn’s Children

Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross
Saturn’s Children

Charles Stross’ new SF novel heads in a different direction from his earlier ones: Rather than exploring the near future of humanity, or the far future after the singularity, Saturn’s Children considers a future in which humanity has died out. Before we went, though, we created some awfully sophisticated robots, and they continued on and built their own culture on the bones of our own once we were gone. (Thus humanity is the Saturn of the title, and the bots are our children.)

The narrator, Freya, is a model built as a sex companion for humans, based on a model named Rhea. Life is hard in this society of constructs, since most robots are enslaved – legally and through controlling hardware or software – to the few aristocrats who run things. Additionally, since their role as companions to humans is well-and-truly obsolete, Rhea’s Get have the additional challenge of finding a reason to live. Indeed, when the story opens Freya is contemplating suicide while living on Venus, but she’s instead derailed by running afoul of another humaniform construct called the Domina, whose animosity makes Freya think she’d better leave the planet fast. Through her contacts, Freya hooks up with the Jeeves corporation, which run a shady import/export business. Hired to run a package to Mars, Freya gets caught between factions trying to fundamentally change the balance of society in the solar system.

The thing that keeps me coming back to Stross’ science fiction novels is the inventive ways in which he dances around the edge of the singularity, acknowledging perhaps more bluntly than any other writer that the transcendence of our species can take many forms, and that there will still likely be unlifted individuals around to view what happens next, even if they don’t understand it. While Saturn’s Children doesn’t see the transcendence of humanity as is typically envisioned, it does see us supplanted by our own creations, even if they are as flawed as we are despite the advantages of being advanced computing machines gives them. They are literally “posthumans”, if not the sort we usually think of when we hear the term.

The machines are caught up in a web of rules which have echoes of Asimov’s Laws, but are more rooted in the nature of programming rules and human laws: The less-advanced robots have no choice but to follow them, while the more advanced ones – ones which aren’t controlled by slave chips – use their smarts to get around them and use them to their benefit. And as always there are the many who fall between the cracks, who aren’t controlled but who are also ignored by those in power as long as they don’t get noticed. Freya meets many such people, from the Jeeveses who have their own power but who operate in the shadows, to some sad, damaged beings who live on the fringes of society, all of whom seem a little human, but also rather inhuman.

Although there’s a lot of intellectual chewiness in Saturn’s Children, the narrative often drags. I think the core problem is the main character: Freya is introspective and occasionally snarky, but perhaps due to her background as a, well, sex robot, she’s a pretty passive figure, more of an observer than a difference-maker.

The plot is similar to Freya in this way, as the stakes are high, but it splutters out in the resolution. It’s not a difference-maker of a story, rather it feels like it falls a few years before the developments that are really going to change things in the solar system. So the book feels more like a tour of this unusual future with a story grafted onto it, and while Freya’s own situation is a tough one for her to get out of, as a novel it lacks weight.

I think Stross intended the nature of identity and freedom in this post-human world to be where the book’s weight would lie: Freya spends much of the book working out her identity as distinct from her mother and sisters, which is tricky since she has her sister Juliette’s memory chip sitting in a socket for much of the book and experiences some of Juliette’s own adventures when she dreams. And the nature of slavery for both tightly-programmed bots and for bots wearing slaver chips comes into play a few times. But these elements seemed more like plot devices to me than really deeply-explored themes. I actually found the nature of the Jeeveses and their company to be more interesting on both counts, perhaps because despite being stereotypical butlers, they seemed more vivid characters than Freya.

Stross is rarely lacking in the ideas department, but as a reader I sometimes find that the story is lackluster compared to the backdrop, as here and in Halting State. Stross can tell a rollicking adventure story with a big payoff in the end, but neither of his last two novels have lived up to the likes of Singularity Sky or Glasshouse. I guess that’s just the price he pays for trying new stuff with each book.

Karl Schroeder: Pirate Sun

Pirate Sun, by Karl Schroeder
Pirate Sun

Last time we saw Admiral Chaison Fanning, he had successfully defeated the fleet of Falcon Formation thanks to his wife Venera managing to shut down Candesce, the sun of the artificial system Virga, which actively suppresses certain technologies within the system. That was at the end of the first volume Sun of Suns, and in this third volume, we catch up with Fanning who is in ongoing interrogation in a Falcon prison. (The second volume follows Venera’s adventures.)

Someone breaks Fanning out of prison, along with two companions from his home nation of Slipstream: The young man Darius Martor, and the former ambassador Richard Reiss. But rather than hooking up with their benefactor, they’re picked up by Antaea Argyre, a member of the Home Guard, a mysterious group dedicated to preventing things from outside the balloon – the forces of what’s referred to as Artificial Nature – from getting in. The four of them hide out on a city in Falcon and spend much of the book playing cat-and-mouse with Falcon’s police forces – who are being aided by Slipstream’s people, since Fanning has been declared a traitor for attacking Falcon in defiance of Slipstream’s Pilot – while gradually making their way back to Slipstream.

I didn’t see how Schroeder was going to top the second volume in the Virga series, Queen of Candesce, which was full of exotic wondrousness set around a compelling central character in Venera Fanning. And indeed, Schroder doesn’t top it, but Pirate Sun is still a very good book.

The book is divided into three parts, the first involving the escape from prison and search for safe haven; the second an effort to defend the Falcon city of Stonecloud from being taken over by the rival nation of Gretel; and finally the party returning to Slipstream and dealing with a complicated situation there. The book’s biggest problem is that the first two parts are mostly a big lead-in to the third part, and much of it feels superfluous, especially the second part. The second part could have been much more interesting: The notion of a city in free-fall absorbing another city, and the tactics that might bs used in defense of that city, is pretty interesting, and the man leading the defense – an enhanced strongman – is also pretty interesting. But the battle rather splutters out at the end, and it felt like all the build-up had no pay-off.

The first two parts mostly serve to build up the subplots which pay off in the third part, but the structure of a running chase sequence makes those parts feel thin. There is some well-executed sense of wonder throughout it, regarding the tactics that Gretel uses to attack Falcon, but it’s not quite enough to carry the story.

The crux of the story involves Antaea, who latches on to Fanning in hopes of finding the Key to Candesce, which Venera used to shut down the sun in the first book. But the reason she’s interested has to do with what the Home Guard had to deal with during the brief outage. As a result, we learn what Artifical Nature is (and it’s cool! But frightening!) and why the book is entitled Pirate Sun (which is less cool – titles are not the series’ strong suit).

As a protagonist, Chaison is okay, but a lot less interesting than his wife. He’s sort of like Captain Sheridan in Babylon 5: A hugely competent leader with a strong sense of morality, whose sense of the right thing to do pits him against his own government, but makes him a hero to some of his subordinates. This means Fanning spends a lot of time agonizing over whether he’s done the right thing in following his instincts, but unable to reach closure until he gets back to Slipstream. Fortunately, his take-charge attitude serves him and his companions well in dealing with the challenges along the way. But his conflicts and character arc are far more vanilla than those of his more complex wife.

The story really takes off in the third part, when we meet the Pilot of Slipstream, who is both hugely annoying and yet quite capable in his own area of expertise (that being politics). With the Pilot and Antaea working against him, as well as two other interested parties who show up for the finale, Chaison has quite a minefield to navigate, and Schroeder pulls it all off adroitly, almost making up for the shortcomings of the earlier parts.

The book’s ending has an unusual quality about it: It’s not clear to me whether it’s the end of the story or not. If Schroeder decides to leave Virga as a trilogy, then that works well enough, but there also seems to be plenty of additional territory to explore, and a rich world to mine for more material. (And unless I missed something, we never did learn the origin of the bullet that hit Venera years ago.) In either case, Virga stands right now as Schroeder’s best work, a mix of cool ideas and traditional adventure storytelling adding up to really good stuff, just as challenging as his earlier books while being better written to boot. I look forward to what he comes up with next.

Superheroes and Science Fiction

Sometimes in the blogosphere you come across a thoughtful, passionate piece which reads like a manifesto, or at least a clear statement of The Way Things Are in the worldview of the writer – and the worldview is so at odds with your own that you just have to respond.

Other times, you write such a response, and then let it sit in your Drafts folder for several months until you finally think, “Hey, I should finish that off and post it…” As you might guess, this post is one of these.

A while back, Comics Should Be Good linked to a pair of articles written by ‘amypoodle’ at Mindless Ones about superhero comics as “soft” science fiction. It’s interesting stuff, but I knew I was going to have trouble with it from the word go, indeed from the beginning of the first post, “Candyfloss Horizons”:

For those unaware of the distinction between hard and soft sci-fi, the former spends its time postulating imaginary futures that unfold out of pre-existing science/theory, whereas the latter jettisons notions of the possible, concerning itself with the imaginary part of the equation. In its most basic form, it deals with the psychological and sociolological impact of tomorrow – the soft sciences – but at its logical extremes it details societies, internal states and/or technologies beyond comprehension, whose function and form defy simple explanation.

When I first read this article, I wondered if she was just trying to tweak fans of hard science fiction, but I don’t think so. I think she genuinely saw hard SF as limited and bland, wrapped up in explaining the nuts-and-bolts of how its ideas worked, while soft SF was more far-ranging, less restrictive. And this is, well, very far from my own thinking.

Now, defining “science fiction” has always been something of a losing battle – sort of the Godwin’s Law of literary semantics – so defining those sub-terms isn’t likely to get you very far, either, though that rarely stops people from trying: You can go read the Wikipedia entries on hard SF and soft SF. And like any good genre fan, I’m always happy to chip in my two cents.

I think that hard science fiction is where the imagination is, extrapolating from current knowledge and trends or just positing a wild idea and running with that to craft a fully-realized world (or at least a rich-if-narrow slice of one) and exploring the implications of the story’s premise. Certainly there’s plenty of hard SF which is mainly concerned with the scientific implications of the ideas, but on the other hand quite a few writers use the ideas as a springboard for a coherent story, or explore the sociological or psychological implications of the ideas. Hard SF certainly doesn’t stick to existing science and theory, as Vernor Vinge’s works often illustrate; one of the preeminent hard SF writers around, his novels The Peace War and A Fire Upon The Deep rather blatantly introduce concepts created out of whole cloth (‘Bobbles’ and ‘Zones of Thought’, respectively) and build their stories around them, spending time exploring what the ideas mean without worrying much about how they work. Charles Stross’ Glasshouse is another hard SF novel which closely examines the social implications of its premise. Vinge and Stross, among others (Alastair Reynolds, Karl Schroder, et. al.), have done a lot to define hard SF over the last decade or two, and I don’t think it fits in the box that Amypoodle describes for it.

By contrast, I mainly think of soft science fiction as referring to stories which contain only the trappings of science fiction, which in which the scientific – or pseudo-scientific – elements are either just part of the background or not treated very seriously, and which don’t really concern themselves with plumbing the depths of the implications of their ideas content. Often they’re re-using tried-and-true SF ideas and routine ways, using them as a setting rather than as a key element in the story. Nearly every science fiction TV show is soft SF, I can’t offhand think of one that isn’t. Certainly both Star Trek and Babylon 5 were. I’d also classify Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series as soft SF, as well as Jack McDevitt’s novels. McDevitt’s books come closer to being hard SF, but for the most part they’re employing well-worn science fictional ideas in the service of his particular stories, rather than breaking new ground or putting the ideas front-and-center.

The core difference, I think, is that hard SF presents the fantastic ideas content as a worthwhile and intellectual challenging component of the story in itself, whereas soft SF does not. But this certainly doesn’t mean that hard SF restricts itself to only dealing with the ideas content, although this is true of some hard SF.

So I think Amypoodle goes off in the wrong direction from the beginning, and this is made even more clear in her follow-up post, which is primarily about Grant Morrison’s comics writing. Its basic idea is summed up near the end:

Soft SF ram-raids and runs with the optimism embedded in the earliest victorian science fiction and brings it slap-bang up to date. It’s hard SF’s 20th century counterpart. Its evolution. Recent hard SF seems so wanky in comparison, what with its fetishistic obsession with the operating manual and what lies beneath the pants of the futuristic societies it slavers over. It also feels terribly stuffy and conservative. Vanilla. ‘Nothing will essentially change’, Star Trek, Stargate and the rest of the drivel explain, ‘but we will have faster aeroplanes that move about in outer-space’. Well, bollocks to that. Do you think anything will be recognizable a million years from now, if we survive that long? I don’t. Least of all ourselves. And as for the stories that inform our new world? Grant and a few others are intuiting them now. They’re showing us what might be – charting the candyfloss horizon.

This paragraph seems completely at odds with the reality of hard SF today. She groups Star Trek and Stargate with hard SF (huh?), accuses recent hard SF of being primarily interested in “the operating manual” (wha?), and her article comes across as unaware of the burgeoning interest in hard SF in the technological singularity which is strongly concerned with the notion that not only is everything going to change in ways we can barely even imagine, but that the big change could be coming sooner than we think.

Using Grant Morrison as an example of how superhero comics are soft SF seems a weird choice, since the style of Morrison’s books has a lot more in common in hard SF than with soft. My perception of Morrison has always been as an ideas man; he has on-the-edge ideas (well, for comic books, anyway) in seemingly endless supply (putting aside the dreary Final Crisis). Where Morrison diverges from hard SF is in the depth of his stories: Unlike someone like Vernor Vinge – another terrific ideasmith – Morrison rarely explores the implications of his ideas in depth; rather, after a cursory examination of an idea (mainly to exploit its “coolness factor”) he moves on to the next idea. Occasionally an idea undergoes successive refinement, usually because a character which embodies that idea sticks around long enough that a further extension of his abilities has time to come to light, but then, this is pretty much how superhero comics have always worked; that’s why the Flash, for instance, ends up with some nifty new talents every few years, as a new writer figures out what else having inhuman speed and reflexes is good for.

To be sure, the lack of depth is partly due to the superhero genre, which has long catered towards style over substance, and takes advantage of the short attention span that most of its audience (hard-core fanboys excepted) seems to have. Morrison has made two significant stabs at dealing with his ideas at greater length and depth, in The Invisibles and Seven Soldiers. The former has flashes of true brilliance, but the good stuff in the middle was bookended by muddled storytelling at either end. The latter was a tasty melange of mostly-preexisting ideas, but its very structure of seven separate characters with their own storylines worked against providing the payoff of real depth that it seemed to desire. (It also fell prey to Morrison’s essential weakness: His characterizations tend to be exceedingly flat.)

So Morrison’s writing isn’t hard science fiction because his ideas are handled relatively superficially. It isn’t soft science fiction because the ideas content is too high.

So what is it?

It’s fantasy.

And that shouldn’t come as a big revelation. After all, superhero comics spring from a fantasy heritage, whether they come from fantastic pulp adventure yarns, or are a sort of mythology for the post-industrial age. Like most fantasy, superhero comics don’t ask you to suspend your disbelief, to imagine that what you’re reading could happen, nor do they treat their ideas as a springboard for crafting a world grounded in the ramifications of those ideas. Rather, superhero comics present immensely powerful beings doing astonishing things, yet not really having a profound impact on the world; it’s still recognizably our world. Even Watchmen, despite Doctor Manhattan’s presence, is still just a few centimeters away from the world we knew when it was published.

Certainly there’s been some cross-pollination from SF over to the superhero genre, but it tends to be transient. Morrison perhaps shows more of its influence than most, but his work is still basically of the genre. Indeed, his best work, his run on JLA, embraces the genre more fully than anything else he’s written.

Superhero comics say, “Yeah, we know this isn’t real, that this could never be real, and we know that you know it too, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less cool.” But heading out to claim that comics are exploring the frontier of the imaginary somehow more seriously, less stuffily, than SF doesn’t match up with the actual books on the shelves. I love comic books – heck, every Wednesday I say “gosh I love comic books” to myself (and sometimes to others) – but forward-looking isn’t a characteristic of the genre. Morrison may inject more ideas content into his stories than most comics writers, but he still does so in a largely superficial manner (his Doom Patrol run was immensely frustrating in this way, with temptingly weird ideas which were thrown around and then discarded without deep consideration).

All of this applies equally well to another of her examples: Jack Kirby. He was a terrific ideasmith and designer of wild and wacky people, creatures and devices, but his creations were never plumbed in depth, and I don’t mean how they worked, but why they mattered. They were just big dumb objects, a term coined for science fiction but which practically defines fantasy, which is full of creatures and things and phenomena which can’t be explained and are rarely explored. They just are. (This is not to belittle Kirby, just to say that his fantastic creations drove his great adventure stories and that I think to see them as going much beyond that is to misunderstand his body of work.)

And from my perspective that’s the problem with Amypoodle’s candyfloss horizon: Like candyfloss itself, the horizon tastes real good, but it’s pure sugar and thus not very nourishing. Cool ideas are far more cool – and a lot more engaging – when they’re examined in depth for their implications and ramifications. Morrison can dazzle us with his bag of tricks when he’s on his game, but for the really chewy stories which really examine how the cool stuff affects our world, you’ll have to avoid being distracted by the candyfloss.

Lois McMaster Bujold: Paladin of Souls

Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
Paladin of Souls

Paladin of Souls is the sequel to The Curse of Chalion, and also the winner of the 2004 Hugo Award for next novel.

The story opens about 3 years after the close of Chalion, and the protagonist is Ista, the mother of the present royina (queen), who lived for 20 years under a cloud of depression and despair due to the curse on the royal house. It’s taken her this long to struggle out from under that cloud, and with the death of her mother Ista is now casting about for some meaning to her life, even as she’s kept a prisoner through kindness of her family and friends at her mother’s castle. Desperate for a change, Ista organizes a pilgrimage for herself and a few helpers, including a pair of soldiers sent by her daughter, Ferda and Foix, and her new lady-in-waiting, Liss, whose main occupation is a horse courier.

On her pilgrimage, Ista learns that more and more demons seem to be loose in the world, a point driven home when one of her party is himself occupied by a demon. But the group soon has larger problems, when they are attacked by a raiding party from the neighboring – and unfriendly – nation of Jokona. After the group is scattered, Ista is eventually rescued by Lord Arhys and taken to his castle Porifors, where she also mets Arhys’ young wife Cattilara. Though charmed by their hospitality – and rather taken with Arhys – Ista soon realizes that there’s something not right in Porifors. In fact, a visit from a party from Jokona some months earlier had adversely affected Arhys and left his best friend, Illvin, close to death. Moreover, all that has transpired can be traced back to Jokona, and Ista finds herself unwillingly at the center of the happenings, and even more unwillingly charged by one of the gods – gods whom she believed abandoned her to her decades-long misery – to set things right.

Being set in the same world as Chalion, I found Paladin suffers many of the same problems, among them its stock and basically unimaginative backdrop. The most interesting aspect of the backdrop are the five gods – the Father, the Son, the Mother, the Daughter, and the Bastard – who each hold sway over different aspects of the world, and with a structure that makes it more than a common polytheistic religion. But the structure doesn’t really play a major role in the story, it’s just a backdrop which shapes the character of the one god – the Bastard – who does play a significant role.

The big problem is that Paladin shares the biggest flaw of Chalion, which is that the story moves so s-l-o-w-l-y. It takes nearly a hundred pages for anything significant to happen, during which we’re mainly treated to the endless musings of Ista over her situation, until they encounter the Jokonan raiders. And then it’s over a hundred more pages before the revelation of what’s happening in Porifors, which is when the real story begins; everything before that it really just set-up, and it drags. A lot.

The balance of the story is generally stronger than Chalion, though: While Ista is not as engaging a main character as Cazaril was (Ista is another stock “strong woman in a society which marginalizes women” character), the challenge she faces is more interesting, and it has a much more dramatic and satisfying resolution. I also enjoyed the denouement of this book better than the first book, as it provides some nice insight into where the main characters will be going after the story ends.

But overall this is still a very flawed book. I’d sum it up with the old chestnut, “If you like this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you’ll like.” As for me, I think Bujold’s career has pretty much bottomed out with this pair of fantasy novels, and I certainly have no interest in reading any of her later fantasies. I’ll probably read further books in the Vorkosigan series (even though I’m not wild about the path that’s taken, either), but the action and adventure and humor that characterized her earlier novels has dwindled and finally vanished, and instead she’s writing dreary dramas with flat characters, and that’s just not worth my time to read.

Lois McMaster Bujold: The Curse of Chalion

The Curse of Chalion
The Curse of Chalion

After the main character of her Miles Vorkosigan series got married, the series kind of stalled out and Lois McMaster Bujold turned to writing fantasy novels, of which this was the first. She’d previously written an uninspiring fantasy named The Spirit Ring, and since in general I’m not a fan of heroic fantasy I dithered for a long time before reading The Curse of Chalion, but since my book discussion group is reading its sequel Paladin of Souls this month, I finally sat down and tackled it.

Chalion is a nation in a generic European medieval fantasy setting, set between two other nations with whom it fights wars from time to time. Our hero, Cazaril, is a former soldier and a broken man; he’d once captained the defense of a castle until their negotiated surrender, and then he was left off the list of names ransomed back to Chalion and sold off as a galley-slave. Eventually freed, he returns to Chalion at the age of 35 – but in a body that feels far older – seeking some small employment with a noble family he’d served years before.

Cazaril gets a lot more than he bargained for, as the provencara of the castle is grandmother to the heir to the throne of Chalion, Teidez, and his sister Iselle. After just long enough to get his bearings, the provencara hires him as Iselle’s tutor (in an exchange which is probably the high point of the novel). This would be difficult enough except that not long after Teidez and Iselle are summoned to the throne of the kingdom. The king, Orico, is old and ill and is largely controlled by his chancellor, Martou dy Jironal, and his younger brother Dondo. The dy Jironals want to get their claws into Teidez and Iselle so they can control the next generation of the throne, and while Iselle is smart enough (with advice from Cazaril) to recognize that she’s being played, Teidez is easily seduced by the riches and flattery the brothers heap on him. Worse, for Cazaril, is that the brothers are responsible for his being sold off years ago, and he’s certain that they plan to get rid of him to cover one of the few tracks they’ve left. When the brothers try to force an alliance by marriage, several desperate souls are moved to stop them, including through the use of death magic – in which one sacrifices oneself to kill another – but things go strangely awry, to the confusion of everyone.

On top of this, it turns out that the royal family of Chalion has been cursed for several generations, that this is what’s holding down Orico, and that Teidez and Iselle will surely inherit the curse when they inherit the kingdom. So Cazaril and Iselle are put in the position of trying to end the curse – through means they can barely imagine – while trying to foil dy Jironal’s ongoing machinations. Along the way they meet some interesting allies while trying to avoid their myriad enemies.

While Bujold still meets the requirements of telling a story that goes somewhere, and flashes some of her skills with dialogue and humor at times, but overall I found this to be a bland book. The setting is relentlessly generic, with nothing to set it apart from any number of other heroic fantasy settings. The characters are also pretty generic, with a standard assortment of “strong women trying to rise above their medieval stereotypes”, “misguided young men”, “corrupt schemers trying to eliminate their rivals”, and so forth. The novel is essentially plot-driven, with character developments that seem de rigueuer given the story developments.

Unfortunately, one of the worst problems a plot-driven novel can have is to be slow, and The Curse of Chalion is oh-so-very slow. It starts with one of the least informative opening paragraphs I can recall in a novel, telling us essentially nothing about the setting, character, or scenario. From there the story drags on for over 50 pages before anything interesting happens, and then bogs down again for more than another 50 pages before the characters finally head off to the royal court. And though Bujold doesn’t generally write action stories, the dialogue here isn’t much to write home about, so the text doesn’t even keep things moving along through lively exchanges between the characters. It just drags.

The novel’s saving grace is Cazaril, the one character who has any, well, character, as a former soldier whose spirit has been broken and has to put himself back together again for the good of the kingdom and of Iselle. His position as the wise advisor to Iselle and some of the dumber supporting characters is a pretty stock position, and his rewards for deeds well done at the end are likewise routine, but his internal struggles to overcome his burdens make for the book’s most interesting moments, especially when he’s revealing his past to another character, or being amazed at the unique position in which he’s been placed.

But overall The Curse of Chalion is merely light entertainment, and it could easily have had 200 or so pages edited out of it. I was a big fan of Bujold’s earlier novels, but I think she peaked with Mirror Dance and her writing has been in decline ever since. This one’s one of her weakest, and it doesn’t give me optimism towards Paladin of Souls.

Alastair Reynolds: House of Suns

Alastair Reynolds: House of Suns
House of Suns

Another year, another novel from Alastair Reynolds – which would be a blithe comment without also mentioning that whenever he publishes a new book, I buy the UK hardcover and drop whatever else I’m reading to read it. Yes, he’s that good: Even his weakest novels are packed with evocative settings and cool ideas. House of Suns is one of his better novels.

A framing sequence (of sorts) set hundreds of years in the future sets the backdrop, in which some rich and inquisitive humans cloned themselves a thousand times and set up family “lines” by sending each clone (“shatterling”) out on their own starship, in advance of the rest of humanity reaching the stars. The bulk of the novel takes place millions of years in the future: There’s no faster-than-light travel, but ships can near lightspeed, which combined with life-extension and hibernation technologies means that the members of the lines have lived for centuries (maybe millennia) of personal time, stretched to those millions of years via their travels.

The protagonists of the story are two members of the Gentian Line, Campion and Purslane, who have violated their line’s conventions by travelling together and becoming romantically involved (heterosexual – the clones are not exact). Campion is impulsive while Purslane is more measured and thoughtful. The Gentian Line travels the galaxy gathering information, and meets once every galactic cycle (!) to exchange that data. In between they accumulate wealth by constructing “stardams” – manipulating ringworlds left by the Priors – an extinct earlier civilization – to enclose dangerous objects – like exploding suns – for the protection of others. The backdrop also includes the Vigilance – a computer swarm observing the galaxy on its own – and the Absence – a black spot where the Andromeda Galaxy used to be.

Campion and Purslane are late to the line’s next gathering, which is good for them since someone else decided to come in and obliterate the Gentian Line. The survivors retreat to a world called Neume. Campion and Purslane had taken on a robot companion named Hesperus who had helped them during the disaster, but who was badly damaged. Two other robots, Cadence and Cascade, are also present as guests of the Line, and are doubtful he can be repaired, but Hesperus had left a final request to be given to the Spirit of the Air, a powerful machine entity which lives on Neume.

Their personal considerations aside, Campion and Purslane also get caught up in the Line’s family politics, which have become especially messy in the wake of the disaster, especially with prisoners to interrogate. Their only clues are the name “House of Suns”, a reference to a Line no one’s ever heard of, and the indication that Campion is somehow the catalyst of the attack, though no one can understand how.

As you can see, House of Suns starts out big and just gets bigger from there, with massive technology at the hands of the heroes, but even more massive technology out there to be discovered. Little of this tech is particularly new to a science fiction reader, but Reynolds deploys it in new combinations and in interesting ways; the wonder in the novel is much more about scale than about kind, and a reminder that sheer scale can still be amazing even after all the SF that’s been written before. (Of course, this does beg the question: After using ringworlds as merely materials in a larger project, and making galaxies disappear, can Reynolds come up with an encore in the theme of scale? It might be wiser if he doesn’t try.)

The “framing sequence” which opens each of the book’s parts is eerie but somewhat disappointing. It provides some insight into how the Gentian Line got started, and is also an allegory of sorts for the main story, but I found the connection between the two to be too tenuous to be really satisfying. I’d hoped for something more concrete linking the two stories.

But that sequence is a small part of the whole book, and the main story is much more rewarding. The focus is on political machinations and the mystery and suspense of the attack on the Line rather than on depth of character, but I also felt there was enough characterization to feel realistic. In particular, the loyalty of Campion and Purslane to Hesperus was at times touching, and Campion’s friction with the other shatterlings feels realistic. Although the narration alternates between the two, Campion always feels like the more interesting of the pair, probably because he has more foibles in his personality. The book might have had additional depth had it been written as a rite of passage or growth for Campion’s character, although that would have left out many excellent scenes which are seen only by Purslane.

The world building is excellent, as it usually is in a Reynolds novel: The sense of history and of a myriad of human cultures, and of their comings and goings as perceived by the Shatterlings is all very well portrayed. The Lines naturally feel a little superior to everyone else since they tend to outlive them, but are occasionally reminded that they’re not the only sharks in the sea, and they’re not perfect either. Though it takes a while for the mystery to draw out, there’s plenty of stuff happening and being revealed to keep the reader entertained; although the book is long, it’s rarely dull.

I found the ending to be a satisfying wrapping up of all the various threads, even if the final chapter did end rather abruptly. Reynolds also comes up with a satisfying rationale for the actions of some of the superhuman entities flying around, one which suggests that sometimes our fears are worse than the reality, but that we’re rarely willing to go out on a limb and risk finding out if that’s really true.

Although I didn’t find House of Suns to be quite as good as Chasm City, or its universe to be quite as richly textured as the Revelation Space universe, I still think it lands in the upper echelon of Reynolds’ novels. Although the sheer sense of wonder is its big selling point, it holds together as a story, too.

Michael Swanwick: The Iron Dragon’s Daughter

The Iron Dragon's Daughter
The Iron Dragon’s
Daughter

I’d owned this book for a while, but I’d rather burned out on Michael Swanwick by the time I bought it. Although he’s wonderful with imagery, I sometimes find his plots and characters to be lacking, and I couldn’t get into Stations of the Tide at all, even though it won the Nebula Award. However, I read a couple of excerpts of his new novel, The Dragons of Babel in Asimov’s and I enjoyed them a lot. Then I learned that it takes place in the same world as The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, and I had to go back and read that one before tackling the newer novel.

The central conceit of the world in the novel is it’s a fantasy world filled with all the traditional elves and dwarves and goblins and dragons, but that the fairy tale stories written about those creatures took place centuries ago, and in the present day this world has gone through its own industrial revolution, and today there are cities and weapons and schools and other trapping of our own modern culture, with magic and fantastic creatures integrated right into it.

The story’s heroine is Jane, a human girl among fantastic creatures, regarded as an oddity in a world that’s full of them. The novel opens with her working as a slave in a factory which builds iron dragons – sentient, flying tanks. Jane is on the edge of adolescence, and is starting to form thoughts of her own independence, although she’s somewhat behind her peers in this respect: Her friend Rooster is the nominal leader of the child workers at the factory, and has been trying to figure out how to escape or at least how to deal with some of their tormentors among the management for a long time. Other workers are happy merely to rise in the ranks among their own. Following one of Rooster’s plans, Jane gets singled out by the plant manager to do a favor for a high elf lady in the area, which leaves her ostracized by her peers. But she also is contacted by an old, forgotten dragon, number 7332, who has been imprisoned at the factory and also wishes to escape. Together they manage to achieve this goal.

The novel is told in several parts, although they’re not declared as such, but there are jumps between the major sections of story. Jane and the dragon settle near a town where Jane enrolls in high school, and the dragon goes quiescent. Jane isn’t a very good student, but aspires to become an alchemist. She also makes new friends of varying quality, and becomes involved in some local elvish customs. The last part of the novel sees Jane attending college and finding that pieces of her life seem to recreate themselves in her new environments with new players each time. She becomes more confident and gains more skills over time, and learns what 7332’s ultimate goals are for her, which are played out in the novel’s climax.

Swanwick’s novels always have a dreamlike quality to them, and Daughter certainly has that. There are even hints that it might all actually be a dream, but Swanwick is too crafty to come out and say that, and he leaves it up to the reader. This results in some allusions to the relationship between our world and Jane’s which I thought felt out-of-place in the novel. I’d have preferred that it have been played with the world it portrays being exactly what it appears, as I think the ambiguity adds nothing to the tale.

The story is of course a coming-of-age story, with Jane growing from an oppressed wallflower to a strong-willed and angry young woman, upset at how her being a human has left her in this second-class position (even though it confers a few advantages on her, too; for instance, some magical constructs work on magical creatures, but not on her). She’s a slightly pathetic character at the start, a little cowardly in her oppression, but with some inner strengths. These strengths come out over time as she stands up to increasingly more important and powerful people in pursuit of what she wants: A life of her own following her dreams. She has several romances with men who are all similar in some key ways, finds some friends and allies, as well as some adversaries. But she always seems to ultimately feel alone, and consequently she always has a certain kinship with 7332, despite the dragon’s frustrating and mercurial nature.

As much as I enjoyed Jane’s journey, I found its ending disappointing since it undercut a lot of her hard work in a relatively brief moment of emotion and show of force. For me the setting was the star of the book: While some commentary I’ve read about Daughter describes it as a melding of science fiction and fantasy, or an subversion of fantasy, I saw it more as applying some science fictional principles to a traditional fantasy setting: After all, there’s nothing that says that such a world couldn’t develop advanced science right alongside its impossible elements. Swanwick parcels out the interactions of these two slices of his world in small bits, and often subtly or obliquely; no wizards driving automobiles here, but characters considering the underlying principles of magic, or the haughty elves effectively forming the ruling caste of an economy driven by the creation of wealth. It’s a rich backdrop and there’s so much more that could be done with it – but Swanwick does quite a bit with it here in the service of the core story.

So yes, I was disappointed with the ending, and I wished Swanwick had chosen a course more in keeping with the tone of the rest of the novel. However, it was still a fun journey, and it’s whetted my appetite for reading The Dragons of Babel in its entirety.

Speed Reading

Last night I did something that’s very rare for me: I read a whole book in one evening. Specifically, I read Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed for my upcoming book discussion group. As I’ve said before, I’m quite a slow reader, usually plodding along at about 60 pages per hour, which means I can expect to spend about 7 hours going through a 400-page novel, the likes of which are common these days. Wild Seed is only about 280 pages, which means it would usually take me over 4 hours to get through it, but I finished it in about 3.

Okay, I did cheat a little bit, because I’ve read it before. I read the 4 in-print volumes in Butler’s Patternist series some years ago (I own a copy of the long-out-of-print volume, Survivor, but haven’t read it). For some reason I didn’t write reviews of the 4 books back when I read them. My recollection is that I thought they were okay but not terrific.

Which is pretty much what I thought of Wild Seed this time around: Okay but not terrific. The book concerns a pair of long-lived people, and their kin, who are all mutants with superhuman – mostly telepathic – powers. They actually seem very much similar to the comic book X-Men, only in this setting one of the long-lived characters, Doro, can jump between bodies (effectively killing any person whose body he inhabits), and is engaged in a long-term breeding program to create more people like himself. The title character, Anwanyu, is much younger, and is a shapeshifter and healer. The book is primarily about their relationship and the tension between them, as Doro expects everyone to bow to his will, while Anwanyu considers much of what Doro is doing to be abomination. The book has some powerful moments, but peters out at the end as the dramatic conclusion of their struggle is quite anticlimactic. (This is somewhat necessary as the book is a prequel to an already-existing series. But still.)

Anyway, although I did skim some of the more tedious bits (Butler often goes into a little discourse about the beckground of whatever new setting the characters are moving to, and then pretty much shoves all the background into, well, the background; there are also some less-than-illuminations digressions into the backstories of the two main characters), the book really was quite a quick read. I’m not really moved to re-read the rest of the series, although maybe I’ll tackle Survivor sometime soon to finish the arc.

Next up is Michael Swanwick’s The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. I’ve read a couple of stories recently in Asimov’s by Swanwick which I’ve enjoyed – especially “A Small Room in Koboldtown” – and I learned that they’re excerpts of his latest novel, The Dragons of Babel, which is a sequel to Daughter. So it seems like a good choice. What appealed to me about the stories is the setting: Traditional fantasy creatures (elves, goblins, trolls) whose world apparently continued developing beyond the medieval era and is now in an industrial age much like ours. A nifty idea.

I find Swanwick’s books to vary widely in quality. I liked The The Drift and Vacuum Flowers (both of which I reviewed here), but didn’t care much for either Stations of the Tide or Jack Faust. I’m hoping that these next books will be more like the former than the latter, even if I’m not generally a big fantasy fan.