I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (MARCH 2021 EDITION)
Well, it’s like that, isn’t it? No books in January, two books last month, four books this month.
Exciting, no?
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first instalment of John Scalzi’s first space opera outside of his Old Man’s War universe. Here, the setting is the Interdependency - a thousand-year-old empire of 48 star systems connected by a mysterious space-time phenomenon called “the Flow”, which enables faster-than-light travel between these specific systems. Because only one of the planets near the Flow is actually inhabitable (all other settlements are either underground or on huge space stations), each of the systems are dependent on trade to survive, resulting in an interstellar mercantile economy run by royal megacorporate houses and overseen by an emperox who (along with a parliament) governs from Hub, where most the Flow routes converge. And as the title suggests, the central premise that Scalzi introduces into this scenario is: suppose the Flow stopped working?
That’s the backdrop for this story that is basically a political thriller in space. Someone is trying to kill Cardenia, the newly crowned emperox - the evidence points to rebel forces on End (the planet furthest from Hub) who are trying to overthrow the local duke. Meanwhile, on End, physicist Count Claremont has discovered that the Flow is on the verge of collapse, which could mean not only the end of the Interdependency, but also the eventual end of the human race. So in a sense, Scalzi is working less from the Heinlein template of his OMW books and more from the likes of Dune and Foundation. And yet this is in many ways better than both - or at least more readable. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I like the Foundation series. Never made it past the first chapter of Dune.)
Scalzi writes snappy, readable prose and zooms in on key characters rather than keep his distance in favor of the bigger picture. He also provides plenty of action, political intrigue (and not a little satire), and severe business negotiations. On the downside, there are probably way too many minor characters to keep track of, and it’s not clear to me why his Interdependency needs a state church, or how you’d go about setting one up from scratch, since it doesn’t seem based on any current Earth religion that I’m aware of - maybe this will become clear later in the series. Which is the other thing: unlike the OMW books, this doesn't work as a standalone novel - it seems designed as a set-up for the following two books. That said, it’s a hell of a set-up, because I’m totally onboard for the rest of this series. Good entertaining fun, is what it is.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was impressed by Colson Whitehead’s previous novel The Underground Railroad, and was keen to read more of him. This is his follow-up novel, which is a fictionalized take on the Dozier School, the now infamous reform school in Florida that operated for over 110 years amid constant rumors that staff routinely beat, raped and even murdered students (particularly black students) until it was shut down in 2011. The rumors were eventually confirmed. Whitehead’s story, which takes place in the early 60s, focuses on Elwood Curtis, an idealistic black teenager who hitches a ride on his first day of university and has the bad luck to flag down a guy driving a stolen car. Elwood is arrested and sent to the Nickel Academy (the fictional version of Dozier, though mostly all Whitehead changed was the name).
You might think you know what happens from there, and you’d be sort of right. But Whitehead wisely avoids a predictable non-stop atrocity exhibition in favor of a story that explores the psychological and emotional impact of the racism, terror and abuse the students endure, both during their incarceration and decades afterwards. Whitehead also stays focused on the friendship between the idealistic Elwood and another student, the cynical Turner who believes racism is a permanent feature in America and not even MLK (Elwood’s idol) can change that.
Whitehead doesn’t shy away from the horror-show of Nickel, but he doesn’t exploit it, either. As heart-wrenching and outrageous as the backstory is, it’s the investment in the characters that really makes this novel work. And while the climactic twist seemed like a bit of a cheat on first pass, Whitehead had me sold on it by the last page. It’s a powerful novel that captures a shameful slice of America’s racist past (as well as its present).
Killer in the Rain by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m a fan of Raymond Chandler, and I picked this up thinking it was another anthology of short stories I hadn’t read yet - and so it is, sort of. Turns out the eight stories here - which Chandler wrote for detective pulp magazines between 1935 and 1941 - are the stories he plundered in the process of writing some of his landmark novels, including The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake and The Long Goodbye. Chandler refused to include these stories in later anthologies because he felt the plots had been too cannibalized to justify reprinting them.
Still, that’s not to say there’s nothing new to see here if you’ve already read those novels. Chandler didn’t just copy/paste - he only used certain bits, and he expanded, reworked and rewrote all of them for the novels. Also, strictly speaking, these aren’t Marlowe stories - literally, in the sense that the narrator goes by a couple of different names (though admittedly he is, for all intents and purposes, the same guy), and figuratively, in terms of style. Chandler was a good writer out of the gate, but it took him awhile to develop and refine that hard-boiled lyrical voice that make his Marlowe novels such a joy to read. These stories also seem more gratuitously violent compared to the novels, although that may be the result of compressing the action into a shorter format (as well as the demands of the pulp audience at the time).
Anyway, it’s a good collection of above-average detective stories, and I think that, unless you’ve memorized the Marlowe novels mentioned above, you’re not likely to feel any sense of déjà vu here. If anything, compleatists have the added value of seeing Chandler grow as a writer and craft the Marlowe template as he goes along. But if you’ve never read Chandler, I’d still recommend starting with the novels.
How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
As much as I liked both Star Trek and reading as a youngster, I never really got into the Star Trek tie-in novels. I read a few and they were okay, but the only ones I ever really enjoyed were the Star Trek Log anthologies by Alan Dean Foster (which were adapted from the ST Saturday morning cartoon series). Which I mention up front because the only reason I picked up this one was that Neil Gaiman told me to. Or, more accurately, Gaiman recommended this novel for three reasons: (1) he was a friend of John M Ford’s, (2) Ford gave him a cameo in the story, and (3) it’s possibly the silliest Star Trek novel ever written.
The basic premise sounds like standard ST stuff - ships from the Federation and the Klingon Empire simultaneously discover a colony planet loaded with dilithium, starting a race to make contact with the locals to get the mining rights. But when the story opens with breakfast going wrong on three different ships, a sloppy Vulcan and a paranoid computer, you know this isn’t your typical ST episode. Indeed, it’s probably the only ST story to feature musical production numbers, screwball comedy, golf duels, an epic pie fight and a nerdy Klingon obsessed with Golden-Age Hollywood films.
It’s also arguably the only ST novel to portray Klingons as basically ordinary people with mundane problems like the rest of us (albeit within the context of Klingon culture) - a trope that pretty much no one ran with after this came out. In fact, according to legend, this novel was so weird that the editors responsible for the series supposedly gave orders to all writers to never do anything like this again. Indeed, it makes me wonder how Ford got away with it in the first place. I’m glad he did - it’s a flawed but fun goofball of a novel, and I sincerely hope someone makes a film version of it one day. In fact, I dare JJ Abrams to make it so.
View all my reviews
There’s no business like show business,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1658069.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Exciting, no?
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first instalment of John Scalzi’s first space opera outside of his Old Man’s War universe. Here, the setting is the Interdependency - a thousand-year-old empire of 48 star systems connected by a mysterious space-time phenomenon called “the Flow”, which enables faster-than-light travel between these specific systems. Because only one of the planets near the Flow is actually inhabitable (all other settlements are either underground or on huge space stations), each of the systems are dependent on trade to survive, resulting in an interstellar mercantile economy run by royal megacorporate houses and overseen by an emperox who (along with a parliament) governs from Hub, where most the Flow routes converge. And as the title suggests, the central premise that Scalzi introduces into this scenario is: suppose the Flow stopped working?
That’s the backdrop for this story that is basically a political thriller in space. Someone is trying to kill Cardenia, the newly crowned emperox - the evidence points to rebel forces on End (the planet furthest from Hub) who are trying to overthrow the local duke. Meanwhile, on End, physicist Count Claremont has discovered that the Flow is on the verge of collapse, which could mean not only the end of the Interdependency, but also the eventual end of the human race. So in a sense, Scalzi is working less from the Heinlein template of his OMW books and more from the likes of Dune and Foundation. And yet this is in many ways better than both - or at least more readable. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I like the Foundation series. Never made it past the first chapter of Dune.)
Scalzi writes snappy, readable prose and zooms in on key characters rather than keep his distance in favor of the bigger picture. He also provides plenty of action, political intrigue (and not a little satire), and severe business negotiations. On the downside, there are probably way too many minor characters to keep track of, and it’s not clear to me why his Interdependency needs a state church, or how you’d go about setting one up from scratch, since it doesn’t seem based on any current Earth religion that I’m aware of - maybe this will become clear later in the series. Which is the other thing: unlike the OMW books, this doesn't work as a standalone novel - it seems designed as a set-up for the following two books. That said, it’s a hell of a set-up, because I’m totally onboard for the rest of this series. Good entertaining fun, is what it is.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was impressed by Colson Whitehead’s previous novel The Underground Railroad, and was keen to read more of him. This is his follow-up novel, which is a fictionalized take on the Dozier School, the now infamous reform school in Florida that operated for over 110 years amid constant rumors that staff routinely beat, raped and even murdered students (particularly black students) until it was shut down in 2011. The rumors were eventually confirmed. Whitehead’s story, which takes place in the early 60s, focuses on Elwood Curtis, an idealistic black teenager who hitches a ride on his first day of university and has the bad luck to flag down a guy driving a stolen car. Elwood is arrested and sent to the Nickel Academy (the fictional version of Dozier, though mostly all Whitehead changed was the name).
You might think you know what happens from there, and you’d be sort of right. But Whitehead wisely avoids a predictable non-stop atrocity exhibition in favor of a story that explores the psychological and emotional impact of the racism, terror and abuse the students endure, both during their incarceration and decades afterwards. Whitehead also stays focused on the friendship between the idealistic Elwood and another student, the cynical Turner who believes racism is a permanent feature in America and not even MLK (Elwood’s idol) can change that.
Whitehead doesn’t shy away from the horror-show of Nickel, but he doesn’t exploit it, either. As heart-wrenching and outrageous as the backstory is, it’s the investment in the characters that really makes this novel work. And while the climactic twist seemed like a bit of a cheat on first pass, Whitehead had me sold on it by the last page. It’s a powerful novel that captures a shameful slice of America’s racist past (as well as its present).
Killer in the Rain by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m a fan of Raymond Chandler, and I picked this up thinking it was another anthology of short stories I hadn’t read yet - and so it is, sort of. Turns out the eight stories here - which Chandler wrote for detective pulp magazines between 1935 and 1941 - are the stories he plundered in the process of writing some of his landmark novels, including The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake and The Long Goodbye. Chandler refused to include these stories in later anthologies because he felt the plots had been too cannibalized to justify reprinting them.
Still, that’s not to say there’s nothing new to see here if you’ve already read those novels. Chandler didn’t just copy/paste - he only used certain bits, and he expanded, reworked and rewrote all of them for the novels. Also, strictly speaking, these aren’t Marlowe stories - literally, in the sense that the narrator goes by a couple of different names (though admittedly he is, for all intents and purposes, the same guy), and figuratively, in terms of style. Chandler was a good writer out of the gate, but it took him awhile to develop and refine that hard-boiled lyrical voice that make his Marlowe novels such a joy to read. These stories also seem more gratuitously violent compared to the novels, although that may be the result of compressing the action into a shorter format (as well as the demands of the pulp audience at the time).
Anyway, it’s a good collection of above-average detective stories, and I think that, unless you’ve memorized the Marlowe novels mentioned above, you’re not likely to feel any sense of déjà vu here. If anything, compleatists have the added value of seeing Chandler grow as a writer and craft the Marlowe template as he goes along. But if you’ve never read Chandler, I’d still recommend starting with the novels.
How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. Ford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
As much as I liked both Star Trek and reading as a youngster, I never really got into the Star Trek tie-in novels. I read a few and they were okay, but the only ones I ever really enjoyed were the Star Trek Log anthologies by Alan Dean Foster (which were adapted from the ST Saturday morning cartoon series). Which I mention up front because the only reason I picked up this one was that Neil Gaiman told me to. Or, more accurately, Gaiman recommended this novel for three reasons: (1) he was a friend of John M Ford’s, (2) Ford gave him a cameo in the story, and (3) it’s possibly the silliest Star Trek novel ever written.
The basic premise sounds like standard ST stuff - ships from the Federation and the Klingon Empire simultaneously discover a colony planet loaded with dilithium, starting a race to make contact with the locals to get the mining rights. But when the story opens with breakfast going wrong on three different ships, a sloppy Vulcan and a paranoid computer, you know this isn’t your typical ST episode. Indeed, it’s probably the only ST story to feature musical production numbers, screwball comedy, golf duels, an epic pie fight and a nerdy Klingon obsessed with Golden-Age Hollywood films.
It’s also arguably the only ST novel to portray Klingons as basically ordinary people with mundane problems like the rest of us (albeit within the context of Klingon culture) - a trope that pretty much no one ran with after this came out. In fact, according to legend, this novel was so weird that the editors responsible for the series supposedly gave orders to all writers to never do anything like this again. Indeed, it makes me wonder how Ford got away with it in the first place. I’m glad he did - it’s a flawed but fun goofball of a novel, and I sincerely hope someone makes a film version of it one day. In fact, I dare JJ Abrams to make it so.
View all my reviews
There’s no business like show business,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1658069.html. Please comment there using OpenID.