Reading roundup
14. D.M.Cornish, Monster Blood Tattoo, Book 1 -- I picked up this book at the library because I'd read something positive about the series just a few days earlier. So I brought it home, and then I read the description on the cover, and I was like, meh. And then I read the Acknowledgements, which thanked God first and foremost, and that's a considerable turnoff for me (unless you are, like, Milton). But I started reading anyway, and I have to say -- it's not a book that's blown me a way, or a series I've fallen in love with, but it does feature very, VERY impressive worldbuilding which I don't remember when I've seen something of this scope and depth last in a YA book. The Golden Compass was the last one that felt as coherent, in that respect, but the world there is much closer to ours, so that's easier. Monster Blood Tattoo features a 120 page glossary (for a 312 page story text) with maps and diagrams and things, but mostly the odd vocabulary explained. The vocabulary is wonderful -- there are these pseudo-English terms for all these odd things that feature in the book, and they actually sound like English words! By which I mean, they seem to be borrowed and cobbled together from the different languages that English borrows from. Leer (people with chemically enhanced eyesight and sense of smell), fulgar, lahzar, sthenicon, gastrid, skold, threwdish, vinegaroon (as a term for sailor, because the seas are vinegary on this world) -- just reading these words fills me with wonder, which is great. Place names and people names are interesting, too -- there is a mix of English and Germanic and Latinate ones, but one gets a reas lense that this is because of a series of conquestes and startified history, not because of lazy worldbuilding. The whole thing felt more REAL, more cohesive than any worldbuilding I've encountered in quite a while.
Pity that the book itself wasn't that exciting. Rossamund the orphan is clearly something special -- he seems to have some kind of connection to monsters, liking the scent that they do and being negatively affected by monster repellent -- and apparently the secret of it is in his name, and also probably in whatever the old dormitory master was going to tell him about the monster he'd killed. But I don't really care about Rossamund -- when he showed that he could not count to five (or listen to important instructions) and got on the wrong boat, in spite of all the stuff that didn't end up -- OK, he is not very old, but at ANY age above elementary school that would qualify as being too stupid to live. He redeems himself a little bit in my eyes by being good at mixing potions and getting some measure of sense later on in the book, but even so I never particularly cared for him. The other major character is Europe the fulgar, and she is a bit more interesting in that she is emphatically morally gray -- she murders monsters for pay and feels no qualms and orders people around, but she also insists searching for Rossamund and helping him. She is also not a *nice* person -- prickly and what the book calls mercurial but what seems to be more manic-depressive. The character I was fascinated by the most, Europe's factotum Licurius, predictably died in a horrible way shortly after he appeared. I do hope we discover a bit more of his backstory later on, as there seems to be something there.
I've noticed a couple of times that steampunk leaves me pretty cold. But the magical technology in these books -- which I guess would qualify as a kind of biochem-punk -- I found quite fascinating. Artificially grown muscles used to propel ships! Chemically enhanced senses! Combat potions and restoratives! Humans implanted with electricity-generating organs that they need to keep the human body from attacking by means of potiony sludge! This is all really cool.
In reading the Wikipedia article on the author, I see that in this case the extensive world-building came first, and the story was sort of an afterthought, which he was badgered into by a publisher. Well... you can tell. Not that it's a bad thing, necessarily -- I mean, LotR came about as an afterthought, too.
Wikipedia says the second book in the series is coming out in May of this year. I'll definitely check it out once the library acquires it.
15. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Recovery Man -- this is #6 in a series where I've read #1 and #3 before. Along the way between #3 and now, I've missed some critical developments -- like the death and apparent betrayal of Miles Flint's mentor, who is now apparently a bad guy. This book deals with the mystery of Flint's toddler daughter's death many years ago, which was the defining even in his life. We also get to meet his ex-wife, whom I could not find sympathetic at all until she did the right thing and offed herself to protect her daughter and the daughter's clones. I did like the clone-who-doesn't-know-she's-a-clone daughter that we get to meet, Talia, who comes across like what she's supposed to be, a smart adolescent going through enormous trauma -- I thought she was quite well done. (I especially liked her comment to Miles when she first meets him, when she asks why he named his ship "after a dead baby", which I've always wondered about, too. I don't care about Miles one way or another, and I found the assorted lawyers and Callisto police personnel pretty dull and kind of superfluous as POV characters, though they were obviously necessary to the plot. I did kind of end up liking and even feeling a bit sorry for the Recovery Man / bad guy, not that he was particularly sympathetic. I find the human/alien interaction in these books to be the most interesting part of the series, and I liked the lone scene in which a human interacts with the aliens du jour -- the aliens in these books are *really* alien, physically and psychologically, which is nice. I found the writing in the first part of the book *really* weak, though -- not sure if this one's worse than the predecessors, or if I was more sensitive to it this time around for some reason, or what, but I cringed a number of times from the dullness, repetition, awkward/boring phrases. I stopped noticing it in the second half of the book, but I'm not sure if it actually got better or I just became inured. I did like a couple of random things -- the advertising that permeates all aspects of life in the company town on Callisto, and the order-in kitchen -- I want one!
16. Elizabeth Bear (matociquala), Undertow -- I enjoyed this book a lot more than I'd been expecting to. I approached it with a bit of trepidation, possibly because I find that I don't actually have much taste for "hard" SF (and this was "harder" than most of the SF books I do read), and partly maybe because the one piece of fiction I'd read by matociquala until then ("Wax", in some kind of anthology) I wasn't particularly impressed with -- the setting and the premise were neat, but the story itself felt kind of flat. So, anyway, I approached Undertow cautiously, and while I can't say that I *loved* it, I did enjoy it a whole lot, and it did what "Wax" did not, which is make me want to read more books by matociquala.
I liked a fair number of the characters, not in a "want to read more books about them" way, or a "want to know what happens to them after the book ends" way, or even a "care if they live or die" way, for the most part, but definitely enough that it kept me reading. I found myself liking Andre from fairly early on (which I suppose shouldn't really surprise me, since I generally like competent, mercenary types), and the self-justification and his little civilized rituals were oddly sweet. I was rooting for him through the novel, and his growth makes sense, though I do admit I was rather surprised by his sudden self-sacrificing dedication to the cause, when he first exhibits it. I also liked (which will probably come as little surprise to anyone) Timothy Closs, who is one of the villains, but the one with slightly more morals than his superior. How could I not like a person who thinks, "Machiavelli's outlook had been not so much simplistic as limited by his times"? I liked him to the point that I was disappointed (in him as a person) by his "I don't want to know what you do" in the face of proposed genocide. It's a little weird, I guess... I tend to become attached to these fictional villain types, uber-competent men unencumbered by general morality, who still have their own principles that they live by -- and when they betray those principles (cf Tywin and Shae, if that's in fact what happened) that's actually a bigger blow to me than a "hero"'s failing. Weird... Anyway, I liked Closs very much, and even the even-less-moral villain, Jefferson Green, was very well done (I liked his insistence/pride in having achieved his position without nepotism, supposedly) and got some great lines: "'Intriguing,' Jefferson said, because it's what he had trained himself to say when he really meant "get to the fucking point." and "Because it's so much less racist to call them 'froggies' in Latin?"
I didn't care much about Cricket, but her POV-voice was quite enjoyable, still. Jean's was too opaque, and I never became interested in him as anything more than a vehicle to advance plot. Out of the secondaries, I didn't care at all about Lucienne Spivak, but I really started liking Maurice after this bit: "'And we vanish into the night like ninja,' Maurice said, and embarrassed himself with a karate chop" and was sorry that he died.
The forggies... I liked them as a species and a culture, a lot, and the way their alien culture and biology permeated everything in the Gourami POV. All the neat "translations" -- clanweal and bandweal and exoparent and handfingers. But the "se" business *really* threw off my ability to enjoy the Gourami-POV scenes, especially at first, and I never really got over it. Not so much the oddness of "se" as pronoun, but also the grammatical oddness it forces by having "se" also be the possessive pronoun, and being dropped sometimes, and "self" instead of "himself". It did give his narration a neatly alien feel, but it really messed with the flow of narrative for me, and overwhelmed any other features of Gourami's voice, so while I did get some feel for Gourami as a character (especially as contrasted with the other froggies), it wasn't nearly as much as I think I would've gotten if not for the genderless narration. I did manage to somehow like Tetra, anyway. I do like that the froggies (or Gourami, at least) have learned to distinguish gender in humans and make an effort to think about them in a gendered way. Also, it's really cool that the ranids get drunk on tea.
As I mentioned above with the froggies, I liked the worldbuilding a LOT. Like the fact that most of it is revealed in a non-info-dumpy way. The froggies, and the peculiarities of their culture and biology, and Novo Haven (not sure what's up with the name?) as a floating city, the way the floatingness of it is present in all these little details and you get references to the city ("And when the city hadn't been broken up for storm in six or twelve months [...] the stench grew oppressive") and then before the massive storm comes and you get: "It was a magic moment; [...] the instant when an office building became a ship of the open seas once more, when an it became a her." Also, A.G. (which never was explained in the text, I think? but from one of matociquala's progress reports apparently stands for "After Google" (what, seriously? -- yeah, seriously, I guess. Awesome!).
The quantum mechanics justification is really cool! The explanation about why conscious creatures can't pass through the Slide makes perfect sense -- well, as much sense as anything in quantum mechanics makes. Although I did have some more trouble swallowing tanglestone as a naturally ocurring source of entangled pairs, but the subsequent explanation that it was apparently the aftereffect of prior quantum catastrophe helped a bit. And coincidence engineering is really, really cool! (as are the various euphemisms for it -- 'cos there would be tons, obviously). And the implications of the various things follow fairly naturally. And I liked the legal framework around cloning (the clone becomes the legal entity) -- I don't think I've seen that before, but that's a good way to deal with abuses of cloning.
The writing is... crunchy. I don't expect to notice writing when reading your average sci fi / fantasy book, but I definitely noticed it here. Setting, action, internal monologue -- there were lots and lots of sentences and phrases that made me stop to admire them. Of course, there were a number that made me stop to re-read them because at first they felt like they made no sense, and a few required several attempts at parsing before I managed to read them the right way around -- but, OK. On the whole, I really enjoyed the writing. My favorite bit of it is probably thisL "Along the horizon, rising clouds walked on insect feet of lightning" -- and the description of carnage at the ranid village also worked for me very well.
I do have to say that the bit of "stunt writing" that shows the coincidence collapse, when all possible future are happening at once, didn't really work for me. I understand what it's doing, and how it's doing it, and why it's a good and interesting way of doing it. But. All possible outcomes = nothing actually happens for real, and the writing itself was not exciting enough in that section to make up for having to read about stuff 90% of which didn't actually happen, and it's such a climactic point, so I was constantly restraining myself from just skimming ahead.
matociquala said this was a plot-driven book, and stuff happened, and moved along quickly, and there were twists and things. But I can't say I particularly *noticed* the plot. It was still much more character-driven than plot-driven for me (which is a good thing, mind). None of the twists were such that they made me go "whoa!" or want to read back and see how they were set up/foreshadowed, which to me is the true indicator of a good plot twist, like, say, the ones in Zelazny. Also, the alien invasion thing -- I understand what happened, and where they came from, and why they went away (I think), but it felt like that part of the plot was unbalanced -- we get to witness the manifestations of the invasion second hand (Closs reliving the marine's memory, and then witnessing the destruction of the station), but the resolution all happens offscreen, which felt kind of... unsatisfactory.
Utterly random stuff I liked -- nice variety of ethnic background names and awareness where they came from and -- this is the opposite of a pet peeve of mine -- a pet anti-peeve? -- when Lucienne hears Kountche's name she "thinks" of him as David, and then sees his badge and realizes it's spelled as "Dayvid". Stuff like that happens all the time in real life and hardly ever in books, and I just love it when it shows up. Also, major points for spelling "Zheleznyj Tigr" (the name of the bar) in a realistic way, in all its consonant-clustery glory.
It's really neat to see that some of the "darlings du jour" made it in and pinged my attention when I read them in the finished copy -- and some of them had been edited out. In general, it was really neat to go through the progress reports on matociquala's LJ once I'd finished the book and read them sort of as a parallel narrative. I've never done that before, except with maybe Tolkien's letters, kinda, and it's actually quite cool. Not that I'd want to read every book this way, but it's an interesting experience.
17. Cameron Dokey, Before Midnight -- so there's this new line of YA fantasy books, "Once Upon a Time", which is a retelling of fairy tales. I wanted to try it to see if they were any good, as I get cravings for YA and YA fantasy specifically occasionally, and need think little paperbacks that I can carry around in my backpack for when I finish my main book too early in the commute. So I checked out this one because a) I've read a YA thing by Dokey before, and while I wasn't terribly impressed, at least I know she can write, and b) it's a Cinderella retelling, and I've read, like, half a dozen of those (two by Mercedes Lackey alone) and so would have a kind of baseline to compare this series againt. Like calibrating an instrument by titrating a known solution, you know?
So, anyway, I started with this one, and it was OK. There are a couple of things that stand out immediately about this retelling. One, there is still magic present, but it's sort of nebulous and subdued, and a lot of the fairy tale elements are represented by correspondences (and in that respect it reminded me of the Adele Geras retellings). No fairy godmother, just an old midwife. No turning pumpkins into carriages, or mice into men -- instead, two fellows Cendrillon has known for a long time clean up well and procure a carriage that's round and orange and just looks like a giant pumpkin (and there are pumpkins present in various capacities throughout the rest of the story, too). There's still magic -- there are wishes, which don't seem to be actually magic except in the case of a killer wind that comes to scatter an enemy army, but are still very powerful. And there is vegetable magic, which I actually liked a whole lot -- apple trees that grow oranges, sunflowers that spring up overnight, a peach with a a key instead of a pit. That was rather neat, and I wished there was more of it.
The second thing that stands out is the happy ending -- and I mean, happy for everyone. The stepmother is not evil -- she is just sad, because she was forced to marry Cendrillon's father, and feels betrayed by the king's decision to force her into it. One of the stepdaughters is perfectly lovely, the other one starts out as a brat, but gets over it. The only reason they treat Cendrillon as a servant is that they don't know she isn't one. There are even two OC young men for the stepsisters to marry and live happily ever after as well. The only "real" villains of the piece are the ambitious queen and Cendrillon's father, who wishes she'd never been born (because his beloved wife died in childbirth). It's... a bit original at least, I guess, but not any more plausible than the actual fairy tale. And also, if you take the darkness out of the fairy tale, you aren't left with much, so I can't say I particularly agree with the authorial choice.
The characters are not any more developed than they would be in the actual fairy tale, except for the stepmother, who is a bit interesting and seems to undergo some actual growth/realization. Everybody else was pretty flat.
I might check out some other retellings by Dokey, but overall I was not particularly impressed.
18, Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road -- So, I gave up on The Yiddish Policemen's Union -- I wanted to like the book, and there were neat things in it, even, but it just wasn't flowing for me -- and read this instead. It has the benefit of being a lot shorter, and, once I got past the overly elaborate narration and into the story -- quite funny in places, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I don't have a whole lot to say about it, except a few random things. The narration is so elaborate that it becomes a full-fledged character, and an amusing one. I had this nagging feeling from early on that patient ex-soldier Amram and Zelikman the wandering physician armed with a narrow blade called Lancet and massive childhood trauma reminded me of someone, and around the third chapter or so I figured out who -- Richard and Alec from Swordpoint. It's by no means an exact match in dynamic, and Amram and Zelikman's relationship is strictly platonic, but I couldn't shake the feeling of similarity thereafter, especially when Zelikman ould do brave, useful, or kind things and then announce, "Now go away and leave me alone. I wish to sulk." I liked both characters, and would-be-bandit Hanukkah who attaches himself to them, and I liked Filaq. It's an archetype I'm fond of, but only when it's done well, and it was, here -- well, and believably. And the last scene, with Filaq and Zelikman, was pignant and quite powerful.
There is an afterword wherein Chabon explains or excuses or generally natters on about why he wrote a book which can be summarized, and in his mind will always be called, "Jews with Swords". I really didn't see why that was necessary. So it's a historical fantasy novel focused on Jews. Is that really such a stretch from a geeky Jews write about superheroes novel, or cult classic with injection of Jews novel, or kids fantasy of the American mythos novel (can't recall if Jews were instrumental there), or an alternative history novel about Jews?
19. Elizabeth Moon, Speed of Dark -- every third blurb on this book referenced Flowers for Algernon, which is also what it made *me* think of -- it's a book narrated (mostly) by an autistic man (a high-functioning autistic man) as he faces the possibility/threat of experimental treatment which could make him "normal". I liked Lou's narration -- it was different, and yet felt perfectly natural, and both his personality and his different mentality came through. In fact, I kind of wish the whole book had been narrated by him. There is one (significant) plot point that relies on outside narration, and one scene towards the end which uses outside POV to good effect but... I don't know... the non-Lou narrated portions just felt weaker, and disconnected from the rest of the book.
I liked the books as a whole, but it's one of those cases where, if I start listing out things that I particularly liked vs things that didn't quite work for me, the latter would outnumber the former, giving the wrong impression. But I'm going to do it anyway.
Stuff I liked: That when Danny the policeman/neighbour is trying to help Lou after the vandalism incident Lou rationally knows to be grateful but still resents the intrusion, and can't appreciate the ride from him because Danny is playing the wrong kind of music. I liked that there's the character of Emmy, who is disabled and has a crush on Lou and is jealous of him hanging out with normals -- a kind of foil for Don. I liked the different ways in which the phrase "you people" plays out -- Mr.Crenshaw uses it pejoratively and the corporate doctor dismissively for autistics, and there is a nice ironic echo of that in Mr.Stacy (the police investigator)'s "you people -- I mean, people who aren't in criminal justice", and is gentled in the pastor's "people like you" (meaning, those who are not whole in some physical way). I like the way Lucia, when she gets angry, automatically tosses "Not you" to Lou, because she knows he'll tend to assume she is angry at him. I liked that Lou rationally deduced that the person stalking him had to be Don, but still refused to believe the evidence. Those kinds of touches make those characters feel real, and their relationships realistically tinged with gray. And I like that the happily ever after Lou gets at the end of the book is not quite the one he was hoping for (space, but not Marjory).
Stuff I didn't like: Mr.Crenshaw is too cartoonish a villain. Come on, not everyone in management might be a genius or a good manager or a decent human being, but I rather doubt that anyone in a position of corporate power in 21st century would be stupid enough to pretty much talk about engaging in law-breaking with a policeman. Even if Crenshaw doesn't think the autistics don't understand anything, I doubt he would talk like that in the presence of other normals. Nobody actually *says*, "I'm a natural leader. My personality profile shows that I'm cut out to be a captain, not crew" outside of a Dilbert strip. Or maybe I've just been particularly lucky/sheltered in my corporate life. I have a similar problem with Don -- he is such an unpleasant character that I find it hard to believe he wasn't kicked out of the fencing group before he snapped. If he actually exhibited some of the charm that gets attributed to him, I might find him easier to believe. I also had the same problem with this book that I did with "Whale Talk" -- the overarching metaphor that gives the book its title feels boring and strained. It's woven in better in this case, but it's still pretty boring. Also, I found the permutations calculation Lou sets up around "once an accident, twice coincidence, three times enemy action" rule of thumb highly ridiculous.
Also, randomly: It's cool that Tom is a ChemE professor (I don't think I've encountered that before in a novel), and he is absolutely right that ChemE students hate O-chem.
20. Cecil Castellucci, Boy Proof -- I picked it up because it looked like a YA book I was likely to enjoy -- nerdy girl in high school. The back cover blurb said: "Victoria -- aka Egg -- may be boy proof, but readers will find [this] fully inhabited narrator irresistible." Um, no. I hated her. She comes across not so much as genuinely nerdy as a grade-grabbing show-off (she keeps bugging the dean to confirm she would be valedictorian) and not so much "boy proof" as just a bitch. She is a bitch to her mother, who tries to present her with a nice surprise. She is a bitch to her "friends" and would-be friends. She is a bitch to the guy she likes. And there's no reason for it! Her parents are divorced but her childhood seems pretty happy. She seems to be drowning in existential angst because bad stuff is happening in the world -- I dunno, maybe it's a post-9/11 teen thing? The only time she is not being repellent is when she is working in her special-effects-wizard father's creature shop. She does get better at being a friend and daughter in the end, but by the time she finally made that decision I loathed her so much there was no way I was going to root for her.
Max, the designated love interest who is supposed to be OMGdeep and "gifted" (and may I point out that Victoria thinks of herself as gifted -- who the hell does that?), comes across not so much as deep as exactly what Victoria accuses him of being at one point -- pretentious. And a bit smarmy, actually. I didn't like him either. I also didn't like the fact that, in a novel dedicated to "all nerdy girls everywhere," the nerds that do appear are such stereotypes. The two guy nerds are fat (and one of them works in a comic book store). The girl nerd, Rue (awesome name, btw!) is "thick-waisted but not really fat" -- gee, thanks for that compliment. The girl who is smart and pretty -- Nelly -- is revealed as a shallow sellout. I actually find all this kind of offensive.
The other thing I find kind of offensive is the message that, apparently, in order to be a real human being you have to go around protesting genetically modified vegetables and stuff. Influenced by Max, Victoria finds an activist cause. Which is great and all, but there are ways to connect with the world that are equally valid, and also room in the spectroom between "activist" and "totally self-absorbed bitch".
Also, the lame screen-names used by Victoria, Max, and the Terminal Earth fans on the messageboard annoy me. Also also, what kind of self-respecting nerd takes trig senior year? Calculus is where it's at!
There are little geeky allusions thrown in all over the place (ents, classic sci-fi movies, even a Philip K. Dick pun), which I did appreciate. Also, I really liked the running joke that every grown-up male seems to have had a crush on Victoria's mom and/or had a poster of her, back when she was playing the hot chick on Nemesis. Oh, and I thought Zach Cross randomly helping Victoria with her math homework was rather cute, if highly improbable.
This book annoyed me quite a bit more than any book has in a while -- since that horrible YA "Warriors" anthology, I guess. But it's good to get this stuff out of the system occasionally.
Pity that the book itself wasn't that exciting. Rossamund the orphan is clearly something special -- he seems to have some kind of connection to monsters, liking the scent that they do and being negatively affected by monster repellent -- and apparently the secret of it is in his name, and also probably in whatever the old dormitory master was going to tell him about the monster he'd killed. But I don't really care about Rossamund -- when he showed that he could not count to five (or listen to important instructions) and got on the wrong boat, in spite of all the stuff that didn't end up -- OK, he is not very old, but at ANY age above elementary school that would qualify as being too stupid to live. He redeems himself a little bit in my eyes by being good at mixing potions and getting some measure of sense later on in the book, but even so I never particularly cared for him. The other major character is Europe the fulgar, and she is a bit more interesting in that she is emphatically morally gray -- she murders monsters for pay and feels no qualms and orders people around, but she also insists searching for Rossamund and helping him. She is also not a *nice* person -- prickly and what the book calls mercurial but what seems to be more manic-depressive. The character I was fascinated by the most, Europe's factotum Licurius, predictably died in a horrible way shortly after he appeared. I do hope we discover a bit more of his backstory later on, as there seems to be something there.
I've noticed a couple of times that steampunk leaves me pretty cold. But the magical technology in these books -- which I guess would qualify as a kind of biochem-punk -- I found quite fascinating. Artificially grown muscles used to propel ships! Chemically enhanced senses! Combat potions and restoratives! Humans implanted with electricity-generating organs that they need to keep the human body from attacking by means of potiony sludge! This is all really cool.
In reading the Wikipedia article on the author, I see that in this case the extensive world-building came first, and the story was sort of an afterthought, which he was badgered into by a publisher. Well... you can tell. Not that it's a bad thing, necessarily -- I mean, LotR came about as an afterthought, too.
Wikipedia says the second book in the series is coming out in May of this year. I'll definitely check it out once the library acquires it.
15. Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Recovery Man -- this is #6 in a series where I've read #1 and #3 before. Along the way between #3 and now, I've missed some critical developments -- like the death and apparent betrayal of Miles Flint's mentor, who is now apparently a bad guy. This book deals with the mystery of Flint's toddler daughter's death many years ago, which was the defining even in his life. We also get to meet his ex-wife, whom I could not find sympathetic at all until she did the right thing and offed herself to protect her daughter and the daughter's clones. I did like the clone-who-doesn't-know-she's-a-clone daughter that we get to meet, Talia, who comes across like what she's supposed to be, a smart adolescent going through enormous trauma -- I thought she was quite well done. (I especially liked her comment to Miles when she first meets him, when she asks why he named his ship "after a dead baby", which I've always wondered about, too. I don't care about Miles one way or another, and I found the assorted lawyers and Callisto police personnel pretty dull and kind of superfluous as POV characters, though they were obviously necessary to the plot. I did kind of end up liking and even feeling a bit sorry for the Recovery Man / bad guy, not that he was particularly sympathetic. I find the human/alien interaction in these books to be the most interesting part of the series, and I liked the lone scene in which a human interacts with the aliens du jour -- the aliens in these books are *really* alien, physically and psychologically, which is nice. I found the writing in the first part of the book *really* weak, though -- not sure if this one's worse than the predecessors, or if I was more sensitive to it this time around for some reason, or what, but I cringed a number of times from the dullness, repetition, awkward/boring phrases. I stopped noticing it in the second half of the book, but I'm not sure if it actually got better or I just became inured. I did like a couple of random things -- the advertising that permeates all aspects of life in the company town on Callisto, and the order-in kitchen -- I want one!
16. Elizabeth Bear (matociquala), Undertow -- I enjoyed this book a lot more than I'd been expecting to. I approached it with a bit of trepidation, possibly because I find that I don't actually have much taste for "hard" SF (and this was "harder" than most of the SF books I do read), and partly maybe because the one piece of fiction I'd read by matociquala until then ("Wax", in some kind of anthology) I wasn't particularly impressed with -- the setting and the premise were neat, but the story itself felt kind of flat. So, anyway, I approached Undertow cautiously, and while I can't say that I *loved* it, I did enjoy it a whole lot, and it did what "Wax" did not, which is make me want to read more books by matociquala.
I liked a fair number of the characters, not in a "want to read more books about them" way, or a "want to know what happens to them after the book ends" way, or even a "care if they live or die" way, for the most part, but definitely enough that it kept me reading. I found myself liking Andre from fairly early on (which I suppose shouldn't really surprise me, since I generally like competent, mercenary types), and the self-justification and his little civilized rituals were oddly sweet. I was rooting for him through the novel, and his growth makes sense, though I do admit I was rather surprised by his sudden self-sacrificing dedication to the cause, when he first exhibits it. I also liked (which will probably come as little surprise to anyone) Timothy Closs, who is one of the villains, but the one with slightly more morals than his superior. How could I not like a person who thinks, "Machiavelli's outlook had been not so much simplistic as limited by his times"? I liked him to the point that I was disappointed (in him as a person) by his "I don't want to know what you do" in the face of proposed genocide. It's a little weird, I guess... I tend to become attached to these fictional villain types, uber-competent men unencumbered by general morality, who still have their own principles that they live by -- and when they betray those principles (cf Tywin and Shae, if that's in fact what happened) that's actually a bigger blow to me than a "hero"'s failing. Weird... Anyway, I liked Closs very much, and even the even-less-moral villain, Jefferson Green, was very well done (I liked his insistence/pride in having achieved his position without nepotism, supposedly) and got some great lines: "'Intriguing,' Jefferson said, because it's what he had trained himself to say when he really meant "get to the fucking point." and "Because it's so much less racist to call them 'froggies' in Latin?"
I didn't care much about Cricket, but her POV-voice was quite enjoyable, still. Jean's was too opaque, and I never became interested in him as anything more than a vehicle to advance plot. Out of the secondaries, I didn't care at all about Lucienne Spivak, but I really started liking Maurice after this bit: "'And we vanish into the night like ninja,' Maurice said, and embarrassed himself with a karate chop" and was sorry that he died.
The forggies... I liked them as a species and a culture, a lot, and the way their alien culture and biology permeated everything in the Gourami POV. All the neat "translations" -- clanweal and bandweal and exoparent and handfingers. But the "se" business *really* threw off my ability to enjoy the Gourami-POV scenes, especially at first, and I never really got over it. Not so much the oddness of "se" as pronoun, but also the grammatical oddness it forces by having "se" also be the possessive pronoun, and being dropped sometimes, and "self" instead of "himself". It did give his narration a neatly alien feel, but it really messed with the flow of narrative for me, and overwhelmed any other features of Gourami's voice, so while I did get some feel for Gourami as a character (especially as contrasted with the other froggies), it wasn't nearly as much as I think I would've gotten if not for the genderless narration. I did manage to somehow like Tetra, anyway. I do like that the froggies (or Gourami, at least) have learned to distinguish gender in humans and make an effort to think about them in a gendered way. Also, it's really cool that the ranids get drunk on tea.
As I mentioned above with the froggies, I liked the worldbuilding a LOT. Like the fact that most of it is revealed in a non-info-dumpy way. The froggies, and the peculiarities of their culture and biology, and Novo Haven (not sure what's up with the name?) as a floating city, the way the floatingness of it is present in all these little details and you get references to the city ("And when the city hadn't been broken up for storm in six or twelve months [...] the stench grew oppressive") and then before the massive storm comes and you get: "It was a magic moment; [...] the instant when an office building became a ship of the open seas once more, when an it became a her." Also, A.G. (which never was explained in the text, I think? but from one of matociquala's progress reports apparently stands for "After Google" (what, seriously? -- yeah, seriously, I guess. Awesome!).
The quantum mechanics justification is really cool! The explanation about why conscious creatures can't pass through the Slide makes perfect sense -- well, as much sense as anything in quantum mechanics makes. Although I did have some more trouble swallowing tanglestone as a naturally ocurring source of entangled pairs, but the subsequent explanation that it was apparently the aftereffect of prior quantum catastrophe helped a bit. And coincidence engineering is really, really cool! (as are the various euphemisms for it -- 'cos there would be tons, obviously). And the implications of the various things follow fairly naturally. And I liked the legal framework around cloning (the clone becomes the legal entity) -- I don't think I've seen that before, but that's a good way to deal with abuses of cloning.
The writing is... crunchy. I don't expect to notice writing when reading your average sci fi / fantasy book, but I definitely noticed it here. Setting, action, internal monologue -- there were lots and lots of sentences and phrases that made me stop to admire them. Of course, there were a number that made me stop to re-read them because at first they felt like they made no sense, and a few required several attempts at parsing before I managed to read them the right way around -- but, OK. On the whole, I really enjoyed the writing. My favorite bit of it is probably thisL "Along the horizon, rising clouds walked on insect feet of lightning" -- and the description of carnage at the ranid village also worked for me very well.
I do have to say that the bit of "stunt writing" that shows the coincidence collapse, when all possible future are happening at once, didn't really work for me. I understand what it's doing, and how it's doing it, and why it's a good and interesting way of doing it. But. All possible outcomes = nothing actually happens for real, and the writing itself was not exciting enough in that section to make up for having to read about stuff 90% of which didn't actually happen, and it's such a climactic point, so I was constantly restraining myself from just skimming ahead.
matociquala said this was a plot-driven book, and stuff happened, and moved along quickly, and there were twists and things. But I can't say I particularly *noticed* the plot. It was still much more character-driven than plot-driven for me (which is a good thing, mind). None of the twists were such that they made me go "whoa!" or want to read back and see how they were set up/foreshadowed, which to me is the true indicator of a good plot twist, like, say, the ones in Zelazny. Also, the alien invasion thing -- I understand what happened, and where they came from, and why they went away (I think), but it felt like that part of the plot was unbalanced -- we get to witness the manifestations of the invasion second hand (Closs reliving the marine's memory, and then witnessing the destruction of the station), but the resolution all happens offscreen, which felt kind of... unsatisfactory.
Utterly random stuff I liked -- nice variety of ethnic background names and awareness where they came from and -- this is the opposite of a pet peeve of mine -- a pet anti-peeve? -- when Lucienne hears Kountche's name she "thinks" of him as David, and then sees his badge and realizes it's spelled as "Dayvid". Stuff like that happens all the time in real life and hardly ever in books, and I just love it when it shows up. Also, major points for spelling "Zheleznyj Tigr" (the name of the bar) in a realistic way, in all its consonant-clustery glory.
It's really neat to see that some of the "darlings du jour" made it in and pinged my attention when I read them in the finished copy -- and some of them had been edited out. In general, it was really neat to go through the progress reports on matociquala's LJ once I'd finished the book and read them sort of as a parallel narrative. I've never done that before, except with maybe Tolkien's letters, kinda, and it's actually quite cool. Not that I'd want to read every book this way, but it's an interesting experience.
17. Cameron Dokey, Before Midnight -- so there's this new line of YA fantasy books, "Once Upon a Time", which is a retelling of fairy tales. I wanted to try it to see if they were any good, as I get cravings for YA and YA fantasy specifically occasionally, and need think little paperbacks that I can carry around in my backpack for when I finish my main book too early in the commute. So I checked out this one because a) I've read a YA thing by Dokey before, and while I wasn't terribly impressed, at least I know she can write, and b) it's a Cinderella retelling, and I've read, like, half a dozen of those (two by Mercedes Lackey alone) and so would have a kind of baseline to compare this series againt. Like calibrating an instrument by titrating a known solution, you know?
So, anyway, I started with this one, and it was OK. There are a couple of things that stand out immediately about this retelling. One, there is still magic present, but it's sort of nebulous and subdued, and a lot of the fairy tale elements are represented by correspondences (and in that respect it reminded me of the Adele Geras retellings). No fairy godmother, just an old midwife. No turning pumpkins into carriages, or mice into men -- instead, two fellows Cendrillon has known for a long time clean up well and procure a carriage that's round and orange and just looks like a giant pumpkin (and there are pumpkins present in various capacities throughout the rest of the story, too). There's still magic -- there are wishes, which don't seem to be actually magic except in the case of a killer wind that comes to scatter an enemy army, but are still very powerful. And there is vegetable magic, which I actually liked a whole lot -- apple trees that grow oranges, sunflowers that spring up overnight, a peach with a a key instead of a pit. That was rather neat, and I wished there was more of it.
The second thing that stands out is the happy ending -- and I mean, happy for everyone. The stepmother is not evil -- she is just sad, because she was forced to marry Cendrillon's father, and feels betrayed by the king's decision to force her into it. One of the stepdaughters is perfectly lovely, the other one starts out as a brat, but gets over it. The only reason they treat Cendrillon as a servant is that they don't know she isn't one. There are even two OC young men for the stepsisters to marry and live happily ever after as well. The only "real" villains of the piece are the ambitious queen and Cendrillon's father, who wishes she'd never been born (because his beloved wife died in childbirth). It's... a bit original at least, I guess, but not any more plausible than the actual fairy tale. And also, if you take the darkness out of the fairy tale, you aren't left with much, so I can't say I particularly agree with the authorial choice.
The characters are not any more developed than they would be in the actual fairy tale, except for the stepmother, who is a bit interesting and seems to undergo some actual growth/realization. Everybody else was pretty flat.
I might check out some other retellings by Dokey, but overall I was not particularly impressed.
18, Michael Chabon, Gentlemen of the Road -- So, I gave up on The Yiddish Policemen's Union -- I wanted to like the book, and there were neat things in it, even, but it just wasn't flowing for me -- and read this instead. It has the benefit of being a lot shorter, and, once I got past the overly elaborate narration and into the story -- quite funny in places, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I don't have a whole lot to say about it, except a few random things. The narration is so elaborate that it becomes a full-fledged character, and an amusing one. I had this nagging feeling from early on that patient ex-soldier Amram and Zelikman the wandering physician armed with a narrow blade called Lancet and massive childhood trauma reminded me of someone, and around the third chapter or so I figured out who -- Richard and Alec from Swordpoint. It's by no means an exact match in dynamic, and Amram and Zelikman's relationship is strictly platonic, but I couldn't shake the feeling of similarity thereafter, especially when Zelikman ould do brave, useful, or kind things and then announce, "Now go away and leave me alone. I wish to sulk." I liked both characters, and would-be-bandit Hanukkah who attaches himself to them, and I liked Filaq. It's an archetype I'm fond of, but only when it's done well, and it was, here -- well, and believably. And the last scene, with Filaq and Zelikman, was pignant and quite powerful.
There is an afterword wherein Chabon explains or excuses or generally natters on about why he wrote a book which can be summarized, and in his mind will always be called, "Jews with Swords". I really didn't see why that was necessary. So it's a historical fantasy novel focused on Jews. Is that really such a stretch from a geeky Jews write about superheroes novel, or cult classic with injection of Jews novel, or kids fantasy of the American mythos novel (can't recall if Jews were instrumental there), or an alternative history novel about Jews?
19. Elizabeth Moon, Speed of Dark -- every third blurb on this book referenced Flowers for Algernon, which is also what it made *me* think of -- it's a book narrated (mostly) by an autistic man (a high-functioning autistic man) as he faces the possibility/threat of experimental treatment which could make him "normal". I liked Lou's narration -- it was different, and yet felt perfectly natural, and both his personality and his different mentality came through. In fact, I kind of wish the whole book had been narrated by him. There is one (significant) plot point that relies on outside narration, and one scene towards the end which uses outside POV to good effect but... I don't know... the non-Lou narrated portions just felt weaker, and disconnected from the rest of the book.
I liked the books as a whole, but it's one of those cases where, if I start listing out things that I particularly liked vs things that didn't quite work for me, the latter would outnumber the former, giving the wrong impression. But I'm going to do it anyway.
Stuff I liked: That when Danny the policeman/neighbour is trying to help Lou after the vandalism incident Lou rationally knows to be grateful but still resents the intrusion, and can't appreciate the ride from him because Danny is playing the wrong kind of music. I liked that there's the character of Emmy, who is disabled and has a crush on Lou and is jealous of him hanging out with normals -- a kind of foil for Don. I liked the different ways in which the phrase "you people" plays out -- Mr.Crenshaw uses it pejoratively and the corporate doctor dismissively for autistics, and there is a nice ironic echo of that in Mr.Stacy (the police investigator)'s "you people -- I mean, people who aren't in criminal justice", and is gentled in the pastor's "people like you" (meaning, those who are not whole in some physical way). I like the way Lucia, when she gets angry, automatically tosses "Not you" to Lou, because she knows he'll tend to assume she is angry at him. I liked that Lou rationally deduced that the person stalking him had to be Don, but still refused to believe the evidence. Those kinds of touches make those characters feel real, and their relationships realistically tinged with gray. And I like that the happily ever after Lou gets at the end of the book is not quite the one he was hoping for (space, but not Marjory).
Stuff I didn't like: Mr.Crenshaw is too cartoonish a villain. Come on, not everyone in management might be a genius or a good manager or a decent human being, but I rather doubt that anyone in a position of corporate power in 21st century would be stupid enough to pretty much talk about engaging in law-breaking with a policeman. Even if Crenshaw doesn't think the autistics don't understand anything, I doubt he would talk like that in the presence of other normals. Nobody actually *says*, "I'm a natural leader. My personality profile shows that I'm cut out to be a captain, not crew" outside of a Dilbert strip. Or maybe I've just been particularly lucky/sheltered in my corporate life. I have a similar problem with Don -- he is such an unpleasant character that I find it hard to believe he wasn't kicked out of the fencing group before he snapped. If he actually exhibited some of the charm that gets attributed to him, I might find him easier to believe. I also had the same problem with this book that I did with "Whale Talk" -- the overarching metaphor that gives the book its title feels boring and strained. It's woven in better in this case, but it's still pretty boring. Also, I found the permutations calculation Lou sets up around "once an accident, twice coincidence, three times enemy action" rule of thumb highly ridiculous.
Also, randomly: It's cool that Tom is a ChemE professor (I don't think I've encountered that before in a novel), and he is absolutely right that ChemE students hate O-chem.
20. Cecil Castellucci, Boy Proof -- I picked it up because it looked like a YA book I was likely to enjoy -- nerdy girl in high school. The back cover blurb said: "Victoria -- aka Egg -- may be boy proof, but readers will find [this] fully inhabited narrator irresistible." Um, no. I hated her. She comes across not so much as genuinely nerdy as a grade-grabbing show-off (she keeps bugging the dean to confirm she would be valedictorian) and not so much "boy proof" as just a bitch. She is a bitch to her mother, who tries to present her with a nice surprise. She is a bitch to her "friends" and would-be friends. She is a bitch to the guy she likes. And there's no reason for it! Her parents are divorced but her childhood seems pretty happy. She seems to be drowning in existential angst because bad stuff is happening in the world -- I dunno, maybe it's a post-9/11 teen thing? The only time she is not being repellent is when she is working in her special-effects-wizard father's creature shop. She does get better at being a friend and daughter in the end, but by the time she finally made that decision I loathed her so much there was no way I was going to root for her.
Max, the designated love interest who is supposed to be OMGdeep and "gifted" (and may I point out that Victoria thinks of herself as gifted -- who the hell does that?), comes across not so much as deep as exactly what Victoria accuses him of being at one point -- pretentious. And a bit smarmy, actually. I didn't like him either. I also didn't like the fact that, in a novel dedicated to "all nerdy girls everywhere," the nerds that do appear are such stereotypes. The two guy nerds are fat (and one of them works in a comic book store). The girl nerd, Rue (awesome name, btw!) is "thick-waisted but not really fat" -- gee, thanks for that compliment. The girl who is smart and pretty -- Nelly -- is revealed as a shallow sellout. I actually find all this kind of offensive.
The other thing I find kind of offensive is the message that, apparently, in order to be a real human being you have to go around protesting genetically modified vegetables and stuff. Influenced by Max, Victoria finds an activist cause. Which is great and all, but there are ways to connect with the world that are equally valid, and also room in the spectroom between "activist" and "totally self-absorbed bitch".
Also, the lame screen-names used by Victoria, Max, and the Terminal Earth fans on the messageboard annoy me. Also also, what kind of self-respecting nerd takes trig senior year? Calculus is where it's at!
There are little geeky allusions thrown in all over the place (ents, classic sci-fi movies, even a Philip K. Dick pun), which I did appreciate. Also, I really liked the running joke that every grown-up male seems to have had a crush on Victoria's mom and/or had a poster of her, back when she was playing the hot chick on Nemesis. Oh, and I thought Zach Cross randomly helping Victoria with her math homework was rather cute, if highly improbable.
This book annoyed me quite a bit more than any book has in a while -- since that horrible YA "Warriors" anthology, I guess. But it's good to get this stuff out of the system occasionally.