Fiction reviews
Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: During World War II, a retired detective - you might have heard of him - investigates the mystery surrounding a Jewish orphan taking refuge in the British countryside and his talkin gparrot. The slim book is entertaining enough because of Chabon's descriptive skills, but it's simply too short to qualify as anything like Kavalier and Clay; it's Chabon showing that he can write fanfic. Neither the detective's name or the Holocaust are ever explicitly mentioned, as if to suggest that the two things - the fantasy of order and rationality, and the genocidal implementation of that fantasy - can't really exist together.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Planet on the Table: This is a collection of Robinson's earlier stories. His interest in the natural world and in the lives of ordinary people in times of major upheaval is apparent, but his skill at handling complexity and at writing landscape has yet to reach maturity. His wobbliness is probably most evident in the story of the alternate bomber crew sent to bomb Hiroshima, which is okay though heavy-handed, but really pales in comparison to a similar story, also about alternate futures stemming from choices surrounding Hiroshima, in Remaking History. The latter story left me thinking for days about alternative futures and how far out you'd have to go into the future to figure out what was the "better" choice, whereas the story in this volume was just another "what if?"
Richard Morgan, Market Forces: This is the second of Morgan's books I read, and I liked it somewhat less than the first, though I'm still glad I read it. Set in a near-future in which corporate control of governance has become official instead of hidden, it features a protagonist who's clawing his way up the corporate ladder, at a new firm where he now specializes in Conflict Investment, funding small wars around the world in search of profit. His only problem: because he once decided not to kill a person who challenged him in an official corporate duel, some of his new colleagues consider him a dangerous nonconformist. Sometimes the book got a tad preachy about the evils of corporations and globalization - I could always tell the difference between the corporate shills' rants about the virtues of capitalism, which Morgan didn't believe, and the marginal characters' rants about the vices of same. But by the end, I saw the story as a skewed version of an Octavia Butler novel - a story of an unusual, structurally privileged person in a world falling apart, and the constraints under which he operated, rather than a story of individual triumph as I expected to find under the standard technopolitical trappings.
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Creepy little story about two sisters living in a decaying mansion in a decaying town, hated and feared by the locals, in no small part because one of the sisters was tried for (though acquitted of) the murder by arsenic poisoning of several family members. The question of whodunnit is addressed fairly early on, though never directly, and the tension comes from seeing what small cruelties are left for people to inflict on each other. Despite the narrator's unpleasantness, it's hard not to share her harsh judgments of the rest of the world, given that the only kindness comes at exactly the wrong times.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Planet on the Table: This is a collection of Robinson's earlier stories. His interest in the natural world and in the lives of ordinary people in times of major upheaval is apparent, but his skill at handling complexity and at writing landscape has yet to reach maturity. His wobbliness is probably most evident in the story of the alternate bomber crew sent to bomb Hiroshima, which is okay though heavy-handed, but really pales in comparison to a similar story, also about alternate futures stemming from choices surrounding Hiroshima, in Remaking History. The latter story left me thinking for days about alternative futures and how far out you'd have to go into the future to figure out what was the "better" choice, whereas the story in this volume was just another "what if?"
Richard Morgan, Market Forces: This is the second of Morgan's books I read, and I liked it somewhat less than the first, though I'm still glad I read it. Set in a near-future in which corporate control of governance has become official instead of hidden, it features a protagonist who's clawing his way up the corporate ladder, at a new firm where he now specializes in Conflict Investment, funding small wars around the world in search of profit. His only problem: because he once decided not to kill a person who challenged him in an official corporate duel, some of his new colleagues consider him a dangerous nonconformist. Sometimes the book got a tad preachy about the evils of corporations and globalization - I could always tell the difference between the corporate shills' rants about the virtues of capitalism, which Morgan didn't believe, and the marginal characters' rants about the vices of same. But by the end, I saw the story as a skewed version of an Octavia Butler novel - a story of an unusual, structurally privileged person in a world falling apart, and the constraints under which he operated, rather than a story of individual triumph as I expected to find under the standard technopolitical trappings.
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle: Creepy little story about two sisters living in a decaying mansion in a decaying town, hated and feared by the locals, in no small part because one of the sisters was tried for (though acquitted of) the murder by arsenic poisoning of several family members. The question of whodunnit is addressed fairly early on, though never directly, and the tension comes from seeing what small cruelties are left for people to inflict on each other. Despite the narrator's unpleasantness, it's hard not to share her harsh judgments of the rest of the world, given that the only kindness comes at exactly the wrong times.