Fiction reviews
Non-sequels this time; sequels to come: Diana Wynne Jones, A Tale of Time City: A young girl, being evacuated from London because of the Blitz, is instead kidnapped by two boys from Time City, a fantastic place that travels through and outside time. The boys think she’s an evildoer who’s going to destroy Time City. But they quickly realize their mistake and then try to cover it up, leading to further confusions and dangers. I thought this was a decent outing from Jones, with her usual pattern of having children and adults know very different things about each other and the world; neither group is wrong, but neither group has the last word, either.
Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire: In the near future, life-extension technology is available to those who have the money and stay well-behaved, which means that the people in power are extremely old and well-behaved and the young don’t think there’s much left for them. Sterling’s great idea here is that the technology advances in spurts and in competing options, so people have to choose - and if you get life-extension now, you may not be able to use the better tech that comes along in five years. That’s a great idea, when so much sf assumes monolithic and non-improving technology. Unfortunately, the story itself is less engaging - a well-behaved old woman decides on a promising new technology, which revitalizes her body but also messes with her mind, so she leaves the US to bounce around Europe with young Eurotrash, talk about art, and try to learn photography. I liked her older, soberer version better, which I probably wasn’t supposed to. Some of the young folks think they have a way around the gerontocracy through virtual reality tech, but I wasn’t excited by the possibility of their success - or failure.
M.M. Kaye, The Far Pavilions: This sweeping romance, published in 1978, was wonderfully satisfying to read while I was up late nights with a newborn. It’s the story of Ash, a boy whose English parents die while he’s traveling with them as an infant in India during the British Raj. He’s raised by his Indian nurse as her own child, until palace intrigue forces her to surrender him to the English; he grows up neither quite English nor Indian, has many adventures, falls in love a few times, and generally dashes around doing exciting things. The descriptions of places and people are wonderful - Kaye makes the reader share Ash’s frustration with the English refusal to believe that Indians really do have their own cultures and ways of thinking, and won’t automatically do what an English person would do in the same situation. The final battle goes on for fifty pages but reads in a quick rush - a great example of how to write a complex battle in a way that’s engaging and clear to the reader.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Memory of Whiteness: In the very far future, when humanity has colonized the solar system, a musician embarks on a tour with an instrument developed by the man whose physics power civilization. He aspires to make music that corresponds to that physics, which may mean that listening to the music shows you your past and future, completely determined. There’s also a conspiracy or two around whether he’ll be allowed to give his concerts. Though early on there’s an exchange about the amusing idea of writing about music, the book doesn’t escape that inherent problem - especially for a musically untrained person like me, much of the writing was essentially meaningless. Robinson’s later genius for landscape is apparent in stretches as he describes coming home to Mars and then to Earth, but mostly I felt he was wasting his time writing about music in a setting over a thousand years from now, both of which worked to distance me from the plot and characters.
Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art: This collection of stories includes a novella of the Culture about a Culture ship’s visit to 1970s Earth. I found it mostly devoid of the humor and complexity that Banks offers at his best; the shorter stories, in particular, tended towards gotcha-type affairs with nothing much to offer - a plant intelligence encounters an explorer (human or humanoid) new to the planet and, not even considering the possibility of communication, plucks its extremities off in a “loves me, loves me not” child’s game. And that’s it. I guess the concept is okay - a version of “boys throw stones at frogs for sport, but the frogs die in earnest” - but the execution offered nothing more subtle than my one-sentence summary.
Ian MacLeod, The Light Ages: Is this steampunk? In an alternate Britain, where mystical aether mined from the ground powers society, a young boy grows up in a mining town. Aether warps the bodies and minds of those who get too close to it, and the boy loses his mother to a hideous transformation that is somehow connected to a strange young girl he meets. He grows up, goes to London, and gets involved in a social justice movement with concerns similar to those in our own world, though the persistence of guilds (empowered by secrets of working with aether, which responds to certain signs and words) makes the social stratification different than that in industrialized Victorian Britain. There were some striking images of magic intertwined with crude technology in urban settings, but I couldn’t work up any sympathy for the characters.
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows: Fifteen minutes from now, with cloning a common technique, a grieving doctor decides to use the DNA of the unidentified man who raped and murdered his daughter to make a child so that he can look into the face of the killer. He has a private investigator follow the child, Justin, as Justin grows. His obsession leads his wife to suspect an affair, so she hires another PI, with catastrophic results. The consequences just keep on spreading out like ripples in a very shallow pond. The speculations about identity, both with respect to cloning and to another element of the plot - a popular virtual reality game so detailed that people can live their offline lives in it “true to life” - are interesting, but not enough to fully offset often clunky exposition and plot twists as regular as a circular staircase. Airport reading. More favorable review from Salon here.
Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire: In the near future, life-extension technology is available to those who have the money and stay well-behaved, which means that the people in power are extremely old and well-behaved and the young don’t think there’s much left for them. Sterling’s great idea here is that the technology advances in spurts and in competing options, so people have to choose - and if you get life-extension now, you may not be able to use the better tech that comes along in five years. That’s a great idea, when so much sf assumes monolithic and non-improving technology. Unfortunately, the story itself is less engaging - a well-behaved old woman decides on a promising new technology, which revitalizes her body but also messes with her mind, so she leaves the US to bounce around Europe with young Eurotrash, talk about art, and try to learn photography. I liked her older, soberer version better, which I probably wasn’t supposed to. Some of the young folks think they have a way around the gerontocracy through virtual reality tech, but I wasn’t excited by the possibility of their success - or failure.
M.M. Kaye, The Far Pavilions: This sweeping romance, published in 1978, was wonderfully satisfying to read while I was up late nights with a newborn. It’s the story of Ash, a boy whose English parents die while he’s traveling with them as an infant in India during the British Raj. He’s raised by his Indian nurse as her own child, until palace intrigue forces her to surrender him to the English; he grows up neither quite English nor Indian, has many adventures, falls in love a few times, and generally dashes around doing exciting things. The descriptions of places and people are wonderful - Kaye makes the reader share Ash’s frustration with the English refusal to believe that Indians really do have their own cultures and ways of thinking, and won’t automatically do what an English person would do in the same situation. The final battle goes on for fifty pages but reads in a quick rush - a great example of how to write a complex battle in a way that’s engaging and clear to the reader.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Memory of Whiteness: In the very far future, when humanity has colonized the solar system, a musician embarks on a tour with an instrument developed by the man whose physics power civilization. He aspires to make music that corresponds to that physics, which may mean that listening to the music shows you your past and future, completely determined. There’s also a conspiracy or two around whether he’ll be allowed to give his concerts. Though early on there’s an exchange about the amusing idea of writing about music, the book doesn’t escape that inherent problem - especially for a musically untrained person like me, much of the writing was essentially meaningless. Robinson’s later genius for landscape is apparent in stretches as he describes coming home to Mars and then to Earth, but mostly I felt he was wasting his time writing about music in a setting over a thousand years from now, both of which worked to distance me from the plot and characters.
Iain M. Banks, The State of the Art: This collection of stories includes a novella of the Culture about a Culture ship’s visit to 1970s Earth. I found it mostly devoid of the humor and complexity that Banks offers at his best; the shorter stories, in particular, tended towards gotcha-type affairs with nothing much to offer - a plant intelligence encounters an explorer (human or humanoid) new to the planet and, not even considering the possibility of communication, plucks its extremities off in a “loves me, loves me not” child’s game. And that’s it. I guess the concept is okay - a version of “boys throw stones at frogs for sport, but the frogs die in earnest” - but the execution offered nothing more subtle than my one-sentence summary.
Ian MacLeod, The Light Ages: Is this steampunk? In an alternate Britain, where mystical aether mined from the ground powers society, a young boy grows up in a mining town. Aether warps the bodies and minds of those who get too close to it, and the boy loses his mother to a hideous transformation that is somehow connected to a strange young girl he meets. He grows up, goes to London, and gets involved in a social justice movement with concerns similar to those in our own world, though the persistence of guilds (empowered by secrets of working with aether, which responds to certain signs and words) makes the social stratification different than that in industrialized Victorian Britain. There were some striking images of magic intertwined with crude technology in urban settings, but I couldn’t work up any sympathy for the characters.
Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows: Fifteen minutes from now, with cloning a common technique, a grieving doctor decides to use the DNA of the unidentified man who raped and murdered his daughter to make a child so that he can look into the face of the killer. He has a private investigator follow the child, Justin, as Justin grows. His obsession leads his wife to suspect an affair, so she hires another PI, with catastrophic results. The consequences just keep on spreading out like ripples in a very shallow pond. The speculations about identity, both with respect to cloning and to another element of the plot - a popular virtual reality game so detailed that people can live their offline lives in it “true to life” - are interesting, but not enough to fully offset often clunky exposition and plot twists as regular as a circular staircase. Airport reading. More favorable review from Salon here.