Reviews: fiction
Harlan Coben, Just One Look: Coben specializes in elaborate conspiracies that unravel years later when a single thread is pulled. It’s like Enron, with more murder and romance. This book starts when Grace Lawson, famous for fifteen minutes as the badly injured survivor of a concert stampede that killed eighteen people, picks up photos she’s just had developed and finds an old picture of her husband and four other people in with the pictures she took. Her husband denies that it’s him. Then he disappears. Murder and mayhem ensue. Once you get past the inherent implausibility of the setup, things work rather well; Coben’s answered most of the “how” and “why” questions, and coincidence doesn’t have to play a big role. Coben does tend to give his protagonists a powerful and shady ally who can help out at crucial moments, but since he puts this one in the setup early on, and gives him an interesting reason to be Grace’s ally, I’m not going to complain.
Elizabeth Bear, Carnival: In a universe haunted by the slaughter of most of Earth’s billions at the hands of automated regulators designed to keep the population in check, some colony worlds have broken free of Earth’s control. Earth’s politics are sexist and heterosexist, but the women who rule New Amazonia will only accept gentle males - i.e., gay ones - as ambassadors, so two disgraced operatives/former lovers are sent. Earth is willing to do this because New Amazonia seems to have access to unlimited clean power, which would - among other things - allow Earth’s population to grow substantially without triggering the wrath of the governors, which kill when the population outstrips available resources. But one of the operatives has a hidden agenda. I hate to say it, but this book should have been longer; I barely figured out the background until halfway through, and I wanted much more exploration of the morality on all sides. Bear is very clear about the flaws of both sides’ systems, but I yearned for more about Earth - even if Earth was playing power politics, and was willing to destroy New Amazonia to get what it wanted, what it wanted was not at all crazy, and I’d even entertain the idea that New Amazonia was morally obligated to share the tech. The end wraps up too neatly given all the moral ambiguities of the setup. I’ll be looking for more of Bear’s work. (Also of note: there are no white or Chinese people left in the universe, because the regulators killed them first, apparently based on their relative resource loads. I’m not sure if I buy that people would still think about this as much as Bear’s characters did, hundreds of years after the fact, but then again I wasn’t raised as a member of a fragmentary remnant of humanity.)
Robert J. Sawyer, Rollback: Nearly forty years ago, a SETI researcher decoded the first message received from alien life, and sent a reply. Now their response has arrived, but it’s encrypted. The researcher might be the only hope of decrypting it, but she’s nearly ninety and failing fast. A multibillionaire offers to pay for her “rollback,” a billion-dollar treatment that will restore her to her early twenties; she agrees, but only if her husband gets the same treatment. Except: the treatment works on him, but not her, and the clock is still ticking on that decryption. Sawyer’s trademark idea-packed premises are fully present here, but in many ways the alien message is a red herring, and the resolution seems tacked on at the end. What Sawyer is really interested in exploring is the effect of sudden rejuvenation - what it’s like to be an eighty-seven-year-old man in a twenty-seven-year-old body, married to another eighty-seven-year-old. Unfortunately, though the man’s reactions are fairly plausible, we don’t get any deep perspective - of course he lusts after a young woman. But he only briefly feels darker emotions, and everything works out for the best - maybe they’re all so well-behaved because they’re Canadian! But I was left feeling a little deprived of the conflict for which I read.
Elizabeth Bear, Carnival: In a universe haunted by the slaughter of most of Earth’s billions at the hands of automated regulators designed to keep the population in check, some colony worlds have broken free of Earth’s control. Earth’s politics are sexist and heterosexist, but the women who rule New Amazonia will only accept gentle males - i.e., gay ones - as ambassadors, so two disgraced operatives/former lovers are sent. Earth is willing to do this because New Amazonia seems to have access to unlimited clean power, which would - among other things - allow Earth’s population to grow substantially without triggering the wrath of the governors, which kill when the population outstrips available resources. But one of the operatives has a hidden agenda. I hate to say it, but this book should have been longer; I barely figured out the background until halfway through, and I wanted much more exploration of the morality on all sides. Bear is very clear about the flaws of both sides’ systems, but I yearned for more about Earth - even if Earth was playing power politics, and was willing to destroy New Amazonia to get what it wanted, what it wanted was not at all crazy, and I’d even entertain the idea that New Amazonia was morally obligated to share the tech. The end wraps up too neatly given all the moral ambiguities of the setup. I’ll be looking for more of Bear’s work. (Also of note: there are no white or Chinese people left in the universe, because the regulators killed them first, apparently based on their relative resource loads. I’m not sure if I buy that people would still think about this as much as Bear’s characters did, hundreds of years after the fact, but then again I wasn’t raised as a member of a fragmentary remnant of humanity.)
Robert J. Sawyer, Rollback: Nearly forty years ago, a SETI researcher decoded the first message received from alien life, and sent a reply. Now their response has arrived, but it’s encrypted. The researcher might be the only hope of decrypting it, but she’s nearly ninety and failing fast. A multibillionaire offers to pay for her “rollback,” a billion-dollar treatment that will restore her to her early twenties; she agrees, but only if her husband gets the same treatment. Except: the treatment works on him, but not her, and the clock is still ticking on that decryption. Sawyer’s trademark idea-packed premises are fully present here, but in many ways the alien message is a red herring, and the resolution seems tacked on at the end. What Sawyer is really interested in exploring is the effect of sudden rejuvenation - what it’s like to be an eighty-seven-year-old man in a twenty-seven-year-old body, married to another eighty-seven-year-old. Unfortunately, though the man’s reactions are fairly plausible, we don’t get any deep perspective - of course he lusts after a young woman. But he only briefly feels darker emotions, and everything works out for the best - maybe they’re all so well-behaved because they’re Canadian! But I was left feeling a little deprived of the conflict for which I read.