Thanks, cicadas and fiction
Many, many thanks for all the Evil Overlord suggestions thus far. Please feel free to leave more, if you think of them.
Cicada update: almost all dead. The sound is like an electric hum, like having your ear pressed to a generator the size of a house - though with more dying every minute, maybe the generator is now only TV-sized. There are so many, coating trees and grass and cars and doors, that it reminds me of that Star Trek: TOS episode, "The Omega Glory," the one with the Yangs and the Kohms - "They sacrificed hundreds just to draw us out into the open. And then, they came, and they came. We killed *thousands*, and still they came!," the bad captain Tracey says. I don't know how the species survives, given that the individual cicadas get themselves killed in every possible way, from flying into doors to landing on pools of water and drowning. They are profligate with their lives, that's for sure. Perhaps they only become stupid after they've mated and laid eggs. A friend of mine says their existence is proof that there is no God, but maybe they're just proof that God has an inordinate fondness for cicadas.
The Portable Dorothy Parker: This is a collection of Parker's poetry, short stories, and reviews, not complete but still pretty comprehensive. Parker's short stories were the best thing about the book, because they were sustained mouthfuls of viciousness rather than the flippant poems we all know, which were so short that staggered one after the other they lost a lot of their force, like snow overwhelming the beauty of the individual snowflake. The play reviews can also be fun, because of Parker's playfulness and desire to puncture pretentiousness, even if the plays themselves are often lost to posterity (and all the better for posterity, according to Parker!). Parker on sex and the modern novel in 1958, some observations which now seem somewhat overstated compared to what came next: "Certainly, nobody wants to complain about sex itself; but I think we all have a legitimate grievance in the fact that, as it is shown in present-day novels, its practitioners are so unmercifully articulate about it.... There is no more cruel destroyer of excitement than painstaking detail.... Can you remember, venerable subscriber, the days when there used to be rows of asterisks? How those little stars twinkled and gleamed, and how warmly they shone upon the imagination!" I'm not sure she's right; it really depends on the detail. Her review of Lolita gains new resonance in light of the present controversy over whether Nabokov "plagiarized" the basic story from a German, later Nazi, writer. She summarizes the story, then changes course: "There is no good, I see at this late moment, to try to melt down the story. It is in its writing that Mr. Nabokov has made it the work of art that it is." Anyway, it was fun reading, even if she hated herself and other people, as the stories and poems indicate. The introduction to the revised edition, by Brendan Gill, is incomprehensibly derisive towards Parker; they really should have picked someone who didn't like to damn her with faint praise.
Elizabeth Moon, Hunting Party: Disgraced former military captain Heris Serrano takes command of an eccentric old lady's space yacht, but gets more than she bargained for from the ship, the crew, the passengers and even the old lady. Intrigue and horse-racing result. Characters grow in satisfying ways, and some of them even disagree with one another for reasonable reasons; in fact, Heris and her employer are almost too reasonable for narrative punch, but things roll along anyway. I wouldn't have noticed this before I started writing myself, but Moon cheats a little on POV, adding in some characters' POVs where it's useful to have them conveying the information they know when we're halfway through the story but those characters have been present since the beginning. On reflection, that gives me a feeling of imbalance, but it's not a big deal.
Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Moon, Sassinak: Why do I keep doing this to myself? I keep reading newer books from childhood idols, and it's usually a big mistake. The Rescue of Ranor, by Wilanne Schneider Belden, is a rollicking good time with a fun take on the science/magic divide and the hero's quest, but I got Belden's Mind-Hold a while back and couldn't get past the first chapter because it was so bad. I've given up on McCaffrey solo, but I tried Sassinak because I've recently been reading some of Moon's books (see above). What a mistake. Two of the Amazon reviews suggested that it's hard to figure out where a bad book like this goes wrong, but I think I know: it's a lazy book. For example, I stopped cold at "... she sensed, in her heavy-worlder friends, the capacity for honesty and loyalty, and in herself an unusual ability to make friends with people of all backgrounds." And they'd even tried to show that instead of tell it in the pages just before; it didn't have to be that way. The narrative lurches forward in ungainly jolts, flinging us twenty years between one chapter and the next when the preceding cuts had been only a few months at a time. Then - not even coinciding with a time shift - on page 258, for the first time we get someone's POV other than Sassinak's, presumably because it makes some events more exciting to narrate (though still not all that exciting). It wasn't even published as a series of novellas first, which would have been an explanation if not an excuse. Time-skipping laziness is a folly to which I am myself quite prone, and it's worse because if you aren't interested in writing the middle parts, you're probably not going to write them in an interesting way, but maybe if you don't want to write the middle you shouldn't publish the book.
Nancy Kress, The White Pipes: Before Kress wrote award-winning sf, she tried her hand as a fantasist, with mixed results. This book, about a woman with very minor magics that allow her to spin story-telling illusions, is more on the plus side of the ledger, I think. Fia and her young son come to an isolated kingdom, where her skills are more unusual and amazing, only to run into an old and embittered lover, a noble so far above her in social status that she is completely at his mercy. Worse, he has a noble wife now, a woman who seems to be the king's lover. Fia finds herself swept up in politics and magic greater than she ever wanted to be a part of. Though the plot was sometimes as awkward as the truly ugly front cover, the characters almost all had complicated and understandable emotions, and Kress didn't take the easy way out for the ending. Ultimately, it's a minor but respectable early work.
David Gerrold, Jumping Off the Planet: I really enjoyed this juvenile sf novel, first in a trilogy. The POV character is the nasty-tempered middle child in a family of three boys whose parents are divorced. Their father comes for a visit and takes them on a trip, ostensibly just a vacation, but it develops that he's taking them into space and away from the custody of their mother. Everyone in the family is screwed up in various ways, from the oldest son who is trying to get a scholarship to college, which will require him to have his sexual preference converted to homosexual to limit breeding on the overpopulated Earth (and this creates a pretty neat twist later), to the screechy youngest son, to the bitterly feuding parents. Then there's the decreasingly stable political situation on Earth - and what's with the animatronic monkey the father inexplicably buys for the youngest son? For some reason, I really enjoyed the middle son's take on the futility of trying to get along with his father: "There was no cookie there," he explains, and I loved that metaphor - cooperate all you want, ask all you want, and there's still no reward where there should be one.
Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer, Sorcery & Cecilia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: This epistolary novel about two cousins, one in the city and one in the country, mixes fantasy with Regency romance. Each author wrote one of the characters, and neither knew what the other was going to say next, so the novel developed organically out of the back-and-forth of letters. I have a feeling that this feels a lot more clever and exciting to the authors than it does to the readers; it's not that there was anything wrong with the book, but the writing didn't seem noticeably different to me because of the unusual method of collaboration. The two girls are charming - one literally - and an enchanted chocolate pot certainly sounds like a good idea.
Warren Ellis & Colleen Doran with Dave Stewart, Orbiter: Horrible confession time: I love sf, but I don't really believe in space exploration. I figure we need to solve our problems here on Earth first. It's only the certainty that eliminating NASA wouldn't increase our spending on health and education that makes me willing to support it. Ellis couldn't disagree more - space exploration, for him, is the next step in our development as humans. This graphic novel opens with the return of the last space shuttle, presumed lost with all hands years ago. The beginning, when the shuttle crash-lands in Florida on what has turned into a teeming settlement, sets a tone of grimness that never really lifts. The shuttle is back, but it's not the same - there's one human survivor, and the shuttle itself is covered with what seems to be living tissue. The mystery, and its sort-of resolution, seemed to me a very poor advertisement for space exploration, since basically it's about terrible things happening to people in space, but Ellis obviously sees it differently. Perhaps he thinks that only through terror can we find wonder. Doran's art is consistently grim and dank, which works given what the story is, but it's a far cry from her big-eyed, gorgeous androgynes in A Distant Soil.
Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross: Gorgeous, just gorgeous. I'm not too interested in Ross' creative process, but if you are, the book would probably be even more enjoyable for you. I also picked up a bit more DC canon, which was nice, and put images to some of the names I've seen elsewhere. Like Justice League, the paintings reminded me that, despite my flirtation with Smallville, my heart will always belong to the Batman.
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead: This book is Card's biggest answer to the question "What happened to Ender Wiggins after the Xenocide?" What happened is that Ender became a Speaker for the Dead, someone who tells the story of a dead person's life with total honesty, which turns out to be a cathartic experience for those left behind. I'm not sure it would really work that way, but it makes for a satisfying narrative, when Ender arrives on a world with another alien population. The aliens - piggies - have killed a human researcher in horrible, painful fashion, but their society is so unintelligible to humans that no one is sure why. When Ender arrives to speak the death of the researcher, time dilation means he arrives just after the death of another man, an abusive husband to one of the human colony's key researchers. He's drawn to the widow - the woman who, as a young girl, first called him to the world - and to her many children, all of whom need different help in grieving and forgiving themselves and their father. The characters are generally interesting, and Card makes what seems like a good stab at the concept of a truly alien value system - though of course it's a fictional system that ultimately comes out of a human mind, and so might not have any lessons for us at all about the nature of consciousness/morality generally. Card wraps things up a bit too neatly, I thought, giving everybody a satisfying ending, but maybe he just wanted to be nice to Ender after so much suffering.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless: Wow, it's been a long time since I read an Adams book. Straight-faced recountings of the utterly bizarre were an Adams standard, and the book certainly has that, what with Ford Prefect arriving at the Hitchhiker's Guide headquarters to discover that it has been taken over by the forces of darkness and accounting, stealing the next edition of the Guide (which, because it exists in every dimension, has only one copy), and jumping out a high window not once but twice - this is the best set piece in the book, and it rolls merrily along. Meanwhile, Arthur Dent tries to find a place like home, fails in some interesting ways, and then, just when he's settled down to a nice life making sandwiches out of Utterly Normal Beasts, along comes the daughter he never knew he had. Somehow, now that I've read Terry Pratchett, Adams seems to lack something - maybe a sort of fundamental respect for his characters' hopes and dreams, no matter how absurd their world; they seem to exist just for our amusement, and Pratchett's seem more likely to go on living behind our backs, when the books are shut. Still, I found myself quoting Adams's discussion of climate-controlled buildings whose windows are built so they can't be opened, with predictable consequences when the climate isn't controlled, so I can't say I was disappointed.
Ken Macleod, Engine City: I slipped up and bought this, the last book in a somewhat loosely connected trilogy, before the others, so I probably missed out on some nuances. The story involves several varieties of humanity in the distant future, some of which are still preparing to fend off the attack of spidery aliens who've caused significant problems before, and some of whom find an interesting separate peace with said aliens. Macleod does a decent job of showing each side's reasoning, though I never felt much connection to the characters as people rather than as representatives of different perspectives. The second half of the book, in which a revolutionary government that rose in the first half has changed over time into a dictatorship, is more promising than the first half, which mostly involves getting people into place, but I didn't think enough time was spent on the details of the new regime to make it truly engaging.
Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God: What if aliens arrived on earth and asked to talk to our paleontologists? What if it turned out they did that because they believed in the existence of God and wanted more confirmation? I feel like a broken record on the subject of Sawyer: great ideas, difficulty on the dismount. This time, the difficulty is bound up with the theological - Graham Greene managed to write a good book about religious belief without alienating me, who doesn't believe what Greene did, but Sawyer shifts from arguments based on science to a deus ex machina (deus ex scripta? I lack the necessary Latin) that completely alienated me, no pun intended, and made the science that came before seem like a lie, like he didn't believe that the science argued for the existence of an intelligent designer the way his characters had persuasively suggested. Maybe the real problem is that believers don't believe; they know, and thus all debates on the subject are bound to be dissatisfying.
Michael Marshall, The Upright Man: I wish Michael Marshall would get back to sf, which he writes as Michael Marshall Smith, and where his noirish style interacts wonderfully with the intelligent refrigerators and handicapped clones who populate his stories. It's odd that this book seems to be getting heavier promotion than his earlier novel The Straw Men, because this would make a pretty bad introduction to Marshall. This non-sf thriller (with only a hint of the possibility of the fantastic) will make very little sense unless you have read The Straw Men; even though I had, it was a while ago and it took me several hundred pages to remember the necessary information. Also, unlike the first book, this one didn't have a motivating idea; things happened because the bad guy was a bad guy, albeit a genius, not much different from your average serial killer beach book. Quotes I liked: "She was the only one of us still latched into anything real-world, and I got the sense she was drifting, like a plug slowly being drawn from a socket. I knew from experience that once this happens the shapes can subtly change, and you may find you don't fit back again. The huddled forms on every street corner and in each piss-reeking doorway show that the music of civilization stops often, and there are never quite enough chairs." Also, when one character pulls a rifle out of a car trunk and another asks what he's doing: "'The forest can be dangerous,' he said. 'It certainly is now,' Tom said." Good point.
Carol Berg, Son of Avonar: Berg's previous books, a slashy, hurt-comfort trilogy and a romance with dragons, have a lot of good elements (the trilogy more than the dragons), but she hasn't quite taken that final step to fully satisfactory epic fantasy. This time, her story involves a disgraced noblewoman, now living as a peasant because her husband was convicted of sorcery, and the strange, wounded man she rescues from her former fellows who seems to have a connection to the world of sorcery, if only he could figure out what it was. The setup was interesting, but there was a huge structural flaw in the novel: a few hundred pages in, we go into a hundred-page flashback, which really disrupted the flow of the story, especially since the key points had already been introduced in briefer summary, so I just wanted her to get over with it and get back to the story's present day, where a lot of cliffs were hanging. The ending also stumbled, since Berg seemed determined to tie everything up far too neatly, but the minor characters were nicely human, with believable motivations and confusions, especially the narrator's estranged brother. First in a promised trilogy, but thankfully stands on its own. Verdict: for serious fantasy fans, probably worth it, but not something to go out of your way to read.
Billy Collins, Nine Horses and Questions About Angels: Collins is America's poet laureate; he writes poems about everyday experience in everyday language, often with humor ("Is there any part of the devil's body/that has not been used to name/some feature of the American topography ..."). "To My Patron," for example, is a list of requests, disclaimed as they escalate ("All I need is a pen/ ... Of course, an oak desk would be nice/ ... And I would not turn down a house/ ... Now if you wouldn't mind/leaving me alone--/ ... I will get back to work on my long metrical poem,/the one I will recite to the cheering throng/prior to your impending beheading."). I found the books quite enjoyable.
Robert Sawyer, Humans: This is the second novel of a trilogy about coming into contact with an alternate Earth, on which Neanderthals were the ones to survive and develop an advanced technological society. Their society is in fact a lot nicer than ours, due in part to their sensitive noses which deterred widespread adoption of fossil fuels and in part to a massive eugenics program to eliminate violent tendencies in the population, supplemented by constant surveillance that prevents any crime from going undetected. Sawyer makes some noises about privacy, but never really makes the affirmative case for it; thus, the Neanderthal society seems foreign, but superior in every way. In this volume, first contact gives way to the beginning of trade, as a homo sapiens and a Neanderthal try to work out a more personal relationship. There were fewer ideas in this book than in the first, but maybe the third book will return to the interesting speculation of the first. What really shocked me was the explicit sex scene, which I'm pretty sure is a first for Sawyer. Sawyer is usually more in the Heinlein juvenelia vein; it was like opening Tunnel in the Sky and getting Friday. This greater attention to sexual descriptions in non-romance fiction seems like a real cultural shift; I've seen it in a fair number of recent books now, by authors who didn't formerly write sex scenes.
Scott Mackay, Omnifix: I think I bought this before I actually read the other Mackay book I had, The Meek. Either that or I got Mackay confused with Scott Westerfeld, whose books I've found interesting in the past. Anyhow, Mackay's problem is different than Robert Sawyer's (who gives two blurbs for this book, one on front and one on back). Like Sawyer, Mackay has great ideas, but where Sawyer fumbles on the follow-through, Mackay doesn't even fully execute the pitch - if that's the right metaphor; I'm not good with sports. Anyhow, the idea here is that aliens have been sending weapons into the solar system for decades. The most recent contained bioweapons 16 and 17, both of which are still doing horrible damage to their victims - 16 causes rapid, horrendous physical degeneration by age 30, and 17 eats away the body bit by bit, saving the brain for last. Humanity hasn't been able to do anything about 16, but for 17 there's Omnifix, which slowly replaces the deteriorating human bits with mechanical substitutes. The protagonist is a specialist in alien weaponry, and he's also a member of a powerful political family, and the confluence causes him problems. Now, it sounds as if Mackay starts in media res, and he sort of does; we never find out about bioweapons 1 through 15, which is a neat idea. But otherwise, Mackay either thinks his readers are idiots or never gave this book to an editor, because information is constantly repeated. On p.23: "I like to think that's all ancient history, but maybe it's not. Let's face it, my dad tried to block his rise to power." Another character, on p.29: "I can't help thinking of your father…. How he tried to block Graham's rise to power all those years ago." As this example shows, often Mackay reuses the same phrases, which increases the annoyance factor. And, as this example also shows, the characters have a bad case of expositionitis. In TV, I imagine that it can be hard to get information to viewers without expository dialogue, but Mackay could have kept this rot out of characters' mouths at least. This book is the most convincing argument for reading your dialogue to yourself out loud that I've seen in a while; it's also an argument for testing your dialogue with a version of the Chinese fortune cookie "in bed" game. If adding "As you know," to the beginning of a character's statement gives the statement a coherent and correct meaning, cut the damn statement. So, at the risk of violating my own rules, what I'm saying here is that I didn't like the book. And that's a shame, because it could have been good.
Cicada update: almost all dead. The sound is like an electric hum, like having your ear pressed to a generator the size of a house - though with more dying every minute, maybe the generator is now only TV-sized. There are so many, coating trees and grass and cars and doors, that it reminds me of that Star Trek: TOS episode, "The Omega Glory," the one with the Yangs and the Kohms - "They sacrificed hundreds just to draw us out into the open. And then, they came, and they came. We killed *thousands*, and still they came!," the bad captain Tracey says. I don't know how the species survives, given that the individual cicadas get themselves killed in every possible way, from flying into doors to landing on pools of water and drowning. They are profligate with their lives, that's for sure. Perhaps they only become stupid after they've mated and laid eggs. A friend of mine says their existence is proof that there is no God, but maybe they're just proof that God has an inordinate fondness for cicadas.
The Portable Dorothy Parker: This is a collection of Parker's poetry, short stories, and reviews, not complete but still pretty comprehensive. Parker's short stories were the best thing about the book, because they were sustained mouthfuls of viciousness rather than the flippant poems we all know, which were so short that staggered one after the other they lost a lot of their force, like snow overwhelming the beauty of the individual snowflake. The play reviews can also be fun, because of Parker's playfulness and desire to puncture pretentiousness, even if the plays themselves are often lost to posterity (and all the better for posterity, according to Parker!). Parker on sex and the modern novel in 1958, some observations which now seem somewhat overstated compared to what came next: "Certainly, nobody wants to complain about sex itself; but I think we all have a legitimate grievance in the fact that, as it is shown in present-day novels, its practitioners are so unmercifully articulate about it.... There is no more cruel destroyer of excitement than painstaking detail.... Can you remember, venerable subscriber, the days when there used to be rows of asterisks? How those little stars twinkled and gleamed, and how warmly they shone upon the imagination!" I'm not sure she's right; it really depends on the detail. Her review of Lolita gains new resonance in light of the present controversy over whether Nabokov "plagiarized" the basic story from a German, later Nazi, writer. She summarizes the story, then changes course: "There is no good, I see at this late moment, to try to melt down the story. It is in its writing that Mr. Nabokov has made it the work of art that it is." Anyway, it was fun reading, even if she hated herself and other people, as the stories and poems indicate. The introduction to the revised edition, by Brendan Gill, is incomprehensibly derisive towards Parker; they really should have picked someone who didn't like to damn her with faint praise.
Elizabeth Moon, Hunting Party: Disgraced former military captain Heris Serrano takes command of an eccentric old lady's space yacht, but gets more than she bargained for from the ship, the crew, the passengers and even the old lady. Intrigue and horse-racing result. Characters grow in satisfying ways, and some of them even disagree with one another for reasonable reasons; in fact, Heris and her employer are almost too reasonable for narrative punch, but things roll along anyway. I wouldn't have noticed this before I started writing myself, but Moon cheats a little on POV, adding in some characters' POVs where it's useful to have them conveying the information they know when we're halfway through the story but those characters have been present since the beginning. On reflection, that gives me a feeling of imbalance, but it's not a big deal.
Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Moon, Sassinak: Why do I keep doing this to myself? I keep reading newer books from childhood idols, and it's usually a big mistake. The Rescue of Ranor, by Wilanne Schneider Belden, is a rollicking good time with a fun take on the science/magic divide and the hero's quest, but I got Belden's Mind-Hold a while back and couldn't get past the first chapter because it was so bad. I've given up on McCaffrey solo, but I tried Sassinak because I've recently been reading some of Moon's books (see above). What a mistake. Two of the Amazon reviews suggested that it's hard to figure out where a bad book like this goes wrong, but I think I know: it's a lazy book. For example, I stopped cold at "... she sensed, in her heavy-worlder friends, the capacity for honesty and loyalty, and in herself an unusual ability to make friends with people of all backgrounds." And they'd even tried to show that instead of tell it in the pages just before; it didn't have to be that way. The narrative lurches forward in ungainly jolts, flinging us twenty years between one chapter and the next when the preceding cuts had been only a few months at a time. Then - not even coinciding with a time shift - on page 258, for the first time we get someone's POV other than Sassinak's, presumably because it makes some events more exciting to narrate (though still not all that exciting). It wasn't even published as a series of novellas first, which would have been an explanation if not an excuse. Time-skipping laziness is a folly to which I am myself quite prone, and it's worse because if you aren't interested in writing the middle parts, you're probably not going to write them in an interesting way, but maybe if you don't want to write the middle you shouldn't publish the book.
Nancy Kress, The White Pipes: Before Kress wrote award-winning sf, she tried her hand as a fantasist, with mixed results. This book, about a woman with very minor magics that allow her to spin story-telling illusions, is more on the plus side of the ledger, I think. Fia and her young son come to an isolated kingdom, where her skills are more unusual and amazing, only to run into an old and embittered lover, a noble so far above her in social status that she is completely at his mercy. Worse, he has a noble wife now, a woman who seems to be the king's lover. Fia finds herself swept up in politics and magic greater than she ever wanted to be a part of. Though the plot was sometimes as awkward as the truly ugly front cover, the characters almost all had complicated and understandable emotions, and Kress didn't take the easy way out for the ending. Ultimately, it's a minor but respectable early work.
David Gerrold, Jumping Off the Planet: I really enjoyed this juvenile sf novel, first in a trilogy. The POV character is the nasty-tempered middle child in a family of three boys whose parents are divorced. Their father comes for a visit and takes them on a trip, ostensibly just a vacation, but it develops that he's taking them into space and away from the custody of their mother. Everyone in the family is screwed up in various ways, from the oldest son who is trying to get a scholarship to college, which will require him to have his sexual preference converted to homosexual to limit breeding on the overpopulated Earth (and this creates a pretty neat twist later), to the screechy youngest son, to the bitterly feuding parents. Then there's the decreasingly stable political situation on Earth - and what's with the animatronic monkey the father inexplicably buys for the youngest son? For some reason, I really enjoyed the middle son's take on the futility of trying to get along with his father: "There was no cookie there," he explains, and I loved that metaphor - cooperate all you want, ask all you want, and there's still no reward where there should be one.
Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer, Sorcery & Cecilia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot: This epistolary novel about two cousins, one in the city and one in the country, mixes fantasy with Regency romance. Each author wrote one of the characters, and neither knew what the other was going to say next, so the novel developed organically out of the back-and-forth of letters. I have a feeling that this feels a lot more clever and exciting to the authors than it does to the readers; it's not that there was anything wrong with the book, but the writing didn't seem noticeably different to me because of the unusual method of collaboration. The two girls are charming - one literally - and an enchanted chocolate pot certainly sounds like a good idea.
Warren Ellis & Colleen Doran with Dave Stewart, Orbiter: Horrible confession time: I love sf, but I don't really believe in space exploration. I figure we need to solve our problems here on Earth first. It's only the certainty that eliminating NASA wouldn't increase our spending on health and education that makes me willing to support it. Ellis couldn't disagree more - space exploration, for him, is the next step in our development as humans. This graphic novel opens with the return of the last space shuttle, presumed lost with all hands years ago. The beginning, when the shuttle crash-lands in Florida on what has turned into a teeming settlement, sets a tone of grimness that never really lifts. The shuttle is back, but it's not the same - there's one human survivor, and the shuttle itself is covered with what seems to be living tissue. The mystery, and its sort-of resolution, seemed to me a very poor advertisement for space exploration, since basically it's about terrible things happening to people in space, but Ellis obviously sees it differently. Perhaps he thinks that only through terror can we find wonder. Doran's art is consistently grim and dank, which works given what the story is, but it's a far cry from her big-eyed, gorgeous androgynes in A Distant Soil.
Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross: Gorgeous, just gorgeous. I'm not too interested in Ross' creative process, but if you are, the book would probably be even more enjoyable for you. I also picked up a bit more DC canon, which was nice, and put images to some of the names I've seen elsewhere. Like Justice League, the paintings reminded me that, despite my flirtation with Smallville, my heart will always belong to the Batman.
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead: This book is Card's biggest answer to the question "What happened to Ender Wiggins after the Xenocide?" What happened is that Ender became a Speaker for the Dead, someone who tells the story of a dead person's life with total honesty, which turns out to be a cathartic experience for those left behind. I'm not sure it would really work that way, but it makes for a satisfying narrative, when Ender arrives on a world with another alien population. The aliens - piggies - have killed a human researcher in horrible, painful fashion, but their society is so unintelligible to humans that no one is sure why. When Ender arrives to speak the death of the researcher, time dilation means he arrives just after the death of another man, an abusive husband to one of the human colony's key researchers. He's drawn to the widow - the woman who, as a young girl, first called him to the world - and to her many children, all of whom need different help in grieving and forgiving themselves and their father. The characters are generally interesting, and Card makes what seems like a good stab at the concept of a truly alien value system - though of course it's a fictional system that ultimately comes out of a human mind, and so might not have any lessons for us at all about the nature of consciousness/morality generally. Card wraps things up a bit too neatly, I thought, giving everybody a satisfying ending, but maybe he just wanted to be nice to Ender after so much suffering.
Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless: Wow, it's been a long time since I read an Adams book. Straight-faced recountings of the utterly bizarre were an Adams standard, and the book certainly has that, what with Ford Prefect arriving at the Hitchhiker's Guide headquarters to discover that it has been taken over by the forces of darkness and accounting, stealing the next edition of the Guide (which, because it exists in every dimension, has only one copy), and jumping out a high window not once but twice - this is the best set piece in the book, and it rolls merrily along. Meanwhile, Arthur Dent tries to find a place like home, fails in some interesting ways, and then, just when he's settled down to a nice life making sandwiches out of Utterly Normal Beasts, along comes the daughter he never knew he had. Somehow, now that I've read Terry Pratchett, Adams seems to lack something - maybe a sort of fundamental respect for his characters' hopes and dreams, no matter how absurd their world; they seem to exist just for our amusement, and Pratchett's seem more likely to go on living behind our backs, when the books are shut. Still, I found myself quoting Adams's discussion of climate-controlled buildings whose windows are built so they can't be opened, with predictable consequences when the climate isn't controlled, so I can't say I was disappointed.
Ken Macleod, Engine City: I slipped up and bought this, the last book in a somewhat loosely connected trilogy, before the others, so I probably missed out on some nuances. The story involves several varieties of humanity in the distant future, some of which are still preparing to fend off the attack of spidery aliens who've caused significant problems before, and some of whom find an interesting separate peace with said aliens. Macleod does a decent job of showing each side's reasoning, though I never felt much connection to the characters as people rather than as representatives of different perspectives. The second half of the book, in which a revolutionary government that rose in the first half has changed over time into a dictatorship, is more promising than the first half, which mostly involves getting people into place, but I didn't think enough time was spent on the details of the new regime to make it truly engaging.
Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God: What if aliens arrived on earth and asked to talk to our paleontologists? What if it turned out they did that because they believed in the existence of God and wanted more confirmation? I feel like a broken record on the subject of Sawyer: great ideas, difficulty on the dismount. This time, the difficulty is bound up with the theological - Graham Greene managed to write a good book about religious belief without alienating me, who doesn't believe what Greene did, but Sawyer shifts from arguments based on science to a deus ex machina (deus ex scripta? I lack the necessary Latin) that completely alienated me, no pun intended, and made the science that came before seem like a lie, like he didn't believe that the science argued for the existence of an intelligent designer the way his characters had persuasively suggested. Maybe the real problem is that believers don't believe; they know, and thus all debates on the subject are bound to be dissatisfying.
Michael Marshall, The Upright Man: I wish Michael Marshall would get back to sf, which he writes as Michael Marshall Smith, and where his noirish style interacts wonderfully with the intelligent refrigerators and handicapped clones who populate his stories. It's odd that this book seems to be getting heavier promotion than his earlier novel The Straw Men, because this would make a pretty bad introduction to Marshall. This non-sf thriller (with only a hint of the possibility of the fantastic) will make very little sense unless you have read The Straw Men; even though I had, it was a while ago and it took me several hundred pages to remember the necessary information. Also, unlike the first book, this one didn't have a motivating idea; things happened because the bad guy was a bad guy, albeit a genius, not much different from your average serial killer beach book. Quotes I liked: "She was the only one of us still latched into anything real-world, and I got the sense she was drifting, like a plug slowly being drawn from a socket. I knew from experience that once this happens the shapes can subtly change, and you may find you don't fit back again. The huddled forms on every street corner and in each piss-reeking doorway show that the music of civilization stops often, and there are never quite enough chairs." Also, when one character pulls a rifle out of a car trunk and another asks what he's doing: "'The forest can be dangerous,' he said. 'It certainly is now,' Tom said." Good point.
Carol Berg, Son of Avonar: Berg's previous books, a slashy, hurt-comfort trilogy and a romance with dragons, have a lot of good elements (the trilogy more than the dragons), but she hasn't quite taken that final step to fully satisfactory epic fantasy. This time, her story involves a disgraced noblewoman, now living as a peasant because her husband was convicted of sorcery, and the strange, wounded man she rescues from her former fellows who seems to have a connection to the world of sorcery, if only he could figure out what it was. The setup was interesting, but there was a huge structural flaw in the novel: a few hundred pages in, we go into a hundred-page flashback, which really disrupted the flow of the story, especially since the key points had already been introduced in briefer summary, so I just wanted her to get over with it and get back to the story's present day, where a lot of cliffs were hanging. The ending also stumbled, since Berg seemed determined to tie everything up far too neatly, but the minor characters were nicely human, with believable motivations and confusions, especially the narrator's estranged brother. First in a promised trilogy, but thankfully stands on its own. Verdict: for serious fantasy fans, probably worth it, but not something to go out of your way to read.
Billy Collins, Nine Horses and Questions About Angels: Collins is America's poet laureate; he writes poems about everyday experience in everyday language, often with humor ("Is there any part of the devil's body/that has not been used to name/some feature of the American topography ..."). "To My Patron," for example, is a list of requests, disclaimed as they escalate ("All I need is a pen/ ... Of course, an oak desk would be nice/ ... And I would not turn down a house/ ... Now if you wouldn't mind/leaving me alone--/ ... I will get back to work on my long metrical poem,/the one I will recite to the cheering throng/prior to your impending beheading."). I found the books quite enjoyable.
Robert Sawyer, Humans: This is the second novel of a trilogy about coming into contact with an alternate Earth, on which Neanderthals were the ones to survive and develop an advanced technological society. Their society is in fact a lot nicer than ours, due in part to their sensitive noses which deterred widespread adoption of fossil fuels and in part to a massive eugenics program to eliminate violent tendencies in the population, supplemented by constant surveillance that prevents any crime from going undetected. Sawyer makes some noises about privacy, but never really makes the affirmative case for it; thus, the Neanderthal society seems foreign, but superior in every way. In this volume, first contact gives way to the beginning of trade, as a homo sapiens and a Neanderthal try to work out a more personal relationship. There were fewer ideas in this book than in the first, but maybe the third book will return to the interesting speculation of the first. What really shocked me was the explicit sex scene, which I'm pretty sure is a first for Sawyer. Sawyer is usually more in the Heinlein juvenelia vein; it was like opening Tunnel in the Sky and getting Friday. This greater attention to sexual descriptions in non-romance fiction seems like a real cultural shift; I've seen it in a fair number of recent books now, by authors who didn't formerly write sex scenes.
Scott Mackay, Omnifix: I think I bought this before I actually read the other Mackay book I had, The Meek. Either that or I got Mackay confused with Scott Westerfeld, whose books I've found interesting in the past. Anyhow, Mackay's problem is different than Robert Sawyer's (who gives two blurbs for this book, one on front and one on back). Like Sawyer, Mackay has great ideas, but where Sawyer fumbles on the follow-through, Mackay doesn't even fully execute the pitch - if that's the right metaphor; I'm not good with sports. Anyhow, the idea here is that aliens have been sending weapons into the solar system for decades. The most recent contained bioweapons 16 and 17, both of which are still doing horrible damage to their victims - 16 causes rapid, horrendous physical degeneration by age 30, and 17 eats away the body bit by bit, saving the brain for last. Humanity hasn't been able to do anything about 16, but for 17 there's Omnifix, which slowly replaces the deteriorating human bits with mechanical substitutes. The protagonist is a specialist in alien weaponry, and he's also a member of a powerful political family, and the confluence causes him problems. Now, it sounds as if Mackay starts in media res, and he sort of does; we never find out about bioweapons 1 through 15, which is a neat idea. But otherwise, Mackay either thinks his readers are idiots or never gave this book to an editor, because information is constantly repeated. On p.23: "I like to think that's all ancient history, but maybe it's not. Let's face it, my dad tried to block his rise to power." Another character, on p.29: "I can't help thinking of your father…. How he tried to block Graham's rise to power all those years ago." As this example shows, often Mackay reuses the same phrases, which increases the annoyance factor. And, as this example also shows, the characters have a bad case of expositionitis. In TV, I imagine that it can be hard to get information to viewers without expository dialogue, but Mackay could have kept this rot out of characters' mouths at least. This book is the most convincing argument for reading your dialogue to yourself out loud that I've seen in a while; it's also an argument for testing your dialogue with a version of the Chinese fortune cookie "in bed" game. If adding "As you know," to the beginning of a character's statement gives the statement a coherent and correct meaning, cut the damn statement. So, at the risk of violating my own rules, what I'm saying here is that I didn't like the book. And that's a shame, because it could have been good.