Summer reading list?

I wonder that my reviews are getting briefer as time goes by.

I'll list the books read since the last post, and withhold their "ratings" if I'm not going to explain the reasons behind reacting the way that I did. Except for those that I loved, loved... And then set the stage for what I'd like to write on next ...

Since May I've been through:

Lyrical Ballads (1798 edition) - William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Paladin of Souls - Lois McMaster Bujold
The Yiddish Policman's Union - Michael Chabon
Rollback - Robert J. Sawyer
The Claw of the Conciliator - Gene Wolfe
The Sword of the Lictor - Gene Wolfe
The Citadel of the Autarch - Gene Wolfe
Tarzan of the Apes - Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tarzan gets the next word, because I'm fascinated by the thing.

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

A Wind in the Door - Madeleine L'Engle

(Apparently the edition that I picked up at a Victoria used-bookstore is somewhat unusual - pictured at right. I used to love these books when I was a kid: I remember asking at garage sales if they might by chance have "anything by Medeleine L'Engle?" Here's to a lovely story by a lovely person...)

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

(I know, I know - yes, it's true, I haven't read it yet. I know that I'm always excited about what I'm reading next but...)

Three Lines Free

Three mini-reviews amidst a busy season:

Donald Dudley - Roman Society

Not a light read, but a vast one... I can't comment on the scholarship, but the world painted here inflamed my imagination and cast my heart beyond the thousands of years: oh, the places I saw. Here I felt the sun of Lucretius' farm, I met briefly and humbly the ancient guide: Virgil. I thought on a sentry tower in rainy weather on Hadrian's wall. I thought on the sleeping dead in Pompeii. I pictured the sun-drenched construction of the Pont du Gard; I dreamed the slow gaze of the eye of the Pantheon... I rode the frontier and mouthed the words: "all things must pass!" while the walls fell and fired... Mostly, I thought long and often on the tides humanity, the ebb and flow of suffering and peace, of individual men and women throughout the ages dreaming themselves of arcadia, of love, of conquest, of war... Such a topic doesn't lend itself to brief reviews, or to light histories. Dudley, a peerless historian, follows his seminal work The Civilization of Rome with this text in which he treats the tides of philosophy, the lives, the personalities, the religion and art of the Republic and Empire. It takes some work, but the mind strains to take in the vista here presented. Can the importance of understanding the past be overstated? I'll avoid the trite: it cannot.

Final Grade: A-
Re-read? As a reference, I'm certain I'll be back.
Neil Gaiman - Sandman: The Dream Hunters

Apparently this work fits within the mythos of a comic book series created by Gaiman. It's also meant to stand alone as an illustrated novella. The book had sat on my shelf for years, and finally received the gaze of the random number generator. The tale: mediocre and forgettable. Gaiman is considered something of "rock star" in the modern Fantasy/SF genre. I'm not a groupie: I'll admit that straight-up. The tale is written as a pastiche of Japanese folk tales: folk tale it is not. I know that Gaiman is using the form as a vehicle for whatever it is he's trying to get across - mainly an air of mystical depth that doesn't materialize. That's what you get when you try to pastiche and don't respect the source material. Doesn't respect the source material? "Didn't Gaiman translate Princess Mononoke," you might ask? Don't get me started on the self-serving malarkey of an afterward that Gaiman pasted into the back of this work - which, when held to the slightest scrutiny, evaporated as the whole cloth it was. And then Gaiman has the moxy to sneer at his own preposterousness when confronted: read the first two paragraphs of the wikipedia entry.

Yoshitaka Amano's art is fine with some lovely highlights - the Fox and the Tanuki are gorgeous. Here, the art's interpretation of the text seems to me the work's primary merit. But Japan is perennially vogue, and it seems that if you stretch far enough, you can fit your brand over the frame. Do yourself a favor: forget that you read this review, and then go and buy any edition you can find of Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain) for a truly wonderful read. Why waste time on self-advertising?

Final Grade: Strictly B material
Re-Read? Back to the used-bookstore for you.

Robert Charles Wilson - Spin

What to write about this novel? It's been nearly a month since I finished - the images remain: a vast and bloody sun filling the sky as a man drives his dying childhood love across a desert... A vast arch in the cerulean sky above the Indian Ocean - the gateway to...

I continue to be exceedingly impressed with Wilson's work. I don't think my previous comparisons with Arthur C. Clarke are too fine. His characterization is true (mostly - I'll grant that this novel had some strictly "use" characters) - his writing gutsy and poignant, and his ideas - well, his ideas... I'm leaving too many ellipses lying about, which means that I think that you should read the book and that I shouldn't write much at all so that none of this harrowing tale is spoiled for you. Then call, and we'll talk about it all you like.

Final Grade: A
Re-Read? Yes - probably as part of dyad with the sequal that I just heard about: Axis

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

Roman Society - Donald Dudley

(Spin was wonderful, unwritten book reviews are now piling up, and I'm off to some NF reading for a change.)

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

Spin - Robert Charles Wilson

(Another Wilson novel in as many months - this challenge is sure making my reading less diverse... But hey, it's Wilson! Who's complaining?)

The Years of Rice and Salt: Contrapuntal Readings in Make-Believe History

Kim Stanley Robinson, for those who don't know, is the author who envisioned mankind's colonization of Mars over centuries; who read California's palm in three lovely novels. It's been said that a man's reach ought to exceed his grasp. In my experience, I'm not sure that I've seen the reach exceeded when it comes to our beloved "KSR"... For an author known for ambitious projects, this novel actually ends up feeling concise compared to some of the narratives we've aprpeciated in the past: a palm-of-hand story for Robinson, and author who likes his canvases big.

The Years of Rice and Salt starts with what every alternate history novel requires: a tantalizing question beginning with "What if..." In this sense, the alternate history sub-genre (a current golden child of mine) grasps the best of what Sci-Fi can be: a liberating palate, a space to explore "what-if" questions in ways that the new "Realism" can't facilitate. Think of The Left Hand of Darkness; think on Fahrenheit 451. In the special space of Science Fiction, just like the beloved special spaces of myth, of folktale, of "fairy tale," the project of understanding our worlds, inner and outer, carries on. What if a godly Gilgamesh was befriended by a bestial Enkidu? What if a Grendel so foul threatened hearth and home in an already harsh land - what would it take to stand against that sort of fear? "Science fiction" ain't new. In many ways, the so-called Realism (a moniker that is in itself nothing but suspect) is the new kid on the block. Robinson's "what-if," as part of this tradition, is entrancing: what if the Black Plague hadn't just crippled the Christian West in the 14th century - what if it had delivered a death blow? What then of Islam, of greater China, of South Asia, of the "Americas" even? How's that for an impertinent question?

Robinson essays to answer his query in an epic that spans a millennium. Robinson's novel might be considered a chronicle in the sense that we are permitted successive views of important happenings along a timeline. The central device here, used as Victorian novelists deployed "the letter" is Reincarnation. Robinson's characters are born and die over and again down through the centuries. The Bardo is the substrate from which the tales of the text are launched. At the end of lifetimes, the characters - tied together in a "familial" jati of souls - meet again in limbo to discuss, to remember, to prepare again to forget. I'll provide one hint that I didn't pick up on until late in the text: pay attention to the first letters of characters' names.

The epic begins on the shores of the Wasteland - the Mongolian horde butts up against the haunted desolation of an exterminated Europe. From there, the text proceeds in a series of remarkable journeys: Mecca to Manchuria, a new France(Firanja) to North America (Yingzhou in the novel), Kerala to the Orkneys. Robinson is our guide, showing us through the eyes of his migrant souls what this other Earth might look like. The project here is not anything as petty as Christian-bashing (as though you were worried): Robinson's history follows a remarkably similar course to the one we are familiar with. This is fair - and in itself a response to the West's solipsism. Exploration and colonization have similar effects. A renaissance is suitably stymied by reactionary forces of church and state. Industrialization leads to equally universal consequences - even more devastating in Robinson's capsized world. I'll leave it to your explorations to discover what forces rise and fall, what ideas flame about the globe...

OVeral, the novel is a lovely work. "Humanist" is a difficult word to avoid when describing the finished epic. Robinson seeks the heart of the matter: religion, ideology, politik aside ... what does the heart yearn for? Tolstoy reincarnated poses his question: "What do men live by?" I know, I know ... there is no "outside" ideology... But there is. The loveliness of the novel builds in the last few chapters. It's not all just vicarious tourism: Robinson's discussions on the meaning of history, the purpose of life, the distribution of finite resources in a finite world are worthwhile and carefully proposed. The building sense of grandeur in the simply human imperative - to always, always and forever try again was heartening and elevating. Robinson restrains himself and doesn't travel paths that we haven't: the text ends around the year 2000 in this other world, and that year looks in many ways similar, and in a few instructive ways more lovely and more terrible than the year 2000 that we knew. When it comes to a text like this, my summaries are cheap: you need to travel the lanes of time yourself. Resist the blurbs.

I need to say that I often wondered how a Muslim would respond to the novel. I can imagine that the experience of imagined history might be more jarring closer to home: a history, for instance, of a Mormon country in Western North America. This would be a good time to note that the novel's copyright is 2002 - a stitch in time as it were. I'd be curious to know how much of the text was completed before an early autumn day in 2001... Robinson's discussions seem respectful to me - he isn't arguing specific cosmology, but the ways in which people respond to divinity, to the sacred. The complaints raised by some of his characters are well-heeled in modernity, and at the same time his fondness for Sufism is again apparent (see his Mars Trilogy). Buddhism gets a more cursory treatment - Chan and Theravada are largely unmentioned. Hinduism is similarly glanced off. The Dao is set up as Islam's primary counterpoint, which works well in the text. One other thought: I need to state that I enjoyed the text, just like I enjoyed Mansfield Park, but I guiltily cringe knowing that Edward Said would have had a field day with this novel. Us Westerners: always tempted by that scimitar's edge of Orientalism.

I did enjoy The Years of Rice and Salt. It's not a light read, though it makes for compelling reading. I had few complaints. The reincarnation device made me interrogate my own ideas about the afterlife, the purpose of mortality: which seems to me part of the purpose of the text. What do we believe, and why? If you have good answers to these questions, you might find your own beliefs and hopes enriched through them contrapuntal harmonies... Robinson has created another beautiful thing.

Final Grade: A/A+
Re-read? once more through the Bardo... yes.

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters - Neil Gaiman

(From the author of Neverwhere, and American Gods...)

The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories

There was a time when we looked at the stars and we imagined worlds like ours - ready and waiting for us to walk out of the rocket doors. We imagined a cosmos full of pristine worlds, much like our lost Eden left-behind: new continents, new planets, a new frontier. We also imagined space filled with races that looked like us, or were enough like us, that all it would take for everyone to get along would be some time in mutual translation sessions.

Those days seem to have passed. Our imagined alien worlds have become more ... alien. We lean towards the likelihood that our delicate cradle, the Earth, is the only spot capable of fostering our kind of life. Even if free water, nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres, and carbon-based biology are out there, we can't deny that our organism would likely be poorly equipped to handle the biota, microscopic or otherwise, of an alien ecology.

Still, maybe we haven't forgotten the old dreams. They just seem much, much less likely. If, in the first place, we can even believe that we aren't alone. In an infinite universe, though, infinite possibility would seem to suggest that other life is "out there" even if you don't happen to believe in an infinite creation: we cannot reject the null hypothesis. And in all of that possibility, maybe there is a world out there, verdant under strange moons, where quiet oceans ebb and flow, and dewy grass-stuff awaits the first footfalls of a new Adam and a new Eve... Try and deny that it doesn't set your heart racing.

I had Anderson's The Queen of Air and Darkness on my shelf because it won the Hugo and Nebula for best Novella/Novelette. Anderson, better known for his works of Fantasy (The Broken Sword and A Midsummer Tempest), taps into a rich SF tradition in Queen's tales. These are stories of colonization, of pioneering, of pushing outwards away from the maddening crowd. Each story approaches the enterprise from a different angle. In most of the tales, humans find someone already there and then make difficult decisions - decisions that should make us feel uneasy, while in other tales things seem to work out as harmoniously as we could imagine. Anderson describes a galaxy in which mankind has left a crowded, wasted Earth on bootstrapped machines that take decades to reach even nearer stars. A minimum of equipment is carried along with the colonists, who are expected to establish basic industry from blueprints brought from their homeworld, and then redevelop - or not develop - their civilization as they see fit. Contact between worlds is tenuous, and visiting out of the question: cost and distance make interstellar travel a last resort. This is not a universe of recent Sci-Fi's FTL deus ex machine: taken into account, Anderson's galaxy may well be more realistic than first blush would suggest. FTL refers to vessels capable of traveling "faster-than-light" - a necessity in order to span the distances between stars that would otherwise take improbable amounts of time. FTL is variously explained in much contemporary Science Fiction by the use of fantastic devices and "drives."

After their long voyages in cryo-sleep, Anderson's colonists step off their rockets, more often than not into fresh, green grass. But then what? Should they stay? Is it right to start the whole thing over again? Are the old ways necessarily the good ways? What do the locals think of the newcomers? Can we live in peace? These are wide-eyed questions, pondered during a wide-eyed era. This is heady pre-New Wave stuff! If we don't believe in the simplicity of the questions anymore, at least the nostalgia for those days warms the blood: I think that on some level, we still want to believe... I'll admit that these stories, in some camps, might be called dated - while reading them Bradbury and Blish, and even a little Burroughs come to mind. But silver hair or no, that seems to me good company to keep. Are the scenarios likely? Yes and no, no different than their iconoclastic children's. Do they make for a worthwhile and enjoyable Science Fiction read? Absolutely! The title tale, the one that I've actually made little reference to, nearly overwhelms the reader with richness of description and imagination within the first two pages. Should it shock us that our dreams, our hopes of new worlds might reflect some of the things we dreamed of in the past - Thomas the Rhymer's traverse, for instance? The first story asks one clever question further: and what if this were manipulated...?

A disjointed review for a collection of tales that might be regarded themselves as variations on a theme. The theme is familiar I'll grant, but it's not one likely to be abandoned by the human imagination any time soon, and it's this familiarity that makes them read, for me at least, like SF comfort food. Bon apetit!

Final Grade: B+/A-
Re-read: Humid jungle night in Mexico? I'm there!

The Generator Speaks

Next train:

The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson

(disclosure: again, I haven't read a novel by Robinson that I didn't liked. Seriously, the Mars trilogy sprang from this man's pen! And now an alternate history of the world supposing that the Plague wiped out European civilization? Ambitious, yes. Credentials to pull it off? Also, yes.)

Galactic Pot Healer

We don't have to love everything the man wrote.

You have to admire Dick, though, for his vision. I get the sense, reading Galactic Pot Healer, that he had expected the work to come out vaster, more weighty than it did. Here, admirably, Dick tackles some of his favorite themes - the crushing weight of conformity, what it means to be useful v. what it means to create ... the nature of perfection. The problem is, clocking in at just under 200 pages, these vast ideas come off feeling a touch undercooked. There are moments of profundity, no doubt, but these are few, and seem to duck quickly off-stage as though embarrassed amidst the light hurly-burly of the rest of the novel. You know that friend that you have, who really means what he's saying about the terror of neo-liberalism, but can't help turning his convictions into purile jokes at the party because he doesn't want to be so gauche as to seem sincere? Yeah, that's what this book was like...

Galactic Pot Healer, which I, like you, originally assumed dealt with the interstellar medicinal qualities of marijuana, actually chronicles the existential traverse of one man from a future totalitarian Earth (about as bleak as you might expect from Dick) to a backwater planet where a vast, godlike alien has summoned him to help restore a sunken, mystical cathedral from the depths of a stygian sea. Along the way Dick makes his typical satirical jabs at authority - not hard enough to draw meaningful blood, but enough to identify the joker as a rebellious sort. Dick's protagonist muses over which seems worse: an impossible, mysterious quest, or a meaningless descent into madness as a cog in a broken machine called Earth. Is it better to burn out, or to fade away? The book proceeds because he chooses the quest, and we are introduced to a team of galactic experts assembled to provide different aspects of what at first blush appears to be an alien undersea archeological project. And then things get wierd. The rest of the novel's plot twists are more the surrealist variety... We likely all have our favorite modes of the Surreal (Make Mine Murakami!) and those surreal modes which seem jarring, manic and annoyingly self-indulgent (*cough* Vonnegut *cough* Slaughterhouse Five *cough*). Guess how I felt about the rest of the novel? Actually, later in the film I started to imagine scenes from the novel in terms of visuals from the conclusion of Miyazaki's Spirited Away... I'm not sure that's what Dick intended. And I liked Spirited Away way, way, way more... To the point that I began to think "I feel like dropping this silly novel and going to watch Spirited Away..."

I'd prefer not to resort to a silly review just because I felt that this was a silly novel. The protagonist in the novel's trade is that of a "pot healer," that is, he is able through some future technology to heal ceramics in such a way as to leave no trace of their former brokenness. Sound metaphoric? The alien female with whom he pairs' specialty is removing the age-old encrustations of coral from sunken relics. And beneath a vast ocean lies the mystical ruin of Heldscalla, the alien cathedral... The ocean threatens living death - an eternity of decay, without hope of release into nothingness. The godlike alien is compared again and again, annoyingly overtly to Faust, though I wonder just how familiar Dick was with that work - the comparison rang false. World-spanning themes like sacrifice, identity, and the magnificence of human imperfection are danced through: not laughed at, granted, but sort of waved at, as though from the window of a truck being driven by a rope-tailed Werj. There was plentious material here - and I scented some great ideas. But something about this soup just didn't marry. The prose was good, even haunting at times. The characters less good, and in the end the story just not very compelling.

I don't know, maybe the novel wasn't that bad. It's one of those books about which I'd say try for yourself and see what you think. And then not at all be surprised if it became your new favorite Dick novel, or if it caused you to swear off Science Fiction for a few months in disgust. All I know is that I saw potential, and then not much payoff. Which, in a sense, is what the book is about...

Final grade: B/B-
Re-read? Not likely.

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories - Poul Anderson

(title story won the Hugo for best Novella in 1972, and the Nebula for best Novelette in 1971)

What's the Big Deal about Pornography?

Well?

Pornography is a big deal, and a big deal not seen on this scale by a lot of other cultures in history. Whether you love it, or you hate it, most of us would admit that sexually explicit materials are available in our society, and to every segment of our society (including minors) in amounts likely never equaled in history. Yes, we have classical vedic art, yes we have Japanese woodcuts, yes we have erotic long poems from most cultures. And in the last century we've had print and celluloid media since pretty much the start. What Dr. Manning is talking about is the availability of high fidelity film and stills, along with text, available to every member of society, absolutely anonymously and absolutely free - on demand. As you may or may not know, such access is widespread - Dr. Manning quotes studies suggesting from 80-90% of High School students being exposed. And so the question is, what do we do with this information? How is this going to affect us as a culture? What about our values relating to sex and family life and gender and equality and even respect for other individuals? Is this not likely to cause exponentially more upheaval than the advent of a magic little pill did in the 1960's?

So, it is a big deal, and I tend to agree with Dr. Manning. Now, if you're looking for answers to some of the questions above, you'll get a cursory treatment of the sociological implications in Big Deal - other more meaty explications have been done and Manning references them, notably Pamela Paul's seminal Pornified (for which the wikipedia entry is somewhat pathetic given that this book in its time was itself a Big Deal). Manning's audience is teenagers, very few of whom are sociologists - very many of whom, though, are developing dangerous habits surrounding pornography. And so Manning targets her information at three classes of readers: accidental pornography viewers, habitual pornography viewers, and people who would like to support loved ones with destructive pornography habits.

Remembering her intended audience, problems with prose are made up for by Manning's sincerity. The text doesn't skirt the issues: it does drag out in the open something that blindsided and ensnared many of my generation. We didn't know! Our parents had no idea what was going on on the internet. The analogy, for some, would be similar to parents providing vending machines in their home that produced crystal meth, having been told that they only produced "healthy snacks." Again, and again, I hear stories about marriages and peers whose chains and suffering were forged during the 90's when we didn't yet have our wits about us. But someone had their wits about them... The multi-billion dollar industry that now grosses more than the top American tech firms combined (yes, I include Microsoft).

Manning provides strategies for the above mentioned classes of people affected by pornography. These seem helpful - especially useful was the chapter for parents looking to prevent the problem before it takes root. I continue to type "problem," because yes, I agree with Manning: modern pornography is a Big problem - and we understand but poorly how it will affect our homes and society, though she describes a few chilling indicators. A wise man recently spoke:

"Stay away from it! Avoid it like the plague because it is just as deadly, more so. The plague will destroy the body. Pornography will destroy the body and the soul. Stay away from it! It is as a great disease that is sweeping over the country and over the entire world. Avoid it! I repeat, avoid it!” (Gordon B. Hinckley, 1997)

Morality discussions aside, you don't have to agree with me to appreciate Manning's contribution. Even if you think that some pornography in moderation is alright, you must admit that parents should have tools to at least address this more-than-pressing issue in their homes. I liked Dr. Manning's book, and I appreciated her bravery - this will likely continue to be an unpopular subject. But the infernal thing about pornography is that, for those caught in its snare, its chains are forged in the very flesh, and despite the good advice available on the subject, despite the programs and steps, little apart from divine intervention is able to deliver the captives. And, to be honest, if you're not into the divine, a broad road of suffering and loss may well portend. Even AA recognizes reliance on a higher power.

I apologize for the grim review. While there is life, there is hope - this I believe. But I tend to believe that as individuals, men, women and families, we will all wash against this bleak shore at some time in our very modern lives, and we had best come prepared. Maybe with some hope, too, thanks to the rare voices of positive thinking and encouragement like Dr. Manning's.

But my friends, I say this: the dark Emperor has no clothes.

Not that our ultimate victory isn't foretold, of course...

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

Galactic Pot Healer - Phillip K. Dick

(what can I say? My blurb is already contaminated by having started to read the thing...)

Blind Lake

My reviews are piling up - I'm not sure why. But I should write something before I forge ahead with my reading... This year is different, no?

I'll come right out with it. I loved Blind Lake. I'll admit, I would have been surprised if I didn't at least like it. The author of Darwinia and Bios (not to mention the much lauded Spin, awaiting the attention of my generator...) has yet to provide much cause for disappointment. So, because of my admitted bias, I'll tell you why I liked it so much - I even made notes for this one!

I often proclaim that I'm not much of a "hard" science fiction fan: the "what if" is more important to me, always, than the "how." Wilson's novel deftly navigates both, and cleverly, yet effectively sidesteps some of the conflict. Blind Lake tells the story of a lockdown, in the dead of winter, at an experimental government astronomical station. The "Blind Lake" observatory utilizes "quantum organic computers" to visualize distant planets - that's right. I don't want to spoil too much, but the premise is too good not to explicate. In the near future, mankind has devoted immense resources to massive space telescope arrays: near-Earth planetary systems have been identified which seem capable of supporting life. But the arrays begin to fail, at once leaving important questions about the planets unanswered, and becoming the most costly pieces of space junk in history. To prop up the failing project, "quantum" evolving neuro-networks are applied to the job of sifting distortion from the signals being received from the arrays. The way that the self-evolving futuristic computers are able to do this is poorly understood. But when the telescopes themselves fail, but the pictures keep coming, only now "zoomed in" on the planet's surfaces: the process takes on a ghostly life of its own - no eyes, but the "machines" see. The Ghost in the Shell premise leads to a mysterious absolute quarantine that traps a group of journalists at the observatory. The ensuing tale is both a study of the humans marooned at Blind Lake, and the tale of what the inexplicable eyes begin to see...

This is a gorgeous novel with just enough technical information to be fascinating and mysterious at once, but in Wilson's developing style, never pretentious. A sense of wonder infuses the mystery of technology which man has created but cannot understand. Wilson's characterizations are engaging: I often think that a measure of a novel can be taken by how kindly its "villains" are treated. In Wilson's work, easy answers are hard to come by; characters ring true because we aren't asked to suspend disbelief in order to service paper-doll heroes and devils. None of the characters experience epiphany, none magically transform, but they act within the tale, and if they learn something along the way, maybe we do to.

Maybe the biggest reason that I like Wilson is his vision of the cosmos... In the works I've mentioned above, we are often left with the sense of a creation teeming with life: consciousness and "humanity" spread across the universe. I put "humanity" in quotation marks, because other life, obviously not human, is just a flawed, just as redeemable, just as miraculous. Wilson builds on the sort of Science Fiction written by one of my favorites, one of the "greats": Arthur C. Clarke, and his ideas about childhood's end... Wilson's visions are humble, compassionate, hopeful... The cosmology suggested by his works intersects with my own in a lot of ways: we both believe in worlds without end, lives without number, and mankind's destiny to grow into something else, something vast, and ultimately wiser than we are. Keep your post-apocalyptic wastelands - I live for this stuff! Wilson's future earth here is darker (the glimpses we are given of it) than some of his other novels have foreseen, but the contrast rings truer: the emphasis on individual choice seems braver, and the ambiguity of his characters' decisions feels familiar.

No, in my opinion it's no wonder this novel was nominated - I keep meaning to look back and see which novel actually won it in 2004. This is a novel that re-affirms what science fiction can be - not reliant on gimmicks, gizmos, the needlessly surreal; not cynical, but not naive. Wilson's writing gathers force with each passing novel - I think we are reading the works of a new "great" as they are being writ, and I certainly don't think that even that is high enough praise for this lovely, engrossing vision of ourselves, in the future.

Final Grade: A/A+

Re-read? You bet!

The Generator Speaks

Next train:

What's the Big Deal about Pornography? - Jill Manning


(The RCW was brilliant, as expected - review pending. And now for something a little different...)

Journey Into China

A short review for my shamelessly indulgent armchair travelguide. I'm a devout sinophile, since my late teens, and this glossy book was gorgeous dessert reading.

The text details the journeys of 10 or so National Geographic writers across China - each through vastly different terrain, cultural settings and experiences. The writing was done in the mid '80's, as near as I can tell, and I know that a lot has changed in the intervening 25 years. "A lot" may be an understatement. Even the land has changed since then - especially on the Yangtze, where the Three Gorges dam was still a pipe dream. Photography styles have changed too: we exepect bright, colorful panoramas - "splendor" - in our current glossies. The photographic style of the day was more restrained, more attuned to the monochromatic. Maybe that's just a by-product of everyone wearing those navy-blue state-issue jerseys in the photos.

Nevertheless, it was a lovely trip. I'm not off to China anytime soon, but I can't wait... The writing is a healthy mix of history, geography and travel anecdote. Attention is paid to the political climate, despite protestations to the contrary in the introduction - I suspect this was required, as in the mid 1980's foreign journalists were apparently accompanied everywhere by state escorts. Ahh, China... A journey along the great wall... Voyaging up the grand canal... The train to Yunnan... Far Kashgar! I'll see it with my own eyes sometime. For now, we have National Geographic.

Grade: A-

Re-read? Yup.

The Generator Speaks

Next train:

Blind Lake - Robert Charles Wilson

Expectations? I must admit, I haven't read an RCW that I didn't like...

The Doomsday Book - Elegy in a country churchyard...

The more days that pass since my completion of Connie Willis' The Doomsday Book, the less I find that I want to say about it. Was it an enjoyable read? The last 200 pages perhaps. Did I like it, all along its torpid meanderings? No, no I didn't. Maybe that phrase "torpid meanderings" is all that needs to be writ. Maybe I'm concerned that once I get rolling with "some" of what I though about this novel, I'll get carried away reviewing terrain that I'd just as soon be done with.

I don't feel like I need to warn of spoilers ahead, since all the information found here is also available on the back cover of the mass-market paperback edition. Along with a pithy comment about "the triumph of the human spirit..." I kid you not. Which may well be my greatest criticism of the text: the novel takes around 400 pages to get to the shocking revelation that we all expected on page one. The endless, tedious buildup to something that we already knew seems more than a little pointless. The characters certainly weren't well developed enough for us to care about their gradual realization of the situation. But I digress...

The Doomsday Book gives you two stories for the price of, well, like five better ones: a near-future narrative of an (*gasp*) influenza epidemic and subsequent government quarantine, and a 14th century narrative dealing with two weeks of, yes, the flu, as well as other more major illnesses encountered by the novel's young protagonist. Time travel has inexplicably been developed in a society that seems remarkably unchanged by and uninterested in the feat. One competing university faction recklessly hurls a 20 year old grad student, alone, into the 1300's. Was I the only person who thought this sounded like risky business, perhaps making it a little difficult to suspend disbelief? No, no I wasn't - in fact we put up with the rheumatic moaning of the novel's best supporting actor (of whom on completing the tome I feel I know little more about than I did in the first chapter) for most of the 300 pages not spent depicting just how banal the 1300's were. We're strung between endless worrying in the 21st century, and endless worrying in the 14th century, with very little action, character development or interesting ideas in between.

I must admit that Willis' account of the black plague was compelling. The final quarter of the novel that actually describes Kivrin's desperate struggle to save the pathetically flawed residents of her village was moving. As was, for me at least, the character of Father Roche: probably my favorite character in the novel. I could have done with much more of this: a fuller, more developed 14th century narrative - fuller development of Kivrin even. Or a shorter novel that poignently told the interesting story. A novel is a frame: the narrative begins and ends at carefully seleted points. Not so here. The text would have benefited from some significant cropping. I could have done with much, much less of unfunny, absurd "comic relief" and pointless, transparent "suspense" in the 21st century.

Maybe I was looking for something that wasn't there... Where was the "big idea?" Was it time travel? Was it that "folks is folks," even in the 14th century? Was it the human cost of epidemic disease? It certainly couldn't have been the painfully superficial musings about God, and bad things happening to good people...

I'm sorry - the Hugo/Nebula vein has provided some truly marvelous reading. It has also exalted some duds. I feel like I could go on with this review, but I'm just really ready to be done with this one...

Final Grade: B-
Re-read? No.

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

Journey Into China - National Geographic Society

Dated coffee-table book reading, anyone?

The Generator Speaks

Next train:

The Doomsday Book - Connie Willis

Farewell, My Lovely

“I thought of a lot of things. It got darker. The glare of the red neon sign spread farther and farther across the ceiling… I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room...”

What is it that so draws me into these novels? Have you read Raymond Chandler? He wrote Farewell, My Lovely in 1940, one year after crafting his masterful The Big Sleep. The exhaustingly lame schticks featuring solitary private detectives sitting behind their desks, cigarettes smoking through the slit-light of Venetian blinds are all pale shadows of Chandler’s Noir paladin, Phillip Marlowe. Here, in Chandler’s sodium-lit, Santa Ana scoured night streets of 1930’s Los Angeles, a truly 20^th century archetype is born… Something more than Byronic, he is our broken Lancelot, our Childe Rowland, yes, our Dante, and our street-running Leatherstocking with a gat. Ah, Marlowe… His name invokes stories told in the dark, our prow drifting down the widening estuary into the vast and savage night.

Chandler’s novels are written all in the first person, and Marlowe is our narrator. And oh, that voice… Marlowe transcends the merely hardboiled: he is eerily self-aware, a being of light in a sinner’s frame. The angels and demons about him discuss guts and brains and heart and blood and hate, but Marlowe knows only poetry:

“The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.”

His darkness is the seeping darkness of twentieth century cities, of Hopkins’ smeared and trodden world, of the rotten gridlines. But his victories are like no other – brilliantly individual – salvation, like suffering can only be personal. The darkness, in the end, sheds about him…

Am I making my case too strongly? Again, have you read Raymond Chandler?

In Farewell, My Lovely we follow Marlowe as he unravels the mystery of Moose Malloy. Chandler’s novel which begins in a lament over the second-class status of African Americans in 1930’s L.A, soon sees Marlowe slipping into a fog-drenched wonderland of gamblers and gigolos, predatory chorus girls, sea-spray and suburbs. Whole towns seem owned by mysterious kingpins berthed in offshore gambling palaces; allies arrive from unexpected quarters, and Marlowe suffers – oh, how he suffers – on the trail of a lost love, a job gone terribly wrong, a deadly mystic and Chinese jade. We meet Anne Riordan, Marlowe’s dark (or auburn as it were) angel. The eventual climax runs a whole quarter of the novel, and once Marlowe catches the scent, the final hunt is spellbinding.

When I write about Chandler, I run the risk of losing my footing in the crush of hyperbole. When people talk about “pulp” or “hardboiled” fiction, certain expectations arrange themselves. Chandler’s “hardboiled” is to his many imitators as a Bach organ concerto is to “chopsticks.” There I go again…

2009: In Review

The stats are finalized: it was a recession year. I would quip about it ... but then you reach a certain age and etc, etc. I keep statistics on the number of books I read in a year - I've kept them now for 5 years. How did 2009 rate? Not badly. I averaged around 3.6 books a month, down from last year's 3.8, but up from other years. The total was 43 titles, and did I enjoy reading them? I did.

Analysis? The last year of residency? College exams? Who knows - I read only a third of the titles during the first half of the year. Perhaps there's nothing more insightful to say than that more of my time is now my own, again.

High Points of 2009's Reading:

Jack Vance's Lyonesse Trilogy, that I read compulsively and considered driving through the night to Hornby Island just to pick up the final volume; my introduction to the poetry of W.H. Auden; re-reading Haruki Murakami's first short story collection in translation, The Elephant Vanishes - imagine your favorite meal, at your favorite restaurant, on a perfect day... In a world with few clear favorites, Murakami Haruki is and has been for many years now my favorite author in any language. I also had a powerful experience with Dante's Inferno.

Low Points of 2009's Reading:

James Tiptree Jr.'s Star Songs of an Old Primate: aside from the solid SF pulp in "Your Haploid Heart," the collection itself was a major disappointment - I'd forgotten how repulsive I find "Houston, Houston Do You Read?" The disappointment comes of regarding Tiptree's other work, like Tales of the Quintana Roo so highly. Also, Zelazny's The Dream Master was drab and uninteresting with the least sympathetic main character I can imagine.

2009's Interesting Reads:

Richard Lewontin's wonderful prose, and even more important ideas in It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions; also Victoria Freeman's astounding genealogical opus Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America. Thor Heyerdahl's seminal adventure diary The Kon-Tiki Expidition was marvelous and transporting, and leaves you feeling hopelessly melancholy that the world he describes vanished before you were born - a world in which people receive telegrams that read "Sailing home-made balsa raft from Peru to Micronesia, stop. Are you coming?" And last but not least, how long has it been since you read early Robert Frost, say A Boy's Will, aloud? Too long. That's the answer.

Up or down on the graph, 2009 was a good year of reading.