Destination: Void

Although we have a limited setting and a small cast of characters, this isn’t to be mistaken for a diorama. Our characters aren’t very fleshed out, and we never really get inside their heads – this is a screen on which to project artificial intelligence. To borrow a metaphor from the book, this is tossing ink on a spider’s web.

From a hard science fiction point of view, the plot here is a little silly – a project based on the Moon is sending out ships full of clones that will be destroyed if they get too close to unleashing something terrible upon humanity? That’s either a colossal waste of resources, or, if the resources are as cheap as the book seems to imply, a colossal waste of time, since if the resources are practically infinite, why bother? One could argue that the development of AI is so important that the researchers involved are willing to throw these resources at it even though they themselves, nor anyone on Earth, will ever benefit, but even that generous reading strains credulity, given what we see in the prologue.

What Herbert does best (as he does in Dune) is the contrast between internal and external dialogue – unfortunately, even with the deception and lies of omission there, there really isn’t a large amount of tension (and that’s with one of the crew being a potential traitor). Secondly, the problems the makeshift crew have with piloting and navigating the ship never seem to rise to the level of critical – Herbert attempts to convey the stress caused by sitting at the bridge, and how some problems simply can’t be diagnosed with the equipment they have on hand, but it never seems quite right, and while the stakes are represented as high, the behavior is not.

The behavior of the crew isn’t necessarily what would be expected, either, given the circumstances. The action begins in media res, with three of the six original crew members dead. They choose to wake only one replacement from the hibernation tanks, in a decision that isn’t really too deeply touched on. There’s also a weird thread of sexual undertone running through the novel, which almost makes it seem as though Herbert cut a more fully formed romantic subplot when he updated the novel (for developments in the field of psychiatry, but what author can’t be tempted to edit what didn’t work?)

I probably would recommend this – even with the problems above, and an ending that feels tacked on (like Dune), this is a fun ride. Is it perfect? No. It works better as an adventure story than a parable or a warning, and after Dune, I don't feel compelled to seek out the sequels.

Dilvish, the Damned/The Changing Land

Dilvish the Damned was not written as a novel; it’s a collection of linked stories featuring the same protagonist. The framing device reads as episodic, as we skip what would be major plot points in another novel. 

Each “chapter” of Dilvish, the Damned begins in media res – since these are all linked short stories, we get a “novel” with the device of significant events being elided. One story will be looking towards overcoming a particular obstacle – and then the story afterwards will be set after the obstacle has been overcome. It’s less a novel than a linked series of vignettes. It works, but it’s not quite a unique enough device to not make me wish that the story was more conventionally told.

The Changing Land is set as a sequel to Dilvish, the Damned, and is written as a novel, so it’s a little less frustrating to follow. It’s essentially a dungeon crawl, which is both kind of cool and, given Zelazny’s inclusion on the recommend reading list to the initial Dungeons & Dragons, unsurprising.

Dilvish is your typical Zelazny protagonist – hypercompetent, wisecracking, notorious. If the first novel hadn’t grown out of short stories, I’d question whether he really needs two novels devoted to his arc. Not that the novels aren’t fun – they certainly are, even if they’re markedly different in tone and pacing.

The ending of each book is a little disappointing, and almost makes me wish that Dilvish hadn’t gotten a resolution, and that Zelazny had continued to flesh out the world.

2016 Reads that I did not write up

Roger Zelazny - Dilvish, the Damned, and The Changing Land
Frank Herbert - Destination: Void
Matt Ruff - The Mirage
Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart


 I'll try to get to all of these in the upcoming weeks.

A Little Lumpen Novelita

For a novel that begins with ". . .not long ago I led a life of crime.", this is banal. Of course, that's what Bolaño traffics in.

The treatment of sex in A Little Lumpen Novelita is a sharp contrast between how it's treated in Jim Harrison's The Big Seven. Our narrator here treats sex almost as something that just happens, even if she initiates it. It's not an all consuming drive, or a constant thought. If there are details, they're clinical, as opposed to gratuitous.

Bolaño's work is both realistic and dreamlike for me because there isn't necessarily a clean break or a turning point -- things just kind of peter out. The randomness gives the work a verisimilitude that more classically delineated novels lack.

That said, there's just not a lot here. Maybe that's something I should have expected, given the title. Not that it's bad by any means -- it just feels a little misshapen and abrupt.

The Big Seven

The Big Seven is a little ridiculous. Maybe more than a little ridiculous. Harrison pitched it as a "faux mystery" because the mystery isn't necessarily the point, and I can buy that. Unfortunately, the point appears to be to wander through the head of a sex-obsessed retired cop.

The Big Seven is a meditation on the twilight of one's life, on sex, on violence, and man's inability to change. There isn't exactly depth here -- the man whose psyche we spend the novel rattling around in isn't a deep or a profound thinker, even if he is very well read. I assume there's more than a little of Harrison in that.

I don't know how representative this is of Harrison's work in general -- I'll have to give him another chance, because this didn't totally grab me.

Inverted World

Christopher Priest's Inverted World is one of the few works of hard science fiction that I would consider recommending to those who are not avid readers of the genre, because I feel it works for several reasons, and the science fiction-related payoff isn't the main one.

There are several inversions here. The first, and most obvious one, is that our narrator lives in a city called "Earth" that moves on rails through the landscape of the unnamed planet the novel is set on.

The second, and more subtle one, is how this could be, in the hands of another author, a bildungsroman. It isn't. Our narrator doesn't change and grow, despite the fantastic experiences he has. In a different novel, he's the one delivering the stirring and revelatory speech towards the end. In this, he isn't.

One of the unusual devices in Inverted World is that the point of view shifts several times, from first to third person, and back again. While several points later in the novel wouldn't work if Priest had stuck with first, it feels a little ungainly.

There were times that I wished this wasn't a hard science fiction novel, but the entire thrust of the story doesn't necessarily work without the reveal on what's happening, how, and why. I just wish there was a better way to deliver it other than an exposition dump.

Inverted World definitely works well, but I can't help but feel that there's an even better novel in here that another author (or Priest, at another point in his career) could have gotten out. Still, would recommend.

The Third Reich

I was remarkably disappointed that the board game at the center of The Third Reich appears to be a real one, and that Bolaño has rendered the rules essentially faithfully. While the story does work with the real game, it doesn't need the game to be real. (With a different author, the game gets more elaborate, more complex, more involved, until Udo actually is commanding the armies of the Third Reich. But that's a novel that would be a lot different than this one, and more than likely, appreciably worse.)

In this novel, Bolaño explores the boundaries between constructs and reality, responsibility for history, and the hold memory (both cultural and personal) has on us.

Udo, our protagonist, is a bright guy, but he's not quite that bright. He doesn't seem to grasp the history here (at least he's on holiday in Spain, rather than another country), or that he's not always two moves ahead of everyone else. Sure, being the German champion of this particular wargame does mean you're a bright guy, but Udo seems to think it means he's always the smartest man in the room.

This meanders in a bit of a dreamscape for awhile, but it doesn't really come to a climax -- it just kind of peters out. The framing device of the novel (that this is a diary the protagonist is keeping so his writing will be better in the future) is transparently funny, given that this is something written earlier in the author's career.

The Iowa Baseball Confederacy

I wish I'd read this book when I was 16 years old -- it's the kind of book that can make a fantastic impression on a kid. Unfortunately, reading it later in life takes out some of the unbridled joy that I think I would have felt reading this as a kid. I wonder if there's a better novel lurking in here -- one where Kinsella shows, rather than tells.

Not that this was unenjoyable, I just think this could have been more than it was.

The Trial

The Trial reads like a nightmare or a joke, and for some time, our protagonist is convinced that fun is being had at his expense. Kafka is often read (to the chagrin of the writer of the introduction) as allegory, but this can be read straight.

There's a feeling of inevitability here, as the machinery grinds on Josef K until we reach our conclusion -- he's never as in control as he seems to think he is.

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me

I was pretty skeptical about this anthology, but it was no more uneven than most others, and there were some standouts here.

Alissa Nutting's "The Brother and the Bird" gives the volume its title, Brian Evenson's "Dapplegrim" is a compelling take on a story with which I was until now unfamiliar, and Aimee Bender's "The Color Master" was a quite evocative.

It was really interesting to see a lot of stories that I was not familiar with, even in the European tradition, and see several disparate takes on the same tale.

Worth paging through, at least.

Angelmaker

Angelmaker isn't anything groundbreaking, but it's a lot of fun. A story of a man rebuking his father's criminal past by living a straight-and-narrow lifestyle, of an aged former spy trying to stop a Doomsday Device, and a mysterious order of monks.

Nick Harkaway names his protagonist "Joe Spork," and then never comments on the name further, other than to lay out Joe's ancestry (father, career criminal, mother, joined a convent within the past ten years, grandfather, a clockmaker and artisan, grandmother, mysteriously absent.) Joe's ancestry sets up a tension that's central to his chapters: his repudiation of his father's criminal ways, and his embracing his grandfather's honest living, makes it tougher for him to deal with the problems that crop up throughout the course of the novel; what to do when you need information, and your best sources of that are from a past where your father was a notorious gangster?

Unfortunately, this dilemma is more or less all the characterization we get on our protagonist, who is overshadowed by supporting characters, such as the elderly former spy, her cartoonish nemesis, and an underworld figure or two. We even get a love interest who's nearly as much of a blank slate as Joe is. Luckily, this isn't a deep, psychological novel where that would be a killing blow; it's pulpy fun, and that's merely a minor negative here.

The Buried Giant

One of the perks of being a respected author is that you don't wind up in the fantasy ghetto, even if you write what looks like a fantasy novel. I would argue that The Buried Giant, while set in a fantasy world, isn't so much a fantasy novel as it is an allegory; for memory, and for a long-term relationship.

The Buried Giant plays with Arthurian legend, but just as scaffolding; the story could be set in any other country, with another set of mythology. The real story here is between the aged married couple, Axl and Beatrice (which, as our author notes "[p]erhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them.") Our story begins with Axl and Beatrice in their village, where they are disrespected and mistreated, so they decide to journey to their son's village, despite having little memory of him, where the village is, or if he'd be happy to see them.

Axl and Beatrice (as well as nearly everyone else we encounter in the story) have problems with memory; events that occur mere hours earlier fade in people's minds, and events of a few weeks ago are all but gone, unless prompted by others. Why and how is slowly revealed over the course of the story, as Axl and Beatrice travel their (limited) world, in search of their son's village (which is described as a few day's walk away).

I read a review which describes The Buried Giant as "Game of Thrones with a conscience," which I can't agree with; this isn't a large, lush, fleshed out fantasy world, and Ishiguro isn't given to exposition dumps. Information is hinted at before being stated outright, and some things never do get stated or explained. This is done to underscore the fragility and transience of memory, even through the (foreshadowed and ambiguous) ending.

I think I'd like to revisit this again at some point -- a second look might make some things clearer.

The Six-Gun Tarot

I was recommended The Six-Gun Tarot by an AV Club review some time ago, and I'm glad I picked it up. It's a fun Western fantasy set in a world much like ours, but not quite. (Actually, it almost feels like it is set in our world, just with Golgotha soaking up all the fantasy elements before they get to the rest of us.)

Golgotha is a very hodgepodge Western fantasy setting; there's a Chinatown, Mormons, Indian legends, other religious trappings, heads in jars, a member of an ancient order of assassins, and some sort of Lovecraftian horror. That sounds kitchen sink-y as all hell, and it's a credit to Belcher that he pulls it off.

Some criticisms: the book feels almost episodic, in an in-media-res sense -- characters will refer to a wacky or supernatural event from the past, and it'll be just brushed aside. With juggling many characters and arcs, some of them can get a little bogged down. I'm not sure how I feel about the treatment of women here; there's one character whose entire life story feels like a tragedy, and another who feels like she never quite got where the author wanted her to go.

All in all, this is a fun fantasy novel that doesn't drag too much and is worth checking out.

McSweeney's 45

It's another anthology from McSweeney's, with dueling (ok, alternating) tales from a Bradbury anthology and a Hitchcock anthology. Some of them are classics (Bradbury's "The Pedestrian"), some are tediously long (Lucille Fletcher and Allan Ullman's "Sorry, Wrong Number"), one is out-of-place (John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio", while an excellent story, just doesn't quite feel like it belongs in here).

China Mieville's "The Design" is excellent and really impressed me, and Brian Evenson's "The Dust" certainly feels like it could be in a 50s/60s anthology. Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" is both terrifying and awful (and the machine described therein is featured in Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun). Julian May's "Dune Roller" is an example of a really worthwhile story I was previously unfamiliar with (more than likely because Hitchcock, rather than Bradbury, picked it, but it certainly could have been a Bradbury pick). In contrast, Benjamin Percy's "Suicide Woods" doesn't belong in here, both because it has little in common with the other stories in the anthology, and because it has far too much in common with stories in other McSweeney's anthologies. I feel like I've read it a dozen times previously, and that's not a good thing, either for it or those other stories.

Overall, recommended. Even the stories I was less than thrilled with are page turners (and as far as page turners, the last story enclosed here is terrifying, and has a lot in common with a favorite, Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit.")

Heart of a Dog

There's a reason this wasn't published in Russia until 1987, and it had nothing to do with the quality of this novel. Written during the height of the NEP period, it's a transparent satire of the life of both the arrivistes and the old money.

At first I thought this was going to be a work along the lines of Jack London, as it opens with the dog as the narrator. But it quickly moves to a third person perspective (although the changes in intelligence the dog undergoes would make for a challenging first "person" perspective).

The conceit of the story is that by transplanting certain parts (such as the pituitary gland) from a (recently deceased) human into an animal, the animal could gain human form and intelligence. Of course, the newly-human dog behaves exactly the way one would expect (crudely), and sides with his benefactors enemies.

It's an easy read, would recommend.

Live! From Planet Earth

There's a lot to unpack in Live! From Planet Earth, (a posthumous anthology of George Alec Effinger stories) but the most interesting ones are the O. Niemand stories (slightly less so their forerunner, "Two Sadnesses.")

The O. Niemand stories are a kind of shared universe story -- they're pastiches of famous American short story writers, set on an asteroid with a dome for life support. The stories have little to no commonality other than that -- they share the same world, but the characters from different stories never touch, or are even glimpsed in the periphery of the others' circles. The Ring Lardner takeoff "Two Bits" and the Twain sendup "The Wisdom of Having Money" are the best of these; the Hemingway bite ("Afternoon Under Glass") is quietly powerful.

Since this is an anthology selected by other writers and editors, we get a blurb at the beginning of each story. Some are more about the writer's connection with Effinger, others are more about the story they're nominally introducing. It's a nice touch, to humanize a man that we wouldn't otherwise know.

There are a few stories in here that aren't strictly science fiction -- "Housebound" is a treatment of agoraphobia, and "Glimmer, Glimmer" works as horror, but it's the same voice throughout. One of Effinger's touches is that even those we would think are the most competent are just as human and scared and fallible as the rest of us -- witness the President in "Solo in the Spotlight."

Not that this is perfect -- "Target: Berlin!" and "At the Bran Foundry" are both farces that don't entirely work for me. "All the Last Wars at Once" is a bit of one, but it absolutely does. "Everything But Honor" is a time travel story with a nice twist, with an ending that's . . .well, not perfect, but in the hands of someone else, it could have been very ugly. 
 
Effinger was a talent who died far too young, and this is absolutely worth picking up.

The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita is not the Faustian temptation story that I thought it would be. Nor is it the story you'd expect from "Satan appears in modern city, wreaks havoc". It's not a tragic love story, either, even if it hints at veering in that direction.

What we do get is Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem (first as a story a character is telling, then later as excerpts from a novel a different character had written). One of the fascinating things about this is how Bulgakov uses different, more obscure translations than we would expect; it's "Yershalaim" rather than "Jerusalem", "Yeshua Ha-Notsri" rather than "Jesus of Nazareth", and "Judas of Kerioth" rather than "Judas Iscariot." This device signals that this isn't quite the story as represented in the Gospels. Instead, it's a (plausible) accounting of a potential historical Jesus, his disciple (only one in The Master and Margarita), his betrayal, and his eventual execution. This story is interspersed with the contemporary action of the novel, that is the Prince of Darkness himself, and his retinue in 1930s/40s Moscow.

Said action entails the actions of the retinue of Professor Woland (a mysterious foreigner we meet in the first chapter, and who appears to be Satan): a man-sized cat, a fanged assassin, a freakishly tall fop, and a witch in and around Muscovite society. In short order, they take over an apartment (of a man who Woland corrects on the historicity of Jesus), organize a magic show which ends with half the audience in a state of undress, expose hypocrites, and get the one man who sees through it committed to an asylum.

Our title characters are introduced later in the narrative: we meet the Master in the asylum, when he's the neighbor of the character who's committed. We hear of Margarita through the story of his life he tells, but we don't meet her until much later in the novel.

Would recommend, as this is a variety of novels in one: that of the historical Jesus in Judea, a not-quite bildungsroman of the poet we meet early, a political satire, and a madcap adventure.

Civilwarland in Bad Decline

Sometimes it's interesting to see how a writer thinks, how their experiences shape their stories. The afterword to Civilwarland in Bad Decline is a little on the nose in that regard; George Saunders details what he was going through as he was writing these stories, how he was relatively broke, working a job he wasn't entirely enthused about, and worrying about how he would be able to provide for his family. In that light, the stories here about parents working a job they hate to support their children, worrying about failing their family, and actually failing to support their family are a lot more poignant.

Out of seven stories in this collection, four ("Civilwarland in Bad Decline", "The Wavemaker Falters", "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror", and "Bounty", as well as the bonus story "A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room") are set in amusement parks. Saunders cover this in the afterword, as well, as well as in an interview:

The truth is, I started writing theme park stories not out of thematic or political interest. I was just trying to divest myself of a certain tendency that I had, which was to be a stodgy, Hemingway-esque realist. I really loved Hemingway, so I wrote a lot of stuff in grad school that was kind of like Hemingway transplanted into my life, but somehow it didn't work. I noticed as a device if I set the story in a strange place, the language got a little more oomph in it. At first it was a way to keep myself honest, to keep me from falling back into this reactionary realist mode that I couldn't pull off. And at the time that I was working on the first book, I was also working at a company that was kind of squeezing the life out of me. It was one of those artistic accidents where I thought I was just doing something to be pragmatic, and then when I did it I could see all the political ramifications. So now I'm actually trying not to do those stories as much, but every so often one will hit me and it will seem like so much fun. It's a step up into that kind of weird fiction that's irresistible.

 The theme park stories are all a little different, of course: "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" is both funny and tragic as hell, as we see through the eyes of a downtrodden verisimilitude inspector who both hates and is lousy at his job, but sticks it out for the sake of his children (with a wife who no longer respects him). "The Wavemaker Falters" concerns a man who caused a tragedy losing the respect of his wife through dealing with it. Of the others, "Bounty" is the longest, and the most memorable; it deals with a dystopian future where society has broken down and where mutants, called "Flaweds" are second-class citizens: working menial jobs, or even enslaved. Unfortunately, it's the least tight of the stories here.

I would highly recommend this; all the stories are imaginative and effective.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Like all short story collections, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher has its ups and downs. There are a few that could be autobiographical ("Sorry to Disturb" and "How Shall I Know You?"). There's what may be a vampire story (or just an extended meditation on mortality) in "Terminus", and there's a story that was possibly written to indulge in a grammatical pun ("Comma", because of course).

There's at least one story in here that I'd never like to read again, which is "The Heart Fails Without Warning." (which, incidentally, is an incidence that occurs in one of the other stories) It's a look at a family dealing with one of their daughter's eating disorder, and it's unsettling as hell.

The class of the lot is the title story, which is (I believe) the only piece in this collection that was not previously published. It's oddly fascinating to read, given that it's a revenge fantasy for a certain class of British intellectual, and it's not played 100% straight (thankfully, because even if you believe Thatcher is odious, you have to wink a little, or it comes off as psychotic.)

This is very much worth reading -- the prose is both memorable and limpid, I knocked this out relatively quickly.

The Fall of Hyperion

The Fall of Hyperion suffers from the same issues of many other sequels -- answering questions is often less interesting than asking them, and resolving mysteries is often less interesting than letting them remain mysterious.

In The Fall of Hyperion we do get a resolution to the pilgrim's stories, although like the previous book, it's on a bit of a cliffhanger.

While Hyperion employed the conceit of each pilgrim telling their story to pass the time, in the style of Chaucer, this novel's conceit is that the pilgrim's experiences are relayed through the not-quite-dreams of another character, which is less engaging.

We also get a significant look at the Big Picture in the universe of the novel, which is interesting from a world-building perspective, but again less than perfect. Some of the actions of the antagonists seem a little too-clever-by-half, as well, sounding more like they have plot armor rather than actual decision making. (Some of this can be handwaved in-universe, but it's still weak, IMO)

Overall, this is a solid read, but not quite what Hyperion was.