In the modern-day story, emotionally-damaged survivors of the war put a human face on a national ordeal. In Jaya’s epic kingdom-building tale — what I like to think of as Shogun, the Cambodian edition – the plot still comes down to individual human will and spirit. In the conquering of nations, sometimes even the lowliest slave has a necessary part to play.
Read my full review at AESciFi.
Viral programming has infants discussing Shakespeare, toddlers running storefronts or repairing sewage lines. But knowledge which is downloaded from a standard package rather than built up from individual experience creates a uniform way of thinking and being that is particularly frightening for outliers.
Read my full review at AESciFi.
I could make some surface comparisons to another critically-acclaimed debut from years past. Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon is also set some centuries hence, also takes place in a universe of heavy extra-terrestrial human colonization, and also features the altered social, legal, and economic dynamics of a humanity that’s bested mortality. But as excellent as Morgan’s post-cyberpunk whodunit is, comparing the two titles, even favourably, sells The Quantum Thief short.
The speculative fiction/noir crossover is not a new thing, from Jim Butcher’s private eye wizard to Neal Asher’s Agent Cormac to any number of genre-tinged Holmes pastiches. Maybe SF and Chandleresque plots just go together like peanut butter and chocolate. I’m sure not complaining. I devour these things.
But Quantum isn’t just a mystery. It’s a caper. And the thief and hero of this title, with the completely appropriate name of Jean le Flambeur, is more in the vein of Arsene Lupin than Marlowe.
Through alternating chapters with titles like “The Thief and the Goddess”, or “The Detective and the Chocolatier”, we follow the parallel stories of a master criminal, and the one man who may perhaps trap him.
At book’s opening, the titular thief is trapped in a literal prisoner’s dilemma. Once every hour, for a subjective near-eternity, he picks up a gun and either shoots or doesn’t shoot. This pseudo-virtual game of betrayal and co-operation with other prisoners is based on a genuine idea from game theory, along with a reasonable application of both conditioned response in psychology and evolutionary algorithms in computer programming. And this is just the first chapter!
In short order he’s been busted out and you don’t think about the dilemma prison for awhile. Yet it’s such a cool idea for something which is more of a prologue to the main story.
The book switches both between and within chapters from the thief’s first-person viewpoint to a third-person focus on his keeper, the mysterious Mieli, and his antagonist, the detective Isidore. Most of the story unfolds on a Martian city which has developed a rather unique privacy-based culture.
The Gevulot is a sensory- and memory-mediating technology which accomplishes everything from blurring out individuals who don’t wish to be noticed or recognized in public, to preventing which experiences an individual is allowed to remember after the fact. Combined with the Exomemory, which stores and encrypts everything anybody ever sees, the result is a world where personal information is both ubiquitous and unattainable.
The social protocols of such a society are weird but plausible. Although intensely private with strangers, citizens of the Oubliette (literally a place of forgetting) are capable of sharing thoughts and emotions directly, by granting access to memories. In fact, everything from street directions to meeting plans are frequently shared in the form of a co-memory, rather than words.
I haven’t even mentioned the other unique aspect about life on Mars. The only currency that matters is time. Everything from a cab ride to a valuable work of art is measured in kilo- or megaseconds. What happens when somebody runs out of time? They drop dead, wake up in a robot slave body, and spend a few years earning back the time to rejoin the human world.
The ideas are dense in this book, and the more you know about both the SF tropes and the actual science he extrapolates from, the more you can appreciate just how clever and thoughtful this first-timer’s writing is. But first and foremost, Rajaniemi always manages to keep moving the plot forward. It’s like fractal bonus material: read between the lines and these subtle throwaway references lead to deeper and more intricate implications, but gloss over them and the big picture remains intact.
(Another thing I like about this book is that the base science is fairly accurate: Flambeur literally is a quantum thief — by which I mean he commits quantum theft, not that he is himself a quantum object, although, in the dilemma prison, that’s arguably true as well.)
By the time I’d gotten a third of a way through the book, I was pretty hooked. Rajaniemi is aware of and respects his genre tropes, but there’s still so much in the world-building of this novel that seems, near as I can tell, wholly new. And there’s something refreshing about a future that isn’t just the American culture, redux. Who ever heard of looking to Provence for inspiration when imagining 25th-century Martian society? Apparently only a Fin living in Edinburgh.
(Tor, 2012)
Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review
An odd collaboration from two writers I wouldn’t have thought of putting together. Check out the Free Press to read my review of Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow’s fix-up novel.
“With a few exceptions, the sixteen stories in this collection exemplify well-grounded, character-driven fiction. While some of the stories fall squarely within the realm of speculative fiction, others could wear labels such as ‘slipstream’ or ‘magical realism’ just as comfortably.”
Read my full review of Geoff Ryman’s excellent story collection at AESciFi.
“I will tell you something else, King, which may be a surprise for you. It will not happen for hundreds of years, but both of us are to come back. Do you know what is going to be written on your tombstone? Hic jacet Arthurus Rex quondam Rexque futurus. Do you remember your Latin? It means, the once and future king.” -Merlin, in The Queen of Air and Darkness
I’m going to make a (I think) reasonable assumption here, that the reader is aware of basic Arthurian legend. Guinevere, Lancelot, Mordred, Morgause, and Morgan Le Fay. The Round Table, Holy Grail, and the sword called Excalibur. There will be some spoilers, some universal to the legend, perhaps one or two little ones specific to this particular book. If this concerns you, read no further.
T.H. White’s four-volume take on the Arthurian cycle draws heavily on the late-fifteenth century epic, Le Morte d’Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory. This in turn brought together in one place the myriad legends, songs, and poems, both French and English, about the mythical king and his knights. But in the half century and change since its publication, White’s tetralogy has almost certainly been the more widely read, if not amongst scholars of medieval literature.
The first part, originally published as a stand-alone novel, even inspired a feature-length animated film from Disney: The Sword in the Stone. It’s a natural fit. Though relatively lighthearted compared to later books, Arthurian legend is so deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of Western society, even young children certainly must pick up on the fact that great things are in store for the young Wart. Certainly that self-proclaimed nigromancer, the white-bearded Merlin, would not take such an interest in his tutouring otherwise.
The Once and Future King is certainly more readable (and several hundred pages shorter) than Malory’s tome (or so I suspect, not having read that work myself), but it’s not an abridged version, a children’s version, or an update with modern language. It’s an entirely new work of Arthurian fantasy, implicitly based on Le Morte d’Arthur as all such works must be, but even within the constraints of retelling this old story, somehow managing to tell a different one.
The titles themselves are revealing. The publisher gave Malory’s work as a whole the same title as the final section. To him (and to White, nearly five centuries later), the ultimate narrative arc was the slow playing out of Arthur’s inevitable tragedy. Themes of sin, doom, and fate pervade the work. Questions of morality, the right to rule, the possibility of change, are given short shrift.
But if Malory’s story was all about the ending, White’s was all about continuing on. The book’s closing chapter drops the curtains before Arthur strides out to his final battle, and the reader is reminded of Merlin’s promise. One day, returning perhaps from beyond the vail of Avalon, Arthur will rejoin the world and be king once again.
The Once and Future King is about the important lessons Arthur learned in his boyhood, and worked hard all his life to put into effect. It’s about how the world was different for his having lived in it. It’s about how, whether he comes back bodily or not, the spirit of Arthur is in all the good parts of humanity and governship today.
The morality in Le Morte is, at times, contradictory, ambiguous, or altogether absent. But White makes the assumption that there is a reason this man is special, beyond finding a magical sword and winning all his battles. He became king for a reason: to make things better. Consequently, he is far more interested in how Arthur strives to achieve this (and how, even today, we strive to achieve it) than in enemies slain or heads chopped off.
Despite this comparative optimism, White doesn’t shy away from the gruesome facts of the barbaric Britain in which his story is set. He avoids detail but states plainly that such things occur. He thoroughly demonstrates the point that might does not, and cannot make right. Simultaneously, he makes clear that finding a better way is an uphill battle. The world can get better. But it is a slow and painful process. Even for wizards, legendary kings, and the best knights the world has ever seen. Every single one of them, you see, is merely human.
The Once and Future King remains today, as the day it was first published, one of the very best works of fantasy ever written. An absolute must-have for any fantasist, literati, or parent. And the Ace hardcover is absolutely lovely.
(Ace, 2011)
Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review
David Brin offers a different take on the first contact novel. Read my review at the Free Press.
I don’t want to call Ryan Oakley’s 2012 Aurora nominee A Clockwork Orange 2.0. There are so many other ways to describe it: it’s raw and bloody; beautiful and horrific; staccato like a machine-gun; and as fresh as it is familiar. His homage to Burgess’ 1962 classic could hardly be more faithful, yet it stands alone, quintessentially a product of now, though with a degree of the timelessness which cemented that earlier novel as a classic.
Of course, [Jack] Vance’s brand of science fiction is atypical, to say the least. This story is among those possessing the least overtly fantastical elements of any of his work, and yet it still feels awfully fantastical. The alien culture he describes is stylish, exotic, perhaps vaguely politically anachronistic. In other words, it stands up against McCaffrey, Le Guin, or Lieber at their world-building best, possessing the same sort of fantasy sensibility one finds in his own cross-genre Dying Earth stories, though The Moon Moth is strictly free of supernatural elements.
Read my full review at Revolution Science Fiction.
Before its English-language release, even, in fact, before the original Japanese books were published, speculation ran rampant about this long novel. What would it be about? What did it have to do with George Orwell’s original work? What was the significance of the “Q”, replacing the nine of the original title?
Haruki Murakami is unquestionably the most well-known Japanese-language writer in the international literary scene. He’s also critically-acclaimed, having collected a litany of high-profile literary awards throughout the world. He’s made odds-makers short lists for the Nobel Prize in Literature the last several years, though he hasn’t won, yet.
1Q84 is a 900-page opus. Originally published in three volumes in Japan, the individual books really don’t stand alone. As with Tolkien’s “trilogy”, it was likely a question of length alone. The English translation has been published as a single volume in both Canada and the United States, by publishers Bond Street Books and Knopf, respectively.
The letter Q and the number 9 in Japanese are homonyms. Said out loud, the title of Murakami’s latest is identical to Orwell’s 1984, when the numbers are pronounced in Japanese. The attractive hardcover also has some unusual typesetting. The book title and page numbers are mirror-reversed on opposite pages. The Q suggests we are in a different world than that imagined by Orwell. The typesetting suggests we are in a different world from our own.
Set in 1984 Tokyo, the novel follows the stories of two apparently unconnected protagonists in alternating chapters. At the novel’s opening, Aomame is a young woman on her way to an important business meeting but is stuck in traffic on the expressway. Dressed smartly and professionally, she nevertheless takes the unorthodox action of leaving her taxi and climbing over the guard rail, climbing down a rickety emergency stairway in order to make her meeting on time. We soon discover why the timing was so important: she’s a professional hit-woman on her way to kill a man.
Tengo, by contrast, is a gentle young man meeting with his editor about an unusual manuscript submission for a literary contest. A part-time math instructor and technically-competent amateur writer, he pushes his editor to consider the unpolished, but compelling story as a finalist. There’s something . . . magical about it. But it will never win, as rough as it is. So his editor, completely disdainful of either convention or ethics, suggests Tengo secretly rewrite the whole thing for the original author, as part of a conspiracy between the three of them.
Tengo doesn’t realize what he is getting himself into with his decision to rewrite the novella, Air Chrysalis. He obtains the permission of its mysterious author, the 17-year-old Fuka-eri, but still feels uneasy. As he learns more about the girl and her history, he begins to suspect that the events of the story may not be entirely fiction.
A ten-year-old girl living in a frightening cult, locked up in an ice-cold shed for 10 days with a dead, blind goat as punishment for some religious transgression — the mysterious Little People who are neither good nor evil, but clearly dangerous — the air chrysalis, whose purpose is unclear: there are hints that these are more than the figments of a teenage girl’s imagination.
But it’s Aomame, who can hardly be said to have an ordinary life to begin with, who is the first to notice that things in the world seem slightly off. She starts noticing odd items in the news, references to both local and global events of the past few years that she can’t believe she wouldn’t have heard of before. A huge shoot-out between Japanese police and an armed radical group with far-reaching policy consequences. A major US-Soviet joint project in space, at the height of the Cold War.
Of course Murakami is known for taking us down the rabbit hole. In the magical realism tradition of Borges, and Kafka before him, the Japanese author’s approach is to simply introduce one inexplicable event after another into his characters’ lives. In fact, down the rabbit hole may not be the right analogy for 1Q84 at all. One can climb back out of a rabbit hole. It’s more like the world itself has been twisted askew — as if somebody turned a crank and reality was irreparably bent into a new shape.
It’s how his characters cope with these situations Murakami throws at them which makes the story. Aomame spends hours going through microfilmed periodicals at the library, sure that the world she lives in has subtly changed from what it was before. But all the newspapers, the history books, even the collective memories of humankind are all consistent with each other, so how can she be sure it wasn’t her own mind which suffered the catastrophic change? Orwell understood the importance of a collective understanding of truth: propaganda and false histories featured heavily in his novel. Unmoored from history, we are helplessly adrift.
Murakami has a tendency to spend pages describing the mundane day-to-day tasks of his characters. But it’s not long-windedness that causes him to describe in detail a trip to the grocery store, or the preparation of miso soup and grilled fish. The mundane in his fiction serves as a counter-point, placing in stark contrast the disequilibrium his characters must contend with as logic is suspended around them.
As in real-life, the emotional and intellectual challenges his characters face are not resolved over hours or days, but months. Close to a year goes by in the course of this novel, and indeed, this timescale is typical of Murakami. Meanwhile, life goes on. Chores must be performed, classes must be taught.
Murakami’s Japanese perspective combined with his deep knowledge and love of Western literature produce a voice that is utterly unique. Though magical realism in the tradition of Borges is a defining part of Murakami’s literary DNA, his plotting takes less from the Argentine writer than Raymond Chandler, master of the hard-boiled detective novel.
Unasked for, Murakami’s characters find themselves embroiled in mysteries as convoluted as Philip Marlowe’s. Their response, a resigned stoicism, is deeply Japanese. But read the author’s translation work for more hints. The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye — caught up in forces beyond their control, you can see Holden Caulfield’s aimless acceptance, Jay Gatsby’s guarded hope. “Fatalism tempered with optimism” is the best one-phrase description I’ve managed to come up with for Murakami’s work.
Is 1Q84 the career-defining masterpiece some were predicting it would be? I don’t feel qualified to say. I think it’s on a par with The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Kafka by the Shore, which I consider his strongest works to date. It’s connection to the original 1984 is . . . indirect.
Orwell’s great fear was a trend towards totalitarian government. Murakami focuses, albeit obliquely, on religious cults, a topic he has tackled in his non-fiction (Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack). Both types of institution enslave minds. But his intention is probably less a direct indictment of the cult mentality than a reiteration of the larger themes we’ve seen in his previous fiction: societal alienation; existential angst.
If Murakami is warning us about anything, it’s probably the dangers of becoming disconnected from our lives. Both political and religious extremism are, in that view, just symptoms of the problem.
(Bond Street Books, 2011)
Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review