As the follow-up to [Hannu Rajaniemi’s] much-lauded 2010 debut, The Quantum Thief, this sophomore effort had a lot to live up to. By and large, it delivers.
Find out how in my Free Press review.
Tag Archives: books
Book Review: Blood & Water
It’s not that dystopias are anything new, or even stories of environmental collapse. But the SF stories and novels of the last several years have to be placed differently than the catastrophes imagined in the 40s, or even the 70s and 80s.
We’re living in a heavily depressed economy. Our countries are waging resource wars. We’re seeing the effects of a changed climate. The stories written today . . . exist in a different real-world context, and therefore might be part of a new speculative genre that couldn’t have existed until recently.
Read my full review of this excellent Canadian anthology at AESciFi.
Tuesday Links (11/13/12)
The Hobbit In-Flight Safety Video: I want to fly New Zealand.
Sharknado!: Enough said, indeed.
Commodity Fantasy: “It’s important that such a work leave the reader a little unhappy, a little dissatisfied, a little edgy — and anxious to snatch up the next volume in the hope that it will provide the experience that the last book failed to. The more like a pack of cigarettes (if you’ve never smoked, trust me — cigarettes temporarily ease the craving but they never quite satisfy it) a commodity fantasy is, the more successful it will be.”
Book Review: The King’s Last Song
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.
Book Review: Wonderful Life with the Elements
One of the publicists at No Starch Press alerted me to this recent title, knowing my enthusiasm for the excellent Manga Guide science text series, whose English editions they publish. I was expecting this latest made-in-Japan outing to be similarly quirky, and it did not disappoint.
Would it have ever occurred to you to visualize the noble gases as afro-sporting Japanese men? It hadn’t crossed my mind, but after reading this book of comic-strip style element characters, now I can’t summon up xenon or helium without a full, puffy top. Halogens like chlorine, meanwhile, have a cueball look, while other chemical groups share anything from punk rock spikes to buzz-cuts.
On the other hand, each unique element is also dressed up in anything from an apron to a lab coat to a business suit — or even a simple pair of white underwear — depending on their most common uses. The basic idea of the book is to put the elements in a real-life context of where we’re most likely to encounter them, their important properties, and their uses and threats to people individually or society in general.
A slim read at 200 pages, just over half of this space is given over to brief descriptions of each element in a standardized format. A brief paragraph illuminates a few of the more significant facts of each type of atom, perhaps a bit of its history or important uses. Some other basic data (density, atomic mass, etc.) and an epigram also accompany each profile (radium is the element that “bit the hand that fed it”, no doubt a reference to Marie and Pierre Curie who discovered it, then perished from radiation poisoning), but the centerpiece is always the anthropomorphic sketch.
Other parts of the text include brief sections on the most expensive commercially available elements, elements necessary to human health, and an argument for rare element conservation as part of an ecologically-sustainable future. But the book is never text-heavy, and can be read from start to finish in just a few hours.
The central conceit is cute; an original approach to connecting the reader with abstract yet critical components of our world. It doesn’t make memorizing the periodic table a breeze (what could and who would?), but it has resulted in some patterns sticking in my head better than before. The fold-out poster-sized table is a nice bonus, though educators might be careful of how they use it, or images from the book itself, both of which sometimes contain some cartoonish male nudity (the Japanese simply aren’t as uptight about that stuff as us).
All in all, it makes for a fun little coffee-table book for either the chemically-minded or the simply curious.
(No Starch Press, 2012)
Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog
Book Review: The Child Garden
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.
Book Review: The Quantum Thief
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
Book Review: Rapture of the Nerds
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.
Book Review: Paradise Tales
“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.
Book Review: The Once and Future King
“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