Tag Archives: reviews

Plodding Publicist

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For the second time in a few months, I’ve had the same one-sided conversation with the same publicist from the same publishing house. One of the review publications to which I contribute received a press release asking for reviews, I volunteered to take a look, he proceeded to ignore the e-mail from my editor, the e-mail from me with my mailing address, the follow-up e-mail asking if he was still planning on sending it.

In both cases, the books are niche titles, an odd little non-fiction, and a translation from a foreign author that is not known here. These are the kinds of books that struggle to get enough exposure, and being one of eclectic interests, I try to do my part. Both times, the same series of e-mails from me to him. And never a response. Not one.

Now you know why you’ve never heard of these books. What a slacker.

Book Review: The Magicians

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It should be pointed out that The Magicians is not Lev Grossman’s first book. His previous novel, Codex, was a bestseller. Previous and coincident with that, he has been the book critic for Time magazine. I mention this because Grossman appeared on genre radars apparently out of nowhere with the original 2009 release of this novel, and has just been recognized with a Hugo Award for Best New Author. But his is a man who had some literary chops before he ever decided to write fantasy.

Little surprise, then, that Grossman acknowledges many of the classic fantasy tropes only to turn them upside down. A brief summary of the plot – a high-achieving Brooklyn teenager is accepted into America’s only college for magic – and you can see why so many of the blurbs mention Harry Potter. But this really isn’t Harry Potter for adults.

We do follow Quentin Coldwater through four years of intense study, and the usual social challenges of the academic elite, but then he is finished, and the question is, what now? Throughout, Quentin has triumphs, but we also see him screw everything up, like a low-speed train wreck, completely predictable but still entirely inevitable. From the beginning, he still thinks of the magical world of Fillory (Grossman’s take on Narnia), discovered through wardrobes and magic buttons, and gets angry at his own magical world for never quite measuring up.

The story is really about a guy who gets everything he thinks he wanted, the chance to live in the world of magic that obsessed him from childhood on, but keeps discovering that not only do “happily ever afters” not really exist, it’s sort of impossible to believe in them as an adult. Magic or no, life is gritty, dangerous, unfair, and nobody gets out of it alive. Coming to terms with that is a part of growing up.

Of course, our protagonist’s journey of self-discovery aside, the story really is magical. Sometimes depressing, horrific, or even mundane, but a compulsively readable, weekend escape, with subtly shaded characters, a very satisfying post-climax plot resolution, and many moments of pure wonder. It’s a rule of fantasy (and much literature) that its characters get beaten down, lose everything, and somehow, in the end, get the job done. But for the reader, the best fantasy is an emotional rescue if you need it, and an invigorating mental vacation otherwise.

The slightly paradoxical fact of this novel is that it’s all about exposing pat, escapist fantasy as a fraud, but in the end, its story – dark and gritty and emotionally genuine though it is – truly is a great escape. This doesn’t undermine Grossman’s message: it’s a great story but we wouldn’t really want to live there.

(Plume, 2010)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2011) The Green Man Review

Book Review: Among Others

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When Morwena arrives in England, she is nearly broken. Her twin sister is dead while she depends on a second-hand cane to walk. She has escaped her mad mother, who is also a witch, only to throw herself on the mercy of a father she has never known, in a place that will never be home. She misses Wales, with its fairies and secret paths, even after the nightmare she experienced there. In short order her father’s three sisters pack her off to a snooty English boarding school where she is outcast for having a limp, liking to read, and being Welsh. And here begins her journey to cope with what she’s lost, and slowly put the pieces of her life back together.

Mor tells her story via near-daily diary entries, over the course of most of a school year, with occasional flashbacks. We only slowly learn the details of what happened before the novel’s opening. Initially, we know that Mor and her sister, also Mor, managed to foil their mother’s dark plans but only at the cost of one of their lives. As the survivor, our Mor has the more difficult task: to continue on, to keep on living. She knows Tolkien would understand. Remember the “Scouring of the Shire”? He obviously knew about what comes after the final battle, about coping with life after saving the world, with surviving but losing everything else.

Among Others is very firmly rooted to a particular place and time – England (and Wales), in the autumn of 1979 – and to read this book is to be transported there. In fact, the book’s sense of reality is so strong that it’s difficult to figure out whether the magic and fairies Mor takes for granted are to be read as really existing or if Walton is employing the device of the unreliable narrator. Truthfully, Walton’s (presumably) accurate rendering of post-industrial Wales is one of factory pollution and semi-urban blight, and her portrait of the ’70s era British private school system is just about the least magical place you can imagine.

And since her conception of magic is something that is completely immeasurable (it may not work at all, or the thing you wanted to happen may occur, but you can never be sure if the magic caused it or it would have happened anyway), there’s a lot of ambiguity as to whether we’re actually reading a fantasy story or a very sad tale about a girl who imagines fairies and mistakenly believes that dropping a flower into a pool releases a spell that will change the world. I don’t usually like the meaning of a story to be so open to interpretation, but that’s entirely personal preference.

The real draw of the novel is Mor’s compelling voice. Ultimate, this is a coming-of-age story for a type of person many of us may relate to. While other girls at school worry about make-up and the boy of the week, Mor hangs out at libraries and bookshops, avidly reading all the science fiction and fantasy she can get her hands on. Books are her haven. Being an outsider seems inevitable, but little by little, Mor discovers that there is a place in the world for people like her, that like-minded people do exist.

Depending on how you read it, the totems and protection magic she uses to ward off her mother’s long tendrils may represent the power of books to serve as a shelter against an emotionally unstable childhood (and particularly an abusive parent). The ability to see fairies may represent either the sense of wonder that some of us lose, or the voracious curiosity that some of us allow to atrophy.

Walton’s knowledge and love of SF comes through in every page, and I suspect that Le Guin, Silverberg, and Heinlein also served as life-preservers during her own teen years. Mor’s regular musings on what she is reading make this book both a story about surviving life as a teen and a loving testament to the written works that make this possible.

I had some nitpicks. I thought the story started to drag a bit during the last third or so, when I found myself asking, “but is anything going to actually happen?” Plotwise, the pacing was slow, and the conclusion was somewhat anti-climactic. But when it comes down to it, this was one of the more readable books I’ve read in some time. I found I could pick it up and immediately fall into Mor’s world, even if I could only spare 10 minutes at a time. And the last line is absolutely brill. This is a book for anyone whose best friends have ever been fictional characters.

(Tor, 2011)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2011) The Green Man Review

Book Review: The Manga Guide to the Universe

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The Manga Guide series began modestly with a single title near the end of 2008, The Manga Guide to Statistics, and it was a surprise hit. Now here we are on book eight of the series, with book nine just around the corner. We’ve had Manga Guides to Databases, Calculus, and Molecular Biology. It seems there is no scientific topic that can’t be improved by adorable comic illustrations. Now we see if that even applies to the universe itself.

The premise is quite brilliant. Japanese high school students Yamane and Kanna are the only members of their struggling drama club. They’ve committed to putting on a show at an upcoming arts festival to justify their existence, but are at a loss as to what they will do. Just then, an American exchange student, Gloria, walks in, eager to join the club and displaying a deep enthusiasm for Japanese culture. The three of them put their heads together and settle on doing an adaptation of “The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter”, wherein a tiny girl is discovered inside a stalk of bamboo, only later to be discovered a princess of the moon.

There’s only one problem, this tenth-century tale needs some updating, today’s post-Apollo program audience won’t buy the idea of a kingdom on the moon. Yamane needs to update the story with a more distant, mysterious location. But knowing little about the heavens, more research is needed. Fortunately, Kanna’s brother is an astronomy major at the university, and his favourite professor is more than willing to share the wonders of the universe with an interested audience. But just how far will they need to go to find a home for their princess?

An introductory astronomy course or textbook normally surveys such a wide array of different disciplines and reasoning techniques that most of them can be covered only qualitatively. The hodge-podge nature of the topic thus provides a less obvious intellectual progression than something like molecular biology, calculus, or chemistry, wherein each new topic builds on a previous one. Ishikawa’s chosen narrative arc is both historical and natural to new students of astronomy, first focusing on the skies as seen from the Earth (especially our own moon), then expanding to the rest of the Solar System, our Milky Way Galaxy, other galaxies, and then the overall shape, history, and future of the universe as a whole. The final chapter discusses a number of open problems in astronomy, including the theory of other universes, and the mysteries of dark matter and energy.

Although I wasn’t expecting to learn about Japanese literature in this book, it was really a nice fit, and in retrospect, it’s quite natural to discuss how cultural views of celestial objects and the universe as a whole have changed over time. Ishikawa also ties the birth of new universes back to the original story in the final chapter in a brilliant and very satisfying way.

Throughout the book, we get a good view of why astronomers believed the universe was a particular way, as well as why they were proven wrong, from discarding the Earth-centered model, to recognizing the vastly greater distances of the stars compared to the relatively nearby objects of our Solar System. The text engages the reader with leading questions and logical implications, and the data and thought experiments are well served by the visual illustrations. Ishikawa uses both some classic analogies and some fresh, unique ones to get some difficult concepts across.

I was delighted that he also took time to cover some hot-button topics that a traditional textbook may have left out: Kanna discovers a UFO and by the end of a chapter, she has learned enough astronomy basics to figure out what it really was and why it seemed to be following her; the possibility of life either in our Solar System or elsewhere in the galaxy is discussed, including the specific details of our best nearby candidates, and the more general statistical argument made famous by Frank Drake.

The Manga Guide to the Universe is a perfect blend of lucidly argued basics and unfettered, cutting-edge possibility. One of the best yet in the series (which is saying a lot).

(No Starch Press, 2011)

Article first published as Manga Review: The Manga Guide to the Universe by Kenji Ishikawa on Blogcritics.

Among Other Things

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The very next morning from that previous post, I did indeed find Jo Walton’s novel waiting. I probably shouldn’t have let myself crack it open, because I’m already more than halfway done, and meanwhile I’ve left off other books I’ve been struggling to finish for awhile. Sometimes books can be hard work to get through and still be worth the effort, but there’s a heck of a lot to be said for something which is simply and only a pleasure and a joy to read, as Among Others is.

Think of Dan Brown. Most of the literati I know turn up their nose at The Da Vinci Code, but even if there isn’t much depth, writing a truly effective thriller like that, the consummate page-turner, requires a certain degree of technical skill that you don’t see that often. After all, even those “serious writers” would surely make their work as readable as possible (we’ll leave out the intentionally obfuscatory post-modernists and poets and essayists). Brown does one thing — suspense and climactic build-up — really well, and while his writing isn’t as smart as, say Ludlum’s, he still chose the write genre to let his light shine.

Just to clarify, Among Others is neither a thriller, nor is it shallow. It draws the reader in more via investment in the characters than a mile-a-minute plot. But it’s very readable, just the same. Definitely one of the best works of fiction I’ve read this year.

Busy, Busy, Busy

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I knocked off an article this weekend, though I’m not sure where I’m going to publish/pitch it yet. But I need to start knocking off some reviews this week, as I’ve received rather a lot of material recently. At the moment I have half a dozen books in hand, plus one game and a DVD set. I hope to get half of these done by month’s end.

I also have a few items in transit that may arrive any time. These actually include several fantasy books, although this is a genre I’ve read little of the last few years. Lev Grossman’s surprise hit, The Magicians, along with his just-released sequel, The Magician King, are both on their way. It’s supposed to be a sort of school of magic premise, but rather than being geared towards younger readers as the early Harry Potter books were, it’s a bit more adult, being an American college of magic, with older, rougher around the edges protagonists. I’ve heard enough good things about the books to be intrigued. (Edit: The 2011 Hugo Award winners have been announced, and Lev Grossman has been recognized as best new SF writer.)

Also on the way is a book I requested, Jo Walton’s Among Others. She’s also an author I’ve been hearing about a lot lately, and this particular novel, which sounds like it’s as much about the life of a speculative fiction fan as being a work of speculative fiction itself, sounds interestingly meta-fictional. Each of these may possibly fall into the young adult category, I’m not actually sure. If so, I wouldn’t consider that a strike against them in the slightest.

Anyway, I’ll post here as I get new reviews up, along with any other articles that may be of interest.

Science Fiction as Real Literature

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I have a number of reviews on the backburner, but one of the things I’m reading in-between is The Secret History of Science Fiction, an anthology with an agenda. The basic premise, as explained in that link, is that if Thomas Pynchon’s critically-acclaimed novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, had won the Nebula, rather than the much pulpier Rendezvous with Rama, maybe science fiction would have earned some degree of respectability. The person who originally put this argument forward was Jonathan Lethem, a writer known both in literary and sci-fi circles, and his short essay is reproduced here.

I got a little annoyed with Margaret Atwood a few years back when she stated that her excellent novel, Oryx and Crake, was not science fiction. I took that to mean that she felt she was too good to write that speculative stuff. It’s a great novel with important societal themes, but it is unquestionably science fiction. The decision to categorize books in a certain way is usually simply about marketing, and not determined by the author. But it can give the false impression that real literature is one category while science fiction is another.

In reality, quality writing, character-driven narratives, and social relevance can all be found both in and out of science fiction. Science fiction isn’t about style or substance, the only real requirements are that it asks some kind of speculative question and the universe follows rational laws.

Great examples of highly literary science fiction include some of Atwood’s works, another Canadian writer, Robert Charles Wilson’s works (particularly Spin), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s brilliant work, The Wind-Up Girl.

What about something like Slaughterhouse-Five, or Charles Yu’s debut novel, How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe (which I reviewed here), or even Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is as likely as not to be found in the literary or “chick lit” section? If you click that review link, you’ll see I argued that Yu’s novel, at least, is not science fiction.

Is that because the book is a little too post-modern, a little too emotionally immediate for science fiction? How else could a book about time-travel not be sci-fi? I must think that mature themes don’t fit into the genre, which must be limited to juvenile adventure fantasies geared towards 12-year-old boys. Well, no. I don’t consider it science fiction because the book is very self-referential, contains aspects of self-parody, and its narrative follows more of an emotional logic than existing within a consistent, objective universe.

In this case, the work is more meta-fiction or modern allegory than anything else. The metaphor of the narrative takes precedence over the logical details of that same narrative. That’s not a knock, it’s just the kind of book it is, more akin to the style of someone like Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist) than the tighter plots normally found in both general and genre fiction.

The point is, there’s no tier-based system as far as quality goes. You’ll find hack work in every section of the book store. If you know someone who is, or are yourself under the impression that science fiction (or mystery, or fantasy, or historical fiction, etc.) is hack work exclusively, you should consider taking a look at a couple of the books mentioned above (or any number of other great sci-fi works, Flowers for Algernon is rightly on many school reading lists).

Perception is everything. I’ve been stealth gifting non-SF friends with top-tier speculative works for years. (The key is in finding the right edition, without the pulpy covers some of the mass market paperbacks have.) If you’re a lover of literature, and you want to read the best that’s out there, you can’t limit yourself to one genre, even the genre of general or literary fiction. The best writers doing their best work are not found exclusively in any one category.

Science Fiction to the Rescue in WWII

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I reviewed the new Heinlein biography recently, which I quite enjoyed. It’s the first of a planned two-volume project, so I am also eagerly anticipating the second, particularly since by the end of part one, only Heinlein’s first couple of books had been mentioned (along with a few notable shorts).

This volume was surprisingly interesting given that the majority of it covered Heinlein’s life prior to his full-time writing career. After all, the reason anyone would want to read a bio of a famous author is because they’re interested in his work, but it turns out he was also an interesting man before he became an interesting author. Of course, he also lived in interesting times, and having now read several histories and biographies taking place in the first half of the twentieth century, I find I just can’t get enough of it. So much happened in the century of my birth.

One rather surprising tidbit came after the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated US entry into World War Two. Heinlein, though he had been forced to give up his first career as a naval officer due to pulmonary tuberculosis, tried absolutely everything to get enlisted again for the war. It seems the Japanese attack had an incredible galvanizing effect on US citizenry such that patriotic, able-bodied men (and women) were volunteering left and right, to the point that officers in charge of enlistment couldn’t keep up.

Though still medically unfit to serve, Heinlein was able to use a former officer contact to get in as a civilian engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. His navy contact also requested that Heinlein, working with pulp giant, editor John W. Campbell, try to recruit — no joke — more science fiction writers to come do war work. In fact, in those early days of the new genre of science fiction, many of the writers did indeed have scientific or engineering training. Heinlein ended up bringing in a young Isaac Asimov (a recently minted chemistry PhD), and L. Sprague de Camp to work in the same research facility out of the yard as he.

Heinlein also ended up doing some minor engineering work that, unbeknownst to him, was related to the still top-secret development of radar technology. Across the pond, English SF giant, Arthur C. Clarke, was also working more directly on radar applications.

Pretty cool. When the world was in jeopardy, the allies called on their best genre writers to save the day. SF enthusiasts often claim their favourite authors can see into the future. When the Allies needed help, however, these writers were brought in to help create the future. Along with the bomb, radar was the top-secret, brand-new Allied technology of WWII. Future Nobel-winning scientists gave their best for the war effort, alongside future Hugo-winning sci-fi writers. Who’d have thought?