Apr 22 2017

The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

The Caves of Steel is really the first of Asimov’s robot novels, as I, Robot was short stories stitched together by a tiny framework narrative. In the introduction, Asimov relates that the conceit of the novel came out of a conversation with an editor: a science fiction mystery that didn’t use technology to cheat and come to a solution too readily. When it was published in 1954, it may very well have been the first science fiction mystery. There’s a lot to like in The Caves of Steel, though more than 60 years after its publication it is also now more a part of history. The story concerns a human policeman and a robot partner trying to solve a murder in a far-future New York. Three thousand years in the future, the city is fully enclosed, and people spend their entire lives in the artificial environment of towers and rolling sidewalks (why did people think these would work?). Life is regimented, with space and food tightly controlled as Earth struggles to support a staggering population of 8 billion. Robots are increasingly replacing human labor, and people are unhappy but don’t know how to fight back. The protagonist, Lije Baley, is strongly but not violently anti-robot. He also fears for his job, as robots are even coming onto the police force.

At first, I was annoyed with the book. Asimov has moved all of the story’s furniture into the distant future, but relations between the characters are still those of 1950s America with a smattering of collectivization laid on top. Coming up with a temporally distant human society that reads like a distinct thing takes considerable historical imagination, and Asimov doesn’t have it here. On the other hand, he was expanding the boundaries of the field as it existed at the time. Dated innovation is an odd thing.

Then I thought about what was happening in America in 1954: the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Society around Asimov was being challenged to integrate a minority it had previously considered inferior, sub-human. The Caves of Steel might be something like an integration novel, from the point of view of a person whose unthinking segregationism is challenged by what he sees. Baley also makes his way to the place where the Spacers (humans who have colonized other star systems and established a return embassy on Earth) live, segregated from and feared by the rest of New York, and thus analogous to black neighborhoods in Asimov’s time, but also a place where humans and robots live in harmony, and thus a possible model of a new society. Baley, whose food in the city is all processed, is offered a real apple during his conference with the Spacers. He eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and … begins to change his mind. It’s not a Fall, but the beginning of a change.

The integration story that I had envisioned halfway through the novel never really materializes. Instead, Asimov substitutes some hand-wavy social engineering that reminds me of what I dimly recall from his Foundation series, so I guess it’s all of a piece. The mystery gets solved, and it’s both reasonably clever and not a technological cheat, so that’s a plus for this book. The Caves of Steel stretched the genre for its time, but it’s also very much of its time.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/22/the-caves-of-steel-by-isaac-asimov/

Apr 17 2017

Bohemian Gospel (Bohemian Gospel #1) by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

Readable, if highly problematic. And usually when the word “problematic” is bandied about, reviewers are considering subject matter or character/authorial point of view. My use of the word comes more from the way Dana Chamblee Carpenter has treated actual history in the service of her tale: abusively, to be blunt about it.

Going off on a bit of a tangent here, I used to edit a fan fiction site, that I also wrote for. Good fan fiction takes its setting and not only respects it but tells a terrific tale that makes you look at the world it’s set in a little differently, with more depth, perhaps, or color. It is good, solid writing and nothing to be sneered at. Bad fan fiction, on the other hand, comes in many shapes and forms. We’re all familiar with bad writing, or narratives that are clear wish fulfillment with no actual plot involved. But the really bad fan fiction, I always felt, was the stuff that bent the setting to the whims of the main character instead of using it to provide a framework for the imagination.

And in no setting is this more upsetting, I feel, than in actual recorded history. Granted, medieval Bohemia is not the best known of all historical epochs, but for fuck’s sake, it’s well-known enough that the liberties Ms Carpenter takes with actual history seem lazy to the point of being offensive. I could forgive her Nicholas’ parentage, I could forgive her the entire ridiculousness of Lady Emma and her subsequent marriage, but that final battle scene was a huge fuck no. That’s not what happened. You don’t get to fuck with history on that large a scale.

The best historical fiction imagines why actual people did what they did, or puts imaginary people into important times and situations in order to explore the milieu. It does not bend history in order to suit the entirely nonsensical story of a goddamn Mary Sue. Everything up to Houska was pretty good, but it all went downhill rapidly after that, and soon lost any pretense of having a meaningful plot (much less deep characters or suspenseful revelations.) There was just a lot of “and this happened, then this happened, then meander meander oooh climactic battle that makes no goddamn sense.” It’s almost like Ms Carpenter wrote each chapter according to how she was feeling that day, as a series of barely related sense impressions. Like with the wolf and the sculptures in the forest. I gave no fucks because none of it felt like organic plot growth but more like scenes shoehorned in to make a word count, or in this case, to fill in fifteen years till our irritating protagonist could do something else monumentally stupid.

And the ending was so annoying! My initial reaction was “oh gosh, I need to read the sequel” (to which, kudos, Ms Carpenter, your writing style is indeed engaging) but after reading the first chapter of The Devil’s Bible, I was just… repulsed. Bohemian Gospel plays fast and loose with history in order to set up a crappy modern-day “I’m so lonely and misunderstood” heroine. What a waste of an interesting premise. I should have paid more attention to the comparisons to Kostova’s The Historian, which was another exceedingly over-rated book, and skipped over this one.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/17/bohemian-gospel-bohemian-gospel-1-by-dana-chamblee-carpenter/

Apr 16 2017

Rules of the Game (Endgame #3) by James Frey & Nils Johnson-Shelton

So I’m not in this book so CLEARLY it is a huge disappointment.

Jk, that isn’t why it was disappointing (tho I could have forgiven my omission had the book made up for it otherwise.) It’s hard to go into why the book failed to reach the levels of awesomeness that the first two books in the series easily reached without going into spoilers, but I think that if you’ve gotten this far and are hesitating about reading the book itself, then what I’m about to say isn’t really a spoiler since it doesn’t discuss anything that happens, but instead a very huge thing that doesn’t happen, and that is this (and you can stop reading any time if you’d rather not find out anything about the book, tho if that were the case, I’d imagine you wouldn’t even have read this far):

The game ends but you’re never told why the game was begun, or who the Keplers are or why they’ve done anything up to this point besides provide a Deus for the plot machina. It’s… weird. You go through all this exciting story but you’re never told why any of it is happening. Which is a valid plot for a certain type of book (Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon comes to mind as a successful example) but Rules Of The Game is not that kind of book. It should be the slam bang conclusion of a terrific action trilogy set against an apocalypse put in motion by manipulative, powerful aliens. Instead, it’s a weird little coda that kills off characters willy-nilly (tho not necessarily unexpectedly, if you’ve been following the trilogy) and gives us no answers about the game itself. If it’s meant to be an existential display of the futility of finding answers to the question of life, it’s gone about it in a way that’s guaranteed to disappoint its existing fans while winning it no new ones. If it’s a brazen ploy to stretch out the suspense over the course of a new set of books, well, that’s both condescending to its fans and indicative of a lack of self-confidence in the authors’ powers of imagination.

So yeah, I was disappointed by the fact that I never materialized in this book’s pages, despite being promised a bigger role than in book two. But mostly I was disappointed by how this book didn’t bother answering any of the questions it successfully, suspensefully raised in the prior books. And that’s a shame, because I really enjoyed the first two novels in the series.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/16/rules-of-the-game-endgame-3-by-james-frey-nils-johnson-shelton/

Apr 10 2017

Shadow & Claw (The Book of the New Sun #1-2 ) by Gene Wolfe

At the end, I put down the book and said aloud, “That was a goddamn waste of time.”

I get that this is just the first two books in a four (or five, if you’re a completist) book series, but damn, how can you reasonably argue that a reader has to slog through 400+ pages of pretentious bullshit before finding even the prospect of intellectual satisfaction, much less entertainment? There was promise in the first two hundred pages, but at no point did either book feel like a complete story, much less one worthy of awards. I am honestly mystified by people who think this was well-written. Gene Wolfe’s impressively vast vocabulary is no substitute for actually being able to string words together in a way that conveys both meaning and style. His constructions are unnecessarily elaborate while also somehow being unevocative: a feat of the most groundless pretension I have ever seen. I get that there are some people who fall for this bullshit (I’ve railed against other books written in this irritating manner) but this is the first time I’ve seen that pool of people drawn from hardcore genre fans, who usually see through literary pretensions and shy away.

That aside, the story is garbage. Again, I’m willing to concede that Mr Wolfe may well pull a narrative feat out of his ass some 400+ pages from now, but these first 400+ pages were about dull, unlikeable people thrown into increasingly unbelievable and uninteresting circumstances. This felt less like a story + plot and more like a fever dream I was expected to scry meaning from. And I certainly don’t mind putting in the intellectual work if there’s anything of actual interest to go through! This, however, was all scenes plucked from better, more entertaining fiction, inelegantly cobbled together with words words words and I couldn’t for the life of me care about any of it (a variation on the Eight Deadly Words, yes. Hi, Doug!)

And I was willing to give Mr Wolfe’s personal peccadilloes the benefit of the doubt till I read that extremely stomach-turning discussion of rape as part of torture. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a realist and understand that rape is an instrument of humiliation, so have no objections to that as part of a discussion of torture. What made me go full-on pearl-clutching was Severian’s reaction to his master’s showing him the drugs and instruments of rape: Severian’s contempt of his master felt very “you’re not a real man if you can’t rape with your penis at will.” This is toxic masculinity at its most unapologetic, tho Severian does chase his contempt with pity, so at least he can condescend to other men? Coupled with the way the women in the book are continuously represented, it’s hard not to believe that this disgusting, rampaging misogyny is not Mr Wolfe’s actual worldview. I, who love Nabokov and indulgently view GRRM’s writing as the stuff written by a person who’s still surprised and proud that he’s finally having consistently loving heterosexual sex, find myself viewing Mr Wolfe’s character extremely dimly. I will never be in a room with him willingly, much less alone. I don’t think I’ve ever said that of an author from his or her books alone. Congratulations are in order, I suppose.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/04/10/shadow-claw-the-book-of-the-new-sun-1-2-by-gene-wolfe/

Mar 21 2017

The Immortal Iron Fist, Volume 1: The Last Iron Fist Story by Ed Brubaker (Writer), Matt Fraction, David Aja et. al.

I got this for free a while back (thank you, Amazon!) and decided to read it before hunkering down to watch the problematic Iron Fist Netflix series.

So. Let’s talk about the good stuff first! Fraction/Aja are terrific, and Danny and the Heroes For Hire (and the way they fit within the Civil War framework) were really cool and fun. I very much like the super hippie, loose Danny Rand of the books, partly because you know if someone pointed out that the entire premise of his fictional life is racist, he wouldn’t get all defensive about it but would be all “dudebro, shit, yeah, we should work to make everything cool.”

But Jesus Christ, Orson Rand.

I’m assuming that his character and his really shitty, occasionally racist history are redeemed — or at least overtly condemned — in future volumes, but he was given way too much rein in this one. I’ve really enjoyed Brubaker’s work on DC’s Gotham properties, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt on not making it hella obvious that Orson’s behavior is unacceptable, but it was really uncomfortable to read, so much so that I likely won’t bother with more. Tbh, I doubt I’m missing out. Plus, there is the entirely awful (4 episodes in so far, and the writers are completely oblivious to how they are playing themselves with each storyline) Netflix series to contend with, and there is only so much self-torture I can endure.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/03/21/the-immortal-iron-fist-vol-1/

Mar 20 2017

Soviet Bus Stops by Christopher Herwig

There are not a lot of words in this book of photography, and the subject is laid out right there in the title. Soviet Bus Stops sounds like it could be terribly dry, almost a parody of narrow history, but no, it’s a glimpse into an interesting and vanishing world.

Photographer Christopher Herwig bicycled from London to St Petersburg in 2002 “with the challenge of taking one good photo every hour.” (p. 9) He noticed details. Beginning in 2003, he lived for three years in the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia. He found what was expected, but also “eccentricities that defied Soviet conventions.” (p. 9) He noticed bus stops in particular:

In Canada, where I come from, bus stops are all the same. But in the former Soviet republics, many were unique, imaginative, and sometimes a bit mad. … Behind the Iron Curtain were millions of individuals who liked to daydream, wanted to push the limits of creativity and needed a way to share it. (p. 9)

As part of the introductory material, Vera Kavalkova-Halvarsson explains part of how these oddities came about. One architect from Belarus who designed nearly 100 “bus pavilions,” as they were known, says that tight regulation, limited technology and competition for major projects meant that there was very little room for creativity. Artists seized whatever opportunities were available, even a humble bus pavilion. “Designing a bus stop was often one of the first independent projects assigned to students of architecture departments. Students were encouraged to produce designs never seen before.” (p. 11) Limited budgets, often about one-third the cost of a car (p. 14), meant that designers and artisans had to be creative to do anything different, but the small scale also meant that bureaucrats with stifling rules did not pay attention to such minor matters.

In very small villages or remote locations, though, they were not minor matters at all. Bus links were crucial connections to the larger world. “The bus stop was a public space and could be used to bring art to the people and to brighten up the surroundings. (p. 12)

After a dozen pages or so of introduction, the rest of the book is given over to photographs of these unusual artifacts. Some are whimsical, like the stop in Kyrgyzstan that’s shaped like a local traditional hat. Some may have double meanings, like the mural of agricultural combines whose silhouettes could be mistaken for rows of tanks. Some are poignant in new ways, like the one shaped like a light house, in a desert near where the Aral Sea used to be. There are giant waves or clam shells from the Black Sea coast, there are abstract crowns in Armenia or yurts in Kazakhstan. There are unexpectedly colorful mosaics from Ukraine. The pavilions from the Baltic republics look like EU money has recently been invested in their upkeep. The poverty of other republics can be seen in the stops’ state. Russia is conspicuously absent from this survey (Azerbaijan does not appear either), and the author does not mention any reason for this choice. On the whole, though, it’s a very interesting glimpse of how much an unregarded object can reveal.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/03/20/soviet-bus-stops-by-christopher-herwig/

Mar 18 2017

Red Rising (Red Rising #1) by Pierce Brown

I don’t know why I expected something lesser than what I read. I think I’d heard too many murmurs of “derivative” and “boy Katniss” but this really isn’t any of that at all. Sure, Red Rising and The Hunger Games both have dystopian settings featuring underdogs who rise to the top via brutal competitions, and both are excellently written, but that’s like saying all sci-fi is the same, which is stupid and reductive.

Anyway, Red Rising? Is an amazing novel. Pierce Brown isn’t afraid to take the rawest emotions and situations and put them on full display. I did have reservations about the whole Eo situation (it was clear that she was going to get fridged, but I was won around to what actually happened because she was the agent of it all) and the whole adoption of martyrdom as a winning tactic made the pragmatist in me recoil, but I was swept up in the drama of it all, that never, thankfully, teetered over into the maudlin. By the end of it, I wanted to go out and binge read the rest, which is pretty much the highest recommendation I can give of a book in a series. Alas, I have too many other books in the way, but soon!

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/03/18/red-rising-red-rising-1-by-pierce-brown/

Mar 14 2017

Jingo by Terry Pratchett

Apparently quite a number of people thought that Terry Pratchett was jolly. Perhaps that was because he wrote books that are laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally overflowing with terrible puns, full of affection for most of their characters, and bursting with absurdities, most particularly the absurdity of living people rubbing up against each other. Perhaps people thought he was jolly because he was, by all reports, affable and unassuming in person. Perhaps it was the hat, or the beard, or both together.

I don’t see how anyone reads a book like Jingo and comes out of it thinking that Terry Pratchett is jolly.

The trappings of the story concern how two great powers go to war, how small incidents get magnified, how a dispute between neighbors escalates to the point where killing vast numbers of them seems a perfectly reasonable solution. There is a disputed territory; there are diplomatic incidents; there is an upsurge in patriotism, a rush to take the king’s shilling, even if there is no king, and to flock to the ancient regimental colors, even if they were chosen just yesterday. Because Jingo is a Discworld book, there’s a degree of slapstick in the precipitating incident: fishermen from different countries, who are usually content with stealing each other’s catch, find themselves squabbling over an island that has suddenly appeared. Meanwhile their sons would just as soon go home, or at least trade provisions so that nobody has to do without warmth or food.

With war brewing between Ankh-Morpork and Klatch, Pratchett shows the heightened atmosphere it brings, the desire to serve a higher purpose that draws Sir Samuel Vimes’ butler to enlist and do his bit, along with the uglier side of mobs gathering to attack the businesses of Klatchians in the city. Some of the Klatchians, including those born and raised in Ankh-Morpork, begin to organize for self-defense, which the mob sees as proof that it was right all along. Other people of Klatchian background rush to the armed forces to prove their loyalty. Even rumor of war closes up the civil space where people had just gotten on with their ordinary lives.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/03/14/jingo-by-terry-pratchett/

Mar 12 2017

The Hanging Tree (Peter Grant/Rivers Of London #6) by Ben Aaronovitch

This series just gets better with each book! The depth and complexity of Ben Aaronovitch’s mystical London really comes into its own here, as we delve deeper into the overarching plot with the reveal of The Faceless Man’s true identity (whom I figured out perhaps half a beat before Mr Aaronovitch intended for the reader to: and kudos again to him for writing such a fine mystery and unmasking.) I admit to having forgotten details of the first five novels — and in my defense, I’d completely forgotten that I’d even requested that the DCPL order this book. I can’t have been the only one, tho, as at checkout, I saw that the line for this book was 7 deep for 2 copies — but a quick glance at my Goodreads reviews refreshed me to the necessities. This, I suppose, is where I lament my lack of time to re-read the novels, but that’s such a First World Problem, I can’t even.

Anyway, Peter Grant owes one to Lady Ty, the genius loci (a.k.a goddess) of the River Tyburn, for her help in a previous novel. She calls her marker in one day, needing him to make sure that her teenage daughter, Olivia, is kept out of an investigation into a drug overdose in a fancy apartment building. Of course, Olivia is uncooperative with either Peter or her mother’s plans, and as Peter investigates further, he finds his path crossing once more with The Faceless Man’s, and so with his former partner’s, Leslie’s. We’re also introduced to Lady Helena, self-proclaimed witch, via her practitioner daughter, who has plenty of secrets of her own. And Special Agent Kimberly Russell of the FBI also has pertinent information for Peter from across the pond.

There is a lot going on in this novel, and most of it won’t make sense if you haven’t read the rest of the series, which I highly recommend you do! Tho, since it’s so good for binge-reading, and gets more complex as it goes, I’m almost reluctant to recommend that you start reading it now instead of in one fell swoop when it finally wraps up. I’m already rather glumly expecting to have forgotten far too much before Book 7 comes out, so am hoping it hurries up and appears!

And so you know, this installment of the series was not only as clever and charming as its predecessors, but was also as refreshingly diverse, if not more so. As a brown Muslim person who’s traveled extensively, it was really, really nice to see accurate representations of real, every day people alongside all the magic and explosions. In fact, the only quibble I have with the authenticity of the book’s characters was in Kim’s dialog, which was waaaaaay too British. Otherwise, another stellar representation of diversity, especially in the way it noted the race of people Peter was meeting for the first time. The default setting in too much Western literature has always been “white,” so to have it noted each time was a refreshing reminder that that’s not how modern-day London is, or most metropoles any more.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/03/12/the-hanging-tree-peter-grantrivers-of-london-6-by-ben-aaronovitch/

Mar 12 2017

Istanbul by Thomas F. Madden


Of all the places that I have visited, Istanbul almost certainly heads the list of those I would like to return to. Arriving in April of 1993, at the beginning of what I thought was six months of travel before going broke in Ireland, I was struck by how European the city was. This despite what sticks in my mind as the most terrifying taxi ride I have ever had, not excepting the one in Rome that followed the question, “What do you mean your train leaves from the other train station?” Perhaps because of that shaky start, I was enthralled and a bit overwhelmed by Istanbul. No pedestrian street crossing has intimidated me since I made my way across a couple of the city’s larger boulevards. No place was as organizedly chaotic as the city’s main bus departure area, just outside the protective walls built by Emperor Theodosius in the early fifth century.

Which is to say, I am squarely in the target market for Istanbul, a one-volume history of the “City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World,” as Madden’s subtitle has it. I have even read and reviewed both books mentioned in the blurbs on the back of Istanbul. Madden knows his potential audience, but he also knows what he is up against in trying to tell the history of Istanbul in about 350 pages.

The purpose of this book is to bring together the history of this urban marvel into one enjoyable and clear narrative. It is, from the outset, an impossible task. The history of Istanbul is so complex, stretching across so many cultures, events, and lives, that a library of books would not suffice to capture it. Yet if the entire story cannot be told, at least the most important episodes and broadest vistas can be sketched. The overarching goal here is to open up the rich history of Istanbul to any interested reader, while offering guideposts along the way for further exploration. … It is impossible to study antiquity, the Middle Ages, Christianity, or Islam without sailing past Istanbul’s shores, visiting its academies, poking one’s head into its churches and mosques. Then as now, it remains “the City.” (p. xvii)

Madden fist saw the city in person seven years before I did, and he fell in love with it. One of the ways that love shows in the book is how he occasionally notes the contemporary fate of an area or landmark; he also notes how modern changes and construction have often led to archeological discoveries that have deepened present-day knowledge of the city’s history. For Istanbul has had periods of destruction and loss every bit as profound as its periods of glory, and much of what once was has now been lost. He makes another structural point in his introduction: “Modern histories often privilege the modern. I have worked hard not to do that here.” (p. xviii) Thus the time in which the city has been officially known as Istanbul receives one chapter at the end of the book, which covers less than a century. Each of the preceding three parts of the book covers roughly a thousand years, though they do not each have an equal share of the book. Part II, on Byzantine Constantinople (330–1453) is the longest, nearly half of the book.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/03/12/istanbul-by-thomas-f-madden/