Feb 29 2016

CyberStorm by Matthew Mather

At its heart, CyberStorm is a book about how the human condition unravels under intense external pressure. Here, the external pressure is a record-breaking blizzard that strikes Manhattan as the Internet, and the many essential services it controls, fall victim to mysterious cyber attacks (which are actually very cleverly explained in the book’s denouement.) There are quite a few interesting ideas in this book, but I’m pretty sure I’d have liked it better as a speculative essay, mostly because as a human-interest novel, it was incredibly terrible. The characterization was almost uniformly awful, with my biggest problem being the narrator. Purportedly an average American, he’s so incredibly privileged and annoying that it’s hard to take him seriously. He does show the occasional flash of self-awareness, but I could hardly even muster the barest human sympathy at his plight, much less his flaws, which is a huge problem when dealing with an unreliable first person narrator.

And then the fucking cholera. Given how it’s a very easy thing to research, not only by the author but also by the protagonists (as the Internet was available to them when it became a problem!) I was hugely disappointed that it was used as a bogeyman not only on a micro but also a macro level. It makes me question the validity of the rest of the author’s technological suppositions. I powered through CyberStorm because of book club but ugh, can’t recommend this to anyone wanting intelligent disaster fiction.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/29/cyberstorm-by-matthew-mather/

Feb 28 2016

Cauldron by Jack McDevitt

Cauldron is the sixth novel in Jack McDevitt’s series of novels featuring Priscilla Hutchins as a protagonist, and is not a good place to begin reading the series. In fact, it’s chronologically the last novel (to date) in the series, as the seventh book goes back to the very beginning of Hutchins’ career to show how everything got started.

The universe that McDevitt has shown through Hutch’s — to use her nickname from the books — eyes is a grand one: enough faster-than-light travel to make the space opera work, but enough of the limitations of lightspeed, the immensity of the galaxy, and the implacability of deep time to show that even an earth-based civilization capable of sending ships regularly through interstellar distances is a mere speck in space and time. One of the recurring motifs of the series is that intelligent life and civilizations, even those that reach the stars, don’t last long on a galactic scale. Xenoarchaeologists appear in several books, and some of the most affecting scenes involve civilizations that have been and gone by the time that humans show up. Not all of the civilizations that the archaeologists explore died natural deaths, however; over the course of the series, evidence mounts of something (or rather, somethings) moving through our part of the galaxy at a significant fraction of c, and laying waste to any place with sufficiently high technology.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/28/cauldron-by-jack-mcdevitt/

Feb 23 2016

Mistborn: Secret History by Brandon Sanderson

Immediately upon finishing Bands Of Mourning, I went to Amazon and purchased this novella. Now, everyone will warn you that you can’t read this book without having read the entirety of the first Mistborn trilogy, and I am no different. But I will further recommend that you read this soon after reading those books, because if your memory holds primarily to impressions as opposed to details as mine does, a lot of the relevance may be lost for you.

There isn’t much to say about the book itself except that it is not at all accessible if you haven’t read the trilogy. In fact, it’s a rather disjointed work, because it fits around the narrative of the trilogy instead of working at all as a standalone. That said, if you enjoy Brandon Sanderson’s work, and if you enjoy indulging in the occasional ugly cry (dat ending yo,) you will enjoy this secret history.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/23/mistborn-secret-history-by-brandon-sanderson/

Feb 22 2016

Bands Of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson

Just Goddamnit, Brandon Sanderson, why are you so good?!?! HOW are you so good?! I spent far too much time yelling at the book like it was an Arsenal match, it was that engaging. At one point, I pounded my fists on the table with rage. Really terrific installment. The Mistborn series just gets better and better and I have no idea how that could possibly happen!

And let me tell you, I’ve been Team Steris from the start, but she’s really terrific here, and I super love her relationship with Wax. Everything about this book is awesome. Even when I thought I’d figured out the plot twist with Telsin, there was more plot twist. Also, I’m betting the spike in the statue’s eye (still) has some significance. But no more, because I do not want even a breath of spoiler to get close to you, dear reader. Just go get the book and read it already.

One other thing: I was thinking, that if I had to boil my life philosophy down to a single author, it might be Sanderson. Not necessarily in the details of cosmological belief, but in the humanity and underlying tenets of faith and goodness. And his work ethic and humility just blow me away. He is a god among writers.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/22/bands-of-mourning-by-brandon-sanderson/

Feb 17 2016

Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi

Was digging through my boxes and boxes of books unopened since my move here over a year ago (my home office will be organized and furnished someday!) for a book for the bff when I came across this again and felt, rather contrarily given how slow I’ve been with reading recently otherwise, that I ought to give it another go. My God, has it been seven years since I first read this? (And thank you to Goodreads for helping me chart this information!) No wonder I remembered so little of it. Which isn’t to say it’s bad for being unmemorable, but the experience is so much of hanging out with the ladies, having tea and gossiping — an experience I like to enjoy, often, in real life — that it blends into my every day with only the exoticism of Iranian culture to differentiate it from either my American or Malaysian lives. Still a fast, lovely read, and a fascinating glimpse into life in Iran, but universally resonant in the way women contend with their (in this case, strictly hetero)sexuality and with men and the expectations of society. Marjane Satrapi’s art takes a distinctly secondary role to the vignettes of her narrative, and while this book is slighter than either her Persepolis masterwork or even the moving Chicken With Plums, it’s still a terrific graphic novel.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/17/embroideries-by-marjane-satrapi/

Feb 17 2016

Wake Up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames

The bff and I are both big fans of Wodehousian humor, so while trawling a Best-Of list last year, I stumbled across a glowing review of this novel, recently out in paperback, and thought I’d buy us a copy. Gave it to him for Christmas, and he passed it back to me recently to read over my birthday. It is certainly an updating of the Jeeves conceit, with a narrator who is a modern-day, American Bertie. One wonders if the modern-day, American equivalent would necessarily be as neurotic as our protagonist Alan Blair, tho. I found the best parts to definitely be the beginning and end, when Jonathan Ames hews more closely to Wodehousian plot structure, than the middle, where Blair flounders with Questions and neuroses and a rather charmless hyper-self-consciousness. Overall, a satisfying book for a Wodehousian completist, but given the choice, I’d rather read one of John Mortimer’s modern-day Rumpoles, such as this one, instead.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/17/wake-up-sir-by-jonathan-ames/

Feb 11 2016

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

I thought that Lagoon would be the first book I read by Nnedi Okorafor. Or maybe The Book of Phoenix, which a friend had strongly recommended. Turns out the first was Binti, one of a new line of novellas published electronically and on paper by Tor.com. I have it on paper, courtesy of a surprisingly well stocked airport bookstore at Chicago’s O’Hare.

“Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs.”

There is a Himba people in northern Namibia, as Okorafor notes in her acknowledgments, and the customs that Binti describes as belonging to her people closely parallel the present-day Himba, translated to a different time and setting — one with interstellar travel and a galactic university.

Binti tells her own story; at the outset she is sixteen, and about to run away. “… I had scored so high on the planetary exams in mathematics that Oomza University had not only admitted me, but promised to pay for whatever I needed to attend. No matter what choice, I was never going to have a normal life, really.” In the first scene, she is fiddling with a transporter, a small lifting device (Micro-antigravity? It’s never explained, only shown) to carry her personal belongings so that she may leave her home undetected, in the middle of the night. From the desert setting, the run-down device, the fervent desire to leave home, it could be Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars movie. Except, of course, for every personal detail about the two characters.

That is one of the things that Okorafor is doing with this short, but by no means slight, tale. She is taking the universal story of leaving home to discover the wide world, the science fictional story of escaping a backwater province of a backwater world to head to the big time of interstellar institutions, and telling it through the eyes of someone who is a young woman, who is black, whose ancestry is not the best among her own people (she alludes to a grandparent from the “Desert People,” about whom some stigma is attached), and whose people are looked down on by essentially all of their neighbors. Some of the neighbors, the Khoush, also depend on and covet technological objects that Binti’s family makes; this relationship of dependence and disdain is surely not a coincidence.

In her brief journey to the spaceport, she encounters whispers and pointing, people who want to touch her hair to see if it is real, disapproval. But people being people, not everyone is mean.

When [the officer, an old Khoush man] finished, he looked up at me with his bright green piercing eyes that seemed to see deeper into me than his scan of my astrolabe. There were people behind me and I was aware of their whispers, soft laughter and a young child murmuring. It was cool in the terminal, but I felt the heat of social pressure. My temples ached and my feet tingled.
“Congratulations,” he said to me in his parched voice, holding out my astrolabe.
I frowned at him, confused. “What for?”
“You are the pride of your people, child,” he said, looking me in the eye. … He’d just seen my whole life. He knew of my admission into Oomza Uni. (pp. 14–15)

The next stage is also straight from classic science fiction.

The ship was packed with outward-looking people who loved mathematics, experimenting, learning, reading, inventing, studying, obsessing, revealing. The people on the ship weren’t Himba, but I soon understood that they were still my people. I stood out as a Himba, but the commonalities shined brighter. I made friends quickly. And by the second week in space, they were good friends. (pp. 21–22)

Danger erupts suddenly into this idyll, before Binti has properly had a chance to find herself among those people who are her people. The rest of the book’s 90 pages are about how she tries to survive the danger, and works to salvage something from the carnage. It’s fast-paced and gripping, but also a reminder of how horrible many adventures portrayed in science fiction and fantasy would be to most people.

There’s a depth, too, a point in showing what Binti has to do to survive, where power lies and what she, a young Himba woman, has to do and become when she encounters hostile power in its rawest form. When I first read through the book, my one complaint would have been that she seemed to make the changes too readily, to adapt too easily. But maybe “seemed” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence, maybe even doing a lot of awful work. Something to keep thinking about.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/11/binti-by-nnedi-okorafor/

Feb 10 2016

The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein by Thomas Ligotti

One of the advantages of picking up twenty books for about twenty bucks in a Humble Bundle is the chance to get to know new authors at low cost. (I’m a long way from a good lending library in English, so no-cost is not much of an option for me.) The Bundle that I picked up and have read about half of the books contained therein introduced me to Ted Chiang, to Elizabeth Bear, and Peter V. Brett. I read Tim Powers for the first time in a quarter century, possibly the first time ever. I’m looking forward to reading more from all three. That’s in addition to getting an omnibus edition of Barry Hughart’s stories of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, as well as a humongous trove of Jack Vance’s work. On balance, the Bundle was a huge win, and I would buy more if not for the matter of the time it takes to actually read the lovely books.

One of the disadvantages, though, is that not every book will be to every person’s taste. I’m afraid that’s what happened with The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein by Thomas Ligotti. The conceit of the book is interesting: take well-known horror classics, and then go further with them. As he writes in his preface, “Why not take Wells’s story [‘The Island of Dr Moreau’] another step or two down the path of pain? … But once this revamping or disfigurement of Wells’s original hair-raiser has been performed, the horror writer may begin to wonder how similar treatments might be applied to other well-known works of the genre. Is the literary artist any less curious or fixed upon an ideal than Dr Moreau?”

Ligotti groups his short stories that answer these questions. There are three scientists, two immortals, leading men, Gothic heroines, loners, and shut-ins. There is a Poe anthology, followed by “The Works and Death of H.P. Lovecraft.” Knowing most of the originals, I enjoyed speculating about where Ligotti might take them. His pastiches capture the style of the originals, as far as I am familiar with them. For my taste, though, they’re just too short, too slight. The stories sketch the ideas, but Ligotti glides past so quickly into the next story that there wasn’t enough time for me to settle in, for the stories to have much emotional heft apart from what they borrowed from their sources. In the end, I found these stories clever (and quick — a mere 128 pages in the phone’s electronic format), but not really any more than that. Perhaps I missed something; perhaps that’s all Ligotti was aiming for; perhaps it’s just as well there were another 19 books in the Bundle.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/10/the-agonizing-resurrection-of-victor-frankenstein-by-thomas-ligotti/

Feb 09 2016

Brayan’s Gold by Peter V. Brett

Brayan’s Gold is a novella that forms part of the back story for the main character in a set of novels by Peter V. Brett, which I have not read. It began as a reference tossed into the first of those, “reminding people that Arlen had a ton of adventures back when he was young and working for the Messenger’s Guild,” as Brett relates in the introduction. He originally had no intention of explaining the reference, but a friend of him convinced him to flesh it out. “Dude,” Matt said. “You’re passing up a chance to write about snow demons?”

And so, in time, Brett seized that chance. Brayan’s Gold is a fun, slight adventure tale that follows Arlen, a young Messenger who is more than he seems. The setting is vaguely medieval, in a world where demons are real and come out every night to rend apart any human they may find outside towns or refuges protected by written magical wards. Few people venture far from home anyway, setting up a niche for Messengers who are fast and reasonably fearless, delivering dispatches and other light items among the feudal rulers of the various territories that Brett describes. The world he shows is sparsely settled, with stretches of wilderness between the protected towns. People make their way along known paths, always making sure to stop at a warded campground overnight, if they cannot reach their destination.

One of the furthest settlements is a fabulously wealthy mining outpost. “Ten nights’ travel from the city proper, it was the sole mine on the third mountain to the west, and higher up than any other.” The delivery? Tundersticks — dynamite for the mine. Naturally, they’re needed in a hurry, and the regular courier for that run is indisposed: broke his leg recently. The reward for a successful run is huge.

Brett gives a quick, economical setup, and moves his young hero out into the wilds with a crusty old Messenger, probably making his last run and planning on retiring into alcoholic obscurity with his share of the fee.

What goes wrong? You name it: bandits, treachery, wind demons, fire demons, rock demons and, eventually, the snow demon that set off the whole avalanche of the story. Is there a fair maiden? Of course there is a fair maiden. Does Arlen win her heart? That would be telling. And also assuming that he even wants to, or that her heart is there to be won, which it’s not necessarily. This is a twenty-first century fantasy after all.

Brayan’s Gold was fun; I knocked it out in an afternoon. The magic system is nifty, the action is fast and occasionally furious, the setting is plausible enough as these things go. I’m glad friend Matt convinced the author not to pass up the chance to write about snow demons.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/09/brayans-gold-by-peter-v-brett/

Feb 08 2016

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

After looking at the power of stories in Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett turns to some of the greatest stories ever told: religions, and, somewhat more incidentally, philosophy. Small Gods, the thirteenth Discworld novel, takes place in and around Omnia, an austere land on the edge of a great desert. The church of the Great God Om dominates life in Omnia. Its Quisition shortens the lives of many Omnians, and its armies work steadfastly to bring the truth of Om to neighboring lands, whether or not those lands have any interest in receiving it.

Omnia functions as something of a mirror image of Discworld’s more familiar city of Ankh-Morpork. The latter has accreted around a river that doesn’t flow so much as ooze, or perhaps subside. It is a freewheeling city in a lush setting, home to myriad gods, where nearly everyone is on the make, or on the take. Omnia ranges around its Citadel on the border of the desert, everything professing devotion to Om and preparing for more conquest of unbelievers. There is a little bit of life that remains untamed, as both a counterpart to Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler and the Quisition’s crackdowns on superstition attest. On the whole, though, Omnia is an oppressive theocracy, bent on conquering and converting any and all of its neighbors.

The novel follows a young acolyte, Brutha, who has been terrified by his granny into unquestioning belief in Om, and whose belief is supported by perfect memory (of Om’s scriptures along with everything else) supplemented by otherwise languid thought processes. On the Disc, gods grow as belief in them grows. Thus Om was able to expand from a patron of desert herders into the moving force behind Omnia’s Citadel and its conquering armies. Unfortunately for Om, gods ebb as belief in them wanes. The real kicker is that sustaining belief has to be sincere, and that is in very short supply in Omnia. In fact, Om is down to just one believer, Brutha, as the god discovers when he is in turtle form and dropped most ignominiously by an eagle into one of Brutha’s gardens’ compost piles.

The god speaks to Brutha, and Brutha wants to believe, but he also can’t quite believe that the god is speaking to someone as far down on the totem pole as he. Before long, a whiff of something comes to the attention to the head of the Quisition, who doesn’t know quite what to make of Brutha either. Rather than applying the usual methods, the chief Quisitor decides to make use of Brutha’s memory in bringing enlightenment to the city of Ephebe, home to philosophers and other heretics but guarded by an impenetrable labyrinth. Brutha does as he is told, up to a point, while also trying to make sure that a certain turtle stays out of the soup.

Nothing turns out as anyone, least of all the gods themselves, has planned. Heresy is not stomped out even in Omnia; the Ephebans have a few tricks up their sleeves; Om has ideas; even Brutha has some unexpected notions.

I’ve seen Small Gods praised as one of the key books that can serve as an introduction to Discworld as a whole, with Brutha and Om as one of Pratchett’s great comic pairs. I’m not quite sure why it didn’t engage my enthusiasm as much. Perhaps because it all felt a bit structured to me, the working out of a premise and a setting, rather than the exploration of what happens when some characters are set in motion. It’s fun, and engaging, and occasionally deep, as all the Discworld books are at this point in the set, but I’m not as likely to return to it as I am, say, to some of the witches’ stories, or of Death’s. Small Gods is a one-off, in its setting; Pratchett did not return either.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/02/08/small-gods-by-terry-pratchett/