Jun 16 2015

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Twenty years and more after reading Stand on Zanzibar for the first time, I was surprised at how vividly its opening had stayed with me. First up the extended epigraph, a quotation from McLuhan, a warning to the unwary about what Brunner is about to spring on his readers, unsuspecting as they may have been in 1968, perhaps less so now. “Innis sacrificed point of view and prestige to his sense of the urgent need for insight. A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. … Innis makes no effort to ‘spell out’ the interrelations between the components of his galaxy. He offers no consumer packages in his later work, but only do-it-yourself kits.” (Brunner brackets this bit of the real world at the beginning of his book with a “message from our sponsors” at the very end, “This non-novel was brought to you by John Brunner using Spicers Plus Fabric Bond and Commercial Bank papers interleaved with Serillo carbons…” His note from the present has become an item in a time capsule.)

Then two sections of rapid-fire sensory input, moderately mediated through prose. The first resembles the script for a news show, mashing together visuals, sound effects, neologisms and background information for the world that Brunner is not so much introducing to his readers so much as throwing them head first into the deep end. The second is titled, “Read the Directions,” and it has bits of narrative that introduce characters who will appear later, but starts off announcing the setting, “For toDAY third of MAY twenty-TEN ManhatTEN reports mild spring-type weather under the Fuller Dome. Ditto on the General Technics Plaza.” In the next six pages, no fewer than two dozen characters make a brief appearance (“Guinivere Steel’s real name is Dwiggins, but do you blame her?”), interspersed with bits of advertising, overheard dialog, and excerpts from The Hipcrime Vocab (HIPCRIME: You committed one when you opened this book. Keep it up. It’s our only hope.), a Devil’s Dictionary of Brunner’s invented 21st century written by Chad C. Mulligan (“a sociologist. He gave it up.”) who returns as an important character and a bit of an authorial stand-in.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/16/stand-on-zanzibar-by-john-brunner/

Jun 10 2015

Viva Polonia by Steffen Möller

In the mid-1990s, Steffen Möller went against the usual tide of migration and moved from Germany to Poland. He started with a two-week language course in Krakow, which he found out about from a poster hung in his university’s cafeteria. From such a simple starting point, his whole career grew: first as a student of Polish — wrestling with seven cases, two verb aspects, adjectives that decline in three genders, and tongue twisters like “W Szczabrzeszynie chrząszcz bzrmi w trzcinie” — then as a teacher of German, onward to a stand-up comic (in Polish) and actor in a long-running television series, “M jak Miłość” (L as in Love).

Viva Polonia is the first of Möller’s four books to date, and it combines his personal story of learning to live in Poland with comparisons between that country and Germany. The book is arranged as an alphabetical series of entries about topics large and small, starting with Aberglaube (superstition) and ending with Zum Abschied (saying good-bye). Ten years of living in Poland, at the time of the book’s writing, furnished him with a rich supply of anecdotes, and enough overall experience to give a balanced picture.

The stories are funny, short, and told with obvious love for (and occasional exasperation about) both places, particularly his adopted country. In the early section on “Betweeners and Desert Mice” Möller touches on some of the real difficulties of living abroad, especially as he has done it — out of curiosity and interest, rather than as a result of family ties or purely economic motives.

In addition, living in another country for many years requires a specific kind of character. Over the long haul, one has to come to terms with living on the periphery of society. I don’t mean only surface things — such as not having the right to vote, constantly having to deal with bureaucracy because of residence permits etc., and not being eligible to become president. It is more a matter of interpersonal problems. One is often fairly lonely. Familiar customs don’t exist. German Christmas markets with the aroma of mulled wine and bratwurst? Forget it.
Then the foreign language: Because one never completely loses a foreign accent, every taxi driver turns around suspiciously after the first sentence; the vote of a foreigner with an accent counts for less at parent-teacher assemblies; after a car accent, describing the details to a police officer is a hellish torture. The probability that language hurdles will send one home depressed in the evenings only declines after many years.
As a foreigner, it is also naturally much more difficult to find friends among the natives. Because one has spent childhood somewhere else, one is not socialized along with members of the same generation. Their songs, films, idols, stickers remain unknown … For example, Poles of my generation like to laugh about their years with the Pioneers in the Communist Youth, or about the first dollars they earned on the black market.

Usually, though, he tells lighter stories, such as the comparison late in the book between outings to the same place undertaken by Germans and Poles (“Zwei Ausflüge”). The Germans are punctual, thorough and organized, arriving as expected, departing on the hour, satisfied with how the day has gone. The Poles arrive late, complaining about their countrymen, disperse into the woods with no leader or direction, barely stop the bus driver from departing without two of their number (whom they know are missing although there is no list of participants, and no count was taken on arrival), and have to wait nearly two hours for the stragglers who, it transpires, have fallen in love during the outing. This helps transform the bus ride back into a free-floating party, with improvised entertainment and no shortage of alcohol. The Poles return much later than planned, but no less satisfied with their day than the German party.

That’s what most of the rest of the book is like: anecdotes that illustrate generalizations. From my limited experience of Poland and my somewhat more extensive experience of Germany, Möller captures them both. The short sections make Viva Polonia breezy to read. As far as I can tell, though, it’s only in German. Sorry about that.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/10/viva-polonia-by-steffen-moller/

Jun 07 2015

Nebula Award winners 2015

The Science Fiction Writers of America announced the winners of this year’s Nebula Awards.

Novel
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer [Laura reviewed Annihilation as part of its trilogy, and didn’t like it as much as the SFWA did.]

Novella
Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress

Novelette
“A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14)

Short Story
“Jackalope Wives” by Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14)

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Guardians of the Galaxy, written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Love Is the Drug, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)

2015 Damon Knight Grand Master Award
Larry Niven

Solstice Award
Joanna Russ (posthumous), Stanley Schmidt

Kevin O’Donnell Jr. Service Award
Jeffry Dwight

The Nebula Awards are voted on, and presented by, active members of Science Fiction Writers of America.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/07/nebula-award-winners-2015/

Jun 04 2015

Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson

Reading Europe In Autumn was more disorienting than usual for an alternate history. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the protagonist of this story set in a slightly-alt near-future Europe could easily have been a slightly-alt me, and not just in the sense that the author had created a sympathetic figure for readers to identify with. One of the book’s episodes takes place in an Estonian manor house where I nearly spent my summer vacation a couple of years back. Another takes place in mountains along the present Polish-Czech border, whereas my episode (which fortunately featured less drama) was in mountains along the present Polish-Slovak border. The protagonist starts off as a chef in Krakow and is rumored to be doing other things. I was doing other things in another Polish city (fortunately (again) not the kind of other things that the protagonist gets up to) while rumors circulated among friends that I was a chef. Or maybe the rumors went around while I was in Budapest; it’s been a while. The protagonist is inspired to become a chef by television shows featuring a chef who is the son of a Polish politician. I’ve met the politician. (Though not the son, who, in our time line, passed away suddenly in 2008.) Yet another episode takes place in Potsdam, not 10km from where I live now, and I’ve been to practically every location he goes to in Berlin. Fortunately (yet again), I’ve never found what he finds in a left-luggage locker at Zoo Station. I’m not sure how many of Hutchinson’s readers will have as many points of similarity as I did, but I found it all just a tad uncanny.

Europe-in-Autumn-002

Rudi, the protagonist, is an Estonian, and as the story opens he is a cook at a restaurant in Krakow. One night, a group of Hungarian mafiosi come in, get drunk, and trash the place. Max, the owner, takes it in stride. After the Hungarians leave, Rudi observes that they should renegotiate the protection deal that is supposed to prevent such things, and Max observed that if their protection “had turned up tonight, half of us would have wound up in the mortuary.” It’s an introduction to a Europe where the chaotic years right after the fall of Communism never really settled down, where, in fact, the falling kept right on going, as states slid apart, small polities proliferated, borders sprang back up, and opportunities appeared in the gray zones around laws and borders.

Rudi himself slips into those, as a conversation with the restaurant’s protection becomes a talk about recruitment into a shadowy, continent-spanning network. This organization of couriers, smugglers, border-crossers, extraction units, possibly also spies and much more provides Rudi with training and the occasional mission. One of these goes, as a character says about an event later in the book, “badly off-piste,” and Rudi drops into a hall of mirrors that would do John Le Carré proud. Is he on the run, or is he doing just what Central wants him to do? Is there a Central at all? Hutchinson adds in an element of alternity that kicks a spy’s natural paranoia up a notch or three.

Each of the episodes has terrific suspense, and as different strands reappear, readers can see the larger piece that Hutchinson is weaving around Rudi’s tasks and misfortunes. Hutchinson deftly captures the different locales (I had some minor quibbles, but I am unusually close to the subject matter, and at any rate people obviously see the same places differently), and he makes each station of Rudi’s career stand out vividly, but in the muted tones of a Europe slowly falling apart, the leaves gradually falling off the tree of civilization. Hutchinson is also adept at not making his protagonist the sole moving part in his story’s world. Additional characters, antagonists and otherwise, develop off the page and away from Rudi. If some of the puzzles remain unsolved at the end, that’s entirely true to the tenor of a novel that’s much more hint and allegation than it is light and illumination.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/04/europe-in-autumn-by-dave-hutchinson/

Jun 02 2015

Eric by Terry Pratchett

Eric plays on the Faust legend, and it read to me as a slighter work than the Discworld novels that immediately preceded it in publication. Wikipedia tells me that Eric was originally published in a larger format, fully illustrated by Josh Kirby, who did most of the covers of the UK editions of the Discworld books (until his death in 2001). Reading the story as something closer to a graphic novel might have made it more fun and obscured the lack of heft.

The long and the short of it, though, is that at this point in the series I like Rincewind a lot less than Pratchett does. I gather that he’s supposed to be something of a wizardly everyman, but he strikes me as a blank slate upon which nothing has been written. In this story, he isn’t as magically hapless as he is in other books — for reasons that are explained toward the end of Eric — but that line of comedy played out for me quite some time ago, as did the running (pardon the word) gag about his Luggage being able to find him no matter how far they have become separated in space, or indeed time.

Structurally, this is the Search for Spock of Discworld. At the end of Sourcery, Rincewind wound up in the Dungeon Dimensions, presumably forever. To get him back, Pratchett has Eric, a young demon hacker, trying to summon up someone like Mephistopheles. Eric’s spells produce Rincewind instead. There is bargaining, though no soul is promised, and Eric compels Rincewind to promise to grant him three wishes. Very much to his own surprise, Rincewind can deliver, but as is the way of these things, Eric does not get what he thought he was getting.

By the end, though, it’s all sorted.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/02/eric-by-terry-pratchett/

May 31 2015

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Guards! Guards! , the eighth Discworld novel, introduces Captain Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork’s Night Watch, to which the book’s back cover assigns the apt adjective “ramshackle.” Pratchett is perfectly clear about what he’s up to in the novel. He dedicates it as follows:

They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No-one ever asks them if they wanted to.

This book is dedicated to those fine men.

In the course of the book, Pratchett does much more than ask whether they want to be slaughtered one by one (spoiler: no). He asks how the Night Watch came to be in such a ramshackle condition in the first place, what they are like in their time off, and how they feel about heroes and dragons fighting in their fair* city. The answers, in short, are (1) because that’s how the powers-that-be want them; (2) not what you would expect; and (3) very cross indeed. Although once the dragon shows up in full strength, the would-be heroes mostly scamper, leaving the regular folk and the Night Watch to sort things out or face the consequences.

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/31/guards-guards-by-terry-pratchett/

May 27 2015

To Be Read 1

The good news is that at present I can buy books faster than I can read them. The bad news is that at present I can buy books faster than I can read (and review) them.

Here are some new things that have appeared (somehow!) in the to-be-read pile, along with what some of my hopes, thoughts, or expectations about them.

Radiant State by Peter Higgins. The third book in the Wolfhound Century series, about which I have written a few times. I was counting the days until its release! But I’m going to finish another book or two that I currently have going before I dive in and find out what happens in the end.

The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor. I had been intrigued by Lagoon a couple of times in the bookstore, but hadn’t picked it up yet. I mentioned the author to a friend; she read The Book of Phoenix, and recommended it strongly, adding that no matter what I thought going in, the book wouldn’t be quite like that. How’s that for an enticing teaser?

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. I had been intrigued by Lagoon a couple of times in the bookstore, and I have now picked it up.

The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café by Alexander McCall Smith. The fifteenth book in the The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I love these books; I always buy the new one and read it when the time is right. I haven’t yet read The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon, so now I have two to look forward to.

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. When I reviewed The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, I said that although that was the first book by Chiang I had read, it wouldn’t be the last. There we go.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/27/to-be-read-1/

May 24 2015

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason.

That’s how Seveneves begins, and it pulled me right in. I stayed up until 3am last night to finish this 867-page hard science fiction novel, to the point that my eyes were watering and my cat was giving me the stinkeye for keeping her awake.

There doesn’t seem to be a good way to explain just how much this book encompasses and how well it does it. There’s lots and lots and lots of orbital space mechanics, which is a very tasty subject. There’s politics (of course), and efforts to save humanity by going to space, and heroics, and an Earth that is destroyed. There’s epigenetics, and new strains of mankind, and delving into what it all means, if anything. This is a hard science fiction apocalyptic scenario in which humankind survives, but survives by changing radically.

The first third of the book deals with the destruction of the moon itself, something that is never explained but simply is. A character that reflects Neal DeGrasse Tyson to an amusing degree figures out what is going to happen as chunks of broken Moon begin falling onto Earth, and works out a timeline in which humanity must find a way to save itself before the surface of the Earth consists solely of fire and molten rock. There is a mad rush to select the best of humanity as well as its most competent, to be sent into space in vehicles that can attach to the International Space Station. Out of 7 billion people, perhaps 20,000 are expected to survive, with any luck. Spoiler alert: they don’t have much luck.

The second third concerns after the Earth is destroyed. Along with humanity in space comes politics, with all the rancor and inability to cooperate that entails. There’s also a rift between the “regular people” who were chosen to learn space mechanics in order to join with the ISS (via a lottery that each country or major metropolitan area conducts), and those who are already there because they have extensively specialized skill sets – robotics, astrophysics, epigenetics, psychology, sociology, biology, etc. In the end only seven people survive it all – seven women. There isn’t a lot of amity among these seven remaining women, who break roughly into aligned groups of 4, 2 and 1, but they work out a deal for rebuilding the human race and then do it.

This is where I’ve seen reviews complain about the gap in the story. Neal doesn’t go step-by-step (as he is so often wont to do), about how the plan these women have made is implemented. Instead he jumps right into the third section, which sees us 5000 years into the future, with the Earth finally cooling down enough for terraforming to begin, and seven differing races of humans, based on the choices each of the Seven Eves made. I can agree that the jump from we’re-all-going-die-in-space to oh-wait-we-didn’t-and-look-at-all-these-cool-things-we-built-up-there-while-breeding isn’t the smoothest, but I disagree that the third section of the book is the weakest. It’s not weak, it’s just an unexpected pivot given the first two sections.

I happen to love Neal Stephenson since I first picked up a copy of Snow Crash and was pulled willy-nilly into the world of Hiro Protagonist. His books have gotten more serious, more thorough, and more hard core since then, but I don’t mind. He writes a damned good story and makes you think while he does it. There’s plenty of good characterization and sub-plots to keep people entertained while he goes into multiple pages of technical explanations, and if you’re like me, you love the technical bits, too. It is hard science fiction, after all.

If this site gave stars, this book would have 5 of them from me. It was right up my alley in nearly all respects, and will come highly recommended by me to anyone who asks.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/24/seveneves-by-neal-stephenson/

May 16 2015

Jhereg by Steven Brust

A thirty-year-old fantasy adventure novel has aged less badly than a seventy-year-old Hollywood novel. That’s the first thing that struck me thinking back on Steven Brust’s Jhereg, and comparing it to the other book that I just recently finished. Though to be fair, I suppose I should check back in another forty years. I’ll mark my calendar. (I’ve also kinda started in on Stand on Zanzibar, which is pushing fifty, and which I am pretty sure I haven’t read in at least twenty, more likely twenty-five. It’s eerily accurate about some aspects of the early twenty-first century. It’s also a bit startling to see how much I retained from previous encounters with the book.)

Anyway. Jhereg was a lot of fun, for values of “fun” that include “lead character is an assassin by profession.” That would be Vlad Taltos, the novel’s first-person narrator and overall hero. Vlad is a mid-level mafioso, in a fantasy world that features humans, a human-like race of people called Dragaerans, various other intelligent creatures, and at least three different kinds of magic. The heart of the action in Jhereg is Vlad’s forty-second assassination commission, which turns out to be more than he had bargained for.

A jhereg, by the way, is a flying reptile with a poisonous bite, not too large to perch on a person’s shoulders, but still big enough to attack people and do grievous harm. Vlad has one as a familiar, and their banter occurs telepathically, or as Brust writes, psionically. Vlad’s world is a high-magic setting, with death often no more than an inconvenience (though it can become permanent under certain circumstances), and teleportation common enough that Vlad will undertake several in a busy day, and that his office has a designated spot for both incoming and outgoing teleportation. This not the kind of book that explores the ramifications of commonplace magic very rigorously; it’s the kind of book that takes such things as read and gets on with telling a fast-paced adventure story. It’s possible that carefully working out the implications of the setting and magical systems that Brust provides would reveal plot holes, but Brust is not a writer to let the action slow long enough for a reader to want to do that kind of poking.

When I first sat down to write up a few thoughts on Jhereg, I had been thinking that there’s not much in it that would make a reader think this is the first book in a series that is still going strong 32 years and 18 further novels later, but that isn’t quite correct. In the book’s world, each Dragaeran belongs to a House, of which there are seventeen. The Houses are named after creatures of the book’s world, some familiar, such as Dragon or Phoenix, some not, such as Jhereg or Yendi. The book itself has seventeen chapters, each preceded by an epigraph concerning one of the Houses, or perhaps the creature itself. The Houses appear to rotate possession of the Imperial throne, and Jhereg is firmly in the middle of the procession. And while there are a few scenes in the book’s prologue about young Vlad, by the time the main story starts he’s grown up and established in his profession. Equally, however, he appears to be writing the story from a vantage point of some years later. Add all of these elements together, and it’s clear that Brust was at the very least constructing a character and a setting that would give him room to tell many more stories. Jhereg is a good start.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/16/jhereg-by-steven-brust/

May 14 2015

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

I skipped a good sixty or seventy pages of this book in the hope that jumping ahead would prevent me from pronouncing the Eight Deadly Words, but in the end it didn’t.

As the copyright page tells any reader, “The novel What Makes Sammy Run? was originally published by Random House, Inc., in 1941. Copyright 1941 by Budd Schulberg.” That’s pretty much the nub of the problem. It’s a book about Hollywood in the mid- to late 1930s, and so much about published novels, movies, and commercial writing has changed since then, that it all felt terribly out of date, and uninteresting. (Schulberg later wrote the screenplay for “On the Waterfront,” among other things, so he went on to have quite a decent career.)

The title character is a complete asshole who fucks over everybody he can in his career, and who supposedly can’t speak a paragraph without swearing, but there was more actual profanity in the first half of this sentence than in all of the book that I read. The past is a foreign country, and one can only allude to their colorful language there.

Apart from not caring what happens to those people, I didn’t buy several other major elements of the book. I didn’t buy that the narrator would care what happened to Sammy either. Sure, if the first-person narrator loses interest in Sammy, then he disappears from the book and it comes to an abrupt stop, but the author’s structural needs are not a real reason for Al Manheim to follow Sammy Glick’s every move. I didn’t buy much of tough dame Kit’s motivations either. And finally, I didn’t buy that Sammy was so much a better shark than all the other predators in the Hollywood tank that everything he tried succeeded.

The things that interested me most about the book fell outside the story itself.

[Sammy] may be said to be between patterns of social responsibility. And I believe this is true not only because he happens to be a second-generation product of the slums, but because our American culture as a whole may be in a state of dislocation. We are a babel of heterogeneous moralities. We are dizzy with change. … No wonder Sammy Glick (including all the Sammy Glicks who would never allow him into their clubs) has found the moral atmosphere so suitable and the underfooting so conducive to his kind of climbing. Yes, Sammy is still running, I’m afraid, and the question still is, How do we slow him down? Perhaps the answer involves an even bigger question: How do we slow down the whole culture he threatens to run away with and that threatens to run away with us?

That’s Budd Schulberg, from an introduction to the novel he wrote some years after its initial publication. That “dislocation,” that “babel of heterogeneous moralities … dizzy with change,” were both from the early 1950s, a period now generally regarded as one of the most stable and homogeneous periods in the nation’s recent history.

In 1989, Schulberg added an afterword, in which he notes a shift in some readers’ perception of Sammy from “the quintessential antihero, the bad example, the free-enterprise system at its meanest, brass-knuckle, kick-in-the-groin dirties” to someone who could be “a positive guide to their futures onward and upward.” While Schulberg still won’t swear on the page, he does not mince words: “But the dramatic transformation of Sammy Glick from the antihero of the forties to the role-model hero for the Yuppies of the eighties is a painful reminder of the moral breakdown we are suffering without even to realize that suffering is involved. … O.K. That’s how they’re reading it in 1989. And if that’s the way they go on reading it, marching behind the flag of Sammy Glick, with a big dollar sign in the square where the stars used to be, the twentieth-century version of Sammy is going to look like an Eagle Scout compared to the twenty-first.”

Budd Schulberg died in August 2009, at the age of ninety-five.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/14/what-makes-sammy-run-by-budd-schulberg/