This is the third Matt Ruff book I’ve read, Set This House in Order. The subtitle of it is A Romance of Souls and that’s accurate. The heroic protagonist is dealing with Multiple Personality Disorder so it’s a very little bit like some other such books you might have read, where the hero is sometimes at odds with themself.
The early and middle parts of the story mostly take place in the Pacific North West, in and around Seattle, which I enjoyed very much. I’ve even been to some of the places mentioned by name. The only real letdown for me in this story was that I was expecting much more of an explicitly fantastical or beyond reality element. There wasn’t anything in here which I couldn’t hand-wave away as subject point of view, which is perhaps welcome news for people who hate genre fiction but love to read about people suffering.
There are some fun story twists as the story unfolds and some great thumbnail sketches of characters. It also leaves a satisfying number of questions unanswered but resolves the major ones I was plagued by, so it’s very nearly ideal for my tastes in that way.
Who might like this book:
People with alters living in their head
People who love reading about Seattle
Fans of cold case mysteries
Who might not like this book:
People with alters living in their head
People looking for a more clearly futuristic or fantastic story
I’ve started using friendfeed as a waystation for aggregation before my feeds hit Planet Binder. So you don’t need to be pulling from both. Or, either, really. Note that the tumblr and gReader feeds often contain pr0n so you may prefer to exclude those from your pull. Or perhaps prefer and highlight them. Get down with your bad elf.
I did what I’ve been threatening to do and deployed OpenID someplace. Here. This blog. I used an existing plugin to do it because I’ve got less time than ambition right now. Enjoy.
I read another Apex book, this one called Hebrewpunk. It’s a collection of stories and if I had to pick one word to describe this collection as a whole, it would be ‘underripe’. Not to say these are bad stories, they’re not. But some of them feel undercooked and some of them feel like they’re the wrong part of the life of the protagonist of the story.
The collection starts off with a heist story named, of course, The Heist. It has a reasonably engaging though not very detailed criminal undertaking in some fantastical near future setting. This sounds like the opening adventure to someone’s Shadowrun campaign. It ends with a bang but not one I found very satisfying, not enough context for me to even understand the ramifications of the crime, the patron, the protector, any of that.
The other three stories in the collection are individual tales of the three criminals from the first story, taking place in their personal pasts. These are more interesting than the first tale but for my money, the last story is the best, perhaps because of the strength of the source material used. That tale, The Dope Fiend, calls out a book used as reference and I’m intrigued enough I’ve wishlisted that book.
In some cases the application simply fails to work with my operating system and browser often enough that it’s not fun and in other cases I just never found myself playing with it. Having them there in my profile felt like a mild burden that I can opt out of so I am.
I have the book at all because I saw Deb Taber as I often do at these places and she made a compelling case for me to buy it along the lines of “gimme your munny!” so then when I got on a plane with nearly no attention span and a powerful thirst for water (yes, I suffered from and continue to suffer from this year’s WisCholera) I figured a collection of short stories would be good flight fodder. It was.
The foreword identifies the lack of unifying theme for the collection other than them being exploratory works by a developing writer. Given that, there’s the unevenness to the stories you might anticipate. Some were created as podcasts and I liked that aspect. There’s an awful lot of pop culture mashed up in these and while I range from finding it amusing to irritating, I suspect it may soon date many of these stories as time accelerates onward.
Here’s my story by story breakdown reactions. As many of these are available as podcasts and in other forms, you don’t need to buy this collection to experience them, but at $15 or so, it’s pretty much a steal.
Absolution, Insured - good zippy opening but I wanted more from the ending
Delve - a remarkable story about the End of Everything (At Least As We Know It), one of my favorite tale settings; I’d pick this as one of the top three in the collection
The Losting Corridor - did not like, it felt like an awkward exercise in 4th wall busting if you consider tropes to be a 4th wall. I find more fun in the tvtropes site.
No World For Warriors - I like stories about immortals and immortal perspective. This one comes with a rumination on the distinction between warriors and soldiers. It’s pretty good. You’ll like it if you like that kind of a story
Another Man’s Run - another one of my top three pick from this collection, it’s a sort of Damnation Alley / Escape From New York / PKD flavored pony express in space story. Despite it featuring a Post Office, I don’t think Vy would dig it like I did
The Last Frequency - I feel bad about not liking this story. I just couldn’t get past how irritating I find radio DJs and how this story didn’t feel like it broke any new ground.
Mercury’s Magnitude - extremely short sequel to The Last Frequency: liked it even less
A Place of Snow Angels - thematically this felt quite a bit like Delve to me but with more imagery; if you find snow more romantic than irritating (eg, you’ve never had to shovel the stuff in order to get out of your home) you’ll probably like it
Akropolis - ehn. It’s a sinister Perry Rhodan story
My Caroline - ehn. It’s a dude who’s monster-whipped with a revenge twist
Killing Jars - it’s a horror story. It reminds me of all those King horror stories people tried to tell me I would enjoy and which I didn’t.
Old Tricks - what if Satan didn’t exist but Loki did? another story I wanted to like more than I did
The End of Flesh - the longest and I’d say strongest story of the piece. This is the third of my top three in this collection. It’s got noir, for which I am a notorious sucker. It’s got cannibalism and other taboos. It’s got a future, one bleak and hungry. When people tell me about MEAT, the NecroPhasiac event is pretty much what I picture. Satisfyingly creepy ending.
I’ve finally dropped the default fancy style sheet and images directory where the generated HTML was pointing at it so now the planet looks a touch prettier. Also added two new feeds for it: this blog, and comments to it.
You know who else I’ve never read but should? Charles Stross. That’s who. So I did! In fact, I read Glasshouse all in a rush. There’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in this book if you’re the kind of reader who likes to anticipate what might happen next. This book is the story of how far some people are willing to go. Some of the people in question are trying to effect massive social change and some of the other people in question are trying to resist and undo that change. It’s seen from the point of view of a conflicted and memory-scarred character.
I’d like to talk more about the plot of this book, but I’m conflicted on this. A lot of the enjoyment I got from the book was from figuring out what might be really going on and what might happen next. I would prefer not to deprive anyone of that same opportunity so if that’s the kind of reader you are, stop here and go pick it up.
For anyone who doesn’t like that, here’s what the book is like. We’re introduced to a protagonist who is suffering the emotionally chaotic after-effects of voluntarily undergoing selective memory removal. I’ll call the protagonist he, though for most of the novel, he’s a she. He volunteers for a study which will consume the rest of the length of this novel. The study, of course, is something other than it’s purported to be but he doesn’t know that when he enters. Or does he? Because it turns out this isn’t his memory edit just before novel start isn’t his first and an earlier instance knew that something was going on.
So once the protagonist is a she, things really take off. Previously concealed forces come into the light, internal and external to our protagonist. We get to see her strive and succeed, as well as strive and fail, to solve the mysteries of the setting and overcome hindrances. She’s very easy to cheer for, even as she reveals to us that she has previously been an amoral killing machine, quite literally. The study is actually a former asylum of sorts, now modified to be a panoptic prison.
This novels reminds me of some of the best aspects of Philip K. Dick and John Varley but puts it together in a style I couldn’t see either of them managing. This book is slick and only seems transparent from the outside.
Who might like this book
Fans of post-Scarcity fiction
Fans of PKD, John Varley, John Le Carre, Iain Banks
People with bodytype dysphoria
People who keep seeing Charles Stross’s name and wondering what a good accessible book by him might be
People who’ve undergone memory redaction, voluntary or in-
Who might not like this book
People who don’t like to have a character develop new levels on them
People who don’t like the reveal of the Great and Powerful Oz as a huckster
People who think gender, sex, and attraction are fixed and invariant