Obsolete Your Idols

One of the books I picked up at FOGcon was The Revolution from Rosinante and it was short enough that I dug in to it right away. It’s the first in a trilogy. Before I get to the contents, I want to mention that this is one of the few books where the cover art lured me over to take a closer look; almost always for me, it’s the author name or title itself that draw me, this time it was an image by Laura Givens, seen at greater resolution in one of her image galleries under the name Infiltrator.

Now, the book’s insides. It’s a sparsely told science fiction story about the Project Manager who became a King.

There’s more to it than that and that’s not even the most plausible interpretation of the story, but that’s mine. It takes place mostly on and near an ambitious project to render inhospitable environments habitable. In SPACE! It’s got plausible near future politics and plausible near future technologies, some bold characters, some nuanced characters, some vile characters. It’s briskly paced and errs on the side of letting the reader do the work.

Who might like this book

• Fans of near-reality thinking-action science fiction. The positive parts of Heinlein, say.
• Paper fans looking for something not too heavy to lug around.
• Mid-level managers.
• The quixotic.

Who might not like this book

• Readers who need every story detail rendered explicit.

 

I read The Beast With Nine Billion Feet by Anil Menon. The first question I have: where’s the fucking sequel already? 

OK, that’s not fair. I don’t want you to get the idea it’s an incomplete story. It’s a story with an ambiguous ending which could be setting up a follow up or just letting me as a reader decide some of the outcomes for myself. So what is this book? I think it’s a Young Adult science fiction story about two siblings dealing with the absence and then the presence of their father. Also there’s some stuff here about the kind of prejudice Frankenstein’s creation might have felt towards Frankenstein’s college classmates.

Things I liked about it

• Likable and plausible characters, even the villains of the piece.
• A fun future, not too utopian, not too dystopian.
• A strong female protagonist who seemed not at all superwoman nor in need of rescuing.

Things I didn’t like about it

• Too short. That’s my only complaint.

Who might like this book

• Readers of YA fiction who don’t need vampires or werewolves.
• Readers who like wild rides through unfamiliar cultures (while some readers may be familiar with India, very few are probably from 2040 AD [yet]).
• Pretty much everyone. I’m not even kidding. I think this book has a lot of great affordances for hanging some thoughts on.

Who might not like this book

• People who are tired of being my friend.

ETA: the name of the author which I forgot last night because I blogged this after drinking.

Sketch a Venn diagram. One circle is HARD SF by which I mean scientifically plausible (or almost) fiction. A second circle is SPACE OPERA by which I mean dramatic or melodramatic adventures in the vast spaces between worlds. The third and last circle is POLICE PROCEDURAL by which I mean a story focusing on the actions of law enforcement meant to capture the (sometimes tedious) details of their work. At the space where those three circles overlap is Alastair Reynolds’s book The Prefect.

If you are not into all of those, this book is going to misfire for you, in all likelihood. Fortunately for me, this is my sweet spot. The SF isn’t all that hard compared to some of his other books, but it was sufficiently robust; the opera isn’t all that melodramatic but it did have a larger than life threat, moments of emotional irony and loud bombastic characters; the procedural is mostly field work and demonstrating adaptability. These all seemed to me to be compromises meant to not push the novel too far out of the overlap in any one direction. Best of all, it works.

In a future where a distributed society (humans, uplifted warpigs, post digital sentience) takes voting Very Seriously Indeed, the police agency we follow about in this narrative are the election prefects. They investigate voting irregularities, enforce the will of the people if needed, and defend the polity from disruptions, both internal and external. It’s structured in the way I expect an Alastair Reynolds book to be, with a progressively exposed and escalating threat, likable but flawed protagonists, gradual exposure of underpinnings like an onion being peeled.

Now, I’m reading this in the context of someone who’s read other Alastair Reynolds books but it seems to me that if you have never read his stuff, this book is probably an accessible if meaty jumping on point. This book would lead fans of N!C!I!S! or CSI:MiamYEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAH or Law & Order: Criminally Ingenious into Reynolds’s SF universe following the thread of the Great Detective protagonist. Tom Dreyfus, in this book, is Goren, he’s Gibbs, he’s Horatio, he’s Sherlock, he’s the messed up, twisted up inside, too sharp for his own good, driven by circumstance, caught in the spider’s web, hero.

Back by popular request, my book review lists:

People who might like this book 
• Fans of Police Procedural TV shows
• SF readers looking for a meaty satisfying entry to an intricate universe
• People who can’t WAIT to be digitized and give up their bodies to gain awesome super powers
• People who love democracy. Really really love democracy.

People who might not like this book 
• People looking for something shorter, like the OED
• People who are looking for a book exploring the complex inner life of a troubled girl who never goes anywhere or does anything
• People who are interested in the tactical games played in societies with strict social mores in order to gain or avoid an arranged marriage to a Person of Influence

I’ve read the Roger Zelazny novel Lord of Light numerous times. First, as a pre-teen doggedly going to the end of the science fiction section of my public library and reading the books there, beginning with the alphabetically last author and rewinding to the beginning of the alphabet. In my memory, I read them all at least once, then I started going back to re-read my favorites. Lord of Light would have been one of the first, its poetry stuck in my head.

Over the years since then, I’ve read it again. Sometimes after an abyssmal book, to cleanse the palette. Sometimes when I was facing a big decision in my life and wanted an absorbing distraction. Most recently, I read it because it was the Book of Honor at Potlatch 2010. The panel dedicated to discussing the book introduced one of the reasons it was selected: cultural appropriation. That’s one of those hot phrases in recent discussions about writing. If cultural appropriation exists [and JT Stewart made a good case that it or something rather like it does], this novel is an example of it on two levels.

First, Zelazny was neither a Hindu nor a Buddhist, but the setting is constructed from pieces of the Hindu culture and beliefs and the protagonist deploys a scheme with Buddhist trappings.

Second, within the context of the novel, the reason for the Hindu and Buddhist bits are that the characters have deliberately chosen to mine out the useful levers from those cultures and use them to shape the world.  In the clearest terms, they have appropriated those cultures and deployed the likenesses which will motivate people and control their environments.

That was the first surprise for me in the panel discussion, an angle I hadn’t considered of the story, and one which came in with two tines. The second surprise in the panel discussion was learning that most of the panelists did not like the story. Imagine that, an award winning novel, widely read, and most of the people who showed up to talk about it didn’t care for it. Some conceded that they had liked it when first reading it but upon further reflection or re-reading, they liked it less, and sometimes not at all. One panelist didn’t like it when she first read it, until she read more analysis of it and then the book was improved by those alternate interpretations and readings of it.

Which is a long way of saying that hardly anyone there who got to speak agreed with me, about Lord of Light being a worthy and re-readable book, an interesting book, a lyrical book, in short, a good book. So this positive review score I’m giving it is one I give in the face of bold disagreement by others. Which I’m okay with.

The story of the book is told largely through a very long flashback. The protagonist is summoned, literally reincarnated, his atman or soul stuff into a body. When he’s more at home in the body, he remembers his past before he was discorporated and that is the meat of the book.  Eventually we find out how he was unable to keep body and soul together and then there’s a wrap up where he wins the war he’s been fighting for about a century. The value of this story is not in being ignorant of the storyline, but in the prose it’s presented in, the implications of the actions and, as with all Zelazny stories, the things he doesn’t tell us.

I think that last element is what keeps me coming back to Zelazny’s writings; he doesn’t tell the reader everything, he takes the story halfway and then the reader has to step forward to meet it there. If you are a reader who needs everything explained, you will not like Zelazny. But that kind of challenge slash puzzle slash opportunity is exactly the kind of narrative my mind seizes upon and savors. So it is with this work.  We’re given bursts of lush prose and vast empty spaces of implication and incompleteness.

Not to say it’s a flawless work.  There are points which bothered me the first time and still do.  An example would be how  extracting the stored pattern of Sam’s consciousness from the media in which it was stored removes it from that media. Or how that pattern can claim to have experienced consciousness while in the media. But those can be glossed over and forgiven.

Ordinarily I try to wrap up my reviews with lists of people who might and might not like a given work. This review is different, I’m experimenting with hReview markup in response to an article on why book reviews are hard to search for. If you miss those lists, comment and I’ll revise.