And Then There'll Be Fireworks
Apr. 27th, 2005 09:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alfvaenContinuing onto the books I have read so far in the last half of spring(the half that comes after the Vernal Equinox, that is):
Scott Mackay's Omnifix is another Aurora-eligible one. It's the first novel I recall seeing by Mackay, but apparently he's got a few out there. It's basically hard SF, but it's a bit misleading off the bat. The human race is suffering from the depredations of nanoviruses dropped from alien probes over the past couple of decades. One of them results in death early in adulthood; another one eats away at the body a piece at a time. The solution for the latter is another nanovirus called Omnifix, which replaces the lost body parts with mechanical substitutes, eventually turning one into a cyborg warrior. This is really the main plot, although there is a gigantic derelict alien vessel that enters the solar system early into the book. We follow a man whose job is investigating the alien probes, as his life is systematically demolished by a jealous rival before he can go to the alien vessel. It's an interesting book, but flawed. Sometimes the main character seemed a little too naïve, for one thing.
Dean R. Koontz's Icebound is one of his older thrillers, originally released under a pseudonym, rereleased a few years back with a bit of updating; he acknowledges it as a homage to Alistair MacLean, which is very clear. A group of scientists is trapped on an iceberg during a winter storm, and one of them is a murderer. The only vessel that can possibly rescue them before they die is a Russian submarine which is not supposed to give away its location. The Russian sub bit would have been a teensy bit more tense if it had still been set in the Cold War, but on the whole it's a very effective and taut thriller that, like MacLean's Night Without End, is best read on a hot summer day.
Joel Rosenberg's Home Front is a straight mystery, so probably not Aurora-eligible, but I read it from the library anyway. Oddly, though, it seems to be set in the same Minnesotan town that is home to some of the characters in his "Keepers of The Hidden Ways" series. The narrator is copyeditor and Vietnam vet who calls together his old platoon to solve the murder of one of their number and give succor to his orphaned teenage daughter. A little bit heavy on "small town good, big city bad", but we can hope that's just the first-person narrator talking. A little bit unsatisfying, as a mystery, but the characters are great.
Gabriel García Márquez's In Evil Hour...well, I enjoyed A Hundred Years of Solitude, and Chronicle of A Death Foretold, and Leaf Storm, and even The Autumn of The Patriarch with its ten-page run-on sentences. But this one never grabbed me, which makes me wonder if it's an early work or something. It's not magic realism, because as I understand it magic realism is a mode of fiction used by writers in oppressed countries to comment covertly and allegorically on the government. This one comments quite explicitly on the government, but I found tedious despite its brevity. Allegedly the plot concerns posters, or "lampoons", being put up around a small town saying things that everyone knows but nobody says, but this is just a subplot, despite the fact that the books opens with a lampoon-inspired crime of passion. Instead it's mostly about the mayor and his attempts to keep control of the divisive elements within the town. Annoyingly, many of the characters don't have names, just being referred to by their professions, and I had trouble keeping the various widows straight. I found it unengaging, and I'm glad it was short.
Rebecca Bradley's Lady Pain is the third in her "Gil" series. The first one was a mostly lighthearted story of an unprepared scion being sent from exile to throw off the yoke of an oppressive emperor, until it turned dark right at the end; the second book was thus a little bit darker. This one is from the POV of the scion's son, which is probably because for most of the book it's best that we don't get to see inside the father's head. It has a good balance of the lighthearted and the serious, but does manage to tie everything up neatly at the end. An enjoyable conclusion to a good series.
C.J. Cherryh's The Paladin is usually listed among her lesser works. For one thing, it's a standalone, and for another, it's fantasy. Well, technically fantasy, but there's no magic or supernatural(despite superstitious belief in demons); it's mostly just a historical set in an alternate world. In this case, it's mostly China, which is good because I find China interesting. The book is not that bad, either, but it's divided into two distinct halves. One of them is the reluctant retired teacher who ends up teaching a student he doesn't want--in this case, a girl who wants revenge for her family's death. In the second half, he returns with her to the land he was exiled from, and things get more political and military. The one-on-one interaction in the first half is much more interesting, though. In other words, the dynamic is similar to Rimrunners, which is a good character story until it takes a left turn into something more action-oriented halfway through. I'd still recommend it to Cherryh fans, though.
S.M. Stirling's Dies The Fire was a great book, though I read it after the Aurora nomination deadline. It takes place on an Earth that has been altered by the same force that flung Nantucket into the far past(qv. Island In The Sea of Time et al.). Basically, electricity doesn't work, explosives don't work, and steam engines don't work. Stirling never really explains this, though his characters discuss it from time to time, and "Alien Space Bats" is the generally-accepted theory. But this being Stirling, he concentrates on the people who realize very quickly what The Rights Things To Do are. One of them is a pilot(who manages to land his small plane even without power)and the family he was escorting to go hunting with bows and arrows; the other is a Wiccan High Priestess who brings together as many people as she can in the country. Set mostly in Oregon, with the Willamette Valley featuring strongly in the plot. There are of course bad guys that our good guys have to fight against, and more books to come.
I enjoyed the book a lot, though it was discouraging for a couple of reasons. One of them is that I would certainly be toast very quickly if technology went away. I have no special skills in blacksmithing, archery, or anything remotely useful, and I am very badly out of shape. The best I could hope for would be a pittance as a storyteller or something. Or a singer. No, I'd be toast. Not that this makes me want to learn archery or anything, but it's still a bit depressing. Secondly, of course, this comes a bit too close to the situation I was describing in my ficlets. Though I may have gone in a different directions, it's sapped my inspiration for it, at least for now. Or maybe all it did was give me a good excuse for giving up on it.
Samuel R. Delany's Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand has a great title, but of course the title has little to do with the plot of the book. It has a great prologue, practically a novella in itself, about a character who is practically lobotomized by having the anger centres of his brain disconnected, and treated like dirt after that because he doesn't fight back. Then we switch to a different character, a first-person narrator, and things only gradually converge to the character from the prologue("Rat"), the only survivor of the destruction of his world, whose brain has been restored. He and the narrator(both male)fall instantly in lust with each other, but eventually they are driven apart. The story ends there; there was supposed to be a sequel, The Splendour And Misery of Bodies, of Cities, but it ground to a halt some years ago; by some reports, Delany stopped writing it after the friends he based the main characters on both died of AIDS. Whether he's worked on it since, I don't know, but a portion of it was released around 1996, and was longlisted for the TIptree Award.
Anyway, the novel does have some cool features, and some annoying ones. The term "woman" is used for every character, male or female, alien or human, and all are referred to as "she". The one exception is that the object of one's sexual desire, whatever gender, one thinks of as "he". That's confusing at first, and at times annoying, but nonetheless interesting. More annoying and less interesting is the subscripting of job: Every "woman" has a job1, a job2, and homework3. I was never quite clear, but it's like your job1 is your actual career, but your job2 is just what you do from time to time to earn money. However, this is the only word so subscripted, which makes it seem gratuitous, and frankly the "1" often looks like ",", which confused me several times.
As far as comparing it to other Delany books go, I'd rate it below Babel-17 and The Ballad of Beta-2, as well as The Fall of The Towers, perhaps about level with Dhalgren, and above Tales of Neverÿon and The Einstein Intersection. Delany can take his own sweet time with the sequel, for all of me.
Isaac Asimov's Nemesis I just finished. I'd never read it before; by the time I bought it, probably on its paperback release in 1990, I was already falling far behind in my reading. Asimov had also squandered some of his goodwill with his attempts to suture the Foundation and Robots books together, perhaps, though I admit I read those closer to the time they came out. Anyway, I'm not really used to his style any more, I think, because I didn't find it that engaging. The places where the characters stopped and discussed some point of science bothered me a little bit more, perhaps. And the ending felt a bit sudden, but that was perhaps because there were no less than three sample chapters from other Asimov novels at the end, so I was expecting more pages than I got. All in all, it hasn't aged well, but it was a noble effort.
In the nonfiction books, the one I forgot to mention as Eats, Shoots And Leaves, by Lynne Truss. The book was often entertaining, but I have to say that I am really not much of a stickler. Seeing bad punctuation doesn't make me wince, nor does most bad usage. (I may rant on usage later, since I personally think farther==further, nauseated==nauseous, media and data do not take plural verbs, and "they" is a third-personal-singular gender-nonspecific pronoun.) I feel confident enough in my use of punctuation, my placement of commas, my judgement of when words are hyphenated, etc., that if I disagree with Truss, I shrug and disagree. I personally don't have a problem with "Two Weeks Notice", for instance, or "CD's". (I do have trouble deciding whether it's '60s, 60's, or '60's, but generally choose the former.) As Truss herself notes, punctuation has changed since it was introduced(the "; --" is now much less common than it used to be), so why should we try to fix it in place now?
Anyway, I'm now rereading The Gap Into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge by Stephen R. Donaldson. This makes the third SF in a row, if you don't count Dies The Fire, but somehow Delany, Asimov and Donaldson come at it from such different directions that it doesn't bother me. Still, making the next book a fantasy might be a good idea...
Scott Mackay's Omnifix is another Aurora-eligible one. It's the first novel I recall seeing by Mackay, but apparently he's got a few out there. It's basically hard SF, but it's a bit misleading off the bat. The human race is suffering from the depredations of nanoviruses dropped from alien probes over the past couple of decades. One of them results in death early in adulthood; another one eats away at the body a piece at a time. The solution for the latter is another nanovirus called Omnifix, which replaces the lost body parts with mechanical substitutes, eventually turning one into a cyborg warrior. This is really the main plot, although there is a gigantic derelict alien vessel that enters the solar system early into the book. We follow a man whose job is investigating the alien probes, as his life is systematically demolished by a jealous rival before he can go to the alien vessel. It's an interesting book, but flawed. Sometimes the main character seemed a little too naïve, for one thing.
Dean R. Koontz's Icebound is one of his older thrillers, originally released under a pseudonym, rereleased a few years back with a bit of updating; he acknowledges it as a homage to Alistair MacLean, which is very clear. A group of scientists is trapped on an iceberg during a winter storm, and one of them is a murderer. The only vessel that can possibly rescue them before they die is a Russian submarine which is not supposed to give away its location. The Russian sub bit would have been a teensy bit more tense if it had still been set in the Cold War, but on the whole it's a very effective and taut thriller that, like MacLean's Night Without End, is best read on a hot summer day.
Joel Rosenberg's Home Front is a straight mystery, so probably not Aurora-eligible, but I read it from the library anyway. Oddly, though, it seems to be set in the same Minnesotan town that is home to some of the characters in his "Keepers of The Hidden Ways" series. The narrator is copyeditor and Vietnam vet who calls together his old platoon to solve the murder of one of their number and give succor to his orphaned teenage daughter. A little bit heavy on "small town good, big city bad", but we can hope that's just the first-person narrator talking. A little bit unsatisfying, as a mystery, but the characters are great.
Gabriel García Márquez's In Evil Hour...well, I enjoyed A Hundred Years of Solitude, and Chronicle of A Death Foretold, and Leaf Storm, and even The Autumn of The Patriarch with its ten-page run-on sentences. But this one never grabbed me, which makes me wonder if it's an early work or something. It's not magic realism, because as I understand it magic realism is a mode of fiction used by writers in oppressed countries to comment covertly and allegorically on the government. This one comments quite explicitly on the government, but I found tedious despite its brevity. Allegedly the plot concerns posters, or "lampoons", being put up around a small town saying things that everyone knows but nobody says, but this is just a subplot, despite the fact that the books opens with a lampoon-inspired crime of passion. Instead it's mostly about the mayor and his attempts to keep control of the divisive elements within the town. Annoyingly, many of the characters don't have names, just being referred to by their professions, and I had trouble keeping the various widows straight. I found it unengaging, and I'm glad it was short.
Rebecca Bradley's Lady Pain is the third in her "Gil" series. The first one was a mostly lighthearted story of an unprepared scion being sent from exile to throw off the yoke of an oppressive emperor, until it turned dark right at the end; the second book was thus a little bit darker. This one is from the POV of the scion's son, which is probably because for most of the book it's best that we don't get to see inside the father's head. It has a good balance of the lighthearted and the serious, but does manage to tie everything up neatly at the end. An enjoyable conclusion to a good series.
C.J. Cherryh's The Paladin is usually listed among her lesser works. For one thing, it's a standalone, and for another, it's fantasy. Well, technically fantasy, but there's no magic or supernatural(despite superstitious belief in demons); it's mostly just a historical set in an alternate world. In this case, it's mostly China, which is good because I find China interesting. The book is not that bad, either, but it's divided into two distinct halves. One of them is the reluctant retired teacher who ends up teaching a student he doesn't want--in this case, a girl who wants revenge for her family's death. In the second half, he returns with her to the land he was exiled from, and things get more political and military. The one-on-one interaction in the first half is much more interesting, though. In other words, the dynamic is similar to Rimrunners, which is a good character story until it takes a left turn into something more action-oriented halfway through. I'd still recommend it to Cherryh fans, though.
S.M. Stirling's Dies The Fire was a great book, though I read it after the Aurora nomination deadline. It takes place on an Earth that has been altered by the same force that flung Nantucket into the far past(qv. Island In The Sea of Time et al.). Basically, electricity doesn't work, explosives don't work, and steam engines don't work. Stirling never really explains this, though his characters discuss it from time to time, and "Alien Space Bats" is the generally-accepted theory. But this being Stirling, he concentrates on the people who realize very quickly what The Rights Things To Do are. One of them is a pilot(who manages to land his small plane even without power)and the family he was escorting to go hunting with bows and arrows; the other is a Wiccan High Priestess who brings together as many people as she can in the country. Set mostly in Oregon, with the Willamette Valley featuring strongly in the plot. There are of course bad guys that our good guys have to fight against, and more books to come.
I enjoyed the book a lot, though it was discouraging for a couple of reasons. One of them is that I would certainly be toast very quickly if technology went away. I have no special skills in blacksmithing, archery, or anything remotely useful, and I am very badly out of shape. The best I could hope for would be a pittance as a storyteller or something. Or a singer. No, I'd be toast. Not that this makes me want to learn archery or anything, but it's still a bit depressing. Secondly, of course, this comes a bit too close to the situation I was describing in my ficlets. Though I may have gone in a different directions, it's sapped my inspiration for it, at least for now. Or maybe all it did was give me a good excuse for giving up on it.
Samuel R. Delany's Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand has a great title, but of course the title has little to do with the plot of the book. It has a great prologue, practically a novella in itself, about a character who is practically lobotomized by having the anger centres of his brain disconnected, and treated like dirt after that because he doesn't fight back. Then we switch to a different character, a first-person narrator, and things only gradually converge to the character from the prologue("Rat"), the only survivor of the destruction of his world, whose brain has been restored. He and the narrator(both male)fall instantly in lust with each other, but eventually they are driven apart. The story ends there; there was supposed to be a sequel, The Splendour And Misery of Bodies, of Cities, but it ground to a halt some years ago; by some reports, Delany stopped writing it after the friends he based the main characters on both died of AIDS. Whether he's worked on it since, I don't know, but a portion of it was released around 1996, and was longlisted for the TIptree Award.
Anyway, the novel does have some cool features, and some annoying ones. The term "woman" is used for every character, male or female, alien or human, and all are referred to as "she". The one exception is that the object of one's sexual desire, whatever gender, one thinks of as "he". That's confusing at first, and at times annoying, but nonetheless interesting. More annoying and less interesting is the subscripting of job: Every "woman" has a job1, a job2, and homework3. I was never quite clear, but it's like your job1 is your actual career, but your job2 is just what you do from time to time to earn money. However, this is the only word so subscripted, which makes it seem gratuitous, and frankly the "1" often looks like ",", which confused me several times.
As far as comparing it to other Delany books go, I'd rate it below Babel-17 and The Ballad of Beta-2, as well as The Fall of The Towers, perhaps about level with Dhalgren, and above Tales of Neverÿon and The Einstein Intersection. Delany can take his own sweet time with the sequel, for all of me.
Isaac Asimov's Nemesis I just finished. I'd never read it before; by the time I bought it, probably on its paperback release in 1990, I was already falling far behind in my reading. Asimov had also squandered some of his goodwill with his attempts to suture the Foundation and Robots books together, perhaps, though I admit I read those closer to the time they came out. Anyway, I'm not really used to his style any more, I think, because I didn't find it that engaging. The places where the characters stopped and discussed some point of science bothered me a little bit more, perhaps. And the ending felt a bit sudden, but that was perhaps because there were no less than three sample chapters from other Asimov novels at the end, so I was expecting more pages than I got. All in all, it hasn't aged well, but it was a noble effort.
In the nonfiction books, the one I forgot to mention as Eats, Shoots And Leaves, by Lynne Truss. The book was often entertaining, but I have to say that I am really not much of a stickler. Seeing bad punctuation doesn't make me wince, nor does most bad usage. (I may rant on usage later, since I personally think farther==further, nauseated==nauseous, media and data do not take plural verbs, and "they" is a third-personal-singular gender-nonspecific pronoun.) I feel confident enough in my use of punctuation, my placement of commas, my judgement of when words are hyphenated, etc., that if I disagree with Truss, I shrug and disagree. I personally don't have a problem with "Two Weeks Notice", for instance, or "CD's". (I do have trouble deciding whether it's '60s, 60's, or '60's, but generally choose the former.) As Truss herself notes, punctuation has changed since it was introduced(the "; --" is now much less common than it used to be), so why should we try to fix it in place now?
Anyway, I'm now rereading The Gap Into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge by Stephen R. Donaldson. This makes the third SF in a row, if you don't count Dies The Fire, but somehow Delany, Asimov and Donaldson come at it from such different directions that it doesn't bother me. Still, making the next book a fantasy might be a good idea...
