Month: August 2003

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Spencer, Wen: (01-03) Alien Taste; Tainted Trail; Bitter Waters

Last Friday, I unexpectedly had the afternoon off because of the blackout (we had power, but state workers were sent home to conserve power to help bring NYC back up). The obvious thing to do was to stretch out in the backyard with a book, but I was curiously reluctant to read the book I was nearly done with (The Merlin Conspiracy), probably because I was nearly done with it and wanted something to immerse myself in all afternoon. For no apparent reason, I picked up Wen Spencer’s near-future SF Alien Taste; after I finished it, I went out and bought the two sequels, Tainted Trail and Bitter Waters.

I bought Alien Taste because of, oddly, Steven Brust’s Paths of the Dead; I posted my book log review to Usenet, where someone picked up on the “Alternatively, he may just have a mouse in his pocket.” quote and mentioned the series favorably. Spencer was a guest at Boskone; I didn’t see any of the panels she was on, but her name in the program reminded me to pick up Alien Taste in the dealer’s room.

Ukiah Oregon was found as a feral child living with a wolf pack, near the town he was named after. As Alien Taste opens, he’s working as a tracker in partnership with a private detective; the current quarry is a missing woman whose roommates have been slaughtered by someone with a katana. Given the title of the book, it’s no surprise to the reader that his tracking abilities (which include tracking by DNA) are, yes, inhumanly good. Ukiah doesn’t know this yet, though, and most of Alien Taste is taken up with Ukiah discovering his origins and how they are tied into the central worldbuilding idea of the series. Over the series, the consequences and the backstory of this idea keep expanding in satisfactorily complicated ways; it’s nowhere near Lord of the Rings level of complexity, but approaches, oh, say, Daniel Keys Moran’s published Continuing Time books (Emerald Eyes, The Long Run, The Last Dancer).

[ Aside: these are set in 2004; the first was published in July 2001. I was initially worried by the back cover copy of the third, which mentions Homeland Security: my reaction was, “Hey, we’ve already posited gay marriage and female-on-female in vitro fertilization as happening sometime around 1999; just accept that we’re in an alternative universe and don’t try to shoehorn in current events.” Fortunately, this turns out not to be a real problem, though I’m still not sure why it was necessary to bring Homeland Security into it. ]

Obviously, I really enjoyed Alien Taste, since I immediately went to Borders and bought the rest of the series. They’re certainly not perfect books: the prose, while reasonably transparent to me, is nothing remarkable, and many of the interpersonal elements lack subtlety (for instance, if you can’t spot the love interests the instant they come on stage, you’ve been, well, raised by wolves). But I liked the cast of characters immediately, a reaction that I find hard to explain in any useful way, and care about how the emotional stuff plays out, unsubtle though it is. The mystery and tracking-methodology elements are also appealing, and feed into the fun, fast, and exciting plots. And I like the way the central idea is being worked out; it’s a rich universe.

The first two are self-contained, though I wouldn’t read them out of order. The third ends on more of a cliffhanger; the fourth will be out in May 2004. I don’t know if more are planned, but I’ll be reading the fourth, as well as Spencer’s forthcoming non-series books.

(Oh, and the relevance of the mouse in the pocket? That would be a spoiler, but the author’s website currently has a teaser quote featuring a mouse . . . [If you want to avoid hints, though, I’d avoid the sample chapters from the sequels.] Edit: said teaser quote is no longer there. Sorry.)

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Westlake, Donald E.: (01) The Hot Rock

I bought several caper movies on DVD recently, including the film adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s The Hot Rock. (Discussion of the film itself is on my LiveJournal.) The movie, of course, prompted a re-read. This is the first of the Dortmunder comic crime novels, in which Dortmunder and the gang have just one goal: to steal an emerald. Unfortunately, with the kind of luck Dortmunder has, it requires them to pull off five or so different jobs, which steadily escalate in absurdity until you get moments like:

In his office on the opposite side of the building, Chief Administrator Doctor Panchard L. Whiskum sat at his desk, rereading the piece he’d just written for the American Journal of Applied Pan-Psychotherapy, entitled “Instances of Induced Hallucination among Staff Members of Mental Hospitals,” when a white-jacketed male nurse ran in shouting, “Doctor! There’s a locomotive in the garden!”

Doctor Whiskum looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He looked at his manuscript. He looked at the male nurse. He said, “Sit down, Foster. Let’s talk about it.”

plus everyone’s favorite catch-phrase, “Afghanistan banana stand.”

The big pleasures of these books are the characters, the sheer inventiveness, and the smooth plots. The small pleasures are the prose and the recurring gags, many of which I was pleased to spot all the way back at this first book, such as the C&I—Capitalists and Immigrants—Bank, and why Fred Lartz stopped driving (took a wrong turn into Kennedy Airport), and so forth.

If you like caper movies, deadpan humor that likes and respects its characters, or superbly crafted prose, you have absolutely no reason to avoid the Dortmunder books. About the only place you shouldn’t start is Drowned Hopes, which is atypically dark; otherwise, enjoy.

[And with that, I am caught up on the book log! Scroll down and down—I was only seven books behind . . . ]

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Brust, Steven: (109) Issola (re-read)

I re-read Issola, by Steven Brust (prior booklog entry), one night when I had a headache and couldn’t deal with anything new. I picked this up in particular because it has a fair bit of information about Morrolan, which I wanted to consider in light of The Lord of Castle Black.

The only thing I have to say about this book that I haven’t said before is that it is quite literally a novel of manners, and I feel very slow for not having noticed this earlier. (And I do intend to go back to the Fantasy of Manners list (collection of LiveJournal posts on the topic), but clearing the gigantic backlog here seemed to be more important.)

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Wells, Martha: Element of Fire, The (re-read)

Another re-read: Martha Wells’ The Element of Fire, in honor of finally finding an affordable used copy—when paperbacks are going for $50 and up, you know something is hard to find.

[ Ignore this if your name is not Nielsen Hayden. Patrick, I think I did e-mail you after Boskone about looking into reprinting this, but you’ve been busy, so, there, I’ve said it again. ]

This is such a great book. I briefly described the setup in the prior booklog entry, and mentioned that it opens with a bang with a rescue from an evil sorcerer’s house; I now discover that the first chapter is online, so you can go read it. Here’s a taste:

There was some soft cursing below as a dark lantern, its front covered by a metal slide to keep the light dimmed, was lit and passed upward. Thomas waited impatiently, feeling the darkness press in on him like a solid wall. He would’ve preferred the presence of another sorcerer besides Braun, the rest of the Queen’s Guard, and a conscripted city troop to quell any possibility of riot when the restive River Quarter neighborhood discovered it had a mad foreign sorcerer in its midst. But orders were orders, and if Queen’s Guards or their captain were killed while entering Grandier’s house secretly, then at least civil unrest was prevented. An inspired intrigue, Thomas had to admit, even if he was the one it was meant to eliminate.

As he reached down to take the shuttered lamp from Gideon something moved in the corner of his eye. Thomas dropped the lamp onto the table and studied the darkness, trying to decide if the hesitant motion was actually there or in his imagination.

The flicker of light escaping from the edges of the lamp’s iron cover touched the room with moving shadows. With the toe of his boot Thomas knocked the lantern slide up.

The wan candlelight was reflected from a dozen points around the unoccupied room, from lacquered cabinets, the gilt leather of a chair, the metallic threads in brocaded satin hangings.

Then the wooden cherub supporting the righthand corner of the table Thomas was standing on turned its head.

The action moves briskly throughout the book, tightly focused in both space (the castle and surrounding city) and time (just a few days). More, it’s strongly character-driven action—and what great characters they are. Here’s one of our dashing protagonists, the Captain of the Queen’s Guard, discussing the Dowager Queen:

“Don’t take me for a fool, Captain.”

“I don’t know what else to take you for.”

“You can take me for a man who did not acquire my power in a Queen’s bed.”

“Yes,” Thomas agreed. “In her bed, on the daybed in the anteroom, on a couch in the west solar of the Summer Palace, and other locations too numerous to mention, and if you had the slightest understanding of Ravenna at all, you would know that it never made one damn bit of difference as to whether she took my advice or not.”

I mentioned most of the things I like about this book in the last entry, but something I missed is an element of the worldbuilding, namely the interesting interaction between landlaw and courtlaw that informs the politics of the novel. Also, a re-read demonstrates how well an important plot twist is set up.

This sounds a little scattered, but I’m trying to avoid just re-typing the last entry. The important thing is that this book rocks, and everyone should (try to find a copy and) read it.

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Moore, Alan: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The, vol. 1 (re-read)

I re-read Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (prior booklog entry) because of all the reviews trashing the movie version. In tallying up the ways the movie differs, I was reminded of what I did like about the book—pretty much everything they changed, apparently. In particular, I thought the best thing about the plot was the way that Mina Murray held the League together with noting more than the application of her iron will—over, inter alia, an ex-opium-addicted Alan Quatermain, a sociopathic Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and (most impressively) Mr. Hyde. (Captain Nemo is, oddly, one of the saner members of the League.) The rest of the plot was not, in my opinion, a great strength of the novel, which I suppose was one thing that did transfer to screen. Anyway, I’ll look for the collection of the second volume, but I’m not holding my breath for it.

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Jones, Diana Wynne: Deep Secret

After the Bryson, I re-read Diana Wynne Jones’s Deep Secret, partly in preparation for the new book in that world (The Merlin Conspiracy), and partly because I just really like it. I have had decidedly mixed reactions to Jones’s works overall (e.g., Howl’s Moving Castle), which may make me an anomaly, as I know many people who seems to like basically everything by Jones. Deep Secret is one I had a positive reaction to: it’s great fun, solidly done, and manages some very tricky tone shifts with remarkable aplomb.

Deep Secret is a multiverse book, in which worlds are arranged in the sign of infinity. Worlds to Ayewards have more magic; worlds to Naywards have less; and Magids are charged with keeping worlds from drifting too far from their place, smoothing the workings of the worlds, and gradually releasing the Deep Secrets into common knowledge. One of Earth’s Magids passes away at the beginning of the story, and Rupert Venables, Earth’s newest Magid, must find a replacement. In the meantime, the Koryfonic Empire, a set of worlds to Ayewards and also Rupert’s responsibility, is rapidly going to hell in a handbasket, as the assassinated Emperor had very carefully and paranoidly hidden all of his heirs. Things come to a head at a science fiction convention to which Rupert has drawn his Magid candidates—resulting in glorious moments such as a centaur from the Koryfonic Empire being congratulated on his excellent costume by con members.

The book is told in multiple first person. Rupert begins the novel, of course, but we-the-readers get a big hint as to the next Magid when one of the candidates, Maree Mallory, gets her own narrative thread. The narrations are nicely balanced, clearly conveying the good and bad traits of the characters. Rupert, for instance, is something of a prat, and Maree is gloomy and defiantly odd—but they’re also strong, lively, and likeable people.

The book is also an affectionate look at cons, though I think some things must be features of British fandom (or else I’m going to a different sort of con). Though the oddities and occasional unpleasantness of fandom are present (I believe I was nearly trapped by Tansy-Ann Fisk’s cousin at Readercon, for instance), the book also captures the friendly, welcoming enthusiasm of fandom at its best. And, as a bonus, there’s a positively hysterical scene of Nick, Maree’s cousin, waking up, that I have heard is a lovingly-observed portrait of Neil Gaiman in the morning; it has to be read to be believed.

As this might suggest, the plot elements set in the con sometimes approach farce. The portions touching on the Koryfonic Empire and a trip into one of the Deep Secrets, however, have a distinctly more serious tone; the Deep Secret is a venture into the mythic that shouldn’t work when put with the con bits, but does somehow.

I really enjoy this book; it’s become one of my comfort books, in fact. So far I’m enjoying The Merlin Conspiracy as well, and we’ll see if it also attains the same status.

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Bryson, Bill: Short History of Nearly Everything, A

I read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything at bedtime during the time when I was still trying to convince myself that I was going to re-read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Like the rest of his books, it works very well for bedtime reading. Unlike the rest of his books, however, it’s neither about travel nor language. Instead, it’s an attempt to provide, well, a short history of nearly everything. Bryson says in the introduction,

 . . . So I grew up convinced that science was supremely dull, but suspecting that it needn’t be, and not really thinking about it at all if I could help it. This, too, became my position for a long time.

Then much later—about four or five years ago—I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable feeling that I didn’t know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on. I had no idea, for example, why the oceans were salty but the Great Lakes weren’t. Didn’t have the faintest idea. I didn’t know if the oceans were growing more salty with time or less, and whether ocean salinity levels was something I should be concerned about or not. (I am very pleased to tell you that until the late 1970s scientists didn’t know the answers to these questions either. They just didn’t talk about it very audibly.)

And ocean salinity of course represented only the merest sliver of my ignorance. . . . I became gripped by a quiet, unwonted urge to know a little about these matters and to understand how people figured them out. That to me remained the greatest of all amazements—how scientists work things out. . . .

So I decided that I would devote a portion of my life—three years, as it now turns out—to reading books and journals and finding saintly, patient experts prepared to answer a lot of outstandingly dumb questions. The ideas was to see if it isn’t possible to understand and appreciate—marvel at, enjoy even—the wonder and accomplishments of science at a level that isn’t too technical or demanding, but isn’t entirely superficial either.

As you might guess from that introduction, the resulting book is a broad, layperson’s view of physics, astronomy, biology, geology, meteorology, chemistry, and probably a few I missed, told largely with a focus on the historical process of discovery.

There are two principal strengths of this book. The first is Bryson’s colorful descriptions of the people and events behind scientific progress. I must admit that I have a terrible memory for names, meaning that most of the anecdotes washed right over me, in one eye and out the other without sticking—but in an enjoyable manner, to be sure. However, one lesson did stick: no matter who gets credit for a discovery, someone else found it or thought of it first. Period. The passage Chad quotes at his booklog is just one good example of this apparently iron-clad rule.

The book also is also really good at sense-of-wonder, in the best SFnal sense. Bryson comes to science new, and he does an excellent job at conveying how cool all this is—on one hand, our knowledge of how things work, and the fact that they work at all, let alone work well enough that we can sit here and write and read books about it; and on the other, how much we still have left to learn.

There are a few mis-steps here and there; for instance, the book passes on the persistent “old glass flows” myth. But in the areas that I’m familiar with, the book generally seems to do a creditable job. And in the areas I wasn’t familiar with, there’s some really striking information; I found the section about Yellowstone particularly interesting. Anyway, I really enjoyed this book and recommend it.

(If you want more excerpts, part of the first chapter is at the New York Times’ website.)

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Rowling, J.K.: (05) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I said I was going to re-read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by (of course) J.K. Rowling, before reviewing it properly. And I was going to, honest. But it just sat there and I kept finding excuses to avoid it, and finally I had to admit that it wasn’t going to happen. (And then I got busy and took forever to finish this review. Does anyone really care, at this late date, what I thought of this book? I didn’t think so.)

I had a minor revelation as to why I was avoiding a re-read: Order of the Phoenix is the Teckla of the Harry Potter series.

I suppose I should explain for non-Brust readers. The Vlad Taltos series is told in First-Person Smartass; when the series opens in Jhereg, our narrator is an assassin-for-hire and minor Mafia boss. In Teckla, the third book in publication order, Vlad begins to have moral qualms about the assassin thing. Also, his marriage is falling apart in seriously messy fashion. And in reaction to all that, he is just so wrong, that it’s quite painful to read. However. It’s unquestionably a necessary book and an important turning point in the series. And the series, as a whole, rocks.

Order of the Phoenix is (hopefully) like that: painful but necessary. It’s not quite as painful as Teckla because it’s third person, not first, and further the third isn’t that tight. (This is something I’d noticed in prior books; I don’t get nearly as much sense of Harry’s personality from the narration as for Bujold’s characters, for instance. Chad’s suggested that this may be partly a genre thing, citing Will in Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising series as another example; I don’t know about that, but I offer it for your consideration.) However, our point-of-view character still spends most of the book mired in unhappiness and anger—and doing painfully stupid things as a result. Which makes it hard to read.

It’s also a remarkably claustrophobic book, considering its length. There are two distinct plot threads running through the book, one with Voldemort and one with the Ministry; these don’t really come together, but I think that’s acceptable as we’re in much more of a continuing story now, one that’s no longer confined to Hogwarts. However, because of the limitations of third-person POV and Harry’s own self-centeredness, we end up knowing very little about events outside Hogwarts once Harry gets to school. This claustrophobia also points out another way in which Harry is wrong: one of the strongest themes of the book is the consequences of insularity. In fact, from what we learn in this book, I think it’s reasonable to say that the overarching conflict in the series is tolerance and cooperation versus slavery and genocide. Worryingly, many of the secondary conflicts introduced in this book are not yet explicit, never mind resolved; Order of the Phoenix is a more complex book than it appears at first glance, but it also is leaving a lot for the last two books. (The fixed length and format of the series, but the complete lack of hints as to future plots, makes judging the pacing a tricky thing; it’s the old “well, looks like we’re ready for big things to really starting happening” problem. At least I’m confident that the number of books won’t increase, unlike some other Big Name Authors . . . )

I think the pacing of the book is generally better than Goblet of Fire, though I haven’t read that one recently. The pre-Hogwarts section of this one is, upon reflection, somewhat too long; there is a reason for it to be there, but I think it could have been shorter and still made the same point. Otherwise, though, we only see very little of the usual distraction of everyday Hogwarts life, which streamlines the plot but heightens the bleak atmosphere. A minor diversion is Harry’s relationship with Cho. Some people vehemently insist these few scenes are childish and unrealistic; this attitude frankly baffles me, as I thought they were absolutely spot-on depictions of adolescent awkwardness. Another subplot, involving Hagrid, I found considerably less successful, except perhaps on a thematic level (and even that I’m not sure of). As far as the main plots, they climax in a tense and furiously exciting few chapters that had me on the edge of my metaphorical seat. I was most impressed.

The ending (1) answers some questions while raising many others, and (2) makes me considerably worried for Harry. Another way this book is like Teckla is that it deliberately, systematically, and thoroughly knocks away the protagonist’s supports, leaving him bereft and isolated (and angry, don’t forget angry). The book also sets up new supports for Harry, particularly in its development of some secondary characters (go Neville! Ahem.), but it is an open question whether he will take them.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is hardly a perfect book, and considering that my one-word opinion was “bleak,” back in June when people were asking, I can’t exactly say I enjoyed it. But I have to admire the increasingly complex explorations of character, morality, and consequences, and I also have to admire Rowling for daring to take the series in this direction. And only a well-crafted book could have me so worried about the futures of its characters. I will be eagerly awaiting the next, however many years from now it comes out.

(If this sounds somewhat disjointed, it may be because I’m trying to talk around spoilers. If you want my spoiler thoughts, try my LiveJournal.)

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