Year: 2009

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2009 Hugo Nominees: Short Fiction

I am voting in the Hugos this year, but am hugely behind in my reading and not very enthusiastic about much of the ballot. So I have allowed myself to not read things and to stop reading things I’m not enjoying, because seriously, life is too short.

Here are brief comments on the short fiction categories (Short Story, Novelette, and Novella). Stories are listed in my order of preference. I’ve got a list of all review links that I can find over on LiveJournal.

Novella

  • Robert Reed’s “Truth” (online). I thought this was good. A claustrophobic chilling explicitly post-September 11th story, it has a brillant central idea and is well written. I think the many-worlds stuff is superfluous, however.
  • “The Tear” by Ian McDonald (in the anthology Galactic Empires). Far future space opera told by rotating through various personalities of the narrator. It has shiny SF stuff and is certainly ambitious, but the prose is occasionally too thick, and I find unsatisfying what the story eventually collapses down to.
  • Nancy Kress’s “The Erdmann Nexus” (online). A competent but not very gripping story set on Earth, mostly in a nursing home, about its elderly residents beginning to change. (As a side note, when Chad’s book comes out, I can wave it around in front of authors and say, “look, quantum eraser experiments do not require consciousness!”)
  • “True Names,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum & Cory Doctorow (online). Self-consciously SF 301 (or higher) and accordingly a lot of work. All the characters are computer programs, or rather instances of a small set of programs and therefore share names, and it’s just full of stuff. I found it hard to get into, and then it turned out to be a kind of story that I just don’t care about.

Did not finish: “The Political Prisoner,” Charles Coleman Finlay (online). I got halfway through and said, “You know, if I wanted to read about Soviet-style backstabbing and gulags and other such grimy, grinding unpleasantness, I could just re-read The Cardinal of the Kremlin or something.”

Novelette

  • “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner (online). A MacGuffin story with a wry voice and a look at what the MacGuffin does to a person’s life and what a person does with their life in response, which is after all the point of a MacGuffin story. Occasionally a little too cute, but enjoyable as a whole.
  • “Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel (online) A Pride and Prejudice / Frankenstein crossover, from Mary Bennett’s point of view. The thing is, the best fanfic gives me a shock of recognition and insight into the source works; this draws parallels but never makes me feel like I see the sources fresh.
  • “The Gambler” by Paolo Bacigalupi (online). Well, it’s less unpleasant than “Yellow Card Man”, but it’s heavy-handed and didactic. Also its immigrant voice occasionally makes me wonder (would a Buddhist think that something was “as though a bodhisattva has come down from heaven,” for instance?).

    Note to bloggers: I have seen multiple people say that the protagonist is from Vietnam. He is not. He is from Laos. There is more than one country in Southeast Asia.

Did not read: “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear (online); “Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders” by Mike Resnick (online).

Short Story

  • “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson (online). This made me happy. Like “The Ray-Gun,” it’s about a fantastical intrusion into a person’s life—this time 26 monkeys who vanish from a bath tub during a touring act—and what they do in response, but I like the voice better, the way its distance contrasts with and yet enhances the emotion.
  • “Exhalation” by Ted Chiang (online). It’s a detailed extrapolation of a world built around a single cool idea, but it gets pretty anvilicious.
  • “From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled” by Michael Swanwick (online). This is very interesting until the end, when it becomes clear that the story was deliberately constructed so that its ending had to be offscreen and unknown to the reader. Which, okay, you want to deliberately go against reader expectations, no-one’s going to stop you, but I don’t have to like it.
  • “Evil Robot Monkey” by Mary Robinette Kowal (online). This isn’t a story, this is a tiny character sketch and not, to my eye, a very interesting one either. Lots of people seem to like this and I have absolutely no idea why.

Did not finish: “Article of Faith” by Mike Resnick (online). I got a couple screens in and said, “Wait, this is a Mike Resnick story, it is clunky and obvious and cliched, why am I reading this again?” So I stopped.

Next up, either some of the Campell nominees or some Best Related Books.

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Malkiel, Burton G.: Random Walk Down Wall Street, A; Andrew Tobias, The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need

I recently asked the Internet for recommendations for personal finance education resorces, and from the resulting discussion, grabbed two books from the library (as what was in at the time): Burton G. Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing, and Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street is more theory than practice, as it is a thorough but readable book aimed at one thing: making the case that it’s not a good idea to pick stocks, or as Malkiel puts it,

No one can consistently predict either the direction of the stock market or the relative attractiveness of individual stocks, and thus no one can consistently obtain better overall returns than the market. And while there are undoubtedly profitable trading opportunities that occasionally appear, these are quickly wiped out once they become known. No one person or institution has yet to produce a long-term, consistent record of finding money-making, risk-adjusted individual stock-trading opportunities, particularly if they pay taxes and incur transaction costs.

He starts by describing where stocks get their value, then analyzes traditional and more recent ways that professionals try to pick stock, all in support of his proposition. There were occasionally points at which I had to stop and re-read, but I was often reading this with a sleeping infant in my arms, which has the usual small-mammal sedative effect. On the whole, I found this an engaging and—more importantly—convincing read. The last section has recommendations at a range of detail, from general principles to a specific portfolio. Malkiel has another book, The Random Walk Guide To Investing, but it wasn’t in the library, so I don’t know how it compares.

Tobias’s advice in The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need tracks Malkiel’s as far as they cover similar topics, but Tobias also has suggestions on things like reducing spending, tax strategies, and planning for your family. His book is much chattier, but it knows that it’s not always taking itself seriously (example: the appendix titled “Cocktail Party Financial Quips to Help You Feel Smug”). If you don’t mind that kind of tone, it’s worth a look: its greater detail on specific financial products helped me get oriented and feel more comfortable on the more concrete level. I recommend them both.

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McKillip, Patricia A.: Forgotten Beasts of Eld, The

I hate it when I re-read a book and discover that it’s not as good as I remember. Patricia A. McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld absolutely enthralled me when I first read it—I distinctly remember sitting at the kitchen table in my D.C. apartment during a college internship and being dimly aware of my roommates coming and going, but being unable to stop reading to say hello or move somewhere more comfortable. I re-read it recently when I was thinking about post-Tolkien fantasy with beautiful prose.

Sybel is a wizard and the daughter of wizards who have buit a menagerie of fantastic animals by calling them—summoning them by name and binding their wills. Her only desire is to call the Liralen, a great white bird with trailing wings: until Coren, one of the Lords of Sirle, comes to her gate with an infant, her cousin and a pawn in the struggle between Sirle and the King of Eldwold. The story is about power, revenge, and what one will, won’t, and should do for love.

The prose is exquisite, the characters sympathetic, the moral and emotional dilemmas gripping, and the magic numinous. But on this re-read, two things bothered me. The first was small: “Blammor” is a terrible name, especially for a thing of dread and terror. The second, alas, is large: the very ending struck me as an unnoticed undercutting or contradiction of what I took to be the moral force of the entire story. As a result, I’m not sure I can recommend this book any more, which is too bad, because it had been the one novel of McKillip’s that I really liked.

Perhaps I should re-read the Riddlemaster series and see if it makes any sense to me now.

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Rees Brennan, Sarah: (01) The Demon’s Lexicon

The Demon’s Lexicon is the first book in Sarah Rees Brennan’s trilogy of the same name. It’s due out June 2; I read an ARC.

In this contemporary fantasy, there are many different kinds of magic in the world, but the strongest comes from summoning demons and allowing them to possess unwilling victims in exchange for power. Years ago, Nick’s mother stole something from a particularly deadly magician, and his family’s been on the run ever since. The magicians killed his father, and his mother is crazy and terrified of Nick, so it’s effectively him and his brother Alan against the world. Alan is the only thing that matters to Nick, but now he’s in immediate danger of possession and—even more troubling—Nick is beginning to think that Alan has been lying to him all along.

The book is tight-third from Nick’s point-of-view, which is a strength and a potential weakness. I admire its tightness, but Nick’s viewpoint is a difficult one—when I said Alan was the only thing that matters to Nick, I meant that literally. There’s another person in danger of possession who’s come to them for help, and neither he nor his sister naturally appeared in the plot summary above, because I was using Nick as the way into the story. I also felt that some of the jokes Nick cracks—perhaps all of them—didn’t really fit, either the situation or my sense of his character. So while I was anxious about Nick and Alan’s predicaments and eager to find out how they would resolve, I still felt a bit of reserve about the book because of its difficult and distancing voice.

This was particularly an issue early on, when I think the wisecrack density was highest, and I’m not sure I would have kept reading if I hadn’t previously enjoyed the author’s nonprofessional fiction and she wasn’t a friendly acquaintance. But since I had that goodwill, I finished the book, and I’m very glad I did. I love the direction the story takes, and I can’t wait to see how Rees Brennan meets the challenge she’s set for herself. If you try the book and like any part of it, I’d recommend sticking it out until the end. (But I still don’t believe in Nick’s sense of humor.)

You can read the first chapter online. Also, the Japanese edition cover by Hiromu Arakawa is the very best cover in the world (much better than the U.S. cover, I think, which Chad says gives off girl cooties like whoa). [Updated Japanese cover link 2014-05.]

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Tyson, Neil deGrasse: Death by Black Hole: and Other Cosmic Quandaries

I’d heard people speak highly of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s science writing previously, but it wasn’t until his Daily Show appearance (and sequel) that I made reading something by him a priority. Death By Black Hole: and Other Cosmic Quandaries seemed like the best place to start.

This is a collection of esays first published in the magazine Natural History, slightly edited for continuity and changes in scientific knowledge, and organized into seven sections:

  1. The Nature of Knowledge: The challenges of knowing what is knowable in the universe
  2. The Knowledge of Nature: The challenges of discovering the contents of the cosmos
  3. Ways and Means of Nature: How Nature presents herself to the inquriing mind
  4. The Meaning of Life: The challenges and triumphs of knowing how we got here
  5. When the Universe Turns Bad: All the ways the cosmos wants to kill us
  6. Science and Culture: The ruffled interface between cosmic discovery and the public’s reaction to it
  7. Science and God: When ways of knowing collide

As this suggests, the book is at least as much about ways of knowing and approaching the world as about scientific theories and discoveries. I think this adds to its appeal and scope. For instance, I really liked the chapter “Stick-in-the-Mud Science,” about what you could learn about the universe with a straight stick hammered in the ground somewhere with a clear view of the horizon—not only is it fascinating in its own right, but Tyson also points out that this demonstrates that ancient stone monuments like Stonehenge are not so extraordinary as to require extraterrestial intervention. See also the chapter “Things People Say”:

The North Star is the brightest star in the nighttime sky. The Sun is a yellow star. What goes up must come down. On a dark night you can see millions of stars with the unaided eye. In space there is no gravity. A compass points north. Days get shorter in the winter and longer in the summer. Total solar eclipses are rare.

Every statement in the above paragraph is false.

Many people (perhaps most people) believe one or more of thse statements and spread them to others even when a firsthand demonstration of falsehood is trivial to deduce or obtain.

Tyson also describes straight-out science clearly and entertainingly, such as this discussion of orbits:

The most extreme example of an elongated orbit is the famous case of the hole dug all the way to China. . . . [Except that to] avoid emerging under two miles of water, we need to learn some geography and dig from Shelby, Montana, through Earth’s center, to the isolated Kerguelen Islands.

Now comes the fun part. Jump in. You now accelerate continuously in a weightless, free-fall state until you reach the Earth’s core—where you vaporize in the fierce heat of the iron core. But let’s ignore that complication. You zoom past the center, where the force of gravity is zero, and steadily decelerate until you just reach the other side, at which time you have slowed to zero. But unless a Kerguelian grabs you, you will fall back down the hole and repeat the journey indefinitely. Besides making bungee jumpers jealous, you have executed a genuine orbit, taking about an hour and a half—just like that of the space shuttle.

I am also fond of the offhand statement that ultraviolet light (UV) is bad for you because “it’s always best to avoid things that decompose the molecules of your flesh.”

There are a few repetitive bits by the book’s nature as a collection of columns, and even the paperback has some unfortunate copyediting goofs (e.g., mixing up “its” and “it’s”), but on the whole I enjoyed this enormously and highly recommend it.

Crossposted to [info]50books_poc.

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Arakawa, Hiromu: Fullmetal Alchemist, volumes 9-10

The ninth and tenth volumes of Hiromu Arakawa’s Fullmetal Alchemist continue to be excellent. These contain an arc of consequences from volume 4 (the Lab 5 arc and associated developments), which are exciting, emotional, and surprising. And, to my joy, include much more in the way of characters acting collaboratively, which was a thing that annoyed me about the original anime. I only disliked one thing, where I felt that drama overrode logic in the timing of a revelation, but it was minor. Read them together, as volume nine ends on a cliffhanger, but definitely read them.

Crossposted to [info]50books_poc.

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Sfar, Joann: Rabbi’s Cat 2, The

The Rabbi’s Cat 2 is the unexcitingly-named sequel to Joann Sfar’s charming The Rabbi’s Cat. It collects two volumes originally published separately in France, “Heaven on Earth” and “Africa’s Jerusalem.”

I didn’t like this as well as the first volume, though it still has a great deal of charm and wonderful moments. The first story features Malka of the Lions, which can only be a good thing and which I enjoyed tremendously. But its very end contains what appears to be an explicit political comment on Israel, and then I get all dithery about not knowing enough to evaluate the comment. Your mileage obviously will vary.

The second story is introduced thusly:

For a long time I thought there was no point in doing a graphic novel against racism. That stance seemed so totally redundant that there was no need to flog a dying horse. Times are changing, apparently. Chances are everything’s already been said, but since no one is paying attention you have to start all over again.

Which rather spoke to me.

The story is a road trip through Africa in search of a rumored Jerusalem with an intact Temple. The cat’s master is initially dubious about the idea of black Jews (“look: blacks, they have slavery; Jews, they have pogroms. It’s a lot to bear. Now imagine a people that had both at the same time. It just can’t be.”), but he and a number of companions eventually set out on the quest. I again enjoyed this to the end, though I have difficulty judging its didactic level. As for the end, I read it in a radically different way from a friend, who suggested (spoilers, obviously) that it was a particularly Jewish mode of storytelling. Her reading makes more sense to me, and I suspect that it is more consistent with the author’s intention, but that ambiguity is worth noting.

Recommended if you like the first one, but not quite as strongly.

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Waggoner, Tim: Nekropolis

Angry Robot is a new SF imprint that apparently thinks I have a much wider readership than I actually do, because they put me on their list for e-ARCs. Which is how I read Tim Waggoner’s Nekropolis, forthcoming in paperback in August (UK) or October (US, Canada, Australia) (publisher page). This is an urban fantasy of the private-eye type, which I initially suspected came about when someone said, “Okay, vampires and werewolves and elves and demons and dragons have all been done, so . . . what’s left? Oo! Zombies!” [*]

Nekropolis is a city in a different dimension to which all Earth’s supernatural creatures decamped three hundred years ago, though they still have access to Earth. Which is where Matt Richter came in: he was a cop from Cleveland who chased a serial killer all the way back to Nekropolis and became the rare self-willed zombie in the process. Now he does favors for people in exchange for fees to help keep up his preservative spells, and a beautiful half-vampire damsel in distress named Devona needs his help.

Waggoner is clearly having a lot of fun coming up with ever-more-inventive variants on common urban fantasy/horror elements, sometimes mixing in technology (genetically enhanced shapeshifters, gangs of cyberpunk vampires) and sometimes just turning it up to eleven (bartender named Skully because, of course, he looks like a perfectly normal human except for the skull head; seven-foot silverfish in the Great Library, etc.). There’s some personal development in among the scenery and action, too, which was in keeping with the genre—not surprising, but not offensive either. In other words, I was having a pretty good time . . . and then I got to the mystery’s solution, which has resonances with actual social injustices that I found distracting and annoying. (It’s theoretically possible that these might get explored in a way I find more satisfying in the two sequels, but I didn’t get that sense from the text.) Oh well. It was at least a quick read, so that lessens my aggravation.

At any rate, if this is your kind of thing, you’ll probably recognize it from this description, so keep an eye out.

[*] This is purely a hypothetical and likely wrong, since the book turns out to be an expansion of a 2004 small-press book that was conceived even earlier, i.e., probably before the serious urban fantasy/paranormal boom. But it was what I thought when I read the premise.

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Monette, Sarah: (04) Corambis

Sarah Monette’s Corambis concludes the Doctrine of Labryinths series. This fourth book features a fairly strong plot-story disjunct. The plot is new to the series, and examines the aftermath of Corambis’s civil war, which ended when the Insurgence’s leaders attempted to invoke a magical engine which killed them all except Kay, the Margrave of Rothmarlin, who is blinded. The story is Felix learning not to be such a terrible person.

This story was very welcome, to say the least—actually it was such a relief that I didn’t re-read the other three volumes looking for overall structure and patterns, because I couldn’t bear going back to Felix in full-out asshole mode. Not only does he get better, but his progress is convincing and emotionally satisfying. Hooray!

Mildmay has much less to do in this book, alas, though I’d suspected as much when considering his arc in The Mirador, and is even absent from a fair chunk of the narrative early on. He’s there, his presence matters to the book, and I’m always glad to see him, but those who strongly prefer him to Felix should adjust their expectations accordingly. Kay, the third point-of-view character, is an interesting person and has a complete arc, but inevitably the weight of the book is tipped away from him and toward Felix, who has three whole books of history with the reader on his side of the scales. Further, Kay’s part of the story is the one most closely linked to the plot, and that is pretty thoroughly subordinated to the story of Felix’s growth.

I have only a couple of small quibbles with the book. There’s one conversation in which our non-omniscient and thus unreliable narrators discuss unreliable narration, which stuck out like a sore thumb to me: the rest of the books aren’t that self-consciously meta. (Speaking of which, it’s not a quibble, but I did note that the book assumes an odd distance from the two really showy episodes via its choice of narrator. I can see some of the effects this produces, but I did find it odd on first reading.) And while I greatly approve of the content of the Conclusion, the form threw me right out of the book—though I seem to be absolutely the only person to feel that way. Otherwise, like its predecessors, Corambis has thorough and complex characterization of its people, their relationships to each other, and the worlds they live in; terrific narrative voices; satisfying arcs of emotional growth; and cool magical bits of the numinous and non-cookbook-y kind. If you’ve been waiting until it was completed to start or continue the series, I think you can go forth and read with confidence.

Monette has also recorded the first two chapters, which you can download via LiveJournal: chapter one, chapter two.

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Butcher, Jim: (01) Storm Front (audio)

I was casting around for an audiobook to listen to after finishing The Hundred Days, and landed on Jim Butcher’s Storm Front, the first book in the Dresden Files, as read by James Marsters, a.k.a. Spike on Buffy and Angel. I’d read this years ago but never picked up the rest of the series, and this seemed like it might be a good way to resume. I had no awkward associations with Marsters’ voice to overcome since I never watched Buffy or Angel, and he does a nice job overall, though female characters are not his strong point. However, he tends to speak fairly low which easily gets lost in traffic noise, so after not that many chapters I was thinking of dropping it.

Another reason was that Harry’s sexism is much harder to take when I have to listen to it. I’d already had plenty of time to reflect how annoying I found his statement that he liked to treat women as other than “shorter, weaker men with breasts”—hello, way to reveal that your default for humanity is not “person” but “man”! And then I got to his encounter with Bianca, which struck me as a textbook example of fear of female sexuality, and I said, “that’s it, I’m done.”

So I skimmed the rest of it, which was a good decision because I’d forgotten how annoying the “I’m going to keep you in ignorance for your own good, woman” thing had been on the page. If I’d had to listen to it, I would have been spitting fire. But with a little “la la la I can’t hear you,” it was a light entertaining read. I noticed this time that Harry already has a fair bit of backstory, and I understand that his life gets ever more complex as the series goes on, which interests me. I may even pick the series back up sooner than four and a half years, next time. Just not in audio.

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