The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach » books

What I’m Reading: 2008 July

mongreldogs — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:51:01 +0000

This is the first in a regular series of posts meant more for myself than anyone else. I just want to keep a record of what I’m reading.

So far in July:

Public Enemies: The True Story of America’s Greatest Crime Wave by Bryan Burrough (552 p)
Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning by Sol Steinmetz (258 p)
The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English by Mark Abley (233 p)
Steampunk edited by Ann & Jeff Vandermeer (347 p)

Of these, the two etymology books were oddly disappointing, most especially because they in fact gave no model for how or why language evolves. Each was just a litany of words and trends in English. *Sigh*

Review: His Dark Materials

mongreldogs — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 23:54:44 +0000

His Dark Materials:

The Golden Compass

The Subtle Knife

The Amber Spyglass

a triology by Philip Pullman
InstaRating: 4 out of 5

This trilogy has apparently sparked quite the bitter controversy, especially online. It’s a tale of High Fantasy, quite consciously in the vein of Tolkein or C.S. Lewis, but it takes a tack quite different than, say, The Chronicles of Narnia. Rather than a vague naturalistic faith that is actually Christianity in disguise, Pullman’s universe has Christianity in fact — but it’s unremittingly evil, dedicated to snuffing out all that is light and free in the world. I can see why believers are outraged…

our

Lyra’s world is like Victorian England but different, with witches and talking bears and a curious mixture of science and magic. Most significantly, part of a person’s soul, called a , lives outside the body, in a physical manifestation shaped like an animal. (It’s a lot like totem animals.) Lyra’s quest leads Lyra north, toward the strange outpouring of Dust that falls across the sky, a glowing metaphysical detritus that somehow clings to adults but not to children. The Church has decided that Dust is sin, which leads them to an unthinkable, horrible action. Lord Asriel thinks Dust is the bridge between worlds, which leads him to a different horrible action…

Pullman pulls no punches here. He comes down squarely on the side of freethinkers and against orthodoxy. In all ways, the Church — particularly, its Magesterium — is benighted, foul, selfish, petty, and evil. No good action springs from it. Indeed, the villian of the piece — Lyra’s mother Mrs. Coulter — is redeemed only when her love for her abandoned child drives her to flee the Church and join with her lover, Asriel.

The second book introduces Will, a young boy from our world or one like it. He comes into possession of “the subtle knife”, an instrument with a blade so fine it can cut between worlds, creating “windows” that allow anyone to cross over. This eventually becomes the driving plot point, as recently something has changed and it has something to do with the knife…

I’m not going to go on about the plot. It’s well-handled and holds together well, and absorbs one’s attention. No world is drawn as vividly as Lyra’s original one (which is perhaps inevitable), and it’s surprising how sharp that contrast stands out at the end of the trilogy, when we return to that original world for a few pages.

You can see why Pullman has cheesed off religious readers — because he meant to. He casts religion in the worst possible light. The “God” people worship turns out to be an angel who arrived first and lay claim to Creation — and who now is a senile pawn of his former Regent! The angels who rebelled turn out to have been the good guys, though they did get equally stomped. The Dust — which is universally seen as light and right and good — depends on free will. Wherever the Dust (or a daemon) has been removed, the person becomes dull, docile — faithful. Pullman makes no apologies and takes no prisoners.

This trilogy so desperately wants to be the atheist’s answer to Narnia that it’s awkward. Pullman doesn’t quite reach that lofty goal. The fantasy is above par and indeed quite inventive. The worlds drawn are varied but hang together. Unfortunately, his agenda undermines Pullman’s craft; too often it feels like being lectured at. (OK, so maybe it does share that pedantic nannyism with Narnia — Lewis’ craft is the superior.)

Worth reading? Definitely. Worth fighting over? Not at all — it’s not the equal of the storm it has raised.

Review: The Book of Lost Things

mongreldogs — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 04:35:11 +0000

The Book of Lost Things
a novel by John Connolly
InstaRating: 5 (out of 5)

This is simply a good book. I would not have thought anything would rank up next to a new book by Guy Gavriel Kay (Ysabel, which I’ll review some other time), but this one easily meets that standard. One of life’s greatest treasures, for me, is a book that compels me to keep reading at an ever-more-breakneck pace. I love a book that gives me the sensation that I’m missing details because the vision is so extravagant and the journey so enthralling that there just isn’t time to savor everything. I love a book so good that, around page 50, I start calculating how long I have to wait so that it will be fresh when I re-read it.

A short summary: David is a pre-teen in World War II Britain, who loses his mother to an unnamed lingering disease and his father (as David sees it) to a stepmother and half-brother. David starts to hear books whisper to him and then, in an ancient house, hears his mother’s voice calling to him. He ventures into the garden just as a Luftewaffe bomber crashes, propelling him into an alternate world where strange versions of well-known fairy tales seem to be true. He meets a kindly Woodsman and a questing knight, but is menaced by the half-wolf Loups, by harpies, trolls, and above all by the Crooked Man, an indistinct but terrifying menace who wants, for reasons left unexplained, for David to tell him the name of his half-brother. At the suggestion of the Woodsman, David travels east toward the castle of the ailing King and his magic Book of Lost Things. What he discovers — there and along the way, in the King and in himself — ends up changing everything.

More detail will inevitably involve spoilers, so I’ll hide them below the fold. If you’re looking for whether this book is a good read, but you don’t want to know the ending, stop here and take my word for it: This is a good book. It will richly reward you for reading it. Connolly shows himself to be a master of atmosphere and foreshadowing. If you need to hear more, and don’t mind knowing what’s coming, read on…

No fooling… there be spoilers here.

Connolly’s greatest strength is his command of atmosphere. This book really pulls you in and makes you live in its world. The landscape is both majestic and bleak, and like all good High Fantasy, there is no doubt that the physical world reflects the underlying moral order: The King is weak (both physically and morally) and the land suffers. Bizarre new creatures, such as the Loups and the worm-like Beast, have begun to plague the country and change its very nature. The light is bleak and dim, even at highest noon. Eventually winter comes on and deadening snow blankets everything — as much as I’ve ever seen, Connolly competently weaves despair into the very texture of his prose.

There’s really only one character, David. Everyone else is a sketch, sometimes a caricature. This is in part deliberate, because David’s new world is clearly woven from fairy tales. The characters are expected to be stock and archetypical. Throughout the novel Connolly interleaves several tales that are almost, but not quite, traditional fairy tales. For example, the story of Little Red Riding Hood ends quite differently in this world (and not entirely in a family-friendly way). And his spin on Cinderella and the Seven Dwarves is outright hilarious. The Dwarfs especially hit the mark as a Monty Pythonesque communist collective.

This is explicitly a quest journey and the point is David’s transition from boy to man (commented on explicitly several times by the narrator). He starts off as mildly unlikable, a boy who has (admittedly) suffered some terrible things but who is unable to move past them. During his journey he is forced to rely on himself more and more and also to come to grips with what he wants, what he’s lost, and what he might be missing in his blind searching for a past that’s gone.

Connolly is quite coy about whether David’s new land “really” exists or not. Certainly, the transitions between our world and the fictional one all seem to imply that he is merely entering a delusional state. He never carries anything from the fictional world to ours, indeed even to the point of re-donning the pajamas and dressing gown he’d discarded upon his arrival. He wakes up in a hospital bed, having been “discovered” in a coma. In the end, the reader is left with an ambiguity worthy of Stephen R. Donaldson and the Thomas Covenant Chronicles — and just as unimportant to the larger meaning.

The book’s major weakness is that David’s overall arc is clear from the outset and remains dismayingly predictable. Who the King is and his connection to the Crooked Man, though coming as a surprise to David, is blindingly obvious no later than a third of the way into the book. The ultimate resolution is pretty much what one expects. Perhaps this too is a facet of the heavy integration of the fairy tale milieu into the story’s structure.

The pleasant surprise was the incredibly detailed backstory eventually given for the Crooked Man. Connolly here invents a modern yet timeless bogeyman that could serve to terrify generations of young readers. Although unique in literature, I think, the Crooked Man easily fits in the rogues’ gallery of all the dark and disturbing Others out there in the pages of fairy tales. He is genuinely creepy and menacing — and, amazing in a world grown too jaded for such things, he is convincingly evil. Without getting absolutist or black-and-white, Connolly manages to come down squarely on the question of whether evil exists.

A warning to those looking to gift this to younger readers: There is some sexuality in the book, some potentially-controversial topics (such as gender identity), and much uncensored violence. The beasts are truly beastly; and not all the people are much better. Young children could easily take away nightmares from this book, not least because Connolly is explicitly focusing on themes (such as death, abandonment, and aloneness) that most upset children.

This really is a book I look forward to re-reading and, perhaps, passing on to my younger relatives. It’s the sort of book I thrilled to discover when I was younger. In the media-saturated and ink-drowning world we occupy today, I’m not sure any book is “destined to become a beloved classic”, but if any book is, it’s this one.

Review: Echelon

mongreldogs — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 21:23:23 +0000

Echelon
a novel
by Josh Conviser

InstaRating: 2 out of 5

This book\’s title caught my interest because I keep up with surveillance tech and its social implications, and ECHELON — the alleged US NSA electronic sifting program — is the monster of all surveillance programs. Although I knew this was a spy thriller, I thought there was a chance that it would delve deeply into some of the issues revolving around the invasive new technologies coming online. Alas, it didn’t pan out that way.

More below the fold — warning: Spoilers to come.

The first, not-unpleasant surprise was that the protagonists work for (not-all-caps) Echelon, a self-appointed collection of intelligence experts who have superseded ECHELON, taking it out of the US government’s control, and directed it toward world stability … a stability they’ve enforced for a century, through means both high-tech (subtle manipulation of information flow) and primitive (assassination). Ryan Liang is the best of the best at covert ops, ruthlessly enforcing Echelon’s secret directives in a vain attempt to wipe out chaos. Ryan is driven by the loss of his parents in a great wildfire in Colorado, and he has never overcome the imagery of Nature run amok.

Oh, and he dies in the first chapter — a somewhat unusual development for the main hero of a spy novel.

It comes in the form of a fall from a cliff face; Ryan is an obsessive and expert rock climber and was trying to work through some conflicting emotions after killing a computer company CEO at Echelon’s command. It’s not made clear why this particular murder hits him so hard or why the expert climber fell… at least not at first.

Rest assured, his death is temporary. He is injected with experimental nanotechnology “drones” on the orders of the head of Echelon, a guy named Turing (aside: Yes, Conviser has the gumption or the hubris or the cluelessness to name the head of his super-hi-tech encryption collective “Turing”. I can’t tell if he was intentionally paying homage to Alan Turing or if he’s being cutesy or if he didn’t even notice.) The drones, though a riot of input and noise, do repair his body and return him to the land of the living.

After recovering (including learning to control the drones via the voice of his manager, Sarah Peters, Ryan goes back into the field. His advanced abilities are being used mostly for surveillance now but he longs for the Action. So he ignores a direct order, moves against a pirate “data haven”, and discovers something he wasn’t supposed to see. Oh, along the way, he gets himself killed again.

This time when he awakes he is grilled by Sachs, head of internal security at Echelon. Sachs says that there’s a vast conspiracy to uproot Echelon and take control, led by none other than Turing. Ryan doesn’t think ask how this even makes sense, since Turing is already in undisputed control of Echelon. Sachs recruits Ryan to keep his eyes open to discover the truth.

Meanwhile someone has murdered Sarah’s band partner (oh, yeah, when she’s not “in the flow”, she plays bass guitar in a neo-punk group) while trying to get Sarah herself. She is saved at the proverbial last moment by none other than Turing.

Then someone ambushes Ryan in his dilapidated old LA apartment, and after all the dust settles, Sachs arrests Turing (just as Ryan figures out, at last, that Turing isn’t the traitor). But a-ha! Turing has encrypted “the Key”, the algorithm that gives Echelon access to all electronic data. “The Key” just appeared one day nearly a century ago, a quantum leap forward in encryption/decryption that allowed ECHELON’s original NSA workers to launch their stealthy coup. Without the Key, Echelon is nearly powerless. Immediately the world starts to slip into chaos. It just could be The End of the World.

Hilarity ensues.

Well, no, not really. What does ensue is a run-of-the-mill thriller with obligatory sci fi motiffs. Ryan’s “drones” give him near-invincibility (except when they inexplicably fail to). Sarah is a net-hacking genius who can’t seem to trace anything. She does get her own “field moment” in a goofy sequence in the Arctic, where she recovers the last surviving hard disk of the listening post that first discovered and transmitted “the Key”.

Long before she figures it out, it’s painfully obvious that “the Key” is a viral meme sent by radio from Out There, allegedly to prepare the human race for conquest by some alien species (which, mercifully, makes no actual appearance in the book). Sachs is redundantly revealed to be the traitor (along with a computer industrialist whose complicity is obvious on the first page we meet him). Sachs injects himself with even more of the drones in a quest to transcend and become the Lawnmower Man. Oh, wrong book, but it’s the same idea.

Together Ryan and Sarah manage, at the last moment, to take Sachs down, re-initialize Echelon, destroy the viral key, kill the other traitor, and get reborn as near-godlike. Oh, and fall in love (of course). Almost all of that happens in the last five pages of the book. It’s almost painful to consider how much this reads like a storyboard for a movie. Clearly Conviser hopes someone in Hollywood reads the book and makes him a multimillion dollar offer.

It might actually be tolerable as a two-hour live-action Matrix-esque throw-away. As a book it was Not Good. Mildly diverting, it doesn’t really reward the time spent reading it. It throws a few Big Ideas into the air but, too distracted by hackneyed convention and safe action-thriller idioms, it fails to catch any of the Big Ideas before they splatter onto the ground and make a mess.

Major peeve: Oh, my goodness, it seems like Conviser just now learned the meaning of the word “subsumed”. It pops up every twenty pages or so, then really ratchets up in the final chapters. I counted eight uses within the last five pages alone!

Review: World War Z

mongreldogs — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 22:18:09 +0000

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
by Max Brooks

InstaRating: 5 out of 5

After the debacle that was The Stonehenge Gate, I was looking for something good to read, to wash the taste of failed prose from my mouth. Happily I picked up this piece of psuedo-history. Written by the author of the offbeat, tongue-in-cheek The Zombie Survivor’s Guide, this book purports to be an oral history compiled and published ten years after the end of The Zombie War, a global outbreak of the undead as in The Night of the Living Dead.

Spoilers and more after the break.

This book is good, really good. It’s not tongue-in-cheek at all. It’s gritty and sharp-edged. Not once does Mr. Brooks break the written equivalent of “the fourth wall”; never does he wink at the reader and confess this is all fiction. The book carries extensive footnoting and multiple references to an official UN history of the war. Some things are left out and you, the reader, are forced to fill them in, as they are background details that would be known to any citizen of the post-Z world he described.

The origin of the zombie plague is left appropriately mysterious and unclear, even to the people in the book. It began, it seems, in rural China… but maybe not, as other cases pop up far too swiftly to be easily understood. It’s caused by a virus transmitted by bites; in other words, it’s weird but entirely natural. Except, zombies underwater survive pressure and chemical corrosion far better than any human flesh could, so maybe it’s supernatural. Even a decade after “the War”, no one knows for sure, and so the reader doesn’t, either.

That’s OK. This book isn’t really about the zombies; it’s about the humans. Mr. Brooks sprinkles skin-crawling episodes of horror and despair throughout the book, tales of flesh-eating unstoppable killing machines pursuing mindless but gruesome ends. That’s his hook and he’s true to it. But he also lifts a curtain on what it would take to survive the initial Great Panic, or to fight block by block across zombie America to reclaim the United States.

As the title indicates, the book is presented as an oral history, a collection of excerpts from many thousands of hours of interviews with many hundreds of people. Most of them we meet only once; a handful are revisited in the final pages to see how their lives have continued. The conceit is a difficult one to carry for 250 pages but Mr. Brooks pulls it off. Each interviewee comes across as a unique person with a unique story; there is extremely little “bleed” among the characters. Amazingly, Mr. Brooks is able to sharply define his characters in the course of no more than a paragraph or so each. The French characters feel French; the South Africans feel different from the French. Heck, he even manages to make the Dominion types — Brits, Canucks, Aussies — feel authentic, and authentically distinct. You can easily imagine a Ken Burns documentary being made from this material, including homespun soundtrack and lingering visuals.

Mr. Brooks’ “history” is every bit as sharp as his characterization. He has meticulously worked out the details of the global crisis; he lays it out logically but not monotonously. The book is divided into eight sections, which cover three distinct phase: the early epidemic (“Warnings”, “Blame”, “The Great Panic”); the desperate attempts to stabilize the situation (“Turning the Tide”, “Homefront USA”, “Around the World and Above It”); and the endgame (“Total War”, “Goodbyes”). By the time the reader is done, a whole new world has been sketched out and filled in.

His world is nuanced. The Battle of Yonkers is the almost-mandatory initial military screw-up that nearly costs the war. (Doesn’t every American war have one?) Soldiers are betrayed by the high tech weapons and outmoded doctrine handed to them; it’s a slaughter. But this isn’t an anti-military rant, some 60s fantasy about how all soldiers are idiot killers who can’t adapt. By the end of the book, the armed services have adapted, fostering tactics and strategies matched to the radically different enemy they fight. Nor is it an anti-technology screed. Sure, the tanks proves useless and the warrior-mounted-Internet a liability. But in addition to the “Lobo” polearm, the infantry carry new rifles with ammo specifically designed to kill zombies without splattering infectious brain matter everywhere. Mr. Brooks handles the political, logistical, technical, even propaganda angles, and he does so exceedingly believably.

I particularly enjoyed the many different nicknames for the zombies, invented by the grunts and adopted by everyone: G (for “ghoul”, I assume); “Zack” (joining Charlie and Ivan and Jerry); and even the British “Zed-head”.

For the concerned, let me put your mind to rest: We (humanity) do eventually win the Zombie War, or at least, the much-depleted survivors do. Twenty years of alternate history (or possible future history?) have been scribed, stretching from the first cases through the ten-year war and the decade of reconstruction. The reader is left with the conviction that this is a world that could be.

Is there a message in the book? Maybe. Many times characters speak of the need for us to rediscover our humanity before we could conquer the undead. The reconstructed world is, comparatively, underpopulated, more intimate, less materialistic. Perhaps something larger is intended. There are appropriately uplifting and soaring tales of human spirit. I’ll write elsewhere on possible reasons why this book, and its genre, exert the pull they do on our imagination. At any rate, Mr. Brooks never lets his message (whatever it might be) overwhelm his narrative. This is a thought-provoking book but it’s also a great read that — for me, at least — flew by.

If post-apocalyptica appeals to you at all, consider picking up World War Z. You won’t be disappointed.

Review: The Stonehenge Gate

mongreldogs — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 00:21:23 +0000

The Stonehenge Gate
a novel
by Jack Williamson

InstaRating: 1 out of 5 … maybe less

During those moments when I delude myself that I’m a writer, I pursue an odd oscillation in my reading. I like to read great works of fiction, to have something towards which to aspire. But I like to leaven that mix with bad writers, people so hackneyed or incompetent that I can realistically say, “Well, if even Writer X can get published, I have a real shot … at least my stuff is better than that.” After reading Oryx and Crake, I was in a bind, because I hadn’t read anything truly bad for a while and I felt the usual intimidation rising up again.

Luckily, then I picked up Jack Williamson’s The Stonehenge Gate and now all is right with the world: This is a truly bad book.

More details, including spoilers, follow the break.

This book so desperately wants to be Stargate, it isn’t even funny. The basic idea is, a group of academics (who meet weekly for a poker game and who pretentiously call themselves The Four Horsemen) discover the outlines of a Stonehenge-like collection of menhirs, except these are buried in the Sahara. Really. The Four Horseman are Derek physics prof (who finds the menhirs in a deep-radar image); Lupe the archeologist (how convenient); Will, the narrator and an English prof; and Ram, the mysterious foreigner “discovered” by Lupe on an earlier dig who, after working his way to a linguistics degree, has returned to the same small college where the others teach. Oh, I should probably mention that Ram has a curious birthmark on his head called “the crown of worlds”, has a checkered past and a truly patchquilt heritage, and had a great grand-mother (“Little Mama”) who was found wandering out of the desert and who, even on her death bed, claimed to have fled to Heaven through Hell after being imprisoned by metal demons. Did I mention the birthmark? Cause it’s going to be important. So just to be sure, I’ll mention it again.

Sorry. That last is one of the technical faults of the novel (as opposed to, say, its ridiculous setting or flailing plotlines). Williamson is about as subtle as a tommy gun. He doesn’t just telegraph upcoming developments; he hand-delivers the whole parcel. There was not one surprise in this book, not one twist not indicated five or ten or fifty pages beforehand. There was no craft.

Back to the plot, such as it is. The Four Horseman (gah, can’t write that and keep a straight face) outfit their own little expedition to find the menhirs. They find them, giant outcroppings of stone that somehow no one else has even seen. These look like Stonehenge except that supported on two of the stones is a third (forming a “trilithon”). It’s immediately apparently to the characters (who thus lag the readers by only fifty or sixty pages) that these trilithons look like gates. But why would anyone build a gate in the desert? If only there were some way to access them…

Of course, happily, Ram’s great grandmother gave him a pendant, an artifact from “Little Mam’s hell”, and of course, it happens to be an all-access skeleton-key type device that transports the three of them through to another world. Oops, I forgot to mention, Lupe was abducted by a metallic looking grasshopper thing. After a little while (maybe a hundred pages) in which nothing happens, Derek is abducted too. In the between, they’ve followed a magic moving pavement through the ruins of a great war, which they immediately conclude must record the fall of the people who built the gate system, er, the trilithons.

Will and Ram end up on a bizarre side journey into a world divide starkly between the quasi-civilized whites (with Victorian-era technology) and the “savage” blacks living in the globe-straddling equatorial jungle, with a rich oral tradition but no writing or government. That’s right, during this interlude, the book stops desperately trying to be Stargate and instead starts desperately trying to be Heart of Darkness. Somewhere in there, Ram accidentally starts a slave revolt that spreads into true revolution… at least, up until the moment that the invading whites are all slaughtered to the last soul by a rapid, gruesome virus that leaves the blacks untouched but causes the whites to melt into pools of their own blood. Yek.

Then Ram and Will go off exploring again, having picked up Kenlen, the requisite cute kid that everyone’s supposed to feel sorry for. After a little bit of wandering, they find a “dead world” so far outside the Galaxy that during its “day” all you can see is the globular cluster it’s departing (leaving its sun behind) and at night, the utter blackness of The Intergalactic Void. Here, for no discernible reason, they catch up to Derek and Lupe who — although separately abducted — have somehow convinced the caretaker robots that they are indeed worthy of obedience. They also make remarkable but incomplete progress in unlocking the secrets of the Ancients — darn it, there I go, slipping into Stargate terminology. The secrets of the Omegans, is what I meant to say.

After a while, Will gets just as bored as the reader and decides to head home, to Earth, because happily now they’ve assumed mastery over the trilithon network and can go anywhere. After a truly pointless episode in which he suffers a relapse from the brush-with-death virus, he heads out with Kenlen and Ram. Being homesick, but not you know, really homesick, they decide to visit the world of Heart of Darkness, wherein Ram discovers that all the whites in the south have died, the whites in the north have seen the error of their ways, and have opened negotiations to recognize the sovereignty and humanity of the blacks — rather than, as human history would seem to predict, rearming and trying to slaughter every last man, women, and child. It’s good to know that literally millenia of oppression and hatred can be turned over in a matter of months. Nonetheless it’s hard work and Ram feels vaguely responsible (having sparked that war and all) and so stays behind to help set it right, despite having evidenced no skills in that particular area.

At the end, Will and his newly-adopted Kenlen wind up in the same sleepy college town where it all started. Williamson makes a half-hearted attempt to explain how one man can disappear with three other people, reappear without them a year late (but with a new, young man in tow), and somehow just slip back into normal life. The book ends with what the author clearly thinks should be an intriguing opening for the return of Derek, Lupe, and/or Ram, but this reader, at least, doesn’t care to be reacquainted with them.

You might wonder why I slogged all the way through 310 pages of this tripe if I disliked it so strongly. I am a little ashamed to admit, it was for the savage joy of writing this review. It’s been a long time since I’ve read something so unredeemingly awful. Williamson really has nothing to offer here.

At this point, I’d like to give my impersonations of some of the characters, based on notes I jotted as I read:

DEREK:

Marco Polo! Marco Polo! For the love of Jesus, didn’t you hear me? Marco Polo!

RAM:

Little Mama’s Hell. Little Mama’s Hell. Little Mama’s Hell. I wonder if this world is Little Mama’s Hell. No? How about this one? Was this one Little Mama’s Hell?

WILL:

I’m thirsty. I’m thirsty. I’m thirsty. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty.

Also

WILL:

Big Questions! Maybe we’ll find Big Answers!

Also

WILL:

I have vertigo. It’s terrible and incapacitating and humiliating and — oh, wait. I’m over it and will never mention it again.

EVERYONE:

Poker metaphor! Poker metaphor! Poker metaphor! Did you see how cleverly we made the connection between our situation and the game of chance called poker? Poker metaphor!

During the Heart of Darkness, the book also suffers from Gotham City Taxonomy Syndrome: All names the same. We hear of a legend of the mythical forbears of the world, black Anak who was murdered by his white lover, jealous white Sheko. Thereafter, it’s Sheko Tower this and Anak Temple that and Sheko Mountain and Anak Jungle. It’s like no one else on the planet had ever both (a) done something memorializable and (b) had a name. One or the other, not both. It proved astonishingly wearying.

Now, the blurb on the back says that Jack Williamson (“the dean of science fiction writers”) has been publishing for 78 years. Nonetheless, this book came out a decade after Stargate started on TV and it borrows heavily, or at least, mows the same lawn: The “gate” system itself. The mysterious empire of gate-builders, now vanished. The extremely curious fact that much of “extraterrestrial” life seems to have its origin on Earth. And of course, the clincher: the people who built the gate turn out to have been human after all, or at least, to have engineer the modern human. Hell, the ancient race vanished after a war with a mysterious and implacable enemy! I don’t think Williamson stole, exactly, but he did lift ideas that, shall we say, were in the zeitgeist already.

Although there is no denying the power and impact of Williamson’s most famous story (“With Folded Hands”), in The Stonehenge Gate, his roots in the pulps show through, to the detriment of his craft. This book captures all that was forgettable about science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s.

To wrap this review, I’ll point of to the ultimate absurdity: Despite being titled The Stonehenge Gate, Stonehenge itself plays no role in the book. The only connection is, some of the characters think the Sahara menhirs look sort of like Stonehenge. Indeed, on at least two occasions, the characters are quick to point out that actual, real Stonehenge is “too crude” to be part of the trilithon system and must be the expression of some “race memory”.

Review: Oryx and Crake

mongreldogs — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 02:55:29 +0000

Oryx and Crake (a novel)
by Margaret Atwood

InstaRating: 4 out of 5

In brief: Snowman is the last (traditional) human alive in a world curiously empty. He bears the secret of what happened to civilization and slowly reveals it to himself as he watches over the successor species: humans carefully designed to thrive in the ecologically-devastated world of tomorrow.

Spoilers and a more complete review follow.

Really, I’m not kidding. I’m going to spill the beans, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know.

This book was recommended to me by a friend (hi, Julie!) whose opinion I trust. So, despite an abortive attempt to get through The Handmaid’s Tale many years ago, I decided to give Atwood a chance and picked up Oryx and Crake. I’ll admit to being an enthusiast of post-apocalyptic fiction (no, coming of age in Reagan’s America didn’t scar me at all, why do you ask?). I like Alas, Babylon and especially The Postman, as well as Mad Max and its many cinematic imitators.

How does Oryx and Crake stack up? Pretty well, actually. The early chapters are appropriately bleak and otherworldly, as “Snowman” goes about his daily routine in this new life and then checks in on the “Crakers”, humans who have been genetically designed for optimal survival in the radically different world of (it is implied but not quite said) runaway global warming and ozone hole depletion. Snowman was once Jimmy, who befriended a loner genius calling himself Crake. Jimmy led the life of the semi-elite, not quite a “plebe” but not quite an important Corporate worker either; until one day, high school friend Crake rescued him from a dead-end life and brought him to Crake’s bioengineering sanctuary.

Snowman, who is what Jimmy became when the world ended, is at least borderline insane with grief and guilt. What, exactly, he feels guilty about is a central mystery of the book, which revolves around his odyssey away from his current habitat back into the smashed ruins of Crake’s corporate lab. Along the way we are treated to flashes of Jimmy’s life in a world spiraling out of control both socially and ecologically. Dark foreboding hints are dropped about the nature of the catastrophe. It turns out that Snowman, while journeying back to “the scene of the crime”, is also on a personal pilgrimage seeking understanding and redemption.

I liked the earlier part of the book more than its endgame. Snowman/Jimmy is more effective when we know very little about him; he never develops into a sympathetic character, though there are flashes. Indeed, by the end of the book, he is pretty much exactly the analog of what he was before the fall: drifting, irresolute, mildly irresponsible. (However, the very ending of the book is somewhat more ambiguous about whether Jimmy/Snowman has grown up any.)

Likewise, the early chapters paint society with a broad brush that nevertheless feels claustrophobic and nightmarish. The world of Jimmy’s teen years is very clearly close to our own; knowing (as we learn early on) that it is a doomed world strikes hard. Indeed, Atwood cleverly creates two apocalypses. (Reminds me of a line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “When I’m around you, Buffy, I find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.”) You might think that the end comes from the abuse of Nature by greedy, stupid humans (and you’d be right, partially). But it’s also planned and caused by a human act of will. The two dovetail nicely, but (sadly) by the time Atwood executes the Big Reveal, it’s been obvious for fifty pages.

Oryx and Crake is clearly a book About Something but I couldn’t tell you exactly what. It touches on themes of responsibility (global and personal) and of blame. There are some wonderful snarky analyses of the causes of human misery, though the solution found by the characters (I won’t say “Atwood’s solution”) is a little depressing and offers no real hope. There are the required sidewise shots at consumerism and patriotism and corporatism and some meditation on the sex trade. But it doesn’t really come together, in the end. The book wraps up quickly given the pacing of the set-up. After drawing a rich and interesting quasi-dystopic future — and also a fantastic snapshot of a ruined Earth — Atwood doesn’t quite make anything of it.

I enjoyed reading Oryx and Crake and I appreciate the artistry of her world-building, especially in fleshing out the world early on. But it’s not likely to be a book I’ll read again; nor one to change my life. It seems to try to hard to bridge the gap separating science fiction and supposed Real Literature, and instead falls into the space between.