Novella Review: “Adrift on the Sea of Rains” by Ian Sales (Whippleshield Books)
First, I must apologize for the lateness of this review. Mr. Sales has been remarkably patient with me and my repeated promises about getting it done. I’m a notoriously slow reviewer for the simple fact that I find it incredibly difficult to say what I think. A less cautious reviewer might simply speak from the heart and let the language be damned, but I think my academic side gets the best of me and demands I relate something more than a simple “I liked it.” And that means I get stuck for long periods of time on any work of art. In any case, I have a lot to say about Sales’ novella, “Adrift on the Sea of Rains,” the first of a quartet of interconnected novellas called the Apollo Quartet (released by Whippleshield Books). Set in an alternate history where the Cold War ended with the destruction of the Earth, a group of astronauts conducting experiments on the Moon struggle to survive long enough to successfully test an experimental machine that may save everyone. It’s a deceptively simple premise. Sales’ hard SF narrative of scientific discovery at times gives way to a character study of Peterson, Sales’ primary protagonist. Peterson’s past is interspersed throughout the novella in italics, providing a thorough account of a military-pilot-turned-astronaut and gifting astute readers with details of the American/Soviet conflict — a more educated reader might recognize details here that went over my head. The narrative shifts between the present, in which Peterson and his fellow astronauts attempt to conduct a successful test of their machine, and Peterson’s past, in which we we are given a glimpse into the man Peterson used to be. This device, however simplistic in design, provides the novella a comparative element that rounds Peterson as a character. Far from someone stuck in a seemingly hopeless situation, Peterson is humanized as an individual whose past complicates our understanding of his present. I wouldn’t call the format wholly successful — largely because I couldn’t quite discern the specific “pattern” in mind — but it did give the text a certain depth that would otherwise have been lacking, since the frame narrative, if one could call it that, is fairly straightforward by design. Short fiction, I find, benefits from some degree of narrative experimentation. On a related note, Sales’ prose is never so overwhelmed by the technical, nor overly sterile — a formal quality I have noticed in my pitiful amount of reading in the hard sf field. An apt description of the prose would be “economical,” providing the right level of character depth, technical detail, and tension to keep the narrative from being dragged under by gravity. Sales’ pension for littering scientific detail throughout is largely responsible for this balance, though a less tech-friendly reader may not appreciate this balance. For example, this brief passage from the middle of the ebook provides a combination of narrative elements: They were trapped, but now there is an escape. All but Kendall gather in the wardroom to discuss their options, squeezing about a single table but, unlike at meal-times, confidently, keenly, meeting each other’s gazes. It occurs to Peterson that he has lived with these men for two years but he barely knows them. He sees seven men he knows chiefly by their reputations and the psychological profiles in their records. Their faces are as familiar to him as his own, but they might as well be the gold visors of spacesuit helmets for all their expressions tell him what each is thinking. Not once since they became isolated on the Moon have they worked together… The Moon has changed them all; despair has made strangers of them… Hope: half a dozen modules in Low Earth Orbit. An elusive hope: they need to find a way to reach the space station. They have one ALM ascent stage left — and Peterson gives thanks it still remains, not launched out of desperation by one of them during the past two years. There are certainly more dense passages throughout the novella, but Sales’ style is perhaps deliberately careful with its science. Here, Sales establishes Peterson’s character in relation to his colleagues and provides snippets of technical detail as part of the mechanism for the emotional undercurrent of the entire narrative. Sales never quite lets that emotional element take over, which seems a reasonable product of the setting and the people involved. Unlike other “save the world with science fiction” narratives, Sales doesn’t indulge in melodrama to heighten the stakes (see The Core or 2012 for a prime example of this poor narrative practice). There’s an almost passive quality to the character development, which I can appreciate simply for my perceptions of realism in this case. I can see where Sales might have turned the wrong way and made his deceptively straightforward narrative into something dull and lifeless. But that never happens. Rather, the narrative’s deceptively lackluster opening — a bunch of guys doing science on the Moon — is built up in slow, deliberate motions into a massive, world-changing conflict. The end of that conflict came as a surprise, and unexpected though it was, I was happy to have caught the minute details which gave away what had actually happened. Sales’ narrative seems to fall into a kind of rhythm in which the scientific “narrative world” becomes what Delany might call a reading practice or protocol; it invites attention to detail on the part of the reader, and that jolt to the brain actually saves me from getting stuck in a reader mode of one form or another. I admit that this doesn’t happen all that often for me, particularly not with stories which are, if one is to look at the appendices, meticulously researched and detailed — a space science nut will certainly pick up details I simply missed (one of them needs to review this). Overall, I quite enjoyed “Adrift on the Sea of Rains.” If you’re looking for a hard SF novella to munch on, this
Book Review: All Those Vanished Engines (2014) by Paul Park
“It occurs to me that every memoirist and every historian should begin by reminding their readers that the mere act of writing something down, of organizing something in a line of words, involves a clear betrayal of the truth.” — All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park (Pg. 173) Of the novels I’ve reviewed in the last year, this is by far one of the most difficult. All Those Vanished Engines (2014) by Paul Park is not your typical SF novel. It is layered, divergent, and postmodern. If I were to describe this book in a single phrase, it would be “a destabilized metanarrative about art and history with mindscrew tendencies.” Though I appreciate the ambitiousness of Park’s narrative styling and prose, All Those Vanished Engines is a somewhat cold work. All Those Vanished Engines (ATVE) is essentially a collection of three novellas. The first is the most mystical of the bunch. Set during an alternate post-Civil War America, it follows Paulina as she attempts to make sense of her past by way of a fictional journal about a science fictional future. As the narrative progresses, however, the journal and the real world become increasingly closer to the same thing, destabilizing the reality with which the novel opens. Of the three narratives, this is by far the most compelling, not only because of its deliberate meta-ness, but also because of the way that meta-ness manipulates the actual reality of the text. The interaction between fiction and a fiction-within-a-fiction produces a chilling effect that is somewhat absent throughout the rest of the book, in no small part because this is the only section which seems dedicated to uprooting the reader’s grasp on something “real.” What became apparent as I continued reading, however, is that each individual section might have been better served as its own novel. The first narrative clearly connects to the second and third, but the first narrative’s closing moments leave too much wide open — too many questions unanswered. The second narrative is the first seemingly autobiographical section, drawing upon Park’s actual writings to examine the writing practice (a supposed postmodernist trait) and a (initially) fictional account of a dying man’s confessions about a secret project conducted during the Second World War (presumably some variation of the Manhattan Project, but with a distinctly 50s nuclear-monsters quality to it). Much of the section follows the narrator as he tutors another writer in the literary art, but it jumps between the narrator’s personal relationships and his efforts to write a novel (Park’s only Wizards of the Coast contribution). Though I am a fan of the postmodern tendency towards self-awareness of the processes of fiction, the second section seemed to me a tad overindulgent, drawing so much attention to the narrator’s writing process as to shove the remaining narrative elements into the background. In particular, I found myself more interested in the bizarre Manhattan-style project and the narrator’s relationship with his family than the long digressions into the fictionality of fiction. Unfortunately, much like the previous section, this one doesn’t offer any sense of closure, leaving much to be desired. The third narrative (the Nebula-nominated novell, “Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance”) is also autobiographical in form, appearing to take place both in the future of the first narrative and during the period in which Park wrote A Princess of Roumania (2005). The cover copy identifies this third narrative as occurring in a near-future U.S., though this must be a remarkably subtle shift forward, as I failed to notice what identified the narrative’s events as “in the future” (I may have forgotten, since each of Park’s sections contain multiple intersecting narratives and time periods). Regardless, here, Park’s marriage to the metanarrative and the seemingly deliberate memoirist focus settles around the history of Park’s grandfather, Edwin, and an unsolved murder in the Park-McCullough House — a real historical house from the 1860s, which I assume was once owned by Park’s actual family; the narrator returns to the house on his journey through his family’s history, unpacking some of the house’s “secrets.” The third section is less abstract than the second, in part because the metanarrative focuses on a multi-layered examination of Edwin Park’s “real” writings (real in the fictional world, at least) in relation to the writing process of the narrator (presumably, Paul). Though this third section returns to the uprooting of reality present in the first narrative (as a form of closure, it seems), I must admit to being somewhat frustrated with the structure and direction. By the time I arrived at “Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance,” I think I had gotten to the point where I wanted the ATVE to stop with its literary games and get to a “point” or “root” that would tie everything together. This became especially important to me because my own knowledge of the manipulated materials is inadequate, a problem which may not bother fans of Park’s work. ATVE is primarily an alternative history with a heavy dose of what appears to be autobiographical material. Much of the shifts in history revolve around the Civil War, a period which I am woefully uneducated. While some of Park’s shifts are obvious (aliens in the first narrative), the other shifts are less so, such that references to characters and moments were, for me, somewhat abstracted. This is made more difficult by the fact that many aspects of the novel seem to refer to Park’s real life and his family, particularly in the second and third narratives, which focus on writing (with references to Park’s work) and family (presumably Park’s actual family members, or analogues thereof). The abstractness of the novel, in other words, became too overbearing for me. For me, it seemed as though the novel lacked a grounding element, something to tie the reader to a solid reality. A time period doesn’t seem like enough to me, especially since the novel is split across three narratives set in what seem to be different versions of reality. I could
Book Review: RedDevil 4 by Eric C. Leuthardt
I didn’t come to this novel with many expectations. The cover description didn’t exactly entice me, but I figured I could give it a shot to surprise me. And surprise me it did. This is by far my least favorite read of 2014 thus far, though the Hugo Award packet may offer a few surprises in the near future. From the first chapter, I knew I would hate this book, and by page 100, I gave up because it showed no signs of improving. If there’s one good thing to say about having picked up RedDevil 4, it’s that I learned never to read anything written by Douglas Preston or Steve Berry, both of whom provided cover blurbs; if Preston found anything here that “blew [his] mind,” he clearly doesn’t know a cliche when it smacks him repeatedly in the eyes. And if Berry thought I’d “[savor] a peck into the psyche [and] one into the future as well,” I’d just assume he doesn’t know what words mean. In short, this is going to be a mean review. Prepare yourself. Here’s the cover description: Renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Hagan Maerici is on the verge of a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could change the way we think about human consciousness. Obsessed with his job and struggling to save his marriage, Dr. Maerici is forced to put his life’s work on the line when a rash of brutal murders strikes St. Louis. Edwin Krantz, an aging, technophobic detective, and his ex-Navy SEAL partner, Tara Dezner, are tasked with investigating the horrifying killings. Shockingly, the murders have all been committed by high-profile citizens who have no obvious motives. Seeking an explanation for the suspects’ strange behavior, Kranzt and Dezner turn to Dr. Maerici, who believes that the answer lies within the killers’ in-brain computer implants. Soon Tara Dezner begins to suspect that the doctor himself is a key piece of the puzzle. As the investigation turns to Dr. Maerici’s own work, it threatens to expose the doctor’s long-buried mistake–a mistake that now stands to endanger the lives of millions. With time running out, this trio of unlikely allies must face a gauntlet of obstacles, both human and AI, as they attempt to avert disaster. Ultimately, the key to survival may lie in the boundary between man and machine…a boundary that is becoming more ambiguous by the minute. Almost all of RedDevil 4‘s problems are a result of its structure. Billed as a thriller, Leuthardt’s novel follows the typical structure of a James Patterson-esque novel. This might not be a problem if the novel remained focused on a title character, as Patterson mostly does in the first of his Alex Cross novels, Along Came a Spider; RedDevil 4, however, shifts between multiple characters: Hagan, Krantz, Trent (a seemingly random virtual reality user), Reverend Elymas (who uses special drugs to enhance his “performance”), the Chameleon (a drug dealer), and some other mostly irrelevant figures. There are so many POVs in the first 100 pages that the novel’s main plot points — mysterious murders and Hagan’s invention — make little to no progress. This is a 300-page novel, and yet barely anything of note actually occurs in the first third. Even when things do happen, they are painfully cliche and hopelessly detached from anything resembling actual people. These are the second and third biggest problems with this novel. A poorly structured novel is fully capable of transcending its limitations if it can provide adequate characters to distract the reader from the other issues. RedDevil 4, unfortunately, doesn’t have adequate characters. Hagan, the apparent protagonist of the novel, is about as wooden and cookie-cutter as you can get. Scientist working overtime to create some newfangled thing? Check. Is he pressured by corporate interests? Check. Does he have marital problems because he works too much? Check. Does he try to justify those problems by saying “but I is gonna make sumfin good, dood”? Check. One can certainly write a scientific cliche well, but Leuthardt provides so little actual emotion and depth to Hagan’s character that you could have deleted him from the first 100 pages and not have noticed at all. There’s nothing new about Hagan’s archetype. We’ve seen this dozens of times before. It’s like being on autopilot. When I see scientists in this situation, I desperately hope they won’t be like Hagan. In this case, I found myself utterly disinterested in what was happening with Hagan; I didn’t care about his marital issues because they felt as common place and desensitized as breathing. The other characters are equally as undeveloped. Trent doesn’t appear to have any real connection to any of the other narratives, nor are his internal emotions, motivations, or desires demarcated in any way other than the most basic sense. Like Hagan, Trent (and most any other character here) could be deleted without causing any real damage to the existing narratives. Additionally, none of the characters seem to be connected in any significant way, except for the Chameleon and Elymas, who have a “business” relationship (drugs). It’s as if Leuthardt started out by writing three bog standard genre novels, and then he shoved them all together and called it RedDevil 4. I’m sure the dots are connected later on in the novel, but I couldn’t get over the lifelessness of the characters to convince myself the rest was worth reading. Even if I could get over the characters, though, the rest of the novel reads just as cliche. AI inventions are not new to science fiction, nor are scientists with marital problems, virtual reality users who become obsessed with the virtual and unearth weirdness, etc. The closest thing to “new” in this novel are the religious elements, but these are mostly stuck in the background. A novel about the public’s debates over the moral and ethical questions raised by artificial intelligence (with a side of terrorism) might actually make for an interesting read. But, again, that’s not RedDevil 4. In short, I pretty much
Book Review: Reflected by Rhiannon Held
I’ve read and reviewed all of Rhiannon Held’s books, which means she’s going to have to hurry up and write more stuff so I can read it. I’ve been a fan of Held’s work since Silver (2012), which was introduced to me for an interview on The Skiffy and Fanty Show, and have reviewed both Silver and Tarnished (2013). Her latest novel, Reflected (2014), is a solid continuation of the series and the culmination of Held’s slow move towards the social questions with which her werewolf society must struggle. Reflected is set a few years after the events of Tarnished, in which Andrew Dare and Silver became the first mated pack leaders of every North American werewolf pack. With Madrid’s plot to manipulate the North American packs and use Dare’s daughter against him exposed, the North American packs are experiencing a boom of confidence. But all is not well for Dare and Silver. Their new responsibilities mean they have to deal with complicated disputes that threaten to challenge tradition and contemporary custom. Dare is called away to handle a custody dispute in Alaska, leaving Silver and Susan, a lone human in the de facto position as Silver’s beta, to man the fort. And across the sea, Madrid, humiliated and weakened in the world of European werewolf politics, plots to destroy Dare’s reputation and tear apart the North American packs; to do that, he must use Felicia, Dare’s daughter, once more — this time by threatening to destroy her reputation, too. Before long, they’ll all find themselves in just a little bit over their heads… If there’s one thing to be said about Reflected, it’s that it really ups the ante when it comes to its examination of the position of women within Held’s secret world of werewolves. For a book which is deceptively just another urban fantasy novel, this one actually raises some brutally serious questions. Does a pregnant werewolf have the right to keep control of her pack if shifting to were form might threaten her child’s life? How do werewolves handle custody concerns when the mother isn’t a were and doesn’t know her child isn’t like her? How well can a woman with a severe disability hold her own in a male-dominated field of power? Held handles all of these issues without simplifying or taking a pure, hard-lined ideological stance. That she does so is notable not because it avoids that annoying “eww, message fiction” canard, but because it adds a certain nuance to an issue which, for many, is almost always presented like a “yes” or “no” question. Here, the answers have ramifications. Whatever choice Silver makes, there will always be threats to her own power (and every other woman’s) down the line, as each action has an opposite effect. This has all been a long time coming, to be honest. Each of Held’s previous novels have slowly leaned the POV to the women in Dare’s life, and here, the women are completely central. They are the POVs. They are the ones making decisions. They are the ones dealing with the conflicts. Dare isn’t entirely sidelined, of course. He is forced to return in the end to deal with the consequences of Madrid’s — and Felicia’s — meddling, which has put Silver in an emotionally compromised position. Given Silver’s past, it makes sense that Held would not opt for a new-and-improved Silver that can simple will her limitations away. If her physical limits are not enough — she cannot shift to were form — then her fragmented personality certainly provides the necessary limits to keep her character realistic in the context of what happened in the preceding novels. I have always loved Held’s willingness to make her characters flawed and even weak in certain contexts; much of that still exists here, particularly for Silver, who must face a psychological trial that could destroy her fragile sense of identity. Though the focus on women in this novel is solid, I must admit that I don’t think Reflected is the strongest of Held’s three novels; Tarnished may not be as tightly plotted as Reflected, but its character development is, with one small exception, better realized. In Reflected, we’re given a personal look into Felicia’s mind, a place we haven’t been before because Felicia didn’t actually appear in the flesh until the last third of Tarnished. Here, Felicia’s past inevitably sticks its head in her business, putting her into a compromised position in relation to her pack. But this also means the reader is left without enough anchoring material to really sympathize with her plight or to understand or respect her decisions. Felicia makes so many obvious mistakes that it’s difficult to think of them as simply a consequence of her age, particularly given her years of life with a North American pack and her father, which, you’d think, would have instilled some sense of loyalty or at least, in light of the fact that she knows Madrid manipulated her for most of her life, that European were are not trustworthy by default. The novel is strongest when it is focused on Silver and Susan — women who are determined, capable, but also flawed. Felicia, however, is flawed only because she has no sense of judgment; this is not explored with as much depth as the other elements I have already discussed, even though it should have been. That said, Reflected is tightly plotted — more so, as I mentioned, than Tarnished — and well paced. Even as things become increasingly complicated by the convergence of multiple subplots, Held keeps things together and makes a beeline for a conclusion that, while expected, was mostly satisfying. Some questions are left unanswered, but I get the impression that they are left as such to convey the immensity of this world-within-a-world (and, perhaps, to leave the story for further novels). It’s a world I’ll keep coming back to. There’s one simple reason that I keep reading and enjoying Held’s novels: they are the kind of urban
Book Review: Boys of Blur by N.D. Wilson
Admittedly, I don’t get a lot of opportunities to review literature for kids. The occasional YA novel? Sure. Most of what I read for review, however, falls firmly within the “not marketed to kids” category (since “adult” means something else here). This review may expose some of my weaknesses when it comes to this particular field, as N.D. Wilson’s Boys of Blur is certainly embedded in a tradition about which I am not as familiar as I should be. Regardless, I will tread honestly here in hopes that I can offer some insight into this particular novel. Boys of Blur takes place in my state of residence: Florida. Specifically, it is set in the fictional town of Taper (near “Muck City,” a.k.a. Belle Glade), deep in the everglades, where nature is often stranger than the people that live there. That’s certainly true of this novel. When Charlie and his family visit Taper for a funeral, his stepfather, Mack, is offered the head coaching job at the local high school, which at one time was known for its fair share of decent players. But Taper is a place of worry and concern for Natalie, Charlie’s mother, who left Taper after divorcing Charlie’s abusive father, Bobby; it also holds worry for Charlie, too: after befriending his cousin, Cotton, Charlie discovers something wicked living and growing in the swamps. Something evil. Something that wants to take Taper for itself. And it might just be up to Charlie to stop it before “it” and Taper’s residents tear themselves apart. Astute readers will recognize some clear parallels to Beowulf here (or, perhaps, its amusing Norse-style adaptation, The 13th Warrior (1999))[1]. Much of the novel’s supernatural elements are of the form commonly associated with the classic epic, which are less direct and more boiled down to a template: monster threatens town, boy seeks out monster, and boy defeats monster (I’m leaving out a few details to avoid spoiling things). In fact, one of the things I loved about Boys of Blur was the way it courted the supernatural in order to provide a semi-bildungsroman with Beowulf as its center. Indeed, from the almost zombie-like creatures that terrorize Charlie and Cotton to the deterioration of Taper as a community to the interesting commentaries on the nature of life and death, Boys of Blur seems like a perfect gateway for young readers who might be curious about the classic epics. I must also admit that I personally enjoy renditions of this story type that opt for a darker vision. Wilson certainly has an eye for the creep-factor. Though some younger readers may find the novel a little terrifying, many will surely be gripped by the macabre nature of the novel’s horror. When the novel is focused on its supernatural elements, it is at its strongest. Wilson doesn’t always offer the level of explanation I would want, but he does thrust his young protagonist into a bizarre and often confusing world of things that shouldn’t exist. Even the “good guys” are sometimes as creepy as the bad ones, which gives the supernatural a distinctly discomforting feel — there is no cutesy here. Wilson also does a fine job of presenting a narrative arc for Charlie that leads to modest, but largely positive changes. Charlie’s family thrusts the reader into an awkward situation (albeit, more so for younger readers than adults): his mother has remarried a supportive man who Charlie seems to accept, but doesn’t fully embrace at the start (a stepfather subplot bonus). They are a mended family rather than a traditional nuclear one. This gives the novel an endearing quality, as it tries to court both its fantastic major plot and its family-oriented subplots in different forms: the former directly and the latter in a more nuanced, deliberately withdrawn sense. Charlie, after all, is twelve, and so what he understands of adult relationships is less pronounced than his understanding of good and evil. Even Wilson’s handling of sports culture in small-town-America adds depth to the narrative — this coming from a reader who is bored stiff by sports-heavy sf. I half expected this book to be reduced to its major plot, discarding any complicated and sometimes difficult material entirely. But Wilson doesn’t do so. Much like Holes by Louis Sachar, which the cover blurb uses as a comparison, this is a novel with a deep underbelly that offers food for thought, even if Wilson does pull his punches in places. The epilogue, thus, serves as a positive conclusion to much of the novel’s subplots and gave me a sense that Charlie had not simply survived something horrifying, but had also come out of it with a renewed vigor. This is, I suspect, fairly normal in books for young people. That said, there is one main concern I had with Boys of Blur. While the narrative deals explicitly with domestic abuse from the perspective of a child, I think Wilson does so by limiting a deeper discussion of that issue. In particular, the book itself provides little in the way of a resolution for this element, almost as though Charlie should have been too young to understand what has already transpired between his father, Bobby, and his mother, Natalie. But Charlie is twelve and seems to understand what has happened in his family, even if he was too little to understand when his parents had divorced. In the end, no significant conversation is had about Bobby, who is undeniably a violent abuser who has shown no real reform, and his involvement in his son’s life, despite the fact that Bobby appears to threaten Natalie in the novel. Charlie does take a stand against Bobby, and the novel try to address the issue, but this is brief and largely forgotten. If Wilson intended the concluding moments to be one of “going to bed with one’s enemy to conquer a greater foe,” then he needed to do so with a more deft hand; likewise, if he intended these other mentions of
Book Review: Zero Sum Game by SL Huang
SL Huang has a Twitter account. One day, SL Huang talked about her new book, Zero Sum Game. I said, “Hey, why don’t I have that in my pile of books to read for review,” and she said, “Well, fine, I’ll put it in your inbox you complaining whiny person.” Thus began a glorious literary friendship. Of course, that story isn’t exactly what happened, but it’s the version I’m sticking with for now. In truth, I came to Zero Sum Game with a lot of expectations: I wanted a fun, adventurous book with crisp, commercial writing, exciting characters, and a larger-than-life crazy-face plot. And that’s exactly what I got. This is the kind of book I would turn to if I needed a break from life. It’s the kind of book I can get lost into, like an action thriller that doesn’t try to be artsy, but still has a lot of heart. This book is like Bourne Identity, but if Matt Damon were replaced by Michelle Yeoh (or JeeJa Yanin) and all of her extraordinary fighting skills were explained by her superhuman ability to almost instantaneously calculate the physics of the world.