Book Review: “Shoresteading” by David Brin (from Gateways)
(I’ve decided to review each of the stories in Gateways — a collection edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull in honor of Frederik Pohl — individually. I will collect my thoughts about the anthology as a whole later. I’m doing this as a kind of experiment, as I find reviewing collections enormously difficult.) David Brin’s contribution to Gateways is an amusing 90+ page novella set in a post-global-warming China. Wer is a poor man trying to make a life for his wife and child by salvaging “valuable items” from the submerged ruins of old Shanghai in order to build a suitable habitat on the carcass of an old mansion. Understandably, things haven’t been going so well — that is until Wer discovers a secret basement full of unusual stones, one of which turns out to be an alien artifact sent thousands of years ago as part of an endless chain message to the stars. And Wer isn’t the only one surprised by the find: soon private groups intrude upon his life, pulling him away from his family and making him wonder if he’ll ever see them again. “Shoresteading” was a welcome shift from the fantasy novels I usually read for review. Purely science fiction, Brin’s tale is filled with exciting ideas. Brin fuses technology and slum-life seamlessly (in top-notch worldbuilding fashion). His world feels all-too-real, even while the narrative plays on stories we’ve read or seen before (alien contact/alien probe tales). And I think that’s what sets Brin’s story above other kinds of alien contact narratives: the alien contact is secondary, in a way, precisely because Brin’s main character is not an upper class everybody, but a lower class nobody who knows how he can be used and manipulated by the upper class and yet still must navigate that upper class world and the decimated planet around him. Wer’s struggle, to put it simply, is wonderfully human and wonderfully three dimensional. One of the other unique things about the “Shoresteading” is how Brin attempts to authenticate his Chinese vision. While I profess an ignorance about Chinese culture, Brin’s new Shanghai and his Chinese characters feel real, from their interaction with the decimated world around them to the ways in which Brin describes the new China. There are even hints at Chinese mythology in this story, with giant serpents and other animalistic robots making appearances (though some might apply the Jonah and the Whale story to “Shoresteading” as an allegorical comparative). While Brin’s vision is enjoyable, the story itself does suffer from some minor pacing issues. Brin shifts his focus more than once in the story in a slightly noticeable way. This produces a multi-tiered narrative which I knew couldn’t be fulfilled by the end and which gives the ending an incomplete feel, as if Brin meant for it to be part of a larger narrative and simply cut it off to fit it into a novella. The end doesn’t resolve the original conflict set up in the first ten to twenty pages, though it does hint that Wer will play a more active role in the future (a slow development that has show Wer going from helpless “toy” to empowered individual). In some ways, I wanted more of a resolution precisely because I cared about Wer and what happened to him. Perhaps the intention wasn’t to “complete” Wer’s narrative, but rather to provide an ambiguous close to reflect the initial perpetual struggle produced in the beginning. But despite feeling incomplete, I still quite enjoyed “Shoresteading.” Placing this story at the start of Gateways was a smart move. Anything less entertaining would make continuing with the anthology less-than-appealing. Instead, I, as a reader, want to know what other fascinating stories have been included. So far, things are looking up. ———————————————— Here are the other reviews (more as they are written): Below are the reviews of other stories in the collection (which will be updated as reviews become available): “Shoresteading” by David Brin “Von Neuman’s Bug” by Phyllis and Alex Eisenstein “Sleeping Dogs” by Joe Haldeman “Gates (Variations)” by Larry Niven
Book Review: Serial Killers Inc. by Andy Remic
Callaghan is a scallywag, divvying up his time between bedding married women, exploiting the vulnerable and dead to make a living at a tabloid magazine, and consuming enough alcohol and hardcore drugs to send him to an early grave. And things are going well for him on this destructive path. But Callaghan has an admirer, someone who has taken a keen interest in his lifestyle and transgressions. Soon Callaghan discovers that his admirer may have a hand in a string of murders in the area, and that he is somehow connected to them. Worst of all, this new killer has an idea to make Callaghan a part of the games. When the walls start to crumble around him and people start to die, Callaghan has to make a decision: continue with his careless lifestyle or finally take responsibility for his actions. But doing so might mean making allies with disreputable characters who have their own twisted sense of morality… Serial Killers Inc. is a disturbingly violent book which demonstrates once more why Remic is both a terrifying human being and a literary dynamo. When I reviewed Kell’s Legend, I said he was “the Tarantino of fantasy,” but having read Serial Killers Inc. I think it’s fair to say that he’s in a league all on his own, touched not by Tarantino’s cult sensibilities, but by the wicked recesses of the human mind. Serial Killers Inc. is a book that questions the morality of immoral people, challenging their limitations in what could be called an exaggerated allegory of “normal” human existence. It’s precisely Remic’s treatment of morality in Serial Killers Inc that makes the book more than a romp into vulgarity. Dragging Callaghan into a game of serial killers and monstrous people means finding a challenge fit for the character, but it also offers challenges to the reader, who might consider how the moral games played in the book reflect upon our world of grays. Remic’s work, however, is not for the faint of heart. It’s violent, crude, and sometimes even vulgar, pushing buttons even I find difficult to stomach. But such things don’t exist in Remic’s work without reason. Serial Killers Inc. is about characters who live in a world where vulgarity and perversion are regularities, and Remic has to find clever ways to make us care about these characters. After all, we would not normally identify with someone who is sleeping with a woman married to a murderer, nor someone who thinks of women as sex objects. And, in fact, it’s because Callaghan is these things that we begin to understand why Remic has chosen to torture him in this novel. Callaghan must be saved, not just from the evils of the world, but also from the evil in himself. This doesn’t mean that Callaghan will come out of the novel’s events a saint; rather, it means he has to acknowledge that his life of disconnection from consequence is unsustainable. Serial Killers Inc. may be a difficult book for some readers to swallow because of its language and themes, but if one can move past these to the heart of the tale (which seems to masquerade as a gory cult horror story, but is, in fact, much more), there’s a compelling story to be had. Serial Killers Inc. does have one major flaw. Most of the plot is straightforward and develops effectively, but where Remic falters is in the introduction of subplots. One of the major subplots is actually a whodunnit mystery narrative with a near-mystical resolution. I thought the way the story turned out was fantastic, but it came too suddenly and with too little foreshadowing to have the impact it needed. Remic does insert clues, but they are often too vague or too short, sometimes even difficult to disentangle from the insanity of the characters who present them (perhaps this is his intention). The novel might have benefited from a linear development of Callaghan’s investigations into the mysteries surrounding the murders of which he has unwittingly become a part. Remic’s novel clearly deals with detective tropes alongside its deconstructions of contemporary morality and cult horror elements. I simply would have liked to see the detective bits expanded as well as the others. As a novel in a new genre for Remic (he traditionally writes science fiction and fantasy), Serial Killers Inc. is a brilliant addition to the man’s oeuvre, encapsulating the rushed, heavy-voiced writing style and cult horror tropes we’ve come to expect of him. This is a novel to entice genre fans with its horror sensibilities, but also one to challenge readers beyond the genre with its no-holds-barred hyperrealism. Though heavy handed, Serial Killers Inc. is a title well worth reading if you can handle Remic’s unrelenting and unrepentant exploitation of the worst aspects of the human condition. Call it a man fantasy or violence porn or whatever you like; if Remic keeps doing what he’s doing, I’ll keep coming back for more. If you’d like to learn more about the book, check out the publisher’s page or the author’s website. Serial Killers Inc. is available on Amazon and anywhere else books are sold.
Book Review: Central Park Knight by C. J. Henderson
Disappointment is an unfortunate thing when it comes to reading. Sometimes a book doesn’t live up to the expectations set up by the cover copy. It’s not often that this happens to me. I’ve found books with such problems to be average or even below-average, but it’s a rare thing that a book leads me to write a review like the one below. Central Park Knight promises adventure of the Indiana Jones variety, magic, dragons, and massive battles. In many ways, Henderson’s delivers on these promises, but not without an inconsistent plot and a slew of other problems, all of which make this novel a weak addition to the urban fantasy genre. Central Park Knight follows Professor Piers Knight, curator at the Brooklyn Museum, a bit of an adventure, and wielder of ancient magics and other arcane things. Of course, those last two are reluctant additions to his relatively simple life at the museum; Knight doesn’t want to be a hero. But whenever monsters and other terrors threaten to the destroy the world, he knows he’s the only one who can do something about it. So begins Central Park Knight: Knight uses all his knowledge to stop a beast from beyond from ending Earth’s days, but even in the aftermath, more dark things are stirring. An old lover once thought dead appears in his office, rumors surface of dragons stirring from the Earth, and talk of new, more terrifying ends reminds him once more why he can’t have a regular curator’s life — because Piers Knight is the only one that knows how to save the world from forces beyond its imagining. The opening chapter of Central Park Knight is my favorite part of the book. It’s only vaguely tied to the actual story, but it gave me the impression that Henderson’s novel would resemble something akin to a New Weird novel. The chapter consists of selections from a fictional academic talk about the existence of dragons and the study of them. It’s fascinating, fun, and set a tone for the book. Henderson, however, never follows through, leaving much of what was compelling about the opening chapters behind for a story that never hits its stride. Therein lies the problem: Central Park Knight is riddled with plotting and writing problems. One of my biggest pet peeves in literature is random POV shifts, of which Henderson seems to be an expert. Viewpoints often shift in the middle of chapters — and sometimes even in the middle of paragraphs — in order to tell us what other characters are feeling at that moment. More often than not, these shifts give us nothing useful to work with as readers, sucking life away from the primary POV of that chapter (usually Knight, but sometimes one of the dragons or George). The shifts are jarring, too, and draw too much attention to themselves, which is the greatest issue here. Once you yank me from the story, it’s hard for me to get back into it without focusing once more on the prose. Popular prose styles aren’t meant to draw attention to themselves; that’s left to more complex and poetic writing, in which language is sometimes more subtle and nuanced. Instead, popular prose should flow and give the reader the space to imagine what is being relayed on the page. The POV shifts made this a daunting task because I could never be sure that the POV on the page would stay firm long enough for me to focus on the character, the scene, or the emotions of the moment. Likewise, Henderson’s prose is bloated and suffers from bizarre temporal orientations (which I’ll explain in a moment). What could easily be said more effectively in fewer words is instead crammed full of excess verbs, prepositions, etc., sometimes to the point of being run-on sentences; such sentences are too frequent for comfort and I found myself growing frustrated when a sentence would suck up four or five lines on the page in order to tell me something that could have been told in less than one line. And then there is the strange structure of his sentences: actions which should be happening on the page are shoved aside by “as he did X, so he did Y” sentences; sentences with this structure are so frequent that the story often gets lost in their clunkiness. Throw in a handful of typos, grievous grammar errors (missing words and the like that should have been caught), and stiff/clunky dialogue (the attempts to make George sound like a modern teenager read more like an offensive caricature than a realistic person) and you end up with a book which reads as poorly as it is plotted. The plot, as such, is where I’ll end this review. The book opens with an event that, quite honestly, is far more climactic and interesting than the story we’re inevitably given. This is a problem not only because the rest of the story is less developed and riddled with logical inconsistencies, but also because one of the characters we’re supposed to care about in the opening scene then disappears without little more than “eh, she went home” as an excuse. I’d expect such a thing from a TV show that has to explain why one of its character (and, thus, the actor) isn’t coming back (House managed to do this by killing one of its characters), but it’s not something I would expect from a novel which is supposed to deal with developed individuals. Since all indications on the actual book suggest that Central Park Knight is a stand-alone novel, these kinds of issues in plotting and character put a black mark on Henderson’s narrative. There are other plot issues that I could mention, but this review is already negative enough as it is. I really wanted to like Central Park Knight. It has an amusing premise, interesting, though undeveloped, characters, and an a mythology and history that, with proper development, could yield challenging and
Book Review: The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo
Readers will remember Kate DiCamillo as the author of the adorable Tale of Despereaux, which was turned into a computer animated film in 2008 (which I had the pleasure of seeing and enjoying). The Magician’s Elephant is a less expansive narrative, but one which attempts to reach into the heart of the human condition through the figure of the child. It is a story which looks at the moral complications of lies, the power of loyalty, and the desire and safety found in the family unit (even if that unit is broken). The Magician’s Elephant is about Peter Augustus Duchene, a young boy who has lost his entire family and who has been adopted by an ill and disgruntled soldier (Vilna Lutz) who wants Peter to grow up to be just like him. But when Peter spends Vilna’s grocery money on a fortuneteller, he learns an amazing truth: his sister is alive and an elephant will lead the way. A series of strange events soon follows and Peter begins to question everything, uncovering the lies about his life and his family. DiCamillo makes me wish I had children. The Magician’s Elephant lends itself well to parental voice acting because it has such a large cast of characters: Peter, Vilna, Adele, the Elephant (you read that right), the Magician, Leo, and several more. Each character, remarkably, has his or her own storyline, though some get more attention than others for obvious reasons. The plethora of characters adds a certain charm to the story, since it allows DiCamillo to move temporarily away from the dark family-oriented narrative of Peter into the odd-ness of her world and its eccentric cast. The novel never truly escapes from darkness, though, resting firmly in dark comedy territory. The darkness is perhaps why I found the book so interesting. Setting aside Peter’s orphan status, the novel is rife with trauma-induced mental illness. Vilna is a broken soldier who still thinks he’s part of the army, crying out as if experiencing flashbacks from a war we’re never really told about. The Magician and Madam LaVaughn have been reduced to the repetition of the same grief-stricken routine by the trauma of the Elephant’s entry into the world. Some readers may find the darkness overwhelming, but I think the effect it has on the closure of the narrative is more powerful than would the excavation of everything but Peter’s story. The intersection of all of these other stories and traumas makes the ending a fascinating (almost cathartic) experience (though, in all honesty, I think there were too many secondary characters, some of which weren’t given the attention they deserved). A good deal of the trauma is also attached to an underlying didacticism in the narrative, which I found interesting not because there were messages to be found and learned in The Magician’s Elephant, but because the perspective through which these moralistic moments are derived is that of a child (Peter). There aren’t any grand moments in which adult characters tell the young protagonist that X is wrong and that they must learn a lesson (except when DiCamillo wants to show how some of the adults are hypocrites). As a story for kids, I think The Magician’s Elephant is a fantastic read. While the story is dark, there are plenty of humorous moments. The quirkiness of the plot and characters doesn’t get in the way of the story, though, which is something some chapter books fall prey to. Instead, The Magician’s Elephant is a wonderful story about the power of family, friends, forgiveness, and compassion, with an interesting cast of characters and a strong plot. It’s definitely something to read with your kids (if you have them) or to read on your own. If you’d like to learn more about DiCamillo and her novels, check out her website. The Magician’s Elephant is available pretty much everywhere books are sold.
Book Review: Dark Jenny by Alex Bledsoe
Every once in a while I go out to the mailbox and discover a book in the mail that I wasn’t expecting. A lot of those books end up sitting on my review shelf, but some of those books intrigue me enough to dig my eyes into them. Such books tend to be quite good. Dark Jenny is one of those books. Dark Jenny follows Eddie LaCrosse, a witty sword for hire who’ll solve any case for a reasonable price. But Eddie also has a history that most people don’t know about, and it involves the fall of the kingdom of Grand Bruan, a feudal utopia with an Arthurian legend at its core. When a mysterious coffin is left in the snow outside his place of business — i.e., a tavern — Eddie begins to weave a tale about murder, dark family secrets, unscrupulous and vengeful characters, and a version of Grand Bruan’s fall that nobody has ever heard before. Dark Jenny is a lot like the movie Clue on a twisted date with The Princess Bride. Bledsoe’s novel is one part dark comedy and one part social critique. As a dark comedy, it benefits from having a strong protagonist and a solid cast of secondary characters. Eddie is sarcastic, witty, and clever, but he is also a farcry from the antiheroes of many popular fantasy series, despite his attempts to avoid involvement in anything other than his business. The result was a character I enjoyed reading about and a character whose motivations I could understand, even if I might have disagreed with him. This feeling is helped by the fact that Dark Jenny is a first person narrative, the result of which is a thorough understanding of Eddie’s thought processes and a lack self-referentiality — that is that the novel doesn’t suffer from requiring some familiarity with Bledsoe’s other works, however minute. Instead, the novel is made internally consistent by a character who feels fully-developed from the outset (the novel opens in a tavern and does a fantastic job of creating a sense of familiarity through Eddie’s interactions with the various minor characters around him) and whose development is then displayed full-force by a flashback narrative (one which shows that development morally through his interactions with the people of Grand Bruan, in which his aggressive nature is challenged by — and challenges — people above his stature; we then get to see how his personality functions and why he is who he is). Eddie’s voice is perhaps the strongest aspect of the novel next to the genre critiques, without which I think Bledsoe’s tale would falter. The core of Dark Jenny is an Arthurian legend twisted on its head, in part because the kingdom has descended into barbarism, which the opening of the novel indicates, but also because Bledsoe doesn’t avoid breaking down the utopianism of feudal myths (often through humor) in order to show the dark inner workings of societies which are served by those myths. To put it another way: Bledsoe’s novel, despite presenting itself as a fun, but dark comedy, is one which critically engages with the mythologies societies give to their citizens, showing the tenuous balance between maintaining order and manipulating one’s subjects. (Bledsoe is engaging with the fundamental unknowability of utopia, which Fredric Jameson discusses throughout his writing, but specifically in Archaeologies of the Future). Bledsoe relays these critiques largely through humor, which is refreshing when one considers how many fantasy novels deconstruct the feudal utopia through elaborate political or metaphysical pessimisms. Dark Jenny does have some issues, though, some of which will be the result of the reader’s taste. While the novel contains within it a heavy social critique, its outer skin — that of its comedic nature — sometimes falls short from a language perspective. Eddie frequently uses euphemisms which are far too modern for the world he is playing with. Though Dark Jenny is set in a secondary world, I felt myself being drawn away from the story when phrases like “she’s a knockout” appeared in the text. Many readers may not be bothered by such things, but I find that the language can only be modernized so much before the story’s medieval settings starts to feel strained against an encroaching modernity. There are also issues related to the Bledsoe’s use of sexual relationships. I never got the sense that certain characters were reasonably attracted to one another (though there is a twist which explains why some characters are that way). In Eddie’s case, there is a love interest, but it felt somewhat strained to me. I tend to prefer romantic relationships which develop realistically. Eddie’s “charm,” while usually evident in other avenues (such as his interactions with Kay), wasn’t given enough space in the romantic subplot. There needed to be more interaction, because without it, I got the sense that the relationship did not contain the depth that Eddie frequently announced in the text (the relationship seemed to be about sex rather than some kind of attraction beyond the physical; the novel suggested that the relationship wasn’t just physical). The novel’s structure is also interesting to note. I feel that some readers will have issues with Dark Jenny‘s jumps between the world’s present and its distant past (at about the same frequency as The Princess Bride), but I found the structure enjoyable and fascinating. This means that the novel doesn’t present itself in a straight way. Some details are revealed from the start, while others are left to be discovered — by the Eddie’s past self and by the reader. The structure works well with the mystery plot that begins the novel’s present and past, and will certainly please fans of other genres than fantasy (mystery fans might find Dark Jenny enjoyable). Overall, however, I greatly enjoyed the book. It’s a dark comedy/fantasy romp with a strong lead character, plenty of mystery and twists, and a solid plot. I’ve been inundated with too many epic fantasy stories; receiving this book in the mail was a
Book Review: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
When my friend and I asked Lauren Beukes to describe Zoo City, she understandably remarked that the book is rather difficult to explain. Zoo City isn’t like a lot of books. On the one hand it is a noir murder mystery with a semi-New Weird slant, but on the other it is a novel about refugees, the music industry, South Africa, guilt, revenge, drugs, prejudice, poverty, and so much more. It is a gloriously complicated novel with equally complicated characters. You might even call it a brilliant example of worldbuilding from outside of the traditional modern fantasy genre. Zoo City is concerned with Zinzi December, a former convict who, like many others, must bear the mark of her crime in the form of a semi-intelligent animal — in her case, it’s a sloth. But there’s also the Undertow — a mysterious force that some claim is Hell reaching out for the damned souls of aposymbiots like Zinzi. Aposymbiosis, however, isn’t all bad. Every aposymbiot is gifted with an ability. Some can create protective charms while others can dampen magical fields. Zinzi can see the threads that connect people to their lost things. And that’s how she survives: finding things for people for a modest fee. But when she takes on a job from a music producer to find a missing girl, things get sticky. Her employer isn’t who he seems and the person she’s trying to find might be running for a good reason. Toss in her debts to a shady organization of email scammers, her complicated relationship with her refugee lover, a murder, and the seedy underbelly of a Johannesburg trying to deal with its new “problem” and you have a complex story about South Africa, its people, and its culture. Zoo City is immense in its complexity, despite having the allure of a typical genre romp. Trying to describe the novel will always leave out some salient detail, which will prevent one from conveying a true sense of the novel. It is, in part, a noir crime novel, but it is also a foray into South Africa’s present. What is surprising about Zoo City is that it breaks the fantasy tradition of disconnection from reality — what some might call the escapist nature of the genre. Zoo City roots the reader in the now, altering details as necessary to convey a world that has been changed by its supernatural affliction (aposymbiosis); it is a novel with an intimate relationship to South Africa’s present (and, by extension, its past). For that reason, I think Zoo City would benefit from multiple readings. The novel’s cultural layers are palimpsest-ial in nature, each element bleeding into another so that almost every detail, allusion, and reference becomes integral to the development of the novel’s characters and the narrative itself. I consider this to be a good thing because the novel doesn’t suffer from feeling disconnected from the world its characters are supposed to occupy (an alternate-history near-today) — that is that the characters are so firmly rooted in Beukes’ South African milieu that they don’t read like characters transplanted from elsewhere. Being so rooted, Zoo City is as much about its world as it is about its characters. The first-person-present narrative style allows for Zinzi’s voice to dominate, but that doesn’t prevent Beukes from providing useful insight into the various other characters around her main character. While the focus on Zinzi certainly shows a lopsided view of the world, it doesn’t fail to show the wider context in which Zinzi has become a part. Zinzi’s detective role, in a way, is a duality: she uses it first as a survival mechanism, but then as a way to dig into her own personal reality, discovering the truth about her friends and even herself. It is through this process that the narrative’s cultural strands build on top of one another, providing the reader with a progressively deepening view of the characters and their interaction with the world around them. Zinzi’s refugee lover (Benoit), for example, is a man with his own mysteries, and it is inevitably through Zinzi’s various other doings, some of which she has hidden even from those that know her, that she not only explains the world from which Benoit has come, but also discovers more about who Benoit is/was and how new events in her life will change the dynamics of their relationship and their relationship to the world around them. Throughout all of this, Zinzi’s humor, sarcasm, and cynicism pokes through, coloring her character and her vision of the South Africa of Zoo City (by extension, the reader’s view is also colored by these interjections). It is this attention to detail and character that I loved about Zoo City. Instead of focusing undo attention to its plot, the novel finds a balance between both plot and character. Neither is written at the expense of the other, but the characters also seem to steal the show because they are all incredibly flawed, and deal with those flaws in (sometimes annoyingly) human ways. Perfection is an impossibility in Beukes’ narrative. Zinzi has many advantages — her magical ability and her attitude, which she uses to intimidate her “enemies — but she is also limited, and knows it. Her actions are appropriately influenced by this knowledge; reading her thoughts as she comes to terms with these flaws, particularly in bad situations, is an amusing, if not voyeuristic, experience. Neither plot or character are perfectly in-sync, however. The ending, I would argue, felt somewhat rushed and without full resolution (by this I don’t mean the last pages, which I think were appropriate based on what occurs in the novel); in a sense, I think the ending shies away from the noir crime narrative Zoo City started with and delves into darker themes that might have been better served by stronger foreshadowing in the novel. Zinzi’s voice and her character flaws do, to some extent, overwhelm these minor issues, making the ending suspenseful and (slightly) insane, and I suspect that