Author: Scott Lynch

2006, Bantam Spectra

Filed under: Fantasy,  Sci-Fi

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In The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch has created an incredibly unique world, populated it with engaging characters, and orchestrated a driving, action-filled plot.

This book features one of the best, and most pertinent, prologues written in the fantasy genre. We get introduced to the protagonist from the eyes of two very different thieves—Chains and the Thiefmaker. Most prologues are written from incredible distance and only give a sense of pre-destiny, myth, and/or a generic world setting. Lynch delivers main character backstory while simultaneously introducing us to his world. After exiting the prologue, I was aching to know more about Locke Lamora and what thievery and mischief has got him into so much trouble.

Locke Lamora is an unassuming master thief operating in a corrupt and violent society dominated by a ruling elite class and a gang-filled criminal underworld. Locke needs every bit of his skill, and cunning, and luck to survive. From the very onset, each of Lynch’s characters is in a state of jeopardy and one can’t help but wonder if someone will perish at the turn of the next page.

Lynch possesses a good sense of timing and an awareness of reader’s expectations as well. The slow initial development of the Lockes’s latest ploy, which dipped a little to near a paean of how great a thief he is, is righted when Lynch deftly turns the story. Locke (along with his gang of Gentleman Bastards) is not, in fact, too smart by half. Lynch raises his characters only so far before putting the screws to them. He thrusts them into a near impossible scenario whose unfolding propels the reader through the remainder of the book.

Locke Lamora is told in the third person omniscient. The knowledge possessed by the narrator manages to broaden our understanding of the world while showing restraint from peering too deeply into any particular character’s motive, thus avoiding the sloppy narration that too-often plagues fantasy novels by giving away what is about to happen and cheapening the unfolding drama. The “he would later learn that” crutch is rarely employed, sustaining the reader’s fear for the characters’ survival. By interweaving the backstory of both the characters and the world throughout the chapters, the exposition is inserted in a way that never feels forced or shoehorned. Never is an interlude disruptive, irrelevant, or something you’d rather skim past.

Lynch also writes setting well. He teases out his wonderfully realized city of Camoor in a way that immediately grasps the reader’s attention. There are no spoon-fed explanations for the details of the world, he instead places his trust in the reader, allowing for a world of greater depth to grow in the reader’s imagination.  Lynch’s world is one that has eked out an existence from the ruins of a former great society. The former civilization possessed a technology and science well beyond the reach of the current society and the evidence is in the architecture and lighting of the main city, Camoor.

Magic, too, is uniquely handled in this story. It is predominantly alchemical. That’s not to say that there aren’t mages in Lynch’s fantasy though. There are, and one in particular–the Bondsmage–plays a pivotal role. Mostly about mind and body control rather than more than the traditional sorcery of lightning bolts and fireballs, the magic in Lock Lamora is a combination of witchcraft and voodoo. Despite the absence of “flair” in this type of magic, the Bondsmage in this story is incredibly menacing.

Unlike many of its fantasy contemporaries, The Lies of Locke Lamora is a stand alone novel. It doesn’t need to be part of a series: rich characters, an immersive world, and strong plot puts Lynch in the elite company of George R.R. Martin and the like. I recommend this to anyone seeking a rewarding break from the sweeping fantasy epic form.

Similar Reads: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch, The Black Company by Glen Cook, The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny

Reviewer’s Note: I read this book based on a friend’s recommendation. Thank you, Todd!

Author: Scott Westerfeld

2011, Simon Pulse

Filed Under: Young Adult, Sci-Fi, Historical.

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Goliath closes the YA trilogy Westerfeld opened barely two years ago with Leviathan (if you want to get caught up, you can read my review of Leviathan here, and my review of the middle book, Behemoth, here). Like its predecessors, Goliath is a fun adventure set in a creative alternate history, where World War One is a fierce battle between the steampunk Clankers (Germany and friends) and the Darwinists (headed by Britain) whose army consists of giant biological weapons created by genetically modifying lifeforms–the titular Leviathan being an armored airship supported by a flying whale.

Deryn, the girl posing as a midshipman in the British Air Navy, and Alek, the Hapsberg prince hoping to find a means of peace, continue their adventure right where things left off. There’s plenty of spectacle in this book, and even more historical figures make their way onto the pages (Nikola Tesla, William Randolph Hearst, Pancho Villa, and others).

As you might expect from the third book of a trilogy, Westerfeld elevates the main characters to global importance, making them lynchpins in the outcome of a world war. Another major factor is a doomsday weapon know as Goliath. With it, Tesla has managed to harness the ability to influence electrical currents from across hemispheres. But whose side he’s on isn’t entirely clear.

There’s a healthy dose of politics at work in this installment, both concerning the war and allegiances, but also in the bubbling up and concealment of series-long secrets–namely Deryn’s gender. It’s good that these threads carry so nicely between the books, because like its predecessors’ plotlines, the events here all open and close neatly in a single volume. But unlike the previous books, which more or less occur in a single setting, this book features lots of globe-trotting.

While adventurous, this served to highlight for me this series’ biggest shortcoming: Westerfeld focuses too much on moment-to-moment adventure at the expense of big-picture storytelling. There’s a a really interesting overarching storyline, it just isn’t granted enough attention to feel nearly as epic as it should. This is a book about a great war fought between nations that use fantastic machines and creatures as weapons and vehicles. It’s a creative setting, and an awesome one; one that ought to be vibrant and as memorable as you can get. The elements are all there, but even after three books, it just never clicks.

Here’s where I come down: this entire trilogy should have been one book. Had that been the case, I think talking about it as a lasting work of children’s lit could be warranted. But instead, the story has been chopped up into 3 somewhat short and easily consumable–then, unfortunately, forgettable–pieces. This was a concern I mentioned in my write up of the first book, as the plot arc quickly closed just as I was being drawn into the greater story, leaving the novel feeling more like an episode than a complete entity.

All told, this entire trilogy isn’t that long. Each book weighs in at 400-500 pages, but with big margins, lots of white space and dialogue, and the copious illustrations (one of the books’ many strengths), they feel a whole lot shorter. The entire trilogy would fit, I surmise, in a normally laid-out paperback of about 500 pages or so.

An epic story like Westerfeld’s in a single big novel is the kind of thing I would have gobbled up when I was younger, and probably still might today. (Of course, in that form it couldn’t be sold to me at the price of 3 hardcovers.) I hope these books found success, it is a great adventure set in a unique world. And perhaps it’s not fair to blame Westerfeld for following the genre’s conventions for serialized scenarios, or for earning the best living he can. But it’s impossible not to notice.

It’s just a shame this is the kind of book that gets lost in a sea of shiny-on-black-cover YA books lined on a Barnes & Noble shelf, rather than one earning its tattered cover in a young reader’s backpack. Hopefully when they get around to releasing these in paperback they consider compiling them, but somehow I doubt that happens.

Similar Reads: Leviathan (Westerfeld), Behemoth (Westerfeld), Boneshaker (Priest)

2011, Mulholland Books

Filed Under: Thriller, Sci-Fi.

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I’m not exactly sure why I’ve been reading time travel books lately, but so far I’ve benefited nicely. Much like The Map of Time–though it is a very different book–The Revisionists mixes just the right amounts of elements from different genres to make for an exciting and compelling read.

Zed is from the future, a future that purposefully obfuscates its own history. Books are only allowed in print for so long before being utterly obliterated from the record. When a person dies, the government scrubs all trace of their existence down to seizing photographs and belongings from the their loved ones’ possession. Faced with such a situation and left with nothing to lose, Zed, who works as an investigator for the government, accepts an assignment to travel back in time in order to protect the Perfect Present.

Zed’s world came about through a chain of terror events (which stemmed from unregulated defense contracting and privatized espionage in the early 2000′s) that resulted in a world war. Years later when society was rebuilt with tighter government control, time travel was invented. Despite the governments best efforts at an iron fist, it fell into rebel hands. These rebels (known as “hags”) travel through time to pivotal moments in the human timeline in the hope of righting a former wrong–stopping an assassination, derailing the 9/11 plot, preventing the Holocaust. It’s the job of operatives like Zed to make sure these events still occur, to keep history from being rewritten and thus preserving the Perfect Present.

It’s damn near impossible to talk about a book like this without spoiling anything, so be warned there’s possible spoilers ahead. I’ve tried not too, but I’m sure there’s some minor points that might be considered spoiler-y, so if you want to avoid that, this is where the review ends for you: exciting political thriller that incorporates time travel is worth your time.

Ready? Okay.

The key to fiction that involves time travel is all in the handling. I imagine it’s pretty easy to get into a plot only to find you’ve written yourself into a paradox that can’t be explained away in the story. Here, time traveling is treated smartly, in that it doesn’t ever really happen on the page. This is not a leap-around-time adventure like Back to the Future. Instead it’s more like Terminator: time travelers from different factions are sent to our present with the purpose of affecting world events in order to steer the future to their designs.

What I liked so much about this book was how much this works in the periphery. Sure, Zed is an agent sent from the future, but the most immediate consequence lies in the present. His job is to make sure a catastrophic event occurs in Washington DC in our era. So we are introduced to the various characters involved (mostly unbeknownst to them) in the cataclysm that’s yet to transpire.

We know what the players don’t. They’re going to die. But Mullen offers a delicious twist on dramatic irony–through the actions of Zed and the hags, that outcome can be altered. And that, really, is why this book works so well: tightly knotted plot lines full of whistleblowers, double agents, treasonous ambassadors, scumbag defense contractors and oblivious lawyers. It’d be a solid political thriller without all the sci-fi stuff. Like any good piece of science fiction, its extraordinary elements work to enhance the book, rather than buckle when asked to support the work without much help.

Mullen shifts perspectives between a few characters (relating their stories or the event in question isn’t necessary for this review so I’ve left them fresh for you) and does a nice job of patiently drawing the different pieces and players together. Slowly Zed moves from the primary character to another player in the game, his story ultimately enmeshing with the others’ to make for a fine cohesive whole. This book went from piquing my interest in the first two chapters to having me riveted. It’s a solid thriller.

Similar Reads: Flashback (Simmons), The Thousand (Guilfoile) The Map of Time (Palma), How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Yu)

2004, Bear & Company

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Historical, Sci-Fi.

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Not that I buy into them, but pseudo-documentaries like the kind often played on The History Channel are a guilty pleasure of mine. Sitchin’s books (there are many) were mentioned in one I’ve been watching recently called “Ancient Aliens.” That show’s title pretty much sums up Sitchin’s thesis: aliens used to live on earth, and live amongst humans as gods.

Sitchin’s clearly a smart guy. He reads multiple languages (including Sumerian), and has spent a lot of time studying ancient artifacts. His basic supposition is that if Homer’s Troy (long thought by scholars to be a mythical place, until its excavation around the turn of the 20th century) can transcend myth, there’s no reason to outright discredit the rest of his rendition as untrue just because we don’t believe it. Hence there were really gods and demigods involved in the politics of men.

Based upon Sumerian legends of “sky people” called Anunaki, legends from which he inferences robots and rocket ships, Sitchin takes his literalist line of logic surrounding Troy one step further and asserts that the gods were aliens. It’s all pretty ridiculous of course, but what follows is some interesting, and often exciting, quasi-science. (I ought to point out, as batty as all this sounds, that if you were to reductively sum up the “plot” of pretty much any of the world’s major religions into a single sentence, it would probably sound equally as ludicrous.)

The book is broken into sections, with the ancient objects targeted for his various trips to the the Mediterranean and Middle East (a carving of a rocketship, a statue with an “airtank,” Sumerian characters charved into an unrecognized bronze smelting ruin in Greece) used as thematic dividers. More than once he roots a premise on what he believes is a mistranslation, such as the Hebrew “Elohim” for God, which he asserts is actually plural–and referring to alien “gods.”  If Indian Jones were an aging, paunchy Jewish man prone to excitability and content to walking tours rather than whip-swinging through temples and tombs, he’d resemble Zecharia Sitchin.

Still, Sitchin does bring up a lot of interesting comparisions between ancient cultures that existed oceans apart. Sitchin draws lines between the Maya, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Olmecs. Of course, when you approach such a topic looking for such comparisons, they’re not hard to find. Things like a certain style of tongue on certain idols indicate, to Sitchin, a relationship between the gorgons of Greek mythology and a Mayan god-beast. This connection could mean that Medusa’s family could have traveled freely across the ocean, or it could touch on some archetypal imagery used by ancient humans, or it could just be coincidence.

Sitchin does this over and over: he points out an interesting connection, poses an interesting question, jumps three steps ahead of himself and calls it “irrefutable” proof that the ancient alien Anunnaki once co-inhabited the planet with us. He even claims that the smoking guns are being shadily hidden away, or possible destroyed, by museums. Assertions like that push the book too far into paranoid conspiracy theory for my taste. Moreover, you can’t just pick and choose myths to “prove” true–the sun isn’t pulled by a chariot, and why would an advanced civilization capable of intergalactic travel fight primitive wars with arrows and build space stations out of rock?

That’s not really a criticism, though–it’s not like I went into this believing it anything other than hooey–because it’s fun. Sitchin ties most of his conclusions to a single place, the one he believes was the Anunnaki “Mission Control Center”: Jerusalem’s Temple on the Mount.

Was this Holy of Holies, the former home of the Ark of Covenant, also a launching pad for an ancient rocket ship? Probably not. But the enthusiasm with which Sitchin relates his (admittedly pretty ballsy) sneaking into a prohibited inner sanctum of one of the most sacred places on Earth makes me wish, just a little, that he had stumbled upon a bunch of aliens playing canasta around the Ark of the Covenant.

I really liked this book. Take it for what it is: a man who looks at statues and convinces himself they are wearing spacesuits, then enthusiastically shares his “discovery” with you. It’s mindrot, but it’s fun mindrot.

Similar Reads: I’ve never read anything like this. Watch “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel (and Netflix streaming) for a taste.

1997, Drag City

Filed Under: Sci-Fi.

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This is the only book I’ve ever read that contains woman-on-chimpanzee fellatio. And that’s not even close to the weirdest part of this gonzo, nearly impossible to categorize book. It’s a very confusing work, so pardon me if I don’t convey it as well as you’d want.

The hero, Victory Chimp, is a genetically engineered, talking chimpanzee–who is also an accomplished chemist and interstellar hero. This makes sense because this book often reads like an acidhead drew up a comic book, then dictated it back to himself.

Victory Chimp found himself sitting inside, as the red ash burned his fur. He sat in the smoke, riding a goat, while an epileptic eye dropped a tear on his head.

Victory Chimp and his friend/lover/something Occula are in an epic time-traveling struggle to save the world from the evil Chon. Most of the time. There is no plot to speak of–a few episodes fit together, like the final segment where the characters are suddenly professional wrestlers–it’s a wandering affair. Not meandering though, this is rapid-fire, REM-dream kind of stuff. I had a hard time caring enough to keep up. But, to be fair, Hunter S. Thompson and William S. Burroughs (I wonder if Hagerty’s middle name begins with S?) elicit the same reaction from me.

Hagerty is fair with the pen. His words and phrases flow nicely, despite it being occasionally tough to see where they are flowing to. He gets a little over-the-top with the big words once in a while, but it’s easy to forgive and to give him a pitiful benefit of the doubt–like you would your stoner friend trying to sound intelligent at a cocktail party (and coming up short).

Now, I experienced this book through the audiobook rerelease of this novel–the paperback was originally released by the same publisher. I’m pretty sure if it weren’t for that I wouldn’t have finished this. Like Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Monro, this rerelease is an excellent example of how music can really add to the experience of certain books. Howling Hex, the band that created this, does a great job of capturing the essence of the book. It’s brimming with dirty layers of music woven together and sometimes piled upon each other, voices fade in and out, sound effects clatter into beats, and there’s some legitimately good songs on here. I’ve left a copy of Victory Chimp in my car, and I’ll almost certainly listen to it again, but probably not for Hagerty’s contribution.

Still, as a book Victory Chimp will definitely appeal to a certain set of readers. Fans of Burroughs and his ilk should read it without much hesitation. It is a well-done and smart book. So if you’re up for something different; really into space/time-orbital travel, wrestling, LSD, ape sex; or you just want to get stoned and read something wacky: here you go.

Similar Reads: The Death of Bunny Monro (Cave), Slow Fade (Wurlitzer), The Squirrel Machine (Rickheit), It Feels So Good When I Stop (Pernice)

[This review is of the audiobook version performed by The Howling Hex and produced by Drag City. A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

2011, Crown

Filed under: Sci-fi

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In 2044 America, the civilized world has crumbled after the end of oil. People live in squalor, in stacks of mobile homes, fighting to survive. Their only relief is an online virtual world called the OASIS. When the founder of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a mysterious quest: find three keys hidden throughout the game and win the OASIS fortune, more than a hundred billion dollars. The keys are buried in obscure, byzantine clues from the culture of the founder’s childhood, the 1980s.

As you might expect, millions of citizens devote their lives to unraveling the answers that will lead them to unfathomable wealth, but after years of searching, nobody has found even a single key, and the world has largely forgotten about the contest. Until, that is, a broke kid named Wade Watts finally finds the first key, and the game is back on.

It’s hard to imagine a novel featuring more layers of nerdity than Ready Player One. A nerdy kid plays a nerdy videogame in which he solves a nerdy quest by knowing and doing the most excruciatingly nerdy things.

Even the prose exudes nerdity, with its careful attention to meaningless details (like how many experience points Wade’s avatar gets each time he solves a puzzle).

Unfortunately, unlike other popular nerds (Patton Oswalt, Simon Pegg, the xkcd guy), Ernest Cline is not funny, and so following the personality-free Wade can be quite dull at times. He exhaustively relates each and every tiny detail, like a LARPer describing the minutiae of a puzzle quest.

I closed the IM window and checked the time. I still had about half an hour until class started. I grinned and tapped a small door icon at the edge of my display, then selected Aech’s chat room from my list of favorites.

In this way, Wade’s narration often reads like someone describing the process of web-surfing to a blind man. Not the content, even, but the “I’m clicking on this button, now I’m scrolling through a list” steps of procedure.

That said, I did find this book quite entertaining, which is confusing, until you stand the novel up against a role-playing game, and measure them against each other. Wade is your standard RPG character: poor, orphaned, skilled in some weird way, and waiting for the quest of his life.

He has a few close friends, a crush on a girl, a vast evil enemy, and a clear goal at each stage of the story. His progress is easy to mark, and he gains powers at a steady clip. You know what the probable outcome will be from the very beginning, and people evidently like knowing what the outcome will be.

In other words, this book is addictive in the same way a videogame is. It’s satisfying on an uncomplicated level to see Wade grow more powerful, and to watch his small victories against the evil, evil, very evil corporate enemy.

So if you want a simple, safe, fun novel that you won’t remember in a month, go right ahead. But do not expect more. Do not expect, for example, the best sci-fi novel of the decade, as Mark Fraunfelder called it at Boing Boing. It’s not even the best sci-fi novel of the month, having been summarily outclassed by Machine Man.

In fact, Machine Man and Ready Player One are so thematically similar that comparing the two will shed light on Cline’s shortcomings. Both novels examine the choice between living a solitary life of comfortable, private achievement, and risking that comfort for a chance at love.

But, where Machine is funny and character-centric, a story emerging through the complex, idiosyncratic voice of a memorable hero, Player is mindless (in that its characters take no unique actions) and risk-averse, imploring you to like its characters because there’s nothing to dislike, and because their enemy is super-evil.

I could not tell you a single thing about Wade’s personality, and each of his friends only has one trait apiece; the girl is cool, the guy is rich, the other two guys are Japanese, they’re all huge nerds.

In Machine, the hero has very real arguments to make for both the solitary life and the chance at love, and while he knows what he wants most, he’s incapable of entirely giving up everything else to get it. Ultimately, he has hard choices to make, and tough prices to pay. Nothing is spelled out, and no agenda lurks beneath the narrative.

In Player, on the other hand, Cline has a billboard-sized Message to get across: don’t let videogames be your whole life, kids! Everybody agrees by the end that the real world is better than the silly old videogame. But these matters are far more complex than a didactic one-sentence moral: after all, Wade and his friends wouldn’t have met, Cline makes it very clear, without the social melting pot of an online world. (Also, for most citizens of Cline’s dystopia, the real world consists of a horrific existence crammed into a trailer with 30 other people, slowly starving to death. That’s better than an idyllic, diverting virtual paradise how, exactly?)

Above and beyond all this, the most important difference between Machine and Player is that the former will surprise you, while the latter will give you only exactly what you expect.

Cline set out to write a nostalgic novel, and he succeeded. The world is drenched in Cline’s own favorite things, it bears the unmistakeable (and often duly cited) fingerprints of Snow Crash and Neuromancer and dozens of other sci-fi stories before it. Cline simply isn’t out to surprise or innovate, he’s just out to capture the feeling of playing a really cool game. It works, for the most part, and while that’s enough to make a fun read, it’s not nearly enough to make a great novel.

Similar reads: Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson; Neuromancer, by William Gibson. For my money, the best sci-fi novel of the 2010s is The Dream of Perpetual Motion, by Dexter Palmer. The best sci-fi novel of this summer is Machine Man, by Max Barry.

Author: Max Barry

2011, Vintage

Filed under: Literary, Sci-fi

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Machine Man began its existence as a kind of blog through which Max Barry sent readers one page a day of the novel in progress. Those readers, who had to pay after the first 43 pages, gave Barry feedback that he sometimes incorporated into the plot of the novel. He even let the cover be decided by popular vote.

This sounds crazy. I mean, crowd-sourcing a novel? That’s a train wreck waiting to happen. That backstory made me skeptical of the book, to the point that I almost didn’t read it. Luckily I eventually did, and the novel itself overcame my skepticism and won me over in a big big way, because the end result, Machine Man the finished product, is delightful.

For the record, I have previously used the word “delightful” zero times to describe a book, but it’s been a long time since I’ve read one that comes together this well. Machine Man has a fascinating plot, outstanding (and hilarious) writing, and one of the all-time best sci-fi protagonists ever. It’s easily one of the two best books I’ve read this year. Let me tell you why.

Charlie Neumann works for Better Future, a shiny, evil corporation of the type that seems to be Barry’s hobbyhorse (his last novel, Jennifer Government, took place in a world where each citizen takes the name of the company he or she works for as their own surname).

Charlie’s very smart and entirely socially stunted. That sounds perhaps like an overused character model, but the way Barry writes him—Charlie narrates as well as playing the hero—makes him unique and engaging and a blast to follow.

Here’s how Charlie describes himself:

I am a smart guy. I recycle. Once I found a lost cat and took it to a shelter. Sometime I make jokes. … I have a job. I own my apartment. I rarely lie. These are qualities I keep hearing people are looking for. I can only think there must be something else, something no one mentions, because I have no friends, am estranged from my family and haven’t dated in this decade. There is a guy in Lab Control who killed a woman with his car, and he gets invited to parties. I don’t understand.

Charlie’s a bit like an alien species or a shoddy human clone: he sees and understands emotions and social signals, but he can’t quite do the subcutaneous algebra required to fit in. Nor he does particularly care to.

All this makes him perfectly suited to the story in store for him. One day, at the corporate lab where Charlie works, he gets his leg crushed in a clamp and they have to amputate it. He gets the best prosthetic money can buy, and finds it woefully inadequate. (Meanwhile, he falls in love with the prostheticist.)

He decides that he can build a much better prosthetic himself, and he does, but then his biological leg is holding him back, because it can’t keep up with the robo-leg.

So Charlie crushes his other leg.

Better Future hears about his project and decides there’s a lot of money to be made. Things get weird and hairy quickly, and the relatively short course of the novel holds an impressive number of twists, surprises, and treats.

In the midst of gleefully over-the-top complications, Barry manages to explore the philosophy and ethics of technology use (along with the philosophy and ethics of being human) without ceding a moment of entertainment. Largely because Charlie tackles ethical and philosophical questions like a socially stunted engineer, which is pretty funny.

Here’s another snippet, in which Charlie is discussing with an assistant what would happen if he used a drug to anesthetize his ventromedial prefrontal cortex (or VMPFC), the part of the brain responsible for manufacturing feelings of guilt. Charlie speaks first:

“So if my VMPFC were suppressed, I’d feel less guilt, but otherwise be the same.”

“A lot less guilt.”

“Right. A lot less guilt.”

“And/or regret. They both lit up the VMPFC.”

I pondered this. “Is there a difference between guilt and regret?”

Jason stared blankly. “I don’t … think … so.”

“I guess one is …” I shook my head. “Lost it.”

“Emotions aren’t really my … area of expertise.”

“Let’s assume they’re the same.”

This kind of thing makes Machine Man a pleasure to read, not only because it’s both funny and thought-provoking, but because it’s driven by characters, mostly the character of Charlie. Like The Sisters Brothers, this is a thoughtful, witty, insightful, and entirely overblown adventure story that takes a little bit of work on the part of the reader, but offers great rewards.

Don’t miss it.

Similar reads: The Dream of Perpetual Motion, by Dexter Palmer; The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt (the other best book I’ve read this year); Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline (I’ll be reviewing Ready Player One soon—it’s not nearly as good as Machine Man, but they are very similar)

2011, Del Rey

Filed under: Sci-Fi

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Embassytown is the second Mieville book I’ve read, and I liked it much more than the first—although I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve become accustomed to his style, or because his sensibility better suits this plot and premise.

Previously, I read The City & The City, an ill-conceived detective novel set in a weird city, undone by the incomprehensible motivations of its characters.

The motives of the characters in Embassytown likewise resist understanding. That’s because, as I’ve finally realized (or perhaps just accepted), China Mieville doesn’t give a shit about his characters, or why they do what they do. Mieville only cares about the weird ideas he dreams up; he only gives his novels plots and his characters names to make something like a canvas, on which his weird ideas can be displayed.

That means that if you look for narrative art in his books, you’ll be sorely disappointed, as I was when I read City. But if you approach his work as conceptual art, you might find it enjoyable, even if it’s largely meaningless. That’s what I found this second time around.

Right away, Embassytown hides its purpose: it’s narrated by Avice Benner Cho, a native Embassytowner. You might think that means the novel is about Avice, or at least has something to do with her thoughts or experiences. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Avice spends a quarter of the book exploring the galaxy, as part of a special class of traveler—but the specifics of that traveling also don’t matter to the core of the novel. When she returns to Embassytown, for unconvincing reasons, she’s there to “floak,” which means, quite literally, that she’s there to do as little as possible. In other words, she has nothing to do within the story: her job is to report events to the reader. You could easily replace Avice with a child or a dog or a motile plant: she is an uncharacter—unmemorable, unactionable, unlikeable (but also undislikeable).

That’s because, like every other individual in this book, Mieville doesn’t give a shit about Avice. He only gives a shit about the non-human natives of Embassytown, the Ariekei, which are like giant roaches with two mouths and a wing that they hear with. He doesn’t care about them as individuals, of course, but as a species, and especially as a species who, with their two mouths, speak a language unlike any in the universe. It’s called Language, and it consists of two simultaneous streams of words that no single human being can replicate (that’s just the tip of the iceberg).

Speaking in Language, the Ariekei cannot lie. They literally cannot say anything that isn’t true. They also cannot understand anything that isn’t Language spoken by a sentient consciousness. They perceive the humans staying on Embassytown as barely animate hunks of flesh. Those humans want, for unconvincing reasons, to communicate with the Ariekei, and so after decades or centuries they have created Ambassadors, who are specially raised pairs of genetically cloned people trained to speak Language as one entity.

Something like a plot begins to emerge when a new Ambassador comes to Embassytown: two regular people who can somehow together speak Language, which is a feat no un-cloned people have ever managed. Meanwhile, one of the Ariekei is slowly training himself to lie, which would be a disaster for the Ariekei and the rest of the universe.

Right about here is where the novel can fall apart if you question it too intensely. For instance, why does it matter if the Ariekei lie? Every other known race in the universe can lie. It seems like lying, and the concept of imagination, would only bring the Ariekei up to about a first-grade level of thought complexity. But for some reason, the humans see the prospect of Ariekei lying as the coming of the apocalypse. OK, then how can the Ariekei imagine things that don’t exist? In one instance, they need Avice to act something out so they can use that action as a simile in Language, but how do they know what they need her to do if they can’t even say it before she does it?

Embassytown teems with these kinds of questions, and the answers it offers are infrequent and thin. I’ve found it’s best to let the questions go and instead take each of Mieville’s weird ideas at face value and enjoy it for itself.

For instance, the Ariekei, in their old age, become brain-dead zombies. In a bygone age, these old zombies would function as mobile feeding stations for the Ariekei young, but somewhere in their history the Ariekei consciously decided to stop feeding their old to their young. So now, out of respect, they shepherd their mindless elderly around with them, until their bodies finally fall apart and they die.

Kind of a cool idea, right? It means nothing, and has nothing to do with the story, but it’s kind of a cool idea. It seems to indicate that the Ariekei are enlightened beings, even though they’re certainly not—they still let their children go through the developmental phase in which they fight and kill each other. The zombie elderly thing is just a cool idea. Ultimately, that’s all this novel is, and it seems that’s all Mieville does.

Interestingly, he does seem to attempt, in spurts, to create the struts and structure of a consistent fictional world, but he can’t seem to carry it off.

For instance, there’s the question: why are the humans on Embassytown in the first place? It took them many, many years to figure out Language, and many more years to learn to grow people in test tubes to speak it, and for what? Supposedly, the humans want the Ariekei’s “biorigged” technology which is described as better than human tech. But that’s a thin rationale, and Mieville knows it.

Late in the novel, he reveals with a flourish that the humans actually want Embassytown as a stopover point on the way to exploring the unknown parts of the universe. It’s unclear why they would need such a stopover point, though, and why it would be worth all the effort.

(It’s also obviously not a stopover point. It is, in fact the farthest backwater in the universe, with vessels landing so infrequently that each arrival warrants an enormous planet-wide festival.)

But still, it seems that Mieville knows that the initial premise for the existence of Embassytown is absurd, and he tries to shore it up, but only winds up with two absurd rationales.

There’s also the question, of course, of why the Ariekei would help the humans as much as they do, but Mieville carefully makes the Ariekei entirely inscrutable, so he doesn’t even need to worry about such things. Whenever questions about the Ariekei come up, the answer either isn’t known by humans, or Avice isn’t “minded to ask” why they do this or that (remember, after all, she’s just floaking along and couldn’t care less about the whys of the world).

In the end, Embassytown is something of an alien travelogue. You journey somewhere new, and witness bizarre things you’ve never dreamed of, but none it really means anything. Nothing here is relatable to a human life, but it does make you think in a bit of a weird way. What if language could be a drug? What if you could only hear sentient beings?

Mieville’s answers are like bizarre insect specimens under glass in a museum: interesting, often beautiful, but, to the average visitor, nothing more than curiosities. He excels at creating vivid, beautiful, fantastic worlds, and that’s clearly all he’s interested in doing.

Similar reads: The Dream of Perpetual Motion, by Dexter Palmer; The City & The City, by China Mieville

2009, Fantagraphics Books

Filed Under: Graphic Novel, Sci-Fi, Horror.

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This book is pretty messed up. I’m not even really sure what it’s about, but it’s pretty messed up.

Edward and William are two very smart little rich kids living off their father’s inheritance. As a hobby, they make steampunky musical instruments out of animal carcasses and phonographs and sundry things. There’s a crazy woman known as Pig Lady, and they somehow have a cavernous workshop hidden beneath the house their father left them. There’s their odd mother, and a girl named Morgen who gets banged in what I can best describe as a snail sorter. And there’s this:

There’s something about this book I really liked. It’s not the plot, because there really isn’t one. I don’t mean that I couldn’t suss out what happens in the surreal narrative, but just that it wanders. The story’s a bit like a fever dream, and it depicts a few of those, tumbling things even farther into its churning delirium. There’s a book called The Squirrel Machine that keep cropping up, but its relevance or importance is anyone’s guess.

It’s not the characters, because they are far from whole. And it’s not really the art, though that is certainly the most interesting aspect to be singled out. Rickheit is very talented with a pen. This book is full of quite detailed, even ornate, drawings. His ability to capture his imagination on paper is staggering (even if the product is more than a little disturbing). While the art is very good, you probably wouldn’t hang it on your wall; after finishing this book, it will be the subjects and not the artistry that sticks with you.

So pretty much what it boils down to is there’s a lot of intricately drawn death and gore and grotesquery, and a little bit of boobs. Mostly a lot of weird happens. None of the parts are all that great, but somehow the whole package left me quite satisfied. The experience is a bit like watching a David Lynch movie. I don’t think I get it, and I’m not even sure I’m supposed to. But I like it.

Similar Reads: Silverfish (Lapham), Kill Your Boyfriend (Morrisson)

Author: Félix. J. Palma

2011, Atria Books

Filed Under: Literary, Historical, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Romance.

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There’s very little I can say about this book without spoiling something. So I’m going to try something a little different to start. Let’s do word association. Take a look at this list and see how many things you think could help make for a good story:

Victorian romance. Parasols. Hoodwinks. Murder. Historical figures in fictional situations. Meticulous plotting. Vengeance. Paradoxes. Bawdiness. Secret societies. Blackmail. The Terminator. Drunk British whores. Jack the Ripper slaughtering drunk British whores. Minority Report. Tribal magic. The time machine in H.G. Wells’s attic. Street brawls. Apocalyptic robot battles. Dimensional rifts. Time travel. Henry James and Bram Stoker having a sleepover. Time Cop. Lava guns. Immortal dogs. Naive girls easily coerced into sex. Parallel universes.  Steam powered automatons. Fourth dimensional dragon-like beasts. Sword fights.

Pretty good odds for an entertaining book right? Right. In any case, if that piqued your interest sufficiently, go ahead and skip the rest of the review, pick up this book, and enjoy.  Read on and I’ll try and explain a little more substantively, but be aware that while I’ll try to limit them, there will be spoilers after the break. If you already think you want to read the book, do so, then return to my review in the future (oooooh).

Last chance to avoid SPOILERS. Okay, you’ve been warned.

It’s not perfectly clear that time travel actually exists in this novel. There’s evidence for it, but also evidence against. The reader, much like the 19th century London depicted in Palma’s excellent novel, gets taken in by an elaborate scam. How deep the scam goes remains debatable–perhaps it’s only superficial and H.G. Wells (the primary protagonist) is nothing more than a character embroiled in a twisting murder mystery spanning a multiverse, or perhaps it goes far deeper.

Whatever the truth is, The Map of Time is full of hoaxsters. You will find youself tricked more than once. Yet each time the wool is pulled, you’ll rush to replace it, or begin looking elsewhere for the otherworldy. The twists are never cheap. I continually found myself feeling self-satisfied as I figured out what was going on, just to be wrong again (in fact, I had to rewrite this whole review, because I unwisely began it before finishing the book). Palma sets a meticulous stage, and the readers will see what we want to see, despite any indication to the contrary–I understand how vague that is, but it’s difficult to be spoiler-wary.

The basic plot follows a few main storylines, each twisting from a center plot featuring Wells himself. First there’s Andrew Harrington. He’s a meloncholy rich kid who falls deeply in love with an alcoholic prostitute. On the very night he renounces his family fortune for his love, he finds her skinned and filleted in a Whitechapel boarding room. After despairing for 8 years, Andrew decides to kill himself, but his cousin intervenes with a plan. All of London is talking about Gilliam Murray, who has been leading London’s wealthy elite on expeditions to the year 2000. They turn to him to send Andrew into the past, where he will kill his love’s killer (none other than Jack the Ripper) before her murder can occur.

For complicated reasons, Murray cannot help. But he directs the cousins to the science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who, he surmises, probably has a time machine upon which he based his novel, The Time Machine.

The second storyline features young Claire Haggarty, who falls in love with the savior of the future on one of Murray’s expeditions. After witnessing him destroy the leader of the robot army amongst the ruins of London in an epic sword duel, she swoons. Tom Blunt, a seemingly goodhearted simpleton in Murray’s employ, manages to convince Claire that he’s the savior of the human race, traveled through time to bed her. When this coercion effects life-threatening consequences for the girl, he turns to Wells for help.

Then there’s Inspector Garret of Scotland Yard, who gets a warrant to travel to Murray’s future in order to arrest a suspect for a murder in order to prevent it from occurring in the first place. There are time guardians and pan-dimensional thieves, glimpses into the future and libraries hidden in prehistory. Some of it is real, and perhaps all of it isn’t. Through Wells, everything intertwines brilliantly. And, I should note, the stentorian and somewhat playful narrator–an omnipotent showman of sorts–adds a whole lot of charm to the story.

Palma is not a perfect writer, there are a few smudges on the polish. Occasional bits of dialogue feel stodgy, and the mostly airtight plot has the occasional minor leak in plausibility–namely, characters too often jump to conclusions with too much conviction, a technique that services the plot but hurts the tension and characterization. But as a whole, The Map of Time is an example of a wonderfully planned and crafted novel. Palma keeps a lot of balls in the air, continually adding more; it really is a spectacle.

I was very much looking forward to this book. A steampunk vengeance story about a Victorian time traveler sounds ridiculously awesome to me. Even when I first suspected a hoax, I wasn’t disappointed, not for a moment. I was a sucker spectator eager for what I believed I was being offered. I kept thinking that maybe, just maybe, the illusion was real.

Offering such immersion and such satisfaction is the sign of a top-notch novel. Even when you know its secrets, The Map of Time is very much a Great Read and well worth your time.

Similar Reads: The Time Machine (Wells), The Chess Machine (Löhr), The Resurrectionist (Bradley), The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Wilder)