Author: George Mann

2008, Snowbooks

Filed Under: Mystery, Historical, Sci-Fi

Find it on Goodreads.

If you’d listened to our most recent podcast (you didn’t, because the recording got messed up, so you might never hear it at all), you would have heard me say this was a Sherlock Holmes-y book that was sort-of-but-not-really steampunk. I was half correct; full of airships and clockwork automatons and laudanum benders and Queen Victoria on an artificial lung crafted from bellows, it’s squarely steampunk. But to define it as that would be to sell it really short. Rather than relying on the setting, Mann writes a good story, leaving the setting to seep in around the edges.

Before we go any further, I have a confession to make. There’s a blight on my reader’s record, a mark of shame I really need to correct. I’ve never read any of the Sherlock Holmes books. From what I’ve picked up (thanks mostly to Gregory House), this book shares a lot in common with Doyle’s beloved mysteries.

Maurice Newberry is a detective and an “agent of the Crown.” He’s not an actual cop, but is good chums with the head of Scotland Yard in addition to packing royal credentials as a sleuth. He lives alone, and spends long hours in his study, often reading books on the obscure or occult, and his hobbies include laudanum and deductive crime-solving. His Watson is a Miss Veronica Hobbes, a sharp and fairly courageous woman, who compliments Newberry nicely. (Her character is fairly nuanced, and quite possibly the strongest in the book.)

In the novel’s early going, there are three primary plot lines. Firstly, there is some sort of plague brought over from India. It is ravaging the slums, and is effectively a small, but obviously hazardous, zombie outbreak. Secondly, there as been a string of murders in Whitechapel, seemingly perpetrated by a glowing blue policeman’s ghost. Thirdly, an airship crashes catastrophically, killing 50, and no sign of the brass automaton pilot is to be found.

It’s fairly obvious of course, being the sort of book this is, that these three strands will eventually be braided together. The fun is in following Newberry and Hobbes as they solve the case(s). So I won’t spoil any of that. As it plays out, this book delivers from every angle. The characters are well rendered. The dialogue has a decorous, almost too-proper politeness to it, one that any fan of Victorian literature will probably find as charming and funny as I did. There are plenty of exciting action scenes, as well as cerebral “Aha” moments. The writing fits the novel’s historical motif well, never underwhelming but rarely going over the top either. The sci-fi elements are plentiful, but don’t overstep their welcome–or worse become so over-concerned with plausibility as to drag down the tone.

This is a fun, engaging book that I think may be criminally underlooked due to genre. Don’t let the steampunk setting repel you, the setting is crucial to the story, but in no way the reason for its success. If you like mysteries and adventure stories, you’re almost certain to enjoy this book.

Similar Reads: The Map of Time (Palma). Also, check out this cool Kickstarter project Nico came across.

Author: Brian Evenson

2012, Tor

Filed under: Sci-Fi

Find it at Goodreads

I’ve been in a long, dark reading drought lately. I’ve been reading only mediocre books, it seems, for months now. I could barely remember what a great read felt like when I got hooked by Immobility.

It begins with a well-used premise, albeit one I’m a sucker for: a man wakes up with no idea where he is, what he’s doing there, or who he is. As the answers come in fits and starts, the questions of his identity and place in the world become dreadful, ominous, and traumatic.

His name, they tell him, is Josef Horkai. He’s been “stored,” as it turns out, which is dystopian lingo for cryogenic freezing. As he regains his wits, he instinctively, almost unconsciously, tries to murder one of the men who woke him up. He fails only because he falls off the bed; he’s paralyzed from the waist down.

The world is in the midst of a nuclear winter, after an apocalyptic event they call the Kollaps. The leader of the small, underground community in which Horkai wakes is an awkward man named Rasmus. Rasmus’s father found Horkai many years ago, fried nearly dead by intense radiation. Somehow, Horkai survived, but he contracted a disease that’s paralyzing him by inches. It’s taken his legs and threatens to move up his spine and kill him, except for special spinal injections that slow the disease’s spread.

That’s why he was stored, Rasmus says, to slow the spread of his disease while they look for a cure. They haven’t found it yet, but they have need of his services in the meantime.

“‘You were a fixer,’” Rasmus says, “‘a detective of sorts.’” A violent man, evidently, one who wouldn’t flinch if dirty work needed doing. The perfect man, it turns out, for a special mission.

By this point, I was hooked. Evenson’s prose and his character work aren’t mind-blowingly special, but he sketches out a gritty dystopia filled with creepy, unnerving people and a potent sense of dread hanging over everything. Evenson excels at creating characters who have something wrong with them, but something you can’t quite put your finger on (and Horkai can’t either).

Often these characters don’t seem to be entirely human—like the twin men, called “mules,” who carry Horkai on his mission. They talk endlessly of “purpose” and don’t seem to understand the world properly. There’s something mysteriously off about these two, Qatik and Qanik, but Horkai can’t quite figure it out. His conversations with them, however, get philosophical and often quite funny. Like this conversation after the trio runs into a stop sign:

“What does it say?” asked Qatik.

“Have you never seen a stop sign?” asked Horkai.

Qatik shook his head.

“Can’t you read?”

Within his hood, Qatik shook his head again. “Neither of us can read. But I can recognize letters.”

Beneath him, he felt Qanik nod. “It’s not important for everyone to read,” said Qanik. “Some read and some do other things. We all have our purpose.”

“Who told you that?” asked Horkai. “Someone who can read, I bet.”

In this way, Evenson explores the idiosyncrasies of this new world in an entertaining style that makes the pages fly by. And mystery infuses everything, like why Qatik and Qanik need biohazard suits to spend even a day in the outside world without dying, but Horkai has no trouble with drastic radiation or, say, getting shot.

The answers, when they eventually come, can be picked apart slightly, but they’re solid enough that they don’t sour the page-turning entertainment of the journey.

In the end, this isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a very solid little piece of sci-fi, a simple idea well-executed, and the most fun I’ve had reading in several months.

Similar reads: Machine Man, by Max Barry; Pure, by Juliana Baggott; The Glister, by John Burnside; Genesis, by Bernard Beckett

2012, Grand Central

Filed under: Sci-Fi

Find it at Goodreads

[WARNING: This review contains minor spoilers about the premise behind Pure's setting.]

When I first read about Pure, it sounded a lot like Suzanne Collins’s wildly popular Hunger Games series, but for adults. As it turns out, that’s a fair description, but it entails as many negatives as positives. Both series (Pure is the first in, of course, a trilogy) follow teenage girls in post-apocalyptic dystopias who find themselves thrust into central roles in the fight between the haves and the have-nots.

The Hunger Games offers a simple premise and structure, with obvious good guys and bad guys. The main character, Katniss, has to survive a battle royale fight to the death with 23 other teenagers. The rich people who orchestrate the battle are evil, and the poor children forced to fight are good (mostly).

Along the way, Katniss’s progress can be tracked by how many children still survive, and Collins offers regular twists and turns that propel the plot. Collins’s prose is plain and slightly juvenile, as should be expected, and you could call just about any facet of the series “simplistic” without stretching the truth. The characters, the setting, the way the action plays out, the moral questions with easy answers—all of these aspects of The Hunger Games are as uncomplicated as they are primitively satisfying.

By contrast, Pure offers a messier, more tangled, much less satisfying dystopian world. Pure’s heroine, Pressia, lives in a dilapidated barbershop, hiding out from the OSR, a vicious pseudo-army that press-gangs all children into service on their 16th birthday. Pressia is old enough to remember the nuclear war that ruined her country and killed her parents. The Detonations, as they are called, had a semi-magical effect: each person caught outside found themselves fused to whatever objects were near them at the fateful moment. Pressia has a doll’s head where her right hand should be, another boy has tiny wings on his shoulders from a pair of birds who are now part of him forever.

The only people who survived without such deformities were those lucky enough to escape to a place called the Dome. Those intact people are called Pures. While the denizens of the Dome claim to be waiting to help the “wretches” out in the waste, nobody really believes them.

Already this is a messy premise. There’s no good guy, only gradations of evil. The OSR routinely embarks on “killing sprees” during which they kill people indiscriminately for practice. The miscellaneous other factions that Pressia meets along her quest each have their own twisted rules—one group of mothers kills every male they encounter. The people of the Dome, as it turns out, carefully orchestrated the Detonations, even programming the bombs to fuse people with objects so as to artificially create a subspecies to serve as a lower class.

I like the fact that everyone has some blood on their hands, especially in contrast to Katniss’s ability to more or less retain her innocence even as she wins a series of fights to the death. But when so many characters and factions in Pure are utterly amoral, none of them are very likable or relatable.

Furthermore, the exaggerated sociopathy of the Dome’s executives makes the whole premise feel cartoonish. I’m no genocidist, but it seems like you could find a more targeted way to eliminate 95% of the earth’s population without crippling your food supply and making it so you have to live in a bunker for the next six generations.

This lack of reasonable and/or heroic factions with which to side also has a disappointing effect on the plot. Pressia and an escapee from the Dome meet up after a little while, and then they go off to… do something. It’s unclear. Find his mother? Maybe. Find an alternative to the OSR? Kind of. In the mean time, mostly, they aimlessly wander around the wasteland, having small interactions with various factions, and slowly collecting individuals who have soured on the Dome’s hegemony.

Eventually, of course, Pressia and her companions will fight against the Dome, but that isn’t even under discussion in this first installment. The Pure trilogy will not be a set of stories that can each stand on their own, it will be three volumes telling one long story. Which means that this book feels the first act of a vast fantasy novel—a long wander through a beautiful, ruined wasteland for the sole purpose of setting up the action of later installments.

It is, however, beautiful. Baggott writes better prose than Collins, even if her portrayal of emotions is every bit as overwrought. Baggott’s violence is of the adult variety, too: much gorier and more graphic than Collins’s.

In the end, though, there simply aren’t enough payoffs for all of Baggott’s wanderings. If you wait until the entire trilogy comes out and then you crush through all ~1500 pages in one go, my guess is Pure won’t disappoint. But if you’re fresh off the Hunger Games, this first book won’t scratch the same itch. As it turns out, simplistic and satisfying feels a whole lot better than complex and pointless.

Similar books: The Hunger Games series, by Suzanne Collins; Salvation City, by Sigrid Nunez; The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway

Author: David J. Kowalksi

2012, Titan

Filed Under: Sci-Fi, Historical, Thriller

Find it on Goodreads.

Writing a time travel novel is a big endeavor. There’s a slew of things you can mess up, and even one loose end can unravel the entire plausibility of your plot.

Needless to say, when I read the premise of this book (alternate history, time travel, some guy trying to save the Titanic) and that it was a debut novel 15 years in the making by a practicing OB/GYN, I didn’t really expect much. Even a few hundred pages into this behemoth of a book, I still wasn’t really sure which way things would fall. Luckily, they fell toward the side of awesome. I found myself really enjoying this novel, churning through the last few hundred pages excitedly.

As you might expect from 750 pages of time-travel fiction, the plot gets pretty complicated. It’s hard to explain my thoughts on the book without a somewhat lengthy set-up, so bear with me.

Things start out fairly straightforward. A man named Wells has traveled back in time and finagled his way aboard the Titanic. He’s from our present and he’s attempting to “correct” history by preventing the ship’s sinking. While he does manage to affect history and avoid the iceberg that famously brought the boat down, the ship strikes a different iceberg while correcting course and sinks all the same. Thus, some of the people who died on the Titanic now no longer died, and history changes.

John Jacob Astor IV is the new survivor most crucial to the plot. After returning to America, the influential tycoon involves the US in a diplomatic feud with England, which results in America staying out of World War I. Flash forward 100 years to 2012. World War II never happened. Most of the globe is split between the German and Japanese empires. The United States didn’t survive a second secession of the South and the Confederacy is now a nation of its own, largely in bed with Germany. The North, however, is largely occupied by Japanese forces. There is no active fighting between the empires, but things are tense and Cold War-like.

Joseph Kennedy Jr. (who couldn’t have died in a WWII that didn’t occur) has attempted some unsuccessful political bids and is now the head of the Confederate Bureau of Investigation. He’s been working on a secret project called Camelot, a gambit move intended to re-unite the USA through causing a clash between the empires. But Kennedy has deeper secrets: through a particular chain of events, he has access to the very same time machine as Wells. As the book opens, the Camelot plot, which involved lots of double agents and similar tactics, has broken down. However, things are still set in motion to trigger a great, and likely apocalyptic, war between the two sides–with America as the battle ground.

I’m oversimplifying things a lot here, Kowalski planned out everything fastidiously. The book is rife with historical figures and events, many skewed due to his alternate history. It doesn’t read like someone read a couple entries on Wikipedia and fictionalized some things, or dropped actual names into a plot that would work fine without them. Kowalski obviously did his homework, then took the time to properly synthesize portions of history into a fiction with clear lines of plausibility.

The main plot that follows features Kennedy and clan scrambling from now war-torn New York City to make a hail mary mission to the time machine (which is located in Nevada), in the hopes of correcting time and undoing the only history they’ve known. Not really sure what will happen, but assured that if they do nothing things will end in ruin (via a test run of the time machine to the future), they opt for a possible chance of freeing the world from doom, even if would result in they themselves ceasing to exist.

Just like Wells before them, Kennedy and his team believe the key to repairing history is… to save the Titanic. They concluded that Wells had brought the Titanic down, not attempted to preserve it. The dramatic irony this injects into the plot is palpable and satisfying. It was perhaps this twist alone that the book won me over. Dramatic irony is easy to abuse or otherwise misuse, but when executed properly it can do wonders for a book. In Kowalski’s case, it propels his characters nicely, and furthermore ratchets up the tension for the reader the closer the character get to achieving their goal. Eventually I found myself genuinely excited while reading, not something I had expected going into this book. Then, as the complexity of the plot’s workings became more visible, Kowalski introduces some very interesting and slightly brain-bending play with time travel and paradoxes, at which point I was all-in.

Further explaining the plot, though, or what those paradoxes might be would take forever and spoil too much. Suffice to say, as things move on, it becomes clear that Kowalski did an impeccable job with his plotting–many things crop up later in the book that I only then realized I had been clued into hundreds of pages earlier. But I rushed past the dangling hints while racing along with Kennedy in his urgent race to save the Titanic.

When I agreed to read this book, I didn’t think it was going to be very good, but figured just maybe it would at least be entertaining. It did manage that, but also managed to impress me. Kowalski’s never going to win any awards for his prose. There’s plenty of clunker lines like this: “He hid the dread behind the rampart of his face.” But when a book’s plot structure is as tight as Kowalski has delivered here, that’s fine with me. If Kowalski writes another book, I’ll read it. I just hope he takes his time with it and gives the particulars the care he gave Company of the Dead–even that means waiting fifteen years.

Similar Reads: The Revisionists (Mullen), The Map of Time (Palma)

[A review was requested and a review copy provided.]

Author:

2010, Random House

Filed Under: Literary, Humor, Sci-Fi

Find it on Goodreads.

Set in a near future as absurd as it is familiar, Super Sad True Love Story depicts a narcissistic America, drunk on credit, obsessed with youth, and largely ignorant of its relationship with the rest of the world. The government is run by the monolithic Bipartisan party, and no one much cares what the military does in Venezuela so long as the never ending stream of hypnotic information keeps scrolling across their “äppäräti.” It’s funny the way Russian literature, blight, or accidental death can be funny.

I’d call it dystopian literature except that in many ways Shteyngart’s novel doesn’t go far enough in reimagining our world to qualify. “Äppäräti” are juiced up smart phones, new fashions are obscenely revealing, and everyone loves shopping. Dystopian literature shows us our world is  stranger than we imagined by drawing out similarities with a world that appears unrecognizable on its surface; Super Sad True Love Story pretty much shows us our world exactly like it is, only worse.

For all the elaborate trappings of its near future setting, Super Sad True Love Story is less affecting as satire than (like the title suggests) as a oddly simple love story. Lenny Abramov, an aging, balding book addict with dreams of immortality falls for Eunice Park, a twenty-something Korean-American beauty and a true product of her times, image obsessed, outwardly confident, inwardly self-loathing. That Shteyngart manages to cut compelling characters from these types is a testament to his talents as a writer; that Lenny and Eunice manage to find consolation in each other is a testament to the strangeness of intimacy.

Lenny and Eunice first meet at a party in Rome right before Lenny returns to the States. They spend the night together, an event which he considers a religious experience, but which she sees as a “lesser evil” than going home with another older guy at the party. Lenny invites her to live with him in New York that same night. Eunice accepts only after this other thing she has going with a guy in Rome falls apart, so why not move in with an almost stranger who worships her rather than returning to her abusive father and cowed mother in Fort Lee?

It’s not the most promising beginning in the history of romance, except that it turns out to be exactly what they both want. Eunice tries to explain her decision to a friend:

When we were walking down this pretty street in Rome I noticed Lenny’s shirt was buttoned all wrong, and I just reached over and rebuttoned it. I just wanted to help him be less of a dork. Isn’t that a form of love too?… I think of him going down on me until he could barely breathe, the poor thing, and the way I could just close my eyes and pretend we were both other people.

Eunice wants to believe that people can change, and Lenny wants to be changed. He wants her to grant him some of her apparent ease in a world out of which he is rapidly aging; he wants her to make him “less of a dork.” His willingness to give himself to her transforms desperation into heroism, because in his heart he believes he can save her too.

On the morning Eunice arrives from Rome, Lenny gives himself a little pep talk:

Lenny, I said aloud. You are not going to screw this up. You’ve been given a chance to help the most beautiful woman in the world. You must be good, Lenny. You must not think of yourself. Only of this little creature before you. Then you will be helped in turn… if you show her that adult love can over come childhood pain, then both of you will be shown the kingdom.

The exchange between Lenny’s openness and Eunice’s guardedness drives the novel through personal and geopolitical disasters, and the possibility that two terribly matched people could find solace in each other (even a doomed solace) amidst a crumbling world is the novel’s most powerful statement. Many of the other characters you could’ve set on fire, and I might not have noticed. (In fact, some of them do go up in flames.) But Lenny and Eunice create something between themselves that I won’t soon forget.

Similar reads: Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, and The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken

Author: Haruki Murakami

2011, Knopf

Filed Under: Literary, Sci-Fi

Find it on Goodreads.

I finished this book almost 2 weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since: I’m still not quite sure whether I like it. Murakami is a brilliant writer, and I found a lot of joy while reading this book. But now that I’ve finished his latest (very long) novel, I’m not sure if I can say it’s a good book. That is to say: while I was reading, I was liking what I was reading; now that I’m done, I’m not sure I liked what I read. Does that make any sense at all? If your answer to that is yes, you’ve probably read Murakami before. (Note: I’ve tried to avoid spoiling anything in this review, but the zany nature of what Murakami writes means I’ll certainly reveal things that some readers might rather be left to discover on their own.)

The story is entertaining and very creative. The writing (though clearly translated, more on that later) is good, and the characters nuanced and complicated. For the most part, the book shifts perspectives between two characters: Tengo, a talented and aspiring writer, and Aomame (whose name means Green Peas), a personal trainer and also secretly an assassin who avenges abused women.

From what I’ve read by and heard of Murakami, world-building seems to be his thing. His books are known for creating their own rules in the worlds they depict. His style is not quite surrealism or absurdist fiction, but he flirts with both. 1Q84 addresses this head-on by acknowledging that it occurs in a world apart from the one we know–the Q in the title replaces a 9, indicating the story takes place in a not-quite-parallel dimension. For reasons that never quite become certain, Tengo and Aomame, who knew each other for a brief shared moment as children before being separated for 20+ years, are integral to the existence of this second 1984, 1Q84.

1Q84 is most readily recognized by the second moon that hangs in the sky. Not everyone is aware of the moon, or the dimensional shift that has occurred, instead living out their lives as if it were the real 1984. But Tengo and Aomame–among a few others–recognize something is off, beginning, at least for Aomame, with seeing the second moon. And in this alternate dimension, some really weird stuff exists.

Tengo reads fiction entries for a writers’ prize, a gig through which he developed a friendship with an editor, Komatsu. One entry catches him, a novella called “Air Chrysalis,” written by an enigmatic girl named Fuka-Eri. The book isn’t written well, but there’s something special about the story (what that is, Murakami frustratingly makes you wait 500-700 pages to find out, slowly leaking details of the story as they become pertinent to the plot of 1Q84), and Komatsu devises a plan in which Tengo will rewrite the book as a secret ghostwriter. The novella tells of a girl–brought up in a cult compound–who witnessed some fantastical things. It becomes an instant bestseller and wins the literary prize. The story gets a lot of exposure, and the Sakigage cult, a secretive religious organization with some organized crime tendrils, and from which Fuka-Eri escaped as a child, isn’t very happy.

Meanwhile, Aomame is plotting with her handlers to kill the leader of Sakigage, who also happens to be Fuka-Eri’s father. This Leader, Aomame and her handlers believe, has intercourse with children as part of a religious ritual. To say much more about the plot without giving too much away would be impossible, so I’ll leave it at that. From here, though, Murakami does a great job of playing the long game. At its heart this is a story of two people coming together against tremendous odds, and Murakami draws that out for a long time (perhaps too long at 900+ pages), all the while keeping tensions balanced nicely and never exerting a too-heavy hand.

But there’s two things that bothered me. First, the writing is good, but has a really wierd cadence. There is lots of repetition, especially in dialogue, but not limited to it. At times, namely in the case of Fuka-Eri who already speaks oddly, this does a lot to enhance the aesthetic. Other times it’s annoying. I’m not sure if this is a result of the Japanese translation or not, but I think that’s at least part of it. Exchanges like this aren’t uncommon:

“Better hurry.”

“Why’s that?”

“The Little People are stirring.”

“The Little People are stirring,” Tengo repeated her words. “In my apartment?”

“No somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else.”

“Way far away.”

“But you can hear them.”

“I can hear them.”

It’s not that they don’t make sense, it’s just that too many passages are structured like this, with extraneous responses as if all the characters are deaf and constantly checking to make sure they heard correctly.

The second botheration is the big one. For all the zaniness Murakami invents, none of the things unique to 1Q84 pertain to the core plot at its most basic level. This is a fatalistic story of long-lost lovers reuniting. The world in which this occurs and which helps facilitate their reunion is well-rendered and interesting, but the story could be told equally well without that world. That’s where I find myself unsure of my opinion on the book. I liked the story, and certainly enjoyed exploring the alternate reality the book presents, but if those two good components don’t mesh into one synergistic whole, does that mean the books fails at something? Or am I expecting more of it than I should? I really don’t know.

If you’ve read Murakami, and you like him, I expect you will probably enjoy this book. If you haven’t, but something I’ve said in this review sounds intriguing, 1Q84 might be a good place for you to start, but you might consider starting with one of his shorter books first.

Similar Reads: Wonder Boys (Chabon), Ulysses (Joyce), Skippy Dies (Murray).

2012, Grove Atlantic/Black Cat

Filed Under: Literary, Sci-Fi

Find it on Goodreads

Ryan Boudinot is a great writer. He’s funny, weird, humane, endlessly creative, and exceptionally talented. But this is not my kind of book.

Boudinot operates on the continuum between science fiction and surrealism. The world has ended, near enough. The vast majority of the world’s population was wiped out in a time of chaos and human/robot wars called “The Age of Fucked-Up Shit.” In the aftermath, America is a ravaged, fragile place full of bizarre eddies.

Swirling around in a few of those eddies are our main characters.

Woo-jin Kan is a famous, world-champion dishwasher. He lives in a tiny trailer with his foster sister, Patsy, an obese woman who grows human tissues on and in her body, for profit. Every once in a while, the doctors come and slice all the tissues off of Patsy. Until the time they come and take her whole.

Abby Fogg is a film archivist who accepts a lucrative assignment from a man representing a mysterious agency called the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential. Her mission: to retrieve a vital piece of tape from a crazy lady named Kylee Asaparagus cavorting with an army of clones on a remote island. The tape contains the last surviving interview with man who might know how the world was destroyed.

Al Skinner is an Army veteran who lives in Phoenix during the winter. Then, during the now-inhospitable summer, he gets his house shrink-wrapped and he travels north to Seattle, to try to remember the war with his old buddy.

Then there are the background details of this weird post-apocalypse. Some entity has set out to recreate New York, on the comparably-sized Bainbridge Island off the coast of Seattle. The Internet has evolved into the “bionet,” to which citizens can hook up their immune and nervous systems and download vaccines or codes to make medicines inside their bodies. The bionet also makes people susceptible to “DJs” who can program their nervous systems remotely, essentially hacking their brains and turning them into zombies that do whatever the DJ wants.

All of this stuff is great. Boudinot writes great characters (Woo-jin is my favorite), fantastic dialogue, and hilarious weird details. The problem, for me, is that he carefully lays out the structure of a science fictional world, and then populates it with a surreal narrative and runs it on dream logic and metaphors.

[Spoiler alert: Upcoming medium-grade spoilers about what happens late in the book. I don't think they spoil the plot, because I don't think the plot can be spoiled (which is a problem, and my main complaint). Still, be warned.]

When Woo-jin struggles to keep his tiny spot in the new, ravaged world, I’m into it. I’m into it when he gets swept up in this weird plan to figure out how the world was destroyed. But then Woo-jin’s “future brain” sends him a message to write a book for “The Last Dude” because it’s all he’ll have to read during something-or-other, and I’m not into what happens next: Woo-jin goes to New York Alki, and shops around his unreadable manuscript, which is in a couple of pizza boxes (when he mixes up the boxes, the story gets confusing but better, in his opinion).

“Shopping around his manuscript” means that Woo-jin puts the pizza boxes in a shopping cart and pushes them around to the offices of literary agents. But, in nascent New York Alki, population density is low, and none of those offices are staffed.

This is the kind of thing I just can’t get behind: an essentially meaningless, intentionally surreal image, begging for you to assign it a meaning. A man wandering the streets of a fake, half-reconstructed New York, taking the book that could save the world around to a bunch of empty agents’ offices.

I prefer my characters to be actually experiencing the central drama of a novel, instead of staggering through a surreal, symbolic world like they’re lost in a Dali painting.

Boudinot seems to know that endless surreal meandering is unsatisfying on its own, as another major thread of the novel involves the transcribed text of that interview that Abby was sent to get. In it, a man named Luke Piper talks about his friendship with Nick Fedderly, who seems to be responsible for the Age of Fucked-Up Shit. These interviews are, like the rest of the novel, well-written and compelling, but ultimately disappointing when they devolve into surrealism. (The thing that brings about the end of the world is a big red unmarked button whose purpose and function is unknown—or it might just be a symbol. In this novel, it’s impossible to tell the difference.)

But at least the interviews have a goal. Luke Piper is going somewhere. Specifically, he’s laying out how the world was destroyed. That’s more than you can really say for any of the other characters. These great characters often seem just on the verge of joining forces and … doing … something. But they don’t have anything to do, and so their stories end in deflated epiphanies that reveal their hollowness.

Like this: it turns out that Abby, after most of the novel on an island, seeing all all-clone self-incestuous orgies and other weirdnesses, was under a bionet spell the whole time. None of that mattered, Kirkpatrick just needed someone to babysit the weird island and Abby’s DJ volunteered her. That tape she was assigned to get? It disappears, and has no effect on her or anyone else’s life.

So then Abby’s sitting there, with Al Skinner (who’s been busy annihilating an army of possibly dangerous androids, but he’s been doing it all, maddeningly, off-stage). He says the guy she thought she was dating was DJing her, and that’s he the slavemaster of hundreds of bionet zombies, and that she should do something about it.

Her response: shrug.

That pretty much sums up my reaction to this book: everything you thought you’d been reading is meaningless. Shrug.

Later on, Abby does take action, finally, but little comes of it. And, similarly, Boudinot crafts a rational ending to tie it all together. Or rather, he throws out the shards of a few rational plotlines so that you, if you desire, can ostensibly go back and patch together what happened. But it’s too little too late. The surrealism at the core here, the book’s metaphorical engine, has eroded the reality of the story to the point where anything could have happened.

There are a lot of these books these days, running the gamut from metaphorical novels like Illumination and The Flame Alphabet, to meaningless weirdness like China Mieville’s Embassytown. People seem to like it. If you are one of those people, definitely read this book, because Boudinot is every bit as good as all of those writers. But if you like drama, as I do, instead of characters meandering around surreal dreamscapes, then avoid this.

Similar Books: The Illumination, by Kevin Brockmeier; The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus; Embassytown, by China Mieville; Et Tu, Babe, by Mark Leyner

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!

2011, Doubleday

Filed under: Sci-Fi, Thriller

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Robopocalypse begins with the fun, rambunctious voice of Cormac Wallace, a commander in the human forces fighting a horde of killer robots controlled by a super-intelligent sentient robot that the humans nickname “Big Rob.” Or, at least they were once controlled by Big Rob. The humans have won the war, but they still have to stamp out the last waves of mindless robots, and Wallace does so with panache. When he encounters a swarm of “stumpers”—little scuttling robots who seek out the heat of human flesh and then explode—he tries desperately to spark up his flamethrower as they scramble up his cold metal armor, thinking this:

There’s going to be a temperature differential at my waist level, where the armor has chinks. A torso-level trigger state in body armor isn’t a death sentence, but it doesn’t look good for my balls, either.

Shortly thereafter, balls intact, Wallace discovers a massive archive of robot-curated files about the human-Rob war, specifically about the human “heroes” of the war (according to the intriguing word choice of the robots). The bulk of the novel then becomes Wallace’s selections from the archive—a series of vignettes from different perspectives and featuring different people. Essentially, it’s a collection of linked stories about the robot uprising and the New War.

This structure has its pros and cons. On the plus side, it lets Wilson skip around however he likes, highlighting the most interesting details of a massive story, and it gives the reader a sense of the war’s breadth and depth.

On the other hand, it takes a writer of unusual talent to make such a project feel like more than a fast-cutting mashup of un-fleshed out characters. Wilson, despite a few early glimmers of real promise, does not have that unusual talent.

Still, you’re reading Robocopalypse, not Shakespeare. The idea of sentient robots rebelling against humanity is as old as robots themselves. This is not original, and it’s not literature, but within that framework, Wilson delivers more than I expected.

He especially excels at interior character moments when he comes at them from the right angle. In the passage I quoted above, after Wallace gets his flamethrower operational, he fries the heat-seeking stumpers by the score:

No explosions, just the occasional sputtering flare. The heat boils the juice in their shells before detonation. The worst part is that they don’t even care. They’re too simple to understand what’s happening to them.

They love the heat.

That is a solid, complex moment, both entertainingly written and insightful, as it connotes the dissatisfaction of fighting something that’s too stupid to know it’s losing.

Here’s another one, when the manager of a small fast food joint is attacked by one of the first rogue domestic robots and, bleeding, and then dragged toward safety by his one employee (with whom he’s only recently made friends):

Felipe grabs me by the waist and drags me back around the counter without even looking at the door. He’s panting and taking little crab steps. I can smell the joint in his front pocket. I watch my blood smearing behind me on the tile floor and I think, Shit, man, I just mopped that.

This chapter is one of my favorites. Felipe and this idiot manager display more character, complexity, and pathos in a short, tangential vignette than most of the main characters display during the entire novel.

That’s not entirely to say that those main characters are bad. But they are a bit shallow. If personal interior moments are Wilson’s strength, his weakness is the heartfelt portrayal of climactic scenes. When one character’s closest relation dies quite horribly, their last words to each other are a series of hamfisted callbacks to some of the dorkier things they’ve said in the novel. There’s not much in the way of growth here, or nuance.

I didn’t really expect nuance from a robot apocalypse novel, but I did want it to live up to its potential. Robopocalypse shows flashes, here and there, of great fiction, or at least signs of bringing novelty to the robot-apocalypse genre.

There’s the old man whose lover is a low-quality android. There are the sentient robots who begin to resent the superintelligent Big Rob, seeing their conscription in Big Rob’s war on humanity as enslavement, equal to or worse than their previous lives as servants of humans. There are the experiments Rob conducts on human subjects, replacing flesh with robotic parts—some of those test subjects escape and become Rob’s greatest enemies.

These are interesting ideas and Wilson is in a relatively specialized position to offer them: he’s not just cashing in with a one-off robot book, he actually holds a Ph.D. in Robotics and writes almost exclusively about robots. Unfortunately, the real heft of those ideas comes from the internal struggle with them, not the external ramifications. In other words, the fact that unhappy robots fight with humans against Big Rob is not interesting in terms of the tactics of the battle itself (especially since we know from the beginning that the humans will win), it’s interesting as an exploration of slavery, computer viruses, free will, and the definition of life.

While Wilson is not entirely unequipped to fully exploit these ideas—as his couple of great interior moments show—he does not succeed with them.

It’s a shame, but all is not lost. Robopocalypse is still an entertaining read, good enough for me to read Wilson’s next book, Amped which comes out in June. Hopefully, he’ll stick with one voice and one main character, and he’ll be able to flesh it out well enough to meet its potential.

Similar books: Machine Man, by Max Barry; World War Z, by Max Brooks

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)