Two books this week:
Cherie Priest - Hellbent
This is the sequel to Bloodshot - vampires and caper novels, two great tastes that taste great together.
Eoin Colfer - Plugged
Colfer attempts to make the transition from YA to Adult with this book. He is, of course, famous for the Artemis Fowl books. I recall I read one of those and it didn't suck. Anyway, this is another caper novel. It sounds complicated - perhaps over complicated?
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
Friday Review, 9/16/2011
Three books this week. Also, it seems that the widget which allows me to post links to the Amazon page is broken at the moment, so that will have to not happen at this time.
E. Archer - Geek Fantasy Novel
I almost forgot this book. It was highly forgettable. At some point, I said "I don't like this book." At that point, however, I was too close to the end not to finish it.
The plot hinges on wish quests. Ralph Stevens (suburban American geek) discovers, much to his surprise, that he is descended from British royalty. As such, his relatives (including his mother) can grant wishes - one per person. The wish granter then creates a narrative virtual reality in which the wisher undertakes a quest loosely related to the wish si made, and through this experience, learns and grows as a human being.
Archer is trying to do something clever here, because Ralph enters the wish quest of one of his cousins, and is thus fully aware that what occurs around him is not actual reality, but rather a narrative construct. So, there's a certain meta-fiction thing going on. Also, the narrator (omniscient, third person) becomes a character - like in Into the Woods, except not as good.
In the end, the whole thing falls flat. I didn't like any of the characters. The narrator is really not very good (although, that may have been the cleverest thing in the book - an excellent writing of a really bad narrator, perhaps), and the plot, ultimately, doesn't make very much sense. Also, the book doesn't really conclude - a narrative council intervenes, and the book ends in a report of the trial of the narrator. Look, Fforde does it better, and even there it gets a little tiresome. Skip this book, read something else.
Paolo Bacigalupi - Ship Breaker
Bacigalupi's books and short stories are set in a post-apocalyptic setting. They aren't part of a series, per se, but they do share the same general setting. At some point in the not too distant future, something happens, something genetic, which results in the wide-scale contamination of food stuffs. "Clean" food is own and patented by Monsanto and such. Free Market capitalism has taken over to a greater or lesser extent, and so the world is every person for hirself. Bacigalupi writes, for the most part, from the bottom up - his heroes are the folks at the bottom, barely scraping by.
In this book, Nailer (later, Lucky Boy) works on a "light crew" for a ship breaking group on the Gulf Coast of the US, somewhere in Texas. Ship breakers make their living stripping the hulks of oil tankers. (post peak oil, the tankers aren't good for anything but scrap, and sometimes the abandoned supply of oil left inside) "Light crew" do the light work; crawling through ducts and such to strip out copper wiring and aluminum staples. "Heavy crew" do the heavy work, breaking up steel bulkheads and such. If you're too big to do light crew work in the ducts, but not big enough to do heavy crew work, you sit on the beach and beg, or you die.
In the aftermath of a hurricane - a city killer, Category 6 or 7 - Nailer and his friends find the wreck of a yacht, a wind jammer, of the sort that rich people use now that oil is a thing of the past. On board, they find a young girl who isn't dead, and who catapults Nailer into a big adventure.
The action is fast paced, and this is a quick read. If you were looking for something to prompt discussion of environmental issues among a group of 7-9th graders, I'd give them this to read. Although the setting is depressing, Nailer and his friends rise above it and do wonderful things.
Apparently, there is a sequel. This book ends solidly, although I can easily see further exploration of the world as being entirely possible. I can even see room for growth in the characters here, or possibly a companion book which follows some of the secondary characters in this book. Either way, if a sequel is as well written and engaging as this book, it will be a good read.
Robert Bennett - The Company Man
More bleak and depressing. This is a fairly solid noir detective novel. The book features The McNaughton Corporation, and is set in Evesden, the gleaming city on the west coast of the US that McNaughton built. The book is set in 1919 and early 1920, and it's alt-hist. McNaughton's technology is far ahead of the rest of the world, and the corporation has used their advanced technology to prevent WWI - the mere threat of a McNaughton armed US is enough to get the principles to back down in Europe.
Despite that early high note, the book tells the story of desperate people in a rapidly decaying city. All is not swell in Evesden. McNaughton has a growing union problem, which has begun to spread into violence and sabotage. Enter Cyril Hayes, employed as a general purpose trouble shooter by McNaughton. Hayes has an uncanny ability to figure out what a person is thinking or feeling, and thus shift his personality in such a way to get exactly what he wants from the person. He describes it as hearing a shift in the music of the person.
Hayes is a broken man, though. His ability is constant - he cannot avoid the thoughts of others. To deaden his mind, he drinks and smoke opium. He is bitter, and his interactions with people continually convince him that humanity is utterly irredeemable.
Hayes is called in by a police detective friend to help id a body found in a canal. This spirals into the broader union issue, which explodes when a train car with 11 dead bodies arrives at a station. When it left the previous station, four minutes earlier, the 11 people were alive. Hayes is asked to make this mess go away, as much as possible. This turns out to be very difficult.
That, by itself, would have been a good read. Hayes and his young assistant, Miss Samantha Fairbanks, stumbling about, finding out dirt, busting some heads, getting shot a few times, drinking heavily - that would have been a stellar novel. I wish I had read that novel. Instead, Bennett includes a sub-plot, or possibly a super-plot - a deus ex machina plot, involving aliens, perhaps. I'm not sure it adds anything to the book, frankly. Surely Hayes' talent is enough to make this sci-fi? (It's published by Orbit, they're a sci-fi press)
At any rate, true to the noir genre, the book ends messily, and it's not clear that anyone has won - not Hayes, not Samantha, not McNaughton, not the aliens, not the unions, no one. I suppose a sequel is possible, but probably unlikely.
E. Archer - Geek Fantasy Novel
I almost forgot this book. It was highly forgettable. At some point, I said "I don't like this book." At that point, however, I was too close to the end not to finish it.
The plot hinges on wish quests. Ralph Stevens (suburban American geek) discovers, much to his surprise, that he is descended from British royalty. As such, his relatives (including his mother) can grant wishes - one per person. The wish granter then creates a narrative virtual reality in which the wisher undertakes a quest loosely related to the wish si made, and through this experience, learns and grows as a human being.
Archer is trying to do something clever here, because Ralph enters the wish quest of one of his cousins, and is thus fully aware that what occurs around him is not actual reality, but rather a narrative construct. So, there's a certain meta-fiction thing going on. Also, the narrator (omniscient, third person) becomes a character - like in Into the Woods, except not as good.
In the end, the whole thing falls flat. I didn't like any of the characters. The narrator is really not very good (although, that may have been the cleverest thing in the book - an excellent writing of a really bad narrator, perhaps), and the plot, ultimately, doesn't make very much sense. Also, the book doesn't really conclude - a narrative council intervenes, and the book ends in a report of the trial of the narrator. Look, Fforde does it better, and even there it gets a little tiresome. Skip this book, read something else.
Paolo Bacigalupi - Ship Breaker
Bacigalupi's books and short stories are set in a post-apocalyptic setting. They aren't part of a series, per se, but they do share the same general setting. At some point in the not too distant future, something happens, something genetic, which results in the wide-scale contamination of food stuffs. "Clean" food is own and patented by Monsanto and such. Free Market capitalism has taken over to a greater or lesser extent, and so the world is every person for hirself. Bacigalupi writes, for the most part, from the bottom up - his heroes are the folks at the bottom, barely scraping by.
In this book, Nailer (later, Lucky Boy) works on a "light crew" for a ship breaking group on the Gulf Coast of the US, somewhere in Texas. Ship breakers make their living stripping the hulks of oil tankers. (post peak oil, the tankers aren't good for anything but scrap, and sometimes the abandoned supply of oil left inside) "Light crew" do the light work; crawling through ducts and such to strip out copper wiring and aluminum staples. "Heavy crew" do the heavy work, breaking up steel bulkheads and such. If you're too big to do light crew work in the ducts, but not big enough to do heavy crew work, you sit on the beach and beg, or you die.
In the aftermath of a hurricane - a city killer, Category 6 or 7 - Nailer and his friends find the wreck of a yacht, a wind jammer, of the sort that rich people use now that oil is a thing of the past. On board, they find a young girl who isn't dead, and who catapults Nailer into a big adventure.
The action is fast paced, and this is a quick read. If you were looking for something to prompt discussion of environmental issues among a group of 7-9th graders, I'd give them this to read. Although the setting is depressing, Nailer and his friends rise above it and do wonderful things.
Apparently, there is a sequel. This book ends solidly, although I can easily see further exploration of the world as being entirely possible. I can even see room for growth in the characters here, or possibly a companion book which follows some of the secondary characters in this book. Either way, if a sequel is as well written and engaging as this book, it will be a good read.
Robert Bennett - The Company Man
More bleak and depressing. This is a fairly solid noir detective novel. The book features The McNaughton Corporation, and is set in Evesden, the gleaming city on the west coast of the US that McNaughton built. The book is set in 1919 and early 1920, and it's alt-hist. McNaughton's technology is far ahead of the rest of the world, and the corporation has used their advanced technology to prevent WWI - the mere threat of a McNaughton armed US is enough to get the principles to back down in Europe.
Despite that early high note, the book tells the story of desperate people in a rapidly decaying city. All is not swell in Evesden. McNaughton has a growing union problem, which has begun to spread into violence and sabotage. Enter Cyril Hayes, employed as a general purpose trouble shooter by McNaughton. Hayes has an uncanny ability to figure out what a person is thinking or feeling, and thus shift his personality in such a way to get exactly what he wants from the person. He describes it as hearing a shift in the music of the person.
Hayes is a broken man, though. His ability is constant - he cannot avoid the thoughts of others. To deaden his mind, he drinks and smoke opium. He is bitter, and his interactions with people continually convince him that humanity is utterly irredeemable.
Hayes is called in by a police detective friend to help id a body found in a canal. This spirals into the broader union issue, which explodes when a train car with 11 dead bodies arrives at a station. When it left the previous station, four minutes earlier, the 11 people were alive. Hayes is asked to make this mess go away, as much as possible. This turns out to be very difficult.
That, by itself, would have been a good read. Hayes and his young assistant, Miss Samantha Fairbanks, stumbling about, finding out dirt, busting some heads, getting shot a few times, drinking heavily - that would have been a stellar novel. I wish I had read that novel. Instead, Bennett includes a sub-plot, or possibly a super-plot - a deus ex machina plot, involving aliens, perhaps. I'm not sure it adds anything to the book, frankly. Surely Hayes' talent is enough to make this sci-fi? (It's published by Orbit, they're a sci-fi press)
At any rate, true to the noir genre, the book ends messily, and it's not clear that anyone has won - not Hayes, not Samantha, not McNaughton, not the aliens, not the unions, no one. I suppose a sequel is possible, but probably unlikely.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Wednesday Hickey of the Beast Post
(link of DESTINY)
Chapter 27
Connie and the Scoobies discuss their options. Jenny opines:
I think there's still plenty of time for the whole Edward thing to be a red herring - perhaps he's sneaking out at 1 to watch whoever it is who is summoning the incubus - but we shall see.
I note that Candlemark and Gleam (who are publishing Hickey) have an exciting new product coming soon - a re-envisioning of Alice in Wonderland. Four re-envisionings, really.
Chapter 27
Connie and the Scoobies discuss their options. Jenny opines:
"At least we can be pretty sure Edward's the one doing it—unless there's another reason a guy might save someone's bloody Kleenex. And if there is, I don't want to know about it. If you're that gross, you deserve to have people think you summon demons."and it is agreed that someone will have to follow Edward the next time he sneaks out, around 1. It is assumed that he's going to the gardens for a little incubus summoning. It is agreed, reluctantly, that Connie should go, and that she needs to go alone. She doesn't even have one of these:
I think there's still plenty of time for the whole Edward thing to be a red herring - perhaps he's sneaking out at 1 to watch whoever it is who is summoning the incubus - but we shall see.
I note that Candlemark and Gleam (who are publishing Hickey) have an exciting new product coming soon - a re-envisioning of Alice in Wonderland. Four re-envisionings, really.
A thing to whet your appetite.
There will be a Hickey of the Beast post later today; I just haven't read the chapter yet. (There will not be a library post this week, Saturday's post from last week will have to hold you until next Tuesday. But it was half-price, so I don't expect too many complaints.)
This is, however, apropos of Hickey, in that Hickey features at least one secondary character who is described as gay. Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, both established authors, have co-written a YA novel which features a gay protagonist (there are 5 view point characters; one of them is gay), and are having trouble getting it published. One agent specifically told them he would represent their novel if they wrote out the gay character. They said, "no." Indeed, they said, "hell, no!" Here's more on that. You should take a look, for sure.
This is, however, apropos of Hickey, in that Hickey features at least one secondary character who is described as gay. Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, both established authors, have co-written a YA novel which features a gay protagonist (there are 5 view point characters; one of them is gay), and are having trouble getting it published. One agent specifically told them he would represent their novel if they wrote out the gay character. They said, "no." Indeed, they said, "hell, no!" Here's more on that. You should take a look, for sure.
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Saturday Library Post, 9/10/11
So, here's the thing. On Wednesday, it rained. A lot. And it's been raining a lot for most of the past week, and it's been a very wet summer. So our rivers flooded. So I could not get downtown to the library before today. To make it up to you, my services are half off, today only...
Adrian Burgos, Jr. - Cuban Star
It's a book about Alejandro Pompez, legendary Negro Leagues team owner (The New York Cubans). I visited the Negro Leagues museum in Kansas City, so I thought I'd take a look at this.
George R.R. Martin - A Storm of Swords
Book 3, for my re-read. I think this is the biggest of the series, and I got it in hard cover. It's very much a "don't drop it on your foot" type book.
Daniel Wilson - Robopocalypse
It looks like a zombie invasion, but with robots instead of zombies. All the mechanized things we rely on decide to stop being reliable and attack us, launching the robot war. Could be good, could be cheesy.
Adrian Burgos, Jr. - Cuban Star
It's a book about Alejandro Pompez, legendary Negro Leagues team owner (The New York Cubans). I visited the Negro Leagues museum in Kansas City, so I thought I'd take a look at this.
George R.R. Martin - A Storm of Swords
Book 3, for my re-read. I think this is the biggest of the series, and I got it in hard cover. It's very much a "don't drop it on your foot" type book.
Daniel Wilson - Robopocalypse
It looks like a zombie invasion, but with robots instead of zombies. All the mechanized things we rely on decide to stop being reliable and attack us, launching the robot war. Could be good, could be cheesy.
Friday Reviews, early on Saturday, 9/10/2011
Well, so. I spent most of the week away from home. That involved two lengthy plane trips, which should have afforded the opportunity to read a bunch. Actually, it did afford the opportunity to do exactly that, but - well, you'll see.
Four books this week.
Chris Ewan - The Good Thief's Guide to Venice
This is the fourth in Ewan's "Good Thief's" series. They follow the exploits of Charlie Howard; caper novelist and aging gentleman thief. (Thief is an odd word. Written once, spelled properly, it looks fine. Written several times, it begins to look wrong...) Howard is in Venice, working on his latest novel and committed to a retirement from his "night" job. He promised his agent he would stop the whole burglar thing. That holds until, oh, the middle of the first chapter. Someone breaks into his apartment and steals Charlie's lucky copy of The Maltese Falcon. Charlie finds himself back in his old life in an effort to get the book back, and is soon embroiled in a deep plot involving black jack and assassination.
Ewan's prose sparkles, as always. Charlie is snarky, and his dialog is delivered with a wink and a sneer through most of the book. Charlie likes to pretend that things don't get to him, but he knows he's pretending. Ewan deepens the relationship between Charlie and Victoria (Charlie's agent). It remains to be seen if the dynamic of the novels will withstand a shift in the relationship from mostly Platonic to something more.
This novel, like the rest of the series, is a caper novel - a novel about a crime being committed. As in all good caper novels, all of the various actors get a piece of what they want, but not everything. That's what I like about caper novels. The author knows that the protagonist cannot totally win; that would be boring. At the same time, the protagonist cannot totally lose; that would be depressing. Ideally, the crook should end up trapped in hir own complicated plot. Here, that doesn't happen, because Charlie is not in control of the action. Instead, he is reacting to a shifting situation, and never really gets on top of things. He gets most of what he wanted, but he doesn't walk away rich - there would be no future to the series if Charlie had walked away rich.
My only disappointment - in one of the earlier novels in the series, Ewan includes a short essay on picking locks. I had hoped this would be a regular feature - something on cracking safes, maybe, or something on opening combination locks. Alas, it seems it was a one time thing.
Jonathan Kay - Among the Truthers
This was a great book until suddenly it wasn't. Kay, a journalist for the Canadian (largely conservative) newspaper, The National Post, immersed himself in US conspiracy culture for two years, focusing largely on the 9/11 Truth movement (the premise that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were an "inside job" of some sort), with a little bit of discussion about the Birther movement (the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the United States). He opens with a quick glance at the history of conspiracy theories, with a heavy focus on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He then uses his two key modern conspiracies to highlight some central elements which he claims are present in most conspiracy theorists. Finally, he attempts to explain why conspiracy theories are different now. I think it is in this third part where he goes off the rails.
The first part of the book trues up fairly well with my understanding of the history of conspiracy theories. The second part is interesting; perhaps a little overly pop-psychology, but not bad. The presentation of various figures within the Truther movement helped support Kay's contentions, and kept the book relevant. The final section - Kay concludes that the modern conspiracy (he dates "modern" in this instance to 1996) derives its key elements from three factors. One: the internet allows the spread of conspiracy theories much more quickly and much more broadly than before. As a result, a homogeneity of thought predominates. Pre-internet, every conspiracy theorist had hir own twist on the event under examination (look at the tangle of theories surrounding the JFK assassination). Post-internet, a few key "facts" anchor the theory, and most theorists agree on these elements as "true". Fair enough.
Two: post-modern liberal arts education has diluted the idea of Truth, creating a culture in which everyone can have their own sense of "truth," and expertise in one area can easily translate into expertise in all areas. Ok, I'm no fan of the post-modern turn in the liberal arts, but this seems a little sweeping, frankly. Also, a little off base, since the two movements Kay is looking at seem to stem from the conservative side of the spectrum. In order to support this assertion, Kay brings in the anti-vaccination movement (the idea that vaccinations of children cause autism), which hasn't been a big thread in his discussion up to that point.
Three: anti-racism has created an environment in which everyone is forced to be a racist. This feels very much like a standard conservative attack on the idea of white/male/straight privilege. Not an attack on the privilege, but an attack on the idea that white/male/straight people HAVE privilege in our modern society, and that this privilege has an effect on how the society looks and works. It feels like a defense of the Birther movement - Kay is saying that the Birthers are not really motivated by the idea that a black man is in the presidency, but by something else. There has been a thread of this throughout, but it really comes to the surface here, and it scars the rest of the work.
Kay ends with a conclusion that states that the cure for conspiracy is prevention. He proposes a curriculum on conspiracy theories, focused on The Protocols, on the grounds that they have been entirely discredited, and so should cause no controversy. The idea of the curriculum is that it would teach students how to avoid the mental traps that lead into conspiracy minded thought, and thus save our Enlightened society.
If Kay had not tried to find some Grand Unifying Theory of Conspiracies, this would have been an excellent book. As it is, it's still a pretty good book, and worth taking a look at.
And then, we got on the plane back home.
I started out by reading:
Trisha Telep (ed) - Corsets and Clockwork
This is a collection of 13 YA Steampunk Romances. Quite a merger of genres there. Most of the short stories work very well. There were a couple I didn't like very much.
I found it interesting that Telep seems to have imposed almost no editorial policy on what constituted "steampunk" - most of the stories feature some sort of Victorian setting in which steam and rationality are subverted by magic and individualism, but, midway through, there's a story set in Texas in 1958. ("Chickie Hill's Badass Ride" by Dia Reeves) It features a 1958 Thunderbird and the struggle against segregation. It didn't, as far as I can tell, feature steam power in any particular way. (I liked that story, incidentally; I just don't see it as steampunk, particularly). There was another story which featured Lovecraftian horrors, but also had no steam power. ("The Vast Machinery of Dreams" by Caitlin Kittredge) (I didn't like that story - the narrative style was cludgy and hard to deal with.) Some of the stories relied more heavily on magic than others - "Code of Blood" by Dru Pagliassotti is set in Venice, but all of the technology is actually driven by elemental magic - is it steampunk, if the steam is caused by a salamander?
My favorite stories in the collection:
Michael Scott - "Deadwood" - on a dirigible trip across an American west, two young people meet and rescue each other (and a bunch of other folks) from greedy industrialists.
Dru Pagliassotti - "Code of Blood" - a young girl saves Venice from Napoleon.
Adrienne Kress - "The Clockwork Corset" - An alternate WWI story, with some interesting gender role switches
Dia Reeves - "Chickie Hill's Baddass Ride" - A couple of black teens save their Texas town from a threat which isn't the KKK - and also from the KKK.
Kiersten White - "Tick, Tick, Boom" - the daughter of a British lord crafts magical bombs to aid labour unionists in their struggle against the factories.
It's a fine collection, highlighting the work of a group of authors I've never met before (but will look for in the future), and possibly offering a toe into the genre of steampunk for folks more inclined towards romance. Or vice versa.
Midway through the flight, my wife gaffled that book, and forced me to begin:
Lev Grossman - The Magician King
Grossman caused a stir last year with his novel The Magicians; a realist inspired novel about a group of teens who find themselves enrolled in a school which teaches magic. And odd non-fantastical Hogwarts, perhaps. The Magicians was moody and complicated, it rambled, and the central thread was sometimes hard to follow. I reviewed it on my other blog (which pre-dates this one): here.
My first impression when I saw that Grossman had written a sequel was "huh. I don't remember that the first book ended in such a way that a sequel could happen." I was wrong. This book is an excellent sequel to the earlier book. It is moody, and it is complicated. It has a lot of the post-modern realism that the first book did, with moody, complicated characters who find that magic, by and large, does not make their lives easier. It is all of that, and it is also far more cohesive than the first book. The pacing is better, and the central narrative thread is much easier to follow. The bits which, in the first book, felt flat - those are not here.
The central thread is a quest. Well, a pair of quests; one by Quentin, and the other by Julia. The Julia bits are told in flash back, and Grossman switches, chapter by chapter, between Quentin and Julia. This works quite well - Quentin is a bit much at times, and Julia's experiences are a little overwhelming at times, and so the whole thing tends to balance nicely. Just as the reader is being bored by Quentin's moping, there's a Julia chapter. And, just as the reader is being horrified by what Julia experienced, there is a Quentin chapter. It fits nicely.
Grossman is still playing with the idea of fantasy as a genre. He's turning tropes on their heads, twisting the ideas that make quest narratives work, and bringing a lot of post-modernity into play here. If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, this may not be the book for you. It isn't a safe book - it's the sort of book that will wake you up, weeks from when you've read it, with new, moody, complicated ideas bubbling through your brain. But, suggests Grossman, that's what fantasy and speculative fiction are supposed to do; that's what is missing in so much of the genre. And that's why the first book was a best seller - because we're hungry for books that make us think.
Trigger warning - Grossman is not gentle with his characters, especially Julia. Julia's quest for an alternate route into the world of magic (she didn't get into Brakesbill, the college that Quentin attended) takes her down a highly self-damaging path, and ends messily. Julia survives, sort of, and is repaired, sort of. In the end, this makes Julia a more interesting character than Quentin, who is basically moody and complicated throughout.
Four books this week.
Chris Ewan - The Good Thief's Guide to Venice
This is the fourth in Ewan's "Good Thief's" series. They follow the exploits of Charlie Howard; caper novelist and aging gentleman thief. (Thief is an odd word. Written once, spelled properly, it looks fine. Written several times, it begins to look wrong...) Howard is in Venice, working on his latest novel and committed to a retirement from his "night" job. He promised his agent he would stop the whole burglar thing. That holds until, oh, the middle of the first chapter. Someone breaks into his apartment and steals Charlie's lucky copy of The Maltese Falcon. Charlie finds himself back in his old life in an effort to get the book back, and is soon embroiled in a deep plot involving black jack and assassination.
Ewan's prose sparkles, as always. Charlie is snarky, and his dialog is delivered with a wink and a sneer through most of the book. Charlie likes to pretend that things don't get to him, but he knows he's pretending. Ewan deepens the relationship between Charlie and Victoria (Charlie's agent). It remains to be seen if the dynamic of the novels will withstand a shift in the relationship from mostly Platonic to something more.
This novel, like the rest of the series, is a caper novel - a novel about a crime being committed. As in all good caper novels, all of the various actors get a piece of what they want, but not everything. That's what I like about caper novels. The author knows that the protagonist cannot totally win; that would be boring. At the same time, the protagonist cannot totally lose; that would be depressing. Ideally, the crook should end up trapped in hir own complicated plot. Here, that doesn't happen, because Charlie is not in control of the action. Instead, he is reacting to a shifting situation, and never really gets on top of things. He gets most of what he wanted, but he doesn't walk away rich - there would be no future to the series if Charlie had walked away rich.
My only disappointment - in one of the earlier novels in the series, Ewan includes a short essay on picking locks. I had hoped this would be a regular feature - something on cracking safes, maybe, or something on opening combination locks. Alas, it seems it was a one time thing.
Jonathan Kay - Among the Truthers
This was a great book until suddenly it wasn't. Kay, a journalist for the Canadian (largely conservative) newspaper, The National Post, immersed himself in US conspiracy culture for two years, focusing largely on the 9/11 Truth movement (the premise that the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were an "inside job" of some sort), with a little bit of discussion about the Birther movement (the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the United States). He opens with a quick glance at the history of conspiracy theories, with a heavy focus on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He then uses his two key modern conspiracies to highlight some central elements which he claims are present in most conspiracy theorists. Finally, he attempts to explain why conspiracy theories are different now. I think it is in this third part where he goes off the rails.
The first part of the book trues up fairly well with my understanding of the history of conspiracy theories. The second part is interesting; perhaps a little overly pop-psychology, but not bad. The presentation of various figures within the Truther movement helped support Kay's contentions, and kept the book relevant. The final section - Kay concludes that the modern conspiracy (he dates "modern" in this instance to 1996) derives its key elements from three factors. One: the internet allows the spread of conspiracy theories much more quickly and much more broadly than before. As a result, a homogeneity of thought predominates. Pre-internet, every conspiracy theorist had hir own twist on the event under examination (look at the tangle of theories surrounding the JFK assassination). Post-internet, a few key "facts" anchor the theory, and most theorists agree on these elements as "true". Fair enough.
Two: post-modern liberal arts education has diluted the idea of Truth, creating a culture in which everyone can have their own sense of "truth," and expertise in one area can easily translate into expertise in all areas. Ok, I'm no fan of the post-modern turn in the liberal arts, but this seems a little sweeping, frankly. Also, a little off base, since the two movements Kay is looking at seem to stem from the conservative side of the spectrum. In order to support this assertion, Kay brings in the anti-vaccination movement (the idea that vaccinations of children cause autism), which hasn't been a big thread in his discussion up to that point.
Three: anti-racism has created an environment in which everyone is forced to be a racist. This feels very much like a standard conservative attack on the idea of white/male/straight privilege. Not an attack on the privilege, but an attack on the idea that white/male/straight people HAVE privilege in our modern society, and that this privilege has an effect on how the society looks and works. It feels like a defense of the Birther movement - Kay is saying that the Birthers are not really motivated by the idea that a black man is in the presidency, but by something else. There has been a thread of this throughout, but it really comes to the surface here, and it scars the rest of the work.
Kay ends with a conclusion that states that the cure for conspiracy is prevention. He proposes a curriculum on conspiracy theories, focused on The Protocols, on the grounds that they have been entirely discredited, and so should cause no controversy. The idea of the curriculum is that it would teach students how to avoid the mental traps that lead into conspiracy minded thought, and thus save our Enlightened society.
If Kay had not tried to find some Grand Unifying Theory of Conspiracies, this would have been an excellent book. As it is, it's still a pretty good book, and worth taking a look at.
And then, we got on the plane back home.
I started out by reading:
Trisha Telep (ed) - Corsets and Clockwork
This is a collection of 13 YA Steampunk Romances. Quite a merger of genres there. Most of the short stories work very well. There were a couple I didn't like very much.
I found it interesting that Telep seems to have imposed almost no editorial policy on what constituted "steampunk" - most of the stories feature some sort of Victorian setting in which steam and rationality are subverted by magic and individualism, but, midway through, there's a story set in Texas in 1958. ("Chickie Hill's Badass Ride" by Dia Reeves) It features a 1958 Thunderbird and the struggle against segregation. It didn't, as far as I can tell, feature steam power in any particular way. (I liked that story, incidentally; I just don't see it as steampunk, particularly). There was another story which featured Lovecraftian horrors, but also had no steam power. ("The Vast Machinery of Dreams" by Caitlin Kittredge) (I didn't like that story - the narrative style was cludgy and hard to deal with.) Some of the stories relied more heavily on magic than others - "Code of Blood" by Dru Pagliassotti is set in Venice, but all of the technology is actually driven by elemental magic - is it steampunk, if the steam is caused by a salamander?
My favorite stories in the collection:
Michael Scott - "Deadwood" - on a dirigible trip across an American west, two young people meet and rescue each other (and a bunch of other folks) from greedy industrialists.
Dru Pagliassotti - "Code of Blood" - a young girl saves Venice from Napoleon.
Adrienne Kress - "The Clockwork Corset" - An alternate WWI story, with some interesting gender role switches
Dia Reeves - "Chickie Hill's Baddass Ride" - A couple of black teens save their Texas town from a threat which isn't the KKK - and also from the KKK.
Kiersten White - "Tick, Tick, Boom" - the daughter of a British lord crafts magical bombs to aid labour unionists in their struggle against the factories.
It's a fine collection, highlighting the work of a group of authors I've never met before (but will look for in the future), and possibly offering a toe into the genre of steampunk for folks more inclined towards romance. Or vice versa.
Midway through the flight, my wife gaffled that book, and forced me to begin:
Lev Grossman - The Magician King
Grossman caused a stir last year with his novel The Magicians; a realist inspired novel about a group of teens who find themselves enrolled in a school which teaches magic. And odd non-fantastical Hogwarts, perhaps. The Magicians was moody and complicated, it rambled, and the central thread was sometimes hard to follow. I reviewed it on my other blog (which pre-dates this one): here.
My first impression when I saw that Grossman had written a sequel was "huh. I don't remember that the first book ended in such a way that a sequel could happen." I was wrong. This book is an excellent sequel to the earlier book. It is moody, and it is complicated. It has a lot of the post-modern realism that the first book did, with moody, complicated characters who find that magic, by and large, does not make their lives easier. It is all of that, and it is also far more cohesive than the first book. The pacing is better, and the central narrative thread is much easier to follow. The bits which, in the first book, felt flat - those are not here.
The central thread is a quest. Well, a pair of quests; one by Quentin, and the other by Julia. The Julia bits are told in flash back, and Grossman switches, chapter by chapter, between Quentin and Julia. This works quite well - Quentin is a bit much at times, and Julia's experiences are a little overwhelming at times, and so the whole thing tends to balance nicely. Just as the reader is being bored by Quentin's moping, there's a Julia chapter. And, just as the reader is being horrified by what Julia experienced, there is a Quentin chapter. It fits nicely.
Grossman is still playing with the idea of fantasy as a genre. He's turning tropes on their heads, twisting the ideas that make quest narratives work, and bringing a lot of post-modernity into play here. If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, this may not be the book for you. It isn't a safe book - it's the sort of book that will wake you up, weeks from when you've read it, with new, moody, complicated ideas bubbling through your brain. But, suggests Grossman, that's what fantasy and speculative fiction are supposed to do; that's what is missing in so much of the genre. And that's why the first book was a best seller - because we're hungry for books that make us think.
Trigger warning - Grossman is not gentle with his characters, especially Julia. Julia's quest for an alternate route into the world of magic (she didn't get into Brakesbill, the college that Quentin attended) takes her down a highly self-damaging path, and ends messily. Julia survives, sort of, and is repaired, sort of. In the end, this makes Julia a more interesting character than Quentin, who is basically moody and complicated throughout.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Hickey of the Beast Wednesday, 9/72011
Worry not, readers who read, I have survived my trip to Tennessee, and have returned to make my usual Wednesday post!
(link here!)
Chapter 26
A very quick chapter this time - lots of action. Chapter 25 ended on a cliff hanger, but Connie manages to evade her mother and get into Edward's room. In a TV show, I think the search of Edward's room would have been in real time - about 20 mins (assuming a 1 hour show). Here, it's just a couple of pages. Connie's friend, who gets her into Edward's dorm, suggests that Edward has spent a lot of time sneaking out all semester. He also suggests that Edward is a "douche". There is some additional circumstantial evidence in Edward's room - but no pentagram, or grimoire, or anything which might specifically point to Edward being the summoner. Nor, however, is there anything which would clear Edward of suspicion - very cagey. I'm still expecting some sort of twist ending. Maybe Edward IS summoning the incubus, but while he's asleep, and only by accident...
At any rate, I am a little surprised that this chapter didn't end a paragraph sooner, which would have been another cliffhanger. Instead, Connie succeeds in escaping Edward's room. Again, in a TV show, there would have been at least a commercial break there, to heighten tension. Tension is already pretty high, but it could have been cranked up another notch here.
(link here!)
Chapter 26
A very quick chapter this time - lots of action. Chapter 25 ended on a cliff hanger, but Connie manages to evade her mother and get into Edward's room. In a TV show, I think the search of Edward's room would have been in real time - about 20 mins (assuming a 1 hour show). Here, it's just a couple of pages. Connie's friend, who gets her into Edward's dorm, suggests that Edward has spent a lot of time sneaking out all semester. He also suggests that Edward is a "douche". There is some additional circumstantial evidence in Edward's room - but no pentagram, or grimoire, or anything which might specifically point to Edward being the summoner. Nor, however, is there anything which would clear Edward of suspicion - very cagey. I'm still expecting some sort of twist ending. Maybe Edward IS summoning the incubus, but while he's asleep, and only by accident...
At any rate, I am a little surprised that this chapter didn't end a paragraph sooner, which would have been another cliffhanger. Instead, Connie succeeds in escaping Edward's room. Again, in a TV show, there would have been at least a commercial break there, to heighten tension. Tension is already pretty high, but it could have been cranked up another notch here.
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