This summer hasn’t been great for reading or writing. My concentration and attention span are low; I read the first chapters of a book only to get distracted by another. Still, I have a few longer posts in the works about books I liked enough (or in one case disliked enough) to inspire substantial thoughts. Meanwhile, here are shorter notes on some books that inspired insubstantial thoughts. Most of them I wasn’t impressed with.<\/p>\n
I can’t decide how I feel about Lint<\/em><\/a>. It took me weeks to read. Not that it’s bad–far from it. But it only works in small doses.<\/p>\n Lint<\/em> is a biography of Jeff Lint, a 20th century science fiction writer distantly based on Philip K. Dick. It’s comedy in a style that mostly doesn’t depend on obvious punch lines, which I like. (Only a few pieces of this novel feel like conventional jokes and they’re the bits least likely to work well.) Lint<\/em> has some genuinely incisive lines: “Truth is unpopular because it doesn\u2019t have a dependent need to be liked or believed–its independence seems like unfriendliness.”) Occasionally descriptions of Lint’s novels aspire to the satire found in Stanislaw Lem’s fake book reviews: “In the novel Jelly Result, half of Eterani city is exactly the same as the other half, because the authorities don\u2019t have enough ideas to cover the whole area.”<\/p>\n But the dominant style of humor here is randomness<\/em>: “On one occasion Lint fired forty pounds of chili from a turn-of-the-century baseball gun mounted on the roof of a 23rd Street apartment block, and eagerly told a baffled Kerouac about it.” Most of the text is a succession of sentences like this. Parts of the book seem written with a text-processing program like JanusNode<\/a>: “They behave like rain upon travelers,\u2019 he thought, seeing those spirits. \u201d\u02dcWe are a circus of ourselves. We make the sleeve. We the alteration.\u2019” This is amusing more often than not, but after a while the rhythm feels overwhelmingly samey, like a stuck nozzle relentlessly pumping out infinite quantities of cake frosting. After every chapter I had to put it down and read something else for a while.<\/p>\n One chapter, though, stood out: the account of Lint’s short-lived animated TV series, Catty and the Major<\/em>, is genuinely disturbing. It reads like a half-remembered urban legend, suggesting this nightmarish cartoon show hides some deeper mystery we don’t have enough clues to solve. Should you give Lint<\/em> a try and find the style hard going, it might be worth pushing on to the Catty and the Major<\/em> chapter. It’s nothing like the rest of the book.<\/p>\n I got interested in this one<\/a> because I’d heard it was written at least partly as a travel guide (the blurb begins “Buried beneath the layers of a traveler’s guide is a hidden history”), and then it got a Hugo nomination. It turns out the travel guide entries are just chapter-heading epigraphs. The bulk of the book is a decent but not unusual epic fantasy, with maybe slightly better than average prose. <\/p>\n Unusually in a genre inclined to bloat, this fantasy may not be long enough<\/em>. It’s plot, plot, plot all the way, with little room to pry into the oddities and philosophical underpinnings of its world. (And there is<\/em> some odd stuff here, which might have been interesting if unpacked; the power relationships inherent in most feudal fantasy are heightened, with the constant presence of literal physical chains as a metaphor.)<\/p>\n Someday, someone needs to write that epic fantasy in the form of a travel guide. (Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland<\/em> isn’t quite the same thing.)<\/p>\n For me, the single interesting aspect of Cold-Forged Flame<\/em><\/a> is how stripped-down it is, almost experimentally so. It’s pure action, lacking any of the context that makes action meaningful–character, setting, philosophy. The protagonist is an amnesiac born at the moment the novel begins. Most of the story is set in a mutable otherworld, the magic-island equivalent of Star Trek<\/em>’s holodeck–the kind of setting SF series use when they want to be Symbolic. The novel’s only serious engagement with ideas is a brief conversation about ethics.<\/p>\n As a blank slate, the protagonist knows only as much as the reader, and in experiencing the story she initially works as a proxy for the reader. Like, at first what little we see of this world looks like Celtic Britain, but then the protagonist sees a gun and instantly understands guns are a thing in her world: “I\u2019m just wondering how I recognize that thing… How can I know all that, when I don\u2019t remember anything from before I opened my eyes on that slab?” She knows about guns because the readers of Cold-Forged Flame<\/em> know about guns, and they deduced what the gun meant in the same moment she did. The protagonist learns her world like a typical fantasy reader, with the same background knowledge and skill in deducing the nature of the world from the cues her author gave her. She is in effect a fantasy fan dumped into a random fantasy story.<\/p>\n Like I said, we don’t learn much about this world before the protagonist reaches Holodeck Island. SF stories don’t usually resort to holodecks (or Lands of Fiction, or insanity pepper hallucinations<\/a>, or other mutable surrealist dreamscapes) until we’ve gotten to know the characters in their normal context; watching them navigate symbolic landscapes is less revealing when, as in Cold-Forged Flame<\/em>, we don’t understand who they are or how their world works in the first place. As the protagonist of Cold-Forged Flame<\/em> learns about herself, it’s less and less apparent what the facts she learns mean. At the climax we learn she’s something called an “Archon,” and we’re given some idea of what an Archon is<\/em>, but having spent so little time in her world we don’t know what being an Archon means<\/em>: how should she feel about being an Archon? What do other people think of them? What’s their place in the world? It’s not clear, so the scene meant to deliver the novels’ biggest emotional punch falls flat.<\/p>\n The Warren<\/em><\/a> is the story of X, an artificial being living in an underground bunker. He’s the latest in a long line of constructs, but the first to be alone instead of part of a pair; his past selves live within himself, perceived as a collection of eyes that open when the personality wakes.<\/p>\n X’s selves trade off the first-person narration as they trade off his body, unaware of any of the others’ actions beyond what they might have written. The prose is perfectly controlled, always clear except where it’s intentionally not, with a strong personality. It’s one of those stories that manage to imply far more about its world than they explain, a landscape packed into a small space. It’s apocalyptic, but it’s apocalyptic surrealism<\/em>. For me, literary surrealism is one of the main attractions of SF.<\/p>\n So it’s odd I didn’t like The Warren<\/em> more than I did. Like the last two books, the problem is that it feels insubstantial<\/em>. There are fewer layers here than there ought to be. Expectations are the problem: SF has literary status anxiety, and fans and marketing copy both have a habit of selling SF books as deeper than they are. (It’s telling how often fan-written reviews say a novel is about certain issues but don’t dig into how<\/em> it’s about those issues, or what it’s actually saying about them.) The marketing surrounding The Warren<\/em> is best summed up by Charles Yu’s blurb: “What is a human? What is a person? The Warren is a truly original exploration of these questions\u201d\u2022the kind of work that causes one to re-examine long-held certainties. Profound and deeply unsettling, in the best way possible.” And, yeah, the questions What is a human?<\/em> and What is a person?<\/em> come up in The Warren<\/em>. But I honestly don’t think it has much to say about them except that, in a science fictional world, maybe our definition of “person” ought to be as expansive as possible. Which is true, but not any more profound than your average quarter-century old episode of Star Trek<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n On the other hand, sometimes my expectations are modest but still aren’t met. The Forgotten<\/em><\/a> and Archangel<\/em><\/a> are tie-in novels based on the TV series Blake’s 7<\/em><\/a>, published by Big Finish, a company that mostly produces audio dramas. There’s one in this series I haven’t yet read that I expect I’ll enjoy–it’s by Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum, who have a good track record with Doctor Who<\/em> novels.<\/p>\n These first two, though… they’re competent, but I can’t call them good even by tie-in standards. They read like bald descriptions of a couple of hypothetical TV stories. They don’t feel like real novels and I get the impression the possibility they could have been real novels wasn’t even on the authors’ sensors. The one memorable incident in either is a strange moment in Archangel<\/em> when we learn Jenna hates going down to the Liberator’s power section because it “always seemed to have the same effect on her. It affected her fingers first, making them ache until it was difficult for her to grip things, then it would slowly seep down her body until her stomach felt bloated and she needed to use the bathroom.” This is more than I wanted to know about the Liberator’s power section.<\/p>\n Towards Zero<\/em><\/a> is a perfectly cromulent Agatha Christie novel. If you’re into Agatha Christie it will pass the time adequately; if not, then not. The only noteworthy moment is when Superintendent Battle notices a clue because it\u2019s something Hercule Poirot would have noticed. This unfortunately just emphasizes that the entirely charisma-free Battle is the detective instead of Poirot.<\/p>\n D. M. Devine\u2019s The Sleeping Tiger<\/em><\/a> is one of a half-dozen paperback \u201cCrime Classics\u201d\u009d I bought off a remainder table. How it\u2019s a \u201cClassic\u201d\u009d I have no idea. This is a stupid book.<\/p>\n Some of the problem is values dissonance; a lot of old mysteries have moments that didn\u2019t age well, but The Sleeping Tiger<\/em> is way<\/em> out of touch. When protagonist John Prescott declines to cover for a doctor who had an accident driving drunk, we\u2019re meant to think he\u2019s a stick-in-the-mud. When he slaps his unfaithful wife, we\u2019re meant to think he\u2019s standing up for himself. His love interest by the end of the book is a woman he meets in the first chapters, five years earlier, when he\u2019s in his twenties and she\u2019s fifteen. Oh, and John takes antibiotics for flu. I hate this guy.<\/p>\n This is the 1960s, by the way: circa 1962–1967. The novel was published in 1961. One thing that’s not at all interesting about The Sleeping Tiger<\/em>, but could<\/em> have been, is that it could have qualified as near-future science fiction if it had occurred to Devine to wonder how the world might change over the next five years. As it is, the novel takes place in the indeterminate 20th century England of your average Agatha Christie adaptation.<\/p>\n Beyond that, John is one of the dumbest mystery-novel heroes I have ever come across. Never mind that he\u2019s willing to get into a car with a drunk. This is a person who upon finding a dead body moves it, gets himself covered in blood, pulls the freaking knife out of its back<\/em>, and tells the police an easily-disproved lie about when he arrived. Worst of all for a detective novel, John doesn\u2019t clear his name through brilliant deduction–the villain finally just outright tries to kill him. Give this one a pass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This summer hasn’t been great for reading or writing. My concentration and attention span are low; I read the first chapters of a book only to get distracted by another. Still, I have a few longer posts in the works about books I liked enough (or in one case disliked enough) to inspire substantial thoughts. … Continue reading Short Complaints About Several Books<\/span> Fran Wilde, The Jewel and Her Lapidary<\/em><\/h3>\n
Marie Brennan, Cold-Forged Flame<\/em><\/h3>\n
Brian Evanson, The Warren<\/em><\/h3>\n
Two Blake’s 7<\/em> Tie-Ins<\/h3>\n
Agatha Christie, Towards Zero<\/em><\/h3>\n
D. M. Devine, The Sleeping Tiger<\/em><\/h3>\n