Book and assorted Foo
Aug. 2nd, 2016 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Let's see, what of note is there to say? Fan Expo's in about a month, and I'm tentatively planning on going right now (to get Jewel Staite's autograph for my Firefly collection). I might even bring baked goods for in-line snacking and (if I work up the nerve) offering to others. I've got a plan to make "Fruity Oaty Bars" from Firefly/Serenity (well, I think they were only in Serenity), and since Blue Sun is the corporation behind the bars, I may try to do a blueberry-starfruity filling (Blue-Star is as close as I can get to Blue Sun). Yay, for obscure geekiness that only I will get. But, it depends on it being in season and in a store that I can get it (in previous years I've seen starfruits in my grocery store but I don't know when they start showing up). Also, I still haven't done a test batch and time's running out. So we'll see.
TV? It's been a long time since I've talked about TV that almost everything I have to say is old news. But let's see... Stranger Things is on Netflix (or you could get it magically another way)... and I quite liked it, it's like 80s Stephen King and 80s Steven Spielberg teamed up to make a movie set in the 80s but using today's effects. Not perfect, and I had an unreasonable amount of nerd rage at them getting D&D wrong (ask me in comments if you're curious), but overall quite well done, even if it is a bit nostalgia-baity.
Killing Joke cartoon came out and, just, ugh. I mean, the original story was iffy enough, but I sort of forgive it because Oracle came out of it (even if it was indirectly). But they added a 30 minute prologue focusing on Batgirl and... I WANTED a prologue focusing on Batgirl, but what they actually gave me was just awful, stupid ideas that if possible made the iffier elements of Killing Joke even WORSE. Why, DC, why?
I've been kind of on a rewatch binge lately, rewatched all of Stargate SG1 and Atlantis, and now moving on to Sliders. The Stargates were more or less as good as I remember it, Sliders... well, I knew it turned to suck eventually, but I'd forgotten how much wasn't that great even in the "good" seasons. Not all-around awful, and I'm still enjoying watching it, but just full of random cringey moments where I viscerally notice bad writing or acting (or the results of executive tampering). It was always a show that I loved more for potential than for what they did with it, and I still want to see a reboot done well. Oh, and it's fun spotting people in it. I was watching an episode and I thought, "Wait, is that Jeffrey Dean Morgan?" (the brother's father in Supernatural, Negan in The Walking Dead, Comedian in Watchmen), and... yup, it was! It took to the opening credits to be sure because he looked so young. He played a tough guy from a "civilization-has-collapsed" world who, chasing after his girlfriend, follows the Sliders to a world where SanFran is a penal colony.
I think that's all I remember for TV, so we'll move onto the bimonthly book roundup. As usual, Goodreads reviews copy-pasted here.
Finished: A World Out of Time by Larry Niven
A man with a terminal illness in the modern day has himself frozen as a last-ditch attempt to survive. He awakens hundreds of years in the future, in a completely new body and told that he must be in service to the State... or else. Soon, though, he gets a chance to escape and flee into Earth's far far future where many things have changed and survival is even more complicated.
This is 70s-era science fiction, and it shows. The science, while treated with a fair amount of rigor, doesn't really seem realistic anymore as it relies too much on ideas that are no longer en vogue, and much of the rest is handwaved to the point where mind-boggling feats like moving planets is done fairly easily. And as for the social exploration? Well, aside from the results of a few different types of eternal youth, about the most imaginitive the story gets in terms of social development is a loosening of sexual mores and a return to a more primitive lifestyle. There's no wow factor of humans who have become alien in a myriad of different ways. Even gender politics either stay more or less the same or are exaggerated to ridiculous degrees.
The book started fairly well, actually, but before too long the book became a slog for me, and I found I wasn't really even following the more scientific parts of the plot, not because it was above my head but just because I wasn't invested enough in anything happening. There's an extended sequence where the main character runs from an old woman in the ruins of the Earth hundreds of thousands of years in the future that just seemed to drag on endlessly, and although it got briefly better around that, it circled back to that plot in a particularly annoying way. All in all, I've seen much better "trips into the far far future" tales than this.
About the only thing I took away from this book was the description of a far distant genetically altered version of a cat that looked pretty much just a head and tail with no limbs, which proved to me that I would still "awww" at a kitty even if you made it into something like a snake.
Finished: Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey (Expanse #5)
The Rocinante is undergoing a refit after the events of the last book. With some downtime, and personal issues cropping up, the crew goes their separate ways for a bit... but it's possibly the most dangerous time for that to happen, as a radical terrorist faction of the OPA is gearing up for a major offensive that may change the game and put everyone in danger.
Okay, it's the Expanse series, and by now, you pretty much know what you're getting. A popcorny action-adventure that's still somewhat smarter than you'd give it credit for, with characters that are appealing but stock, and alternating viewpoints.
And this book is more of the same. And yet not. Firstly, because with the other books, mostly, the crew of the Roci's story was told through the eyes of Holden, and the other viewpoint characters were outsiders or engaged in secondary plots that related to the main one. In this one, most of the secondary viewpoints are different members of the core crew. This makes the book instantly more engaging and interesting than the others... you're no longer meeting a bunch of new characters, you're getting deeper into characters you already enjoy (at least, presumably, if you've stuck it through five books). Sometimes we learn their secrets, sometimes we seem them put through the wringer, and sometimes we just get a good adventure with them. Either way, unlike most of the other books, I was never bored and struggling to connect with one of the storylines.
The book's generally a lot bigger, especially for a book where the major ongoing threat of the previous books is mostly on the sidelines (or at least the background), and everything else is going to hell. It feels natural although sometimes hard to relate to some of the big events which for me provoked something of a feeling of numbness rather than loss (although, that might be a somewhat realistic reaction). Still, on the whole the book kept me turning pages and looking forward to see what happened next, even when some of it was predictable.
I think this may either be the best of the series so far, or a close second, which is an impressive feat for a book five (of a proposed 9!). The biggest failing I found was that, unlike the other books, I never really felt like it told a complete story. Sure, in the others there was always the sense of "there's still dangling plots that are going to lead to major things later," but I always felt like a story was setup, reacted to, then responded to and resolved. Instead, here it felt like we just got the "reacted to" part. The book felt like a couple of smaller stories that were going on in the first half of a bigger story, where everyone was just trying to survive the situations set up in Act 1, and the book ends when they're just about in position to move on and either deal with the root cause or at least settle into their new status quo. On the one hand, it means it's just slightly unsatisfying... on the other, it makes me eager to read the next book right now, which is always a good way to finish an installment in an ongoing series.
In a series like this, you're not really advising people who aren't already invested in the books, so really reviews tend to boil down to "How does this compare to the rest of the series? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? Is it still worth reading?" And so really all I probably needed to say is that this is one of the better books in the series and I'll absolutely be reading the next.
Finished: Packing Fraction and Other Stories of Science and Imagination (short stories)
A short book of even shorter short stories. This one I believe is targetted towards teens, with the goal of getting them into science fiction. The stories are interesting enough and deal with a few real issues alongside cool SF ideas, but both are made somewhat milder... not so much to match the sensibilities of teens, but so that parents might not complain.
There are also short interviews with the author and directions for where to go for more of their work or what stories they like, which adds to the sense of an earnest attempt to interest the younger generation in not just reading science fiction but writing it as well.
Of the stories, most of them fell into the category of "mildly enjoyable but left no lasting impression." The one that I'd single out as a little more interesting than the rest, to my tastes, at least, is Robert J. Sawyer's "Stream of Consciousness."
I got this for about a buck at an online store. I'm not sure it'd be worth paying much more than that (more because of the short page count than quality reasons). But at that price, I'm not disappointed at least.
Finished: Echopraxia by Peter Watts (reread)
Reread, so I'll just say I think I liked it more the second time around, not as much effort needed to understand what's happening so the subtler charms are easier to enjoy.
Finished: Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer
Mycroft is a convicted criminal, sentenced to be a Servicer... forbidden to own property, and in exchange for food and shelter must work for whoever requires his services. Because he has a particular set of skills, this often means working for the upper echelon of 25th century society. And in the course of his work, Mycroft has encountered what seems like a miracle, a young boy who can bring art to life... literally.
This is a particularly hard book for me to review. There's so much going on here, and while much of it is good, and some I'd call very good, some of it rubs me the wrong way in terms of personal tastes. And, complicating things, this is in no way a complete story. It's half of a longer work, with the sequel coming out next year, and it's one of those ones where the individual book doesn't feel like it tells a stand-alone story, you have to read both or be content with an unfinished tale.
It's also a bit gimmicky in ways. The book is told in somewhat of an 18th century style (and deals with SF extrapolations of ideas of that period as well). This means that the narrator, Mycroft, frequently talks directly to the reader, anticipating their objections and answering them. Of course, he's talking directly to the reader of an age even father in our future than he is, so sometimes he explains why he uses antiquated things like gendered pronouns or commits the sin of talking about religious matters. I don't think the gimmick is itself a good or bad thing, but you as a reader may have definite opinions on it. I found it a generally interesting approach, but it wore thin over time.
For my own purposes, I think one of the things it does best is worldbuilding. In many ways it could be considered one of those books which is mainly designed to show off an incredibly different society, where countries are obsolete, discussing religion in large groups are outlawed, and there are many other changes. It's this part that, for me, worked best. It was genuinely interesting learning new details about the world and how it worked and why it gradually developed in this way.
I also, mostly, liked the revelation of Mycroft's personal story, how he came to be in the position he was in and what's still going on in his life. Many of the other characters were difficult to get a handle on for one reason or another, and Mycroft should have been the same way, but he kept my attention.
As for the things I didn't like as much? Well, one is an element that I knew going in I would have trouble with. The character of Bridger who has abilities that can only be described, at present, as magic. He can bring toys or pictures to life, not merely animating them but providing them with properties. He could take a drawing of a healing potion and have it really heal, and his constant companions are a set of army men that now act like tiny real soldiers. I'm a SF reader, as opposed to a fantasy reader, and usually intrusions of outright fantasy rankle. I was hoping for some plausible SF explanation for the whole phenomenon, but none was coming (I suppose there's still an outside chance there'll be one in the sequel, although based on how it's been written so far, I'm not convinced... it's slightly more possible that the whole event could be explained as an unreliable narrator). All that said, though, it worked a little better than I thought, mainly because the characters who were exposed to the mystery asked reasonable questions, tried to approach it in something of a systematic way, even while knowing that it should have been impossible. Unfortunately this aspect dropped off as the book went on, but as a way to make it more palatable to me, it was a good way to start.
Now my biggest problem with the work. The book spends a lot of time with internal politics of the aristocracy, the highest class of society. As is usually the case in stories that focused on them... I don't give a damn about their stories. You can tell interesting stories with these types of people, but it's a much harder sell. They've already got privileged lives and pretty much everything they've ever wanted so I'm not really invested when some of that is threatened. And although it was interesting for maybe ten pages, the constant obsessing over the various lists ranking the top most influential people in society (of which the top seven have been the same people on virtually everyone's list for decades). To me it's like reading about people worrying about their placement on People's Sexiest Celebrities Alive list. There is a little more than that, concern about the world as a whole, and it builds interestingly towards this, but... there are long stretches that I just didn't care about anything happening except insofar as it sometimes revealed interesting worldbuilding details.
So although I can certainly see talent here, and understand why this book is being highly praised in many circles, it's proving not so much tuned to my personal tastes. I'd probably rate it a 2, albeit a high one, but since it's a first novel where I'm traditionally more forgiving, and because it was on the high end of 2 anyway, I'll make it a three. I might still like to explore more of Ada Palmer's work in the future... but, at this point, I'm not sure I want to continue reading the rest of this story. I might, but it may be the sort of thing where, a few years down the line I may spontaneously decide that I wonder how it turned out, rather than buying it when it comes out. Or, perhaps, if I hear a lot of reviews where they talk about having addressed some of my personal difficulties with the book.
Finished: Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder (reread)
I've already read this several times and talked about it here even before I started doing Goodreads reviews.
Finished: The Passage by Justin Cronin
The US government, after obtaining samples of a virus that resembles classical vampirism, begins an ultra-secret project to refine and weaponize this discovery, by injecting variations on the virus into test subjects recruited from Death Row, and also a little girl who's not in the system. Naturally, everything goes according to plan and nothing goes wrong at all with this totally reasonable idea, but you might want to avoid the planet Earth for the next few centuries as it may be overrun with monsters.
This book's gotten a lot of hype... the author got apparently a huge advance for it, it was on the NYT bestseller list for a while, and there's talk of a movie adaptation, it's one of those books I've heard about for years since it came out.
And I wanted to like it so much. But I really didn't, at least not in total. (Warning, I will be a little bit more spoilery than usual...)
To be fair, there are some things really well done. Some of the early character work, for example, is vivid and instantly engaging, even if some of it might have been on the cliche side or involve plot elements that were a little too overdramatic, I was there, invested, enjoying the little stories and digressions. And, also to be fair, there is a really neat conception to the monsters that takes a while to really be fully explained, but I liked it and was almost enough to paper over some of the problems I had with the book. Unfortunately, it wound up working a little like, "I'd really like to explore a book with this type of monster concept (or vampires based on this idea), but not this book."
Here's the big thing, and I guess it's kind of a spoiler but it's mostly about how the story's structured... if you read the plot description, you already know much of what I'm going to say aside from exactly how it's presented.
The book takes place in two "parts" (it's actually divided into something like 10 explicitly divided sections, each with multiple chapters, but the first couple section comprise one "part" of the story as I define it and tell mostly one story, and the rest comprise the other and tell another, linked story). The first part tells of the government project in the early days and how it came to be and got out of control. The second part jumps 100 years later, where monsters have virtually overrun the Earth and only a few small settlements survive using discipline and constant lights to keep the monsters out.
Leaving aside the issue that, in my mind, they skipped the most exciting part of the story, part one and part two have in many ways opposite problems, although a couple in common too. In part one, as I said, I got really into the characters. I mostly bought into the world (save for some overdramatically stupid actions to cover up the project), the monsters were a creepy looming threat, and I wanted to know what happened next. As it went on, I did have one major problem, which I'll get to in a bit, but on the whole, I liked it.
Then we jumped to the second section. Where most of the previous characters that were lovingly set up are dead or gone (some still maintain a presence in the book either because of circumstances they set up or because they're actually still around... this shouldn't be a spoiler as the plot involves vampires... but the focus has shifted.) Where we get a new bunch of leads and... they're much, much blander. Some of this is unavoidable, they've been raised in a small community under strict guidelines and siege conditions. So you might have people who are more or less courageous than others, or have special talents others don't, but there's not much divergence of experience. They use the same kind of slang, have the same kinds of concerns, have a shared backstory. But I've seen books where all the characters come from small isolated communities like this where they made it work for me. And honestly, in this section I didn't care much what happened to any particular person. It was like the rich character building in the first book exhausted the writer and he coasted the rest of it... while I was reading the thirtieth chapter of these new characters I was still wishing I could find out what happened to one of the characters in the first bit.
What made it worse was the author's seeming reluctance to kill off members of his new group of pet characters. Sure, there are deaths, and sometimes important ones, but... people keep showing up improbably alive, and there are plenty of fakeouts where you think somebody's died, or turned, only to later find out, nope. It's almost like the author was traumatized by killing off the whole world that he was afraid to kill off anyone else that he'd put time into. By the end of it I wasn't believing any death involving a small core group, and the adventure felt shallow because of it. It's like what goes on in the Walking Dead with Rick's core group, only worse (and you don't get the excuse that the audience might stop watching if their favorite actor is killed off, we've already bought the whole book). And because the monsters are so powerful at this point, the constant survival verges on the ridiculous or requires constant deus ex machina (more on this very soon).
The second part of the book is so much longer too, so I kept wishing that we'd get back to the book we started with.
Now the biggest problem for me. So many of the characters in this book are puppets at various points. By which I mean their actions and motivations are directed by some outside agency. In some cases this is because of the monsters telepathically influencing people. In others, it's because of what isn't explicitly confirmed but I could only interpret as "divine intervention."
I'll get back to the monsters in a bit, because I want to focus on that one. Now, leaving aside what may or may not be true about the reality we live in, in narrative terms, having God pop in to direct your characters usually makes for a horribly unsatisfying story, for me. Because unless you do it very carefully, it sort of means that He's the real protagonist of the story and, being presumably omnipotent and omniscient, he doesn't face significant challenges. We're just reading his plan unfold. A book where God intervenes to drive plot developments is like a book about a writer writing a book. He writes about coming up with the characters, he writes about coming up with the idea for the twist ending and how he drove certain characters to make certain decisions to get there. Maybe it can be done well, but most of the time I want to read the actual story, not read how the story was set up. To be sure, there are only a few cases where this feeling really comes to the fore, and there are valid alternate readings where it's coincidence or some other unexplained factor involving vampires, but to me, they're egregious enough that it soured the book for me. I mean, it's a book about vampires taking over the world! You had me at the premise! But you had to screw it up by adding characters who cross the country and stumble upon secret locations because God told them to because they needed to be at the right place and time to do something. Having a character who seems supernatural even before they're put into the project. Having all of nature go crazy trying to protect her. Just tell a story about humans making choices while surrounded by monsters and it'd be much more entertaining because now, every time it gets dangerous, I'm half expecting God to step in and tell everyone exactly what to do. Deus Ex Machina is considered a flaw enough when it's the ending, but when it's used all along the way, it's usually a dealbreaker.
Let's move on to the other set of puppeteers. The monsters have some telepathic hold over people over long distances, sometimes without even meeting them. Now, in theory, this can be cool, creepy, a looming threat and sense of paranoia... and there's a fundamentally cool idea lurking at the core of the monsters that, as I said earlier, I'd love to see explored by someone else. But in this book, what it felt like was that sometimes people would just do crazy $@!$ because the plot couldn't move on if they didn't. There was so much potential for actual interpersonal conflicts in the situation, but instead people just do random self-destructive or murderous things at random convenient-for-the-plot times. A better writer could have made it work, pressed on the hopelessness, the dread that anyone could be controlled, made it make the characters take actions that drive the plot forward, but it didn't work here. Here, far, far too often, it didn't seem like the characters drove the plot forward, we just had to wait till various people were puppeteered to do so. Unless maybe you count the puppeteers as the characters, but they weren't the ones I wanted to read about (at least, not in this story).
Now, of the two, I had a lesser problem with the monsters controlling people. And, in fairness, the explicit divine intervention tapered off significantly in the second part (there was still unlikely survivals, as well as supernatural things happening that aided the main characters, but it could be explained within the context of the other supernatural plot elements). So we had a first part where I was into the characters and what was happening but people and events were driven too much by deus ex machina. Then we moved into a much longer second part, where the deus ex machina wasn't really as big a factor, but... I didn't much care about the characters or what happened. Of the two, I much preferred the first part.
So yeah, I ranted a lot about the book, and probably made it seem like I enjoyed it less than I did. I gave it two stars. I enjoyed it mildly, but... too much annoyed me, and I wanted it to be so much better, to even a little bit live up to the hype. Instead, it disappointed me. There are two other books in the series for those who don't have my issues with it... maybe they get better, maybe they even specifically address some of my problems in ways that would make me retract my position on the first book. But I don't think I'm ever going to find out.
Finished: Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder (reread)
Another multiple-time reread, nothing more to say.
Finished: Scratch Monkey by Charles Stross
Oshi Adjani works for an inconceivably advanced artificial intelligence, doing various jobs like taking out planetary dictatorships and mass-murderers. She believes what she's doing, even though it may require some despicable actions of her own, is for the good of humanity as a whole. And it may well be, but when Oshi discovers a secret about her boss, she can't let it lie. In punishment for questioning, she's given one last dangerous assignment, one that, if she completes it, she can go free. But it's an assignment so dangerous that the odds of surviving it are slim. The boss needs a scratch monkey, an agent that is fundamentally disposable. And that agent is Oshi.
Charles Stross has written some of my favorite books, books that spew novelty from every page and leave readers reeling with the feeling that they've really seen a potential future, past the Singularity where it's impossible to predict or even understand... and maybe you still don't entirely understand it, but you feel as close as someone's liable to come. Unfortunately, a lot of his recent output has been decidedly more grounded, as he's simply not interested in some of the same themes that he used to be. There's nothing wrong with this, but I am still interested, and I was craving something more like the old Stross. Then I discovered Scratch Monkey, an unpublished (but nearly published) novel that he posted for free on his website. I'd heard the name before but somehow I thought it was simply a short story that I may or may not have already read... when I realized my mistake, I was excited. An early Stross novel sounded like it might be right up my alley!
It was almost just what I wanted. I mean, to be fair, it's not as polished as some of his other works. And there are a few of the other hallmarks of earlier Stross, where the novel doesn't seem to flow as one continuous story, but rather it seems like a few shorter tales jammed together. But it does have a lot of the magic from my early days of discovering a favorite new author.
The book starts out almost reading like Stross was attempting to write a pastiche of the Iain M. Banks' Culture stories. As though he really wanted to write a Culture story, but of course writing directly in another author's universe isn't always looked upon favorably, so he reworked some of the underpinnings of the universe, changed a few of the names, but kept it similar enough that everyone would know what he's going for. Considering Stross has done acknowledged pastiches in the past (or, rather, since writing this), it's possible this was exactly what happened, although from a bit of quick googling I can't find any actual evidence, and it is indeed possible it was merely accidental similarity. Suffice it to say though, he did a good enough job that, in the unlikely event someone were to open up the Culture to other writers (somewhat like the book He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson, where other writers wrote sequels to Matheson short stories), Stross would be one of the ones I would be most excited to see.
But it doesn't stay as a near-Banks pastiche, that's just the starting point. Stross' own cynicism on superadvanced AI soon comes to the fore, and from then on it takes off in a different direction and becomes more distinctly Strossian, exploring many of the same themes I've read from him in his later works, but with a different story behind it, becoming an exciting grim action-spy adventure in a post-singularity environment, with a good dose of body-horror (and perhaps soul-horror).
In addition to the "multiple short stories" effect (which actually wasn't too much a detriment to me... I almost wish it went even more in that direction, I'd have enjoyed a book that was just a series of independent missions by Oshi), I don't think the book ends quite as satisfying as I'd hoped, and there are a few blips along the way where I lost track of how certain significant characters related to each other, to the point that I was surprised when suddenly that relationship became a bigger deal.
It might be my least favorite of the type of book that I envision when I say "early Stross" (I phrase it like that because Stross is a diverse writer and also has some early works that are completely different and unfair to compare to, including some I simply haven't read just because the premises weren't something I was especially interested in... but when I say "early Stross" I mean far-future SF with singularity-type themes). Then again, I might rank it slightly higher than his first published novel, but it's been quite a while so I'm not sure. Still, if you're like me and hoping for something to scratch a similar itch as Accelerando, and have read all his published work, this might be the thing for you. If Goodreads allowed finer-grain ratings, I'd probably put it somewhere in the high three stars, but since it doesn't, I'll round it up to four.
Finished: Company Town by Madeline Ashby
Hwa is a bodyguard working for a town built around an oil rig, off the coast of Newfoundland. Unlike virtually everyone else in town, she has no cybernetic attachments. She's hired to be the bodyguard to the son of the billionaire who just bought the whole town, who has been receiving very specific unusual death threats. Meanwhile, Hwa's old clients and friends are being targetted by a serial killer.
There's a lot of good in this book, and a few off-notes that don't entirely dampen my enthusiasm for it, but just keep it from being that much better.
Let's start with the good. I enjoyed the characters, for the most part, even when they were unlikeable, and particularly the complicated relationship between Hwa an her mother.
Hwa herself is the standout, of course, and as a lead character she is particularly interesting... in addition to being a Canadian (Which automatically makes a character 10% cooler), she also suffers from a disease which gives some interesting challenges as well as a notable physical difference, a "stain" of red birthmarks on one side of her body. Although one of the minor things that bugged me was that the author introduced a conceit where the stain functions as a natural dazzle pattern rendering her somewhat invisible to computers. I just couldn't buy into that, maybe on certain rare occasions it might glitch but it seems like the kind of thing where, I could buy it now, but that far into the future? If having some kind of a design on part of your face still messes up cameras, innovation has failed to the point that there shouldn't have the kind of AI helpers they do. Moreover, there's plenty of references to other characters looking at her and deliberately editing out the stain so as not to be put off, which kind of suggests that a face was recognized by their systems. Luckily, the story doesn't really hinge on this idea and it only crops up a few times, so it winds up looking more like a thing where the author got attached to a cool idea but didn't entirely think through some of the implications. Sorry, that went on a bit of a tangent, because really, what I wanted to say for this paragraph was that I did really like the main character. Even when dipping into a maritime accent.
The setting is also quite interesting, both the physical setting of an oil rig city and the near-future extrapolations of technology and society. There's nothing groundbreaking, but it's entertaining and mostly believable (and again, Canada makes everything 10% cooler).
The plot was also mostly engaging, until the end, although there were a few times when I thought the implications of something were unclear because people didn't react like I expected.
On the whole I was pretty impressed with it. It is one of those books, however, that somewhat falls apart at the end. Some of the interpersonal relationships are resolved in what feels like an overly schmaltzy way (albeit, given what the character's life's been like that, I found myself somewhat wanting it to be schmaltzy, I just felt like it was too much too fast). And when one of the big mysteries was resolved, I found myself not really remembering who the person involved was at all, they simply hadn't made enough of an impression beyond the name feeling somewhat familiar. And the motives behind everything seemed to take a big step outside the fairly believable and grounded tone the rest of the story had set.
I think part of the problem was that it was a fairly short novel, it could have been filled out in ways where some of these swings didn't seem so dramatic. I liked it though, and I'd read more with these characters if the author chose to write more in this universe. I think it's another book that I might only give a 3.5 if I could give half stars, but if I have to choose, I think I'd round upward in this case.
Finished: Battle Royale Slam Book (Essays on the Cult Classic) (essay collection
That's right, I read a book of essays.
The Battle Royale Slam Book is a book of essays on the book, movie, and manga versions of Battle Royale.
Honestly, I'm not really sure why it needs a special book of essays. I mean, I love the book, but it's not the deepest work in the world. I wouldn't have read this at all, except that it happened to be part of a bundle of ebooks I bought, and I happened to already be rereading Battle Royale. So, I figured I'd keep an ereader open on my computer and read an essay now and then when I had some free time, maybe learn some additional context that I'd missed in the original.
And there is certainly some of that, information on certain trends in Japanese society when the book was written, about certain in-jokes that would go over a reader's head without knowledge of the local pop culture, and about how the book was first received by the judges in the competition which "discovered" it. These tidbits are mildly interesting, although all in all, they're the sort of thing that could all fit into a short preface of a new edition of the book or something.
Unfortunately, a lot of the other essays seem, to me, to fall in the category of 'trying too hard', searching for deep meaning in the text of a cult movie/book/manga, or trying to use it to make some grand point about humanity, or comparing and contrasting with other movies... the kind of stuff that you had to do for school even while you were pretty sure the author never actually intended the symbolism the teacher insisted was there. In this case you sometimes get writers talking about how, say, since a certain character got killed than it was an indictment on that type of person, a theory which might have held more water if it wasn't a book who's premise required most of the characters to die.
Moreover, as I said, Battle Royale may have started as a book, but it's been adapted into a movie and a manga, and all three are talked about in the book. Oddly enough, there isn't really an essay that takes a look at the differences between the media and what drove those choices and what they wind up changing about the story, which might have been interesting to me, but instead, you get a few which draw from all three, and a bunch of essays that are clearly only discussing the movie (and considering I thought most of the changes from the book made it inferior, the fact that I noticed which one they were talking about meant they were usually talking about bad decisions as though they were elements worthy of deep analysis).
So I guess this is a book for superfans, but for a particular kind of superfans that not only may like the movie version more than the book, but also really likes literary analysis. That is not me on two fronts.
About the most interesting part of the book was, at the end of one essay which compared Battle Royale to various 80s Hollywood teen movies, the author went on tangent discussing how the stars of those movies would fare if they were put into Battle Royale together. Although the tale was too flippant and rushed to really enjoy, at least it was trying something a little bit fun.
That section also reminded me of what I'd hoped this book would be. When I first heard the title, and realized it was from multiple authors, but before I read the description, I had an instant of hope that this would be a book full of short tales, by a variety of authors, set in other instances of The Program. Either they could choose a single Program that happened on another year and each writer choose one story to tell within that, or each writer could tell their own take on it, with maybe some telling individual short tales of winners or losers, some exploring life outside the game, others transposing the setting to another part of the world, and maybe a few where they take a gimmick like putting (probably thinly disguised versions of) the teen cast of Archie comics or Hogwarts students or something in a Battle Royale situation.
Now, maybe Battle Royale's author wouldn't want to invite others into their world like that, or maybe simply nobody thought of that idea, but, far more than a book of essays, that's a book I'd not only want to read, but I'd pay money for.
This one? I'm glad I got it for free (or rather as part of a bundle which already contained other books that were worth the full price I paid for said bundle), since I wouldn't have bought it alone, but I didn't hate it, I just mostly found it unnecessary. I guess two stars seems appropriate.
Finished: Battle Royale Remastered by Koushun Takami
42 students (average age roughly 15) are gassed on a school field trip and awaken on an island, where they're told they've been chosen for this year's Program. Everyone knows what that means... one class is chosen every year, and they will have to kill each other until only one survives. Some will team up, some will try to escape, and some are willing to kill people they've grown up with.
Battle Royale Remastered is a new translation of Koushun Takami's cult classic Battle Royale. I've already read the previous translation, and even reviewed it. The fact that I'm reading a retranslation should tell you already that I like the story a lot. So, although my rating is going to be the same (because I'm rating the book itself), in this review I will be talking specifically about the translation.
I think it's fair to say that the prose portions, generally speaking, flow more smoothly in this edition. It still has some of the more unfamiliar stylistic elements of the previous work and, I assume, from the original Japanese (where it suddenly to ramble off into an irrelevant observation or imagined line of dialogue somebody observing it might say), but on a line by line basis the prose seems, not necessarily clearer, as the original was usually pretty clear as well, but more natural.
And yet, the dialogue doesn't seem to have changed much at all. There's a certain rhythm to the way things are said that may be natural in Japanese dialogue but seem just slightly off when translated literally, and it seems an effort was made to leave that rhythm intact through the translation. However, the contrast with the much smoother prose seems to make it stand out more... when the prose is also, a little bit, 'off', I feel like I can adapt to it much more easily. Sometimes when I read I feel like I do an extra layer of translation in my head, and when I have to do it for some parts but not for others I have to be more conscious of it.
There are a few other changes that stood out. One, there was a line early-on that made clear that a name was "probably a joke" because it was a play on a famous TV character (whereas in the old translation, it just said that it must be a joke or pseudonym, but didn't explain why, leaving me wondering why that was). Thumbs up for that one. The other one was that a few of the names of institutions changed. The Army is now referred to as the "Nonaggressive Forces." The first time I read this, I loved it, echoing back to Japanese's real Self-Defense Forces. Every subsequent time I liked it less and less, because there were times where it really seemed to be less awkward to say "Army" (even if Army was shorthand for Nonaggressive Ground Forces, as they referred to Nonaggressive Naval Forces). Similarly, what was "Charity House" in the original is now "House of Love and Mercy" and... I really preferred the original, which made it immediately clear what it was. Maybe if they'd used the full name sparingly and referred to it informally the rest of the time, it would have worked better for me. Otherwise, there may have been a few other things I noticed, but none stood out (and I'm sure some I was simply wrong about because I remembered the original incorrectly).
I think it's probably a good translation, but having read the original so many times, I'm used to it and even when something is an improvement a part of my brain identifies it as "subtly wrong."
As I write this, I now have two copies of the book, and I'll probably give one away. And, I think the one I give away will be Battle Royale Remastered, the new translation. For all the reasons above (which likely won't bother a new reader nearly so much), and, for one more. The cover. While I try not to judge a book by the cover too much, I will judge the covers and, where there are choices... I want the best cover. And honestly, I don't know what they were thinking with this cover. Gaudy and cartoonish images of a bloody fight between students, Remastered's cover is not nearly as appealing as the simple minimalist silhouette of two students (with the space between the students forming the shape of a gun). That was brilliant, subtle, and one of the things that convinced me to give it a try (so I guess I was judging a book on its cover, a little). I am so, so disappointed that they changed it.
There is an interview with the author that adds some extra value to those who've read another version, but it's not enough for me to change my mind.
Started (or finished but haven't yet reviewed): Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis C. Chen (received for free from a giveaway), The Future Is Japanese (short story collection), The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North, The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler (received for free from a giveaway)
TV? It's been a long time since I've talked about TV that almost everything I have to say is old news. But let's see... Stranger Things is on Netflix (or you could get it magically another way)... and I quite liked it, it's like 80s Stephen King and 80s Steven Spielberg teamed up to make a movie set in the 80s but using today's effects. Not perfect, and I had an unreasonable amount of nerd rage at them getting D&D wrong (ask me in comments if you're curious), but overall quite well done, even if it is a bit nostalgia-baity.
Killing Joke cartoon came out and, just, ugh. I mean, the original story was iffy enough, but I sort of forgive it because Oracle came out of it (even if it was indirectly). But they added a 30 minute prologue focusing on Batgirl and... I WANTED a prologue focusing on Batgirl, but what they actually gave me was just awful, stupid ideas that if possible made the iffier elements of Killing Joke even WORSE. Why, DC, why?
I've been kind of on a rewatch binge lately, rewatched all of Stargate SG1 and Atlantis, and now moving on to Sliders. The Stargates were more or less as good as I remember it, Sliders... well, I knew it turned to suck eventually, but I'd forgotten how much wasn't that great even in the "good" seasons. Not all-around awful, and I'm still enjoying watching it, but just full of random cringey moments where I viscerally notice bad writing or acting (or the results of executive tampering). It was always a show that I loved more for potential than for what they did with it, and I still want to see a reboot done well. Oh, and it's fun spotting people in it. I was watching an episode and I thought, "Wait, is that Jeffrey Dean Morgan?" (the brother's father in Supernatural, Negan in The Walking Dead, Comedian in Watchmen), and... yup, it was! It took to the opening credits to be sure because he looked so young. He played a tough guy from a "civilization-has-collapsed" world who, chasing after his girlfriend, follows the Sliders to a world where SanFran is a penal colony.
I think that's all I remember for TV, so we'll move onto the bimonthly book roundup. As usual, Goodreads reviews copy-pasted here.
Finished: A World Out of Time by Larry Niven
A man with a terminal illness in the modern day has himself frozen as a last-ditch attempt to survive. He awakens hundreds of years in the future, in a completely new body and told that he must be in service to the State... or else. Soon, though, he gets a chance to escape and flee into Earth's far far future where many things have changed and survival is even more complicated.
This is 70s-era science fiction, and it shows. The science, while treated with a fair amount of rigor, doesn't really seem realistic anymore as it relies too much on ideas that are no longer en vogue, and much of the rest is handwaved to the point where mind-boggling feats like moving planets is done fairly easily. And as for the social exploration? Well, aside from the results of a few different types of eternal youth, about the most imaginitive the story gets in terms of social development is a loosening of sexual mores and a return to a more primitive lifestyle. There's no wow factor of humans who have become alien in a myriad of different ways. Even gender politics either stay more or less the same or are exaggerated to ridiculous degrees.
The book started fairly well, actually, but before too long the book became a slog for me, and I found I wasn't really even following the more scientific parts of the plot, not because it was above my head but just because I wasn't invested enough in anything happening. There's an extended sequence where the main character runs from an old woman in the ruins of the Earth hundreds of thousands of years in the future that just seemed to drag on endlessly, and although it got briefly better around that, it circled back to that plot in a particularly annoying way. All in all, I've seen much better "trips into the far far future" tales than this.
About the only thing I took away from this book was the description of a far distant genetically altered version of a cat that looked pretty much just a head and tail with no limbs, which proved to me that I would still "awww" at a kitty even if you made it into something like a snake.
Finished: Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey (Expanse #5)
The Rocinante is undergoing a refit after the events of the last book. With some downtime, and personal issues cropping up, the crew goes their separate ways for a bit... but it's possibly the most dangerous time for that to happen, as a radical terrorist faction of the OPA is gearing up for a major offensive that may change the game and put everyone in danger.
Okay, it's the Expanse series, and by now, you pretty much know what you're getting. A popcorny action-adventure that's still somewhat smarter than you'd give it credit for, with characters that are appealing but stock, and alternating viewpoints.
And this book is more of the same. And yet not. Firstly, because with the other books, mostly, the crew of the Roci's story was told through the eyes of Holden, and the other viewpoint characters were outsiders or engaged in secondary plots that related to the main one. In this one, most of the secondary viewpoints are different members of the core crew. This makes the book instantly more engaging and interesting than the others... you're no longer meeting a bunch of new characters, you're getting deeper into characters you already enjoy (at least, presumably, if you've stuck it through five books). Sometimes we learn their secrets, sometimes we seem them put through the wringer, and sometimes we just get a good adventure with them. Either way, unlike most of the other books, I was never bored and struggling to connect with one of the storylines.
The book's generally a lot bigger, especially for a book where the major ongoing threat of the previous books is mostly on the sidelines (or at least the background), and everything else is going to hell. It feels natural although sometimes hard to relate to some of the big events which for me provoked something of a feeling of numbness rather than loss (although, that might be a somewhat realistic reaction). Still, on the whole the book kept me turning pages and looking forward to see what happened next, even when some of it was predictable.
I think this may either be the best of the series so far, or a close second, which is an impressive feat for a book five (of a proposed 9!). The biggest failing I found was that, unlike the other books, I never really felt like it told a complete story. Sure, in the others there was always the sense of "there's still dangling plots that are going to lead to major things later," but I always felt like a story was setup, reacted to, then responded to and resolved. Instead, here it felt like we just got the "reacted to" part. The book felt like a couple of smaller stories that were going on in the first half of a bigger story, where everyone was just trying to survive the situations set up in Act 1, and the book ends when they're just about in position to move on and either deal with the root cause or at least settle into their new status quo. On the one hand, it means it's just slightly unsatisfying... on the other, it makes me eager to read the next book right now, which is always a good way to finish an installment in an ongoing series.
In a series like this, you're not really advising people who aren't already invested in the books, so really reviews tend to boil down to "How does this compare to the rest of the series? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? Is it still worth reading?" And so really all I probably needed to say is that this is one of the better books in the series and I'll absolutely be reading the next.
Finished: Packing Fraction and Other Stories of Science and Imagination (short stories)
A short book of even shorter short stories. This one I believe is targetted towards teens, with the goal of getting them into science fiction. The stories are interesting enough and deal with a few real issues alongside cool SF ideas, but both are made somewhat milder... not so much to match the sensibilities of teens, but so that parents might not complain.
There are also short interviews with the author and directions for where to go for more of their work or what stories they like, which adds to the sense of an earnest attempt to interest the younger generation in not just reading science fiction but writing it as well.
Of the stories, most of them fell into the category of "mildly enjoyable but left no lasting impression." The one that I'd single out as a little more interesting than the rest, to my tastes, at least, is Robert J. Sawyer's "Stream of Consciousness."
I got this for about a buck at an online store. I'm not sure it'd be worth paying much more than that (more because of the short page count than quality reasons). But at that price, I'm not disappointed at least.
Finished: Echopraxia by Peter Watts (reread)
Reread, so I'll just say I think I liked it more the second time around, not as much effort needed to understand what's happening so the subtler charms are easier to enjoy.
Finished: Too Like The Lightning by Ada Palmer
Mycroft is a convicted criminal, sentenced to be a Servicer... forbidden to own property, and in exchange for food and shelter must work for whoever requires his services. Because he has a particular set of skills, this often means working for the upper echelon of 25th century society. And in the course of his work, Mycroft has encountered what seems like a miracle, a young boy who can bring art to life... literally.
This is a particularly hard book for me to review. There's so much going on here, and while much of it is good, and some I'd call very good, some of it rubs me the wrong way in terms of personal tastes. And, complicating things, this is in no way a complete story. It's half of a longer work, with the sequel coming out next year, and it's one of those ones where the individual book doesn't feel like it tells a stand-alone story, you have to read both or be content with an unfinished tale.
It's also a bit gimmicky in ways. The book is told in somewhat of an 18th century style (and deals with SF extrapolations of ideas of that period as well). This means that the narrator, Mycroft, frequently talks directly to the reader, anticipating their objections and answering them. Of course, he's talking directly to the reader of an age even father in our future than he is, so sometimes he explains why he uses antiquated things like gendered pronouns or commits the sin of talking about religious matters. I don't think the gimmick is itself a good or bad thing, but you as a reader may have definite opinions on it. I found it a generally interesting approach, but it wore thin over time.
For my own purposes, I think one of the things it does best is worldbuilding. In many ways it could be considered one of those books which is mainly designed to show off an incredibly different society, where countries are obsolete, discussing religion in large groups are outlawed, and there are many other changes. It's this part that, for me, worked best. It was genuinely interesting learning new details about the world and how it worked and why it gradually developed in this way.
I also, mostly, liked the revelation of Mycroft's personal story, how he came to be in the position he was in and what's still going on in his life. Many of the other characters were difficult to get a handle on for one reason or another, and Mycroft should have been the same way, but he kept my attention.
As for the things I didn't like as much? Well, one is an element that I knew going in I would have trouble with. The character of Bridger who has abilities that can only be described, at present, as magic. He can bring toys or pictures to life, not merely animating them but providing them with properties. He could take a drawing of a healing potion and have it really heal, and his constant companions are a set of army men that now act like tiny real soldiers. I'm a SF reader, as opposed to a fantasy reader, and usually intrusions of outright fantasy rankle. I was hoping for some plausible SF explanation for the whole phenomenon, but none was coming (I suppose there's still an outside chance there'll be one in the sequel, although based on how it's been written so far, I'm not convinced... it's slightly more possible that the whole event could be explained as an unreliable narrator). All that said, though, it worked a little better than I thought, mainly because the characters who were exposed to the mystery asked reasonable questions, tried to approach it in something of a systematic way, even while knowing that it should have been impossible. Unfortunately this aspect dropped off as the book went on, but as a way to make it more palatable to me, it was a good way to start.
Now my biggest problem with the work. The book spends a lot of time with internal politics of the aristocracy, the highest class of society. As is usually the case in stories that focused on them... I don't give a damn about their stories. You can tell interesting stories with these types of people, but it's a much harder sell. They've already got privileged lives and pretty much everything they've ever wanted so I'm not really invested when some of that is threatened. And although it was interesting for maybe ten pages, the constant obsessing over the various lists ranking the top most influential people in society (of which the top seven have been the same people on virtually everyone's list for decades). To me it's like reading about people worrying about their placement on People's Sexiest Celebrities Alive list. There is a little more than that, concern about the world as a whole, and it builds interestingly towards this, but... there are long stretches that I just didn't care about anything happening except insofar as it sometimes revealed interesting worldbuilding details.
So although I can certainly see talent here, and understand why this book is being highly praised in many circles, it's proving not so much tuned to my personal tastes. I'd probably rate it a 2, albeit a high one, but since it's a first novel where I'm traditionally more forgiving, and because it was on the high end of 2 anyway, I'll make it a three. I might still like to explore more of Ada Palmer's work in the future... but, at this point, I'm not sure I want to continue reading the rest of this story. I might, but it may be the sort of thing where, a few years down the line I may spontaneously decide that I wonder how it turned out, rather than buying it when it comes out. Or, perhaps, if I hear a lot of reviews where they talk about having addressed some of my personal difficulties with the book.
Finished: Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder (reread)
I've already read this several times and talked about it here even before I started doing Goodreads reviews.
Finished: The Passage by Justin Cronin
The US government, after obtaining samples of a virus that resembles classical vampirism, begins an ultra-secret project to refine and weaponize this discovery, by injecting variations on the virus into test subjects recruited from Death Row, and also a little girl who's not in the system. Naturally, everything goes according to plan and nothing goes wrong at all with this totally reasonable idea, but you might want to avoid the planet Earth for the next few centuries as it may be overrun with monsters.
This book's gotten a lot of hype... the author got apparently a huge advance for it, it was on the NYT bestseller list for a while, and there's talk of a movie adaptation, it's one of those books I've heard about for years since it came out.
And I wanted to like it so much. But I really didn't, at least not in total. (Warning, I will be a little bit more spoilery than usual...)
To be fair, there are some things really well done. Some of the early character work, for example, is vivid and instantly engaging, even if some of it might have been on the cliche side or involve plot elements that were a little too overdramatic, I was there, invested, enjoying the little stories and digressions. And, also to be fair, there is a really neat conception to the monsters that takes a while to really be fully explained, but I liked it and was almost enough to paper over some of the problems I had with the book. Unfortunately, it wound up working a little like, "I'd really like to explore a book with this type of monster concept (or vampires based on this idea), but not this book."
Here's the big thing, and I guess it's kind of a spoiler but it's mostly about how the story's structured... if you read the plot description, you already know much of what I'm going to say aside from exactly how it's presented.
The book takes place in two "parts" (it's actually divided into something like 10 explicitly divided sections, each with multiple chapters, but the first couple section comprise one "part" of the story as I define it and tell mostly one story, and the rest comprise the other and tell another, linked story). The first part tells of the government project in the early days and how it came to be and got out of control. The second part jumps 100 years later, where monsters have virtually overrun the Earth and only a few small settlements survive using discipline and constant lights to keep the monsters out.
Leaving aside the issue that, in my mind, they skipped the most exciting part of the story, part one and part two have in many ways opposite problems, although a couple in common too. In part one, as I said, I got really into the characters. I mostly bought into the world (save for some overdramatically stupid actions to cover up the project), the monsters were a creepy looming threat, and I wanted to know what happened next. As it went on, I did have one major problem, which I'll get to in a bit, but on the whole, I liked it.
Then we jumped to the second section. Where most of the previous characters that were lovingly set up are dead or gone (some still maintain a presence in the book either because of circumstances they set up or because they're actually still around... this shouldn't be a spoiler as the plot involves vampires... but the focus has shifted.) Where we get a new bunch of leads and... they're much, much blander. Some of this is unavoidable, they've been raised in a small community under strict guidelines and siege conditions. So you might have people who are more or less courageous than others, or have special talents others don't, but there's not much divergence of experience. They use the same kind of slang, have the same kinds of concerns, have a shared backstory. But I've seen books where all the characters come from small isolated communities like this where they made it work for me. And honestly, in this section I didn't care much what happened to any particular person. It was like the rich character building in the first book exhausted the writer and he coasted the rest of it... while I was reading the thirtieth chapter of these new characters I was still wishing I could find out what happened to one of the characters in the first bit.
What made it worse was the author's seeming reluctance to kill off members of his new group of pet characters. Sure, there are deaths, and sometimes important ones, but... people keep showing up improbably alive, and there are plenty of fakeouts where you think somebody's died, or turned, only to later find out, nope. It's almost like the author was traumatized by killing off the whole world that he was afraid to kill off anyone else that he'd put time into. By the end of it I wasn't believing any death involving a small core group, and the adventure felt shallow because of it. It's like what goes on in the Walking Dead with Rick's core group, only worse (and you don't get the excuse that the audience might stop watching if their favorite actor is killed off, we've already bought the whole book). And because the monsters are so powerful at this point, the constant survival verges on the ridiculous or requires constant deus ex machina (more on this very soon).
The second part of the book is so much longer too, so I kept wishing that we'd get back to the book we started with.
Now the biggest problem for me. So many of the characters in this book are puppets at various points. By which I mean their actions and motivations are directed by some outside agency. In some cases this is because of the monsters telepathically influencing people. In others, it's because of what isn't explicitly confirmed but I could only interpret as "divine intervention."
I'll get back to the monsters in a bit, because I want to focus on that one. Now, leaving aside what may or may not be true about the reality we live in, in narrative terms, having God pop in to direct your characters usually makes for a horribly unsatisfying story, for me. Because unless you do it very carefully, it sort of means that He's the real protagonist of the story and, being presumably omnipotent and omniscient, he doesn't face significant challenges. We're just reading his plan unfold. A book where God intervenes to drive plot developments is like a book about a writer writing a book. He writes about coming up with the characters, he writes about coming up with the idea for the twist ending and how he drove certain characters to make certain decisions to get there. Maybe it can be done well, but most of the time I want to read the actual story, not read how the story was set up. To be sure, there are only a few cases where this feeling really comes to the fore, and there are valid alternate readings where it's coincidence or some other unexplained factor involving vampires, but to me, they're egregious enough that it soured the book for me. I mean, it's a book about vampires taking over the world! You had me at the premise! But you had to screw it up by adding characters who cross the country and stumble upon secret locations because God told them to because they needed to be at the right place and time to do something. Having a character who seems supernatural even before they're put into the project. Having all of nature go crazy trying to protect her. Just tell a story about humans making choices while surrounded by monsters and it'd be much more entertaining because now, every time it gets dangerous, I'm half expecting God to step in and tell everyone exactly what to do. Deus Ex Machina is considered a flaw enough when it's the ending, but when it's used all along the way, it's usually a dealbreaker.
Let's move on to the other set of puppeteers. The monsters have some telepathic hold over people over long distances, sometimes without even meeting them. Now, in theory, this can be cool, creepy, a looming threat and sense of paranoia... and there's a fundamentally cool idea lurking at the core of the monsters that, as I said earlier, I'd love to see explored by someone else. But in this book, what it felt like was that sometimes people would just do crazy $@!$ because the plot couldn't move on if they didn't. There was so much potential for actual interpersonal conflicts in the situation, but instead people just do random self-destructive or murderous things at random convenient-for-the-plot times. A better writer could have made it work, pressed on the hopelessness, the dread that anyone could be controlled, made it make the characters take actions that drive the plot forward, but it didn't work here. Here, far, far too often, it didn't seem like the characters drove the plot forward, we just had to wait till various people were puppeteered to do so. Unless maybe you count the puppeteers as the characters, but they weren't the ones I wanted to read about (at least, not in this story).
Now, of the two, I had a lesser problem with the monsters controlling people. And, in fairness, the explicit divine intervention tapered off significantly in the second part (there was still unlikely survivals, as well as supernatural things happening that aided the main characters, but it could be explained within the context of the other supernatural plot elements). So we had a first part where I was into the characters and what was happening but people and events were driven too much by deus ex machina. Then we moved into a much longer second part, where the deus ex machina wasn't really as big a factor, but... I didn't much care about the characters or what happened. Of the two, I much preferred the first part.
So yeah, I ranted a lot about the book, and probably made it seem like I enjoyed it less than I did. I gave it two stars. I enjoyed it mildly, but... too much annoyed me, and I wanted it to be so much better, to even a little bit live up to the hype. Instead, it disappointed me. There are two other books in the series for those who don't have my issues with it... maybe they get better, maybe they even specifically address some of my problems in ways that would make me retract my position on the first book. But I don't think I'm ever going to find out.
Finished: Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder (reread)
Another multiple-time reread, nothing more to say.
Finished: Scratch Monkey by Charles Stross
Oshi Adjani works for an inconceivably advanced artificial intelligence, doing various jobs like taking out planetary dictatorships and mass-murderers. She believes what she's doing, even though it may require some despicable actions of her own, is for the good of humanity as a whole. And it may well be, but when Oshi discovers a secret about her boss, she can't let it lie. In punishment for questioning, she's given one last dangerous assignment, one that, if she completes it, she can go free. But it's an assignment so dangerous that the odds of surviving it are slim. The boss needs a scratch monkey, an agent that is fundamentally disposable. And that agent is Oshi.
Charles Stross has written some of my favorite books, books that spew novelty from every page and leave readers reeling with the feeling that they've really seen a potential future, past the Singularity where it's impossible to predict or even understand... and maybe you still don't entirely understand it, but you feel as close as someone's liable to come. Unfortunately, a lot of his recent output has been decidedly more grounded, as he's simply not interested in some of the same themes that he used to be. There's nothing wrong with this, but I am still interested, and I was craving something more like the old Stross. Then I discovered Scratch Monkey, an unpublished (but nearly published) novel that he posted for free on his website. I'd heard the name before but somehow I thought it was simply a short story that I may or may not have already read... when I realized my mistake, I was excited. An early Stross novel sounded like it might be right up my alley!
It was almost just what I wanted. I mean, to be fair, it's not as polished as some of his other works. And there are a few of the other hallmarks of earlier Stross, where the novel doesn't seem to flow as one continuous story, but rather it seems like a few shorter tales jammed together. But it does have a lot of the magic from my early days of discovering a favorite new author.
The book starts out almost reading like Stross was attempting to write a pastiche of the Iain M. Banks' Culture stories. As though he really wanted to write a Culture story, but of course writing directly in another author's universe isn't always looked upon favorably, so he reworked some of the underpinnings of the universe, changed a few of the names, but kept it similar enough that everyone would know what he's going for. Considering Stross has done acknowledged pastiches in the past (or, rather, since writing this), it's possible this was exactly what happened, although from a bit of quick googling I can't find any actual evidence, and it is indeed possible it was merely accidental similarity. Suffice it to say though, he did a good enough job that, in the unlikely event someone were to open up the Culture to other writers (somewhat like the book He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson, where other writers wrote sequels to Matheson short stories), Stross would be one of the ones I would be most excited to see.
But it doesn't stay as a near-Banks pastiche, that's just the starting point. Stross' own cynicism on superadvanced AI soon comes to the fore, and from then on it takes off in a different direction and becomes more distinctly Strossian, exploring many of the same themes I've read from him in his later works, but with a different story behind it, becoming an exciting grim action-spy adventure in a post-singularity environment, with a good dose of body-horror (and perhaps soul-horror).
In addition to the "multiple short stories" effect (which actually wasn't too much a detriment to me... I almost wish it went even more in that direction, I'd have enjoyed a book that was just a series of independent missions by Oshi), I don't think the book ends quite as satisfying as I'd hoped, and there are a few blips along the way where I lost track of how certain significant characters related to each other, to the point that I was surprised when suddenly that relationship became a bigger deal.
It might be my least favorite of the type of book that I envision when I say "early Stross" (I phrase it like that because Stross is a diverse writer and also has some early works that are completely different and unfair to compare to, including some I simply haven't read just because the premises weren't something I was especially interested in... but when I say "early Stross" I mean far-future SF with singularity-type themes). Then again, I might rank it slightly higher than his first published novel, but it's been quite a while so I'm not sure. Still, if you're like me and hoping for something to scratch a similar itch as Accelerando, and have read all his published work, this might be the thing for you. If Goodreads allowed finer-grain ratings, I'd probably put it somewhere in the high three stars, but since it doesn't, I'll round it up to four.
Finished: Company Town by Madeline Ashby
Hwa is a bodyguard working for a town built around an oil rig, off the coast of Newfoundland. Unlike virtually everyone else in town, she has no cybernetic attachments. She's hired to be the bodyguard to the son of the billionaire who just bought the whole town, who has been receiving very specific unusual death threats. Meanwhile, Hwa's old clients and friends are being targetted by a serial killer.
There's a lot of good in this book, and a few off-notes that don't entirely dampen my enthusiasm for it, but just keep it from being that much better.
Let's start with the good. I enjoyed the characters, for the most part, even when they were unlikeable, and particularly the complicated relationship between Hwa an her mother.
Hwa herself is the standout, of course, and as a lead character she is particularly interesting... in addition to being a Canadian (Which automatically makes a character 10% cooler), she also suffers from a disease which gives some interesting challenges as well as a notable physical difference, a "stain" of red birthmarks on one side of her body. Although one of the minor things that bugged me was that the author introduced a conceit where the stain functions as a natural dazzle pattern rendering her somewhat invisible to computers. I just couldn't buy into that, maybe on certain rare occasions it might glitch but it seems like the kind of thing where, I could buy it now, but that far into the future? If having some kind of a design on part of your face still messes up cameras, innovation has failed to the point that there shouldn't have the kind of AI helpers they do. Moreover, there's plenty of references to other characters looking at her and deliberately editing out the stain so as not to be put off, which kind of suggests that a face was recognized by their systems. Luckily, the story doesn't really hinge on this idea and it only crops up a few times, so it winds up looking more like a thing where the author got attached to a cool idea but didn't entirely think through some of the implications. Sorry, that went on a bit of a tangent, because really, what I wanted to say for this paragraph was that I did really like the main character. Even when dipping into a maritime accent.
The setting is also quite interesting, both the physical setting of an oil rig city and the near-future extrapolations of technology and society. There's nothing groundbreaking, but it's entertaining and mostly believable (and again, Canada makes everything 10% cooler).
The plot was also mostly engaging, until the end, although there were a few times when I thought the implications of something were unclear because people didn't react like I expected.
On the whole I was pretty impressed with it. It is one of those books, however, that somewhat falls apart at the end. Some of the interpersonal relationships are resolved in what feels like an overly schmaltzy way (albeit, given what the character's life's been like that, I found myself somewhat wanting it to be schmaltzy, I just felt like it was too much too fast). And when one of the big mysteries was resolved, I found myself not really remembering who the person involved was at all, they simply hadn't made enough of an impression beyond the name feeling somewhat familiar. And the motives behind everything seemed to take a big step outside the fairly believable and grounded tone the rest of the story had set.
I think part of the problem was that it was a fairly short novel, it could have been filled out in ways where some of these swings didn't seem so dramatic. I liked it though, and I'd read more with these characters if the author chose to write more in this universe. I think it's another book that I might only give a 3.5 if I could give half stars, but if I have to choose, I think I'd round upward in this case.
Finished: Battle Royale Slam Book (Essays on the Cult Classic) (essay collection
That's right, I read a book of essays.
The Battle Royale Slam Book is a book of essays on the book, movie, and manga versions of Battle Royale.
Honestly, I'm not really sure why it needs a special book of essays. I mean, I love the book, but it's not the deepest work in the world. I wouldn't have read this at all, except that it happened to be part of a bundle of ebooks I bought, and I happened to already be rereading Battle Royale. So, I figured I'd keep an ereader open on my computer and read an essay now and then when I had some free time, maybe learn some additional context that I'd missed in the original.
And there is certainly some of that, information on certain trends in Japanese society when the book was written, about certain in-jokes that would go over a reader's head without knowledge of the local pop culture, and about how the book was first received by the judges in the competition which "discovered" it. These tidbits are mildly interesting, although all in all, they're the sort of thing that could all fit into a short preface of a new edition of the book or something.
Unfortunately, a lot of the other essays seem, to me, to fall in the category of 'trying too hard', searching for deep meaning in the text of a cult movie/book/manga, or trying to use it to make some grand point about humanity, or comparing and contrasting with other movies... the kind of stuff that you had to do for school even while you were pretty sure the author never actually intended the symbolism the teacher insisted was there. In this case you sometimes get writers talking about how, say, since a certain character got killed than it was an indictment on that type of person, a theory which might have held more water if it wasn't a book who's premise required most of the characters to die.
Moreover, as I said, Battle Royale may have started as a book, but it's been adapted into a movie and a manga, and all three are talked about in the book. Oddly enough, there isn't really an essay that takes a look at the differences between the media and what drove those choices and what they wind up changing about the story, which might have been interesting to me, but instead, you get a few which draw from all three, and a bunch of essays that are clearly only discussing the movie (and considering I thought most of the changes from the book made it inferior, the fact that I noticed which one they were talking about meant they were usually talking about bad decisions as though they were elements worthy of deep analysis).
So I guess this is a book for superfans, but for a particular kind of superfans that not only may like the movie version more than the book, but also really likes literary analysis. That is not me on two fronts.
About the most interesting part of the book was, at the end of one essay which compared Battle Royale to various 80s Hollywood teen movies, the author went on tangent discussing how the stars of those movies would fare if they were put into Battle Royale together. Although the tale was too flippant and rushed to really enjoy, at least it was trying something a little bit fun.
That section also reminded me of what I'd hoped this book would be. When I first heard the title, and realized it was from multiple authors, but before I read the description, I had an instant of hope that this would be a book full of short tales, by a variety of authors, set in other instances of The Program. Either they could choose a single Program that happened on another year and each writer choose one story to tell within that, or each writer could tell their own take on it, with maybe some telling individual short tales of winners or losers, some exploring life outside the game, others transposing the setting to another part of the world, and maybe a few where they take a gimmick like putting (probably thinly disguised versions of) the teen cast of Archie comics or Hogwarts students or something in a Battle Royale situation.
Now, maybe Battle Royale's author wouldn't want to invite others into their world like that, or maybe simply nobody thought of that idea, but, far more than a book of essays, that's a book I'd not only want to read, but I'd pay money for.
This one? I'm glad I got it for free (or rather as part of a bundle which already contained other books that were worth the full price I paid for said bundle), since I wouldn't have bought it alone, but I didn't hate it, I just mostly found it unnecessary. I guess two stars seems appropriate.
Finished: Battle Royale Remastered by Koushun Takami
42 students (average age roughly 15) are gassed on a school field trip and awaken on an island, where they're told they've been chosen for this year's Program. Everyone knows what that means... one class is chosen every year, and they will have to kill each other until only one survives. Some will team up, some will try to escape, and some are willing to kill people they've grown up with.
Battle Royale Remastered is a new translation of Koushun Takami's cult classic Battle Royale. I've already read the previous translation, and even reviewed it. The fact that I'm reading a retranslation should tell you already that I like the story a lot. So, although my rating is going to be the same (because I'm rating the book itself), in this review I will be talking specifically about the translation.
I think it's fair to say that the prose portions, generally speaking, flow more smoothly in this edition. It still has some of the more unfamiliar stylistic elements of the previous work and, I assume, from the original Japanese (where it suddenly to ramble off into an irrelevant observation or imagined line of dialogue somebody observing it might say), but on a line by line basis the prose seems, not necessarily clearer, as the original was usually pretty clear as well, but more natural.
And yet, the dialogue doesn't seem to have changed much at all. There's a certain rhythm to the way things are said that may be natural in Japanese dialogue but seem just slightly off when translated literally, and it seems an effort was made to leave that rhythm intact through the translation. However, the contrast with the much smoother prose seems to make it stand out more... when the prose is also, a little bit, 'off', I feel like I can adapt to it much more easily. Sometimes when I read I feel like I do an extra layer of translation in my head, and when I have to do it for some parts but not for others I have to be more conscious of it.
There are a few other changes that stood out. One, there was a line early-on that made clear that a name was "probably a joke" because it was a play on a famous TV character (whereas in the old translation, it just said that it must be a joke or pseudonym, but didn't explain why, leaving me wondering why that was). Thumbs up for that one. The other one was that a few of the names of institutions changed. The Army is now referred to as the "Nonaggressive Forces." The first time I read this, I loved it, echoing back to Japanese's real Self-Defense Forces. Every subsequent time I liked it less and less, because there were times where it really seemed to be less awkward to say "Army" (even if Army was shorthand for Nonaggressive Ground Forces, as they referred to Nonaggressive Naval Forces). Similarly, what was "Charity House" in the original is now "House of Love and Mercy" and... I really preferred the original, which made it immediately clear what it was. Maybe if they'd used the full name sparingly and referred to it informally the rest of the time, it would have worked better for me. Otherwise, there may have been a few other things I noticed, but none stood out (and I'm sure some I was simply wrong about because I remembered the original incorrectly).
I think it's probably a good translation, but having read the original so many times, I'm used to it and even when something is an improvement a part of my brain identifies it as "subtly wrong."
As I write this, I now have two copies of the book, and I'll probably give one away. And, I think the one I give away will be Battle Royale Remastered, the new translation. For all the reasons above (which likely won't bother a new reader nearly so much), and, for one more. The cover. While I try not to judge a book by the cover too much, I will judge the covers and, where there are choices... I want the best cover. And honestly, I don't know what they were thinking with this cover. Gaudy and cartoonish images of a bloody fight between students, Remastered's cover is not nearly as appealing as the simple minimalist silhouette of two students (with the space between the students forming the shape of a gun). That was brilliant, subtle, and one of the things that convinced me to give it a try (so I guess I was judging a book on its cover, a little). I am so, so disappointed that they changed it.
There is an interview with the author that adds some extra value to those who've read another version, but it's not enough for me to change my mind.
Started (or finished but haven't yet reviewed): Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis C. Chen (received for free from a giveaway), The Future Is Japanese (short story collection), The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North, The Forbidden Library by Django Wexler (received for free from a giveaway)
