dukedom_enough in the twenty-first century

This is a title I should have used in 2000 or 2001, except that we didn't have LT and Club Read then. I am old enough for the 21st Century to have seemed very distant for much of my life - I'd be turning fifty in that decade! How impossibly far away that seemed.

This year I'll try to be better about commenting on short stories when I read them, so you can see more-frequent updates.

Books completed in 2010:
Lark Rise by Flora Thompson
Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente
The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts
Wireless by Charles Stross
Kraken by China Mieville
Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy by Dean Baker
Zendegi by Greg Egan
What I Didn't See by Karen Joy Fowler
Viator Plus by Lucius Shepard
Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

And first up for a short story: "The Very Slow Time Machine" by Ian Watson. I reread this to check that it was what an LTer was seeking over on Name That Book. I had forgotten what a terrific writer Watson is. From 1979, a version of the "Benjamin Button" story. A capsule appears from nowhere, containing a passenger who experiences time in reverse, getting one year younger for every year that passes outside.

>2 dukedom_enough: is that what you were doing across the room? :-)

Oh, hey, I just very recently read The Very Slow Time Machine, which obviously includes the title story. I had remembered reading that story ages and ages ago and the premise really stuck in my head as a memorable, fantastic idea. On re-read, I still felt that way about the premise, but had much more mixed feelings about the oddly mystical ending. After reading the entire story collection, I've came to the conclusion that that's my impression of Watson's writing in general. It's an interesting combination of the brilliant and the "Uh... what?" Come to think of it, that's also how I felt about God's World, the one novel of his that I've read. I honestly can't decide at this point whether I want to read more of his stuff or not.

"...England's green and pleasant land." Not lately, apparently. Hope everyone there is keeping warm!

bragan@4,

Interesting observation. I wonder whether Watson isn't less well known, given how well he can write and imagine, than any other SF writer of his ability.

>5 dukedom_enough: Hello from snowy England! That's an amazing picture isn't it? I wonder when the last time was that it looked like that. I always think its funny in films set in the U.K. that there is invariably some snowy Christmas scene with people going about their day-to-day Christmas tasks and treating it as a normal occurence, whereas the reality is that it hardly ever snows at all in the south-east of England. If it does then the place more or less grinds to a halt and nobody talks about anything other than the fact that it is snowing.

Well, I hope you don't have to become accustomed to the problem.

My review of Gwyneth Jones's Grazing the Long Acre, which I read in 2009, is now on Issue 3 of Belletrista.

Lark Rise by Flora Thompson.

Lark Rise is the first book of a trilogy, Flora Thompson's lightly fictionalized memoir of her early years in the 1880s and 1890s, growing up in a small hamlet in Oxfordshire, England. The author appears as "Laura" here and in the sequels, Over to Candleford and Candleford Green; the three books are usually collected as Lark Rise to Candleford.

"Lightly fictionalized:" the book has little plot. Mostly, it recounts the pattern of daily life in Lark Rise and its surroundings, as situated in history and a changing world. Interspersed with the data are vignettes, one or two pages each, of the residents Laura knew, capturing their characters well while illuminating the natural and social orders and their place in them. Thompson is very good with the sensual details of the landscape, plants, animals, and everyday activities, as best shown by an example:

Against the billowing gold of the fields the hedges stood dark, solid and dew-sleeked; dewdrops beaded the gossamer webs, and the children's feet left long, dark trails on the dewy turf. There were night scents of wheat-straw and flowers and moist earth on the air and the sky was fleeced with pink clouds.

For a few days or a week or a fortnight, the fields stood 'ripe unto harvest.' It was the one perfect period in the hamlet year. The human eye loves to rest upon wide expanses of pure color; the moors in the purple heyday of the heather, miles of green downland, and the sea when it lies calm and blue and boundless, all delight it; but to some none of these, lovely though they all are, can give the same satisfaction of spirit as acres upon acres of golden corn. There is both beauty and bread and the seeds of bread for future generations.

Commentary about the book often notes that she brings us a way of life that has vanished. In fact, she brings us several. Enclosure, by eliminating ancient rights to use of common lands, had reduced most of the villagers of Laura's parents' generation to relative poverty and dependence on limited wages for agricultural work. The landscape itself had been transformed, with crops replacing the earlier heather around Lark Rise. A younger generation was beginning to enjoy a bit of England's increasing prosperity. The books were published during the years of World War 2, and include numerous allusions to the years lying ahead of her heroine. Thompson's ability to frame the past and future in the present moment is superb; I cannot think of another book that does this so well.

This isn't the sort of book I normally read. As usual, there's an SF-connected reason why it has been on my TBR list for many years. John Crowley cites it as a source for his major fantasy novel of 1982, Little, Big, and uses a quote from it as the epigraph. I think what he took from Thompson was this sense of an apparently fixed way of life that in fact is rapidly passing.

I read this now because avaland and I have recently watched the first season of the BBC television series "Lark Rise to Candleford." The series is much more plot-driven than Thompson's book, turning her brief vignettes into hourlong episodes. As I watched, I found I was asking how this story could have supplied a source for Little, Big. I think the answer is that, while the series is a lovely evocation of rural English life, its producers needed more plot and less description than Thompson supplies, and concentrated on only a part, missing Thompson's particular sense of time passing. That's usual for media versions of books. Perhaps I will change my mind when I get to the second and third of the books, which move Laura closer to the age we see in the series.

And, without having been told in John Crowley's talks and Little, Big's epigraph, I would not have guessed that Thompson's book was relevant to his. Regardless, I'm pleased to have made Ms. Thompson's acquaintance, and look forward to reading the second and third books.

Review of the Democratic Party get-out-the-vote script of Monday evening, January 18, for the Jan 19, 2010 special election for the US Senate seat from Massachusetts.

This is more of a blog post than a review, but I am talking about a real document. Most of you know about the recent special election for Senator from Massachusetts, in which Republican Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley and took the seat that Ted Kennedy had held for decades. For a couple of nights just before the election, I volunteered at a phone bank in Lowell, MA, calling likely Democratic voters to urge them to get to the polls. We worked from a written script, but were free to improvise as needed. I saved the script from Monday night, and want to note something that bothers me about it.

I would hear a tone, and would then hear the voter answering his or her phone. That voter most likely had already received up to ten or more calls that day on the election, because the Coakley campaign knew that a large turnout of the Democratic Party base would be needed to win. Most of those were recorded messages, "robo-calls," from the likes of Bill Clinton, urging a vote for Coakley.

My script described Coakley's virtues and the opposition she faced, then had me ask if she could count on the voter's support. I just timed it; it takes me thirty seconds to read the full script, and my conversation with the voter would only start at the end of that time. Thirty seconds. That's an eternity when you're talking to someone who already has heard from your side multiple times. I'm not Bill Clinton. Any value my call could have lay in the fact that I was an ordinary voter, a Coakley volunteer who believed she was the right candidate; lay in a personal connection I might establish with the voter.

The author of the script wanted thirty seconds to pass before I could establish that connection, and left no point where I would explain my volunteer status. Most people getting such a call would have hung up long before that point.

I, and I think most of those around me, rewrote the script. I started by introducing myself as a volunteer for the Coakley campaign, noted that her election was imperiled, and asked for her support. That took about ten seconds, and it started with the personal connection; I at least got to have a conversation with a few of the voters.

This isn't even the only problem with the script, just the one I'm noting here. What was the unknown author of the script thinking? Can it really reflect expert thinking about how you approach voters? I find that very hard to believe. A better script would not have made a difference to the outcome; I'm citing it here as just one example, one I have direct experience with, of how badly this campaign was run.

Just finished Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest, and will be reviewing it soon.

"Larissa Miusov"

A short story in Lucius Shepard's new Viator Plus collection. I missed his reading of this at Readercon in 2007. A perfectly solid Shepard story whose eponymous character is a Russian emigre who seeks escape from a cushioned, unbearable existence. Shepard has written much better stories, though.

Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente

Think of a novel as an amalgam of its story, its ideas, its people, and the language in which it is told. Does a particular story demand a particular sort of language? Surely there's a lot of flexibility in choosing these elements.

Palimpsest is a fantastical city, sprawling over a vast territory, functioning on magic, eclectic in architecture, infested with clockwork insects, populated by humans and chimerae, where sentient, willful trains run through the subways. People from our world may visit, but only in our dreams, and only after a sexual encounter with someone who has already been there. That partner will have had a skin blemish somewhere on his or her body, an apparent tattoo, which is actually a map of a region of Palimpsest. In his or her next dream, the new initiate will be able to visit that region. He will awaken with a map tattoo on his own skin, indelible, giving access to a different neighborhood of the city to his subsequent partners. To explore new areas himself, he must find new partners.

We explore Palimpsest with several people, all quite peculiar even before venturing there, as they learn the city and, eventually, seek to emigrate to it permanently. Valente has a China Mieville-class imagination, and it's a joy to see her invent the people, creatures and places of the city. She tells the story, the wonders and horrors of Palimpsest, in a lush prose which verges at times on prose-poetry. Many - most - of the lushest passages work, advancing the story and giving the reader a glimpse of the marvellous:

Zarzaparrilla Street is paved with old coats. Layer after layer of fine corduroy and felt and wool the colors of coffee and ink. Those having business here must navigate with pole and gondola, ever so gently thrusting aside the sleeves and lapels and weedy ties, fluttering like seaweed, lurching as though some unlunar tide compelled them. The gondolas are rimmed in balsom and velvet, and they are silent through the depthless street. Great curving pairs of scissors are provided in case of sudden disaster, tucked neatly beneath the pilot's seat.

Then again, at least for me, many passages do not work. Oleg is a locksmith in our world, who collects locks of all sorts:

Keys did not really fascinate him, though he collected them as well, matching them carefully, not to the lock that was made for them, modern to modern, brass to brass, keycard to slot, as a common locksmith might, but to the ones he felt they yearned for, deep in their pressed metal hearts. ... Only Oleg had heard their cries for each other. Only Oleg knew their silent grief that they could not join.

The difficulty of poetry, and poetic prose, is that every word and phrase must be nearly perfect. Valente falls short in many places, including in many of the numerous sexual encounters that enable her protagonists' exploration of the city.

Does all this work? Did the author's idea require her language? Might a plainer style have been a better choice? Maybe, but then we would not have her successful flights either. On balance, I'm happy to go for a positive rating. Worth a try if you like innovative fantasy.

One wonders whether this is the author's style of writing generally or the language she has chosen to tell this particular story with (can we differentiate between language and voice?) I'm reminded of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus where the wonderful purple prose does indeed seem to be integral to telling this particular story. This might make an interesting general discussion if I can suss it out a bit....

Valente's story "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew", available free at Clarkesworld Magazine, is also in fairly ornate prose. Those two items are all the Valente I've read so far.

>14 dukedom_enough:/5 - the style of writing, and subject matter (to a certain extent), remind me of Tanith Lee (who was obviously heavily influenced by Angela Carter. I read Lee's Paradys books late last year (they were included in a course of fairy tales) and I ended up asking the same questions - Does all this work? Did the author's idea require her language? Might a plainer style have been a better choice?

I can why such a style is adopted, these are fundamentally heightened gothic stories infused with strong sexual tones. Since gothic is slightly ridiculous to begin with, once you heighten it you end with the danger of being completely ridiculous. It's a fine balancing line. (Not unlike 1970s prog rock).

>17 Jargoneer: I am also reminded of Oates' fabulous American gothic Mysteries of Winterthurn which was told in an elevated language - very skillfully done throughout, very much reflective of the story. Certainly in with regards to Oates, it is a style affected for this particular story.

Read "Far Future Calling" by Olaf Stapledon. Stapledon will be Memorial (i.e., deceased) guest of honor at Readercon this year, and I wanted to reread this. It's not a story, but a radio play, never performed and only published long after his death. Modern (1931) humans receive a vision of the far future from one of the Last Men (plus a Last Woman) - a sort of precis of Last and First Men. The impact of the novel comes from the sheer accumulation of detail; the relative shortness of the play is telling. A slight work, interesting mainly as a curiosity.

The Warlord of Pandora

Just saw James Cameron's film Avatar last weekend. Cameron's story of transformation to, and sympathy for, alien natives is far from new. People have been writing books like this -- planetary romances -- at least since John Carter headed off to Mars in 1912, on the way to saving a princess and becoming Warlord of Mars. That this movie is such a splendid version of the White Man Saves Interplanetary All stories I grew up on makes it that much more disappointing -- hasn't my beloved SF genre progressed at all in 98 years? I can't remember ever feeling this combination of simultaneous delight and disgust for a work.

Looking forward to your review of Yellow Blue Tibia since I heard you all the way upstairs laughing out loud many times.

>20 dukedom_enough: Clearly, we agree on the "delight and disgust".

>20 dukedom_enough: - the disgust for me was partially based on the fact that they had spent $300m on making the film and another $130m plus on marketing it. $430m for a film just seems excessive to me.

Have you seen the film of a Princess of Mars? It came out at roughly the same time as Avatar in the States - not out in the UK yet but has the look of a straight-to-dvd film to me.

Jargoneer@20,

I knew there was to be a Princess of Mars film but not that it had come out. I'd have spotted an ad or review. Bet they're kicking themselves for not waiting, making it a bit better, and cleaning up as "The Next Avatar."

As for the money spent: One can always point to this or that as money which would better be spent on something else, but this is an especially striking example. We at least see a result for all that money. I'm sure Hollywood is looking to the 3D aspect as their future - we may have big TVs, but not yet 3D TVs, have to go to a theater for that for a few years.

>23 dukedom_enough: - this is the website of the producers - Asylum - Princess of Mars. Note the tagline on the poster - The classic story that inspired James Cameron's Avatar.
There is a big budget bells-and-whistles version scheduled for 2012 release but that may never see the light of day.

Dejah Thoris is BLONDE?! And, apparently, played by Traci Lords?! This movie's status just dropped from "rent from Netflix" to "if I see it at a library sale for $1, maybe...".

Excuse me while I weep.

To cleanse the palette after that, I'll point to a post I've discovered, but not yet read, about the similarities to Burroughs.

Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts' latest novel superbly combines first-rate science fiction with laugh-aloud humor, both in the service of a story about the scars left on Russia by the twentieth century, and about a Big Picture of our place in the universe.

SF often skips over human concerns to bring us big ideas, like this: "If we succeed in establishing interplanetary communications, all our philosophies, moral and social views, will have to be revised." That's not Roberts, but V. I. Lenin, in the novel's epigraph. Lenin's grand ideas tended to leave out the individual; by contrast, Roberts' account of our place in the universe centers on the individual particulars of the life of his protagonist, fictional Russian SF writer Konstantin Skvorecky.

Immediately after World War II, Skvorecky and some fellow writers are conscripted by Stalin himself to brainstorm a fake account of a threat of alien invasion. It seems that communism always needs an external enemy, and Stalin thinks the capitalist world won't last long enough to supply a reliable one. The writers finish the job and are told never to speak of it again - advice they follow, happy still to be alive after encountering the great leader. Four decades later, in 1986, a weary, elderly Skvorecky learns that something like their scenario may actually be happening, as he is drawn into a fast-moving adventure.

I often think of humor as a sort of candy, pleasant but unserious. But a characteristic dry humor helped get the Russians through the horrendous history of the past century. English writer Roberts does a fine job emulating that wit here, in Skvorecky's encounters with various people involved with - well, whatever it is he has also become involved with. I cannot offer an example at any reasonable length, because the humor grows out of the situations Skvorecky lands in. The double meanings of humor, of puns, including interlingual puns, are the essence of Roberts' story, inextricably bound up with his SF Big Idea even as they embody Skvorecky's ordinary humanity and ironic sensibility. That SF idea is a fresh take on a common SF theme, one that needed new approaches, I think.

This novel is an example of the very best of modern science fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson has suggested that it should have won the 2009 Booker Prize. It is a fine novel of character, avoiding Roberts' occasional tendency to be emotionally chilly. Even the cover, using the standard trick of having cyrillic characters represent the latin characters they resemble ("ya" for a sort of backwards-R, for example) advances Roberts' purposes well. I am very pleased to have met Konstantin Skvorecky.

I have a review of Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Word for World is Forest" over on the "March is read a novella month."

I know you have read books since March 10th. Go ahead. Ask me how I know:-)

Have you been spying on me??

Well, it's so easy when you are on the other side of the bed.

Zendegi by Greg Egan

Many of us here at LT have LP records, left from our earlier years - vinyl disks with musical information encoded in the analog modulation of a spiral groove. When we try uploading them to fancy digital formats, we face many possibilities for losing the musical data therein. We must be careful or we can be left with an unacceptable copy, as Greg Egan's protagonist, journalist Martin Seymour, learns in the first chapter of Zendegi. A human being can be viewed as a sort of collection of data: personality, responses, memories. What might it take to upload a human mind into a computer, and how good a job might be good enough? What might an imperfect job imply, practically and ethically? Threatened by terminal disease, Martin must attack the problem urgently, hoping to leave something of himself in a popular virtual-reality gaming environment, with the goal of helping to continue raising his young son.

Egan here exchanges his usual cosmic themes for a careful focus on imagining aspects of how the dawn of uploading might go, and on the father-son relationship. He draws Martin and his son Javeed with more than his normal attention to character and emotion: a father's desperation at the oncoming orphaning of his six-year-old; a son's confusion and sadness in facing his father's mortality, coming immediately after the loss of his mother. Egan handles such personal themes less successfully, though, than in his earlier Teranesia and "Oceanic". He sets his story mainly in Iran in 2027, with an early section in 2012 showing a more successful version of the reform movement of 2009. The 2012 section is compelling, the best part of the book in a novelistic sense. The 2027 setting is somewhat generic, although a welcome visit to Ian McDonald's turf of near-future, non-Western settings. For Egan, the idea is always first. The excitement and interest stem from understanding what is happening in intellectual terms, of feeling the thrill when a scientific experiment returns a remarkable result, one that brings philosophical questions in its wake.

Egan's best novels - Permutation City, Distress, Teranesia - are among the most signficant, questioning sf novels we have. Zendegi is not in their class, but still fascinating and moving. Watch those recording levels.

Wow, now I'm torn... I hadn't heard of Zendegi, but the concept and the issues it deals with sound fascinating to me, and Egan has sometimes been really, really good at exploring such ideas. On the other hand, I found the last several books of his that I've read really unsatisfying... And Distress and Teranesia, rather than striking me as among Egan's best, failed to make much of an impression on me.

Hmm... To wishlist, or not to wishlist? I will have to ponder.

I, too, have been disappointed with the recent shorter fiction - and haven't tried the two recent novels, Schild's Ladder and Incandescence. He took several years off to work in politics - on the rights of imprisoned illegal immigrants to Australia. I had thought he'd lost something, or that his time might have passed somehow. But this one is better than those recent stories, at least.

I realize my liking for Teranesia is a bit eccentric. So what's your candidate for his best?

I haven't read Incandescence, but Schild's Ladder bored me to tears. Of his novels, the two I really, really liked were Permutation City and Quarantine. Which I think were also his earliest... not a particularly good sign. I have enjoyed some of his shorter stuff, though. I thought the collection Axiomatic was terrific, but I haven't read any of his short fiction since then.

Well, perhaps I will give Zendegi a chance. We'll see...

bragan,

Have you read Oceanic? It's a novella, 20,000 words. I think of it as the end of his good period.

I also loved the early novels. There's nothing else like Permutation City, which I think of as a philosophically radical story. I know of no other writer who has picked up on its ideas; maybe no one could?

I haven't read Oceanic, no. And I'm amazed that Egan himself made Permutation City work! I suppose it's not too surprising that no one else has...

I enjoyed Permutation City, Quarantine, Distress (at least the parts I understood!), and Teranesia but perhaps not well enough to bother to keep up with Egan when I moved away from most SF. Still, this one sounds intriguing.

Read What I Didn't See by Karen Joy Fowler, a collection. My review will appear in Belletrista in the next issue.

My review of What I Didn't See is now up at Belletrista:

The interesting point about most of the stories in Karen Joy Fowler's superb new collection is what doesn't matter in them. Most feature some element of the fantastic, which typically would be their point. But here, the fantastic element or idea is always less interesting than Fowler's character or milieu...

The rest here.

Just finished Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas. Fun enough, but not the equal of his Under My Roof. Cthulhu Mythos story - in the 1960s, R'lyeh rises, all the world's squares turn into monsters ruled by The Tentacled One, and only the hipsters remain unchanged and see what's happening. Jack Kerouac undertakes a cross country run from LA to NYC, with the aid of Allen, Bill, and of course Neal to fight the horror. Written in an imitation of Kerouac's style, but not nearly as clever as Under My Roof.

i've just about finished Zendegi and have enjoyed its intimate scale a good deal. It's defn. very techie but within the very circumscribed and very well defined realm of trying to define a portion of what might become AI in operational terms rather than as a "given." I like the focus on the key players too - "family/friends SF."

Glad you're liking it. Egan is uneven, I know, and can get a bit tedious, but his best work is worth a few disappointments, for me.

I've been reading more than reviewing, so following is a late review.

Lucius Shepard specializes in dark fantasy at novelette and novella length, having produced only a couple of novels over a career in which he has written numerous collections' worth of shorter work. He's always worth reading, but of course quality varies, from the merely good to the extraordinary.

Viator Plus comprises a number of ordinary (for Shepard) shorter pieces, plus an excellent but unusual short novel. Of the shorter ones, "Chinandega" is the best. A young man travels to a backwoods town in search of his missing sister, and encounters Shepard's usual sinister presences, and a vision of the world's essential corruption.

Two stories, originally published under the pseudonym "Sally Carteret," feature the first-person story of rock singer Julie Banks. Shepard often features sympathetic women, but his viewpoint characters are normally men, with the women's interior lives not visible except via word or action. On the evidence of these stories, this choice is best for him; Julie is very masculine in her outlook.

The real reason to read this book is the short novel, Viator, which is a greatly expanded version of the 2005 short novel of that name. Shepard has said that he was depressed while writing that earlier version -- which I haven't read.

The new Viator is a departure for this author. Not so much in theme and imagery, which are usual for him: a socially and economically marginal man is thrown together with men like himself, in a marginal place, and begins to encounter phenomena outside his - or anyone's - experience. Viator is a seagoing freighter which was beached in Alaska years ago. It is now home to several men, hired for obscure purposes, asked to perform investigations with unclear purpose. The freighter's surroundings are improbably tropical for Alaska, and the sounds and sights of otherworldly creatures and places become progressively more apparent as the men's behaviors and obsessions become ever stranger.

Contrasted to this scene is the nearby, quite mundane Alaskan town which Shepard's protagonist visits, and where he begins a romance with the wary owner of the general store. The greater than usual length here allows the author to round out their story more completely than he usually does. Their relationship is appealing and convincing as each dares to hope for more than life has brought before.

Shepard's style here is different from any story of his I have encountered before. He uses many extremely long, complex sentences - often half a page long. Shepard's no Hemingway in any case, but he's never written like this. Example:

He had felt only intermittently connected with her during the call, sparks and flickers, the sputtering of a faulty connection, but after switching off the phone, he felt that a protective envelope had dissolved, the cold rushing in to fill the vacuum, and he shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, gripping the rail at the very peak of the bow (was there a word for that precise spot, the last firm footing behind the prow, some Latinate term, the perigolum, the spitaline, or maybe a vulgar British naval term dating from the days of the lash?) amid the spicy smell of the firs, peering off into the night, unable to make out a trunk, a bough, a fern, and then seeing shapes melt up from the darkness, amoeboid blotches of a shinier black than the air, shiny like patches of worn velvet, drifting and jittering across his field of vision, a whole zoo of them slipping about, and he thought that here in the forward position, at the edge of Viator, aloft from the world, he should have a perfect angle on things, a true perspective in every direction, even inward, unless such an angle was impossible and no matter what promontory you scaled, hoping to penetrate the incidental distractions that blinded you to your life, to understand its central circumstance, you discovered that you had no central circumstance, no fundamental issue, no rational compass by which to steer -- it was all a distraction, all a flowing (according to Heraclitus, at least), a flux impossible to navigate, and you were borne along on unknowable currents and tides until you, the mad captain of your soul, ran yourself aground on the reef of a heap of white powder, a homeless shelter, an abandoned ship, an abandoned relationship...and sometimes that tactic worked out for the best, as it may have for Lunde, as it might have for Wilander if he'd had the good sense to strand himself on the shoal of the trading post and cultivate the illusion of a central circumstance with Arlene.

If you weren't keeping score, that was a single sentence. Does this work? For me, at least, it neither adds nor detracts from a fine Shepard story. I don't place it among his very best, e.g. "Surrender," "No Mans Land," "Skull City" or A Handbook of American Prayer. However, four stars for the book, based on this short novel.

Amusing: a pointer to a flash fiction in the form of a product review at Amazon. "DO NOT USE THE CABLES!"

Be sure to go on to the other reviews at Amazon, some of which are even funnier than the one the Nielsen Haydens highlight.

Just finished The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. Writing a review is going to be a bit of a chore - very complicated book. I liked it, but anything that gets five whole paragraphs from bluetyson is, as you might expect, a bit out of the ordinary.

You've peaked my interest in the Shephard material. Are there any collections that you know of that have some of that extraordinary material you mentioned there in the end?

Unfortunately, when you don't write novels, you become pretty good at maximizing the revenue from your collections. Also, collections tend not to get published in mass-market editions. So it'll cost - a general problem with horror/dark fantasy writers, I think.

I'll look at my books and see. Meanwhile, I see Abe Books has some inexpensive copies of A Handbook of American Prayer, the novel I mentioned, and of Eternity and Other Stories, which is a better collection than Viator Plus. Also there: his first collection, The Jaguar Hunter and vampire novel The Golden, both of which were good.

Hmm, I see from ISFDB that Subterranean has "Skull City" in a collection from 2008 that I somehow missed...

I think we have an extra (ex-lib) copy of A Handbook of American Prayer around the house, don't we Dukedom? (rescued from a library sale where I couldn't bear the thought of leaving it languishing on the table). Providing I can find it and you are interested, stretch, we'll send it you. I think it's not his usual dark fantasy stuff though (Dukedom?).

stretch@47,

My favorites are scattered throughout Shepard's collections; however, I tend not to go for the ones he wins awards for, so you could also look into those.

Barnacle Bill the Spacer's title story won a Hugo; it also has boxing story "The Beast of the Heartland," which Michael Swanwick goes into transports about (Shepard was a boxer for a while when young.)

Eternity and Other Stories has "Crocodile Rock," International Horror Guild Award winner, plus "A Walk in the Garden," which I put in the class of the stories I named above.

His second collection, The Ends of the Earth, is probably his best overall, with "No Man's Land," "Surrender," and Nebula award nominee "The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter." However, copies may be hard to find.

And we do have that extra copy of A Handbook of American Prayer; comment me or avaland a mailing address if you're interested.

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

Jean is an exceptionally good thief. At the beginning of The Quantum Thief, he is rescued from a particularly nasty prison by someone who needs his skills. Isidore is an amateur detective, whom we meet as he solves a case. Of course, this novel will bring these two together, in a complex plot, made more complex by Jean’s partial amnesia.

However, The Quantum Thief is not only a mystery, but science fiction, set in a post-Singularity solar system. Human minds run as software on artificial substrates, possibly as many simultaneous copies, wearing bodies varied in shape and capability. Minds far beyond human intelligence exist. Humanity has splintered into subcultures that might as well be different species; one subculture runs what amount to LAN parties as religious rituals. Jean’s prison is virtual, confronting many copies of himself and other prisoners with an endless round of prisoner’s dilemma games, which always eventually end in death for the losing copies. Minds enslaved to carry out work are called gogols, dead souls, whose plight is feared and, in some places, forbidden, so that other means to do the work must be found.

The novel is a mystery, dense with clues, revelations and double-crosses, where what Jean’s rescuer wants him to steal is a larger mystery to them both than how; the story is largely Jean’s rediscovery of his earlier life. That life, and most of the plot, are set on an attractive, partly terraformed Mars, a relative backwater in the solar system, where gogol slavery has been replaced by periodic stretches of community service by minds who are free the rest of the time. Time away from such service is the Martian currency. Society is mediated by a software network called gevolut, which gives citizens fine, almost fractal control over who has access to information about themselves, in what contexts and for how long. Gevulot is like Facebook would be, had it been designed by some guardian angel of privacy, but universal and ubiquitous. It is this system that Isidore must negotiate, in his first chapters, in order to catch a - well, not killer, exactly, because the victim can be revived, after a fashion. The workings of Mars and gevulot were the most interesting parts of the book for me. Rajaniemi seems very up to date on speculations about mind uploading, online privacy, and the singularity.

By contrast, he is weaker on physical science, with much of the exposition on such subjects feeling as though he were asking the reader “do you want quantum sauce on that?” Other flaws include using standard SF tropes without definition, e.g. “utility fog” - routine for me, but a reader unused to SF would find the going very rocky. I’m not sure all the many moving parts of the plot really fit together. Revelations about Rajaniemi’s solar system are held until late in the book, often for no real plot purpose, making reading the book harder than it needed to be.

This is Rajaniemi’s first novel, and has received a great deal of hype. The Charles Stross blurbs on the cover compare him to Greg Egan, Alastair Reynolds and Ted Chiang. I disagree in the Egan case - he’s not that interesting on physics and philosophy, Egan’s specialties, and I also disagree in the Chiang case - he’s not nearly Chiang’s equal as a writer. Reynolds - perhaps; I haven’t read that much Reynolds. Most mysteries are not to my taste, and I found the book overly busy. Rananiemi comes up with a great many clever ideas, many more than I’ve noted here, but except for the intriguing gevulot material, these ideas felt to me as though nothing but cleverness was really at stake - unlike Stross or Bruce Sterling, for example, where cleverness serves an original, interesting take on the world. The book’s story has a real ending, but with a coda promising further adventures, so perhaps the second and third books of the promised trilogy will take us further into the more cosmopolitan parts of the author’s solar system, and fulfill the great promise of this fine debut.

Hmm, The Quantum Thief looks intriguing. Actually, it looks like the sort of thing that I'd probably either really love, or find kind of annoying. In particular, this...

Other flaws include using standard SF tropes without definition, e.g. “utility fog”

...reminds me why I didn't care much for Stross' Accelerando. If you were already familiar with the ideas and the lingo, there wasn't really much in it that would be new and exciting to you, and if you weren't, it would probably just be incomprehensible.

Still, it sounds work checking out. On to the wishlist it goes!

>50 dukedom_enough:. Thanks so much for those suggestions. I'll def. be on the lookout for some of those collections in used bookstores.

Also, The Quantum Thief will be add to my wishlist as well.

Definition of a dead language: one that lacks a Quest Visual translation pack.

(That guy Otavio is suspiciously good-looking for a coder...)

shhhh! don't tell anyone I'm here. I've been over to CR 2011 and am totally overwhelmed. I thought I'd hide here and curl up in a fetal position on the couch over there for a few weeks until things simmer down a bit... Now, where's my thumb and blankie....

>55 avaland: I think I'm gonna join you!

>51 dukedom_enough:, hmmm, I can't decide whether or not to add this to my wishlist. It sounds interesting but your misgivings make me think it might be one to pass up.

>55 avaland:, 56, Hey ladies, no hiding! I found you here!

>55 avaland:, 57 drat! we've been discovered.

You think this is bad; 75-books-2011 pretty clearly has more messages this week than all other groups put together. Club read is only number 5 or 6.

Actually, we "only" have 87 members so far, versus 137 in 2010 and 127 in 2009. I think everyone is just abnormally chatty at the beginning of the year, setting up new threads, etc.

I'm still hiding. My husband has a big closet where I could live quite well for a short time (and his is not near so full as mine). I'll sneak out and post during meal-times.

59 - Hey, we're 3rd now!

It's the early-January rush; I predict posting will slow in a couple of weeks.

We're now the second most active group in terms of posts this week. I don't think we can ever catch up to the 75 Books in 2011 group - thank god - but it cracks me up that the group is so busy right now. Obviously everyone is chatting, rather than reading. :)

True.

Writer Carol Emshwiller is being celebrated. Belletrista has recently republished a story of hers.