Trading in Danger – Elizabeth Moon

Leave a comment August 1, 2015 nicklavitz

There are two principal ways in which this book (and those that follow, one would presume), is particularly strong.

The first, and more subtle, is the credibility of descriptions of military behaviour and composure under pressure. I hadn’t entirely understood why certain aspects of the heroine’s behaviour seemed so believably military-cadet-like until I learned that Elizabeth Moon has a military background herself.

The second particular strength is the nature of the world that’s being described as a backdrop to the story. With a far-flung empire and obligatory travel time measured in weeks and months rather than days, a kind of rule-by-consensus evolves. The distance and time involved in travelling from one point to another maintains and enhances the importance of shipping and transport while diluting the ability of any central authority to exercise control or to enforce a particular set of rules. Finally, it gives disproportionate power to anyone capable of bridging those distances with either information or matter, and those who have that sort of power have a strong incentive to hang on to their monopoly of it.

So it is that Kylara Vatta, after being thrown out of a military academy for rather spurious reasons, finds herself earning her way back into her family’s graces (and being conveniently moved away from the epicentre of the scandal she’s created by getting thrown out of the academy) by captaining a ship that’s due for salvaging at a location a few months travel from home.

Her genetic heritage – a desire to make the best of every situation and a constant search for trade and profit – manifests halfway through the journey as she spies an opportunity for some lucrative work if she makes a small detour. From there things slide downhill fast as she finds herself inadvertently embroiled in a complex fight between unknown but very powerful organizations, while still piloting nothing more than her ready-for-the-scrapheap outdated trading vessel.

Some weaknesses in the narrative comes in counterpoint to its strengths. While the military background of those characters that deserve one is impeccable, the character descriptions fall a little flat when we look at the civilian and emotional aspects. Specific character traits are explained, demonstrated, explained again, analysed in excruciating detail through italicized internal monologues, and then analysed and examined some more a few paragraphs later because we may not have gotten the message the first time. Ky’s affinity for combat, her complexes regarding the way she’s perceived by her family (too nice to strays), her dilemma about getting involved or becoming independent of her family – it is all over-explained, it comes back too often, and it moves forward too slowly to merit the many lines of text dedicated to the subject.

In terms of the very interesting concept that law and order become fungible and difficult to enforce over the vast distances of space, the idea is great, but disappointingly under-utilized. We spend more time worrying about whether we can trust the people in the ship, or whether Kylara can get over her first love affair, than examining the concept of how society and those who wish to further it struggle to protect against those who would take advantage of the relative lawlessness of space. We get aspects of this – the existence of militias and mercenaries in particular – and the genesis of the story more or less depends on the premise, but it’s rarely dealt with head-on in the text.

That said, despite being very linear and having some character balance issues (Kylara is the only properly developed character in this first book), the story works both as a by-the-numbers space thriller, executing a simple plot well, and as a coming of age story for a young heroine who discovers her strengths as she exercises them. For a young adult crowd, an excellent demonstration that science fiction can be fertile soil on which to grow adventure stories.

I enjoyed the book very much, even if I don’t think it’ll be winning any literature prizes.

Rule 34 – Charles Stross

Leave a comment July 30, 2015 nicklavitz

So I’m less than one paragraph, not even a full line into Rule 34 and I read, “…and you’re coming to the end of your shift on the West End control desk”. I bite down on a sudden surge of frustration that threatens to overwhelm me.

The thing I disliked the most about the previous book by Charles Stross, Halting State, was the use of the second person perspective. “You’re” is the seventh word in this novel. A quick scan of the rest of the book seems to indicate the entire thing is written from my own point of view. I lose a fraction of a millimetre of enamel as my molars grind against each other in an involuntary expression of irritation, then I wrestle control of those muscles back from my subconscious.

I unclench. This is Stross’s second book in this universe, maybe he got better at using the second person and somehow it’s going to feel a little less like someone’s scratching the surface of my brain and then smearing tabasco on it.

What is Rule 34, anyway? Is there a rule 33? Turns out that Rule 34 is an internet meme, so we’re going to need to know what one of those is too. Rule 34, or the 34th rule of the internet, states that pornography or sexually-related material exists for every conceivable content, somewhere. In Stross’s universe, the Rule 34 police unit trawls and monitors the most disgusting things on the internet in an attempt to police the overspill of the aforementioned imaginative horrors into the real world.

Given that the world itself seems replete with filth of every conceivable kind, the unit is somewhat overtaxed, all the more so since it’s considered a not-very-good-place to be assigned, so it’s long on deliverables and short on talent.

The local police force (because we’re in Edinburgh, in an independent Scotland), is suddenly dealing with a very twisted and somewhat revolting death caused – it would seem – by foul dealings of a very technologically sophisticated kind, and this death turns out to be the small and phallically-protruding tip of an iceberg of mammoth proportions.

By the time I’ve understood all this, my subconscious has more or less made peace with the second person perspective, but every time I put the book down and pick it up again, the shock of (self?) recognition causes my sense of style to grumble indignantly and I’m running the risk of a premature enamel shortage.

I find the book hard going. The Scottish dialect is deliberately kicking the glass house of story immersion and reminding me I’m turning the (virtual) pages of a (digital) book. As cracks appear in my acceptance of Stross’s reality, only a lifetime of polite upbringing prevents me from cursing the author by name for his love affair with phonetic spellings of accents that hail from beyond Hadrian’s wall. Nevertheless, I soldier on.

Somehow, two thirds of the way through the book, I find that I am closer to the end than I thought, and that I am anticipating the dénouement. A short period of life spent in Glasgow many years ago perhaps makes the style more approachable for me than some, and the interaction between new technology and the people in Stross’s universe is, after all, very well thought through. Oh God, am I actually enjoying this now?

I’m almost bitter that I’ve been tricked into liking a book written in the second person (actually a great variety of second persons that get quite confusing at times, you might want to dial it down a bit next time). I’m also, to my immense distaste, accepting the fact that some of the characters would have been impossible to understand had we not been put into their heads (thankfully with some editing-out of the more repulsive thoughts). Therefore the use of the second person does – am I actually agreeing with this? – serve a real purpose here.

The final page flickers briefly across my eReader as I swipe from right to left and I’m presented with a list of other books by Charles Stross. What? That’s how it ends? Also: steady on, I’ve bought two of his books already, one thing at a time. But here’s the thing: while I had a hard time with it to start, and it clearly required more effort than many books to get into, against all expectations, I actually enjoyed this. Despite some story elements that are – to say the least – quite disturbing.

The story doesn’t end so much as fall off the edge of a cliff, with a deus-ex-machina-esque wrap-up that’s almost as sudden and unexplained as Don Juan taking the statue’s hand for a one-way trip to hell. I realise I’m not sure what the motivation of some of the characters really is, or that I have fully understood what happened, or even if I have enough information to attempt a full understanding.

But this doesn’t matter, because the story was actually less important than the people who inhabit it. The mystery we’re following is too convoluted to lend itself to a casual understanding, and too much is left unexplained (especially to a financially-trained person) for it to hang together nicely, but by the end, I was in it for the scenery, I wanted to know what happened to the characters, and I was just enjoying the descriptions of how the technology changes our interactions with the world around us, and with each other.

The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell

Leave a comment July 21, 2015 nicklavitz

The Bone Clocks is David Mitchell’s latest work of almost-but-not-quite fantasy. Nobody wraps elements of the fantastic into the setting of modern life as seamlessly as Mitchell does. So much so that if the person sitting next to me on the plane in a few weeks announces that they’re an atemporal, one of the immortals from The Bone Clocks, I might not even be surprised.

A Bone Clock is a normal human being, counting down the years to their death. But in Mitchell’s world, there are a few individuals who are something more. Referred to as atemporals, these people come back when they die (in the case of Horologists), or they hold off the effects of the passage of time by consuming the souls of other rare psychoactive individuals (in the case of Anchorites). Horologists do not choose to be what they are, and find the existence of Anchorites, who prolong their lives at the expense of others, unacceptable. Hence: War.

A war carried out in hiding, among a very few individuals. A war that feels important because we see it up close, but is actually dwarfed in its effects on the world at large by the evolution of global politics and the climate over the novel’s span. The story is told within the lifetime and, in two of the six parts, from the point of view of Holly Sykes, an intelligent 15-year-old when we first meet her, who elopes after an argument with her mother, only to discover that her boyfriend is cheating on her, causing her to elope farther than she at first wanted to.

During her journey away from home, Holly will come into contact with the conflict between Anchorites and Horologists, and will become a piece on the chessboard of their war. This is due to more than just coincidence, and involves her own gifts as well as her brother’s. Much of what happens will only be understandable with hindsight from later on in the novel, because just when it feels as though we’re getting enough information to make sense of it all, the scene changes. Mitchell does what he does best, and we find ourselves following a different story in a different place, from the point of view of a different person, whose narrative will inevitably cross Holly Sykes’s at some point.

Mitchell pulls off point-of-view changes masterfully, leaving important unanswered questions hanging for quite some time as our attention is drawn to other events that affect another character’s life. He adroitly nuances right and wrong in the minds of young protagonists, setting them on trajectories in a way that presages much more pronounced moral positions at later points in their lives, when we meet them again, but keeps both his protagonists and antagonists human, because having seen the world through their eyes, we know they are not cut from cloth of a single colour.

The tapestry is woven with care and with a strong sense of how much ambiguity the reader can cope with before he is overwhelmed by open questions. Nevertheless, this is a book that requires your attention, and a failure of attention will be paid for in confusion as things are revealed later on. A serious book, you might call it.

Relevant subplots are thick on the ground, from the resentment between a writer and the reviewer who trashed his book in public to the origin stories of some of the atemporals in the Russia of several hundred years ago. Mitchell has given himself (as he did in Cloud Atlas), a story mechanic that gives him licence to visit any time in history and weave his story in the context of his choosing, and he uses his superpower to great effect.

Mitchell avoids holistic denouements. At no point do we feel that a subplot or story thread is completely “wrapped up”. True to reality, stories continue until their motivating protagonists die, or move on to other endeavours. Conclusions are messy compromises that don’t entirely satisfy our desire to see evil punished and good rewarded. Nevertheless, an undercurrent of individuals getting their just desserts does more or less permeate the novel, even if our heroes end up having less than idyllic lives and some of our antagonists deserve far more than they eventually get. Perhaps it is this very softness in the telling of the end of the story that made me put the book down feeling sorry that it had ended. There had been no major battle, the victors were not standing on the corpses of their fallen foes, and yet the story was finished, insofar as the threads that we were given at the beginning were concerned. It wasn’t so much anticlimactic as just more believable.

Will this win the World Fantasy Awards? I have no idea. I think it perhaps unlikely, because I’m not sure this is what fantasy readers are necessarily looking for. I think this could win some mainstream awards despite the strong thread of speculative fiction that runs through the entire novel. I might get shot for saying this, but I think this is a level of literature above what most fantasy books seek to achieve. Unsurprising perhaps, this is after all the novelist who gave us Cloud Atlas, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the Nebula, Locus and Arthur C. Clark awards for best novel, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Few people will say that The Bone Clocks was not a very good book, but there are a lot of voters out there who prefer Gandalf to Holly Sykes.

To be clear, I think this book is spectacular, but hard to compare to other works of “fantasy”, as it if doesn’t wholly belong in the genre. I enjoyed it in a different way to how I enjoy most of my fantasy and science fiction. It provokes reflection on the motivations of characters and the interactions these motivations engender in a far more complex way than the more two-dimensional individuals who populate many of my favourite novels. It also, however, lacks many of the whiz-bang special effects that I quite enjoy in these genres, or the resounding conclusion that’s timed to coincide with the crescendo of the accompanying musical score. Perhaps not for all audiences then.

That said, in the hands of a good screenwriter, with a few liberties taken with the pacing and the story, this could make one hell of a movie. Someone call Christopher Nolan! I’d pay good money to watch that.

City of Stairs – Robert Jackson Bennett

Leave a comment July 15, 2015 nicklavitz

A grand novel by Robert Jackson Bennett, brought to my attention through its nomination for a World Fantasy Award, City of Stairs is many things. It is a spy thriller. It is the concluding tome in an Epic never written. It is a fantasy novel that plays with the genre the way a cat plays with the loose thread on your favourite sweater.

The Epic landscaping involves two cities, Bulikov and Ghaladesh. The former used to be the seat of the world, built and maintained by six Divinities of varying persuasions, and the capital city of the Continent. The latter is the capital of Saypur, across the South Seas, a country that spend most of its history under the Continent’s thumb, before it’s hero, The Kaj, invented weapons capable of laying low the Divinities themselves, and at the moment of their destruction, all that they had wrought ceased to be.

That moment, known as the Blink, savaged the Continent, knocking it abruptly backward in its development and into a state of chaos. Saypur led a peaceful invasion in the wake of this short war, bringing a semblance of order to the Continent, and creating in the process a deeply-felt resentment in the majority of the population.

Into this morass walks a Foreign Ministry agent, a sort of spy, if you will, from Saypur, called Shara. She is going to Bulikov, or what is left of the once-great city, to investigate the murder of someone dear to her. This now-dead person used to be a professor who was researching the history of the Continent and its Divinities. This is something that only citizens of Saypur can do, since any mention of Divinities, and any symbol that might refer to them, is outlawed on the Continent according to the Worldly Regulations.

What follows is a fantastic tale of gradually fading magic dating back to the time of the Divinities some 70 years ago. A multitude of objects maintain some semblance of their former power, remain miraculous. Some spells, referred to again as miracles, still seem to work despite the disappearance of the Divinities. In a manner that students of real modern history will recognise, the citizens of Bulikov and the Continent are deeply resentful of not only the occupying presence of their conquerors, but also the deliberate repression of their belief system and the humiliation, both real and imagined, imposed upon them by the victors. There simmers a reservoir of rebellion, and unhealthy things are afoot.

City of Stairs is first and foremost an exercise in world-building. The system of magic and nature of the Divinities is unique, interesting, and provides plenty of opportunity for plot twists as the underlying fabric of this world is revealed to us.

The political backdrop is also quite fully formed, with detail painted in where necessary (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example), and provides for a rich reservoir of nationalistic resentment that ably drives the story forward, motivating many of the main actors.

The detective story, spy novel and political intrigue are perhaps all too closely tied together, as we grow to realise that these are not different threads, but part of the same picture, and the characters we are following are not random heroes, but predictable heroes, once we learn of their own origin stories. I found this part of the book a little too convenient. I read another review that compared one character to Aragorn, but that is too generous – Aragorn, in the Lord of the Rings, had a self-determined reason to be exactly where he was, whereas Sigrud is there by virtue of coincidence. It’s all a little too neat for me.

The only other criticism I have is that I found some of the miracles worked by the Divinities a little trite. If there is magic in the world, and we give the name “Divinity” to the one who created this or that particular miracle, I feel that the miracle in question ought to be more meaningful than a cantrip that allows one to sneak into a monastery for a quick shag. Maybe that’s just me…

I found the story extremely entertaining, the world is fascinating and the concept of a civilization recovering from the loss of its very active and supportive Divinities is very original. I also feel that a lot of what needs to happen for this world to come to any sort of equilibrium has yet to happen, and so there is lots of scope for further books in this universe. I’m usually not a fan of serial novels set in the same universe because it all too often seems driven by a combination of commercial interests and a lack of new ideas, but I could certainly stand to read another novel set in this world, so it’s perhaps a good thing that another one is gestating as we speak (and a third in the planning stages).

I happily recommend this novel to readers of fantasy looking for new ideas to nourish their imaginations that go beyond finding another word for “goblin” or a new take on elvish culture, and I fully understand how it came to be nominated for the World Fantasy Awards.

Seveneves – Neal Stephenson

July 13, 2015 nicklavitz

In Seveneves, Neal Stephenson goes one-up on all the other apocalyptic disaster stories out there with a narrative that begins with the explosion of the moon, and follows this up with the natural consequence of such a catastrophe – an extinction-level event that almost puts an end to the human race some two years after the opening scene.

On his website, Stephenson attributes the inspiration of this narrative to a discussion he was having about the space debris problem, whereby a collision in orbit could lead to a chain reaction that results in a cloud of obstacles basically shutting off access to space. This is known as the Kessler Syndrome after a NASA scientist who first put forward the theory in 1978.

The human race quickly comes to understand that the continuous collision of moon fragments will create a white sky, as the entire atmosphere becomes saturated with moon fragments, and that this will quickly by followed by the hard rain, a several-thousand-year long ongoing rain of moon fragments that superheat the atmosphere as they fall to earth and comprehensively reshape the surface, destroying everything and killing everyone.

The first half of the book follows the adventures of the rapidly growing crew of the international space station, as well as the efforts of a proactive and determined entrepreneur, who all struggle to prepare in time for the beginning of a long exodus from Earth. The chosen few representatives of the human race are going to have to survive away from the surface for several thousand years if the human race is to survive at all.

Stephenson explains it all through the eyes of the professionals in orbit, explaining in great detail the constraints, challenges and obstacles the astronauts face, and the difficulty of creating solutions in an environment where resources are scarce and every mistake has disproportionate consequences. Eventually, politics and human conflict inevitably get involved, further complicating survival in an environment where the slightest error inevitably leads to loss of life. This results in the human race eventually reduced to seven women – the titular Seven Eves, parents of the future human race.

The second half of the book starts five thousand years later, as the planet is finally being reseeded in advance of recolonisation. We find a society deeply influenced by its starting point – seven distinct peoples more or less cohabiting in orbit, three billion people overall, the custodians of the largest engineering project ever imagined – the re-terraforming of old earth to bring it back to life.

Here the narrative continues with carefully wrought descriptions of incredible technologies, most of which are designed to orbit or de-orbit objects reliably and in as short an amount of time as possible. Much of what we discover is influenced and inspired by the ad-hoc solutions found by the original Eves and their compatriots in the space station, five thousand years ago. A history that is now known as the Epic, a hugely influential origin story which is replayed on screens everywhere as the video footage has survived the intervening centuries.

We enter now into the world of emergent politics and jockeying for the best position during the next stage of civilisation – the return to the surface of the Earth, but we see it from a distance as our main actors are no longer the movers and shakers but rather a small group of people caught in the political crosswinds.

Stephenson points out the many ways in which politics troubles the waters during the latest phase of what is – if you take a step back from it all – a triumphant story of survival and regenesis. The focus on the difficulties of the present moment, even though the chosen moment is clearly critical in the future of the human race, draws attention away from the overall success story – a civilisation capable through ingenuity, planning and patience, of bringing life back to its ancient world after a calamity of cosmic proportions.

This second part to the book lacks the immediacy of what precedes it. In some ways, it matters little who wins a war of politics when the race has survived thanks to the heroics of a small clutch of individuals five thousand years ago, and the trials and travails of these new characters matter only insofar as we are placed in their position and live the events through their eyes.

Perhaps Stephenson felt (rightly) that he couldn’t finish the story at the inflection point when the seven find themselves finally safe from space debris and cosmic rays, and can start rebuilding rather than merely surviving. Unfortunately, the initial two acts were so powerful that it is difficult to imagine what could have followed it as a final act that would have been abvle to measure up. Furthermore, the long and detailed descriptions of the technology reach saturation point a fair distance from the end of the book, and this seems to throw the balance between narrative and description slightly out of whack, to the point where I was sorely tempted to skip a few paragraphs – never a good sign.

Regardless of this imbalance in the last third of the novel, Seveneves is near-earth, hard science quasi-space opera on a tremendous scale, without a doubt an impressive flexing of the muscles by a master of the genre, and a book I would not have wanted to miss for all its 880 pages!