When one is in a used bookstore with a bunch of writers, it is only natural to expect that you will end up with a couple of purchases you would not ordinarliy consider. I was at a science fiction writing conference, so naturally we were clustered in the SF section of Half-Price Books. The selection was impressive. As I browsed the colorful spines of the books, one title caught my eye. “Hey, guys!” I said, “Check this out. Bimbos of the Death Sun!”

The response was not quite what I expected. “That’s a good book,” one of my party said. “Really funny,” another concurred. Then I noticed a badge on the cover proclaiming that it had won the Edgar Allen Poe Award in for best paperback mystery in 1988. What was I to do? Bimbos joined my other unplanned purchases.

Note that the cover pictured here looks nothing like the version I have. Just look at that picture. Can you imagine a worse cover for a book with that title? Seriously. [Update – the current picture is a major improvement.]

It took me a while to work through the reading pile to get to Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb, but when I finally did I was surprised. It’s not science fiction. It takes place at a science fiction convention (”Rubicon”), but there are no aliens (unless you count the Scot), no wondrous technology (unless you count the personal computers of the late ’80s), no world-threatening cataclysms or mysterious paranormal events. Bimbos of the Death Sun is a murder mystery.

It follows the pattern my sister likes so much: create a really nasty guy, have him anger just about everyone, then kill him off. Lots of suspects, lots of motives, a crazy hotel scene with people coming and going to provide unlimited opportunity for mischief.

The title of the book is simultanelously ironic and exploitative; one of the characters is a writer who wrote a hard science fiction novel that involved the effect of solar radiation on computers, and (as an afterthought) on women. The book is not at all sexist — the author’s girlfriend made sure of that — and has no sex in it. The publisher decided to call it Bimbos of the Death Sun and give it a suggestive cover to promote sales. The author in the story is embarrassed; I suspect that Ms. McCrumb was chuckling gleefully when she thought of the name. (Can you blame her?) In fact, I imagine her at a convention, sitting with friends, drunk, when an informal Most Salacious Science Fiction Title contest breaks out…

[Hmm… I have a short story that needs a title. Maybe I’ve been going about it the wrong way.]

This was a fun read. It’s not really a whodunnit because the reveal is gradual and begins long before the big final confrontation scene. There is a lot going on, however, and there is no shortage of odd characters. Every stereotype of trekkie and gamer and SCA member and fantasy addict is (lovingly) packed into a single hotel, and it looks like a pretty good time. You know, except for the murder.

The book was marred for me by a couple of things. Foremost, some of the characters behave in ways I just could not accept as real. I’m not talking about the wacky Rubicon attendees, but about the people around them who are supposed to be normal. The police detective is the biggest offender in this department. More than once I thought to myself, “no cop would ever do that, let alone one who’s been promoted to detective.”

My other complaint is that someone was given a very complicated task with almost no notice, then took it upon himself to make the task even more complicated to catch the killer, and then pull that task off with grace and style. In the movies, at least he would have had a chance for “Montage Training.”

Despite those complaints, I greatly enjoyed reading Bimbos. It was a good light read with many, many chuckle points as it went along. I think folks who attend conferences like the one in the story would find even more humor that I missed. Oh, yes, they do exist, and probably thirty years later are even crazier — though perhaps more commercial.

The book is not science fiction, but it belongs in the SF section of the store, all right, since that’s where the readers this book is aimed at hang out. If you run into this title in the used book store, take a look!

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Sweet!

Thanks!

My backlog of things to blog about is getting embarassingly long, so this little rieiew will likely be short. (“He says that like it’s a bad thing,” the experienced readers among you say…)

The Emperor’s General by James Webb is a story that takes place primarily in the waning days of the second world war, and is told from the point of view of Jay Marsh, an aide to General Douglas MacArthur. The story has many layers as Marsh wrestles with balancing his blossoming career in MacArthur’s camp – one which he finds himself surprisingly adept at – and the love of a woman and the promises he made.

MacArthur’s occupation of Japan after the war was quite peaceful and successful, and this book examines some of the trade-offs that MacArthur made to ensure that stability. Some of those compromises were less than honorable, as he steadfastly refused to allow any of the Japanese royal family to be tried for war crimes, despite very strong evidence that they were intimately involved in the atrocities at Nanking.

Captain Marsh, who understands the Japanese language and, more importantly, Japanese culture, becomes a key go-between, an unofficial conduit of information between the Emperor’s men and the general. Marsh becomes increasingly disenchanted with the process as he realizes that guilt or innocence have nothing to do with who will be tried and who won’t. “There is no sin in Japan,” he observes, “only shame.” Several generals and politicians have been designated to bear the shame of defeat and the shame of the crimes committed.

Meanwhile, Marsh is in love with a Filipino woman, and I had to cringe every time he made promises that no matter what happened he would come back to her and they would marry. He won’t. We know that from the first chapter of the book. Something is going to happen and his most solemn vow will be broken. By giving us this foreknowledge, the author quite effectively casts a shadow of tragedy over even their happiest moments. There’s some good storytelling going on.

It’s also obvious that the author has done his research. Webb knows his military lore (he once served as Secretary of the Navy), and he has a good flair for bringing the historical characters to life, and providing a very well-rounded view of the historical incidents. This is another story that would benefit from a short list of suggested reading at the end, for those who want to learn more about the history without the encumbrance of a story narrative that must necessarily take precedence over fact.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Sweet!

Thanks!

My buddy John had spoken more than once of this book, and on a Christmas eve (give or take) when we found ourselves in the same bookstore he bought it for me. (This is the same John I accidentally stole Dead Girls from, compounding his largesse, though without his knowledge.)

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, is a big book, filled with history, science, politics, and adventure. The title refers to an informal compilation of knowledge on the subject of making and breaking codes. Much of the story takes place during the second world war, when the same forces that accelerated the development of the atomic bomb also lead to enormous strides in computing machines. Much of that computing power is devoted to the breaking of codes.

I’m not sure how historically accurate some of this stuff is, but he makes a pretty compelling argument that allied code-breaking turned the war, not just in Europe (with the famous enigma crack), but in the pacific as well. To this day, events in the battle of Midway are ascribed to good fortune. Could signal intelligence have been the real hero?

At the center of the story is a karass — a name coined by Kurt Vonnegut to describe a group of people whose lives are inexplicably but undeniably intertwined. The karass is such an intrinsic part of storytelling that I’m surprised it has never been named before. “So, we meet again,” is something a karass-mate would say. (Although, to be honest, most of my stories are not grand enough to encompass a whole karass.) If you cannot accept the idea of a karass then there are parts of this story that are going to be difficult for you. In this case the karass is stretched across generations; it is an inheritable karass, and to my mind this pushes things a little too far. There really is no reason that some of the people involved needed to descend from the previous batch. I might have been more tolerant of the connections if, at the end, many of the characters weren’t so blasé about the enormous coincidence. “You taught my grandfather karate in Shanghai before the war? Holy crap! That’s staggering!” was not said.

Still, for all that this is one seriously powerful karass that all concerned seem to take for granted, the story works very well. One of the cool things about it is that cryptography is not just treated as a technology, not just as a weapon, but as a socially significant phenomenon. Cryptography is a cornerstone of privacy in our world, and privacy is a cornerstone of freedom. Somewhere in there Stephenson makes the leap to “a currency not controlled by a government could have averted the holocaust”, and that was a leap I didn’t manage to make, but overall the message worked.

What was really cool was how human the people making these giant advancements in technology and mathematics were. Paradoxically, the writer made them human by emphasizing their oddities, the ways they didn’t conform to the human norm. In this way the novel was populated with a host of interesting, dynamic, and believable people. Some of them were pretty damn clever as well. The story goes back and forth between people just starting to define what the nature of a programmable machine even is, to people with hacker as a middle name. That worked very well.

And now a brief time-out for the complaining: There were a couple of business ethics points that were contrived, simply incorrect, and since they were critical to the progress of the plot they bothered me. There was a sequence that involved a family of geeks dividing an inheritance that didn’t work on two axes – the solution they arrived at was flawed in a way all the geeks would have recognized, and there was a much simpler solution that would have accomplished the same thing. General Douglas MacArthur, a peripheral member of the karass, makes a jump of faith I just couldn’t handle. I was bothered at the end when a statue of Buddha was melted down in a scheme I don’t think would have worked anyway. Somehow the last two people alive in the submarine belonged to the karass.

OK then! Now that that’s out of the way, I have to say that I’ve never read a better story about the inner lives of geeks even as they go about rewriting all the rules. The geeks, both the documented historical ones like Turing and the add-ins, are all pretty cool. Did geeks win the second world war, or did factories, or did the marines? Does it even matter? In the years of war and the time following, secrecy was a national asset, and secrecy was increasingly dependent on mathematics and computation. Reading about the code-breakers of old, the guessing-games and rooms full of men using abacuses on one side versus a computing machine that may deafen you on the other, makes for some good reading. Add on top heroism, adventure, and prose written with a dry wit, and you’ve got yourself a good book.

And then there’s the open hatch on the submarine. Danm. Complaints I registered above acknowledged, you just know that a member of the karass went though that hatch. Somebody got out. Stephenson didn’t have to write this part; the story can live without it. But he did, and I’m glad. It hangs over a good span of the book. The answer to that mystery is as satisfying as it is tragic.

One last complaint, or perhaps a left-handed compliment. This book needs a bibliography, or at least a recommended reading list. There were dozens of times through the course of this story that I wanted to know more about the surrounding events. I can only assume Stephenson did some serious research, and I’d like to be able to follow in his footsteps. All historical fiction should at the end cite sources, but in a story about the dawn of the information age, that seems even more important. There is a great appendix about one particular code that you and I can use, written by someone who obviously thinks a lot about passing information in a hostile environment, but I really wanted more. It is unconscionable that a book that tickles my interest in so many subjects does not supply a reading list at the end.

I liked Bobby Shaftoe. I liked Goto Dengo. I liked the geeks. Stephenson created a whole zoo of people I liked. Right there, you know you’ve got a good story. Embrace the karass; find your own karass, and enjoy this book.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Sweet!

Thanks!

The Fourth Bear: A Nursery Crime by Jasper Fforde looked promising. “Brilliantly, breathlessly odd.” USA Today called it. ‘Odd’ is one of my favorite adjectives when applied to light prose, and the recommendations on the back cover of the book reinforced the impression, comparing Fforde to the creators of the Simpsons and to Douglas Adams, mentioning outrageous satirical agility, and so forth. I thought I was in for a treat.

What I got was certainly pleasant, and I did chuckle frequently while reading, but I was not swept away. Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading police force is trying to solve the case of a missing reporter who went by the name Goldilocks, last seen in the company of three bears. She was preparing to blow the lid off a huge story that had something to do with championship cucumbers. Inspector Spratt is himself a PDR (Person of Dubious Reality), which makes him uniquely qualified to wade through the myriad of credulity-stretching oddities and clues. Meanwhile, the Gingerbreadman has escaped from the mental hospital and has resumed his killing spree…

There are puns aplenty, occasional self-referential humor, and a nudge-nudge feeling pervades the book. Being up on your nursery rhymes will certainly help; I was pretty vague on the Jack Sprat rhyme, for instance. While I found it easy to put the story down, I also found it easy to pick back up again.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Sweet!

Thanks!

Blood Magic by Matthew Cook first caught my eye as it sat on the megabookstore shelf because of its striking cover art. Yep, without that cover and the fact that the bookstore chose to put the book cover-out I never would have picked it up. A sad state of affairs, really. I picked up the book and noticed that it was the debut for the author. I was wavering at that point, but decided that first-time authors need every break they can get. Plus I’ve read plenty of stories by established writers who have stopped really trying and started phoning it in. It occurred to me that maybe a new author must clear taller hurdles to find himself cover-out at a megabookstore. Finally, I got the feeling that while there would be no life-changing prose inside, it did look like a good read from a pure entertainment perspective. So, next to Cormac McCarthy and Truman Capote in my bag I added Matthew Cook.

Tellingly, with five new books to choose from, the one I went for first was Blood Magic. I like light reading for pure entertainment. In that I was not disappointed. The main character is Kirin (or is it?), a solitary woman making a living as a scout for the army. She’s not too bad at old-fashioned kicking ass, but the cornerstone of her ability is that she can use blood magic – the blood of living creatures (especially people) gives her power, and she is able to bind the souls of the recently dead to her purposes.

Most of society thinks these abilities are evil — especially organized religion — but Kirin is constantly doing altruistic things. She is certainly not evil, but, well, there’s a not-so-nice side to her as well. She is a satisfyingly complicated character. In the world, there are very few things that are distinctly good or evil. You’ve got monsters killing lots of people, but they don’t come across as evil so much as dangerous. We don’t have any insight into their motivation, so it’s hard to judge them. The closest to evil we find is blind intolerance among some of the people — but even those people have their good sides.

A couple of nit-picks: the author overuses a couple of phrases (one of those phrases was one that I had to purge in several places in The Monster Within, so I might be over-sensitive to it), and there were some paragraphs that just didn’t read well, but overall it is clear that the writing group that supported Mr. Cook took the job seriously and helped him a great deal.

Towards the end of the book I was thinking, “There’s no way he’s going to wrap this all up,” and I was dreading the classic fantasy “Book that isn’t really a book but just the first pages of a larger volume.” I’m happy to report that while there is plenty of stuff unresolved at the end, there is a satisfying ending to this episode. Characters have changed and learned. There has been little progress in solving the larger problems, but it’s the people who make this story interesting, and that’s where the change occurs.

If you’re looking for an enjoyble read from an new author, consider Blood Magic. As I set up the link to Amazon, I discovered that the full name of the book is Blood Magic: Book One Of The Ballad Of Kirin Widowmaker. Luckily, the cover doesn’t have all that Ballad/Widowmaker junk or I probably wouldn’t have bought it.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Sweet!

Thanks!

A friend of my loaned me Danté’s Equation, by Jane Jensen, with very high praise. It’s a big book, and perhaps I should have saved it for my upcoming (but still ill-defined) transatlantic adventures, but after the genteel, well-mannered, and rather slow prose of my last read (not reviewed here yet), I was ready for someone to let loose and just tell a good story. I was not disappointed.

The book centers around a group of five people, each of whom represents life out of balance in different ways, along the different axes defined in the Jewish mysticism of kabbalah. Superficially it’s a science fiction story, enough so that the characters are each uprooted and transplanted to a universe that matches their own imbalances – essentially they are plunged into a world every bit as messed up as they are. With such a mirror to look into, the characters are given the opportunity to change — or not. Behind it all is a genius physicist and mystic who disappeared while in Auschwitz. It seems he came up with a pretty dang amazing theory, and now, sixty years later, rumors are starting to get around that there exists a manuscript that could hold the key to a new sort of super-weapon.

The “scientific” idea that underpins the whole thing (and is echoed in the mysticism) is elegant and nicely described, but when it needs to interact with modern physics, that interface is a bit shaky, and sometimes just incorrect. It’s fiction, so that’s all right, but don’t take any science morsels you pick up here and try to apply them elsewhere. Remember, kids — stay away from mini black holes!

It took me a while to get started with the story; the first few chapters suffer from similitis (inflamation of the simile gland) and some rather lengthy As-You-Know-Bobs (discussions between people who really should both know this stuff already, staged so the writer can explain them to us). Early on I was tripped up by chunks like “He always left home before the crack of dawn so he could watch the sunlight warm the stones. There was a cold bite in the air this morning. His black wool coat and hat absorbed it like a sponge.” I’m not sure I want my coat to absorb the cold like a sponge, but if (as is likely, grammar aside) the author meant that it was the sunlight that is being absorbed, then sponge really isn’t a very useful image. There were many places in the early going I hesitated, tripping up on phrases where the author was just trying too hard.

The story never completely gets over the similitis, but after a while one gets the feeling that the author is no longer trying to come up with particularly choice similes, and is content to let her natural language tell the story. Once she reaches this stage, her easy voice does quite well, and I spent two very late nights watching the intertwined lives of the characters… um… intertwine. The narration is in third person, but Jensen does a good job changing the voice of the narration to match character who’s point of view we are sharing at that moment. It’s really quite fun to understand the characters through their vocabulary and the way they interpret the world.

In the framework of the “People ending up in the place they are (literally) most in tune with” rule, there is a monster coincidence – two people ending up in the same place out of an infinite continuum of possibilities. “Ah Ha!” I thought when Coincidence Guy A was explaining the rule to Coincidence Guy B, “That they are having this conversation at all is a refutation of that rule! When they work that out, it’s going to be cool!” They never worked it out; no one ever blinked an eye at the staggering impossibility of it. I even came up with a good explanation that would have made a very interesting plot point.

You know, when I write these reviews, I spend a lot more time on the problems of a story than what was good. Maybe this is because that’s how I treat my own writing now, always looking for things to improve. So, I’ll just leave you with this: This story has interesting people who grow and change, people who find balance and maybe (just maybe) a little peace. In the end you are rooting for these people, even the jerks, and when they do change it is believable (well, mostly…) and rewarding. And that’s what makes a good story, no?

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

2

Sweet!

Thanks!

In The Novel, by James Michener, one of the characters learns the hard way that critics should not also be writers. Perhaps the reverse is also true, that writers should not be critics, but I expect he would not brand these ramblings as criticism anyway.

The book is divided into four parts, each told from the point of view of a different person. All these people’s lives are intertwined, and as the book progresses it is very interesting to see how the various characters interpret their relationships. Through it all is the title character, the novel, which at the start of the story seems to be a concrete thing, a particular work by a specific author, but as the story progresses through changing points of view we also see The Novel become more abstract, until by the end Michener is discussing the novel as an art form and its role in modern society.

We begin with The Author, told by Lukas Yoder, a bestselling writer who is finishing his latest—and last—novel. His editor, Yvonne Marmelle, has been with him since his start, and it was only through her force of will that Yoder was not dropped by her publishing company after his first books didn’t sell. It is in the second part of the book, told by Marmelle, that we begin to see that while Yoder’s work is beautifully written, there is a part of her that yearns for something more. She wants passion. She wants a writer who takes risks. She wants to find an artist.

Michener’s characters are all archetypes, idealized versions of the Steady Writer, the Intelligent and Combative Editor, the Incisive and Controversial Critic, and the Philanthropic Dowager Reader. The last is less of a cliché than the first three, as there really is no stereotypical reader.

When I got to the section told by the critic I almost put the book down. I really didn’t like this arrogant jerk at all, but what really cheesed me was Michener’s description of his classroom methods (the critic is a professor of creative writing of growing renown). When I read about the way he taught he sounded to me like about the worst writing teacher imaginable, yet he was presented as a favorite among students. I took a breath. Michener is not a teacher, but he’s seen the inside of a lot more academic writing classes than I have. Somewhere along the way he got confused.

Once we dispensed with that part of the characterization the rest of my objections to the critic were, I think, exactly the ones Michener wanted to elicit. The man is an elitist asshole. But, and this is a point Michener eventually brought me around to, was, just because he’s an elitist asshole doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

Yoder is accused by the intellectual elite (their term) of helping to bring the vacuous television age of fiction to the masses. “He does little harm, but no good,” one critic says. Yoder seems (mostly) immune to the criticism, and later we learn why, when we investigate a pile of letters he is answering. Some of them say, “I wouldn’t be reading books at all if it weren’t for you.” Yoder is quietly proud of being a gateway drug, a stepping stone on the path to intellectual freedom, happy that perhaps one of the steel workers that reads his work will pick up another book and another and another, though Yoder would never express such an ambition out loud.

Michener provides an interesting cast who are compelled to dig further into questions on the nature of art and the responsibility of artists. Is true art an act of rebellion? What are the responsibilities of an artist, both to his vision and to a society as a whole? Are ‘popular’ and ‘artist’ opposed?

In the end, it is the Reader who decides. Turning to a favorite old tome, she finds it oddly disappointing, lacking the substance she had recently discovered in more challenging works. And Yoder, in the shadow of tragedy, sits down to write a new novel, the one after his last, in a bold, new style. It’s fun to cast forward past the end of The Novel. A new journey is beginning, filled with promise, fraught with risk. I like stories that have me writing new chapters long after I’ve consumed the last page.

As a side point of interest, The Novel gives a good look behind the scenes in the publishing industry, as we discover just what a manuscript has to overcome to find its way into print. (One of every 900 manuscripts that come in gets serious attention.) You’ve heard some of it before in these pages as I discuss my own efforts to crash down the gates. A couple of things I knew intellectually but really hit home for me upon reading: recommendations from elitist assholes are really, really valuable when it comes to reaching the right people, and writing school is not just for perfecting your craft and broadening your horizons. It’s a great place to meet elitist assholes. I’d like to believe that the ‘learning to write’ part is still more important. I could really benefit from some of that.

As I read the arguments in the story, I was compelled to consider my own efforts against the yardsticks of the various points of view in the story. My completed stuff is more oriented to entertainment through a story well told than it is about big-A Art. Sometimes I get closer, though, and that feels good. Reflecting on some of the things said in The Novel, I also feel better-prepared to defend my breaking of rules. That’s what writers do. The ultimate goal for me is to write something that is Art without forgetting the story well told. I think that goal puts me in good company.

Addendum: I was prepared to surrender the field to the Artists, but you know what? I put that yardstick against my story and while it is foremost an enjoyable read, upon further review The Monster Within is about freedom. It’s wrapped in a good yarn, but in just a few seconds I could enumerate four different types of freedom displayed and it’s the tension between those forms that drives the story. I didn’t plan it that way at all, but when you do something you love, it’s going to carry your beliefs along with it, and that’s a good thing. When I get panned (let’s all hope I achieve the stature to be panned) I’ll respond with, “That was about freedom! You got a problem with freedom? Are you with us or agin’ us?” (Critics understand irony, right?) I’m not yielding the big A yet.

Note: if you use the above link to buy this book (or a Kindle, or a new car), I get a kickback.

Sweet!

Thanks!