In contrast to Charles Runyon's "Deeply Sicko SF" (as determined by the readers of rec.arts.sf.written) about which I blogged the other day, Norman Spinrad is simply a writer's writer, and his book, The Void-Captain's Tale is a masterpiece. His characters have individual, powerful voices, and one can literally feel the number of re-writes Spinrad went through to make sure everyone in his books is unique and special. His cultures are dense, and with just a few special touches-- here, it's the way characters "trade the stories of their names"-- he makes his worlds come alive. Ships jump from star system to star system, and a tradition has grown that the wealthiest passengers don't do cryo but instead help keep the crew from going nuts on the weeks-long voyages by filling the vast, heat-dissapating spaces with balls, gardens, and various "divertissements." There is decadence aplenty within these floating bawdy houses, but it is of a most mundane sort.

The special touch to TVCT is that hyperspace jump requires an organic component. Usually these "pilots," who are emotionally and physically wrecked by the experience, are plucked out of finishing schools already identified as being on a downward spiral, and are offered a chance to make something of themselves and retire young. But the experience of hyperspace is so ecstacy-inducing that, when forciby retired, most pilots go crazy or commit suicide. Sometimes they die en-route, and the captain is forced to pick a volunteer from among the passengers who, untrained and unprepared, is likely to die or destroy the ship with his inexperience.

The pilot of this ship is a such a volunteer, one of the few ever to make it home alive, who liked the experience so much she's still doing it. Unlike other pilots who usually just try to recover from their experience and shun the rest of the crew, she is strong, conscious, arrogant, and brash, and wants to mingle with the crew and passengers. This violation of strict tradition brings out powerful feelings in the Captain, crew, and guests, and those feelings drive this book forward. The tension in this story is simple: the Captain becomes obsessed, almost Ahab-like, with this fascinating pilot and in his downward spiral makes poor decisions that ultimately doom his crew.

Is it "depraved?" Yes, but in a different way: the captain in his obsession demonstrates that quality called "depraved indifference," and Spinrad has done his usual tour-de-force job of showing how a character can get himself into such a position, convincing us each step of the way that, yes, human beings really do think this way, and yes, what we're seeing is a slow, inevitable slide down into madness and no, there's nothing anyone could really have done or forseen to prevent it. But there's nothing to suggest that the universe depicted or any of the other characters in it are anything more than ordinary, sufficiently moral human beings. Great read.

Tags: book, review
Current Mood: amused
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A few weeks ago I blogged about Justina Robson's Living Next Door To The God Of Love, which I thought was okay. In that book, a thing called The Unity exists, and although it is ineffable, it has agents that have created weird, extant, alternative realities for human beings, a search space whereby Unity searches for meaning, often by absorbing the distinctiveness of individuals into itself. It has one major agent running around, and a lot of human beings trying hard to find the key that will unlever Unity's power over humanity. Unity is a seething mass of all the things its ever absorbed; a great storm of "seethe" broke away, called itself Jaeleka (the nominal titular character), and things got weird.

I just finished the book that came before Living Next Door..., Natural History, and it leaves me with this one strong impression: while I can see how Robson got from Natural History to Living Next Door..., I really, really wish she hadn't.

The second book had wonderful, complex characters and lovely set pieces, but it didn't all add up to a meaningful story; Natural History, on the other hand, not only has the same complicated, wonderful, lovely characters you come to love or hate, but it does have a meaningful story with a highly charged and yet satisfying ending.

Robson starts with a world where human beings have genetically engineered thousands of species of human/machine hybrids, the Forged, who do the dangerous, dirty, environmentally challenging, or merely drudge work. Spaceships, ocean explorers, asteroid miners, Jovian gas harvesters, each is an individual human being whose structure has been pushed to absurd, extreme limits. The naming scheme for these people is wonderful, complex, and creative. Robson did marvelous work.

Crippled by an accident, Forged interstellar explorer Voyager Lonestar Isol finds something that gets named Stuff, which allows her to repair herself and travel instantly anywhere in the galaxy. She returns to Earth where she tells the Forged Independence Movement that she has the power to take them "away from the monkeys," to a world of their own. She says she has found such a world, and allows one human visitor, Zephyr Duquesnse, to go there, to assess whether the Forged or "all humanity" should lay claim to it.

But Stuff is not just wish-fulfillment technologies. And when we learn what it is, we learn what it can do for us, but the price for some may be just too damned high.

What annoys me now more than ever is the amount of mythology she crammed into Living Next Door... to try and make it consistent with this book. Natural History was good enough. Robson could have written another book, a better book, without relying on the Stuff mythology and then tacking on all the extra elves, mystical engines, and past lives crap.

Everyone in Natural History book is brilliantly thought-out and realized: Zephyr, Isol, Gritter, Tatresi, Corvax, even Bob The Collie. If you like your SF literary, this book might just you cry. Robson plays a bit fast and loose with her science (transitions from Jovian to Terran space seem to take only a few hours even for fusion-based STL craft, for example) but it's okay: it's all in service to an excellent story.

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Wynd Temptress, by Kathryn Anne Dubois (2003, Ellora's Cave) is one of those stories that's sat on my hard drive for ages and I finally got around to reading, because I was bored yesterday and stuck on a bus for a long time without my laptop. I regret having read it.

There's a modest infodump in the beginning where we learn that it is 2150 and the Earth is recovering after The Psychic Wars, in which the normals and their tame psis are now hunting down and trying to control or eliminate any remaining telepaths. Forty years earlier, the Psychic Wars ended with the death of the super-telepath the Tyrea, who apparently lit of nukes and otherwise trashed the planet in a "if I can't have it nobody can" spasm as he went down.

The Tyrea left behind three daughters (convenient that, but I've written worse), whose names are suggestive of wind, fire, and water. Each of their "romance" stories is told by a different author, starting with Dubois's tale of "wind," Jezermaih, and the man sent to assess the risk she presents, Adam.

Adam is a telepath, retired from the PSI Agency (an extragovernmental agency that all governments agree is necessary to stop the Continental Council, a renegrade group of telepaths trying to breed the next Tyrea, from succeeding), called back to duty to assess this greatest risk they've ever known: a child of the Tyrea, now living in Alaska. In chapter one, Adam tells us his plans: he'll kidnap Jezermaih and take her to one of the agency's Sekret Bases, where he'll interrogate her as roughly as necessary to determine her risk level. Oh, and Adam's favorite tool to accomplish his mission? Rape.

Yes, it's that kind of story. It's presented as a romance. He does kidnap her, whisks her away to his Sekret Agency Base (which is in the middle of a vast Alaskan plain but somehow has power and a five-star suite of romantic bedrooms and jacuzzis and a heated swimming pool), ties her down, strips her naked, and molests her with his hands and mouth. She manages to get free, bashes him on the head with a lamp, and ties him up to try and get the numerical code on the ignition of his SUV so she can get out of there. After confessing to the reader that she's not brave enough to actually torture him with a knife or a strangulation rope, we get another sex scene where she "tortures" him with frustration. He gives her the wrong code, she runs to the SUV, he takes advantage of her absence to get free and again they reverse their situation and he's again taking advantage of her immobility.

It's not just awful. Dubois is a competent writer, a little expository, but no David Weber. It's ugly. The characters' "love" that they achieve by the end of the book is presented as an ultimate state of being. Moral of the story: Somewhere out there is the perfect man (buff, exceptionally well hung, cooks a perfect meal, and has money), and if he has to rape you for you to figure out he's perfect, eh, so what's a little rape?

She should have killed him in chapter three.

Tags: book, review
Current Mood: nauseated
Current Music: Fort Minor, Where'd You Go

I read this book because it was listed as one of the two most "deeply sick and depraved" books of SF, at least according to the readers of rec.arts.sf.written. Unfortunately, it's not really that depraved. Or if it was, I was so overwhelmingly bored by it that the supposed sickness didn't make much of an impression.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about I, Weapon is that it isn't a novel at all; it's the plotter's synopsis for a Marvel comic about the same year as the book. Doing a synopsis of the synopsis will be difficult, but here goes: it is The Future. The Morlocks-- excuse me, the Progs-- live on the Moon and on habitats about Jupiter. Their agents, the Stafi and Landed, do the grunt work and raise the Eloi-- excuse me, the Unguls-- humans so mutated after Terra's first nuclear war that they are fit only as foodstock. Humanity had spread throughout the galaxy, only to be forced back to a few dozen worlds by the villainous Vim. A desperate Prog, consulting The Computer, learns that the only possibility of success is a breeding cycle to create a godlike human who can crush the Vim. The first half of the book deals with her struggles to reach her goal: she has to collect the sperm of an Ungul, an Unchanged, and an "Evolutionary Variant", mix them all together, and then carry the product to term herself all "the old-fashioned way, without the use of a breeding tank or gene equipment," The Computer tells her. The end of the book is an unchallenging narrative of her offspring's heroic success after success. I won't spoil the ending, such as it is, for you.

Is it "depraved?" It certainly may have been once upon a time: we have flat, drab, colorless passion meandering across the page as our blue-skinned, bug-eyed heroine (the lights are low in those sublunarian bases to preserve power) mates with these various creatures. Runyon takes particular delight in displaying the ranches where human-stock meat is raised and butchered, and spends inordinate amounts of time when the hero starts making it with a Vim female.

So: you got your cannibalism, your pornography, your vague sense of bestiality. There's even a snuff scene for those with that kind of bent. There's a hint of lesbianism when the logic-driven Prog heroine tries to describe her feelings for her oh-so-useful-and-beautiful (illegally gengineered to be a sex toy, but now free and educated) Stafi assistant, but then puts them aside as irrational and never acts on them-- pity, as the Stafi seems to be the only real human in the place.

But it's all so boring! Runyon is a complete hack; his exposition goes on for page after page after page. His dialogue is completely "as you know, Bob." When the hero gets into Vim territory he discovers that he is carrying a "psychic inhibitor"; without it, he is a God and an unimaginative one at that, and the book is really over when Runyon has another 80 pages or so to fill. Terrible read.

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Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Heather Alexender, Something's Up In The Loft

Candy by "Maxwell Canton" (a psuedonym for Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg) is a 1958 novel that is apparently fondly remembered by lots of its fans for its breathless descriptions of an excessively naive, manipulable and attractive young lady as she careens through one bizarre encounter after another while a rolling cast of late-50s stereotypical characters attempts to seduce her: her teacher Professor Mephesto, her Uncle Jack and his wife Livia (who apparently also swings wildly between cocaine-fueled cockwhore and sullen brat), the peculiar Dr. Krankeit and the desperate Dr. Duncan, and thereafter by equally creepy physicians, doctors, police officers, cult leaders, Communists, religious gurus, and finally The Buddha himself. Very few of these men (and sadly, never Livia) ever get into her pants; those that do tend to have less-than-succesful moments. The book is replete with descriptions of her lush nakedness and cute euphemisms for various body parts.

The book is really a succession of farcical set-pieces about pretentious teachers, "liberated" women, the weird "sexology" of the late 1950's, the rise of strange religious cults (although why they take a swipe at the Quakers I can't tell), the relationships between cops and gay bars at the time. There's an almost painfully extended piece about Jews and the way they did or did not integrate well with the larger American community at the time. (I write "painfully" because there were a lot of men from my family and their extended communities who bore the scars of those battles. One of my relatives in the early 1970s delighted his mother by becoming a law professor-- "A doctor and a lawyer!"-- a career which he almost immediately abandoned to write porn. Sadly, I'm not actually related to him and my parents adamantly refused to tell me his pen name.)

I found the book a bit disappointing. I can see how it was a thrill to read in 1960. I can see how the authors thought it was subversive and funny. But one of the things I've learned in the past forty years is that we don't really run to a reductio world when we have one of these bizarre societal adolescent moments; instead, we outgrow them, establish a new equilibrium, and move on. It was a "smile, yeah, that was probably amusing once" kind of book.

I should probably track down a copy of The Happy Hooker and reread it. Xaveria Hollander was my introduction to the perversity of the world.

Tags: book, review
Current Mood: amused

Greg Egan used to be one of my favorite writers. I say "used to be" because Egan opened my eyes to the wonderfully evocative power of truly hard science fiction, only to eventually have him throw it all away with his own ham-handed politics and pecadillos. For a while, since the publication of Schild's Ladder, Egan hasn't written much, but now he's back with a new series, the Amalgam stories, the first of which was "Riding the Crocodile" (link leads to full text of story), and which is the setting for his next novel, Incandescence.

A new Amalgam story, "Glory" (link leads to PDF of full story), appears in the anthology The New Space Opera, and has been published for free at Eos books' website.

"Glory" is an awful story.

My reaction to "Riding the Crocodile" was that it was Greg Egan pandering to the bulk of his audience: those of us too lazy to actually follow the physics of Schild's Ladder, but willing to be thrilled at a certain level of mastery of physics and willing to buy a certain amount of handwavery as long as it seemed plausible. "Riding the Crocodile" is also pandering in that it proposes a posthuman, "AI's are people too" universe in which people flit about from starsystem to starsystem via fast-as-light radio transmissions, switching from arbitrary digital existence to biological instantiation without a second thought.

"Glory" takes this pandering one step further. His opening scene wants to be one of those masterpieces of physics handwaving, in which he shows his Amalgam civilization throwing a one kilogram weight almost up to lightspeed fast enough that it will go all the way through its target star, in the process setting up shock waves so that the star, in its wake, is briefly turned into a nanomachine factory that creates primitive devices for listening for radio waves and converting nearby matter into useful tools, which the Amalgam can then operate by remote control. I don't buy it; neither space nor the insides of stars is that predictable. His description of the matter/antimatter engine is amazing; his attempt to convince you that it'll all work in the end pure nonsense.

What follows from that is, well, it's not really a Greg Egan story. Instead, it's more like a Greg Egan fanfic. All of the elements of Egan's own hangups are there. There's absolutely no possibility of intimate relationships; Egan has written a species with a reproductive urge so limited and incapable just so he won't have to write about it or think about it. (At this point, I have to admit that I kinda miss the manipulative, teenage Greg Egan of such passionate works as "Mind Vampires" and "The Demon's Passage.") The only thing that matters is mathematics; anyone obsessed with anything else, like art or politics, is either a fool, a knave, or a villain.

( Spoiler. And the point to this review. )

I call bullshit. This story completely failed to move me, either in a sensawunda depiction of a technological application of known physics (one of Egan's true strong suits), or in his story, which is a phoned-in Heinleinesque "the right man in the right place to make the right decision," only in this case Egan's characters are more shallow than usual, their convinctions contrived, and the ending a pale shadow that imparts no meaning or message.

(My thanks to fallenpegasus for also reading the story and giving me his reactions to it, which mirrored my own in many places.)

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Current Mood: annoyed