I can't help but be disappointed by the end of Joe Abercrombie's 600,000-word epic first trilogy, The First Law. It is a series that promises one thing and very quickly gives you another. It has twists and turns that set your expectations on edge, and yet... it leaves you with only ashes, at the end.

The First Law begins is three places: the nation of The Union with its capital in Adua, a rich country situated near the equator, Gurkhul, a nation south of the equator, and "The North." Adua has colonies in both Gurkhul and the North, and at this point in its existence is stretched thin.

Into this story we get only a few unique points of view: Jezal dan Luthar, a nobleman's son and something of a fop earning his Captaincy in His Majesty's army, his friend Collem West, the hideously unpleasant Inquistor Sand dan Glokta, the vicious woman Ferro Maljinn with a special need for vengeance, and the Northman Logen Ninefingers. Later, you will meet West's sister, and Jezal's commanding officer, and many of Logen's friends, not as viewpoint characters but still so important you come to know them. For every one of these characters, you come to want something. You want justice. You want fairness. And I will warn you now: you will never get it from Joe Abercrombie. His theme is simple: People Suck. The Weak Get Crushed. Life Isn't Fair. You want much from and for these characters, and you don't get it.

Abercrombie's series has everything you could want: a quest to the End of the World, mystical high castles, high magic feuds, spectacular battle scenes, bloodthirsty villains, desperate heroes, amazing stylistic moments of description that start out pedestrian and win you over in the end. Every single one of his characters has depth and uniqueness, every single one is his own voice, his own background, his own culture. You will never stop to wonder in who's head you find yourself. The characterization is astounding, and his characters go deep and real. It is a brilliant and bold story that climbs over the bodies and scales the battlements of extruded fantasy product, unbuttons its fly and pisses all over the generic doorstops that litter the big box bookstore shelves.

And yet, for all the astounding dramatic pyrotechnics, the ending leaves me vaguely depressed, vaguely upset, and without sympathy for losers, without celebration with the winners, without any real heroes.

If you want to see a writer at the top of his game and pushing all of the pieces across the chessboard to make his point by the end of the game, then read Joe Abercrombie. But don't be surprised if you come away from him they way you come away from Peter Watts: for all that you discovered, after 600,000 words you finish wondering why you put yourself through that in the first place.

Tags: book, review
Current Mood: discontent
Current Music: Victims of Science, The Device Has Been Modified

The other day, as I was looking through an acquaintance's library, I came across the Open Gaming License book, The Book of Erotic Fantasy, which is intended as a rule add-on to Dungeons & Dragons, D20 edition. There was a bit of a kerfluffle after the book started circulating and Wizards of the Coast amended the rules of their public license to prevent works from circulating that were obscene, pornographic, or contrary to community decency.

They needn't have bothered. The book isn't really worthy of the attention.

There are two sections of the book worth attention: the spells section and the monsters section. The monsters are interesting and, if a bit predictable, still contain a lot of sparks for interesting campaigns. You'll have to work to create the scenarios suggested for many of the monsters, but they're still worth it. The spells are clever and intriguing.

On the other hand, the characters, feats and skills section of the book suggest a complete paucity of creativity. The three standard classes offered are "Imagist" (an illusionist who works primarily with beauty), "Kundalist," (a kind of sex monk), and "Tantrist," (a mage who uses sex to raise power). The whole theif/bard/rogue end of the business, with prostitutes, courteasans, and so forth is ignored, and if you're gonna run a city campaign those would be great roles to play. The feats and skills sections are weak, and suggest an unfortunate tendency to try and impress modern "altie" sexuality on the Dungeons & Dragons world. Piercing and tattooing were not always sexual, and were not always associated with alternative sexuality, but they are in this book.

There's an okay section in the beginning in which the writers try to be adult about the whole thing. For the most part they succeed, but they were preaching to a critical member of the choir when I read it. I couldn't help but hear the sniggering in the background.

It probably doesn't help that the illustrations are, for the most part, photographs, many of them digitally edited for special effects, and many of them straight-up nudes. Not the sort of book you can read in public.

All in all, this book isn't a great addition to either the D&D collection of books, or to the further understanding of human sexuality. Most of the rules are the sorts of things a good gamemaster could come up with on their own, the creative effort is somewhat pauce, and the sexuality much more modern than is appropriate. I think the book succeeds mostly in its final page, where Phil Foglio pretty much makes the same case that I did: good players and game masters will handle sex the way they handle any strange encounter, and the existing rules are sufficient to the game. This book was not required, and it does little to further the genre.

Tags: book, game, review
Current Mood: tired

This is going to be an unfair review, because it is a comparison of writing styles based upon a recommendation. An acquaintance of mine familiar with my appreciation of the David Weber Honor Harrington series, recommended that rather than read "those atrocious Hornblower In Space books," I read Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series. Campbell, he explained, was a former Naval officer himself and had a far better grip on what it means to describe leadership and command than a wanker like Weber.

I've read the first book, The Lost Fleet: Dauntless, and I have to say that I'm generally underwhelmed.

The premise of Dauntless is this: Captain John Geary, now known as "Black Jack Geary," was lost in action a century ago when the peace-loving laissez-faire Alliance was attacked by the money-grubbing corporatist Syndicate. Geary led the very first successful battle against the attacking Syndics, as they came to be known, but his ship was destroyed shortly after he sent out what became known as Black Jack's Last Order: "Close with the enemy!"

A century later, Geary is rescued by the Alliance Main Expeditionary Fleet from a cryogenic survival pod. The pod is rated for two people and only fifty years, but he was the only occupant, and the power cell lasted longer than anyone should have expected. There was barely a year left on it, the enigneers tell him. Worse, the Fleet has just been smashed by the Syndics, dealt an entirely possible fatal blow, and all of the commanders have been killed. Captain John "Black Jack" Geary, by dint of seniority, has command of the fleet. Some take this as A Sign From Above.

Okay, let's start off with this: that's about as hokey as it gets.

It gets sillier. Black Jack's Last Order has become standard doctrine. There is no military discipline within the fleet. Over the century, the war has become a ragged stalemate with each side throwing ships and crews at one another, and all the "old hands," not just Geary, were killed in the first years of the assault. Nobody in the Alliance thought to hold back experienced commanders to train the next generation. Ships leap forward to slug it out with their counterparts without any thought to tactics, inter-ship coordination, long-term strategic goals, or even personal survival. Tactical planning to maximize your own chance of survival has become an act of cowardice. Admirals just shout Black Jack's Last Order and hope their flagship takes less damage than the enemy's. Over the century of warfare, weapons have become marginally better and ships marginally more efficient, but the Alliance military traditions have decayed to little better than well-organized pirate crews. The Alliance tradition of treating enemy combatants with respect and giving them a chance to survive after their ships have been disabled has fallen by the wayside, and survival pods are used for target practice. Equally unlikely, the Syndic crews have suffered the same disintegration of skill and discipline.

The Alliance is depicted as a vast, vibrant collection of worlds, with two "allied" smaller multi-star nations along for the ride (this gives Campbell plenty of time to deliver "As you know" messages from Geary to the leader of those allies' ships that are with the fleet). Campbell wants me to swallow that nobody, anywhere, in any position of authority, thought to consider military discipline important?

Geary comes out of cryo and, trading his "hero" status for command authority, starts to try and forge real military discipline. But his tradition involves real maneuvers; some ships must stay behind to guard the tender and repair ships; some ships won't get a shot at the enemy; sometimes real tactical thinking involves not attacking; treating prisoners of war as human beings worthy of respect. These changes annoy the current generation of Captains in the fleet, and there are stresses within his command.

Dauntless is therefore a by-the-numbers Star Trek level of plot, with all the set pieces predictable even before the story begins. There are no surprises.

Campbell is terrible at tension, about foreshadowing problems within Geary's command and then springing those problems on Geary. On the one hand, readers know the numbers Campbell is plotting by; on the other, Campbell isn't doing a good job of setting those numbers up. The removal of problem officers, combat with the Syndics, and so on plod along with no real highs or lows.

Part of this is because Campbell has chosen to keep to a single POV, namely Geary's. We get a lot of Geary's weariness, and all of his concerns about the fleet, and we get the ocassional Greek chorus to Geary about the current state of the fleet from the commander he trusts. But weariness and angst are not tension.

The Syndics are even more mustache-twirling than Weber's Havenites; Syndic starship commanders are called "CEOs," they're resource-wasting corporatists who fall into three categories: management, voluntary labor, and involuntary labor (which was "voluntary labor" that became incapable of paying its dues.) The conflict is so jejune as to be embarrassing.

Connie Willis once said that foreshadowing was the soul of writing. If that's true, then Campbell's work is soulless. There's a great opportunity halfway through the story for Campbell to hold fast one of his great foreshadowed secrets, but no, he has to spill the beans right there. At an abandoned mining camp, they discover that the computers have not only been wiped, they've been trashed; and the safe has been broken into with drill bits of no known size manufactured in known space. An investigator on the crew proposes maybe the criminals wanted the bits to be untraceable, but Geary tells him that using the most common drill bits would be even more untraceable since there are millions of them in space. So why would someone use non-standard drill bits? Hmm... And then Campbell gives away the whole store. Bummer, that.

Reviewers have been breathless about Campbell's "accurate consideration of relativistic physics," but I didn't get that from the story. What I got was a lot of handwaving about relativistic effects in a way that told the reader, "At least I've thought about the effects of combat at 0.1c; when was the last time you read something like that, huh!?" Well, actually, I have read stories where relativistic effects were taken seriously: Greg Egan comes to mind.

Campbell's work is pedestrian and even-keeled, and that's unfortunate in military SF. Military SF needs serious highs and lows; there needs to be something more at risk than "just lives." Military SF typically throws away lives with abandon. Readers want more than that.

Telling me this is better than Weber misses the point. The genius of David Weber is that he gives us multiple points of view. He shows us what other characters are thinking, and his take on the weight of command and the structure of military life contains as much nuance as Campbell's. If Weber's characters are idealized heroes and Campbell is trying to show us what happens when an idealized hero gets stuck dealing with the realities of the position, then both writers are doing their jobs. I like Jack Geary; he does seem more human, less inevitable, than Honor Harrington. But the writer is just kinda hacking along, presenting problems too insignificant and solutions too pat, to do more than be entertaining. He really should have kept his mystery a secret.

I have bought the second book, and I'll read it (although Egan's Incandescence is next, now that I have time), but unless something improves soon, I probably won't go on to the third and fourth books of the series. On the other hand, a single POV and a limited time frame make these books much smaller and quicker reads than the Weber-ian Expository Monolith.

Tags: book, review
Current Mood: satisfied

Grey, by Jon Armstrong, is a science-fiction love story set in some far future Earth-based dystopia. The hero, Michael Rivers, is the scion of Hiro Rivers, owner of the RiversGroup Security Service, supposedly one of the most powerful families among the citified. Michael is in love with Nora, daughter of the owner of the MKG Security Service, a competing company with which there was to be a merger until, at the end of chapter one, someone gets through RiversGroup Security, attacks Michael, and makes the value of RiversGroup plummet. The two companies accuse each other of the assault, and Michael and Nora embark on a Romeo and Juliet-like attempt to get together even as their world starts to come apart around them.

The real treat of this novel is Armstrong's extremely over-the-top übercultures. Hiro has a film team record his every moment for posterity, listens to heavy metal so powerful every concert leaves dead behind (and every band has ümlauts over every vowel, such as Alüminüm Anüs, Töxic Tësticle Färm and Hammørhëd), and curses like a potty-mouthed schoolboy while being interviewed on celebrity televsion. At one point, Michael is slated to marry Elle from another family; her überculture, Pentunia Tune, is the worst excesses of candy-raver visual kei, with eye-tearing colors strewn in liquid excesses throughout overly bright and empty lives.

Michael belongs to the grey subculture; he lives for black, white, charcoal, soot, raven, graphite, onyx, and cobalt. He loves plain, severe suits in calm, elegant cuts. He's even had one eye surgically altered so that it only sees in black and white. He wants to be calm, cool, almost still-life. He and Nora get their inspiration and subculture from Pure H fashion magazine, and when they're together they quote to each other from captions as they attempt to understand what the photographer was saying.

But the novel never adds up to very much. While Armstrong is very inventive in his creation of the ültra and petunia subcultures, he never really gives you any impression that his civilization actually works. How do these people get fed? What kind of economy is there? There's immense amounts of labor and industry shown in these chapters, from the thousands of people assembling Hiro's various rock concerts, to the ones rebuilding and then partying at Michael's PartyHaus, and yet you never get the sense that these people are anything more than mannequins Armstrong put there to dress the stage. Michael is a deeply passive character, as befits the subculture he has chosen, and makes very few meaningful decisions throughout the story.

I wanted more out of this book. Sure, it's a satire, it's meant to show how shallow and flat the world can be if we allow our personas to be created and modified by our attachment to a media subculture. The last chapter, where Michael finally begins to understand Hiro, is meant to show that deep understanding comes only from deviating the script which you've been fed, but ultimately the power of the novel is cut short by Armstrong's bombastic finale. But to succeed it must be more than just satirical, it must be plausible, and Grey falls down on the job there. To create his malignant, magniloquent world, Armstrong has created a world that cannot exist, a world with too many contradictions, a world of post-human technologies and beastly excesses, and that ultimately detracts from the power of his satirical eye.

Tags: book, review
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Rush, Losing It

I read Saturn's Children by Charlie Stross last week, and after having thought about it some, I've come to the conclusion that the book is shallower than I wanted it to be.

The book follows the adventures of Freya Nakamichi, a sex 'droid designed to please her human masters. Unfortunately for Freya, human beings have been extinct for two centuries or so, leaving us with a character with no idea what to do with her life. Most robots designed to serve human beings were cute, anime-like designs for household use, but Freya's shaped like the real deal, a tall ogre out of place in a world of short bishi and chibi designs. Depressed and despondent, she takes a job as a courier, winds up in all kinds of trouble, and ends up careering around the solar system, gets possessed by the spirit of her dead sisters, and eventually comes face-to-face with the biggest dream and fear every robot has: meeting a real live human being.

Unfortunately, this book falls off the end of the world toward the last chapters. Up until the info-dump where Freya reveals the true nature of robot devotion to human beings, a ham-handed scene if ever there was one (although fortunately the worst of it is ob skene), I was convinced that Charlie was going somewhere interesting with the book. Charlie mentioned that the book is an homage to Robert Heinlein (and the final set piece of the book is set in Heinleingrad, Eris), and the end of the book is as unconvincing as the ending of Freya's namesake novel, Heinlein's Friday. At the end of Friday, you might recall, the titular character ends up marrying the guy who raped her at the beginning of the book ("it was just business") and running away to some far away stellar colony, leaving Earth to collapse under its own corruption. The ending of Saturn's Children ends with a very similar, and even more serious problem, left unresolved: robots who are honest with themselves about their origins are terrified that H. Sapiens might someday re-emerge and assert their right to rule, disrupting the free will of the machines. It's presented as the central conflict of the main character, emerging throughout the book, growing in intensity as Freya gets closer and closer to meeting an authentic H. sap, only to be ignored in the final two chapters in favor of pyrotechnics and "aww, aren't they sweet" moments.

Charlie's ability to create engaging, intense, and intensely clever tight spots from which his heroine must escape, often with that classic transition, frying pan, fire, is here in all its glory. He does a great job of cranking up both the threat and the resolution, over and over again, while weaving a Sol-spanning conspiracy that should ultimately leave you breathless. Charlie knows how to dress the stage and then set the furniture ablaze a la Jack Bickham, and his technical hard SF knowledge is second to none. But if Saturn's Children is a Heinlein pastiche and an Asimov homage, it's also unfortunately got something else: A Neal Stephenson ending.

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Current Mood: listless

I finished Mlyn Hurn's Rayne Dancer, which I had mentioned reading a few weeks ago. Man, what a dud. First, do you remember the ridiculous uproar when Cassie Edwards lifted an entire passage on the natural history of the blackfooted ferret for her romance novel from a book, passage by passage, and put it into the mouth of her "primitive" hero? Hurn's done more or less the same thing; there's an entire disposition on the history and origin of the white tiger. While cuddling in bed after sex, Sean asks Rayne where her pet white tiger (no, really!) comes from and Rayne says

No white tigers in the wild were found after the 1950's in fact, and the wild species, which is really just a sub-species of the Bengal tiger, only survived in captivity due to inbreeding and crossbreeding programs. The white tigers, which survived until present times, are the result of the breeding programs using inbred and crossbred mixes of the Bengal and the Siberian tiger. An albino would have pink eyes, and there had been only one recorded instance of true albino tigers. In Cooch Behar, which we know as West Bengal, in India, two albino cubs were shot in 1922. The white tiger has pale blue eyes, a mottled grayish-pink nose and is white with the dark stripes that can vary from black to a chocolate brown color. White tigers are born only to parents who both carry the recessive gene for the white coloring.

Yeah, that's real post-sex conversation. Sounds like it came straight out of Wikipedia (the Wikipedia article is pretty close, even mentioning the Cooch Behar incident, but I suspect she got her pillow talk elsewhere, as the wording and tone aren't quite the same). Oh, but the rest of the book's just as bad.

In a scene in which our hero has been called away from Rayne's side to deal with some crises at his brother's farm nearby, our hero says of the third crisis of the day, "I think this goes beyond normal happenstance and things going wrong." What things? Oh, the phone line has been cut in two places-- but we're supposed to accept that the villain, an experienced international psychic man of mystery, would make such a mistake and that Sean, an experienced international psychic man of mystery himself, would not immediately jump to the conclusion that something very wrong is happening. Oh, and he's already met the villain, a man who wears expensive suits and drives an expensive car who visited Rayne yesterday with no apparent agenda and no explanation for his being there. Yet Sean's never actually shows real suspicion about him.

The scene where Sean proposes to Rayne was written by Victor Appleton, only without the punning skill. On the other hand, the villain was by John Norman, complete with pointless exposition.

Oh, Sean doesn't have a PDA, or a cell phone. Hurn tells us, "Using his computerized communication device, he had connected with the wireless remote to the Agency's database." Uh, yeah, it's called browsing the web with your iPhone, maybe using HTTPS. Amazing technology there, Sean.

Oh, and toward the end of the book, Sean and his boss have a conversation in which Sean basically says, "I have everything under control. No, I don't need to be tested. She couldn't possibly have suborned me. I'm going to marry her, she's the best fuck I've ever had." And the boss says, "Okay. As you know, Sean, you're the best field man, so I'll trust your opinion." And that's it. No follow up, no procedures, nothing.

Goddess, I think Kouryou-chan could see through this crap.

Tags: book, review
Current Mood: disgusted

Trial of Flowers is one of those new books in the "steampunk and decadence" genre that seems to have become popular since the emergence of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Trial follows the adventures of three men: Jason the Factor, Imago of Lockwood, and Bijaz the Dwarf, as the three of them face the rising old and corrupt gods and their magick that threatens to either overwhelm their beloved City Imperishable, or attract the attention of neighboring nations determined to raze the City to the ground before the gods can gather their full strength. The City is a place of "eletricks" and "hedge mages," of "poor magicks" and "boxed dwarves," of steam and iron. It might be New Orleans, or Casablanca, or Shanghai, with the last magics and the first difference engines vying for attention.

Jason is a mercantile agent who works for the city's most powerful mage and who has a secret torture chamber under his warehouse, Imago a shifty lawyer who's lost one case too many and owes money to legbreakers, and Bijaz is a "made dwarf," his body artificially stunted in its growth, trained as an accountant, with a taste for snuff theatre. These three don't necessarily get along as they each fumble their way toward saving themselves, and maybe the city as well.

As I mentioned, the inevitable comparison to China Mieville is there, but if there's one thing Jay Lake does better than China, it's this: Jay does not flinch. Not for a second. Heck, Steven R. Donaldson, once hailed as the modern master of characters wallowing in their own degradation, was never quite as skilled at not flinching the way Jay does not flinch. Thomas Covenant's self-loathing was never quite as pointed or tangible as Bijaz's.

That said, the issues involved do make it hard to care about Jason, Bijaz and, to a lesser extent, Imago. These aren't nice people, and the scatological hells through which Jay metaphorically and literally drags them, often face-down, is tough reading. The expected redemptions aren't as rewarding as we might hope. This ain't no book for the beach. But they're all done so well and so artfully that once you're into the book, once you've accepted the humane ugliness that Jay has decided to show you, you'll be hooked.

Trial of Flowers isn't a perfect book. There's a sense of isolation to the City Imperishable; its presence on a world full of people never quite feels right. Even Moorcock's Melnibone' felt more attached to its wider world than the City Imperishable, and I sensed that discordance more than once. But the wider world isn't what the book is about, so once you've stepped into the City Imperishable, there really is only one way out. You'll just have to travel through the city's sewers, pursued by eyeless, frog-tongued children and accompanied by two mad dwarves, each insane in his own way, to get there.

Highly recommended to readers of the "new weird," urban steampunk, and good literary fantasy.

Tags: book, review
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Jie-Bing Chen, Moonlight On Ehr-Chuan Spring

This week I've been reading Evolution's Darling, Scott Westerfeld's first book. Westerfeld is one of those writers who frustrates other writers: he's clearly brilliant, with a beautiful style and a pretty damn solid grasp of the pulpy aspects of modern science and post-Singularity suppositions, but he insists on slumming in the lucrative but critically ignorable young adult market with books like Pretties and Specials. But Westerfeld blows my mind in this book, his least seller, because he's quite clearly got sex on his brain. The opening fifth of the book is about how a young woman, 15 when the book opens, who lives alone with her star-hopping freelance journalist father, encourages her father's AI (against her father's wishes) to full sentience and sentient rights. The scene where the AI goes over the top and develops a Turing 1.0 score includes this lovely tidbit:

They spent two days in these raptures, sleep forgotten after Rathere injected the few remaining drops of the med-drone's stimulants. The tiny cabin was rank with the animal smells of sweat and sex when Isaah discovered them.

When I read that, I was puzzled. Scott Westerfeld? One of the hottest properties in Young Adult science fiction? The guy who wrote the pulpy Risen Empire novels which, while geekily thrilling could not in any sense be described as sexy? I thought it was a fluke, but no. Later, an art dealer is describing an artist she admires:

Did thirty years in an outmoded blast-factory before he popped the Turing boundary. To Leao, that sounded even worse than her English public school. (Public/private, private/public— the kind where the big girls fist-fuck the little ones and you never tell your parents.)

This is followed in the next chapter by one of the most disturbing sex scenes between two consenting adults ever written.

Now, on the one hand, I find this heartening. On the other, this is his worst-selling book. It was also his first book. I can't help but wonder which made it a poor seller: the sex, or his relative obscurity at the time.

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Current Mood: surprised

The second Grey Knights novel is Dark Adeptus, which I managed to find at Half-Price, lucky me, and read in about three days. Pretty good considering it's 400 pages long.

Brother Alaric is joined by Inquisitor Nyxos to the Borosis star system, which has mysteriously gone silent. There, they discover a whole planet that has mysteriously emerged from the Chaos and seems to be overwhelmed by biomechanical life-forms of hideous and corrupt intent. Their mission is to get down to the surface, find the source of the corruption, and kill it.

Counter does as good a job here as he did with the previous book. He makes a strong case that Alaric is clever and creative, not features normally found in a Grey Knight, and is as skilled at using his mind as he is at his magic or his halberd. The ending is particularly satisfying as Alaric, confronted with a situation he cannot win, figures out how to change the rules in mid-game to his favor. He's a more sympathetic person in this book, worrying much more about civilians he's worked with, and perhaps we could argue needs.

On the one hand, it's not as satisfying as the first book. The villain at its core doesn't seem as all-consuming. The conspiracy isn't as big, the threat not as convincing. Counter doesn't do as good a job convincing us the threat posed by Ukrathos is real, mostly because Ukrathos is away from center-stage most of the time, doesn't corrupt those around himself effectively, and only makes boastful claims rather than showing us the effects he might have. It weakens the real threat of the plot.

There's a description in chapter six that made me grin:

The city's towers soared out of the chasms below, masses of flesh like tentacles wrapped around them as if holding them upright. The towers were in the half-Gothic, half-industrial style of the Adeptus Mechanicus but all similarity to an Imperial city ended there. The black steel spires were fused with the city's biological mass, so that some were like massive teeth sticking out from rancid gums or huge steel leg bones, skinned and wrapped in greyish muscle. Bulbous growths fused obscenely with sheer-sided skyscrapers.

My first thought upon reading this was, "Yeah, I saw Bubblegum Crisis, too." A lot of Counter's writing is like that: he does a very good job with his cinematic descriptions, as if you can see into his head and watch him replaying the best grotesqueries of anime or cinema he's ever absorbed. That's okay, I do it too.

All in all, a fine middle book. I'll see how the third book pans out next week.

Tags: book, review
Current Mood: satisfied

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.

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Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Ayreon, Age of Shadows