2016 Locus SF: ANCILLARY MERCY bu Ann Leckie

I don't remember ever having such a problem with the structure of a trilogy...especially one that I ended up mostly enjoying. There's a moment about midway through Ancillary Sword ***mild spoilers to follow*** where Breq, the narrator, more-or-less proclaims that she's going to assassinate the Empress of the Galaxy (well, the Radch Empire that dominates human settlement of the galaxy). This was an exciting moment that seemed to promise that a somewhat contained story was going to escalate to a great adventure story. The rest of the book involves a trip to a throneworld that seems to cement that idea...and then the second book turned into a comedy of manners on and around out-of-the-way Athoek Station. I assumed that this was a diversion, a sort of mid-trilogy holding pattern while we wait for the big galaxy-shattering events of book 3...

Well, we're not done with Athoek Station by any stretch of the imagination, or the conflict-via-manners storytelling that came with it. In fact, this volume is so strongly tied to the previous one that they would have fit nicely into one volume. That also makes it hard to describe the plot without spoiling the previous book. Breq continues to navigate the Radch Empire's precarious politics, which are confused by the presence of Artificial Intelligence ships and also distributed/networked human intelligence. There is a bit more detail on the aliens around the Radchai, though they remain mostly mysterious. And, there is an action sequence to give the series something of a climax, though the solution once again depends more on Breq's clever diplomacy. And, if the action is slightly increased, the humor is much moreso. It's not too much of a stretch to say that the series, which started as space opera adventure, ends as a comedy.

Maybe it's not fair to speculate, but I get the impression that after her first novel, Leckie settled into a comfort zone telling this kind of softer, funnier character-based drama. It's worth it, however, because comfort and confidence also mean stronger writing. I don't think there's any question that this is the best written book in the series. The characters have really gelled, the humor works (something of a rare thing in serious science fiction), and the world only gets richer and more compelling even as we stay in such a narrow slice of it.

Though it's the best written of the trilogy, I'm not going to say it's the best. Ancillary Sword still benefits from introducing the ideas, the world, and the characters, and Mercy is hurt a bit by some of the false expectations set up by the first book - if we'd had this tone from the first, this would've been a more enjoyable read. Now that Leckie has found her voice, and it's a strong one, I'm interested to see what she'll do next (and she has the sweet bonus of winning all of the awards in the process of finding her voice).

Grade: B

2015 Locus SF and 2014 BSFA Winner: ANCILLARY SWORD by Ann Leckie

If Ancillary Justice plays like a blockbuster science fiction movie that also happens to be very smart and relevant, Ancillary Sword plays like an episode of the Imperial Radch tv show. Said tv show is also pretty smart and relevant, and it does a solid job of extending the themes of Justice, but it doesn't expand on those themes, and it lacks some of the scope of the previous work. I still enjoyed this, but it wasn't Empire Strikes Back to the first book's Star Wars, it was more random "Next Generation" episode to Wrath of Khan.

I don't think I can discuss this plot without mildly spoiling Ancillary Justice, so reader beware.

This book picks up right where the last book left off. Breq has uncovered a deep crisis within the Imperial Radch that threatens to tear the Empire apart, and at the very least could return it to the most vicious form of its colonialism which recent reforms had attempted to moderate. She is able to take command of a ship and proceed to further investigate said crisis. This takes her to Athoek Station, which seems like the jumping off point for a big quest that will delve into the big mysteries of split identities and possible alien infiltration raised by the previous novel...but instead, Sword settles in while Breq meets the locals, tries to do some reforming of corrupt colonial policies and gets involved in some old-fashioned detective work. In other words, it reads a lot like the flashback scenes of the previous work, but it lacks the interspersed bits that contained some more action, nor does it have the big revelations and big galactic-stakes climax of that book.

I'm certainly not saying this is bad, it's just not what I expected. The conflicts and mysteries of Athoek Station are interesting, and Leckie does a good job developing the place and its characters. But the first book introduced three or four really strong concepts that really hooked me in, and this book doesn't add much new to the mix or really advance the overall plot significantly. Breq also began to wear on me a bit - it's interesting that she has a lot of empathy while working on behalf of a largely unempathetic empire, and so she is always fighting for the justice that is supposed to be one of the cornerstones of the Radch. In practice, however, this involves a lot of scenes where she lectures people on why their policies are wrong (I came to refer to this, probably unfairly, as Breqsplaining). I was also bummed that the most interesting character from the last book, Seivarden, is mostly sidelined, as is a promising new character with an interesting hook named Tisarwat, who doesn't get enough to do after the early chapters either. And I'm still not entirely taken by the prose, though again, there is a good excuse for its occasional stiffness.

So, a slight disappointment, but it does set the stage for an exciting third entry, which I will be reading, thanks again to Locus SF voters.

Grade: B-

2014 Locus SF: ABADDON'S GATE by James S. A. Corey

The third novel of what was originally supposed to be The Expanse Trilogy (at least, that's how I understand it) didn't do as much to advance the story as much as I had hoped. This entry was the first (and last, so far) novel in the series to win a major award, and I get the sense that it is beloved by Expanse fans, but I wasn't too fond of it, and I struggled somewhat to get through it because it feels a bit like it's spinning its wheels, but also because of one character that I found particularly annoying.

The extraterrestrial encounters of the first two books have escalated to create a mysterious object in the outer solar system. The crew of the Rocinante, a ship that was central to the first two books, find themselves drawn towards this mystery alongside the competing powers of the solar system (the Earth, Mars, and Outer colonies)  and competition between these powers again leads to conflict. Meanwhile, we get some new POV characters for the Game of Thrones-style 3rd-person limited narration: a gruff officer from the outer colonies put in an awkward position by his Earthly birth named Bull, a lesbian Christian missionary named Anna, and Melba...ugh, Melba.

This series has always been pretty pulpy, and that continues here. The pulp elements help make all of the books fun, propulsive reads. But, Melba takes the pulp to a whole other level, one that carried past suspension of disbelief for me. She's a vicious augmented fighter motivated by a psychopathic need for revenge who develops an intricate plot to destroy the man she blames for the destruction of her wealthy family. In other words, she's completely over-the-top, and both her actions and the success she achieves in her aims are pretty ridiculous. To make this all the more frustrating, her crazy arc drives and dominates this book that is ostensibly about humanity's contact with the remnants of an intergalactic empire. That last bit is the story I want to read, especially with these fun characters and Corey's fast-paced style and storytelling that are both accessible and imaginative. But, most of the book involves humans fighting each other while being manipulated by this master-plotter vengeance heiress.

This is it for me and the Expanse for now, that I won't rule out picking up another entry down the line some time. It's a series that I'm obviously ambivalent about: its biggest virtue - pulpy, exciting plotting, is also often its biggest downfall.

Grade: C+

2013 Hugo and Locus SF Winner: REDSHIRTS by John Scalzi

Hey, I'm alive!

I have a good streak of reviews for all of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus SF winning novels going, so I thought I'd peek in to keep those up. So, I'm doing Locus-winner Redshirts today, Nebula-winner 2312 in a couple of weeks, and maybe a general 2013 Hugos post before WorldCon. I rather hope that either Redshirts or 2312 wins the Hugo as well. I wouldn't mind reading a third novel if it were good, but I'm not that excited by the other entries. Throne of the Crescent Moon does look interesting, but the word that seems to pop up the most in reviews is "light," which I feel is a euphemism for "this is a generic fantasy adventure in a slightly unusual setting." I would feel bad about ignoring the two female nominees, but I think I've given Bujold and Grant their fair share of consideration. I really enjoyed Miles Vorkasigan's early adventures, but I feel like it's time - at book fifteen - for that series to either wrap up or grow into something different. And Grant's zomblogging series has never really worked for me. If I'm wrong, and you think any of these three are brilliant, let me know.

I like that I'm pretending I still have an audience after a fourteen-month break. :)

I was extremely skeptical about Redshirts as well. The idea of following some of the expendable ensigns on an Enterprise-like ship has potential, but there seemed to be even larger potentials that this novel would be overly meta, or, worse yet, a cavalcade of Trekkie in-jokes. I can't honestly say that Scalzi avoided either of those pitfalls, and yet, I really enjoyed this novel much more than I expected to.

We follow a new cohort of ensigns, led by a former student of an alien seminary named Andrew Dahl, as they join the Universal Union flagship Intrepid in the 24th century. They soon learn that the Intrepid has an alarmingly high casualty rate among those who go on away missions with a small core or bridge officers. They also learn that people often act irrationally, and the laws of physics even seem to change, in events surrounding these officers. Most of the ship's crew goes to great lengths to avoid any contact with them, for fear of being dragged off on a likely-fatal away team mission, but one crewman in hiding spurs them into action when he tells them his theory that the Intrepid is locked into the narrative of an old tv show, and the lethal bridge crew are the stars.

So, yes, the whole thing is a big in-joke, and an old one at that (I know the "redshirts always die" concept goes back decades in fandom). And yes, it all gets very meta as the characters come to understand they are characters, and Scalzi starts to explore the meaning of death in fiction (especially in the codas). But Scalzi still does a great job selling it all. He tosses off plenty of classic space opera plot ideas, and, though The Chronicles of the Intrepid is supposed to be a bad show, some of them were pretty interesting. For instance, he deals with Dahl's religious background well, and he has the feel of episodic space opera plotting down pat. This novel really made me miss Star Trek on television (especially reading it soon after watching another one of Abrams' dumb blockbuster pseudo-Trek movies). It also made me more interested in reading Scalzi's more straightforward sf; Old Man's War has moved up significantly on my "to read" list.

When the novel turns to the more meta aspects and begins to focus on storytelling more, it does lose some of its charm. But, Scalzi, other than short-cutting through a lot of the disbelief that some characters should have felt, manages to do some solid character work and say a few interesting things about writing along the way. I'm sure it's not the most brilliant novel about writing we've ever seen...but we've seen a lot of works in that category. Scalzi keeps his approach grounded, accessible, and character-oriented. In the process, he doesn't match the brilliance of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, Auster's New York Trilogy, or Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds, but he doesn't end up on that steaming mountain of garbage made up of 99% of postmodern metafiction either. The three codas, where Scalzi really starts to spend more time in the "real world" could have been a good deal shorter (especially the second), but they do have some nice moments.

I'm surprised to say, I'd be perfectly happy to see this win the Hugo - even against a more ambitious book like 2312 (though I'm only halfway through it, maybe it will wow me in the second half).

By the way, I listened to this as an audiobook. I think it was paced well for that mode of presentation. Wil Wheaton reads, and I was worried that would be an uncomfortable gimmick, but he acquitted himself well.

Grade: B+

2012 Hugo nominee, novel: EMBASSYTOWN by China Mieville

Mieville has obviously made plenty of waves in the past decade, and I have to admit that his books are consistently very good, even if only one has really clicked with me.  As much as the Hugos have turned towards fantasy over that same time period, I still think there’s a slight preference for science fiction among WorldCon voters…or at least a reserve of feeling that science fiction should be competing better against fantasy. So, when a hot author like Mieville turns toward space opera for the first time,* and gets some great reviews in the process, I think you have a very strong contender not only for a Hugo nomination, but for a win.

The novel takes place on the planet Arieka, a distant outpost of Bremen, a human (or “Terre”)-dominated stellar empire. The Ariekei are non-humanoid aliens with very different physiognomies that breathe a different atmospheric composition, and, most importantly, they have a very literal language that makes their cognition entirely different from other species. In other words, it’s a more likely portrayal of aliens than your typical Star Trek races, and one that takes us back to the linguistic Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that we saw back in Babel-17. The Bremen colony on Arieka is a smallish outpost called Embassytown, whose residents see the Ariekei as strange, somewhat frightening, Hosts.

Avice Benner Cho grows up in Embassytown, but learns that she has a talent for the “immer” that makes interstellar travel possible. She leaves Arieka and gets to see the universe, but she is eventually drawn back home with her linguist husband Scile, who wants to learn more about the Ariekei. We also learn a great deal about the Ambassadors, the only people really capable of communicating with the Ariekei. This requires a pair of twins linked through surgery and training. Avice is friends with Ambassadors named CalVin, but she also witnesses the arrival of a new Ambassador named EzRa, who inadvertently rocks Embassytown to its core.

The ideas are fantastic, as you’d expect with Mieville, but I also had some of my other typical Mieville complaints. The characters are all pretty flat, serving either to forward the plot or convey exposition and/or ideology. Mieville’s plots also all seem to follow the same trajectory: he sets up a society, shows its precariousness, and then tests it with a revolution (I wonder if Mieville is stuck in this revolutionary rut because he’s a Marxist).  I would like to see something different from him. The structure of the novel also seems needlessly flashy with a non-linear narrative that serves little purpose (and accordingly gets dropped after about a hundred pages).

So, my verdict seems to follow what I say about most Mieville novels (other than maybe The City & The City). It’s a well-written work with incredible ideas that could have worked better with more character and plot development. Honestly, this might have grabbed me more as a novella that simply established the world – I think such a work could have been a true classic. But, it’s a rare thing in this day and age to see a space opera this original and well-written that captivates mainstream literary circles and makes bestseller lists all over the place. As such, I expect it to do very well in the voting this year.

Grade: B


*I’d argue that The City & The City is actually a science fiction novel rather than a fantasy novel, which makes the 2010 Locus awards look rather silly (The City & The City won Fantasy, while magic-steampunk-Old-West-zombie-gas novel Boneshaker won as “SF”)

2009 Locus SF – ANATHEM by Neal Stephenson

Anathem is an ambitious, epic novel that deals with central questions in the philosophy of science.  This is the only novel I can think of that directly addresses the central episitemological and ontological questions: what is the nature of physical existence and how do we know what we know?  In many ways, the novel picks up Stephenson’s standard themes about information, science and spirituality, and it also picks up on his more recent obsession with great thinkers, but it’s also a fairly big departure, as Stephenson creates his own world.

Anathem takes place on a world not unlike our own called Arbre, where science is a sort of religion, and there has been a longstanding conflict between scientists and laypeople.  The scientists have retreated to monasteries called concents, and they only interact with the outside world at certain intervals (every year, decade, century, or millennium, depending on their level).  They’ve also been forced to renounce most technology, so the “avout” intellectuals spend all of their time on abstract and theoretical inquiries rather than applications.  At the novel’s beginning, the narrator, Fraa Erasmus, is in his late teens and tasked with personal dilemmas like his choice of order (which are divided around the aforementioned philosophical questions), but he soon becomes involved in a situation with global implications.

It’s hard to say much more about the novel without spoilers.  The plot doesn’t get going until over 300 pages in, and there are facets of the world itself that are major reveals fairly late in the book.  I will say that we’re told early that the titular “anathem” is a ceremony in which avout are expelled into the “saeculur” world, so it’s fairly obvious that these two worlds will eventually collide.

I think Stephenson is probably the most exciting sf writer out there right now, and this novel does deliver big ideas and (eventually) an exhilarating story.  The world building contains some nice ideas, and the monasteries are well-developed with their own politics and mysteries (and, hey, since they’re monks, they have to have cool martial arts as well!)  Stephenson spends a lot of time inventing etymologies for new words.  “Anathem” for instance, merges “anthem” and “anathema.”  Sometimes it’s entertaining; sometimes it can feel a bit precious and self-indulgent (and, are we supposed to assume that the novel’s language, Orthic, is identical to modern English?).  Also, the world’s history is very similar to Earth’s.  This is largely intentional, but some of the similarities go too far.  Thelenes, this world’s Socrates, makes all of the same discoveries, and uses the same techniques, and apparently lives the same life. Again, I can imagine arguments for why this might be, but it's mostly because Stephenson wanted to talk about Socrates in the context of this world. In other words, he skips some great opportunities for some Rice and Salt-esque alternate-history-building.

It’s also, like Stephenson’s last novel, too long.  I, for one, enjoy Stephenson’s long digressions.  He’s quite good at making a lecture into something that can illuminate the plot, world, or characters at the same time it gives you something to think about.  In this novel, however, the lectures seem to be far more repetitive than usual.  Almost every one has the exact same point, which thus gets hammered into the ground (I hope I never see the phrase Hylaean Theoric World again).  I preferred the more eclectic tangents of his previous works.  Anathem does feel like a chore sometimes.  If three or four hundred pages had been cut, this would have been a much stronger work.

These complaints aside, it’s an exciting novel that really pays off in the last few hundred pages.  Each act is more exciting than the last, and the climax is fantastic.  I’d have to say it would have been my Hugo pick.  I’d certainly recommend The Graveyard Book to more people, and it does seem like a more polished, and finished work, but I think the ambition and scope of Anathem more fully realizes the promise of speculative fiction.

Grade: A-

2008 Hugo and Locus, 2007 Nebula – THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is a talented writer, and perhaps the literary establishment's greatest defender of genre fiction.  As a result of a few brilliant essays on the subject, serious-minded sf fans, like myself, have a lot of goodwill for the guy.  His Kavalier and Clay reimagined the creation of Superman by Jewish immigrants in the 1930s with a little bit of magical realism added in for good measure, and won him the Pullitzer Prize.  Thus, when Chabon returned with a novel with some mild speculative fiction elements (an alternate history), the sf awards took notice in a big way. It was a regular occurrence in the ‘70s, but this is the first award since the early ‘90s to get the Hugo, Nebula, and the Locus.

In the world of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, the Roosevelt administration followed through with a plan (just briefly considered in our world) to resettle Jewish refugees from the Nazis in an Alaskan colony.  Israel, no longer the sole refuge, was destroyed in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, which of course created more refugees.  The Jewish-Alaskan colony of Sitka is semi-automous, but is on the verge of reverting back to U.S. control as a conservative President plans to reassert authority (and possibly expel the Jews).  Like Dick in The Man in the High Castle, Chabon never clearly explains his alternate world.  The reader has to gather clues throughout the book (there are other tantalizing hints: JFK married to Marilyn Monroe?).

The background may be a speculative fiction alternate history, but the plot is pure noir.  Alchoholic homicide detective Meyer Landsman stumbles across the murder of one of his neighbors, an odd chess-obsessed drug addict.  Landsman and his half-Jewish, half-Tlingit partner Berko Shemets investigate, against the best wishes of the new police chief, who also happens to be Landsman's ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish.  The department has higher priorities than a drug addict's murder, as she is trying to close out all open cases in the few months before Reversion to the United States.  The investigation soon brings them into conflict with a Hassidic mafia, and eventually leads to a larger conspiracy that links the dead man with Landsman's recently deceased sister, Jerusalem, and the United States government.

Chabon is a fantastic writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed the novel.  My one complaint is that the plot is a bit byzantine and sometimes feels a little contrived.  There were moments when it felt more like James Bond than Sam Spade, what with the giant conspiracy and secret military training facilities.  The novel is at its best in the quieter moments between Landsman, Shemets and their families, or when its revealing little everyday facets of Chabon's intriguing alternate history.  The action set-pieces and the big mystery reveals felt more like distractions than thrilling plot-movers.  Also, I think the more you know about Jewish culture, the more fun you'll have with the novel.  I probably know a little bit more than the average goy, but I felt like I was still missing some subtle "easter eggs."

Grade: A-

2007 Hugo and Locus SF – RAINBOWS END by Vernor Vinge

Near-future sf is tricky business.  It’s hard to spot the right trends, and it’s easy to over-estimate the pace of technological change.  My past encounters with Vinge have been space operas tens of thousands of years in the future.  In this entry, he switches gears and gives us a 2025 wherein pretty much every bit of preliminary research circa 2006 pays off to make a very different world.  Today, if you watch your average thirty-something try to text, then watch your average twenty-something do the same, you’ll notice a pretty dramatic difference.  That is a testimony to how quickly younger generations can adapt to new technological trends.  On the other hand, we’re talking about texting here.  I know there are people who think twitter solely responsible for the downfall of autocracies across the globe, but, in many ways, incredible advances in computing power and connectivity have led to only superficial changes in society.  However, I come here not to judge Vinge as a futurist (I’m pretty sure he blows it, but I think that's been my verdict on every near-future novel after Stand on Zanzibar), but as a thrice-winner of the Hugo for best novel.

In Vinge’s future, there are “wearable” computers that plug people into global networks.  You can interface visually through special contact lenses, and even overlay visuals onto the real world to create “augmented realities.”  Vinge does a great job looking at some of the cultural implications of this.  Many people live in fantasy worlds, from Discworld to MiddleEarth to RowlingSpielberg (I'm not sure I get the connection there) to the fictional bibliophilic fantasy world of Jerzy Hacek to the Pokemon-like Scooch-a-mout.  Hackers can also control interfaces and hitchhike on users from worlds away.  For a point of view character, Vinge uses a great new twist on Rip Van Winkle.  Since 2010, famous poet Robert Gu has suffered from Alzheimers.  A cure is administered, and Gu returns to this new world.  He’s so far behind that he has to go back to high school, and there he hangs out with his granddaughter Miri, a boy named Juan Orozco, and a few fellow senior citizens.  They all get roped into a massive international conspiracy involving the Great Powers and experimental mind control.

Mind control is an odd choice for Vinge.  He used it in his last Hugo winner, and it’s also been popular in a few other sf entries (a lot of Whedon’s later material; hey, I just rewatched Serenity the same day I finished this novel).  I guess it’s a natural outgrowth of our greater understanding of the human brain, and another way to look at issues of free will.  I just think the timing is odd.  I’d think the lesson of the ‘00s is not “beware new technology and mind control,” but rather “mind control isn’t necessary because people will still do extreme violent things for the old motivators: nationalism and religion.”  Vinge does comment on this latter theme as well though – Vinge’s world is a place where weapons of mass destruction are far too easy to obtain, and even small extremist groups must be feared.  Actually, now that I think about it, mind control is less of a theme in this novel, and more of a MacGuffin.

The setting is genuinely fun and intriguing, even if it is a bit hard to buy for less than two decades (I’ll be sure to post a retraction of this review in 2025 if I’m proved wrong).  The characters are less exciting.  There’s a good start with Robert Gu – he was a cruel but talented man before alzheimers, buy now it’s no longer clear if he is as cruel or as talented.  That said, he’s still a cog in Vinge’s plot more than he’s an independent character – and he’s by far the most developed of them all.  The rest of the characters fall very flat, and Vinge’s teenagers feel like adolescents.  And there’s a particularly important character named Rabbit whose character is never really explained, and yet it’s also not as mysterious as it could have been as it seem to rely on an old cyberpunk trope (and the characters basically say as much).  Rabbit is supposed to be a trickster character, but he’s not quite convincing or interesting enough.  The plot is even worse than the characters.  There’s the MacGuffin, and characters are manipulated by omnipotent hackers into running around looking for it.  The entire second half of the book is a repetitive sequence in the UCSD library, that involves a lot of telling and not much showing.  We’re back to what annoyed me so much about A Deepness in the Sky.

At least the library setting looks cool and science fictiony:

There’s also something very farcical about the plot – this novel actually feels like Vinge trying to write a Neal Stephenson-style action-comedy, and the book is poorer for the comparison.  The humor is more forced than Stephenson’s, the action’s duller, and the ideas just aren’t as sharp or interesting.  I’ve also mentioned accessibility issues with the past two Vinge winners.  In the ‘00s as a whole, the Hugos have gone to books pitched at broader audiences than ever before…but this is the exception.  I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone not very well versed in sf ideas.

There’s a solid start here, especially with Gu and the wearables, but I wasn’t as engrossed by the final product as I could have been.

Grade: B

2006 Locus SF – ACCELERANDO by Charles Stross

Am I really supposed to take this singularity thing seriously?  Really?  Advanced AIs and a proposal to Von Neumann factory the moon out of existence, set in the 2010s? Like theology, the sort of techno-optimism that proponents of singularity back is fun to talk about, but it can quickly and effortlessly segue into the ridiculous. Stross’s saving grace is that he doesn’t seem to take the singularity seriously either. I get the impression that he is a believer, but this novel is about 30% serious speculation and 70% running wild with speculative concepts. I do like that Accelerando embraces the ridiculous. I just wish it had embraced plot and character with equal fervor.

This is especially true in the first part, where we have at least some contemporary reference points to ground us. The novel begins with Manfred Macx, a man filled to the brim with tech ideas, but, due to a general dislike of wealth, he usually gives them away to make other people rich. He also has a lot of conflicts with his dominatrix/wife Pamela. He helps to kick off the rapid push towards singularity by sending software copies of lobster brains that have collectively achieved intelligence into space. From there, we get this accelerating technology developing through singularity. Stross occasionally interjects with a summation of the latest changes; by the 2030s, the solar system and the human lifecycle begin to become unrecognizable. From there we get a generational epic. Manfred’s daughter Amber explores an alien wormhole network, his grandson Sirhan works with other family members to try to find an independent niche in the new solar system, copies of the original generation pop up, and the family robocat, Aineko, has a fairly big role to play in everything.

Where does all this wacky speculation leave character and plot? Nowhere to be found, really, as might be fairly obvious from that vain stab at summarizing them. Manfred has some presence (though even he’s straight out of a Warren Ellis comic). Everyone is either so dull, on the one hand, or so wild unpredictable, on the other, that I couldn’t really tell you anything about them. The fact that there’s no plot is underlined by the fact that there’s no end. Maybe the sequel Glasshouse carries things to a more satisfying conclusion, but this novel just peters out.

Also, going back to our old accessibility discussion, this book . . . no. Not at all. Stross throws out concepts at a dizzying speed, and he rarely stops to explain them. Do you know what a Von Neumann machine is? A Matrioshka brain? I did, but I barely kept up. I don’t really see the reason to not define terms like these. One of the great things about sf is the “sense of wonder,” and I guess that’s what Stross is shooting for with this assault of Big Ideas. However, Big Ideas have dimishing returns, as far as I’m concerned, and the Idea-per-page highwire act in this book got boring for me by the mid-point. When the characters spend all of their time discussing how much computing power there is in the solar system and how very impressive that is, it’s hard to care about anything.

A whole lot of writers in this decade, and, from what I’ve seen, Stross may be the worst offender, are working to make science fiction a more insular conversation. If you don’t have a solid grounding in foundational texts and you don’t follow the right science news sites, don’t bother showing up. And people wonder why readers are turning to fantasy and steampunk?

So, if you are the type of reader who’s up-to-date on sf terms and concepts, especially relating to the singularity, and you’re more interested in Big Ideas and being amused than plot and character, I think you’ll have a great time with this book. Obviously, lots of readers have. Otherwise, go nowhere near it.

Grade: C+

2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award – THE BAROQUE CYCLE: QUICKSILVER, 2005 Locus – THE BAROQUE CYCLE: THE CONFUSION and THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD by Neal Stephenson

This one takes some explaining.  The Baroque Cycle is a massive work by Neal Stephenson – a sort of prequel to his information-opus Cyptonomicon that focuses on several of the characters’ ancestors in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  Together, The Baroque Cycle forms one 2600 page story, though it was published as three separate novels at six-month intervals (and then later as eight smaller novels).  The first entry, Quicksilver, won the Clarke.  It finished third in the Locus voting in 2004, but the final two-thirds were both eligible in the next year, and they won as a single unit.  The first novel, Quicksilver, does start slow, so I can see why the Locus voters passed it by, though it does get quite good after 300 pages or so.  The second novel, The Confusion, is a work of genius.  The third novel overstays its welcome (after reading for thousands of pages, I found myself yelling “get on with it already!” during the home stretch).  Really, The Baroque Cycle should be seen as one work, so it is fitting that Locus grouped them together (and I’m doing the same).

So, 2600 pages, huh?  The Baroque Cycle is daunting, and at the end, it’s a fairly uneven work.  Fundamentally, it’s about the dispute between Leibniz and Newton over who invented Calculus.  This was a real fight between two genius men who were also crucial political figures in British history – part of the dispute is about science and the politics of science, but it also involves questions of scientific professionalization, struggles over the British crown, the birth of high finance, the prehistory of information technology, and the nature of God and the cosmos. 

If you groaned or gave a weary sigh during any part of that description, run away now.  Run as fast and as far from these novels as you can.  However, if you’re at least mildly intrigued by a 2600 page novel of scientific disputes and political intrigue, there’s a decent chance that you will enjoy yourself here.  Stephenson livens things up with the picaresque hero Jack Shaftoe.  In contrast to the Stephenson’s invented scientist character, Daniel Waterhouse, Jack is an uneducated clown who has wild, swashbuckling adventures across the globe.  He starts out as a mercenary and vagabond in Quicksilver, then spends most of The Confusion as a pirate.  Bridging the two stories is Eliza, a beautiful young woman who goes from harem slave to aristocrat over the decades-long story, and sponsors schemes in the criminal, political, scientific and financial world that the Cycle so masterfully jumps between (and often combines!)

We follow these three characters for most of the novel from their youths in the 1660s to 1714 (the Hannoverian succession for those keeping score at home).  Waterhouse lets Stephenson explore the scientific revolution and England’s burgeoning Royal Society, and especially its superstars, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton.  He uses Jack Shaftoe to delve into the underworld and to tell a series of comic adventure stories.  Eliza takes us into the worlds of royal courts and early modern trade and finance.

As history, it’s generally accurate and rather ingenuous.  Several historical characters make cameos or play large roles, including several kings, queens, and scientists (a young Ben Franklin even pops in early on).  Stephenson has his facts straight and more than once I would look up a particularly unlikely-seeming event or meeting and find that it really did happen more or less as Stephenson described.   There is some artistic license taken – Stephenson puts a witch execution in New England a few decades after they had stopped, for instance – but that’s really where Stephenson’s genius comes in.  Yes, the main characters are his creations, and yes, there are several improbably (and impossible scenes).  At one point, Stephenson even stages a Disneyesque musical number in a Jack Shaftoe scene.  But all of these moments only serve to bring the history even more vibrantly alive.

What exactly does this all have to do with science fiction then?  Well, there are some moments that are pure fantasy (an immortal sorceror appears, and much of the plot turns on some alchemical gold – both are elements carried over from Cryptonomicon).  But, more fundamentally, these are novels about science.  They explore the implications of science by taking real discoveries and exaggerating them or carrying them to extreme ends.  Leibniz really did consider building a mechanical calculator, and is thus one of the prehistoric pioneers of the computer.  In Stephenson’s world, he gets to build his calculator.  This is science fiction at its most pure.

This is my third Stephenson review, and it should be clear by now that I’m a fan of his work, and especially his irreverent, witty, and discursive writing style.  I’m also a fan of historical settings and richly drawn worlds, so, it’s not a surprise that I loved these novels.  Stephenson’s tics are all still here – especially his tendency to run off on long tangents that can turn into academic lectures.  You either love it or hate it, and if the latter, you’re going to have a hard time with Stephenson and the hardest time of all here.

I did say that this is an uneven work.  Quicksilver takes a while to get going.  The Confusion is probably the best thing that Stephenson has ever written and one of my favorite novels.  System of the World was painful to get through at times.  It’s a nice two or three hundred page epilogue to the first two parts…stretched out to nine hundred pages (for symmetry’s sake?).  In System, for once, Stephenson’s diversions aren’t all that interesting, there’s a great deal of repetition (you will grow sick of the phrase “Trial of the Pyx”), and the characteristic long-winded descriptions just aren’t that interesting.  I’d suggest skimming the final volume if you can bring yourself to do so.  It also wouldn’t hurt to bone up on history before delving in – I gave up on Quicksilver when it first came our, but I found it a much breezier read after reading up on seventeenth-century English history for a class I was teaching. 

In summary, it’s a highly rewarding set of novels that I can’t recommend highly enough…so long as you’re interested in history, can tolerate Stephenson’s quirks, and you can hold your nose and make your way through some slow portions.  The Confusion alone is worth these obstacles though. 

Grade: A

2004 Locus SF – ILIUM by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons’ Ilium follows the misadventures of a group of war-re-enactors, as the egos of the organizers and the participants threaten to get in the way of historical accuracy.

Okay, the war is the Trojan War, the site is a terraformed Mars thousands of years in the future, and the organizers are godlike beings. But, it was reassuring for me to imagine the story on a smaller scale, since, as is the norm with Simmons’ space operas, the story has to go BIG: the nature of Earth and humanity are on the line, supertechnology and omnipotent beings abound, numerous references to great works of the western canon are thrown in to give the proceedings extra artificial weight, and one volume cannot contain the action. Honestly, if not for the fact that I’ve read or want to read every other Locus sf winner, I would have skipped this one, because it’s exactly what I’ve come to expect from Simmons after three disappointing books in a row (Fall of Hyperion and the Endymion duology). My eyes glazed over for a lot of my reading, and I’m afraid I won’t remember a thing about this book if I don’t write this review right now.

As I said, it’s the far future, most of humanity is extinct, but there are a few survivors bouncing around Earth, some missing-in-action “post-humans,” Greek gods on Mars (who may be said post-humans), and some sentient robots bouncing around the rest of the solar system. The Greek gods live on Olympus Mons and are recreating the Trojan War. They’ve brought a few twentieth-century scholars of the Iliad in to consult, including sometimes-narrator Thomas Hockenberry (who may as well just be PJF from Riverworld). Hockenberry is given the power to morph into different characters and teleport, but he’s also often given impossible, history-sabotaging tasks by the gods (“kill Athena!”), not that these lead the plot anywhere interesting in particular. There’s also some action with the few remaining humans on Earth where they hang with Oddyseus and fight Prospero and Caliban for some reason. There’s a good amount of Roger Zelazny here – the futuristic Greek gods, whatever their origin, reminded me of the futuristic Hindu gods of Lord of the Light, and Oddyseus adventuring on a destroyed future Earth took me right back to This Immortal.

My favorite portions of the novel involve to “moravecs” or sentient robots from the Gallilean moons of Jupiter. Mahnmut is a Shakespeare scholar from Europa, and Orphu is a Proust expert from Io. The scholars are tasked with a mission to check out Mars. Their scholarship doesn’t do much other than allow Simmons to remind us that he knows some things about literature, as he so often does. The Canterbury Tales format of Hyperion was original and fun; since then, the Keats, Shakespeare, Homer, and Proust references just seem like Simmons doing his shtick. Is it in his contract or something? At least Mahnmut and Orphu have personalities though, unlike the human characters.

I think Simmons is just not for me. His world-building doesn’t have the depth that I look for as it leans to heavily on shallow intertextuality, and he always ramps the stakes up to the point that nothing seems to matter.

Grade: C-

2003 Locus – THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT by Kim Stanley Robinson

Why Europe? By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the area was a backwater compared to China and the Islamic world. The Europeans discovered America, and, by the eighteenth century, they were on the path to world domination. Why this happened is the fundamental question in world history, and one that I think should interest science fiction authors as they often deal with issues of discovery, expansion, and technological and scientific advancement. In this epic novel, Kim Stanley Robinson digs into the science fiction writer’s toolbox to examine this and other questions of world history.

Robinson uses alternate history to get at these big questions, and he does so in a way that I think no other science fiction writer has. Philip K. Dick and writers of historical fantasy or steampunk usually focus on aesthetics, capturing the mood of a era or shocking the reader with a sense of dislocation from a world like and unlike our own. How many times have we seen the old “Nazi flag flapping in a modern city” trick? Harry Turtledove is a bit more focused on the historical questions, but he still spends more time wargaming alternate Americas than historical inquiry. Robinson, however, wants to know what made the modern world, and he does it by subtracting Europe.

This is an ambitious work of massive scope. Robinson starts with the Black Death, which killed as much as half the population of Europe in our own world. Robinson has it explode in virulence and wipe out more than 99% of the population. Then, he follows the rest of the world for the next seven hundred years to see what happens. Who discovers America? The Chinese, but they arrive among the hunter-gatherer societies of California rather than near the wealthy societies of Mesoamerica, and they don’t have as many competitors as the Spanish, so Indians have more time to maneuver. The Iroqouis (Hodenosaunee) form a pan-American movement of resistance. The Enlightenment is centered in Samarkand; the industrial revolution in India (giving us a bit of well thought out steampunk, for once). Rather than a post-Inquisition Jewish diaspora spreading capital and knowledge, there is a Japanese diaspora prompted by a Chinese invasion. The Great War is a six-decade affair that pits industrialized China against industrialized Islam, killing a billion people. San Francisco is a Chinese city called Fangzhang centered north of the “Gold Gate.” In other words, many things follow the same path – the processes of exploration, scientific discovery, technological transformation, and international conflict make certain developments inevitable, but the shape of these changes is different enough to make things interesting. Similarly, the same natural disasters occur (Japan’s Ansei earthquakes and the great California flood, both in our 1850s-1860s, get special attention), but the contexts change.

As a history geek, I’d be happy to read a dry fictional history in this mode for 600+ pages, but Robinson also manages to give us a consistent set of characters through an ingenious device. We begin with Mongol Bold Bardash and African Kyu, who are both enslaved and shipped to China. When they die, they come to the Bardo from the Tibetan book of the dead, and then they are reincarnated into the next age as Bihari and Kokila in India. They, and a small group of other characters, form a jati; they are destined to meet in each life and influence each other, and Robinson helps us keep track by using the same letters in their names. K is brash and rebellious while B is humble and steadfast.

I can’t say that The Years of Rice and Salt always works as a character-centered novel; sometimes time passes too quickly, and it is hard to get attached to storylines when we change scenery every sixty pages or so (on average). I’d almost rather have 10 short novels set in this world than this set of vignettes. But, I did think it worked extremely well, and the last two chapters slow things down a bit and offer a nice capstone to the whole novel, as K and B become scholars who can look back on everything that’s happened before.
It’s probably not for everyone, but I adore this novel; it’s one of my favorites from the past decade. I love that a book can create interesting, centuries-spanning characters, build a really fascinating counterfactual world, and be so unabashedly intellectual. This isn’t just a historical novel, this is a novel about history, and I think science fiction is at its best when it works as social science, and tries to dig into the workings of the world.

Hominids, pshaw.

Grade: A

2002 Locus SF - PASSAGE by Connie Willis

This is the first Willis I've read not set in her time-travelling historians of Oxford world, though there are a lot of similarities. It's clear to me by now that Willis has a shtick. Take some annoying characters, have the protagonists go to comical lengths to avoid said annoying characters, have the whole plot hinge on failures of communication, and add in some meticulous historical research, and you've got a Willis novel. And there's nothing wrong with that. Most writers have shticks; the question is whether they can engage a reader enough with plot, character, and prose to keep them coming back anyway.

The setting this time in a hospital in contemporary Colorado (Willis's home). Joanna Lander is a psychologist studying Near-Death Experiences, the whole light-at-the-end-of-a-tunnel phenomenon. She works in close quarters with a true believer named Mandrake, who is convinced that these NDEs prove the existence of an afterlife (and psychic powers). Mandrake and his star subject Mrs. Davenport are the prime annoying characters that the protagonists must avoid at all costs this go round. When a neurologist named Richard Wright shows up at the hospital with a plan to study the biochemistry of NDEs, Joanna jumps on board against Mandrake's objections. Wright has found a drug that can simulate the effects of Near-Death Experience on the brain, and, eventually, Joanna agrees to become a subject. As each simulated NDE brings her further into what feels like a real experience of an actual historical event, Joanna struggles to maintain her objectivity and frantically dodges through the corridors of the hospital to try to understand exactly what her experience means.

Why does she move frantically through the hospital? Because Connie Willis thinks it's funner that way, I guess. There's a lot of manufactured drama here. At first, it makes a fairly mundane science thriller into more of a page turner - the fact that Joanna has to sneak, run, and dodge her way through the hospital for tiny tidbits of information makes things a bit more exciting.  After a few hundred pages, however, I really wanted to yell, "Good God everybody!  Get some $%#@*^ing cellphones and have a $%#@*^ing direct conversation for once!"  Joanna, you don't have to take a taxi to the parking lot to avoid Mandrake. You can say "I'm not interested in your work, and I have other things to do."  It's easy! The novel sort of exhausted me, and I started to get the feeling that everything was spinning in place as Willis goes to great lengths to keep her mysteries going. The last part is especially frustrating, as it involves characters reconstructing information that we already know. We have to see the same hundred-page investigation twice!

That said, I couldn't stay mad at Willis for long. Her dialog, as always, is naturalistic yet clever, and genuinely funny and charming, and her core characters are typically lovable (does she make the ancillary characters so petty and awful just to make the main characters more attractive in contrast?). A dying young girl named Maisie, who is obsessed with disasters, is particularly smart and funny. And, as I've said, writing awful people is a real writer's skill, even if it's not one that I always enjoy reading. The core mysteries are interesting, and there are a couple of bold choices here. I knew in a book about Near-Death Experiences that someone important is going to face death themselves, and Willis heavily foreshadows how this is likely to happen in the hospital. But who faces death, how it happens, and the outcome took me completely by surprise. This novel managed to shock me. I also thought it was bold of Willis to write a direct, secular confrontation with the meaning of death. She has a lot of opportunities to give herself an out, but she remains a committed skeptic to the very end.

In the end, I liked the novel, though I was often frustrated by it. I think it could have been a lot better at about 2/3rds the length.  I'd recommend it to Willis fans, but I'd guide Willis newcomers to To Say Nothing of the Dog instead.

Grade: B

2001 Locus SF – THE TELLING by Ursula K. LeGuin

LeGuin wrote many of the finest novels of the New Wave in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s – really, some of the finest sf novels, period.  She returned to her beloved fantasy series, Earthsea, in the early ‘90s with a novel that I found aimless and a clash with the original trilogy.  Now, in the ‘00s, she returns to her Hainish social sf, which included classics like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, and…well, it works.

Like The Left Hand of Darkness, The Telling takes a delegate of the interstellar Ekumen from Earth and puts them into a society of aliens (though humanoid and distantly related).  Sutty was born in India and lived for a time in Vancouver, hiding from religious extremists who have taken the planet’s government.  As an agent of the Ekumen she takes the very long trip to Aka, a planet where a new pro-technology Corporation government is attempting to wipe out all vestiges of an ancient folk religion.  It’s quite a clash for Sutty, but she comes to see more parallels between theocratic Earth and the anti-religious extremists of Aka’s Corporation. Sutty settles in a secluded valley where many of the old religious traditions survive, including a powerful storytelling tradition, the titular Telling, led by paired priests called maz. 

The book debates issues of rationalism and modernism versus religion with plenty of nuance – just when I thought LeGuin’s portrayal of the folk religion was two idealistic, she does pull in a few twists about how it played out in other regions on Aka.  It is, perhaps, a tad too preachy, but I’ve seen worse.  LeGuin also throws in a little mysticism, but she keeps it ambiguous.  The real star, though, is the prose.  It’s always been LeGuin’s strongest suit, and here she uses a loose, succinct style that feels almost like a prose poem at times.  It’s grounded, but it also fits the folkoric world that most of the novel takes place in.  It’s a similar airy and laid-back style as Tehanu, but it played much better here.

While The Telling certainly doesn’t top her earlier books, it is a worthy entry in the Hainish saga and LeGuin’s catalog.  She has a few more wins coming towards the end of the decade, and I’m looking forward to them now.

Grade: B

2011 Hugo and Locus SF, 2010 Nebula: Novel - BLACKOUT/ALL CLEAR by Connie Willis

Well, I managed to finish this 1140 page monstrosity. I think the Hugo nominators were right to combine these two books as one volume, and that’s how I’m going to talk about them. It’s clearly one story, and the dividing point between the volumes is rather arbitrary. I’ve seen some criticism of the division as a result, but it seems unfair to Willis, who apparently didn’t have much choice. The way the economics of book publishing are these days, I don’t necessarily blame Ballantine either. An 1150 page print-job has to cut into their profits, and Willis isn’t necessarily a New York Times bestseller. I don’t blame them for keeping All Clear out of the Hugo Voter’s Pack initially either (I got my copy for free using an old-fashioned, analog version of bittorrent called the St Paul Public Library).

So, the question isn’t "should this 1140 page book be divided into two volumes?"…it’s “should this book be 1140 pages long in the first place?” My answer: Hell no. That said there is a lot to like here. I’ve been dreading this book since before it was nominated, because of the length and the fact that Willis has covered much of this ground in novels and stories I’ve already read. I guess I forgot how charming a writer Willis can be, because she did suck me into this novel at several points. Unfortunately, there are just as many points when I wondered how the novel could possible still be meandering on.

For the third time on this blog, we’re in twenty-first century Oxford, where historians literally travel into the past to do their research. Mr. Dunworthy is still desperately trying to protect his students from past dangers, and he’s still failing miserably. Willis adds a time travel wrinkle by arbitrarily switching settings and protagonists. The three main characters are Polly, Merope, and Mike, and all of them travel to Britain in 1940, at the beginning of World War II. When their scheduled method of return fails, they must try to find each other and another way out, all while avoiding death in the Blitz, while also worrying about possibly altering the future and causing Britain to lose the war, which may or may not be the reason they’re stuck. We also get occasional chapters in 2060, as the Oxford crew investigates some anomalies in travel to that period, and this includes young Colin Templer, last seen in Doomsday Book. Then we have a set of nurses during the V-1 rocket attacks in 1944, and the attempt to create a fake invasion of France to distract the Nazis from Normandy in the same year. These are the main stories (though there are a few more), and it’s only very slowly that Willis reveals how they all connect together.

I enjoyed this basic storyline, and some of the resolutions, quite a bit, especially since Willis’s prose is clear, light, and clever, and her research is impeccable and richly detailed. The last hundred pages or so especially sparkle as the puzzle pieces get together and the relationships between the characters pay off. Getting there can be a real chore though. Willis likes to wring drama from delaying the passage of information. A character vitally needs to know x, but loud noises, air raids, other characters making speeches, dull wittedness, mixed signals, rocket attacks, limps, sudden marriages, secrecy, etc., all prevent the straightforward conveyance of x. End chapter on cliffhanger. Rinse and repeat. Very quickly, this becomes less dramatic, and more annoying. In fact, I was still annoyed about this from the last Connie Willis book I read (Passage, review forthcoming soon) going into this book, so I had little patience. Considering that it’s these constant interruptions that do the most work in stretching the novel’s length, those 1100 pages were pretty unbearable a lot of the time. Everyone’s so damned passive-aggressive (fittingly, in Willis’s model of time travel, the whole damn space-time continuum is also highly passive-aggressive). Just communicate!

As I’ve said before, as a historian, the Willis books were among my most anticipated when I started this project. While they’re certainly given me their fair share of entertainment, they’ve frustrated me just as often. Reading Blackout/All Clear, I’ve decided that one of the things that’s most disappointed me is that they’re not really about history, they’re about historical settings. The research is admirable, but we never get more than hand-waivey discussion of how history works (in these books, it’s a mixture of coincidence and individual heroism). Her historians don’t ask the sort of questions that any real-life contemporary historian asks about the why and how of things, and that’s where my biggest disappointment comes from. If you want good science fiction that explores the themes of academic history, check out Kim Stanley Robinson. If you want well-researched and charming historical fiction with an sf twist, Willis is for you. Unfortunately, I’d been hoping for the former.

Grade: B-

2000 Locus SF – CRYPTONOMICON by Neal Stephenson

After writing what is, for better or worse, the landmark cyberpunk novel of the ‘90s in Snow Crash, Stephenson worked hard not to be pigeonholed in the sub-genre. He’s followed it up with a novel about nanotechnology that’s full of Victoriana, a series of novels about Early Modern Europe, a novel about mathematical monks, and this family saga that moves from World War II to Silicon Valley in the late ‘90s. Still, in all of these novels, he maintains some of the same cyberpunk sensibilities.

Cryptonomicon introduces us to two families with intertwined histories (whom we’ll see again in future Stephenson works): the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes. Before World War II, Daniel Waterhouse is a socially awkward mathematical genius and Bobby Shaftoe is a hardcore marine who’s already seen some of the horrors to come during a tour of duty in a China savaged by the Japanese (who Stephenson insists on calling Nipponese in all of his novels). Waterhouse eventually joins Alan Turing to do crucial cryptography work, and Shaftoe ends up as part of a series of harebrained schemes (which usually result in insane action set-pieces) to aid their efforts. In more contemporary times, Randy Waterhouse is working on a Silicon Valley start-up that hopes to create a “data haven” in the Pacific where information can be freely exchanged without government interference. He hires Douglas and Amy Shaftoe to lay cable for him near the Philippines, but soon becomes involved in a hunt for lost Nipponese gold leftover from the war. The novel jumps back and forth between the two plots with the usual amount of Stephenson’s long digressions about mathematics, philosophy, religion, etc.

It’s epic (I read this for the second time in paperback in an edition that ran to 1140 pages), and it’s incredibly fun. Considering the length, and Stephenson’s tendency to deliver lectures, it does inevitably slow down at many points. Like Robert Sawyer, Stephenson can go off on rants that’d be better suited to a blog than a novel. But, Stephenson can also deliver the action and excitement, and most of the novel is page-turning. Also, unlike Sawyer’s, his prose is a joy to read. There’s a three page description of one character’s preferred method consuming of Fruit Loops at one point. Is it necessary? Certainly not. Is it a funny read that gives some insight into the main character. Yes.

I’m sure Stephenson’s not for everyone. Even people who like the mini-(well, sometimes, maxi-)lectures, might not by as happy with the silliness of some of his action scenes, which can make John McClane’s hijinks look realistic. I wasn’t always on board with his arguments either. He spends a lot of time hammering "Godless," postmodernist straw-men academics (I kind of got the impression that Randy’s problems with his girlfriend had some basis in the author’s life). These scenes really jumped out at my this time, maybe because these things (religion, postmodernism) have become so much more politicized in the last ten years. Or maybe I was just being overly sensitive. Even more problematic for me was the fact that the data haven itself seems destined to become a haven for some really awful criminals. I think Stephenson is right to show that international criminals of various stripes would be the first on board, but he seems to think this a minor setback and well worth freedom from state interference. I think that proposition is worth a little more consideration.

Sure, it could’ve used a bit of trimming, but this is one of the funnest reads out there, and it does a great job of brining a sci-fi/tech geek sensibility to the history of World War II and the rest of the twentieth century.

Grade: A-

1999 Hugo – TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG by Connie Willis

Well, this is a change of pace. We’re back in the Oxford of the 2050s that we saw in Willis’ The Doomsday Book. Again, we have historians as time travelers, and again the science fiction aspect takes a backseat to a focus on characterization and English “comedy of manners” humor. Time travelling is important to the plot, especially the novel’s climax, but we spend most of the novel in Victorian England while our protagonists try to return a cat and discover the fate of an ugly vase.

In the 2050s, the historians are preparing for a celebration of the renovation of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed over a century earlier in the blitz. The inconsiderate and monomaniacal Lady Shrapnell has pushed young historian Ned Henry to the brink in her quest for a decorative vase dubbed “the bishop’s bird stump.” Professor Dunworthy tries to protect Ned by sending him to return a rescued cat to 1888, from whence it had been taken by another historian, Verity Kindle, after a near-drowning. Verity is close to a young Victorian woman named Tossie, and Ned meets a nice young man named Terrence, and soon the two Victorians fall in love. Unfortunately, they’re both supposed to marry other people and the course of history may depend upon their progeny. Verity and Ned, fearing that it is their involvement that has changed these relationships, desperately try to find Tossie’s true husband-to-be.

While the wonderful writing and clever dialogue of The Doomsday Book remain, the stakes are clearly much lower than the dual raging epidemics of Willis’s earlier novel, which managed to kill off most of the characters by its conclusion. You don’t often hear that a story falters because the stakes are too high, but The Doomsday Book may be the exception that proves the rule. It’s hard to laugh at fussy upper class twits when everyone is slowly and painfully dying in two different eras. However, in a light tale of Victorian love, this kind of comedy is quite a bit more welcome. This is a really fun and sweet novel, and I think it accomplishes more by doing less. It still has a lot to say about destiny and random chance, and it can still be quite suspenseful. Willis uses a Victorian historian, Professor Peddick, to introduce dueling theories of history – that it is the product of the agency of a few important, individual decisions or that it is the product of broader forces, from mass movements to weather and geography. These ruminations fit in perfectly with the novel’s themes and enrich the overall experience. At the same time, the relationship between Verity and Ned is cute, and gives the reader something to root for.

It’s very different from most of the Hugo winners, which tend to feel like important epics even when they’re brief. There are no intergalactic worlds or dark dystopias here. If I had to describe my experience reading this novel in one word, it would be “relaxing.” That might sound like damning with faint praise, I wouldn’t want every book I read to take the same attitude, but I rather enjoyed this sandwiched between Forever Peace and A Deepness in the Sky.

Grade: A-

1998 Locus SF – RISE OF ENDYMION by Dan Simmons

Hyperion is one of the best space opera novels of all time, but its resolution, The Fall of Hyperion, is a rushed-feeling mess of a book. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to continue with the final two books of the series after that, but I do have a solid streak going with the Locus awards, and since the final book won I felt obliged to continue.

This second pair of books does manage to recapture some of what made Hyperion so special, though they also manage to repeat some of the messy mistakes of Fall. In the third book, Endymion, we return to Simmons’ universe a quarter-of-a-millenium later and see that much has changed. The Catholic Church has taken over from the old Hegemony and created an empire called the Pax. A young man from the planet of Hyperion named Raul Endymion (enough with the Keats references already!) meets up with some survivors of the first series and becomes the escort for a twelve year old girl with a capital “D” Destiny named Aenea. The novel unfolds as a chase across several worlds as church officials pursue Raul and the girl (and their robot pal). Unlike Fall of Hyperion, the story is simple, the cast limited, and the sum total engaging and fun.

In this volume, Rise of Endymion, we return the epic and manic universe-bending mess of Fall of Hyperion. The fate of the whole universe is on the line, the rules can and will change at any moment, and the power of love will somehow save everyone. Raul continues to hop from planet to planet, and Aenea continues to slide toward her Destiny. Even though only the second novel won the Locus, the pair of novels make a single whole, and I wouldn’t recommend reading either separate from the other.

Actually, I’m not sure I’d recommend that either. On the one hand, Simmons’s prose, character work, world-building and action scenes are all pretty great. Much of the novel moves from world to world, and Simmons uses his extensive knowledge of history and literature and a respect for the genre’s history to build a series of really interesting places for the protagonists to visit. For instance, the planet of T’ien Shan, featured on the cover, features colonists from Buddhist monasteries, who built a new home high in the mountains of a planet with a noxious atmosphere near the surface. These sections come the closest to matching the greatness of Hyperion. But, there is quite a bit of chaff in that wheat. Far too much of the book is taken up with the machinations of the church antagonists, which don’t serve much purpose and really start to drag. And, the rules do go out the window late in Rise, just as they did in Fall. We get a series of infodumps about evolution and theology and Buddhism and love, which allow for Simmons to chat about what are surely some pet interests before employing a series of deus ex machinas to quickly wrap everything up. As I’ve said before, it’s great when a speculative fiction author uses the full scope of his or her imagination to push the boundaries of reality…but, when characters can come back from the dead, teleport across the universe, or collapse an interstellar civilization with a thought, the stakes of the conflict really aren’t clear.

Simmons is a fine writer, and a lot of this is interesting, but none of it reaches the quality of the first book. I’d say, read Hyperion, then go skim or read some synopses of the rest if you just have to know where it all goes.

Grade: C+

1997 Hugo and Locus – BLUE MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson

Blue Mars wraps up Robinson’s monumental Mars trilogy, which tries to bring scientific and sociological realism to the colonization and terraforming of Mars. By this volume, we’ve entered the twenty-second century. Multiple revolutions have rocked Mars, and the surviving members of the original colonists, plus the succeeding generations of Martians, focus on forging new economic and political systems for the rapidly growing population and the changing climate of the red planet.

Again, Robinson spends a lot of time on these economic and political questions. Usually, he demonstrates an awareness of socio-economic complexities, but there are a few more straw man moments here and some rather embarrassing moments where characters inspire unanimous awe by espousing Robinson’s utopian views. Yes, his Martian society works a little too perfectly, and there are echoes of Pacific Edge throughout the trilogy. I do like that Robinson will go out on a limb with these issues though – constructing an entire Martian Constitution or imagining the future theoretical frameworks that guide various academic disciplines. For instance, he creates a whole new meta-theory of history here – it’s mostly just a modification of Marxist historiography, and it doesn’t really work for me, but I admire the guts and imagination it took for Robinson to posit it. He does the same thing with physics and neurology as well.

Alongside the academic theorizing, Robinson continues to offer detailed descriptions of Martian landscapes and a focus on character development, usually in tandem. The changes in Mars are dramatic and beautifully evoked by Robinson, as in wonderful passages where characters explore their memories while looking out on an icy Martian sea. I especially like the ways that Robinson draws on the work of Aldo Leopold to examine the aesthetics of “wild” nature and the human place therein.

And the characters have mellowed, a lot. Red Mars is probably a more dramatic and exciting entry in the series, but, boy, are the main characters horrible people. By the end of Blue Mars, I’d come to sympathize with all of the survivors, even the manipulative and melodramatic Maya. At the novel’s beginning, the “red” Ann Clayborne threatens most of Martian society with an obnoxious stubbornness, but the later sections following her were some of my favorite in the entire series. In one chapter, she spends time with new Martian fauna and the geneticist that designs them. In another, she takes a trip to Uranus with a fourth-generation Martian girl. She’s the one who least wants Mars to change, and Robinson’s rendering of her coming to terms with the terraforming can be quite moving.

From skimming a few online reviews, it seems that the consensus is that this is the worst of the trilogy, but I think it was actually my favorite of the three excellent books, mainly due to the characters’ mellowing. Plot-wise, it is perhaps an anti-climax. The most dramatic events take place in the early chapters, and the novel winds down with the musings of the aging First Hundred colonists as they accept their losses, contemplate senescence and death, and relate to the vastly different generations of the Martian-born. Honestly, if you’re a fan of tight plotting and the three act structure, avoid Kim Stanley Robinson like the plague. I love his prose, and I don’t mind the long descriptive passages and the time he spends on various ruminations. Even I’ll admit that this volume could have used a little trimming though.

I’m interested to see how much I see the influence of this widely-read trilogy in coming novels. I know one idea in the particular volume has been picked up by other writers. Robinson describes a period of the rapid settlement of the solar system, and he dubs it the “Accelerando,” which was later picked up by Charles Stross. I also hadn’t realized that the future of Galileo’s Dream may well have been in the same universe as the Mars trilogy (there are a few strong hints, including a fictional mathematician that appears in both). The Mars trilogy may not be for everyone, but I do think every sf fan should give Red Mars a shot. Robinson’s detailed world-building and rich prose are hard to match.

Grade: A

1996 Hugo and Locus – THE DIAMOND AGE by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite authors. His 1992 novel Snow Crash, a hyperbolic, hyperactive cyberpunk novel set in a future where the state has crumbled, is probably his most famous work, but it didn’t win any of the awards I’m covering. This is probably for the best, since I don’t think it’s a great novel. It’s funny, exciting, fun, and interesting, but it’s also silly, ridiculous and swerves erratically between over-the-top action scenes and infodumps about Sumerian religion. Every novel since has won an award though (apparently, Locus readers adore Neal Stephenson), so I get to talk about him a lot.

The Diamond Age is Stephenson’s one Hugo win. The novel is an homage to Charles Dickens’ class-oriented Victorian fiction, but it takes place in a future world dominated by nanotechnology. Matter compilers can create just about anything a person could need or want, but it’s an expensive and potentially deadly technology – sentinels have to protect people from deadly nano-viruses and the majority of the world’s population still have to toil to afford their basic necessities. Meanwhile, a select few live with immense wealth, but to protect that wealth they congregate in “tribes” that enforce social order. The action in this novel takes place in Hong Kong where the Han tribe dominate, though there is also an enclave of Neo-Victorians. The Neo-Victorians have retreated to the strict social mores and class deference of 19^th century Britain to bring order to the modern world.

The leader of the Neo-Victorians, Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, commissions an amazing educational text that combines nano-technology, sophisticated interactive software, and live remote actors to give his granddaughter a well-rounded understanding of the world, morality, and her own emotions. When its creator is mugged, the book accidentally ends up in the hands of a very young, abused working-class girl named Nell. The rest of the novel follows Nell’s education and mimics the style of enlightenment novels (which obsessed over the idea of education and what we would call “nature or nurture”). As always with Stephenson, there’s a variety of entertaining side stories, including my favorite involving a Neo-Confucian judge. There’s also a secret society of hackers trying to bring down the hierarchical social order that has evolved.

The ending is the one point where the novel seems to fall down a bit (a common problem for Stephenson), but this is a fantastic and original novel, especially the portions involving Nell or Judge Dee. Highly recommended.

Grade: A