The Fledgling

Fledgling by Octavia Butler is not a science fiction book. My local library's science fiction section is a mess. All sorts of books are thrown in among the truly random assortment of sci-fi. So when I was rushed over to the section with seconds to choose a book I just grabbed the first novel that looked like it was printed recently. A quick scan of the 'Praise for Octavia Bulter' revealed someone mentioned her writing was like cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is like catnip to me, I can't resist. Only upon exiting the library did I realize I was holding a vampire novel set in the modern day. I decided to just roll with it because a little variety can be a good thing.

As mentioned Fledgling is a modern day vampire story. Like many vampire stories written it is not a horror story but rather an exploration of what it means to be predator among humans. I'm a humanist. I tend to root for the humans no matter the narrative. So generally I have trouble reading super sympathetic portrayals of serial murders (or at the very least superhumans who feed off regular folk). I enjoy the ethical tightrope that vamps have to walk but in most writers' hands vampires are totally justified in doing what they do and any messy questions are totally ignored or hand-waved away. I remember one incredibly poorly written book (whose name escapes me) where the cheerful solution to the 'ethical human eater' dilemma was to only kill annoying people. As opposed to only killing criminals. Thankfully, Fledgling is very much concerned with the ethical questions raised by vampires. On the other hand the novel raises whole host of other icky moral situations...

Fledgling is about a young vampiress who has lost both her memory and her family following a brutal attack. The narrative follows the fledgling vampire, Shori, as she pieces together who attacked her family and what it means to be a vampire. A good deal of the book is about uncovering all the various rules of vampire society and the full extent of their powers. But in order to give a proper review of Fledgling I must talk about what these powers are so be warned now. I won't ruin anything but if you want to read this tabula rasa you have been warned.
[Spoilers] Like any mythical creature vampires operate by different rules for each author. Here is a rundown for this book:
-Super strength/speed
-Sleeps during day and burns in daylight
-Hypnosis. Any human bitten by a vampire is rendered completely and totally under that vampires control to the point that if a vampire orders a bitten person to die they will kill themselves. Thus they can wipe out memories and manufacture new ones as well.
-Super sexy. Vampire bites cause intense pleasure and are addictive.
-Nigh invulnerable. First chapter the main character is recovering from being burnt to a cinder and shot in the head twice.
-Totally different species than human. No one 'becomes' a vampire.
[/Spoilers]



So lets talk about positive first. This is a well written book. Butler is a professional author and you can tell. The book clips along at a good pace with crisp prose. It's written in first person perspective and the alieness of Shori's thoughts can be very interesting. She isn't human, and it shows in both how she talks and thinks. She loves her family of humans but it's definitely different than human love. And as a human being myself, I feel this is where the book runs into trouble.

Shori is still a child on the vampire timescale. She is close to full maturity but cannot have children yet. What she can and does have though is a lot of sex. Perhaps this is a good time to mention that Shori looks like a ten year old. So, um, yeah. I... I'm not sure where I stand on this. She's not human, she's not ten but just the idea that this sexually voracious creature looks like ten year old is creeping me the math out*. This of course raises questions: why? Why choose to have your main character look like a ten year old? Why not make her look 16 or 17 years old (young but old enough to consent)?

Then theres the structure of the vampire lifestyle. Each vampire has seven or eight human 'symbionts' which are a vampire's food source/companions. Since vampire bites are super sexytimes they basically count as lovers as well. Symbionts can and do marry other people but must remain close by their vampire. They all live in big houses in rural areas far away from other people. All of which means that they are pretty close to being polygamist Mormons. At one point a character says that being a symbiont is the closest anyone has come to a workable group marriage. The arrangement works particularly well when the Matriarch (or Patriarch) of the family has total verbal control of every member of the family I'm guessing. Once again I'm not sure what exactly Octavia Butler is trying to say here. She could have chosen different rules or societies for vampires. But she went with this. The 'family' awkwardness is actually a minor subplot of the book but it's shown as a totally positive situation. So, yup, polygamy.

Oh yeah, so it turns out daughter vampires can't live with male vampires including their brothers and their fathers because, um, they smell too enticing. Like sexy enticing. So there's that quicky factoid for you.

----------

Fledgling is a disturbing read and puzzling. I'm really not sure why it was written, what its overall message is. Supposedly this a book about racism. But while racism exists in it Fledgling doesn't actually have much to say about it besides that racism is bad. None of the vampire stuff adds anything to the racism message. So what you are left with is book about sexy sexy ten year olds and joyous polygamy. Not ideal. Fledgling only feeds on 2 of 5 symbionts.

*'math' is how I cuss now.

Rim

Rim by Alexander Besher

I have a confession to make. I chose this book because it looked bad. Specifically it looked like the sort of gimmicky excess that is common in modern sci-fi. Ideally a reviewer should go into a book with clear eyes and zero bias. I started reading this looking to pick a fight. After reading a quality hard sci-fi book from the golden age of sci-fi (Mote!) it seemed like a clever idea to contrast it with the shallow buzzwordy sci-fi I've come to associate modern sci-fi with. As you may have guessed from my tone, Rim is not that infuriating spectre I was prepared to battle. Although don't be mislead: Rim is pretty bad! It's just that Rim is like a dopey dog with a wandering eye, sort of endearing even though it keeps drooling everywhere.

Rim was made in 1994 and goddam if it doesn't show. I got about thirty pages in before I checked the copyright date on it- you can tell pretty quickly this wasn't written recently. For one thing it takes place in exotic 2028 which, sitting here in exotic 2011, does not seem to far away. Certainly not 'space castles and androids' amount of time away. Sigh, in 1994 there was still an actual space program. But I get ahead of myself. The main thing dating Rim is it's unabashed love of Japanese culture. This may not sound like a clear indicator but allow me to explain. The author is extremely gushy about things that are now commonplace like yoga. The book imagines a world where Eastern flavored New Age ideas have turned everyone into awesome psychic spiritualists. I may be  mistaken but I think the mid-90s was when Eastern things like meditation classes and yoga and herbal supplements like ginkgo really caught on among yuppies.* Besher keeps name dropping things like 'otaku' and 'yakuza' like they are these hip newly discovered things. I get the feeling that when Rim was written maybe they were hip new concepts. Perhaps 1994 is when the Japanophile sub-culture was just blossuming. But by the time I got to college in 2004 Japanophiles were friggin' everywhere. I'm not saying the average American knows what an 'otaku' is but... its kind of hard to avoid finding out these days if you have a passing interest in Japan (as I do).

Nothing as cool as this exists in Rim

Enough with the lead in, lets talk about the book. Rim positions itself as a cyberpunk novel: it is about virtual reality and it's a noir piece. Except the book fails pretty miserably at being noir- it's as gritty as a Roomba. And come to think of it fails at being about virtual reality. Because in Rim virtual reality and alternate spiritual realms are one in the same. Rim posits a world where enlightenment and computers are completely entangled. Tibetan monks are programmers, as are Zen masters. Japan (or as it's called in the book New Nippon) has had a virtual reality disaster and now phases in and out of existence due to a virus in its system. It is this virus that retired psychic detective (and part time geomancer!) Frank Gobi has been hired to destroy. But first he must spend the first third of the book having tea and going about his daily life. Then, finally, the action picks up. The middle part of Rim is legitimately fun, if totally ridiculous.  Sexy sex, killer androids, a space station resort with a golf course and 17th century Japanese castle perched on top of it, and increasingly arbitrary characters like cowboys and hearty Englishmen. Also gratuitous space-lesbians. Yes the middle part of the book was still dumb. But at least it was fun dumb. Once the book reaches Japan the fun drains out though. And the end is a complete shambles with every single plot thread tied up brusquely. The main bad guy appears for one page before being defeated 'off screen'.

I know this review seems just about wrapped up. But special mention needs to made about the bizarre and annoying style in which Rim is written. Everything is labelled as being part of this Eastern meditation paradigm. Every. Single. Thing. That bottled water Frank is drinking: it's from Bhutan. That love interest is wearing a Tibetan sweater with Vhituazan thunderbolt designs. The tea is crushed chi-opening herbs from Sri Lanka. I would've killed for someone to just once suck down some Liptons. It gets to the point where Besher is just throwing New Age words in front of regular things. E-mail, no: it's chi-mail. Tantric taxi service. And that's not all. People don't feel fucking tired in Rim: their chi is drained. At one point Frank drinks a herbal tonic that he is told will 'tonify his middle burner'. Upon drinking it not only does he feel his middle burner tonified it also aligns all seven of his conscious states. I like meditation, I believe in it but... fuuuuuuck.

Rim gets no Yang out of Yin.


*I don't have anything against meditation (or yuppies!). Or if I do now, it's because Rim made them seem so damn aggravating.

The Mote in God's Eye

The Mote in God's Eye was a long book (537 pages) so this review is a day later than it should be. I apologize.

Before I get started let me gush about the title of this book. Soooooo good! (this is a technical term for critics) It was the title that originally attracted me to The Mote. I must have read the title a long time ago- long enough that I no longer remember where or when. The phrase simply stuck with me as such poetic fragments can. Regardless of where I picked it up I was aware of the book, and sought it out based on the strength of the title alone. Something to keep in mind for those in the creativity business. Incidentally, the name of this blog comes from a mashup of Of Mice and Men and another delicious phrase that caught in my brain courtesy of the darkly funny webcomic Achewood. It was vaguely disappointing to discover while reading the book that the title is well explained and entirely logical. 

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle is a grand, golden age of sci-fi, space opera. That opening right there may tell you whether you'll like The Mote or not. Myself, I have no problem reading dated science fiction. As long as the prose and premise are strong the old tropes of hard science fiction don't trouble me. And, let me get this out of the way, The Mote is well written. I throughly enjoyed it. But... but it is what it is.

Preoccupation with Cold War: check. (It's not bad in this book though)

Preoccupation with nuclear holocausts: check.

Bland handsome dereing-do hero: check.

Cellphones: absent. Although to be fair there weren't really any moments where I felt that modern technology had rendered the story ridiculous.

The Mote in God's Eye really acquits itself pretty well to a modern reader. It mostly takes place on board  a Naval starship and thus dodges having to describe in detail future everyday society. And it takes place so far in the future that the awkward feudal government of the Second Empire is sort of plausible. 

The plot follows the first contact with an intelligent alien race. It is the Second Empire of mankind and there are hundreds of colonized worlds. One day an alien ship appears in a far flung colony system. The Navy responds quickly but accidentally destroy the craft. Suddenly mankind is no longer alone in the cosmos! A expedition is quickly assembled to travel to the alien crafts point of origin. The fate of humanity could well rest on the outcome of the expedition. A big part of the fun of this book is careful unraveling of the master plot so too much detail could be detrimental here.

The prose recalls Asimov- it is more interested in big ideas than people. The Mote is very clearly written as well. The characters, as mentioned, are a little stiff. But given the epic nature of their undertaking and the fact that many are in the military the stiffness comes off more as flavor than a flaw. The dialogue is stilted and a little cheesy (my fiancée had a laugh at the 'E Gads! and whatnot being thrown about). I can not say it bothered me too much though. I was too wrapped up in the slowly unfolding mystery of the aliens.

Overall I recommend this book to anyone who can deal with sci-fi golden age prose. I throughly enjoyed. It will not redefine you as a person or any of that BS. But it is interesting, fun, and ends up posing an interesting ethical quandary by the end of it. 13 of 17 quasars!

The Howling Stones

I plan on writing a review a week. But I can't stand to see the blog so barren right now. So here is a review of the book I ended up reading instead of The Watch. It's called The Howling Stones by Alan Dean Foster.

Being a writer often does not pay well. So to make full living writing often requires an author to keep publishing a steady stream of books. The daily grind of the regular author has actually been somewhat romanticized in our culture. For example, consider The Beatles 'Paperback Writer' and Kurt Vonnegut's famous character Kilgore Trout. The point is there are some books that someone has obviously pored their heart and soul into. And there are books that were written because a man must eat. The Howling Stones is the latter. It isn't a bad book by any means but it is... workman-like. It is set in Foster's continuous galactic setting of the Humanx Commonwealth. I've never read any Humanx books but this novel is entirely standalone.

The cover is oddly entirely literal. The book is about weird aliens who use glowing green stones to open oval portals to other galaxies. Heck the two main characters are even on the cover in the background about to explore the portal. The jacket blurb actually describes the entire plot basically straight up to the end. It is an incredibly straight forward book. There are primitive aliens on a tropical planet whose world is slowly being allied to one of two galactic empires the Humanx and the AAn. One island group in particular is stalling and being uncommonly stubborn. They aren't interested in awesome space technology. They are fully committed to their complex culture and are avoid anything that could erode their culture like video games. The hilariously named protagonist Pulickel Tomochelor is a low level diplomat sent in to help sway them. It turns out the aliens aren't interested in Humanx culture because they possess stones that, among other things, can open portals to other universes. Pulickel must decide what to do- seizing the stones by force is horrible but they are too powerful to not reverse engineer.

Pulickel is an interesting character and I like that Alan Dean Foster decided to write a type of charcter who has basically never been a sci-fi hero: the mid-level bureaucrat. Pulickel is devoted to his career, officious, and entirely business. He is nicely contrasted by his fellow xeno-biologist on the island Fawn Seaworth. Fawn is a statuesque blonde who is as laid back as Pulickel is by the book. There isn't much chemistry between them but then there isn't much chemistry in anything in this book.

Which is the problem of course. While I'm delighted of the novelty of Pulickel he doesn't exactly jump off the page. Nor does Fawn. Or the aliens. Foster details the alien worlds flore and fauna but personally I just couldn't find them very compelling. The writing isn't bad per se. It simply doesn't excite. Only when hopping madly between universes does the book show real life. The book ends oddly too. It just sort of stops, leaving quite a few questions and basically every plot thread loose.

 The Howling Stones is a pleasant enough read. But don't expect too much from it's solid prose. I'm trying to come up with a fun rating system. Something sci-fi themed like... stars. Brilliant. Why hasn't anyone ever thought of this before?!

3 out of 7 stars!

The Watch

Lets kick this thing off. Each week I read a science fiction book. Then I give my opinion on the work. Simple as that. There is a lot of science fiction out there- my goal here is simply to act as a guide. I like to think that I have fairly solid judgement. But bear in mind that human beings tend to have differences, don't expect my review to mirror your own thoughts. If I write something egregious I'm fine with a lively rebuttal but let us keep it civil, eh?

Which is a good segue into my first review: The Watch by Dennis Danvers. This is a book that I couldn't stand but I'm sure for some they would have no problem with it. The story of The Watch is thus- Peter Kropotkin is dying of old age in 1920 after a successful seventy year career of anarchy. Then he is given a reconstructed body of himself circa age 30 and dropped in 1999 Richmond, Virginia. At which point the book deals with Peter getting a job, finding a place to live, and meeting friendly poor people. At some point the book becomes about Peter slowly unraveling the mysterious timetravelly conspiracy of his manipulative benefactor.

But I didn't get that far.

This is the only book in recent memory that I didn't bother to finish. In fact I only got 85 pages in. The rest I skimmed random pages and the ending. I want to stress that this is not normal for me, nor will it be regular for me to review books with only a portion actually read. But eighty pages in I just couldn't go on. So I write this review as a warning. The Watch has an awesome cover (I know, I know, judging book by cover etc.); it's story sounds like it has potential. But I found this dire enough to drop, something I only do very rarely. So what happened?

The short answer is I didn't like the main character. The long answer is... Peter Kropotkin is Dennis Danvers. In spirit anyways. It is clear that the third person omniscient narrator considers Peter a genius and incredibly wise. All the young punks approve of him. The homeless like the cut of his jib. Sexy not-for-profit administrators think he's remarkable. And Peter's 1920s, anarchy tinted views cut quick the ills and injustices of 1999. Or rather they would if Dennis Danvers had anything even vaguely insightful to say about modern life. In fact, Peter seems to spend more time marveling over how kick-ass airplane vodka and instant coffee are. The biting social commentary is resigned to some one-off facile thought about ravenous capitalism. By the ending Peter and his counter culture friends are supposed to be revolting against the Man or something but none of them seem to have real problems with society. They are supposed to be rebels but mostly they seem to spend their time having lunch.

All of which grew more and more annoying as it went on. The Watch purports itself to be 'a masterful novel of truly audicious conception.'* Well it tries to walk the walk but goddam if it is incapable of talking the talk. There is nothing new here but the prose puts such emphasis on itself as being, well, anarchic. It becomes intolerable to read. It's the Coffee and Cigarettes of books. So busy preening over itself it neglects to have a plot and characters worth having. If there is one thing I cannot abide it is baseless smug pretension.

It's ironic really. Peter is obviously meant to be a stand in for the author. But the constantly smirking, clumsily manipulative, and ultimately self-satisfied time travelling antagonist (Anchee) is a much better fit for the author.


*From the author's bio. Also: Yikes