Pym by Mat Johnson
323 pages
Published 2009
Read from October 25 to October 27
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
"I really only read The Narrative [of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket] as homework before I read Pym
by Mat Johnson. The cover and blurb of that book have intrigued me for
months. I even had it checked out for a while earlier this year, but
elected to hold off on it until I had the chance to read Poe's original
novel." So I wrote in my review of Poe's Narrative, which I read way back in June.
I'm
coming to face how very little -- how shamefully little, how
appallingly little -- African American literature I have read. One book
by Octavia E. Butler, which I really liked; one book by Nnedi Okorafor,
which I really wanted to like. I almost bought Ellison's Invisible Man
half a dozen times between my late teens and the day I got a library
card last year. And... that's it, as far as I can remember. The one
history I own by a Black historian is titled The History of White People.
I am the worst kind of lip-service liberal, never poking my head out of
my fantasy fiction comfort zone, clinging to my humanities degree as
evidence of not-wholly-debased intentions without making substantive
effort to inform myself of other perspectives.
What struck me
most powerfully about this book, qua a book, is the mixing and mingling
of what I would ordinarily classify as incongruent styles. Dry, bitterly
hilarious social satire rubs elbows with the "low" humor of pratfalls
and the prominence of Little Debbie snack cakes as a central plot point.
Pointed social commentary commingles with the structure and plot of a
Crichton-esque airport adventure novel. It resists easy
compartmentalization. Given how little I've explored African American
literary and critical perspectives, it's best that I don't try to impose
any kind of labeling anyway, beyond affirming that I think Pym is pretty damn funny.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Friday, October 25, 2013
2013 read #135: Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey.
Kushiel's Chosen by Jacqueline Carey
700 pages
Published 2002
Read from October 20 to October 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
This is a rarity: a middle volume in a fantasy trilogy that actually shows discernible improvement over the first volume. Many of Kushiel's Dart's weaknesses are still present, but they're toned down considerably. The game-of-thrones politicking still rests on a shaky grounding of vaguely defined, almost interchangeable tertiary characters, but whether through 1400 pages of exposure or some upgrade in Carey's descriptive faculties, I could tell who was who most of the time. There are still miraculous, absurd Hollywood escapes from certain doom, but there were only two or three such prodigies this time around; I lost count in the first book. There are still a number of glaring homophonic substitutions in the text, but Carey or her editors seem to have caught more of them before the book went to print.
Unfortunately (and here come some slight spoilers), this book's emphasis on Melisande as a villainous mastermind of the highest order exposes the fact that, really, Melisande doesn't have much characterization to speak of. She's exceptionally beautiful, yes, even by the standards of angelic half-breeds; she's a sexual sadist; she's brilliant and does the inevitable eleven dimensional chess thing, where she's always thinking ten thousand moves ahead of anyone else. And that's pretty much it. She has all the depth of a Goodkind second-string villain, which is to say, about as much depth as there is ketchup on a dollar menu cheeseburger. That's a flimsy basis for your series' central conflict-slash-conflicted love interest.
Chosen also has that most annoying of sequel tendencies, the exaggeration of a central character's trademark tic. In chapters that feature Joscelin, not a page goes by without him flashing and crossing his goddamn vambraces. And then when he's off-screen for the second half of the book, he has to go and teach that gesture to some poor suckers. Another sequelitis symptom: it's becoming evident, via repetition, that Carey is fixated on pushing her heroine into bed with Harlequin cover barbarians. That said, Kazan was a better character than Selig was, if only because "Balkan pirate prince" is a less exhausted racial cliche than "Germanic warlord."
700 pages
Published 2002
Read from October 20 to October 25
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
This is a rarity: a middle volume in a fantasy trilogy that actually shows discernible improvement over the first volume. Many of Kushiel's Dart's weaknesses are still present, but they're toned down considerably. The game-of-thrones politicking still rests on a shaky grounding of vaguely defined, almost interchangeable tertiary characters, but whether through 1400 pages of exposure or some upgrade in Carey's descriptive faculties, I could tell who was who most of the time. There are still miraculous, absurd Hollywood escapes from certain doom, but there were only two or three such prodigies this time around; I lost count in the first book. There are still a number of glaring homophonic substitutions in the text, but Carey or her editors seem to have caught more of them before the book went to print.
Unfortunately (and here come some slight spoilers), this book's emphasis on Melisande as a villainous mastermind of the highest order exposes the fact that, really, Melisande doesn't have much characterization to speak of. She's exceptionally beautiful, yes, even by the standards of angelic half-breeds; she's a sexual sadist; she's brilliant and does the inevitable eleven dimensional chess thing, where she's always thinking ten thousand moves ahead of anyone else. And that's pretty much it. She has all the depth of a Goodkind second-string villain, which is to say, about as much depth as there is ketchup on a dollar menu cheeseburger. That's a flimsy basis for your series' central conflict-slash-conflicted love interest.
Chosen also has that most annoying of sequel tendencies, the exaggeration of a central character's trademark tic. In chapters that feature Joscelin, not a page goes by without him flashing and crossing his goddamn vambraces. And then when he's off-screen for the second half of the book, he has to go and teach that gesture to some poor suckers. Another sequelitis symptom: it's becoming evident, via repetition, that Carey is fixated on pushing her heroine into bed with Harlequin cover barbarians. That said, Kazan was a better character than Selig was, if only because "Balkan pirate prince" is a less exhausted racial cliche than "Germanic warlord."
Sunday, October 20, 2013
2013 read #134: Modern Classics of Fantasy, edited by Gardner Dozois.
Modern Classics of Fantasy, edited by Gardner Dozois
654 pages
Published 1997
Read from September 28 to October 20
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
When I finished my 125th read of the year, a neat round milestone, I spent the rest of that morning reading the reviews I posted in January, February, and March. I may say I don't like to read my own writing, but it's easy enough for me to find myself sucked into it, because at heart, beneath my critically low self-esteem, I am a complete narcissist. But anyway. The point is, I realized it had been a while -- a long while -- since I had dug into an anthology of short fiction. Since February, in fact, and the painfully '90s stylings of After the King. I've checked out several anthologies since then, but each time I got literary cold feet and returned them unread, rejecting them in favor of more consistent and reliable reads.
But reading those reviews from eight or nine months back swelled my nostalgia glands. Short story compilations can be chores to read, what with the wildly varying quality and the psychological hurdle of having to get invested in a fresh set of characters and a new story universe every ten or twenty pages, but they can also lead to the most wonderful and unexpected marvels of setting and storytelling. I smile even now to remember Emma Bull's "Silver and Gold," E. Lily Yu's "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," and Kelly Link's "The Summer People." Until I have the money to subscribe to Fantasy & Science Fiction and suchlike, these anthologies are my only ticket to the wonders of truly effective short speculative fiction. With my nostalgia came a craving for more.
Fortuitously, I stopped by a rival public library later that day, and amid their depressingly bare and dilapidated shelves, I found this tome. I've wanted to get my hands on it ever since the late '90s, when its massive crocodile-dragon skull-mountain leering above a quaint village (in the best James Gurney style) made for the most evocative cover by far in the era's science fiction book club adverts. Seeing Gardner Dozois' name on the cover, a fact that meant nothing to me in the '90s, gives me high hopes for it now, as do many of the names on the contents page. I've wanted a crash course in "classic" fantasy for a while, and the bundle of pre-1970s stories in this anthology intrigues me. But enough introduction. On to the stories.
At first I rolled my eyes at Dozois' preface -- I don't think I'd ever seen "didactic" used so many times on one page before, and I have a degree in the humanities -- but before long he had me scrambling after his effortless name-dropping, me going "Wait, what was that? Slow down, who published what? What story is that? That sounds awesome, slow down!" I want to get a copy of this book so I can pore through his introductory material and reading recommendations inch by inch, piecing together my own education in the history of my preferred genre.
"Trouble with Water" by Horace L. Gold (1939). Dozois claims this is "one of the most famous modern fantasies ever written"; clearly I have some homework to do. I thought it was neat enough, in both main senses of the word: it was a cute little story (aside from the broad "Long Island Jew" stereotypes, which would not feel out of place in a network sitcom in the late 1990s), but it wrapped up a little too neatly for my worldly, cynical twenty-first century tastes. It felt a bit insubstantial for the weight of its evident legacy -- although this might be a result of the contemporary ubiquity of the "magical creatures from the Old Country settle in America" convention in fantasy, making it harder for this story (perhaps one of the progenitors of that very cliche) to stand out.
"The Gnarly Man" by L. Sprague de Camp (1939). I like the cut of L. Sprague de Camp's jib. This is only the second story of his that I've read, so I'm sure he had some horrible poisonous opinions he didn't hesitate to air in other venues. But for now, permit me the innocence of just liking the guy because he loved writing about dinosaurs and 50,000 year old Neandertal dudes working as sideshows in Coney Island. That last bit, incidentally, is all this story amounts to: a lightweight, pulpy take on what sounds like a prototypical Poe plot. Enjoyable, though ultimately (I think) forgettable. (Poe would have made it far more grotesque and gothic, I can tell you that.)
"The Golem" by Avram Davidson (1955). Introducing this story, Dozois proclaims it "a near-perfect little masterpiece." That's a heap of expectation to pile on the poor thing. But I'll admit, it was a delightful little trifle, charming but, again, a shade insubstantial.
"Walk Like a Mountain" by Manly Wade Wellman (1955). I have mentioned, in my review of Kelly Link's "The Summer People," my love for Old Weird Americana in fantasy fiction. This story is an excellent example of that theme, or inspiration, or esthetic, or milieu, whatever you want to call it. It's been a while since I read "The Summer People"; I think I like that story better, if only because I seem to recall its characters and conflicts having more development than those here. One thing that's already beginning to strike me as I read this anthology is how far back these themes (Old Weird Americana, magical beings from the Old World coming to America, ironic playfulness and genre awareness) go in the history of the genre. The only way you could distinguish these 60-75 year old classics from today's top-notch material is relative depth of character and complexity of conflict. Most of these entries, so far, have been concept-based or "punchline" stories: they hit a single beat, raise a single wrinkle, and they're done. It's possible this is merely an artifact of Dozois' selection criteria, but what little I've read of pre-1970s short genre fiction seems to confirm this tendency. Characters tend to be props in these old stories, useful merely to set up the parameters of the story, with no real sense of a life before or after the tale, no sense why we should care about them as characters. Silver John, the narrator here, is a slight exception, but he's also the central figure in a large sequence of stories, so maybe he doesn't count. Anyway, I liked this story a lot, and I've added Wellman and Silver John to my reading wishlist, but I think I'm accustomed to a bit more from my fantasy, thanks to current styles and sensibilities.
"Extempore" by Damon Knight (1956). Another "punchline" story in the late Golden Age vein -- the technicalities of time travel were a common motif in those days. Worth a wry smile but otherwise not especially distinctive.
"Space-Time for Springers" by Fritz Leiber (1958). According to Dozois' rambling introduction to this story, "Springers" invented the subgenre of cat fantasy. It's also the first story here that feels almost modern, a character study at turns hilarious and strangely affecting. Very good indeed.
"Scylla's Daughter" by Fritz Leiber (1961). Dozois cited this story in his preface as an example of how fantasy stories skulked their way into science fiction magazines of the time (fantasy was considered a dead genre, lacking the "didactic" qualities that made sci-fi seem socially acceptable) by adding a few elements to make them look more science-fictiony. In the midst of a archetypal barbarian swordsman and clever thief novella, a time traveler pops in riding a dragon, and pops out again until required for the deus ex machina ending. Aside from that, I found this story entertaining in a corny way, kind of a middling fantasy effort, really. Maybe if I read this listening to prog, it would have set the mood better. A pity; I'd been looking forward to my first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story. Not that I disliked it by any means, I just wasn't blown away.
"The Overworld" by Jack Vance (1965). Another adequately good but not astounding story. As we move out of the first half of the century, we seem to be leaving one-note "punchline" stories behind in exchange for world-based stories, where the setting is the main character. I've been curious to read The Dying Earth, and this did nothing to damp my interest; I'm just glad I live in a time when character-based stories are the norm. Sly heroes tackling quests for laughing sorcerers work better as Harryhausen movies than stories, I think.
"The Signaller" by Keith Roberts (1966). Oh my gosh, I like this story way more than the in media res opening led me to believe. It's another story where the setting is the main character, a lovingly detailed alternate history where the Spanish Armada conquered England and an elite guild of semaphorists communicates across an otherwise backward twentieth century Europe. The main character is of only secondary importance here, his life story merely a framework for the story's real substance, an extended, leisurely examination of the workings of the semaphore network and its system of apprenticeship, an exercise in practically undiluted worldbuilding. I dig it. I do wish that the technologically stunted world of guilds and Mother Church had been better integrated into the stuff about Norse gods and Fairies; as it is, it feels like two story universes shoved into an awkward juncture, and then all of a sudden it ends. I understand that this story was later subsumed into Roberts' novel Pavane, which of course I have to add to my to-read list.
"The Manor of Roses" by Thomas Burnett Swann (1966). A lush, sentimentalist medieval fantasy, seeming to prefigure Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry in general tone. Languorous and lovely, oddly modern, given its publication date. Maybe a tad predictable, but I really enjoyed this one.
"Death and the Executioner" by Roger Zelazny (1967). "Far-future technology gives select men the power of gods" seemed a bold, mind-blowing storyline when first I encountered it, in a novella published in Asimov's Science Fiction sometime in the late '90s. It degrades with repeated exposure, however. I realize now it reproduces many of the set pieces and inherent limitations of the superhero genre, and leads to battles of equally matched, equally invulnerable titans, the victor being the one who successfully plots out every contingency (and every decision of his enemy) ten thousand moves in advance. Here, in a characteristically late '60s touch, our space-faring gods gained power not through technological singularities but by way of some kind of psionic superman flu. All of which sounds pretty dumb in retrospect, but I have to admit, this was one of those rare times when a twist revelation caught me entirely off-guard. So the first chunk of this story was middling; the reveal was outstanding; the denouement was unmistakably Zelazny. (Even Dozois admits the guy was a tad predictable with his interchangeable, super-competent heroes.) I'm still unpacking what the whole "Rild was an actual Buddha" thing meant, because his entire story was a lot of buildup for what amounts to a "figure out what it meant on your own" ending.
"The Configuration of the North Shore" by R. A. Lafferty (1969). Concept-based or "punchline" stories never entirely went away; you may find them in quantity in most SF magazines to this day, a continuing staple of genre fiction. Here we have a mildly interesting little number with a terrific fourth-wall-breaking ending. Pretty good.
"Two Sadnesses" by George Alec Effinger (1973). The first sadness: Ashdown Forest getting carpet-bombed and flamethrowered into desolation around an obliviously optimistic Winnie the Pooh. The second sadness: Rat and Mole, of The Wind in the Willows, getting on in years, return from an adventure to find their homes paved and destroyed for a factory, their friends dead, the river polluted. They drift downstream into a Cuyahoga River-style conflagration. Welp. The '70s sure were a cheerful decade, weren't they? (Good thing we're all done with warmongering, and no one stands a chance of abolishing all those environmental protection laws, I gotta tell ya.) This kind of dark, gritty, "real world issues" revisionism of innocent literature is so ubiquitous nowadays that it's hard to remember the trend actually began somewhere, and could actually pack a punch at one point. A total downer. Not my favorite story, but worth a read.
"The Tale of Hauk" by Poul Anderson (1977). Unremarkable, non-essential bit of supernatural Nordic fluffery, disappointing after everything that's come before. Possibly the first story in the collection I don't care for -- in itself a remarkable achievement, given how mixed these products tend to be. It felt more suited for that After the King anthology; here it seems worse for the contrast.
"Manatee Girl Ain't You Coming Out Tonight" by Avram Davidson (1977). Here we go, this is more like what I've grown to expect from this book. A memorable meander through a forgotten, ramshackle rum and cane-shack paradise, rich with deft description and immediately vivid characters. And were-manatees. Not a perfect story -- the plot is flimsy; the characters, though vivid, are simple stereotypes; worst of all we never see the goddamn were-manatees -- but it was right up my alley.
"The Troll" by T. H. White (1978). This story feels more suited to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century: a man identified only as Mr. Marx tells us (presumably in a warm study after a sumptuous and correct dinner party) the tale of his father meeting a troll in a Swedish hotel. Not just the quaint framing device, but the whole English gentleman abroad feel of the piece, Daddy Marx ambling the Arctic countryside to clear his brain, the abrupt and accidental denouement resulting from no deliberate action of the protagonist -- it feels like a lost Wells creature feature. Enjoyable, if terribly dated.
"The Sleep of Trees" by Jane Yolen (1980). Hey, we're in the '80s! You know how we can tell? There's the overt lesbian eroticism, there's the tinge of atheism/questioning the rightness of the gods, there's the cardboard cliche of a Hollywood Actor (who also gets his comeuppance), and it isn't very good. Okay, that last item doesn't date this definitively to the '80s (much '80s SF was quite excellent, in fact), but this story is a disappointment.
"God's Hooks!" by Howard Waldrop (1982). Izaak Walton (that Izaak Walton) forges fishhooks from meteoric iron to fish for Leviathan in a demon-haunted slough. I don't think anything I could add would be a more rousing endorsement for this story. Holy shit, this is great.
"The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" by Lucius Shepard (1984). Oh my god yes! The cover story! See, as I mentioned before, teenage me found the cover art absolutely mindblowing, and every time I saw the ad I was consumed with curiosity and conjectures about what the story it depicted would be like. In recent years I've figured out that cover art for anthologies and pro magazines is often bought in bulk, well in advance, and only rarely ties in with a particular story. I had assumed that would be the case here, but nope! I really do get to read about the 6000 foot long dragon dwarfing the city that has grown in its shadow. And what a story it is. I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm almost dizzy with how good it is. I have to blink myself back to reality. Just... goddamn, that was good. I don't keep a list of my all-time favorite short stories, but if I did, this one would be high up. These last two stories are building up a critical mass of awesome.
"A Cabin on the Coast" by Gene Wolfe (1981). Another "punchline" story, a little one-note for my tastes, but the antagonist is nicely creepy, and the story is quite adequate overall.
"Paper Dragons" by James P. Blaylock (1985). This reads like it could have been published last year. A thing of haunting, mist-shrouded beauty, dank with unseen life, mechanical creatures that never quite quicken, San Francisco fogs and diaphanous ecologies of cloud just at the edge of sight. Gorgeous.
"Into Gold" by Tanith Lee (1987). A generation after Rome relinquished contact with its frontier legions, as the son of the former commander adopts the role of hereditary warlord prince, an Orientalist caricature of an esoteric/alchemic witch in touch with dark powers shows up and seemingly bewitches him, and his loyal friend and lieutenant thinks he must do anything he can to thwart her. Like Poul Anderson's Nordic reanimation fantasy earlier in this volume, I found this story to be kind of a yawn, even though I love the idea of lost legions going native after the collapse of Roman authority. Not an awful story, it just fell flat for me.
"Flowers of Edo" by Bruce Sterling (1987). Meiji noir. That's the most apt description I can divine for this. Well, maybe not noir, exactly, but it's an urban tale of drink and dark alleyways, brawls and fires and electric demons in the wires. Very good.
"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" by Ursula K. Le Guin (1987). "'You fell out of the sky,' the coyote said." I love blunt, evocative opening lines like that. This is my first exposure to Le Guin's short fiction, and I like it. A tiny bit heavy-handed with the moralizing, but whatever. It's the best story involving talking turds that I've ever read.
"A Gift of the People" by Robert Sampson (1988). This one exquisitely captures the ingrained primate horror of the dark, the shadow shapes that follow you beyond the corners of your eyes, the silence you feel tingling between your shoulderblades. Reading it at night made my skin crawl. Pretty good.
"Missolonghi 1824" by John Crowley (1990). Lord Byron tells a Greek servant boy about the time he freed a captured satyr from villagers bent on violence. A brief, bare-bones, mostly unremarkable the-gods-of-folklore-are-real tale.
"Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson (1990). I've been looking forward to this one since I first glanced over the contents page. It does not disappoint. I'm amazed how much can be packed into just nine pages -- people who feel real, heart and personality, a different sense of the world. And of course bears discovering fire.
"Blunderbore" by Esther M. Friesner (1990). '90s humor ceased tickling me, well, sometime after the late '90s. The stray Seinfeld episode since then has contributed to the evidence of those "hilarious" stories and novels from that decade: none of it makes me chuckle anymore. Even classic Simpsons episodes barely managed to raise a smile, when I rented some from Netflix a couple months back. Above all, fantasy set-dressings do not pair nicely with jokes about corporate speak and jogging, oat bran and designer heels. This story wasn't as annoying and spastic as The Good Fairies of New York, but it failed to do anything for me. Woefully dated.
"Death and the Lady" by Judith Tarr (1992). Oh hey, I remember this one. It was originally published in the After the King anthology. Already read, already reviewed. Apparently I called it "quite good" in February, and that's good enough for me. Moving on.
"The Changeling's Tale" by Michael Swanwick (1994). Swanwick is one of my all-time favorite authors, based on a sample of two novels and several reliably mindblowing short stories. Stories like "The Edge of the World," "Riding the Giganatosaur," and "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" made a huge impact on me when I was a teen. This was not long after I realized that my own stories up to that point were childish scribbledegook, devoid of character or effective plotting or anything to recommend them beyond a certain innocent enthusiasm. "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," in fact, appeared in Asimov's at roughly the same time I had submitted what amounted to Raptor Red fan-fiction to the magazine. Swanwick's stories hit me so hard I wondered why I even bothered. And then I produced or at least formulated my own blatant imitations of those three stories. As an adult I read a couple more of his stories, "The Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Midnight Express," which reaffirmed my impression that Swanwick operates on a level of storytelling I simply cannot comprehend. This turns out to be not my favorite Swanwick story, but then, that bar is prohibitively high; it's a standard post-Tolkien elf story, so it lacks the conceptual whatthefuckery I associate with Swanwick, but it's a solid example of its type.
"Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" by Peter S. Beagle (1995). This guy's obsessed with unicorns, ain't he? No matter. This is a sweet, charming delight, disarming and funny and beautifully melancholy.
"Beauty and the Opéra or the Phantom Beast" by Suzy McKee Charnas (1996). A pretty good eroticized revisionist-reimagining sort of story. Knowing nothing more than the sketchiest teaser trailer outline of the source material, I don't know how evocative it is as a retelling, but as a story it's perfectly adequate.
It feels odd to be done with this book. It's only been about three weeks, but it feels like I've been absorbed in it forever. Short story anthologies, even good ones (and this is the best one I've read so far), can be exhausting to read. Bad anthologies exhaust with the mediocrity of their selections; good ones exhaust the emotions, acquainting you with new people and new worlds just long enough to break your heart with them, then shoving you into the next wringer before you can recover. Still, this was a terrific experience, and now I crave more of these books.
654 pages
Published 1997
Read from September 28 to October 20
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
When I finished my 125th read of the year, a neat round milestone, I spent the rest of that morning reading the reviews I posted in January, February, and March. I may say I don't like to read my own writing, but it's easy enough for me to find myself sucked into it, because at heart, beneath my critically low self-esteem, I am a complete narcissist. But anyway. The point is, I realized it had been a while -- a long while -- since I had dug into an anthology of short fiction. Since February, in fact, and the painfully '90s stylings of After the King. I've checked out several anthologies since then, but each time I got literary cold feet and returned them unread, rejecting them in favor of more consistent and reliable reads.
But reading those reviews from eight or nine months back swelled my nostalgia glands. Short story compilations can be chores to read, what with the wildly varying quality and the psychological hurdle of having to get invested in a fresh set of characters and a new story universe every ten or twenty pages, but they can also lead to the most wonderful and unexpected marvels of setting and storytelling. I smile even now to remember Emma Bull's "Silver and Gold," E. Lily Yu's "The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees," and Kelly Link's "The Summer People." Until I have the money to subscribe to Fantasy & Science Fiction and suchlike, these anthologies are my only ticket to the wonders of truly effective short speculative fiction. With my nostalgia came a craving for more.
Fortuitously, I stopped by a rival public library later that day, and amid their depressingly bare and dilapidated shelves, I found this tome. I've wanted to get my hands on it ever since the late '90s, when its massive crocodile-dragon skull-mountain leering above a quaint village (in the best James Gurney style) made for the most evocative cover by far in the era's science fiction book club adverts. Seeing Gardner Dozois' name on the cover, a fact that meant nothing to me in the '90s, gives me high hopes for it now, as do many of the names on the contents page. I've wanted a crash course in "classic" fantasy for a while, and the bundle of pre-1970s stories in this anthology intrigues me. But enough introduction. On to the stories.
At first I rolled my eyes at Dozois' preface -- I don't think I'd ever seen "didactic" used so many times on one page before, and I have a degree in the humanities -- but before long he had me scrambling after his effortless name-dropping, me going "Wait, what was that? Slow down, who published what? What story is that? That sounds awesome, slow down!" I want to get a copy of this book so I can pore through his introductory material and reading recommendations inch by inch, piecing together my own education in the history of my preferred genre.
"Trouble with Water" by Horace L. Gold (1939). Dozois claims this is "one of the most famous modern fantasies ever written"; clearly I have some homework to do. I thought it was neat enough, in both main senses of the word: it was a cute little story (aside from the broad "Long Island Jew" stereotypes, which would not feel out of place in a network sitcom in the late 1990s), but it wrapped up a little too neatly for my worldly, cynical twenty-first century tastes. It felt a bit insubstantial for the weight of its evident legacy -- although this might be a result of the contemporary ubiquity of the "magical creatures from the Old Country settle in America" convention in fantasy, making it harder for this story (perhaps one of the progenitors of that very cliche) to stand out.
"The Gnarly Man" by L. Sprague de Camp (1939). I like the cut of L. Sprague de Camp's jib. This is only the second story of his that I've read, so I'm sure he had some horrible poisonous opinions he didn't hesitate to air in other venues. But for now, permit me the innocence of just liking the guy because he loved writing about dinosaurs and 50,000 year old Neandertal dudes working as sideshows in Coney Island. That last bit, incidentally, is all this story amounts to: a lightweight, pulpy take on what sounds like a prototypical Poe plot. Enjoyable, though ultimately (I think) forgettable. (Poe would have made it far more grotesque and gothic, I can tell you that.)
"The Golem" by Avram Davidson (1955). Introducing this story, Dozois proclaims it "a near-perfect little masterpiece." That's a heap of expectation to pile on the poor thing. But I'll admit, it was a delightful little trifle, charming but, again, a shade insubstantial.
"Walk Like a Mountain" by Manly Wade Wellman (1955). I have mentioned, in my review of Kelly Link's "The Summer People," my love for Old Weird Americana in fantasy fiction. This story is an excellent example of that theme, or inspiration, or esthetic, or milieu, whatever you want to call it. It's been a while since I read "The Summer People"; I think I like that story better, if only because I seem to recall its characters and conflicts having more development than those here. One thing that's already beginning to strike me as I read this anthology is how far back these themes (Old Weird Americana, magical beings from the Old World coming to America, ironic playfulness and genre awareness) go in the history of the genre. The only way you could distinguish these 60-75 year old classics from today's top-notch material is relative depth of character and complexity of conflict. Most of these entries, so far, have been concept-based or "punchline" stories: they hit a single beat, raise a single wrinkle, and they're done. It's possible this is merely an artifact of Dozois' selection criteria, but what little I've read of pre-1970s short genre fiction seems to confirm this tendency. Characters tend to be props in these old stories, useful merely to set up the parameters of the story, with no real sense of a life before or after the tale, no sense why we should care about them as characters. Silver John, the narrator here, is a slight exception, but he's also the central figure in a large sequence of stories, so maybe he doesn't count. Anyway, I liked this story a lot, and I've added Wellman and Silver John to my reading wishlist, but I think I'm accustomed to a bit more from my fantasy, thanks to current styles and sensibilities.
"Extempore" by Damon Knight (1956). Another "punchline" story in the late Golden Age vein -- the technicalities of time travel were a common motif in those days. Worth a wry smile but otherwise not especially distinctive.
"Space-Time for Springers" by Fritz Leiber (1958). According to Dozois' rambling introduction to this story, "Springers" invented the subgenre of cat fantasy. It's also the first story here that feels almost modern, a character study at turns hilarious and strangely affecting. Very good indeed.
"Scylla's Daughter" by Fritz Leiber (1961). Dozois cited this story in his preface as an example of how fantasy stories skulked their way into science fiction magazines of the time (fantasy was considered a dead genre, lacking the "didactic" qualities that made sci-fi seem socially acceptable) by adding a few elements to make them look more science-fictiony. In the midst of a archetypal barbarian swordsman and clever thief novella, a time traveler pops in riding a dragon, and pops out again until required for the deus ex machina ending. Aside from that, I found this story entertaining in a corny way, kind of a middling fantasy effort, really. Maybe if I read this listening to prog, it would have set the mood better. A pity; I'd been looking forward to my first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story. Not that I disliked it by any means, I just wasn't blown away.
"The Overworld" by Jack Vance (1965). Another adequately good but not astounding story. As we move out of the first half of the century, we seem to be leaving one-note "punchline" stories behind in exchange for world-based stories, where the setting is the main character. I've been curious to read The Dying Earth, and this did nothing to damp my interest; I'm just glad I live in a time when character-based stories are the norm. Sly heroes tackling quests for laughing sorcerers work better as Harryhausen movies than stories, I think.
"The Signaller" by Keith Roberts (1966). Oh my gosh, I like this story way more than the in media res opening led me to believe. It's another story where the setting is the main character, a lovingly detailed alternate history where the Spanish Armada conquered England and an elite guild of semaphorists communicates across an otherwise backward twentieth century Europe. The main character is of only secondary importance here, his life story merely a framework for the story's real substance, an extended, leisurely examination of the workings of the semaphore network and its system of apprenticeship, an exercise in practically undiluted worldbuilding. I dig it. I do wish that the technologically stunted world of guilds and Mother Church had been better integrated into the stuff about Norse gods and Fairies; as it is, it feels like two story universes shoved into an awkward juncture, and then all of a sudden it ends. I understand that this story was later subsumed into Roberts' novel Pavane, which of course I have to add to my to-read list.
"The Manor of Roses" by Thomas Burnett Swann (1966). A lush, sentimentalist medieval fantasy, seeming to prefigure Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry in general tone. Languorous and lovely, oddly modern, given its publication date. Maybe a tad predictable, but I really enjoyed this one.
"Death and the Executioner" by Roger Zelazny (1967). "Far-future technology gives select men the power of gods" seemed a bold, mind-blowing storyline when first I encountered it, in a novella published in Asimov's Science Fiction sometime in the late '90s. It degrades with repeated exposure, however. I realize now it reproduces many of the set pieces and inherent limitations of the superhero genre, and leads to battles of equally matched, equally invulnerable titans, the victor being the one who successfully plots out every contingency (and every decision of his enemy) ten thousand moves in advance. Here, in a characteristically late '60s touch, our space-faring gods gained power not through technological singularities but by way of some kind of psionic superman flu. All of which sounds pretty dumb in retrospect, but I have to admit, this was one of those rare times when a twist revelation caught me entirely off-guard. So the first chunk of this story was middling; the reveal was outstanding; the denouement was unmistakably Zelazny. (Even Dozois admits the guy was a tad predictable with his interchangeable, super-competent heroes.) I'm still unpacking what the whole "Rild was an actual Buddha" thing meant, because his entire story was a lot of buildup for what amounts to a "figure out what it meant on your own" ending.
"The Configuration of the North Shore" by R. A. Lafferty (1969). Concept-based or "punchline" stories never entirely went away; you may find them in quantity in most SF magazines to this day, a continuing staple of genre fiction. Here we have a mildly interesting little number with a terrific fourth-wall-breaking ending. Pretty good.
"Two Sadnesses" by George Alec Effinger (1973). The first sadness: Ashdown Forest getting carpet-bombed and flamethrowered into desolation around an obliviously optimistic Winnie the Pooh. The second sadness: Rat and Mole, of The Wind in the Willows, getting on in years, return from an adventure to find their homes paved and destroyed for a factory, their friends dead, the river polluted. They drift downstream into a Cuyahoga River-style conflagration. Welp. The '70s sure were a cheerful decade, weren't they? (Good thing we're all done with warmongering, and no one stands a chance of abolishing all those environmental protection laws, I gotta tell ya.) This kind of dark, gritty, "real world issues" revisionism of innocent literature is so ubiquitous nowadays that it's hard to remember the trend actually began somewhere, and could actually pack a punch at one point. A total downer. Not my favorite story, but worth a read.
"The Tale of Hauk" by Poul Anderson (1977). Unremarkable, non-essential bit of supernatural Nordic fluffery, disappointing after everything that's come before. Possibly the first story in the collection I don't care for -- in itself a remarkable achievement, given how mixed these products tend to be. It felt more suited for that After the King anthology; here it seems worse for the contrast.
"Manatee Girl Ain't You Coming Out Tonight" by Avram Davidson (1977). Here we go, this is more like what I've grown to expect from this book. A memorable meander through a forgotten, ramshackle rum and cane-shack paradise, rich with deft description and immediately vivid characters. And were-manatees. Not a perfect story -- the plot is flimsy; the characters, though vivid, are simple stereotypes; worst of all we never see the goddamn were-manatees -- but it was right up my alley.
"The Troll" by T. H. White (1978). This story feels more suited to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century: a man identified only as Mr. Marx tells us (presumably in a warm study after a sumptuous and correct dinner party) the tale of his father meeting a troll in a Swedish hotel. Not just the quaint framing device, but the whole English gentleman abroad feel of the piece, Daddy Marx ambling the Arctic countryside to clear his brain, the abrupt and accidental denouement resulting from no deliberate action of the protagonist -- it feels like a lost Wells creature feature. Enjoyable, if terribly dated.
"The Sleep of Trees" by Jane Yolen (1980). Hey, we're in the '80s! You know how we can tell? There's the overt lesbian eroticism, there's the tinge of atheism/questioning the rightness of the gods, there's the cardboard cliche of a Hollywood Actor (who also gets his comeuppance), and it isn't very good. Okay, that last item doesn't date this definitively to the '80s (much '80s SF was quite excellent, in fact), but this story is a disappointment.
"God's Hooks!" by Howard Waldrop (1982). Izaak Walton (that Izaak Walton) forges fishhooks from meteoric iron to fish for Leviathan in a demon-haunted slough. I don't think anything I could add would be a more rousing endorsement for this story. Holy shit, this is great.
"The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" by Lucius Shepard (1984). Oh my god yes! The cover story! See, as I mentioned before, teenage me found the cover art absolutely mindblowing, and every time I saw the ad I was consumed with curiosity and conjectures about what the story it depicted would be like. In recent years I've figured out that cover art for anthologies and pro magazines is often bought in bulk, well in advance, and only rarely ties in with a particular story. I had assumed that would be the case here, but nope! I really do get to read about the 6000 foot long dragon dwarfing the city that has grown in its shadow. And what a story it is. I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm almost dizzy with how good it is. I have to blink myself back to reality. Just... goddamn, that was good. I don't keep a list of my all-time favorite short stories, but if I did, this one would be high up. These last two stories are building up a critical mass of awesome.
"A Cabin on the Coast" by Gene Wolfe (1981). Another "punchline" story, a little one-note for my tastes, but the antagonist is nicely creepy, and the story is quite adequate overall.
"Paper Dragons" by James P. Blaylock (1985). This reads like it could have been published last year. A thing of haunting, mist-shrouded beauty, dank with unseen life, mechanical creatures that never quite quicken, San Francisco fogs and diaphanous ecologies of cloud just at the edge of sight. Gorgeous.
"Into Gold" by Tanith Lee (1987). A generation after Rome relinquished contact with its frontier legions, as the son of the former commander adopts the role of hereditary warlord prince, an Orientalist caricature of an esoteric/alchemic witch in touch with dark powers shows up and seemingly bewitches him, and his loyal friend and lieutenant thinks he must do anything he can to thwart her. Like Poul Anderson's Nordic reanimation fantasy earlier in this volume, I found this story to be kind of a yawn, even though I love the idea of lost legions going native after the collapse of Roman authority. Not an awful story, it just fell flat for me.
"Flowers of Edo" by Bruce Sterling (1987). Meiji noir. That's the most apt description I can divine for this. Well, maybe not noir, exactly, but it's an urban tale of drink and dark alleyways, brawls and fires and electric demons in the wires. Very good.
"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight" by Ursula K. Le Guin (1987). "'You fell out of the sky,' the coyote said." I love blunt, evocative opening lines like that. This is my first exposure to Le Guin's short fiction, and I like it. A tiny bit heavy-handed with the moralizing, but whatever. It's the best story involving talking turds that I've ever read.
"A Gift of the People" by Robert Sampson (1988). This one exquisitely captures the ingrained primate horror of the dark, the shadow shapes that follow you beyond the corners of your eyes, the silence you feel tingling between your shoulderblades. Reading it at night made my skin crawl. Pretty good.
"Missolonghi 1824" by John Crowley (1990). Lord Byron tells a Greek servant boy about the time he freed a captured satyr from villagers bent on violence. A brief, bare-bones, mostly unremarkable the-gods-of-folklore-are-real tale.
"Bears Discover Fire" by Terry Bisson (1990). I've been looking forward to this one since I first glanced over the contents page. It does not disappoint. I'm amazed how much can be packed into just nine pages -- people who feel real, heart and personality, a different sense of the world. And of course bears discovering fire.
"Blunderbore" by Esther M. Friesner (1990). '90s humor ceased tickling me, well, sometime after the late '90s. The stray Seinfeld episode since then has contributed to the evidence of those "hilarious" stories and novels from that decade: none of it makes me chuckle anymore. Even classic Simpsons episodes barely managed to raise a smile, when I rented some from Netflix a couple months back. Above all, fantasy set-dressings do not pair nicely with jokes about corporate speak and jogging, oat bran and designer heels. This story wasn't as annoying and spastic as The Good Fairies of New York, but it failed to do anything for me. Woefully dated.
"Death and the Lady" by Judith Tarr (1992). Oh hey, I remember this one. It was originally published in the After the King anthology. Already read, already reviewed. Apparently I called it "quite good" in February, and that's good enough for me. Moving on.
"The Changeling's Tale" by Michael Swanwick (1994). Swanwick is one of my all-time favorite authors, based on a sample of two novels and several reliably mindblowing short stories. Stories like "The Edge of the World," "Riding the Giganatosaur," and "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur" made a huge impact on me when I was a teen. This was not long after I realized that my own stories up to that point were childish scribbledegook, devoid of character or effective plotting or anything to recommend them beyond a certain innocent enthusiasm. "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," in fact, appeared in Asimov's at roughly the same time I had submitted what amounted to Raptor Red fan-fiction to the magazine. Swanwick's stories hit me so hard I wondered why I even bothered. And then I produced or at least formulated my own blatant imitations of those three stories. As an adult I read a couple more of his stories, "The Very Pulse of the Machine" and "Midnight Express," which reaffirmed my impression that Swanwick operates on a level of storytelling I simply cannot comprehend. This turns out to be not my favorite Swanwick story, but then, that bar is prohibitively high; it's a standard post-Tolkien elf story, so it lacks the conceptual whatthefuckery I associate with Swanwick, but it's a solid example of its type.
"Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" by Peter S. Beagle (1995). This guy's obsessed with unicorns, ain't he? No matter. This is a sweet, charming delight, disarming and funny and beautifully melancholy.
"Beauty and the Opéra or the Phantom Beast" by Suzy McKee Charnas (1996). A pretty good eroticized revisionist-reimagining sort of story. Knowing nothing more than the sketchiest teaser trailer outline of the source material, I don't know how evocative it is as a retelling, but as a story it's perfectly adequate.
It feels odd to be done with this book. It's only been about three weeks, but it feels like I've been absorbed in it forever. Short story anthologies, even good ones (and this is the best one I've read so far), can be exhausting to read. Bad anthologies exhaust with the mediocrity of their selections; good ones exhaust the emotions, acquainting you with new people and new worlds just long enough to break your heart with them, then shoving you into the next wringer before you can recover. Still, this was a terrific experience, and now I crave more of these books.
Friday, October 18, 2013
2013 read #133: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins.
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
392 pages
Published 2010
Read from October 16 to October 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
As is the norm with this series, I put lots of spoilers in this review. You know what to do.
While waiting an inordinate amount of time for my library to retrieve a dilapidated copy of this book from storage somewhere, I confided to a friend, "I'm GUESSING Snow captures her and sends her to an even bigger! even badder! even hungrier! game." Thankfully, this was not to be. I was amused by what we got instead, with Katniss, televised star of a propaganda reality show buttressing a dystopian tyranny, getting forcibly recruited to star in a televised propaganda reality show (of sorts) to stimulate the rebellion. I was also a fan of the rebellion being a bunch of tyrannical jerks themselves, just waiting for the other shoe to drop so they could do unto their enemies as they were done unto. And the ending was strong, thanks to that moral equivalency of the supposed good guys thing, and also moving in a little-sister-gets-incinerated-possibly-thanks-to-your-best-friend sort of way. Yeah, it was a bit heavy-handed, but this is a popcorn book, that's to be expected.
Some of the problems I had with this series, left hanging especially after Catching Fire, were resolved. President Snow isn't a vampire (thank Christ), he's merely an amateur hour Mithridates left suppurating after one too many sips of plausible deniability. The whole idea of District 13 still feels pretty silly to me, but at least they're evil totalitarians in their own right, instead of magical saviors out of nowhere. On the other hand, while I'm glad to learn Panem isn't an acronym (I was thinking "Pan-America," bastardized over generations of language drift), it isn't much of an improvement to learn it's literally a reference to bread and circuses. You don't name your evil empire after your favorite population pacification strategy; that's Scooby Doo level thinking. (Imagine naming America "Fox & Friends.") And I still have a problem with Snow (and now Coin as well) being personified versions of their respective evil empires, in the video game sense that if you take one down, you destroy the evil empire. I prefer my evil empires faceless and bureaucratic, metastasized throughout society and impossible to kill with just one arrow.
Nonetheless, this was an entertaining end to a mostly entertaining series. The biggest stumble was sending the gang back to the Games in Catching Fire, but that's behind us, and I'd say this all wrapped up nicely.
392 pages
Published 2010
Read from October 16 to October 18
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
As is the norm with this series, I put lots of spoilers in this review. You know what to do.
While waiting an inordinate amount of time for my library to retrieve a dilapidated copy of this book from storage somewhere, I confided to a friend, "I'm GUESSING Snow captures her and sends her to an even bigger! even badder! even hungrier! game." Thankfully, this was not to be. I was amused by what we got instead, with Katniss, televised star of a propaganda reality show buttressing a dystopian tyranny, getting forcibly recruited to star in a televised propaganda reality show (of sorts) to stimulate the rebellion. I was also a fan of the rebellion being a bunch of tyrannical jerks themselves, just waiting for the other shoe to drop so they could do unto their enemies as they were done unto. And the ending was strong, thanks to that moral equivalency of the supposed good guys thing, and also moving in a little-sister-gets-incinerated-possibly-thanks-to-your-best-friend sort of way. Yeah, it was a bit heavy-handed, but this is a popcorn book, that's to be expected.
Some of the problems I had with this series, left hanging especially after Catching Fire, were resolved. President Snow isn't a vampire (thank Christ), he's merely an amateur hour Mithridates left suppurating after one too many sips of plausible deniability. The whole idea of District 13 still feels pretty silly to me, but at least they're evil totalitarians in their own right, instead of magical saviors out of nowhere. On the other hand, while I'm glad to learn Panem isn't an acronym (I was thinking "Pan-America," bastardized over generations of language drift), it isn't much of an improvement to learn it's literally a reference to bread and circuses. You don't name your evil empire after your favorite population pacification strategy; that's Scooby Doo level thinking. (Imagine naming America "Fox & Friends.") And I still have a problem with Snow (and now Coin as well) being personified versions of their respective evil empires, in the video game sense that if you take one down, you destroy the evil empire. I prefer my evil empires faceless and bureaucratic, metastasized throughout society and impossible to kill with just one arrow.
Nonetheless, this was an entertaining end to a mostly entertaining series. The biggest stumble was sending the gang back to the Games in Catching Fire, but that's behind us, and I'd say this all wrapped up nicely.
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
2013 read #132: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
230 pages
Published 2007
Read from October 14 to October 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Sometimes I hate reading paperback editions of popular books. A paperback edition has had time to nurture a thick crust of blind praise and critical blurbs on the back cover and several pages deep in the front. Even if you do your best to ignore them, the barnacles of praise emit and saturate you with a zooplankton soup of expectations. Like with this book. Sure, it won awards, and that's a promising sign, most of the time. But the whole thing is sticky with famous writers and newspaper critics spooging about how funny it is, how much they laughed from beginning to end, its hilarious language. And I hate knowing that Neil Gaiman and Amy Sedaris and Kirkus universally found Alexie's narrative voice hysterical, because to me, it just wasn't that funny. Certain characters were funny, certain events were hilarious, but the style did nothing for me. In fact, the narrative voice was the one and only thing I disliked about this book. It read like an actual teenager's absolutely true diary, or worse yet some wacky random blogger's output.
Full of, like, sentence fragments.
And one-liners.
And jeez, so much emphasis.
ALL THE TIME, you know?
It gets annoying.
Off-putting, even. Too flippant, you know? It's like, jeez, an awkward voice for a truly affecting story.
I don't know what other voice one would use for this sort of high school confessional. I haven't read... well, I haven't read any books of this genre before, at least none that come to mind. But the prose here kept me at arm's length, as if I were a stereotypical teen boy unable and unwilling to articulate an emotional attachment to my male friends. Which is a shame, because this story is a series of emotional punches to the face. My eyes swam in their sockets seemingly for half the book, despite the narrative style. So maybe the writing itself wasn't as much of a distraction as I thought, but whatever. I think I would have liked this book just a little bit better if it weren't so aggressively casual and OH MY GOD, right?
230 pages
Published 2007
Read from October 14 to October 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Sometimes I hate reading paperback editions of popular books. A paperback edition has had time to nurture a thick crust of blind praise and critical blurbs on the back cover and several pages deep in the front. Even if you do your best to ignore them, the barnacles of praise emit and saturate you with a zooplankton soup of expectations. Like with this book. Sure, it won awards, and that's a promising sign, most of the time. But the whole thing is sticky with famous writers and newspaper critics spooging about how funny it is, how much they laughed from beginning to end, its hilarious language. And I hate knowing that Neil Gaiman and Amy Sedaris and Kirkus universally found Alexie's narrative voice hysterical, because to me, it just wasn't that funny. Certain characters were funny, certain events were hilarious, but the style did nothing for me. In fact, the narrative voice was the one and only thing I disliked about this book. It read like an actual teenager's absolutely true diary, or worse yet some wacky random blogger's output.
Full of, like, sentence fragments.
And one-liners.
And jeez, so much emphasis.
ALL THE TIME, you know?
It gets annoying.
Off-putting, even. Too flippant, you know? It's like, jeez, an awkward voice for a truly affecting story.
I don't know what other voice one would use for this sort of high school confessional. I haven't read... well, I haven't read any books of this genre before, at least none that come to mind. But the prose here kept me at arm's length, as if I were a stereotypical teen boy unable and unwilling to articulate an emotional attachment to my male friends. Which is a shame, because this story is a series of emotional punches to the face. My eyes swam in their sockets seemingly for half the book, despite the narrative style. So maybe the writing itself wasn't as much of a distraction as I thought, but whatever. I think I would have liked this book just a little bit better if it weren't so aggressively casual and OH MY GOD, right?
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
2013 read #131: A History of Warfare by John Keegan.
A History of Warfare by John Keegan
398 pages
Published 1993
Read from October 12 to October 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The main gist of this book, repeated again and again in every chapter, is the insufficiency or outright incorrectness of the Clauswitzian analysis of war, "continuation of politics by other means." Keegan's essential idea seems to be that war is an element and extension of culture, its practice and purpose culturally bound, which as far as ideas go is pretty darn safe and unprovocative. Keegan's explorations of martial history have a slight tendency toward mechanistic, reductive explanations; he traces the ultimate cause of nomadic steppe people's willingness to fight and kill without compunction, their "dynamism and ruthlessness" in contrast to "primitive" and "oriental" warmaking, to their practice of slaughtering stock, for example. I do agree with Keegan's assertion that anthropologists (and conventional historians as well, though he doesn't single them out) have a tendency to ignore the actual prosecution of warfare in human society and history. Overall a stimulating, interesting read, rather tragicomically dated by its 1990s optimism regarding peacekeeping, the United Nations, and "neighbourliness" in the coming decades.
398 pages
Published 1993
Read from October 12 to October 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The main gist of this book, repeated again and again in every chapter, is the insufficiency or outright incorrectness of the Clauswitzian analysis of war, "continuation of politics by other means." Keegan's essential idea seems to be that war is an element and extension of culture, its practice and purpose culturally bound, which as far as ideas go is pretty darn safe and unprovocative. Keegan's explorations of martial history have a slight tendency toward mechanistic, reductive explanations; he traces the ultimate cause of nomadic steppe people's willingness to fight and kill without compunction, their "dynamism and ruthlessness" in contrast to "primitive" and "oriental" warmaking, to their practice of slaughtering stock, for example. I do agree with Keegan's assertion that anthropologists (and conventional historians as well, though he doesn't single them out) have a tendency to ignore the actual prosecution of warfare in human society and history. Overall a stimulating, interesting read, rather tragicomically dated by its 1990s optimism regarding peacekeeping, the United Nations, and "neighbourliness" in the coming decades.
Saturday, October 12, 2013
2013 read #130: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
391 pages
Published 2009
Read from October 9 to October 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I have the feeling that if I were to sleep on this review, to let my opinion of this book steep overnight, I'd be certain to mark down the rating I'm giving here. While almost as entertaining as The Hunger Games, Catching Fire is marred by structural and conceptual problems and a likely fatal case of "recapture the magic"/sequel malaise.
Extensive spoilers follow, do not read if etc.
One of my issues with The Hunger Games was how predictable it was. That book followed a tidy, self-contained plot arc, setting up Katniss' life and the titular sacrificial games, sending her to the Capitol, getting her into the arena, and following the televised bloodsport to its inevitable happy-but-not-quite ending, de rigueur for the first installment of a genre trilogy. I will admit that the major twist halfway through Catching Fire caught me totally off-guard... primarily because the twist was so goddamn stupid I never would've seen it coming. Seriously, sending Katniss and Peeta back for a second round in the Games? Right as the whole "overthrow the corrupt government, or maybe go full Logan's Run and light out for Sanctuary, because yeah, both are plausible options in a totally technocratic dictatorship" storyline was just starting to get interesting, you're gonna pull a Jaws 2 on me? Please.
Rare is the dystopian dictatorship that actually comes across as competent. The same goes for dark wizards and evil emperors in conventional fantasy -- the hero has to defeat them somehow, and figuring out a way to beat a competent evil empire is just too hard, so just make the foe mustache-twirling Evil and call it a day. Leaving aside the whole sequence where President Snow, his mouth reeking of blood (seriously, wtf is up with that dark wizardly cliche, I thought this was supposed to be sci-fi), comes to threaten Katniss personally and without subtlety, the last thing a technocratic dictatorship would do with a popular anti-authoritarian figurehead is put them back on Must-See TV. Ugh, the whole business is so clumsily contrived to get Katniss and Peeta back into a recapture-the-magic rehash of the first Hunger Games, I actually tossed the book aside at that point and began making cracks about The Hunger Games 2: Game Hungrier.
And then of course it turns out thatSanctuary
District 13 is REAL and they have like all kinds of hoverships and shit
waiting for our heroes, we were just sitting on it this whole time
'cause we're dicks, and oh, District 12 was destroyed but don't worry,
everyone you cared about is safe for the next book in the series, and
ugh, I kind of feel like marking down the grade I gave right now.
But I won't, because I was entertained, and even genuinely moved a couple times, and I'm still hoping the final book will redeem this disorganized middle-act mess and make it all worth my while. It's a dimishing hope, but it's still there.
391 pages
Published 2009
Read from October 9 to October 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I have the feeling that if I were to sleep on this review, to let my opinion of this book steep overnight, I'd be certain to mark down the rating I'm giving here. While almost as entertaining as The Hunger Games, Catching Fire is marred by structural and conceptual problems and a likely fatal case of "recapture the magic"/sequel malaise.
Extensive spoilers follow, do not read if etc.
One of my issues with The Hunger Games was how predictable it was. That book followed a tidy, self-contained plot arc, setting up Katniss' life and the titular sacrificial games, sending her to the Capitol, getting her into the arena, and following the televised bloodsport to its inevitable happy-but-not-quite ending, de rigueur for the first installment of a genre trilogy. I will admit that the major twist halfway through Catching Fire caught me totally off-guard... primarily because the twist was so goddamn stupid I never would've seen it coming. Seriously, sending Katniss and Peeta back for a second round in the Games? Right as the whole "overthrow the corrupt government, or maybe go full Logan's Run and light out for Sanctuary, because yeah, both are plausible options in a totally technocratic dictatorship" storyline was just starting to get interesting, you're gonna pull a Jaws 2 on me? Please.
Rare is the dystopian dictatorship that actually comes across as competent. The same goes for dark wizards and evil emperors in conventional fantasy -- the hero has to defeat them somehow, and figuring out a way to beat a competent evil empire is just too hard, so just make the foe mustache-twirling Evil and call it a day. Leaving aside the whole sequence where President Snow, his mouth reeking of blood (seriously, wtf is up with that dark wizardly cliche, I thought this was supposed to be sci-fi), comes to threaten Katniss personally and without subtlety, the last thing a technocratic dictatorship would do with a popular anti-authoritarian figurehead is put them back on Must-See TV. Ugh, the whole business is so clumsily contrived to get Katniss and Peeta back into a recapture-the-magic rehash of the first Hunger Games, I actually tossed the book aside at that point and began making cracks about The Hunger Games 2: Game Hungrier.
And then of course it turns out that
But I won't, because I was entertained, and even genuinely moved a couple times, and I'm still hoping the final book will redeem this disorganized middle-act mess and make it all worth my while. It's a dimishing hope, but it's still there.
Friday, October 11, 2013
2013 read #129: Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific by Tim Flannery.
Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific by Tim Flannery
236 pages
Published 2011
Read from October 10 to October 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Some part of me has always wanted to be a field researcher. I don't like excessive heat, or cold, or damp; I don't care for blood-sucking parasites of any description; I would not like malaria or ghastly gastrointestinal diseases; I like my skin free of fungus and burrowing larvae whenever possible. Yet from a young age I've been drawn to stories of exploration, whether that meant climbing cliffs in Baffin Island or crossing Antarctica by dogsled or digging up early traces of agriculture in the hinterlands of New Guinea. If I had made other choices in life, I could conceivably be netting tropical birds or cataloging unusual conifers or chipping out samples from some Cretaceous lake bed even now. Who knows, if the country doesn't implode before my current wealth of debts is paid off, I might be able to go back to school and get a useful degree, one that lets me pursue my more quixotic and bug-infested ambitions in some unguessable corner of the world in years to come.
One such corner I've long daydreamed of is the strange scatter of islands east of New Guinea: the Bismarks, the Solomons, New Caledonia. I'm a sucker for living fossils, and the Antarctic plant kingdom hoards some of the largest and most visually striking living fossils of all, forests composed of conifers and primitive flowering plants dating back to the waning days of Gondwana, vegetative communities evolving largely along their own separate paths while the rest of the world got swept up by such fads as grasses and true pines and maple trees. It gives me a thrill to see pictures of New Caledonia's Araucaria forests, or Norfolk Island's "pines." I won't say anything silly like "It's an atavistic response," but I do find ancient flora damnably compelling.
On the strength of two of his books, Throwim Way Leg and The Eternal Frontier, I had decided that Tim Flannery was also compelling, albeit in the more limited arena of pop science and natural history writing. Among the Islands was rather less compelling than memories of those two books had led me to expect. It was a relaxed book, more like an evening of casual conversation and reminiscence than anything else, a chatty, rambly, somewhat shallow account of a series of ramshackle expeditions into my favorite corner of the Pacific. It was an enjoyable way to spend a few hours, but I left it feeling like I didn't learn much, aside from (alas) the depressingly inevitable sense of how much irreplaceable biological wealth has been gouged out and destroyed by unregulated exploitation, even in such remote regions.
236 pages
Published 2011
Read from October 10 to October 11
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Some part of me has always wanted to be a field researcher. I don't like excessive heat, or cold, or damp; I don't care for blood-sucking parasites of any description; I would not like malaria or ghastly gastrointestinal diseases; I like my skin free of fungus and burrowing larvae whenever possible. Yet from a young age I've been drawn to stories of exploration, whether that meant climbing cliffs in Baffin Island or crossing Antarctica by dogsled or digging up early traces of agriculture in the hinterlands of New Guinea. If I had made other choices in life, I could conceivably be netting tropical birds or cataloging unusual conifers or chipping out samples from some Cretaceous lake bed even now. Who knows, if the country doesn't implode before my current wealth of debts is paid off, I might be able to go back to school and get a useful degree, one that lets me pursue my more quixotic and bug-infested ambitions in some unguessable corner of the world in years to come.
One such corner I've long daydreamed of is the strange scatter of islands east of New Guinea: the Bismarks, the Solomons, New Caledonia. I'm a sucker for living fossils, and the Antarctic plant kingdom hoards some of the largest and most visually striking living fossils of all, forests composed of conifers and primitive flowering plants dating back to the waning days of Gondwana, vegetative communities evolving largely along their own separate paths while the rest of the world got swept up by such fads as grasses and true pines and maple trees. It gives me a thrill to see pictures of New Caledonia's Araucaria forests, or Norfolk Island's "pines." I won't say anything silly like "It's an atavistic response," but I do find ancient flora damnably compelling.
On the strength of two of his books, Throwim Way Leg and The Eternal Frontier, I had decided that Tim Flannery was also compelling, albeit in the more limited arena of pop science and natural history writing. Among the Islands was rather less compelling than memories of those two books had led me to expect. It was a relaxed book, more like an evening of casual conversation and reminiscence than anything else, a chatty, rambly, somewhat shallow account of a series of ramshackle expeditions into my favorite corner of the Pacific. It was an enjoyable way to spend a few hours, but I left it feeling like I didn't learn much, aside from (alas) the depressingly inevitable sense of how much irreplaceable biological wealth has been gouged out and destroyed by unregulated exploitation, even in such remote regions.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
2013 read #128: Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey.
Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey
701 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 30 to October 9
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Some vague-ish spoilers ahead.
The first three hundred pages, I think, are the most interesting part of this book. Carey attempts to meld two distinct genres, game-of-thrones style fantasy and S&M porn, with mixed but generally encouraging results. Main characters die unexpectedly, which is always an intriguing sign. But around the three hundred page mark, the story abandons most of the bondage-courtesan spy angle and slips into something more comfortable, an unremarkable pseudo-medieval paladin and barbarian sword-swinger, with countless daring escapes and cunningly overheard conversations, bold journeys and innumerable sword battles against impossible odds, with a couple Ray Harryhausen god sequences thrown in, because why not. After the sex-spy motif dried up, I realized there wasn't much of substance left. Game-of-thrones fantasies (I use the term generically, though Carey does name-check that particular book here) work best when the contenders are realized, interesting characters with their own points of view and motivations. None of Carey's characters achieve that level of distinction, leaving all the maneuvering and double-crossing rather meaningless, lost in a tangle of interchangeable Francophone surnames and blandly masculine cardboard cutouts, positioned on a one-dimensional axis between Noble and Devious, as if George R. R. Martin were reduced to his D-list character backlog, scraping together a random Baratheon bastard here, a generic Florent cousin there. So, basically A Feast for Crows. OHHHHHHH SNAP I went there.
The characters outside the angel-begotten lineages of Terre D'Ange are worse in some ways, largely variations on stale ethnic stereotypes: violent, mead-swilling, poetry-loving German warriors; tattooed and Mother Earth-y Britons; boisterous and cunning Roma horse-dealers and gamblers; kindly, generous, persecuted Jews. Worst of all, after two particularly momentous main character deaths, everyone seemingly obtains indestructible plot armor, and every single plan and gambit the narrator embarks upon meets with ridiculous amounts of success. After that page three hundred watershed, Kushiel's Dart doesn't even try anymore; it settles into a travelogue of increasingly improbable peregrinations, touching on every corner of Carey's pseudo-medieval Europe, cramming in more events with less and less detail as if squeezed by a publication deadline or a hard page limit. Toward the end I was half-joking to myself, "Well, she's visited every named location now except not-Italy and not-Syria, those must be held in reserve for the sequels." And sure enough, the last chapter or two sets up the gang's next mystery in a back-stabby cliche of pseudo-Renaissance Italy.
I moderately enjoyed this book, and found myself sucked in whenever I happened to settle in to read it, but it failed to hold my interest whenever it wasn't physically in my hand. And oh my lord, the typos. At first I thought the embarrassing wealth of incorrect homophones was a stylistic choice, but when we read about the "souls" of someone's feet, you start to wonder if some copy editor wasn't paid enough.
701 pages
Published 2001
Read from September 30 to October 9
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Some vague-ish spoilers ahead.
The first three hundred pages, I think, are the most interesting part of this book. Carey attempts to meld two distinct genres, game-of-thrones style fantasy and S&M porn, with mixed but generally encouraging results. Main characters die unexpectedly, which is always an intriguing sign. But around the three hundred page mark, the story abandons most of the bondage-courtesan spy angle and slips into something more comfortable, an unremarkable pseudo-medieval paladin and barbarian sword-swinger, with countless daring escapes and cunningly overheard conversations, bold journeys and innumerable sword battles against impossible odds, with a couple Ray Harryhausen god sequences thrown in, because why not. After the sex-spy motif dried up, I realized there wasn't much of substance left. Game-of-thrones fantasies (I use the term generically, though Carey does name-check that particular book here) work best when the contenders are realized, interesting characters with their own points of view and motivations. None of Carey's characters achieve that level of distinction, leaving all the maneuvering and double-crossing rather meaningless, lost in a tangle of interchangeable Francophone surnames and blandly masculine cardboard cutouts, positioned on a one-dimensional axis between Noble and Devious, as if George R. R. Martin were reduced to his D-list character backlog, scraping together a random Baratheon bastard here, a generic Florent cousin there. So, basically A Feast for Crows. OHHHHHHH SNAP I went there.
The characters outside the angel-begotten lineages of Terre D'Ange are worse in some ways, largely variations on stale ethnic stereotypes: violent, mead-swilling, poetry-loving German warriors; tattooed and Mother Earth-y Britons; boisterous and cunning Roma horse-dealers and gamblers; kindly, generous, persecuted Jews. Worst of all, after two particularly momentous main character deaths, everyone seemingly obtains indestructible plot armor, and every single plan and gambit the narrator embarks upon meets with ridiculous amounts of success. After that page three hundred watershed, Kushiel's Dart doesn't even try anymore; it settles into a travelogue of increasingly improbable peregrinations, touching on every corner of Carey's pseudo-medieval Europe, cramming in more events with less and less detail as if squeezed by a publication deadline or a hard page limit. Toward the end I was half-joking to myself, "Well, she's visited every named location now except not-Italy and not-Syria, those must be held in reserve for the sequels." And sure enough, the last chapter or two sets up the gang's next mystery in a back-stabby cliche of pseudo-Renaissance Italy.
I moderately enjoyed this book, and found myself sucked in whenever I happened to settle in to read it, but it failed to hold my interest whenever it wasn't physically in my hand. And oh my lord, the typos. At first I thought the embarrassing wealth of incorrect homophones was a stylistic choice, but when we read about the "souls" of someone's feet, you start to wonder if some copy editor wasn't paid enough.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
2013 read #127: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
315 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 30 to October 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Goddamn it. All I want is a hiking book that meets these three criteria: 1) well-written, 2) written by a person who actually hiked the entirety of the featured trail, 3) not revolving around the author's bizarre neuroses and fucked up personal life. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods meets criteria one and three, but the whole point of the book is how hilariously unprepared Bryson was to attempt the Appalachian Trail, and his washing out is anticlimactic, a foregone conclusion. The Cactus Eaters by Dan White barely squeaks by on points one and two, but the whole book is made awkward by White's one-that-got-away nostalgia-cum-exhibitionism regarding his future ex-girlfriend. David Brill's As Far as the Eye Can See checks off two and three, with the exception of the perhaps inevitable "finding myself" narrative, but was written with all the command of lyrical English one would expect from a community college writing center.
I want a book written with the glee of a Bryson or the passion of a Muir, by someone who managed to put one foot in front of the other from end to end, without any of the emotional exhibitionism that seems to win such critical acclaim. I want to luxuriate in the trail experience without slogging through all the crap better reserved for the author's therapist. I don't think that's a lot to ask, but then, pure hiking narratives are quite the niche product, so I'm probably doomed to perpetual disappointment.
Wild is one of those special books that somehow got marketed in just the right way to accumulate baffling amounts of critical support. It was the first pick of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, FFS, with three pages of glowing blurbs fronting the paperback edition. The key thing to remember is, Wild is not a hiking narrative as I would understand it. It is a soul-baring tell-all memoir -- well-written enough, sure, but a wholly different genre altogether.
I have an empathy deficiency when it comes to people with at least one relatively normal and wholesome parent who want to complain about their childhoods. Most times, when someone whines about how their dad left them, I'm like, "Oh yeah? So? At least your mother loved you and raised you properly. Come back to me when you got a sob-story like mine, champ." At least Strayed grew up poor, so I have some sympathy for her, but still. Every chapter of the book goes into some extended recitation of all the angst and agony she went through, a spiral of pain and heroin and bad choices and therapy persisting four years -- four years -- after her mother died. I know hangups about loving, caring parents are a common thing, but I just do not understand them. It is a blank spot in my brain. I have never in my life known what it is to have a loving, caring parent. I have never as an adult understood people who go into existential crises because their parents hid something from them or got sick or died young. I lack the emotional software to grok why a grown-ass adult should base so much of their identity and self-understanding on their parents. They are separate people. Get over it. Going into a four-year spiral of self-destruction because your mom died just sounds so goddamn codependent to me. If this is an emotional deficiency in me, I can't do anything about it; I literally cannot imagine giving so much of a shit about a parent.
That's not even getting to Strayed's description of swallowing chunks of her mother's cremated remains, so that her mom would always be "with" her, which... well, it made me dry heave while reading it, which is quite an accomplishment, I guess.
All that whining about how much her mother's loss devastated her, and yet the only time I was moved to tears in this entire book was in the acknowledgments, when she concisely describes how one of her trail friends died a few years later.
I can see how, on technical grounds, this is a "good" book. It was a fast and absorbing read, even as I rolled my eyes every time Strayed broke off from her trail narrative to do yet another flashback to depict how fucked up she was before the Pacific Crest Trail finally taught her acceptance. I enjoyed her trail narrative, which was decidedly dirty and unglamorous (and all the more evocative after my own single experience with backpacking, a month or so ago). All the parts about her self-destructive spiral, though, those weren't a good fit for me.
Plus, she only walked about a thousand miles of a 2,650 mile trail, so pffft.
315 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 30 to October 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Goddamn it. All I want is a hiking book that meets these three criteria: 1) well-written, 2) written by a person who actually hiked the entirety of the featured trail, 3) not revolving around the author's bizarre neuroses and fucked up personal life. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods meets criteria one and three, but the whole point of the book is how hilariously unprepared Bryson was to attempt the Appalachian Trail, and his washing out is anticlimactic, a foregone conclusion. The Cactus Eaters by Dan White barely squeaks by on points one and two, but the whole book is made awkward by White's one-that-got-away nostalgia-cum-exhibitionism regarding his future ex-girlfriend. David Brill's As Far as the Eye Can See checks off two and three, with the exception of the perhaps inevitable "finding myself" narrative, but was written with all the command of lyrical English one would expect from a community college writing center.
I want a book written with the glee of a Bryson or the passion of a Muir, by someone who managed to put one foot in front of the other from end to end, without any of the emotional exhibitionism that seems to win such critical acclaim. I want to luxuriate in the trail experience without slogging through all the crap better reserved for the author's therapist. I don't think that's a lot to ask, but then, pure hiking narratives are quite the niche product, so I'm probably doomed to perpetual disappointment.
Wild is one of those special books that somehow got marketed in just the right way to accumulate baffling amounts of critical support. It was the first pick of Oprah's Book Club 2.0, FFS, with three pages of glowing blurbs fronting the paperback edition. The key thing to remember is, Wild is not a hiking narrative as I would understand it. It is a soul-baring tell-all memoir -- well-written enough, sure, but a wholly different genre altogether.
I have an empathy deficiency when it comes to people with at least one relatively normal and wholesome parent who want to complain about their childhoods. Most times, when someone whines about how their dad left them, I'm like, "Oh yeah? So? At least your mother loved you and raised you properly. Come back to me when you got a sob-story like mine, champ." At least Strayed grew up poor, so I have some sympathy for her, but still. Every chapter of the book goes into some extended recitation of all the angst and agony she went through, a spiral of pain and heroin and bad choices and therapy persisting four years -- four years -- after her mother died. I know hangups about loving, caring parents are a common thing, but I just do not understand them. It is a blank spot in my brain. I have never in my life known what it is to have a loving, caring parent. I have never as an adult understood people who go into existential crises because their parents hid something from them or got sick or died young. I lack the emotional software to grok why a grown-ass adult should base so much of their identity and self-understanding on their parents. They are separate people. Get over it. Going into a four-year spiral of self-destruction because your mom died just sounds so goddamn codependent to me. If this is an emotional deficiency in me, I can't do anything about it; I literally cannot imagine giving so much of a shit about a parent.
That's not even getting to Strayed's description of swallowing chunks of her mother's cremated remains, so that her mom would always be "with" her, which... well, it made me dry heave while reading it, which is quite an accomplishment, I guess.
All that whining about how much her mother's loss devastated her, and yet the only time I was moved to tears in this entire book was in the acknowledgments, when she concisely describes how one of her trail friends died a few years later.
I can see how, on technical grounds, this is a "good" book. It was a fast and absorbing read, even as I rolled my eyes every time Strayed broke off from her trail narrative to do yet another flashback to depict how fucked up she was before the Pacific Crest Trail finally taught her acceptance. I enjoyed her trail narrative, which was decidedly dirty and unglamorous (and all the more evocative after my own single experience with backpacking, a month or so ago). All the parts about her self-destructive spiral, though, those weren't a good fit for me.
Plus, she only walked about a thousand miles of a 2,650 mile trail, so pffft.
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