Science, Fiction, Life

Category: Book Review (Page 3 of 4)

Book Review: Leviathan Wakes

Leviathan_Wakes_(first_edition)

One of the side effects of having a day job that borders on science fiction (shooting rocks on Mars with a laser mounted on a nuclear-powered robot) is that I find it’s much harder for “hard” sci-fi to impress me. (“Hard” sci-fi, for the uninitiated, is sci-fi that tries to be scientifically accurate.) Too often it’s full of cardboard characters who are there just to advance the plot to the next point where the author can lecture the reader about the next gee-whiz piece of futuristic tech that they researched.

However, I had heard some great things about Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (a pen name for Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham) and the rest of the Expanse series. I even had a brief exchange on twitter with them in which they expressed interest in asking me some questions about Mars (alas nothing ever came of this). So I was cautiously optimistic when I finally was able to get my hands on an ebook of Leviathan Wakes from the library.

Turns out no caution was necessary: Leviathan Wakes was excellent. Possibly the best hard science fiction I have read since Red Mars. Heck, in many ways, it’s better than Red Mars. Leviathan Wakes is set a few hundred years into a future where humanity has colonized the solar system. Often sci-fi skips over this phase of exploration and just waves its hands and says that humans have colonized the stars and there is faster than light travel so now let’s go fight some aliens. That’s not the case here. Instead of shying away from the messy, slow, complicated process of becoming a multi-planet species, Leviathan Wakes drops us right in the middle of it. Earth is still the cradle of life and is required to sustain the colonies, but only barely. Mars is a sovereign nation with a dominant military presence in space. Ceres and Eros and other large asteroids have been reconstructed into giant space stations, home to millions (artificial gravity provided by spinning up the whole asteroid and building stations such that “up” is toward the interior of the asteroid”). The asteroid belt and outer planets have loosely allied into the “Outer Planets Alliance”.

The book does a great job with the technical details. The main bending of the rules has to do with the propulsion system used by the ships. Other than that everything is pretty good. There’s no artificial gravity fields or “inertial dampers”. Instead gravity is provided by either spinning or accelerating. For high levels of acceleration, people have to strap into padded couches and get injected with a cocktail of drugs to avoid passing out. Combat in space is as much a dance of jamming communications or being dark to radar or detecting infrared signatures as it is about actually firing ordnance (and of course, it’s mostly missiles since the distances involved are usually too larger for ballistic projectiles to make sense).

But while it is good with the technical details, the book doesn’t get bogged down in them, and it has some great characters too. The two point of view characters are Jim Holden, an idealistic captain of a small crew (a bit reminiscent of Firefly) who keep ending up in the middle of unexpectedly significant events, and Miller, a washed up detective on Ceres trying to complete his final missing person case against all odds (bringing a bit of the noir/mystery genre to the book, especially in the first half). The supporting cast are good too: Naomi Nagata (Holden’s highly competent XO), Alex Kamal (a Martian-born ex-navy pilot), and Amos Burton (the hilarious mechanic). Even minor characters have distinct personalities and a role to play in the story.

The future of Leviathan Wakes feels real. It’s not just a bunch of white American scientists and steely-eyed missile men with “the right stuff”. The space stations are huge and messy and multicultural. Kids from the slums of Ceres speak an almost incomprehensible mash up of slang and various languages. The Mormons are at Tycho station, preparing to launch a generation ship to the stars. There are women in positions of authority (head of security on Ceres, admiral in the Martian navy, etc.). Arabic and Hindi are commonly spoken, and many other cultures make cameo appearances in the names of minor characters. This all adds up to a feeling of verisimilitude, like this is a future that could really exist.

To me, that’s one of the best things about this book. It makes it feel possible to colonize the solar system, something that in my line of work it’s easy to get cynical about. I was discussing the book with a co-worker the other day and she said something that I realized really rang true. Not only is it a good book, but it makes me more excited about my job because in some small way I’m contributing toward the future that the book depicts.

So ok, the technical details are good, the characters are good, what about the plot? It’s awesome. This is a long book, but it’s a page-turner. Every chapter ends with something that makes you want to start reading the next one. Cliffhangers can be poorly done, with the reader wondering what just happened or getting annoyed at the author for hiding things. There’s very little of that here. Instead you get the good kind of cliffhanger, where the chapter ends with some new twist or piece of information with such major implications that you just have to turn the page and find out what happens next. I was reminded in the best possible way of Storm of Swords, where the book seemed to have several climaxes because so much happened. A similar thing happened here. I feared I was nearing the end at one point because things were starting to feel climactic, only to check on my kindle and find that I was only halfway finished! I do much of my reading out loud to my wife right before bed and I can always tell if a book is working by how long it takes for me to start to nod off. I’ll just say this: I didn’t nod off very often with this book!

Bottom line? Leviathan Wakes was awesome. I highly recommend it to everyone, especially my planetary science colleagues. I am eagerly looking forward to reading the next books in the series. There is also apparently a TV show on SyFy based on the books called The Expanse, so I will need to check that out (once I have verified that it won’t spoil events in the later books).

Other minor thoughts:

  • Reading out loud also means that it’s noticeable when dialog doesn’t feel natural. I’m happy to report that the dialog in Leviathan Wakes reads very well out loud. I imagine the audiobook would be very good.
  • The book deftly incorporates bits and piece of other genres and pieces of fiction that I have loved without ever feeling like a copy cat. I mentioned above that the crew of the Rocinante reminded me a bit of Firefly, and that Miller’s early chapters had a nice noir feel to them. I was also reminded of StarCraft and Mass Effect at times, two of my favorite sci-fi video games.
  • I only have a few negative things to say about the book. It would have been nice to have a female POV character. There were a few times where I lost track of exactly what was happening and why (in particular, the geometry of the inside of the big space stations could be confusing and so the characters’ motivations for getting to a certain location sometimes got fuzzy). And as with any sci-fi, there were a few cases where the rules had to be broken to accommodate the plot.

Book Review: Outlander

Outlander-1991_1st_Edition_cover

I had heard a lot about Outlander, the famous romance novel involving a nurse from the 1940s who travels back in time and falls in love with a handsome Scotsman. Many of my female friends love the book and its sequels, and I heard the TV show being lauded as Game of Thrones, but for women. So I thought it would be educational for me to read the novel and see what all the fuss was about. I’ve never really read much in the romance genre, which always seemed like a shame because surely there’s some good stuff there that I am missing out on. Outlander is often given as an example of a great romance novel, so I figured I should try it.

Before I go on, I want to acknowledge up front that I’m decidedly not the target audience for Outlander. I get that. That was actually part of the appeal: so much fiction is written with “white straight male” as the target audience that I wanted to see what it would be like to read something that wasn’t “for me”.

Sadly, I have to report that I really didn’t like it very much, and I am shocked that women do.

The first half of the book was fine. I read it in one huge gulp while traveling overseas, and while the writing wasn’t amazing, it was a pretty good story. But then two things happened. First, I wasn’t traveling anymore so my chunks of reading time were much more fragmented, meaning I could only read smaller passages at a time. This always leads to me being more picky about the quality of writing, no matter what I’m reading. When you aren’t fully sucked in, it’s easier to spot the odd word choices or sentences that fall flat, or minor inconsistencies. But more importantly, at around the halfway mark in the book, Jamie the sexy Scotsman beats the main character with a belt. And then, within a matter of days, she has basically forgiven him. And then he rapes her (but it’s ok because after she says “No, Stop, please, you’re hurting me!” and he keeps going and says he “means to make you mine” and that the marriage vows included the provision that she must “obey”, she eventually says “yes”, so it’s definitely just kinky sex that leaves her battered and bruised definitely not rape). And that was when the book lost me.

From the way the book is written, it’s clear that this incident is supposed to be forgiven and Claire (and therefore the reader, because Claire is very nearly a blank-slate of a character upon which the reader is supposed to project herself) falls madly in love with sexy Jamie the sexy Scotsman. But for me, the moment he beat her and then raped her, the logical behavior on her part would be to try to escape as quickly as possible and go back to her loving husband in the present. You know, the one she chose voluntarily and who does not abuse her? The book from that point on should have been about getting away from this barbaric man, and this barbaric time period and back to the man who she supposedly loves. But nope. She goes to the standing stones that sent her back in time and then decides that she’d rather not go back to 1945 and all of its relative safety and comfort. Her husband in the present, Frank, is a slim academic type who Claire finds ever so boring as he goes on and on about his historical studies. Nothing is so unappealing as an intelligent man who is passionate about his academic pursuits. Much better to stay in the past with Jamie, the big, buff, virile Highlander whose favorite pass-times are (1) finding any excuse at all to be beaten (seriously, like half of this book is about all the times Jamie was beaten in the past, or gets beaten in the present, or is recovering from being beaten, etc.), and (2) sex.

Also, let’s talk about the antagonist in this story “Black Jack” Randall. In what is surely the most subtle subliminal message ever, the bad guy looks just like Claire’s husband from the present! Hmmmm! “Golly, I wonder if she will go back to her pathetic, skinny, nerdy husband who also happens to look like the vile, raping, antagonist?” How do we know he is not just a rapist, but the bad kind that we hate? (because it’s already been established that beatings and rape are ok as long as the victim deserves it and eventually stops protesting) Why, because he’s a homosexual of course! By my count there are two gay men in this book. One is a minor character who, of course, molests little boys. The other is the antagonist, Jack Randall, a pathetic and evil man who gets off on torturing and raping Jamie toward the end of the book.

For most of the book, Claire is an extremely passive and boring character (the better to allow the reader to project onto her).  She goes from place to place, obeying what others say, listening in on important conversations without being part of them, making very few decisions for herself. At the end of the book I was excited that she was finally taking initiative in attempting to save Jamie, reversing the damsel in distress trope by having the woman save the man. But of course we can’t have that, so she ends up being held at knifepoint and Jamie saves her by giving himself up as a plaything for the bad guy. Then Claire gets tossed out in the snow, and in a ridiculous scene, wins in hand-to-hand combat with a starving wolf by breaking its neck against the corner of a building (I mean, I know WWII nurses were tough, but come on). And then she gets rescued by some men, who then actually rescue Jamie, somehow, through a plot involving unleashing a herd of cattle in the dungeon? Oh and she kills a man by severing his brain stem with a knife. Because that’s easy to do for someone with very little training or strength.

And then at the end of the book, they flee to Normandy, and Claire (a) very nearly converts to Catholicism for some reason (mostly so that there can be a scene where a priest hears her confession and absolves her of any guilt about leaving her loving husband Frank behind in the future), and (b) cures Jamie of his severe bacterial infection AND his PTSD by sending him into an opium-induced hallucination where he thinks that she is the bad guy, and he fights her, and then they end up naked on the floor? Yeah, I don’t know what that was all about.

And finally, the book ends with some sexy sex in an underground hot spring and the revelation that Claire is not infertile, as she once thought! The powerful sperm of the sexy Scotsman, clearly superior to the sperm from her boring, skinny nerd husband, managed to impregnate her. Hooray!

Phew. Ok, so clearly I didn’t much like this book. The only reason I kept with it is because I wanted to see what all my friends saw in it. Maybe my problem is just that I’m the opposite of the target audience, but I really can’t comprehend why so many of my feminist female friends like this book. And just to be clear, I don’t mind the loving detail used in describing how sexy Jamie is: I expected that and it didn’t really bother me. Certainly plenty of books that I read are guilty of the opposite: describing female characters in great detail (making sure to mention something about breasts), and then oh yeah also there was a dude standing next to her and he was tall or something. And it’s not even that the writing is mediocre: I read plenty of fantasy and historical fiction books with just so-so writing. It really all comes back to the fact that I don’t get how a relatively modern woman is supposed to just forgive a man who beats her with a belt for “disobedience”. I don’t care how handsome or charming or honest or self-deprecating he is, or how much he tells you about all the times he was beaten as a kid (har har, isn’t it cute how he got beaten so much because he’s stubborn and disobedient? After all, “boys will be boys” and the only thing to do about it is beat them. PS: Claire, Jamie wants to make it clear that if you have kids he’s totally beating them too.) If this book is supposed to be a woman’s fantasy (and for the vast majority of the book it clearly is), then why make the love interest beat her and rape her? I just don’t get it. I’m very uncomfortable with the potential conclusions that could be drawn from that. But then, I don’t understand why so many women apparently enjoy reading 50 Shades of Gray either.

In any case, let’s just leave it at this: I’m glad to be done with this book and very much looking forward to reading something new.

A martian’s review of The Martian (book)

the-martian-cover

As someone whose day job can be summarized as “zapping rocks on Mars with a laser” and who is interested in writing speculative fiction, I know you will be shocked to learn that I have some opinions about the novel The Martian by Andy Weir. I will now share these opinions with you!

The premise behind this book is as simple as it is compelling: Astronaut Mark Watney is stranded on Mars after his crewmates believe that he has died in a violent sandstorm and are forced to abort the mission. Watney has to survive on the surface of Mars with limited supplies and equipment, until a rescue mission can come get him. It’s basically like Castaway, but on a planet that is extremely hostile to life instead of a tropical island.

The Castaway analogy works, but the best description of The Martian I have heard (and I forget where I heard it, sorry! Edit: someone pointed out that it was this xkcd. Because of course it was xkcd). is that it’s like that scene from Apollo 13 where they have to get the square CO2 filters to work in a round hole, but it goes on for an entire book. If you loved that scene, you will love The Martian. If you don’t remember that scene, then you may not be as excited to read page after page of how Watney figures out how to grow potatoes in Mars soil, or how he manages to create hydrogen by catalytically breaking down rocket fuel.

I know you are now bracing yourself for a few thousand words of pedantic nit-picking from the Mars scientist who wants to correct every little scientific detail in the book, but surprise! I’m not going to do that for two reasons: One, it’s boring. Two, the book was actually pretty good in terms of science. I have two main technical things that I’ll complain about but then I’ll move on to some other non-sciencey things to nit-pick about instead!

The main technical problem in the book is that it vastly overestimates the violence of a martian dust storm. In fact, it repeatedly calls them sand storms. The problem is, Mars has a very thin atmosphere, so while you can get very fast winds, they don’t have much “oomph” behind them. They certainly are not going to dismember a communications antenna and send it hurtling like a javelin into a hapless astronaut. And you’re not going to end up with the drifts of sand that are described when Watney wakes up from his almost-fatal impaling. Sand does move on Mars, but not in huge amounts like that.

I actually heard an interview with Any Weir yesterday, and he brings this up. He says that he actually knew that this was inaccurate, but that since the book is basically a Man vs Nature story, he wanted Nature to land the first blow. And he also pointed out that scientists like me are now coming out of the woodwork explaining to people that the winds on Mars aren’t actually that strong, and so the net result is probably that the public knows much more about the strength of wind on Mars that they would have if he had gotten the science right. So ok, I can live with that.

My other main problem is that Watney has to drive an absurdly long distance across the surface of Mars. It’s just not realistic to have someone drive halfway around the planet. I get that he’s in a giant rover, and so can traverse across obstacles much larger than the robotic rovers could. But he certainly wouldn’t be doing that at 25 kph. And just as importantly, for most of the time he is unable to communicate with NASA or the orbiting satellites, so he doesn’t have high-resolution images to help him plan his route. I can tell you that even with 25 cm per pixel resolution to help us plan where the current robotic rovers drive, we are still surprised by obstacles sometimes.

But really, other than the inciting event and one of the major plot points, I thought the science was pretty good. That sounds snarky, but it’s true: those are both places where the Story takes precedence over being realistic, and that’s ok. For the rest of the book, all the technical details were about right. There were countless places where I put the book down and yelled at Watney “No! Don’t do it that way! This way would be much better!” or other comments along those lines. And then in the next line, he would realize exactly what I was thinking. These were not cases where the technical details were wrong, they were places where Watney was being deliberately slow so that typical readers can follow along with him as he figures things out.

In reality, upon being stranded, an astronaut would probably sit down and figure out in a few hours and a few pages of calculations what it takes Watney weeks, and lots of trial and error, to sort out. But that would be awfully boring to read, and amazingly, Watney’s struggles are not! To me that is the great accomplishment of this book: it manages to make long, detailed descriptions of technical problem solving not only palatable, but actually engrossing. This book is a page turner!

The book is so readable because of Mark Watney’s voice. His personality is finely-honed to be extremely charismatic, likeable, funny, and relatable. The Martian is a spectacular example of the power of voice to make a piece of fiction readable and exciting. If Watney didn’t have a compelling voice, nobody would be able to tolerate the long passages of technical details. At times, I found the degree to which Weir tries to make Watney a relatable everyman a bit annoying. In particular, whenever Watney is making cracks about how nerdy those guys at NASA are. DUDE. You are a mechanical engineer slash botanist astronaut on Mars. I’m pret-ty sure that qualifies you as one of those nerds at NASA!

This spilled over into some of the scenes on Earth as well. In order to make the scenes on Earth understandable to a normal audience, everything had to be explained in great detail. So you end up with lots of scenes where one character has to come across as clueless so that the other character can explain things to them (and to the reader). This is not how normal conversations between people at mission control would go. Realistic conversations would be nearly incomprehensible to someone who is not an expert, thanks to all the shorthand. People wouldn’t be explaining things in great detail, instead other people would be cutting them off mid-thought, already seeing where they are going and jumping to the next logical conclusion. Believe me, when I first got to participate in rover planning meetings as a baby graduate student, everything was just a confusing jumble of acronyms and jargon. Heck, sometimes it still is!

So, I totally understand why all the Earth scenes had to be the way they are so that readers can follow them, but I still found it a bit annoying. (In fiction there’s a term for conversations between two characters where one of them explains something to the other, when both of them already know it. It’s called the “As you know…” trope.)

Anyway, on to my biggest complaint about this book. You will notice that up above I said that Watney’s voice was extremely compelling. I was careful to say “voice” and not “character” because in my opinion Watney is an extremely poorly-developed character. I know, I know, this is going to be an unpopular opinion. But hear me out. Over the course of an entire novel, what do we learn about Watney? He’s from Chicago, he likes to crack jokes, he hates disco. We get a few mentions of his parents. We learn what his areas of expertise are (the better to buy into his ability to come up with MacGyver style hacks). But even though it is abundantly obvious that Watney has TONS of free time as he sits around on Mars, we never see any depth to his character. We’re supposed to believe that he just sits around and watches bad 70s TV in all his copious free time and doesn’t do things like, say, reminisce about all the people and things he misses on Earth. He apparently has no friends, no significant others, no pets. He barely even thinks about his parents. Where are the emotional scenes where he is missing the ability to step outside and feel the breeze on his skin, the warm sun on his face? Where are the dark moments where he almost gives up hope? Why doesn’t he seem to be fazed by more than a year of absolute isolation? Nope, hardly any of that. He just watches TV and makes bad jokes during all his free time.

I’ll tell you my theory: the author was afraid that getting too negative would bum people out and make them stop reading. So instead we get a protagonist who is so freakishly optimistic and cheery that it removes the emotional core of the story. There are lots of cliche sayings about not being able to appreciate the good without the bad and the like, but I think they really do apply here. As it is right now, The Martian is a pretty good book. If Weir had been willing to dig a little deeper and allow his character to explore some of the actual emotions that a person would go through during years of solitary confinement on a hostile alien planet, it would be a great book.

But all my nitpicks and complaints aside, I should make it clear that I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I highly recommend it. Is it great literature? No. But it is awesome science fiction, with a heaping dose of accurate scientific fact. It’s an exciting page-turner, and it is likely going to do more to inspire people to be interested in space exploration and teach people about Mars than NASA could ever dream to do with all of its public outreach and press releases. I have no doubt that there are kids in high school right now who will be inspired by this book (and/or the movie) to go on to become engineers and scientists. And for that, I’m willing to overlook some minor flaws and get swept up in a good story with everyone else.

 

 

Book Review: Ancillary Justice

download

I wasn’t really sure what to expect going into Ann Leckie’s “Ancillary Justice”. All I knew about it was that it had been winning just about every sci-fi award out there, it was in the subgenre of military sci-fi, and that it did some interesting things with pronouns.

I came very close to not finishing this book. I found the beginning to be extremely slow, to the extent that I often found myself nodding off, even when I was reading in the afternoon instead of before bed. I’ve heard it said that the greatest sin an author can commit is to bore the reader: readers will put up with all sorts of emotional abuse (see also: Game of Thrones) but boredom is the death knell for a book. I find that my tolerance for novels where the only motivation to keep reading is to figure out what is going on is waning as I get older, and in this novel nothing really happens until about a third of the way in, and I didn’t really understand the main character’s motivation until closer to 50%. To be honest, I would have given up on Ancillary Justice if it hadn’t won All the Awards. The only reason I stuck with it is that I wanted to see if it ever got better, or if I was really that out of touch with what SFF fandom likes.

Thankfully it does get better once the story actually begins. Now that I have finished the book, I see that all that early stuff is relevant, and provides the foundation upon which the rest of the story is built. It’s just that while reading much of the beginning of the book I didn’t know or care what was going on.

The central idea for the novel is pretty cool. In this far future universe, space ships are powerful artificial intelligences, and they are crewed by a combination of normal autonomous humans and “ancillaries” which are human bodies that are controlled by the AI. The main character of this novel is one of these AIs, so to add to the confusion at the beginning of the novel, not only do we not know what is happening or why we should care, but the point of view is very very odd. It’s actually a rather clever way of having what amounts to a first-person omniscient narrator: from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph, the POV jumps from one ancillary body to another, so you end up with multiple conversations with multiple people in multiple locations happening at once. Or simultaneous descriptions of what is happening inside a building, and out on the street, and across town. I actually thought this was pretty cool even if it was hard to follow at times, and when, at one point the connection between the main character’s various bodies is severed and they are left as a collection of individuals, the shift from near-omniscience to regular old first person is suitably jarring.

Once the plot gets rolling, the book is better, though I still found myself confused more often than I like. I won’t get into the details of the plot other than to say that it’s your basic revenge plot, with some interesting twists.

I have to take some time to talk about the pronouns though. Throughout the novel, the main character refers to everyone as “she” except for a few rare cases where the main character is speaking in a different language. The idea is that the primary language of the empire does not make any gender distinctions. This is far from the first science fiction novel to play with pronouns like this, but I think it’s the first novel in a while to do this and also become extremely popular. I was not surprised by the pronouns in this book, because they had been causing a buzz in fandom since it came out. To be honest, my first reaction to the constant use of “she” was annoyance. Not that the female pronoun was being used, but because I couldn’t accurately picture the characters. But then that leads to the question: why do I care whether this character is male or female, if the society in which they live doesn’t care? A society like that would not have all of the other visual signifiers of gender that we take for granted so it doesn’t really matter what characters look like. In some ways it would have made more sense to use a new word that does not connote maleness or femaleness: that would be more consistent with a language and culture that doesn’t distinguish. But then using a made-up pronoun all the time in a book written in English might have been just as distracting.

I eventually got used to everyone being called “she”, but because my brain has spent its whole life in cultures where it does matter whether someone is male or female, and because the word “she” in English denotes female, I ended up giving up on trying to figure it out and just pictured this as a novel populated entirely by women. That doesn’t bother me, I just know it is not accurate, because in the rare cases where the narrator switched to a language that does distinguish, some characters are called “he”. In the end, I think my feelings on the pronouns in this book are that I found them annoying, but in a good way. They made me think about some of my cultural defaults, which is a healthy thing to do.

So my overall thoughts? It was ok, and I might give the sequels a try: I suspect they won’t start off as slow because less time will need to be devoted to explaining how ancillaries work and setting up the events that eventually set the plot in motion. I am surprised that this book has won so many awards. I found it to be very slow to start, and once the plot was rolling along it was ok but not great. The idea of AI-controlled ancillaries is pretty cool, and the unusual pronouns were mind-bending in a good way, but the novel has an unfortunate tendency to force the reader to turn the page to make sense of what has already happened rather than turning the page to find out what will happen next. Personally, I much prefer the latter.

Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

201411-award-books-fall-slide6-949x1356

 

There’s no shortage of post-apocalyptic stories out there, but it has been a while since I’ve seen one done this well. The taxonomy of post-apocalyptic fiction is worth its own blog post, but for our current purposes, it can be simplified down to two types: the loud, angry apocalypse, and the quiet, sad apocalypse. Station Eleven falls squarely into the latter camp. It doesn’t tread any new ground: the premise is that a highly contagious and lethal strain of the flu sweeps the world and causes the collapse of civilization in a matter of days, leaving behind isolated groups of survivors struggling to come to terms with their new world. But the strength of this novel is not in an original premise, but in its almost flawless execution.

The story is centered around the events of a night just before the end of the world, when famous actor Arthur Leander dies of a heart attack onstage while performing as King Lear. From this central event, the novel jumps forward and back in time. It looks ahead to decades after the apocalypse, following the Travelling Symphony, a caravan of musicians and actors with a motto borrowed from an old episode of Star Trek: “Survival is not sufficient”. They roam what use to be Michigan, trying to survive and putting on performances of Shakespeare and classical music. The novel also jumps back in time, providing glimpses of characters’ lives before the apocalypse. The decadence of Hollywood and jet-setting business people contrasting with the “simple” life of the survivors of the end of civilization.

In a less-skilled author’s hands, a novel with so many jumps between characters and times could become confusing or difficult to follow, but that’s not a problem here. This book is very well-written: it’s well above par compared to most genre writing, while avoiding purple prose. Mandel deftly handles the shifts in time, place, and point of view in such a way that they make perfect sense and all build upon each other, weaving together connections between them all. She also manages the impressive feat of making the pre-apocalypse scenes just as interesting, if not more so, than the post-apocalyptic ones.

Station Eleven is the sad, quiet type of post-apocalyptic novel, reflecting poignantly on all the things about modern life that we take for granted, and speculating about the values that people would try to keep alive after the end of the world. Yet for all that, it doesn’t wallow in sadness. The feeling that it evokes is more bittersweet than depressing, and there is a hopeful strain to it.

I highly recommend this novel, whether you are a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, or just a fan of good writing. This is one of those novels I found myself savoring I approached the end because I didn’t want it to be over, and I’m looking forward to reading it again someday.

 

Book Review: Fool’s Assassin by Robin Hobb

rhho2s1qbzbzymfhn3ni

Of all the epic fantasy series I’ve read, Robin Hobb’s Farseer books are among my favorite, and that’s primarily because of the great job that Hobb does getting the reader inside the main character, FitzChivalry’s head (for better or worse). The previous books follow him from being a young boy struggling to survive court intrigue, to a trained assassin working for the king, to a battle-weary man seeking solitude after a life of trauma and loss. I was surprised to hear that Hobb was coming out with a new Fitz trilogy since his story was pretty clearly finished, but at the same time I was excited to spend some more time with Fitz and the other characters from past books.

Warning: It’s hard to discuss this book without spoiling anything. I’ll keep the spoilers mild but you have been warned.

Fool’s Assassin starts with Fitz in late middle age, enjoying a peaceful retirement with his wife Molly. The book moves slowly, but the writing was good enough to keep me turning the page as the reader is brought up to speed on some of Fitz’s past exploits and his current situation. Although they both had thought she was too old, Molly announces that she is pregnant. After a long section where Fitz believes Molly has become demented rather than pregnant (my first reminder of the downside of being inside Fitz’s head: he is all too often oblivious to major plot points when it is convenient for him to be so) she eventually does give birth to a tiny but healthy daughter, Bee. Everyone assumes Bee won’t live long because she is so small, but other than her small size she turns out to be healthy, capable, and smart. She’s just shy and a bit odd. When Molly dies suddenly, Fitz is left to raise Bee himself.

About halfway through the book, the point of view chapters start to alternate between Bee and Fitz, and much as I have enjoyed the previous Fitz books, I found myself dreading Fitz’s chapters and looking forward to Bee’s. Fitz has the habit of throwing himself long, elaborate pity parties in his head, and the reader gets to come along for the ride. There is some nice writing in here about dealing with loss of a spouse (Hobb writes poignant and bittersweet very well), and the challenges of parenting, but Fitz still tends to be a downer.  And as this book progresses, his tendency to be wrong about everything just to add conflict to the plot got to be really annoying. Bee on the other hand is everyone’s favorite point of view character type: smarter than she seems, constantly underestimated by everyone around her, clever but flawed enough to be interesting, with hints of extraordinary abilities that even she does not fully understand. (Actually now that I think about it, she reminds me a lot of Bean in the Ender’s Game books.)

The book continues on, with other new (and often highly annoying) characters introduced to add conflict, but unfortunately the plot does almost nothing, and that ends up being my biggest criticism. This is not a finished book, this is the first act of a book that has been split into three pieces so it can be released as a trilogy. There’s a lot of filler here and not much plot, and what plot there is has some pretty significant holes in it that I won’t go into to avoid major spoilers. The writing was still good enough that I found myself staying up late turning pages, but in the end all this book gives is the inciting event for the real story. I’ll be reading the sequels, but if I had known how unsatisfying this one would be I would have waited for all three books to be out first.

 

Book Review: The Mirror Empire

TheMirrorEmpire-144dpi

I really wanted to like this one. I first encountered Kameron Hurley’s writing in her truly excellent piece “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle, and Slaves Narrative“, which won a Hugo award last year. When I heard that she had a new epic fantasy series coming out, I was excited to read some fantasy that dares to break out of the mold of western European clones and Tolkien imitators. On this count, Mirror Empire does not disappoint.

Mirror Empire is set in a world populated by mostly matriarchal societies, where most soldiers and religious leaders are women, and men are prized for their beauty and/or dancing skill. Marriage is not limited to one man and one woman, but can involve many adults of various genders. In one of the societies, there are three pronouns, in another society, there are five.

Gender roles aren’t the only place where Mirror Empire deviates significantly from your typical Tolkien imitators. Much of the world is an inhospitable forest, populated by carnivorous plants. Fortresses and temples are living structures, grown and sculpted by magic users (we’ll get back to the magic in a moment). The Dhai culture which lives in the forests are pacifists: they aren’t even allowed to touch another person without asking permission first, and they eat only plants, except when a loved one dies, in which case that person’s organs are cooked and served in a ceremonial feast.

In this world, instead of horses, people ride giant dogs or giant bears, except calling the creatures “dogs” or “bears” is a somewhat misleading shorthand. When they are described in detail it becomes clear that they are something more bizarre altogether. Instead of using pigeons or ravens to carry messages, “sparrows” are used, but again the common English word does not convey how bizarre the “sparrows” in Mirror Empire are.

The magic in Mirror Empire is based on the orbits of several moons. As a certain moon rises higher in the sky, those people who can channel that moon’s power are capable of doing magic. One of the moons gives control over air. Another, control over plants. The story is set during a time when the moon Oma is ascendant. The other moons rise and fall on decade-long timescales, but Oma rises only every few centuries. Oma gives all sorts of strange powers, mostly driven by the power of blood, but it also has the strange side effect that it opens portals to parallel dimensions and that’s where things get interesting.

As Oma rises, it is revealed that strangers in a parallel world, very similar to the main world where the story is set, are invading. For each person in the main world, their clone exists in the mirror world. To cross from one world to the other, your clone in that other world must be dead. A couple of key things are different in the parallel world. First, the Dhai are not pacifists, they are a deadly and powerful empire. And second, the parallel world is doomed. So the warlike Dhai in that world would very much like to come take over the main world of the story. To do that, they have to start killing people, so more can cross over. Plot ensues.

It’s a fascinating world, and an interesting premise. Unfortunately, the storytelling doesn’t live up to the ambitious worldbuilding. From the beginning, I struggled to keep the many characters straight. There are numerous point of view characters, and a multitude of additional minor characters. Even when I did know who the characters in a given scene were, I rarely understood their motivations. At one point a character dramatically kills herself but I still have no idea why. Later, another character holds an innocent little girl hostage, and then kills her and shows zero remorse. Not understanding character goals is a death-blow to just about any fiction, and particularly when they point of view character is of the anti-hero type. Unless you are really really deep inside their head and have a deep understanding of what they are doing and why the anti-hero will just come across as a confusing jerk.

I should make it clear that I don’t mind books with large casts of characters who have complex motivations. Among my favorite books of all time are Shogun and the Game of Thrones series, both of which have lots of characters and complicated political intrigue and conflicting motives. Why did I have an easier time following Game of Thrones than Mirror Empire? Part of it is that Game of Thrones has it easy. It’s set in a familiar western European fantasy setting. The names are all very similar to typical English names. I think author skill also plays a big role here. George R.R. Martin uses a lot of different tricks to help readers keep track of who’s who. His books are full of sigils and heraldry and titles nicknames for a very good reason: they are shorthand for the characters. You may not remember who Gregor Clegane and Oberyn Martell are, but when you introduce them as “The Mountain that Rides” with the three Clegane dogs on a field of yellow, and “The Viper” with the Sun and Spear of House Martell of Dorne, all of a sudden the reader has a lot more to go on. Likewise, Martin uses heraldry to immediately make the motives and allegiance of even anonymous soldiers more clear. If the point of view character is a Stark and they run into a bunch of soldiers with Lannister lions on their uniforms, you know there is going to be trouble. Mirror Empire lacked a lot of these clues, and combined with the less familiar world, I think that played a big role in my confusion.

I hoped at the beginning of Mirror Empire that things would get more clear as I read on, but although some things are explained, I spent much of the book confused. It was like missing the first few weeks of math class and then trying to catch up. Even as I caught up, the story built on previous details and events that I only partially understood, so that comprehension was always just out of reach. By the end I was reading, not because I was invested in the events of the story, but because I wanted to be done.

So, bottom line, I’m conflicted about Mirror Empire. There is so much about it that I love. It’s not a Tolkien knock-off! It is set in a bizarre and interesting world. It plays lots of fun games with gender roles. Carnivorous forests! Evil invaders with an actual motive beyond just “spreading darkness”. I want to see more of this level of creativity in fantasy! I just wish that, in this case, the execution matched the ambition. It’s pretty clear from the ending that there will be more books in this series. Hurley is a relatively new author, so I am hopeful that with more experience, her future books won’t suffer from the problems that made Mirror Empire fall short of its very lofty goals.

 

 

 

Book Review: Hero of Ages

Hero of Ages is the third volume in the Mistborn trilogy, by Brandon Sanderson and it picks up some time after the twist ending of the second book, The Well of Ascension. I can’t really talk about Hero of Ages without spoiling the other books in the trilogy, so here’s your warning: Spoilers for ALL THREE books in the trilogy. Read on at your own risk!

Here’s my short, non-spoiler review: I have mixed feelings about this book and series. On the one hand, the magic system (certain metals give certain people special powers when eaten in powdered form), and premise (what happens after the Dark Lord wins?) are both interesting, and this third book brings things to a pretty satisfying ending. But on the other hand, the writing and character development was not great. This series is worth reading, but is most enjoyable if you don’t think too much about it.

9780765356147

Still here? Ok. So, here’s the thing. Brandon Sanderson is a prolific and popular fantasy writer, and his books tend to get very good fan reviews, so I had high hopes for this series. Problem is, it never quite worked for me, and what’s even more frustrating is that it’s hard to even put my finger on why. I have some ideas though. So, this is going to be less a review and more me trying to work out why these books didn’t fully work for me, which requires going through some of my complaints. I should note up front that despite my complaints, I think on the whole the books are pretty good. Not classics, but good, fun reads. I’m glad I read them. I just found some aspects of them frustrating.

Gripe the First: Elend

First of all, let’s talk about Elend’s character. Earlier in the series, he is an uncertain scholarly type, who ends up as a king but is not really leadership material. His heart is in the right place but he is too timid and idealistic. In the second book, he meets Tindwyl who puts him through leadership boot camp, which basically was: wear nicer clothes and don’t be such a pushover and everyone will follow you. He eventually follows this advice and it seems to work. Now we get to The Hero of Ages, and some time has passed since the end of the last book, when (No, seriously, Spoiler Alert!) Vin saved Elend’s life after he was stabbed at the Well of Ascension by turning him into a mistborn. Here’s what bothered me: Throughout the beginning of Hero of Ages, the reader is beat over the head with the fact that Elend is now a great leader, a manly man who is manly, and oh so handsome in his white uniform, and also, he is not just a mistborn but an extremely powerful mistborn.

For example:

[Elend arrives at a city that is about to be attacked and takes command]

“Open the gate and bring my horse in,” the newcomer said. “I assume you have stables?”

“Yes, my lord,” the soldier said.

Well, Fatren thought with dissatisfaction as the soldier ran off, this newcomer certainly knows how to command people. Fatren’s soldier didn’t even pause to think that he was obeying a stranger without asking for permission. Fatren could aready see the other soldiers straightening a bit, losing their wariness. This newcomer talked like he expected to be obeyed, and the soldiers were responding. This wasn’t a nobleman like the ones Fatren had known back when he was a household servant at the lord’s manor. This man was different.

I think this bothered me for two reasons: first, he’s basically a completely different character, and second, this is pounded into the reader throughout the beginning of Hero of Ages. It seems pretty clear that Sanderson realized that he needed a character who had all of these attributes for the plot in the third book to work, and so spent much of book 2 trying to transform the character to that the third book would be plausible. But then it was like he didn’t trust that the transformation was complete, so book three starts after some time has passed and we’re just told over and over again how handsome and leaderly and powerful Elend is, just to make sure we got it. I mean, character growth is great, but I guess what bothered me was that this was more like character replacement.

While I’m complaining about Elend, I should also mention the complete lack of chemistry between Elend and Vin. Basically the only indication that they’re in love throughout the book is when the narration states that they love each other. There’s one chapter where their personalities actually come out and there is some banter and playfulness between them, but otherwise in most scenes with Vin and Elend they have about as much chemistry as Anakin and Padme in the Star Wars prequels.

Gripe number 2: This is my Worldbuilding Let Me Show You It

Throughout Hero of Ages, each chapter begins with an excerpt written by Sazed that is relevant to the events of the chapter. These excerpts are almost always pure info-dumps, serving to explain some aspect of the worldbuilding. Without these little explanations, parts of the book would be hard to understand, so they’re important. But I found myself getting annoyed at Sanderson’s apparent need to explain every last thing. Like, I get that you worked out lots of details about the Mistborn world and magic system. But as with all research for writing, just because you did it doesn’t mean it belongs on the page. It was like, after the first book, Sanderson went through and made a list of things that people had criticized about the worldbuilding, and then wanted to show that he had found an explanation for all of these things. Also, these excerpts made some of the “twists” that come later in the book extremely obvious. Maybe the reader was supposed to figure them out before they happened, maybe not. It was kind of fun to be able to say “Ha! I knew that would happen!” But at the same time, I think it would have been more fun to be surprised. I read somewhere that the best twists in fiction are those that the reader doesn’t see coming before hand, but afterward it’s clear that there is no other way things could have happened.

Another aspect of the over-explanation that bugged me through all three books was the need to explain the fight scenes to death. A side effect of the ever-increasing complexity of the magic system (by the end of the third book there are three inter-related systems of magic that characters are using) is that all fight scenes have to be explained in great detail to know what’s going on. The reader needs a lot more information than in a normal fight scene. To Sanderson’s credit, he manages to make some very complicated fights comprehensible, but in doing so, the fight scenes tend to become tedious descriptions of metal reserves and the side effects of newton’s laws as the characters push and pull on various metal objects.

Also, speaking of physics: There are a few instances where the worldbuilding tries to get scientific. These are almost inevitably painful to a science-minded reader.

Gripe Number 3: On Atheism

This is a more personal gripe that probably won’t bother most people. One of the plot lines in Hero of Ages deals with a character who is struggling to find faith in any religion after the death of someone he loved. He spends many chapters moping around, despairing that all of the religions that he knows so much about have logical inconsistencies. On the one hand, this character’s distress at not being able to find a suitable religion makes sense: he’s spent his life preserving memory of ancient religions and now he can’t find one to help him through a difficult time. But on the other hand, it seemed almost as if these scenes were the author’s way of saying that life without religion is awful and pointless and unbearable. As someone who is not religious, I can say that it’s possible to handle grief and find meaning in life without relying on a higher power, and it made me uncomfortable to read these chapters that seemed to imply otherwise.

Also, it was jarring to read about Sazed freaking out about how all his religions are wrong, and then go to a chapter where a character is, literally, talking to a god. Like, that’s one of the things about being a non-religious person: If there were overt evidence of a god, then everyone should obviously believe in that god! It was hard to separate what I knew as a reader from what Sazed knew, but it sure seemed like he had a lot of evidence pointing to there being actual gods to worship.

Other gripes:

Heavy Handedness – Look, I get it: Elend is worried that he is no better than the Lord Ruler he overthrew. I GET IT. Could we not repeat the same introspective agonizing over this every single Elend chapter, and have this theme pop up in Vin’s chapters, AND have Elend’s enemies point this contradiction out to him too? It’s great to have a theme and all, but readers are smart. No need to hang flashing lights on the theme every time it appears.

Spook’s sacrifice – HE SHOULD BE DEAD. His story arc was over, and it ended with him sacrificing himself to save his friends. I actually yelled at the book when it was revealed that he was still alive. I mean, I’m not expecting a George R.R. Martin level body count here, but his arc would have been much better if he didn’t survive.

Vin’s orbital dynamics – Vin becomes a goddess and moves the planet closer to the sun, and then realizes that the sun is too strong and is going to burn everything now that the ash is gone. So she turns the planet around so the other side is facing the sun. How does that solve the problem? That just burns all the people on the other side of the planet. But I guess they’re not characters so we don’t care, and setting half the planet on fire will not have any negative effects on the other half of the planet. Why didn’t she just put the planet back where it belonged? Sigh.

Ok, so those are a few of my complaints. On the other hand, there were some aspects of the book that I thought were quite good. The plot is quite strong and the ending is satisfying. Also, I really enjoyed the chapters about the shape-shifting Kandra (although when TenSoon had to traverse the breadth of the empire I can’t figure out why he didn’t turn into something that could fly rather than running the whole way). And for all my complaints about it, the worldbuilding is very thorough and unique.

So, we come back to the main question: why did I have so much trouble getting into these books? For some reason, I found myself unable to fully suspend disbelief, and so what would otherwise be minor problems became major distractions. Part of it is probably that Sanderson and this series are so popular that I read with extra scrutiny, but I don’t think that’s the main reason. After putting my various gripes down in writing, I think I can see what the real problem was: the author and the story structure were too obvious. Picture a story as a living creature: it’s skeleton determines its basic shape, but then that skeleton is fleshed out to become a healthy animal. This story, I could see the bones peeking through. And once I noticed them, they threw me out of the story, and being less than fully-immersed meant that I noticed more bones, and so on. All stories have underlying structure, all authors make choices the emphasize certain themes or develop characters to suit the story they are writing. But for some reason the Mistborn series the author’s choices were more apparent to me than for other stories, making it harder to sink into the fictional world. On the bright side though, it was quite educational from a writing standpoint.

All in all, Hero of Ages and the whole Mistborn series are definitely worth reading. I just had trouble getting fully immersed, and so didn’t enjoy them as much as I might have liked.

 

Book Review: Ready Player One

Ready Player One Paperback Cover

 

Were you alive during the ’80s? Have you ever played the original PacMan? How about Atari? Have you ever been eaten by a Grue? Have you ever played a role-playing game of any kind? Do you know the names of all the cast members in Real Genius? If so, then this book is for you. If not… well, you’ll still probably enjoy it.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a a fun near-future sci-fi novel that doubles as a love-letter to everything geeky and everything 80s, and especially geeky things from the 80s. Here’s the premise:

In the mid 21st century, the world is a mess thanks to the effects of climate change. The economy is in shambles, fossil fuels are incredibly expensive, and most people live in poverty in densely packed “stacks” – skyscrapers made of stacked mobile home units. At the same time, the internet has undergone some drastic changes of its own. It has now been superseded by the Oasis, a virtual world that is sort of like if World of Warcraft, Facebook, and Reddit had a baby. People spend much of their lives immersed in this free virtual online world, using virtual reality visors and haptic suits to experience the Oasis as if it is reality. Kids go to school in the Oasis, business people do their business there, the Oasis currency has superseded the dollar as the coin of the realm. The Oasis is everything, for everyone. The real world has become sort of an afterthought.

Of course, when the guy who created the Oasis, James Halliday, passes away, there is the question of who gets his fantastic wealth and control over his company (and therefore, the Oasis). Rather than bequeath the money to a relative, or found a charitable foundation, or other traditional routes, Halliday instead creates the greatest video game “easter egg” in history. Anyone who can acquire the three keys and pass through the three gates will find the egg and gain control over Halliday’s fortune and the Oasis itself. Halliday was obsessed with geek culture from the 1980s, so of course the hunt for the keys and the egg is based on deep knowledge of everything 80s.

The main character of the story, Wade Watts, is a teenaged “gunter” (short for “egg-hunter”) who has made it his life’s work to find the egg. He has mastered every arcade game out there, and can recite the dialog from every 80s movie and TV show. He knows the original Dungeons and Dragons monster manual by heart and instinctively spouts the name and year of every 80s song he hears. He’s the ideal candidate to crack Halliday’s riddles and find the Egg.

The only problem, he’s not the only one looking for it. There are thousands of other gunters looking for the egg, but there is also an evil corporation Innovative Online Industries, determined to cheat, lie, and steal its way to control of the Oasis. They want to turn the open-source paradise of the Oasis into an advertisement-filled gated community for the rich (something that might sound awfully familiar if you have been following the current net neutrality debate). When Wade finds the first key and clears the first gate, he ends up on their hit list and has to run for his life (in the real world and the Oasis) while tries to beat the bad guys to the final egg.

In the process, Wade also has to navigate his relationships with his friends Art3mis and Aech (pronounced “H”), who he has never met in person. He falls in love with Art3mis, and Aech is his best friend, but they are also competing to find the egg, so the farther they get in the quest, the harder it is to maintain their close ties.

This book gets lots of attention for it’s frankly amazing smorgasbord of 80’s nostalgia. It is stuffed with pop culture references and nods to various areas of geekdom, and it’s lots of fun to recognize them (though for me, some of the references are from before my time). But despite all of the nostalgia, Ready Player One is quite a good near-future sci-fi story as well. The Oasis as depicted in the book doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched, given our present reality. The virtual world Second Life is similar in many ways, and Facebook recently purchased Oculus, a company developing the first commercially viable virtual reality gaming headsets. (Seriously, reading that link after reading Ready Player One is actually kinda creepy in how similar it sounds to the Oasis.) In the tradition of many sci-fi classics, Ready Player One takes a look at our present, and extrapolates plausibly to the near future, exploring a lot of the nuances in the process. A big part of the novel is how society has changed in response to the Oasis, and for me this was the most interesting part of the book.

Of course, another nice thing about having a book set in a virtual reality world, is that you can genre-hop all over the place. The Oasis has thousands of planets on it, and each planet has its own set of rules. Some planets are fantasy worlds with spells and dragons. Others are full of laser blasters and space ships. Steampunk, cyberpunk, anime, wild west, etc. It’s all there, and one of the other great things about the book is smashing those genres and fictional universes together. Remember as a geeky teenager, having heated debates over whether a Star Destroyer could win in a fight with the Enterprise? Or who would win in a fight, Batman or Superman? This book taps deep into that vein of geekiness and it’s tons of fun to read.

The only downside of this book was that, toward the end, there are a few scenes that come across as a bit… twee. I mean, the messages are nice, but the book kinda hits you over the head with them.  That said, otherwise the ending is satisfying and ridiculous in all the right ways. Ridiculous as only a mash-up of the 80s can be.

Bottom line, this book was lots of fun. It’s quick and light and full of nostalgia. If you have geeky tendencies, then by all means check it out. If you don’t, it’s still a very good speculative look at the future of the internet and gaming that you might find interesting.

8-Question Book Meme!

stack460

I came across this meme over on SF Signal, and it reminded me of the olden days of Live Journal, when it seemed like all anyone did was post answers to sets of themed questions. For nostalgia’s sake, and because I’ve been too busy to do much reading, writing, or blogging lately, here are my answers:

  • The first science fiction, fantasy or horror book I ever read was:
  • The last science fiction, fantasy or horror book I read that I’d put in my “Top 20″ list is:
    • I guess I would say Wool by Hugh Howey is the last book that has really wowed me enough to earn five stars on Goodreads, and I’m pretty stingy with my 5-star ratings. You can read my full review here.
  • The last science fiction, fantasy or horror book I couldn’t finish was:
    • I don’t often give up on books partway through. I guess the last time I did was for Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. I’ve heard great things about the Malazan series, but I put this one down after just a few chapters because it wasn’t working for me. Of course, my impatience with this book might be because I tried it during the primary operations period for the Curiosity Mars rover, when I was living in an apartment in Pasadena, working bizarre hours on the rover team, and my leisure hours were very precious. Maybe I’ll give this another try someday when I am more rested and less stressed out…
  • A science fiction, fantasy or horror author whose work I cannot get enough of is:
    • I’m not so fervently loyal to any one author that I don’t get tired of them eventually. Sure, I am waiting eagerly for the next book in certain series, but no author is perfect and variety is good. For example, I love George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, but before A Dance with Dragons came out, I re-read the whole series and I was definitely ready for something else afterward. The same thing happened when reading a massive collection of Ray Bradbury’s stories. I love his writing style, but after such a large dose of it I was ready for something different. So basically, I don’t have a good answer for this question.
  • A science fiction, fantasy or horror author I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t read yet is:
    • Peter S. Beagle is the first that comes to mind. In particular, several authors who I respect greatly have recommended The Last Unicorn, but I have not gotten around to reading it yet. Also, I am ashamed to say that I have never read anything by Kurt Vonnegut!
  • A science fiction, fantasy or horror book I would recommend to someone who hasn’t read sf/f/h is:
    • I suspect most people have actually read something that is sf/f/h, or at least watched movies in these genres. But for someone who really has no idea what to read, I would have to say The Fellowship of the Ring for fantasy, just because it is so fundamental to the genre. Some people say that books like Game of Thrones are a better “gateway” because they are not so prominently fantastical, but I would argue that in many ways Game of Thrones is a response to Lord of the Rings, so it is much better if you are already familiar with the genre. Also, I guess I favor going “all in”: If someone wants to try fantasy, I prefer to recommend something that is clearly fantasy (while still being excellent).
    • For science fiction, I would recommend Fahrenheit 451. It’s a wonderful book with beautiful writing, and clearly has a speculative element to it, but also shows how sci-fi can be used to say something about current issues and society.
    • I don’t read much horror, but I really enjoyed George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream, so I guess I would recommend that. Stephen King’s The Stand was also great, but I think I consider post-apocalyptic a genre of its own that overlaps with horror and science fiction.
  • A science fiction, fantasy or horror book that’s terribly underrated is:
    • I had to think about this for a while, but I will go with City by Clifford Simak. For some reason, while Asimov and Bradbury and Clark are still well-known names from golden age sci-fi, Simak is not. I really enjoyed City, and the stories have a quiet poignancy that stands out from some of the more gee-whiz technology-oriented older sci-fi.
  • A science fiction, fantasy or horror book that’s terribly overrated is:
« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Ryan Anderson

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑