SF/F Review – Hugo Nominated Short Stories

 Book Club Review, WorldCon  2 Responses »
Jul 242015
 

300x300xhugo-awards.jpg.pagespeed.ic.AsqaLzncTzThese reviews got long, so I’m breaking them into two parts. Novelettes yesterday, Short Stories today, as that’s the same order we discussed them in my bookclub.

Overall Puppy Note (preemptive!): It’s impossible not to talk about the Puppies heavily when reviewing these stories, since the Puppies vandalized the Hugos this year. As such, many of my reviews address them directly. Based on the readings of the Sad/Rabid Puppy nominations, there are two things I think can be definitively said about the Puppies. The first is that they don’t much care about thinking through the implications of their worlds or spending mental effort to make them make sense.

The second is that (to quote an esteemed bookclub member) they are heavily invested in their own moral superiority. In retrospect, the second should have been obvious simply by taking their own rhetoric at face value, but I guess sometimes the obvious eludes me unless I really have it hammered home by reading the same moral over and over in a group’s fiction. Perhaps I was fooled by their claims of “Hating Message Fiction” and “wanting to nominate works that aren’t message fic.” As a reminder, the Puppy leadership complained about Message Fiction by saying:

 

These days, you can’t be sure.

The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?

There’s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land?

A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It’s about sexism and the oppression of women.

Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It’s actually about gay and transgender issues.

 

But let’s let the works speak for themselves…

 

Short Stories

 

“On A Spiritual Plain”, Lou Antonelli

Much like yesterday’s Ashes to Ashes, this is an bland tale with mediocre prose. At first I was intrigued by the premise – a planet whose physical properties demonstrate that souls exist! After someone dies their consciousness remains localized near their point of death, due to (ahem) the planet’s magnetic field. It is a fully functional person, able to think, feel, learn, communicate, and weakly interact with the world!! Holy shit guys, the afterlife is real, and it’s on this planet! Immediately I was snapped into Awesome Transhumanism mode. This is obviously where all humans will rush to now, when they are close to death, so they need not be annihilated by the destruction of their body! How will society change when Death has finally been defeated, at least locally? How long before our scientists can create a device that mimics the (ahem) magnetic field of the planet in other places, allowing us to achieve immortality anywhere in the universe? THIS IS GREAT!

Oh wait, no. It turns out that the moral of the story is that DEATH IS GOOD. And by not dying all the way, the poor bastard is being denied the awesomeness of death. The goal of the rest of the story becomes to kill him again, because it didn’t take the first time. You did not die enough! Die more! The kindly chaplain has no qualms about resorting to trickery to achieve this, but fortunately(?) his victim is cool with dying, so when he finds out what’s happening he doesn’t put up a fight. Apparently “he would rather be nothing, than a ghost on a strange wold.” Cuz fuck strange worlds man. Death is so much better than novelty! Arrrrrgh.

If you like poorly-written BLATENT Deathist propaganda, this is the story for you. I find it morally repugnant.

Puppy Note: Wow. The novelettes hinted at this trope with Ashes to Ashes (“Death is the solution to all your woes!”), but it’s really hammered home here. The Puppies embrace Death, and seem to want their fiction to demonstrate the moral superiority of Deathism. Every character’s goodness and/or wisdom is proportional to how gracefully they accept their own voluntary extinction. A purposeless extinction at that. And they call themselves the culture of life. O.o

Anyway, this is obviously Message Fiction. The Puppies actually love Message Fiction, as long as it’s their message.

 

“The Parliament of Beasts and Birds”, John C. Wright

Wright intended this as a Sunday School sermon, and that’s basically what it is. You can read it as it’s intended – another way of presenting Catholic Dogma to the laity – and roll your eyes. Yes, as written this should never have been accepted into the Hugo’s because it isn’t Sci-Fi or Fantasy or Horror or anything, it’s just straight-up religious indoctrination. But here’s the wonderful thing about really old religions – they are horrific. The most effective tool for conversion to atheism is (IMHO) simply taking off the blinders and reading the Old Testament as it is written, taking it all at face value. It is the story of a Lovecraftian Eldritch Horror which men have been worshipping to gain advantage over others on Earth. Wright’s story, by staying true to the source material, tapped directly into that. If you ignore his intentions and just read it as a straight horror story, you’ll find an excellent piece of existential horror that will leave you terrified. See my full post about it for more on why, if you’re interested.  It is easily my favorite story on this ballot, and I’ll be voting for it to win. I’m with you Fox! We must kill God!

Puppy Note: Sermons are the original Message Fiction. This story is literally nothing but a very thin veneer over what is 99% message. There is almost nothing here EXCEPT the Message. Any Puppy who ever claims that they’re against Message Fiction again will be exposing him/herself as a liar. You can interpret it as a pro-God message (boring) or a death-to-God message (Yeah!!) but either way, it’s Message Fiction. I personally don’t have any problem with Message Fiction. I think Message Fiction is the best kind of fiction (because if you aren’t trying to say something, why are you bothering to write?), as long as it’s done well. I thought this was well done, so I enjoyed this a lot. :) But the Puppy Hypocrisy is stunning.

 

“A Single Samurai”, Steven Diamond

This is a Basic Story in the most basic sense of the word. It is literally “Warrior gives his life to save his people. Yay!” with nothing else. This isn’t bad, of course. Every one of us needs to read stories like this when we first start reading fiction. These sorts of stories are the bedrock on which our literary taste grows. All the nuance and subtle play of complex works depends on the reader already being familiar with the basic warrior ethos story. And this also has Kaiju in it, which we all need to experience for the first time at some point. You can’t fully appreciate Evangelion without knowledge of the Giant Robot genre. You can’t fully appreciate Magica Madoka without knowledge of the Magical Girl genre. You need to build up to great works by starting with the simple stuff.

And as a simple story, this works great. It’s competently written. Unlike the other pro-death stories, which are pro-death purely for the sake of being pro-death, in this story death is shown to be a bad thing, but one which it is noble to accept when it leads to the greater good. A warrior who sacrifices himself to save his people. That’s inspiring, it’s a good moral.

But it is undeniably Simple. It is a Basic story. We all read this story dozens of times when we were children. There is nothing new here for anyone over the age of ten. Why is another version of such a simple story on the Hugo ballot? There is absolutely nothing new to see here. I am absolutely flabbergasted.

Puppy Note: Do the Puppies simply not understand what awards are for? The rehashing of childhood tales is not an award-winning endeavor.

Message Fic – yup. It’s a good message: “Heroes will lay down their lives to save others, if they have to. Be heroic!” But it’s still message fic.

 

 

“Totaled”, Kary English

I’m very torn on this story. It is easily the best written of the five, by far. The premise is great, and the story was interesting. But it focuses on the wrong story. I guess the author wanted to tell a touching story of a dying mother letting go of her children, and she completely missed the implications of what she’s writing.

When the worst people in our society do horrendous things, and we lock them up in the worst places we can create, and they keep doing terrible things to other prisoners and guards even within those prisons, how do we punish them further? We lock them up in solitary confinement. Because forced isolation is painful to humans. Painful enough that many jurisdictions consider long-term solitary confinement to be cruel and unusual punishment, equivalent to torture. So when I learned that the protagonist in this story is a brain in a jar, essentially someone suffering from Locked-In Syndrome I figured it was going to be somewhat horrific. But the author skims right over this, and never gives us any indication that the protagonist is on anything other than an extended no-phone vacation.

Worse than that, it quickly becomes apparent that her co-workers and boss at the brain-research facility are FULLY AWARE THAT SHE IS CONSCIOUS, and don’t give a damn! Instead they use her as slave-labor to advance their research. So we have a story of someone in constant isolation, unable to interact with the world aside from simple yes/no responses to one other person during regular working hours, being used for slave labor, with the understanding that she will die in six months and nothing can be done to alter that.

And somehow this isn’t a horror story??

I am horrified that the author was able to take those circumstance and try to write it out into a touching story of a dying mother saying her final goodbyes. I mean… it’s a good story. It’s well written and emotionally touching. But it seems like focusing on the story of a conflict with your in-laws when two blocks over there’s a genocide being carried out.

Puppy Note: I don’t quite know what to make of this. Again, it seems to be a story about accepting death, but at least this time death is portrayed as something to be sad about, rather than something to be welcomed. A surprisingly good entry, considering the Puppies’ track record so far.

 

“Turncoat”, Steve Rzasa

Pure drek. The villain is one-dimensional, the hero is invincible, and tech-jargon is used as a replacement for anything that might be thought-provoking or compelling.

I said before I like Good Message Fic. This is the opposite of that. It is the worst kind of message fic. It is actually The Worst Argument In The World, put into story form. It is very simply “My ideological opponents are Hitler. If you agree with them, you are as bad as Hitler.” I’m not kidding. The author doesn’t use the name “Hitler”, but the antagonist is a genocidal, racist, megalomaniacal dictator.

There are interesting stories to be told of people trapped in situations where they have to behave horrendously or suffer terrible consequences (turning over the Jews in their attic or be killed themselves). These stories are full of tension and drama. Fortunately, our Turncoat protagonist doesn’t have to make any such hard decisions. The moral of the story seems to be “If you aren’t really onboard with literally committing genocide, and you can easily switch sides, turn the tide of battle, and not have to worry about taking any sort of risk to yourself… then heck, why not?” It’s not really inspiring.

Puppy Note: The most outrageous example of “heavily invested in their own moral superiority.” Message Fic with nothing to say. Seriously, you complained about the Hugo’s promoting “Message Fiction” because gay characters are portrayed positively, or a spacefaring society doesn’t make gender-distinctions and refers to everyone as “she”, but then you nominate a story whose sole purpose is yelling “my opponents are Hitler!” without even bothering to try to portray your own arguments sympathetically? What is wrong with you?

 

Book Club Note: As I said yesterday: I strongly encourage all book clubs to do something similar to this once a year. Reading shorts is a nice change of pace. Also, it provides immense reading-time-to-discussion value! Reading all the Hugo nominated Short Stories and Novelettes took half the time (or less) of reading a single novel, and with ten shorts there is SOOOO MUCH to talk about! We went significantly over time. A very favorable ratio, even compared to the best books.

 

Let’s hope there’s less Puppy Poo next year though.

SF/F Review – Hugo Nominated Novelettes

 Book Club Review, WorldCon  1 Response »
Jul 232015
 

300x300xhugo-awards.jpg.pagespeed.ic.AsqaLzncTzThese reviews got long, so I’m breaking them into two parts. Novelettes today, Short Stories tomorrow, as that’s the same order we discussed them in my bookclub.

 

Overall Puppy Note (preemptive!): It’s impossible not to talk about the Puppies heavily when reviewing these stories, since the Puppies vandalized the Hugos this year. As such, many of my reviews address them directly. Based on the readings of the Sad/Rabid Puppy nominations, there are two things I think can be definitively said about the Puppies. The first is that they don’t much care about thinking through the implications of their worlds or spending mental effort to make them make sense. The second is less flattering, and so I’m putting it off until tomorrow’s post, where it is much more thoroughly supported (due to it being more strongly represented in the Short Stories).

 

Novelettes

 

“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium”, Gray Rinehart

A decent, if fairly unremarkable tale. An example of “didn’t bother to think through the world-building.” The basic premise is that a technologically- and militarily-dominant alien species is oppressing a human settlement on a planet they both colonized, and the humans chase them away by exploiting a simple superstition in their religious beliefs. “Drive Away Your Alien Overlords With This One Weird Trick!” They have a fear of bodies buried under the earth, and so are willing to give up military dominance of billions in infrastructure to get away from those scary buried corpses. If anyone bothered to think on this for more than ten seconds they’d realize any such belief system would have been weeded out of the memetic ecosystem aeons ago. No expansionary society can have a belief system so easily hacked. If one guy with a shovel can overthrow any size military occupation in a single night, your belief system will not propagate.

The story itself failed to strike much emotion. No one seemed particularly harmed by the alien “oppression”, as far as I could tell we were supposed to be cheering for the humans merely because they are human. That’s OK, I guess, but it’s not compelling.

Puppy Note: The story’s basic premise is remarkably stupid (but sadly not the stupidest thing the Puppies nominated). But it had to be stupid, to get across the moral of the story, which seemed to be “Your religion is stupid. Look how stupid it is, we can exploit it so easily! It’s important to have a non-stupid religion, like ours!” /sigh

 

“Championship B’tok”, Edward M. Lerner

Oh dear lord. Remember how much I hated The Dark Between The Stars? THIS IS THAT BOOK, IN STORY FORM! Just apply everything I wrote in that review to this story. To recap: “as much emotion as reading a bad history textbook” and “there is not a single person in this book. There are a bunch of plot-advancing devices that have names. But they are empty husks, whose only purpose is to get us from Event A to Event B to Event C, and give us no reason to care about any event or any person.” Holy cow is it bad.

Puppy Note: Let’s get the obvious out of the way. This is not a short story. It’s a novel excerpt. For the Puppies to have nominated this is an insult to the Novelette award. There is no character building, plot arc, anything, because there can’t be! It’s one chapter out of a novel. This is like nominating a movie trailer for Best Short Film. This is a clear example that either the Puppies didn’t bother to read their slate before they voted on it, or that they have no idea what these awards are supposed to be recognizing. It took a Novelette nomination away from an actual novelette, which is a damned shame. That alone puts this below No Award. The awful quality is just the kicker.

 

“The Day the World Turned Upside Down”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Lia Belt translator

A gorgeously written surrealist piece, with extremely evocative prose. While reading it I actually experienced vertigo, and felt like I was somehow reading upside-down, even though the words were still right-side up. The premise was fascinating, and the survivors’ struggle to simply exist without flying into the stratosphere was fantastic. I absolutely loved most of it.

But I hated the protagonist. He is an extremely creepy stalker, who spends the entire story hunting down the girlfriend who broke up with him because he refuses to accept her breakup. When he finally finds her at the end of the story, trapped with a broken leg in her house, he again confesses his undying love and complete stalker-tude. To her credit, she reiterates that they broke up and it’s over, even in her position! He refuses to accept her breakup (again!), then goes into her bedroom and discovers that she is totally over him and started dating someone else. So he goes into a slut-shaming tirade and leaves her to die.

I generally like damaged characters. And I love villains! Villain stories are among my favorites. But I really despise entitled misogynistic assholes who we’re supposed to sympathize with and consider the heroes. That is not a villain story. So this piece didn’t leave me with the delicious sense of evil and tragedy that a good villain story leaves you with, it just left me feeling slimy and gross. Ugh. I’m kinda torn on this work, as the wordcraft and world is so evocative. But ultimately I just can’t like a piece that reads like it’s glorifying something this ugly.

Puppy Note: The only non-Puppy work on this ballot!

 

“The Journeyman: In the Stone House”, Michael F. Flynn

A very welcome surprise! This is a fantastic piece! The prose is superb and the voice is extremely strong! You cannot read this without immediately knowing just what the protagonist is going through, and feeling every single bit of it right along with him. And smiling the whole time. :) I especially love the banter between Teo (the protagonist) and Sammi (his travelling companion). Teo is a very old-school “honor and glory” type. He does what he does because it is awesome, and he is awesome, and he wants to be remembered down the ages and sung about, because we’re all going to die and that is true immortality, etc. It’s inspiring and exciting and swells the chest with pride. Sammi is a barbarian who speaks in broken English, but is obviously the smarter of the pair. He’s got a razor wit, always ready with a snarky quip, and always does the practical, smart thing in any situation, even if that would be seen as “cowardly” by the bards. He doesn’t give a crap about someone singing about how heroically he charged into the mouth of a dragon, he’d rather sneak up on the dragon, poison its food, and live to tell about it. Sammi is also incredibly admirable in this regard, and I would honestly consider him a Rationalist character. The interplay between the two of them really makes the story, and it was fantastic to read! Plus the storyline was pretty engaging too!
Oh! And did I mention the budding romance between Teo and the guy who’s been hunting him down? It is adorable, especially because it seems that right now Sammi is the only one who realizes what’s happening between the two of them… those two still think they hate each other! /squee!! It’s masterfully done, and I tip my hat to Mr. Flynn.

It is interesting to note that this appears to be an entry in a serial story (a previous story in the same storyline having been published in 2012, and the main storyline obviously not even close to resolution at the end of this novelette). However this isn’t just an excerpt, it really is a full story in the serial style – it has a beginning, middle, and end, and leaves you feeling satisfied. It’s much like a single episode in a season of Buffy – advancing the main arc of the season while still being a good self-contained narrative on its own. I’m happy to see serial works coming back in print form, I had assumed they were dead outside of cyberspace.

Puppy Note: Michael Flynn is an old hand in the Hugos, having six previous nominations. It’s a good thing the Puppies came along to right the injustice of him being shunned by the SJW circles and Hugo elitist conspirators, who had kept him from getting his due recognition…

Also, I get the feeling that the Puppies aren’t great at reading subtext, because I suspect that many of them would not have nominated a story with an budding gay romance. Either that or they didn’t bother to read their slate before nominating it *cough cough*.

 

“The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale”, Rajnar Vajra

This started out strong, and I thought I was going to like it just as much as The Journeyman. The prose is good, and it’s written in that clever modern style that’s so fun to read. You know the one, you see it in most urban fantasy and some steampunk, very Whedon-esque. I was cruising along, having a good time, when we got to The Puzzle. I really like puzzles in my fiction! Some of my favorite works are basically very elaborate puzzles for the reader to figure out, with narrative and character, so I was excited. And this puzzle was introduced as something that a team of scientists had been working on for 30 years! And if they failed at it, they lost their home planet and had to move back to Earth! Wow, this is gonna be awesome. I am looking forward to some intense Insight Porn, because that’s half of what Rationalist Fiction is about, right?

While he’s describing the puzzle, halfway through the second paragraph the solution is obvious. He’s not even done setting it up yet and already I can tell what the answer is. Seriously a team of highly motivated scientists couldn’t figure that out after 30 years???? It’s not even a good puzzle!!! In fact it’s almost insulting to my intelligence how simple it is! I thought maybe I’d just been spoiled by the Insight Porn that is LessWrong and Cracked and SSC, until I got to the solution the author wrote…

Which was even stupider than I could have imagined, because I graduated middle school. I’m gonna spoil it for you, but don’t worry, you aren’t missing anything. The cows on their world, that have spent 30 years eating, reproducing, and doing nothing else, but are all wearing Apple Smart Watches? The Smart Watches were actually made by the symbiotes living on the cows, who have spent 30 years eating, reproducing, and doing nothing else. Oh, and did I mention this is a pre-industrialized world? Let me take that back… this is a pre-agricultural world.

That’s right. The symbiotes created those Smart Watches (using stone tools??) on a world without any industrial development at all. No factories, no refineries, nothing. I’m not the world’s smartest person. But I am aware that to build a Smart Phone/Watch takes literally centuries of industrial development, as we bootstrap up the tech ladder to produce the high-precision machinery needed to make such things. You don’t chisel one out of stone. It would take a society of hundreds of thousands of people (at least) all in extremely specialized careers to have the infrastructure needed to make this. That sort of society is impossible to hide, especially for thirty years! And it would collapse is suddenly everyone within it stopped acting like a modern society and instead hung out with cows, eating and reproducing and NOT GOING TO THEIR DAY JOBS IN THE FACTORY FOR 30 YEARS!!

I was personally insulted by this story’s lack of respect for my intelligence. It assumes I am a drooling idiot, and I’m willing to read whatever this author will shovel out on a whim without bothering for one second to think through the implications of the world he’s created. I actually hate this story. >:(

Puppy Note: Again, it seems the Puppies can’t be bothered to think through any of the implications of their world, or spend even two thoughts on world-building. Also, how did this get published in what is supposedly a Hard SF magazine? Doesn’t the “Hard” in “Hard SF/Hard Fantasy” mean “took time to think about what is being proposed so that it makes some damn sense”?? This story is not SF, because for the cow-parasites to have “made” the Smart Watches basically means they magic’ed them out of thin air. It is a fantasty story with conjuration magic, that is dressed up with techno-babble. Really? Adding techno-babble to your fantasy story is all it takes to be considered SF for Analog’s purposes? That is a low bar.

 

Book Club Note: As I do every year, I strongly encourage all book clubs to do something similar to this once a year. Reading shorts is a nice change of pace. Also, it provides immense reading-time-to-discussion value! Reading all the Hugo nominated Short Stories and Novelettes took half the time (or less) of reading a single novel, and with ten shorts there is SOOOO MUCH to talk about! We went significantly over time. A very favorable ratio, even compared to the best books.

 

Short Stories tomorrow!

SF/F Review – The Dark Between The Stars

 Book Club Review, WorldCon  3 Responses »
Jul 102015
 

Dark_Between_the_Stars_2014_1st_edThe Dark Between The Stars, by Keven J. Anderson

Synopsis: A “space opera.” War among the stars, as humans are attacked by The Darkness (not the band).

Book Review: First, a minor quibble. This book isn’t SF, it’s Fantasy In Space. You will have to make a conscious effort to forget any physics you know to preserve the suspension of disbelief. It’s interesting that sometimes these things work and sometimes they don’t. I’m a fan of Star Wars and Warhammer 40K, and both of those are known to laugh at the idea of being constrained by basic common-physics-sense. But they have a flair, a certain bombast, that makes you eager to play along. This novel lacks that, and the result is groan-inducing.

But to get to the heart of the matter… Guys, I tried with this book. I really did. I felt the Puppies deserved a fair shake and I did absolutely everything I could to give them my fairest. After all, they have to their credit Warbound which was good in parts and wasn’t bad overall, and Parliament of Beasts and Birds which I quite liked. I can’t just denounce something without actually reading it. But after slogging through 220 pages of this abomination I could not read a single page further, and I was only about 1/3rd of the way through.

This is not a story. This is an outline of a story with a few physical descriptions fleshed out. You know those “Here’s a refresher of what happened last season” 5-minute clips that come out when a new season of a TV series begins nowadays? Imagine nothing but an entire book of that. Events are summarized, but no details are filled in. The result is a story with as much emotion as reading a bad history textbook. Allow me to demonstrate:

“Elisa was so furious and indignant she could barely think straight” is used to display anger. Can you feel the anger radiating off the page? Me neither. But it’s nothing compared to this next line, delivered after a mother witnesses her son die:

“That meant her son was dead! Anger warred with her grief.”

Let me be very clear – I’m not taking two sentences out of context of a greater tapestry. That is literally the entire effort that Anderson put into showing us the grief of a mother watching her child die before her. The paragraph before this was things blowing up, the paragraph after is exposition telling us things we already know (how her son got here), and the paragraph after that is descriptions of how damaged her ship is. The entire book is like this! The author does not give a single fuck about his writing, so why should I? Other examples:

“The survey ships orbited the small moon, and the readings were unusual enough that Keah decided they warranted a hands-on surface investigation. Adar Zan’nh agreed.”

…

“Sparks showered from control panels throughout the command nucleus, and the life-support systems shut down.”

Dry narrative that fails to evoke emotion, and the most-mocked cliché in Star Trek, at the same time!

“Sendra gave Garrison a gaze full of meanings, regrets, questions, and not-so-subtle flirtation.”

HOLY SHIT GUYS!! The only time I’ve read a line like this before is in fanfics that are parodies of bad fanfics!

But the complete lack of emotion and terrible writing aren’t the worst of it either. By far the worst part of all this is that there is not a single person in this book. There are a bunch of plot-advancing devices that have names. But they are empty husks, whose only purpose is to get us from Event A to Event B to Event C, and give us no reason to care about any event or any person. This book is empty. Not Recommended.

Also, in the glossary at the back there is an entry for “Black Robots: intelligent and evil beetlelike robots…” Yes, it says ‘evil’ in their description. Seriously, was this book written by-and-for eight-year-olds? I was surprised no one cast Magic Missile at The Darkness.

Book Club Review: Hahahahaahha! No. Not Recommended.

Puppy Note: Seriously guys, what the hell? Are you just trolling us? This is one of the worst books I’ve read in years. Apparently simply putting words on paper is enough to get a Sad Puppy Hugo nod. No wonder Brad had to go full post-modern, it’s the only refuge left to him now that he hitched his wagon to this turd.

On the plus side, it really puts into perspective the other books that were nominated. Skin Game and Three-Body Problem and Goblin Emperor all had their faults, and I can’t say any of them were really good. But now that I’ve been reminded what a BAD book looks like, I feel a lot better about those.

SF/F Review – Ancillary Sword

 Book Club Review, WorldCon  No Responses »
Jun 262015
 

Leckie_AncillarySword_TPAncillary Sword, by Ann Leckie

Synopsis: A populist-leaning general sides with the underclasses against the ruling elites in a far-future analog of Imperial Rome.

Book Review: Leckie had set expectations high with her debut, Ancillary Justice, which was stunning. In this sequel she delivers in some areas, but falls short of her former glory in a few others.

(note, this is a sequel, so this review has a spoiler or two for the original book)

Her writing is still extremely strong. Everything flows wonderfully, and the protagonist’s ability to see out the eyes of her crew makes for a cool excuse to use a lot of quasi-Omnicient-Narrator tricks while remaining in the first person. It also allows for multiple actions happening simultaneously which we cut back and forth between, which makes for energetic reading. Leckie’s characters feel real, and the emotion in the narrative is strong – you cheer at the protagonists wins, hate who she hates, are worried when she’s worried, etc. This is something that improved a great deal from the first book, where it was harder to identify with the protagonist. And the plot of the novel is also fairly strong and keeps moving at a good pace, you want to keep reading. In fact, this is the first book I’ve read in quite a long time that kept me up waaay past when I should have gone to sleep, because I couldn’t put it down.

Leckie also portrays a very strict, hierarchal society fantastically, with all the protocols and formalities those require. And she does a fantastic job of striking that “underdog” nerve. Yes, I know it’s a teenage power fantasy, to suddenly be the supreme military commander in an area and be able to force the elitist assholes who are literally and figuratively exploiting and raping the underclasses to shape the fuck up and start acting like decent humans or by god you’ll have them stripped of their positions, flogged, and if necessary executed. Yet that power fantasy feels soooo good, and it’s damned compelling. Who hasn’t wanted to be the person to expose the most corrupt powerbrokers and punish them for their crimes? It is a sweet taste, and I reveled in it.

The book’s biggest problem is that it is a Middle Book and suffers from the typical Middle Book problems. The author is mainly setting up things for the final book of the trilogy, bridging the initial instigating action of the first book and climatic action of the third book with a bunch of “moving us from point A to point B” action that isn’t nearly as compelling. The first book is all about One Esk’s quest for the revenge of the murder of the one person she loved, revenge she must take on the Emperor(!), with a climactic showdown in the imperial palace. She swears at the end of that book to keep secretly working to destroy the Emperor, even as she’s outwardly siding with half of her. You’d think that would continue to be the defining struggle, but it rarely gets mentioned. It looks very much like One Esk is doing the Emperor’s will by bringing order to this system, and she doesn’t seem to be making secret plans or cooking up plots to destroy the Emperor at all. The stakes also seem low – we’re placed in a system out at the edges of the Empire that makes a luxury good that no one cares about right now, so it’s entirely untouched by the civil war shaking the important parts of the empire. It feels like the Emperor just wanted One Esk out of the way in a quiet place she couldn’t make trouble, and One Esk complied. There’s some hints that they’re near something important, but of course all that will turn up in the last book, not in this one.

Furthermore, the climax is not very climactic. It’s a brief flurry of violence without any lead-up tension and it’s over in a few pages. I was surprised when the book ended, it seemed very sudden, without anything important having been resolved. There hadn’t been much character growth in anyone, and the ultimate plot of Galactic Civil War was barely advanced. I was very disappointed. Honestly, I wish authors would simply stop writing Middle Books. All trilogies should only be two books long, and jump straight from the first book to the third book with maybe a single chapter taking the place of the second book. They’re almost always a let-down.

I’m not sure how to rate this book. I greatly enjoyed it while it lasted, but I didn’t feel very fulfilled after it was done. Like most middle books, my final opinion will probably depend on how I feel about the concluding book, where the actual resolution to the story rests. /sigh Based on my inability to stop reading it, and the strength of the writing, I’ll go with a provisional Lightly Recommended.

Book Club Review: I’m happy to say that the single-gender thing was not nearly as big a deal this time! Everyone had grown pretty used to it from having read the first book, so it no longer served as a stumbling block. There was still a bit of talk about it, but it didn’t dominate the discussion, thank goodness. I was so over it already.

Unfortunately Ancillary Sword was more simplistic than Ancillary Justice. Ancillary Justice was nuanced, and made cases both for and against its themes of consequentialism and determinism, giving the reader a lot of room for interpretation and argumentation. Ancillary Sword, OTOH, comes down pretty hard on the “populism is good, elitism is bad” side of class struggle. It’s a safe bet that most modern readers will be strongly on that side as well, and it’s emotionally compelling, but it’s not terribly thought-provoking.

There are, however, still quite a number of things to discuss, and we had a good conversation at the book club. Recommended.

Puppy Note: This should be right up the Puppies’ alley–a military space opera with good plotting. The primary message even mirrors their Hugo narrative! A minority of corrupt elites have taken control of the political institutions, and an outsider has to rise up for the common man to set things right. (or as The Phantom would say: “a thorough hill kicking and some ant stomping seems in order.These people gots to learn some manners.”) And yeah, it’s an intoxicating narrative! It’s why I always lean a bit to the Puppies’ side when I read Larry’s blog; he is very good at telling that story. :) So normally I would assume they’d love this. But due to the gender thing I think they’ll assume that the author is on the “wrong” side of the political spectrum, call it “message fiction,” and dislike/hate it.

They’re right that it’s message fiction (as all good fiction is, because if you aren’t saying something about the human condition why are you even writing?), but they’re wrong about the message. Ancillary Sword’s message is their message. It’s populism, and anti-elitism, and standing up for what’s right. They’ll think the message is something about hating men, I guess? Because the Radch society only has one non-gendered pronoun that applies to all people? OK, whatever.

I would be thrilled to be wrong though.

Amazing Man

 WorldCon, Writing  3 Responses »
Jun 222015
 

I dashed off a little short story, inspired by the Sad Puppies Hugo Fiasco. I had fun writing it, I hope someone finds it enjoyable to read. :)

Amazing Man flew over the Los Angeles sprawl at a good clip. He’d thought of it as his “patrolling pace” just a few short weeks ago. A high enough speed to cover a lot of ground, but not so fast that he couldn’t track all the small-scale human movements below. It was still too fast for a cape though. The wind would whip it so loudly he couldn’t hear himself think, and his thoughts were pretty important. It was even fast enough to rip the breath from anyone who needed to breathe, so it was a good thing he didn’t. His chest rose and fell out of habit, an affectation he’d adopted to put the people around him at ease.

In a sense this was still patrolling, but now he was looking for slabs of lead shielding rather than crimes in progress. That was the byproduct of another previous effort to put humans at ease, by affording them a sense of privacy. He could, in actuality, see through lead without a problem. He’d been so stupid back then, hopping back and forth like the oblivious nerd trying to impress the popular girl, thinking he had a chance. Even last month he’d let those orphans smear their greasy hands all over his costume, smiling the while. They had no idea how hard it was to get stains out of it! He couldn’t just take it to the dry cleaner. And no Amazing Fabric Cleaning Vision either. All the positions he’d twisted himself into, trying to make the humans happy! For years! And for what? Well, at least one good thing had come from his naiveté–now lead shielding acted like a neon sign flashing “Insurgents Here!”

Los Angeles was in better shape than most other major cities. The fighting here had been brief. The populace had already seen how futile resistance was, and the National Guard had defected to his side before he’d even arrived. He’d probably be able to lift his personal overwatch from LA in a matter of weeks. He hated when people referred to it as martial law. That was downright ungrateful. He kept tabs on the insurgent sympathizers who said it. It was his duty, as the liberator and overlord of America, to ensure that his subjects could enjoy lives free from civil strife. Amazing very much believed in the personal responsibility ethic of “you break it, you bought it.” Even if he’d fixed it rather than broken it.

As he flew over a suburb he spotted a lead slab, installed to shield a basement. He zoomed in with his Amazing Vision and saw a group of young men sitting in a circle, tapping away on their phones furiously. His Amazing Hearing was well-known, no one would speak a word against him aloud anymore, but that was no impediment to the youth. It was almost as if the past five years had been a training regimen to prepare the populace in audio-free communication. Come to think of it, that wasn’t so implausible. It was too bad Steve Jobs couldn’t be brought in for interrogation anymore. Unless… he had faked his own death?? The possibility was intriguing. Amazing would love to end this whole resistance fiasco just by punching the right guy hard enough. Counterinsurgency was frustratingly difficult.

Amazing focused on the tiny phone screens to confirm his targets. Rallying cries of “Death to tyrants!” and “We are Americans, we kill kings!” Really hurtful stuff. He was a far more benevolent ruler than those self-interested liars that had kept getting elected. He altered his course to home in on the insurgents. They didn’t look like he’d expected insurgents to look, with turbans and beards. They looked just like any other group of teens gathered for a social event. Heads bowed over phones, fingers flying, not a word being said. If it wasn’t for the lead shielding above them he wouldn’t have given them a second glance.

He dropped into the basement feet-first, punching through the house above like an unpopular rocker leaping onto an unwilling crowd. He’d intended to appear in their midst with the clarity of a bolt of lightning, or a much more popular rockstar, but shoddy construction ruined his entrance. Debris crashed around him. The billowing dust obscured all vision. Screams of panic, and at least one of grievous injury, filled the room. Amazing frowned. This was almost as bad as the time he’d crashed Dr. Vile’s nephew’s bar mitzvah, thinking it was an Evil League gathering. Those poor grandmas never knew what hit them. Amazing pursed his lips and blew, clearing the air with his Amazing Breath. Slowly the cries died into shocked silence, aside from the screeching kid in skinny jeans clutching a shattered leg. A bow-tied hipster in the corner quietly pissed himself.

Amazing scanned the room with his Amazing Psychoanalytic Vision to find the insurgent most suited to his needs. The one who would be most terrified by what was about to happen, and who would tell everyone he could of the horror of this afternoon. Amazing didn’t have the time to root out every single insurgent cell. He needed to give the impression that he was aware of all subversive action and always just a moment away from crushing it. He figured the best way to do that would be to strike at random times and places across the nation and make sure everyone knew what had happened.

After a couple seconds he focused on the dreadlocked hippie type pressed against the back wall. The hippie enjoyed attention, and didn’t believe in staying quiet. Amazing hoped he had a lot of followers on whatever Insta-share thing he used.

With that Amazing burst into action. A single step and he was across the room, up to the elbow in someone’s chest, his fist protruding from their back. A huge sidestep and he was against an exterior wall, one hand pressed against the concrete foundations, a mess of brain pulp and shattered skull under his palm. A spin and a dash–he literally ran through one of the insurgents, the body exploding in a red mist, before grabbing the bow-tied kid’s jaw in one hand and twisting his head off his body. A final step and he was next to the injured kid. He stomped his chest flat in a single motion. From start to finish, less than one second. He knew the hippie couldn’t have followed it. One second everything was fine, the next Amazing Man was dripping gore and the hippie’s friends were so much falling meat.

“I’m tired of your terrorist shit,” Amazing intoned. “It ends now. Consider this your warning.” The kid stared at him, frozen, not even daring to breathe. Amazing held the pose, unsure of how to exit the scene. Back in his self-effacing heroing days people would thank him at this point, which was his cue to be gracious, salute someone, and fly off. This extended pause was awkward, and there was blood trickling under his collar. Could the kid at least acknowledge he’d heard him?

A strained croak escaped from the hippie’s mouth, which would do. Amazing rocketed out of the basement. He accelerated sharply, hoped the wind of his flight would strip him clean, like a super-powerful air hose. Instead it just dried the viscera onto him, leaving his skin sticky and his creases crusty. In annoyance he flared his Amazing Aura, incinerating everything within an inch of his body, aside from his asbestos underwear. Come to think of it, his costume was also a holdover from his days of cringing appeasement and self-abasement. He had the body of a Greek god. From now on that underwear would be the entirety of his costume.

As soon as he dyed it purple, anyway. He couldn’t have an asbestos-grey costume, even a really small one. He wasn’t gauche.

Amazing Man sat in the throne room of his Amazing-Lair-cum-Presidential-Palace, contemplating how to ferret out his secret arch-nemesis Steve Jobs, when he was interrupted by an approaching clamor. One of his newly-minted Lieutenants of Liberty, resplendent in black-and-purple ballistic armor, marched through the opposite doorway. He came before Amazing’s throne and kneeled, head bowed, helmet under his arm. Amazing was uncomfortable with such displays of deference, but he’d once read it was an important ritual among military organizations. His Amazing Psychoanalytic Vision confirmed that his Liberty Legion found it deeply comforting, so he’d mandated the act. He wondered if this was a universal human trait, or if his organization simply tended to attract people who needed this sort of structure.

Then he realized that he was again making himself uncomfortable to pander to the vagaries of the current in-crowd. That the in-crowd were his loyal followers didn’t change a damn thing. He was done being a simpering puppy.

“Stand up,” he snapped. “Report.”

The man rose reverently, but refused to make eye-contact with Amazing. Probably bad news then. Either that or he was intimidated by Amazing’s manly physique. Amazing found he really enjoyed the liberty of his much smaller costume. He should have done this years ago.

It was probably the bad news though. His Legion was flat-out incompetent.

“My lord, we’ve captured the reporter. She is waiting just outside.”

Success on their first try? Amazing blinked in surprise. That was a new record! He’d been this close to adopting Dr. Vile’s style of punitive motivational tactics (he imagined his thumb and forefinger very, very close together). He didn’t have to worry about a henchman uprising like Dr. Vile had suffered, and he’d been getting tired of failure. He eyed the lieutenant skeptically, not quite sure how to react to good news from underlings.

“Bring her in,” Amazing ordered. With his luck they’d gotten the wrong reporter anyway.

The lieutenant returned promptly with three Legionnaires, escorting a feisty, tough-as-nails reporter. Miss Paula Perry, from the State Journal Weekly. Amazing expected her to see the wall behind him at some point, but she was struggling the entire way across the room, and when she’d finally been deposited at the foot of his dais she simply glared directly up at him. All things considered, this was preferable. It would make the reveal so much more dramatic!

“Ah, Miss Perry,” Amazing greeted her with a smile. “You’ve been in hiding since my ascension, and I feared you’d fled the country! I should have known you’d still be here, riling up the masses. Reasonable responses never were your strong suit.”

He’d practiced that line in a mirror, so he knew it delivered the perfect mix of power and contempt.

“I knew this would happen!” Paula spit at him. “I tried to warn everyone! I’d been trying to warn them all from the first day!”

“Oh, I know all about your warnings. I followed your column, devoutly. I read and tracked every word of yours. Every. Single. Lie.”

Paula pulled back in surprise, momentarily speechless.

“You did?” she asked. Amazing grinned down at her. Slowly comprehension dawned over her stupid face. “You were V.Populi77? You? You didn’t have anything better to do than troll the comments of some weekly columnist?”

“You weren’t just some columnist for me. For you see…” Amazing reached back, picked up a pair of black thick-framed glasses from his throne, and slipped them over his face.

Paula eyes bugged out and she gasped in recognition.

“Emilio?”

“Yes. Your polite, cringing, and unfailingly nice coworker. I was Amazing Man the whole time!”

“That’s why your stories always praised Amazing Man so much.”

“No!” Amazing snarled the word, then calmed himself as its echoes died away. “No. I was simply trying to counteract your constant hate-pieces. In return you and your coterie of Mean Girls attacked me, tore me down in public, and baited the rest of the journalistic world into hating Amazing Man!”

“But everyone else loved you! Your columns were way more popular than mine! They’re why people read the paper.”

“So you admit my work was better?” Amazing demanded.

“Well… I mean, it was definitely better liked…”

“Then how do you explain THIS!?” Amazing stepped to the side and with a sweep of his arm gestured grandly at the wall behind the throne. “Last year when I was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, for an incredible in-depth piece on Amazing Man, I was passed over and the Prize was given to this vile hate-piece instead!”

The wall was solid marble, forty feet wide and rising to a gothic arch seventy feet up. Starting five feet from the top was the full text of a State Journal Weekly article, carved into the marble in giant letters. Amazing had carved those letters himself, with his Amazing Cutting Vision, seething all the while. He’d had to focus carefully, exercising control not to cut deeper on the most infuriating lines.

“Amazing Man Amazingly Narcissistic. -Paula Perry; SJW, Nov 14 2018

As the city throws another parade in Amazing Man’s honor, perhaps we should take a moment to ask if our thanks aren’t misplaced.

In a world of crashing climates, is the best use of a massive super-natural force really the stopping of muggings and personal crime? Millions starve, hundreds of millions are displaced, civil conflict and disease run rampant in half the world. How many could be saved if Amazing Man used his strength to keep a series of massive dynamos spinning? Free, limitless energy would end half our conflicts, and break humanity’s carbon addiction.

Or what if Amazing Man were to allow himself to be studied by scientists, so we could determine the source of his powers?

Consider even the event that has prompted our latest parade, the poisoning of the city’s water supply. While we are all grateful to have been saved by Amazing Man, revelation of his Amazing Water-Purification Vision raises alarming questions. How many lives could he save by providing clean water in developing countries? How many other powers does he have that he isn’t telling us about?

And yet where do we see him? In showy fights with evil geniuses. Or punching common thugs. Flashy actions that are always caught on camera and praised. He is conspicuously absent from the sort of high-impact work that doesn’t come with limelight.

More than anything else, Amazing Man seems to crave affirmation, and anyone who doesn’t provide it for him can go hang. One can only shudder to think what he might do if the news cycle ever changes focus and the affirmation he needs begins to drain away.”

 

It had been carved in the same font the State Journal Weekly used.

It even included the small stock photo of Amazing Man that had run with the column, carved into the wall in bas-relief.

Slowly Paula turned her gaze back to Amazing.

“Are you saying this is my fault?” she asked.

“All of you ivory-tower snobs, trying to tell the rest of us how to live our lives. I was just trying to make the world a better place! But I didn’t fit into your little clique, didn’t toe your party line, so you attacked me at every opportunity. You tried to destroy my career, while you slandered my good deeds, and your incestuous little group rewarded you for it.”

Paula shook her head, looking dazed. Her eyes kept moving from Amazing’s face to the wall behind him and back again.

“It was worse than I thought,” she said, “You’d never be happy as anything less than a messiah figure. Why not just cut to the chase and call yourself Messiah Man instead? Or The Amazing Christ?”

“And you’re still doing it! You have this need to cast me in the worst possible light. The whole system was corrupt, ruled by out-of-touch elites. The masses loved me, and you sought only to tear me down! I had to take back America for the common man, for the overwhelming majority of us underdogs!”

“And that article of mine,” Paula gestured to the wall, “is what convinced you of this?”

“I’d been so naive before that. I read your columns, but I had faith in the process. I believed that I would be judged by the content of my character. Afterwards I realized I never even had a chance. That’s when I decided things had to change.”

“So all of this…” Paula gestured around herself to indicate the Presidential Palace, the Liberty Legions, and presumably the entire Liberated States of America. “All of this was because you felt snubbed by a group of people you don’t even like?”

Amazing ripped the glasses from his face and crushed them in his fist. His responding roar was super-human, shattering all the glass in the Palace and leaving Paula with mild, but permanent, hearing loss.

“It’s about ethics in superhero journalism!”

Emilio won a Pulitzer that year, as well as a Peabody, an Oscar, a Grammy, a Dobby, and a Tony Award; all purely on merit and not for any other reason at all. Amazing Man won the Nobel Peace Prize. That last one raised a few eyebrows, but it was pointed out that the Peace Prize had previously been awarded to people with a much higher body count than Amazing Man had managed, and wouldn’t it be better to keep it that way? It was hard to argue with that logic.

Miss Perry was released, because Amazing Man was above petty things like personal revenge. She is now happily employed as a Field Hand in the Angola Liberty Farm.

Modernizing The Hugos

 WorldCon  9 Responses »
Jun 092015
 

Rocket-future-2This started out as a reply to a comment, and became long enough I decided to make it a post. If you’d like to skip to the chase, the bottom two paragraphs are the important bits, and my point is “It’s time to end the requirement that a Hugo can only be given to a work published for the first time in the previous calendar year.”

On my review of Three Body Problem, Beerwulf wrote:

>As far as the Puppies are concerned there is no “everything else that goes into making a good SF story”, what you consider to be the “everything else”, they (and I) consider to be just optional extras. One of the motivations for the SPs is that SF has become too literary, too concerned with the optional extras and not concerned enough with what’s important, what makes SF, SF.
[…]
I’ve commented before about “Pure SF”: science fiction with everything that isn’t science fiction removed. Even if I agree with everything in your review (which I don’t – I might comment later about that), then this would stand as a great example of “Pure SF”.

I can see that, and it makes a lot of sense. And I agree that what makes SF SF is the important part. I generally dislike EarthFic (Literary Fiction) and consider it a wasteland. All that “everything else” heaped upon itself is just empty fluff without the base. If you’re going to bake a cake, you need actual flour. But I also think that just flour isn’t enough for me. Hardtack will fill you up, but it’s not a joy to eat. I want all those other things too. I guess that’s where the “difference in taste” thing comes in. For some people that extra stuff probably detracts rather than adds.

I will say I enjoyed The Martian. It had enough of the Other Stuff to make me happy, even if it wasn’t quite as well executed as it could be. It was certainly better than Three Body, IMHO.

I’m not sure this really explains the Puppies that well though. They nominated Skin Game, and if we’re talking about the “Pure SF” Stuff, it has none at all. It’s an urban fantasy. They also nominated Parliament of Beasts and Birds, which is religious horror and again has no “Pure SF” in it.

If a contingent of readers did want to bring more “Pure SF” back into the Hugos, nominating the most right-wing or the best-selling SF is not the way to do it. Their best bet would be to alter the Hugos to adapt to the modern world. A LOT of great titles are being passed over due to adherence to archaic rules from the times of print publishing.

Aside from Three Body, what are the two best-regarded recent “Pure SF” books you can think of? For me it’s Wool and The Martian. Both are insanely successful and fairly well written. Neither was eligible for a Hugo because they were first published serially online. (As more and more great works are!) By the time they made it into print (or had a large enough audience that they could potentially be nominated) they had passed the year that they were eligible. This is ridiculous. Most people do their reading online nowadays, and most stuff that’s published online spreads through word-of-mouth. That takes a fair handful of months, no matter how good it is. Putting something online shouldn’t make you ineligible for a Hugo. It’s absolutely ridiculous that neither Hugh Howey or Andy Weir were even eligible for a nomination!

It’s time to end the requirement that a Hugo can only be given to a work published for the first time in the previous calendar year. My own preferred solution would be to extend it to anything published in the three calendar years preceding the convention. This allows for word of mouth to spread. Alternately, it can be changed to making eligible anything released for the first time in a new publication format in the previous year (print as opposed to electronic, or full ebook as opposed to a collection of posts), with previous nominees obviously ineligible. An inability to change this, IMHO, is much more likely to kill the Hugos than any silly Puppy movement.

SF/F Review – The Three-Body Problem

 Book Club Review, WorldCon  23 Responses »
May 282015
 

51kxQMvzMeL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu (translation by Ken Liu)

Synopsis: A secret SETI-equivalent Chinese program makes radio contact with an alien species.

Book Review: The Three-Body Problem starts out with a bang, dropping us right into the middle of China’s Cultural Revolution in the late 60s, from the perspective of a persecuted intellectual. The emotional impact is high, the politics are gripping, and the gradual revelation of a mysterious government program reels you in. Unfortunately, Cixin Liu isn’t able to keep the emotion going once we flash ahead to the modern day. He switches gears to focus on the alien-contact conspiracy and the exploration of a scientific problem, and only halfway pulls it off.

One of the great things about SF, that sets it apart from other genres, is the wonder of discovery. The intellectual excitement of running into a puzzle and working through it via experimentation and deduction. Or the exploration of how a culture would have evolved to handle vastly different circumstances. When Liu sticks to these he does a damn good job! Aside from the Cultural Revolution, the most exciting parts of the book are when we’re being shown the alien’s world. Unfortunately, this is only one aspect of storytelling, and everything else that goes into making a good SF story seems to be ignored.

For a start, the characters are almost undifferentiatable. The only one who sticks out is the hard-boiled cop. Everyone else is a young, single engineer. It’s worth pointing out that the protagonist is actually a married man with at least one child, and yet he’s written exactly like someone with no family at all. If someone else hadn’t reminded me of the brief scene where his wife and child are introduced I would still be under the impression that he was a single young man. And even the hard-boiled cop is basically just a hard-boiled, sarcastic version of the same character template.

There is no discernable emotion after the Cultural Revolution section. An author isn’t just supposed to show us cool gadgets and interesting puzzles, s/he is supposed to make us feel something. Or at least convince us that someone in the novel is feeling something. The Martian was non-stop puzzle-solving challenges, but the entire time there was a joy to it, or excitement, or some sort of relatable emotion. Three-Body Problem is flat in affect throughout.

The dialog can be taken as an example of this problem. It never feels like the sorts of things real people would actually say to each other (with the occasional exception of the cop, Da Shi). Rather, in almost every case it is little more than a way to give us exposition or tell the plot. It feels like people are being forced into verbalizing info dumps rather than actually interacting with each other, and it’s wooden and awkward.

Finally, there is prodigious amounts of telling-rather-than-showing. As a single example, here’s how the after effects of severe radiation dosing is handled:

“However, like everyone else who remained in the cafeteria after the explosion, [character] suffered severe radiation contamination.”

The entire book is like this. Contrast this to the handling in Leviathan Wakes, where the two characters are shown nearly panicking when their radiation counters go red, grimly joking about it afterwards, and later on we see them taking a cocktail of anti-cancer drugs which they’re informed they’ll have to take regularly for the rest of their lives. It took a few extra paragraphs to show that, and make us feel both the panic of the exposure and the consequences of it. It involved us emotionally with the characters. Liu’s line was little more than an acknowledgment that he knows radiation exists, and added nothing.

I will say that this may be intentional. Perhaps the Chinese style of writing is far more sedate than the American style, and to have characters who feel things is considered crass and readers hate it. This could be considered a fantastic book by Chinese critics, for all I know. But at the risk of being culturally insensitive… I consider this poor fiction. This sort of flat, bad writing – wrapped around an intriguing idea with a great puzzle and fun discovery at its center – is what I think gave SF it’s bad rep waaaaaay back in the day. It is entirely possible to write SF that’s based around a mind-blowing idea with a fantastic puzzle, full of all the wonder of discovery and exploration, while also having a story arc, compelling characters, realistic dialog, strong writing, and emotional resonance with the reader. Sure, it’s a lot harder. But if it was easy everyone would be doing it. Not Recommended.

Book Club Review: The lack of engagement and emotion really hurt this as a Book Club book. Once the puzzle is solved and the mystery is revealed, what is there for readers to discuss? The characters, the emotion, the themes. What we think the author was trying to say. In a story that doesn’t have any of those things, the discussion was a bit forced, and didn’t last very long. Not Recommended.

Puppy Note: This book was not on the Puppy Slate. When I thought to myself “How did this book make it onto the Hugo Ballot?” my first thought was the same uncharitable thought that the Puppies normally have. I thought “This is cultural inclusiveness being taken too far. The liberal thought-leaders want to show they are racially/culturally diverse, and they know that this book is CRAZY popular in China! For it to be so popular among so many readers, it must be fantastic! So let’s make sure it gets a nomination regardless of its merits.” Thus a type of affirmative action – signaling your awesome cultural acceptance and diversity at the cost of nominating a book that would have been much more deserving of the Hugo on its merits.

Except that the Puppy Leaders have come forward to say that they love this book, and would have put it on their slate if they’d known about it!! And I’m like… WHAT THE HELL is going on?? OK, we all already suspect that the Puppies don’t have great taste in SF lit, but if they think this book deserves a nomination on its merits, than perhaps *I* am being a giant, insensitive dick by assuming that only someone with a hidden liberal agenda would nominate this. Obviously people must actually like it. And if I am lumping in the Sad/Rabid Puppies with their hated “SJW” nemesis for picking crap for political reasons, maybe that’s a big flashing sign that says “There is no such thing as the political-reasons voter, and the Puppies were even more wrong that I thought from the very beginning.” Seriously, if I can’t tell you apart from your political rivals based on book selection, I think you’re grasping at straws.

Second, apparently Puppy-approved books can be nominated without the Puppy’s help. In fact, despite their efforts in this case. If the liberal conspiracy you claim is keeping good works down keeps nominating things you like (much like they nominated Correia and Torgerson in the past…) then it might not actually exist.

Third, why the hell hadn’t the Puppy Leadership heard of this book!? I am not very in-touch with the SF community. I have very rarely heard of more than 1 or 2 books that are nominated each year. Yet even I had heard of The Three-Body Problem. If the Hugo Popes deciding what books should be put on the Puppy Slate are so poor at reading the field that they can’t identify and nominate The Three-Body Problem, and have to admit afterwards “Man, I’m glad that made it in, because we love it!” then perhaps they are doing a shit-ass job of being the Hugo Popes and should relegate that job to the SF-reading hive mind again. FFS.

SF/F Review – Skin Game

 Book Club Review, WorldCon  2 Responses »
May 142015
 

skingame_lgSkin Game, by Jim Butcher

Synopsis: An urban-fantasy supernatural bank heist

Book Review: This is a frustrating book, because it has some very cool parts, but some very big failures as well, and you can see the unrealized potential within it. It reads very much like a novelization of the Buffy TV Series if it had been done by someone without Joss Whedon’s talent for self-awareness and meta-analysis.

Skin Game has that snappy, modern, referential humor that we so love. It is often funny, and in parts laugh-out-loud hilarious. The big parasite twist absolutely made my evening. :) The writing is never bad, and in parts it is outstanding! “Her heels clicking with metronomic inevitability” or “with all the sympathy of a bullet in flight” are evocative and high-impact lines. And the characters are generally strong and distinct, making them easy to identify and accept.

Unfortunately the awesomeness-to-word-count ratio is not favorable. The story seems to need to take a break every so often to have a fight scene, like a Fox executive is standing over Jim’s shoulder saying “No one’s been staked in 20 minutes? Throw some vampires at them!” Now, some of these fight scenes are vital, well-built, and fantastic. The one just outside Carpenter’s house was a tour-de-force, with a fantastic build-up, high stakes, the possibility of something bad actually happening, and major plot-altering outcomes as a result. I loved it. But several other fight scenes were dull, and could have been removed entirely without changing the story one bit. Any time a scene can be removed without altering a story at all, it should be.

It wasn’t just the fight scenes though. There’s a lot of really unfortunate dialog that basically consists of the characters telling the reader how s/he should be feeling right now. Most of it while trying to sound profound or moving. That is bad writing. You never tell a reader how he should feel (even if it’s dressed up as friends psycho-analyzing the protagonist to make him feel better). You make a reader feel things by showing them action that evokes those feelings. No matter how many times someone says “They took away everything that was familiar. They hurt you.” that doesn’t make us feel that pain. Repeating it doesn’t make it more impactful. There was not a single emotional point in the book that was left un-belabored.

As a result, a lot of the book was simply boring. Which is one of the worst things a book can be. Any time I have to resort to skimming a book it loses esteem in my eyes, and I had to do that quite a bit. With the exception of the fight outside Carpenter’s house, I never felt reluctant to put it down, or excited to pick it up again.

I suspect that part of the problem is that this is the 15th book in a (planned) 20 book series. Call me cynical, but I have a very hard time believing this story arc had to be spread out over 20 books and couldn’t have been done in (say) five. Very little of consequence happened in this book, and all those extra pages I was forced to skim through were just padding. For comparison, Catherine Valente wrote Deathless, which in the course of a single book takes its protagonist from age 10 to age 60+, covers two world wars, and has an amazing character arc, intense plot, and vast changes in the world. It’s an epic story. A few years ago I read the first Dresden novel (Storm Front). Harry Dresden seems virtually unchanged since that novel. Same with the world he’s in. Valente accomplished more in a single book than Butcher’s done in fifteen. I kinda resent that. My time is being wasted so a series can be padded out. Bleh.

Ultimately, I want something that will stick with me when I read (or watch) a story. Buffy was campy and fun, but it was also good–it still reverberates in my life. Skin Game, once you skip the boring bits, was certainly fun. But there’s nothing there that’ll stick with me. As one friend said: “A workman-like example of entertainment product.” It’s probably good beach reading with a drink. But that’s not what I’m interested in. Not Recommended.

Book Club Review: There isn’t much to say here. I won’t say there’s nothing for a book club to talk about. It is interesting to compare what different people find enjoyable – what jokes worked for some but not others, what bored one person vs what excited another, etc. There were a couple people in our group who were legitimately entertained and said the rest of us were being too finicky. But that only gets you so far. There wasn’t anything thought-provoking or innovative to push discussion. While it may be a good book for individual reading for some, as a book club book I would Not Recommend.

Puppy Note: This book really isn’t terrible, it’s just not great. Which means it’s already better than at least one nominee I’ve read every year. Every year since I started participating in the Hugos there’s been at least one book that I thought was simply awful, and in one case I was surprised the book had even made it to print! This book is easily better than any of those. And from what I’ve heard, some of the other books in this series have been quite a bit better. Which, first of all, makes me more convinced there should be a separate Hugo category for Series. But which also makes me ask “Why did Brad pick this book, this year?” It’s obviously not a good example of what Butcher can do when he really tries (or at least I hope that’s the case). Picking this particular mediocre book smacks very much of the exact sort of “basing Hugo decisions based on insider knowledge and politics,” rather than “just judging a work on its merits” that the Puppies campaign was supposedly against. Oh how quickly things turn.

In the grim darkness of the Hugo future, there is only Rabies

 WorldCon  9 Responses »
May 042015
 

business-cat-is-seriousI just re-read “Is this art?” Great post, and short, take five minutes to go read it if you can. Most relevant part is:

> If Person A uses the word “art” to mean “something beautiful that required skill to create” and Person B uses the word “art” to mean “something intentionally created to make a statement,” then it seems like their debate over whether the urinal is “art” should be resolved as soon as they clarify what they meant by the word.

> As far as I can tell, the disguised query in this case is usually “does this deserve to be taken seriously?” which can be translated in practice into, “Is this the sort of thing that deserves to be exhibited in a gallery?”

 

If the Larry and Brad can be taken at their word, they seem think that the answer to the question “Does this work represent the best of SF?” should be answered with “If the casual reader picked up a book for entertainment reading, would the Hugo winner be the best SF book of the year for that?”

This does make some sense — most people read fiction purely for entertainment. Their primary criteria for judging a work of fiction is “Was it fun to read? Did I have a good time?” So Larry and Brad have a point when they say that the Hugos do not represent the “large majority” of the reading public. The majority of the reading public is picking up a good yarn. And there is nothing wrong with that. It’s the same way I watch TV, or watch movies. For these sorts of things, you want Indiana Jones. You want the heart-of-gold guy having awesome adventures and cracking wise the whole time, who has loyal friends and scary enemies and wins the heart of the girl at the end. This is a fun-as-hell tale!

But some percentage of the SF readership considers SF to be Serious Business. It’s not just for fun, it is Art. I confess I am one of those people. I’m ok with admitting to being slightly snobby in SF reading. FFS, I run a silly Harry Potter Fanfic Podcast, I gotta have *something* I can be snobby about! Everyone needs are least one thing to snob over, whether it’s cooking, or reading, or gun use/knowledge. My thing is genre fic.

If you’re a bit snobby and consider SF to be Art, simply “being fun” is not a good enough criteria for an award. There’s lots of that. My criteria goes further… things that include “Making me feel an emotion really hard” and “Great skill in writing” and “Making me think” and “Being innovative and pushing the boundaries of the genre.” “Being fun” is included, but it’s not primary, and sometimes it takes a hit to make room for all the other things. Indiana Jones is great, but it doesn’t make me think, and in 2015 is certainly is not innovative or pushing the boundaries!

This is why some authors can consistently put out multi-best-selling books but never get a Hugo award. They put out great work that’s popular, and it’s fun to read, but that’s not what the Hugo award is for. I even get the impression that most people who pick up a book for fun-reading know this. They know that awards go to heavier stuff with an art focus, so they don’t look for an award sticker (or avoid it) if they don’t want something like that. Instead they look for the “Best Seller” line on the cover and buy that. It’s only when they want something more involved that they’ll pick up something that won awards. I think that the casual reader is ill-served by the Puppies’ initiative, because while they can still get the fun best-sellers by buying best-sellers, they don’t have a way to find the more artsy stuff when that’s what they’re in the mood for.

Larry and Brad wanted to make the Hugos into a “Best of what’s fun and popular!” award, because to them that’s synonymous with “Best of SF.” Their biggest problem was that generally the people who care enough to participate in the Hugos disagreed with them. We’re in it to argue over the artsy stuff. The people who share their opinion that having fun is the primary point of fiction don’t care enough to get involved. They pay for the best sellers and read them and have a good time. Why should they care if some geeks who take all this too seriously spend hours upon hours arguing over this point or that? Why would they invest that time, and that effort, and pay $40, when they already read their fun book and moved on to the next one?

The only way to marshal the forces is to turn them Rabid. In America that means the Culture War. This has already been refined to a science in the USA so the playbook is common knowledge. Make it a Red vs Blue thing, paint the other side as oppressors who are unfairly manipulating the system to keep out the people they hate, make it about standing up to an entrenched & corrupt power in order to defend the aggrieved common man, etc. Both sides do it. And BOY does it work for getting attention!

Which means that the Hugo’s future depends on how virulent the Rabies becomes. If things are left to shake out on their own, I’m of the opinion the pleasure-reader populace will go back to reading best-sellers and not caring much about the Hugos. It just isn’t worth their time and money on purely literary grounds. The only way to keep this movement going is to continue to fan the flames of Culture Warfare, keep the base riled up about how much the SJWs are assholes and need to be kicked around. That’s possible of course, the news media has been doing it for what… two decades now? It’s our country’s most popular drug. And Vox Day would love that result. I’m not sure if Larry and Brad have their hearts set on it as well. I get the feeling they honestly cared more for the genre than the politics, and just got carried away with the rush of popularity. But at this point they might be too committed and may be happy to go along with making the Hugos another Culture War battlefield. Just goes to show that nothing is sacred in war.

Why “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” rocks

 Book Club Review, WorldCon  1 Response »
Apr 302015
 

aesops fablesNormally I would hold off on saying anything about the Puppy Short Fiction until I do my full “Short Stories and Novelettes” post after my bookclub discusses them all. But that won’t be for another two months, and I keep seeing a ton of people saying John C Wright’s “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” is terrible. I haven’t read any of the other shorts yet, but I want to speak up and say that perhaps people are reading it wrong.

I assume that, due to Wright being super-Catholic and a darling of Vox Day, people are presuming that this story is meant as some sort of Christian allegory, and are reading it as such. To that I say: Death of the Author! Wright’s intent doesn’t matter, the story should be judged as it’s own work, and I think it is a really damn good work. I, too, had to struggle to get past my Puppy antipathy, but it’s worth it! Because yes, the beginning is really slow and quite boring. But if you push past that, it keeps getting better and better, and ended absolutely fan-fucking-tastic!! I think I’m a much bigger fan of religious horror than I thought I was.

For starters, the writing style is well done. It’s a throw-back to the old Talking Animal fables, which come with a very distinctive voice, and Wright does an excellent job of speaking in that antiquated, fable-style voice. It’s not amazingly difficult to do, but it certainly isn’t easy (as anyone who’s tried to mimic that archaic style without sounding ridiculous can tell you – eg Ren Faire actors), so it deserves to be noted that he did it well. Both the voice and the structure call up those olden tales skillfully.

But more importantly, try not to listen to it as a preacher delivering a sermon, but just as a story. It soon becomes clear this is a horror story.

Echopraxia kinda cemented in my mind the concept that “If a God existed, it would be necessary for Man to kill him.” Parliament pushed those same buttons for me. Cat’s brush with God is of an intrusive, alien, ever-watching eye, like that of a Lovecraftian Elder God. Then the minds of the animals are altered against their will, changing their personhood (the grossest violation of personhood that there is IMHO), and it isn’t even a change made FOR THEIR BENEFIT. They are given an aversion to nudity that imposes costs on their existence and makes them feel bad. It is a purely malevolent act, and smacks of species-sabotage. Plus the body-horror scene of everyone being twisted into upright grotesqueries. Then they are denied any way to improve their own existence, being put entirely at the mercy of alien minds (the uplifted humans) who may not give a damn about them. Finally, their only way to opt out of this is to literally destroy their intelligence and agency, reducing them to rutting beasts. Possibly a fate worse than extinction, I’m not sure.

The only ray of light I see is Fox. If I was writing this into a novel he would be the cunning trickster, lying just below God’s radar, finding a way to undermine and eventually overthrow the Hosts of Heaven.

It’s a bleak and horrifying tale, and if it wasn’t for the bad taste that the Puppies’ tactics have left in everyone’s mouths it might be easier to acknowledge that its really quite good. So I’m encouraging everyone to try to overlook that unfortunate fact and read the story like you’d read anything by Watts or Gaiman. I don’t have any comment on Hugo Voting – since tactics are a big part of what’s happening in that game this year it would be silly to tell people “don’t consider the circumstance when voting.” Take everything into account when voting. But when reading, or discussing the piece as a work, it’ll make life much more enjoyable to focus just on the story, if only for one day.

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