|
" There are some bizzare things in the story that I thoroughly hope are scene setting. I feel Reynolds is trying for a different, perhaps more mature, r...more
There are some bizzare things in the story that I thoroughly hope are scene setting. I feel Reynolds is trying for a different, perhaps more mature, reflection. The book has some positives: for example, I like the character progression, which I find an improvement on his earlier works.(less)
"
|
|
|
This is the second time I've met the book, and I enjoyed it more an an audiobook. It's a good romping story, and particularly impressive as a first novel.
But it's imperfect. That none of the (anti-)heroes die, through good fortune, sometimes by absol...more
This is the second time I've met the book, and I enjoyed it more an an audiobook. It's a good romping story, and particularly impressive as a first novel.
But it's imperfect. That none of the (anti-)heroes die, through good fortune, sometimes by absolutely ridiculous good fortune, and that most of the baddies die, through misfortune, is a distinct negative. If the storyline is going to depend on luck, which, actually, it doesn't, then please please don't make it quite so one-sided.
The other weakness is the setting. It's light huggers, immense slower-than-light starships, wandering the stars. But the society doesn't feel at all original, everything feels like another paranoia place, admittedly a well developed one. It's the wild east, the Russian version of the wild west, right down to the revolutions. As I said, it's well-developed, but I feel I've read much the same thing in so many other books before.
On the other hand, there's some fun technologies, and there's some immensely fun physics. The book contains some original fantasy science, which is nice. Also, so far as I can tell from my position of ignorance, it does conform to the universe as understood in our times --- hence no faster-than-light drive. And the starring star-ship, Nostalgia for Infinity, is the scifi teenager's wet dream substitute for the boring boy's fast car. I want, I want, I want ... :-)
The characters, well, I do feel for them, and I very much enjoyed their story, but I did get hacked off with the good luck, especially at the end. The fairy waved her magic wand, and they all lived happily ever after ... .
Definitely worth a read, but it's good pub grub, not a Michelin restaurant.(less)
|
|
|
I've just read David Brin's Uplift trilogy.
There are adventures that involved me, had me rooting for the heroes and wishing ill for the enemies. They're three good independent stories that are worth the read just for that.
But I want to comment on oth...more
I've just read David Brin's Uplift trilogy.
There are adventures that involved me, had me rooting for the heroes and wishing ill for the enemies. They're three good independent stories that are worth the read just for that.
But I want to comment on other matters, as usual. There's somethings about his world that need special mention. So this is the spoiler warning.
A couple of minor points first. Unfortunately, the old whore magic of Psi is important in the story. Yes, reading novels is about wish fulfillment, but I don't like Psi. It's not creative wish fulfillment, it's the lazy get out of jail free fantasy of a child's "I wish". Having said that, it was also pretty standard in scifi for quite a long period, so Brin's usage isn't something uniquely bad.
Brin also has the misfortunate of old scifi difficulty: the future comes along and wrecks a part of his story. This can't be helped. If your plot needs someone in the future to be unable to find a camera, if your plot needs people to have to find wall phones to communicate with others, you story is going to be bolloxed when the future invents smart phones. The solution lies with the reader, who must suspect another reality, and go back to the day when 'advanced communications technologies' had yet to cede to creative engineering.
No, I'm far more concerned about a couple of other matters in this book. It's too common major flaw is yet more story of plucky superhero humans overcoming incredible odds to bloody the nose of ultra-powerful aliens. Yes, there is something in the story that makes that plausible: the aliens depend on their technobible for everything, and have become stuffy and uninventive, presumptive and arrogant. Yes, the fall is due, yes, they fall, but it's the same plot and atmosphere in many scifi stories, and it's got to be dull.
Too much of the story's movements aren't plucky humans, or preprogrammed aliens, it's luck. Too much of the plot turns on good fortune. Well, that's how it seems to me: it's quite possible I've missed some subtle depth. What's worse, though, is that far far too much of the story is super-human smugness, and it gets on my tits. I'll give Brin, he's got a character that takes the piss out of this, but all the same ... .
Actually, there's so much luck in the trilogy that I suspect there's actually an unseen hand, something that was perhaps going to be revealed in another novel that hasn't been produced. The uplift universe is full of aliens whose cultural history goes back a very long way. Their universe irregularly gets stuffy and then gets kicked up the arse: this time its the humans doing the rear rearranging. But the human success depends so much on luck ... are this universe's mythical old progenitors really still around, perhaps using the humans to do some universe shaking? There are a lot of unanswered questions that would be answered by that.
The problem with that is the core of the tales are always the plucky earth underdogs doing incredible things. The stories would be rather wrecked if it turned out in the unwritten novel that the underdogs were really overdogs, and their stunning plucky victories were inevitable. I can well see why such a story would be a problem. It could only work if the humans turned bad, or maybe the invisible hand turned bad, but divided, and a small "good" faction were able to guide all the other goodies into underdog victory. Not that it matters, David Brin writes his novels, not me, so I'm talking crap.
But, you see, that illustrates one of the strengths of this series: I WANT MORE. Go read the novels, go enjoy them.(less)
|
|
|
|
See my review of the Uplift War.
|
|
|
|
See my review of the Uplift War.
|
|
|
The City & the City
China Miéville
Two cities, intertwined, denying each other. If you see someone in the other city, you unsee them. It’s like, as a guy, I unsee the hotness of the beauty in the office so I can work with her the colleague. But it’...more
The City & the City
China Miéville
Two cities, intertwined, denying each other. If you see someone in the other city, you unsee them. It’s like, as a guy, I unsee the hotness of the beauty in the office so I can work with her the colleague. But it’s not that, it’s more the unseeing the existence of the neighbour’s lover because you know she needs someone to make her happy and never mind she’s married: it’s to unsee so something, someone, doesn’t even exists.
In the City & the City, it’s a cultural unseeing; children are taught not to see across the symbolic crosshatch boundaries, they’re taught not to see people in the other place. People in each community wear a particular style of clothing, walk with a particular gait. Clothing differs by culture, gaits differ by culture, and you learn not to see someone who’s wearing the other style of clothes, who’s walking the other gait. But it’s not mere politeness and tradition: the unseeing is enforced by a bunch of hard, violent, legalistic thugs: if you break the rules badly enough, you disappear. Even coppers. So people conform.
It’s a glorious idea, this setting.
Actually, the different gait thing is one thing I’m not sure of, but the book is too good to allow a doubt like that to get in the way. Hah --- just searched pubmed; gait can change between cultures. Score one more for Miéville.
Is it Belfast in the troubles? Jerusalem, perhaps? Cold war Berlin? Brussels/Brussel/Bruxelles/Brüsel, thirty years forward? Buda and Pest, once, maybe?
This divided city --- no, cities --- isn’t Brussels to be, because the separation is ultimately enforced by fear. If it were Brussels, it’d be enforced by bureaucracy: you’d have to carry the right set of paperwork for where you were, and there’d be too much paperwork to easily carry both sets, never mind that it’d be illegal.
This might be old Berlin, but it isn’t. It could be a Berlin that divided a thousand years ago, and never rejoined. Whatever, the physical setting is brilliant, it’s essential, but it’s not what separates. That is the people. They separate themselves. The fear, that just reinforces.
The lines between the cities are, most of the time, just marks on the ground. No huge wall, like Berlin or Belfast. Not the river, like Buda and Pest. Just municipal boundaries. Arcane, knotty, winding between houses, looping round streets, these are slowly changing municipal boundaries. They’re as knotty and as ungeographic as the border between the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which carefully ignores the fact the border river was straightened because detested occupiers did the straightening. Did I mention these two cities are city states, two tiny countries, a schizophrenia of Singapores, somewhere in the cultural soil between Europe and Arabia? If I were to guess a physical setting for this novel, I’d guess Jugoslavia. Or maybe Rumania. But it’s not a specific place, it’s quite deliberately not that, it’s an imagined reality. Perhaps the two cities are Slavic and Ottoman? The history’s not explained, rightly not explained, even though archeology is the setting for the victims’ lives.
Sometimes, sometimes, both ignoring cities really do share the same central street, really do have inhabitants of each sharing the same road, the same pavement, the same mist. Everyone carefully unsees. But you get out of their way when they come rushing through, step over the drunk as if he doesn't exist rather than step over the drunk as if he doesn't exist.
Miéville has written a very tight novel. Hardly anything is mentioned that doesn’t have a purpose. The separation between city and city is very cleverly dealt with: it’s hinted, it’s mentioned by small spikes of atmosphere, hardly more than phrases at the beginning. The reader is encouraged to imagine. This is very well done, because a lot of the awkward questions about the practical are carefully left unaddressed, but you don’t see them, and if you do it’s for you to answer. But, don’t get me wrong, Miéville has examined the split in some depth, it’s at the heart of the plot, as you might expect. But no more than necessary. As I said, it’s very well done.
The core characters are the police & the victims. There are no others. Of all settings I’ve come across, this is one that absolutely begs for character tales: no plot, just people living their lives, their odd lives in their odd cities. The lead is a policeman, a too dedicated to his job policeman, out to find a revenging justice for the victim. He’s hugely motivated by his sense of revenge.
But I want more. I want those characters pottering around the edges, because the edges are superbly strange. The setting has something of the flicker of a fire.
A young woman is found murdered. But this is no ordinary murder case. You’ll have read many a book cover with a blurb starting with those two sentences, so you can read the rest of it without me bothering to write it. Yup, the plot requirement of murder mysteries seems to require tensioning up the racket, and in that respect this book is very traditional. It’s well plotted, I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to suggest the murder gets solved. It’s Agatha Christie with slavic spunk. The characters are believable, perfectly fit to purpose, painted rather well. There does seem to be a bit of an influence of Inspector Morse, which I always ultimately had a problem with because, really, colleges are collegial, not murderous, that’s for crows. So what.
No, it’s not the plot or the characters that make this book stand out, as good as they are, it’s the setting. The two cities, and the way the peoples of the two cities behave to preserve their separation.
The City and the City by China Miéville. Wow. Miéville is the master of the city. His Perdido Street Station rang true to the mother whore, London. This book is urban noir, an old form renewed. I’m going to reread it, right now.(less)
|
|
|
The fundamental theme behind David Brin’s various Uplift series of novels makes me feel uncomfortable. But that’s a good thing; one of the strengths of science fiction is that it can be used to explore uncomfortable themes without the associated cult...more
The fundamental theme behind David Brin’s various Uplift series of novels makes me feel uncomfortable. But that’s a good thing; one of the strengths of science fiction is that it can be used to explore uncomfortable themes without the associated cultural baggage.
The Uplift series explores race and racism without obvious reference to the terrible history of the first half of the 20th century. This allows Brin to consider this deeply disturbing subject without the baggage of antisemitism, or other living anti–X cowardices which so poison the question of race in the modern world. He can look at the core principles of race and racism and explore their core characteristics, exposing the unavoidable genocidal characteristic underlying the attitude, without invoking the clouds of violent passion caused by recent and contemporary world history. Those clouds? So many governments stoke fear of foreigners to keep their population distracted from the real cause of their problems, those very governments.
In the Uplift universe, intelligent species are almost always “uplifted” by others, changed from dumb animal to intelligent animal by another species’ biotechnical intervention. But the newly uplifted species remain in the debt of the uplifters, and that species that has to pay off the debt. Individuals do not matter a hoot; your fate is determined by your choice of parents. Race is at the core of the culture of the five galaxies.
One thing that isn’t explored is the difference between race and nation, something particularly relevent in our contemporary world. In these novels, species is race is nation. It’s a pity, but there’s a lot to chew over in any case.
Brightness Reef is set on an isolated planet, Jijo, in a galaxy left fallow for wildlife to recover and develop new candidate species for uplift to appear. Renegades and criminals from varies species, “sooners”, have arrived to illegally settle Jijo. Different species arrive at different points, and fall into racist war with each other. But after the last species, humans, arrive, and after more wars, a “commons” is established in which the various species live together, in a tense peace, in service to their common religion & planet, not their species. This is something of a cross between an American experience (lots of different peoples arriving from outside and coming together to create a new society) and the European experience (lots of warring tribes exhausted by total war and working together instead). Underlying the commons is the uniting religion: each species has given up their advance technology so they can devolve back to animal status, so future aliens can uplift them again, having lost the sins / debts that currently stain their species. At least, that’s the religious ideal.
Then along come a bunch of starfaring aliens, with their starfaring technology, to stir things up. These are criminals, not here to join the devolution, but to steal biological material for illegal projects. Unfortunately, these criminals need to cover their tracks by eradicating the existing population. They try to go about this by creating false divisions between the peoples of Brightness Reef. These false divisions invoke false fears that sound much like the false fears raised by nationalists and racists in the modern media. Brightness Reef is relevent.
These criminals are human and Rothen, who claim to be the species who uplifted humans. What interests me in particular is that the Rothen are presented in the same way as racists present “aliens within”, and that presentation isn’t questioned. The Rothan, here, are the jews of the uplift universe (or should we say muslims now?), and that’s one thing that makes me particularly uncomfortable about this novel. But it’s sci–fi, it’s exploring these themes, it’s bringing the attitude to attention without the usual baggage. This is interesting indeed. That the “jews” are the ones sowing the fears reveals the underlying truth: using the race card is all about gaining, using and abusing power, dividing your perceived enemies, making them fall. The divisions are fake. The people you are encouraged to hate are your natural allies; the real enemies are those wanting you to hate.
The adventure is good and told well, with many characters taking their part in its progress. There’s much jumping between characters, but the tales are all pretty much contemporary to each other, and they’re not difficult to follow.
The different races are physically different. I enjoyed imagining their physical experiences, there are some deliciously inventive ideas in here. However, the psychological difference is much smaller: a matter of timbre, not depth. This disappoints me, as always: it’s so rare to see genuinely different ways of thinking in sci–fi, unfortunately. Even so, relative to too many novels, they’re inventive and enjoyably different aliens.
A key character is a man who’s undergone a very serious head injury, losing his ability to speak. His stark injury is dealt with interestingly and sympatheticly. He needs to be mentioned, but I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about such injuries to know whether his protrayal is accurate. However, his pyschological experience is stranger than those of the alien characters. I think this reinforces my opinion of the weakness of the psychology of the aliens.
One of my favourite characters is a young “hoon” who has the good taste to be very fond of 19th and 20th century anglophone literature. He calls himself after Alvin, from Clarke’s The City and the Stars. His friend calls herself Huck, and her name gives a taste of their particular adventure. But I have to thank Alvin for his description of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a description of the novel that describes what I love to find in poetry.
Brightness Reef is not a standalone novel; unless you don’t mind some seriously unanswered questions. It is well written, adventurous, ambitious, tight and with enough depth to entertain most people well. I certainly enjoyed listening to George Wilson’s narration, and found it good. I will follow up with the other books in the trilogy when I can. This book’s worth an exploration.(less)
|
|
|
The language in this book is so appalling I found the thing impossible to read.
Most people, when they buy a cliché dictionary, use it to find annoying phrases to avoid. Mr. Cobley seems to have used one as a resource. Let me give you an idea of just...more
The language in this book is so appalling I found the thing impossible to read.
Most people, when they buy a cliché dictionary, use it to find annoying phrases to avoid. Mr. Cobley seems to have used one as a resource. Let me give you an idea of just how awful the thing is ... here are clichés from the preface:
- In the title, "has gone before"
- "ruthless ... enemy"
- "far away star system"
- "fertile ... world"
- "swathed in ... forest"
- "ancient secrets"
And that's just the first paragraph. Seriously, the first paragraph! There are so many clichés here that he's achieved cliché meltdown: I really, genuinely, cannot read this book. I don't know if this guy is deeply lazy or deliberately being irritating by writing so badly. Whatever, it's impossible to see the story through the awful awful language. This is Douglas Adams' "small lump of green putty found under my armpit one morning".
I reckon he's trying to copy the style of early pulp science fiction, but he's not realised that, then, the language may have been rushed and thrown out of a typewriter like smoke from a wheelspin (see, copies are horrible, aren't they), but the atmosphere of that time made the language fresh and exciting, then. Emphasis on the then. But it's been copied, copied, copied, so much so that now it's bloody irritating. It's descended to deepest cliché: any writer who knows anything about his tradecraft should know how clichés build: they're once exciting phrases that have grown tired, so tired they've fekkin' annoying. It's why you have to be wary when reading Fleming: Bond's not written in clichés, they're the utterly copied originals. The same goes for pulp sci-fi, except that was never quality writing in the first place.
I should never have bought this book; I was in Foyles at St Pancakes with not much time. It's the second book in a series, and I bought the original because Iain M Banks recommended it, according to the cover. Don't touch it; don't for a moment presume this book has anything like the quality of Banks' works. I haven't got a clue why he recommended it. I tried to read that first book, but the language so irritated me that I ended up skimming it just to sneer and giggle at all the fekkin' clichés this desperately lazy writer invoked. The plot is clichéd too, as I remember, but nothing like in as appalling a way as the language: with non-annoying language it might have earned 2 point something stars.
Now, of course, the guy might be using dire language deliberately. He might so hate his readers he wants to annoy them intensely by pelting them with stuff he's grabbed out of his grandmother's toilet. Well, sod that, he can bugger off. The language is so awful that this series, so far, is the worst I'm come across in 40 years of reading SciFi.(less)
|
Haze
by
L.E. Modesitt Jr. (Goodreads Author)
|
|
This isn't so much a review as an unstructured reaction to
Modesit's Haze.
I enjoy Modesit's love of the details of doing work. He could make
reading about mopping a floor enjoyable ... "Michael put the
mop in the bucket, allowing the warm water with the...more
This isn't so much a review as an unstructured reaction to
Modesit's Haze.
I enjoy Modesit's love of the details of doing work. He could make
reading about mopping a floor enjoyable ... "Michael put the
mop in the bucket, allowing the warm water with the crude odour of
pine to be absorbed by the mop, and squeezed the mop in the
bucket tray to remove the excess liquid. He put the mop on the floor. The
floor was shaded by the day's dirt of staff walking between offices,
& the dust that had settled out of the night's still air. He swung
the mop from left to right, a scythe, three times, four times, leaving
arcs of clean damp where the mop had taken the dust. He put the mop back
in the bucket, soaking and squeezing it to remove the dirt, before
cleaning the next section of floor. The corners were stubbed, extra
attention was paid to a particular piece of stubborn dirt, then the floor
was clear. Michael gathered the bucket, and left the fresher floor for the uncaring attention of another day's shoes."
That's not from Modesit. It's what I didn't really find
in this book. I listened to "Haze" as an audio book, rather
than reading the tree leaves. And I missed those working patterns. But, you see, it could be the format, I'm new to it, and it might not bring
so much to my attention that style of writing---but I think not.
Having said that, the descriptions of simple actions are still in the
book, and still enjoyable; there's just not enough of them.
Much is set on the far future earth, a far future earth with working
practices of today's earth. There hasn't been much progress. But this is a key part of the story: most of the rest of the tale takes place on Haze, a future world which has developed. Mysteriously, Haze is the United States upgraded, whereas Earth is inherited by the nasty communists. The book still echoes the propaganda of the cold war, except this time the nasty nasty reds are the Federation --- no, not that one, but a Chinese Federation. I do wish he'd drop the United States nationalism: it's like believing your wife is a goddess to be polished once a day rather than a flawed woman to be loved. Sex is much more fun, and productive, than cleaning something so obsessively it blinds you.
The story: yawn militarism. Oh, it worked, it carried me, and Modesit had
the decency to have the hero question all the deaths, question the social
order that hosts then, and carry on regardless, pretty much. But the
militarism is back to the US obsession with nasty nasty foreigners, who
ultimately fail because they don't have the good fortune to be born ... gosh ... truly American. It's either ironic or politically simplistic. It's certainly culturally naïve.
A lot of the story is awe science & technology, which Modesit has the
decency not to flub. His hero is neither a scientist nor an engineer, he
simply observes, and doesn't entirely believe what he sees. He comes from one post-American society, the invaded and occupied America, and is introduced to, and given tours around, another. It's something like a propeller plane pilot being introduced to a TGV, but add a millennium of technological progress without giving up the train sets, if you get the drift.
Yet the new social order of the highly advanced freedom loving America is
actually very Brave New World. This is no police, except for looking after the insane, although there are courts and lawyers. A society that doesn't need policing is a society that doesn't contain ordinary people, with their ordinary arguments, and their ordinary stupidity. The nasty nasty communists do have the police, and the equivalent special forces (indeed, the hero is a special operative), and they're nasty, but not out-of-their-way malicious. There, people can chose to disobey, but if they cause too much bother, or are caught, or both, they get (severely) punished. But they're left alone if they don't upset the social order: the police enforce order, not obedience. On the other hand, in Brave New America, they're not entirely people, so there's no trouble, so there's no need for policing. No drunks. No violence. No stupidity. No family rows. No flawed humanity. Except for the insane. I suspect this is less a nasty comment on Brave New America, more a weakness of nationalist idealism, or perhaps libertarianism, which is naïvely idealistic about humanity when those humans live in a libertarian society: somehow, libertarianism makes humans lose their animal ancestry. That's why I find the supposedly ideal libertarian society to be no such thing. You can see the rain on the road to fascism shining in this gleaming innocence.
This book certainly has more depth than many. The author has clearly added some puzzles I didn't bother to work out; some of the characters say so at the end. But it has some very ordinary American nationalism flaws, a political crudity that lets it down --- unless that really is irony peeking his sharp nose out from under nationalism's bedsheets?
If you're a Modesit fan, it's worth seeking out. Otherwise, if you come across it, grab it, you'll enjoy it. But is it worth a special search? Probably not.(less)
|
Sign in with Facebook
to:
to:
to:
to:
