"I haven't read Les Mis, actually. (sheepish grin)
Thanks
-JRS
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Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an interesting study in contrasts. There's a lot to love about this book, and I entirely understand all the enthusiasm for it. The mystery is well played, convincingly revealed slowly and puzzlingly, and has a really we...more
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an interesting study in contrasts. There's a lot to love about this book, and I entirely understand all the enthusiasm for it. The mystery is well played, convincingly revealed slowly and puzzlingly, and has a really well written villain. (Serial killers are tough to do well, and Larsson does it well.)
The eponymous character, Salander, is a fascinating study of a survivor, someone who has been through really hellish circumstances and made it out the other side. She's warped and distorted, brilliant and dysfunctional, and a well realized character. She is also a datajack and some elective prosthetics short of being an exceptionally well done cyberpunk hero, and functions quite well in Larsson's modern, affluent Sweden.
Likewise, the Vanger family is interesting in a 19th century family novel sort of way, learning all the eccentricities of this bunch of fairly strange, wealthy industrialists who have sequestered themselves on an island. The opening premise, too, is interesting. In 1966, a 16 year old girl went missing from the island, and would Blomkvist, a recently discredited investigative journalist, be willing to trawl through the family history and see if he can turn up some clues for the obsessed, eldery, and rich family patriarch.
There's also a lot to dislike about this book. The actual main character, Blomkvist, a fairly obvious self-insertion for Larsson himself. He's a writer for a magazine that specializes in exposing crooks among the rich and powerful, a short stretch for Larsson who made his living, according to Wikipedia, documenting and exposing Swedish extreme right and racist organizations, and being under threat of violence from them. (He wrote the books for pleasure.) Blomkvist is something over 40, and a deeply methodical investigator, and frankly is not that interesting a human being. And yet, for reasons never really explained, virtually every female (and one male, apparently) in the story wants to sleep with him. I didn't buy his attractiveness, I didn't buy Salander's acceptance of him into her life, nor her initial attraction to him (though the evolution of that attraction is one of the strengths of the book.) There's just an awful lot of "Well ok then." problem solving that Blomkvist accomplishes merely by being a decent human being.
The book also has two other problems. First, English isn't its natural language. While the translator has done a reasonable job making the book /readable/, the structure, pacing, and style are clearly not how novels are ordinarily written in English. There is a /bucket/ of exposition, in fact, the first third of the novel is exposition of the Vanger family's extended history, who they are, what they do, how many of them were old school Nazis, and so forth and so on. Larsson may have been writing for pleasure, but clearly his work played into it, and by God he's going to tell you about it. The streak of Nazism running through the Vanger family is interesting culturally, but all the exposition is deadly boring, and I put the book down for months when I bogged down in that part back in July. I imagine that in Sweden, this is how novels are told, and as a reader of novels, I would have expected it. As an American reader slogging through the English translation, it made for tough going. Ultimately I skimmed ahead about 40 pages until some of the things I read about in the online summaries started happening, and the novel picked up there.
The second problem is closely related to the first. Larsson /died/ after submitting the manuscripts, giving him what amounts to an instant case of McCaffrey-Heinlein syndrome, where nobody's willing to cut one word of what was written. (Both McCaffrey and Heinlein had this while they were alive, as a result of their well-deserved fame.) Really good books are born in the editing.
This could have been a really good book. It has strong characters (especially Salander) and is a clever, engrossing mystery, but the telling of the story, between the cultural gulf and the lack of editing, requires a lot of endurance.(less)
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On the Bottom
by
Edward Ellsberg
recommended for:
Science fiction and nautical fans
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
click here.
Personal history aside, this is an excellent book. If you want a manual on how to tell a technologically complex tale, Ellsberg does it. He brings you the cast of characters, almost all men, who were there, who made the story happen. He gives one chapter of the physics of deep sea diving (as it was in 1925) so the reader knows what he's talking about later when "The Bends" comes up. But the focus is always on the human story. The hopes and fears, the resolve, the mental toughness that drove him and his men to push the technology of the day and raise the submarine, despite conventional wisdom being against them. When they suffer a catastrophic setback close to the end of raising the sub, you feel it with them. When they finally get the thing above the waves, you cheer with them, only to endure the nail biting tow home.
I especially like the Flat Hammock Press hardbound edition of this book: ISBN-13: 978-0971830301. This edition, published in 2003, has afterwords and appendicies that give the reader more context, spell out the histories of all the ships in the story, and give some brief biographical information on Ellsberg himself, as well as some of the more famous people he worked with at the time. It also contains a DVD of newsreel footage shot at the time. (1925 - don't be surprised that there's no soundtrack. Widespread commercial adoption of movies with sound didn't happen until 1927 with Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer). Some of them do have an audio track of Ellsberg narrating them much later.
Summary: A book that's personally important to me, and also just a darn good book. Highly recommended.(less)
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Full Disclosure: I /wrote/ the On Gossamer Wings side of this book, and I was probably no more than the third person to read Drumlin Circus, after Jeff himself, and probably his wife. So I'm not a disinterested party here.
That said, let me talk abou...more
Full Disclosure: I /wrote/ the On Gossamer Wings side of this book, and I was probably no more than the third person to read Drumlin Circus, after Jeff himself, and probably his wife. So I'm not a disinterested party here.
That said, let me talk about Drumlin Circus first. Jeff writes a /tight/ short novel. From the opening fanfare when Simon Kassel is first noticing something odd in the bleachers to the end when, well, everything disintegrates into total, entertaining mayhem, the pacing is tight, the dialogue is snappy, the people interesting, and the ideas. Good heavens the ideas. I'm intimately acquainted with this universe, so it takes me a moment to step back and boggle at the sheer volume of ideas. A blown FTL jump leaves colonists on a completely unknown world on the wrong side of the galaxy. There are machines there that can, if you know a drum pattern to give them, make pretty much anything. And everyone has an agenda, from the Institute to the Grange, to the Tears, to the Circus, to the very things the thingmakers make. Truly boggling, and Jeff pulls it off with aplomb. In the past, I've said Jeff writes old school science fiction, and while I meant that as a compliment, I have to say he pulls off new school just as well. I liked Kassel. I liked Lizzie, the Tear witch who is his on-again off-again girlfriend.I liked her boss, the Mother Exalted. More than that, I felt like i knew them, and I kept wanting to give them faces of people I knew because Jeff has fleshed them out as people so very well. And far from the utopia a planet with mild weather, low population, and replicators seems like it ought to be, Valinor (the Drumlin World) seethes with conflict, as people pursue, contest, and fight over different visions for the future of humanity there. Even if I didn't have a stake in this book. Even if I didn't have a novella of my own on the back side of this book, I'd recommend it highly on the strength of Drumlin Circus alone.
On Gossamer Wings, like I said, is my story, so I can talk a little more freely about its creation. Jeff invited me to write in his world several years ago. It wasn't until the idea for On Gossamer Wings popped into my head, nearly full fledged, and wanted a world where flight did not exist, and where Natalie could invent it without also being a machinist genius and a materials science genius, and frankly more geniuses stacked up than were really believable. The story idea /begged/ to be in Jeff's world. Rural? I can do that. Late 19th century technology? I can do that, albeit with much research. (For pete's sake, I had to research /underwear/ to finish that story. Think about it. Elastic is 20th century science.) Tragic story? That's what I had in mind. And as I sat down to write the first few lines, I thought, "Channel Steinbeck. It's that kind of story." I think it worked quite well. The most challenging parts were Natalie's lines and the ending. Natalie doesn't /speak/. She doesn't have human language at all, really. Working up all the gestures for when she was communicating with someone else and then describing them clearly but without repeating myself was tricky. And the ending, of course, was hard to write. By the end of the story, I /liked/ Natalie. I wanted so badly for her to succeed and live happily ever after. But the story needed, with equal urgency, a different ending than that. An ending nobody wanted, but that every step along the way of the story led to, one link in the chain after the other.
About the book format: This book, like the old Ace Doubles before it, has two stores. Drumlin Circus begins with the front cover - the one without the barcode - and runs to the middle of the book. Flip it over to the back - note the barcode hiding in the cover art - and you'll see completely different cover art, and the /front/ of the second story, On Gossamer Wings, is there. Because English is read left to right, with the book "upside down," the second story is rightside up and reads normally, ending in the middle. The ebook is more conventional, mostly because when we built it, there was no nice way that was well supported by ereaders to give access from the "cover" of the ebook to any particular page inside. So the ebook version is much more like a normal anthology, with only two stories, and combined cover art.
-JRS(less)
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James
is now following Jeff Duntemann's reviews
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I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. It's a good story, sure, and it has some very interesting ideas and it delves deeply into the concept of emergence, which is fascinating, but I remember feeling at the time that while Li is present in...more
I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. It's a good story, sure, and it has some very interesting ideas and it delves deeply into the concept of emergence, which is fascinating, but I remember feeling at the time that while Li is present in the story, it's almost a cameo role compared to Cohen (the AI) and Arkady. The problem is that Li is also the most interesting character in the story, and as she sleepwalks through this novel, we sleepwalk with her.
Aside from this fairly serious problem, it's a good, if not extraordinary conspiracy thriller set in Moriarty's usual, brilliantly conceived and executed world. Moriarty's politics and conspiracies make sense if one pays careful attention to all the details and thinks them through.
I give it a 3, though now that I've reviewed it and glanced over some summaries to refresh my memory, I may have to go back and re-read it, and I may change my mind.
-JRS(less)
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I'm one of those people who re-reads books. I re-read this one a few weeks ago, and it was as good as I remembered. Back around the time this book was new, I'd had my appetite for cyberpunk re-whetted by Richard K. Morgan, and was looking around for...more
I'm one of those people who re-reads books. I re-read this one a few weeks ago, and it was as good as I remembered. Back around the time this book was new, I'd had my appetite for cyberpunk re-whetted by Richard K. Morgan, and was looking around for other good authors in the genre to read. Moriarty did not disappoint. And all these years later, on rereading? I was still awake half the night just digesting all the /ideas/ Moriarty filled this world with. If you want a book with an astonishing amount of science and wow factor built in, Spin State is a good choice.
Which brings me to a second point. In Cyberpunk/Future Noir, writers tend to want to balance the overwhelming technology both inside their protagonists and out with something more human. Gibson's spacefaring Rastas are a fine (though not especially successful) example of this. Moriarty's approach was to assert that Bose-Einstein condensates - quantum-paired materials that permit quantum teleportation, and which are the backbone of her universe's economy - occur on one colony world, nestled in coal seams. The colony is a company town, and the mining is human-intensive, backbreaking coal mining. More importantly, the coal mine, the occurrence of the Bose-Einstein condensates in it, and the very human process of mining it are all integral to the plot.
Where the book fails (and it's a small failure, for which I'm docking only one star) is in trying to cram too many interesting ideas into one story. In addition to all the interesting things about Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum teleportation, coal mining, and politics, Li, the main character, is a posthuman. She's genetically engineered and hiding it, and she's a cyborg, and she's in an on-again off-again love affair with an AI. All her quantum teleportations have begun erasing her memory, which she has to restore from backups which, in turn, have been edited by the security agency she works for. It's a lot to digest all at once, and while Moriarty manages to keep Li human enough to identify with, and to move the story along, there were times when some pruning of the tree of ideas in this story might have streamlined things, and allowed Li to breathe a bit better as a character.
Or maybe I'm just jealous of the sheer smarts of this book.
Anyway, a fine read, and I'm pleased to say that Moriarty has two new books in the pipeline - a third in the Spin State series, and a fantasy book - which I'm looking forward to reading.
One other thing. Read Chris Moriarty's website(s). If you write, read her advice to writers. I recall one of her articles where she mentioned that in the process of writing /Spin State/, she realized halfway through that she was writing a spy story, so she went back to one of her favorite Le Carre books (I think it was /The Spy who Came In from the Cold/), and tore the story apart, took notes, until she understood exactly how Le Carre's first big hit really worked as a story. She then put those tools to work finishing /Spin State/, powering through the point at which she'd been stuck. This sound advice (and Le Carre's /The Looking Glass War/) served me well on my second novel.
-JRS(less)
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James
is now following Chris Moriarty's reviews
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2007
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Q&A with Rowena Cherry
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James, your books look awesome. Can't wait to read them, but you know how high that TBR stack can get. Thanks for adding me. Karen
Hello, James,
