Weasel Words

June 26, 2009

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is the single worst piece of SF I’ve ever read. Arguably, it may be the single worst book I’ve ever read, taking the hotly contested lead from Shadowdale, a piece of D&D fiction written by a literal committee of RPG designers. But whether or not it wins that competition, there’s no way around the inarguable fact that it is a terrible, awful, no-good book. You should not read it, under any circumstances.

“But Mike,” you might protest, “it’s chock full of laudatory dustjacket quotes from all sorts of famous people whose books I like! Can they really be that wrong?” Yes, it turns out. Yes, they can. I trusted those people, too, but I was let down by all of them. And I think I’ve figured out why those people gave such horribly mistaken endorsements.

Because, see, the single worst feature of Little Brother is that it is unrelentingly didactic. It is lecture after goddamn lecture. Social networking! Public key crypto! Why hippies were good people! Why you can’t trust the government’s security measures! Why open source is good! And all in the anvilicious tone you’d expect from a Chick tract, with cartoonish bad characters there to serve as a foil for the main character’s awesome righteousness.

So let’s say you are an aging liberal, maybe a hippie yourself, or someone who wishes they’d been old enough to be a hippie. You are strongly in favor of all this stuff that Doctorow is preaching. You are, in fact, the choir. If the book were just aimed at you, you’d maybe applaud it, but sort of reluctantly admit that it’s actually a bit horrid. But it’s not aimed at you. Doctorow cleverly put a YA label on this thing, so it is aimed at kids.

Well, kids. Now that’s different. You figure that kids are none too bright, and they need this sort of unsubtle, over-obvious pounding in of messages. So it’s good broccoli for them. Of course, you don’t think it’s broccoli, you think that this message of subversion and hipster-techno-hippie attitude is going to be fun and cool for them. But whatever, you figure it’s something they need to read, so you give it a blurb so that libraries will dutifully stock it as a worthy piece of fiction for yutes. (Who will not read it, because this book has nothing in it to appeal to anyone of any age, and kids are not really attracted to adult glorification of youthful rebellion, particularly when the youths in this book ring so very, very false.)

Yes, my theory here involves everyone who praised this book having nothing but contempt or condescension for its audience. This is the most charitable reading I can come up with, because the alternative is simply that the people who praised it have inexplicably terrible taste in at least this instance, and actually liked this steaming shitpile of a book.

So anyway, if you’re a fan of Doctorow’s standard SFnal setting of “Slashdot, circa 1998”, enjoy heavy-handed preaching, really want to picture Cory Doctorow writing a scene about pawing a teenage girl’s breasts, and/or have been waiting for fiction that will talk at some length about vampire LARPing, well, this is the book for you!

If, however, you are sane, you should stay far, far away. Do not be swayed by the disingenuous praise for this book, because it is all lies. Do not be swayed by the fact that it’s been nominated for a Hugo, because that did not actually happen, I choose to believe. Just do not read this book.

And now, just in case you’re thinking of reading it anyway, I will present you with the opening, as a final warning:

I’m a senior at Cesar Chavez High in San Francisco’s sunny Mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced “Winston.”

Not pronounced “Double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn”. unless you’re a clueless disciplinary officer who’s far enough behind the curve that you still call the Internet “the information superhighway.”

And it gets worse. Much, much worse.

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June 26, 2009

So for the last fifteen years or so, I’ve had a list of books I mean to read right this minute, any day now. And on that list has long been William Gibson’s Neuromancer . So many times I’ve picked it up, fully intending to read it. I’ve even packed it on vacation every year for the last five. But now I’ve finally read it.

And it’s pretty darn good. Obviously, this is one of the defining works of cyberpunk, inventing a bunch of the stuff that we take for granted today, and even the word “cyberspace.” And it was written in 1984, the same year the IBM AT, with its 80286 processor was introduced, and a year after the Delphi dialup service (which wouldn’t have anything to do with the internet for another eight years) was launched. So there was a possibility that it’d feel dated.

But, amazingly, it didn’t. I mean, okay, 3D interfaces sound a little retro Second-Lifey at this point, but this feels a lot like a novel that could have been written this year. It’s less dated than Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (which feels very like the Internet of the mid-90s) or anything by Cory Doctorow (which is usually dated by the time it’s published). In fact, the only thing that felt dated in the book was the orbital space stations. AIs and computer networks, sure, those are expected in modern SF; but space stations? What kind of retro-Golden Age fluff is that? There’s no room for space stations in realist near-future SF.

Timelessness aside, in 2009 this is merely a very good book. Gibson is a very good writer, and everything about the book is very competently done, but from the vantage point of today, it’s all very familiar. Megacorporations controlling everything, down on their luck technocowboys, ninja ladies with mirrorshades and leather, cyberspace, it’s all just the common furniture of the genre. You’ve seen it in a bunch of movies (most notably The Matrix, which owes about eighteen kinds of debt to Gibson), you’ve read it in dozens of novels, including ones like Snow Crash that are responding in a near-parodic fashion to Neuromancer, and it’s just hard to be blown away by it when it’s all so familiar.

Still, it’s not that hard to imagine what this would have been like when it was released 25 years ago, and it would have been motherfucking mindblowing. It won all the major awards, and there’s no question it deserved them. If it suffers from Citizen Kane-itis today, a victim of its own massive success and ongoing influence, well, so it does. But this is one of the foundational novels of SF, and you need to read it for that reason alone; that it’s also enjoyable even on contemporary terms is a nice plus.

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June 26, 2009

It occurs to me that I forgot all about John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue . I’d previously read his The Power of Babel and found it excellent, so was very interested in this smaller, lighter-looking book.

And light it was. This is basically McWhorter ranting on about how this or that point of disputed linguistic theory is obviously right, and those motherfuckers who disagree with him are goddamn idiots who couldn’t linguize their way through a plate of linguini. He uses many exclamation points — multiple at a time in places — and you can practically hear him slam down his fist every time he writes “Period.”

The overall effect is that of sitting at a hotel bar when a linguistics convention is in town, and listening to the most entertaining drunk you’ve ever sat next to. It’s not a deep or serious book, and I’d recommend McWhorter’s other book first, but this is a light bit of enjoyable fluff.

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June 25, 2009

So after finishing the big ol’ book of musical history, I was filled with a desire to re-read Dave Duncan’s “A Man of His Word” series (Magic Casement, Perilous Seas, Faery Lands Forlorn, and Emperor and Clown). I was a bit nervous about it, because this was one of my favorite series when I was junior high — the same time I was reading, and loving, David Eddings and R.A. Salvatore and the like — and while I knew that recent Duncan was good enough for adult scrutiny, I was a bit afraid that these wouldn’t be as good as I remembered.

Happily, my fear was groundless, because these books are great. They remain immensely fun adventures, with characters I love, and world-building and magic systems that are still fresh and interesting. In fact, they were so compelling that I immediately did something I didn’t mean to do, and jumped right into Dave Duncan’s “A Handful of Men” (The Cutting Edge, Upland Outlaws, The Stricken Field, and The Living God).

Reading all eight of these books in a gulp, I was impressed again at Duncan’s range. Because while “A Handful of Men” is a sequel to “A Man of His Word”, it’s a very, very different series. This isn’t some Mallorean-like thing, where he just re-wrote the first series.

Fundamentally, “A Man of His Word” is a coming of age story, and focuses on two teenage protagonists becoming adults. The story is about their personal journeys and growth, and is told in a high-energy teenage voice. But “A Handful of Men” is about a period of historical turmoil and epic happenings in the world. Its protagonists are primarily mature characters who know their place in the world, and its voice is more assured and relaxed even as the scope of events is ratcheted up in importance. That Duncan was able to write books that felt so different while featuring the same world and characters is a heck of an accomplishment.

So the books definitely live up to the quality standards I expect of my reading these days. What about the things that I didn’t pay attention to back then, like sexism and racism?

On the sexism front, well, these are set in an objectively sexist world — one of the main plot drivers of the first series is whether people will accept a queen regnant — but they’re not sexist books. The female protagonists in the books are strong characters (and at one point, two of them even have a discussion about the unfair sexism of their world — not in a didactic way, but in the way that a strong young woman who’d grown up in relative isolation might, when she encounters the unpleasant realities of a sexist society). They pass my test of okayness, and will probably pass yours, unless you demand gender-equal utopias in all fantasy.

On the racism front, it’s more complicated. For the most part, the biggest sin the books commit is racial essentialism — members of this race really are different than members of that race. Personally, I forgive it by thinking that it’s doing to David Eddings’ books what Jo Walton’s Tooth and Claw did to Trollope — asking, “If people were really as described in this book, what would that mean?” and coming to the conclusion, “It’d mean they were fantasy creatures.” Because Eddings’ “national character” bits, where everyone from a country has the same personality traits, makes no sense at all. But saying that djinns tend to be proud, and goblins savage, well, okay, I can go with that.

That said, there’s an unfortunate bit in the last couple of books where a previously off-screen race (anthropophagi) turn out to be dark-skinned cannibals with bones through their noses, which is legitimately regrettable. But for the most part, the books are fairly positive on the subject, with elements like a protagonist being portrayed as a decent and admirable person for treating members of despised races (gnomes, who feed on garbage) as worthy of respect and dignity. It’s good enough for me, and certainly better than epic fantasy average.

Anyway, the upshot is, these books that I loved when I was in middle school turn out to be precisely the sort of book that I love now, and I think they’re still among my favorite Dave Duncan books, and consequently among my favorite fantasy novels. If you haven’t read these, they are back in print now (in POD editions, so you probably need to get them from Amazon instead of going to a legacy bookstore), and absolutely worth reading.

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June 25, 2009

I’m almost reluctant to even talk about Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century , which is a history of twentieth century classical music. Because the problem is that the book is excellent in ways I can’t do justice to.

Basically, what Ross does is take you through the history of the twentieth century from a musical perspective. So you start off in cozy, fussy Vienna at the turn of the century; then move to the excitement of Paris in the ‘20s; the jazz age in America; the chaos of the Weimar Republic; the totalitarianism of the Nazis and Stalin; post-WW2 avant garde-ism in all its forms; and finally into the syncretism of the present day.

And as he does this, he’s giving you at once an in-depth, detailed overview of how all this music evolved, how different periods relate to and influenced each other; and a broad cultural history, of the sort that makes twentieth-century history feel vivid and real by capturing the spirit and feel of the times in a way that you can maybe only do by looking at music.

If you have any interest at all in the twentieth century or classical music, you must read this book.

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June 25, 2009

I always hate writing booklog entries for single, isolated books late in serieseses, because the only useful thing there ever is to say about a late series book is how it compares to earlier entries in the series. But in the case of Jim Butcher’s Princeps’ Fury and Turn Coat , I don’t actually remember with any accuracy how they compared. But I’ll take a stab at it anyway.

So, Princeps’ Fury is the latest Codex Alera book, and continues to be compellingly readable fantasy. However, I think there was a major problem with the plotting in this book. Specifically, certain events required one of the protagonists to be “off camera” for a long period of time. You can’t just ignore a major character for a whole book, so Butcher gave him a side plot to deal with.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, except that the sideplot feels both too major (in that, objectively speaking, it’s far more important than the main plot), but also not nearly major enough (in that it doesn’t affect a single character or place we give a damn about), and the end result is very odd. Imagine if The Two Towers saw Merry and Pippin sail off to the west, kill all the Valar in a bloody civil war, and then pop back to Gondor. It’s like that, a weird distraction from less important events.

Still, the book is good, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Turn Coat, well, what’s there to say about it? It’s a Dresden book. The larger story advances in interesting ways, and it’s all full of Dresdeny goodness. I want more, now.

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May 17, 2009

I’ve described myself as a “Dave Duncan fanboy” at least twice on this booklog, and only re-reading some old entries kept me from doing so a third time just now. One of the things I love so much about his work is that he doesn’t repeat himself. While his last series, for instance, was an epic fantasy set on a dodecahedronal world, his latest series — comprising Dave Duncan’s The Alchemist’s Apprentice, The Alchemist’s Code, and The Alchemist’s Pursuit — is a series of mysteries set in a Renaissance Venice with about the amount of magic that Renaissance Venetians would have expected.

The protagonist is the youthful assistant to an aged seer named Nostradamus, who is occasionally called upon by the doge to investigate matters in an unofficial capacity. The resulting stories are some combination of light adventure, fantasy of manners, mystery, and straight historical fiction. It’s an airy and charming combination, and Duncan’s writing is, as ever, propulsive and appealing.

There aren’t a lot of epic fantasists who could so convincingly switch registers to write this sort of thing; it’s a testament to Duncan’s range that you could believe he’d written nothing else, and that he was an Ellis Peters-style writer of period mysteries. And while I’ve always loved, and continue to love, Duncan’s fantasy series, these were delicious enough that I almost wish he was a full-time mystery writer, and that there were a good dozen or so of these. Recommended.

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May 17, 2009

Douglas Adams is, of course, most famous for his Hitchhiker’s Guide books. And like any reasonable geek of a certain age, I read those in middle school about 20-30 times, to the point where I can almost open up to a random spot and start quoting.

But even after all that, I never can keep the rambling plot of the books straight. Which is why it was such a surprise to me to first read Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency back in the day. Because here’s a book whose plot seems at first to be just as shaggy and uncontrolled as that of the Hitchhiker’s Guide... except then it all fits together just so, and it turns out to be one of the most tightly-plotted books I’ve read.

Re-reading it now, it turns out to be just as tightly plotted as I remember, but also somewhat sadder. Adams’ work was always a mixture of humour and melancholy, and this is definitely tilted further toward the melancholy side than the Hitchhiker’s Guide, which is presumably why I re-read that one so often and this one not so much.

Still, it’s not depressingly bleak or anything (though I remember that the sequel is, so won’t be reading that again), and it’s a very well-done novel with lots of quotable bits and a memorable and unique story. If you haven’t read this, and you enjoy the more sober and well-done type of British humour, you should give it a go.

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May 17, 2009

Quick, name a Hugo-winning novel.

Did you say Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang ? No, of course you didn’t, because despite having won a Hugo, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly major work in the field these days. Which is both strange and understandable.

Strange because though written in 1976, this is a book that’s ripped from today’s headlines. Catastrophic climate change, cloning, post-apocalyptic survival — all very relevant themes in today’s world. (Well, okay, cloning seems to be on a bit of a decline from the glory days of Dolly the sheep, but still.)

But understandable because those topics are sort of background material these days, so whatever originality and force of novelty this book had in 1976 is evaporated thirty-odd years later. And what’s left is a competently written but not outstanding novel harmed by a couple of major flaws — a three-part structure with big time skips makes it seem like a paste-up of short stories (which for all I know is true), and its conception of clones is rather weird by modern standards.

If you’re making a point of reading Hugo winners, you won’t be irritated by this one; if you’re not, there’s no particular reason to pick it up.

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May 15, 2009

Back when I was in junior high, I would look at the wall of tie-in books — Dragonlance, Star Trek, Forgotten Realms — in Waldenbooks’ SF section and sneer. Who’d read those trashy things, I always wondered, as I picked up the vastly superior literary output of Terry Brooks and David Eddings.

But then at some point, I had a philosophical epiphany, which was that popular things are popular for a reason, and that instead of just dismissing them as trash, I should try to figure out what that reason is. So I bought a couple of DragonLance books — the Weis and Hickman ones that start things off — and they were pretty decent, as fantasy novels appealing to junior high kids go. So I then proceeded to buy every novel TSR published — all the DragonLance, all the Forgotten Realms. Yeah, I know. It’s how I roll.

But as I read them, I couldn’t help but note that a lot of them were, how shall I put this... horrible. Because of course it turned out that Weis and Hickman were vastly better writers than most of the converted RPG-designers that they had churning out these other books. But there were some exceptions, the most notable of which was R. A. Salvatore, whose Drizzt books were up at that Weis/Hickman level and stood way above the rest of the crowd.

We skip ahead now to my college years, when I had another philosophical epiphany, which was: A lot of popular things are popular because people have bad taste. In the grip of this epiphany, I finally broke my TSR novel habit, and gave away a giant box of terrible books to a surprised and grateful geek. But I did keep the “good” books, those Weis/Hickman ones and all the Salvatore.

Fade to black again, and this time the curtain comes up on the present. Well, okay, last month, due to the part where I’m perpetually behind on this thing. Having just finished a book on classical history, I’m in the mood for something counterbalancingly trashy. Well, it turns out that I have R.A. Salvatore’s Passage to Dawn sitting around, and what’s trashier than the tenth chronicle of Drizzt Do’Urden?

After reading it, I can officially say: Not a whole heck of a lot, because boy howdy, this is some trashy trash. Either my high school judgment of Salvatore was overly optimistic or my tastes have matured quite a lot, because this book was just objectively bad in a whole bunch of ways. The gamey roots of the novel were thrown right up front, with explicit reference to game mechanics. I mean, look:

It was Robillard’s turn, and he focused on a single zombie that had cleared the water and was ambling up the beach. ... A line of fire rushed out from his pointing finger, reaching out to the unfortunate target monster and then shrouding it in flames, an impressive display that fully consumed the creature in but a few moments. Robillard, concentrating deeply then shifted the line of fire, burning away a second zombie.

“The scorcher,” he said when the spell was done. “A remnant from the works of Agannazar.”

The first thing that’ll stand out to any player of Baldur’s Gate is that they just name-checked a third-level wizard spell. And accurately described its mechanics, down to the part where a high-level wizard can target multiple enemies with a single invocation. But beyond that, it’s hard not to wince at the writing. “Target monster,” really?

So, yeah, the writing’s bad. The plotting’s also pretty lousy, the characters are stereotypes, there are awful pretentious “philosophical” interludes between sections of the book, and in general the book has virtually nothing to recommend it.

Unless you grew up reading this stuff, anyway, in which case, it’s a direct injection of nostalgia such as you can’t get many other ways, which is why I secretly enjoyed reading it. Still, it’s impossible to actually recommend this book, so what I’d instead suggest is that you go back in time and read better stuff in junior high. You deserve a better grade of nostalgia than this.

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