My friend

This is not even tangentially related to this site’s subject, but there’s little point to having your own blog if you can’t follow your own arbitrary whims from time to time.  I’m planning on getting a cat from the animal shelter within a week or two, and I’d wanted to post something in memory of my old cat for a while, so now seems like the time.

I got Kira from a local shelter in 2000, when she was about 9 months old.  I noticed her when I was walking past the rows of cages, and she reached out her front paw and touched me, then pushed her cheek against the cage bars and tried to rub against my hand.  Quite a stroke of good fortune for both of us- she had been abandoned there for a while, and was a few days away from being euthanized.  Despite being fairly skittish with most people, she seemed to take to me quickly, and so I adopted her.

She loved to sit by the windows, where she could enjoy the sunlight and watch the birds.  Once she got used to company, she liked to come up to people, sit nearby, and stick one of her paws out and rest it on the person’s hand.  She would always sleep in someone’s bed, preferably with someone in it.  She was quite noisy; she had a very loud rumbling purr and would greet people she liked with a sort of chirping sound.

She died too soon.  On June 30th of 2008, a tumor that had been growing in her stomach suddenly burst.  She had no chance of recovery, and she was put down the same day.  It was very sudden; she continued on happily with her usual activities until the last few hours of her life.  I’m grateful for that small mercy.

She was a wonderful cat, and I was lucky to have her in my life for 8 years.  The woman in charge of the cats at the shelter (I’ve always mentally referred to her as the “cat wrangler,” though sadly her real job title probably wasn’t as cool) said she had been neglected and possibly abused by her prior owners, so I guess I was able to give her something better than she would have had otherwise.  I hope I did.  She deserved it.

Ways of experiencing fiction

Via Grasping for the Wind, I came upon this interesting post by James Enge, in which Enge talks about the role played in each person by the “naïve reader” and the “sophisticated reader.”  As Enge describes it:

The naive reader wants the hero to kill the bad guy and marry the space-princess (or space-prince, or what have you). The sophisticated reader is muttering, “Yes, this is much like the plot Burroughs used, with overtones of Hamlet and the occasional oblique reference to postmodernism which is de rigueur for self-consciously retrogenerical pastiche, n’est-ce pas?” The naive reader just wants to sit back and enjoy the movie. The sophisticated reader is the guy sitting in the row behind who won’t STFU.

Each person contains both.  The naïve reader experiences the story directly- as Enge says, it is “the one for whom the reading experience is emotionally fulfilling.” The sophisticated reader, through deeper analysis and understanding of things beyond what’s up in the foreground, can augment the enjoyment of the naïve reader-or disrupt it, either by identifying issues the naïve reader would miss or running wild and nitpicking everything.

This made me think of a related question: What aspects of fiction are the primary sources of enjoyment, and what aspects are secondary or in the realm of peripheral details or nitpicking?  These categories don’t correspond precisely to Enge’s casual and sophisticated reader, but they are somewhat related.

I think one of the biggest and most common barriers to understanding when considering fiction is the assumption that all fiction is ultimately about, or at least ought to be about, the same things, and that likewise all readers enjoy or ought to enjoy the same things.  One of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction, especially (but by no means exclusively) hard science fiction, is that it often moves issues of scientific and technical realism, along with things like creativity and logical consistency of background, from the peripheral/nitpicking realm to the foreground.

For me, and I think for many people who like science fiction (especially written), getting science and technology right isn’t just something that appeases my desire to nitpick or allows me to appreciate a story on an additional, supplementary level, it’s a source of pleasure in the same way that the plot and characters are.  Background and setting are similar. I enjoy it when a setting is put together well, when the extrapolated social and technological effects of the science presented makes sense-and again, this is front and center in my mind in the same way that character and plot is.  It’s primary, not supplementary.  Fantasy often does something like this too, with J.R.R. Tolkien being the most obvious and striking example.  This is quite different from most other forms of fiction, where the setting may have thematic relevance but is usually not an object of interest in itself.  (Historical fiction is an exception, since the historical veracity of the setting is often a significant part of the reader's enjoyment.  It would be interesting to know how much overlap there is between historical fiction readers and SF readers)

Indeed, some science fiction works more or less invert the normal hierarchy entirely, not only putting science, extrapolation of technology, and logical construction of setting up in front as sources of enjoyment, but pushing things that are conventionally considered the core of what good fiction should be about, such as characterization and prose style, into the background, or almost into oblivion altogether.  If I’m reading a science fiction book with imaginative and well thought-out ideas, the quality of characterization often becomes a nitpicky background concern to me.  A science fiction story is certainly not harmed by good characters, but often it isn’t much harmed by their absence either.  A lot of the complaints about characterization in science fiction often strikes me as sort of like hearing someone complain that magical realist author Gabriel Garcia Marquez failed to explore the physical mechanism or social effects of the technology of the giant magnet that the gypsies had in One Hundred Years of Solitude, or about the improbable and melodramatic plots of many operas.

This is not an absolute rule, and it’s certainly possible to write science fiction that is primarily based on character or stylistic flair.  There are plenty of character-based stories I like.  I think my description captures the genre’s general thrust, however.  This has serious implications for other issues, such as the desire of some people for science fiction and fantasy to gain greater respectability, but this post is long enough for now.  I’d be interested in hearing how other readers experience science fiction, and if your take on the nature of the genre is similar to mine.

The Shadow of the Scorpion by Neal Asher

Neal Asher has become one of my favorite authors as of late.  This makes for some frustration when you’re living in the United States, where much of his work has not been published, making it necessary to either import or scour eBay and the like.  (Aside from Asher and Stephen Baxter, I almost never import books- I’m too cheap, I prefer to buy domestic editions of books by foreign authors to encourage the publishers to bring more of their stuff to this country, and my vast backlog makes waiting for a domestic release basically a non-issue.) Fortunately, Night Shade Books has been bringing more of Asher’s work to the U.S., first with Prador Moon and now with the prequel to Asher’s Ian Cormac series, Shadow of the Scorpion: A Novel of the Polity.

Part of Neal Asher’s Polity future history (Gridlinked, The Skinner, etc.), Shadow of the Scorpion is a story of the early days of future Earth Central Security agent Ian Cormac.  The young Cormac enters the service of the Polity as an infantryman in the aftermath of the Prador War, a cataclysmic conflict between humans and the monstrous Prador that lasted decades, destroyed whole worlds, and took billions of lives.  Fresh out of training, Cormac is assigned to the security forces on the devastated planet of Hagren, a Polity world that suffered ecological devastation and the death of half of its human inhabitants during the war.  Now rebuilding has begun, but the inhabitants are threatened by surviving Prador still lurking in the wreckage of a crashed Prador dreadnought, and by human Separatist terrorists who will commit any atrocity to overthrow the Polity and the artificial intelligences that rule it.

What should have been a relatively simple assignment policing Hagren while its society is rebuilt and civic order restored becomes much more when treason is discovered amongst Cormac’s squad mates, and Cormac is chosen by his superiors for a hazardous mission to infiltrate a local separatist cell.  This sets Cormac on a dangerous journey across the devastated former battlefields of the Prador War, pursuing humans as lethal and pitiless as the Prador themselves.

Interspersed throughout this story, Shadow of the Scorpion also tells of Cormac’s youth in the dark days of the war, and of the mysterious scorpion-shaped AI war drone that haunted his childhood- and that has seemingly reappeared.

I really liked this book.  It provides plenty of the intense action Asher is known for, and continues to explore the setting of Asher’s future history.  On a purely action/adventure level, the book definitely delivers, with Asher’s usual talent for excitement, description, and visceral power brought to the forefront.  It also gave me what were probably the two things I most wanted from Asher: more information about the character Ian Cormac, and a closer look at the society of the Polity itself.

Most of the Polity universe books are set primarily on worlds outside the Polity, or on the Polity’s frontier, or on worlds suffering some crisis, and are shown mostly from the perspective of Earth Central Security personnel or people outside normal society.  The flashback portions of The Shadow of the Scorpion gives us a nice look at Polity’s society on Earth itself, as experienced by average people.  I love the world-building aspect of science fiction, so I enjoyed this a lot.

An important part of the flashbacks revolves around technology to edit or erase your own memories, sought by Cormac’s shell-shocked older brother after returning from a tour of duty as a field medic on the front lines of the Prador War.  Quite plausibly, this is a much-sought service during the war, common enough to support the existence of large clinics dedicated to it, and Asher explores it well.  The book chillingly juxtaposes the psychological devastation of war and the grotesque physical injuries wrought by Prador military technology, with the Polity’s enormously advanced medical science seeking to reassemble shattered minds with same casual efficiency with which it repairs broken bodies.

While there is still plenty of action, this is a more character-based story than is typical for Asher, and fortunately I think the characterization here is stronger than what I’ve seen from him previously.  The portrayal of a newly recruited Ian Cormac several decades younger than the one we first met in Gridlinked is well done- Cormac is still recognizably Cormac, but he displays a previously unseen degree of emotional vulnerability befitting a man who has not yet become desensitized by decades of violence and horror.

The flashback sequences from Cormac’s childhood are also well-done.  Asher’s portrayal of the young Cormac, a bright, introverted, precociously serious-minded child, rang very true to me.  (There’s a brief line suggesting that Cormac has been diagnosed with mild autistic tendencies, and while it’s not the focus of the story, I think Asher’s portrayal is one of the more insightful and understanding fictional portraits of it that I’ve seen.)

The flashback scenes about Cormac’s older brother’s return from the war are also effective, and do a good job of portraying something often unexplored in stories of soldiers returning home.  Mixed with the happiness of seeing your loved one safely home, there is the tension and awkwardness of reuniting with someone you care about who has been profoundly changed, the trepidation of wanting to reach out and reconnect with someone deeply marked by experiences you can never truly understand and not really knowing how.  The portrayal of this is fairly subtle, yet to me unmistakable and quite poignant.

Shadow of the Scorpion is well worth reading for any fan of Neal Asher, action stories, vivid far-future societies, or examinations of some of the questions raised by technologies to reshape the human mind.  I think you’ll get more out of it if you’re already familiar with Ian Cormac and the Polity (Gridlinked would be the place to start there), but it is a self-contained story that stands well on its own.  I highly recommend it, and I hope Nightshade continues to bring this sort of book to the U.S.

Space Opera group on Facebook

When not distracted by the laborious task of making my thrice-yearly posts to this blog, I also run the Space Opera group on Facebook.  I'm proud to say that we just exceeded 200 members after being in operation for a little under a year.  If you're on Facebook and you like science fiction, come check us out.

A tympanic membrane three sizes too small

I really like most aspects of the Christmas season- the lights, the decorations, other people giving me stuff, even the weather.  In fact, there’s really only one thing about the season I don’t like: that infernal music.

Traditional Christmas songs are fine.  What I can’t stand are the hideous modernized version of Christmas music, usually in some half-assed generic rock and roll or jazz style, that is endlessly piped into the sound system of seemingly every place of business within traveling distance of my home.  I go grocery shopping, it’s there.  I go to the mall, it’s there.  I go to the dentist, it’s there.  It never ends.  And my exposure is fairly limited; at least I’m not subjected to it at work.  I can’t imagine what it would be like to work at something like a grocery or department store and have to hear it for hours on end, day after day.

Is it just me?

The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt

The Court of the Air is a novel by Stephen Hunt, combining elements of Victorian steampunk and fantasy. It was released in the United Kingdom in 2007, but didn’t reach the United States until this year. The follow up, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, is already out in the UK and will hopefully be reaching the US before too long.

Millennia ago, the world was in the throes of an ice age, and the people living on the surface were the slaves of the underground empire of the Chimeca and their monstrous gods. Eventually, the Chimeca were overthrown and the ice receded, allowing the nations of the surface to flourish again. Magic, steam power, and industrial technology exist side by side.

Above all other nations stands the Kingdom of Jackals, secure thanks to the Royal Navy and its flying aerostat warships. The Navy served the kingdom well in its recent war with the “Communityist” Commonshare of Quarter shift, a nation that has fallen under the rule of a brutal collectivist regime and seeks to spread its revolution by force. The Quartershiftians were forced back, and now the rulers of the Commonshare have sealed off the borders with a deadly magical “cursewall” to keep any invasion out- and to keep their own starving people in. Despite their military supremacy, the Jackelians are a mercantile people with no interest in conquest, preferring to attend to their own affairs.

The book tells the story of two teenage orphans from Jackals. Molly Templar is a resident of a grim orphanage in the capital of Jackals. The orphanage manager apprentices her out to a brothel, but her first customer turns out to be an assassin after her life. She flees back to the orphanage, only to discover that it has been attacked and all her friends slaughtered. Desperate, she flees into the underground warrens beneath the city, a legacy of the ancient Chimeca.

Oliver Brooks is a young man who lives with his uncle, a merchant, out in the country. As a child, Oliver suffered extended exposure to the fey mist, which can give people powerful supernatural gifts- or leave them violently insane or monstrously deformed. Oliver seems to have remained normal, but like everyone exposed to the fey mist he is considered a potential public menace, kept under government surveillance and forbidden by the state to travel far from home. His life is shattered when his uncle is murdered, and he himself is framed for the crime. He is rescued by a mysterious man named Harry Stave, an agent of the Court of the Air, the Kingdom’s enigmatic and ancient protectors. Oliver too must flee his home, and finds himself pulled into the deadly intrigues of Quartershift, Jackals, and the Court.

As the two young fugitives struggle to survive, they discover that they have key roles to play in a coming struggle involving agents of Quartershift, a revolutionary Communityist conspiracy against Jackals, traitors within the Kingdom, and the bloodthirsty worshipers of the ancient Chimecan gods, who seek to unleash something far worse than even the totalitarian horror of the Commonshare.

The setting is an interesting hybrid, magical but with the sort of grimy feeling you would expect from a story about orphans in the Industrial Revolution. The world of the story runs on a combination of magic and a sort of alternate physics. There is plenty of mundane technology that works on natural principles-firearms that propel bullets with exploding plant resin, skyscrapers held up by the pressure from pneumatic pumps, vast computer databases based on moving mechanical parts instead of electronics- but not natural principles as we know them.

The historical parallels are obvious, e.g. Jackals is an industrializing commercial nation with the world’s mightiest navy, and its enemy Quartershift is a former monarchy now ruled by brutal, oppressive revolutionaries, but this serves as a sort of initial framework and springboard rather than a straitjacket. There’s a lot of little nods to real history in the setting- the Oliver Cromwell-like historical figure who broke the absolute power of the ancient Jackalian kings, the practice of orphanages renting out their charges as a cheap disposable workforce, the “sun god” of pre-Revolutionary Quartershift, and so on-but nothing like a one-to-one correspondence. There are some strong hints that the story is actually set on a future Earth after some world-reshaping cataclysm, but it’s not made explicit.

I loved this book. It does a wonderful job of combining an exciting story and a great and imaginative setting. Hunt manages to make things detailed and evocative while simultaneously keeping the plot extremely fast-paced. The story and setting continuously build at breakneck speed, with events progressing and escalating while the setting offers new ideas at a relentless pace; the book sometimes seems on the brink of careening out of control, but it never does. You’d expect a book to seem either rushed, disjointed, or overstuffed when it simultaneously incorporates steampunk-style technology, a fantasy analog of 19th-century Europe, bloodthirsty cultists, sorcerers, assorted political intrigue, communist revolutionaries, ancient civilizations, a race of sapient steam-powered robots, and malevolent Lovecraftian deities, but Hunt does a great job of making everything work together. This kind of frantic pace and sheer density won’t appeal to everyone, but I thought it worked beautifully.

I really can’t recommend The Court of the Air enough. It’s one of the most exciting and inventive fantasy books I’ve read in some time, and one of my favorite books of 2008. I can’t wait to see what Hunt does next with the series.

Book reviewer link meme

John at Grasping for the Wind is compiling a master list of science fiction and fantasy book review blogs.  Here's how he explains it:

what you can do is take the following list and stick it on your website, then add yourself to the list, preferably in alphabetical order. That way, I will be able to track it across the web from back links, and can add each new blog to my roll as it comes along. So take this list, add it to your blog, and add a link to your blog on it. If you are already on the list, repost this meme at your blog so others can see it, and find new blogs from the links others put up on their blogs. Everybody wins! Be sure to send the list around to others as well. There is an easy to copy window of all the links and text at the bottom of this post to make it even simpler to do.

You can get the HTML for the most recently updated version of the list right here.

And, now here it is:

The Accidental Bard
A Dribble Of Ink
Adventures in Reading
The Agony Column
The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
Barbara Martin
Bibliophile Stalker
Bibliosnark
BillWardWriter.com
Blood of the Muse
Bookgeeks
Bookslut
Bookspotcentral
The Book Swede
Bookrastination
Breeni Books
Cheryl's Musings
Critical Mass
Dark Wolf Fantasy Reviews
Darque Reviews
Dave Brendon's Fantasy and Sci-Fi Weblog
The Deckled Edge
Dragons, Heroes and Wizards
Dusk Before the Dawn
Enter the Octopus
Eve's Alexandria
Fantasy Book Critic
Fantasy Cafe
Fantasy Debut
Fantasy Book Reviews and News
Fantasy and Sci-fi Lovin' Blog
The Fix
The Foghorn Review
From a Sci-Fi Standpoint
The Galaxy Express
Galleycat
Graeme's Fantasy Book Review
Grasping for the Wind
The Green Man Review
Highlander's Book Reviews
io9
Jumpdrives and Cantrips
Literary Escapism
Michele Lee's Book Love
Monster Librarian
Mostly Harmless Books
My Favourite Books
Neth Space
NextRead
OF Blog of the Fallen
The Old Bat's Belfry
Outside of a Dog
Pat's Fantasy Hotlist
Piaw's Blog
Post-Weird Thoughts
Publisher's Weekly
Reading the Leaves
Realms of Speculative Fiction
Rob's Blog o' Stuff
ScifiChick
SF Diplomat
SciFiGuy
Sci-Fi Songs [Musical Reviews]
Severian's Fantastic Worlds
SF Gospel
SF Reviews.net
SF Revu
SF Signal
SF Site
SFF World's Book Reviews
Silver Reviews
Speculative Fiction Junkie
Speculative Horizons
Sporadic Book Reviews
The Sword Review
Tangent Online
Temple Library Reviews
Tor.com [also a publisher]
The Road Not Taken
Un:Bound
Urban Fantasy Land
Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic
Variety SF
Walker of Worlds
Wands and Worlds
The Wertzone
WJ Fantasy Reviews
The World in a Satin Bag
WriteBlack

Foreign Language (other than English)

Cititor SF [Romanian, but with English Translation]

Elbakin.net [French]

#@$&% MACHINES!

I just wanted to assure any readers wondering about my absence that I have not been slain in a gangland assassination or died an ironic death entombed beneath a pile of old Jack Vance paperbacks that came crashing down on me when their weight proved too much for my cheap self-assembled bookshelves to withstand.  I’ve just been plagued with computer problems, and my computer usage has thus been limited.  I should be fully operational and writing on a timelier schedule soon, though, provided the damn thing doesn’t become sentient and murder me in my sleep.  Which, considering my usual luck with electronics, is a serious possibility.

The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt

Jack McDevitt has become one of my favorite writers in the past few years, with his combination of plots focused on mystery and discovery, his knack for the small but effective detail of setting or character, and his skill at including the mundane nuts-and-bolts aspects of events in a way that makes things more interesting and believable, creating a story of exciting events that still seems to take a place in a world where you can easily imagine regular people going about their lives.  The Devil's Eye is the fourth book in Jack McDevitt’s series about far-future antiquities dealer Alex Benedict and his pilot and assistant, Chase Kolpath.  (Preceded by A Talent for War, Polaris, and Seeker.)  I’d personally recommend reading the Alex Benedict series in order, but each book is quite accessible on its own, including this one.

Benedict receives a strange and frightened message from Vicki Greene, a celebrated young horror author.  Benedict has never met her, but she asks for his help, and soon Benedict discovers that she is transferred a large sum of money to his bank account.  He tries to get in touch with Greene to find out what she wants, only to discover that she has undergone a voluntary mind wipe, a procedure usually used on unreformable repeat criminals that irrevocably destroys memory and personality.  Baffled by these events, Benedict feels obligated to find out why Vicki Greene turned to him for help, and just what it was that terrified her so much.

The search quickly takes Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath to the distant planet of Salud Afar, an isolated world in the galactic halo far outside the boundaries of the Confederation that unites most of humanity.  It has been only a few decades since the people of this world threw off the yoke of a brutal dictatorship that ruled the planet for centuries, and the nations of Salud Afar still struggle to escape either falling into chaos or returning to the old regime, still looked back on fondly by many citizens.  Meanwhile, tensions between humanity and the Ashiyurr, the only others sapient species humanity has ever encountered are growing, spreading fear across the isolated world.  There, under an all but empty sky, 20,000 light years from the nearest human planet, Benedict and Kolpath hope to retrace Greene’s steps and find out who or what drove her to destroy her own mind.

The Devil's Eye is an enjoyable entry to the Alex Benedict series, continuing its predecessors’ style of science fiction historical mystery.  The central mystery is intriguing and unfolds at a good pace.  Like much of McDevitt’s work, the story maintains a sense of groundedness, for lack of a better term, that is uncommon in science fiction.  The main characters are interesting but still relatively normal people with ordinary interests and concerns-I can envision them hanging out with friends or just puttering around the house on an idle weekend more readily than I can most fictional characters.  The same is true of the setting, aided by the fact that the Alex Benedict books are all narrated in first-person by Chase Kolpath.  This made me feel more immersed, and has the dual effect of both making the future portrayed seem more tangible and making Kolpath’s forays into places and events outside her normal experience seem more ominous and eerie.  In general, I like how McDevitt uses the first-person perspective, and he's good at incorporating seemingly inconsequential details into Kolpath's narration- her occasional asides about her world's entertainment and pop culture, for instance- that make the character more alive and more sympathetic.

The book is not horror, but much of it does have an eerie and sinister atmosphere.  The world of Salud Afar is an appropriately creepy environment, its night sky utterly black and empty except for a single star, the eponymous Devil’s Eye.  The planet’s society, strewn with the physical and psychological scars of a brutal police state that existed within living memory, gives the feeling of a “haunted” world, still living in fear.

The Devil’s Eye is like the first book in the Benedict series, A Talent for War, in that the mystery revolves around a specific person who the reader comes to learn about and sympathize with without ever “meeting.” I liked this personal aspect, as it gave more emotional punch to the secrets Benedict and Kolpath unravel.

The Devil's Eye is well worth reading for McDevitt fans, and for people who like science fiction with a strong mystery element.  I look forward to seeing what McDevitt does next.

Out-of-Context Conversation Theatre

I'm standing in line at the store last week, and there's a fellow behind me on a cell phone.  I pay him no mind until I hear him say:

"Yeah, we're having him shot in Salt Lake City next week!"

Well, that piqued my interest.  He was silent for a moment, and then followed up with:

"Yeah, yeah.  We're bringing a crew up from California."

Now, I know criminal overlords don't openly discuss gangland slayings on their cellphones when they're in line at Walgreens.  But I was still slightly relieved when I heard him start talking about camera equipment a few moments later.