Characterization in science fiction

Ryan Britt has a very good post at Tor.com entitled “Genre in the Mainstream: Does SFF Marginalize Characters?” It's well worth your time.

Britt hits on a good point when he remarks that a typical science fiction book simply has more things competing with the characters for attention than a more conventional story- a character who might seem perfectly acceptable in isolation may seem lackluster when placed alongside ideas that are much more interesting than he is. In a somewhat similar vein I would add another factor, the inescapable scarcity of resources that go into a book's creation.

Time is finite, energy is finite, and the number of words in a book is finite. Provided with equal amounts of these resources, “serious” fiction can put more into its characters because it generally does not place a significant focus on subject matter other than the characters; the plot and setting are mostly or entirely there to further characterization or theme, rather than as things meant to be interesting in themselves. Character-focused fiction is usually also free from the need to explain the nature of its setting or the laws that govern it.

Often, science fiction simply does not have the resources to spare. Take a book I reviewed here a while ago, Incandescence by Greg Egan. Not a character piece, to put it mildly. Its length is modest, 256 pages in the Night Shade Books copy that I own. Now, there are probably ways it could be tweaked to make the characterization somewhat better while staying at that length and without any damage to the book's specifically science fictiony virtues. But probably not by much, because our hypothetical Incandescence 2.0 also still needs to cover, with same amount of detail and clarity of explanation:

A galaxy-wide multi-species civilization. Ways in which uploaded personalities originating from biological species with radically different physiologies, psychologies, sensory organs, etc. interact comfortably in shared virtual environments. A mysterious, isolationist second civilization in the galactic core. The workings of a galaxy-wide communications network that is limited to light-speed transmissions and carries not only messages but entire machine intelligences. Panspermia. The physics of space close to black holes. The physics of space close to black holes. The biology and society of an alien species. The invention of the scientific method by a member of that species, and the gradual process of discovery through experimentation. The consequences of living in an environment where the effects of relativity are significant enough to be noticeable in day-to-day life.

And so on. And then there's the actual plot that still needs to fit, too.

Some writers are better than others at creating strong characters while still giving attention to plot, setting, and ideas. But there are still trade-offs to be made and different authors will tend to be more effective at some ratios of these elements than others.

Obviously, better characterization is better than worse, all else being equal. Some of my favorite science fiction stories are strongly character-based.   But- as Britt alludes to- much of the criticism leveled at science fiction on this matter is built on the assumption, often the explicit assumption, that the emotions and personalities of the characters is what fiction is really about, or at least what it ought to be about. It's not surprising that this would be so; in people, being strongly socially and emotionally attuned is a much higher-status trait than the sort of attributes that often draw people to science fiction, and it makes sense that the status of science fiction would correspond to that of the sort of personality it brings to mind.

Which is why, ultimately, my answer to the question “Does SFF Marginalize Characters?” is, “Frequently, yes. So what?” One of the things I love most about science fiction is precisely that it treats things like science, technology, and carefully thinking about how systems work and how they might be affected by change as actually interesting, instead of being bound by the sort of assumptions that privilege one facet of the human mind above all others as the one stories should be about.

Book Review: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

The Quantum Thief is the debut novel of science fiction author Hannu Rajaniemi. You can visit his website here.

The central character of the story is Jean le Flambeur, a legendary thief with a career that spanned centuries of time and the breadth of the solar system. Now, however, he is only another inmate in the Dilemma Prison, a virtual jail in the outer solar system where the uploaded personalities of criminals are kept for “rehabiliation” by the Sobornost, the posthuman collective of uploaded minds that is the greatest power in the solar system. His imprisonment comes to an unexpected end when he is rescued by a woman named Mieli. Mieli is no altruist, however- she and her masters have a job that requires the solar system's greatest thief. Le Flambeur agrees, feeling he owes her a debt of honor for his rescue. More importantly, the physical body he now inhabits after his release from the Dilemma Prison back into the world of flesh and blood is subject to Mieli's direct control.

But it's not just an object that Mieli needs le Flambeur to find. Much of le Flambeur's own centuries-long memory is missing. Le Flambeur's past self apparently had secrets so important that even his own memory was not secure enough, and so he hid them away in external storage external storage or locked up somewhere beyond awareness in his own mind and released only in response to particular stimuli to give his future self clues about where to find the rest of himself.

The trail left by his fragmentary memories  takes them to the Oubliette, a city of (comparatively) baseline humans perpetually crawling across the surface of Mars to keep ahead of the swarms of hostile, replicating, ever-evolving machines descended from malfunctioning terraforming machinery that now dominates much of the planet. The Oubliette is a place where privacy is almost absolute, and through the electronic network that links everyone in the city each citizen can control how much other people are able to see, hear, or even remember them. Le Flambeur remembers that he once lived here, and that the place is important to him- and if there were a place where he'd secretly hide memories away, this is it.

Meanwhile, a young detective in the Oubliette named Isidore Beautrelet is helping to investigate recent murders and acts of “gogol piracy”- forcible uploading of minds. He works in cooperation with a person known only as the Gentleman, one of the tzaddikim- mysterious vigilantes who have sworn to protect the city from outside threats. His successes bringing to the attention of wealthy Oubliette citizen Christian Unruh, who has a seemingly inexplicable mystery he wants solved. This mystery will bring Isidore and le Flambeur into collision with each other, and with the truth about le Flambeur.

The Quantum Thief is an excellent book that simultaneously works very well as a character-based story, an adventure, and a novel of ideas. The central plot is interesting throughout, especially as it builds up steam approaching the climax.

Jean le Flambeur is very enjoyable as the main viewpoint character. Much of the story is told by him in the first person, and fortunately he's a fun character to  follow around. The other major character's were also engaging; I was particularly fond of the Gentleman, Isidore's mysterious masked partner and mentor. (Especially once I decided that, in my head, the Gentleman would be played by The Question.) Rajaniemi does a very good job of creating characters that are clearly recognizable “types”- the roguish gentleman-thief, the mysterious woman with a painful secret, the earnest young detective and his older, more hard-nosed partner- but remain interesting, emotionally engaging individuals instead of being stock cliches.

The Oubliette is a fascinating setting with some intriguing elements. Each person is mentally linked to a citywide network that lets them exchange information and memories, while shrouded in protective encryption called gevulot that allows them to control what information about them can be accessed by others. Since everyone's mind is linked directly to the network, even the extent to which other people can see or hear you in real time, or- if a person consents through a “gevulot contract,” transmitted from mind to mind- remember you after the fact can be filtered this way. In addition to its importance to the main mystery plot, it creates an interesting situation in which people's basic psychology remains unchanged from our own but technology has radically changed fundamental aspects of social life. The hints given about the rest of the solar system are interesting as well, though are they fairly vague for the most part.

The book is very idea-heavy and set in a future where technology and society have changed radically. The technology to upload, download, or edit human minds is ubiquitous,  nanotechnology and other advanced technologies have risen to almost magical levels, advanced post-humans have risen to godlike heights of power and intellect, and even the comparatively unchanged humans in places like the Oubliette, who retain a fundamentally human psychology and lives that are at least somewhat recognizable,  are profoundly different from 21st-century humanity in all sorts of ways. Within this world, Rajaniemi quickly throws the reader in the deep end and mostly expects him to swim on his own. New concepts and terms come  quickly and aren't always explained right away, or in depth, though as things progress it gets easier to keep up and infer things from context.

I like this sort of approach when it's done well (as it is here),  since it makes it possible to put a lot of speculative technologies, setting information, and the like into the story, and can create a sort of puzzle for the reader to solve as he starts to gain enough context to understand things that were previously confusing or obscure. But it's not for everyone, and in comments I've seen from people who didn't like the book this is almost always the reason. If you do enjoy that sort of approach, though, The Quantum Thief does it very well.

I would definitely recommend The Quantum Thief for science fiction fans, especially those interested in  very idea-focused SF and subjects like transhumanism. It's a somewhat iffier proposition if you're not a fan of the sort of dense take-no-prisoners worldbuilding I described above, but if that's not an absolute deal-breaker for you the story and characters are strong enough that I think the book is still worth a try. It's definitely a strong debut, and I look forward to seeing what Hannu Rajaniemi does next.

Book Review: Orbus by Neal Asher

Orbus by Neal Asher is the follow-up to Asher's The Skinner and The Voyage of the Sable Keech, and part of his larger Polity future history (Gridlinked and the subsequent Ian Cormac books, The Technician, Hilldiggers, etc.) It continues where The Voyage of the Sable Keech left off and has a number of recurring characters, but while it's not strictly necessary to have read them to follow what's going on here I'd recommend reading them in order.

Spatterjay is a marginally habitable planet that lies just outside the territory of the the AI-ruled interstellar society known as the Polity, best-known for the virus that pervades its bizarre ecology. Transmitted by the bite of a leech-like creature native to the planet and able to infect almost anything, it gradually transforms its carriers, making them stronger, tougher, and virtually immortal- and, in the case of non-native life like humans, transforming them into monstrous, mutated creatures if they don't get sufficient nutrients from their species' native environment to maintain enough of their natural biological processes enough to prevent the virus's genetic material from supplanting them entirely.

Both the planet's name and its human population, commonly called “Hoopers,” are a legacy of the devastating war between the Polity and the alien Prador, when the infamous war criminal and collaborator “Spatter” Jay Hoop aided the Prador by helping round up millions of human prisoners into concentration camps on Spatterjay. Beyond Spatterjay lays the Graveyard, a vast and mostly uninhabited expanse filled with the burnt-out ruins of worlds ravaged during the war. It is now neutral territory providing a buffer zone between the Polity and the Prador Third Kingdom, inhabited only by a few isolated settlements eking out a living in the ruins and by criminal elements using it as a refuge where the warships of both great powers are forbidden to go.

Jericho Orbus is one of the oldest Hoopers of all- one of the original humans imprisoned by Jay Hoop, and one of the very, very few to actually survive. His sanity shredded by the horror of what he saw and suffered, and of what he had to do to survive, Orbus became brutal even by the standards of Spatterjay's frequently violent culture. He spent centuries sailing the  fearsomely dangerous seas of Spatterjay, eventually becoming  the captain of a crew of other shattered men and women who served as outlets for his all-consuming rage- as masochistic as he was sadistic, and able to survive the punishment he dished out thanks to the superhuman resilience granted by the virus.

This might have gone on indefinitely, were it not for a near encounter with death during the events of The Voyage of the Sable Keech that nearly led to a total takeover of his body by the virus. The psychological and physiological shock of having almost his entire body irrevocably altered by the virus and then returned to something at least resembling human jarred something awake in him, the parts of himself he had to bury to do what he had to do to survive the unimaginable horror of his past- his humanity.

Sniper, an artificially intelligent polity war drone built during the Prador War and since gone freelance, has decided to make himself scarce after receiving a summons from the ruling AIs of the polity, who have some questions for him about his role in recent events on Spatterjay. Lying low, he and his companion Thirteen, a fellow free drone, stow themselves away in the cargo hold of a small freighter, the Gurnard- a freighter captained by none other than Orbus, who has found a new life for himself as he tries to overcome the brutal centuries-long nightmare of Spatterjay. They are caught by the Gurnard's AI- which allows them to remain as passengers and seems oddly sanguine about the discovery of a fugitive war machine hiding in its cargo holds.

Meanwhile Vrell, a rogue Prador infected with the Spatterjay virus and transformed into something even more fearsome than the rest of his kind, has seized control of a Prador dreadnought and is headed to the Graveyard to lie low. The King of the Prador Third Kingdom has taken an interest in a relic of the Prador's past that now resides there, a powerful, monstrous entity that is thought to be mythical by most of his species- and will be at the heart of events driven by something older and more horrifying still. And when Orbus finds himself and his ship recruited for a covert Polity intelligence operation in the region, it becomes apparent to sniper that the sequence of events that led to a superhumanly dangerous man with a burning hatred for the Prador and a rogue war drone with centuries of experience that was literally born to fight them finding themselves together on a freighter bound for the graveyard was not a coincidence

Orbus is an excellent space opera and a great addition to Asher's future history. As usual, Asher's action sequences are top-notch here, and the events of the story provide plenty of scope for them. The central story is interesting, with lots of action and some well-paced and well-executed revelations about the Prador, the Spatterjay virus, and the nature of Orbus' mission into the Graveyard.

It was nice to see more about the Prador, a race of crab-like aliens that have been enormously important to the history of the Polity but have usually been peripheral figures, at most, in the events of most of the books. Orbus helps drive home just how disturbingly alien they are. Prador society is staggeringly oppressive, exploitative, and cruel by any sane human's standard. This is not out of malice, but because Prador are highly competitive organisms whose biology- specifically their high fecundity combined with the ability of adult Prador to control their children through pheromones- makes it possible for groups of Prador to work together as a cohesive unit without the sorts of instincts, behaviors, and emotions that human social bonds depend on. There was no selective pressure favoring the evolution of the capacity to feel sympathy or pity or loyalty, so Prador don't feel them. It's nothing personal.

Orbus was a side character in The Voyage of the Sable Keech, and a rather disturbing one, so it's interesting to see him given a larger role as he retries to regain his humanity. He doesn't stand out as much as some of the other characters, but in this case it works. Rather like Asher's portrayal of an autistic boy in The Shadow of the Scorpion, some of the criticisms of Orbus' characterization that I've seen elsewhere were directed at the very aspects of the character that I liked and thought made the character ring true. Orbus is generally fairly subdued, quiet, has a somewhat flat affect, and doesn't stand out as much as those around him-  in other words, he acts the way people trying to put themselves back together in the aftermath of devastating psychological trauma very often act, and that made him quite compelling to me.

I definitely recommend Orbus to fans of Neal Asher's Polity universe, and Asher's work as a whole to any fan of space opera. Frustratingly if you're an American reader, most of his books have seemingly been released in every industrialized country on Earth except the United States, but they're well-worth seeking out. (I strongly recommend The Book Depository if you're an American looking for something from the United Kingdom; they ship free worldwide and I've had nothing but positive experiences dealing with them. Third-party sellers at Amazon.com can also be helpful.) Neal Asher continues to impress.

Book Review: Stonewielder by Ian C. Esslemont

Stonewielder is Ian Cameron Esslemont's third book in the Malazan epic fantasy setting that he created together with Malazan Book of the Fallen series author Steven Erikson. Like Esslemont's previous Return of the Crimson Guard, it's events are contemporaneous with those of Erikson's books but focused on other parts of their shared universe. Chronologically, it is set after Esslemont's Return of the Crimson Guard and seems to take place around the same time as Erikson's Reaper's Gale or Toll the Hounds.

The Korelri subcontinent  and it's numerous nearby islands are home to several nations, with a largely sea-based economy and culture. Stretching along its northern shore is the Stormwall, a vast fortification that holds back the yearly assaults of the Stormriders, a mysterious seaborne race wielding powerful magics who have assailed the wall for hundreds of years for reasons unknown. It is defended by the Stormguard, a military force assembled from professional soldiers, press-ganged conscripts, and religious warriors dedicated to the patron deity of the wall and of Korel, a goddess known only as the Lady whose worship is Korel's principle religion. Years ago, the Malazan empire's attempted conquest of the region ended ignominiously when their invasion force mutinied and its leaders set themselves up as the new rulers of the Korelri territory they had conquered, forming an uneasy peace with the other political powers of the region and the native Korelri now under their rule.
 

Greymane is a former officer of the Empire's army who left to fight for the Crimson Guard, a mercenary army dedicated to the Empire's overthrow, and is now trying to settle into a peaceful civilian life as a swordsmanship instructor. The Malazan Empire and its new Emperor have decided to send a new expedition to Korel to bring its traitorous former generals to heel- and for reasons unknown, he wants the wanted traitor Greymane to lead it.
 

Meanwhile, the Stormguard is struggling to continue fulfilling its ancient task, with its ranks growing thinner each year. The Stormwall itself is faltering, with the accumulated damage to the  Wall from the Stormriders' renewed assault each year accumulating faster than it can be repaired and threatening the ancient structure with collapse. No one knows who the Stormriders are or what they want, but if the Stormwall falls they have the power to lay all of Korel to waste. Like the rest of Korel, the leaders of the Stormguard place their faith in the Lady and Her protection... but what does She actually want?

Stonewielder is a fine addition to the Malazan universe and Esslemont's best book to date. The book is well-paced, and  Esslemont successfully juggles a large number of characters and plot threads and is able to keep things well-paced. The central plot is interesting and build to an excellent climax. As a Malazan fan, it was nice to get a closer look at locations that are only alluded to in Erikson's books, and Esslemont creates an interesting setting with Korel.

The action scenes are exciting and evocative, and there are some truly impressive sequences here. The battles tend to feel more “military” than those in Erikson's books, probably due to the comparatively lower level of power possessed by most of the characters here compared to some of the prominent figures in Erikson's books. The character's are a bit more life-sized, and there's less emphasis on the sort of awe-inspiring acts of individual skill and heroism common in Erikson's books and more on the clash of armies made of brave but relatively average men and women, standing side by side with their comrades. I like the sort of stuff Erikson does with the vast power of someone like Quick Ben or the larger-than-life prowess of characters like Kalam and Karsa Oorlong, but the contrast Esslemont provides is also quite interesting and effective.

Esslemont's abilities as a writer have developed noticeably. His writing style in Stonewielder has grown smoother, and lacks the occasional awkwardness or clunkiness of description or dialogue seen in Night of Knives and Return of the Crimson Guard. Stonewielder seems, for lack of a better word, more confident than Esslemont's previous work. I enjoyed those books overall, but in them Esslemont's writing sometimes sometimes had an  awkward, stumbling, nervously restrained quality, like an intelligent but shy person giving a public speech. The awkwardness is gone, and Stonewielder feels much stronger as a result. 

 

Stylistically, Esslemont's writing is more straightforward and less given to digression and introspection than Erikson's. Which is preferable is subjective, but both writers do well with their respective styles and both have created a good fit between style and subject matter, with Esslemont's more austere writing working well for the more down-to-earth story he's telling.  (Down to earth by Malazan standards, I hasten to add, which is sort of like saying someone is “short compared to most other giants.”)
 

Stonewielder is a fine book and a worthy addition to the Malazan series. It's not something I'd recommend for people new to the series, who are likely to be quite lost without the context provided by earlier books, but it is very strongly recommended for anyone familiar with the previous Malazan books. (If you're not familiar with it, I strongly recommend the whole thing for fans of dark epic fantasy in the vein of things like Glen Cook''s Black Company series. Start with Erikson's Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates.) If you're a Steven Erikson fan who didn't care for Esslemont's previous work, I'd still recommend giving Stonewielder a shot. Esslemont is really coming into his own here, and I'm eager to see what he'll do next.

Book Review: Crossover by Joel Shepherd

Crossover is the debut novel of Joel Shepherd and the first book in the Cassandra Kresnov trilogy.

Cassandra Kresnov is a GI, an artificial person created by the advanced science of the League, one of the two great powers of human space, and used as a soldier in the League's long struggle with its rival the Federation. Like her fellows, Kresnov was built to be far stronger, tougher, and faster than any human being. But Kresnov is an experiment who was also given something else- the creativity , initiative, and intelligence of a human being. It made her one of the League's most effective soldiers, but in time it  also lead her to begin questioning her masters and her purpose until she fled the military and the League.

She flees to the Federation under an assumed name and human identity, hoping to go unnoticed and live a normal life. Taking up residence on Callay, a prosperous Federation world far from the League, she seems to be achieving her goal when she is abducted and brutally dissected by agents of the Federation Intelligence Agency operating covertly on Calais. She is rescued and reassembled by Callay's internal security force, the CSA, but her secret has been exposed in a society where the idea of artificial life is abhorred and her legal status as a person is unclear.

Held prisoner by the Callayan government while her future is argued over, her fate seems to be completely out of her hands- until she finds herself caught in the midst of a plot against Callay by a strange alliance of covert league operatives, including a force of GIs, and the Federation's own intelligence service, each acting for reasons of their own. Desperate, Callay's unprepared government turns to Kresnov for her combat skills and knowledge of the League and GIs. Kresnov, wanting to protect the closest thing to a home she's ever had, agrees.

I really enjoyed Crossover. The plot kept my interest throughout, and both Kresnov's personal conflicts and the larger story of political intrigue they are a part of were consistently engaging and worked together well. The action sequences are tense and effective, and do a nice job of demonstrating just how terrifyingly deadly Kresnov can be without making her seem omnipotent.

Kresnov is a likable and interesting protagonist, and I enjoyed the fact that Shepherd made her introspective about her own nature and condition without resorting to cliché “I wish I was a real human” angst. The characterizations of the CSA agents are also well-done, and are quite effective in portraying people who are brave, competent, and professional but have suddenly found themselves in over their heads.

Callay and its principal city, Tanusha, is a well-realized setting, and Sheppard makes it an attractive and appealing society without making it feel outright utopian or unbelievable. I like his handling of it as the crisis in the book escalates and the Callayans desperately respond, conveying the Callayans' shock and panic as they suddenly find the peace and security they have long taken for granted threatened without portraying them as utterly helpless or ineffectual. The larger universe beyond is described in less detail, but the conflict between the Federation and the League and the inner workings of the Federation among its own members is interesting.

The League was especially interesting as one of the antagonists, since its ideology and behavior- forward-thinking, scientific, devoted to progress, rationalist, unrestrained by the dead hand of the past- are in many respects a non-idealized form of the sort of thing frequently associated with the good guys in science fiction stories. (E.g. Asimov's Foundation, Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, etc.). This was an enjoyable change from the more typical sorts of human antagonists commonly found in the genre.

I would definitely recommended Crossover for science fiction fans, especially fans of far-future SF/space opera with a focus on action. I look forward to catching up with the rest of the trilogy.

Memories of Borders

Fair warning: This post involves me getting maudlin and sentimental about the fate of a multibillion-dollar retail chain.

I only make the occasional trip to my nearby Borders now, and it's been along time since I did a significant amount of my book shopping there, but I was still saddened to hear that the company had filed for bankruptcy and was closing many of its locations. 

When I was a little kid, I had three main sources of books. One was my grandfather, who had a large collection of history, science, and geography books. This is probably what set me down the path to becoming a science fiction reader, since the astronomy books were usually my favorites.

The second was the local library, which was an invaluable resource for me as a kid first delving into science fiction, but had a rather limited selection of the genre- especially if I wanted to read something that had actually been published that decade or find lots of books by a particular author who had captured my attention, two concerns that loomed larger as I became a bigger fan of the genre. My library options were further constrained by the fact that the books aimed at my age group mostly filled little or no interest for me, and because- in an excellent demonstration of the fact that being able to read at college level in elementary school is entirely compatible with being a complete idiot- I assumed that "Young Adult" at my library meant young adult, as in people in their 20. Obviously. Why else would they call it that?

Consequently, I avoided that section on the assumption that I wouldn't be allowed to get books from it. Even at the time this seemed odd to me, since I couldn't figure out what was in those books that was so bad that people under 18 could not be trusted with them, but I was much too shy to ask the librarian about it. That wasn't too big a deal, though- there were plenty of books with no age-specific labels on them that seemed more interesting anyway. The science fiction books were right next to the technothrillers, which I also investigated from time to time, so I ended up knowing more about busty KGB spies seducing men to steal NATO military secrets than a 4th grader probably ought to, but all in all it was for the best- there are probably few things that would have squelched my desire to read more effectively than excessive exposure to what adults typically thought someone my age should read.

The third source was a B Dalton I occasionally visited at the mall in the next town over. It was better than nothing, certainly, and it gave me a better chance of finding recently published books by an author I'd discovered than the library. But it was very small, the shelf space containing subjects I had any interest in was still smaller, and the science fiction section was roughly the size of my couch.

Between them, these sources provided me with quite a bit of reading material. More importantly than any particular book or books, they showed me that reading was fun and interesting.

I'm sure my teachers at school weren't trying to make me believe that reading was a dull, inane  ordeal to be tolerated only to the minimum extent necessary to make them leave me alone... but if they had been they wouldn't have needed to do things any differently, so I was very lucky to have countervailing influences. Still, these resources were limited, and I began to feel their limitations more keenly when I was interested in reading books about a particular subject or by a specific author instead of just rummaging through shelves until I stumbled on something that caught my eye.

My first visit to a Borders was on a trip to downtown Chicago when I was probably 10 or 11 years old- time to kill before an appointment. I had never seen, or even imagined, anything like it before. Row after row of bookshelves, each seeming to stretch out forever. The science fiction section alone was nearly bigger than the entire B Dalton at the mall. The atmosphere was calm, peaceful, and unthreatening, the sort of place I always wished I could be in. I still remember the first book I got there, too- the paperback of Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire.

For several years, my access to Borders was limited to those occasional trips into the city with a parent, squeezed in if there was spare time before our primary business. When I was in high school, however, another Borders location opened much closer to my house, which meant that going there became something that it was possible to do any time I had a spare hour and a ride. It was an opportunity I took advantage of frequently.

The popular claim that mega-chain stores like Borders or Barnes and Noble are bad because they hurt independents drives me up the wall, and this is a big part of the reason why. I know there are many fine independent bookstores out there, and I'm happy for the people with the good fortune to have easy access to such places- but I have very, very little patience with those who lament the existence of stores that made it possible for millions of people who didn't enjoy that same privilege to have greater access to the wider array of books that the anti-chain partisans themselves already enjoyed and took for granted.

I do most of my book shopping online now. The Borders near my home is still there, and I still go from time to time. I don't know about the one I visited downtown, since I don't know its address, but in light of the large number of store closings announced for Chicago there's a good chance it's one of the casualties.

Whatever happens to the chain next- and the answer seems to be "nothing good"- Borders will always be special to me. I can't describe the feeling of my first visit to one adequately, and if I could it would probably sound utterly ridiculous- an elementary-schooler in rapturous awe at the sight of a chain store's lobby. But I was.  I loved books- for what they were, and for what they helped my imagination create a refuge from- and here there were more than I had ever imagined possible in single place. Encountering something like Borders for the first time made the world seem like a much richer, and perhaps less malevolent, place than I had imagined before.

Thanks.

Book Review: De Bello Lemures by Thomas Brookside

De Bello Lemures, Or The Roman War Against the Zombies of Armorica is a self-published book, about the length of a long novella, by Thomas Brookside.

De Bello Lemures is presented as a newly recovered and translated Latin text, originally written in the late 2nd Century AD by Lucius Artorius Castus, a Roman military commander. The story begins in Armorica (Brittany), a minor backwater of Roman Gaul where Artorius and his troops, a mix of Roman legionaries and Iazyges (an Indo-Iranian tribe that settled in Eastern Europe) auxiliaries, have just successfully put down a native uprising. When the surviving rebels are put to death by crucifixion, one of them calls out a curse in his native tongue just before expiring, saying that he will lead the dead to take revenge on the Romans.

Artorius, contemptuous of the natives and what he regards as their barbaric superstitions, thinks little of it. That night, however, while returning to camp after dining with a wealthy local citizen, Castus and his companions- Radamyntos, an Iazyges officer, and Pacilus, a tribune- are attacked on the road. Their assailants are men dressed in rags, covered in blood and filth, and bearing terrible wounds, incapable of any speech other than inarticulate moans. Possessed by bloodlust and able to shrug off wounds that no man should be able to survive, they fall upon the local farm boy serving as Castus' guide and tear him apart with their bare hands and teeth before Castus and his fellows are finally able to bring them down.

In the distance, Castus and his companions can now hear a low, dense droning sound- the sound of more inhuman voices like those of their attackers, filling the forest. With the countryside overrun by ferocious and almost unkillable madmen, they will need to find defensible shelter to survive the night. What fuels the murderous insanity of the men who attacked them is unclear, although Radamyntos recognized one of their assailants- he had killed him in battle and seen him dumped in a mass grave the day before...

I'm not generally a fan of zombie horror, but I greatly enjoyed De Bello Lemures. The storytelling held my interest, and the atmosphere was very strong. Castus is very effective as a protagonist and narrator, and Brookside does a good job of making him compelling without soft-pedaling or glossing over the sort of attitudes a man of his time, place, and station would likely have.

Brookside makes extremely effective use of his historical setting, and this adds to the story enormously. What makes everything work for me is that the historical element isn't a gimmick or an excuse to just retread standard zombie tropes in fancy dress. It's far more fundamental, and it greatly affects the impact of the book.

As described above, the book uses a “lost document” framing device and is built on the conceit that De Bello Lemures is an actual recovered work written by a second-century Roman Roman general. The story is prefaced with an introduction describing the discovery of the original text due to advances in the use of synchrotronic x-ray analysis on ancient documents, the provenance of the medieval palimpsest where the recovered text was found (including an explanation of why the title of the book, appended to it centuries later by a medieval copyist, is written in incorrect Latin) and the intense controversy incited in the scholarly community. It also includes information about Castus and the various theories that have been offered to explain its bizarre contents. The story is footnoted throughout to explain allusions made by Castus,  the historical and cultural context in which he lived, and the implications of certain statements and events in light of the overall body of knowledge about ancient Rome.

The main body is told by Castus in the first person. What really makes it work is that, while there are some concessions to modern writing conventions, primarily concerning dialogue (which the foreword explains as interpolations added to the English translation rather than features of the original Latin text), Castus' voice feels very authentic; Brookside does a very good job of capturing the tone and style of translations of genuine Classical histories.

The historical verisimilitude is enjoyable in itself, but it's even greater power is the atmospheric effect it creates. Zombies have become a very well-worn pop culture trope at this point, and for me personally they don't really work well as horror because they're too transparent and too concrete for my tastes- what they are, what they want to do, and usually some clue as to how they can be overcome or at least resisted usually becomes apparent to both the readers/viewers and the characters fairly quickly, even if their ultimate origin is not explained. While I'm sure I'd be horrified by the idea of a dead body coming back to life and attacking people in real life, in fictional contexts they usually just seem generic to me- they're orcs or stormtroopers or nameless hoodlums, except ickier.

De Bello Lemures manages to avoid this problem. The book's historical details and academic presentation, along with Castus' terse, no-nonsense writing style, creates a context in which the presence of zombies seems much more jarring and incongruous, much more wrong, than it would in a story set in present-day. This drives home just how incredibly bizarre, unnatural, and disturbing zombies would really be in a way nothing else I can think of really has. It made them seem truly horrifying, instead of merely dangerous

I'd strongly recommend De Bello Lemures for any fan of horror or dark historically-based fantasy. It's a short read, but well-worth getting and a very promising debut for Thomas Brookside. You can read a free preview here.

Book Review: Stealing Light by Gary Gibson

Stealing Light is the first book in the “Shoal Sequence” space opera trilogy by Gary Gibson. Though part of a series, Stealing Light also works very well as a self-contained story. Gibson is an author who is, unfortunately, all but unknown in the United States; I became aware of him by sheer chance and had to track down the British versions of his books.  Happily, it was worth it.

Five centuries from now, humanity has begun to spread among the stars with the help of the Shoal, an ancient race of aquatic aliens with a monopoly on faster-than-light travel. Their vast interstellar vessels have made an interstellar human civilization possible- but one utterly dependent on the Shoal. Humans are only allowed passage through a small portion of the vast expanses of space under the Shoal's dominion. Our contact with- or even knowledge of- other sentient species is strictly controlled and filtered by the Shoal, and our technological development is restricted to ensure that we can never become their equals.

The main character is Dakota Merrick, a pilot and former soldier turned smuggler. Merrick is one of a small number of surviving “machine-heads”- products of a disastrous and now abandoned military project to create soldiers with implants that allow their minds to directly interface with machines. On one of the more marginal human-settled worlds two groups of settlers, the Uchidans and the militaristic Freeholders, wage war for control of the planet. The war is going badly for the Freehold, but its agents make a momentous discovery- an unimaginably ancient alien spacecraft, older even than the Shoal, with technology that could put whoever possessed it on an equal footing with them. Successfully unlocking the knowledge in the ship's vast databanks and taking control of the vessel is beyond their abilities- but it may not be beyond a machine-head's.

Machine-heads have been hard to come by since the tragedy that led to the abandonment of the technology, but when Merrick finds herself in need of work and a way to lie low after a job goes awry she becomes an ideal candidate. She accepts employment with the freehold accompanying an expedition to the Nova Arctis system for what she has been told is an expedition scouting possible locations for the freehold to relocate if it loses the war. There, buried, the ship that the freeholders stumbled upon awaits. With her is Senator Arbenz,an ambitious Freeholder politician, and Lucas Corso, a freehold specialist in alien programming languages who Arbenz has blackmailed into coming along.

Their mission could radically change a state of affairs that has persisted in this region of the galaxy for tens of thousands of years. Meanwhile, an agent of the Shoal who calls himself Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals is about to become a player in these events.  The Deep Dreamers, huge genetically engineered Shoal that can perceive the vast web of possibilities shaping the near future and predict probable future events, have seen a catastrophe unfolding in the near future that would mean the destruction of countless species, and perhaps even the Shoal. Trader has dedicated his millennia-long life to protecting his people, no matter the cost to other species- and his mission will soon bring him into contact with Dakota Merrick.

I liked Stealing Light quite a bit. There's a lot of excitement, excellent pacing, and some very impressive action sequences. The central conflict held my interest, and the revelations about the questions raised earlier in the book- the motives of the Shoal, the nature of the disaster predicted by the Deep Dreamers, the reason the machine-head project was abandoned- are interesting and well-done.

The book has a tighter focus than many large-scale space operas- the great majority of the book directly follows Dakota Merrick, rather than a large number of different plot threads and characters in the manner of stories like Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth series or Alastair Reynolds. In Stealing Light's case this works out quite well- Dakota Merrick is an interesting protagonist, and the focus helps the book keep up its momentum.

I greatly enjoyed the setting, which had a nice sense of eeriness and successfully created an impressive sense of scale. This starts off early, with the revelation that humans had recently detected a massive series of supernovae in the Large Magellanic Cloud. In addition to creating a sense of foreboding and mystery, it drives home the inhumanly vast scope of events, in both time and space- it took 160,000 years for the light from this catastrophe to reach human territory. The later revelations about both the Shoal and the mysterious race that built the ship abandoned Nova Arctis add to this.

I also especially like the briefly glimpsed Shoal home planet, a world intentionally set adrift from its parent star and propelled into interstellar space by the Shoal's unimaginable technology and sustained by the light and heat of the miniature artificial fusion “suns” orbiting it. The entire surface is covered by ocean, and  in the complete darkness of ts lowest depths lie the Deep Dreamers- vast expanses of genetically engineered nerves and flesh the size of mountains, peering into possible futures. At times Stealing Light it put me in mind of Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series, though Stealing Light's tone is less bleak and gothic.

Stealing Light by Gary Gibson is recommended for any fan of modern space opera in the vein of authors like Hamilton, Reynolds, or Neal Asher. If you like  it, you can continue the story in Nova War, followed by Empire of Light.

Book Review: Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson

Dust of Dreams is the ninth of the planned 10 books of the Malazan Book of the Fallen epic fantasy series by Steven Erikson.  Familiarity with the story up to this point is essential to understanding what's going on; this is definitely not a place to jump in if you haven't been following the series. Unlike the previous Malazan books, which are part of a larger story but meant to have some sort of resolution within each individual book, Dust of Dreams ends on a cliffhanger that will be continued directly in the forthcoming tenth and final book, The Crippled God.

(Newcomers should start at the beginning with Gardens of the Moon. I highly recommend the whole series for fantasy fans, especially if you enjoy books like Glen Cook's Black Company series)

The Bonehunters, renegade former Army of the Malazan Empire, have crossed the seas to the continent of Lether, a previously isolated land where beings of tremendous power are converging. Adjunct Tavore, their leader, intends to lead them past the civilized lands of the Empire of Letheras into the barren Wastelands beyond, and from there to the distant land of Kolanse- for reasons she will reveal to no one. Outlawed in their native lands and half a world away from everything they've ever known, the bone hunters have only their trust in the Adjunct and their loyalty to their comrades in arms to drive them as they march towards a lonely, lifeless land on a mission they don't comprehend or expect to survive.

Their allies have reached Lether are on the move to join them: the veteran cavalryman of the Khundryl Burned Tears and the Grey Helms, a warrior-cult dedicated to the war gods Togg and Fanderay. Meanwhile, other forces are at work. The matron of the last surviving bastion of the K'Chain Chemelle, the ancient species whose hive-like societies once dominated much of the world, is making a desperate and seemingly mad bid to save her people- one that rests on a human woman. Onos Toolan, the ancient and formerly undead warrior who has become chieftain of the nomadic White Face Barghast, struggles to maintain peace in the face of clan leaders and other rivals calling who are calling for war against the neighbors of the barghast and increasingly resentful of their new leader's opposition. The Errant, one of the ancient Elder Gods who ruled the world in its prehistory before being displaced by a younger generation of deities, is gathering his fellows in the hope of making a bid to regain his ancient power and glory. And somewhere in the midst of these events lurks the Crippled God, whose machinations to free himself from his torment and imprisonment have laid whole nations to waste.

I really enjoyed Dust of Dreams. Stylistically, the book lies somewhere between the more straightforward earlier books in the series and the more introspective and occasionally digressive style of its immediate predecessor, Toll the Hounds. The balance is mostly pretty successful, moving the action along steadily while still giving a lot of time to build up atmosphere. There are parts that get a bit too verbose, but the the book as a whole was more than strong enough to keep me reading. Erikson has a talent for evoking emotion through both large-scale, often cataclysmic events and individual struggles and tragedies, and the combination of the deeply personal and the implacably, pitilessly impersonal side by-side is very effective

The Malazan series has always been quite dark, despite containing a good deal of humor and inspiring heroism, and Dust of Dreams is even more so. The tone is relentlessly grim and foreboding, something reinforced by the book's events, the descriptions of the bleak, empty expanses on which most of the action takes place, and the thoughts of the characters as they march onward in a seemingly hopeless and senseless cause.

This is one of the ways the vast history of Erikson's setting, stretching back across hundreds of thousands of years, pays off. It's particularly striking in this book, and it adds a lot to the atmosphere. We finally get a close look at the K'Chain Chemelle-  hundreds of thousands of years ago the world's dominant intelligent species and builders of wonders far beyond any achievement of humans, now a single isolated enclave barely clinging to existence. We  learn more of the ancient history of the Tiste Andii; once the race whose vast power cast down the dominion of the  K'Chain Chemelle, now themselves a fading remnant that has all but vanished from the world. Lether itself is changing, it's long isolation and stasis shattered by the arrival of the Malazans. The Errant and his fellow Elder Gods, who once commanded fundamental forces of the world and were worshiped with vast offerings of blood and human sacrifice, are a shadow of what they once were and have been all but forgotten. The weight of history feels almost crushing, with vast gulfs of time swallowing up even the mightiest beings and empires, every civilization and event built atop the dust of countless once-glorious races, nations, and even gods long since dead and forgotten.

The darkness can seem almost overwhelming at times, and it's added to buy some brutal emotional punches in the story. Despite this, it still- like the previous Malazan books- has a certain positivity that distinguishes it from a lot of other fantasy on the darker, grittier end of the spectrum. The heroism of many of the characters, whether they're marching off to war like the Bonehunters or struggling to prevent one like Onos Toolan, is in many places quite inspiring and moving, and grows even more so set against the dark background of Erikson's story and setting.

I definitely recommend Dust of Dreams for anyone who's followed the Malazan series so far. It's a rewarding continuation of the series so far and a fine buildup to the series' climax in The Crippled God.

Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic... RISE.

I've decided to bring Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic back to its original home at Blogspot. I would like to thank the people at BSCreview.com for hosting this blog for the past few years, and for all of their assistance. I've imported everything back, but there are still some kinks to work out and the layout is something of a work in progress, so please bear with me if you run into a broken link or something that looks wonky.

If you have a site or blog that links to my previous location, please change your link to point here,  http://vastandcool.blogspot.com/. If I had a link to you that didn't survive the transition here, contact me at vastsf AT hotmail DOT com and let me know.

Content here has been sparse of late. The past few years have been extremely draining on me, for various reasons, and that's taken its toll on this blog. However, some of those clouds have parted and I'm more optimistic looking to the coming months. I'd like to thank everyone who reads this blog and everyone I've encountered and interacted with- other bloggers and reviewers, authors, people in publishing- as a result of it,  for helping to make it possible and giving me the drive to continue with it. That means more than I can express. I'm going to make 2011 the best year Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic has ever had.