I expected clunky prose, and found plenty of it (with all the ultra-this and super-that occasionally becoming unintentionally humorous) — but I didn’t expect it to be so rough I actually couldn’t tell what was going on. In First Lensman’s mining disaster sequence, Smith mixes wholly invented (I’m sure) miner’s argot with (I think?) some real-world-but-unfamiliar-to-me mining terminology such that I had only a vague idea what the characters were doing.

It was way more bloodthirsty than I was prepared for. I expect space opera to have a high body count as a rule, but I also expect the baddies (colorful evil leaders and direct henchmen aside) to largely be as evil and faceless as Star Wars‘ stormtroopers. Smith’s Lensmen cheerfully toss off remarks like, “In emergencies, it is of course permissible to kill a few dozen innocent bystanders,” which is probably pragmatic, but not exactly heroic or noble. They’re also pretty hard on combatants who are not actually evil or villainous, and may even become staunch allies a chapter or two later. In Triplanetary, Conway Costigan employs tactics against civilians that would be labeled terrorism today.

They were racier than I expected them to be, including descriptions of skimpy outfits, lurid (if unspecific) threats of fates-worse-than-death at the hands of sadists and/or sex-obsessed aliens, an instance of implied bisexuality, and a smidgeon of actual smooching.

But on the other hand:

• I was struck by how un-xenophobic these novels are. Alien races are often described as having “monstrous” appearances, but still worthy of inclusion in the ranks of civilization’s defenders — even, sometimes, if they have decidedly un-human mores.
• You couldn’t by any stretch call these novels “feminist,” but they’re not quite as sexist as I expected — several of Smith’s women are intelligent and self-directed, not just props for men to wrangle over, or insignificant background characters.
• I found it positively eerie to read about First Lensman’s slim poll margins, electoral dirty tricks and counter measures here in the twenty-first century — Smith is almost spookily prophetic.
• It really is astounding how much even modern science fiction draws on Smith’s tropes. I totally buy Lensmen as a key inspiration for Jedi, and Smith’s rays-vs.-shields space battles use the same fundamental rules as everything from Star Trek to Star Wars — and this before the invention of the laser. Star Trek’s plethora of inscrutable super-advanced alien races also seem to owe a debt to Smith’s Arisians.

needs more demons? I wouldn’t presume to say so. But it does help to bring some historical perspective.

“The United States of Huck” was written as introduction to Huckleberry Finn, but it goes beyond insight into Twain’s controversial classic (Saunders in particular has some very interesting thoughts about the novel’s problematic conclusion). It’s also a heartfelt plea for us all to be our best selves, to be Huck Finn rather than Tom Sawyer.

“The Great Divider” also made me want to stand up and cheer. It’s about tension along the Mexican border and the vigilante border patrol groups who call themselves The Minutemen, and it’s written with the verve and snap that characterizes Saunder’s fiction. It’s clear where Saunders’ own sympathies lie, but Saunders doesn’t demonize anyone in the essay — he struggles, as does the reader, with the essential contradictions of the circumstances. If these are basically decent people, why are they doing this? Why are they so much more rational in one-on-one conversation? (I had the fortune to read “The Great Divider” shortly after seeing the stunning documentary 9500 Liberty, which deals with some similar issues, and which I also unhesitatingly recommend).

* and, I’d quibble, two short pieces that are really epistolary fiction

needs more demons? no way.

It was a bright, cool March morning: mare’s trails trailed across the southeastern sky toward the rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front-loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey Ferguson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised the front scoop, and began turning it toward the open doors of the barn — just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the road.

“Trunk and Disorderly” catapults a Bertie Wooster figure into interplanetary intrigue studded with broad jokes: a Dalek-resembling character who barks words like “Inebriate,” or, when randy, “Inseminate”; a high-tech take on Marvel Comics’ Silver Surfer; and a villain with full-on James Bond-style expository megalomania. There’s also a bad-tempered, often drunken, pachyderm. Stross sustains the tone throughout the piece, and if it doesn’t approach the droll heights of Woodhouse’s comedies of manners, it delivers far more raygun-blazing action.

Least successful for me was “Unwirer,” a cautionary fable about the consequences of restrictions on information flow, co-authored with Cory Doctorow.

Fans of The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue will be pleased by the inclusion of a story featuring their protagonist Bob Howard; I thought it was the most successful (and least one-note) of the shorter pieces in in Stross’s spy+otherwordly horrors milieu. Similar in background but darker in tone are “Missile Gap” and “A Colder War.”

The collection also features a brief joke piece that enjoy the unusual distinction of originally being published by Nature, “Snowball’s Chance,” a deal-with-the-Devil story that manages to be funny and preachy, and Palimpsest, a time-travel novella of daunting complexity, and perhaps the most epic scope — spanning literally trillions of years — of any piece of short fiction I’ve read. It requires a fairly high degree of tolerance for adjoining sentences with various powers of ten, like “‘Over the two and and a half million epochs accessible to s — each of which lasts for a million years — we shall have reseeded starter populations nearly twenty-one million times, with an average extinction period of sixty-nine thousand years,’” not to mention drastic shifts in narrative perspective. And some preachy bits, despite which I liked it more than not.

needs more demons? too close to call.

Standage with opens Herschel’s discovery of Uranus by way of background, pays some attention to the contention-fraught business of planet naming, discusses “Bode’s law” and the “missing” planet between Mars and Jupiter, and goes beyond Neptune to Pluto and other similar objects that were never called planets — and even beyond that to extrasolar planets, which take the radical idea to its ultimate conclusion: since planets around other stars are too distant to observe directly with an optical telescope, the only way to find them is through the pertuberances of orbits. (Strictly speaking, the planets of the solar system don’t actually orbit the sun; the sun and the planets orbit their mutual center of gravity. Since the sun is far more massive than the sum of the planets, this basically means the sun wobbles a little bit, and through similar wobbles the presence of planets around other stars can be detected.)

The previous two books of Standage’s that I read, The Victorian Internet and The Turk were so lively and well-written that I recommended them to pretty much anyone, not just those with an interest in history. The Neptune File perhaps has less sizzle. I wouldn’t push it on someone with no interest whatsoever in astronomy, or someone with no tolerance for history. But if the phrase “astronomical history” makes your eyes light up a little (instead of glaze over…) this is a definite must-read.

needs more demons? no.

I have noticed that private detectives do not spend much time discussing the injuries incurred in the line of duty, or whatever it is they call their work. They alll seem to have this incredible ability to shake of serious beatings, sometimes with blunt objects, with a remark to the effect that they were a little stiff the next day but a good shower and massage would take care of it
…
I’m not like that. I bruise easily. The contusions I suffered from that fall in the warehouse in Bicêtre left ugly yellow and purple blotches. I’d probably have them for months. And they hurt. I won’t mention it again, but I did want you to know.

Much of The Alternative Detective’s pleasure is meta-textual — it assumes you’ve read enough hardboiled PI fiction that you will appreciate how it honors some of the time-worn genre conventions and inverts or undermines others, like the more-or-less invincible protagonist. The Alternative Detective also riffs on some of the shopworn plot elements of the genre, perhaps most explicitly on The Maltese Falcon-styled tales. For my taste, The Alternative Detective never got quite so silly that I stopped paying attention to its plot entirely; nor did it ever get so serious that I gave it the kind of scrutiny I give to Dashiell Hammett’s fiction.

I was a little bugged by the narrator’s hippie-ness (worse, actually: ex-hippie-ness) — but that’s mostly a personal problem on my part, and anyway I wasn’t bugged enough to stop.

needs more demons? I’ll go with “no,” though it’s a close call.

Stewart’s novel is set after the cataclysmic return of magic to the world — the Dream — ended civilization as we know it. City centers became inimical and largely uninhabitable. Technology mutated into new forms or simply ceased to function. Humanity survived, but in isolated pockets.

Near the end of the 21st century, Edmonton’s South Side and Vancouver’s Chinatown are entering an uneasy alliance. Vancouver has problems with monsters on its borders; Edmonton is trying to build a market for its cyberpunkish mercenary services. But although there is a dash of military-sf style action, Stewart’s story is primarily about character and family. The tangled relationship between the Southside’s leader, Winter, and his granddaughter Emily (at the novel’s outset, Emily has just been jailed by her grandfather) is both reflected and contrasted by the complex dynamic of Chinatown’s enigmatic “Minister of Borders” Water Spider, and his father. An estranged marriage between a Southsider and a Vancouverite is less symbolic than emblematic of the cultural clashes between the two communities.

Within a few chapters, I thought I had a handle on how most of the major plot elements would develop and resolve themselves. I was correct on some points, but dead wrong on several others. The Night Watch is perhaps less emotionally satisfying than if it had gone as I expected — it’s not a novel for anyone who insists on unalloyed happy endings* — but much more intellectually satisfying.

Also, it has some of the best writing about painting that I’ve encountered in recent memory.

I thought Resurrection Man could have used a touch more expository background; I think The Night Watch overcompensated just a touch. The Night Watch also has a fairly large cast of characters and while the principals were also clear, I was occasionally confused by some of the minor players (Stewart for instance refers to Chinatowns ministers variously by their full names, nicknames, titles, and by their symbols of office — which lent things a nicely realistic feel, but made me wish once or twice for a crib sheet).

Overall, though, I very much enjoyed The Night Watch.

needs more demons? no.

* If you require novels with unalloyed happy endings, this is almost certainly the wrong site to read

I’m glad I waited to read Resurrection Man, partly because it isn’t quite as good (it’s one of Stewart’s earliest novels) but also because both are fundamentally guy-forced-to-grow-up-and-confront-stuff novels where the force originates at least partly from the guy’s supernatural abilities. In Resurrection Man a good chunk of what Dante has to confront is mortality, quite literally represented in the opening chapters in which he dissects what appears to be his own corpse.

It’s very rare that I think a novel has too little exposition, but Resurrection Man is perhaps an example, mostly because Stewart’s characters use fairly common words (angel, minotaur) with quite different meanings. It’s quickly apparent that Resurrection Man is set in a world significantly different from ours, but even the alert reader may not figure out the differences in the first several chapters. In some ways this is a good thing, as it places the focus on the characters and their interactions, but Stewart is also parsimonious in dealing out Dante’s family’s backstory. Several characters know important things that they allude to vaguely but don’t spell out for a while (or ever), and the result was initially a bit confusing.

I thought Stewart leaned a little heavily on arthropod imagery for shock value. It works — bugs! ew, gross! — but it’s a bit of a blunt instrument.

These defects are balanced by some vivid writing, sharp dialogue, and well-drawn characters. And as magic-returns-to-the-modern-world stories go, this one is remarkably original in significant respects. If I didn’t find it completely satisfying, I still found it well worth reading.

needs more demons? nah.

Tinker melds several major tropes/minor sub-genres of fiction, fantastic and otherwise: there’s magic-as-a-science à la de Camp, Garrett, Lieber, Pratt, Zelazny et al. There’s faerie-returns-to-modern-world à la Arnold & Windling’s Bordertown and followers. There’s near-future-dystopia-with-cyberpunk-trappings à la too many to mention. There’s a classically structured coming-of-age/romance. A bit of espionage/mystery. And so on.

This is the sort of blend that would have sold a book from an unknown author to me twenty years or so ago. In the intervening years, though, many of these elements have been overused in fantasy. When I read the back cover blurb a couple of months ago, it almost put me off reading anything by Spencer at all, and I only picked it up after A Brother’s Price had converted me to a bona fide fan of her fiction.

I liked it a lot.

Partly it works because character drives the story as much as the plot. But it also works because it’s smarter than it might at first appear. The reader learns in the first few pages that the city of Pittsburgh environs travels periodically between mid-21st-century Earth more-or-less as we know it and “Elfhome.” Spencer very gradually introduces increasing complexity on both the human and elvish sides of the story, mostly without indigestible exposition dumps, that reveals she put more thought in her setting than is typical for the genre. The elvish society has nods to the folklore tradition and Shakespeare’s and Edmund Spenser’s classics, but also had some interesting and original qualities. There were a few plot twists I didn’t see coming at all, a few I did that were satisfying anyway, plenty of snappy dialogue, and plenty of action (some of it decidedly R-rated).

Quibble: I got to a point in the book where there weren’t many pages left and a lot of plot threads still dangling, and worried that it was going to be one of those books that turns out to be only the first half or third of a much larger novel. It doesn’t, quite, but the dénouement seemed rushed to me, and the very end introduces new unresolved elements which will clearly be the focus of a sequel.

needs more demons? nope.

This sort of gender role reversal has long been a staple of science fiction and fantasy, but Spencer handles it with an unusually light touch. She eschews the common device of a viewpoint character outside the culture or even especially critical of it. Instead, she focuses on the plot — which is fueled by palace intrigue on the verge of boiling into outright rebellion, affording ample opportunities for derring-do and hanky-panky. The protagonists are likable, the antagonists quite despicable, and it had me turning pages way too fast to notice any nits of copy editing that might have been present. And really, there should be more action-adventure featuring paddle wheel steamers. Who doesn’t love paddle wheel steamers?

I have to say, though, that although I enjoyed this book a lot, the very last sentence squicked me out a little bit.

needs more demons? nuh-uh.

Spencer doesn’t seem concerned with creating a believable consistent future. Hers is the sort of universe where a starship will radio its position to home base if its warp jumps takes it a few light years off course. Other than warp drives, there’s only one major piece of technological innovation on display, genetically augmented humans. Outside the Sargasso, altered humans are at best treated as second-class citizens, at worst as property — the historical antecedents are unambiguous. The approach to genetic engineering serves Spencer’s plot more than the dictates of logic; if you were modifying humans to make them more docile and easily controlled, for instance, you wouldn’t want to also make them hyper-intelligent. Spencer’s alien races are distinctly star Trek-y: they’re either humanoid enough to be played by human actors, or they’re nonhuman enough to be a special effect, usually modeled on one or more terrestrial critters.

The novel badly needs a good edit. There are some terrible sentences. One that took me a while to parse describes how Captain Paige Bailey stalls an alien race called the civ by giving them glass blanks that take a long time to move: “To a civ, with their smaller hands, the blanks would be nearly impossible to carry more than one, thus perfect for her needs.” This awkward construction could be easily fixed: “The civs’ smaller hands would find it nearly impossible to carry more than one of the blanks. They were perfect.” There are also numerous copy editing errors. One line of dialogue reads, “You’ve got to be fucking me,” with “kidding” or “with” missing. A crucial, absent “not” made me stumble over “New Washington was only slightly better, as they might see offspring as freeborn people.”

If you can put these flaws aside, however, Endless Blue is a fast-paced, mildly racy adventure with likable, if thinly drawn, protagonists. It’s the sort of book for which descriptions like “science fantasy” and “yarn” are tailor-made. Spencer manages to wrap up the major plot threads, although the denouement feels a little rushed, but there’s clearly enough room in the “Sargasso of Space” for a sequel. If she writes it, I’ll probably read it.

needs more demons? not really, but does need an editor.