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.

Zahn’s rail-connected universe is by no means hard sf, but as in the previous book, Zahn delivers some solid science fictional twists to the mystery. One of them is so obvious that I got a little impatient waiting for the penny to finally drop, but I think that may have been in part a diversionary tactic on Zahn’s part.

Somewhere in the build-up to the climax I got a little confused about which planetary system everyone was off to and why, but my favorite plot twist snapped me back to full alertness.

I’m wrestling with myself over whether I want to read the final book now! of wait another month to prolong my enjoyment of the series. Now! may win.

needs more demons? nope.

But I have some muddled thoughts about how the book was characterized and positioned in the marketplace. (I also just started reading Interfictions 2, the second Interstitial Arts Foundation anthology, so I’m also under the influence of Henry Jenkins’ excellent introduction, which has me seeing the world through interstitial-colored glasses).

Of course, The Time Traveler’s Wife has been wildly successful, with over two and a half million copies sold to date, earning Niffenegger a reported five million dollar advance for her following novel, Her Fearful Symmetry. So my remarks should probably be taken with a lot of salt; luck and celebrity endorsements may not have hurt, but Harcourt’s choices ultimately did well by the book. If there’s any value to my nattering maybe it’s that any fan of this novel who on principle refuses to read anything labeled “science fiction” is more than theoretically capable of enjoying science fiction. But then I think of what the science fiction shelves look like these days — clogged with media tie-ins and supernatural soap operas* — and I almost wonder if the marketing category “science fiction” is now excluding good writing to the extent that good writing with speculative elements should stop labeling itself as such. (Analogously, consider the expectations of books filed in the “romance” section vs. the expectations of books filed under “fiction” that deal with people falling in and out of love).

Anyway, I think The Time Traveler’s Wife is every bit as much science fiction as it is romance. It has at least as much in common with “pure” SF like (most particularly) David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself as it does with fiction that uses unstuckness in time and/or the subjective nature of memory as metaphorical tools to examine the shape of a relationship, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or 500 Days of Summer.

Niffenegger isn’t interested in exploring the nuts & bolts of how time travel actually works (although the character Henry DeTamble certainly is), but she does seem interested in examining how a relationship between people with objectively different timelines could actually work — what the emotional landscape of such a pairing would be like, and how foreknowledge would affect the unfolding of events (Henry’s approach to house-hunting is particularly funny and clever). It’s this decidedly speculative cast that makes me assert the novel is definitively science fiction.** On the other hand, the novel’s two first-person voices have a sureness and attention to detail that makes me think that the story would work (if perhaps not quite as well) if time were untangled for the characters to produce a conventionally structured romance plot. One of the classic “is it science fiction?” tests asserts that if all speculative elements are removed from a story, it must not still make sense. By this standard The Time Traveler’s Wife is definitively not science fiction.

I also really hate the cover, which features a soft-focus very young Clare (from the knees down) waiting for a time travel visit from adult Henry, whose shoes are laid out in expectation of his arrival. (Henry travels in time but his clothes do not.) It manages to look simultaneously be a book-with-woman’s-shoes-on-the-cover (a.k.a. signify ch–kl-t), seem a bit Merchant-Ivory-ish (fine on its own terms, but misrepresenting the amount of fisticuffs and punk rock the book contains***), and bring to the fore the creepy aspects of an adult man visiting a minor with whom he’s eventually going to have lots of sex (Niffenegger mitigates the premise’s inherent creepiness very adroitly, mostly by having Clare be the sexual aggressor at the junctures where it matters, and rigorously maintaining Henry’s refusal to commit statutory rape.) I found the cover so off-putting that I would not have read it if it had not be recommended by my wonderful fiancée.****

Coincidentally, said wonderful fiancée also just wrote about The Time Traveler’s Wife. What are the odds?!

*I read a few of these, but at least I have the grace to be embarrassed by that fact.

**When I was younger and more callow, the world of literature could neatly be divided into “science fiction” and “books I didn’t want to read.” Some of the genre critics implicitly reinforced this, not least with assertions that works by mainstream writers that incorporated sf elements were “bad” when evaluated as science fiction (Vonnegut in particular took a lot of heat). These writers were generally pilloried on two counts: for rehashing concepts already thoroughly explored within the genre, and for a lack of speculative rigor and internal consistency. It took years before I understood how jealousy-fueled these arguments were, but the latter point has some validity: a writer like Vonnegut isn’t at all interested in the mechanics of interstellar travel or whether Ice-nine could actually exists; he’s interested in using these devices as metaphors for examining the behavior (and misbehavior) of 20th century societies in the real world. Niffenegger may or may not be familiar with science fiction’s best time travel books, but she unflinchingly tackles causality and predeterminism, and has several tactics for minimizing the suspension of disbelief required by the novel. It is not “bad” when evaluated as science fiction.

*** Even the choice to include Henry and Clare’s Merchant-Ivory-friendly surnames DeTamble and Abshire in the back cover copy seems slightly suspect.

**** Not that being off-putting to me hurts a book in the marketplace, as established above. I do remember at least one mid-’80s experiment in which a publisher issued a novel with one cover for the science fiction market and another for the disaster novel market, but I don’t remember the book in question at all, so I suppose that experiment did not succeed. A similar approach probably wouldn’t have benefited The Time Traveler’s Wife much — but I would have read it sooner and with less hesitancy.

needs more demons? no.

I’m no literary critic; I’m read The Three Musketeers primarily because I recently saw Slumdog Millionare, and I’ve been making a conscious effort to read books a little farther afield from my usual choices.

But for whatever it’s worth, here are my impressions.

Initially I found The Three Musketeers an uphill climb, mostly because I didn’t pay enough attention during European History class. Pevears’s copious notes are very helpful, but he assumes more knowledge of 17th-century French (and even English) politics than I brought to bear. In particular, the balance of power between King Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, and Queen Anne (of France, but who is not French) was a little hard to puzzle out.

After I more-or-less internalized the dramatis personae I enjoyed the novel quite a bit — for a while. Dumas weaves his genre-defining derring-do skillfully through the threads of actual history. It reminded me a bit of how fantasist Tim Powers spins tales of high and improbable action around real events and people (only without the fantastic elements). A good portion of my pleasure in the book derived from flipping to an end-note and experiencing the jaw-drop of “that part really happened!” And, thanks in no small part to Pevear’s lucid translation, some of my pleasure derived from moments of genuine laugh-out-loud humor.

As the novel goes on, however, its tone darkens considerably and I found it increasingly unpleasant. I know it’s unfair to chastise a 19-century novel for sexism, but the portrayal of the novel’s femme fatale, Lady de Winter, seems to go beyond that and into misogyny. (Richelieu is guileful, a figure to be feared, but ultimately not ignoble; Lady de Winter, whose ambitions, cunning, and vengefulness roughly equal those of the male protagonists, is unsupportable.) It might be interesting to see a modern recasting of Lady de Winter as the novel’s heroine.

needs more demons? (too a silly yardstick to apply to a literary classic)

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.

So I feel like the degree to which this volume leaves me unedified and unmoved (except to vague annoyance) requires some systemic explanation: it’s not that these guys have suddenly quit being funny and/or incisive. It’s not that these guys all make themselves the heroes of their dumping anecdotes, or at least not any more than the form intrinsically requires; there’s plenty of sadder-but-wiser and gee-what-a-schmuck-I-was, and even some humility. And I’m a reluctant endorser, these days, of the meta-conceit that underlies this book: the notion that making a relationship survive requires learning things that are mostly readily learned from dead relationships.

So why doesn’t it speak to me more than it does? Maybe these gentlemen seem a little too eager to hash over the sad ends of their previous romantic entanglements. Maybe even in the most awkward moments of these awkwardness-filled essays (Dan Savage’s is up there, for one) there’s still a little too much boastfulness for my taste (Look! Look what I went through to prove I wasn’t straight!). Maybe the “but I’m much better now” attitude that many of the authors adopt somehow trivializes how miserable I made myself for so many years — but frankly, I don’t feel any need to closely examine that misery anymore.

Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.

needs more demons? Sure. Some demons could’ve shown these guys what it’s really like to have one’s heart ripped from one’s chest. Kidding, I’m kidding.