Winslow in Love isn’t exactly either of those things, but it’s also not exactly neither of those things. But the recommendation for Canty came from such a trusted source that I’d more or less determined to read all his fiction before I started, and Winslow in Love, his third novel, seemed like as good a place to start as any, and it doesn’t at all shake my intention to read more.

Rocketing through Richard Winslow’s moodswings, as he barrels highways in his slightly improbable but thoroughly à propos Lincoln Town Car is a little dizzying, precisely as I’m certain it’s meant to be. “Precise” is a good word for the novel as a whole: incisive dialogue, even more incisive interior monologues, and vivid, but never over-written. But it’s also reckless, like Winslow himself, with jarring narrative elisions and some sharp deviations from the forms it feints at playing with (the academic turf war/infidelity novel, the man-drinks-self-to-death book, etc.).

(The dénouement doesn’t entirely sit easily with me, but it would be very hard to articulate why without damaging the experience of reading the novel.)

needs more demons? no.

The not-so-good: Wake’s prose takes fast-paced to new extremes. Short declarative sentences with a lot of sentence fragments. Like that one. And this one. It seems susceptible to parody, and I found it a tad wearying. But it sure made for a quick read.

The even-less-good: Wake feels more like a prequel than a main event. It’s one of those novels where not a whole lot actually happens, and much of the plot conflict is driven by characters’ lack of clear communication (admittedly, so is Pride and Prejudice, I suppose). It picks up more of its dramatic tension by starting in medias res with a boatload of “how we got here” flashback — which is fine, but I think I might have preferred the res the series is in medias of to be set after the events of this book.

needs more demons? kinda.

But I also think that The Windup Girl would be stronger if it were tightened up a little bit. It’s a good novel as it stands, but it might have been a killer short novel. And although it was not published previously as linked short stories, the density of exposition and the quantity of recapitulations of character relationships and plot points makes it feel almost as if it were originally structured with serial publication in mind.

The Windup Girl returns to the post-global warming, post-fossil fuel world of “The Calorie Man” and “Yellow Card Man,” two of the strongest stories from Pump Six and Other Stories. Part of my problem with The Windup Girl’s quantity of exposition stems from my previous familiarity with Bacigalupi’s milieu, but part of it is legit — after the first few times, mentioning the power source of an item whenever it is referenced is overkill, as if a contemporary naturalistic novelist referred to “internal combustion engine cars.”

This is a shame, because for me it somewhat overshadowed The Windup Girl’s many virtues, like the vividly imagined future Thailand, the slow-boiling twisty plot, vivid characters, and the white-hot core of environmental rage that fuels the book.

needs more demons? needs just a little more focus.

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.

Instead, I think it’s fairer to accept that no baseball book can be comprehensive, and ask two things of Hemple’s book: that it deepen the reader’s understanding of (if not appreciation of) the game, and that it be entertaining along the way.

For me, it succeeds on both counts. I came late to baseball fandom, mostly through riding to band rehearsal with avid Sox fan singer Dave Kichen. I initially learned about the game from Dave, and from Jerry Trupiano and Joe Castiglione’s play-by-plays. I pestered Dave with endless questions, but there’s still a lot I don’t know. For instance, Hemple spends a lot of time on why lefty/righty matchups matter. This isn’t something you pick up on so much when your game education comes from the radio, since it’s mostly about sightlines and which way a throwing arm points. The acid test: the first time I watched a game after finishing this book, I really did feel I had a significantly better grasp of why certain base running, stealing, and position substitution decisions were made.

And Watching Baseball Smarter was an enjoyable, if not exactly compelling read. I have the impression that Hemple worked hard to avoid offending readers while still trying to let some of his personality shine through. Probably the most important aspect is that Hemple makes a real effort to portray both sides of baseball’s many debates, e.g, “The new [interleage] matchups, though limited to just a handful of games each year, boosted attendance but angered purists who felt that the World Series should have remained the only meeting between the leagues.” Sometimes he expresses forceful opinions, but usually uncontroversial ones like calling “Minute Maid Park,” “Coors Field,” et al “hideous names.” Hemple steers clear of outright team favoritism, although there’s a discernable amount of National League bias.

needs more demons? nah. but an index would have been helpful.

Many specific attributes of Tolkien’s fiction, like a vaguely feudal/English pastoral culture and the presence of multiple humanoid races, dominated the new sub-genre. The homogeneity may have been helped by the introduction of Dungeons & Dragons, which codified a unified fantasy backdrop setting, including elements explicitly drawn from Tolkien and other fantasists (and which ultimately inspired books of its own).

At some point, genre writers, who I have to presume, were frustrated by heroic fantasy’s increasing adherence to convention (and arguably, therefore, reduced creativity) started writing fiction which melded otherwordly entities with contemporary urban settings. In particular, Emma Bull was one of several writers involved in the “Borderlands” project, a “shared universe” setting which yielded several novels and loosely-linked anthologies. (Once the novelty wore off, I thought the “rock’n'roll elf” sub-sub-genre itself started to get stale.)

I missed Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks when it was first published in 1987. It’s not a “Borderlands” novel — no rock’n'roll elves here, just rock’n'roll faeries — but it has a similar flavor. It’s set in Minneapolis, and the affection for the city which pervades this novel is one of its best qualities. Bull’s depiction of walking down Hennepin Avenue to the First Avenue night club reminded me vividly of my own trips to the old 9:30 Club in DC; I thought throughout that Bull applied her strongest prose to the least fantasy-oriented scenes.

War for the Oaks has some of the rough edges I expect in a first novel (and a few “now, why didn’t the bad guys see that coming?” moments), but I liked it overall, and thought it was better written than many fantasies. In the introduction Bull points out that her actual (and substantial) experience as a professional musician post-dates War for the Oaks, but nonetheless it’s a much less ridiculous depiction of the local band scene than most (even if the band’s cover tune choices are painfully dated). In fact, the scenes focusing on band dynamics reminded me more than a bit of Pagan Kennedy’s The Exes.

What strikes me as funny about reading this novel in 2007, though, is that it also fits into a much more current publishing cycle. I presume the “supernatural romance” sub-genre owes its popularity mostly to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series and Laurel Hamilton’s “Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter” novels. Unlike Buffy, Blake, and their many followers, War for the Oaks doesn’t feature vampires or a protagonist who’s in an action-oriented line of work (private investigator/vigilante/cop, etc.), but it does feature lovingly detailed descriptions of character wardrobes and (hu)man(oid)-candy, and it includes some racy bits. The book was reprinted in 2001 , with the supernatural romance publishing upswing well underway, and I’m (pleasantly) surprised that Tor didn’t package this book to cash in on the trend.

Needs More Demons? Nope.