The first thing I noticed was the vividness of the prose. In the service of these stories Beach deploys striking metaphors and similes, crisp and believable dialogue, and rich and evocative adjectives and verbs. It frankly astounds me that this is his first published fiction.

WIthin the first few pages I was also struck by the formidable range of Beach’s stories. They’re all over the map, both literally, and in terms of tone, setting, even genre and theme.

It’s also impressive how complete many of the stories are. Some not only establish character, setting, mood, but also establish a narrative conflict or even suggest its resolution. A few beg for continuation, to be seen as an excerpt from a longer work — and at least a couple of them are explicitly connected — but most of them don’t. They’re self-contained little nuggets. One of them is almost like a distillation of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle into, well, 420 characters.

I’m tempted to include a handful here, but I wouldn’t know where to start or stop. I almost want to retype the whole book, which would clearly exceed the boundary of fair use. And there’s a generous sampling at 420characters.com; if it’s not quite the set I would have curated, I think it’s fairly representative.

Lest I seem too gushy — I do think it’s far easier to make a great string of 420 characters than to make great strings of 420 characters that tie into a cohesive whole the size of a book, or even the size of a more typical short story. Last paragraphs are much harder to write than first paragraphs, and most of these stories are more like beginnings than like endings. Beach hasn’t proven to me that he can sustain the level of creativity he displays here throughout a work that’s judged by more conventional standards, less dependent on elision. But I really, really, want to see him try.

needs more demons? absolutely not.

needs more demons? not really.

needs more demons? perhaps, but not as many as before.

needs more demons? for my taste, yes, a bit.

Of course there are exceptions that prove the rule, and happily, Predator’s Gold is one of them. Surviving characters from the first novel continue to grow and evolve (I’ll eschew specific spoilers, but if Reeve is perhaps not as cruel to his protagonists as, say, Joss Whedon, he’s assuredly not the sort of novelist from whom all sympathetic characters escape unscathed), and Reeve introduces new characters who also go through significant changes — there’s none of the stagnant quality to character dynamics that sometimes afflicts sequels. Some of Reeve’s people make appallingly bad choices in this novel, but that didn’t lessen my emotional involvement.

Reeve introduces a few nifty wrinkles to his world-building, and more importantly, deepens the moral complexity of the story; what was shaping up to be a a mostly-good versus mostly-evil conflict in the first novel becomes substantially more nuanced, nicely mirroring the good-people-doing-bad-things aspect of the plot. Speaking of the plot, it’s satisfyingly twisty and suspenseful. And once again I found Reeve’s language, coinages, and nomenclature delightful. I laughed aloud several times, and inflicted read-aloud passages on my patient wife.

needs more demons? no, no, and again, no.

Dept. of neither-here-nor-there: Mortal Engines is a decade old (and due for a round of reprints early next year, it looks like) — my encountering it only now indicates a clear failure of the Internets to reliably surface to me the books I want to read most.

needs more demons? no.

The Peace War wasn’t much to my taste. It posits a rather magical technology which a regime exploits to prevent global thermonuclear war, at the cost of halting technological advancement except within its inner circle. (In both of these novels I found the implicit politics intermittently hard to stomach). It has some interesting characters (and a few tiresome stock figures) and an action-oriented plot that might translate well to film. But fundamentally it relies on a gambit I’ve always thought a bit unfair: the reader spends the first chunk of the novel working out what the characters already know about the “magic” technology, and then Vinge changes the rules abruptly.

Marooned in Realtime was more my speed. In it a small group of humans from the near future find themselves in the far distant future, apparently after the rest of humanity is extinct. There are conflicts between factions that want to rekindle human civilization, and some with other objectives. Vinge sets up an intriguing variation on the locked room mystery, again involving extrapolations of his “magic” technological innovation. The primary viewpoint character is a 21st-century ex-police officer struggling to solve the murder, which requires trying to comprehend the motivations and motives of people whose subjective lifespans have been hundreds or even thousands of times longer than his. Vinge doesn’t play completely fair by whodunnit rules, but changes the game in mid-stream less than The Peace War; there are some feints toward some rather hoary resolutions that Vinge thankfully doesn’t follow through on. A curious mix of pessimism and optimism marks Marooned in RealtIme; Vinge suggests that our capacity for self-destruction is likely to stay with us; I found his nearly-empty future Earth distinctly depressing. But the human spirit and survival drive offer a glimmer of hope, if not as steadfastly and rosily as they do in, say, the Star Trek universe. I’m certainly not sorry I read these books.

needs more demons? adequately equipped with demons.

In several specific chapters it struck me as not only reminiscent of several Arthur C. Clarke works, but also evocative of older and less cerebral earthlings-struggling-to-comprehend-and-survive-a-strange-environment tales (Farmer’s “World of Tiers” Burroughs homages, in particular). But it’s also firmly in the post-Singularity sub-genre of science fiction, and informed by recent thoughts about space-time geometries, among other things.

On one level it’s the story of Cley, a young woman in the far distant future who may be the last “original” human (or at least the closest to homo sapiens) and her struggles to escape a powerful (but helpfully imprecise) entity bent on her destruction. But it’s also a rumination on how intelligence might differ, on the breadth and voracity of life, and on the value of the human spirit — and humanity itself — in a vast and indifferent-seeming cosmos.

It worked least well for me when Cley is among the “Supra” humans. The Supras intelligence supposedly outstrips ours, their lifespans are measured in centuries, and their physiologies are substantially different — they’ve dispensed, for instance, with external genitalia. But Benford’s portrayal of their society seems almost parochial, with unquestioned assumptions of heterosexual orientation, serial monogamy, and sexual jealousy as a motivating factor. When one of them courts Cley, the dynamic is all-too familiar from Woody Allen movies. (To be fair, Supra society is not Benford’s primary focus: our viewpoint character, Cley, looks in on them as an outsider; maybe some of the assumptions about the rules of that society are Cley’s as much as Benford’s. And I’m glad Benford doesn’t dwell on them too much; they suffer from the frequent problem of portraying supposedly hyperintelligent beings: they seem capricious and supercilious at best, emotionally retarded at worst.)

I liked the book better after Cley and her companion, Seeker After Patterns, a hyper-evolved and not-at-all-played-for-laughs distant descendant of raccoons, take their leave of the Supras. But the novel also becomes curiously hermetic at that point; Cley and Seeker talk to each other, but not much to others. Still, I enjoyed some of Benford’s descriptions of space-borne life. And Seeker is an interesting character, among the more convincingly rendered non-human intelligences I can recall. (And success in this portrayal is critical to Benford’s overarching thematic goal of exploring the diversity of intelligence.)

I found the novels’s resolution less than satisfying. There’s an element of deux ex machina, which, although the groundwork for it is well laid, still seemed a bit pat. But there’s a lot to admire about Beyond Infinity; it was certainly thought-provoking and I suspect it will be memorable as well.

needs more demons? it’s a bit hard for me to distinguish between “flaws” and things are just not to my taste.

* when I read the afterword I learned that Beyond Infinity is actually an expansion and reworking of an earlier sequel to a Clarke book.

It introduces a hefty dose of moral ambiguity into the story. In the original film, no one on the Death Star was portrayed as anything other than evil. But in Reaves and Perry’s revisionist take, the Death Star is home to conscripted doctors, conscience-stricken pilots, kindly prison guards, and other beings who are clearly not evil. Even the cold and cruel Governor Tarkin is humanized to the extent that he’s given a girlfriend.

Reaves and Perry do a good job of engaging the reader’s sympathies for the non-evil Death Star denizens without making them so well-rounded that they violate the general mood of the Star Wars uiverse. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension arises from the fact that the reader knows what happens to the Death Star, and the characters don’t. I found myself hoping that Reaves and Perry’s motley collection of misfits would somehow find a way to escape the Death Star’s fate.

I thought the first section was a little slow, but I read the second almost in a single sitting. I generally feel like it’s a mistake to try to science up Star Wars; even a Star Trek level of pseudoscience seems a bit jarring. There’s a little bit of that here, but not so much that I found it really obtrusive.

needs more demons? not so much

I’m older than Smith’s target audience, and it may be I’m judging Smith according to standards he’s not trying to meet — maybe he’s more interested in creating a nightmarish mood than a credible plot. But there are plenty of young adult novels I don’t feel any need to make excuses for; this one feels sloppy and unimaginative compared to the YA novels I usually read.

needs more demons?