needs more demons? not so much.

• When Pierson’s characters talk about bands, the made up names, e.g., The Boy Who Cried Sparrow, sound so believable I had to use Google to make sure they weren’t real.
• This book has the most realistic depiction ever of a high school friendship between two ubernerds. I say this as a “co-author” of a comic apocalyptic “novel” that shamelessly ripped off “Hitchhickers’ Guide” and Tolkein metal and whatever else my ubernerd pal and I were reading/listening to, and which was not utterly unlike Darren and Eric’s TimeBlaze project.
• Darren’s voice, holy crap. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To is the first book I read beginning to end on an e-reader device, and I set bookmarks on pages with passages that made me really want to read them aloud to anyone in range, and there were, like, a dozen. Here’s one:
  

  When I get up to my room I take my shirt off and look into the mirror for a while, not in a vain way, just to see what the fuck is going on with my torso, scrawny and fat at the same time, has to be the worst torso for miles. Then I might turn on MTV, again not because I like what’s going on there but simply to gape in wonder at what the fuck is wrong with everybody, and occasionally there’ll be some stupidly hot girl on, writhing around on the top of a car.

  and here’s another:

  Basically something I think I believed without ever having thought about it is that part of being smart is not being able to start a sentence with a subject and then end that sentence by saying that subject is a good thing and actually mean it.

  Darren usually opts for flat, uncomplicated language like this, but if it’s low on frills, it possesses a distinctive rhythm, and it feels so completely authentic that I sometimes feel as if Pierson must have rooted around in my own high school-era cranium.

• The title of this blog alludes to the fact that strictly naturalistic fiction, with no speculative or fantastic elements, sometimes leaves me feeling like there’s something missing. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To does have speculative/fantastic aspects, but it’s a measure of how resonant that I found it that I almost wished it hadn’t. I was so interested in what was going on between Darren, Eric (and other characters I won’t mention to avoid spoilers) that sometimes the fantasy elements felt almost intrusive. Coming from me this is high, if a bit left-handed, praise. (I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s textual evidence that Darren is delusional and that the novel’s fantastic events didn’t “really” happen, but it’s at least hinted at that fantasy worlds are one of Darren’s coping mechanisms for dealing with the messy emotional business of the real world and real people; once or twice I even had the sense that it might have been a distancing technique for Pierson — that maybe he didn’t think he could make the story compelling without the sci-fi twist. The irony here is that I think would have found it compelling, but I might never have thought to pick it up without that hook to draw me in.)

One thing I didn’t love quite so much — the ending works thematically, but it seemed a bit rushed. It leads into the prologue –but that prologue feels almost like it belongs to a different novel entirely. Maybe a sequel is in the offing. But whether Pierson revisits Darren, Eric, et al in future fiction or not, I eagerly await his next book, no matter what genre labels might apply to it.

needs more demons? Absolutely not.

The January Dancer is fundamentally a space opera, with nods to sources as wide-ranging as Smith’s Lensmen (for sure) and Whedon’s Firefly (I suspect). The plot unfolds in a formal structure patterned after Celtic music forms (which I found off-putting at first, but only at first). The story incorporates a number of revelations, some of which have more payoff for the reader than others (when has a mysterious alien artifact ever not had unexpected significance or qualities), but some of which Flynn clearly expects the reader to work out at about the same time the characters do.

Two side notes: if you are considering reading this novel and daunted by the star map, list of characters, and/or the time-measurement conversion chart at the front of the book , don’t let them dissuade you. None are necessary (although the map is helpful) and the time chart can safely be ignored.
Also I was surprised that The January Dancer was not shorlisted for the Hugo and/or Nebula awards. The word “jilted” comes to mind.

needs more demons? Nope.

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.

Odd Girl Out drops the detective elements almost completely in favor of action-adventure, which is less to my personal taste. Even more unfortunately, it more-or-less reprises a set piece from an earlier books (there’s even some dialogue along the lines of “remember the last time we had to fight in a baggage car?”). Once again, I saw the big reveal coming way before agent Frank Compton figured it out. Rather bafflingly, the stage was clearly set for another twist, but the penny was never dropped. And although Odd Girl Out certainly advances the overall plot arc, the characters are more static than in the previous novels.

I still enjoyed it, and I will get around to reading the recently-published fourth volume sometime. But I worry that the schtick may get exhausted — or my patience with it, anyway — before the story is concluded.

needs more demons? maybe.

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.

Zahn is clearly aware of the sources he’s riffing on — at one point Compton and his maybe ally/maybe femme fatale actually watch Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes — but two attributes of the novel save it from sinking into parody. The first is Compton’s narrative voice, which seems to be modeled on Hammett’s Continental Op. He’s quietly competent, eschewing the misogyny and personal demons of Chandler’s Marlowe, and Compton always takes his own situation seriously, even when Zahn’s tongue slips into his cheek. The second is that the unraveling mystery works fairly well in science fiction terms. (There’s a point where the seasoned SF reader may find a conclusion obvious well before light dawns on Compton, but on the other hand Zahn finds more-or-less credible explanations for some of the flimsier tropes of detective/espionage fiction that he borrows.)

Night Train to Rigel wraps up with a lump of exposition before a pair of predictable (if emotionally satisfying) set-pieces, a minor flaw in a novel that seems tailor-made for the description “ripping yarn.” There are two more novels in the series (although this one is complete in itself) and I look forward to reading them once I dig out of my soon-to-be-overdue library book pile.

needs more demons? no.

I went through Dragon and Thief like it was a tub of movie popcorn. It reminded me pleasantly of the uncomplicated space action yarns I devoured as an adolescent from the likes of Bischoff, Chalker, and Foster, although it was more kid-friendly than several of them. (Heinlein’s juvenile novels also came to mind, although Zahn’s milieu is more cosmopolitan than I think of as characteristically Heinlein.)

Dragon and Thief struck a fair balance between wrapping up some narrative threads and setting up future novels in the series. I will read more.

needs more demons? no.

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.