But only in brief, alas!
Stressed out from work, slow-cooking in the humid Buffalo summer, and unable to find a new book for the life of me, I decided to pick up Peter F. Hamilton's "Night's Dawn" trilogy again, from where they sit dominating their part of the shelf.
Alas! I find I cannot get through it a second time. That which pulled me in last time is just not enough this time around. I muscled it through The Reality Dysfunction, but a little bit into the Neutronium Alchemist I am calling it a day.
This is the ultimate SF space-opera junk-food, crammed full of guilty pleasures, and it goes on for a few thousand pages. The trilogy comes out to a very hefty 6 books in mass market paperpack, and I see they've just re-printed the trilogy in 3 massive trade paperbacks.
The good: well-fleshed out far-future SF. Lots of tech, lots of exposition. Aliens. Bio- & nano-tech galore. Living spaceships, living space stations. Satanism! Zombies? Historical personage fetish? Gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence.
The bad: plotting structure jumps all over the place. Viewpoint is third-person omniscient, which is fine, except that the view just hops every which way. We seem to get stuck following a random collection of characters for hundreds of pages, wondering where the "main" characters got. Often, the reader will abruptly follow someone who drops out of the story completely within a dozen pages or less. While there are chapters, they are just numbers, they don't structure the plot at all. Any given chapter will jump viewpoints and sublot with little or no rationale. It's great at mosaicing a universe and a situation from many angles; not so great to read. Worse the second time around. Also bad: Zombies? Historical personage fetish? Gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence.
The ugly: Hamilton hates the semi-colon! This will make it hard for us to ever be friends.
Also ugly: is it sexist or just full of sex? The sexual-physical evaluation of every female character by every male viewpoint character gets to be too much. There seems to be a belated moral in main character Joshua Calvert's eventual return to the minor girl he impregnated. I'm perfectly all right with lots of sex (particularly in the future, where both unhealthy repression and the negative side-effects of free love have been reduced or eliminated), but the constant reduction of women to sex-objects is something that bugs me after about a few hundred pages. In Hamilton's defense, his vision of the Edenist society is laudably egalitarian, with most of the -isms banished by biotech: group "affinity" creates psychosis-free individuals and a truly democratic state.
Also ugly: Hamilton brings up, but fails to critically engage with, a number of problematic ideas. The biggest on my twitch-list are the concepts of ethnic streaming, and a haphazard approach to social justice. The former is a policy undertaken the governments of earth, whereby each new planet is designated for a given ethnic/cultural group. This policy of apart-ness is never really examined, and while the interplanetary political scene seems devoid of prejudice, the problem of a culture/ethnic group as having a defined unity doesn't even come up. In the few instances where Hamilton engages with issues of social justice he seems mixed up, offering half-hearted criticisms of the socially stratified, unequal distribution of wealth and power (with the egalitarian Edenists hanging in the background) before diverting to almost Ayn Rand-ian confirmation of the basic goodness of the wealthy.
Also ugly:Zombies? Historical personage fetish? Gratuitous sex, gratuitous violence.
And finally, ugly: Deus ex Machina. One of these days, Hamilton will write something that doesn't depend on one of those at the very end.
Not to knock it too much! If you haven't read "Night's Dawn" yet, and like space opera, this is hours upon hours of enjoyment. The faults just turned out to be a bit too much for me the second time through.
Next time: a new novel? I hear rumors of a book club starting somewhere in my circle. I'm also starting a new blog, on coffee! of all things, so we'll see how that goes.
Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Swainwick's Stations of the Tide
This is one of my favorite books. The imagery here is just imprinted in my brain, and I re-read it pretty frequently--it's probably in my top dozen or so most re-read books.
I don't quite know where to stick Swanwick's work generally. His style seems to vary a good deal from one piece to the next, and he's as remarkable for his ability to seamlessly slip out of SF/F tropes as for his way of breathing life into well-used ones. Like most of the best SF authors, he displays no concern for the "boundaries" of the genre; most people seem to know Swanwick from The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which I'll have to re-read one of these days--it's basically a straightforward attack on the bastardized-Tolkien fantasy one sees so much of, and, more deliciously for one such as me, a bit of categorical landmine for the critically-minded.
Why oh why must categories be so fun?
Incidentally, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is one of the most pessimistic novels I've ever encountered, and that includes McCarthy's The Road. It's just, y'know, you don't expect that level of nihilism in a book that has like elves and shit.
But. Stations of the Tide remains, for me, his most affecting work. Three points stick out for me: the range and vivid nature of the imagery, the magic, and the re-representational/simultaneity/heteroglossic style.
Also, the main character is only ever referred to as "the bureaucrat". He's middle-aged, not in particularly good shape, not all-knowing, not an Action Hero or Competent Man nor even a Human Camera on a sight-seeing trip; he's a really interesting character. And he's only ever referred to as "the bureaucrat".
The basic plot runs thusly: it's some point in the (presumably far) future. Humanity has colonized a number of other worlds/solar systems, and the most advanced civilizations seem to be large "floating cities" in space. Technology is controlled by the government; worlds such as Miranda, where most of the novel takes place, are under a relatively high restriction regarding what kinds of technology can be manufactured, used, or owned. A citizen of Miranda who has been off-world has returned, possibly with some stolen technology, and an agent of the government is sent to find him.
Nothing terribly new here. The notion of artificially-constrained technology goes way back, probably most memorably done in Dune. To Swanwick's credit, the treatment here is a lot more nuanced and believable--technology controlled for multiple reasons, socio-economic as well as environmental, and with a Butlerian-Jihad-esque event in the background. (The bureau of technology control seems to be a much wiser response to a catastrophe than Herbert's post-Jihad world--but then Swanwick didn't feel some inexplicable urge to have both starships and melee combat as central plot devices. I digress.) There's little or no technology here that hasn't been fictionally explored in depth elsewhere--AI, nanotech, etc.
But Swanwick turns all this into gold. His writing throws us into the world he's created-gah! I love it. I've written elsewhere (have to put that up) of the various techniques that authors use, SF authors particularly, to establish the fine-grained texture: the sense of both the concrete phenomenal qualities of the immediate action, and also grounding that experience in a sketched-out larger world. Both conditions are necessary for really engrossing difference to be met with the appropriate level of disbelief-suspension. You could use this novel as an example of how to do this well.
In Stations of the Tide Swanwick steers clear of exposition, only grudgingly letting the important concepts drop into our laps. Thus we never get an explanation for most of this huge landscape he evokes; one is left with more questions than answers. The protagonist is fixated on his goal, and so we see all this other intriguing stuff from, as it were, his peripheral vision. The corners of his eyes. He doesn't focus on the Thulean stargazers, the complex cultural accommodation of Miranda's jubilee tides--doesn't reflect on the use of The Tempest in naming the celestial bodies, or the physical/social nature of the Puzzle Palace, or even the exact planetary processes about to plunge a continent underwater. The television melodrama playing in the background throughout the novel enters into his consciousness, and hence ours, more thoroughly than any of the hard or soft science in which we as readers might be interested. Through brief, non-expositional passages, we get a sense of the history and nature of both the larger world and the protagonist himself, sometimes at once: as when a woman the bureaucrat used to be sexually involved with asks him, "do you realize that we've never met?"
It's a bit like Cherryh's celebrated "extremely limited third," a smooth and unpretentious style that is very good at showing (as opposed to telling). But Swanwick gives his characters more room, never really getting inside their heads--it's essential, here, as the central cast are all concerned with varying degrees of deception. Rather than neat summaries of either the cultural or psychological landscapes, we're given many monologues and stories and digressions from other characters, always discernibly biased in a way that would be difficult to write or enjoy reading at book length, but that work in these little doses to make a patchwork panorama of both characters and world. Swanwick also isn't afraid to take a moment and admire the scenery, or have his narrator comment a bit more eloquently than the protagonist seems likely to do--as when the ongoing television series is described as "a scream straight from the toad at the base of the brain, that ancient reptile that wants everything at once, delivered to its feet and set ablaze." But, for the most part, all we get are the aspects of the world that the bureaucrat notices.
What a world it is! The imagery, the startling ideas, are one of the strongest reasons you should read this book. Some samples: an entire continent is about to be submerged, as happens every few centuries. All the native life, including the aborigines, have evolved some form of amphibiousness, often two distinct life-phases. "Fairy" fungi grow amazingly quickly, covering entire buildings in fragile waving structures. The bones of the deceased are wired together and set to hang from trees. Witches practice strange rites. Skeletal robotic "surrogates" walk about with television screens for heads, showing the faces of the human using them.
The AI that ate Earth is represented as a giant naked woman in shackles. When the bureaucrat asks her what she wants, Earth replies: "What does any mother want from her daughters? I want to help you. I want to give you advice. I want to reshape you in my own image. I want to lead your lives, eat your flesh, grind your corpses, and gnaw the bones."
There's also magic going on in this book. Witchcraft, voodoo and the like (the whole of the Tidewater has this hard-to-pin-down Mississippi Delta feel; it comes out most in the darkly magical, the swampy landscape, and the carnival abandon of the inhabitants. Without ever making a clear allusion outside a few French names, there's more than a pinch of New Orleans here, I think).
But it's not really magic--it's all tricks, sleight of hand, misdirection, drugs and technology.
Or...maybe there is magic here.
I'd like to argue that this book problematizes the boundary, deconstructs the binary, pick your terminology--it really messes about with what magic is. Not in the way that Swanwick will do later (there are no fighter jets that are also dragons etc.), but by highlighting the subjective, deceptive, and recollective aspects of "magic". And more than that--even when the book brings a technologically-savvy skepticism to all the so-called "supernatural" events, it denies us access to a single, objectively true narrative. We see what the bureaucrat sees, which is often a maze of illusion and misdirection; his attempts to get to the bottom of things yield only more ambiguity. A variety of answers are offered to his every questions, some of them obviously false, none of them obviously true. And Swanwick coolly messes with our expectations--as SF readers we're prepared, for example, to believe in a hidden population of shape-shifting aliens; then another character offers an in-depth analysis of population mechanics and extinction that renders this hypothesis suspect. Simultaneously, slow clues throughout the novel make us doubt all the bureaucrat's sources of information. It's at once a critique of the notion of "magic" (if magic is just illusion used to achieve a certain end, and if all manipulations of others fit on that spectrum where does that leave us?) and also of the massive structure of assumptions, the received knowledge (from specialists, from scientists & historians, from witnesses) that we build our world-view on.
The result is not an utterly groundless world, one lacking a solid past or physical constancy--but it is one in which certainty is unattainable. We learn enough to get a little of that "sense of wonder" us SF junkies are always after, and the bureaucrat learns enough to get by. The bureaucrat's progress and personal survival seem to question whether the loss of such a necessarily-flawed world-view (one might call it the totality-demanding world-view) is really so tragic. Pragmatic, fluid world-views, ones with lots of admitted flaws, seem to work pretty well.
Clarke had that famous line, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But of course, good relativists (or rather embodied, situated, contextualized viewpointed-ists) like ourselves know enough to stick on a caveat: "...from a sufficiently primitive perspective." Clarke's dictum ignores the existence of omni-skeptics, "Brights" such as myself who would never consider phenomena to be "supernatural". The irony in Stations of the Tide is that the bureaucrat should be such a skeptic--he's more highly educated and more technologically advanced than the inhabitants of Miranda. Instead, he becomes deeply enmeshed in all of this craziness, has his illusion of objective totality and culturally-specific reality ripped away. The universe here is not laid out on some cosmic autopsy table, ultimately effable and orderly; it's kicking and scratching, slipping around corners, grinning as it shuffles the deck. The question is not whether or no there is some ultimate order, it's whether and how we know and work with the world.
Another irony is that the bureaucrat, as the viewpoint character, should be the one we as readers identify with--Office Joe adventures in the land of Voodoo Crazies. To a certain extent these kinds of characters are necessary in SF--characters whose sense of normalcy and difference is close enough to the readers' that they will focus on what the reader would--and to a certain extent the bureaucrat fits this model. He also turns out to be in many ways more post-human than is immediately apparent; the witches and gypsy-seeming folk of Miranda who seem so exotic at first turn out to have life-experiences much more understandable than the elite of the floating cities.
The novel is, dare I say it, post-modern. But in a quiet way, a deep way. The wild and fantastic imagery take center stage, and it's only later that these ambiguities begin to resonate. Swanwick distracts with the surface ideas, the exotic settings and characters and such, while playing out other ideas much more quietly. The Puzzle Palace, for example, is probably the most subtle and effective virtual...thing...I've ever encountered in fiction, more functional and tangible than Gibson's cyberspaces, less self-important than Williams' Otherland, and with hints of texture and depth that I've not found anywhere else.
Stations of the Tide is also highly unconventional in how it unfolds. Although the close third person of the bureaucrat makes up the primary frame, Swanwick constantly hits us with re-represented stories, stories told directly from the mouths of other characters. Thus we get long bits from characters who aren't the bureaucrat, who have their own histories and foci, their own biases. Its another way of presenting swaths of culture and character without succumbing to the lure of objectivity. Swanwick eventually throws several kinds of technological enhancement into the mix: semi-sentient recorded diaries that overlap with historical documents that are themselves reconstructed, stories made mysterious by surrogate orators, absorbed memories from identity-clones in the Puzzle Palace. Really you have to read the book to get all this--the point is, what feels like a fairly traditional third-person SF whodunit rapidly but quietly evolves into this heteroglossic mosaic, with the narrative suddenly leaping and changing. But it never breaks; the flow always stays with the bureaucrat, and we know no more than he does.
There are far too many writers today who would take all these ideas and flog them to death. There's enough material here to fuel some Night's Dawn-length monstrosity (sorry Pete), but Swanwick is content to craft this really beautiful novel and clock it in at about 250 pages. I just saw the other day that it's been re-printed (a lot of good SF re-printing going on lately), so it's probably around somewhere if you look. Someday I'll try to write something more concise about this, but I'll probably wind up being even more long-winded.
And I didn't even mention the weird resonances I get between this and dystopian novels, nor the tantric sex! Crazy.
Alright, as you can see from this, my third post, I'm not keeping up my writing with my reading, so I'm gonna try to do more "in briefs" and keep these longer rants for stuff I really feel for.
Jake out.
--
I don't quite know where to stick Swanwick's work generally. His style seems to vary a good deal from one piece to the next, and he's as remarkable for his ability to seamlessly slip out of SF/F tropes as for his way of breathing life into well-used ones. Like most of the best SF authors, he displays no concern for the "boundaries" of the genre; most people seem to know Swanwick from The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which I'll have to re-read one of these days--it's basically a straightforward attack on the bastardized-Tolkien fantasy one sees so much of, and, more deliciously for one such as me, a bit of categorical landmine for the critically-minded.
Why oh why must categories be so fun?
Incidentally, The Iron Dragon's Daughter is one of the most pessimistic novels I've ever encountered, and that includes McCarthy's The Road. It's just, y'know, you don't expect that level of nihilism in a book that has like elves and shit.
But. Stations of the Tide remains, for me, his most affecting work. Three points stick out for me: the range and vivid nature of the imagery, the magic, and the re-representational/simultaneity/heteroglossic style.
Also, the main character is only ever referred to as "the bureaucrat". He's middle-aged, not in particularly good shape, not all-knowing, not an Action Hero or Competent Man nor even a Human Camera on a sight-seeing trip; he's a really interesting character. And he's only ever referred to as "the bureaucrat".
The basic plot runs thusly: it's some point in the (presumably far) future. Humanity has colonized a number of other worlds/solar systems, and the most advanced civilizations seem to be large "floating cities" in space. Technology is controlled by the government; worlds such as Miranda, where most of the novel takes place, are under a relatively high restriction regarding what kinds of technology can be manufactured, used, or owned. A citizen of Miranda who has been off-world has returned, possibly with some stolen technology, and an agent of the government is sent to find him.
Nothing terribly new here. The notion of artificially-constrained technology goes way back, probably most memorably done in Dune. To Swanwick's credit, the treatment here is a lot more nuanced and believable--technology controlled for multiple reasons, socio-economic as well as environmental, and with a Butlerian-Jihad-esque event in the background. (The bureau of technology control seems to be a much wiser response to a catastrophe than Herbert's post-Jihad world--but then Swanwick didn't feel some inexplicable urge to have both starships and melee combat as central plot devices. I digress.) There's little or no technology here that hasn't been fictionally explored in depth elsewhere--AI, nanotech, etc.
But Swanwick turns all this into gold. His writing throws us into the world he's created-gah! I love it. I've written elsewhere (have to put that up) of the various techniques that authors use, SF authors particularly, to establish the fine-grained texture: the sense of both the concrete phenomenal qualities of the immediate action, and also grounding that experience in a sketched-out larger world. Both conditions are necessary for really engrossing difference to be met with the appropriate level of disbelief-suspension. You could use this novel as an example of how to do this well.
In Stations of the Tide Swanwick steers clear of exposition, only grudgingly letting the important concepts drop into our laps. Thus we never get an explanation for most of this huge landscape he evokes; one is left with more questions than answers. The protagonist is fixated on his goal, and so we see all this other intriguing stuff from, as it were, his peripheral vision. The corners of his eyes. He doesn't focus on the Thulean stargazers, the complex cultural accommodation of Miranda's jubilee tides--doesn't reflect on the use of The Tempest in naming the celestial bodies, or the physical/social nature of the Puzzle Palace, or even the exact planetary processes about to plunge a continent underwater. The television melodrama playing in the background throughout the novel enters into his consciousness, and hence ours, more thoroughly than any of the hard or soft science in which we as readers might be interested. Through brief, non-expositional passages, we get a sense of the history and nature of both the larger world and the protagonist himself, sometimes at once: as when a woman the bureaucrat used to be sexually involved with asks him, "do you realize that we've never met?"
It's a bit like Cherryh's celebrated "extremely limited third," a smooth and unpretentious style that is very good at showing (as opposed to telling). But Swanwick gives his characters more room, never really getting inside their heads--it's essential, here, as the central cast are all concerned with varying degrees of deception. Rather than neat summaries of either the cultural or psychological landscapes, we're given many monologues and stories and digressions from other characters, always discernibly biased in a way that would be difficult to write or enjoy reading at book length, but that work in these little doses to make a patchwork panorama of both characters and world. Swanwick also isn't afraid to take a moment and admire the scenery, or have his narrator comment a bit more eloquently than the protagonist seems likely to do--as when the ongoing television series is described as "a scream straight from the toad at the base of the brain, that ancient reptile that wants everything at once, delivered to its feet and set ablaze." But, for the most part, all we get are the aspects of the world that the bureaucrat notices.
What a world it is! The imagery, the startling ideas, are one of the strongest reasons you should read this book. Some samples: an entire continent is about to be submerged, as happens every few centuries. All the native life, including the aborigines, have evolved some form of amphibiousness, often two distinct life-phases. "Fairy" fungi grow amazingly quickly, covering entire buildings in fragile waving structures. The bones of the deceased are wired together and set to hang from trees. Witches practice strange rites. Skeletal robotic "surrogates" walk about with television screens for heads, showing the faces of the human using them.
The AI that ate Earth is represented as a giant naked woman in shackles. When the bureaucrat asks her what she wants, Earth replies: "What does any mother want from her daughters? I want to help you. I want to give you advice. I want to reshape you in my own image. I want to lead your lives, eat your flesh, grind your corpses, and gnaw the bones."
There's also magic going on in this book. Witchcraft, voodoo and the like (the whole of the Tidewater has this hard-to-pin-down Mississippi Delta feel; it comes out most in the darkly magical, the swampy landscape, and the carnival abandon of the inhabitants. Without ever making a clear allusion outside a few French names, there's more than a pinch of New Orleans here, I think).
But it's not really magic--it's all tricks, sleight of hand, misdirection, drugs and technology.
Or...maybe there is magic here.
I'd like to argue that this book problematizes the boundary, deconstructs the binary, pick your terminology--it really messes about with what magic is. Not in the way that Swanwick will do later (there are no fighter jets that are also dragons etc.), but by highlighting the subjective, deceptive, and recollective aspects of "magic". And more than that--even when the book brings a technologically-savvy skepticism to all the so-called "supernatural" events, it denies us access to a single, objectively true narrative. We see what the bureaucrat sees, which is often a maze of illusion and misdirection; his attempts to get to the bottom of things yield only more ambiguity. A variety of answers are offered to his every questions, some of them obviously false, none of them obviously true. And Swanwick coolly messes with our expectations--as SF readers we're prepared, for example, to believe in a hidden population of shape-shifting aliens; then another character offers an in-depth analysis of population mechanics and extinction that renders this hypothesis suspect. Simultaneously, slow clues throughout the novel make us doubt all the bureaucrat's sources of information. It's at once a critique of the notion of "magic" (if magic is just illusion used to achieve a certain end, and if all manipulations of others fit on that spectrum where does that leave us?) and also of the massive structure of assumptions, the received knowledge (from specialists, from scientists & historians, from witnesses) that we build our world-view on.
The result is not an utterly groundless world, one lacking a solid past or physical constancy--but it is one in which certainty is unattainable. We learn enough to get a little of that "sense of wonder" us SF junkies are always after, and the bureaucrat learns enough to get by. The bureaucrat's progress and personal survival seem to question whether the loss of such a necessarily-flawed world-view (one might call it the totality-demanding world-view) is really so tragic. Pragmatic, fluid world-views, ones with lots of admitted flaws, seem to work pretty well.
Clarke had that famous line, that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But of course, good relativists (or rather embodied, situated, contextualized viewpointed-ists) like ourselves know enough to stick on a caveat: "...from a sufficiently primitive perspective." Clarke's dictum ignores the existence of omni-skeptics, "Brights" such as myself who would never consider phenomena to be "supernatural". The irony in Stations of the Tide is that the bureaucrat should be such a skeptic--he's more highly educated and more technologically advanced than the inhabitants of Miranda. Instead, he becomes deeply enmeshed in all of this craziness, has his illusion of objective totality and culturally-specific reality ripped away. The universe here is not laid out on some cosmic autopsy table, ultimately effable and orderly; it's kicking and scratching, slipping around corners, grinning as it shuffles the deck. The question is not whether or no there is some ultimate order, it's whether and how we know and work with the world.
Another irony is that the bureaucrat, as the viewpoint character, should be the one we as readers identify with--Office Joe adventures in the land of Voodoo Crazies. To a certain extent these kinds of characters are necessary in SF--characters whose sense of normalcy and difference is close enough to the readers' that they will focus on what the reader would--and to a certain extent the bureaucrat fits this model. He also turns out to be in many ways more post-human than is immediately apparent; the witches and gypsy-seeming folk of Miranda who seem so exotic at first turn out to have life-experiences much more understandable than the elite of the floating cities.
The novel is, dare I say it, post-modern. But in a quiet way, a deep way. The wild and fantastic imagery take center stage, and it's only later that these ambiguities begin to resonate. Swanwick distracts with the surface ideas, the exotic settings and characters and such, while playing out other ideas much more quietly. The Puzzle Palace, for example, is probably the most subtle and effective virtual...thing...I've ever encountered in fiction, more functional and tangible than Gibson's cyberspaces, less self-important than Williams' Otherland, and with hints of texture and depth that I've not found anywhere else.
Stations of the Tide is also highly unconventional in how it unfolds. Although the close third person of the bureaucrat makes up the primary frame, Swanwick constantly hits us with re-represented stories, stories told directly from the mouths of other characters. Thus we get long bits from characters who aren't the bureaucrat, who have their own histories and foci, their own biases. Its another way of presenting swaths of culture and character without succumbing to the lure of objectivity. Swanwick eventually throws several kinds of technological enhancement into the mix: semi-sentient recorded diaries that overlap with historical documents that are themselves reconstructed, stories made mysterious by surrogate orators, absorbed memories from identity-clones in the Puzzle Palace. Really you have to read the book to get all this--the point is, what feels like a fairly traditional third-person SF whodunit rapidly but quietly evolves into this heteroglossic mosaic, with the narrative suddenly leaping and changing. But it never breaks; the flow always stays with the bureaucrat, and we know no more than he does.
There are far too many writers today who would take all these ideas and flog them to death. There's enough material here to fuel some Night's Dawn-length monstrosity (sorry Pete), but Swanwick is content to craft this really beautiful novel and clock it in at about 250 pages. I just saw the other day that it's been re-printed (a lot of good SF re-printing going on lately), so it's probably around somewhere if you look. Someday I'll try to write something more concise about this, but I'll probably wind up being even more long-winded.
And I didn't even mention the weird resonances I get between this and dystopian novels, nor the tantric sex! Crazy.
Alright, as you can see from this, my third post, I'm not keeping up my writing with my reading, so I'm gonna try to do more "in briefs" and keep these longer rants for stuff I really feel for.
Jake out.
--
Monday, March 31, 2008
Swainston's Dangerous Offspring
First off, I didn't realize when I ordered Steph Swainston's Dangerous Offspring that it is the third in a series. Take my criticism, then, with a grain of salt, because some of my gripes might be resolved by reading the first two. That said, it seems to me to be a relatively self-contained story, not following a cliff-hanger or anything like that.
I liked this book, I burned through it in just a couple of days, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys some creative SF/F. It definitely leans strongly in the fantasy direction--and, if you know me, I'm prejudiced against fantasy, and I'm still recommending it. If you like American Gods, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, have dabbled with Jordan or Goodkind or Martin, and are not overly freaked out by some SF elements, pick this up. It's a fun read, if not likely to make your classics list. At any rate it's not the usual Tolkien rip-off.
Synopsis! Then gripes.
It's (mostly) a first-person account of one Jant Comet, a winged humanoid from a land (planet?) called the Fourlands, which is apparently a single continent. Two millennia or so prior to the story, Insects invaded the Fourlands from the north--big horse-sized insects, hive-building, they devour everything organic. It is revealed to us readers (though not to most of the inhabitants of the Fourlands) that the Insects actually come from some multi-dimensional poly-world thing called the Shift. To combat the insects, the Emperor formed "the Circle", which is a group of people who are granted immortality on the basis of their usefulness in the war against the insects--one Swordsman, one Cook, one Blacksmith, etc. And the Emperor grants immortality to their spouses, as well! (Which to me just seems rife with problems, but I guess it's a nice gesture.) Jant fills the role of the Messenger.
The novel picks up with a campaign to retake land from the Insects using a massive dam project to alternately flood and drain Insect-occupied land. Things don't go smoothly, of course, and Jant runs around on lots of weird errands, and we get lots of flashbacks and side-plots as well.
I bought the book on the strength of a single chapter, "The Ride of The Gabbleratchet", which was reprinted in The New Weird anthology. It's not very directly related to anything else going on in the novel, and it's also by far the best and most interesting chapter--which probably isn't good.
The main Fourlands plot is what I might call "low realist fantasy": there's little or no magic and the style is not of "high" fantasy like LOTR or the Earthsea books, for example, while it also lacks the more dedicated grittiness of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (which, while containing magic stuff, rides on the strength and non-miraculousness of its realistically portrayed characters and cultures). There are a number of "races", all of which can, apparently, interbreed. The only noticeable para-human traits (and, yes, one of the races is explicitly described as human) are the non-functional wings on the backs of one of the dominant groups. Technology is your typical Muddled Medieval--swords & shields, trebuchets etc. Their are some discrepancies-- the presence of "journalists" and segments of popular publications hint at printing presses, while the rest of the culture seems pre-industrial. Meh.
I stand by my statement that this is a very enjoyable book. But problems for the discerning reader abound, on a number of levels. Some examples:
-Plotting is anything but tight, and anything but believable. Major chunks of the text deal with Jant's relation to Cyan, the daughter of a prominent immortal--despite the fact that she has little or no bearing on the potentially apocalyptic Insect-action going on at the front. Cyan is also not a very likable character--she's just a spoiled teen, nothing more, so it's really unclear why Jant or we the readers are spending so much time with her. Also--Muddled Medieval strikes again--Cyan has modern-style tampons?
-The calendar! Maybe there's some deeper connection to our own timeline referenced in the other books? But if the book bears no relation to dear IRL Earth, why throw us with the sentence "It isn't 1925, it is the year 2025"? Eh? Eh?
-Jant is a halfbreed born of two humanoid races, neither of which can fly. Jant can fly. Maybe this is explained better in the earlier books, but in a book lacking magic (and with pretty clear anatomical descriptions), this is pretty silly for a host of reasons. I'm gonna go ahead and hope that he's supposed to be some sort of genetic throwback. That said, the problems with flying intelligent beings, especially when they're human in form, are myriad, and this book tries too hard for realism to ignore that and get away with it.
-On that note. Jant has claimed the spot of "Comet", or the Messenger, in the Circle of immortals (he's the only thing that can fly, and the immortals can be replaced if they lose to a challenger, so...). And the immortals, just to be clear, have wonderful recuperative powers and do not age, but can still be killed. So why the hell is Jant constantly getting into fights with Insects? It's unrealistic enough that non-combat immortals like the Blacksmith are going into battle (since the non-coms are supposed to preserve and build on their skills, not fight), but Jant is the only. Thing. That can fly. Letting him risk getting killed all the time is sort of like you're leading an army, you have the only pair of walky-talkies in existence, and you're using them to cudgel enemy infantry.
-Lack of sense in the military and cultural backdrop is one of the hardest for me to swallow. An example: there is no hierarchy in the military...at all. The immortals are each specialists in a weapon, or in a non-combat skill. But there's no immortal whose talent is, say, strategy. Presumably they all answer to the Emperor, who grants them their immortality, but even when he takes the field there's no clear chain of command. Soldiers march in units by weapons, each type trained by that respective immortal, rather than in any kind of truly organized fashion. I'm no lover of hierarchies, particularly the military kind, but to watch a disaster unfold because of a fairly unbelievable blind spot is a little painful--the emotional effectiveness of the book relies on the military events heavily, and it's difficult to sympathize when you can't understand how an army this stupid could function, much less exist. Then you think, is this bad writing/research, or some subtle comment on the problem of this whole social structure? And then you go, hm, yeah, it's just not well-thought-out by the writer.
-Along with the Muddled Medieval tech, there's a lot of oddness in the language. I do like that Swainston didn't try to half-ass some languages--the few foreign words here are totally acceptable (although since they only seem to refer to terms that have simple one-to-one translations, it's not clear why she used them). However, nitpicky point here--they talk in terms of the metric system. A lot. One character, the Engineer, is prone to spouting lists of numbers, all in metric units. Now while I can get behind translating "whatever-it-is-they're-'really'-speaking" into "okay-we'll-make-that-analogous-to-English", (Tolkien after all using the method brilliantly--if only more people would try to copy that part of his formula) the metric system is a lot more recent, it's historically embedded in the English language at a certain point...I don't want to see "thee" and "thou" and "kilometer" coming from the same character, is what I'm saying. Maybe that's hopelessly American of me? I'd like to think it's a little more philologically nuanced.
There's also a character who speaks in some sort of antiquated, Cockneyish accent, yet who mentions treating someone for "VD". It breaks continuity, imho.
Also, when a character from another, more advanced civilization starts naming elements like uranium, none of its sword-wielding audience seem surprised or confused.
-The writing is inconsistent stylistically, and has some persistent flaws. The great majority of the book is Jant's first-person account, but it's an as-it-happens account, not a recounted-in-a-journal-or-to-a-listener format. Nor is it a stream-of-consciousness approach--basically this is the worst kind of first-person, the kind that will describe a fight or other swift action in such detail that it takes ten times as long to say or read as it would to occur. There's little subtlety of psychology; we're told everything bluntly or not at all.
Extended flashbacks are frequent, typically with no discernible impact on the main storyline before or after; they're usually attempts to flesh out characters. The first chapter is a flashback to events a century before the second, and are written with a gruesome attention to (gruesome) detail that belies the fairly blithe attitude of the rest of the book.
The view-point shifts away from Jant and returns with no framework and no consistency. So, for example, there is one chapter entirely in the voice of Saker Lightning (one of the most prominent immortals, Cyan's father)--we get a whole chapter-worth of first-person flashback with no device or precedent to explain why it's not of our accustomed narrator (and, without revealing too much, this chapter made me scratch my head and wonder if I understood the immortality mechanic at all). Nor is it clear if Jant knows all that is revealed in this chapter. There are also a few unpredictable "press releases", a brief third-person omniscient sequence, and an even briefer moment when Jant speaks to the reader directly, addressing "you" and confessing that he lied about a few things. To which I say, what the hell?
Swainston does not impress much in her characterization or even the main plot. The strength of her writing is in the weirdness, in her attention to detail in painting very new scenes. It's what makes the Gabbleratchet chapter so effective, with Jant chasing Cyan abruptly from world to world, seeing scenes so strange that Cyan believes she's dreaming the whole time, or overdosing. (Oh yeah, the heroin-ish-analogue in the Fourlands occasionally sends you tripping into other dimensions or some such. Neat!) There's little characterization or plot, just scenes and creatures and motion, and it's very effective, with the interspersed dialogue and monologues adding to snapshots of this delightfully weird, big, old polyverse that Swainston has dreamed up.
It's written very differently, but the first chapter is also very effective, covered in blood and haemolymph, never descending into horror or scare-tactics but maintaining a morbidity and fascination with the Insects and corpses and such that's way more intriguing than one more Muddled Medieval Peasant Army trudging onward, as we get later in the book.
All in all a fun read, you can easily see where the strengths and weaknesses are. I also applaud the breadth of Swainston's vocabulary; you'll probably want to keep a pen and paper to hand or be quick with the dictionary to catch it all. I plan on picking up the first two books at some point; hopefully they're more consistent. Or maybe her next release will be. I'm really liking this New Weird stuff, but I haven't found a novel that satisfies like the short stories do.
This book is also worth reading because it contains the sentence: "It could be love, or it could be all that seafood."
Jake out.
I liked this book, I burned through it in just a couple of days, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys some creative SF/F. It definitely leans strongly in the fantasy direction--and, if you know me, I'm prejudiced against fantasy, and I'm still recommending it. If you like American Gods, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, have dabbled with Jordan or Goodkind or Martin, and are not overly freaked out by some SF elements, pick this up. It's a fun read, if not likely to make your classics list. At any rate it's not the usual Tolkien rip-off.
Synopsis! Then gripes.
It's (mostly) a first-person account of one Jant Comet, a winged humanoid from a land (planet?) called the Fourlands, which is apparently a single continent. Two millennia or so prior to the story, Insects invaded the Fourlands from the north--big horse-sized insects, hive-building, they devour everything organic. It is revealed to us readers (though not to most of the inhabitants of the Fourlands) that the Insects actually come from some multi-dimensional poly-world thing called the Shift. To combat the insects, the Emperor formed "the Circle", which is a group of people who are granted immortality on the basis of their usefulness in the war against the insects--one Swordsman, one Cook, one Blacksmith, etc. And the Emperor grants immortality to their spouses, as well! (Which to me just seems rife with problems, but I guess it's a nice gesture.) Jant fills the role of the Messenger.
The novel picks up with a campaign to retake land from the Insects using a massive dam project to alternately flood and drain Insect-occupied land. Things don't go smoothly, of course, and Jant runs around on lots of weird errands, and we get lots of flashbacks and side-plots as well.
I bought the book on the strength of a single chapter, "The Ride of The Gabbleratchet", which was reprinted in The New Weird anthology. It's not very directly related to anything else going on in the novel, and it's also by far the best and most interesting chapter--which probably isn't good.
The main Fourlands plot is what I might call "low realist fantasy": there's little or no magic and the style is not of "high" fantasy like LOTR or the Earthsea books, for example, while it also lacks the more dedicated grittiness of Martin's Song of Ice and Fire (which, while containing magic stuff, rides on the strength and non-miraculousness of its realistically portrayed characters and cultures). There are a number of "races", all of which can, apparently, interbreed. The only noticeable para-human traits (and, yes, one of the races is explicitly described as human) are the non-functional wings on the backs of one of the dominant groups. Technology is your typical Muddled Medieval--swords & shields, trebuchets etc. Their are some discrepancies-- the presence of "journalists" and segments of popular publications hint at printing presses, while the rest of the culture seems pre-industrial. Meh.
I stand by my statement that this is a very enjoyable book. But problems for the discerning reader abound, on a number of levels. Some examples:
-Plotting is anything but tight, and anything but believable. Major chunks of the text deal with Jant's relation to Cyan, the daughter of a prominent immortal--despite the fact that she has little or no bearing on the potentially apocalyptic Insect-action going on at the front. Cyan is also not a very likable character--she's just a spoiled teen, nothing more, so it's really unclear why Jant or we the readers are spending so much time with her. Also--Muddled Medieval strikes again--Cyan has modern-style tampons?
-The calendar! Maybe there's some deeper connection to our own timeline referenced in the other books? But if the book bears no relation to dear IRL Earth, why throw us with the sentence "It isn't 1925, it is the year 2025"? Eh? Eh?
-Jant is a halfbreed born of two humanoid races, neither of which can fly. Jant can fly. Maybe this is explained better in the earlier books, but in a book lacking magic (and with pretty clear anatomical descriptions), this is pretty silly for a host of reasons. I'm gonna go ahead and hope that he's supposed to be some sort of genetic throwback. That said, the problems with flying intelligent beings, especially when they're human in form, are myriad, and this book tries too hard for realism to ignore that and get away with it.
-On that note. Jant has claimed the spot of "Comet", or the Messenger, in the Circle of immortals (he's the only thing that can fly, and the immortals can be replaced if they lose to a challenger, so...). And the immortals, just to be clear, have wonderful recuperative powers and do not age, but can still be killed. So why the hell is Jant constantly getting into fights with Insects? It's unrealistic enough that non-combat immortals like the Blacksmith are going into battle (since the non-coms are supposed to preserve and build on their skills, not fight), but Jant is the only. Thing. That can fly. Letting him risk getting killed all the time is sort of like you're leading an army, you have the only pair of walky-talkies in existence, and you're using them to cudgel enemy infantry.
-Lack of sense in the military and cultural backdrop is one of the hardest for me to swallow. An example: there is no hierarchy in the military...at all. The immortals are each specialists in a weapon, or in a non-combat skill. But there's no immortal whose talent is, say, strategy. Presumably they all answer to the Emperor, who grants them their immortality, but even when he takes the field there's no clear chain of command. Soldiers march in units by weapons, each type trained by that respective immortal, rather than in any kind of truly organized fashion. I'm no lover of hierarchies, particularly the military kind, but to watch a disaster unfold because of a fairly unbelievable blind spot is a little painful--the emotional effectiveness of the book relies on the military events heavily, and it's difficult to sympathize when you can't understand how an army this stupid could function, much less exist. Then you think, is this bad writing/research, or some subtle comment on the problem of this whole social structure? And then you go, hm, yeah, it's just not well-thought-out by the writer.
-Along with the Muddled Medieval tech, there's a lot of oddness in the language. I do like that Swainston didn't try to half-ass some languages--the few foreign words here are totally acceptable (although since they only seem to refer to terms that have simple one-to-one translations, it's not clear why she used them). However, nitpicky point here--they talk in terms of the metric system. A lot. One character, the Engineer, is prone to spouting lists of numbers, all in metric units. Now while I can get behind translating "whatever-it-is-they're-'really'-speaking" into "okay-we'll-make-that-analogous-to-English", (Tolkien after all using the method brilliantly--if only more people would try to copy that part of his formula) the metric system is a lot more recent, it's historically embedded in the English language at a certain point...I don't want to see "thee" and "thou" and "kilometer" coming from the same character, is what I'm saying. Maybe that's hopelessly American of me? I'd like to think it's a little more philologically nuanced.
There's also a character who speaks in some sort of antiquated, Cockneyish accent, yet who mentions treating someone for "VD". It breaks continuity, imho.
Also, when a character from another, more advanced civilization starts naming elements like uranium, none of its sword-wielding audience seem surprised or confused.
-The writing is inconsistent stylistically, and has some persistent flaws. The great majority of the book is Jant's first-person account, but it's an as-it-happens account, not a recounted-in-a-journal-or-to-a-listener format. Nor is it a stream-of-consciousness approach--basically this is the worst kind of first-person, the kind that will describe a fight or other swift action in such detail that it takes ten times as long to say or read as it would to occur. There's little subtlety of psychology; we're told everything bluntly or not at all.
Extended flashbacks are frequent, typically with no discernible impact on the main storyline before or after; they're usually attempts to flesh out characters. The first chapter is a flashback to events a century before the second, and are written with a gruesome attention to (gruesome) detail that belies the fairly blithe attitude of the rest of the book.
The view-point shifts away from Jant and returns with no framework and no consistency. So, for example, there is one chapter entirely in the voice of Saker Lightning (one of the most prominent immortals, Cyan's father)--we get a whole chapter-worth of first-person flashback with no device or precedent to explain why it's not of our accustomed narrator (and, without revealing too much, this chapter made me scratch my head and wonder if I understood the immortality mechanic at all). Nor is it clear if Jant knows all that is revealed in this chapter. There are also a few unpredictable "press releases", a brief third-person omniscient sequence, and an even briefer moment when Jant speaks to the reader directly, addressing "you" and confessing that he lied about a few things. To which I say, what the hell?
Swainston does not impress much in her characterization or even the main plot. The strength of her writing is in the weirdness, in her attention to detail in painting very new scenes. It's what makes the Gabbleratchet chapter so effective, with Jant chasing Cyan abruptly from world to world, seeing scenes so strange that Cyan believes she's dreaming the whole time, or overdosing. (Oh yeah, the heroin-ish-analogue in the Fourlands occasionally sends you tripping into other dimensions or some such. Neat!) There's little characterization or plot, just scenes and creatures and motion, and it's very effective, with the interspersed dialogue and monologues adding to snapshots of this delightfully weird, big, old polyverse that Swainston has dreamed up.
It's written very differently, but the first chapter is also very effective, covered in blood and haemolymph, never descending into horror or scare-tactics but maintaining a morbidity and fascination with the Insects and corpses and such that's way more intriguing than one more Muddled Medieval Peasant Army trudging onward, as we get later in the book.
All in all a fun read, you can easily see where the strengths and weaknesses are. I also applaud the breadth of Swainston's vocabulary; you'll probably want to keep a pen and paper to hand or be quick with the dictionary to catch it all. I plan on picking up the first two books at some point; hopefully they're more consistent. Or maybe her next release will be. I'm really liking this New Weird stuff, but I haven't found a novel that satisfies like the short stories do.
This book is also worth reading because it contains the sentence: "It could be love, or it could be all that seafood."
Jake out.
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