Vernor Vinge - The Children of the Sky

Vernor Vinge's Hugo award winning A Fire Upon the Deep stands as one of my absolute favorite works of Science Fiction, an exquisite blend of big ideas and fast paced adventure. The novel's themes and protagonist, if not the rest of its setting, received further exploration in its prequel, the (once again) Hugo winning A Deepness in the Sky. I had problems with the plot and pacing of that novel, but it was still a fascinating and well crafted book. The Children of the Sky, though, is, at long last, a direct sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep that promised to continue the story past the cataclysmic events that ended that masterwork and to resolve what was probably best left unresolved. As you may have guessed from that last sentence, The Children of the Sky does not live up to its predecessors in either scope or execution.

We begin with Ravna and the children rescued from the Blight, who were stranded on a medieval world and are now waking from coldsleep. The Blight fleet that was pursuing them is still coming, but, due to their victory at that novel's end, will not arrive for centuries. By the time it does, Ravna knows that they must, using the information stored on their crashed ship (the Out of Band II)'s archives, advance to its technological level. But that's not quite as easy to do as it is to say, and there are problems along the way.

The vast majority of the novel is taken up by worldly political squabbling. The world is populated by the Tines, Vinge's fantastic group-minded and dog-like alien creation, but the Tines are not a homogenous whole. As if navigating the alien factions wasn't tricky enough, the humans, too, are splitting down the middle. The children, you see, quite literally slept through the events of the last novel. They don't feel the same terror that Ravna does at the thought of the Blight fleet. In fact, they aren't even sure if they believe Ravna's story. Their parents, after all, were the ones who unleashed the Blight, and they know that their parents were neither stupid nor evil. The faction that calls itself the Disaster Study Group reasons that, perhaps, the Blight was not evil but good and that Ravna and her ally Pham Nuwen were not heroes in stopping it but the perpetrators of a calamity on the scale of an interstellar genocide.

Like its predecessors, The Children of the Sky attempts to fill itself with numerous big ideas; alas, none  quite succeed. We get a few further insights into Tinish culture, particularly on the formation of packs and even on Tinish romance fiction. Those are all interesting, but none of it really rises beyond adding frills to their establishment in A Fire Upon the Deep. The one piece of new and Tinish ground treaded is that of the tropics, where innumerable Tines have merged together into a single massive whole. One of the choir's emissaries says: the Choir as a whole may not have what you call intelligence, but it is a happier way to know reality than is your stunted existence (p. 324). But we never delve deeper than that, never get more than vague hints and a few glimpses of how the choir really functions.

Like Tinish culture, the idea of recreating a star faring civilization from medieval routes is here on a far larger scale than it was previously but still adds little. In addition to Ravna's focused path, the inventor and businessman Tycoon begins what is called an industrial revolution in a far away land. Unfortunately, all of that stays in that far away land until the novel's ending. These developments should be beyond game changing for the Tines. Early on, one of Tycoon's associates admits that: Tycoon has lots of stupid ideas, including the notion of getting power by selling things (p. 53). That raises a fantastically interesting point, no? But we never return to it, never get to see how a Robber Baron might establish and conduct himself in the dark ages. Instead of focusing on massive societal changes, we see a bare handful of inventions and how they play into the bickering of the familiar factions.

Furthermore, one of the main ones of those factions, the Disaster Study Group, proves perpetually obnoxious to read about. I'll let them explain their foundation: The DSG starts from the position that we can't know exactly what happened at the High Lab and how we managed to escape (p. 77). To this, Ravna responds: When these deniers say 'we can't really know,' that is a lie. I know (p. 78). Nonetheless, the deniers, perhaps, have a credible reason for not trusting her. But Ravna is not the only one that knows what happened; the reader knows too. As a result of that, and as a result of how there is no new evidence or debate but simply two positions shouted at one another, the reader soon just grows annoyed at the deniers and wishes they'd finally find out so the novel could move on. It never does.

In the absence of big ideas, The Children of the Sky becomes a shallow thriller, and I doubt you'll be surprised when I add in that its plot isn't all that great either. The main problem with it is simply that it is long and bloated, something that is made a thousand times worse by virtue of the fact that it is almost perfectly predictable; my only incorrect assumptions were my continued hopes that the Blight's fleet would ever arrive, that the industrial revolution would take center stage, or that something  interesting would happen. At one point, Ravna is kidnapped. She and a few allies escape, but they are lost in the middle of nowhere. To survive, they decide (for some unfathomable reason) to be travelling performers. The section, like many of the novel's better ones, is effective but silly. Afterwards, they are recaptured again and, after that brief digression of roughly seventy-four pages, we go back to exactly where we were heading and Ravna is brought, captive, to the kidnappers' employers.

But the novel's real problem is character. There are multiple villains here, but every single one of them is of the moustache twirling variety. To give a small example, we learn that one of them always enjoyed (p. 369) throwing prisoners out of its air ship. The narration itself calls characters villains, every character in the book can agree without a doubt that they are evil (p. 231), and the debate is not on the issues or on the people themselves but rather on who is villain-in-chief (p. 304). To be fair, not every villain is simple, at least insofar as the word implies a lack of complexity. Some are idiots. Take this exchange between two of Ravna's captors as they stand over her:

"So you've told her about the radio link to the orbiter?"

"No, but you've done that now."

"…Oh." Gannon thought about that for a second and then laughed. "Like you said, it doesn't matter what she knows now." (p. 216)

It's not just the villains that are one dimensional. The main characters each have one or two dominant traits or interests, and that is all they are. The deniers may be wrong about the Blight's intentions, but they are right on the money when they say that Ravna is so obsessed with the threat that she cares about nothing else. More than it's a matter of goals, the problem is that Vinge's characters don't seem to have emotional lives. Johanna is betrayed by her fiancé, and we see her express anger, but the reader can't, despite their best effort, feel all that shocked by it. We don’t see a single scene of the two together, and we saw no affection for him in her thoughts even before the betrayal; the text would be fundamentally unchanged if we heard that the two were mortal enemies from birth on.

The characters' shallowness – and every one of the novel's other problems – is exacerbated by the prose. In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vinge wrote in a childlike tone when writing from a child's perspective, and, the rest of the time, wrote with a generally easy air filled with clever turns of phrase. Those are, very occasionally, visible here; Tinish group minds and their merging, for instance, can bring literal truth to the idea of a rumor having a life of its own. But it's not enough to save the mess that we've got.

Only one of The Children of the Sky's viewpoints is particularly young, and the vast majority of it is told from Ravna's perspective, which is to say that of a woman many decades into this whole living business. Yet she and every other character (the narrator most certainly included) talk like overexcited preteens. Devious aliens tell themselves to Be cool (p. 53). A human's Tinish companions are known as their Best Friend (p. 79). A supposedly clever human manipulator visibly reminds himself that the Tines are seriously not human (p. 127). The Out of Band II (or OoBII) is here always referred to as Oobii (p. 82). World leaders are described as geeky (p. 412).The occasional bit of not so surprising dialogue is followed by breathless interjections like: That was Jefri! (p. 419) Dialogue and narration are constantly interrupted by shouts of Hei! (p. 63), perhaps used as a preventative measure to drag back one's flagging attention.

If I was slightly more inclined to play the game of coincidences and portents, I might point out how this is the first volume of the series to not include the word deep in its title and how, no doubt as a direct result of that, it is the first to not be, in any sense of the word, deep. Whatever the fate of that conjecture, The Children of the Sky is nowhere near the level of either of its predecessors. Stripped of the overawing backing of one of Vinge's mammoth ideas, the plot and characters here are revealed as shallower than skin, and that's not at all helped by the author's juvenile diction. Even removed from the comparison to Vinge's other works, this is simply not a good book.

Vernor Vinge - A Deepness Upon the Sky

So high, so low, so many things to know. (p. 775)

A Deepness in the Sky is the prequel to his fantastic, Hugo winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep. But unlike most prequels, A Deepness in the Sky doesn't blandly putter about the backdrop or spend its time retconning with sledgehammer subtlety. Though we are exploring Pham Nuwen's history, we're doing so in a fashion far enough removed from the earlier (/chronologically later) novel that A Deepness in the Sky has space to become its own story. In fact, the closest connection between the two is thematic, with A Deepness in the Sky presenting a claustrophobic counterpoint to the mind-boggling expanses of its predecessor.

A Deepness in the Sky is a book of humanity constrained. By the time of its occurrence, humankind has grown far beyond what we can now imagine, but true greatness – the ends of misery and suffering, the permanence of civilization and justice – remain out of reach, nothing more than impossibilities and "Failed Dreams" (p. 323). We've learned much through all these thousands of future years, but mainly we've learned of limits (p. 770). Unable to go beyond the speed of light, no culture can survive between planets and systems, and so planetary civilizations rise and fall. At the height they're wonderful things, but there is so much darkness. (p. 770) No matter how great a civilization may grow, it cannot be eternal. A Fire Upon the Deep showed a path of potential and nigh endless ascension, of mobility and transcendence if only one could overcome the dangers. A Deepness in the Sky, taking place entirely within what that other novel would call the Slow Zone, has the rises and falls without the possibility of growth or apotheosis. It shows humanity endlessly struggling against the "wheel of time" (323) and humanity being endlessly broken upon it. 

It is this inevitability that the outsider, planet-born Pham Nuwen strives against. He dreams of a single Humankind, where justice would not be occasional flickering light, but a steady glow across all of Human Space. He dreamed of a civilization where continents never burned. (pp. 556-7) Motivated by that dream, Nuwen approaches the disparate Qeng Ho trading culture and tries to meld them into a unifying force. But his dreams prove impossible. Mere organization is not enough; humankind is fundamentally outmatched by time and space.

Outmatched within its own boundaries, that is, for the novel's main action takes place far past the establishment of this cycle of rises and falls, takes place as humankind reaches something utterly alien: the On/Off star (which emits no heat at all for 215 of every 250 years) and, on the one planet that orbits it, the Spiders, a nonhuman technological race. Then there's the fact that the Qeng Ho expedition to this star is not the only one. The Emergents have also arrived, a disparate human civilization that possesses its own dark secrets and strengths. 

After their so ominous introduction, it's not that surprising when the Emergents prove villainous and betray the Qeng Ho they'd pretended to coexist with. The Qeng Ho expedition must not only struggle to survive under the Emergent's tyranny but also, in Pham Nuwen's case, struggle to find a way to finally overcome the necessity of these endless and unwinnable life and death struggles. Nuwen, though, is not the only one striving.

Nuwen's counterpart in the space borne part of the story is Tomas Nau, the Emergent's leader, who has reached his own solution with the aid of Focus, an Emergent science that allows once-free individuals to be turned into hyper efficient slaves. This transcendence through cruelty is efficient, allowing not only short term miracles but also the long term coordination and stability that would be needed to truly enact the kind of justice and greatness throughout space that Nuwen envisions. But, though he's initially drawn to use of the Focused, Nuwen eventually realizes that the cost is too high and that any utopia created with such inhumanity at its center is not worthy of its own immortality.

The far opposite of Nau's practicality only approach might be Sherkaner Underhill's. Sherkaner's one of the sentient spider-like creatures that the whole story revolves around, but his role isn't that of a prize passively sitting by while his betters fight over him. No, Sherkaner's busy with his mad ideas, playing the role of the resident and eccentric mad genius, spouting out a thousand flights of brilliancy and fancy a second and then moving on before they're all the way out of his mouth, a tireless flirting around what might just be possible without ever letting the difficulties of reality in, a job that falls those around him to face in order to make use of his mind.

It is, eventually, something like Sherkaner's method that triumphs. No matter how well meaning or ruthless we are, Vinge shows us that we alone are not enough to triumph over time, fate, and inevitability. No, for that we need technology and an endless search for what is possible. In the end, the On/Off star doesn't give Pham Nuwen the answers, but it does show him that answers are not impossible, and, as readers of A Fire Upon the Deep know, that is eventually enough to get him (and all of us?) the rest of the way. As Nuwen himself puts it, "We've finally found something from outside all our limits. It's a tiny glimpse, shreds and drags of brightest glory." (p. 770)

Tying into all this is actually the question of classification. I've seen A Deepness in the Sky often called Hard Science Fiction. That's, well, rather bizarre. Let me remind you, oh venerable and impossible to pin down internet classifiers, that this is a novel that contains a star that turns itself off every once in a while and genuine antigravity, to name just the two most obvious case-breakers. My point here goes beyond simple quibbling with genres, though. A Deepness in the Sky is not a work grounded in the current trends of scientific thought, and one could go so far as to say that that's the entire point of it. This is not a novel about what we know, but rather about what we don't know, and Vinge is damn careful throughout to divorce it from the strict boundaries of 21^st century plausibility. As such, and making full use of Clarke's third law and all that goes with it, Vinge makes frequent references to the "magic" of such incomprehensible things things, be they the On/Off star (p. 197), the previous and inconceivably advanced prior dwellers on Arachna (p. 254), or even Focus technology (p. 294). There's even a mention of the Weird (which, though this is certainly not Horror in either its methods or its mindset, is a rather related field) in the form of a reference to your typical Cthulhonic horror (p. 297).

But, my thousand plus word reveling in Vinge's fascinating thematic arc now past, there's also a story here, and, though I've no doubt done my inadvertent best to convince you otherwise with all my blathering, it's not a pretentious one at all. At its best, it's fantastic. Vinge plots like a hunting hound given flight, free to go anywhere he can imagine and downright damned if he won't explore ever interesting nook, cranny, and consequence of what he's dreamed up. But there are flaws, too, and some are, alas, quite grievous. In my review of A Fire Upon the Deep, I said that "Vinge’s characters, and even his plots, are well overshadowed by his ideas" and that "once just about all’s explained and understood […] a bit of the excitement leaves the affair." In A Deepness in the Sky, we, alas, reach that point far sooner, a likely result of the novel being far more stationary, with much less stage space, and so running out of new and totally out there sights to throw at us far sooner. Once that point's reached, and with the exception of Pham Nuwen's flashbacks, things are up to the plotting and the characters. And things don't go nearly as well.

Once its fantastic opening is done, and once we've settled into its middle section, A Deepness in the Sky proceeds to trudge along for a truly incredible amount of time. There is a climax coming, of course, but we know roughly what shape it'll take from a quarter or a third of the way through, and the vast majority of the character's actions aren't so much bringing it about as they are talking about what they'll do when it hits them of its own volition. This idle and often almost eventless pacing is highlighted by the timescale. Years and years pass over the novel's course, which just seems to turn the character's profitless determination and motionless enthusiasm into, well, nothing at all. Then there's the bewildering way that so many of the novel's intermediate game changers happen entirely off screen and are only alluded to in passing. This is bad aboard the ships, where we spend the majority of our time, but is far worse on the Spiders' world of Arachna, where gaps and skips leave the villain developing somewhere totally out of view and inconsequential feeling and, because of it, undefined by anything but uninteresting blanket statements like Whatever was evil, Pedure was very good at it. (p. 583)

Characters in general prove, if not a problem, not exactly a strength. Like in A Fire Upon the Deep, they're wholly ruled by the forces around them, but here there are long periods where none of those forces are particularly evident and we're left with not much but the characters themselves sitting around. Vinge is decent at creating believable and realistic individuals, but, whether by design or by virtue of falling short, the reader never comes to grow close to any of them. This works for characters like Pham Nuwen and Sherkaner Underhill, both of which are too much larger than life and to scheming to serve as easy points of reader identification, but it does end up leaving the work without any real emotional center, with a bunch of characters that make certainly well realized minor characters but none that the reader ever truly lives through.

Despite these flaws, though, A Deepness in the Sky is a stunning and expansive read. It's not quite as breathtaking or simply excellent as its predecessor, but it still does show off Vinge's skill and imagination, still stretches out and smashes (delightful!) holes in your imagination. Though A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are separate enough to be read individually, their combined effect shows both the possibilities for greatness and for disaster in the author's vision of the future, and each is a daring and powerful work of Science Fiction. Put in order, the two show a probable arc for technology's progress. Most of this novel is a seemingly endless stagnation that follows that technology's brief arrival, but just because the answers are hard to find does not mean that they are not there, and Vinge seems sure that technology will eventually able us to succeed at our most fundamental goals.

Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep

Vernor Vinge’s 1992 Hugo Award winning novel A Fire Upon the Deep opens as follows: How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails. (p. 1) From those sentences on, the novel’s one of tremendous scale, a playful book full of adventure and heart that is, one can never forget, a behemoth of nigh unimaginable proportions, a colossus as awe inspiring as the star-studded night sky it takes place in the depths of.

The idea central to the book is that there are Zones of Thought, that the galaxy and its physics are not uniform entities but are rather stratified by areas of different potential complexities and even natural laws. From the Slowness towards the galaxy’s core, where the Earth of our present lies entombed and where sophonts can only crawl across the stars, to the Beyond, a realm like the majority of our Science Fiction and filled with mingling races and faster than light travel, all the way to the Transcend, the place where the restraints of reality are so lax that those who’ve reached it become as Gods, impossible for us to conceive and capable of almost any feat. It’s an interesting set up, and Vinge is an author skilled enough, and a dreamer daring enough, to not shy from its complexities but rather to search out its implications.

So many authors of Science Fiction (and Fantasy) seem determined to attain the grandeur of celestial timescales and zeroes after their dates without either the ability or willingness to actually give that history life. Needless to say, that’s not at all the case here. Rather than give the Transcendent the easy gravity of immortality, Vinge delves deeper, into something simpler, stranger, and, once considered, infinitely more awesome. The Transcendent are so much greater than we are, and their conceptions of time and reality so different, that it’s rare they stay communicative for more than five or ten years. They lost interest, or grew into something different – or [they] really did die. (p. 72)  Instead of a being eternally humanoid, they're brief, ephemeral, and infinitely vaster in that short span of time.

But it’s not just as the very top of his delectable and speculative layer cake that Vinge has imbued with life. Though the Zones themselves seem permanent, and though the evolution of life from Slowness to Beyond and even Transcendence if the race proves capable is well established, the actual details of Vinge’s world are ever in flux. Faced with the vastness of space and time, with the prospects of further advancement into the Transcend or the dangers of their neighbors, entire races frequently perish or ascend. As Vinge says, civilizations were transient and races faded… (p. 307) At one point, when faced with a beach so odd and beautiful that it might be unique, we’re told that, considering the immensity of space and the uncountable races that inhabit it and inhabited it, saying that something is unique is an extreme thing to say about anything in the Beyond. (p. 166) I can think of several excellent examples of Science Fiction concepts so excellent that they defined entire imagined cosmos in their tales’ reality and their readers’ imagination, but here is something different, an eminence of eternal change and possibility vaster than any one idea, no matter how strong.

To my puzzlement, Vinge's treatment of information seems often accused of being outdated and/or hopelessly retro. That’s bizarre to me. It’s true that the internet here is mostly composed of simple text based messages, just about identical to the emails of today, but the face of the thing’s irrelevant next to the structure and mindset of it, and there Vinge excels. His is a future concerned, above all else, with information, and it’s the pursuit of information that shapes its structure and its masters, that drives the very economy of the Beyond.

Of course, we don’t know all this at the novel’s beginning, and, fear not, despite the brilliance of the world building, A Fire Upon the Deep is anything but a slow or self-indulgently expository novel. In fact, the broad outlines of the plot are just about as standard as you can get. In the prologue, bumbling human explorers stumble upon an archive containing an ancient entity more powerful, and more malevolent, than they can imagine. I probably won’t be shocking anyone when I say that it escapes and that it starts wreaking havoc. Sequestered for so long in the archive with the perversion, though, was what just might be some means of combating it, and that means ends up marooned after a shipwreck on a medieval-level world populated by pack intelligences with the last two child survivors of the researcher’s last escape ship. Alternating with the children’s perspectives and those of the world’s natives is that of Ravna, a human woman from up in the Beyond who is at first key to monitoring, and then to trying to rescue, the trapped children and their cargo. The fun of it all is further accented by all manner of gleeful ingredients, from the amateur spy who reassures his companions by saying “Hey, don’t worry. I’ve read all about doing this sort of thing!” (p. 31), to Vinge’s pulpish habit of underlining entire sentences for emphasis, to his constant playing and subverting (or even simply subsuming) the tropes of the most excitable adventure stories, as when Ravna realizes upon meeting one particularly larger than life character that after a lifetime of reading romantic fiction, she’d run into her first hero. (p. 89)

Crucially, though, Vinge somehow manages to never cross the line between fast paced fun and shallow or thin tales with nothing to offer besides the whittling away of time. The key to that is, rather unsurprisingly, the depth and brevity of his world and its constant and mind-expanding games of scale. Both of those make themselves felt constantly and naturally through the most innocuous details or statements, like one character’s casual mention of “nonlinear reading” (p. 281) or another man of this far future’s saying that half-assed programming was a time-filler that, like knitting, must date back to the beginning of the human experience. (p. 487)

Another vital component of it all is the way that Vinge is able to suggest and even dive into genuinely alien minds. Chiefly on display are two creations, the pack based and technologically primitive Tines and the two Skroderiders that accompany Ravna on her mission to the Tines’ world. Of those two, it’s the Tines that fascinated me most, creatures whose very consciousness was the product of multiple distinct and independently sentient parts. Vinge explores the concept in all sorts of interesting ways with Flenser and Steel, Tines that have become a cross of megalomaniacal dictators and mad scientists, experimenting on their brethren and themselves to discover just what makes them them and just how a pack could be artificially created. Despite their profound strangeness, however, the Tines are relatable in their way, emotional, sympathetic, and even at times understandable. As one of the children with them observes of one of their conversations, the ideas were so alien, and yet the overtones of affection and humor were somehow very familiar. (p. 293)

It doesn’t hurt that the Tines’ world is so fascinating. It may be only a part of the whole, but Vinge, like China Miéville, has the unique ability to make his every throw away idea incredibly fascinating and his every sub plot seem fertile enough for a series. I, at least, know I’d gladly have read, loved, and considered great a Fantasy novel containing nothing but a smaller scale version of the Tines portion of this text. Their world has numerous interesting factions and characters, unexplored yet tempting horizons, is everywhere rich with the implications, from architecture to art, of a pack mind species. The fantasy plotline that takes place there reminded me a great deal of K.J. Parker’s Engineer trilogy with its focus on technology and the changes that it leads to, but here, of course, the characters have a cheat sheet, the two sides both struggling to invent from scratch the weapons and items that they know exist, leading to a world and a confrontation within it marked by huge gaps and leaps in ability and technology.

As enjoyable as the plot is, it still does seem small at first when glimpsed against the entirety of the Zones and the uncountable races that reside there. In fact, many sophonts take exactly that position in the first half or so of the novel, saying that there have always been such galactic catastrophes and that, really, it’s no big deal for any except those that get caught in them. The fact that the perversion then proves a danger to not just humanity and those near it but to all the Beyond serves to raise the stakes and immensity of the threat to critical levels, but does still leaves the individual seeming hopelessly outmatched as entire civilizations fall and die on the periphery, their fates only obliquely revealed through the shifting views of the Net.

Even that’s barely touching on the incredible effects of living near the Transcendent, knowing that there are beings infinitely superior to you, infinitely above you, capable – and, now, willing – to use sophonts as but their playthings. We’re all, as one character says, nothing but “happy automatons, running on trivial programs. […] [The Transcendent] could make devices like you and I.” (pp. 255-6) But the cast as a whole is not given into such fatalism. No, the message here is one of defiance and action, no matter how fleeting or seemingly hopeless, how short lived or even doomed. Our perspective in the prologue says it first: While we exist, when we exist, we should do what we can, (p. 3) but I think my favorite iteration of the sentiment comes later, when one of the novel’s most audacious, but ultimately weaker, characters says that he “will not be flotsam on the wave of the future.” (p. 450) (All of which is similar to another of Parker’s themes, the one best summed up by Basso’s declaration that Destiny is the enemy. (p. 203, The Folding Knife))

Despite all that, though, Vinge’s characters, and even his plots, are well overshadowed by his ideas. The excellence of each and every one of his humanoid and alien creations comes from their reactions and actions in their extraordinary and inventive situations, and the joys of his flashy plotting come from the way that it interacts with his cosmos. So, once just about all’s explained and understood, or at least as much as it ever will be in the novel’s pages (or ever could be by our Slow Zone minds?), a bit of the excitement leaves the affair, and the broad strokes of the novel’s ending aren’t too surprising, even if the particulars might be. Tied into that is the fact that we only get to viscerally feel the aspects of the climax that take place on the Tines world, a shame because it’s in terms of the larger galaxy that the unexpected aspects of the ending really hit. But, for all that, the ending’s still a damn fine one, a shade disappointing only for being merely very good at the end of such an exquisite work.

A Fire Upon the Deep is the epitome of what so much Science Fiction is trying to be, a gripping and exciting book filled to bursting and over the rim with interesting ideas that stretch out your mind, fill your head with wonder, and make you contemplate something profoundly other and infinitely vast. Here, at the tail end of this panegyric, I still feel like I may have understated just how much this novel hit me and just how much I liked it. So let me have one more sentence-length shot at conveying how I feel about it: A Fire Upon the Deep is absolutely brilliant. Now go read the book.

Best Reads of 2011

Largely, I think, due to reading so many magazines and so many parts of various books for classes, I read the fewest books in 2011 that I did in any year since I started keeping track in 2009. Still, I've ended up with the at least somewhat respectable total of one hundred and nine volumes conquered, and, needless to say, quite a few of those were rather excellent. And so the time has come for the eight best of them, presented in alphabetical order. We begin with…

Reviewed here.

The Wounded and the Slain isn't an exciting book. It's downbeat, instead, not to mention depressing, dejected and dispirited, filled with character and heart and written with a kind of rough poetry. Though there is a crime at the book's center, it's very much a crime with a small c, not a jumping off point to adventure but a tortured, haphazard, regrettable, and, above all, pointless thing. The descent into darkness thing is an inexorable crawl, not a glamorous leap. I don't think you could ever call this a pleasant book, but it's one that'll hit you hard, and it's a damn good one.

Reviewed here.

As stark as it is focused, as streamlined as it is jagged, Red Harvest embodies much of what interests me about the noir genre. Though wholly concerned with matters of justice, this is a compassionless novel, maybe even a(n intentionally) heartless one. Morality here is a brutal force, and the idea of right is relegated to strength and violence. But, in this nigh lawless place, even the lawman, the only one standing up for us, might be corrupt to the core. This is a fast novel, a fun novel, and a damn disturbing one.

Reviewed here.

Like Red Harvest, The Ammonite Violin is disturbing and raw, but here those qualities don't come from bare language, harsh violence, and a lack of emotion but rather from a series of stories that are almost unutterably rich in their composition, filled with overwhelming and enveloping language and positively overflowing with feeling. The longing shown here is the kind of calculated, unbearable, and revelatory longing that might come gushing forth from an excised heart with all the force of the heavy, dark blood that comes with it.

Grimscribe is horror extraordinaire Thomas Ligotti's second collection, and it takes place wholly within nightmare, on the edge of utter dementia itself. Its stories toy with that border, giving glimpses and tantalizing, horrifying hints, leaping across for brief moments where sanity howls before falling back. Amidst it all are several of Ligotti's best tales, including Nethescurial, an insidious and Lovecraftian beast of a tale that can actually be read for free (albeit with an annoying formatting issue or two) here. In my personal rankings, Grimscribe is roughly tied with the author's Songs of aDead Dreamer and Teatro Grottesco for the overall prize of his best work. Suffice to say, this is a brilliant collection.

Reviewed here.

I knew I'd like Sandkings going in, maybe even knew I'd love it, but I didn't know how much. The Stone City is a Science Fiction Weird Tale in every sense of the word, and an absolutely brilliant one at that, fiction that probes the limits of human understanding and strangeness with as much skill as Lovecraft himself brought to the table. This isn't, though, a collection with one centerpiece. Every tale here is filled with breathtaking images and audacity, entire worlds and some of the best characterization you'll ever come across. I know a lot of readers view Martin's older works as a now-done sideshow compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, but doing so is a dire mistake.

Reviewed here.

Embassytown is the rare Science Fiction novel that is not only alien in its choice of colors and its number of tentacles. The aliens shown here are convincingly inhuman, but it's the aspects of language that Miéville uses them to explore that are stranger and more intriguing still. Those concepts are explored in full, taking the humans in the narrative to and past the breaking point, twisting and shattering and reinventing every aspect of their world. Miéville's as skilled as any with coming up with brilliant and challenging ideas, has the ability to ride them for all they're worth, and the talent to present the whole with his fantastic prose. Though it's very different from his early work, Embassytown is no less excellent.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion builds a vivid, colorful, and fascinating world and populates it with larger than life, well explored, and somehow believable characters. I think it says a lot about the novel that I chiefly remember two scenes, one the thrilling, grand, and inventive climax and the other an unimportant scene where the main character eats some rather unpleasant food in a diner. Try as I might, I can't decide which of those I liked best, or which felt more real, and, amazingly enough, the two fit so well into the same narrative that, looking back, they really don't seem all that different in importance at all.

Review to come.

A Fire Upon the Deep operates on a scale so much vaster than what can be easily conceived that the reader's practically pummeled with awe as they turn the pages, and turn them they will. The central plot of A Fire Upon the Deep is a gripping adventure story that takes place amidst an unimaginably complex and fascinating universe, a story filled with grand ideas and with a cast made up in large part of some of the best made and most convincing aliens I've ever seen. A Fire Upon the Deep isn't only one of my favorite books of this year: it's one of my favorite Science Fiction novels ever and even one of my favorite novels.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

Though it also had its fair share of excellence, 2011 packed in more than a few disappointing novels: Boneshaker, If You Could See Me Now, and even the legendary Frankenstein among them. But the latter two had some good ideas, if a fumbled execution, and even Boneshaker was more formless mush than actively bad. Only Wicked Things managed to truly and genuinely piss me off, not because it hadn't met my expectations (though, needless to say, it hadn't) but because it was simply an awful book, one that rambled about aimlessly, setting up numerous hints and clues, and then oh-so-cleverly keeled over dead before resolving anything. Ha ha. Wicked Things tries to be a stylish, plot-based read, but the ending reveal leaves it a thriller that forgot to thrill, a horror novel whose only real horror moment is a and unsubstantiated cheap shot, a novel whose characters are stick figures then jerked out of their unremarkable paths, and a book with nigh no redeeming features.