Publications 7 and 8

Over the past week or two, I've had two rather nice pieces of news that I didn't get a chance to report.

First, there's my horror flash Painting Nothing, which was just accepted by The Gloaming for publication. Painting Nothing was written rather early compared to most of my other horror stories, and it's admittedly not as subtle and is a bit more blatant in its worship of Thomas Ligotti (I wrote it as I finished Teatro Grottesco for the first time). Still, I think it's a nice tale, and I hope you all enjoy it when it surfaces.

Then there's the matter of Legwork, which is a rather strange fantasy short I wrote some time ago when high on the inspiration energy of having just discovered Haruki Murakami and the short fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. Fantastic Frontiers Magazine thought it worthy to be in their debut issue.

With these two sales, I have a total of four forthcoming stories, which is a rather unprecedented (but quite nice) experience. Oddly enough, the past months' onslaught of publications comes in a time when my output's been rather sluggish. Since the fall, I've only managed four stories (one of which sold to Beneath Ceaseless Skies), which is rather below last year's frenzied pace. Still, the summer should hopefully give me some time to get the numbers back up.

B.B. Griffith - Blue Fall

Released in 2011 by the author's Griffith Publishing, Blue Fall is the opening to a series of books centered on the explosive and barely containable world of the Tournament. I had issues with Griffith's pacing and world building, but the action scenes at the book's center are damn good and strong enough to keep the reader charging through the book's pages.

The Tournament is at the novel's very core, and the characters' varying takes on it are fascinating. To some, it's a sport, a World Cup of team shooting (p. 297). A refuge for competition without limits. (p. 392) To others, it's a hive of luxury and decadence, a plaything of the rich, the product of fabulously wealthy men and women who had been born in the wrong era and yearned for the days of the gladiator and the Coliseum. (p. 239) Some view it as a chance to mean something, to avoid dying in some little duplex without anybody giving a good goddamn." (p. 500) And, to others, it has the challenge of the first of those, the significance of the second, and the height of the third. It's a return to the days when whole nations, entire races of people, pinned their hopes and futures on individual warriors. Whole wars were won and lost on the outcome of a single battle between heroes. Entire countries were moved. Empires rose and fell. (p. 475)

Unfortunately, the Tournament's actualities are just as hard to pin down as its purpose. We hear that no one on earth was out of their [the Tournament's] reach (p. 443). But that doesn't seem to make sense. Who and what is this Tournament? For an all powerful organization, one has to wonder why they seem to have only a single worthwhile courier and why, for all the mentions of their security forces, they're unable to control their players in any way. More important than the makeup, though, is the question of secrecy. It makes absolutely no sense that the Tournament wouldn't be found in about three days. Why? Because its fights are in broad daylight. In hotels and streets, subways and highways, and worse still. Because its battlegrounds are packed with civilians, and because the organization seems wholly incapable of containing any amount of information at all. Admittedly, the ferocity of the round that we see is constantly remarked upon. The Tournament is growing more visceral, harder to contain. It's turning into a war (p. 297). But that doesn't quite explain it. The players marked as psychotic aren't the only ones that are careless. Even those that seem comparatively sane have no problem with logic like: If the madmen of Black can destroy a dance club with impunity, then we can certainly make a bit of a stir on a runway. (p. 263) Positing no greater media or security presence at an airport than at a dance club is simply mind boggling in our post 9/11 world. Besides which, I just want to point out that any organization so focused on secrecy should avoid making a uniform for itself, let alone something like dark jumpsuits emblazoned with a white letter T. (p. 464) Real inconspicuous, guys.

We first learn of the Tournament from Frank Youngsmith, an everyman and a nobody, an investigator of insurance claims. In the novel's first third, he follows the oddities in a case, stumbles across something that doesn't seem possible, is warned away, and then seems to disappear altogether. His neighbor enters his apartment and finds him gone, the place searched. At the end of the book, a Tournament official tells him that he somehow managed to find and make public more about our work than anyone in the history of our organization. (p. 498) How he did that sounds like an interesting story, right? Maybe even one you'd like to read a book about? Well, Blue Fall is not that book. I don't mean, mind you, that Frank's story is badly told here. I simply mean that it's not here. At all. Frank vanishes entirely from the book for hundreds of pages, and everything from just before his quest's beginnings to its conclusion is entirely absent, an omission as striking as if every third chapter had simply been cut from the novel.

For the characters who are actually present, characterization here is of two halves. During the actual matches, things are too fast moving for in depth portraiture, but Griffith successfully throws in details, emotions, and dialogue to give us vivid, larger than life players that are, in their own ways, flawed. Unfortunately, Griffith seeks to broaden his characters beyond their sport. Of course, I'm not saying that characterization beyond the boundaries of plot is a bad thing. But it doesn't work here, because the entirety of the novel's plot is within the Tournament's framework, leaving the rest of the burden of characterization to chapter long backstory-discharging info dumps that cover the players' lives before they were recruited. Griffith's writing is compelling enough to prevent these from growing truly boring, but they never grow interesting, either, and our real questions (why are these seeming nobodies chosen for the Tournament rather than, say, Special Forces officers?) remain unanswered. These flashback chapters don't add much in the novel's early stages, when the characters are first getting introduced, but the two or so that follow the Tournament's commencing are annoyingly intrusive breaks in the action.

So, okay. We're a fair few paragraphs into this review, and I've been pretty hard on Blue Fall. But it has a redeeming feature, and it's a pretty big one: Blue Fall is a damn fun book. Once it gets going, Blue Fall starts picking up momentum and never stops. Before long, it's a speeding vehicle filled with gunfights, bravery, and set pieces that can be best summed up as awesome tumbling about in the backseat. Alright, that metaphor kind of crashed and burned. Nonetheless, watching the Tournament unfold in all its mayhem is glorious. 

Griffith's writing is always clear and capable of some very good lines (In the interims between dinners, time seemed to physically beat upon him. (p. 246)), but it's in battle that it gets great. Firing off multiple match ups at once allows Griffith to flip between them fast enough to keep the tension sky high up for chapters on end. More impressive still is how, in a novel with numerous teams and even more numerous players, Griffith keeps it all from blending together into gunfighter stew. No matter how many fights are going on at the moment, and no matter how many different tactics are about to succeed or blow up with explosive glory, it's always perfectly clear where each team member is and what their goals are. Furthermore, those set pieces I was just talking about aren't just window dressing. Players successfully and not so successfully make use of every part of their environment, giving us scenes like deafening gunfire mingling with still louder music in a dance club and traffic jam-trapped motorists being tricked into becoming distractions by the players. Like I said before, I have no idea how even one of these messes could ever be hushed up, but their creation's a joy to witness.

Blue Fall is dedicated to anybody who's "been known to open up a book simply to escape," and what a nice escape it is. While elements of Griffith's world building don't seem wholly plausible, and while the pacing of the exposition can be clumsy, Blue Fall is still a powerful read, one propelled forward by the strength of the combat at its center. Despite my issues and reservations, I will be reading the next volume in the Tournament series.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Seven

If only Buffy had stayed dead. When she fell at the fifth season's close, the show had three absolutely excellent seasons (the aforementioned five as well as its second and third) under its belt and had established itself as a master of humor, drama, and horror. Then came season six, a mixture of poorly executed trauma and failed farce. Looking back, even that utter wasting of great characters and potential – an exploding outward in a thousand unfocused and irrelevant directions instead of a cohesive arc – would have been a preferable ending place. That's not to say that season seven imitates its predecessors faults, mind you. No, this show does get back on what might, from a distance, look like the right track. It's Buffy against the forces of darkness again, everything tied into one character-trying and plot-twisting arc. Only, when we weren't looking, the once-right track eroded, fell to pieces, and – much as this metaphor's starting to go off the rails – lost just about everything that once made it worthy. What's left is po-faced, embarrassingly grandiose, undercutting of everything that has gone before, and jam packed with enough new characters to staff an entire network's worth of awful spinoffs.

Let's start with the characters. Not the main characters, mind you. Oh no. Remember when the show was actually about the people on the box art? When they had focused arcs that interacted with each other, that grew and changed? When we could watch their growth and know them with all the clarity we'd have had if they'd existed? We've left all of that far behind. Of course, this isn't the first batch of new characters we've had. By this point, Buffy'd been going on for a damn fair while, and new blood was always a part of keeping things fresh. But it's not that new people are introduced here, and it's not that they don't work. Some do. D.B. Woodside, for instance, is quite enjoyable as the school's principal, and freelance vampire hunter, Robin Wood. The problem is that there's nothing but new faces here. An onslaught of them. Literally dozens of the bastards, flooding the set in utterly uncharacterized hordes until Buffy's living room is so packed the camera needs to pan for whole seconds to show all of the nameless faces. Before long, it starts to seem that the writers have wholly forgotten how to make us care about characters and are just hoping to hide that fact with sheer numbers. It doesn't work. By the end, I was looking on Andrew (the season's surviving member of the Trio/Three Douchebags in a Van that so marred the sixth) as an old friend in comparison to everyone around him.

Seriously.

So who are all these people? Potential Slayers, of course. It turns out that the slayers are all part of one bloodline, and we learn that the Watchers' were the ones that kept track of them and trained them so that they would be ready, if they were called up. (Of course, Buffy received no such pre-Slayerhood training, but we've bigger fish to fry at the moment than one little retcon.) Now, the First Evil is hunting them, and it's up to Buffy to collect, protect, and train them. So that's what she does. Before long, her house starts to resemble – and then just outright become – less generic slice of suburbia and more a refugee shelter. As for the potentials themselves, there are so many that there's no time at all for the writers to distinguish them, let alone make us care about them. As a result, they range from faceless to obnoxious, and they never amount to anything until the final (regrettable) episode. In the meantime, though, we are shown them striving to better themselves (they fail) and, occasionally, succumbing to their foes and dying. Surprisingly, the perishing of unnamed, uncharacterized clutter fails to provoke tears.

Only two characters in all of this actually manage arcs, and the main one is, obviously, Buffy's. Arc, though, might be the wrong word. It implies continuous change, moving towards a climax and a new being. That's not quite accurate. Buffy has one jarring shift near the beginning, and then she trudges along, constantly pointing at the aforementioned change in case we missed it, until the show's end. Here, Buffy must go from fighter to leader. She does this by making speeches. Endless, endless, fucking endless speeches. For entire stretches, she'll make one an episode. They're awful, so self consciously inspirational that you want to cover your ears from the embarrassment. To give just one glimpse of them:

I'm beyond tired. I'm beyond scared. I'm standing on the mouth of hell, and it is gonna swallow me whole. And it'll choke on me. We're not ready? They're not ready. They think we're gonna wait for the end to come, like we always do. I'm done waiting. They want an apocalypse? Oh, we'll give 'em one. Anyone else who wants to run, do it now. 'Cause we just became an army. We just declared war. From now on, we won't just face our worst fears, we will seek them out. We will find them, and cut out their hearts one by one, until The First shows itself for what it really is. And I'll kill it myself. There is only one thing on this earth more powerful than evil, and that's us. Any questions?

That's from Bring on the Night. Lest you think it a climactic moment, it's the first of the just-discussed many, the season's veritable hordes of speeches, and it's far from the last time that Buffy will decide to take the fight to the enemy and then promptly not do anything until the next speech.

Spike... is actually still awesome.

Then there's Spike. His arc here works. Amazing, I know. It is, I think, the only complete storyline to do so. Spike, soul in hand, is tormented by what he's done. In his vulnerable state, the First Evil comes to him and vies for control of his soul and purpose. It comes to a head in Lies My Parents Told Me, where Giles and Wood decide that Spike is too dangerous to their team and attempt to slay him and where Spike, as he's beaten by Wood, comes to terms with his vampirism and what he's done. The only blemish on the whole thing is that it's such a small part of the season's overall time and that its buildup, execution, and aftermath are all but lost amidst every(regrettable)thing else. Anya's return to humanity might have managed to reach some of Spike's heights, but suffers far more from its lack of screen time and is wholly submerged by dreck before long.

The pacing of season seven is the worst pacing Buffy's ever had. The levity's almost wholly gone now, replaced with a failed sense of impending doom that just translates into endless brooding. Characters mope, motivate themselves, head out on some ill defined venture with no clear goal, fail, and proceed to mope once more. There's no sense of progress at all, not from Buffy's side and not from her foe's. There's no relief from this at all, because the side stories vanish as we progress. Then again, considering how poor efforts like Him are early in the season, that may be for the best.

Well doesn't this look like an interesting villain.

The enemy causing all of this, our final big bad, is the First Evil, the being of evil incarnate that we first met in season three. Now, the First Evil is incorporeal. That might, you may be thinking, pose a problem. It does. The writers get around this in two ways. First, through the introduction of avatar type characters. In the first half, we get the ubervamp (no, seriously). It's a vampire with far more strength and almost none of the vampire's traditional weaknesses. It also can't speak and, so, has no personality to speak of; it moves about the screen with roughly the same force of character that a scurrying raccoon, inadvertently given super strength, might have. Then, after a brief stint with Spike, it settles on Caleb, played by Nathan Fillion. Now, I love Nathan Fillion. Firefly's Mal Reynolds is likely my favorite character in television. But Caleb is a failure, just another villain who trudges about, doesn't properly react to punches, and hits really, really hard. He also spouts nonsensical pseudo-religious mush. Fascinating. Sadly, things are even less interesting when the First Evil chooses to act with its own untouchable charms. As we see in Conversations with Dead People, it talks to people. Before long, they're all aware that it's evil incarnate they're speaking with. They still listen. Apparently, knowing that it's the embodiment of everything you've ever strove against isn't reason enough to disregard its advice. Needless to say, mayhem ensues. Needless to say, it's stupid.

To show how utterly worthless this season is as a conclusion, though, we must really look closer at the finale. The last two episodes – End of Days and Chosen – are pitch perfect examples of irredeemable, inexcusable failure. As one of my friends and fellow viewers noted, the climaxes in these two episodes somehow manage to combine being contrived and being totally flat. No matter how much the writers cheat in the set up, and no matter how much we might grit our teeth and go along with it, they still can't bring off a good finish.

Apparently, Joss Whedon looked
at this design and thought,
"Yes, that looks suitably ancient."

We begin with Buffy's acquisition of the Scythe, a mythical battle axe that, we later learn, she wrests from Caleb in a bitter struggle. I say "later learn," even though we see the scene in real time, because there's no struggle at all. She just picks it up. It seems, judging by conversations to come, that it was supposed to be a sword in the stone moment, but that's just about exactly the thing that could use some prior set up. Anyway. Buffy gets the Scythe, which looks, at best, like it was from some faux-Medieval video game and, at worst, like it's from Rock Band.

Buffy goes off to research her new toy. Luckily, it's the fifth result on the first website that is tried. She tracks down a mysterious woman to learn more about it. This woman is a pagan, in an Egyptian style tomb, in California. Not a Native American, though, we're told. Alright then. Get out of the way, history, and let's proceed.  The woman gives a long speech. Once she's done, Caleb (who was, evidently, standing directly behind her without her commenting and, maybe, hiding in her dress to stay out of frame) snaps her neck. He and Buffy fight and, as Buffy almost dies, Angel steps in to save her. He then stands off to the side while she almost dies. When Caleb finally falls, Buffy and Angel embrace and kiss. Spike, who was evidently watching from the corner and decided to not intervene as Buffy fought for her life, grimaces. Angel then goes home, but not before dispensing a magical amulet. Fatuus ex machina.

Most of that, mind you, is about five minutes, and I'll spare you a blow by blow of the scene's rest. After all, we've a climax to cover! Once the final episode's first half (consisting entirely of brooding and a planning scene we're so artfully kept away from) is over, we get to the big finish. Buffy, the rest of the cast, and the horde of faceless, obnoxious potential Slayers enter the Hellmouth to have a throw down with the First Evil and defeat its army of ubervamps before they can invade Helm's Deep. Their victory comes from two avenues. First, Willow uses the power of the Scythe to make every woman who might become a slayer a slayer right then and there. This may have been a very good idea. It might have been a powerful closer, a last statement about the empowerment of women in a show that dealt so heavily with such scenes. Completely lacking set up as it is, it doesn't quite make it, to say the very least.

Hey, the amulet that random stranger
gave me with no explanation twenty minutes ago
turned out to save the day!
Well isn't that just dandy!

That's nothing at all, though, compared to the source of their ultimate victory. That amulet that Angel brought, less than an hour ago? It saves the day. When Spike wears it into the Hellmouth, it fills with light, destroys the ubervamps, and saves the world. I'm not leaving out a step, mind you. None of this is set up. At all. In any way. We get no inclination of what the amulet does before it does it. It plays no role in the character's plans. It seems like it would have done the same thing if worn by an invading gerbil. It is a deus ex machina of monolithic proportions, an embodiment of the ultimate failure of every writer that so much as added a comma to the show's script. It is the apotheosis of pathetic writing.

The plot's resolution is ridiculous, and don't be fooled into thinking that the characters save it. They don't even try. In terms of their physicality, there's the slight question of why Buffy, mortally stabbed moments before, not only proceeds to soldier on but totally forgets about her injury. Really, though, that's small beans compared to what happens inside the characters' heads. One can only assume that a side effect of entering the Hellmouth was a complete lobotomy, an end to all personality and emotion. It's the only possible assumption for Xander's only comment upon Anya's death to be, "That's my girl," said with a smile on his face. Lucky we get to avoid an actual display of emotion at the closing, right?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer started rocky, grew great, crashed and bombed with season six, and then seems to have fallen far enough to tunnel through the earth's core with this last miserable offering. The characters are gone, drowned in a faceless tide. The plot is tired and overwrought. The world is saved by an unforeshadowed magical amulet. The season is rubbish. If only Buffy had stayed dead.

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.

Review Policy

I like to read and review books. You have a book that you would like me to read and review. We're in a good place to make a mutually beneficial exchange, I think. There are just a few things that you should know:

You do not need to be a regular reader of the Hat Rack to get a review, but having some idea of what I like to read may be in your best interests. Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction are my core focus, but I will read outside of those genres. If your book is Middle Grade or a Paranormal Romance, however, you'd best look elsewhere.

Reading and reviewing are not the only things in my life. Even if they were, I have an ungodly huge stack of books at any time. If I agree to review your book, I am not lying. I will do so. But it will take some time. Maybe several months.

If I read your book, I will review it. Even if I hate it. Some of the negative reviews I've done on this site are downright brutal (see here and here, for examples). Read those and imagine it's your book. Only mail me a copy if you are okay with that possibility.

I do not have an e-reader and will not review e-books.The author, content, length, and whatever else you care to name is irrelevant. If it is not a physical copy, I am not your man.

I am not interested in self published or vanity published books.

All of that look okay to you? Still interested in a review? Excellent. Email me at nskteh[at]gmail[dot]com.

Jack Hight - Siege

Jack Hight's debut novel centers on the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, and it's hard to imagine a more dramatic backdrop for a story. Unfortunately, Hight may not be the greatest of writers to bring such a drama to light. The writing is cliché, shallow, and, save for the inherit awesomeness of the events it recounts, not even particularly exciting.

Evidently not one to dodge the thick of things, Hight eschews adding some imagined character and instead centers things on Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, one of the siege's most important figures. Longo, as he's referred to in the book, was an Italian nobleman who came to Constantinople with seven hundred of his own men to add what he could to the city's defense. Upon his arrival, he was placed in charge of the land defenses. In the novel, his role's rather more feisty still. Here he's an escaped Janissary who lives to get vengeance for his family, slain by the Turks. Towards this end he's created a ragtag band of fighters, including the bawdy "huge bear of a man" (p. 17) Tristo and the young former slave of the Turks, rescued in the novel's opening chapters by Longo himself, William, whose role in the group can be pretty safely summed up by mentioning that Tristo calls him "young pup" (p. 286).

As for the decision making abilities of this historically brilliant leader, well, those can probably be shown by his actions in the prologue. After joining a crusade to kill a single, specific Turk on the other side, Longo notices that his side starts losing. Instead of helping out, he decides that the logical thing to do is to "play dead" (p. 2) and, once the fight's over, take on the entire Turkish camp by himself. He tries this, but after killing multiple men in close combat, barely escapes with his life. Just to make things more amusing, we hear that the leader who just faked a heart attack so he could enact his personal revenge in the most illogical way possible "blamed himself" (p. 17) for the men of his who died in the battle. Yep, Longo, that sounds pretty damn warranted.

The arc at the novel's center is Longo's, for, much as Siege is the tale of Constantinople's fall, it's also the story of Longo learning to live again. The reason? Love, of course. In the course of defending the city, Longo falls for the Princess Sofia, and their romance is tenderly foreshadowed by him repeatedly noticing "the soft curves of her cleavage" (p. 238). Come the novel's end, he's realized that "There were things more important than revenge" (p. 326).

Sofia is also one of the novel's viewpoint characters, described by the jacket as a "stubborn princess," a reader of philosophy, a swordfighter to rival many of the men around her, and fond of utterances like: "Princess is a pretty title, but I would gladly trade it for a chance to choose my own destiny, to do as I wished, love who I…" she cut herself short. (p. 242) As you've no doubt surmised, Sofia's not going to win any contests in originality; she's a tad too filled with Disney Princess spunk for that, a bit too reminiscent of Arya Stark before Martin pushed the cliché to fascinating and terrifying conclusions. Still, Sofia's not dislikable. I know that sounds like damning with the faintest praise, and maybe it is, but she has her endearing moments.

Of course, she and Longo's beautiful love is taking place in a city upon the brink of destruction, and it's time for us to turn to those destroyers and besiegers, the Ottoman Turks and their Sultan Mehmed II, the third of our central characters (the three people that the jacket informs us will "decide the fate of an empire"). It is, alas, with the Turks that many of the novel's problems arise. Mehmed's a young Sultan desperate to prove himself after gaining the throne, then having his pop take it back, and now being given one last chance. So far, so good. Unfortunately, Hight pushes the (quite interesting) relationship between Mehmed II and his father, Murad II, into realms of needless inaccuracies. The opening chapters give Mehmed credit for a whole slew of victories that were, in actuality, his dad's. Then there's the quite amusing moment when, after hearing that Mehmed's acclaimed conqueror by the people, Murad asks him, "What have you conquered?" (p. 41) Seeing as Mehmed didn't get that title until after he'd taken Constantinople (and so, you know, conquered something) the question's really quite a good one.

The problems with the Turks go beyond historicity, though. We stay at a respectable distance from the Byzantine Emperor Constantine, and the lovemaking of Longo and Sofia's quite a beautiful thing, but the narrative never stops dwelling on Mehmed's depravity. It's rather telling, I think, that the two main words we get in their original tongue are sword (yatağan (p. 4)) and penis (sik (p. 46)), even if we thankfully don't get the same word for both. Speaking of cocks, or rather the lack thereof, we've the harem politics to deal with, where two unlikable women scheme against one another without, with one exception, ever accomplishing much. The main problem of all that is that, as it just about never reaches back and actually effects the main story, it's just a detour, and one the reader will probably rather speed through to get back to you the whole Constantinople thing we're in this for.

The harem politics, though, does rather lead to the treachery at the novel's center. Though center doesn't really cover it. There is treachery everywhere within this novel, one huge scheme that seems to have little idea of its goal and a thousand players, each of which often acts in totally incomprehensible ways, assassinating the people they themselves have put in place and so forth. The highlight of all that is when one official goes to speak to the Sultan in order to tell him about a secret way into the city. It's a trap, though, and he tries to kill the Sultan. But his secret way in was perfectly good, for some unimaginably nonsensical reason, so, once his assassination attempt fails, the city's doomed. Nice going. Key to the general theme of treachery, though, is Isa the poisoner. We're told that "poison dealers like Isa […] existed" (p. 406) in the historical note that ends the novel, and that's all well and good, but I can't help but think that those poisoners probably weren't much like this. Isa is a fifteenth century secret agent, well able to slaughter his way into the heart of the sultan's court and to defeat anyone at all who stands against him.

The rest of the cast, unaware of the treachery deciding just about everything behind their backs, takes a brief break from their love interests to defend the walls on the final day. The battle scenes here and elsewhere in the book are competently done, if not excellent. Hight gives us some sense of the strategic overview, but most of our time is spent in the close up, behind our heroes as they hold the line. Really, the worst part about the combat is the amount of it; random battles against poorly tied in Spanish assassins serve to dull the fights that count. Then again, battle really is what holds this book together, fight scenes the moderately adrenaline-pumping glue that propels the not particularly deep or original characters into the reader's mind.

Every part of Siege that tries to rise above the simple existence and grandeur of the city and then its destruction is forgettable, shallow, or has been seen innumerable times before. The action is adequate but not exemplary, a phrase that could describe most of the book and would suffice if it did have one excellent element to make it worthwhile. It doesn't.  Nothing about Siege is incredible but the history it's immersed in, and, much as Constantinople's a great story, Hight has nothing much to add to it. 

Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

There are things that cannot and should not be explained. (p. 85)

As a longtime reader or two might know, this is not the first time that I've read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It was, actually, the first of the Murakami novels I read and, at the time, I knew that I liked it but didn't know what to make of it besides that. Since, and as a result of that first exposure, I've read, reviewed, and loved several of Murakami's novels, and yet, as time went on, it was this one that outlasted them all in my thoughts. About a year after that first read, and several months after the book's in-absentia rise to the position of one of my favorite novels, I reread the book and found it lived up to every one of my expectations. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is Murakami at his best, at his most playful and his most insightful. [A note before we begin: there are SPOILERS aplenty in the following.]

Information is key and king in Hard-Boiled Wonderland's Tokyo, and, from the beginning, the conflict over it is what dominates and threatens the world. Devoted to the preservation of knowledge and its exclusivity we have the system, and the system is the state. (p. 160) Arrayed against them are the factory, dedicated to the breaking of the system's codes and the revealing of its revelations. Our dear protagonist, a member of the system, is drawn into the conflict by a neutral, eccentric and brilliant scientist whose breakthrough discoveries, we're told, could spell the end of the world. (p. 128)

All of this is, as the narrator observes, your classic cops-and-robbers routine, (p. 33) and it's from there that the book's noir comes from for this is as much a crime novel as it is a Science Fiction one, a surreal fantasy, or a work of pure Literature (much as I hate the term applied as a genre) – which is to say, of course, that's it's somehow both not at all and the very exemplar of the form. Of course, Murakami's usual vivid colors are in full force here, as is his floating and flowing surrealism, all of which is obviously antithetical to the orthodox noir of a Hammett or a Goodis. 

That dismissal, though, misses the narrator's endlessly witty and even insightful observations, often, in the very purest tradition of noir, showing the bizarre nature of it all and the narrator's insignificance and even powerlessness before it, albeit always with a special Murakami twist:  I was a leftover wrapped in black plastic and shoved into the cooler. (p. 21) The writing here is a constant toying with intentional absurdity (Walls a toasted off-white, like the muffins I eat for breakfast. (p. 7)) and profundity, blurring and even obliterating the lines between them: There must be as many paths of human fat as there are ways of human death (p. 8) or: Even cast aside, clothes know a permanence that eludes their wearers. (p. 374)

But while the System/Factory conflict drives the first part of the novel, and while it's never really silent, the reader comes to realize that it's the symptom rather than the cause of the problem. Progress is pure, devoid of good or evil intent, but the pursuit of it and the actualization of its fruits are deathly dangerous: It's this pure focus, exclusive of all view to loss or gain, that's seen science achieve such uninterrupted advances. […] [But] the purity of science often hurts many people, just like pure natural phenomena do. (p. 253) Ultimately, the question of its possession by good or evil is irrelevant, for progress and knowledge hold all the potential for our misery and harm: Civilization […] faces serious crises because science is used for evil – or good. (p. 29) 

The promised end of the world does come, or at least the end of a world: Actually speaking, it isn't this world. It's the world in your mind that's going to end. (p. 270) The looming apocalypse does come, but it does so in personal form, the scientifically-caused dissolution of the narrator's mind and soul, leaving him in an inner world of his own consciousness, cut off forever from what we view as reality. 

That brings us to the second of the book's two threads, that entitled The End of the World and taking place entirely within that unreal world created by the scientist's machinations and growing in prominence as the novel progresses. This is a world made up of a single, isolated town, surrounded by a perfect wall, overlooked by a clock tower that has long forfeited its role as a timepiece. (p. 38) It's a world that's the opposite of the outside, one that remains forever unchanged (p. 14) and where absolute peace can be found in mindlessness, motionless existence, for it's our intellect that leads to all the so-beyond-natural ills of the world. As one character in this inner setting says, lay down your mind and a peace come. A peace deeper than anything you have known. (p. 318) 

Murakami does not just allude to this deeper realm and leave us to draw our own conclusions. No, he shows it to us in chapters that alternate with the jagged coolness of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and could not be more different. As the narrator is more and more submersed into this peace the tale circles absolute stillness and absolute zero, each chapter resplendent with the fading remnants of true awareness and bursting with a languor so brilliantly evoked that the reader's thoughts, too, drift in ever smaller currents, relaxing and weakening as the heartbeat slows and wonder grows. Here, in this world, there is everything and here there is nothing, (p. 385) and it's a perfect nothing. (p. 86)

Murakami doesn't just raise questions. No, as crushing waves of melancholy and an almost agonizing beauty imbue every word of the novel's ending chapters, Murakami's brief but deep epic of thought reaches two successive peaks. The first is the justification of progress and striving, no matter its cost. For the utopia of absence that the End of the World shows us is not only devoid of loss but also of gain, not only misery but also joy: The absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope. (p. 334) For, as we come to see, Love is a state of mind (p. 334) and cannot exist for those who have no mind. But then comes the so-understandable, so heartbreaking finale to it all. For the narrator, though now fully conscious of the costs, cannot leave behind the peace that he's found. He stays, immersed in the harmony and perfect nothing of that dreamed and conflict-free world.

The level of cool and grandeur, in their corresponding sections, does come at the expense of plot. As the narrator quips at one point, this isn't the kind of thing they show on TV. This drama was a lot more complex and with no discernible plot. (pp. 112-3) While "no discernible plot" really is going a bit too far, it's not far off in terms of effect. Though a lot happens here, none of it is gripping in a roller coaster, plot boiler, gotta find out what happens next kind of way. This is, rather, the kind of book where the narrator can observations and wit power on unhindered through a scene where he may be, say, stabbed in the gut with a knife. While such a distance could certainly leave many a book powerless, though, Murakami effortlessly keeps you engaged with his characters, prose, absurdity, and with the reality of his setting. What's most surprising about the last of those is how real the day to day world of the characters is, no matter how impossible the events within it become. Murakami accomplishes this through a deft weaving of the mundane into the fantastic, having his characters prepare food and live their lives all around the plot and, of course, by utilizing his characteristic barrage of references, which here include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 2011: A Space Odyssey, Turgenev, and Borges, to name just a few.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World was written early in Haruki Murakami's career but exemplifies, nonetheless, so many of his strengths. It's true that this is the most out and out genre of the Murakami novels and stories that I've read, but my affinity for it goes deeper than that. The world here is filled with fantastically daring ideas glimpsed from the shadows and approached head on. The writing is filled with, in one section, always dancing wit and, in the other, surreal majesty. The book, throughout, is a entertaining to read, fun from first word to last, and also a work of stunning power and sorrow, a novel that's joyous, poignant, and profound.

Publication v6

Over the last year and a bit, I've had a fair few publications to announce around these parts. In case you couldn't tell from the posts, I was grinning from ear to ear for each of them and, just maybe, doing a bit of jumping up and down. Well, I've another of them, and this one's a big deal. Maybe the biggest since the breakthrough of the very first. Though I haven't yet gotten to review one of their issues, Beneath Ceaseless Skies is one of my absolute favorite places to find fantasy stories. Just a few days ago, they accepted my story "Beyond the Shrinking World." To make an awesome thing even more awesome, this is not only my first fantasy sale, not only the sale of my longest story yet (by far), and not only a sale to an awesome market, but my first pro sale. So yeah, I'm pretty excited. I'll keep you guys updated as I know more.

James Herbert - Sepulchre

From what I'd heard of James Herbert before cracking open Sepulchre, he was a prolific British horror (or "chiller") author, a writer not considered great but certainly considered fun. Unfortunately, Sepulchre, my introduction to the man, nails the "not great" part of that better than the "fun" one. Sepulchre straddles the line between thriller and horror. Wait, no, that's not quite right. It sits awkwardly between the most clichéd deep ends of the two, the one making no attempt at all to engage with the other besides fouling up its every passage. Then again, either one of these tissue-thin plots would, on their own, be not only little more effective but  utterly unable to carry a novel. The book's thoughtless using of several troubling horror tropes is disturbing, but its real problem is that it's just not very good.

The prologue and first chapter, five pages between them, set up just about everything you need to know about Sepulchre with one exception. In the prologue, we get some brief discussion of how the Sumerian's early history has been wholly lost to us and the (rather groundless) conclusion that there might be a "good reason" (p. 2) for this. The first chapter, meanwhile, shows resident Irish badass (Liam when he's vulnerable, Halloran when he's not) mowing down some IRA kidnappers with a sub machine gun. And, in the dead zone between unexplored mysticism and senseless slaughter, you have your novel.

But, like I said, that's misleading in one crucial respect. Despite its thorough thoughtlessness and lack of depth, Sepulchre is a slow moving novel. Structurally, one imagines that the horror portion's meant to be a slow building of atmosphere and dread, that the thriller is meant to be giving us time and subtle clues to work out some elaborate web of deception for ourselves. But the prose is too simple to evoke atmosphere, and the plotting's too simple for there to be anything to work out. There is, by my count, a single plot twist in the novel, which makes me wonder if the London Free Press review (presenting more plot twists and turns than one has fingers) was written by a no-fingered man. Herbert's writing is the kind that, if coupled with constant scares or gunfights, could serve passably to move the plot along and generate some fun for us all, but it, and his characterization, is totally incapable of sustaining the novel alone.

Our main man is the aforementioned Halloran, a bodyguard working for the security company Achilles' Shield. He is, from the first, an enigma in the way that only a cliché can be: There was something about his eyes… He looked like a man who could be cruel. Yet there was a quiet gentleness about him too. Cora was puzzled. And interested. (p. 22) So yeah. Ruthless tough guy with a heart of gold, or at least I think that's what we're supposed to be inferring from the repeated mentions along the above lines. From what we actually see, Halloran thinks of nothing but being a professional and perfect bodyguard, acts in the most professional manner, and the only thing he works to prevent harder than security breaches is actual character development. He comes in an enigma, and he'll be damned if he dies having gained an iota more depth.

Halloran is called in to protect Felix Kline, a psychic that finds underground mineral deposits for Magma Corporation. Kline's an arrogant and obnoxious fellow who looks "nothing like a genius, and nothing like a wizard" (p. 35) and surrounds himself with various detestable characters and may be far more ancient than he appears. After a fair bit of doing not much in the city, the whole procession, Halloran included, heads off to Kline's estate, Neath. I'll let Herbert give you your introduction to the place:

There were dark places in Neath, corners, niches, which sunlight could never touch, rooms gloomed in permanent dusk, corridors where dust motes seemed to clog the air, halls where footsteps echoed in emptiness. Yet there were also areas of dazzling light, the sun bursting through leaded windows with a force intensified by thick glass; these were cleansing places, where Neath's dank chill could be scoured from the body, although only briefly as other rooms, other corridors, were entered, brightness left behind like some sealed core.

Halloran explored and found many locked doors. (p. 98)

Wow, sounds pretty great, right? Claustrophobic and oppressive and choking on mysteries. Reading that paragraph, I was ready to forgive everything that had come before and ready to settle in for a creepy as hell ride. I don't think I'd be spoiling things too much if I say that doesn't happen. In fact, that paragraph is, I'd say, not only the only prose that is actually in any way noteworthy as prose in the novel but also the only moment of particularly effective writing in the entire thing.

Once Halloran gets to Neath, he sits around, and he and the reader wait for something to happen. It takes its sweet time coming. Until it does, we spend chapter after chapter (after chapter) receiving clues about Kline's evil nature that could only be said to be subtlety building to a devastating reveal if you've not only not read a horror novel before but likely have never read a novel and maybe are not fluent, or even conversant, in the English language. Among these clues are chapter long backstories of the four men closest to Kline. Allow me to distill them: we've got an American serial killer, a Polish cannibal, and two degenerate Arabs that prove to be homosexual rapists.

I know, I know, that last one's not exactly politically correct. If it's any consolation, I don't think Herbert's actually quite as prejudiced as he appears. Just slavishly dedicated to horror tropes and utterly tone deaf as to their implications. The gay torturers and rapists aren't all that's here. In addition, Kline's personal assistant, the Cora that was "interested" (p. 22) in Halloran above, is being steadily corrupted by Kline, and it takes the form of sexual deviancy. Cora has been twisted into a lover of…  bondage! Halloran, everyone's favorite ruthless killer and prudish lover, is of course "dismayed" (p. 146) by this. Of course, one of the times he fucks her, it's a tastefully written rape scene, a right "ravishment" "against her will," but she soon "could not help but respond," (p. 220) so that's all okay.

As I've already discussed, the novel's thriller and horror elements are essentially unconnected, save that Kline feels some threat's nearing him (as comes clear at the end, it's a threat he brings on himself, so I'm not really sure what he was sensing, but anyway). The majority of the book overtly focuses on the thriller plotline, which is developed through such nonsensical lapses in thought as the chiefs of the boydguarding company being, themselves, completely unguarded. The horror plotline is supposedly simmering in the back of all this before bubbling to the surface and taking control, but, as I've no doubt made clear, it doesn't exactly do this.

Come the end, everything does come to a head, even if all the drama and (far too long in coming) action is clichéd enough for the momentarily captured hero to shout "you're crazy" (p. 318) and "this is insane" (p. 321) at the monologue-spouting villain. The core of that monologue is Kline telling us that he's part of a conflict that "still goes on" (p. 319), where one side is "evil for evil's sake" (p. 371) and in the service of the devil, of Bel-Marduk, and the other serving the later-coming Christ. Of course, there's really nothing at all about this celestial struggle until the last sixty pages, but what the hell, we see more than enough of Kline to be able to imagine a multi-millennia quest to kill his master and him. All our cards on the table (Kline's evil! the Sumerian allusions amounted to nothing at all beyond a generic ultimate evil! everything's just about as you thought!), we proceed through our rather stuttering conclusion, one that takes place long after the reader's grown bored of caring for anyone at all in it, and then, thankfully, to the end.

Sepulchre is basically all of the worst clichés about horror novels rolled into one. The characterization's flat, the plot's predictable, gore and violence are treated with all the care and subtlety of a toddler finger-painting in blood-red and shit-brown, the morals displayed are nonetheless narrow-minded and sexist and prudish, and we end with a nice happy shoot out and a destruction of the Big Bad. Most damning of all, it's boring. You've better things to do than read Sepulchre.

Martin, Nightflyers, and The Speculative Scotsman

If you exit the Hat Rack, take a right, and cross the Atlantic Ocean, you might find yourself at the Speculative Scotsman's. But while we may be a tad geographically distant, we're a fair bit closer in terms of content. And so, when Niall asked if I'd be interested in doing a guest post on the SS while he tours these here states, I responded with a multi-paragraph version of "Hell yes!" The piece's up now, a review of George R.R. Martin's Nightflyers novella that hopefully does both the story and the blog it's hosted on justice. And above and below it is praise for this here Rack that just can't be good for my ego...