mostly harmless books

Thanks to the lovely BoingBoing and Cory Doctorow, I occasionally end up on a podcast/audiobooks website and download all the cool-sounding fiction I can get my grubby virtual hands on. I’m not really into podcasts, but I’ve found a couple of nice places - StarShipSofa and EscapePod, plus SFFAudio which has links to many places. And, for someone who loves accents, listening to Starship’s Tony Smith is very fun (like a puzzle! “now what did he say here?”)

So yesterday, finding myself without a bus book, I listened to stories - one from EscapePod, several from StarShipSofa.

First up was Elizabeth Bear’s Tideline. It’s about death and mourning and new life. And a robot and a kid. Chalcedony is the last of her (human) plutoon, a broken down battle robot that devotes the rest of her existence to creating a memorial to her dead companions and, unexpectedly, protecting a young boy. Another story of the robot-that-develops-a-heart? Yes and no. Every action can be explained by the laws of robotics - Bear’s, if not Asimov’s. A robot protects humans. A robot learned how humans honor their dead. A robot learned about the importance of remembering.

I wasn’t expecting to like a robot story so much, but I did. And although Arthurian myth might sound out of place, it fits right in.

Second, the SSS podcast.

Poetry: Greg Betty - Bottles
I didn’t even realize this was a poem, I thought it was a very short story. A bit of a different take on the “ships in bottles” idea.

Flash Fiction: Atalanta Pendragonne - Moon Over Baton Rouge
Another different take, this time dealing with vampires. A fun little story I enjoyed a lot. (But, really, that name?! Why?)

Article: Matthew Sanborn Smith - Jim Sawgrass
I never had any particular interest in genealogy or genetics, but this guy has a lot of free time on his hands and the short overview of how we’re all really related and how no family is really older than each other and how migration influences genealogy was really fascinating. He’s also funny, which made it even better.

Main Fiction: Paul Di Filippo - Bad Beliefs
I’d heard about Paul Di Filippo, never read anything by him as far as I can recall, and I got this podcast for the Jeff Carlson bit, so I had no particular interest in the fiction. But… boy was it cool. I never got what memes were (except for those annoying tags on blogs), but in here they’re personifications of… ideas? There’s “Drunk driving is safe” and “I’ll never die” and “Fuck the police” and another dozen or so embodiments of good and bad beliefs. Mostly bad, like the title says. The idea might be old, but it was new and exciting for me. I hope I’ll be able to track down a text copy of this, because I kept drifting off and I missed some parts, which is too bad for such an interesting and fun story.

On The Sofa With Jeff Carlson
This actually wasn’t as interesting as I was hoping. I’m sort of currently reading Carlson’s Plague Year and I was curious about the author, but I’d already read his bio so there was nothing really new. I might listen to it once I finish the book(s), because it might be better learning about his sources of inspiration after I finish reading.

And since we’re on internet stuff, Afterworld is an awesome post-apocalyptic animated series which can be watched online (on on AXN if they have it in your country).

To finish off on a positive note, my boyfriend informs me that Big Bang will happen again in 9 days and I should read Forever Peace. Plus: we won’t have to go to work anymore. Minus: we won’t get to go on holiday. I really want to go to Spain, so I hope the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t kill us all. At least not before October 4th.

I started Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep almost accidentally. I was at the seaside and I had finished my other 2 books, so my boyfriend lent me his (or, as he said later, “I got this for you because I’d known you’d run out of reading material and start whining”).

My previous encounters with space opera had been less than fortunate. I tried to like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion books (and failed); I copyedited Peter F. Hamilton Pandora’s Star and almost fell asleep several times. But now I know what the problem was: not the space opera, but the politics and innumerable characters.

A Fire Upon the Deep has two plotlines and just a handful of characters, and at about 900 pages in my edition Vinge has more than enough time to focus on each and every one. No complex politics of some huge galactic federation, no dozen of characters each on another planet. The novel gives you a sense of the size of the Universe, actually; civilizations and species come and go, and on the universal scale, it’s the norm, not a tragedy. How could one destroyed planet be important when thousands have dissapeared before? Makes you feel insignificant, really.

Quick summary before I go on: evil entity (aka the Blight) comes to life and starts swallowing up civilizations; one ship with 2 humans and 2 aliens race against their many enemies to try to destroy it, while the Countermeasure is on a planet on the verge of war.

I admit much of the (pseudo?) scientific stuff was boring at times; fortunately, understanding it was not very important for understanding the story, as long as you got the basic idea that the Universe is made up of zones where the properties of physics are different so civilizations can develop in ways we can only imagine (since the Earth is in one of the “slowest” areas).

The characters aren’t its strong point, either. After 900 pages you know little to nothing about their past - or much about their thoughts and wishes. There’s a bit of a love story, but it’s not too convincing, there’s some drama which is better… but the worldbuilding and the adventures are truly impressive. And, for me, the planet of the Tines is one of the most interesting fictional places I ever read about.

The Tines are a race of dog-like creatures with a collective mind. Each Tine is actually a pack of several members who are only intelligent when together; they cannot get too close to another pack (except for sex) because their thoughts get mixed up, they cannot spread their members too far apart or they lose intellectual capacity. Add this to a conquest war in a medieval setting with one human child on each side and you get a page turner… the 900 pages won’t seem that much anymore.

I found the fictional society of the Tines fascinating; the concept was original and Vinge explored it in many ways, making the Tines feel very human and very alien at the same time. It’s no small feat that he made me care more about “dogs” than the human characters.

The rest is interesting, too, although at some point it becomes clear what will happen.. Even though it was the main plotline (after all, the Universe was in danger), I felt the Blight and Countermeasure were secondary to the war and scheming on the planet of the Tines. Maybe because things on a human (well, alien) scale are easier to perceive. Or because one of the climaxes of the book was more difficult to predict. Anyway, the result was that I kept reading on to see what would become of the packs, not to learn the fate of the Universe. Individuals are more interesting than abstract concepts.

I could go on, but writing about such a large book in a couple of hundred words is difficult to impossible, and I am tired, so I’ll leave it at this. If you don’t generally like space opera, this is the way to start. I don’t like the idea of “intergalactic adventures”, it makes me think of Star Wars silliness (yes, blasphemy, I don’t like Star Wars), but this is an adventure and it takes place at FTL speed and it’s great.

(Last in the www.nemira.ro campaign Scrie ca sa primesti… o carte, which ends today.)

Picking up where I had left off… Part 1 here.

Laird Barron - Proboscis. “The most common usage is to refer to the tubular feeding and sucking organ of certain invertebrates like insects, worms (including proboscis worms) and molluscs.” That’s what wikipedia has to say about the title of this story. If I had known what a proboscis was, I might have gotten this story. I didn’t, so I didn’t. A group of bounty hunters get a pair of fugitives who are then let go. Then I think the strange things are supposed to start happening, something about an X chromosome and the proboscis, but I was so lost I missed the point. Something takes over some of the characters? Some sort of being who sucks their souls out? I might re-read it one day, but if anyone’s willing to explain the plot to me now I’ll appreciate it. (I first read Laird Barron in The Del Rey Book of SF&F and I liked the story in there, The Lagerstätte, better. He does seem to have a penchant for naming his stories with weird/foreign words.)

Elizabeth Hand - Kronia. I don’t think this is a story per se. It doesn’t seem to have a beginning, an end or a plot. “Alternative personal histories”, the short intro says. Maybe it’s a dream, maybe it’s people with bad memories, maybe denial. I liked it, and yet I missed something. I’ll love it if it turns out the apparently disjointed memories make something coherent. To reread. It mentions the short movie La Jetée, which I’ve had for years and never watched to the end, so I’d better get to that.

Elizabeth Bear - Follow Me Light. Elizabeth Bear seems to be in all the anthologies I read lately :) She has a story in Wastelands, and then in The Del Rey Book of SF&F. I liked the first one, the second was about a topic that doesn’t interest me one bit (boxing). This third one is great, again. Not to give the plot away - because, even though at some point you start to get it, it’s more fun putting the clues together - I’ll just say it’s about running away from something (water/the ocean, in this case) and the cost it comes with.

Jeffrey Ford - Boatman’s Holiday. I’d read it in Ford’s Empire of Ice Cream and I remembered it, which is rare for me, so it impressed me a lot back then. Charon is a very interesting character and I’ve liked most interpretations of his story I read. So, here he decides to take a holiday to an island resort. Well, not really a resort, but an island which might or might not exist. Making the ferryman of Hades into a likeable guy is not easy, but Ford does it perfectly.

Howard Waldrop - The Horse of a Different Color (That You Rode in On). It’s a story about vaudeville, and this is something very out of my culture. I’m starting to understand things a bit only now, with my friend Wikipedia’s help. The Horse… is written in the form of an interview with Manny Marks (as the reporter says the interviewee likes to spell his name) who is Manfred Marx of the famous brothers, who in our world died as an infant. But however interesting this tidbit is, I never saw the Marx Brothers, I’ve never read about them (until now), I have no clue about vaudeville in general and frankly I don’t really care. There is an interesting plot twist at the end, but you have to understand the world to enjoy this fully.

Adam L. G. Nevill - Where Angels Come In. Scariest story in here, tied with Northwest Passage. Maybe even a bit scarier. It’s the classic “haunted house on the hill” tale - the local kids decide to explore it, feel there’s something wrong but pride doesn’t let them back off, and then bad things start to happen. The plot is not new or important. The things in the dark are. The atmosphere is. And their combination makes you jump at every noise and start seeing white faces in the dark corners. Taking an age-old “cliche” story and making it exciting (as in “heart beating faster”) and damn frightening takes skill, so congratulations.

Albert E. Cowdrey - Twilight States. Confusing (in a good way). You read and you feel things make sense, even though there’s obviously something strange in the other room. Things start making even more sense… until the authors goes “haha, it’s actually the other way around!” and you have to rearrange everything in your head again. But if you pay attention while you read, all the hints are there.

To conclude: judging by the hit/miss ratio, the best antho I’ve read so far. Actually, because I don’t think you can apply good/bad notions to literature, the anthology I liked best. If you’ve got similar tastes to mine, run to get it.
(Actually, one or two friends have already said they’re getting it based on my review, so go me!)

(Ok, I admit, I am shamelessly trying to get more books from the www.nemira.ro promotion. So sue me. I did read the books so I might as well get something if that’s possible. And books are the best prizes! Also, since most of the things I can pick are (hard) SF, it will make some of my friends happy that I’m not reading “fairy tales” anymore :P Writter for Scrie ca sa primesti… o carte.)

But this isn’t going to be another raving review about how GRRM is the best thing since Tolkien and how he singlehandedly changed the face of fantasy and blah blah. It’s going to be more of a “why I didn’t like A Song of Ice and Fire at first”.

I’d been hearing about the books for ages. Wow, amazing, brilliant, best fantasy cycle ever etc., but I didn’t read them until my friend Horia sent me his copies. Needless to add that given all the praise I’d been hearing, I was expecting to love the story. What I got was confusion. Lots of.

The prologue was ok. Things happen, blood, people die. I managed to figure out who was who and… the characters dissapeared from the story. Back to square one.

The good thing is that GRRM does the main characters brilliantly. My favorites are Arya and Jon and I hope they don’t get killed off in book 6 or something, or I’ll be one pissed of Jen. However, all the billions of secondary characters and all the ancient kings with the same name and all the unending details about who and what armor is wearing and all the political plots… aaargh! That almost killed the story for me. I honestly don’t give a damn about the endless descriptions. I can imagine a character, but I don’t give a fuck what he’s wearing. And politics bore me in general, but I can take them in moderate doses.

I think I only started to enjoy the book in the last quarter, when things starting to clear up. But a couple of hundred pages is a bit too long for that, and if the book wasn’t so incredibly hyped I would’ve given up loong ago. What kept me going was… well, the fact that GRRM is smart. He gives you one little clue to make you curious then switches POV and you’re left hanging, so of course you have to read on - even through the boring chapters. Dany and Jon and Tyrion and especially the hope I’d learn more about the Others kept me going. The world beyond the Wall is much more fascinating to me than the politics of Westeros.

And, after bashing the book so much, what do I have to say? Well, I devoured the next 3 volumes, to the point when I was on a plane and I was hoping it wouldn’t land before I found out what happened to Arya, so something must’ve worked to get me hooked.. The downside of all the details is that almost 2 years after reading the books my mind is blank and I can only remember the very basics of the plot… thank God for internet summaries :)

(Beside not writing on this blog, that is.)
Working, traveling (beach!), reading. Reading books I need to write about but really, I know I won’t, so I’ll just make a bunch of posts with very short opinions. Someday. For now I have a couple of posts scheduled with some Nemira books for a contest which ends August 31st.

I’m reading The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 2006 and loving it (more or less expected; first part review is up already); I’m reading A Fire Upon the Deep and liking it (amazing; who’d have thought I’d like space opera?!); I’m sort of reading Jeff Carlson’s Plague Year (but haven’t touched it in 2 weeks or so, for some reason) and sort of reading Rama II (which, like people have told me, is not like Rendez-vous with Rama, therefore kind of sucks so I’m temporarily abandoning it).

I’ve also been fiddling with a blog a bit - due to a WoW overdose… I decided I can’t just play for one whole weekend so I needed to do something else - and only broke it once. I added a couple more things in the sidebar and this morning I managed to convince the boyfriend to help me with the more complicated stuff. From once in a while it pays to have a programmer boyfriend :P I still have big plans, i.e. interconnecting this with my Romanian blog so I only have to update my Now Reading plugin (bottom left) and Reading list once, not separately for each blog.

The fern is going to go away too. Eventually. When I find/take the perfect picture and convince one of my friends to help me with the Photoshop part.