Thursday, 1 August 2013
The Fractal Prince
Hannu Rajaniemi
Gollancz (gollancz.co.uk)
978-0-575-08892-4
Hannu Rajaniemi is a magnificent bastard of a novelist, who – to echo a line I used it reviewing his previous novel – manages to both have his cake and eat it. (There’s probably a quantum physics joke in there, but let’s leave it and move on.) The universe of The Fractal Prince is literally littered with hard science concepts, or at least enough hints and plausible techno-jargon that you can’t really tell the difference. At the same time, it’s high-action space opera of the very best kind, full of stunning set pieces and future-powered superhumanisms that seem specifically tailored to drill straight into the still-teenaged hindbrain of your average SF geek and make it squee with delight.
It’s hard to balance cleverness and credibility with awesome fun, but Rajaniemi appear to do it effortlessly. And speaking of magnificent bastards, protagonist Jean le Flambeur – already a wonderful character, combining various parts of a dozen criminal archetypes from the witty gentleman conman to the nerdy hacker/safecracker – here gets a chance to develop in interesting ways. In The Quantum Thief le Flambeur’s charm made him effortlessly likeable, but the hints of the older, nastier Jean he’d left behind made him deeply compelling. The Fractal Prince puts a hunter on his trail and raises the stakes, forcing le Flambeur to reveal a little more of himself – even as he cloaks himself in other people’s stories.
He’s not the only one who’s roleplaying, either, because at its heart this is a story about stories. le Flambeur and his partner-captors have left Mars behind for the ruins of Earth, and the majority of the novel takes place in the unashamedly Arabian days of the city of Sirr, which appears to be the only surviving bastion of flesh-and-blood humanity left on Earth.
That it has withstood the relentless all-consumption of the Sobornost minds is thanks to its stories – the self-replicating memes and body thieves of the wildcode desert are enough to make even the godlike uploaded intelligences of the Sobornost founders think twice.
Like the Martian Oubliette of The Quantum Thief, Sirr is an astonishingly imaginative and well-realised place. To tell you much about it would be to spoil the joy of discovery, but it’s a place of jinn and spices, of palaces and minarets built out sideways from the kilometre-long Shards of a fallen orbital.
And again like Oubliette, Sirr has its particular theme – a theme which, like that of Oubliette, informs the structure of its novel’s narrative. About halfway through the novel comes a line of apparently throwaway dialogue – ‘Sometimes it is more important to hear how a story is told than what the story is’ (p.154) – but it’s more telling than its circumstances suggest. The Fractal Prince wears the conceit gleefully, looping threads of narrative round and round itself in such a way that any attempt to describe their tangled skein would probably require a flipchart.
In lesser hands you’d end up with a confusing web, and in truth it’s a more sophisticated reader than me who can join all the dots on a single read-through – particularly what motivations the villain and even whether his plot makes any damn sense at all. But as with The Quantum Thief it just about ties together on re-reading, and while I might have hoped that in his second novel Rajaniemi’s might have found a way to tighten up one of the few flaws of his debut, the plot is (as that line I mentioned earlier suggests) almost irrelevant.
The same logic applies to the ideas. Rajaniemi’s science bears the stamp of authenticity, as you’d probably expect from a chap with a Ph.D in Mathematic Physics, but unlike a lot of hard science authors he manages to fold the technical aspects into the ongoing narrative in such a way that they enhance, rather than distracting from, the tale being told. Mainly this is thanks to Rajaniemi’s extreme aversion to the expositionary infodump; where we learn about the background details of his setting it’s organically, through the interaction of the characters rather than some intrusive narrator bringing the story to a crashing halt.
It’s slightly less subtly handled here than in the preceding novel – particularly an interlude regarding what feels like a Macguffin-to-be, the Kaminari Jewel – but one of the many blessings of The Fractal Prince’s layered, self-referential narrative is that it makes the scene-breaking nature of the various flashbacks, flashsidewayses, and flashvirtuals a virtue rather than a flaw.
Nonetheless, you do get a better idea of what drives the various factions – particularly the Sobornost, who (while relatively incidental) were fairly inscrutable in The Quantum Thief. What you learn is genuinely original, and fairly mind-boggling at that. The Sobornost are making war on death, on the inherent unpredictability of quantum principles: ‘the taming of physics… taking the dice from God’s hand, the creation of a new Universe with new rules… where all those who died can live again, turning away from the laws written down by a mad god’ (p.142). It’s like the solar system’s most epic temper tantrum ever, railing against the unfairness of a random universe by retreating into a virtuality which follows more rational, classical rules. It’s genius.
About the only place the novel falls down – or stumbles, at least – is in the way it handles the payoff from the conclusion of The Quantum Thief. It feels a little too lightweight after all the drama and shenanigans back on Mars, though it does lead to an excellent virtual face-off in a forest full of menace and tigers, oh my. I think the likely cause of the problem is The Fractal Prince’s circular structure, again – by the time this last thread from the last novel is tied up, we’ve already moved on in triplicate.
But if the worst thing you can say about a book is that it hasn’t quite managed 0% plot fat, it does tend to suggest a reviewer struggling to find points of criticism. So go, reader – run to your local book emporium and buy The Fractal Prince. Read it now.
I’ll wait.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Saturday, 22 June 2013
Jack Glass
Adam Roberts
Gollancz (gollancz.co.uk)
978-0-575-12762-3
I’ve been staring at Jack Glass for over an hour, trying to find the best way to start this review. There’s little point in summarising the plot, because the plot is just another postmodern cog in the cunning little machine that Adam Roberts has so intricately assembled. This is a clever book, but it’s a little too distanced and mechanical in its cleverness to ever quite manage to qualify as enjoyable.
Jack Glass is science fiction, I can say that much; SF of the old fashioned kind. In its author’s own words, the novel is a collision of ‘the conventions of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction and ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction, with the emphasis more on the latter’ (Acknowledgements, p.372).
Perhaps you’re curious about the precise definition of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction. Perhaps you’ll visit the Wikipedia article, and find it described by the author of The History of Science Fiction as valorising ‘a particular sort of writing: ‘hard SF’ linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or technological-adventure idiom’.
The author of The History of Science Fiction is Adam Roberts.
Roberts clearly knows a lot more about Golden Age SF than most; his novel seems to be assembled of oblique nods to genre classics, and if I got a quarter of the references I’d be surprised – leaving me with a vague sense that the author is sticking his tongue out at me from just beyond my field of vision.
Nonetheless, it broadly conforms to its author’s own definition – strange, that. The setting is a plausible-seeming space opera, and Roberts pays scrupulous attention to keeping his science as hard as possible. He does a good job of extrapolating the sociological implications, too, and the hints we’re given of Roberts’ future society are interesting.
From the brutal extrapolation of privatised prison labour which sets the scene for the first act, to the countless philosophies and religions and pathetic rebellions among the scattered sumpolloi that make up the bulk of oppressed humanity, Jack Glass’ setting is all too easily believable, and painted on occasion with a delicately warped sense of humour. Take this hard-done-by merchant complaining of society’s binding laws, the Lex Ulanova:
“That’s the thing about the Lex – it even regulates the bounds of illegality. So: we are taxed not from 100% of our gross, but from 143%. To take into account our supposed involvement in the black market.” (p.283)
But for all that the third of the novel’s parts draws back to consider large-scale social problems, from humanity’s potential self-destruction, the injustice of the ruling Ulanov dynasty and questions of moral relativity (as well as special relativity), the primary focus of Jack Glass is on the narrative mechanics of the traditional mystery.
Because before it’s an homage to Golden Age SF, Jack Glass is first a deconstruction of detective fiction – which combines nicely with the ‘problem-solving’ aspect of that definition I mentioned earlier.
The novel itself is the puzzle – less a whodunit than a whydunnit, or a how. All of which the narrator makes clear in the introduction, as they lay out a challenge for the reader:
In each case the murderer is the same individual – of course, Jack Glass himself. How could it be otherwise? Has there ever been a more celebrated murderer?
That’s fair, I hope?
Your task is to read these accounts, and solve the mysteries and identify the murderer. Even though I have already told you the solution, the solution will surprise you. (pp.1-2)
The tone of that introduction is superior, condescending; it’s like being set a test by a teacher who thinks you’ll fail, and the natural reflex is to jerk against it and solve whatever it is we’re supposed to solve, dammit. That’ll show them.
But Jack Glass is, I think, primarily an intellectual exercise. It’s a little too pleased with itself, and a little too pleased with its clockwork mysteries, to the point where it forgets to provide a beating heart beneath the artifice. And it’s hard to care about the characters, particular when they’re presented in a faux-naïve style which quickly becomes maddening:
“’It would require someone of great strength to lift such a thing,’ was Deño’s opinion. ‘Even assuming they were acclimatized to the gravity.’
This was self-evidently true. So do you know what Diana thought? She thought: since that suggests that the murderer is a person of great physical strength, the murderer will actually be a very weak individual. Diana knew murder mysteries, you see. She had played a thousand Ideal Palace whodunits. A thousand, at least! (p.109)
The conceit waxes particularly strong in ‘The FTL Murders’, the second and longest part of the book and the part of which Diana is the focal character. That seems sensible enough, given the protagonist’s lack of worldly experience, but even in the most horrific sections of the first act – and it gets plenty dark – there’s a touch of that same mad childishness.
It’s a necessary omission, though, in order to keep the eponymous Jack even slightly sympathetic – the naivety of the narrative voice renders even the most horrific actions almost quaint. Murdering, de-boning and hollowing out your fellow man so you can wear him like a skin-suit is more the stuff of video nasties than of your typical protagonist, but Jack’s actions are presented in such a clinical, unjudgemental fashion that they seem almost reasonable. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
Besides, as the structure of the novel makes clear, this version of events is potentially doubly sanitised: by Jack himself, though it’s possible he’s not the type; and by his faithful chronicler, who has made it their mission ‘to tell his story. To tell his story to you.’ (p.367)
Whether you’ll care to hear it is debatable. You can only tease your readers for so long before they’ll grow tired, as becomes readily apparent in the third part of the novel. Roberts departs from the linear narrative his own definition of ‘golden-age’ SF requires, in order to start playing around with chronology – appropriate, given the nature (and the solution) of the mystery.
And while the structure and solution of the mystery is a genuine dash of genius, our heroine Diana’s talent for intellectual problem-solving manifests itself in an unfortunate, frustrating fashion – as a prolonged series of interrogatives. Diana primarily, but all the characters ask themselves the same couple of questions over and over. How? Why? How? Why? It’s all to little avail, until Diana’s ability to decode a heavily allusive dream finally allows her (but probably not the reader) to figure it all out – by which time the point has become rather moot anyway.
Jack Glass is endlessly inventive and undoubtedly clever, with some interesting things to say about the nature of crime and punishment, but in its incessant game-playing it tippy-toes across the line between amusing and annoying. I imagine it was more fun to write than it is to read; certainly it’s more fun to write about.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Gollancz (gollancz.co.uk)
978-0-575-12762-3
I’ve been staring at Jack Glass for over an hour, trying to find the best way to start this review. There’s little point in summarising the plot, because the plot is just another postmodern cog in the cunning little machine that Adam Roberts has so intricately assembled. This is a clever book, but it’s a little too distanced and mechanical in its cleverness to ever quite manage to qualify as enjoyable.
Jack Glass is science fiction, I can say that much; SF of the old fashioned kind. In its author’s own words, the novel is a collision of ‘the conventions of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction and ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction, with the emphasis more on the latter’ (Acknowledgements, p.372).
Perhaps you’re curious about the precise definition of ‘Golden Age’ science fiction. Perhaps you’ll visit the Wikipedia article, and find it described by the author of The History of Science Fiction as valorising ‘a particular sort of writing: ‘hard SF’ linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or technological-adventure idiom’.
The author of The History of Science Fiction is Adam Roberts.
Roberts clearly knows a lot more about Golden Age SF than most; his novel seems to be assembled of oblique nods to genre classics, and if I got a quarter of the references I’d be surprised – leaving me with a vague sense that the author is sticking his tongue out at me from just beyond my field of vision.
Nonetheless, it broadly conforms to its author’s own definition – strange, that. The setting is a plausible-seeming space opera, and Roberts pays scrupulous attention to keeping his science as hard as possible. He does a good job of extrapolating the sociological implications, too, and the hints we’re given of Roberts’ future society are interesting.
From the brutal extrapolation of privatised prison labour which sets the scene for the first act, to the countless philosophies and religions and pathetic rebellions among the scattered sumpolloi that make up the bulk of oppressed humanity, Jack Glass’ setting is all too easily believable, and painted on occasion with a delicately warped sense of humour. Take this hard-done-by merchant complaining of society’s binding laws, the Lex Ulanova:
“That’s the thing about the Lex – it even regulates the bounds of illegality. So: we are taxed not from 100% of our gross, but from 143%. To take into account our supposed involvement in the black market.” (p.283)
But for all that the third of the novel’s parts draws back to consider large-scale social problems, from humanity’s potential self-destruction, the injustice of the ruling Ulanov dynasty and questions of moral relativity (as well as special relativity), the primary focus of Jack Glass is on the narrative mechanics of the traditional mystery.
Because before it’s an homage to Golden Age SF, Jack Glass is first a deconstruction of detective fiction – which combines nicely with the ‘problem-solving’ aspect of that definition I mentioned earlier.
The novel itself is the puzzle – less a whodunit than a whydunnit, or a how. All of which the narrator makes clear in the introduction, as they lay out a challenge for the reader:
In each case the murderer is the same individual – of course, Jack Glass himself. How could it be otherwise? Has there ever been a more celebrated murderer?
That’s fair, I hope?
Your task is to read these accounts, and solve the mysteries and identify the murderer. Even though I have already told you the solution, the solution will surprise you. (pp.1-2)
The tone of that introduction is superior, condescending; it’s like being set a test by a teacher who thinks you’ll fail, and the natural reflex is to jerk against it and solve whatever it is we’re supposed to solve, dammit. That’ll show them.
But Jack Glass is, I think, primarily an intellectual exercise. It’s a little too pleased with itself, and a little too pleased with its clockwork mysteries, to the point where it forgets to provide a beating heart beneath the artifice. And it’s hard to care about the characters, particular when they’re presented in a faux-naïve style which quickly becomes maddening:
“’It would require someone of great strength to lift such a thing,’ was Deño’s opinion. ‘Even assuming they were acclimatized to the gravity.’
This was self-evidently true. So do you know what Diana thought? She thought: since that suggests that the murderer is a person of great physical strength, the murderer will actually be a very weak individual. Diana knew murder mysteries, you see. She had played a thousand Ideal Palace whodunits. A thousand, at least! (p.109)
The conceit waxes particularly strong in ‘The FTL Murders’, the second and longest part of the book and the part of which Diana is the focal character. That seems sensible enough, given the protagonist’s lack of worldly experience, but even in the most horrific sections of the first act – and it gets plenty dark – there’s a touch of that same mad childishness.
It’s a necessary omission, though, in order to keep the eponymous Jack even slightly sympathetic – the naivety of the narrative voice renders even the most horrific actions almost quaint. Murdering, de-boning and hollowing out your fellow man so you can wear him like a skin-suit is more the stuff of video nasties than of your typical protagonist, but Jack’s actions are presented in such a clinical, unjudgemental fashion that they seem almost reasonable. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.
Besides, as the structure of the novel makes clear, this version of events is potentially doubly sanitised: by Jack himself, though it’s possible he’s not the type; and by his faithful chronicler, who has made it their mission ‘to tell his story. To tell his story to you.’ (p.367)
Whether you’ll care to hear it is debatable. You can only tease your readers for so long before they’ll grow tired, as becomes readily apparent in the third part of the novel. Roberts departs from the linear narrative his own definition of ‘golden-age’ SF requires, in order to start playing around with chronology – appropriate, given the nature (and the solution) of the mystery.
And while the structure and solution of the mystery is a genuine dash of genius, our heroine Diana’s talent for intellectual problem-solving manifests itself in an unfortunate, frustrating fashion – as a prolonged series of interrogatives. Diana primarily, but all the characters ask themselves the same couple of questions over and over. How? Why? How? Why? It’s all to little avail, until Diana’s ability to decode a heavily allusive dream finally allows her (but probably not the reader) to figure it all out – by which time the point has become rather moot anyway.
Jack Glass is endlessly inventive and undoubtedly clever, with some interesting things to say about the nature of crime and punishment, but in its incessant game-playing it tippy-toes across the line between amusing and annoying. I imagine it was more fun to write than it is to read; certainly it’s more fun to write about.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Monday, 6 May 2013
The Outcast Blade
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-847-8
The Outcast Blade is the second ‘act’ of The Assassini, an alt-historic fantasy focusing on the political and romantic intrigues of 15th-century Venice; it follows on from The Fallen Blade, which I didn’t really enjoy, and is considerably more assured than its predecessor.
The Venice of the time was Europe’s richest city, grown fat on the trade between east and west. Grimwood’s version is equally well-off, if significantly more vulnerable militarily. Venice’s navy has been all but wiped out defending Cyprus against Egypt’s Malmuk Sultanate in the previous book; that the Sultanate was equally mauled in the exchange is little comfort to Venice’s ruling Council of Ten, because now it finds itself caught between two rival powers, the inheritors of ancient Rome.
To the north, the Holy Roman Empire of Sigusmund; and out of Constantinople to the east, the waning but still formidable Byzantine Empire. As The Outcast Blade begins, both empires lay claim to the recently-widowed Giulietta Millioni and her son Leo; Guilietta is cousin of Venice’s childless, unmarried and imbecilic Duke, and her son will most likely be his heir.
Both empires dispatch prospective husbands to Venice, to vie for Guiletta’s hand and secure the Ducal throne; that both princes come with a sizeable army for escort is not lost on the city state’s warring Regents, though their plans to turn the situation to their advantage have little in common.
Little, that is, but the instrument of those plans: Tycho, the eponymous ‘blade’ of the title. Newly knighted following his tide-turning intervention in the naval battle off Cyprus, the former slave and trained assassin is more concerned with wooing Guilletta for himself. But the Millioni princess wants nothing to do with him, having convinced herself he let her husband die at sea.
That’s five paragraphs and 300 words or so to set the scene, and I haven’t even touched on the fantastic aspects of the series. This is detailed, complicated stuff – as you might expect from a novel so concerned with intrigue, and sometimes it can be a little hard to keep together in your head, but Grimwood does an excellent job of folding the details into his tightly-wound plot so the action rarely suffers an expository emergency stop. With alternative histories you never know quite how much is fact and how much fiction until you knuckle down and hit Wikipedia yourself, but the novel appears thoroughly researched and well-grounded in the complex realpolitik of the period.
And it’s politics which drives the action here – intrigue and romance, and the blurry line that divides the two. Medieval Venice is where the philosophy of vendetta* was first dreamed up, and it sometimes seems as if everyone in the city must be walking around with their hand on the hilt of a hidden blade. Nobody trusts anyone, sex is cheap and life cheaper, and arguments over the former seem often to shorten the latter – at least for one of the parties involved.
Which brings us neatly back to Tycho, the point at which politics, sex and violence collide. The young knight is… well, he doesn’t know what he is, but his aversion to sunlight and hankering for the lifeblood of young women makes it pretty clear to the reader. Grimwood never writes the word, however, and does a decent job of keeping the hoary old clichés of vampire lore relatively fresh. In Venice, a city half underwater, old of the older and more commonly neglected tropes – that vampires are loath to cross running water – has a major impact on Tycho’s existence, but his supernatural speed and strength makes him one of Venice’s most powerful assets… if he can be controlled.
Not least of all by himself.
Tycho aside, the novel’s third pillar – fantasy – is played down nicely. While the vampire knight/assassin seems a walking nexus of the weird, outside of his personal twilight zone the fantasy is as grounded and gritty as its politics - and well-integrated with same.
Alexa, mother and Regent to Venice’s Duke, has a little power herself which she mostly uses to keep track of political rivals, and she knows more about Tycho than she’s telling; her brother-in-law and fellow Regent Alonzo relies on his hired alchemist for support. The Byzantines have their magi, meanwhile, and Emperor Sigusmund has his Krieghund: a brotherhood of werewolves more in the American Werewolf in London vein – grotesque, agonising transformations and all – than the neutered puppies of Twilight.
The difficulty of the Krieghund’s transformation is emblematic: magic in the Assassini series does not come without difficulty, without pain. The relative rarity of the fantastic, and its high cost for all involved, goes some way to explaining why the setting hasn’t diverged too significantly into unicorns and magic missiles; together with the Pope’s** traditional dislike for witches and ‘demons’, it’s a cost which has kept ensured even Venice’s rulers keep their magical dabbling to a minimum.
The Fallen Blade suffered somewhat from having to lay the groundwork for its setting. Its sequel is able to build on that foundation, giving it a little more freedom to breathe, and the novel is much the better for it. I’m still not massively enamoured of Grimwood’s style, however. He has a tendency to plonk ugly, broken fragments of sentence down on the page with little grace, almost as if they occurred to him as an afterthought:
A visit from Lady Giulietta followed by a summons from her uncle. Both in their way his self-declared enemies. And Alexa had not been in touch since he admitted to Giulietta that she’d asked him to watch out for her. (p.111)
It’s a stylistic choice you might expect from someone writing a Chandler pastiche, all quick cuts and short, unvarnished sentences, and what works for 40s noir doesn’t necessarily work for medieval pseudohistory. It feels too modern, and every time I stumbled across another fragment it took me abruptly out of the book.
Grimwood’s Venice would make a fine noir setting, however; for all its surface beauty the city is dirty, dangerous, amoral and utterly corrupt. It features less than in the first novel, but city’s darkness is made more apparent by being thrown into contrast against an extended, idyllic pastoral sequence which resembles nothing so much as the Sicillian interlude in The Godfather. Tycho’s exile is rural, peaceful and blissful; and Grimwood does well to keep it engaging, playing off the fact that we know it cannot last.
Sure enough, Tycho’s back in Venice before too long and on a collision course with the powers threatening the city. The final climactic confrontation is pretty awesome, outdoing The Fallen Blade’s naval engagement in tension and coherence, if not in scale. The final resolution feels like something of a cheat, however; while it’s a long way from the overblown deus ex machina which destroyed the Mamluk fleet in the series’ first book, The Outcast Blade again confirms that Tycho’s not so much playing with a stacked deck as making up the rules as he goes along.
Characterisation is good, particularly of the story’s women, and the interplay between the characters feeds through nicely into the various intrigues, giving them extra depth and heft. The novel can sometimes be frustratingly opaque, however. There’s a fairly blurred boundary between subtlety and incomprehensibility, between delighted surprise and its frustrated counterpart, and The Outcast Blade often falls the wrong side of the line – particularly in the big dramatic moments, when violent reversals can leave you blinking, unable to shake a sense of ‘where the hell did that come from…?’
While The Outcast Blade‘s refusal to play fair with its readers is a pretty damaging flaw, the rich, inky-black atmosphere and scrupulously well thought-out blend of historic and fantastic elements makes it worth the read. I’ll definitely pick up the third (and presumably final) book in the series when that emerges, in the hope that this time the storytelling can live up to the setting Grimwood has created. Third time’s the charm, they say.
* Although I didn’t get that far down Wikipedia’s ‘History of Venice’ page, so this may not be true. The Godfather would certainly seem to disagree.
** Popes plural, actually; at this point in history there are two, and ‘magic is bad’ seems to be about the only thing they agree on.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-847-8
The Outcast Blade is the second ‘act’ of The Assassini, an alt-historic fantasy focusing on the political and romantic intrigues of 15th-century Venice; it follows on from The Fallen Blade, which I didn’t really enjoy, and is considerably more assured than its predecessor.
The Venice of the time was Europe’s richest city, grown fat on the trade between east and west. Grimwood’s version is equally well-off, if significantly more vulnerable militarily. Venice’s navy has been all but wiped out defending Cyprus against Egypt’s Malmuk Sultanate in the previous book; that the Sultanate was equally mauled in the exchange is little comfort to Venice’s ruling Council of Ten, because now it finds itself caught between two rival powers, the inheritors of ancient Rome.
To the north, the Holy Roman Empire of Sigusmund; and out of Constantinople to the east, the waning but still formidable Byzantine Empire. As The Outcast Blade begins, both empires lay claim to the recently-widowed Giulietta Millioni and her son Leo; Guilietta is cousin of Venice’s childless, unmarried and imbecilic Duke, and her son will most likely be his heir.
Both empires dispatch prospective husbands to Venice, to vie for Guiletta’s hand and secure the Ducal throne; that both princes come with a sizeable army for escort is not lost on the city state’s warring Regents, though their plans to turn the situation to their advantage have little in common.
Little, that is, but the instrument of those plans: Tycho, the eponymous ‘blade’ of the title. Newly knighted following his tide-turning intervention in the naval battle off Cyprus, the former slave and trained assassin is more concerned with wooing Guilletta for himself. But the Millioni princess wants nothing to do with him, having convinced herself he let her husband die at sea.
That’s five paragraphs and 300 words or so to set the scene, and I haven’t even touched on the fantastic aspects of the series. This is detailed, complicated stuff – as you might expect from a novel so concerned with intrigue, and sometimes it can be a little hard to keep together in your head, but Grimwood does an excellent job of folding the details into his tightly-wound plot so the action rarely suffers an expository emergency stop. With alternative histories you never know quite how much is fact and how much fiction until you knuckle down and hit Wikipedia yourself, but the novel appears thoroughly researched and well-grounded in the complex realpolitik of the period.
And it’s politics which drives the action here – intrigue and romance, and the blurry line that divides the two. Medieval Venice is where the philosophy of vendetta* was first dreamed up, and it sometimes seems as if everyone in the city must be walking around with their hand on the hilt of a hidden blade. Nobody trusts anyone, sex is cheap and life cheaper, and arguments over the former seem often to shorten the latter – at least for one of the parties involved.
Which brings us neatly back to Tycho, the point at which politics, sex and violence collide. The young knight is… well, he doesn’t know what he is, but his aversion to sunlight and hankering for the lifeblood of young women makes it pretty clear to the reader. Grimwood never writes the word, however, and does a decent job of keeping the hoary old clichés of vampire lore relatively fresh. In Venice, a city half underwater, old of the older and more commonly neglected tropes – that vampires are loath to cross running water – has a major impact on Tycho’s existence, but his supernatural speed and strength makes him one of Venice’s most powerful assets… if he can be controlled.
Not least of all by himself.
Tycho aside, the novel’s third pillar – fantasy – is played down nicely. While the vampire knight/assassin seems a walking nexus of the weird, outside of his personal twilight zone the fantasy is as grounded and gritty as its politics - and well-integrated with same.
Alexa, mother and Regent to Venice’s Duke, has a little power herself which she mostly uses to keep track of political rivals, and she knows more about Tycho than she’s telling; her brother-in-law and fellow Regent Alonzo relies on his hired alchemist for support. The Byzantines have their magi, meanwhile, and Emperor Sigusmund has his Krieghund: a brotherhood of werewolves more in the American Werewolf in London vein – grotesque, agonising transformations and all – than the neutered puppies of Twilight.
The difficulty of the Krieghund’s transformation is emblematic: magic in the Assassini series does not come without difficulty, without pain. The relative rarity of the fantastic, and its high cost for all involved, goes some way to explaining why the setting hasn’t diverged too significantly into unicorns and magic missiles; together with the Pope’s** traditional dislike for witches and ‘demons’, it’s a cost which has kept ensured even Venice’s rulers keep their magical dabbling to a minimum.
The Fallen Blade suffered somewhat from having to lay the groundwork for its setting. Its sequel is able to build on that foundation, giving it a little more freedom to breathe, and the novel is much the better for it. I’m still not massively enamoured of Grimwood’s style, however. He has a tendency to plonk ugly, broken fragments of sentence down on the page with little grace, almost as if they occurred to him as an afterthought:
A visit from Lady Giulietta followed by a summons from her uncle. Both in their way his self-declared enemies. And Alexa had not been in touch since he admitted to Giulietta that she’d asked him to watch out for her. (p.111)
It’s a stylistic choice you might expect from someone writing a Chandler pastiche, all quick cuts and short, unvarnished sentences, and what works for 40s noir doesn’t necessarily work for medieval pseudohistory. It feels too modern, and every time I stumbled across another fragment it took me abruptly out of the book.
Grimwood’s Venice would make a fine noir setting, however; for all its surface beauty the city is dirty, dangerous, amoral and utterly corrupt. It features less than in the first novel, but city’s darkness is made more apparent by being thrown into contrast against an extended, idyllic pastoral sequence which resembles nothing so much as the Sicillian interlude in The Godfather. Tycho’s exile is rural, peaceful and blissful; and Grimwood does well to keep it engaging, playing off the fact that we know it cannot last.
Sure enough, Tycho’s back in Venice before too long and on a collision course with the powers threatening the city. The final climactic confrontation is pretty awesome, outdoing The Fallen Blade’s naval engagement in tension and coherence, if not in scale. The final resolution feels like something of a cheat, however; while it’s a long way from the overblown deus ex machina which destroyed the Mamluk fleet in the series’ first book, The Outcast Blade again confirms that Tycho’s not so much playing with a stacked deck as making up the rules as he goes along.
Characterisation is good, particularly of the story’s women, and the interplay between the characters feeds through nicely into the various intrigues, giving them extra depth and heft. The novel can sometimes be frustratingly opaque, however. There’s a fairly blurred boundary between subtlety and incomprehensibility, between delighted surprise and its frustrated counterpart, and The Outcast Blade often falls the wrong side of the line – particularly in the big dramatic moments, when violent reversals can leave you blinking, unable to shake a sense of ‘where the hell did that come from…?’
While The Outcast Blade‘s refusal to play fair with its readers is a pretty damaging flaw, the rich, inky-black atmosphere and scrupulously well thought-out blend of historic and fantastic elements makes it worth the read. I’ll definitely pick up the third (and presumably final) book in the series when that emerges, in the hope that this time the storytelling can live up to the setting Grimwood has created. Third time’s the charm, they say.
* Although I didn’t get that far down Wikipedia’s ‘History of Venice’ page, so this may not be true. The Godfather would certainly seem to disagree.
** Popes plural, actually; at this point in history there are two, and ‘magic is bad’ seems to be about the only thing they agree on.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Sunday, 7 April 2013
Salvage and Demolition
Tim Powers
Subterranean Press (subterraneanpress.com)
978-1-59606-515-4
Salvage and Demolition, the latest novella from Tim Powers, is a classic. I don’t mean it’s necessarily an enduring work of genius (though it’s pretty damn good); rather that it’s written in such a way, and about such things, as to instantly hurl its reader back in time to the (or at least ‘a’) golden age of science fiction.
Which is undeniably the point. Because this is a story about a) time travel and b) stories, and because the author is Tim Powers, the note-perfect echoing of fifties/sixties SF seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Not for nothing is the last line of the novella ‘He turned to the first page and began to read.’ (p.155)
And sure enough, our hero is soon thrown back to 1957 as he becomes inadvertently caught in a ‘discontinuity circuit’. Round and round he goes: Richard Blanzac, a rare book dealer and functional alcoholic in the traditional mould. Not quite an anti-hero, but rough enough around the edges to make for a richly human – and powerfully sympathetic – protagonist.
I’m not sure how much more than that I should say. It’s a sign of a good book that you don’t really want to talk about the plot, for fear of spoiling not the twists and turns but the simple joy of experiencing the way the whole thing unravels – or curls around itself, more accurately. Suffice to say that Salvage and Demolition – and the neat little time-loop which gives it structure – orbits around the esoteric contents of a box brought to Blanzac for valuation and resale. A signed copy of Howl and some letters from Jack Kerouac, a TV guide from 1957, a double-decker science fiction novel, the contents of an ashtray… and the handwritten manuscript of a long and remarkable poem.
Some of these things are more significant than others.
If you’ve read much post-war science fiction, particularly out of America in the late fifties or early sixties, the style of Salvage and Demolition is like a warm bath of nostalgia. Its language is plain and direct, its sentences short and straightforward. There’s a sincerity to the storytelling you don’t often see these days, and little attempt at overt irony. Like a tale told by the man on the barstool next to you, it has no interest in convincing you of its own cleverness but allows its narrative to stand or fall on its own merits.
There’s no doubting either the merits or the cleverness of Salvage and Demolition, however; that unassuming style conceals an intricately constructed piece of narrative clockwork.
While the complexities of the time loop are what drives the story forward, it spends most of its time on Blanzac and the girl he meets in 1957, Sophie Greenwald. The relationship is given an interesting spin by the out-of-joint circumstances of their meeting, but it’s hampered by the dense exposition Sophie often spouts in place of dialogue. Perhaps this is something forced on Powers by the novella-length of the story, or perhaps it’s another gesture towards old-style SF verisimilitude, but either way it can be a little jarring on occasion. Nonetheless, the banter back and forth between the two has just enough spark to hold the reader’s interest.
Slight wobble aside, Salvage and Demolition is an elegant, well-crafted tale, and complex enough to both reward re-reading and have your thoughts returning to it long after the event. Its dramatic conflicts manage quite cleverly to feel both epic and everyday in scope, and it delights in its own contradictions. It’s perfectly self-contained in narrative terms, and yet manages to hint at whole vast conspiracies beyond the bounds of Blanzac’s mobius-strip time-hopping.
The art which heads each chapter is a little hit-and-miss, with what looks like manipulated photos illustrating the characters or events of the chapter to come. While some are quite cleverly conceived, others feel cluttered and overworked. On balance I think the novel might be better off without them, but they’re an unusual and distinctive extra touch to an already worthy story. Whether they’re worth the extra cost of the Deluxe Hardcover Edition my advance proof paperback is threatening to turn into, I’m less sure.
Regardless, whatever the format you find it, Salvage and Demolition is a fast and exciting read that punches above its weight. It’s worth reading any way you can.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Subterranean Press (subterraneanpress.com)
978-1-59606-515-4
Salvage and Demolition, the latest novella from Tim Powers, is a classic. I don’t mean it’s necessarily an enduring work of genius (though it’s pretty damn good); rather that it’s written in such a way, and about such things, as to instantly hurl its reader back in time to the (or at least ‘a’) golden age of science fiction.
Which is undeniably the point. Because this is a story about a) time travel and b) stories, and because the author is Tim Powers, the note-perfect echoing of fifties/sixties SF seems unlikely to be a coincidence. Not for nothing is the last line of the novella ‘He turned to the first page and began to read.’ (p.155)
And sure enough, our hero is soon thrown back to 1957 as he becomes inadvertently caught in a ‘discontinuity circuit’. Round and round he goes: Richard Blanzac, a rare book dealer and functional alcoholic in the traditional mould. Not quite an anti-hero, but rough enough around the edges to make for a richly human – and powerfully sympathetic – protagonist.
I’m not sure how much more than that I should say. It’s a sign of a good book that you don’t really want to talk about the plot, for fear of spoiling not the twists and turns but the simple joy of experiencing the way the whole thing unravels – or curls around itself, more accurately. Suffice to say that Salvage and Demolition – and the neat little time-loop which gives it structure – orbits around the esoteric contents of a box brought to Blanzac for valuation and resale. A signed copy of Howl and some letters from Jack Kerouac, a TV guide from 1957, a double-decker science fiction novel, the contents of an ashtray… and the handwritten manuscript of a long and remarkable poem.
Some of these things are more significant than others.
If you’ve read much post-war science fiction, particularly out of America in the late fifties or early sixties, the style of Salvage and Demolition is like a warm bath of nostalgia. Its language is plain and direct, its sentences short and straightforward. There’s a sincerity to the storytelling you don’t often see these days, and little attempt at overt irony. Like a tale told by the man on the barstool next to you, it has no interest in convincing you of its own cleverness but allows its narrative to stand or fall on its own merits.
There’s no doubting either the merits or the cleverness of Salvage and Demolition, however; that unassuming style conceals an intricately constructed piece of narrative clockwork.
While the complexities of the time loop are what drives the story forward, it spends most of its time on Blanzac and the girl he meets in 1957, Sophie Greenwald. The relationship is given an interesting spin by the out-of-joint circumstances of their meeting, but it’s hampered by the dense exposition Sophie often spouts in place of dialogue. Perhaps this is something forced on Powers by the novella-length of the story, or perhaps it’s another gesture towards old-style SF verisimilitude, but either way it can be a little jarring on occasion. Nonetheless, the banter back and forth between the two has just enough spark to hold the reader’s interest.
Slight wobble aside, Salvage and Demolition is an elegant, well-crafted tale, and complex enough to both reward re-reading and have your thoughts returning to it long after the event. Its dramatic conflicts manage quite cleverly to feel both epic and everyday in scope, and it delights in its own contradictions. It’s perfectly self-contained in narrative terms, and yet manages to hint at whole vast conspiracies beyond the bounds of Blanzac’s mobius-strip time-hopping.
The art which heads each chapter is a little hit-and-miss, with what looks like manipulated photos illustrating the characters or events of the chapter to come. While some are quite cleverly conceived, others feel cluttered and overworked. On balance I think the novel might be better off without them, but they’re an unusual and distinctive extra touch to an already worthy story. Whether they’re worth the extra cost of the Deluxe Hardcover Edition my advance proof paperback is threatening to turn into, I’m less sure.
Regardless, whatever the format you find it, Salvage and Demolition is a fast and exciting read that punches above its weight. It’s worth reading any way you can.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
The Quantum Thief
Hannu Rajaniemi
Gollancz (orionbooks.co.uk)
978-1-575-08888-7
Every now and then an authorial début attracts the kind of attention usually reserved for the second coming of Christ, the launch of a new iPhone or some equally monumental happening. The Quantum Thief was one of these, appearing on the shelves with the ringing endorsement of various stars of the SF pantheon. And it’s almost, almost as good as they say it is.
To start at the start, the opening line is an absolute gem:
As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk. (p.1)
It’s a fascinating idea, barely given time to breathe before Jean is broken out of the prison – and perhaps that’s just as well, because there’s only so many times you can replay the Prisoner’s Dilemma before it becomes a kind of prison for the reader, too. But the swiftness of the pace in this opening chapter is brutally unforgiving, hurling concepts and terminology at the reader and expecting them to keep up.
It’s a risky strategy which could easily intimidate and overwhelm, but Rajaniemi tempers the information overload with a snappy, stylish delivery which just about manages to keep the novel from capsizing.
Things stabilise quickly after the breakout, once Jean and his rescuer – and her sentient spaceship – evade their pursuers and come to a delicate truce, and the novel settles into a comfortable, slower (but by no means sedate) rhythm as they head to Oubliette, the moving Martian city which is the main setting for most of the novel.
That’s not to say that the flow of ideas slows to a trickle, however. Oubliette has a time-based economy where the population are eventually, once their allocated time runs out, re-uploaded into beings called Quiet to carry out various necessary public functions until they’ve earned back the right to exist as themselves.
Even more complex and fascinating is Oubliette’s social structure, which takes the currently-raging privacy debate to an extreme but logically solid conclusion; every citizen has a ‘privacy sense’ or gevulot which allows them to limit how much of themselves they share – including memories, names, faces and even their physical presence:
‘Let’s have a look at the agora memory – like this.’ The sensation is sudden, like finally finding the word that was at the tip of your tongue. Mieli remembers seeing the agora from high up, in incredible detail, knowing that she can recall every face in the crowd. She has a clear memory of the thief running across the agora.
“Oh,” the Gentleman says. There is a sudden gevulot request from him asking her to forget his reaction. She accepts…(p.103)
The concept is fresh and fascinating, and impeccably well thought-through, from its effects on Oubliette’s social mores to the inevitable ways people find to get around it – ‘analogue holes’ such as newspapers, for example, which are technically illegal but tolerated:
There are pictures; a black-and-white shot of him… The awareness that people he has not shared gevulot with now know who he is and what he has done makes him feel dirty. The gentleman at the next table is looking at him sharply now. He pays quickly, wraps himself in privacy and makes his way home. (p.121)
The way Rajaniemi presents this and other ideas – as fragments and passing asides, building up a sensation of depth through an organic layering of information – can be a little intimidating, but it’s a technique which comes with its own rewards. The barrage of ideas and unfamiliar words grant the world they inhabit a bewildering, complexity, at once filled with alien concepts and strangely familiar in its richness and variation. Every concept and location reveals itself as just another small cog, meshing with what’s come before and hinting at the shape of a larger, interlocking machine. And it gives The Quantum Thief longevity as a novel, as well; terms and events you took on faith the first time round develop an additional richness on re-reading, granted additional context by your foreknowledge.
This is fractal worldbuilding, a whole made up of little details which are themselves comprised of smaller parts within, and down and down the rabbit hole. It’s not always perfect, unfortunately, and certain aspects of the setting start to look a little shaky when you focus on them too hard. For example, how is the Martian space elevator anchored to a moving city without centrifugal forces plucking the scuttling settlement off the face of the planet? And what are the exact mechanics of Oubliette’s time economy – one character, a ‘millenniaire’ possessed of thousands of years, dies like any other man as his Watch winds down – so are time (money) and time (remaining until Quiet) not the same thing? Everyone in Oubliette acts as though they are, and yet.
But for the most part the setting is well thought-through, and rewarding to think about. This is the sort of novel which isn’t just great entertainment. Its refusal to condescend is an education, in that it makes you want to go away and look things up you didn’t understand – the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in my case – and rewards you when you do, with little in-jokes and nuggets of deeper insight.
It’s worth taking a moment to talk about the Shakespearean flair of the language, too. The Quantum Thief has a vocabulary all its own, mixing quirky neologisms with re-purposed words from across the globe: zoku, gogol, qupt, q-dots, archons, Sobornost, spime, tzaddik, gevulot, exomemory, vasilev and guberniya, among others.
Again, there’s little in the way of hand-holding – the words are allowed to glitter and tantalise un-exposited, building a sense of both the alien-ness of the setting and its complexity. Yet it’s astonishing how the reader’s assimilation of the novel’s vocabulary subtly aids suspension of disbelief, easing them into a living, breathing world.
For all that this is a glimpse of a far-future, truly posthuman society – and handles its posthumanism seriously, with talk of requiring ‘permissions’ to access a body’s full superhuman capabilities, and discussion of body designers’ taste in movie star – The Quantum Thief wears its science lightly. As in other areas, the novel prefers to skip lightly across the surface of its concepts, rather than getting bogged down in the dense technicalities which are a common danger of ‘hard’ SF.
Content to let the science tick away in the background, the plot calls on older, pulpier forms, hinted at in the belle époque flavour of Oubliette society and architecture, and outright waved in your face when one character is gifted a genetically engineered Cthuloid monstrosity as a pet and names it ‘Sherlock’.
Because both main threads of the plot are detective fiction of sorts, with Jean le Flambeur trying to hunt down whatever parts of himself he left on Mars, and a teenage super-sleuth becoming mixed up in a cryptographic conspiracy that goes to the heart of Oubliette society. In this way The Quantum Thief gets to both have its cake and eat it, wrapping an intelligent, challenging piece of SF in the slick and entertaining tropes of a space-opera detective novel.
Even the action is first-class, drawing on high-tech superhumanism to create thrilling and sensational set pieces. Rajaniemi does indulge in the overused trick of winding time down to a crawl, but here it’s a necessary evil; on one occasion we see the action from an unenhanced participant’s perspective, and it’s a nightmarish blur of impossibly fast sound and fury.
The action isn’t frivolous, either, but given the weight of consequence. A particularly exciting knock-down drag-out faceoff between two augmented characters comes to a screeching halt when both, having temporarily shut down each other’s techno-superpowers, realise the third person in the room is pointing an antique (ie 20th-century tech) revolver in their direction. Even when death is mostly temporary, it doesn’t seem to be taken lightly.
So. The novel’s first and second acts are brilliant, effortlessly balancing the interweaving plot lines with a perfect evocation of a living, breathing – and very alien – society. If The Quantum Thief falls down anywhere, however, it’s in the climax. The pace picks up as it’s supposed to, and the stakes are suitably elevated, but the brilliantly-evoked setting begins to get a little motion-blurred.
Too much happening, too fast – for the first time you’re reminded that this is Rajaniemi’s début novel, as the climax teeters on the edge of incoherence. It just about holds together, but it takes a close re-reading before all the motivations which drive it start to make sense – and having to stop and puzzle out what exactly is going on isn’t terribly compatible with the last act’s breakneck flow.
Nonetheless, it’s to The Quantum Thief’s credit that the plot is completely driven by character motivation rather than the other way around. And there’s a lot more to recommend, from the novel’s sly wit and superb characterisation to the hints at how this world links back to our own. The zoku, for example, appear to be an evolution of twentieth-century gaming clans into a sort of quantum-entangled socialist collective, swapping and reshaping their virtual and physical presences with casual indifference and gamifying everything from relationships to war.
But it feels like going into any further detail would be to spoil the pleasure of discovery. While some of the ideas might not be all that new, it’s the way they’re realised that is The Quantum Thief’s real joy. And now this review is finished, I’m off to read the sequel.
Gollancz (orionbooks.co.uk)
978-1-575-08888-7
Every now and then an authorial début attracts the kind of attention usually reserved for the second coming of Christ, the launch of a new iPhone or some equally monumental happening. The Quantum Thief was one of these, appearing on the shelves with the ringing endorsement of various stars of the SF pantheon. And it’s almost, almost as good as they say it is.
To start at the start, the opening line is an absolute gem:
As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk. (p.1)
It’s a great hook, throwing open a dozen intriguing questions, and its dust-dry wit speaks volumes about the man narrating it. Jean le Flambeur: posthuman, mind-thief, trickster and wag, the prisoner of the Axelrod Archons.
And prisoner is the operative part of that description, at least as far as the first chapter is concerned, because Jean is an inmate of the Dilemma Prison, forced to play endless iterative games of the Prisoner’s Dilemma – a classic example of game theory, in which combinations of cooperation and defection between the two participants prompt various patterns of reward and punishment – against his fellow inmates. Over thousands and thousands of iterations, the inescapable logic of the system will burn away the selfish, sociopathic inclination to betray, turning career criminals into cooperative, productive citizens.
It’s a fascinating idea, barely given time to breathe before Jean is broken out of the prison – and perhaps that’s just as well, because there’s only so many times you can replay the Prisoner’s Dilemma before it becomes a kind of prison for the reader, too. But the swiftness of the pace in this opening chapter is brutally unforgiving, hurling concepts and terminology at the reader and expecting them to keep up.
It’s a risky strategy which could easily intimidate and overwhelm, but Rajaniemi tempers the information overload with a snappy, stylish delivery which just about manages to keep the novel from capsizing.
Things stabilise quickly after the breakout, once Jean and his rescuer – and her sentient spaceship – evade their pursuers and come to a delicate truce, and the novel settles into a comfortable, slower (but by no means sedate) rhythm as they head to Oubliette, the moving Martian city which is the main setting for most of the novel.
That’s not to say that the flow of ideas slows to a trickle, however. Oubliette has a time-based economy where the population are eventually, once their allocated time runs out, re-uploaded into beings called Quiet to carry out various necessary public functions until they’ve earned back the right to exist as themselves.
Even more complex and fascinating is Oubliette’s social structure, which takes the currently-raging privacy debate to an extreme but logically solid conclusion; every citizen has a ‘privacy sense’ or gevulot which allows them to limit how much of themselves they share – including memories, names, faces and even their physical presence:
‘Let’s have a look at the agora memory – like this.’ The sensation is sudden, like finally finding the word that was at the tip of your tongue. Mieli remembers seeing the agora from high up, in incredible detail, knowing that she can recall every face in the crowd. She has a clear memory of the thief running across the agora.
“Oh,” the Gentleman says. There is a sudden gevulot request from him asking her to forget his reaction. She accepts…(p.103)
The concept is fresh and fascinating, and impeccably well thought-through, from its effects on Oubliette’s social mores to the inevitable ways people find to get around it – ‘analogue holes’ such as newspapers, for example, which are technically illegal but tolerated:
There are pictures; a black-and-white shot of him… The awareness that people he has not shared gevulot with now know who he is and what he has done makes him feel dirty. The gentleman at the next table is looking at him sharply now. He pays quickly, wraps himself in privacy and makes his way home. (p.121)
The way Rajaniemi presents this and other ideas – as fragments and passing asides, building up a sensation of depth through an organic layering of information – can be a little intimidating, but it’s a technique which comes with its own rewards. The barrage of ideas and unfamiliar words grant the world they inhabit a bewildering, complexity, at once filled with alien concepts and strangely familiar in its richness and variation. Every concept and location reveals itself as just another small cog, meshing with what’s come before and hinting at the shape of a larger, interlocking machine. And it gives The Quantum Thief longevity as a novel, as well; terms and events you took on faith the first time round develop an additional richness on re-reading, granted additional context by your foreknowledge.
This is fractal worldbuilding, a whole made up of little details which are themselves comprised of smaller parts within, and down and down the rabbit hole. It’s not always perfect, unfortunately, and certain aspects of the setting start to look a little shaky when you focus on them too hard. For example, how is the Martian space elevator anchored to a moving city without centrifugal forces plucking the scuttling settlement off the face of the planet? And what are the exact mechanics of Oubliette’s time economy – one character, a ‘millenniaire’ possessed of thousands of years, dies like any other man as his Watch winds down – so are time (money) and time (remaining until Quiet) not the same thing? Everyone in Oubliette acts as though they are, and yet.
But for the most part the setting is well thought-through, and rewarding to think about. This is the sort of novel which isn’t just great entertainment. Its refusal to condescend is an education, in that it makes you want to go away and look things up you didn’t understand – the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in my case – and rewards you when you do, with little in-jokes and nuggets of deeper insight.
It’s worth taking a moment to talk about the Shakespearean flair of the language, too. The Quantum Thief has a vocabulary all its own, mixing quirky neologisms with re-purposed words from across the globe: zoku, gogol, qupt, q-dots, archons, Sobornost, spime, tzaddik, gevulot, exomemory, vasilev and guberniya, among others.
Again, there’s little in the way of hand-holding – the words are allowed to glitter and tantalise un-exposited, building a sense of both the alien-ness of the setting and its complexity. Yet it’s astonishing how the reader’s assimilation of the novel’s vocabulary subtly aids suspension of disbelief, easing them into a living, breathing world.
For all that this is a glimpse of a far-future, truly posthuman society – and handles its posthumanism seriously, with talk of requiring ‘permissions’ to access a body’s full superhuman capabilities, and discussion of body designers’ taste in movie star – The Quantum Thief wears its science lightly. As in other areas, the novel prefers to skip lightly across the surface of its concepts, rather than getting bogged down in the dense technicalities which are a common danger of ‘hard’ SF.
Content to let the science tick away in the background, the plot calls on older, pulpier forms, hinted at in the belle époque flavour of Oubliette society and architecture, and outright waved in your face when one character is gifted a genetically engineered Cthuloid monstrosity as a pet and names it ‘Sherlock’.
Because both main threads of the plot are detective fiction of sorts, with Jean le Flambeur trying to hunt down whatever parts of himself he left on Mars, and a teenage super-sleuth becoming mixed up in a cryptographic conspiracy that goes to the heart of Oubliette society. In this way The Quantum Thief gets to both have its cake and eat it, wrapping an intelligent, challenging piece of SF in the slick and entertaining tropes of a space-opera detective novel.
Even the action is first-class, drawing on high-tech superhumanism to create thrilling and sensational set pieces. Rajaniemi does indulge in the overused trick of winding time down to a crawl, but here it’s a necessary evil; on one occasion we see the action from an unenhanced participant’s perspective, and it’s a nightmarish blur of impossibly fast sound and fury.
The action isn’t frivolous, either, but given the weight of consequence. A particularly exciting knock-down drag-out faceoff between two augmented characters comes to a screeching halt when both, having temporarily shut down each other’s techno-superpowers, realise the third person in the room is pointing an antique (ie 20th-century tech) revolver in their direction. Even when death is mostly temporary, it doesn’t seem to be taken lightly.
So. The novel’s first and second acts are brilliant, effortlessly balancing the interweaving plot lines with a perfect evocation of a living, breathing – and very alien – society. If The Quantum Thief falls down anywhere, however, it’s in the climax. The pace picks up as it’s supposed to, and the stakes are suitably elevated, but the brilliantly-evoked setting begins to get a little motion-blurred.
Too much happening, too fast – for the first time you’re reminded that this is Rajaniemi’s début novel, as the climax teeters on the edge of incoherence. It just about holds together, but it takes a close re-reading before all the motivations which drive it start to make sense – and having to stop and puzzle out what exactly is going on isn’t terribly compatible with the last act’s breakneck flow.
Nonetheless, it’s to The Quantum Thief’s credit that the plot is completely driven by character motivation rather than the other way around. And there’s a lot more to recommend, from the novel’s sly wit and superb characterisation to the hints at how this world links back to our own. The zoku, for example, appear to be an evolution of twentieth-century gaming clans into a sort of quantum-entangled socialist collective, swapping and reshaping their virtual and physical presences with casual indifference and gamifying everything from relationships to war.
But it feels like going into any further detail would be to spoil the pleasure of discovery. While some of the ideas might not be all that new, it’s the way they’re realised that is The Quantum Thief’s real joy. And now this review is finished, I’m off to read the sequel.
Tuesday, 24 July 2012
Warrior
Jennifer Fallon
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-653-5
Two things happen in Warrior. This isn’t hyperbole, or writerly misdirection to hook you into reading more of this review: the second book in the Wolfblade Trilogy could have been stripped down to a dozen pages or so and still served as a functional second act.
You’ll notice I said functional, not fun. What happens is what has to happen, and what’s so obviously been coming since the prologue of Wolfblade, the first in the trilogy. Those critical scenes lay the foundations for a confrontation we don’t get to see here, and which will presumably take up most of the third book’s equally ample girth.
But for almost seven hundred pages of Warrior, nothing happens. There is incident, but it’s all incidental. A more sophisticated writer might have used the biblical thickness of the novel to build tension and tighten the screws, instead of dwelling on the banal to the extent Warrior does. Where there’s foreshadowing, it’s clumsy and overt; where there’s an attempt at suspense, you can all-but hear the cheesy musical sting.
And critically, the politics which makes up the central driving motivation for almost every character is simply boring – modern politics might be sadly lacking in backroom backstabbings, but the medievally fantastical sort needs a bit of fizz and intrigue to keep it from turning into a slightly less sophisticated version of Prime Minister’s Questions. It’s hard to persuade yourself that any of this really matters when Fallon seems to treat it mostly as an afterthought – and when even the rival schemers spend twenty-four years manoeuvring to negligible effect.
Which chronological shoe-horning allows me to smoothly segue into the odd structural choices which do little to distract from Warrior’s slack, bloated through-line. The book starts eight years after its prequel, giving Marla Wolfblade’s children a little time to grow up and become characters rather than plot tokens, which does give the novel a suitable dynastic heft.
But it’s as though nothing else has changed in all those years – the nation of Hythria is still ruled by Marla’s wastrel brother, while the same political enemies are still skulking around the corridors of power, plotting and scheming to very little effect. The same people hold the same posts, and about the only other sign of time passing is that Marla’s tally of husbands has risen to a black-widowy four.
It’s unclear why Fallon decided now rather than then was the time to pause and start her trilogy’s second act; the action focuses on a new arrival in Marla’s household, in the shape of the painfully emo Luciena, daughter of a Wolfblade husband who lived and died off-page between the books. Her childish defiance is instantly tedious, and even as a political pawn she barely makes a ripple in the plot.
Her effect on Marla is more profound, making the matriarch look at herself and her actions in a new light, but barely touched upon which is a shame. I’d rather have spent more time examining the effect of Marla’s political streetfighting on her battered soul than spend precious pages on the next generation of Wolfblades.
The children. Not that they qualify for that title for long, as the tying off of the Luciena subplot abruptly catapults us forward another twelve years, and Hythria remains locked in social and political stasis. Damin Wolfblade is Marla’s eldest and heir to the throne; a gaggle of cousins, siblings and milk-brothers surround him, of varying levels of cardboard-cutoutery, but he’s the real focus of Warrior.
Damin’s interesting. His uncle, the nominal ruler who Marla has quietly usurped, is a hedonist, paedophile and sociopathic waste of space with little interest in keeping a fragile country from tearing itself apart, and everyone around Damin is subtly terrified that the heir will turn out just the same. Fallon is playing her cards more carefully here, and it takes a closer reading than the novel has really earned to establish exactly what Damin’s worth.
Unfortunately it’s primarily Damin’s passivity which makes him inscrutable, and when you can only observe your protagonist in the reflected glow of his peers’ behaviour, that tends to put the focus elsewhere. And just as with Luciena earlier in the novel, it’s the rest of the Wolfblade mob who wallow in the limelight.
While none of them have quite the same depth as Damin here, or his mother did in the trilogy’s first book, the action does at least begin to pick up a bit. Towards the end of Warrior we see genuine incident, and while the plot developments may have been telegraphed, trumpeted and writ large in letters of neon fire, they’re nonetheless affecting. Here we see flashes of the uncompromising insistence on cause and consequence which made Wolfblade so refreshing, but it’s too late, too late. And too reliant on the almost wilful blindness of the supposedly-canny Marla and her brood to the unapologetic lunatic they’re harbouring in their midst.
I enjoyed reading Wolfblade; the writing wasn’t going to win any awards, but it had an uncompromising streak which made it quite a break from the cosy norm. Warrior retains the pedestrian prose, but little enough happens that its forerunner’s brutal pragmatism barely gets to rise above the murky surface. Even when it does, it feels a little like a rehash of earlier, better scenes. The offing of a (relative) innocent, the reluctant setting-aside of bloody vengeance in favour of political pragmatism – we’ve heard these songs before.
However, having ragged on Warrior for close to a thousand words now, it’s necessary to caveat this review a little by noting that in the last few dozen pages Fallon doesn’t merely recover her authorial mojo, but also teases at an action-packed, exciting final volume. So here I am, hoping Warlord can live up to that promise and redeem this sagging second act.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-653-5
Two things happen in Warrior. This isn’t hyperbole, or writerly misdirection to hook you into reading more of this review: the second book in the Wolfblade Trilogy could have been stripped down to a dozen pages or so and still served as a functional second act.
You’ll notice I said functional, not fun. What happens is what has to happen, and what’s so obviously been coming since the prologue of Wolfblade, the first in the trilogy. Those critical scenes lay the foundations for a confrontation we don’t get to see here, and which will presumably take up most of the third book’s equally ample girth.
But for almost seven hundred pages of Warrior, nothing happens. There is incident, but it’s all incidental. A more sophisticated writer might have used the biblical thickness of the novel to build tension and tighten the screws, instead of dwelling on the banal to the extent Warrior does. Where there’s foreshadowing, it’s clumsy and overt; where there’s an attempt at suspense, you can all-but hear the cheesy musical sting.
And critically, the politics which makes up the central driving motivation for almost every character is simply boring – modern politics might be sadly lacking in backroom backstabbings, but the medievally fantastical sort needs a bit of fizz and intrigue to keep it from turning into a slightly less sophisticated version of Prime Minister’s Questions. It’s hard to persuade yourself that any of this really matters when Fallon seems to treat it mostly as an afterthought – and when even the rival schemers spend twenty-four years manoeuvring to negligible effect.
Which chronological shoe-horning allows me to smoothly segue into the odd structural choices which do little to distract from Warrior’s slack, bloated through-line. The book starts eight years after its prequel, giving Marla Wolfblade’s children a little time to grow up and become characters rather than plot tokens, which does give the novel a suitable dynastic heft.
But it’s as though nothing else has changed in all those years – the nation of Hythria is still ruled by Marla’s wastrel brother, while the same political enemies are still skulking around the corridors of power, plotting and scheming to very little effect. The same people hold the same posts, and about the only other sign of time passing is that Marla’s tally of husbands has risen to a black-widowy four.
It’s unclear why Fallon decided now rather than then was the time to pause and start her trilogy’s second act; the action focuses on a new arrival in Marla’s household, in the shape of the painfully emo Luciena, daughter of a Wolfblade husband who lived and died off-page between the books. Her childish defiance is instantly tedious, and even as a political pawn she barely makes a ripple in the plot.
Her effect on Marla is more profound, making the matriarch look at herself and her actions in a new light, but barely touched upon which is a shame. I’d rather have spent more time examining the effect of Marla’s political streetfighting on her battered soul than spend precious pages on the next generation of Wolfblades.
The children. Not that they qualify for that title for long, as the tying off of the Luciena subplot abruptly catapults us forward another twelve years, and Hythria remains locked in social and political stasis. Damin Wolfblade is Marla’s eldest and heir to the throne; a gaggle of cousins, siblings and milk-brothers surround him, of varying levels of cardboard-cutoutery, but he’s the real focus of Warrior.
Damin’s interesting. His uncle, the nominal ruler who Marla has quietly usurped, is a hedonist, paedophile and sociopathic waste of space with little interest in keeping a fragile country from tearing itself apart, and everyone around Damin is subtly terrified that the heir will turn out just the same. Fallon is playing her cards more carefully here, and it takes a closer reading than the novel has really earned to establish exactly what Damin’s worth.
Unfortunately it’s primarily Damin’s passivity which makes him inscrutable, and when you can only observe your protagonist in the reflected glow of his peers’ behaviour, that tends to put the focus elsewhere. And just as with Luciena earlier in the novel, it’s the rest of the Wolfblade mob who wallow in the limelight.
While none of them have quite the same depth as Damin here, or his mother did in the trilogy’s first book, the action does at least begin to pick up a bit. Towards the end of Warrior we see genuine incident, and while the plot developments may have been telegraphed, trumpeted and writ large in letters of neon fire, they’re nonetheless affecting. Here we see flashes of the uncompromising insistence on cause and consequence which made Wolfblade so refreshing, but it’s too late, too late. And too reliant on the almost wilful blindness of the supposedly-canny Marla and her brood to the unapologetic lunatic they’re harbouring in their midst.
I enjoyed reading Wolfblade; the writing wasn’t going to win any awards, but it had an uncompromising streak which made it quite a break from the cosy norm. Warrior retains the pedestrian prose, but little enough happens that its forerunner’s brutal pragmatism barely gets to rise above the murky surface. Even when it does, it feels a little like a rehash of earlier, better scenes. The offing of a (relative) innocent, the reluctant setting-aside of bloody vengeance in favour of political pragmatism – we’ve heard these songs before.
However, having ragged on Warrior for close to a thousand words now, it’s necessary to caveat this review a little by noting that in the last few dozen pages Fallon doesn’t merely recover her authorial mojo, but also teases at an action-packed, exciting final volume. So here I am, hoping Warlord can live up to that promise and redeem this sagging second act.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
The Gathering Storm
Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-165-3
The Wheel of Time turns, and authors come and go. The Gathering Storm is the twelfth doorstop in Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series, and the first to be published following Jordan’s death in 2007. Even fans of the Wheel of Time would admit that the series had lost its way somewhat, becoming bloated with characters and descriptions of soft furnishings.
Memories abound from the last few novels of hundred-page prologues in which I recognise not a single character, or entire books which not only fail to drive the plot forward but actually end, chronologically speaking, before the events of the previous novel’s climax. Reading the Wheel of Time was beginning to feel less a pleasure and more like an endurance race, where you only continue in an attempt to justify the countless hours invested in the series.
The Gathering Storm, however, feels like a transition – like one of the winds with which each novel in the Wheel of Time traditionally opens had blown through the book and swept out all of the cobwebs. It seems primarily concerned with beginning to tie off the thousands of loose ends still extant – and with only one (now two) more novels planned for the series, it’s about time.
While there are still occasional troublesome reversions to the same meandering, unfocused narrative that crippled the preceding books, you get the sense that Sanderson spent much of his time balancing the need to respect those parts of The Gathering Storm which Jordan had already written with an abundant awareness of the series’ shortcomings.
Plotwise, it’s labyrinthine enough to defy any attempt at summary. Broadly – the end of the world is coming, and Dragon Reborn Rand al Thor is still trying to forge the various bickering nations of men into an army capable of staving off the darkness at the Final Battle. Which is much the same summary as the preceding novels, but where The Gathering Storm differs is in its focus on Rand’s internal struggle. I’m little able to construct an adequate timeline of his rise from shepherd to messianic ruler, but it can’t be longer than a couple of in-book years – a short period in which to adjust, and one which has had its consequences.
One of the most interesting parts of The Gathering Storm is in showing the effort Rand’s expended on turning himself into a weapon, a cold, unfeeling monster able to justify almost any atrocity by the knowledge that he’s trying to save the world. For the first time, we’re shown how disturbing his transformation is for those who know (and knew) him, and just how brittle his mental state has become. Given that his past self, the Dragon Lews Therin, went mad and blew an Everest-dwarfing hole in the world, doesn’t bode too well.
What The Gathering Storm manages better than its predecessors is to provide a window on Rand’s mental disintegration, to let us see why he makes the decisions he does… and the damage it does to his increasingly fragile psyche. It’s to Sanderson’s credit how interesting he manages to make the previously anodyne Rand, showing a deft touch for characterisation. Unfortunately, even with 766 pages to burn there’s simply too much going on to allow this level of characterisation to filter down, and while the story is veritably chock-solid with political intrigue, supernatural battles and the personal crises of its many, many supporting characters, it all feels a little thin in comparison.
Mat Cauthon, mercenary warlord and Rand’s childhood friend, is given particularly little to do and plenty of pages to do it in – his meandering journey towards the city of Caemlyn feels almost leisurely, and detracts from the tension which otherwise runs through The Gathering Storm. The superficiality and tedious repetitiveness of his own internal monologue – women are pretty, but I’m married now, but I just want to be free, but I have responsibilities, but oh what’s the harm in a little gambling and wenching, but ad infinitum – makes these particular sections of the novel almost unendurable. The book would have been better off without him, or at least with giving him something more interesting to do.
Nonetheless, despite the wooliness and lack of drama which seeps into the novel on occasion, there’s a decent sense of rising tension and periodic bursts of action which keep The Gathering Storm from becoming another near-unendurable bore. And more importantly, whereas the preceding eleven books have just continued to grow thicker and more tangled, like some ever-expanding ball of wool, here we finally get a sense that resolution might be in sight. Loose ends are tied off, long-running plot arcs are resolved, and minor characters are allowed to fade into the background as their purpose is served.
Incomprehensible unless you’ve read through the entire series, and hard work even if you have, The Gathering Storm is nonetheless a substantial step up in terms of quality and content. Sanderson’s style is simply more focused on effective storytelling than Jordan’s, showing a willingness to dispense with much of the vast quantity of peripheral plots, places and people in order to focus on what really matters. Whether it’s due to a detachment from the material which Jordan as its creator found impossible, or simply down to talent, is fairly irrelevant. The Gathering Storm is better than the Wheel of Time has been in a long time, and the groundwork Jordan laid is as complex and vital as ever. If Sanderson can continue to steer the remaining novels in the same direction, reading the end of the Wheel of Time might even become a pleasure rather than a chore.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
Orbit (orbitbooks.net)
978-1-84149-165-3
The Wheel of Time turns, and authors come and go. The Gathering Storm is the twelfth doorstop in Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series, and the first to be published following Jordan’s death in 2007. Even fans of the Wheel of Time would admit that the series had lost its way somewhat, becoming bloated with characters and descriptions of soft furnishings.
Memories abound from the last few novels of hundred-page prologues in which I recognise not a single character, or entire books which not only fail to drive the plot forward but actually end, chronologically speaking, before the events of the previous novel’s climax. Reading the Wheel of Time was beginning to feel less a pleasure and more like an endurance race, where you only continue in an attempt to justify the countless hours invested in the series.
The Gathering Storm, however, feels like a transition – like one of the winds with which each novel in the Wheel of Time traditionally opens had blown through the book and swept out all of the cobwebs. It seems primarily concerned with beginning to tie off the thousands of loose ends still extant – and with only one (now two) more novels planned for the series, it’s about time.
While there are still occasional troublesome reversions to the same meandering, unfocused narrative that crippled the preceding books, you get the sense that Sanderson spent much of his time balancing the need to respect those parts of The Gathering Storm which Jordan had already written with an abundant awareness of the series’ shortcomings.
Plotwise, it’s labyrinthine enough to defy any attempt at summary. Broadly – the end of the world is coming, and Dragon Reborn Rand al Thor is still trying to forge the various bickering nations of men into an army capable of staving off the darkness at the Final Battle. Which is much the same summary as the preceding novels, but where The Gathering Storm differs is in its focus on Rand’s internal struggle. I’m little able to construct an adequate timeline of his rise from shepherd to messianic ruler, but it can’t be longer than a couple of in-book years – a short period in which to adjust, and one which has had its consequences.
One of the most interesting parts of The Gathering Storm is in showing the effort Rand’s expended on turning himself into a weapon, a cold, unfeeling monster able to justify almost any atrocity by the knowledge that he’s trying to save the world. For the first time, we’re shown how disturbing his transformation is for those who know (and knew) him, and just how brittle his mental state has become. Given that his past self, the Dragon Lews Therin, went mad and blew an Everest-dwarfing hole in the world, doesn’t bode too well.
What The Gathering Storm manages better than its predecessors is to provide a window on Rand’s mental disintegration, to let us see why he makes the decisions he does… and the damage it does to his increasingly fragile psyche. It’s to Sanderson’s credit how interesting he manages to make the previously anodyne Rand, showing a deft touch for characterisation. Unfortunately, even with 766 pages to burn there’s simply too much going on to allow this level of characterisation to filter down, and while the story is veritably chock-solid with political intrigue, supernatural battles and the personal crises of its many, many supporting characters, it all feels a little thin in comparison.
Mat Cauthon, mercenary warlord and Rand’s childhood friend, is given particularly little to do and plenty of pages to do it in – his meandering journey towards the city of Caemlyn feels almost leisurely, and detracts from the tension which otherwise runs through The Gathering Storm. The superficiality and tedious repetitiveness of his own internal monologue – women are pretty, but I’m married now, but I just want to be free, but I have responsibilities, but oh what’s the harm in a little gambling and wenching, but ad infinitum – makes these particular sections of the novel almost unendurable. The book would have been better off without him, or at least with giving him something more interesting to do.
Nonetheless, despite the wooliness and lack of drama which seeps into the novel on occasion, there’s a decent sense of rising tension and periodic bursts of action which keep The Gathering Storm from becoming another near-unendurable bore. And more importantly, whereas the preceding eleven books have just continued to grow thicker and more tangled, like some ever-expanding ball of wool, here we finally get a sense that resolution might be in sight. Loose ends are tied off, long-running plot arcs are resolved, and minor characters are allowed to fade into the background as their purpose is served.
Incomprehensible unless you’ve read through the entire series, and hard work even if you have, The Gathering Storm is nonetheless a substantial step up in terms of quality and content. Sanderson’s style is simply more focused on effective storytelling than Jordan’s, showing a willingness to dispense with much of the vast quantity of peripheral plots, places and people in order to focus on what really matters. Whether it’s due to a detachment from the material which Jordan as its creator found impossible, or simply down to talent, is fairly irrelevant. The Gathering Storm is better than the Wheel of Time has been in a long time, and the groundwork Jordan laid is as complex and vital as ever. If Sanderson can continue to steer the remaining novels in the same direction, reading the end of the Wheel of Time might even become a pleasure rather than a chore.
This review was originally written for SFcrowsnest.com
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