recent reading

[mamajoan]

No news from the doctor yet about Ruthie's condition. I shall keep you posted. (really!)

Yesterday I finished reading The Aware by Glenda Larke, an Australian fantasy author. Apparently there is a large and thriving scifi/fantasy community Down Under, which we up here know little about, and that's too bad because they are turning out some really good stuff. I believe it was morgan_dhu who suggested this one to me.

Anyway, it's basically a sword-and-sorcery swashbuckler, with a female protagonist and the usual assortment of mystical/magical creatures and people. You know the drill: there are good magicians and bad magicians, and the bad ones want to rule the world and enslave everyone with their magic, while the good ones want ... to rule the world and enslave everyone with their magic. But in a GOOD way. ;) Larke adds a twist to it with the concept of "the Aware," which are people who can't use magic themselves but can perceive it, and can tell who is a magician and which kind they are. Magical spells don't work on people with Awareness, which naturally causes them to be viewed with deep suspicion by those who do magic.

So the protagonist, Blaze, is a woman with Awareness who works for the "good guys," doing the dirty work that they're too civilized to do themselves. She travels far and wide, meeting up with a wide assortment of unsavory types, some of whom she kills, some of whom she screws. ;) In the story, she's sent to retrieve an errant noblewoman, but ends up stumbling onto an evil plot of an evil magician, and in the course of foiling said plot, she discovers an even bigger and more diabolical plot being cooked up by the so-called "good guys." Okay, so if that all sounds pretty formulaic, maybe it is; but it's well-written, with lots of humor, action, a healthy but not overly sickening dose of romance, and of course, a few plot twists at the end. And very blatantly left open for a sequel, which I understand has already been published so I had better track it down.

To sum up: very enjoyable read, well worth the effort of tracking it down.

Before that, I read Camouflage by Joe Haldeman. Haldeman is a scifi author whose work I have enjoyed before, although I do find that (like the vast majority of white men writing scifi, even these days) you have to grit your teeth against his transparent and largely ineffective attempts to include strong, interesting female characters. In this book particularly, I had read a considerable number of reviews all saying the same thing, namely that it's a very interesting story with a very interesting concept, for about the first 3/4 of the book -- and then has a very sudden and unsatisfying, even disappointing, ending. So I went into it with that in mind, and indeed, the reviews were right.

The basic plot is that thousands or millions of years ago, two different aliens crash-landed on Earth. They both have the ability to shape-shift, and are immortal, so they spend centuries masquerading as various Earth species, ending up, not surprisingly, as humans. The two aliens are unaware of each other's existence -- and have forgotten their origins -- so they follow different paths in their integration into human society. Then, sometime in the early 21st century, humans discover one of the spaceships and start studying it, which, naturally, draws both of the aliens together to check it out. And then the aforementioned disappointing and unsatisfying conclusion takes place.

So, I don't have a lot to say about this one. Despite having a considerable amount of "hard" science and also a fair amount of "soft" science (sociology, etc.), it's basically fluff. The blurbs on the cover said things about deep insight into humanity and yadda yadda, but I can't agree with that. If Haldeman was trying to make a point with the two alien beings about the two sides of the human animal, aspects of personality, or anything like that, it didn't work for me. It was entertaining to read for the first 3/4, and then it was just eye-roll-worthy, and that's about all there is to it.

Before that, I read The Hunter by Julia Leigh, another Australian book, for mofic's book club. This one isn't scifi, exactly, but is basically about a guy going into the wilderness to hunt an animal that most people think is either extinct or a myth. It was interesting to read because it's so different from the kind of stuff I usually read -- charged with testosterone to some extent, but also very introspective. I don't really have much to say about this one either.

I also recently read Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, which won the Hugo (highest scifi award) for Best Novel a couple of years ago. This book struck me as a throwback to the "golden years" of science fiction -- by which I mean that it's a fascinating story from a scientific standpoint, but woefully inadequate when it comes to portraying the human emotions and relationships in the story. Most of the first "masters" of scifi (white men all, of course) were great at coming up with interesting "what if?"s, and spinning them out into fascinating tales based on legitimate science as well as believable speculation -- but they were terrible at crafting believable, interesting, likeable characters, and developing those characters, and making them feel and learn and grow.

So "Spin" posits a near-future Earth which suddenly one day finds itself encased in a sort of bubble, a "membrane" that surrounds the entire planet and blocks out the stars, moon, and much of the sunlight. The people on Earth quickly realize that time runs slower inside the bubble than out, so outside, our sun is rapidly hurtling toward extinction, millions of years going by outside for each month that goes by inside.

Some Earth scientists figure out a pretty ingenius plan for dealing with this, which I won't detail because it's really interesting and you should read it. ;) Anyway, more stuff happens, and eventually by the end, the main characters figure out who put the Earth in the bubble and why.

Wilson uses a literary device in this book, where he basically tells the story in two timelines. He switches back and forth between the initial timeline -- starting when the main character is about 12, when the membrane first appears -- and the later timeline, maybe 30-40 years later, when everything starts to get figured out. This is a not uncommon device in modern fiction, and it can work if done carefully. I didn't find it confusing, exactly, but I felt that it didn't add to the story, and in fact detracted from it, since the later timeline was constantly hinting at stuff that he hadn't yet revealed, and then by the time he got around to explaining it in the earlier timeline, you had already pretty much figured it out. So it just felt awkward and unnecessary.

But my main problem, as I said, is the characterization. The main character, the narrator, is fairly two-dimensional as a person. He talks about feeling this or that, but it's not convincing: too much "tell," not enough "show." The woman he's in love with factors heavily into the story -- she's also the twin sister of the guy who figures out all the science -- but her motivations and feelings are pretty unclear throughout, and when she does talk about feeling this or that, again, it's unconvincing. The author talks about how people on Earth feel about no longer being able to see the stars, and so forth -- you can imagine that it would have an enormous psycho-social effect on the entire planet -- but again, it's not fleshed out, it's not a comprehensive, convincing job of world-building. Like so many of the early masters of scifi, Wilson neglects the human element in his rush to develop an interesting scientific story.

And don't get me wrong: it IS an interesting story from the science standpoint. The "what if" that Wilson has started off with is pretty outrageous to begin with -- "what if the Earth were enclosed in a bubble that slowed down time?" -- and he does some really fascinating stuff with that premise. So I would recommend it from that standpoint. But it definitely annoyed and frustrated me that he did so little with his characters. And of course, not surprisingly, the book woefully fails the Bechdel test. (At the very end he sticks in a lesbian subplot, which I guess was meant to add depth to a couple of the minor characters; but since it's at the end, and since it involves two minor characters, it just feels gratuitous and pointless.)

Anyway...so, if you enjoy hard scifi, especially near-future speculation type stuff, you'll like this story. But you should definitely think first about whether, or how much, the characterization stuff is going to bother you. Because by the end of Spin it was bothering the crap out of me.

I'm also at the moment trying to read two nonfiction books: The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of by the recently deceased Tom Disch, which is a sort of history of how science fiction influenced and was influenced by society; and For Her Own Good by Barbara Ehrenreich, which is a history of medical advice given to women throughout the ages, and how the medical community has used its influence to control women, and so forth. I'm not getting very far with these, but I'm still working on them.

My total books read for 2008 is now up to 33! Go me! :) My "Read in 2008" tag on LibraryThing.

Comments

have you read any Garth Nix?

[lightningrose.livejournal.com]

Australian author queenalia gifted me with. Enjoying it quite a bit.