Holy shit! Peter Watts gets a beatdown!

So Peter Watts may have made the mistake of arguing with some US border guards. According to Cory Doctorow, they then gave Watts a beating, charged him with assaulting a federal officer, and sent him packing into Canada in his shirtsleeves in the snow.

Now he's facing a federal felony charge in the US. Watts, for those who don't know, is the author of the fabulous Blindsight, a bleak but mindblowing novel that was nominated for a Hugo a few years back. It's available as a download thanks to its Creative Commons license.

The folks who like to grovel before authority are predictably already turning up in Boing Boing's comments. We don't know what happened, maybe he was at fault, blah blah blah. You know what? I don't even care if Watts argued with the guards, if he verbally provoked them, if he refused to follow their orders immediately. I don't for a minute believe that an SF author and former marine biologist in his forties just lunged at a border guard.

I do believe that border guards have an absurd amount of power over people. When you have that much power in one place, you've created a job that attracts bullying assholes. Not all of them, but way too many are just there to push people around and feed their piggy little egos.

I've donated $20 to Watts through his PayPal account on his website.

If, like me, you've ever been treated like dirt by some jackass of a border guard, kick in a few bucks. Free Peter Watts!

But what does it all mean?

Thomas Harlan's House of Reeds is in no way a bad book. But it is not a book that made me want to jump up and down in glee, either.

House of Reeds is apparently the sequel to Wasteland of Flint, and the story of its protagonists will continue in Land of the Dead (which, according to Wikipedia, is out next month). I haven't read Wasteland of Flint, because my library doesn't have it, and neither do my local used book stores. With that disclaimer out of the way, on to the meat of the book.

Harlan is a good goddamn worldbuilder. He's apparently written a whole whack of alternate history/fantasy epics for Tor, as well as working as a game designer, and it shows. In this series, he's merged alternate history with space opera and military SF, creating a weirdass background that sucked me right in. The basic story is this: sometime around the 1500s, the Aztecs conquered the world. They could do this because a few hundred years earlier, a big fleet of Japanese refugees, fleeing the Mongol invasion of Japan, washed up on the shores of North America. So Aztecs got to learn all about things like steel and horses and gunpowder, and then they went and beat the crap out of most of Europe. Take that, Columbus! Flashforward a few hundred years, and the joint Aztec-Nipponese space navy is still kicking ass and taking names. Our heroes are all either members of the Aztec-Nipponese empire, or they're on its fringes trying to survive.

The story takes place almost entirely on the planet Jagan, where the Aztec secret police/priesthood is planning to deliberately incite a small brushfire war, a flowery war. They want to throw one of the younger sons of the Aztec emperor into the mess. He's a drunken idiot, so he'll either man up and cover himself in glory, or die and please the gods that way. His Scottish bodyguards will have to try and make sure it's the former. Meanwhile, Gretchen Anderssen, the xenoarcheologist and hero of the first book, has been ordered to Jagen to study a possible ancient and powerful artifact, and Captain Mitsuhara Hadeishi of the Imperial Navy has just come into orbit after a long patrol, looking to resupply and refit his battered ship.

The elements of a great epic story are there, but Harlan never quite makes them gel. Characters are defined well to start with, but we don't get below the surface of most, probably because there are so many conflicting plot threads – there are at least four viewpoint characters that I can recall just from Hadeishi's ship. Then there are Anderssen and her team, the bodyguards, the wicked old spy pulling everyone else's strings, diplomats, the various alien locals, and so on.

A word on those aliens: Harlan can't do original alien critters. We get a cat-alien, a whole bunch of lizard aliens, and a brief cameo by bug aliens and a super shapeshifer alien. They all fall into categories such as fierce predator, wise old mystic, or barbarian warrior. The fact that they come off like the clichés of how other races were portrayed in Victorian fiction isn't a good thing.

Just when it seems things are settling down in the plot, Harlan suddenly pulls out the big guns, ignites the war, and turns the last third into one long chase scene/gun battle. It's not that I don't like action sequences, but these go on and on and on. They're also disturbingly colonial. Almost every fight involves small numbers of well armed humans holding off hordes of less-well-armed local lizard people. It's like Rorke's Drift, one of the battles of the Sepoy Revolt. Or maybe I'm going too far back, and it's just a Black Hawk Down homage. Harlan lovingly describes how the massively overpowered weapons of the humans chew up hundreds of lizard guys at a time.

The plot about the alien device of great power also never comes together. I'm not actually sure what it did, in fact. I think it did something, and there was some attempt to explain exactly what near the end of the book, but it seemed sort of inconsequential by then. Another key plot, a thread involving a hidden alien and the prince's bodyguards, seemed to be deliberately leading into the next book in the series, and was left dangling.

For fans of well-written military SF or space opera, I'd say give it a try, especially if you can find the first book in the series for background. But it just never quite came together for me.

The seas are red because they're full of blood, get it?

Scott Lynch's follow up to The Lies of Locke Lamora is the almost as good Red Seas Under Red Skies. Two of the protagonists from The L of LL are back, Lamora himself and his good buddy Jean Tannen. They've relocated to a new city, two years after the bloody denoument of the last book, and are working a long, long con.

The first half of the book is split between the con itself – they're trying some complicated theft/swindle targeting the richest and most dangerous casino owner and gangster in town – and the back story of how they got there. At the end of Locke Lamora, the title character was half dead and Jean wasn't in much better shape. Lynch shows Lamora diving into a big pool of self pity, with Jean forced to repeatedly fish him out. Lamora puts himself back together slowly (in the movie version, there'll be a montage of him re-learning card tricks) until he's ready to take on the big con.

Just as the con gets going, however, it's derailed. The military dictator of their new home town decides to press the two Gentlemen Bastards into service. He's on the verge of a civil war with the town's wealthy merchants. He wants a fake pirate scare, so he has Locke and Jean given a crash course in seamanship and sent out with a crew. They'll ravage the annoying merchants and give the dictator the excuse to make his army and navy even bigger.

Then there are mutinies, battles at sea, numerous assassination attempts, new love, betrayal, more sea battles, more betrayal, and Jean and Locke are squeezed tight between so many clashing factions they're almost squished. The book concludes with an orgy of finales – to the con, the pirate wars, and the fates of half a dozen characters.

On a page to page level, the book is almost as good as LoLL. Locke and Jean are still compelling characters, and the pirates, casino owners, various henchmen and others are colourfully drawn. The new city – I still can't remember the damn place's name – just isn't as lively or as fully realized as Camorr, however. The pirate ships prove a better setting.

My key complaints with the book are twofold. First, the flashback structure doesn't work as well here as it did in The Lies of Locke Lamora. In that book, we were learning about the education and allegiances of the Gentlemen Bastards as we watched them doing their job in the present day. In Red Seas, an enormous amount of time is spent in the first few flashbacks on Locke being miserable, but we already know he gets over this in time to jump into the big con game. It all feels too drawn out, and it hurts the book's forward momentum. Second, the grumbling and personality conflicts between Locke and Jean feel a bit contrived. They seem to constantly be offending, disappointing or annoying one another. It never amounts to anything, though. There just isn't enough conflict to tear the duo apart.

Oh, and yet again the love of Locke's life is referred to, but does not appear. Two books running is a bit much to drag out such a key plot point.

Still, it's very deserving of the label swashbuckling. Fun characters, a fun world, and a fun adventure. If you liked the first book, by all means read it and move on to this one.

Locke Lamora is stealing your wallet right now

I'm a little late to this party, but I finally got around to reading The Lies of Locke Lamora over the last few days. And by "reading" I mean "absorbing as fast as my eyes would allow." This is one of those books that, if you like it, you will stay up until 3 a.m. reading the damn thing, just to find out what happens next. And you'll stay up until 4 a.m. to find out what happens after that, sleep and an early workday be damned.

The title character is a street urchin when we meet him, with a gift for thieving and deceit. He's so good at it, in fact, that he's being sold by his current owner/unsuitable parental substitute, the Thiefmaker, to a crooked priest. While the Thiefmaker runs a sort of wholesale Fagin-style operation in training orphans for crime, the priest, Father Chains, is running a boutique business. He needs clever apprentices who can be trained for the long con.

The story follows Locke through intercut scenes, part in the present as he and his band of thieves try to gull a rich nobleman and avoid a brutal gang war, and part in the past as we see how he and the gang grew up and trained together.

All the characters are vivid, particularly Father Chains, a priest of "the thirteenth god," the god of thieves and swindlers. There's also Jean Tannen, Locke's portly best friend who happens to be lethal with a pair of hatchets, the card sharking Sanza twins, and Bug the adolescent apprentice of the gang. Their gang moves through the city of Camorr, a Venice-like creation peopled by nobles, gang leaders, thugs, merchants, assassins, shark-fighters, priests, and guards. Camorr itself is one of the most memorable characters, with its numerous islands and canals, and its mysterious glass-like structures left by a vanished elder race. (I'd say it has about 700 milli-Crobuzons.)

Locke's character, or lack thereof, is at the centre of the story. He's physically a little short and slight, with a forgettable face, no particular skill with weapons or hand to hand combat, no magical ability, and no noble title or destiny handed down by the gods. He's just too clever for his own good, and very skilled at deception and fast talking. Part of the time, he reminded me of a trickster figure like Loki or Coyote, morally ambiguous and talking his way in and out of ever problem he encounters. In modern speculative fiction, Locke most closely resembles Miles Vorkosigan, from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. It's refreshing to see characters in genres (fantasy and military SF, respectively) who usually rely on brawn and machismo using their brains and mental toughness, instead. (And if you liked Locke Lamora and you haven't read any Vorkosigan books, boy, are you in for a treat. Get yourself to the library right now. You'll thank me for this.)

Are there problems with the book? Yes, of course. There's the love of Locke's life, who is mentioned frequently but doesn't even get a cameo in one of the flashbacks, which makes the book feel less than whole. If you like moral characters, you may be troubled by Locke's utter lack of most ethics; his primary motivations are loyalty, revenge, and a need to outsmart people. There are also moments that stretch believeability thin, even in a novel like this; a sequence in which Locke tries to infiltrate the same building three times in three different disguises in one day comes to mind. 

Still, those are minor problems compared to the book's primary virtue: it is fun. This book is swashbuckling, an updated successor to the novels of Sabatini or The Princess Bride. Looking back over the past half dozen SF and fantasy novels I've read, the number that is just fun is sadly small. Books that inspire a grin should be treasured.

Summer reading for Dollhouse fans

Ahhhhhhhh... Dollhouse has been renewed. I admit, I didn't think it would happen, while my girlfriend (she who is both wise and beautiful) always kept the faith. It'll be nice to see some more episodes, hopefully of the interesting variety, and not of the "Echo has an assignment as X" style.

But what to do for the next five or six months before we get another fix of Dollhouse? We go to the library and the video store, of course. For my fellow Dollhouse fans, a selection of stories that cover the same themes: body swapping, identity, reality when the mind is a commodity.

• Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan. I've already mentioned this one, but both this book and its sequels, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, explore the possibility of wholesale body swapping and immortality through cloning and downloading. It's dark, grim, noirish post-cyberpunk with lots of sex and violence. The politics become more explicit with the follow up books, but they never take over the story.

• The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides, and Last Call,  by Tim Powers. Again, body swapping and dark quests for immortality, but in Powers case using magic. The best of the bunch is probably The Anubis Gates, although my favourite will always be On Stranger Tides for its sword fightin', piratical ways. Far, far superior to any of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

• Dark City, directed by Alex Proyas. A year before The Matrix came out and everyone started talking about bullet time, there was a much quieter, much better film that covered the same territory and then some. Dark City is about a man who wakes up next to a murdered woman, seemingly her killer. But he can't remember anything. He flees through a shifting city that never sees dawn, and in which people are swapped from home to home and role to role much like... dolls in a dollhouse? With its synthetic personalities, it's the closest analogue to Dollhouse you can find. Plus, a chance to see Keifer Sutherland before he got all annoying as a torture-monkey on 24.

• Diaspora, by Greg Egan. This staggeringly brain-twisting novel concerns both AI and uploaded personalities. In similarly-themed short stories, Egan has also explored creating multiple copies of oneself, in some cases to undertake suicidal scientific research, such as travelling into a black hole.

• The City of Lost Children, directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. A mad scientist kidnaps children in order to harvest their dreams and save him from his nightmares. A steampunk setting with clones, blind radar-enabled cultists, and Ron Perlman with a bizarre hairstyle, speaking French.

I love you, John Bellairs

One of the best things about having a mother who works in a school library is getting discards, the books that are too old or grubby or beat up to keep in circulation anymore. This was obviously really cool when I was a bookwormish nine-year-old, but even as a bookfanaticish 30-year-old it's pretty neat.

So this Mother's Day, after doing some mildly backbreaking yard work to thank Mom for bringing me into the world, she gave me a sack of books. Well, most of them are intended for my girlfriend, she who is both wise and beautiful and will be a teacher soon. But I'm calling dibs on the two John Bellairs books.

Back in the 1990s, there was this big craze for horror novels for kids. R.L. Stine novels in particular. Well, I spit on your R.L. Stine novels, do you hear me! They cannot hold a candle to the fiendish works of Mr. Bellairs!

Do your Stine novels have covers by Edward Gorey? I think not! Do they build their horror slowly, using realistic settings and character development? Do they weave a tapestry of horror from commonplace items – a ring made from a bent nail, a cheap Egyptian-style souvenier? Do they leave the reader certain something is wrong but not entirely sure what? I think not!

Mostly, I've read the Johnny Dixon novels, so I'm eagerly re-reading The Curse of the Blue Figurine for the first time since I was about 12 years old. I'm struck by some of the details – the intensely Catholic background of the main characters, the blunt attitude toward death and injury – that I didn't recall. I did recall that Johnny was a fairly nerdy, bright kid with glasses. I have no idea why he appealed to me as a young reader. None whatsoever. There's also the crotchety and eccentric professor, who frankly puts Dumbledore to shame as a weird old mentor figure.

I've also got a copy of The Dark Secret of Weatherend, which stars Anthony Monday. I don't think I've ever read any of the Anthony Monday books so this will be an interesting little treat.

About a year ago, I re-read what must be the most terrifying of Bellairs books. It's a Johnny Dixon book, and the premise is both bizarre and unforgettable. A realistic baseball-playing automaton has been created by a mad scientist. But it only works if human eyes are inserted in its head. Go. Go now and find a copy of The Eyes of the Killer Robot. It's high octane nightmare fuel for 10 year olds.

The Ends of the World: Notes toward a taxonomy of apocalypses

Riley: Buffy. When I saw you stop the world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you. It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.

I just finished Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (short review: good!) and it only occurred to me about halfway through the book that I was reading a completely new kind of post-apocalyptic novel.

For those unfamiliar with the story, it concerns the lonely sexbot Freya, who was activated shortly after the death of the last living human being. Indeed, a wee accident with the biosphere and global warming has boiled the Earth and left nothing alive in the inner solar system. Robots – thousands and thousands of conscious, human-equivalent robots – have formed their own society in the absence of human life. Much of the plot concerns various robot factions trying to clone and bring back human beings. This would itself be a kind of apocalypse for the robot society, because with their Three Laws conditioning, they would be enslaved anew.

Science fiction and fantasy are the only genres that regularly deal with the end of the world, outside of religious fiction. Naturally, they've come up with more than one variation on the idea. I thought I'd try to break them down by type. At first I thought it would be easiest to divide them up by the way the world ends, but I soon realized that it's the kind of stories the authors tell in the aftermath that are most distinctive. Here's a partial and incomplete list.

• Rebuilding from the ashes

Everything's broken, probably because it got nuked or maybe hit with an asteroid. But don't worry! Our intrepid heroes are going to make it all okay again. It'll just take some common sense, a little engineering know-how, and probably at least one fight with a group that wants chaos and madness. Before you know it, we'll all be growing crops in USA 2.0! This type of story allows authors to give citified 20th and 21st Century characters the pioneer/survivalist spirit. It has much in common with stories of colonizing uninhabited planets.

Classic Example: Lucifer's Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle.

• We're doomed!

The grim counterpart to the novel of rebuilding is the story in which it seems that no recovery is possible. More common in short fiction, this is the story that often stars the last few humans on Earth. Maybe some of them will make it, but it's not likely. Themes are more personal and literary, with a focus on moral choices.

Classic Example: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

• Biker barbarians from Hell

Adventure stories in a post-apocalyptic setting often borrow more from the Mad Max films than from previous novels. These stories are about conflict, especially conflict between a remnant of civilization and the ever-present goons who want to loot it, burn it, and piss on the ashes. 

Classic Example: The Road Warrior

Not So Classic Example: Waterworld (Christ, that was like a punch to the groin.)

• Inhuman hordes

Most people are familiar with this story thanks to George Romero's movies, but it doesn't have to be zombies that swarm over civilization. Vampires, mutants, infected folks, even aliens or demons will do just as well. Stories are about the survival of small groups, often thrown together. Interpersonal dynamics are key, and the threat from within the group, or from other surviving humans, is often as important as the threat from without.

Classic Example: I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

• The quiet end

Sometimes the apocalypse isn't so bad. Some stories step back and take a surprisingly relaxed approach to the death of 99 per cent of the population. These stories often include dreamlike descriptions of cities returning to nature, and human survivors determined not to make the mistakes of their ancestors. By necessity, these are often plague stories, so as not to have to deal with too much radiation or nuclear winter.

Classic example: The City, Not Long After, by Pat Murphy

• The replacements

Humans are entirely gone, but something else has come to take our place. Maybe it's aliens, or maybe chimps have evolved intelligence, or maybe it's robots and AIs. Often, these stories are about the protagonist's attitude towards the vanished human species.

Classic Example: Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross

• The surreal aftermath

Sometimes the end is just weird. Maybe magic comes back and causes chaos, as in Sean Stewart's excellent Galveston books. Maybe consensual reality actually breaks down, as in The Gone-Away War by Nick Harkaway. Whatever happens, all bets are off. Strangeness and coming to terms with a new and fantastic landscape is the order of the day, and elements of horror and fantasy slip into the tales.

Classic Example: Pollen, by Jeff Noon

• Earth is gone, but we're okay

In some tales, Earth is a talisman, a land that is now cut off from humans, even as they move off-planet. Dan Simmons Hyperion stories and even the Cowboy Bebop series both explored an Earth that was destroyed or seriously damaged, even as human life thrived elsewhere. The destruction of the Earth in these stories is often a symbolic touchstone, rather than a plot point.

Classic Example: Steel Beach, by John Varley

Regency Madness!

How many stories does it take to make a trend?

One of my friends, the Infamous Lisa, has already bought and is tearing through Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the new super-high-concept book by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. If you haven't already heard about it – perhaps you've been living under a rock, or busy with the smoldering embers of RaceFail '09 – it's a literal re-writing of Austen's book to include hordes of the undead. And also ninjas. Two out of three of a nerd trifecta isn't bad. If the next book is a re-writing of Persuasion that includes pirates fighting ninjas who are also robots and zombies, it will have covered every possible nerd base.

Then I heard (via Torque Control) that one of the novelettes up for the Hugo this year is "Pride and Prometheus," a tale of when young Mary Bennett met Victor Frankenstein. (Just won the Nebula, too.) And hey, I already downloaded the whole Baum Plan for Financial Independence collection, so I'll read that this week. 

These stories are directly Austen-derived, but the 900-pound gorilla in this burgeoning sub-genre is clearly Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Set during the Napoleonic wars, in a slightly alternate England, it is one of the better fantasy novels I've read in the past decade. 

And a few years before Clarke was dipping into Austen's stomping grounds, Jasper Fforde was meddling with early Victorian literature with The Eyre Affair. It's set about 20 to 30 years later than Austen's works, and it is considerably more metafictional, so should we include The Eyre Affair in this list?

Personally, I've always felt that Jane Eyre was a story that needed a re-write of its own. Think about it – a mysterious Gothic mansion, strange noises in the attic, madness, fire, gypsies, fears of miscegenation. The first two thirds almost read like an H.P. Lovecraft story already. Now we just need to twist what's up in that locked attic room a little bit. Perhaps it's a white ape, or a woman slowly transforming for the dive past the reef at Innsmouth.

Are we really seeing the birth of yet another new sub-genre? Austenpunk doesn't really sound right, somehow. Maybe we should call it Regencypunk? Or is the -punk suffix completely inappropriate? 

All I know right now is that I'm shortly going to tackle reading Pride and Prejudice, so I can properly understand Kessel's story and the tale of zombies and upper class society. Who says reading SF doesn't broaden your literary horizons?

"You're dead"

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

Dollhouse's latest episode, Haunted, didn't do much for me on the level of basic plot. The idea was good – someone who's brain has been scanned comes back from the dead to solve their own murder. But the execution felt like an episode of Murder She Wrote more than anything as cool as the last couple of episodes.

Really, the best part of the main plot was Boyd's comment that this really means the end of the world. If the rich can buy themselves new bodies when they die, what's to stop them from going on and on forever, erasing the poor but young once every twenty or thirty years? 

I don't normally mentally re-write episodes, but last night I was fervently hoping that the murder would turn out to have been a suicide. If you knew that a friend would bring you back, and temporarily store you in the body of a super-healthy 25-year-old, wouldn't you be tempted to kill yourself and then hijack the new body? Sadly, no.

Side note: anyone interested in these plots from a more SFnal perspective should read some of the British SF that's come out over the past few years. Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod have both written several stories over the past few decades about downloadable, copy on demand minds. However, the best of the British brain-scanners is probably Richard Morgan and his Takeshi Kovacs series. Altered Carbon, the first in the loosely connected trilogy, is about an ex-soldier and ex-con who has to investigate a millionaire's apparent suicide. The millionaire – backed up from a copy – doesn't believe he killed himself. It's a world where the rich are immortal, and where bodies can be swapped around like cars. No synthetic personalities, but it's a very good, very grim look at similar technology.

Back to Dollhouse. The episode's saving grace was its two sub-plots. Predictably, Agent Ballard can't stop himself from abusing the privileges of the Dollhouse. It's also becoming clear just how vile the programming of Millie was; she's his willing slave without even being aware of it.

Topher's creation of a friend for his birthday was even more interesting. This seems like it was intended to showcase the positive side of the Dollhouse. What if you are alone, and strange, and no one gets you? Who do you turn to? Topher made a friend (someone who was probably 80 to 90 per cent based on himself) for his birthday. It was both heartwarming and creepy at the same time. I'm so glad they didn't have sex.

Not too many episodes left now. Fox is apparently going to announce the show's cancellation or renewal mid-May.

The (Old) New Weird: Martha Wells

In the beginning, was the weird tale. Like science fiction and fantasy, it's debateable when it first emerged, but we can all look back at H.P. Lovecraft and definitively say "Yep, that's pretty effin' weird right there." As with punk rock, it's much easier to point to a definitive example (the Ramones) than to root around looking for precursors.

So when we talk about the New Weird, it's easy to point at Jeff VanderMeer or China Miéville's work and say, "Yep, that's pretty new and pretty effin' weird." But like the Ramones, they did not emerge fully formed, and we can find examples of weirdness that may not even have influenced the modern practitioners directly, but which came before them.

The preceding is just a long way of saying that I'm going to be talking, occasionally, about some authors who wrote weird stuff. Starting today with Martha Wells.

In the 1990s, Wells wrote three fantasy novels for Tor, all pretty well reviewed, which chipped away at the conventions of fantasy literature. By 1993, when The Element of Fire was published, we were 16 years into Terry Brooks Shannara series, the first book of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series was three years old, and any number of people were starting to immitate those authors, rather than drawing inspiration directly from Tolkein or the original myths. Fantasy was settling into what it largely remains today: the realm of thick-as-a-brick books that come in lengthy series. All those books more or less mined from Tolkein's work, so you had a seemingly endless number of semi-European, quasi-medieval quests and knights and wizards and the whole fantastic cladogram of near-human species.

The Element of Fire has swords, it is true, but it also has firearms. Hero Thomas Boniface lives in an Elizabethan-style world, in the nation of Ile-Rien, whose capital Vienne is a mashup of Paris and London, circa 1550. And there are magicians, although they're usually addressed as Doctor, and they study at an analogue of Oxford. There are non-humans, but they're wild faeries, representing chaos and madness. Our second protagonist, Kade Carrion, is half-fey and the heir to great powers, and not entirely a good guy.

And there are fights with rapiers. I'm going to just take a minute here to say a personal thank you to Ms. Wells for this book. I fence. That is, I go to school gymnasiums and community centres, put on white jacket and gloves and a mesh mask, and practice trying to hit other people with analogues of 18th Century court swords. I am not very good at this. But even someone who is not very good quickly becomes frustrated by the boring descriptions of any kind of swordplay in a standard fantasy novel. Therefore, anything with actual rapiers, and with decently written fight scenes, and duels, is a breath of fresh air. Thank you, Ms. Wells.

Of course, I never would have guessed it's anything unusual from the jacket copy. Whoever was writing back-cover stuff for Tor back in '93 clearly didn't know what the hell they were holding. Check out the header: "Where high-tech wizardry meets fairy magic and a kingdom hangs in the balance..." It has wheel-lock pistols! This is high tech? It's like even gunpowder totally baffled the fantasy division.

As to the plot of the book, you can find it and read it yourself. (Again, ignore the back cover. The king's sister is not our for revenge, among other problems.) The Element of Fire is good, but her later two books would outshine it.

In 1997, Wells returned to Ile-Rien and the city of Vienne, this time several hundred years later for The Death of the Necromancer. It's now a city with steam engines and trains (which help keep the dastardly faeries away, all those iron rails, you know). And Nicholas Valiarde is the city's greatest thief, out for revenge on the man who caused the death of his adoptive father. Meanwhile, he's being pursued by the city's greatest sleuth, a consulting detective who keeps company with a medical doctor.

Yes, in the midst of some marvelous gaslight fantasy, we're treated to the Count of Monte Cristo/Moriarty being pursued by Holmes and Watson. Soon, of course, there is dark necromancy and even revenge has to take a back seat to preventing an apocalypse. Except for one section near the end where the action bogs down for several chapters, it's an almost perfect book.

Two things about the book always strike me. The first is that Wells implies a lengthy history for all her characters. There's a real sense that we're coming in on the fourth or fifth book in a series, that in some parallel world The Strand has been publishing Valiarde stories for years. If we could just dig up those older stories, we'd see how Valiarde met and recruited his band of thieves, eccentrics, wrongly-accused cracksmen and opium-addicted sorcerers.

The second I didn't realize until years later, because I read Death of the Necromancer before Element of Fire. This is the fact that Valiarde, the anti-hero of Necromancer, is actually descended from Denzil, the villain of Element of Fire. It's an odd but appropriate choice, because Valiarde is not your average good guy. At one point he notes that his first impulses are almost always wrong; he has to fall back on the moral teachings of his adoptive father and think about what's right and wrong. Valiarde at first pursues the story's true villain because the necromancer discovers his identity; after that it eventually becomes a vendetta for him. Justice and revenge, for Valiarde, are quite similar.

I've left City of Bones for last, although it was published between the two Ile-Rien novels. While Ile-Rien was one of many attempts by authors to tug fantasy out of Generic Medieval Europe, City of Bones is full-on New Weird, before there was any such category.

The main character is Khat, who lives in a city on the edge of a massive desert riven by steep canyons and infested by dangerous creatures. Khat is not human; instead he's some kind of near-human whose race was created in the distant past. And he has a pouch, like a marsupial. Oh, and the soldiers in the city of Charisat use rifles powered by brass air reservoirs, so they have to pump the pressure up between shots. And there are strange mind-magics and knife fights and racial politics. And I'm saying this from memory because I've been trying to find a copy of this book again for the past several years, and not only does it not turn up in my local used book stores, but my library has no more copies! Dammit! 

City of Bones has stuck in my mind since I first read it in the mid-1990s. If it were published today, it would easily be filed as New Weird, and people would compare Wells to other authors working in that tradition. But it was published too early; the reviews of it at the time couldn't even agree if it was fantasy, science fiction, horror or a combination of the three. These days, that's often how the New Weird is defined: as a melding of all three genres, much like the work of H.P. Lovecraft. 

There are plenty of Martha Wells books out there that I haven't even touched on, including a three-book cycle that features Nicholas Valiarde's daughter going on a dimension-hopping expedition. Check them out.

Next time on (Old) New Weird: Tim Powers.

Fine, push all my nerd buttons at once

So I was just thinking to myself the other day, man, it's been a while since I've done any serious RPGing. I really need to slay a dragon or use psychic powers to fight space vampires or something. But what sort of game?

And then I get the news, (via Torque Control) that China Miéville's New Crobuzon trilogy is being turned into an RPG.

"The city of New Crobuzon is an incredibly rich setting," said Adamant Entertainment owner Gareth-Michael Skarka. "We're extremely proud to be producing a game that gives it the level of detail and attention that it deserves."

"I grew up on RPGs," said China Miéville, "And the idea of a Bas-Lag game is incredibly exciting and humbling. That people might want to play in the world of my books is a tremendous honour."

The game will also feature a special treat for Miéville's fans – the original map of the city of New Crobuzon, drawn by the author, as well as his own illustrations of some of the creatures found in the world of Bas-lag.

So yeah, I might just be buying that. 

This is probably not the first RPG to be created at least partly by a socialist, but it may be the first American RPG to be based on material that's openly pro-revolution. I wonder if it'll come with a Coles Notes version of the Communist Manifesto?

Me Teesa, you... seriously expect me to buy this dialogue?

I started S.M. Stirling's The Sky People with all the enthusiasm in the world. I'd enjoyed Stirling's alternate British Empire in India novel The Peshwar Lancers, and this book promised to be even better. Dinosaurs! On Venus! And cave people and sabretooths and US/Soviet Cold War shennanigans! Awesome!

Well, it could have been awesome. In truth, it was only adequate. Stirling doesn't promise more than he can deliver here: it's an adventure novel that deliberately harkens back to the early- to mid-20th Century planetary romances and Golden Age SF novels in which life is abundant on both Mars and Venus. The Edgar Rice Burroughs novels are an obvious source of inspiration, but plenty of other well-known authors, from Asimov to Heinlein, have stocked Venus with life.

Stirling updates this trope by creating an alternate world which is very similar to ours, but in which life is identified by the 1950s on both of Earth's nearest neighbours. The Cold War cools down as the Soviets and Chinese compete with the Americans and Brits to build ships and eventually bases on the two planets. By the last couple of decades of the 20th Century, they've both accomplished their goals, and they're trying to figure out why there are recognizably human (and neandertal) people on Venus, along with the aforementioned dinosaurs and other prehistoric critters.

From this point on, there are spoilers. You have been warned.

Our hero is Marc Vitrac, an American lieutenant (of course) with the military/science outpost on Venus. Marc is about as dull a hero as you could have. He's brave and stalwart, young and handsome and square of jaw, and just a little bit too headstrong for his own good. He came from Planetary Adventure Central Casting, which may have been a conscious choice on Stirling's part. His only distinguishing features to my mind are his constant musings on how the Earth people sent to Venus are both physically and mentally top notch, the best of the best (which a cynical person could interpret as making him a closet eugenicist) and his constant use of Cajun dialect. Marc's from the bayou, you see.

Which fits him in perfectly with all his fellow Earth-human characters, every one of whom is distinguished by their national/racial/linguistic tics. There's Cynthia, the black scientist from New York. There's Christopher, the totally not French English toff, ("I say, dear boy!") there's the Lithuanian-Soviet Binkis, and there's Teesa, of the Cloud Mountain People. Stirling's characters are types, rather than people. If you were hoping to develop a deep and sustained interest in them as well-rounded folks, forget it. This is an adventure novel.

Well, it's an adventure novel after the first 150 pages or so. The opening portion of the book, which is in many ways my favourite part, is an extended tour through Stirling's worldbuilding. Cynthia goes fossil hunting, Marc shows the others around the bronze age Venusian city near their base, we see dinosaurs and giant wolf-critters. Marc tames a giant feral wolfoid puppy. It's all very relaxed and plot-free. The most significant bit of info is that Venus was obviously terraformed, starting 200 million years in the past, by something that then periodically dumped Earth species there. Which explains the dinosaurs, cave people, etc. It's that mysterious alien presence, which starts interfering with Binkis, the neandertals, and Teesa's Cloud Mountain People, that will eventually kick start the plot.

Binkis has crash-landed with a shuttle in a remote part of the Venusian outback. A joint American-Soviet expedition heads off to find him, with our main American/Brit/French characters and Binkis's wife aboard an airship. They also crash (there's a cool, if unlikely, attack by giant pterosaurs) fight some neandertals who have scavenged Soviet AK-47s and are being led by Binkis/holding him hostage, meet Teesa's people and form an alliance with them. Marc, who has been mooning over Cynthia the whole book, gives up on her and starts chasing after blonde space princess Teesa. Teesa is painful to read. She's a classic Planetary Romance/Jungle Girl character, prone to saying things like this:

"Who are you, warrior, that you walk my dreams and hurl thunder?" she asked. "You are not the one who now leads the beastmen against us – you are his enemy, is that not so?"

And yes, she does wear a fur bikini. Everyone changes into fur bikinis and/or briefs for the finale, which involves a dinosaur-mounted attack by our heroes on an army of AK-toting neandertals, and a confrontation with the computer that the mysterious aliens left behind to run the Venus terraforming project.

The Sky People isn't bad in any particular way. As I said, Stirling doesn't advertise it as a transcendent novel or a reinvention of old tropes. This book is built out of the solid, old tropes of Burroughs and Heinlein, renovated a bit with better science. But it could have been so much more.

Just look at Our Hero. Burroughs and Heinlein and a hundred other authors sent white, male, handsome, competent, American heroes zipping off to Venus for half a century. In Stirling's update, we get exactly the same guy. Just imagine if he'd made Cynthia the protagonist, instead of what feels increasingly like the obligatory minority/female sub-hero. That alone would have been an interesting change. (Some of the Venusians keep slaves, and the Americans do not interfere. It's quickly forgotten, and barely mentioned by our descended-from-slaves character.)

It's useless, really, to talk about the book you'd wished to read. The book I read was okay: competent adventure, dinosaurs in space, exactly as advertised. It just makes me worry that we aren't moving forward at all in a lot of areas of SF. This book is like the softer side of RaceFail: it's not overtly racist by any means, and Cynthia isn't treated as a moron or incompetent. It just puts white males in the top spot, with everyone else holding down the supporting roles.

There are a lot of books out there now like The Sky People, which look backward to SF's roots, failing to innovate in plot, or character, or writing style. They thrive on nostalgia and the frisson readers get when that nostalgia is given a modern update. Frankly, I don't need to read any more of that.

A backhanded compliment

I'm sure this will be in next month's Ansible, but I squirmed when I read one of the comments in this NY Times piece on the sale of Audry Niffeneger's forthcoming second novel.

Joe Regal, Ms. Niffenegger’s agent, said: “There are going to be people coming to the book with claws out. That’s just reality. It’s for reasons completely unconnected to the book.” He added that even “The Time Traveler’s Wife” faced naysayers. “There were lots of people who dismissed the first book because it sounded like romance or science fiction or said because it sold so well, it can’t be good,” Mr. Regal said.

Aaarrrggghhhh...

Goddammit, The Time Traveler's Wife was SF, and it was a romance, and both were done well and thoroughly intertwined with the characters. Remove the love story, and you're left with the clinical details of a man whose disability is that he travels randomly in time. Remove the time travel and it's a boring and predictable tale of two clever young things in the city. But together, the elements of a tragedy come together. It's damn good, which has nothing to do with what genre it falls into.

Racefail 2009

About which you can read more here, here, here, or even here.

As I understand it, (and I only heard about it two days ago on Torque Control and Whatever, linked above) the whole thing started off with a post by Elizabeth Bear on how to write "the Other," whether other races, genders, sexual orientations, etc. I've since read the original post, and it was an honest attempt to grapple with the question. More of a public mini-essay than any attempt to be definitive about it. Somewhere in the comments thread, things got a bit snippy. There were posts in response. It turned into a general discussion of people of colour in SF/Fantasy fiction in general, and within fandom as well. Then there were open letters, and more posts, and things got ugly. About which ugliness, see Scalzi's blog. Someone tried to use one of his comment threads to out an anonymous blogger's identity. And there'd been no discussion about the debate on Whatever about the topic, which had been confined almost entirely to LiveJournal, and flying under a lot of folks' radar.

The only thing I have to add to the whole mess is that it seems like it's the progressive end of the SF/Fantasy blogosphere that's tearing itself to shreds. I wandered over to John Ringo's site earlier today, he of Oh John Ringo No fame. Anything going on there? No, all's quiet in his forums. Now, if there's anyone who could benefit from a little consciousness raising in SF, you'd think it would be him. Go on, click that link. It's a review of Watch on the Rhine, a John Ringo collaboration in which rejuvenated Waffen SS soldiers save the Earth from an alien horde. 'Cause they're just misunderstood good guys.

Really.

And Racefail started because a writer was trying to talk about how she goes through the process of trying to get characters from another background right, about how she tries to make them real and whole characters. And among the mess of screeching (which I do not have the patience to entirely sort through) I've found some good posts by pros and fans about those issues, and about race and gender in SF in general.

SF does contain overt, and unconscious, racism. John Ringo's bizarro novel was just the first one that popped into my head, and I used it here as an example, not to encourage anyone to extend the messy discussion to his place. But the people savaging one another in this thing? I'm thinking 99 percent of them are not part of the problem. The people who are, aren't even aware that it's going on.

ETA: cleaned up some of my messy sentence construction Wednesday at noon. It is better to write when wide awake.

The (non)story of the end of the world

You can't accuse Bruce Sterling of shying away from the consequences of his ideas. He hasn't really ever written what you'd call a happy ending into any of his novels (I've not read The Zenith Angle, so perhaps it ends with the main characters frolicking with puppies, but I doubt it.) Holy Fire ended with the main character finding some peace, I suppose, but also terribly estranged from humanity. Heavy Weather killed off the bad guys, but left the plains states devastated by the world's largest supertornado. Islands in the Net saw the protagonist kept hostage for years, her husband married off to her best friend. Distraction, in some ways my favourite of Sterling's novels, also left its main characters damaged by experimental neurological treatments and floundering after having waged months of cynical political battles.

Sterling seems to often write about the utter randomness of the universe. Justice, for him, is not something that occurs naturally to neatly wrap up a story.

The Caryatids, his latest novel, doesn't even wrap up at all, really. Not only does it not tie up any of its three major strands, it doesn't even let us know if the world is saved. Or if anyone can save it.

The titular caryatids are four clone-sisters, Vera, Radmilla, Sonja, and Biserka. The first three each take a turn narrating the novel, which concerns efforts to recover from a global environmental catastrophe. Global warming is the chief, but not the only, cause of the mess. The collapse has seen millions die, and wiped out most of the world's old nation states. (It's implied, but not stated, that they've been largely replaced by smaller local governments, so it's not exactly a libertarian or anarchist wet dream.) While China survives as the last and most totalitarian of the world's governments, the other two big powers are what we'd call non-governmental organizations. The Dispensation are glamour-obsessed capitalists, trying to charm and buy their way out of environmental apocalypse. The Acquis are earnest quasi-socialist greens - all about hard work, sacrifice, and mind-blowingly weird technological fixes. China, too, is trying to save the world, or at least it's corner. Each of the narrating clone sisters is affiliated with one of the three factions, giving us a tour of their respective world views.

That's about it for the novel, actually. It's a tour of the world, and a lightly sketched one with little backstory. We never find out how the Acquis or Dispensation were founded, or what happened to the old nation states, or even why, exactly, the four (formerly seven) clones were created. There was some grand plan about them saving or conquering the world using ubiquitous sensor systems, but it seems to have collapsed before they even grew to adulthood. Those sensor systems give us a Sterling neologism: everyware. Despite the lack of back story, the technology and world building, the evocation of a damaged world, are the book's strongest suits.

When it comes to characters, I wish I could say I liked anyone in this book. Vera, the Acquis cadre who narrates the first section, comes closest to being a likeable character. But like all the clones  she's deeply emotionally wounded, prone to crying and outbursts, and seemingly incapable of doing anything to save herself. Sterling's characters have been growing more and more depressing since Heavy Weather. Some sequences are like being stuck in an elevator with a depressed person. After a while, you just want to slap them and tell them to crack a smile, dammit. The clones don't have much of a sense of humour.

Yet they're surrounded by madness that should make you laugh. Radmila distracts the proles by dancing on top of a giant Martian tripod-style robot that smashes quake damaged L.A. buildings so the Dispensation can start rebuilding. The entire Dispensation seems to be run by half-witted celebrities, a clan of Ronald Reagans and Britney Spearses that has propagated itself, each one making the expected metamorphosis from actor to politician. Sonja marries a young Gobi-desert bandit who's name translates as Lucky. Vera even manages a bit of slapstick screwing up in the first chapter, although she's very serious about it, of course. As is everyone else. It's not just clones who don't laugh.

The novel also comes to a crashing halt in the early part of the China segment, as Sterling infodumps a lecture about what happened to China. He also goes on an extended rant about how heroes packing guns never save the world, how it's only saved by serious management, about getting people together and making them work towards a common, sane goal. Then Sonja and her husband strap on guns and go looking for trouble. 

So what does it all come to? I really wish I knew. There is deliberate craft in its non-ending – it isn't that Sterling simply ran out of steam. He wanted it to end this way. Loose ends lash about madly, just like in real life. In that sense, despite the exoskeletons and giant robots and attacks of the clones (and yes, there is an attack by clones, using robots) it's the most realistic SF novel to come along in a while. It suggests that we not only face catastrophe of our own making, but that the natural catastrophes of the universe aren't going to give us a break either.

When Anathem came out last year, a lot of reviews noted that it was the most Stephensonian of Neal Stephenson's books. The Caryatids is in the same boat. If you like Sterling – if you like people declaiming to one another, with italics, if you like wild yet eerily plausible near-future speculation, if you like clones and robots and weird politics and oblique satire – you'll enjoy it. 

Get your squid hats ready

Margaret Atwood has a new novel coming out soon, The Year of the Flood. It is, of course, not science fiction. From Amazon:

Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners - a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, the preservation of all species, the tending of the Earth, and the cultivation of bees and organic crops on flat rooftops - has long predicted the Waterless Flood. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have avoided it: the young trapeze-dancer, Ren, locked into the high-end sex club, Scales and Tails; and former SecretBurgers meat-slinger turned Gardener, Toby, barricaded into the luxurious AnooYoo Spa, where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda, or the MaddAddam eco-fighters? Ren's one-time teenage lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the CorpSeCorps, the shadowy and corrupt policing force of the ruling powers Meanwhile, in the natural world, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue.

I liked The Handmaid's Tale, and it certainly needs no additional defense from me among science fiction fans. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Governor General's Award, was shortlisted for a Nebula, a Booker, and a Prometheus Award (an odd collection of awards and nominations if ever there was one).

Handmaid's Tale belongs in the great pantheon of dystopian novels of warning, and Atwood's second proper SF novel (we're not counting The Blind Assassin for these purposes) left me decidedly cold. I never got past the first few chapters of Oryx and Crake, and it was not well treated by SF reviewers.

This new book, from a rather short description, looks to have replicated many of the things that are wrong with Oryx and Crake. Atwood's prose is often sublime, but when she turns to post-apocalyptic satire, her use of ham-fisted neologisms is painful.

So I probably won't be reading it, unless the reviews are much, much better than I expect. Instead, I'll probably go read her last book from the Massey Lecture series, Payback. Written just before the current economic upheaval, a book about debt and indebtedness looks like a pretty good warning of dystopia about now.

Why I hate Chapters

I went to Canada's big box bookstore chain on Wednesday, in search of The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling's first new novel in years, and arguably his first proper SF novel in more than a decade.

Couldn't find it. Not on the shelf. Not on the ludicrously misnamed New and Hot in Science Fiction table. Not in non-genre fiction. 

I ask a clerk. Bruce Sterling? Never heard of him (of course). We look it up on the computer. 

Ah, they do have it in store. Three whole copies. Have I looked on the shelf? Yes. Have I looked on the New and Hot in Science Fiction table? Yes. 

Two clerks later, we determine it is actually still in the back of the store. Judging by the lack of a big fat hole on the S shelf of the SF section, it has never actually been shelved. Because Bruce Sterling is not on the A list.

Sterling is one of the fathers of cyberpunk. He has been producing genre defining, award winning, best selling and well reviewed SF since the late 1970s. None of this matters to non-SF fans, and I don't expect it to. Sterling isn't in the public consciousness the way William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, or even Philip K. Dick are. For mass market purposes, he's a B lister. One of the top of the B listers, one with a devoted fan base all his own, stoked by his work as a futurist, WIRED blogger and general weirdo. But none of this matters to a big box book store. If he's not going to shift an entire crate of product in his first week, if he's not Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer or J.K. Rowling or Stephenson, who cares? The books will get on the shelf when they get there. I imagine fans of any genre author, or even some good non-genre authors, have had similar frustrations trying to get a new book in their hands.

This is why Chapters will die. The only thing they can do better than Amazon is get books out there as physical objects, where you can see them and grab them up on impulse. And they can't even do that right.

Chapters, and its American big box bookstore cousins, are based on volume. I remember when I first went to a big box bookstore as a teenager. Not just a few shelves of SF books, but shelf after shelf after shelf. Books I'd only ever heard of on Prisoners of Gravity. It was nerdvana. (And who were they competing with? It was not, in my neck of the woods, with small mom and pop bookstores, or even with specialty stores, because the wastelands of suburbia contain neither of these things. It was with chains of shopping mall bookstores. Like Black Bond. So one chain out competes another. Who cares, if we get more book selection?)

Chapters has been beaten at its own game by Amazon. Everyone knows this already, of course, but the "where's my Bruce Sterling book" incident shows why. Obviously, Amazon has more books, and it's almost never out of stock of anything. This is not because Amazon is more virtuous or has a deeper respect for books or authors or readers than Chapters. Amazon does not care about my desires, any more than Chapters does. It's just set up to fulfil my desires anyway. It might not have one person on staff who gives a crap about SF either, but it's happy little filing system will let me locate the book, read the reviews, give me recommendations for other books, and even ship it to me for free if I buy a large enough volume of stuff. 

The Chapters in my home town was still plenty busy around Christmas and during the Boxing Day sales. But it's basically dead walking. I wonder what we'll do with all the parking lots and the giant shells of bookstores when the last person without an internet connection dies?

Slap your editor, Harry

I came home from the library the other day with two books featuring mammoths on the cover. One was The Breath of God by Harry Turtledove. (This is the other one, in case you were wondering.) Obviously, everthing goes better with extinct megafauna. I tore through most of my non-fiction selection, then got down to reading Turtledove's work.

Now, I didn't have a lot of preconceptions about Turtledove. I've never read any of his Guns of the South books, because... well, I just don't give a crap about the subject matter. I was born and raised and still live in Canada. So I don't have that American gene that makes people obsessed with the (US) Civil War. When I read some 19th Century alternate history, I'm more likely to go for something with Mounties in it (disclaimer: by a friend of mine).

But this looked like something more in my line. I'm sick of fantasy novels that just use Generic Medieval Europe + Magic + Elves. Anything with an Ice Age setting gets my attention.

Unfortunately, The Breath of God contains a few glaringly ugly sentences right up front. Check out page eight.

"Life is full of surprises," Ulrik Skakki said, which would have been funny if only it were funny.

And

They not only herded wooly mammoths, as the Bizogots had for centuries uncounted, but rode them to war, with lancers and men with long, long lances on the beasts' shaggy backs.

Seriously? If lancers aren't men with lances, then what are they?

I read another ten pages from that point, far enough to determine that those weird, awkward phrasings on page eight seem to be anomalies. But Turtledove and his editor ought to have taken a harder look at that section. Ouch.

Dark symmetries

An interesting article on Clarkesworld this month about a piece of SF that isn't often published or read as such. Robert N. Lee tells us about "The Most Important Genre Novel You'll Never Read." 

He's right. I'm not going out of my way to read The Turner Diaries, by William Luther Pierce, anytime soon. Ever since it was raised to true notoriety along with Timothy McVeigh and his madness, I've seen it mentioned off-handedly as a novel about a future race war.

It's far worse than that, as Lee tells us. It's the diary of a member of a far-right white supremacist organization which launches the ethnic cleansing of the United States, and then the world. Along the way, they slaughter every white woman who's ever slept with a man of another colour, and start a nuclear war. It sounds like something written from a perspective of self-devouring hate, the kind that leaves something hollow and vile, at the far end of human. Lee does nothing to dissuade readers from this view

I recommend Turner because it's poisonous. I don't envy anyone who reads it without building up tolerance to the darker ends of genre fiction and to work written by people who hate you personally and want you dead. This book should hurt going down — if it doesn't, you shouldn't read it. It's worth the pain, though, and more to the point, provides an opportunity that should hit us all hard in the center of our eternal eleven-year-olds: saving the world from evil, no shit.

This book is the Necronomicon. The Turner Diaries is bound in human skin, written in blood and contains demons — real ones, not Biblical bogeys. We've all witnessed the power of these monsters. This is the real deal from all those horror stories: the book of secret dark knowledge, access restricted to its devoted worshippers yet hidden in plain sight, awaiting the one who can best harness or defeat its pure evil.

What struck me was that the framing structure of the story seemed familiar.

It's the diary of a member of a "persecuted minority" in the near future, with the document itself supposedly having been discovered and published in the farther future.

That's identical to the framing structure of The Handmaid's Tale.

Notably, they're both dystopian novels (although readers of The Turner Diaries might not consider it dystopian to slaughter 95 per cent of the world's population), they both concern a resistance to the established order, and they both end with the main character taken off the stage. Turner himself dies a suicide nuclear bomber (of course) destroying Washington D.C. (of course) whereas Offred simply takes a chance at escape and vanishes from her own narrative. Given the world she's escaping through, her end is not likely a happy one. Lastly, many people wouldn't consider either book to be proper SF, whatever that is. Atwood has been famously defending herself against the charge of writing SF ever since Handmaid's Tale was published.

I don't mean to say here that there are any similarities in philosophy, ideology, or quality between the two books. Indeed, you'd have to wander far and wide to find two books generated from such opposite ends of those spectra. Atwood's work is genuinely art, and my only complaint about the text is that sometimes it feels like Atwood-the-poet overrides Atwood-the-novelist. The book is, in fact, sometimes too well written, and the finely crafted metaphors can kick you right out of the grim reality of Gilead.

My hypothesis is that the structural similarities are a matter of parallel literary evolution. Both Pierce and Atwood needed to tell a particular kind of tale, and they found the discovered diary, which is one of the oldest frame stories for fantastic tales, to be the best format. Because it goes back as far as Gulliver's Travels, it has a certain respectability lacking to the full immersion approach that SF has championed for its readers. The frame story offers a way for non-SF readers - the target market for both books - to be eased into a strange world.  All political fiction is propaganda, and none more so than dystopian and utopian novels. Artful or wretchedly written, vile or virtuous, the propagandist has to connect with their audience. 

I just hope more copies of The Handmaid's Tale are selling this year than The Turner Diaries.

Science fiction, meet elves

All the Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear is an odd hybrid of a book. I first heard of it on Scalzi's blog, and I'm halfway through it now.

It's good, at least so far. It's the tale of Muire, last of the valkyries (or, by the text's tongue-mangling spelling, the waelcyrge) aka the Children of Light. In the opening chapters, the world ends, as the Children of Light face off against evil wolf things and their own wayward kin, in something that's near enough to Ragnarok. Only Muire, a steed called Kasimir, and one traitor and evildoer, the Grey Wolf, are left alive. 

Then the story jumps 2,300 years in the future. The world's ending again.

That's a hell of a hook for any story. The story is most notable so far for mixing pulp SF, Lovecraft, Wagnerian pseudo-Norse mythology, and steampunk into a thick gumbo of weirdness. 

Here's a sample, from a flashback as Muire begins to understand that the humans who have inherited the world from the gods are headed for their own apocalypse:

The tears that choked her breathing weren't from the wasp's futile venom. They came because she could no longer deny what she knew. Cascading catastrophe, the system in failure. It was not Muire's first apocalypse. But then, her kind had always been better at retribution than prevention.
And she knew as if it had been blazoned on a banner, with desperation would come war.
Black sorcery, radiation weapons, nanites, railguns, orbital assault, biotoxins and all the ills the flesh is heir to: Valdygard had died its first death in ice. The second was in flames. Mountains were heaved up and pounded flat. Oceans steamed and cities died in silence, suffocated under falling dust.
Eiledon... was spared.

This is some weird stuff. Kasimir, the valkyrie's mount, is a two headed deer-like winged creature. Horribly wounded, at the start of the story he is restored into a magical steampunk cyborg by one of the last miracles of the Children of Light.

So we've got ancient demigods, future technology, animal-human hybrids, cyborgs, killer cyborg flying reindeer/antelopes... it reminds me of Rifts.

Ah, Rifts, uber-nerdy game of my early teenage years. And some of my later teenage years. But hardly any of my twenties, I swear to god! Rifts, for those who decline to link, is the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink pen and paper RPG. Created in the 1990s, it it set on a future earth wracked by both nuclear and magical holocausts, it includes cyborgs, giant robots, monsters, demons, elves, dwarves (and the whole Tolkeinian pantheon of near-humans) dragons, psychics, evil empires, Cthulhu critters, Atlantis, dinosaurs, vampires... I could just keep listing elements for line after line here. 

Rifts, however, and the entire Palladium Games line, are mostly notable for being of fairly mediocre quality. The game system is antiquated by modern standards, the rules are cumbersome, character generation takes forever, and the books themselves are often marred by writing that's clumsy to downright bad. Throw in at least one or two proofreading errors in every book and you've got yourself a bargain basement games line, that survives on the sheer balls to the wall fun of its concept. Yes, you can be an elven commando who fights vampires with his cyborg dwarf buddy! Or you can be an Atlantean with magic tattoos, or a talking mutant dog with psychic powers!

All the Windwracked Stars succeeds (so far) because of the fine writing. So when you're not simply geeking out over the weirdness of the premise (a scandal when a main battle shoggoth crushed a student demonstration...) you're carried along by the melancholy tone that's set on the very first page. Muire is in mourning for one world that's died, and for another about to perish. The kind of subtle prose on display here is far from the rule-filled pages of an RPG intended for teenaged boys.

A lot of folks are doubtless going to label the book part of the New Weird movement, but I can't help but wonder if this mashup of fantasy and SF is just going to become mainstream in the future. To understand either All the Windwracked Stars or Rifts, you have to be immersed in SF and fantasy. It makes no sense outside a cultural context that includes Tolkein and Wagner and H.P. Lovecraft and Star Wars. That sphere, the nerdsphere if you will, has been expanding like a young universe for the last thirty years. Everyone has a passing acquaintance with it, many of us are deeply immersed. So Bear's book offers us, as the Norse would have it, kennings. Like barbarians around a campfire, she has but to mention a shoggoth, or an animal-human hybrid moreaux, and we know this to be an offhand reference to another tale, another saga for nerdkind. And we nod our heads in appreciation. Truly, this bard knows the old tales well.

Bear, like the makers of Rifts, has all the pieces to play with. What she does with it is what will distinguish her from the others who try this sort of hybridization. So far, I'm enjoying it immensely.