Review: The Metrognome & Other Stories / Impact-20

The Metrognome & Other Stories by Alan Dean Foster
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The short story is flexible. You don't have to keep a plot aloft for long, so you can float some pretty thin ideas and see if they survive. Yet their brevity means that every word counts. That is, unless you're selling material to a sci-fi magazine, and you've got to stretch that idea over four thousand words... or maybe they pay by the word, and since you know some sneering editor is going to chop it down anyway, why not linger on your description of your gnome's beard and suspenders, and let him ramble awhile in his tough New Yorker dialect?

I suspect Alan Dean Foster may be a write-to-contract kind of guy. His Hollywood novelization credits are impressive to say the least - Star Wars (both A New Hope and Force Awakens), Star Trek (countless), Alien (one thru four), Terminator, etc. etc. - so I have no doubt he is a master of his craft, but these stories read flabby. I always imagined that any story published has survived the author's own vicious cull, and sits atop a pile of rejected ideas and aborted drafts. Now, I fear that in some cases, pretty much anything that's done may make the cut.

Impact-20 by William F. Nolan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Impact-20, on the other hand, is exactly what I would hope for from a sci-fi short story collection. Nolan puts on all sorts of different and entertaining voices, exploring fearlessly and in every direction, and the stories jump from horror to mystery to space to suburban mania. Above all, the stories are only as long as the plot demands - when there is an interesting concept to explore, Nolan explores it, but he never lets an idea get stale on the page. (The only thing I skipped was Ray Bradbury's introduction.) The writing is fresh, funny, and often absurd. Good stuff.

Review: The North Water

The North Water by Ian McGuire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is truly disgusting. I understand that work on a whaling ship was not clean or appetizing or lemon-scented. I also understand that by means of the revolting passages we are reminded that life on an 18th century Arctic whaler was about as far from the luxuries of civilization as one could get. (Unless, of course, something were to happen to one's ship...)
That being said, some passages were so riotously revolting that I couldn't take it seriously. It's the grossest book I've ever read, and it was an act of titanic restraint not to read aloud while my friends were eating.

On thirst:

"The deep cavity that remains [in the dead bear] is half-filled with a steaming pool of hot black liquid--blood, urine, bile. Sumner leans forward and starts to drink it, ladling it up quickly into his open mouth with both hands."

On incontinence:

"He stops, groans, then leans over and vomits out gobbets of half-digested seal meat onto the frozen snow beneath. He feels a sharp pain like a lance jabbing in his stomach and releases and involuntary squirt of shit into his trousers. [...] The sweat is frozen on his brow, and his beard is hard now with saliva and bile and fragments of tooth-ground meat."

On scavenging the blubber from a decomposing, bloated whale corpse:

"The blocks of blubber they slice and peel away are miscolored and gelatinous--much more brown than pink. Swung up onto the deck, they drip not blood, as usual, but some foul straw-colored coagulation like the unspeakable rectal oozings of a human corpse."

All that being said, there's a ripping yarn in here too. McGuire does an amazing job of bringing this salty, frigid world vividly to life. The elemental forces lend it an air of fable, as dark forces play out on these poor saps. If you can swallow these passages, there isn't much worse in there--and there's a whole lot better. Best read on an empty stomach!

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Review: American Tabloid

American Tabloid by James Ellroy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's terrifically brutal, bloody, and hard as nails. It's only after you've adjusted to the savagery on every page that you begin to see how brilliantly Ellroy creates - and destroys - his characters. There's Big Pete Bondurant, the goon who's losing his interest in mayhem. Cool, calm Kemper Boyd, the spy whose lust for penthouse suites is only outstripped by the tower of lies he's building. And Ward J. Littell, the rabid anti-Mob investigator with no brakes attached. They're all despicable, and yet at the same time I had to know where they'd end up.
As with any book about the web between the Mob, the CIA, the FBI, the invasion of Cuba, Howard Hughes, the Kennedys and JFK's assassination... it's dense. There are a zillion players, lies, conspiracies, and coverups, each one slimier than the last. For all it's complications, everything can be traced back to motive, demand, need. If you've ever finished a hard-boiled mystery and thought, "Geez, I wish that was more violent, cynical, complicated, action packed and political!" then this is the book for you.


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Review: Tenth of December

Tenth of December by George Saunders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Unfortunately, this is some of the most powerful writing I've ever read. It's unfortunate because most of these brilliant stories are huge downers. Fortunately, this collection is bookended by two notes of glorious optimism.

His narrators are the resentful, lonely casualties of the American Dream. They're the people about whom Michael Moore would make a polemic, but who wouldn't bother seeing the movie. They hold onto a deluded sense of manifest destiny with a death grip, and the reader's agony is to see the distance growing between these people and the better lives they desperately strive for. The experience of living inside many of these character's heads is draining - after some stories, I had to put the book down for a day or two before I was ready to pick it up again.

Nevertheless, even the darkest stories float with the perfect words, and Saunders' humour is sharp without breaking stride. Reading the whole collection makes the finale all the sweeter, but if it's all just too real, skip to the end (the titular "Tenth of December") and you'll feel all better again.

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Review: All My Sins Remembered

All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"When it came to searing laser murder, Otto was one of the best," says the teaser page inside the cover. I knew I'd found a perfect road trip book.

It's a series of (connected) spy stories, where our superspy hero makes use of his hypnotic and physical conditioning by the interstellar Confederacion to infiltrate human colonies on different worlds to make sure they don't mess up the aliens too badly.

Most striking about Haldeman's writing is how concrete everything feels. Even with the most bizarre premises, his stories play out on ground level with the footsoldiers. The shadows of his experience in the Vietnam War stretch long - always there is struggle between following orders and following conscience, the dubious morality of government, and the disorientation of being thrust into an alien land.

Don't get me wrong - the book still delivers on it's "searing laser murder" promise, but it's a thinking reader's searing laser murder.

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Review: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Finding a life story like this one is a once in a lifetime opportunity for an author. Louis Zamperini seemed to live a host of lives, each one pushing the limits of the human experience: Olympic runner, pilot, castaway, prisoner of war, haunted veteran.

Hillenbrand's writing is clear and elegant - it was a long book, but the story flew past. Her extensive research comes alive on the page, and the plot never loses focus as non-fiction sometimes can. The story she tells is one of the most incredible human experiences I can think of, and plumbs both the darkest depths of depravity and the greatest tests of spirit. I was reading this simultaneously with 1984, and the fictional dystopian torture prisons were put to shame.

It's not all pain and suffering, though. There's all the antics, mischief and sabotage you'd expect of prisoners of war, their determination only getting stronger in the face of abuse. The strength that these prisoners take from each other's company is far more than the sum of its parts.

This book gets a place of honour on my True Tales of Harrowing Adventure shelf. Terrifying, enraging and ultimately uplifting.

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Review: Forever Free

Forever Free by Joe Haldeman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like it or not, we plunge forward into the unknown future. If you don't like where things are going, why not tap out for a bit - and try again in 40,000 years? (If you can make it...)

While the critics seem divided on this one, I was blown away. Forever Free is brimming with ideas, and takes all the ideas introduced in Forever War into new territory and permutations. Like Orson Scott Card's Ender series, Haldeman writes strange and fascinating societies, systems, species and philosophies - and not through dry, world-building exposition, but as a conversation about what it means to be human.

William Mandella (kinda sounds like Haldeman backwards, don't it?) is a charming narrator. Raised by hippie parents in a 1970s nudist camp, he remains indelibly, reassuringly human even as the very nature of existence is called into question.

Sci-fi fans: read these books! (While this is called Forever War #3, apparently the middle one, Forever Peace, is standalone. This picks up shortly after Forever War #1 left off.)

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Review: The Silver Pigs

The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ancient Rome is fascinating. It holds the beginnings of so much of our modern world, and the political intrigues, military campaigns, unsettlingly familiar cultural practices and world-devouring expansion give us a lifetime of incredible stories. I want to know it all.

Unfortunately, this means that I struggle to read fiction about it. I don't want to start mixing up the real, breathtaking history of it with someone else's ideas. So it's really too bad that Lindsey Davis's writing is so entertaining. For a first novel, it was really quite good: funny, exciting, and interesting characters. The plot got a little confused at times, but the engaging voice and forward momentum glossed things over well enough.

This is only the first of a daunting twenty books about the same uncouth, grizzled detective. While his hard-boiledness is a little cliche at first, he reveals enough depth and complexity to at least interest me further (but for my earlier objection). He's a good replacement for, say, Jack Reacher, who wears a little thin after the too-many installments I've read. It's also nice to read a detective novel by a female author, meaning our hyper-masculine protagonist treats the women in his life with something approaching decency. (I'm looking at you, Reacher.)

Maybe I will try another one, after all...

And if you're interested in the ancient Rome non-fiction I was mooning over, I couldn't oversell the riveting Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland.

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Review: Running Blind

Running Blind by Lee Child
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The women in Jack Reacher's life are either dogs or foxes, but they're certainly not actual human people. This installment is particularly stuffed with kalokagathia. (I've been wanting a chance to use this word since reading it in Will Storr's brilliant Selfie - it's a fancy way of saying that outer beauty equals inner beauty.)

I was pretty pleased with myself for solving the mystery way early. Spoiler: the ugly girl did it.[the ugly girl did it. (hide spoiler)]

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Review: 1984

1984 by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bleak! Have something else on the go to lighten the mood. My concurrent nonfiction is about American POWs being starved, tortured and generally dehumanized in Japanese prison camps (Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand), and the parallels in abuse are frightening.

I gave this book a go because it was a cultural touchstone I'd never read. It is infinitely more readable than Brave New World, which was the other big dystopia book I somehow skipped in high school. Orwell's characters actually live, feel, and struggle to retain a self. Beware, however, when someone starts to read a political manifesto, because you're going to get, like, the whole thing. (Let alone the interminable appendix on the grammatical construction of NewSpeak - this book does not require a Silmarillion!)

While our hero is constantly dreaming of being part of the Glorious Manly Rebellion, the more interesting character is his love interest, Julia. She sings the party rhetoric louder than anyone, but has been finding ways to flaunt the system her whole life.

Her unquestioning acceptance of totalitarian rule rings scarily true - does any young person today even flinch at giving over their name, address, GPS location, contact list, or photo albums so they can download an app? But she steals, cheats, lies and runs away to live a parallel, private life, and is utterly blase about it. Tyranny is normalized, but so is small, personal rebellion. She's bored by talk of revolution and escape and bringing down Big Brother, which Idealistic Hero Man must resent, but how many of us would actually be her?

Anyway, time for something optimistic. (On Tyranny, perhaps, Mom?)

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Review: The Forever War

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite the title, this not a book about combat. It's about the human experience as a pawn in a faceless military machine. It's also a vision of several futures, as soldier William Mandella travels across centuries of bureaucracy (preserved by the relativistic effects of long stretches of near-lightspeed travel). Published in 1974, it's an anti-war war book, rife with cynicism, disillusionment, and alienation.

It's also a story about how a man from our world (the protagonist is born in the 1970s) deals with being thrown into the future, having to adapt to changing realities of society, combat, and even what it means to be human. By the time he gets to the year 3143, he's just as much an alien as the "enemy", who we barely meet.

There's no sci-fi messiah, no computer overlord, and no futuristic deus ex machina, all of which is refreshing. The imagined technology is terrific (remember the "I know kung fu" sequence from the Matrix? It's a direct lift from Haldeman) but the plot stays very human. The ending is a bit trite, in which our hero lives happily ever after in paradise and restores the nuclear family, but the book remains a muscular, imaginative, plausible vision of what our world could become.

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Review: Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts

Will Storr vs. The Supernatural: One Man's Search for the Truth About Ghosts by Will Storr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just finished a re-read, and it stands up to my original five star rating. An open-minded cynic's investigation into the paranormal, but also an examination of the people who believe, experience and reject it. The book finishes with more questions than it starts with, but gives an overview of the range of experiences, delves into a little history, and surveys the scientific literature on the subject of ghosts, hauntings, possession and the afterlife.

This book will appeal not just to fans of the occult, but anyone who's heard a story or seen a thing they can't explain. The writing is sharp and funny, and Storr immerses himself in his studies. He shows compassion for the looniest, but has little patience for the charlatans. In these subjects, you see the ground being laid for his next project - Heretics: Adventures With The Enemies Of Science - which is also terrific.

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Review: Annihilation

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I venture to say: this is not sci-fi! This is the horror of the unknown, wherein eldritch forces twist the world and warp our very selves!

It's slow like a roller coaster ratcheting up a hill. Vandermeer lets the story drip out slowly, as we strain to make sense of things along with our hero. The book drifts further and further into a dreamlike state, where some mysterious and seemingly inevitable fate looms. It evokes a lot of the same uncanny as The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, another great bite-sized horror.

This is a very short read, and though it's the first of a trilogy it stands alone, provided you don't need every question answered. The concept carried me through to the last page, but I felt no need to unravel things any further. (I was also warned off the second and third installments by a trusted friend, so the Wikipedia plot summary was enough for me.)

If you liked this flavour of horror, I highly recommend Nick Cutter, specifically Little Heaven. Think: similar Eldritch Horror but throw in a Jim Jones-style cult from whom three murderous weirdos try to rescue a little kid.

Also:
Squads have hypnotic triggers implanted by their commanders - not really a spoiler - which I'd never run across before, until one day later when I started The Forever War, from almost fifty years earlier. I'm clearly behind on my tropes.

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Review: American Pastoral

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The older a river gets, the more winding it becomes. This makes for a scenic paddle, but don't expect to cover much ground.

"An act of domestic terrorism blows apart the perfect family" - the plot summary doesn't reveal how many pages are spent detailing the ins and outs of the glove manufacturing process in New Jersey. Further, no matter how many characters the narrator writes off as bores, their pedantry is transcribed at length. I almost never skim; I skimmed a lot. Against this drone, a few key scenes stood out with shocking immediacy. While the contrast must have been intentional, it required serious investment to appreciate it.

For readers who have followed Philip Roth through his writing life, I'd be interested to know your thoughts. Is this his voice, or is this a put-on of rambling American sentimentalism? It all felt a bit long and heavy.

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Review: Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A hero rises through honesty, integrity and sangfroid. It's refreshing to read a story about someone who doesn't harbour a deep and tortured darkness inside. A true Stoic. Also, there were a hell of a lot of Thomases knocking around back then.

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Review: The Anubis Gates

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's utterly ridiculous, so it's best gulped down quickly. (Don't, for example, make a book club around it.) Satisfying twists, and more insane characters that I had bargained for. For a time travel book, Powers' London is slapdash and minimally researched, I'm sure, but the narrative doesn't slow down long enough for that to matter. The mechanics of magic and time travel may have raised a couple of inconsistencies in the plot, but if I were to go back and figure them out then I'd surely wreck the book for myself entirely. Best read with an open mind.

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Review: Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us by Will Storr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Funny, smart, and eye-opening. Will Storr is a textbook New Journalist - he's front and center in his books, gallavanting around the world to talk to strange and fascinating people and immerse himself in strange and fascinating subcultures. What's most compelling about his writing is watching his opinion change and evolve as he explores, as he is scrupulously openminded in his conclusions. Finishing Selfie left me with as many questions as I began with, but undoubtedly better informed.

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Review: Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I loved The Martian. The protagonist solved incredibly complicated problems with a lot of calculations and a dash of dad joke humor. The stakes were so high - a dude stranded alone on Mars with a busted spacesuit - that the character clung to puns and math in the face of existential terror.
Unfortunately, it seems that I inferred that emotional depth. The narrator of Artemis also clings to puns and math to solve a complex problem in space, and while the cast has expanded the characters haven't gained any further depth.
Suspense in Artemis doesn't come from character or atmosphere, but from numbers - the oxygen is running out, the batteries are losing charge, the level of x is approaching y. Success is measured by how often people high-five each other, and romance is measured by teenagers rolling their eyes at each other. The whole thing reads like it's written to be PG-13.
Finally: Andy Weir is a white, middle aged computer programmer-turned-novelist from Mountain View, California. I can't help but question his choice to make his narrator a teenage Muslim girl. The plot certainly isn't affected by it, and it feels artificial. Could he be angling for wider readership? Could he be writing with the Hollywood adaptation in mind? (There's also a slightly pervy computer geek character that drools over the girl - could that be Weir in his own story? Creepy.) I'd like to think there's less cynical reasons for it, but none come to mind.

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Review: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Should a novel be timeless? Does it bother you to see your plot revolve around, say, Apple, or LucasFilm, or Starbucks? Because it kind of bothers me. And while the book is thematically based around bridging the gap between the new and the old, a brand name on a page still breaks the fourth wall for me.
Set in Silicon Valley, MP24HBS is at the very least sipping the high tech Kool-Aid. Google is central to the plot, and I struggled to care about their internal staffing hierarchies and the computing power of their algorithms or whatever. It's a breezy read, and skips between high-gloss locations on a fairly thin plot. The fact that there seems to be a major plot hole really didn't bother me that much, because the stakes were low to begin with.

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Review: Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another book on my "I'll Probably Like It When I Get Around To It" list. And so I did! My understanding of the symbolism, and even the events, of this book are vague at best. (I try not to read anything about a book before writing a review, so I'm sure everything I write has been said.) It's compelling enough, and short enough, that I think I'll read it again sometime and put it together a little better. But here are my first thoughts:

Heart of Darkness is dreamlike, in its narrative, its cryptic urgency, and its otherworldly landscape. Conrad's prose is clean and direct, which gives the story strength and endless forward momentum through the mire, while only barely hinting at what deeper secrets lurk behind the veil. Everything and everyone struggles for power beneath the surface - the company men, the natives, the jungle, the river - except Kurtz, the enigma of the jungle who seems both all-powerful and powerless, at peace and at war. For how little he actually appears in the book, his shadow is cast on every page.

One of the most powerful parts of the story for me was the inevitable awakening from the dream-state, as the narrator is thrown back into trivial, repulsive life. I loved this:
"I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. [...] I tottered about the streets, grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons."
The inanity of civilization is at once miserable and charming. It is as "perfectly respectable persons" that we have to live, but who hasn't grinned bitterly at them once in a while? Finding these feelings put into words, and thereby understanding them better, must be one of the greatest rewards of reading.

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Review: Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Somehow I got through high school without reading Brave New World. Thank God.

Of course it makes perfect sense as a go-to for English teachers everywhere, since it spews potential essay questions out of its eyeballs, and the characters are simple manifestations of their defining traits (Conformist, Non-conformist, Strong, Weak, Brave, New, Worldly, &c.).

I can also understand that for its time it was a more challenging and innovative idea, but sci-fi has come such a long way, and can be so subtle and emotionally engaging (I'm looking at you, China Mieville), that Brave New World just left me cold. That said, I always told myself I'd read it one day, and it was pleasantly short. Next!

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Review: Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Saunders' book is part a dialogue between ghosts, written like a script for a play, and part a collection of brief citations of historical sources, some real and some invented, indistinguishably mixed. While this bizarre form may seem contrived or pretentious, it is the overwhelming variety of perspectives that gives this story its incredible power.

Speaking from a crowd of historical sources, each recounting their own version, distances the facts from the overall truth. I mean that the facts - whether the moon was full on a certain night, who was at the party, what was said to whom, &c. - are infinitely contested and therefore irrelevant; the reader must reject the idea of history as a tidy, known quantity, and accept that the truth can be understood without the facts being known. (How very quantum!) Further, that confusion is so much more true to life than to pretend that there is an agreed upon story of anything.

But! This is not a dense, philosophical book. Saunders' ghosts run riot. Funny, tragic, obsessive characters manifest their unfinished business with a bursting abundance of life force. Anything is possible in this afterlife, but these ghosts are bound by their human foibles. Surely any reader can imagine themselves among them. In the end, a wonderful story about the meaning of death and life.

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