Arts & Letters

Another orbital period has passed, which means it’s time to recap the year or some such thing. I’m still catching up on movies, and I’ll be posting a recap of the year in beer in the next few days too, but let’s take a look at my reading for 2013 and see where I’m at. I keep track of my book reading at Goodreads, and they have some fancy statistic generator things (that isn’t anywhere near as detailed as I’d like, but hey, I’ll take what I can get). Since I’ve been using the site for a while now, I’ve got several years worth of stats to compare too.

Let’s start with overall books read:

So I’ve read 31 books in 2013, which looks like a significant decrease when compared to 2012, but that is a bit misleading too. I was reading solely for quantity in 2012, and I cheated a bit in that I read a bunch of short novellas and comic book collections. My original idea for 2013 was to only read super long epics, but that was perhaps too ambitious, so I just sorta read what I wanted, length be damned. Of course, book length is tricky to measure, but by any standard, the average length of books I read in 2013 was much higher than 2013. On the other hand, it appears I did read more overall in 2012:

Proportionally, it’s not as big a disparity, but it is still significant. It appears that reading super long epics does sorta take longer than reading three smaller books with an equivalent number of pages. That’s perhaps not strictly true, but longer books tend to meander, which means I tend to get bored and fall asleep earlier and thus not cover as much ground.

The perfect example of this is Pandora’s Star, the longest book I read in 2013 and the first in a bloated duo of books that are supremely longwinded. I don’t normally mind this, but those books tested even my patience (though I did enjoy them quite a bit in the end). All told, those two books alone account for almost 20% of my reading this year. Another epic of note that I read was Douglas R. Hofstadter’s monumental Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It clocks in at 832 pages, but it is some very dense, heady stuff, and it had been sitting on my shelf unread for about 5 years or so.

You can also see that I read a small portion of comic book collections and novellas in 2013 as well, but not as many as in 2012. Other stats of note:

• 3 Comic Books (one Morning Glories and two Locke & Key)
• 2 Novellas (both from Ian Sales’ Apollo Quartet)
• 8 Non-Fiction books, which is less than last year, but proportionally more
• 10 of the 31 books were written by women, which is again less than last year, but proportionally much higher. It’s still not equitable, but 2012 was the year of Lois McMaster Bujold, while 2013 was much broader (9 different female authors).
• 23 Fiction books, mostly in the science fiction or fantasy realm, though a couple of oddballs popped here or there.

Goodreads also provides a neat little gizmo that graphs publication dates, as such:

If you click the image above, you should be able to get a more interactive version of the graph, though I do find it annoying that it only states the publication date, not what book it is! The oldest book of the year was Leigh Brackett’s 1949 tale of Martian adventure, The Sword of Rhiannon (for those who don’t recognize the name, she was one of the screenwriters on for The Empire Strikes Back).

So it’s been a pretty good year for reading. I certainly didn’t get through as much as planned, and I definitely didn’t spend as much time reading in 2013, but I think I did pretty well. As for next year, I think I’m going to take a similar approach: read what I want, length be damned. I may also get off my arse and read all the Hugo nominated books this year, something I’ve always wanted to do. Indeed, I’m pretty sure that I’ve just read a book that will be nominated in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, but I’d also like to take a shot at the other (shorter) fiction categories. I’ll probably set my sights at a similar 30 books/11,000 pages rate for 2014, but who knows how things will go?

I recently ran across the 2013 Worlds Without End Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge and thought it sounded like fun. The rules are simple: “read 12 books – 1 each by 12 different women authors that you have not read before including 1 random author selection – in 12 months”. I’ve started this a bit later in the year than I’d like, and I’m beding the “that you have not read before” rule a bit on at least one or two selections, but still, I’ve actually made pretty good progress. Halfway there, actually. Alas, I’ve found my selections to be a mixed bag.

• Among Others by Jo Walton – Winner of the 2012 Hugo Award for best novel, this one was already in the reading queue, and I was quite looking forward to it. Unfortunately, this is a book that struck all the wrong chords with me. It’s about a young girl named Morwenna, who was badly injured, and her twin sister killed, when they foiled their mother’s nefarious and abusive use of magic. Sound exciting? Well, that’s all happened before the story begins and is only referred to obtusely (details are generally unclear). As the book opens, Morwenna (having successfully escaped her abusive mother) is being sent to a boarding school by her father. Cool, so this is going to be one of those magical boarding school stories, right? Well, no, nothing really happens at the boarding school except that Morwenna is unpopular. On the one hand, I can respect what Walton was going for here, and she has turned many genre conventions on their head. Indeed, I love the way magic is portrayed in this book. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, only with magic, there doesn’t appear to be any connection between the two events. Want to shut down a Phurnocite factory? Drop some flowers into a lake. In a month, the factory shuts down, citing unprofitable margins. Did the magic work? Or was it simple economics here? In Walton’s world, there is little distinction. Magic works, but at weird angles. It’s great! Unfortunately, there’s not really a story to hang all of this on, and the boarding school stuff is just a rote high school story. It may not be common in SF/F, but it’s common enough in general culture.

  It’s more of a character sketch than anything else, as we follow Morwenna through her first school year. She’s friendless at first, and takes solace in reading SF/F books, eventually making friends with librarians and a local SF Book Club. This book is absolutely filled with SF/F book references, and I suspect that anyone who grew up in the late 70s or early 80s (when this story is set) will delight in the nostalgia of those references (personally, I found the discovery of new books and authors interesting, as it’s very different in the age of the internet than it was back then (or even in the early 90s, when I was dipping into SF/F). I liked the book club scenes, but little comes of it. There’s a confrontation of sorts at the end of the book, and there is some personal catharsis for the protagonist, but in the end, what I got out of this book is basically this lesson: people who read SF/F are, like, totally awesome. Which is true, I guess, but I already knew that!

• The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes – Now this is more like it. It’s a serial killer story with a little science fictional twist of time travel. There’s a house that exists outside of time, and when a twisted guy named Harper stumbles upon it in the depression era, he is compelled to use it as a base to launch his serial killing campaign across time against girls who “shine”. In the present day, we’re following Kirby, a damaged but spunky survivor of Harper’s shenanigans who is attempting to use her newspaper internship to research serial killings. Along with her reluctant partner, old-hand crime reporter Dan, Kirby eventually stumbles upon details of killings that don’t make sense. Harper likes to leave impossible mementos when he kills his shining girls, like a baseball card from the future. This is not a perfect novel, and is actually a bit disorienting at times (you are often introduced to a shining girl, only to see her die quickly, which leads to a lot of character introductions, even relatively late in the book), but I was taken enough with the style and cleverness of the plot. As time-travel thrillers go, there’s a lot to like, and everything is internally consistent, but it doesn’t really have quite as revelatory a structure as I was expecting. Still, this book is well worth reading if the premise interests you.
• The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett – Recognize the author? Yep, she was one of the screenwriters for The Empire Strikes Back, but she actually had a long history of SF/F writing behind her at that point. This seems to be her most famous work, a tale of aliens and humans on Mars. At this point, these stories are pretty well defined, but this seems to be a particularly well constructed version, and Brackett’s prose seems to be a step above her contemporaries. The story follows an Indy Jones prototype named Matt Carse, a gun-slinging archaeologist who stumbles onto the long lost tomb of the Martian god Rhiannon and is subsequently plunged into the distant past… for adventure! It’s a fun little adventure tale, short and sweet, definitely of its time (published in 1953), but again, the style seems to be a step ahead of her contemporaries. Definitely worth checking out for genre completists.
• vN: The First Machine Dynasty by Madeline Ashby – This is a generally well done science fiction story… that didn’t really strike a chord with me. The premise, following a few von Neumann robots that go on the run from various enemies, is all well and good, and the characters are fine for what they are. There’s an excessive focus on family and especially parentage here, to the point where I wonder if people who have kids would get more out of this book than I did. As it was, there seemed to be weird tonal differences from page to page, and I sometimes found myself confused as to what was actually going on. I should mention that I actually listened to this on audiobook rather than reading it, and to be honest, I was not impressed with the voice work here, though it wasn’t particularly awful or anything (I’m not sure if it’s the book or the reader or some combination of both, or perhaps a weird negative feedback loop of some kind). Some interesting ideas here, but this book was just not for me.
• The Ship Who Sang Anne McCaffrey – McCaffrey is probably better known for her fantasy novels, but I thought this one, about a human brain implanted into a spaceship, sounded interesting. And that premise is indeed pretty good, though the book essentially amounts to a series of mostly disconnected stories. This episodic nature means it doesn’t quite hold together as a whole as much as I’d like, but each story was relatively well done and interesting on its own, and there are some repeat characters, etc… Again, I didn’t feel like this was really ringing my bells, but it was certainly an enjoyable short read as well (I enjoyed it much more than Among Others or vN). This is apparently the first among many books, but while I enjoyed this one well enough, I don’t see myself reading any of its sequels, which I guess says something as well.

So yeah, I really enjoyed two books, was a little meh on one, and didn’t particularly care for another. I actually didn’t mention Lois McMaster Bujold’s Curse of Chalion, which I loved (significantly more than any book in this post), because I thought I had written about it before, but it turns out that I didn’t. That one also bends that rule about not having read the author before, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to really finish off this reading challenge by year’s end (especially if I keep choosing books that don’t particularly inspire me, like some of the above). That being said, I’ll be giving it a shot. If you have any suggestions that seem more my speed, feel free to leave a comment…

I have no problems with long books. Even long books that meander down tangents aren’t an inherent issue for me. Heck, I can get pretty longwinded myself. My favorite book is Cryptonomicon, a novel filled with so many digressions that I find it hard to even say what it’s about. On the other hand, the only reason I can put up with such excess is if I’m engaged. Good characters, good story, interesting ideas, heck, even well written prose can keep me going.

So when I picked up Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton I wasn’t immediately turned off by the length or the leisurely pace. On the other hand, clocking in at around a thousand pages, Hamilton had plenty of time to test my patience. It’s a bloated book, to say the least. Plus, it’s really just the first half of the story and the “sequel”, Judas Unchained, is another thousand-plus page novel. In essence, what we have here is a 2000+ page story, split into two books. Again, I have no inherent bias against this sort of length, but in this case, I’m seriously doubting that it needed to be that long. The funny thing is that, over the course of these two books, the story falls together rather nicely. Things mentioned early that may have seemed extraneous generally do play a role later in the story. I ultimately found myself enjoying the series (I certainly would not have completed it otherwise), and there are lots of things I really like about it, but the excessive length was unnecessary.

By way of explanation, let me tell you about how I almost abandoned Pandora’s Star. It was only about 100 pages in, and it was our introduction to a character named Justine Burnelli. She’s a member of an interstellar dynasty and as we meet her, she’s on a “safari” on some planet. She’s taking a hyperglider trip across the countryside… and Hamilton lingers on every single detail of the trip, from the tethers on the glider to the flowers on the mountainside, to the tune of about 30 or so pages. Nothing of import actually happens during this trip – she flies over the landscape, that’s it. Now, I suppose it does illustrate something about Justine’s personality and as a matter of fact, this “hyperglider” thing comes into play later in the story (um, about 2000 pages later). But it’s also something that could have been done in about 5 pages.

Now, take that situation and repeat about 100 times (this is no exaggeration, and you could probably jack that number up to 200 or 300), and you’ll have an idea of why these two books are so long, and why their length is something of an issue for me. It’s not the story that’s a problem, it’s that Hamilton thinks we need to see every component of every sub-plot. For instance, one of the characters is named Paula Myo. She’s basically a galactic detective, and we see her take on a seemingly unrelated case at one point. This is fine in concept – it’s an introduction to how formidable she is – but it drags on and on and on for far too long. It turns out that the characters in that case become important later in the story, but the original investigation still didn’t warrant as much time as Hamilton spent on them.

Ultimately, after about 500 pages or so, the book does settle into a groove where things actually start happening. And when stuff actually feels important, Hamilton’s obsessive focus on detail is much more welcome, if sometimes still a bit overbearing. So there was clearly enough here to keep me going, but I maintain that this could have been at least 25% (if not a full 50% or even more) shorter.

The story begins when an astronomer notices two starts disappeared from the sky in an instant. The speculation is that some advanced society has implemented a Dyson sphere, but why so suddenly? An expedition is put together to answer the myriad questions. Meanwhile, a sorta cult/terrorist group is trying to hunt down an alien called the Starflyer, whom they believe is able to brainwash human beings and thus has been infiltrating the Commonwealth political and economic structures.

As previously mentioned, things start slowly, but eventually pick up. At some point, a war with an alien species (called Primes) breaks out, and that’s when things start to get really interesting. The Primes very well realized… and terrifying. Hamilton’s detailed style is at its best when he’s writing from the Primes’ perspective (particularly a Prime known as MorningLightMountain) and when he’s detailing battles in this war (and they are epic battles taking place across 20-50 worlds at a time). The Primes are a scary enemy, but their motivations and methods are, well, alien, and Hamilton does a good job exploiting the differences between the Primes and Humans during the battle sequences, as well as overall strategy. The balance of power tips both ways at different times, and it’s a war I could see either side (or both sides) losing.

There are far too many characters to summarize right now, even if I focus only on main viewpoint characters. This is definitely a challenge of the book, as you will sometimes go several hundred pages before returning to a given character. Some characters are visited frequently, of course, but others may only have 20-30 pages in the entire two books. Many of them feel rather similar, though I’m not sure if that was intentional or not. There’s a weird focus on sex and superficial looks, though again, that might be a reasonable speculation in a universe where comprehensive rejuvenation is available. There were a few characters I actively disliked (notably including a guy named Mark!), but most were approachable enough and easy to spend time with. Sometimes I felt like characters were nothing more than plot delivery devices, but occasionally we get a glimpse into something that humanizes them. I wouldn’t call the characters a failing or anything that bad, but they definitely seem to take a back seat to the story and technology.

For the most part, Hamilton touches on every SF trope he can. A galactic civilization called the Commonwealth, with plenty of unique planetary governments. Longevity treatments mean that humans can live indefinitely. Memory inserts and cloning mean that you can be “re-lifed” if you suffer “body-loss”. Varying degrees of computer/human interfaces and cyberware. Genetic modifications. All sorts of fancy energy weapons and force fields. FTL travel comes in the form of wormholes. Inside the Commonwealth, these wormholes are set up along with a train system, though once the war starts, spaceships are built. Time travel is even sorta touched on at one point (traveling to the future, so no paradox). He touches on the singularity with a character called the Sentient Intelligence (SI). We run into all sorts of cosmic structures and big pieces of technology like the Dyson spheres. I already mentioned the Primes, but there are several other alien species… In particular, the Silfen are an interesting bunch. They’re kinda elf-like and they eschew most technology (and politics/economics, for that matter), choosing instead to wander along their Paths (which are sorta like wormholes, but much less distinct and much more hand-wavey). Other aliens include the High Angel, an alien spaceship that invites anyone who is interested to live in its pods. And there’s probably a ton of other stuff I’m leaving out.

Despite Hamilton’s tendency to be longwinded, all of this stuff is there for a reason. It all fits together in the end, and each of these technologies plays a role in the story. Even if it didn’t need to be this long or include quite so many viewpoint characters, that Hamilton has managed to string all of this together in a way that fits is actually very impressive.

Hamilton’s views on technology and its resulting consequences is generally well thought out and logical. While he does touch on a lot of hand-wavey stuff (see list of SF tropes above!), he never takes that too far, and most of it seems to be an approachable extension of current trends. For instance, while he does mention beam weapons and force fields and the like, nuclear bombs are still pretty effective. He speculates about some advancements in that area, but nothing that feels unreasonable. He’s set up a truly terrifying alien threat, but he doesn’t rely on a deus ex machina to resolve the conflict.

So this is a difficult series for me. On the one hand, it’s longer than it needs to be. On the other hand, it’s a highly imaginative, epic space opera, and ultimately every engaging to read. In the end, it’s something I can recommend for fans of SF who don’t mind excessive detail or extremely long books. And if you go into it knowing that the two books are meant to be read as one story, that might make things a little more approachable (I was unaware that the first book would just sorta end without resolving anything, which left a bad taste in my mouth).

Every once in a while, a publisher has the bright idea to bring back serialized publishing. If it was good enough for Dickens, it’s gotta be good enough for Stephen King, amiright? Indeed, King dabbled with the serial novel form a few times in the mid-90s and early 21st century (remember those skimpy The Green Mile installments popping up in book stores?) Others have too, and there’s always been stories published in parts via magazines (often expanded when translated to book form, but still). I don’t think it’s ever truly caught on, but now that we’ve reached the internet age and digital publishing has established itself, it’s just a lot easier and at the end of the day, you don’t have 13 tiny books cluttering up your shelves (as I understand it, they generally come grouped together on your ereader).

With all due respect, I don’t care for this approach, which is why I waited until John Scalzi’s latest novel, The Human Division, had completed its serial run and made it’s appearance as a final novel. I don’t begrudge Scalzi the whole grand experiment, but I just don’t have the temperament to wait a week between chapters (even if the chapters are self-contained, more on this in a bit). I’m the same way with TV shows, though in some cases I catch up with the series and start watching serially from that point on because I’m really enjoying it. So I may have to put up with it sometimes (and in the case of television, I understand the various forces that conspire to keep a serialized structure), but I don’t generally like it. But enough kvetching about the method of publishing, let’s get to the good stuff.

I really enjoyed the book. It’s not perfect, and there is one thing I’m really annoyed by, but it’s still a really fun page-turner. By way of introduction, this one is the fifth book that has been set in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War universe… and by my reckoning, it’s the best since the first. Each book in the series has taken a different perspective on the universe. The first book focuses on the military grunts. The second book focuses on The Ghost Brigades, basically the special forces of this particular universe. It was a solid read and exciting and all that, but in my mind it was plagued by a galactic sized plot hole at the center of the story. The Last Colony is the third book, and it examines the colonists (through the eyes of characters from the first two books). It had some loose ends, but I liked it a lot. And the fourth book is Zoe’s Tale, basically a retelling of the third book, but from the perspective of the teenage daughter of the colony leaders. That’s a tricky approach, but I think Scalzi cleared the bar, even if it suffers from similar loose ends to the third book.

Being a serialized book, The Human Division is a bit more disjointed, but the main narrative thrust of the story is told from the perspective of the Diplomatic Corps. It picks up after the events of The Last Colony and Zoe’s Tale, and without giving too much away from those earlier stories, the human factions of the story are taking a decidedly more diplomatic approach than they used to. Most of the stories surround the crew of the Clarke, a small diplomatic vessel manned by what is generally considered to be the “B” Team. They tend to bumble along most of the time, but during periods of extreme stress, they do manage to get things done.

The chapters of the book tend to alternate between tales of the Clarke, and other various one-off stories. The Clarke stories are the best of the lot, at least partly because we get to know those characters the best. Lieutenant Harry Wilson tends to be the one causing the most problems, or rather, discovering most of the problems and devising ingenious solutions. He gets into lots of shenanigans, and it’s all great fun. Wilson is actually a character from the first book, and it’s always great to return to him. The one-off chapters are a little more hit-or-miss. Some are great, some are just fine. Those “fine” ones (I’m looking at you, “A Voice in the Wilderness”) are sometimes almost completely irrelevant to the rest of the story. Most of them seem to center around a sorta shadowy conspiracy that hasn’t quite been defined just yet. They’re self contained and I liked all of them, but Scalzi doesn’t always come back to their characters. Given the episodic nature of the book, it’s not really a complaint, and I like it when the author lets the universe breath a little.

Each story is mostly self contained, yielding a feeling very similar to that of a television series (indeed, this seems to be what Scalzi was going for, calling each chapter an “Episode”). There is an overarching plot, mostly centering around that conspiracy, but the focus is more on each individual story and resolving those conflicts. There is some refresher courses on the events of the earlier books in the series (totally understandable), but also a little repetition amongst the episodes themselves, almost as if Scalzi was expecting people to skip around. That’s ultimately a very minor flaw though, and each story works pretty well in its own right. They’re all filled with Scalzi’s trademark witty banter and humor, but also with clever little mysteries or conundrums that spark that sensawunda feeling every now and again. Some of them are bit predictable (Checkov’s gun abounds here – if Scalzi mentions a long lost artifact in passing, you can bet that Wilson will probably stumble onto it by accident and almost spark a diplomatic disaster…), but that didn’t actually diminish the stories at all (for me, at least).

Also like a TV series, the ending of the book is something of a cliffhanger. The immediate conflict is resolved, but it feels like we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ultimate driving forces behind this book. It feels like the end of a season of TV, but that’s not necessarily that satisfying either. It’s not the worst offender in that respect (more on that in a later post, as I just finished a different book that basically just ran out of pages – apparently I have another 1000 page brick to get through to get any sense of closure at all). Anyways, Scalzi has announced that The Human Division has been renewed for a “Second Season”. Again I don’t begrudge him his cute experimental serial book as TV series metaphorical setup, but I really hope this second season finishes what has been started here. Scalzi is mildy prolific, so I’m hoping for a quick turnaround on this next season, but even then, we’ve probably got at least a year before the next book hits (I’m guessing it will be serialized as well).

Ultimately, I still really enjoyed the book and would recommend it. Even though it’s probably good as a standalone, it would be worth reading at least the original Old Man’s War (or all the other books in the series) first. Despite the cliffhanger, which was a little disappointing, I still like this book overall much better than the other sequels. This is mostly because I’m banking on an actual conclusion in the next installment and I trust that Scalzi can deliver something satisfying. I’d rather not have to wait for it, but such is life!