Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand

Winterlong

Once again, this review is going to suffer some because of how long ago I read this book. I'll be caught up to myself soon enough.

Elizabeth Hand is generally hit or miss for me, but on this one it was pretty much all hit. I'll be honest, most of the action revolved around violent death and wrongful sex, but this still managed to be a beautiful story. Artsy fartsy for sure, but splashy enough to pull me through it at a run.

Sex, knowledge, skill, death - each of these being traded back and forth by the survivors of our civilization reborn in darker shades. I'm kind of a sucker for any kind of sacred prostitutes in a narrative. All religions have to deal with sex somehow - to pretend that huge driving force can be overcome with prayer always strikes me as knowingly dishonest. Of course, children raised from birth to be the playthings of the powerful is as evil as it gets, and I admire Hand for making them more than victims and revenge fodder.

I would have more to say about this, but I loaned my copy out twice now and haven't got it back yet from the second time. That right there should tell you something.

Dayworld by Philip José Farmer

Dayworld

Well, Farmer tried with this one. I mean, the concept was good. How to divide up the world evenly when you have too many people? When there is not enough land, can we do it by time? And how much would we miss the length of spring or summer if we got the full span of life over time?

Unfortunately, the whole is less than its parts. This whole book came across as very 70s despite having been published in 1985. It had a few pleasant quirks - the idea of fads being different by day and having to navigate that as you crossed from one into the other was fun. But I didn't care much about the mystery or the characters or the final, far too long chase.

I have both the sequels. I'll give the first a try. There was enough that I enjoyed that it deserves a second look, but not enough that I'm holding out much hope.

Marching Through Georgia by S.M. Stirling

Marching Through Georgia

I don't know. I just don't. It was written well. It kept me interested. The battle scenes were some of the best I've read. But a book that has me choose between cheering on Nazis or cheering on slave-owners? Not something that comes naturally, even when it's clear that the rest of the series probably deals with some changes of heart among the main slaver characters.

Here's the deal, I am not a history buff. I have a vague understanding of what led up to various American or world wars, but that's it. So I don't get that same thrill that I would guess regular readers of the stuff enjoy from the cleverness of manipulating facts and possibilities into a plausible situation. For me to enjoy work like this, I need a few facts filled in for me and I need characters and a story worth caring about. I'd say I got all three here.

Sea of Glass by Barry B. Longyear

Sea of Glass

This isn't the first one I've read that plays with the idea of the government restricting the number of children a family can have. And it's not the first one to show a group of kids bonding together in a home run by the powers-that-be to combat abuse and their own confinement. But this is definitely the first one in which the battered, raped, orphaned-by-the-state kid winds up, through a lifetime of his own research, agreeing with those in charge and actively working for them right up through the end of the book.

I think SoG will stick with me in same way that The Sheep Look Up has, though it is more sf and less likely. Over and over in these latter day dystopias, the idea crops up that we need to cut back on population to the point that mass killings becomes the answer. Will that happen? Could be, in the fullness of time. I can't imagine feeling that it's moral even then, though.

There's just so much death in this novel, from characters we know and grow to feel close to up through the nameless, faceless masses. And, in the end, is death actually life? Does it save the world, or is it all just pain for the sake of pain? Almost every destructive or horrific action in the book is taken for what the perpetrator considers a positive reason. Revenge for a friend. To prevent wholescale war. In search of affection. Do the means justify the ends? That's not a question that I have the philosophical credentials to answer, in the large scale.

final thought: One of the better ones I've read in the past year and a half, and one I'll pass on to others.

Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom by David Wingrove

Chung Kuo: The Middle Kingdom

This one was a roller coaster. Not because it was a wild ride that left me excited and exhilarated and ready to jump on another, but because the first half took forever to build up and the second went by fairly quickly. Come to think of it, maybe I should have said, "This one was a steep grind up a tall hill and a quick ride down the other side." So there you go - honesty in review.

I have a hard time remembering names sometimes, both in real life and in literature. Imagine my horror when I cracked this one open to find something like 5 pages of lists of motherfuckin' names, all set out in families, so the reader could have some hope of keeping everyone straight. I almost decided to skip it, but since I own three of the books in the (7 volume) series already, I figured I'd better give it a go. I'm glad I did, but god save me. 704 pages of Li Yuan and Fei Yen and Li Shai Tung? I eventually just let go and stopped trying to remember who was fucking, killing, torturing, bribing, or dominating who.

That's pretty much what happens the whole time, by the way. It sort of reminded me of Perdito Street Station, except that instead of a brilliantly fleshed out world of fantasy and steam punk and politics and blood, I instead found myself wading through some English guy's imagine of what the heavily overpopulated and regimented world would look like if run by a pre-Communism-style China.

Don't get me wrong, I can enjoy a story about imaginative brutality as much as the next (sick minded) guy. Once I stopped stressing about who exactly was who, the book clipped right along for me. I loved the image of the world encased in towering, flowing structures of "ice" (air-light plastics). Some of the characters managed to lift off the page eventually (although most stayed as flat and stylized as the characters of China's written language), even if most of their actions involved either being stomped on or stomping on someone else. I guess I just felt like, if I'm going to wade through that much necessary world building, I want more back in return.

final thought: After I cleanse my palate with a half dozen other sorts of dystopias, I'll give the second book in the series a shot. I hear that once Wingrove gets all his ducks in the row, the novels do pick up and roll.

When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger

When Gravity Fails

And back to our regularly scheduled dystopian meandering. Sorry, folks - I'm reading, but I'm not always writing.

After working through some fairly dense/thoughtful novels recently, I was damn happy about the chance to just sit down and enjoy a good, solid sf paperback. This one was suggested fairly recently by a blog visitor, and I'm glad. It's sort of a Muslim-world, cyberpunk who-done-it. With lots of sex changes, which I approve of in my dystopian fiction. Or real life, honestly - whatever gets you through, I say.

It didn't break any new ground for me, but I liked the ground it trod. I'm sort of a sucker for that whole "independent small timer tries to navigate the underground world by his wits without losing his ass in the process" thing, so this was right up my alley. Since that's pretty much the plot. It was a quick read. Unlike Gibson or Womack, Effinger didn't bother to get bogged down in the coolness of the tech itself or how and why it works - it does, and the plot goes on.

I'll admit, part of the enjoyment to be found in reading dystopian (or apocalyptic) fiction is a certain bloodthirstiness. A taste for brutality or horrific happenings at a safe remove from ourselves. And Effinger deals that out handily. Female assassin-whores distorted with plastic surgery, personality-changing chips employed to up the suffering during murder, mutilation and degradation, it's here in spades. And I enjoyed every minute of it.

I'll be keeping an eye out for the other two in the Marîd Audran series, without a doubt.

final thought: Is there power in staying powerless?

Moscow 2042 by Vladimir Voinovich (Владимир Войнович)

Moscow 2042

I'm not a student of either Russian politics or literature,, so I'm sure plenty of the deeper meaning (and possibly the jokes) passed me by on this one. That being said, I'm enough a child of the Cold War - and Voinovich is enough of a writer - that I didn't feel lost or let down. My sister asked what I was reading. I showed it to her and said, "It's funny as hell. It's a lot funnier than it looks from the cover." She, of course, replied, "It would have to be."

Moscow 2042 came out in 1986, written just a few years before perestroika and glasnost and the reforms that swept through the USSR. If you were around back then, you know the images that the American public received of life under communism - bread lines, ridiculous bureaucracy, censorship, drab clothing, heavy vodka drinking, plenty of propaganda at work. Interestingly, that's nearly exactly how Voinovich portrays his dystopian version of communism at work. Now, I have no real idea how day to day life in Moscow went in the early 80s, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't quite as glum as we were led to believe. Reading this one boosted that feeling - if it was already that bad, the dystopian, possible future would have been a hell of a lot worse.

I wondered a few things while I read this one. Who is he satirizing with his working class writer hero, ready to ride into Moscow on a white horse and be declared Tsar? How much of what he was satirizing was already happening and how much was extrapolation? And what is up with so many writers giving their late-middle-age alter egos young, willing, sexually gifted women to fuck? I mean, sure, I get it. But really? Were there honestly that many Russian spy babes out to rub their naughty bits up on aging writers? I doubt it. Probably helps keep warm, though.

But there were still plenty of tasty little bits to enjoy. The horrors of vegetarian pork. The concept of food and shit and whether one is the other. Long bills on caps to prevent the people from looking at movies projected on the clouds. I do tend to love books that take government control to the absolute extreme. Reading them is like whistling past the graveyard: can't happen to me! Nope, not here!

final thought: For me to get this much enjoyment out of a translated novel satiring something I know so little about is fairly amazing. I have nothing but praise for

Obernewtyn by Isobelle Carmody

Obernewtyn

I only read this a couple weeks ago, and I'm already starting to forget it. A passable story for the young'uns, but not much to mull over afterward. Did you read my last entry, concerning Gathering Blue? It pretty well applies to this novel as well. Look, I'm all for fantasies about plucky young women who evidence unknown strengths and powers to bring their friends and society itself to safety, but do they all have to be such sad sack characters?

final thought: Even at 13, this would have been a throw-away read for me. Nothing great, nothing terrible. Just there.

Terraplane by Jack Womack

Terraplane

I know I'm not doing myself any favors by reading Womack's work out of order, but he writes well enough that I get along regardless. Once again, as I said when I read Elvissey, Womack is that rare author that manages to twist language until it truly does sound evolved but not overly contrived. "Why aren't we knived?" asks the killer Jake at dinner. Nouns into verbs and back again - once you get the flow, it's worth riding.

And once again Womack delves into race and the American history thereof, into corporate ownership (no stretch to think of the Coke company owning and branding their workers), into what happens when you twist just here and here and then see what comes out of the culture. He's sort of the less-techy-obsessed William Gibson.

As a guy fairly obsessed with personal liberty and keeping as much corporate bullshit out of my life as possible, his future seems mighty damn bleak in a very WalMart sort of way. On the other hand, I'm a white man in the '00s, not a black person dealing with the hate and oppression this country's doled out for a couple hundred years. To Norman and Wanda, the idea of almost-equality goes a long way toward making up for other flaws in the Dryco age.

final thought: It's all about loyalty and what that means in the face of ownership, relationships, love, brotherhood, military comradeship, political ties. Who are you loyal to? Do they deserve it?

V for Vendetta by Alan Moore (illustrated mostly by David Lloyd)

V for Vendetta

I watched the movie. It was sort of eh to me, mostly because Portman used up all her acting ability back around 1994. That being said, I dug the concept, so when a cool gal offered to loan me her copy of the collected comics, I pounced on it.

Who doesn't love a little chaos and humor in the face of fascism and repression? Who doesn't love the idea of the everyman who manages to evade the cops, slip between shadows, blow up the broken courts, do away with torturers and pedophilic priests? Do I think that bombing the halls of "justice" is a good way to get my voice heard at this time? Of course not - but I haven't got the government peeping in my bedroom every night yet or banning art and music yet or forcing a power-grabbing religion on me. Yet.

I'm drawn to anarchy as a philosophy. Not the punk's AN-AR-KEE!, necessarily (though I've still got a soft spot in my heart for those kids), but the empathetic don't-rule-me-and-I-won't-rule-you train of thought. Too bad I can't imagine it ever working. Get two people agreeing to pull together, you'll have a third bashing them both in the back of the head while they're busy.

In a less general sense, regarding the actual comic - I loved the story, I wasn't wild about the art. But then, it had a very 80s style that seems a little dated now, which pretty well excuses it. As an American, I have no cultural connection to Guy Fawkes or the masks, but I know enough about the whole thing not to be confused by the allusion and I think it worked. I wish now that I owned the collection, because I'd like to read it again in a few months and see if it's deep or shallow.

Oh, and because I am a dork with a head full of quotes and musical bits, I liked catching the meanings, here and there, of the lines that V dropped. Especially stuff like the Anti-Nowhere League. If you want your comic to have a soundtrack, that's the way to do it.

final thought: I'd like to see an English director film it with an English cast some time.

Count Zero by William Gibson

Count Zero

I feel like I've read the Sprawl series as a set of flashbacks. I started with the most recent, Mona Lisa Overdrive, slammed all the way back to Nueromancer, and then wound up filling in the final blanks in the middle. I don't know if it's because I have all the pieces now or just the way this one was put together, but Count Zero is my favorite of the three. (The only big flaw being the complete lack of Molly).

But what's not to like? Corporate rule may be my "favorite" form of dystopia in fiction - it's just so god damned possible these days - and Gibson loves it as much as I do. There's less out and out techbabble and more story (necessary, I guess, when you have at least three plot lines tangling up together and no dearth of worthwhile characters to follow) - although, as usual with the godfather of cyberpunk, most of the techy stuff is right on the nose some 20+ years later.

From what I understand, the reason Gibson let his image of the internet wander so far is that he really didn't have much of a clue about computers when he started writing these things. He heard a few things about it, came up with ideas that sounded cool to him, and went with it. That's how he wound up presenting us with steampunk computers and fractured AI personalities mimicking Vodun spirits and the web itself as a sort of shared hallucination of infinite space and possibility. He didn't know what was considered impossible, so he went ahead and invented it anyway.

Having finished all three of his Sprawl novels, I'd like to see a book of short stories by different authors set in that vast urban landscape. Jack Womack, China Miéville, maybe even someone like Haruki Murakami. Just an idea.

final thought: Putting aside his agile story-telling, his amazing tech predictions, and his ability at world-building, you know what I really do appreciate about Gibson? He offers a sort of hope for his characters at the end, and us through them. Not everyone makes it, but those who do are often better off, thanks to dumb luck and their own effort, at the end than they are at the beginning. And after 8 months of nearly unmitigated dark resolutions, that's something worth having.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Neuromancer

This damn book took me forever to get through. Not that it's not great sf, by the way - because it is. Just as forward thinking and right on as the rest of his work. But I'm more interested in the odd little side details - the Sprawl itself, the people in the bars, Panther Moderns, 3Jane - than I am in all the tech forecasting.

Now, any book with Molly, the modern samurai with the embedded glasses and razor tip fingers, is worth picking up. Don't get me wrong - if I'd started the Sprawl series with the first one like I should have, I'd probably have enjoyed it more. But working backward put it in a different frame, and I got fairly bored halfway through.

I may have to revisit this one later. I suspect I am simply burned out on Gibson's cyberpunk view of our future/now. Which is why I jumped into some classic Harlen Ellison stories last night, changing directions for a new view.

final thought: You have to really admire that so much of it has already come true. I wonder what else will.

Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson

Mona Lisa Overdrive

Normally, I'm a stickler for reading series (serieses?) in order, but so far I keep reading Gibson's work all which-a-way. His novels are fairly convoluted, too, so I'll probably reread it in the future, once this whole dystopian list is over and done.

That being said, I do enjoy his work. I'm not enough of a geek to get all the techy little computer/matrix/nano stuff, but as long as I keep up a good clip and let the story roll, it's clear enough. His world isn't that far from our own (in fact, it's dead similar in certain places), and people are people regardless of what kind of hardware they wear/are jacked into/have implanted in their skulls.

You know, a lot of really tech-noodling speculative fiction is a total sausage fest. It's still a boy's club in a lot of ways. But Gibson does a really good job hopping gender to gender. Even his purely artificial personalities come across as more realistic than some of the "people" offered to us by some other authors I've picked up lately (Rand, I'm looking at you).

I think I need to read the first two Sprawl books before I can offer up much on the actual plot, frankly. I'm just starting to really delve into the cyberpunk genre, and I feel like I need to take a better look around before I can fully comment.

final thought: Even as shallowly as I have read Gibson's work, it's clear to see why he is considered a true genius of cyberpunk. He was writing in the 1980s about technology we're just starting to consider common now.

Devil On My Back by Monica Hughes

Devil On My Back

(That particular wiki page does little justice to the book, by the way, but there aren't a lot of online options for plot summary on this one.)

This is one I read as a middle schooler. It's young adult all the way, and not as good as, say, A Wrinkle in Time. You've got all the classic elements of dystopian fiction - a slave class, a shadowy overlord, forced hive mind, withdrawal from nature, controlled reproduction. The story clips along just fine - a little adventuring, a touch of freedom, and hint of amnesia. But, in the end, not really a satisfying book.

The ending just felt like a cop out. "We know what's best for everyone, son. We'll drive the slaves until they have to escape or die, and through dream-programs, we'll slowly wean others from the infopak lifestyle." Meh. Throw open the gates, let the people roam free, quit with the pussy-footing.

I guess it just all felt too... easy. The guy at the top agreed with the protagonist, and was already working against the system he was supposed to be upholding (albeit very slowly). There was never any real danger for the escapees. The society was already on the track to major change/destruction of the dystopian system.

final thoughts: I liked it better when I was 11. No surprise, huh?

The Shore of Women by Pamela Sargent

The Shore of Women

Oh, good holy god, that was terrible. All the reviews I can find online gush about the thought provoking ideas and ground breaking concepts, but they must have been reading a different book. Here, I sum up for you:
1. Given half a chance, men will enslave and rape women.
2. The only way for women to be safe, therefore, is to enslave and rape men, using their offspring as another way to bind them.
3. Happiness is found either in ignorance or love-against-the-odds.

It's sort of neither a defense or criticism of separatism. It's just a bland romance dressed up as a sf novel. Characters introduced at the beginning don't reappear until just in time to wrap everything up nicely at the end. Characters in the middle only exist to pound home the political points. Twice, Sargent has to go for the ol' deux e machina to keep her hero and heroine moving along, and that's just flat lazy.

SOW just failed for me on every count. It's not good science fiction. It's not good feminist theory. The dystopian elements get buried under the adventures, and the adventures are boring. It came out in '86, but it read like the mid 70s.

final thoughts: It wasn't quite as bad as Anthem, but at least Anthem was short as hell.

The Running Man by Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)

The Running Man

Ol' Stevie ain't subtle. The points aren't left up to you to figure out, they're all but written in neon: the mass of people will accept anything as long as they are entertained and comfortable, and the most one man can hope to accomplish is near-meaningless gestures at the expense of everything he holds dear.

But, again, I don't read King for the message, I read him for the stories. This is a fun one, too, if your idea of fun is a possible future of deadly tv shows, rising crime, miserable poverty, souring pollution, and fascist governments. Which, yeah, I enjoy all those things as long as they stay on the page.

And yes, our pop culture is getting sicker and bloodier. And yes, our freedoms are being stripped away. And yes, we're getting poorer by the day. And yes, health problems get worse all the time due to our ongoing efforts to pollute the galaxy. And yes, corporations do seem to be pretty much in power. And so yes, sometimes it does feel like all I want to do is raise a middle finger to the whole damn mess and give it a hearty FUCK YOU.

final thought: I want to hear a punk concept album built around this book.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale

I honestly have little to say about this one. The Christian dystopias always get to me. I think I find them a little more likely than the hive-mind ones in my lifetime. Or maybe growing up in the bible belt just makes me more cautious of those who would encode biblical morals into law.

Margaret Atwood writes better speculative fiction centered around the subjugation of women than, for example, Sheri S. Tepper. Mostly, I think, because she's also skillful at telling a story while she gets her point across.

Once again, though, all of civilization comes down to reproduction. And I feel like that's pretty much true - when only a few can have children, the powers-that-be will seek to control them.

final thoughts: And yet Canada's still safe space?