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.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games

The twisted government, the youth-violence-as-entertainment, the love match that takes on all odds - I enjoyed the hell out of Battle Royale. Oh wait, shit, I'm supposed to be talking about Hunger Games.

Seriously. People kept suggesting this book to me, knowing my tastes and reading habits. And it's not like they were wrong - it's a fun read. But Collins was dipping water from a well I've bathed in many times before. Again, maybe I just need to stay away from young adult novels for a while. I would have loved this at 13. I was always running around making weapons out of random stuff anyway, so I probably would have adopted chunks of the plot into my make-believe life. At this age, though, the way the author just passed right over certain plot holes and unlikely moments that should have been dealt with better bugged the crap out of me.

I liked the set up, the idea of the games as retaliation against formerly rebellious colonies. Of course, forcing parents to sacrifice their own children over and over is pretty much a textbook example of how to breed further revolution, but okay. Powerful governments have done stupider things. And that bit all smacked just a little too heavily of Jackson's "Lottery". I liked them prepping for the games, except that it all had much the same flavor as the pre-run parts of King's Running Man. Of course, I enjoyed the survival game itself, except, well, you know. Battle Royale and so on.

If the sequel turns up at my house, I'll probably read it one afternoon. But honestly, I barely expect to remember much about this one in a few weeks. I do hear that a PG-13, teenybopper movie version is being made. Oh, goody.

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Altered Carbon

I really dig the hardboiled sf/mystery style (Lethem also does this really well). After Halting State, all the violence and action that Morgan packs into his work was especially welcome. It's not great literature, but it's a fun ride.

I have this massive fear of being trapped. Trapped underground in a tight cave. Trapped under the ice (not that I have ever seen a really frozen lake or pond - I'm a Florida boy). Trapped in my own body, mind alive but unable to move (China Miéville's books tap into some of that, especially some of the punishments in the Bas-Lag novels). So Morgan's vision of mind being kept "on the stacks", frozen in time or manipulated by anyone who can afford the technology, really gave me the heebie jeebies.

Not to mention all the brutality in Altered Carbon. Now, this isn't packed full of detailed violence like Chung Kuo, by David Wingrove, but he does linger on some pretty fucked up torture a time or two. I don't have a problem with that. It fuels the rage behind the story, and who among us isn't a little fascinated by blood and gore?

All in all, a dark, flowing cyberpunk adventure. I thought I knew the answer to the whodunit early on but turned out to be wrong - a good thing, indeed. I look forward to reading more in the series.

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

The Lottery and Other Stories

I picked this up for the actual story "The Lottery," of course. Count this as another classic that I just never got under my belt in school. I knew the twist, of course, so I didn't feel any urgent need to run out and pick it up. But I saw a decent copy of the collection for just a couple bucks, used (and let me just say again, thank god for used paperbacks), so I grabbed it.

What a revelation! "The Lottery" is the last story in the collection, and I took my sweet time getting there. I kept this in the car as my lunchtime/between times book, and I wallowed in it every chance I got. No one told me that Jackson wrote so damn well! Little slices of people's lives, most of them passing slowly over some common misery or guilty failure, examining it clearly and with beautiful skill. "The Daemon Lover", with the slow crawl of the day when a wedding never happens (obvious to the reader, torture for the protagonist), especially exemplifies this.

You know, the story "Flower Garden" is sort of the real life companion to "The Lottery" itself. In both, neighborhood prejudices and mean little traditions have crippling consequences for everyone involved. Jackson was saying an awful lot of smart shit about race relations (and doing it in the 1940s! - there are people today who think they're putting out intelligent comments on race relations who use a lot more space to say a lot less than this story or "After You, My Dear Alphonse").

As for the story itself, "The Lottery" still slides under your skin even if you know where the sting comes in. Know what's even scarier, though? This is what Jackson later said about the massive amounts of hate mail she received when the story was first published:

The general tone of the early letters, however, was a kind of wide-eyed, shocked innocence. People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.

final thoughts: This could just be a personal blind spot, but I think that too much is made of one story, detracting from the skill and, yes, possibly genius shown in her other work.

Level 7 by Mordecai Roshwald

Level 7

First off, let me say that this copy, which I got for under a dollar from The Paperback Rack, is the proud winner of Worst Cover Yet. Click on that thing and really check it out. It's like they summarized the plot for a seven year old, gave her glue and round-end scissors, and said, "do it up, kid."

Just had to say that, because it's sort of been bugging me.

With that out of the way, I did enjoy the book. It's a quick read, fairly slim, but nice and creepy in that nuclear-war-leading-to-the-complete-loss-of-human-life 1950s way. It's interesting in that the enemy isn't the Soviets (or even us, from their point of view), but the nuclear arms themselves. A 2 hour war is set off by a glitch in the system, and it wipes us out from top to bottom.

The whole thing is done diary-style, by a military man living 7 levels below the earth, where he should be among the safest people on the planet. His daily life, food, air, and social needs are met without worry. He has only to do his duty and stand the fact that he'll never be above ground again. It's the loss of sunshine, more than anything, that preys on him. You know, I suffer from a fear of being trapped underground, and I could feel the weight of all that rock and soil the whole time I was reading.

The style was a little dated, but what do you expect? It was written 50 years ago. My main complaint has to be the sexism that permeated the narrative. The main female character, although a psychiatrist and one of the chosen few living in the deepest, safest level, giggles and flirts and generally acts like a manipulative female stereotype. Frankly, even Heinlein does a better job writing women, and that ain't saying much.

final thought: Worth reading, but more as a blast from the past than a warning for now.