Categories
books

Hugo Novels 2010

I just finished reading the last of the novels nominated for a Hugo Award this year. I thought I’d write out a few brief thoughts on each, since this is my first year of trying to be really conscientious about my Hugo votes. I’m almost done with the nominated short stories, and then I’ve got about a month to get through the rest of the packet. So I think I can do it, I’m just going to have to do some skimming when it comes to the “best related work” category.

Boneshaker – Cherie Priest
Of the nominated novels, I would have to say that this one is the most fun. It doesn’t claim to be profound, it doesn’t try to be artsy, it’s just a good, enjoyable read with solid characters and an entertainingly built alternate America, one that involves both steampunk and zombies. I loved it. In keeping with the zombies, I could even feel comfortable saying that I devoured it. If it was a movie rather than a book, I’m betting several critics would use the word “romp” to describe it. This is one I’d definitely recommend to my friends.

The City & The City – China MiĆ©ville
I’ll admit this up front: this is the only book I didn’t actually finish reading, and I feel very ambivalent about it. I started reading The City & The City shortly before I came down with mono, at which point when I tried to read, nothing made sense anyway. Even before I got sick, though, I found the start of the book to be something of a slog, though I tried very gamely and got about a third of the way through. The central concept, of two cities interwoven where people just learned to not see the other city, never really made sense to me. I found it annoying rather than interesting, which is not a good basis for reading a book. By the time I was well enough that I could manage to make sense of the English language again, the book was long overdue and I couldn’t renew it, so I just returned it. I feel like maybe I didn’t give The City & The City quite a fair shake, but at the same time I’ve been unable to find the motivation to check the book back out and try reading it again. Which pretty much says all that needs to be said about my feelings.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America – Robert Charles Wilson
I struggled a bit with this book as well, for about two thirds of it, though I did finish it and found the downhill third to be fairly satisfying. Ultimately, I felt like the novel was much more about the post peak-oil apocalypse setting rather than the characters. And don’t get me wrong – the setting was extremely clever and entertaining and well-thought-out, but I had a difficult time enjoying it when I couldn’t connect with any of the characters. Part of this is due to a narrative style that I think owes a lot to 19th century adventure stories (think: how Watson talked about Holmes) which gave the book a lot of its atmosphere. Unfortunately it also seemed to keep all of the characters at arms length, and I had a hard time really following what they were doing and why. For example, when the narrator asks the woman he’s in love with to marry him, she says yes – and my immediate reaction was, “what the — as far as you’ve described, she doesn’t even like you that much.” I like clever settings as much as the next person, but I need a little more than that to really love a novel.

Palimpsest – Catherynne M. Valente
The only true fantasy offering this year – I take this under the authority of the Denver public library, which has “science fiction” stickers on all the rest. I read a lot of fantasy, and I wanted to like this book, I really did. It had its neat points; the characters were interesting for the most part, and the setting was very well crafted. But in the way that Julian Comstock focused a little too much on its setting, I think maybe Palimpsest focused a little too hard on its characters, and a lot of times the plot felt like an afterthought. I will also admit that I am not a fan of the writing style that Valente used. I think that more articulate or educated people might describe it as “lush” or “rich,” while throwing in an “erotic” somewhere for good measure. I can take erotic or leave it when it comes to fiction, but to me “lush” often equals “prose that gets in the way of the actual meaning.” There were times when I felt like the language was obfuscating or needlessly complicating the authors point – though maybe I missed it, maybe the language was the point – and felt annoyed or bored rather than enraptured. I will also note that I’m one of those philistines that doesn’t like poetry (with only a few exceptions) so I tend to prefer the workmanlike to the fancy, particularly when we’re talking about anything longer than a short story.

WWW: Wake – Robert J. Sawyer
I’m already a fan of Robert J. Sawyer, so I was primed to like this book. I also wasn’t disappointed. Often the speed at which I read a novel indicates just how much I like it (since I steal more time to read then) and I powered through this one in only a few days. My only real complaint about the novel was that many of the plot lines seemed incomplete, or like they’d just been dropped before the ending. I recently found WWW: Watch at the library, which provides an answer to that problem. This was the first of a series, not a stand alone book. That makes it harder to judge as well; as part of a series, of course it will feel unfinished when compared to the other books. I thought the story was generally very interesting, as well as the characters, though I’m still not one hundred percent on how I feel about his treatment of consciousness developing on the internet. Then again, I also don’t think I could have done any better. Either way, this is another one I’d recommend to my friends as an enjoyable read.

The Windup Girl – Paolo Bacigalupi
The first half of this book took me a ridiculously long time to read. The second I finished in one day. At first, I really wasn’t sure about the story, or the characters, though the setting was very fascinating from the first page. But it grew on me, and surprised me, and demanded that I think about things that I wasn’t all that comfortable thinking about, which doesn’t happen all that often when I’m in novel reading mode and just want to find a fun story about space marines shooting aliens. (Note: This story does not involve space marines or aliens, though people do get shot.) Of the 2010 nominees, this is the only one with an ending that I could not possibly have predicted, even two pages before I read it. This is the one that surprised me, and kicked me in the head, and made me want to read it again just to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything. I wasn’t sure about the book at first, but once I got in to Bacigalupi’s writing style and invested myself in the world he’d created, I found it very compelling and – most importantly – enjoyable. It’s an uncomfortable story with uncomfortable heroes about uncomfortable topics, and I think it was beautifully done. I’ve still got a month to mull it over, but I think this is where my vote will end up.

Categories
books

Rapture Ready

I recently checked Rapture Ready: Adventures in the parallel universe of Christian pop culture out from the DPL branch near my workplace. The copy that I got had a different cover on it than what you see on that website; it was white, with a candy necklace on the front – except this candy necklace had a giant pink cross on it.

This made me feel just a little weird about reading it on the bus, though I didn’t let that stop me.

I don’t normally read a lot of non-fiction to begin with, and unless the book is exceptionally well written, I tend to slog through and take it in a little at a time. Not so here; Daniel Radosh deserves a lot of compliments. In general, his writing was very conversational, very entertaining, and he covered the necessary background or concepts that went with his own experiences without ever becoming the least bit dry. This was a book that I read while riding on my exercise bike, and that’s a rare compliment indeed – it takes a very interesting book to get me to forget the fact that I hate exercise bikes because they make my ass go numb.

Looking at the narrative in the book, the two words that really spring to mind are “humor” and “humanity.” There’s a lot to find amusing in any pop culture; the weird quirks Mr. Radosh identifies in Christian pop culture seem even funnier (in a bizarre sort of way) to an atheist such as myself. But I think it’s very important that he leavens the humor with a very big dose of humanity and understanding.

Which isn’t to say that he is in any way supportive of the strange, walled-off sort of pop culture that has been created by a certain segment of American Christians. With deft comedy, he skewers the segments of that pop culture that so deftly need skewering, presents others with little comment when they will handily collapse under their own weight, and in a few instances becomes well and truly angry or a bit frightened when such emotions are richly deserved. I think what makes all of that so genuine is the sense that, while his stated purpose from the beginning was to find the dark underbelly of the true nuts, he was also doing his best to be open minded and allow himself to be surprised.

At the end, you get the sense that all in all, the experience has left him strangely hopeful. I found Mr. Radosh’s strange journey to be something that gives me hope as well. While there are quite a few scary figures to be found within Rapture Ready (Ken Ham being one of the front runners) there are also many people who are hoping to find some sort of common ground, who seem just as disturbed as the non-Christians by some they are sharing their pop culture with. If nothing else, it asks the question, “Can’t we all just get along?” and posits a cautious, “Maybe.”

A few highlights from the books:

  • Mr. Radosh’s exploration of literature such as the “Left Behind” book and his meeting with two Christian authors.
  • Jay Bakker makes a couple of appearances in the book, which really confirmed my opinion that he seems like an awesome human being.
  • Mr. Radosh’s meeting with Ken Ham. Wow, that guy sounds scary.
  • The imaginary conversation with Stephen Baldwin. Hilarious.
  • The multimedia appendix on the book’s website is pretty darn cool.
  • I would definitely recommend it.

    Categories
    books

    A pox on both your houses

    If you’ve been hiding under your rock and playing Star Trek Online more than me over the weekend, you might have missed the fact that Amazon and Macmillan are having a little conflict.

    It reminds me of the heady days of high school, when pretty much everyone was just trying to get to class and then two enormous jerks that you didn’t even know would start shoving each other. Suddenly the hallway would become a clogged mass of students, with those on the inner ring chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” and the rest of us just wishing those assholes would knock each other out already because we were going to be late to class and there’s a danger of claustrophobia when you’re being crushed by a bunch of your stinky, hormonal fellow teens.

    Anyway, Scalzi, whose altar I worship at daily just so you know, is of the opinion that Amazon’s come out looking like a bigger pile of fail than Macmillan. Quite possibly. But he’s also gone on to further emphasize the point that the people who are getting really screwed are the authors.

    I don’t really see a point in taking sides in this particular corporate slugfest, even if I agree that Amazon is coming across like a petulant child. But it is the authors that are getting hurt, and badly. Particularly since Amazon hasn’t completely pulled their titles; you can still buy them used or from other resellers, which means the authors get cut out of the deal entirely. Now, if you’re in the market for used books normally, that doesn’t make much of a difference, but if you occasionally buy books with the thought of getting a good read plus the warm fuzzy of helping one of the little guys pay their mortgage, it reveals itself as quite the dick move.

    Supposedly Amazon has caved. As of the time I’m writing this post, the Macmillan titles are still unavailable through the regular Amazon store, however. And even after it goes back to normal, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this sort of ridiculous skirmish happen again in the near future. I think it just serves as a very important reminder that when corporate titans clash, as amusing as it can be to watch, it also comes with the potential to hurt the livelihood of people who have absolutely no say in what caused the mess to begin with1.

    It just means that we dedicated book nerds need to be a little flexible in our book-buying habits. Personally, I don’t give a rat’s behind which giant bookstore chain gets my money when I buy a copy of, say, Old Man’s War. I just want to know that Scalzi’s getting his little sliver of the pie so he’ll write something else fantastic for me to read in the near future.

    1 – Obviously, this is not unique to the publishing world.