More books!

[aelfgyfu_mead]

This was supposed to be Part 2, but the previous entry was so long ago that that seems ridiculous now.

More books I've read in the past . . . um . . . while.


I'm putting A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge at the top because I want to recommend it most enthusiastically to anyone who reads SF. I rarely reread books (unless I'm teaching them) because life is too short. Brilliant Husband got the third book in the series and said I might have to reread the second. So I reread the first, which is A Fire Upon the Deep —and then realized that the second is a prequel, so I probably should have read them in the other order.

I have no regrets about rereading the book, only about not remembering it better. How could I have forgotten?

The world-building is amazing. This universe is not dominated by humans, although some of the major characters are human; they're important to help us as readers situate ourselves among the other races. Only as I'm writing about the book did it occur to me: here's a male author who can write a totally convincing female protagonist without me even thinking, "Yeah, a man wrote this." Never entered my head until now. In fact, he writes not one but two key female human characters whose point of view we follow; they're as fully realized as any of the male characters, enough that I feel almost foolish raising the issue, because it's not an issue here.

Vinge also writes aliens who have an alien mindset, and he writes from inside that mindset so well that it takes a while to work out exactly what these aliens are, because they don't need to reflect on their nature.

The plot involves an artificial intelligence that becomes very dangerous, human refugees, a planet whose people are nowhere near achieving space flight who come into contact with aliens who have, and multiple non-human and even non-humanoid races.

It's brilliant. Stop what you're doing now and order it or locate it at the library. The rest of this entry will be here when you get back.



I enjoy the work of Pat Cadigan, as you may have noticed before (or you might not have, because I can't find any of her work in posts marked "books"0, but time has affected her novels. While many of her visions of technology seem frighteningly accurate, I find the complete absence of cell phones rather jarring! It's not her fault that she didn't see cell phones coming, but it's a lot harder to believe in a future that would otherwise look real when I keep thinking, "If only this character would place a quick phone call!"

Tea from an Empty Cup follows multiple characters, and the beginning is a bit confusing. The clearest narrative line follows a police officer, Dore Konstantin, as she investigates the mysterious deaths of people who were plugged into virtual environments. It isn't even clear what killed them. Meanwhile, Yuki searches for her lost friend, going straight to an underworld boss in the hopes of finding him, or at least finding out what happened to him. Naturally, that's a risky strategy.

Aside from my occasional frustration that no one could use a phone, which threw me out of story's world occasionally, I found the novel engrossing. More mysteries crop up than the who and how of the murders, and I could hardly put the book down because I wanted to know.

Possible spoiler/warning: I got to the end and still was not entirely sure of a couple of things. I attempted to ask Brilliant Husband, but he couldn't even remember if he'd read the book (which probably means he hasn't). Sadly, I read it so long ago that I only remember one of the questions I had! If you read it, please let me know (if you might possibly remember some answers).



I didn't actually read Fools (also by Pat Cadigan) right after Tea from an Empty Cup. I do like to space out authors and series. I found the phone problem even worse in this book, sadly, because the characters in an era of holographic ads and flying cars can't make calls unless they can locate a working phone booth, and that affects the plot seriously.

If you can get past that—and I really think that I as a medievalist and Star Trek fan should be able to get past such problems better than I do—it's a fascinating novel. You will soon discover that there is more than one narrator. I won't tell you how many, because I didn't figure that out right away. Questions of memory and identity play out in very interesting ways.

The story starts with an actress realizing that someone else has bought her personality, which is not unusual, but the buyer has apparently fallen in too deep and now thinks that she's the actress herself. Then there's a character dodging the Brain Police. Then . . . then it gets complicated. As often happens in Cadigan's novels, people are messy, and one's hold on one's identity may be a lot looser than most of us would like to think.

Spoiler/hint: the type changes when the narrator does. I didn't figure that out right away. I blame that on reading while on a plane. I was happy if I had sufficient light to read at all!



Wireless is a collection of short stories and novellas by Charles Stross. I like his Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise series; I also like his Atrocity Archives series (The Jennifer Morgue and The Atrocity Archives). I don't like The Merchant Prices; I read the first book, but I disliked it enough that I read no more.*

I have decided that humor is the decisive factor. The Merchant Princes lacks humor from the narrator and the characters (at least in the first book); the other two series I mentioned have it. Wireless is a mix. I really didn't enjoy most of the stories, to be honest, though I felt that most were well-written. "Rogue Farm" left me cold (in an effective way), but "Palimpsest" made me want an hour of my life back. "A Colder War" is largely an early version of The Atrocity Archives: a similar universe, but with no humor and no characters that I really cared to follow; I want those minutes back, too.

The book is worth checking out of the library if only for "Down on the Farm," which comes after the first two books in The Atrocity Archives (the first being a novel plus a novella, the second a full novel) and before the third (The Fuller Memorandum—wait, why is that not in my pile to write up? Crud). It has the usual mix of humor and horror that makes me cringe, and yet I have to keep reading. Yes, it's Bob Howard again. Yes, he's in over his head. Isn't he always?




The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross: again, I didn't read this book right after what came before it, but I don't even know where the book is, so if I don't write about it now, odds that I will ever remember are low. I don't want to say too much because even telling you what characters do and don't appear is a spoiler for previous books.

I should reiterate that the horror is almost too much for me to stomach, but the humor and the characters I care about keep me going. I mostly enjoyed it. I want to forget some bits. I will read the next. I think I can give a one-line summary that may work not only for all past but all future Atrocity Archives books:

Bob Howard is in over his head. Again.

Stross published another book in the series a year ago or more that we don't even own yet. I'll have to get back to you on whether the tagline works for all the books. (And yes, it works for the first one, which includes flashbacks: Bob Howard was always already in over his head.)




The Broken Kingdoms by N. K. Jemison follows her Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, although it's not clear to me how much time has gone by. ("A lot of time" would probably be fair to say.) Most of the characters are new. Oree Shoth is an artist born blind who can only see when she creates real art. She finds a homeless man and takes him into her home. Everything goes to pot.

I liked this better than the first novel: I complained there that a first-person protagonist withheld information. Here, we have a first-person protagonist whose thoughts we truly follow, and I found the result more satisfying. (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was Jemison's first novel, so I'm not really surprised to find her second even better.) I also didn't have the nagging feeling that there were bloopholes.

This world has many gods who live and walk among human beings, but they are not omnipotent and omniscient. Their motives are not always identical to humans', or even comprehensible to us. The planet has a variety of cultures and religions (which is something I complain about with much SF tv, where worlds tend to be monolithic).

I enjoyed this book and eagerly await the next.




The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman proved a mostly enjoyable read. I really liked American Gods and loved Anansi Boys, but I didn't like Coraline or Stardust much at all.

So it seems that, with a sample of four books, I like Gaiman's adult fiction but not his children's fiction (setting aside screenplays, where it seems almost the reverse—Beowulf seemed to be aimed at adults, but was a total failure, but I've liked his Doctor Who scripts better, particularly "The Doctor's Wife").

I was pleasantly surprised that the opening of The Graveyard Book really drew me in. Chapters that followed were uneven and sometimes only loosely connected; Gaiman wrote a series of stories about a cast of characters rather than a novel. I think it helps to know that going in (I decided after the second or third chapter).

Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is being raised by ghosts in a graveyard because his parents entrusted him to them. He grows up in the course of the book, from an infant to a young man. The characters around him are colorful. Don't look for a whole lot of psychological realism here, any more than you'd look for scientific realism. I thought some episodes were much better than others.

I read this and the next book on the recommendation of The Progeny.†



Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs got off to an amazing start. The novel is based around a series of found photographs, as the author explains at the end. A teenaged boy in Florida has come to disbelieve his beloved grandfather's stories of how he grew up in a special home in Wales between escaping the Second World War and going back to fight in it. He thinks his grandfather's photos are just crude manipulations. Then something horrific happens, and he goes in search of the home to learn the truth. Photos frequently accompany the text.

The novel shows an amazing imagination, but towards the end, I began to feel that it had become restrained rather than inspired by the photos. I was completely dissatisfied at the end. I don't believe there are plans for a sequel, which is probably good, because I'd feel really torn between wanting to know what happens and feeling annoyed that this one didn't have a proper resolution.


I am out of gas and still not caught up. I bet I'm forgetting books. I'll have to do the two I've read most recently another time.

For next time:
The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers
Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks

Oh, and I remembered a third! Fool Moon by Jim Butcher! And I either didn't do the first one, Storm Front, or I neglected to tag one or more entries "books." I'll try to figure that out.


* Please pardon excessive linking. It's partly for anyone who might be interested, and partly so that I can find my own way back to other things in the future—having gone through my "books" tag to see if I'd written about these books, I want to know where to find them again if I want them!

†I'm going to try The Progeny and see if that sticks for the one who is no longer a Small Child. kristen_mara suggested keeping SC and changing what it stands for, which is a great idea, except that I Am NOT a Small Child would probably not go for that (and IANaSC is just too long). I really like her idea of "Supreme Commander," however, because she seems to think that she is. The Progeny would probably not be amused at these remarks, so please don't tell her I made them, at least until she has children of her own in, oh, a dozen or more years.