6. Terra Insegura by Edward Willett
One of the few science fiction novels I reviewed and loved this year, Willett’s sequel to Marseguro is exactly what science fiction needs: action, awesome ideas, and good characterization. No more good vs. bad plots. There’s so much grey in Willett’s book that it makes you really think about everything, from what occurred in the previous novel to what happens by the end. It’s absolutely a must for science fiction fans.

Shaun’s review of Terra Insegura is here; his review of Marseguro is here.

…Willett really shines at world-building. He brought Marseguro (the planet) to life for me and I enjoyed getting to know Earth of the Body Purified (which reminded me of Heinlein’s religious dictatorship of “If This Goes On –“ and Revolt in 2100), however briefly the action takes place there.

…Willett is a strong writer with a great concept and good story. Anyone who wants to read a novel that talks about tough ethical questions and has characters whose lives are in shades of grey will enjoy Marseguro.

I look forward to the promised review of Terra Insegura.

Nice!

Defining Diana

I’ll let the back cover copy handle the set-up:

Found naked and alone in a locked room, the beautiful woman was in perfect health–except she was dead…

It’s 2043 and much has changed: nuclear war, biotechnology and all-powerful corporations have transformed the world…

Now science is taking DNA manipulation to new, unrestricted levels.

Superintendent Frank Steele is an old-fashioned cop. He commands a small, elite police unit that is handed all the biazarre and baffling cases no one else can solve. He knows the money, murders, missing persons and gruesome body shops are all connected…

He knows it starts with the girl…

It does, indeed, start with the girl (name of Diana, hence the title), but it takes us through a fascinating panoply of intriguing (and disturbing) possibilities. There’s a thriving sub-culture of Borg, for example, humans who have been modified, not genetically, but through mechanical and electronic implants. There’s plenty of genetic manipulation going on, too, of course. There are crooked politicians and nefarious corporate thugs and plenty of greed to go around, and caught up in it are the aforementioned Frank Steele, the old cop who started on the force back in the good old days of, well, now, and his compatriots: David Ross, highly unstable and violence-prone, and with some really nasty personal habits; Willa O’Reilly, for whom Steele has a definite thing but who has her own issues related to her ex-husband (who turns out to have not been quite what she thought, in a number of ways); Cat Podnarski, the forensics expert with her own unfortunate man problems; Wannamaker the possibly corrupt Borg cop…they’re all memorable characters, and the interplay among them as they clamber, rather like insects in a spider’s web, through the complex strands of Trenholm’s plot, is what makes Defining Diana work so well. It’s all set in a much-changed but still recognizable Calgary (where Trenholm lived for many years).

If you like near-future science fiction of the dark and gritty kind, or present-day police procedurals, or (as I do), both, you’ll enjoy Defining Diana…and you’ll look forward to the sequel, which I understand is in progress.

I also enjoyed Defining Diana because its notions of what the ability to physically modify the human body and even program the human brain might mean for future society echo some of the themes in my own Marseguro and Terra Insegura.

Oh, and Defining Diana is, like Marseguro, a finalist for the Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English this year. Naturally I’d prefer that Marseguro wins…but Defining Diana would also be a worthy recipient.

In case I haven’t mentioned it recently: vote here.

A little bleaker, a little less “gosh-wow” sensawunda (due to familiarity), a lot closer to home, Terra Insegura is the perfect balance to Marseguro: you’ve got to read this one if you read the first. It does stand on its own, but why deny yourself the pleasure of the full literary tapestry Edward Willett weaves with these two?

And it ends, in part:

Willett keeps his characters moving all over the board, but always toward their stated goals (rational or not), which will just happen to intersect in an Earth-shaking conflagration. While I was disappointed each time a story-line chopped off, it brought me back to another I wanted to follow as well. Willett is well able to keep all his juggling balls in the air at the same time.…It’s a good story, a great mate to the first volume, but a little dark. It isn’t a tale of victory so much as a story of survival scratched from the jaws of annihilation.

Read the whole thing, but beware of spoilers!

See, summer before last I was visiting him in Kincardine, Ontario, and discovered that he had several of the early Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher  in paperback. I started reading them. But he was missing some. So then I ordered the omnibus editions available through the Science Fiction Book Club. And then I ran out of those…and found myself buying the hardcover versions of new ones as soon as they appeared.

Which is just a long-winded way of saying that I reall, really like the Dresden Files books. And the latest, Turn Coat, doesn’t disappoint.

One of Butcher’s strengths is his ability to weave together, over the course of many books, a wide range of plot threads. The veteran Warden Morgan has been Harry Dresden’s bane for years, obviously considering him a prime target for elimination on behalf of the White Council. But suddenly Morgan shows up at Harry’s apartment in need of sanctuary. Seems he’s been wrongly accused of treason against the White Council. And as the cover blurb puts it, “Now Harry must uncover a traitor within the Council, keep a less than agreeable Morgan under wraps, and avoid coming under scrutiny himself. And a single mistake may cost someone his head. Like Harry…”

Harry’s first-person voice is as engaging as ever, there are some really interesting developments involving an invisible sentient island out in Lake Michigan, we find out more than we really wanted to know about the internal workings of the White Court of vampires (with one particularly disturbing scene late in the book to remind you very forcibly that even though the White vampires don’t suck blood, they aren’t Nice People) , we see more of the workings of the White Council than ever before, there are some knock-down drag-out magic-and-mayhem battles and…

Well, it’s got everything you could ask for in a Harry Dresden book, in other words. But just remember: read one Dresden Files book, and you may, like me, find yourself starting down the road to an expensive addicition.

You’ve been warned.

City of Glass

There’s not much point in summarizing what happens in this one, since the only way anyone is ever going to read it is if they’ve read the first two and enjoyed them. Suffice it to say that all the angsty teens from the previous books, with star-crossed would-be-lovers-if-they-weren’t-siblings Clary and Jace and Clary’s best-friend-turned-vampire Simon at the centre of things, are here, that there are a number of big surprises in store for them (although I have to say I guessed the Biggest Surprise of All a long, long time before the author did the Big Reveal), some Very Bad Things happen (the death of one character in particular rather shocked me, but certainly demonstrated the author’s determination to keep the stakes high), and the ending satisfied. The Buffy vibes have lessened slightly since the first book, though I can’t deny both Buffy and Harry Potter came to mind at various times.

Nevertheless, if you’ve read the first two, I recommend this final volume. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

The cover, by the way, carries a blurb from Stephanie Meyer, who says, “The Mortal Instruments series is a story world that I love to live in. Beautiful!” Whether that’s a selling point or not may depend on how you feel about Twilight. Aside from envying her sales figures, I have no opinion on Meyer’s writing, not having read any of it. But I keep thinking maybe I should give it a try. After all, we both liked this…

(P.S. Although you probably shouldn’t read this one, or any of the Mortal Instrument books, hard on the heels of Peter V. Brett’s The Warded Man. There’s an eerie similarity to the magic systems, both of which involve the drawing of wards on a person’s flesh to enable them to better fight demons. Just coincidence, but I think Brett’s operating at a slightly higher level thatn Clare, both in writing and in storytelling (and of course he’s working in the adult rather than the YA arena, which gives him some advantages, complexity-wise), and while I still enjoyed City of Glass, I think its impact was oddly lessened by the echoes in my brain from my just-prior reading of The Warded Man.)

And I? I call it bunk.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love the musical. (Or at least I love the music; I haven’t had the chance to see it on stage.) In fact, it was the musical that brought my wife and I to the book, which we read together.

We should have just read a synopsis.

The faults we found are numerous. If the goal was to somehow make the Wicked Witch of the West sympathetic, it failed. She almost reached that point fairly early on, as a student at Shiz. As the book wore–and “wore” is absolutely the right word for what became, by the end, a tedious chore to read–her motivations made less and less sense until, at the denoument, she seems to have simply lost her mind for no reason except that the author had no other way of making things match up with the events of the original Wizard of Oz. She was almost completely passive throughout, far more of a victim than an active character, making very few choices of her own, acted on by forces beyond her control. Maybe that’s supposed to be more “realistic,” but it’s also boring, annoying, and ultimately unsatisfying. Throughout I felt the controlling hand of the author-as-puppeteer, making people do things simply because there were things that had to be done, not because it made much sense for them to do them.

And ultimately, I felt a kind of anger at Maguire for building a career that apparently consists primarily of taking the work of others and trashing it for his own purposes. Oh, I know, he’s “re-imagining it for our times.”

Well, bah. Also humbug.

And that much-vaunted “wordcraft”? Also overrated, in my opinion. At times Maguire’s attempts to set his prose soaring were downright laughable, at others well-nigh incomprehensible.

In the right hands–an accomplished fantasy writer, perhaps–a retelling of the life of the Wicked Witch of the West might well have been something special. But this retelling, the one we’re saddled with now, the one that has inexplicably become so popular, is nothing special at all. If you love the original Wizard of Oz, don’t read this book. If you enjoyed the musical, don’t read this book. Only read it if you’re so curious as to what the fuss is about that you absolutely must know for yourself why everyone raves about it…and don’t mind being potentially horribly disappointed.

Not recommended by me or my wife..though we’re apparently a minority of two.

We can live with that.

I loved them, and moved on to buy the next few in paperback. Now I am fully addicted and purchase them in hardcover the moment they appear. Which is how I came to read Storm from the Shadows.

Once again, I devoured it–but I have to say, if you aren’t already a fan of the “Honorverse,” you’d probably find the appeal hard to fathom. Weber tends to advance the plot through scene after scene of what, on television, would be called talking heads. People are forever getting together over (usually lovingly detailed) cups of coffee or other beverages and discussing things. In the process, of course, they’re telling the reader what’s going on, but still. For a purportedly action-packed series, there’s a high preponderance of conversation in wardrooms and boardrooms and restaurants and the like.

However, the action, when it does take place, is well done, fast and furious, and you never know for certain who will live or die once it kicks in–even long-established characters have been known to go out in a blaze of glory.

Weber has carefully crafted a future tech that makes battles between starships plausibly mimic battles between sailing ships of old, with “ships of the wall”, long-distance bombardments, and the like (though the similarities are waning as technology advances). Of course, he also spends pages and pages describing that technology in sometimes excruciating detail. I enjoy that sort of thing myself, but I suspect it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

I’m also noticing, this far into the series, certain phrases Weber overuses in describing his space battles. Ships are always “leaping in agony,” battle-steel is always buckling or shattering, etc. Unavoidable after so many books, and not really annoying…but noticeable.

Oh, the plot? Well, there’s not much point in delving into that, except to say that Honor herself is peripheral to this story, which focuses on Michelle “Mike” Henke, Honor’s best friend, and events that take place in parallel to what seemed much more important events in the last Honor Harrington book–but which, we realize as the book progresses, are in fact about to unleash all kinds of mayhem in future books.

Yes, I enjoyed this latest outing, though it’s almost a placeholder of a novel, a kind of novel-as-lever intended to force, with a sometimes audible grinding noise, the huge mass of the series into a new direction. But I suspect I’ll enjoy the next book more as the new threat introduced in Storm from the Shadows knocks everything in the Honorverse akimbo.

So: read it if you’re already a fan of the series. If you’re not, don’t start here. Go back to the very beginning.  On Basilisk Station and The Honor of the Queen are both still available for free in ebook form. But be warned: they’re habit-forming, and soon enough, like me, you may be hooked on the hard(cover) stuff.

There’s a long tradition of fabulous and exotic cities in fantasy fiction, from Gormanghast to Minas Tirith to Ankh-Morpork, but few that are stranger or more fascinating than Ararat, the city to which a man named Arjun comes in search of a missing god, only to find that it’s pretty much like tracing a needle in a haystack in place that is plagued with gods, where streets and buildings and whole neighborhoods change at the whim of the gods, and where no one is even certain what the gods are…or if they are gods at all.

On the day Arjun arrives, one of these gods, the Bird, soars over the city and changes everything. A young man named Jack gains the ability to fly and move with lightning speed. A sea captain takes command of a new ship that can likewise fly, but in the process loses the woman he loves. And soon Arjun crosses paths with a mysterious man who claims to capture bits of the gods in glass cases, sets one of those bits free, turns one of the gods into a monster…and then begins to learn some pretty peculiar abilities himself from another version of that same mysterious character.

It’s a complicated story full of politics and bloodshed, with a cast of characters straight out of Dickens or Shakespeare–but all of them are overshadowed by Ararat itself, which is really the main character, immense, inexplicable, and ever-changing, a combination of a memorable epic-fantasy city and metaphor for the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics writ large.

I liked Thunderer a lot, and I’m glad to hear there’s a sequel coming.  Gilman got my vote for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer on the strength of this book, so…highly recommended!