Archive for Reviews

Book Review: “Kraken” by China Mieville

When China Mieville’s The Scar — still my favorite book of his — came out, I was working for an over-the-air sci-fi-themed radio show which shall remain nameless. They booked an interview with Mieville, and as the board-op, I called him (I’m guessing at his hotel in Los Angeles or wherever he was), thanked him for being on the show, and potted him up when it was time for him to go on. The hosts talked to him about the novel, which was noteworthy to them I guess because it had a vampire in it. After about 15 minutes, they thanked him, and it was over*.

Mieville’s latest novel, Kraken, is about a giant squid in the same way The Scar is about a vampire.

Kraken is an extremely difficult book to summarize; Mieville’s plots often are. So instead I’m going to link you to this review by The Guardian. Their one-sentence precis is quite masterful:

Following the quest of museum curator Billy Harrow to recover his mysteriously vanished prize exhibit, the giant squid Architeuthis, Kraken plunges Billy and the reader into an alternative London of cults and magic.

Now that you know that, here’s what I liked (and didn’t) about the book:

When I first started reading the novel, I have to say I was — quite sadly — disappointed. Not with the content or the ideas, but with what I perceived to be the novel’s generic nature. It had many of the hallmarks of a fantasy story, and while each element was quite interesting… well, a $1000 hamburger at a gourmet restaurant still looks like a hamburger. To wit:

  • The main character, Billy Harrow, is about 30, intelligent, a little geeky (but not too much), and non-violent. Stuff happens to him. Eventually he takes control of that stuff.
  • Dane is a guard who is the key to the world of weird, and while our MC didn’t like him at first, it turns out he’s quite an important character.
  • There’s a trio of policemen who want Billy to work for them, and they come off kind of like Smith in the first Matrix, but it turns out that, hey, they’re not all bad.
  • Wisecracking female cop who knows more than her colleagues? Check.
  • Small god who is very helpful but can’t actually do anything.
  • This is the big one, the one that really ripped it for me: while the Big Bad Guys are the usual sort, it seems like most urban (or regular) fantasy contains two guys who speak with a funny patois or patter to their speech, are ruthless, love their jobs, and are feared by everyone. Yep. They’re totally there. And they commit murder and inventively-violent ways which, to me, seemed far too over-the-top even for Mieville, who, in the past, has had the arms of a dead child grafted onto its mother’s face as a form of punishment.

After the first 100 pages or so, I got into the swing of things and the generic feel of the characters went away. The use of conventions makes sense — it allows a fantasy reader to jump right into the world through the use of familiar characters, and casual readers are able to map character types onto the kind of characters they’re used to in, say, political thrillers or romantic comedies, thereby making what is often a very tough book to read just slightly easier.

And make no mistake: this isn’t the easiest book in the world to read. Mieville knows a lot of words, and he makes no bones about using them all — and not just in the order you’re used to. His writing is almost gymnastic in nature, and it forces you to pay attention to every bit of it in order to ensure you don’t miss anything. It’s really tough on those of us who are quick readers. He also continues to use very visceral and phantasmagoric verbal imagery — something I noticed in the New Crobuzon books — and, while it adds strength to the storytelling, sometimes it just gets tiring to have to think so hard about the words, instead of what they’re saying. (For example, when the Final Boss is revealed, and the monologue is given, I had trouble remembering the various clues that were given throughout the rest of the story as the Final Boss explained them.) I don’t mind working hard to read a book, but it can be too much from time to time.

I really enjoyed the book’s humor and genre awareness — for example: if you give a Star Trek fan the magical power to teleport, of course he’s going to beam everywhere he can. And speaking of Trek, one of Billy’s primary weapons throughout the novel is his phaser. It really works. In some places, Mieville basically says “yeah, this genre convention is crap, here’s how it really is when a magical practitioner does it”. That works too. One of his strengths is that every little bit of the world is fully-realized, which means the novel is packed full of little moments of win.

Also on the positive column is the sheer amount of cool and different powers the denizens of London possess. Smoking reality, teleportation, burning something so thoroughly it never even existed, creating a demonically-possessed iPod… there are dozens, and they’re all interesting. As are the end-of-the-world cults and the weird religions, the Embassy of the Sea, and the penultimate Boss Fight (think Jenova, with the final boss being Sephiroth).

Kraken is Mieville at his creative best, building a detailed and immersive world with a complex and layered plot that — in this case, quite literally — could mean the end of the world. The novel certainly has its flaws, as I noted above, but it’s definitely a good story, exciting and enjoyable to read. It’s no The Scar, but I think it’s a better book than The City and The City (which I didn’t really enjoy that much). I for one would’ve preferred another visit to New Crobuzon, but this is almost as good.

So, if this book’s just sitting on your bookshelf, gathering dust, perhaps it’s time to —

— oh, yes, I’m going there —

RELEASE THE KRAKEN!

funny dog pictures-Release the Kraken!

* One would think the guy who had actually read the first novel in the New Crobuzon cycle might have helped in the prep for the interview. But that didn’t happen. If only I’d known how big a fan of Mieville’s I’d become, I’d have gotten in on the ground floor there.

Book Review: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald is the kind of science fiction novel that rewards the attentive reader. It begs its fans to create timelines and diagrams and carefully-plotted maps of the characters’ paths through the Queen of Cities. I felt I was missing layers of meaning, and if I just took the time to do the math, to make a map, I could discover the clever synchronicities and hidden stories that I missed on my first read. It may just be an illusion created by the quantity of detail crammed into this book, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Dervish House covers a week in the lives of a group of people in Istanbul as they move through a morass of religion, technology, terrorism, commodities trading, and deals made over ancient artifacts. The drama begins when a suicide bomber strikes on the tram line. Nobody except the bomber dies — that wasn’t the point of the attack. The effects of the explosion ripple outward. One character miss a job interview. Another send his Kid Detective spy robots out to see what happened. Still another makes a note of how high the stocks for a bombing had gotten on the Terror Market.

From there, events spin out of anyone’s control. One of the last Greeks in Istanbul must finally face the consequences of his misspent youth. A group of day traders conspire to divert crude oil from Iran’s radioactive oil fields to Baku, and thereby turn themselves into instant millionaires. A nine-year-old boy hunts for terrorists while the squatter in his basement sees visions of djinni. Across the street, a woman searches for the tomb of a mummy who was embalmed in honey — the legendary Mellified Man, whose flesh is said to have healing powers to rival a unicorn’s horn, and who may have never existed in the first place.

From a science fiction point of view, one of the more interesting aspects of The Dervish House is the way McDonald makes nanotech scary without resorting to a gray goo scenario. In fact, explicitly denies that scenario. He points out that we already live in a world filled with replicating micro-bots: We call them bacteria. The problem with nanotech is not that it might drown the world under a blanket of ooze, but that it could be used to reprogram the human mind on the scale of an epidemic. Simultaneously, he presents this as nanotech’s great promise — that we could turn every person’s body into a living computer of vast capacity.

I first heard of Ian McDonald in discussions of The Windup Girl. The Dervish House has the same sort of complex plotting and frenetic pace as The Windup Girl, but with far more complexity and optimism and both in the setting and in the characters. Yes, there is global warming to deal with, and nasty geopolitics, and the threat of technology used for evil, but there is also beauty and hope in McDonald’s Istanbul. In a way, The Dervish House calls to mind my favorite parts of my beloved cyberpunk — flying through filthy, glorious cities, watching brilliant people struggling in the space between corrupt governments and ruthless corporations.

The Dervish House is supremely clever. I have a feeling that I’ve missed many of the jokes (although there are some good ones about a science fiction writer who plays a minor role in the story). A reader who is knowledgeable in Turkish politics and history would probably get much more out of this book than I did. However, The Dervish House contains enough detail to get its readers through the various intrigues without resorting to tedious infodumps. This is probably not a book that will change your life, but it is a lot of fun.

Book Review: “Super Sad True Love Story” by Gary Shteyngart

Warning: the following book review contains explicit language, which is quoted directly from the novel. Reader discretion is advised.

I find most near-future-world-gone-mad stories hit-or-miss. Either they try too hard, or the characters are too flat, or the ideas are just too far out there (or not far out there enough). But occasionally I’ll find one that has the perfect mix of stuff I like.

With Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, I got lucky.

Super Sad True Love Story is a hilariously-scary near-future love story about a 39-year-old man named Lenny Abramov, clearly based at least in part on Shteyngart himself. The son of Jewish Russian immigrants who moved to New York before he was born, Lenny grew up with all the Russian pessimism, Jewish guilt, and immigrant pride that those folks were wont to do. Now he works for a multinational corporation’s Post Human Services division, selling life extensions to HNWIs (high net worth individuals). Our story begins with him finishing up a year in Italy, trying to make sales and failing spectacularly, living in a way considered dangerous by his coworkers (eating too many carbs, drinking too much wine), going to parties, and trying to figure out how he’s going to explain to his boss and close friend Joshie why he hasn’t hooked any clients.

At a party, Lenny runs into Eunice Park, spending time in Italy between her graduation from college and her entry into law school. Eunice, the daughter of Korean immigrants living in New Jersey, is very thin, very pretty, and very much a product of her environment. Lenny falls in love with her instantly, and through a strange confluence of circumstances manages to take her to bed.

Using first-person accounts from Lenny’s diary and Eunice’s GlobalTeens account (more on that shortly), the book then follows Lenny and Eunice as they separate and get back together, return to New York, and try to build a relationship.

Until America falls.

From a science-fictional perspective, Super Sad True Love Story is the standard “America loses power while Europe and China grow in strength, America falls, America is rebuilt” story I’ve read in various short-stories and novels over the years. But where the novel shines is in the author’s uncanny predictions of the near future*. Here are some:

Money: The dollar is as devalued as the currency in current third-world nations, but most upper- or middle-class Americans use yuan, or “yuan-pegged dollars”, which are worth more. Right now, if I’m reading the news right, the dollar isn’t as well-respected globally as it used to be. Also, in the book, several nations are run by their largest companies — StatOil in Norway, HSBC in the UK (which is now called HSBC-London), Stability in Canada, and Petro in Russia. Mergers are rampant, too; Eunice’s bank is AlliedWasteCVSCitigroup, and LandOLakes also apparently has a financial wing.

Technology: Phones have been replaced by an umlaut-laden version of the word apparatus, “apparat”. People rarely speak (or “verbal”) to each other, preferring to use apparati to instantly find out about others. This is already happening; people on dates, trying to build relationships, would rather sit and stare at their phones than actually speak to each other. Apparati are also getting smaller and smaller, and are able to bring in more and more information; while cell phones have actually gotten slightly larger, the other half is already happening. (The book also has a very clever dig against iPhones in it.) Oh, and the sheer amount of information Lenny can get about Eunice as he flies back from Italy is staggering and scary — credit information, friends, photos, addresses, shopping trends…

Social Networking: Today, everyone and everything is on Facebook, and Facebook can suck in all your different social networks — Twitter, Foursquare, GetGlue, etc. In Super Sad True Love Story, everyone — adults, kids, professionals — uses a social network called GlobalTeens. Eunice happens to write long letters to her best friend Jenny, who lives in California (where Eunice used to live), and GlobalTeens keeps telling her that people don’t read anymore, that she should send image messages or video streams instead.

TV News: There are apparently only two 24-hour news channels, FoxLiberty-Prime and FoxLiberty-Ultra. Lenny’s parents watch these. Everyone else gets their news from media streams, which can come from anywhere, including Lenny’s friend Noah (who does a political stream) and Noah’s girlfriend Amy (who, despite being in perfect shape, runs the “Muffintop Hour”). This is sort of a riff on Current, and others who have YouTube or UStream shows.

Devaluation of Shock: Slang has gotten more and more extreme. JK, for example, has become “JBF”, or “just butt-fucking”. Eunice talks to Jenny about porn they watched together as children (and the context indicates this is completely normal). The terms AssLuxury and AssDoctor are thrown around with impunity. One of Noah’s friends runs a liberal-slanting news stream intercut with explicit video of hardcore homosexual sex. The pervasiveness of porn and the subsequent imitation of acts seen in it is described in Jenny’s letters to Eunice about parties where it is normal for people to have pornographic-style sex in company. A top retailer of clothes for women and men is JuicyPussy. The hot new jeans trend is called Onionskin, which are completely transparent. “TotalSurrenders” are women’s undergarments that pop right off with the touch of a button. And we complain about pants on the ground…

Rating Everything: Walking through New York City, Lenny passes credit poles, which display his high rating (1520). Apparati can rank everyone in the room to see who the most desirable men and women are. Personality and fuckability are measured on a scale of 0 to 800. At Lenny’s office (a converted synagogue — actually kind of a cool image), an arrivals/departures train board shows what kind of mood everyone is in.

American Patriotism: In the novel, America is very much in decline. Poorly-spelled signs from the American Restoration Authority claim “Together We’ll Go Far” (the Wells Fargo slogan; I knew it sounded familiar) and various other vaguely-positive messages about change. Anti-immigrant sentiment is strong, and people who don’t look like “‘Murricans” (in the Fox News sense of the word) are grouped by metaphor or stereotype — Chinese people save, Latinos spend or have bad credit, and so on. As things get worse, roadblocks are set up throughout New York, plastered with signs saying that, by reading the sign, citizens deny the existence of the checkpoint while implying their consent to let the ARA do whatever it needs to do. And while the use of apparati is permitted on airplanes, the closest Lenny can get to JFK to meet Eunice’s plane is somewhere on the Van Wyck Expressway, at an ARA checkpoint patrolled by National Guardsmen with automatic weapons.

The novel is full of clever wordplay, prescient references, hilarious-while-being-vaguely-uncomfortable interactions between characters, and a scenario about the end of America that will frighten the hell out of you because it’s completely plausible. It’s also vaguely reminiscent of the way Muggle Britain was unaware of the war between Voldemort and the Order during HP6 and HP7. I really enjoyed reading it, and I got through it quickly — it’s an easy read, and I’ve always found humor to go faster than tragedy. I’d call this a satire more than anything else, but I think it also fits into sci-fi in the same way as films like Gattaca and Code 46**, and its exaggeration of what’s happening now echoes the “Would You Like To Know More” moments of Paul Verhoeven’s adaptation of Starship Troopers. I definitely recommend Super Sad True Love Story.

And I’m not JBF.

* I believe the book takes place in the 2030s (possibly the 2020s or 2040s). I can’t recall it ever being explicitly stated, and I wasn’t able to easily infer it.

** A quick rant about “Code 46” — I really liked the film, and thought it was beautifully-shot with great sets and locations. It doesn’t have any cursing, and there’s no explicit violence, but it’s rated R. Why? Because in one scene, actress Samantha Morton is shown from the front with her bottom half completely uncovered. Meanwhile, films suffused with violence like “The Dark Knight” and “Batman Begins” are PG-13. What does it say about us as a culture that we’re more afraid of a one-second shot of the place that babies come from than our tweens and teens seeing a pencil jammed through a guy’s eye and the aforementioned guy stumbling around in pain for at least five times that long?

Film Review: “Tangled”

For as long as my daughter has been alive, I’ve pledged not to be one of those parents — you know, the ones who bring kids to inappropriate films*, or bring kids with inappropriate behavior to films.

Well, we managed for four years. But when my daughter’s best friend’s mom suggested we all get together and see “Tangled”, I couldn’t very well say no. And off we went.

“Tangled” is your standard modern-day-Disney riff on the old “Rapunzel” story. In this version, however, Rapunzel’s parents are the king and queen, and they didn’t need an enchantress to help conceive her. Instead, the enchantress has been hiding a magical flower which bestows eternal youth and health. But when the queen falls ill late in her pregnancy, her soldiers find the flower and she drinks a potion made of it. Her illness is cured, and when Rapunzel is born, the baby’s magical hair can cure anyone who knows the secret song. At first the enchantress just wants to steal a lock of Rapunzel’s hair, but when she finds out it only works if the magic is freely given, she steals the baby.

Fast-forward 18 or so years, to Rapunzel’s 18th birthday. She’s been locked in a tower all this time, thinking the enchantress (Mother Gothel) is her real mother. But the tower isn’t a terrible place; other than no human contact with anyone other than Mother Gothel, Rapunzel is free to read, dance, paint, sing, cook, play music, or do anything else that suits her. However, for her birthday all she wants is to see the floating lights — a huge flock of floating lanterns released on the birthday of the lost princess. Mother Gothel says no, and Rapunzel resigns herself to her fate.

And then Flynn Rider, a thief, shows up. He, along with some henchmen, stole the lost princess’s crown, but when the palace guards get too close, he escapes and stumbles upon the tower. Rapunzel promptly hits him with a cast-iron frying pan, makes a deal with him — “you guide me to see the lights, and I’ll give you back your satchel, which you seem so very intent on retrieving” — and off they go on a madcap adventure full of singing, amusing animals, derring-do, and, because it’s Disney, love between the rascally-yet-kindhearted male character and the naive-yet-courageous princess just on the cusp of legal adulthood.

The animation in “Tangled” definitely lives up to the Disney name — the lighting, color, art, and movement are gorgeously-done. However, I was less than impressed with some of the voice synching — there were areas I definitely noted that didn’t look quite right. The music was also very good, for what it was — audio wallpaper, except for the singing parts — but it isn’t a soundtrack I want to buy instantly (compared to, let’s say, “Stardust”, where I actually paused the DVD to go on iTunes and buy the soundtrack right away). The songs didn’t blow me away either, except for the first two numbers — Rapunzel’s song about her day, and Mother Gothel’s “Mother Knows Best”. I feel kind of bad saying that because I’m actually related to the lyricist (he’s my cousin) and if you don’t go see the movie or buy the soundtrack that probably has some impact on how much he gets paid, but I’m not going to lie to you. The duet between Rapunzel and Flynn wasn’t all that inspired, and the song about the henchmen and their dreams wasn’t all that different from any other song like it in any other princess-centered animated film. Fortunately, there aren’t that many songs in the film.

The cast for the film was rather small — in fact, the king and queen don’t have any lines at all. Mandy Moore plays Rapunzel, and she’s quite good. Zachary Levi (Chuck from “Chuck”) is Flynn, and you can just hear him playing half the lines as Charles Carmichael***. Donna Murphy (Picard’s love interest in “Star Trek: Insurrection”) is Mother Gothel, and she’s clearly having a good time doing the role. Ron Perlman, Jeffrey Tambor, and Brad Garrett also appear. The best acting, however, comes from the obligatory Disney animal characters. First is Pascal, Rapunzel’s pet chameleon, who conveys a wide range of emotion with only his eyes and tail, and gets to stick his tongue into… well, you’ll just have to see it. And second is Maximus, the horse of the captain of the guard. He really steals the show. “Played” as more of a large dog than a horse, he has some of the best moments in the film. I mean, it is a Disney film; one thing they know how to do is animal characters. His duel with Flynn is one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen this year.

One thing I do want to talk about before I close is death. This film contains three direct references to death — two characters actually die, and you also see a hangman’s noose as one character is led off to be executed. I saw this film with a four-and-a-half-year-old and a three-year-and-eleven-month-old. The latter child I think handled it better because she’s seen a lot of Disney films, but my daughter hasn’t really been exposed to death beyond the passing of one of our cats a year or so ago. It was hard to explain to her what the hangman’s noose was and why the character was so afraid to see it, and it was even harder to make sure she understood why the other two characters died. One of their deaths was the classic Disney “cursed by their own hubris”, but the other was… well, I’m not going to mince words: someone got stabbed. The film is rated PG for “brief mild violence”, so I guess someone being stabbed to death qualifies as mild these days, but I really didn’t expect it. My daughter wasn’t traumatized or anything, and the story does have a happy ending (it is a Disney animated film), but it’s something to think about if you’re bringing a young child.

Also, make sure your child understands the concept of being kidnapped as a baby and raised by an evil enchantress who only seems like a nice person, or else you’ll be answering questions throughout the entire film. As I said before, Mother Gothel isn’t really evil… at least, not until Rapunzel defies her and leaves the tower.

And finally, not that it really matters, but there’s a huge plot hole in the film: what exactly is Mother Gothel doing with her eternal youth and good health? Just… living forever? Seems kind of silly to me. What’s the point of having those things if you don’t use them? It’s never addressed, and as an adult, it bothers me. Kids won’t mind, though.

Overall I enjoyed the film, although I’m kind of miffed that I paid $26.50 for it (two adults at $9.50 and one child at $7.50). I give it 2.5 stars if you’re an adult, and 3.5 if you’re a kid — this is the kind of stuff kids love these days, apparently, and I can’t imagine any kids going and not enjoying themselves. Still, it’s PG for a reason, so make sure your child understands the Disney interpretations of kidnapping and death before plunking them down. It’s 100 minutes long, too, which makes me happy — I hate paying theaters for anything under 90.

* When I saw 28 Days Later, there was a woman there with a child who couldn’t have been more than six. And as you know if you’ve seen it, the film is full of violent images and, in the very first scene, Cillian Murphy’s penis**.

** I really hope that phrase doesn’t screw up Escape Pod’s Google ranking.

*** Does he still do that character? I haven’t watched Chuck since the end of Season 2.

Film Review: “Ponyo”

About a year ago, I started hearing buzz about a Japanese animated film called Ponyo. I knew it was directed by Hayao Miyazaki, known in the U.S. for, among other things, “Nausicaa: Valley of the Wind”, “My Neighbor Totoro”, “Spirited Away”, and “Princess Mononoke”. My first exposure to Miyazaki was with “Mononoke”, and while I enjoyed the animation and the story, the ending threw me a bit. Then, later, when I saw “Spirited Away”, I felt the same — mostly starting when the main character took the train away from where she was working.

But then I heard people saying that the first 20 minutes or so of “Ponyo” made no sense, and were just beautifully-drawn sea scenes. So I mentally shelved it and figured I’d come back to it at some point.

Enter Netflix, which I just subscribed to. Netflix, which had “Ponyo” in HD.

Well, one Saturday night, my daughter wanted to watch a movie, so I suggested “Ponyo” — it was age-appropriate, and contained nothing more objectionable than occasional scary images (according to what I read before showing it to her). We had dinner, settled in, and began to watch.

She was hooked. Completely captivated. And so was I.

“Ponyo” is a riff on the classic “Little Mermaid” tale of the fish who wants to be human. However, in this story, the fish who wants to be human is the half-human-half-fish daughter of a human sorcerer and the goddess of mercy. While exploring the sea near a Japanese harbor town, she is caught up in a net that is dredging the sea bottom, cleaning up trash, and eventually washes up in the shallows near the home of five-year-old Sosuke. Sosuke saves her from the glass bottle that’s got her trapped, and there he names her Ponyo (her given name is Brunhilde). Later, Sosuke takes Ponyo to his school, shows her to his friends and the old women next door (his school is beside a Senior Center, where his mother works), and eventually loses her to the sea when her father uses magic to retrieve her.

And then it gets weird. Because, you see, Ponyo has fallen in love with Sosuke and will do anything to be with him, including defying her father, stealing his magic elixirs, and transforming into a human girl. In doing so, she creates a massive storm which nearly washes Sosuke’s mother’s car off the road and ends up submerging the entire town in what is some of the coolest artwork I’ve seen in anime lately.

Because “Ponyo” is directed at children, you know the ending will be happy. But there’s plenty of adventure to be had, lots of humor — once Ponyo gets to Sosuke’s house, there’s several moments my daughter and I both LOL’d at — and and ending that, while somewhat neatly-wrapped-up (what about all those flooded houses and shops?), is still satisfying.

The artwork in “Ponyo” is beautiful, as befits a Miyazaki film, and you really feel like you’re in that harbor town with Sosuke. The mother, Lisa, is somewhat cliched (think Misato Katsuragi at her most stressed-out), but she’s a good character nonetheless. The seniors with whom she works provide plenty of comic relief, as does some of what Ponyo’s father gets up to. And then, when the town is submerged, the adventure Sosuke and Ponyo go on is quite a cool sequence.

Because the film was made by a Japanese studio and written by a Japanese writer, there are some things the characters do that don’t track. It’s hard to explain to my four-year-old why Sosuke’s mother is leaving him alone for the night — from what I know of Japanese culture, kids are a bit more self-sufficient than American kids of the same age, but still, Sosuke is only five — and the food they eat is very different from what she has in the morning. I mean, I’ve never given my daughter a ham sandwich for breakfast*. She also didn’t understand the supermarket, and I don’t think she comprehended that the reason none of the letters looked familiar was because it was another language. But these are small things.

The voice acting was probably the weakest part of the film, at least for me. Tina Fey didn’t do a very good job as Lisa, and the girl who played Ponyo (the youngest Cyrus sister) had a very annoying voice. Of course, that was part of her character, but still… annoying. The youngest Jonas brother played Sosuke, and he was all right. Liam Neeson played Ponyo’s father, and while he sounded mostly like a put-upon Irish father, that really wasn’t right for the role — despite the character’s appearance. The best voice acting by far was done by the women who played the ladies at the senior center — Betty White and Lily Tomlin.

If you’re a Miyazaki completist, or you want to see a really beautifully-drawn film, I’d say you should watch “Ponyo”. Your younger kids will like it, and older ones will sit through it without too much difficulty. At least, the first time. I liked it for the artwork, and for its humor. But overall, I don’t think it was as strong as some of Miyazaki’s other films, despite the strength of Sosuke’s character and the way he sees the world he lives in. In some ways the hyperactivity of Ponyo’s character and viewpoint actually detract from the story as a whole, and it’s at its best when Sosuke is the center of attention. Still, I’d say it deserves most of the praise it’s received, despite my problems with it.

If you’re a kid, it probably gets four stars (out of four). My daughter certainly considers it her new favorite, and loves to sing the theme song. But for adult audiences, I’d consider it a three-star film.

* Actually, we keep kosher, so she’ll never have one anyway, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Review: For the Win by Cory Doctorow

I don’t play MMORPGs. I never have. They’re just too big for me. If I’m going to play a RPG, it’s going to be something I can play by myself, with lots of cut-scenes and a hint book — because, in my opinion, the best part about RPGs isn’t figuring out that you need to combine the Widget of Destiny with the Wilted Flower to create a Magical Key of Awesomeness. It’s playing the game like an interactive movie with battle sequences.

Which is why I love Final Fantasy VII and X so very much.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t also thoroughly enjoy Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, For the Win.

For the Win, ostensibly a YA novel (I’d say “mature YA”), contains some pretty heavy concepts, most of them dealing with economics, gaming, labor, employee rights, and the way totalitarian governments deal with lawbreakers. But fortunately, that’s not all it’s about.

For the Win follows a few major characters and spans the entire near-future Earth (much in the same way that Doctorow’s Little Brother was just around the corner in terms of its timeline). In California, Leonard Goldberg dreams of going to China to meet his guildmates in Svart… Svartal… Some-Long-Viking-Word Warriors. In Atlanta, Connor Prikkel works to protect Coca-Cola’s games division from people who game the system. In India, Mala forms an army to take on gold farmers at the behest of the games companies themselves. In China, Matthew Fong uses his savant-like strategies to get the best stuff from games. Also in China, we have Jiandi, a radio host very popular with the downtrodden factory girls — the young women who make a huge amount of stuff Westerners take for granted. And then, I believe in Indonesia or Malaysia, we find the trio of Big Sister Nor, Justbob, and The Mighty Krang, who just want gold farmers to have the same rights as everyone else.

Far more complicated than Little Brother, For the Win requires readers to keep all these characters and their motivations straight in their heads, while also keeping track of the different game worlds in which they all play. S-Word Warriors, Mushroom Kingdom, and Zombie Mecha are the three main ones, but Doctorow also gives us glimpses into others, such as Magic of Hogwarts, which I for one would really like to play. But like Little Brother, For the Win educates as well as entertains. Most gamers have at least heard of gold farmers, of boys and young men in China playing games to make money and get big items that can be sold to people who don’t have eight hours a day, every day, to level their characters up. What For the Win does is reminds us that these gold farmers, while they do get to play games all day, are still doing work, and if they’re in one of the many countries where workers don’t have rights… well, things can get ugly. Especially if they demand what even the most slacker teen working at Taco Bell has here in the U.S. (and much of the West).

It’s a big concept, and not something that every YA reader will be able to wrap his or her head around. Doctorow does a great job of breaking down the economics and the labor issues into understandable chunks, but I don’t think a tenth-grade teacher could give this book to an average English class and expect all the students to grasp everything as well as, say, a college freshman or early-30s writer could do. Not the author’s fault; like I said, these are big concepts, much bigger than Little Brother‘s relatively-simple “freedom to do what we want, without being spied upon, so long as we’re not harming anyone” message.

This book is also pretty violent. Kids are hurt, and even killed; there’s one scene where a murder takes you completely by surprise because you’re expecting something different to happen. The police beat and jail young teens and adults alike. There’s riots, narrow escapes, unjust imprisonments, and a disproportionate number of kicks or punches to the groin area — for a book as short as For the Win, I really did notice it. I guess that’s intentional — not every YA reader has been beaten up by the police, but I’m going to bet that most boys, by the age of 18, have taken at least one shot to the nads and can therefore identify with the pain the characters are going through.

I realize now that this review has been fairly dark so far, which isn’t fair to the tone of the book — Doctorow’s writing is quick and witty, full of contemporary phrases that the intended audience will totally grok. And there’s lots of hopeful moments, such as when Leonard realizes his dream only to find out that what his parents were putting him through was nothing compared to the lives his friends in China have to deal with, and then watching him rise to the occasion. Plus the irrepressible good humor of Jiandi, Ashok’s insistence that everything is going to be all right if only people listen to him, and of course the ending. I can’t tell you much about it, because it would be spoiler-y, but if you’ve ever read a YA novel where kids are the heroes and adults are the villains, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea what happens.

I really enjoyed For the Win, and I enjoyed it even more because Doctorow makes all his books available for free on his website. I read this as a PDF on my iPad — the first electronic book I’ve read for pleasure* — and if you have a device that can read PDFs, you can just download it. But that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with picking it up in the store. I’m fairly certain that most people have done so (or at least bought a Kindle/Nook version).

I wouldn’t recommend this book to someone just picking up Doctorow for the first time (although it is pretty accessible). However, if there’s a gamer in your life that you want to start reading books instead of killing orcs, this is definitely one to buy. Technically-minded people will also appreciate the level of detail and research in the novel, and genre readers will see all of this happening just around the corner.

For the Win. Full of win.

* I had to read Wealth of Nations on a website for one of my seminar courses in college. White Courier font on a black background. My eyes hurt. A lot.

Review: Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen

Every now and then, a sci-fi or fantasy novel or series comes along that completely redefines your definition of “the best sci-fi book I’ve read”. Which is not to say it’s the best book ever, or that everyone who reads it will love it.

However, in the case of author Sean McMullen’s Souls in the Great Machine, I feel comfortable saying “you’re going to like this book”.

SOTM, released in 1999 as a single-book version of McMullen’s Voices in the Light (1994) and Mirrorsun Rising (1995), takes place in Australia, in the future, after a worldwide event called Greatwinter led to the end of modern technology as we know it. No cars, only trains — many powered by wind or by passengers doing the pedaling. No phones, only beamflash — long-distance semaphore similar to the Clacks. And no computers.

Until a young woman named Zarvora Cybeline decides to build a computer.

The thing is, she can’t do it with electronic machines, because the Wanderers — satellites left in orbit from the technological age — will blow electronic and fuel-powered machines out of existence the moment they sense them.

What’s a girl to do? Well, if you’re Zarvora, you take over the most powerful entity in Australia — Libris, the library system — and conscript criminals and numerate individuals to sit in a huge room and do calculations for you. Occasionally you’ll have to duel someone — with flintlock firearms — or take over the government, but when you want to prevent the end of the world (again), sometimes a girl’s got to get her hands dirty.

Into this world, we bring a cast of characters that you’ll enjoy the hell out of, including such rogues as:

  • Lemorel: an extremely intelligent librarian who you should never, ever wrong. Because she’ll kill you.
  • Glasken: a chemistry student with a taste for fine wine and fine women. Guess who he ends up with.
  • Theresla: an abbess from a far-off region who, it’s said, eats grilled mice on toast. When she can find toast.
  • Ilyire: a driven, dangerous man who you’d be glad to have at your back. Just make sure he’s on your side first.
  • Dolorian: a beautiful junior librarian who knows exactly how many buttons of her blouse should be undone at any time.

These characters, and all the other inhabitants of Australia, are subject to a strange force — the Call — which sweeps across the land, forcing those caught unawares to walk south, to some unimaginable fate. No one knows where the Call comes from, and only a few can predict it, and no one can resist it. Precautions are taken — belt anchors, mercy walls, and the like — but if you’re caught, you’re gone.

Lest you think nothing actually happens in the book, I assure you there’s murder, mischief, sex, love, war, technology, and a whole lot of humor. In fact, McMullen is one of the most consistently humorous writers I’ve encountered who isn’t specifically writing a humorous tale.

The book itself is massive — a small-print mass-market paperback version is almost 600 pages — but into those pages you’ll find a world unlike many others, a world of intelligence and honor, chivalry and technology, science and religion, and much, much more. Oh, and for some reason, lots of talk about breasts — I’m going to be honest here: one thing McMullen does in both the Greatwinter and Moonworlds sagas is show his characters’ appreciation for that part of the female anatomy. It’s not like there’s a Hooters in Rochester (the Australian city around which much of this book takes place), but trust me. You’ll notice it.

And if you really like the book, don’t fret — there’s volumes two and three, The Miocene Arrow and Eyes of the Calculor. I personally think Souls is the best of them, and it does stand alone; you don’t have to read the other two.

I’d love to tell you everything about my favorite scenes — Denkar meeting Black Alpha’s true face, learning about resistance to the Call and how exactly that works, Glasken’s time with Theresla as well as his escape from the most dangerous fighting monks in the land, and the final duel between the villain and… well, I can’t tell you that. I don’t want to spoil the book for you — especially when, as I said, this is the book that, to me, redefined my personal definition of “best” when it comes to SF novels. It has everything I like — full characters, a sweeping story, great worldbuilding, and enough action to keep me interested without taking away from the science and technology*.

Buy this book. Read it. It’s worth it. Trust me.

* And breasts. Hey, I’m a lech, but at least I’m a charming one. Right? Anyone?

Review: The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne Valente

The Habitation of the Blessed, being the first volume of A Dirge for Prester John, is the newest addition to the long and honorable tradition of fan fiction dedicated to a 12th-century forgery. The original letter described a kingdom in the generically exotic and conveniently distant “east,” where a Christian priest ruled a nation of improbable creatures, and oh-by-the-way also the Fountain of Youth. The letter went viral, spawning argument, analysis, fan fiction, and ill-fated military expeditions whose commanders though Prester John would show up with his griffins and his lions to help with the Crusades. It stayed popular for the next five hundred years, until Europeans got far enough east to realize that Prester John had never existed.

More information about the historical Letter of Prester John can be found at the handy Prester John website.

Catherynne Valente’s book takes on the myth from a science fiction point of view, asking the practical questions of — How did a random Christian guy end up king of all these incredible people? How does a society made of so many radically different people, from the talking griffons to the headless Blemmyes, actually work? And what is life like for people who drink from the Fountain of Youth?

The world she builds on this foundation is like nothing I have seen before. If I had to, I suppose I could compare it to the way I remember Narnia, before someone pointed out all the Christian symbolism and I grew old enough to wonder where the tea and sugar came from. Catherynne Valente does a remarkable thing in a book with one foot in a medieval bestiary: Not one of her characters is a symbol. Each of them, even the ones we only meet briefly, feels as real as any of the people I see every day. At one point our heroes meet a man who is digging endless tunnels through the mixture of air and sea that has smothered his city. He has the head of a goat, and his circumstances are strange even by local standards, but in a crisis he puts his head down and gets to work, trusting everyone else to do the same.

The superbly-drawn characters make the framing narrative and structure easy to follow. The Habitation of the Blessed has at least four major narrative tracks — the story of Hagia, fierce and beautiful, who forces Prester John to see her as a person and not just as an upsetting body, the story of Imtithal and the queen’s children, Prester John’s own story, and the story of the monks who followed him.

Prester John himself has the potential to be just another Christian man who arrives in a foreign country, fails to understand or even acknowledge the beliefs of the locals, and decides that God wants him to be in charge (why they never seem to use the premises that 1-their God is supposed to be omnipotent and 2-the locals are getting along fine to deduce that 3-God is ok with the status quo… is a topic for another time.) Like the rest of the characters, though, he isn’t a just symbol or a message, and it’s hard not to feel for him as he tries to make sense of the bizarre world in which he finds himself, as the people he meets challenge and overturn his most deeply held beliefs, just by existing.

I didn’t want to put The Habitation of the Blessed down and read something else, but I ran out of pages. It comes to a conclusion of sorts, though there is clearly more story left to tell. My only consolation is the promise of a sequel.

Review: Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

While I do not read romances, and I have not read a book by Jane Austen since high school, I nevertheless decided to pick up Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal. She is a brilliant writer, and I trusted her to write something I could endure. As it turned out, enduring the book wasn’t a problem — the hard part was putting it down.

The choice of detail in Shades of Milk and Honey is exquisite. Everything is described in spare, precise language. I can still see the glass cherries, the nymph’s face hidden in the tree, the dark and stormy bedroom of a heartsick girl. There is not a single wasted word or padded scene. That makes Shades of Milk and Honey a quick read. There is very little action until the dramatic ending, but that does not slow the narrative down. The majority of the book is concerned with interactions between people — with word and gesture, thought and response. I found it enthralling.

I believe the plot will be familiar to readers of romance. Two sisters named Jane and Melody try to walk the narrow path that society has marked for them, with the threat of scandal and ruin pressing in on both sides. Mary Robinette Kowal does not pull her punches in her portrayal of traditional marriage as an economic arrangement between families. As the sisters cannot inherit, they must either marry well or fall into poverty when their father dies. Romance in this setting is a matter of survival. Melody, who is beautiful, has no shortage of suitors. Jane, on the other hand, is cursed with a big nose and brown hair, and believes that she will never find a husband.

The aspect of the book that has gotten the most attention is its magic. Mary Robinette Kowal has made her book’s magic small and subtle, to avoid breaking history. This was not an easy task, and she has spoken at length about it elsewhere. The magic is called Glamour. It is the art of folding the ether to produce small illusions — a dress on a mannequin, a piece of ambient music to liven a party, or an elaborate “glamural” that turns a room into a forest glade. Jane has a particular talent for glamour, which gets her into trouble before it gets her out of it.

Just as the magic has been carefully constructed so as to allow the Regency period to proceed more or less as it did in the real world, the language in Shades of Milk and Honey has been chosen to fit the period. Modern readers will notice obvious examples of archaic English, such as “shew,” but the overall effect is wonderfully subtle, making the book feel right without distracting the reader. Shades of Milk and Honey is a deceptively simple book resting on a foundation of solid research.

I am told that there are plans for another book, which will involve swashbuckling. I can’t wait. I had my doubts about this book at first, but I’m glad I gave it a chance, and I am looking forward to the sequel.

Review: The Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle

“For my part, I prefer aliens that look alien. Then when they ritually eat their first-born, or turn arthropod halfway through their life-cycle, it isn’t so much of a shock. You expect it. Humanoid aliens, they’re trouble.”

— Mary Gentle, The Golden Witchbreed

A few months ago, I finally picked up Mary Gentle’s science fiction duology, The Golden Witchbreed and its sequel, Ancient Light. The story that begins in The Golden Witchbreed is standard SF: A human ambassador arrives on an alien world to assist the first contact team, and finds herself snarled in local politics. The difference lies, first, in what those local politics turn out to be, and second, in Mary Gentle’s deft handling of character and interwoven plotlines.

The alien planet, Orthe, is inhabited by humanoid aliens who are just human enough to make the ambassador trip up — and the reader, too, if she’s not careful. The Ortheans are drawn with superb attention to detail. Most of the aliens that the reader meets in The Golden Witchbreed live in small holdings that answer to a larger, elected-as-needed assembly of representatives, and an elected monarch who rules by divine right. Mary Gentle does not make the mistake of having a One World Culture for her aliens, however, or even just a few variations on a theme.

As the ambassador travels away from the capital city, the reader gets to see one culture shade into another. I enjoyed watching the ambassador slowly adapt to Orthe. As her grasp of the language and social niceties moves from being trained, to being practiced, to being second nature, the vocabulary in her narration changes. The humans have classed the Ortheans as a pretech, but when a group of Barbarians arrive in the hollowed-out hull of an ancient flying machine, both the reader and the ambassador realize that something far stranger is going on.

The Golden Witchbreed is a good book, but it is not a complete story without Ancient Light. Ancient Light begins twenty years after the ambassador leaves Orthe. Political upheaval on Earth has left her without a government to represent — instead, she answers to the Company. Having discovered the ruins of an ancient civilization on Orthe, the Company wants to know whether any of the alien technology could be put to human use. Alien politics, human politics, alien religion, and the ambassador’s own shaky hold on her sanity raise the stakes in Ancient Light to the point where I finished this book standing up — because finding a chair would have meant looking away from the page.

Orthe is a world so finely balanced that mere observation by an outsider is enough to change the system. To me, these books read as a statement about invasion and colonization, though Mary Gentle never wields the message stick hard enough to make me confident that’s what she was trying to say. The Orthe duology is good science fiction, and has as much to say about our past as our future. I recommend these books without hesitation.

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