100 Books #126 - Jose Saramago's SEEING

"...since the citizens of this country were not in the healthy habit of demanding the proper enforcement of the rights bestowed on them by the constitution, it was only logical, even natural, that those rights had been suspended."

Terrifying thought, isn't it? And an eternally fresh and topical one. And this is not some talking head pundit on one of the opinewz channels that infest American TV, but a Portuguese Nobel laureate describing the immediate aftermath of one of the most farcically awful political crises he could imagine for a proud Western democracy. And there's more, so much more, of this where that came from.

Last year, I twisted my mind into a pretzel taking in the odd but absorbing prose style of Jose Saramago's Blindness, and felt that I would never be the same again. And as I finish out this year, achieving my stated goal and then some in terms of number of books read in a year, I here prove that indeed, I am forever changed. Which is nice if you're going to read more Saramago.

Sing hosanna, my mind snapped right back into that pretzel shape. And good thing, too, because if I'd let myself get distracted by the difficulties posed by the prose style, I would have missed one of the most horrifyingly entertaining and terrifyingly funny reads of my life.

As the title might suggest, Seeing* is a sort of antithetical sequel to Blindness, though not strictly in the sense of the continuing adventures of a hero or heroine from the earlier novel. Indeed, the events and truths of Blindness are not even alluded to until rather far into Seeing; there is simply a strong sense that the early crisis here -- a general election held on a bizarrely stormy day not only has a disappointing voter turnout but also results in more than 80% of the cast ballots turning up completely blank -- is the aftermath of an earlier catastrophe, but the contemporary reader could substitute any recent disaster (Hurricanes Katrina or Sandy, say) for the plague of "white blindness."

Unlike the unremitting tragedy and squalor of Blindness, though, Seeing has a pretty wicked satirical bent, especially in the early chapters when the parties on the left, middle and right are squabbling over for which party/candidate all those blank votes are "really" for, and government ministers are trying to come up with a solution to this crisis. One feels in their deliberations, in which the suspension of every civil liberty that First World citizens cherish is at least considered, one by one, echoes of the kind of panicky calculation and hapless cruelty that led to all of the white blindness victims' being herded into a disused mental hospital and left to fend for their helpless selves in Blindness, but here it's all taken much further. And the reader learns an important thing: Saramago is funny.

And yes, it's all but impossible, as matters escalate, to read Seeing without thinking of the Arab Spring, as what started as simply a casting of blank ballots develops into full-scale Gandhiesque passive civil disobedience and the government, for its part, makes an un-Arab-Spring decision to simply withdraw its services. No confidence in us, the officials seem to say? Fine. We have no confidence in you, either. Enjoy your lack of services. As an alternative to mass slaughter, it makes me wistful, that decision. But then things get silly, in a scary way (or possibly scary, in a silly way) when the government-in-exile basically just comes around to treating the "rebel" populace of the capital city pretty much exactly the same way it treated the disease victims in Blindness; this subversion is an infection that must be quarantined, but it would be heartless not to poke food in at them once in a while, wouldn't it?

And again, all of these vicious and brilliant insights into the nature of government and the responsibilities of citizenship, into the way people generally treat each other and into the way they could if only they would keep to their principles (ah, me), are delivered in Saramago's crazy and yet perfectly lucid** prose style. I don't know how he does it, you guys. Again, no dialogue tags or quotation marks, hell, not even any proper names, but the reader still winds up with a perfect insight into who all the characters are as individuals (even though they are known by only the most generic of referents) to the point where she can tell who is speaking even from just a fragment of dialogue. The only other writer I've seen come close to pulling this off is Theodore "Godbody" Sturgeon. But he broke everybody off into point-of-view chapters.

So in the end, Seeing feels rather a lot like a lost J.G. Ballard apocalypse, one in which the world is poised to end, not with a rush of wind or water or a crystallization or a drought, but with a refusal to participate, with apathy. Which, given Ballard's style of apocalyptic heroes, is very Ballardian indeed!

And on a purely personal note, oh, could I sympathize with those elected officials who had this crisis dumped into their laps. "The biggest mistake I made in my political life was letting them sit me down in this chair," the president says at one point. When I was a member of my home town's town council in 2001-2004, I said the same thing. All the damned time. Less so his next remark "I didn't realize at the time that the arms of this chair had handcuffs on them." But sometimes I did. Sometimes, I did.

All in all, a  horribly fun read. If ever there is a film adaptation, I demand it be directed by the likes of Richard Lester.

*Ensaio sobre a Cegueira in the original Portuguese. Portuguese isn't my best language, but I muddle through okay (not for a whole novel yet!) and so I get "Essay Concerning Sight" as a more literal translation. I guess I can see how that "essay" might throw an English-speaking reader, mislead him or her into expecting non-fiction, but remember that the word "essay" originally meant something more tentative, an attempt, the thought conveyed being that someone is playing with an idea rather than making declarations about it. And since this book is, in part, exploring the consequences of the prior novel's "white blindness", I like the "what if" quality the original Portuguese title suggests to me. But, you know, marketing.

Also, check out this cover for the Portuguese Spanish language edition! I love it so much!

**This despite some of the most convoluted sets of mixed metaphors I've ever encountered. But people do talk that way, especially when they're excited. How mimetic. Or something. Also, I read this book via my Kindle, as part of a single file that contains the Collected Works of Jose Saramago. I thus never had any idea how close I was to the end of the book, as the "percent completed" indicator stayed at the same number for chapters and chapters. With a dead tree book (which is how I read Blindness) there was a physical cue that the end was approaching. With an ebook as one of a single file of collected works, the ending sneaks right up on one and there is trauma. Aaah! This is, though, my only quibble with ebook reading so far.

100 Books #125 - Charles Palliser's QUINCUNX

I suppose we could regard Charles Palliser's Quincunx as final proof that for every genre or great genre master of fiction, however obscure or archaic, there is not only someone who will attempt a pastiche of it/him, but sometimes there is even one who is very, very good at it. Charles Palliser is one of these, an otaku's otaku in the realm of... the nineteenth century social novel?

I didn't know there could be such a thing. Did you?

For Quincunx* is a Dickensian pastiche of the very highest order, though it goes Dickens one better, or at least earlier, by setting itself in Britain's late Regency (and therefore pre-Victorian by a good bit) period. And perhaps it takes the Dickens to 11 at the very least, both in terms of legal/inheritance wrangling as plot driver and of risible degrees and numbers of coincidences at least in that Dickens' and Palliser's Londons have hilariously small populations.

And there is still more to keep the 21st century reader chuckling, for about halfway through, when a certain heraldry puzzle assumes paramount importance, the penny drops and one realizes she is in fact reading a high quality prose version of a hidden object game. All that is missing is the frustrating experience of "breaking" the cursor by mis-clicking on too many objects, but then again, that could be substituted for by our young hero's continually narrowly escaping yet another assassination attempt -- or only sort of escaping, continually forced as he is to more or less respawn as the penniless, near-helpless, delerious, paranoid, starving waif that he is for most of the novel.

And why is this so? Because, as I said, property inheritance and greed are the great drivers of the plot. An ancient francophone family (lots of glorious surnames feature in this story: Umphraville, Palphramond, Mompesson!) whose possession of a profitable estate dates back, apparently, to the time of William the Conqueror and whose bloodline includes Plantagenet ancestry, fell on hard times a few generations before our hero (John Mellamphy, he who answers to oh so many other names as he grows up) was born has been shadow-fighting over different versions of the patriarch's will in addition to publicly battling it out in the Court of Chancery (shades of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, eh wot?). Depending on what document finally surfaces and is approved, one family could be turned off the estate in favor of, well, several others.

The plot is intricate and small details matter; like in playing a hidden object game, we have to scrutinize every scene with care, somewhat hampered by our guide through all of this, John of the Many Surnames, from whom Secrets Have Been Kept and whose life is perpetually both endangered and protected by different interests, depending on which will from which they would benefit.

All this and all the Dickensian social justice hand-wringing you could ask for, as we spend time with body snatchers, dishonest bankers and lawyers, out-and-out bandit gangs, "down below men" who make their living salvaging coins and other valuables that have fallen into the sewers, starving Victorian garment workers, and, every once in a while, the gentry living high and betting too much on cards and horses. Like you do.

If that sounds like something you might enjoy, you'll enjoy the hell out of this book. I did, even though I snickered a lot. Hey, snickering is good.

*And I absolutely wound up reading this one now because of Aliette de Bodard, whose Obsidian and Blood Aztec godpunk trilogy employs the visual device and term of "quincunx" - a five-fold cross, more or less - and every time I came across the term, I remembered that my mother had presented me with a battered but still nice hardcover edition of Quincunx and it was still the substantial base of my small but formidable tower of dead tree TBR. Brains are funny old things.

100 Books #124 - Joseph Roth's THE RADETZKY MARCH

"A word, a word so easily spoken; it is not spoken."

I am developing a minor obsession with the literature of the 19th and early 20th century Hapsburg Empire, and I can't quite put my finger on why, or how it started, unless it was when I read about Robert Musil in Philip Ball's amazing Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. Ball's interest was in Musil's unfinished two-volume novel, The Man Without Qualities, and its depiction of a mathematician's dispassion for the world, which doesn't sound terribly promising on the face of it, does it? But it's quite an engaging read nonetheless, and one that I look forward to re-reading again soon; I'm a Robert Musil fan (see also my look last year at Musil's first novel, The Confusions of Young Torless, from last year), loving his way of examining moral and social paralysis and its consequences, as well as how his German prose becomes English.

The (delightfully!) occasionally ornithological Radetzky March* both does and not partake these qualities (or, I guess, lack of qualities) as it details the misadventures of three generations of the Trotta family: a grandfather ennobled as a reward for sort of blunderingly saving Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's life in battle, a son whom the new Baron forces into a civil service instead of a military career**, and a grandson who takes up the family's military mantle again, only to very nearly disgrace it.

But this makes it sound like The Radetzky March is a book in which things happen, and really, it's not. It's more a book in which things are felt and perceived, and what is perceived is mostly that the Empire is in a period of stasis and stagnation, a period in which the gloss of civilization is polished to a blinding brightness, the better to conceal the turmoil it hides, the turmoil of an empire that purports to bind a staggering variety of cultures, religions and ethnicities into one people*** but really hasn't, except in that all those different peoples are temporarily too busy buffing and polishing (under some duress) to get on with the business of being themselves and hating each other. But don't worry, they'll get around to it. Boy, will they get around to it.

But even that makes it sound like stuff is happening. Which is erroneous. I mean, these people don't even eat:

"The baron had a bizarre relationship with food. He ate the most important morsels with his eyes, so to speak; his sense of beauty consumed above all the essence of the food -- its soul, as it were; the vapid remainders that then reached mouth and palate were boring and had to be wolfed down without delay."

And:

"He was sorry that Trotta had missed the schnitzel. He would have gladly chewed a second one for the lieutenant -- or at least watched it being eaten with gusto."

Nor do they ever really seem to talk to each other, especially not the Trottas. Especially not the youngest Trotta, who is constantly struggling over whether or not to utter even the most banal pleasantry: "Carl Joseph almost replied reverently 'Good evening, Herr Doctor!' But all he said was 'May I?' and sat down."

And things get worse when young Lieutenant Carl Joseph Trotta (the grandson), posted to a border village whose chief employer is a bristle factory, suddenly faces his duty as a soldier to put down an insurrection at said factory. He insists to a colleague that he "simply won't order the men to shoot!" because he now realizes that the factory workers are "poor devils" but another tells him "You'll do what you have to, you know you will." And what he has to do right away is get drunk... And do things improve from there?

"Immense files swelled around the Trotta case, and the files grew, and every department in every agency splattered a little more ink on them, the way one waters flowers, to make them grow."

So, uh, not so much, then.

And then there's the dreary love affair and whatnot (in general, women are not well-regarded in Radetzky March, but what are you gonna do? This is a story about a young man raised motherless by, apparently, a motherless son of a military hero, said son spending most of the novel either in military school or in the military. Sausage fests everywhere). Sigh.

But so then why bother to read this stuff at all, you might ask? Because it's good. As a masterful evocation of the spiritual paralysis of an entire society, as a look at the consequences of too much civilization as something that does not require robot butlers and flying cars to happen, as a vivid portrait of the twilight years of Emperor Franz Joseph (who had "lived long enough to know that it is foolish to tell the truth.") and the Hapsburg Empire just before the outbreak of World War I****, and, yes, as an exquisite piece of writing for its own sake -- as all of these things, The Radetzky March is a very, very good book.

*The book's title comes from a piece of music by Johann Strauss, Sr., which a military band plays outside of the grandfather's house every Sunday to salute their local hero. It's a nifty, stirring tune if you care to enjoy:



As for my characterization of Radetzky March as occasionally ornithological, dude, it is loaded with references to birds, from a servant's caged canary to the different birds singing outdoors in every season in Austria and the empire -- a very charming touch. Seriously. More birds than anything I've read this year that wasn't by Michael Chabon. Birds signal changes in scene and setting and sometimes provide the strongest of dramatic counterpoints (hello, wild geese and Russian ravens!). This is wonderful!

**The grandfather's insistence that the son have any career but military stems from a misunderstanding regarding a children's history book that presents a tarted up version of how the grandfather saved the Emperor's life, to which the grandfather takes great but ultimately ineffectual umbrage in one of the more bitterly humorous sections of the novel.

***All in the service of allowing the Hapsburgs, once Holy Roman Emperors and lords over most of Europe in one form or another, to feel like they still had an Empire and were still a relevant power in world affairs, big terrifying inbred jaws and all (though yes, I'll admit to having been a little sad when they finally had to cut down the Sisipalm in 2008).

Oh, and check out the people, as seen through the eyes of a somewhat minor character, Count Chojnicki:

"The German Austrians were waltzers and boozy crooners, the Hungarians stank, the Czechs were born bootlickers, the Ruthenians were treacherous Russians in disguise, the Croats and Slovenes, whom he called Cravats and Slobbers, were brushmakers and chestnut roasters, and the Poles, of whom he himself was one after all, were skirt chasers, hairdressers and fashion photographers."

So, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was basically the Golgafrincham B Ark, then?

****Weirdly, it was only when the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was communicated (very dramatically) that it hit home for me that the events of this novel were taking place in the 20th century. The book otherwise feels so timeless, so universal, that a particular historical event's depiction, even second-hand as happens here, is really jarring, but not in a bad way. Just a wow way.

100 Books #123 - Diane Duane's SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD

Oh man, it's a good thing a certain someone who talked me into reading Harry Potter this year didn't show these to me until long after I'd done with Hogwarts, because Potter & co. would have suffered even more by comparison with these than they already did with the Greats.

As I found myself explaining to a work colleague who is trying to get her 13-year-old son to read more, among the many reasons Duane's Young Wizards books look to be better than Potter is that their would-be wizards are teaching themselves (with a lot of help from the natural world, which is all quite magical if you're just paying attention) instead of slaving over, e.g., potions in a student cauldron in a dreary classroom for a grade. I like the way Duane has conveyed the pleasures of learning and discovery rather than making the learning process seem like a dreary chore, a set of hoops the impatient student must jump through in order to get to do the cool stuff.

I also like the way Duane has situated magic in the world of Young Wizards. It's got a slight Jedi/Force feel to it in that the practice of magic is one of the things that keeps the universe working (the idea that humanity/intelligent life is the universe's consciousness trying to understand itself is a subtle theme), but in a very reasoned and scientific, rather than a mystical, way. Magic slows down entropy, if it's practiced by the right kind of people, by which is meant people who care enough to make the effort even if it costs them everything. And thus the universe can be safeguarded.

Magic, in this world, then, is a calling rather than a privilege, a practice to be undertaken alongside of, rather than instead of, the rest of one's life in the world. Which means there's no elitism to it, no us versus them mentality, despite the secrecy.*

That's not to say it's not quite a lot of satisfying fun for our two young heroes in this first novel, Nita and Kit. Both of them are nerdy little outcasts with a bent for book-learning (the scene in which Nita comes across this first novel's titular textbook is one every bookworm will recognize, a bit ruefully) and a need to exercise their talents, but of course that means both of them are ostracized according to their lights: the rather passive Kit is a wallflower, the more aggressive and active Nita gets beaten up a lot. But lest this start to sound like a magical Revenge of the Nerds, Nita is more interested in harnessing her budding powers to protect herself from damage and recover a treasured space pen than in tit for tat. And soon, when her spell to recover said pen brings a fascinatingly strange new presence into her and Kit's lives, she's got much more interesting stuff to think about than getting back at some bullies. Like getting to know the trees, especially the rowan tree she's been climbing in her whole young life, who tells her of how the trees have always been watching over and protecting humanity, since they were just another primate screaming in the branches -- and why humanity is worth protecting.

Too, this book does the best job of any I've seen since Fritz Lieber's Our Lady of Darkness of fulfilling the promise inherent in that oft misused genre name, urban fantasy. Here as in the Lieber, we get a true magic of cities, in a radiant and lively good aspect as well as in a creepy and malevolent evil one. And, rarity of rarities, the good aspect is every bit as interesting and vividly imagined and engaging as the evil -- and that's saying a lot, because the foe Nita and Kit and their white hole pal Fred (!) take on is quite possibly the most genuinely heartbreaking and terrifying dark lord I've encountered at least since Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy -- and this being-or-nonbeing, the Starsnuffer, let me say, licks Voldemort and Sauron hollow, as his world is way more interesting and scary than Mordor could ever hope to be. The fire hydrants alone!

And so again I find myself asking, just as I did in my prior post, why the hell isn't this book more famous? Seriously, kids, check this stuff out. Diane Duane is amazevaries.

*I want to make a comparison. If Harry Potter is Big Bang Theory, with muggles standing in for nerds as the class to be either mocked/attacked or protected, but hardly ever respected in their own right (even as it pretends to be a sop to those nerds reading), then Young Wizards is Community.

100 Books #122 - Philip K. Dick's THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH

Holy Mother Lug Nuts, how did this one escape my notice for so long? And I such a Dickhead that I've even enjoyed Clans of the Alphane Moon? But so it goes: of the handful of Philip K. Dick novels that are/were still on the eternal to-be-read pile, The Penultimate Truth was one for a long, long time. I guess this was partly because I'd assumed I'd read all of his A material and most of his B and all that was left was, well, not either of these.

Shows what I know. Thank goodness for my pal EssJay (who else?), who broadcast her great love for this all-but-forgotten work earlier this year. In her opinion, it should have been a bestseller.

And speaking of EssJay and Philip K. Dick, if you happen to be someone who hasn't read any of my all-time hero's work and are wondering where to start, she went so far as to make a PKD newbie decision tree. And really, even if you're not a newbie, you should go admire. You might even find it useful in helping a friend figure out if PKD is right for them!

Of course, I'm one of those fantatics who thinks PKD is right for everybody, so, well, caveat lector for the rest of this blog post. Because it's not just going to be about this book. No.

Several years ago, I had a dream, a dream so marvelous that I actually cried on waking up and realizing it had all been a dream (even though my dream self had spent a lot of the dream questioning how it could possibly be real). In it, I had found in my father's garage of all places, a big wooden crate brimful of those trade paperback editions of PKD's novels that Del Rey was releasing in the 90s. Among all the beloved familiar titles were some I'd never heard of before. As in they didn't exist. At least not in our world. I'm talking dozens of new-to-me, new-to-everyone, full-on PKD novels. I couldn't decide what to read first. I couldn't carry them all. I couldn't figure out how they'd gotten there, because my dad doesn't do science fiction, nor did my grandfather (most of whose crap is what posthumously clutters that garage). And there was no one with which to share my discovery, my joy, and obviously it was meant to be that way.

Then I woke up. To sadness. So much sadness.

Anyway, I bring this up because I realized, as I was raving to EssJay about it, that The Penultimate Truth feels like one of those books from my dream. How is this book not more famous? It's kind of the bridge book between his conventional* science fiction and his batshit looney tunes theo-philosophical druggie cuckoo stuff. Read closely. You can almost watch the artistically refined madness taking hold of him, in, for instance, the plot the Yancemen (think of them as the 1%, who managed to provoke World War III and then duped the entire surviving population of both sides into evacuating into vast underground "ant tanks" to live and work at an ever-accelerating pace building more weaponry because the Yancemen have also duped everyone else into believing that the War Never Ended) cook up against one of their number, to get him out of the way forever, according to their law: said plot involving fabricating ancient artifacts and alien skulls, salting a building site with them, and letting him get busted for not reporting a discovery that would put a halt to his building project. Dude. The Yancemen are pretty close to all-powerful. They could pretty much just disappear this Runcible guy. But no.

Awesome.

And yet agonizing, too. The Penultimate Truth is also one of the most conscience-burdened of PKD's novels, if not the most, more so even than Dr. Bloodmoney, for Bloodmoney is just concerned with the agenbite of one man's inwit. This one features a whole society of Yancemen whose sole and circular pursuit in life is keeping 99%** of humanity from discovering their hoax -- and working at an ever more frenzied pace to build the robotic "leadies" the tankers believe are going to the war effort but are really going to fill the entourages and private armies of the Yancemen. And most of these Yancemen are at least a little uneasy about their part in this monstrous deception, although none of them seem to have the courage to do anything to address the wrongs from which they benefit. Pangs of conscience never overcome complacency -- or fear, with fear being perhaps the stronger obstacle/opponent, fear of reprisals from betrayed fellow Yancemen and fear of "another war" if the 99% ever emerge from the ant tanks and learn the terrible truth -- in PKD.

Or almost never. Because someone is acting in sneaky ways for the benefit of the 99%, adding delicious mystery, and another layer of paranoia, to the plot.

"Not much of a way... of inheriting the Earth. Maybe we haven't been meek enough." That one little line of dialogue neatly sums up the whole book. It could be spoken among either the Yancemen or the tankers. You'll have to read the book to find out who says it. And you'll remember that I quoted it here, and you'll feel what EssJay calls the "Dick Click" -- that frisson of understanding you get when all the weird crap PKD has been throwing at you finally starts to make a kind of sense, though I think the real Dick Click in this novel is a few chapters after this exchange.

At any rate, for this PKD fan who is also a big fan of hoaxes and hoaxers, this book was pretty much a pipeful of crack. As my bit about my PKD book dream I mentioned a few paragraphs ago might indicate, I'm kind of trying to ration what new-to-me PKD remains. After this, though, my resolve is kind of crumbling.

*Well, conventional for him, anyway.

**Dick never uses these figures, but the dystopia he has created for The Penultimate Truth so perfectly fits our current situation and rhetoric that it's impossible not to use them, just as its impossible not to think of the robotic "leadies" the tankers keep building as our modern drone weaponry, at least in part. PKD was a freaking precog, yo.

100 Books #121 - Jonathan L. Howard's KATYA'S WORLD

I had to keep reminding myself, as I read Katya's World, that without Wesley Crusher, who annoyed millions with his over-the-top precocity and tendency to save the occasionally weirdly bumbling asses of the crew of the Enterprise-D, we would not have the 24k slab of awesome that is Wil Wheaton today. Which is to say that sometimes, it's worth putting up with an improbably gifted young protagonist being the one to think of all the solutions to all the problems in order to enjoy the rest of a show's or novel's offerings.*

And what offerings there are! Like a stormy human-colonized water world, in which everybody lives in underwater cities, travels by submarine, and struggles to exploit the amazing mineral resources on the ocean floor and in the ocean water. Like a colony of entirely Russian descent (the powers-that-were in the waves of human colonization having concluded that removing the possibility of ethnic tensions was a very good idea) who eschew intoxicants and other Russian folkways because the environment is too hostile and drunkenness can easily lead to death.

Like a war fought under the waves, not among said Russian-descended colonists, but against invaders -- from Earth! A war that warped the culture of Katya's world forever, ten years before the events of this novel unfold, and is still warping it.

And, most importantly and excitingly, like a giant mysterious something haunting the deep, destroying subs and interfering with transport and commerce, which Big Benthic Baddie starts having a direct and frightening effect on Katya's own fifteen-year-old life as she starts her career as a submarine navigator! Said BBB and its secrets providing a marvelously creepy and menacing undertone to the whole novel. Yowza.

All this and a fascinatingly enigmatic hero-villain amalgam who totally steals the book even before we find out what he's really up to. Except that might not be what he's really really up to. Except that it might be after all. See?

So on the whole, I agree with my dear EssJay, who loved the Snape out of this book and hopes to see more works, maybe even for grown-ups, set in this fascinating world. Howard handles the science and the sociology very well, as well as the tension of sub-oceanic combat, sub-hunting, seek-and-destroy missions, discussions on the nature of synthetic vs. artificial intelligence**, so I know that, for instance, some prequel work on the war that preceded this story, or how Earth went from a colonizing powerhouse to something mysteriously crippled and desperate, would make for good reading for any age group.

And really? Katya's Wesley Crusher-ism isn't that annoying. If you could tolerate Sheriff Carter's always being the one to come up with the brilliant off-beat solution that all the scientists in Eureka couldn't, Katya won't bother you at all. But if you caught yourself rolling your eyes at Carter sometimes, well, they'll roll a bit more for this. But don't let that stop you. This is a neat book!

*And really, I want to forgive said annoying precocity and ass-saving as maybe one of the necessary trappings of young adult fiction, which I have but rarely read, even back when I was a young adult, but is that the case? At any rate, I probably wouldn't have noticed/been bothered by it so much had this been a first person narrative, in which case I could take it as a slightly unreliable narrator maybe inflating her importance to the course of events a bit, instead of the third person omniscient that I got. A pity.

**And, as Essjay so gleefully pointed out, even this heady stuff is made lucid for young readers but is never presented in a condescending info-dump, in narration or dialogue, which is always appreciated!

100 Books 120 - Octavia E. Butler's WILD SEED

It's been too long since I immersed myself in one of Octavia E. Butler's magical-biological-genealogical-alien-witchcraft-historical-futuristic-mind-blowing series. I always forget, until I'm deep into one, how much I love them, love her way with language, with imagery, with storytelling, with poetry, with imagination.

Wild Seed begins a series I've long had my eye on but had long avoided because my local public library didn't have all of it: the Patternmaster series, a late entry in which (Survivor) I accidentally picked up there many years ago. I have since learned that it is not specifically sequential, and that I could have enjoyed the books in any order, but now that I have them all in one convenient e-book file, my serial compulsion can be satisfied and I can submerge myself without anxiety.

Which is to say that I'm going to be picking up where I left off and starting the "next" Patternmaster book, Mind of My Mind, immediately after finishing this blog post.

Wild Seed concerns a sort of battle of body and mind between two all but supernatural beings in the colonial era, when black slaves were Africa's greatest export and white settlements in the New World depended on them utterly, north and south of a certain arbitrary boundary that would be drawn in a hundred years or so. Living and ruling several settlements in America (and elsewhere) is one Doro, thousands of years old, a being who takes over the bodies of others (sadly killing the original occupants in the process) and who has been breeding pockets humanity in semi-captivity to produce individuals with unique abilities like telepathy and telekinesis -- with the attendant responsibility to protect them from the rest of humanity who would regard his human livestock as witches and torture and burn them as such. And in Africa, living quietly but treated with reverence as an oracle is Anyanwu, an immortal shape-changer, a woman with such minute control over her body that she can analyze and overcome any pathogen or poison, can alter her very DNA to become any creature she has "analyzed" (by eating), and who has thereby lived for a good 300 years. Anyanwu turns out to be a "wild seed" -- the descendant of some lost or escaped members of one of Doro's earlier captive populations, whose talents are beyond Doro's wildest dreams. He Must Have Her and breed her with his other stock, whether she is willing or not.

If you're guessing that Butler has found in this science fictional/magic realistic story a way to comment on gender, slavery, race, free will, coercion and class, you're guessing right, but if you're guessing that she ever beats the reader over the head with these heavy notions, you're not. As Doro and Anyanwu struggle for control, these ideas and problems naturally occur, but only subtly. Butler is too deft a hand to preach at the reader. While she is often regarded as Zora Neale Hurston in genre fictional disguise (and Butler does have some of that lyrical quality for which Hurston is praised), Butler never feels like she is writing polemics or parables, even when some of her novels have "parable" in the title.

That being said, there is often a slightly creepy quality to Butler's work. I trace it to its explicit physicality, its minute focus on biology and how biology can be manipulated. Thus the Oankali of Lilith's Brood/Xenogenesis trilogy fame are some of the most fascinating and frightening aliens I've ever encountered, and here in this book we find that Anyanwu herself is one of the most compelling heroines, very nearly omnipotent, but cowed by Doro's threat to round up and all but enslave* her descendants (two of whom were caught in the same net she herself was, and whom Doro promptly bred to one another over her objections that this was incest; Doro forces his populations to breed incestuously all the time and just kills off any babies born with too many undesirable traits). Her power just makes her subjugation all the more desirable, and Doro is just the being to try to keep her in check -- and to keep her from realizing that she alone in all the world could actually oppose him if she dared.

Despite it all, though, this pair has a kind of love, and Octavia E. Butler is one of the very best novelists in the world when it comes to writing about love -- agape, filia or eros, it doesn't matter which. Reading one of her novels is like gorging oneself at a feast, but without the bellyache afterwards. She leaves me wanting more.

Good thing there still is some. But I probably should hoard those works of hers I haven't read yet and ration them out like EssJay and I do with Philip K. Dick. That's what I should do.

But, you know, I'm weak, and silly, and don't always do what I should.

*Doro's people do not live like slaves, happily dwelling in rich and prosperous towns and villages here and there, thriving and free to exercise their weird talents within those carefully controlled and defended enclaves, but their apparent freedom is that of pampered zoo animals, who don't even really get to choose their mates.

100 Books #119 - Fydor Dostoevsky's POOR FOLK

At first glance, there would appear to be just two characters in Dostoevsky's epistolary first novel, Poor Folk, but really there are four. We have the two letter-writing doomed lovers, Barbara (Varvara) Dobroselova and Makar Devushkin, and we have the pair's mental models or emulators of one another. The story told in the letters of this pair of chastely loving neighbors, in which they live out their lives of privation and longing for one another, is thus given an almost unbearable tension as they all but scream at one another for understanding. "Ah, little angel, you are a perfect child! I know well you are weak as a blade of grass," Makar might say to the decidedly not weak Barbara, for instance, projecting quite forcefully his distorted ideal of femininity on the woman he has decided he must protect even though it is obvious from the very beginning that, sad as Barbara's straits are, she is doing a much better job of taking care of herself than Makar is.*

It's this tension, rather than the horrible living conditions described or the novel's famed status as a possible satire on Gogol's "The Overcoat" and other works, that kept me reading this**; it's the same inter-character tension that I love best about Dostoevsky in particular, and Russian novels in general, after all. There is a perverse streak in me that loves to watch characters willfully misunderstanding each other while claiming (usually dismissively) to understand each other perfectly. I say perverse because nothing makes me angrier than when this happens to me in real life. In fiction, however, it's my crack.

So, while earlier this year I decided, after having thoroughly loved the first volume of Joseph Frank's giant biography of Doestoeversky, that I needed to read Poor Folk right away, I kind of put it off, largely out of a feeling of obligation to others. I am comrades with lots of writers who released new fiction this year and whose work could benefit from what small light I could shine on it; I finally allowed some friends, new and old, to talk me into reading all the Harry Potter and all the Dark Tower novels.... the year slipped away.

But as it comes to an end, I find myself in what my good pal EssJay aptly describes as a "sneaky hate spiral" in which all fiction annoys me or otherwise fails to keep my attention. I've been here before; I know what I need, and so I keep "guaranteed good stuff" that I know I'll like against such times. Hence Poor Folk at last. AaaaaaAAAAAaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh.

My own pecadillos notwithstanding, this book is a searingly worthwhile read even if  you don't get off on the kind of tension I'm celebrating here. Doestoevsky at the kinda-faltering start of his career is better than almost anyone else at his or her peak. Listen: I hate epistolary novels. Hate them. But if all of them were like Poor Folk, I would love them. They would be my favorites.

For instance, a good chunk of Barbara's correspondence is devoted to a rather lengthy account of her childhood and upbringing, which means Dostoevsky, brand new novelist, has already set for himself the daunting task of writing convincingly in a female voice -- and a unique and specific female voice at that, for Barbara is revealed as a woman whom we would now understand as a survivor of domestic violence, both physical and emotional, whose character has been shaped/warped by terrible events that she simply understands as commonplace, as just the way the world works. Her presentation of self, not precisely from a victim mentality seeking redress but as one who subtly demands a weird blend of pity and respect for her suffering, is astonishing and uncomfortable to read, and utterly masterful. One cringes at lines like "Yet this did not arise from any WANT OF LOVE for me on the part of my father, but rather from the fact that he was incapable of putting himself in my own and my mother's place. It came from a defect of character." Isn't making excuses for one's abuser a classic sign of abuse in the modern paradigm of same? But Dostoevsky knew it and saw it from the very beginning of his career, decades before it got codified into modern social services jargon. He was that good, right from the start.

All that and a bravura depiction of the humiliations and extraordinary degree of unrewarded effort that poverty inflicts on its victims, whatever the century.

Dude. My jaw is still in my lap. And I'm thinking about opening a hot dog stand.**

*Indeed, Barbara spends a lot of the novel berating Makar for spending money on unwanted gifts for her, which he insists on doing despite her many, many protests, because as far as he is concerned, that is what men must do for women they love, and women who claim they don't want them are just being coy. This, of course, enrages Barbara further, even as it also causes her to worry because it is plain that not only can Makar not afford the bonbons and presents of cash he is constantly sending her, but that he is basically endangering his own survival to do so. Her protests just drive him to try harder to please her with gifts. And so on. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so awful. Or vice versa.

**Well, that and the "just enough" funniness, chiefly achieved in exchanges between our lovers about whether or not a writer for whom Makar serves as amanuensis is a genius (Makar's version) or a hilariously bad hack (Barbara's), complete with extensively quoted passages so ridiculously overblown that they can't even be counted as satire. When Barbara continuously declines to read more, Makar's assumption that she is simply reading them in the wrong spirit and might like them better "when you have a bonbon or two in your mouth" makes it all even funnier. If you're the type who can laugh at patriarchy and patronizing, anyway. Which I can.

***Wink again at Unca Harlan.

100 Books #118 - J.G. Ballard's THE WIND FROM NOWHERE

Were I a little better at anthropomorphizing, if I could bring myself to impart sentience and a unified will to planet Earth and its ecosphere without giggling, I would say that sometime in the mid to late 20th century, Gaia decided that, once and for all, She needed to get rid of this bad case of humans she's got and started working on a plan. And that furthermore she convinced J.G. Ballard to allow her to use his fiction as the laboratory in which various schemes were tested out. Ballard would perform Her thought experiments so She could pick the best way to bring the human world to ruin, or at least chase us off this planet, without unnecessarily expending all the energy and endangering all of the other life forms She wanted to keep.

Hey, you've got to admit it's as good a characterization as any for this cycle of "elemental apocalypse" novels. J.G. Ballard has drowned the world, crystallized the world, dried up and burned the world, and, in The Wind From Nowhere, blown the world to dusty pieces with hurricane-force winds.

But hey, as well I've come to know, even if his world is just one posh apartment building, J.G. Ballard enjoys destroying with gleeful abandon. Or rather, enjoys letting a single force (usually one that humanity has unleashed upon itself in one way or another) have its wild and wicked way with the world, to the world's greatest possible cost. It's not Ballard's fault everything gets trashed; it's ours. Or, very occasionally, that of the odd freak cosmic accident.

Unlike Hollywood, though, which is addicted to focusing on heroic efforts to fight disaster -- fire a missile to destroy the comet that's going to hit the Earth! Infect the invading alien ship with a computer virus! Sic the army on the giant ants! -- Ballard is more interested in watching ordinary, passive, bemused observer-refugees, whose lives usually were already pretty much trashed due to these same faults long before the natural disaster du novel hit, watch the disaster. And occasionally make a token effort to survive it, but, you know, nothing too strenuous.

I'm amused with myself to only now be reading this one, which is not only the first of Ballard's elemental apocalypses, but Ballard's first published novel of any kind (though Ballard dismissed it as "hackwork" and tended to refer to The Drowned World as his first novel). I tend to be fiercely chronological when I take up a new-to-me writer, but I also take advice from friends seriously, and the many passionate Ballardians I'm blessed with in my life, concerned that The Wind From Nowhere might sour me on the author, all told me to start with The Drowned World or Hello, America.* So I did.

And yeah, my friends were right. Had I started with this novel, I might not have gone on to read others, might not have become a Ballard fangirl, because while The Wind From Nowhere features a lot of the things I've come to love or at least find interesting about Ballard, they're buried in a conventional fight/rescue narrative that is weirdly dull compared to the passive/observing motif of the rest of the elemental apocalypse, and flat out boring compared to the disintegration and madness of High Rise.

That being said, this is still not truly a bad book. There are loads of hints of future greatness to be had here, most notably in the small but vivid storyline of Susan Maitland, estranged wife of one of the sort-of protagonists**, who elects to stay in her posh London apartment when everyone else is evacuated to the building's foundations or other underground locations. She wants to watch the houses fall down, she tells the porter, thus presaging so many Ballardian observers, and  she and the state of her surroundings prefigure many of the delights of High Rise and other of Ballard's bravura descriptions of destruction and swift decay.

And, of course, speaking of destruction and decay, there's plenty of that to be had, too, for Ballard was obviously a master of depicting that from the get-go. As almost the entire planet (save the extreme northern and southern latitudes) becomes a giant dustbowl and some of the characters begin speculating about most of the formerly human-dominated planet turning into a band of permanent storm a la Saturn, the reader feels every sandblasting whipcrack of the mighty winds that have leveled everything in their path across the earth. One can almost imagine this being apocalypse of which Cormac McCarthy's The Road is post-.

Although I'm not sure that road, to say nothing of its surrounding trees and whatnot, would have survived The Wind From Nowhere.

*Hello, America is still on my to-be-read list. I've actually started it a few times, but only get a few chapters in before I get the screaming willies over how much it reminds me of the later stages of Greg Bear's Blood Music, which is my #1 freak-out novel of all time.

**A big flaw in this book, for me, was the surfeit of characters, none of them in the spotlight for long enough to become anything more than stick figures blowing in or hiding from the wind. A few figures eventually emerge as important to what actual narrative there is here, but they're little more than cameramen, roving around London or the central Mediterranean to show us the awesome destruction.

100 Books #117 - Richard Stark's THE HUNTER

I first became aware of the character of Parker, celebrated and brutal mid-century modern antihero, through Darwin Cooke's amazing graphic novel adaptations of this and two other novels. Well, of course I did! Although I still haven't seen the adaptation of this one; the story is brand new.

So the tone and content of Parker's first story, The Hunter, had little to shock me (though I won't say it had nothing to shock me, because I can't. Some early plot developments made my jaw drop), but that's not to say the novel itself did not.

It's a weird, weird thing to do, reading crime fiction from fifty years ago. It's still shocking*, still thrilling, but probably not in the way the author intended. The modern reader is largely desensitized to the brutality, but becomes shocked by, and perhaps a little disbelieving of, the ease with which so many of Parker's crimes are committed. In the first chapter, he forges a driver's license with just a form he picks up at the DMV and a ballpoint pen, commits check fraud multiple times, kits himself out in style, and checks into a nice Manhattan hotel. No photo ID required for any of it. Once or twice a store phones the bank he has duped into giving him some other guy's checkbook to make sure the funds are there, but that's it.

So yes, that's right: The Hunter's power to shock the modern reader lies in its status as a study in the freedoms we've all had to give up because of amoral asshats like Parker. One can almost hear the heavy metal security doors slamming behind him, from the perspective of 2012.** To say nothing of the trust extended toward strangers -- though of course the kind of  trust from which Parker benefits in his early chapter identity theft spree was only ever really extended to confident, well-dressed white men, wasn't it? So once the shock of watching him proceed this way wore off this reader, it was well-nigh impossible not to think, in part, serves the jerks (those would be his dupes) right for having that kind of attitude. Even though, yes, yes, they all did and it was the social norm of the time, blah blah.

I told you reading mid-century modern crime fiction was a weird experience for a post-millennial girl.

It's also, though, a weirdly rewarding one, a short burst of action and speed and relentless drive, to watch Parker hunt down his double-crossing partners who let him take the (supposedly fatal) fall for a complicated theft that involved deserted landing strips, cross-border munitions shipments, South American revolutionaries, and, of course, murder. It's hard not to be gleeful as he shakes down the people whom those partners threw up between him and his targets like so many human roadblocks, though of course one has qualms about innocent dupes being so treated.

This all means that Richard Stark (real name Donald Westlake, and what a prolific son-of-a-gun that guy was) achieves quite a lot in a small space. His first novel with his signature character as Stark may even be a richer read for us post-millennials than it was for the thrill-seekers who pulled it off a drugstore paperback spinner "back in the day."

But of course, I would say that, wouldn't I?

*Largely due to its depiction of both Parker's and his foes' seriously brutal treatment of the women in thier lives, the casual violence, the contempt, the commodification. "Mysogyny" feels like too weak a word to describe it. Eugh.

**Of course one knows that these losses took place gradually and slowly, though at increasing speed since we declared war on yet another intangible at the beginning of this century. Give it another decade and people will barely remember a time when they didn't have to bring reams of proof of identity to get a driver's license.

100 Books #116 - Hugh Howey's SECOND SHIFT: ORDER

After a reader has taken a few of the pummelings that Hugh Howey delivers so very, very well in his Wool/Silo series, one starts a new one with a certain caution that is not unlike the so-called Firefly Effect, I find. One knows going in that one is going to love at least one of the characters passionately, and that one is going to suffer horribly as a result. So the teeth clench, the abdominal muscles tighten and "guard" even as one flips past the title and copyright pages.

Such was my experience of starting, and reading, and finishing Second Shift: Order, the immediate sequel to First Shift: Legacy, and the middle of a prequel trilogy giving us a glimpse of how the world of Wool came to be. I was still reeling from Juliet and her fate when I took up First Shift; I was still recovering from the revelations and the anguish of First Shift when I took this one up.

And so I started reading with my dukes up, yes I did.

So the big questions now, for the purposes of a review* would be 1. Was this preparation on my part justified, i.e., did I wind up taking another pummeling as I'd expected and 2. Did said preparations help, or make it worse?

And the answers are... well, of course it's more complicated than that. Of course!

Second Shift is told from the points of view of two protagonists, whose stories unfold in alternating accounts of life in Silos One and 18. In Silo One, we rejoin Donald, an unwitting engineer of the world of the Silos whose journey from the world we readers know and down into that of the Silos we followed in First Shift -- and whose essential annoying nebbishness this reader totally failed to notice as the horrifying events of that novella unfolded, but whom she really wanted to slap quite often in this one and, retroactively, that one. For Donald is a guy that just lets things happen to him, who doesn't question what he's asked to do until it's too late, and who lets himself be manipulated into making this whole agonizing world possible. In First Shift, he designed the Silo system and seems to have just pretended to himself that it was some kind of intellectual exercise that might see use as a sort of rhetorical weapon in the hands of an authority figure into whose orbit he was drawn by a girl (of course), but never really thought we get used... even after it got built.... And now, in Second Shift, he is one of a small, elite cadre of dwellers in Silo One who are not living the true Silo life but are instead cryogenically sleeping through it, taking turns (Shifts) spending time animate and in charge of making sure all of the other Silos are functioning, technologically and sociologically. And of shutting down Silos that "break down" in one way or the other. Even though there are lots of people inside even the most dysfunctional Silo. And Donald is still pretty much a nebbish. Uh oh.

In tandem and in contrast to Donald in Silo One is young Mission Jones, a blue-clad Porter in Silo 18. He is a new member of what amounts to a guild: the people who haul stuff from one level to another. Computer parts, food, messages, dead bodies, whatever Silo dwellers need transported, the Porters, in singles or in pairs, do the hauling, up and down the endless stairs of 140 levels of underground society. It's an important job, and Mission is proud to do it, even though he knows he will eventually sacrifice his joints to the decades of toil. He also likes being a conduit for and a discoverer of knowledge and gossip, even though very little of what he learns is pleasant or has happy implications. Like the fact that some people on levels far below the Farms near the surface have decided to grow their own food. Or that some people are sneaking their own cargo up and down the levels, either on foot or by means of midnight pulley rigs. People, he finds, tend to resist being cogs in a well-designed survival machine. They don't like being parts that make up a whole. They want to be wholes themselves, independent and free. Which is dangerous in a society so closed and minutely designed and balanced that even an unauthorized glitch of a pregnancy guarantees the erring mother a sentence to cleaning once the child is born. Birthdays are deathdays, after all.

Unlike Donald, though, Mission is an active character in his own story, making decisions and doing things, taking risks and reaping rewards and punishments. The reader gets high on his agency and the mixture of hope and tragedy that make up Mission's very nature (nomen est omen, eh?). Howey gets his hooks into us with this character, oh yes he does. That bastard.

Ultimately, Second Shift is about the quest for forgetfulness. Those still alive who created this world do not want to have to think about, to remember what they did or why, and their efforts to keep everyone else docile and ignorant keep backfiring in tragic and yet horribly predictable ways. Failure and tragedy are always inevitable in this world, which Howey was at great and horribly successful pains in First Shift to show us could become our world with just a little more remote weaponry, a little more population pressure, a little more Tea Partying, and a little less fellow feeling.

But then, he reminds us, that no matter what happens to us, no matter what we do to ourselves, even if we're trapped in Silos below the ground in conditions that mimic, perhaps, those of a generational spaceship**, what we're packing away like so many grain seeds for the future are still people, and they are still capable, within their confined spaces, of great things, of acts of nobility and sacrifice, of lovingkindess and creativity, of demonstrating over and over again that they are worth saving, if those who put them there can just find a way to keep them alive without destroying what they're trying to preserve. If only.

A third volume in this series, Third Shift something, is due out next year. And you'd better believe I'm going to read it. And you'd better believe I'll have my dukes up.

*Though do I really write reviews, really? I'm more into the autobiographical experience of reading a book. But anyway.

**Which really is kind of what these Silos are, except the world they will someday colonize is the same planet they "left" when they went below its surface. Neat trick, that.

100 Books #115 - Aliette de Bodard's MASTER OF THE HOUSE OF DARTS

The Aztec godpunk trilogy that began with Servant of the Underworld and continued in Harbinger of the Storm comes to its Obsidian-y and Bloody end in this last volume but as should be the case in any good mystery series, Master of the House of Darts stands perfectly well on its own, even though we take up the thread of the story very soon after the conclusion of Harbinger.

The middle volume was all about the struggle for succession, and ended with the more or less expected victor emerging as Revered Speaker (in a bizarre and unique way), but his rule was not yet cemented, for various reasons. To do that, Tizoc-zin must lead his warriors in battle (his "coronation war"), capture physically perfect prisoners, and sacrifice them to the gods to ensure the continuation of the world as the Mexica knew it.

As we begin the action in Master of the House of Darts (the title given to the heir apparent to the Mexica throne, usually the Revered Speaker's younger brother), that battle has been fought and won, but a paltry 40 prisoners are brought back to Tenotichtitlan -- so the new Speaker's rule is already on shaky ground.

And then one the victorious warriors and one of the would-be sacrifices die unexpectedly and mysteriously.

And others suddenly aren't looking so good either.

Enter our hero, Acatl, the Death God Gumshoe, solver of crimes, defender of innocence, and High Priest of the Dead. He is by now a most seasoned solver of supernatural crime and has the scars and scabs to prove it.* Quickly, he determines that the sacrifice, an honorable warrior of a faraway kingdom now lying dead and leaking pus, died of most unnatural causes, namely a supernatural disease, as did the warrior who claimed credit for capturing him.

Uh and also oh.

Soon the plot is thicker than clotted blood as various candidates for the caster of the malign spell that has caused what threatens to become an epidemic are brought up and eliminated. Is it the merchant from a previously conquered city who turns out to have been a member of that city's Imperial Family? Is it the High Priest of the storm-god Tlaloc (a vicious frenemy of Acatl's -- and hey, the diseases's symptoms mimic suffocation or drowning, so this hypothesis immediately volunteers itself to the seasoned Obsidian & Blood fan)? The titular heir-presumptive, who happens to be a devotee of Tlaloc's wife Jade Skirt? All of them? None of them?

Acatl goes through all of the usual detective motions, trading hypotheses, interviewing suspects, raising the souls of the victims to ask what they remember of how they died... all the while stubbornly clinging to his faith in a person who has pretty much been the Archie to Acatl's Nero Wolfe. As the story and the mystery all finally come together, the roots of the later holiday, Dia de los Muertos, become evident and the reader suddenly feels a compulsion to re-read Malcom Lowry. As one does.

One also feels a need to go back and read the trilogy from the beginning, all in one go, to catch all the stuff she obviously missed. And knowing that she needs to read on an empty stomach.

And since a lot of elements in these stories are inspired by actual events, actual history -- the emperors, the inter-city politics, and yes, the epidemic -- one wants to do some non-fiction reading as well. As one does.

Damn fine stuff, this.

*Aztec spell-casting and other acts of propitiation and divination requiring that the supplicant donate quite a lot of his own as well as other animals and people's blood to the cause.

100 Books #114 - Jean Plaidy's LIGHT ON LUCREZIA

I thoroughly enjoyed Plaidy's earlier look at the life of the infamous but possibly unfairly maligned Lucrezia Borgia, Madonna of the Seven Hills, in which Plaidy neatly focused, not on the most infamous rumors and legends about this woman and her family, but on how those nasty tales might have gotten started. This is a nice distinction, maybe -- you can't talk effectively about rumors without mentioning their content, at least in passing, after all -- but one that Plaidy is a master of making, and making into satisfying novels.

Which is why I love her, and, as I mentioned when writing about The Scarlet Contessa, a book set in pretty much the same time and place as Plaidy's Borgia books, wish she'd taken up Caterina Sforza as a subject at some point. Oh, what a glorious book that would have been!

La Sforza does make an appearance in  Light on Lucrezia. the sequel to Madonna of the Seven Hills, but only for a few pages: a swift depiction of her resistance to Cesare's military onslaught and her famously rapey personal encounter with the man after he won the battle. How Plaidy could convey this account and then pass over the notion of writing a book about Caterina will always be a mystery to me. If I'm wrong about this, and she did write about Caterina in more detail under one of her many, many pseudonyms, please, for all love, enlighten me.

But enough about the Lady of Forli; this book is about Lucrezia, picking up exactly after the previous book with the apprehensive coming of the second of her three husbands, Alfonso, illegitimate son of the king of Naples, to Rome. Plaidy protrays this marriage as utterly idyllic, marred only by what every relationship in Lucrezia's life seems to have been marred: the jealousy of the odious Cesare. Every page devoted to this marriage -- and there really aren't many of them -- foreshadows the poor Alfonso's inevitable fate, so when it comes, the reader yawns a bit. And yawns a bit further when Lucrezia predictably chooses to stick by her evil brother, whom she has been conditioned to worship and seek to please since birth.

The rest of the novel focuses on Lucrezia's third marriage, to another Alfonso, this one the heir to the Duke of Ferrara -- which is to say that things pick up from here. Ferrara is ruled by an ancient line of haughty, snotty aristocrats, the Estes (who trace their lineage to times before the Carolingians ruled a good chunk of Europe), who resent that their bloodline will now bear the taint of Borgia ancestry, too, if Lucrezia does her job and makes Este babies. Which is to say that Lucrezia is thrown into a den of vipers, with the chief she-snake being her sister-in-law, Isabella, Marquesa of Mantua, who has long regarded herself the prettiest, most stylish, most accomplished woman in Italy and so sees Lucrezia as a rival to be humiliated at every opportunity. Hilariously, the passive and pliant Lucrezia's non-reaction to Isabella's ploys (and those of Isabella's own sister-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga) is precisely the best way to keep her would-be rival at the height of annoyance.

As Lucrezia's domestic troubles take center stage, at last the figures of her father Rodrigo (Pope Alexander VI) and brother Cesare the Fratricide, fade into the background. This may be why a lot of readers have complained that this second Borgia novel is dull compared to the first; it lacks the dramatic focus the first book, devoted almost wholly to foreshadowing the murder of Giovanni Borgia by Cesare, had. But really? It's all in the title: Light on Lucrezia. Finally, Lucrezia Borgia is the heroine of her own life, or at least as much of one as a Renaissance Pope's only (acknowledged) daughter can be. Which is to say that the modern reader spends a lot of these books wanting to slap Lucrezia and tell her to take some control and set some boundaries, but yeah...

La Borgia's reputation seems to have been on the mend in my lifetime, and I wonder if Plaidy's books might not have helped get this started. For my part, I find her portrait of a passive people pleaser annoying but having the ring of truth to it. A pretty little girl with such monstrous relatives might well just teach herself not to see them as they were as long as they kept her in nice dresses and poets and behaved themselves when she was around, especially in a society that still exercised mighty energies to keep women in their places (the odd amazing virago like Caterina Sforza or Isabella d'Este notwithstanding; some people just don't follow the rules, no matter when they're born), and I find the idea that Lucrezia was such a one far more plausible than that she was a monstrous female Cesare, whoring and poisoning her way across Italy out of ego, malice and desire for power.

So yeah, Holliday Granger played her just right.

100 Books 113 - Lee Battersby's THE CORPSE-RAT KING

Is that a crown in your pocket, or are you just happy to come and rule us?

That's not a quote from this novel, but really? It totally could be.

Marius Helles makes his living robbing the corpses of soldiers who have fallen in battle, a practice he has refined to an art -- until he has no living to make at all. Tee hee. What happens is, he robs the wrong corpse -- that of a fallen king -- and is observed holding a crown by one of the recently dead, who misreads the situation and next thing Marius knows, he's been sucked down to the world of the dead! Whom the gods are ignoring! Because, the dead think, they have no king! So they need a king! Marius has a crown, therefore he must be a king! So he can be their king! But of course, Marius doesn't want to be dead, even if he gets to be KING DEAD!

All of that sounds spoilery, but that's all just the first chapter of The Corpse-Rat King, in which the newly-dead Marius gets his mission: find the dead a king, or else. But like all good Heroes, Marius at first Refuses the Call, and runs away. As excuses for a tour of a funky fantasy world go, this is a highly original one.

Battersby, too, took some time making this more than just a generic fantasy world. There are a lot of nice touches, like a short discourse on a tradition of throwing corn dollies into the water at the beginning of an ocean voyage and the industry of dolly-making that has grown up around it, that, combined with Zombie Marius' antics, make this book a genuine pleasure to read.

There are some disturbingly funny moments, such as when Marius almost "rescues"* a drowned Mad King who is a dig-in-your ribs reference to Caligula (he even named his horse "Littleboot" which is roughly an English translation of "Caligula" -- the nickname bestowed on the beloved toddler son of the Roman commander Germanicus that stuck right on through the kid's rise to the imperial throne) and rides him like a horsey beneath the waves. Or when... but that would be spoilery. Eff off. But oh, how I giggled.

This is another novel that I started and let go by the wayside because of shiny things that came my way. This should not reflect on the book's quality, however. I'm just distractable that way. And though I had read many other things between the putting-aside and the taking-back-up-again (a span of three or four weeks), I did not have to refresh my memory as to what had been going on. And once I was reading it again, I kept on at a giddy pace, carried away by Battersby's wonderful world building (and cathedral building; the Cathedral of Bones licks the Iron Throne hollow as an enduring taunt/symbol of a founding ruler's conquests) and Marius' resourcefulness as he first runs away from and then embraces his quest, like every hero does.

The ending leaves room for a sequel, by the way. Hurrah for Mostly Dead Marius!

*For "rescue" read "spirits away so he can proceed to the land of the dead and become their king."

100 Books #112 - David Colby's DEBRIS DREAMS

So come on now, admit it. You've always felt, deep down inside, that the one thing that science fiction was still missing, egregiously so, was a good and thorough discussion of the pressure differential implications of farting in a spacesuit.

Problem. Solved.

David Colby's debut novel, Debris Dreams has such a discussion, and much, much more to offer the young adult or the supposedly grown-up science fiction aficionado, and plenty to offer the more casual reader as well. Colby has packed a primer in space habitat sociology, a convincing space-borne war story*, a charming coming of age narrative, and a tale of the ultimate in sucky long-distance relationships, into a brisk-reading 284 pages of microgravity adventure.

Our heroine, Drusilla Xao, is a sixteen-year-old conscript into the Chinese-American-Alliance's Space Marines, suddenly called to war when a demented-yet-calculating band of militant Lunan seperatists launch a successful terrorist attack and destroy Earth's one and only space elevator, completely cutting off the post-petroleum society down the gravity well from its colonies, destroying a good chunk of Kenya in the process, and stranding everyone in near-Earth orbit. Drusilla's parents lived and worked on that elevator, as did most of her companions' parents; they now have nothing left to love or fight for but each other -- except for Drusilla, who has an e-girlfriend she has always longed to meet in person and be together as a couple with... down in Ontario.

Drusilla's homosexuality is only a minor plot point, but it tells everything about the society Colby hopes we'll one day achieve. In Drusilla's world, being gay is just a thing like having green eyes or dry ear wax or not liking artichokes (that it also allows our young author/narrator to engage in a bit of wolf-whistling at some of his female characters' physical attributes now and then without being an icky white male ogler-in-prose is merely by the bye**). There are more important things to worry about, like always having breathing equipment handy in case of a hull breach or not stranding yourself unable to move in the middle of a room at zero gee or if that heat signature in that cloud of space debris is maybe another Lunan attack on the way.

A lot of the world-building takes the form of Drusilla's email exchanges with her beloved Earthbound Sarah as she explains her world and her culture, smitten teenager to smitten teenager. Since This is War and resources are limited, these exchanges are short and thinly dispersed and so don't intrude overly on the narrative, but are nicely informative all the same -- Dru and her author have given a lot of thought to conveying a lot in just a few words, packing in infodump and heartbreaking longing in a tiny space. The effect of this device is to make Drusilla's world comprehensible without once feeling like the author is talking down to his readers, which is something a lot of novelists with a lot more work under their belts than Colby has could stand to pay attention to.

My only real complaint about the book is a niggling little one (which, see addendum below). Because the governing alliance includes China, the characters' most intense and passionate moments tend to contain a lot of Chinese vocabulary. In places, the book has actual characters, but most of the words are in pinyin (Chinese syllables rendered into the western alphabet). Somehow, the characters came out fine in my Epub copy, but the pinyin got garbled, and thus is full of question marks in place of letters. Sometimes I could interpolate the letters (I took Mandarin in college mumble mumble years ago) but sometimes a lot of question marks in a row left me questioning, too. Fortunately, context clues let the reader gloss over these bits, but it's a pity nonetheless.

So yes, if you loved the anime series Planetes, or Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, or the TV series Firefly or Brand Gamblin's Tumbler, or Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile fiction (or even some of his more adult fiction with its casual sexual hijinx), or all of the above -- and really, I have a hard time imagining how it could not be all of the above -- Debris Dreams will feel quite familiar to you, but as I've explained, that doesn't mean it's a rehash of any of those, or that it will bore you. Quite the contrary!

Where was this stuff when I was a young adult sci-fi fan? Oh yeah, the author wasn't even born then. Um...

*The best elements of the novel are the combat scenes, many of which feature young Space Marines fighting out in the black in power armor, i.e., not in spaceships of any kind. And fight scenes within space habitats and orbiting factories, featuring the sights and smells of blood spraying in microgravity. These scenes are simply stunning.

**Though this does give Drusilla a slight taint of Mary Sue when coupled with her meteoric rise from civilian apprentice spacer to "Star Corporal" in the Space Marines. But it's only a slight taint.

ADDENDUM (Nov. 30) - I spent a few days in discussion with Kate Sullivan at Candlemark and Gleam, this novel's publishers, and we determined that what was going on in the pinyin was a fault in how a lot of e-readers handle accent marks -- tone marks in pinyin. The rising tone was fine, but the rest were rendered as question marks. Kate asked me whether the garbled accented letters were worse than not having the textbook-correct pinyin and I told her it would be better to just have the syllables in regular italics. The hard core Mandarin speakers would be able to tell from context most of the time which meaning for a syllable was meant, and the rest would just see the italics and either gloss over the foreign words or look them up. Kate has since decided to do away with the accent marks and just present the Mandarin words in italics, sparing us all the question marks and gobbledygook. You think a big Six Five Four publisher would do that for us? HA.