Tag: Skiffy

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Ad Astra

Time, I guess, for a little SF book blogging!

:: Here’s one of the great all-time opening paragraphs:

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying…but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice…but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extre,es, a fascinating century of freaks…but nobody loved it.

When I note that SF has had to scrape and fight for every tiny morsel of respect it’s ever been grudgingly offered by the Keepers of the Literary Canon, and I contrast that anti-SF attitude with writing like that paragraph, I invariably end up wondering if the Keepers of the Canon actually ever bothered reading any SF. Seriously, folks, Alfred Bester could write.

We’re talking Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination here, one of the great masterworks of all science fiction. Crammed into this fairly short book — my hardcover copy, a recent reissue of the book by the SFBC, ticks in at 212 pages, and toward the end of the book when Bester hits his stride with some of the more mind-bending stuff, he engages in some typographic pyrotechnics that take up entire pages — is a revenge tale, a love story, a mystery, another mystery, some space opera goodness, more mystery, a depiction of a massively corporate society, yet more mystery, daring escapes, and an iconic anti-hero twenty years before Stephen R. Donaldson introduced us to Thomas Covenant.

After a brief and fascinating introduction to the world of the novel (if you’re going to start your novel with an infodump, you’d better be as good a writer as Alfred Bester), we make the acquaintance of Gulliver Foyle (“Gully” for short), a mechanic’s mate on a space ship who also happens to be the sole survivor of the ship’s destruction. He’s floating along in space, eeking out a survival of sorts for months within the flotsam of the ship’s wreckage, when another ship comes by and…flies away again, leaving Foyle to die. Foyle becomes driven by the need to exact revenge upon this ship, the Vorga, and its crew who abandoned him without a single attempt at a rescue. From there the story barely pauses as the single-minded revenge story gradually increases in scope until Gully Foyle himself turns out to be…nah, I’m not going to spoil it here. Read the book.

I knew coming into this book that Bester was a great writer, having enormously admired a number of his short stories (“Fondly Fahrenheit” is of particular note). Even so, I wasn’t prepared for how good The Stars My Destination is.

:: From there I turned to Leigh Brackett and her book The Coming of the Terrans, which is a collection of five novellas set on Mars. But not the Mars we’d recognize today; this is the Mars as imagined by writers who toiled twenty years before the Viking landers unmasked the Martian landscape. (In fact, in a brief foreword passage inside the book’s front cover, Brackett notes that the astronomers of her day were quickly “reducing these dreams to cold, hard, ruinous fact”. This collection was published in 1967, a full ten years or so before the Viking landers touched down.) Brackett’s Mars is still a world of canals, ancient civilizations, deserted alien cities set at the side of long-dry oceans, and newer cities where the upstart humans from nearby young world Earth mingle with the Martians whose dying world boasts a history measured in millennia.

Strictly speaking, Brackett’s work here isn’t space opera, but its cousin, planetary romance. (I tend to think of planetary romance as space opera where nobody goes to space.) All of the tales in this book have an elegiac tone, and several have as main characters scientist-types who are searching for some kind of glory amongst the artefacts of long-dead Martian cities. For an idea of the kinds of stories that await within this book, one only need note the titles of the novellas within. They include “The Beast-Jewel of Mars”, “The Last Days of Shandakor”, and my favorite, “Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon”.

Well, maybe not: those titles sound pulpy in nature, but Brackett was no pulp hack as a prose stylist. Some might argue that a writer of her talent should have aspired to better than these kinds of pulp tales, but to my way of thinking, somebody‘s got to be writing the pulp tales, and a pulp tale by a good writer is always preferable to a literary tale by a hack.

I also find that with stories like this, it’s no real difficulty to summon up the suspension of disbelief necessary to buy into a Mars that has actually been inhabited for centuries by fabulous societies of aliens, any more than I find it hard to grant for the purposes of a story that many ages ago there was a land of heroism and darkness called Middle Earth whose only surviving records to our day were in the form of a Red Book found in Westmarch. Your mileage may vary. Suspension of disbelief is a tricky thing, after all.

:: I’ll be reviewing this book for GMR in a week or so, but I just wanted to note a wonderful observation within its pages, by Harlan Ellison:

An observation: it is my theory that the full and total explanation of the behavior of babies and kittens is that they spend all their time trying to make that which is moving, stop; and that which is stopped, move.

Now that is as true as anything I’ve ever read, anywhere.

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Stalkin’

A week or so ago I finished reading Deathstalker by Simon R. Green as part of my space opera obsession. This book was a mixed bag for me — sufficiently positive that I’ll grab the next book at some point, but since I know the series has six or seven books in it, the quality will have to improve a bit if I’m going to commit to the whole thing.

As our story begins, there’s a guy named Owen Deathstalker who lives on some backwater planet, where he’s happy to go along his everyday life and not worry too much about the workings of the politics of the Empire in which he lives. His life is shattered when the Empress Lionstone (great name, that) declares him an outlaw and strips him of his hereditary title as head of the Deathstalker clan. Owen finds himself with a series of questionable companions with whom he plans to form a rebellion against the Empire.

Now, there’s some other stuff that happens, too — lots of time is spent detailing the various intrigues within the Imperial court and the clan loyalties that swirl around the Empress. In fact, Green spends too much time on that aspect of his story, so much so that at one point Owen Deathstalker, the title character in this inaugural book in a long and ambitious series about this character, disappears from the book for about 150 pages or so as we follow the trials and tribulations of Clan Wolfe and Clan Campbell.

Other things are problematic as well; Green’s tone shifts all over the place. At times the book is a riveting space opera adventure, but at other times it almost reads like a parody of a space opera adventure. Our main villain, the Empress Lionstone — commonly referenced as “the Iron Bitch” — gets her first major opportunity to vent her imperial wrath and show her lethal teeth when some resistance fighters infiltrate one of her parties and humiliate her with, of all things, a pie in the face. That’s a good indicator of how odd this book feels at times: it’s an at-times graphically violent space opera that takes us to many worlds in its 500-some pages, follows multiple plotlines involving a pretty large cast of characters, gives us warriors who can spontaneously summon tremendous powers from within themselves, gives us clones as secondary citizens and oppressed telepaths, features ancient weapons and artefacts of alien origins, has ships hyperspace-ing from one end of the galaxy to the other at will, and…pie-throwing. Um…OK. Nothing against pie-throwing in principle, of course — I’m a fan of the old edible missile — but here it just had me thinking, “What?”. Some reviews I’ve read indicate that Green is working at actual parody or pastiche here, but I must have missed an awful lot of the jokes.

Other things with the characters don’t fare so well. The Empress basically comes off as your standard autocratic ruler who is sadistic and brutal in her eagerness to remain in power, but that’s about it. There’s nothing to grab onto as a character there. The most sharply-drawn characters are people who seem like they should be minor characters, and the guy whose name is on the front of the book — Owen Deathstalker — gets kind of short-shrift for much of the work. (It gets better at the end.) Also, certain surprising revelations aren’t handled terribly well; one is absolutely no surprise at all, and the other is a surprise but then doesn’t seem to matter when the character in question dies soon thereafter.

But still, for the most part Green keeps the pages turning, and he’s got some gift for prose (I quoted the first couple of paragraphs here, and I still maintain that that is one heck of an opening passage). I just hope the series either (a) settles down a bit in the next few books, or (b) throws caution to the wind.

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The New Space Opera


The New Space Opera, originally uploaded by Jonathan Strahan.

That cover sets the bar pretty high, eh? I like my SF with BIG EFFIN’ STARSHIPS. So that cover indicates BIG EFFIN’ STARSHIPS. Therefore, bring on the tales about stuff that happens in and around BIG EFFIN’ STARSHIPS!

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JLB for President!

Jayme Lynn Blaschke has announced his candidacy for the SFWA. His platform seems interesting, but I must acknowledge that I have no dog in this fight, since I’m not a member of the SFWA and I doubt I’ll bother joining if and/or when I become a published writer.

Consider yourself warned, John Scalzi!

UPDATE: Having read JLB’s platform again, I declare myself solidly behind him. Now to start making campaign posters, and lining up hands for him to kiss and babies for him to shake…or is that the other way around…hmmm….

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Graphically speaking

I’ve been reading quite a few graphic novels of late, and I have some more in the “to read” stack, seeing as how the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library actually stocks them to a nice degree.

(If you live in or near a locality with a large public library system and you’re interested in graphic novels, give this route a try. I firmly believe that one big reason that graphic novels are seemingly forever stuck in that “on the brink” phase, where people are constantly saying things like “Hey, these aren’t the funny books you grew up with!”, is that graphic novels tend to be priced in so high a fashion as to seriously discourage random exploration of the medium. Do I strongly recommend Craig Thompson’s Blankets? Absolutely. But if someone came to me and said, “I have forty bucks. Recommend some reading material I might like”, I’d probably feel a little guilty if I advised them to blow their money on Blankets only to have it not be their cup of tea.)

I don’t know if we’re in some kind of “Golden Age” of graphic fiction, but there’s just some amazing work being done outside of the standard superhero stories. (Not that there is anything inherently wrong with superhero stories in the first place.) To anyone who would dismiss the graphic novel along the lines of “I don’t need pictures to go with my storytelling”, I’d simply ask if you keep your eyes shut when you go to the movies!

Here are some thoughts on some recent reads of mine.

:: I never saw the David Cronenberg film of A History of Violence, so I have no idea how accurate the film is to the original graphic novel. I heard that the film was very good, so I checked out the novel on that basis alone, much as I did with The Road to Perdition a few years back. In that case, I found the ways in which the film diverged from the novel interesting, and I couldn’t decide which version of the tale I preferred. (In fact, the versions are sufficiently different that I find it easy to like both equally.)

A History of Violence has much the same kind of feel as Perdition; both involve (at least in part) the way big-city violence comes to small-town America. Even though both books are by different authors and have different artists, the same kind of emotional pall hangs over the story in each, a sense of impending doom where happiness will be destroyed forever, and quite violently, at that. Part of this comes from the art of History, which has the same stylistic feel as Perdition, with heavily-lined black-and-white images that make the larger panels almost impressionistic in nature.

I found the tale of History a bit less gripping than Perdition‘s. In History, a pair of violent killers come into a small town where they are done in when they run afoul of the wrong guy to pick on. The rest of the story comes out of the reasons why Tom McKenna is the wrong guy to pick on, and just what the secret history he’s concealing happens to be. I did find it a bit disappointing when it turned out that McKenna is your basic “running from the mob” kind of protagonist, but even so, the story does take some surprising twists as it heads toward its conclusion.

:: Of a completely different nature is Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi. I read Persepolis more than a year ago (and seem to have inexplicably not posted about it here), but I finally read the second volume just a few weeks ago.

Here is an amazing memoir of an Iranian expat, now living in Paris, who grew up witnessing firsthand her country’s embrace of — or descent into — fundamentalism and oppression. The first volume deals mainly with Satrapi’s childhood and early adolescence, while in the second Satrapi goes to live abroad to finish her studies. Thus the books tell two stories: the first, an internal tale of a society’s willful decision to become fundamentalist, and in the second, a story about a person living abroad who happens to come from one of the more disliked nations on Earth.

As autobiography, Satrapi’s work is riveting. She has a keen perceptive gift that is the key to all good autobiography; in our lives, we all tend to be our own heroes and villains from time to time, and Satrapi never shies from depicting her own faults as well as her own strengths, her own mistakes as well as her own triumphs. And her ability to put into very few words and images the strife that surrounded her country in that tumultuous period is particularly noteworthy. At one point, while discussing the fundamentalist government’s focus on acceptable public clothing for women, Satrapi writes:

The regime had understood that one person leaving her house while asking herself:

“Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my makeup be seen? Are they going to whip me?”

…no longer asks herself:

“Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is ti livable? What’s going on in the political prisons?”

I wonder if there will be a Persepolis 3. I hope so. Satrapi’s art is simple and evocative, and her writing is exemplary.

:: Moving into equally serious territory, last night I read The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot. In this book, a teenaged runaway girl named Helen is living on the streets of London for a time with her pet rat; she has run away from home because of her father’s molestation of her. Over the course of the book, Helen draws much inspiration from the life of Beatrix Potter, to the point where she unconsciously (or perhaps partly consciously) begins to model her own life on that of Potter, with whom she apparently shares some parallels.

This is a difficult work to characterize. Parts of it seem almost fantastical, but those kinds of elements are always portrayed as being in the mind of Helen; and what I admired most was the book’s insistence on the role that story and fantasy can play in helping us heal from unspeakable hurts. Too often we view fiction as “escapism”, but in this story, Talbot gives us a character for whom fiction is an essential way of dealing with her particular part of the world.

:: And now into pure fantasy: The Life Eaters, written by David Brin and painted by Scott Hampton. This book depicts a World War II gone horribly awry when the concentration camps turn out to be massive “factories” for necromancy, thus bringing the gods of Norse mythology to horrible life.

Apparently this is based on a short story of Brin’s (and it reminded me in part of a story of mine; I’ll have to post that here at some point). It’s a fascinating blend of fantasy and SF tropes, as well as an enjoyably dark tale about the borders between science and mysticism. My only complaint here was that to me the ending felt a bit rushed.

:: Moving into the folkloric type of talespinning, there was the utterly gorgeous Book of Ballads with art by Charles Vess and written by many contributors, among them Emma Bull, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, and Jane Yolen. Seriously, this book contains in a fairly compact package the work of some of the top names in fantastic literature today.

According to Terri Windling’s introduction, in the 1990s Charles Vess illustrated a series of comics which simply told the stories of old ballads from the English, Irish, and other traditions. For anyone who is used to more “sanitized” folklore, the original tales and ballads often turn out to be quite dark, and a number of the tales contained in The Book of Ballads are downright grim. But each is done with charm, and Vess’s artwork — black and white, with so many tiny and precise marks that one wonders how much time Vess spends on a single panel — is always stunning.

I recommend this book highly; it’s made its way onto a short list of graphic novels of which I’d like to own my own copy.

:: OK, a brief digression here. I often have difficulty reading manga, and oddly enough, it’s nothing to do with the right-to-left thing. (For those who have never tried to read an authentic manga, they are printed in reverse of the way we print books in our culture, and you read right-to-left.) This is easy enough to get used to. My problem with a lot of manga is the artwork: I often find it terribly difficult to figure out just what it is that I’m looking at, and in a graphic novel, that’s not the effect one wants. The latest victim here was a book called Trigun, which I went into with high hopes, mainly because of its subtitle: who wouldn’t want to read a tale subtitled “Deep space planet future gun action!”?

I’ll try it again sometime. But for now, I found the art nearly incomprehensible a lot of the time.

:: OK, last one. This is the wonderful Castle Waiting by Linda Medley. This is another collection of installments of a comic, so the book ends without much sense of closure — so I fervently hope this isn’t the end! (And according to Medley’s official site, this is only Volume One. Huzzah!) But the book is incredibly generous in its contents: there are almost 450 pages here. Lots to get through.

Castle Waiting is the story of the denizens of, wait for it, Castle Waiting. This castle is the formerly abandoned home of Sleeping Beauty (the first chapter tells that story from a different perspective), but is now home to a motley collection of odd characters (a steward who has the head of a stork, for instance) whose lives have all come together at this castle. Into their midst comes a pregnant woman named Jain, whose past is rather mysterious (and which is never really explained in the extant volume!). Medley delves into the backstories of these strange people who have made their home in this abandoned castle, with its water sprites and mischievous bodyless demons (he’s a head with feet) and a nun from a cloister for bearded women and so on.

If I had to make an analogy, Castle Waiting feels cut from similar cloth as The Princess Bride; it’s not parody per se, but rather gentle pastiche, loaded with in-jokes and inside stories that descend into other stories of their own. The book meanders all over the place, and never once did I mind.

Bring on Volume Two.

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PZ and Skiffy

Apparently while I was offline, PZ Myers turned 50. And in doing so, he demanded that readers write poems celebrating him, or something. So here’s a tri-partite Fibonacci poem in honor of Dr. Myers:

I.

P
Z
has turned
fifty. May
he never meet an
axe murderer in overalls.

II.

He
is
the scourge
of I.D.,
but his secret love
is ever the cephalopod.

III.

For
a
guy who
descends from
monkeys, he’s oddly
mild-mannered. Clark Kent o’ the Plains.

(Anyone quibbling with my accounting of syllables will be subject to pistols at dawn!)

He also provides the latest “Bold it if you’ve done it” meme-thing, this time springing from somebody’s list of “the most significant SF and fantasy books ever” or something like that. Here’s the list, to which I have added some comment where appropriate. Bold means I’ve read the book; italics means I definitely plan to read the book; strike means I have no intention of reading the book, for one reason or another, and a question mark before the title means that I haven’t even heard of the book. No markup at all means I have no views on the book whatsoever. OK? OK.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (Duh!)

The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov (I’m always surprised at the way Asimov’s writing seems to have fallen out of favor. I’ve loved the guy for years.)

Dune, Frank Herbert (I started it once, but I got exasperated at having to flip back to the glossary just about every other sentence. I’ll definitely read it again, though.)

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin (Don’t remember it all that well. My reaction at the time was “Meh”. But then, I was in eighth grade.)

Neuromancer, William Gibson (Sorry, but cyberpunk just doesn’t do it for me. I started this novel four or five times before I decided that it simply wasn’t my cup of tea. One of the iconic opening sentences of SF, though.)

Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke (I love Clarke, too. I’ve read a lot by him, but never this, for some reason.)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley (I’d have found this book a lot easier to like if not for the continual “Wow, do Christians suck!” subtext. So much good stuff here, though.)

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. (Just got a copy from SFBC!)

The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov (Not familiar with this.)

? Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras

? Cities in Flight, James Blish (Aside from Blish’s novelizations of Star Trek episodes, I’ve read nothing by him at all. It’s really a shame how many SF authors are vanishing into the mists of out-of-print-land.)

The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison (Hey, Harlan, can we get a progress report on Last Dangerous Visions?)

? Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison

The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany

Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey (Tried McCaffrey years ago and bounced off her. Unlikely to try again.)

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card (Sorry. I’m usually pretty good about not holding artists’ political views against them, but for some reason, I can’t get beyond the fact that Card is a homophobic reactionary twit.)

The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson

The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

Gateway, Frederik Pohl (I loved this! I need to read the follow-up books.)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson (What a great book this was.)

Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice (Saw the movie, see little to be gained by reading the book. Loved the movie, though. Cruise was fine as LeStat, in my eyes.)

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

? Little, Big, John Crowley

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny (Ahhh, the Amber books. Gotta finish those.)

? The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

? Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement

? More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon

? The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith

On the Beach, Nevil Shute

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

Ringworld, Larry Niven

? Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys

The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien (Tried once. Got about three pages in. Will try again.)

Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (Best ending ever! OK, not really. Stephenson has no idea how to end his books.)

Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner

The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester (Just acquired this one, too.)

Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein

? Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock

The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks (I read this in seventh grade, before I read Tolkien. I’ve never tried reading it since, for obvious reasons. I tried reading Brooks’s non-Shannara series a few years ago — some kind of dark fantasy thing — and I didn’t like it, either.)

Timescape, Gregory Benford

? To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

I obviously haven’t read all of these, so I can’t properly judge how “essential” or “significant” every title here may be. Seems to me, though, that Tigana should be in there somewhere, or The Stand. (I consider horror to be part of the SF and fantasy rubric.)

And now this is where you can all jump in comments and tell me what an ill-read slob I am, that I haven’t read the Hitchhiker books or whatever else!

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Shamus is evil and must be destroyed.

All that reading of Shamus‘s blog has, as I predicted here, finally demolished my resistance. Today at Target I weakened and bought, from the “cheap computer games” section, Galactic Civilizations (which apparently includes an expansion pack of some sort) and Freelancer. And I saw a bunch of others I’d like to try at some point as well, including a Star Wars five-pack thing.

(Shamus pleads ignorance here as to how this could happen, claiming that when he writes about games it’s mainly to rant and rave about them, but I know reverse psychology when I see it! He’s not fooling anybody!)

I figure that at least the games I bought kinda-sorta fall into my whole “space opera” research thing, right? Yeah, research. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.

(But we’re having company this week, so I won’t be firing these games up until either next week or maybe even the week after.)

UPDATE: Shamus finally noticed this post, and is now twirling his mustache as his nefarious plot comes to fruition. Ah well.

Anyhoo, as noted, I haven’t played any of the games yet, due to Real Life stuff that has made it not-quite-a-good-idea to start playing yet. But this coming weekend? All bets are off. (This is shaping up to be a bad weekend, what with me planning to play one or more of the games and go to the brand-spankin’-new Borders nearby on Saturday. I just hope I remember to do the laundry, wash the dishes, and feed the cats!)

In his post, Shamus says this:

I must add, there is something humorously over-the-top about his approach to this that I find admirable. He didn’t just run out and get one game. No, he went in and got a big ‘ol pile.

It’s like a monk who decides to try alcohol for the first time, so he strides into the liquor store and gets a bottle of wine, some whiskey, a vodka, something printed in spanish which may or may not be be tequila, the makings for Jello-shots, and a case of beer. I mean, why screw around, right?

Well, you gotta dive in with both feet, right? What’s the point of starting halfway? Besides, there’s always the possibility that maybe the first game I try stinks, and if I don’t have another to jump into, how do I tell if it’s the game or if it’s me that isn’t working out right?

Anyway, for the time being, I plan to restrict myself to games from the Cheap Shelf at Target only (except for the afore-mentioned Star Wars fivepack, which comes out per game to about the same as a cheap game from the shelf at Target anyway.

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Yeah, I’ll have a Screaming Viking!

Back when I was soliciting space opera reading suggestions*, a reader e-mailed me (or maybe he commented, I can’t recall) about a book called Space Viking by H. Beam Piper. I saw a few copies on eBay, but never acquired one.

Now, I see that I won’t have to. Viva Project Gutenberg!

OK, all you geniuses, what’s a good gizmo on which to read e-books?

(via)

* Not that I’ve stopped soliciting space opera reading suggestions, folks. Feel free to keep those coming!

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“I’ll be right here”

Over at AICN they’ve started running a series of articles that are apparently a tribute to 1982, which Harry Knowles bills as the “best genre year ever”. Now, I’m not sure about that, but it’s a personal thing — Knowles was twelve, which as we all know actually is the true Golden Age of science fiction. Anyhow, the first article he runs is about that year’s megablockbuster film ET: the Extra-Terrestrial.

Here’s something about E.T., and only a few, few other movies… it gets childhood intrinsically, so completely RIGHT. High praise indeed for Melissa Mathison’s script, which has the cadence and the smart-assery that is inherent in every kid. Childhood is messy and joyful, dangerous and crude. Everything is truly an adventure, and nothing is certain. The kids cuss, like I certainly did. They ride their bikes recklessly, just one skid or sharp turn away from slamming into the pavement and serious injury. There is a sense of danger every day. And when you’re a kid, you LOVE it. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, like waking up a summer’s day and having no idea what the day will bring. Spielberg nailed that.

Yeah, I still blubber like a baby at that damn movie. Sometimes I blubber just thinking about it. The moment that always gets me started is when ET goes into defib, and they get out the paddles to try to shock his heart back into beating. The doctor puts the paddles on ET’s chest, yells “Clear”, hits the button; ET’s body convulses as the voltage pours through him; and about twenty feet away, little Gertie (Drew Barrymore) recoils with fear, and then starts to cry.

Uh, I’m gonna go check something out in the corner…don’t mind me….

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Malazan

A few days ago I finished Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson, which is the first book in the fantasy mega-series The Malazan Book of the Fallen. I can’t say I loved the book, but I found it highly compelling, and I definitely plan to continue reading the series. Just not for a while.

This is epic fantasy, no doubt about it. Boy howdy, is this book epic. The sense of scale in this book is, to my way of thinking, even more vast than in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. In fact, Erikson has given himself a canvas here that is so big that for much of the book, I barely knew what was going on.

So a word of warning: if you like moral clarity in your fantasy, with heroes fighting against all odds against the Horrible and Magical Villain who is firmly ensconced in the Giant Granite And Iron Citadel that squats at the exact center of the blasted region where nothing grows that he has called his own, don’t bother with Gardens of the Moon. This ain’t that kind of fantasy.

But if you have at least some taste for following characters without knowing just who the good guys are, or if you like not knowing if the 700-page volume you’re reading even has “good guys” in any general sense of the term, then Gardens is for you.

There also isn’t much plot here, in the traditional sense; the book follows a more “situational” path. There’s a continent called Genabackis, which is the subject of a military conquest campaign by the Malazan Empire, and the book follows the exploits of a fairly large cast of characters as they react to events shaped by the Malazan invasion. Some of the characters are military officers, some are soldiers, some are mages, some are assassins, some are thieves, some are unclassifiable, and some are gods.

I mentioned last week that Gardens of the Moon contains almost nothing by way of the traditional infodump, which only serves to heighten the reader’s sense of being at sea here. There really is no place in the book where anyone sits down to give a lengthy precis of the history involved, so the reader has to be pretty attentive. In the short run, this makes the book rather hard to follow as the lack of a “big picture” hampers things a bit. But in the long run, as the various details that are handed out piecemeal throughout the narrative begin to fall into place, the tale becomes quite a bit more satisfying.

(My understanding is that Gardens is something of a stand-alone novel.)

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