Happy Thanksgiving

Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear

Published by Prime Books on October 23, 2012 

Elizabeth Bear is a graceful, imaginative writer who skillfully illuminates the depths of the characters she creates. While the social relevance for which she often reaches sometimes seems a bit forced, she deserves credit for pushing the boundaries of science fiction and fantasy.

The stories in this collection I liked best tended to be science fiction. My favorite, "Tideline," won a Hugo. It is a poignant and memorable story. Chalcedony, a malfunctioning derelict of a war machine, combs the beach looking for pretty objects she can string together to make necklaces. She needs the help of a boy named Belvedere to carry out her final mission. Bear blends science fiction with one of Lovecraft's monsters in "Shoggoths in Bloom" as a black scientist in 1938 confronts a moral dilemma. This Hugo-winning story explores the ethics of enslaving a species that was created for the purpose of being enslaved. While full of entertaining ideas about future living, "In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns" is primarily the story of a murder investigation, complicated by shifting identities and an engineered cat that seems to have lost its memory. "Dolly" gives a slightly new twist to the "fine line between androids and humans" theme.

Other stories in the collection are less impressive but still worth reading. After she receives a brain implant for pain management, a young girl in "The Something-Dreaming Game" makes herself pass out from oxygen starvation so she can visit aliens who have a use for her implant. A former rock star and guitar goddess -- "The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder" -- while pondering the approaching end of her life, learns the meaning of life and death from dead guitar players. Whether brain repair is a euphemism for mind control is the question asked in "Gods of the Forge," a tale of industrial espionage that ends too abruptly. "Annie Weber" is about parasitic aliens who enjoy drinking cappuccino. An HIV-positive kid must decide whether to live her life as a harpy in "The Horrid Glory of its Wings."

Some stories don't have much to do with science fiction or fantasy but were nonetheless interesting, if unspectacular. "Sonny Liston Takes the Fall" is an odd story about Sonny Liston and Muhammed Ali and the experience of being black in America during the middle of the twentieth century. "Sounding" is about a whale that helps a struggling fisherman find some tuna. "Confessor" is an attempt at a thriller with the addition of genetic engineering.

There are also stories that didn't do much for me. With advice from a witch, "The Cold Blacksmith" tries to manufacture a heart for a demanding girl. A witch also turns up, along with a princess, in "Love Among the Talus," a story about which potential suitor the princess will marry after the battles cease. A dragon named "Orm the Beautiful" negotiates with the Museum of Natural History to preserve his Chord. The last shark eats the last people in "The Inevitable Heat Death of the Universe." In "Cryptic Coloration," three giggly girls stalk their professor who, when he's not teaching, uses his abilities as a magi to track down mythical creatures -- the sort of creatures who prey on giggly girls. In "The Ladies," women have the right to vote and Thomas Jefferson persuades John Adams' wife to run against her husband in the presidential election.

On the whole, while the collection is uneven, the best stories are exceptional and even the stories I didn't like so much are readable. The collection is an excellent introduction to Elizabeth Bear for science fiction and fantasy fans who would like to become acquainted with her work.

RECOMMENDED

The Light of Amsterdam by David Park

Published by Bloomsbury USA on November 13, 2012

A woman who should be content with her marriage instead feels insecure and makes needless drama for her husband. A man maps the course of his self-destructive downfall and then feels sorry for himself, in part because he has alienated his son. Given the chance to join her daughter's celebration of her forthcoming marriage, a mother instead spends her time moping and brooding and, yes, creating drama for her poor daughter. Awash in self-pity, these gloomy characters from Belfast visit Amsterdam on the same weekend. I'm surprised the city survives.

Marion and Richard are taking a break from the business they own to spend a weekend in Amsterdam. Marion is obsessively and irrationally annoyed by Richard, a form of madness to which she is driven by her feelings of inadequacy. She is convinced that Richard is having, or is preparing to have, an affair with one of their employees. Marion responds to her fears in a way that struck me as utterly ridiculous, the sort of contrivance that would appear only in a novel, never in real life.

Also visiting Amsterdam is Karen, who works as a cleaner in a Belfast retirement home. Karen's daughter Shannon is having a "hen party" in Amsterdam before her wedding, an event that requires Karen to dress as an Indian on the flight and during the first night of partying. Karen might be the most complex of the book's characters, both in her relationship with her daughter (the nature of which she can't quite grasp) and in her inability to understand her own behavior. Karen's bitterness leads her to make the sort of self-indulgent proclamation that has fueled many a soap opera: if Shannon's father is invited to Shannon's wedding, Karen refuses to attend.

Alan is an art professor who lost his marriage over a brief dalliance with a graduate student. Alan's wife Susan wants to move to Spain to open a guest-house (doesn't everyone?), but the weekend she schedules to look at a property is the weekend Alan plans to spend in Amsterdam, attending a Bob Dylan concert. Alan charitably agrees to take their troubled sixteen-year-old, Jack, with him, thus freeing Susan to spend the weekend in Spain with the man Alan and Jack both depise. Jack is moody and withdrawn; he treats his parents with scorn. The sections of the novel that feature Alan and Jack focus on Alan's frustration as he attempts to connect with his son. Although their story is familiar and not particularly insightful, it at least feels authentic.

The characters come within sight of each other at the airport and cross paths from time to time as the novel progresses. The pace slows after the characters arrive in Amsterdam, as if David Park needed to give each of them something to do but didn't quite know what. Alan repeatedly runs into Karen and seems interested in her when any rational man would flee from her at top speed. Their interaction is all that ties the three stories together, yet it doesn't amount to much.

The story is marred by page after page of mind-numbing exposition as Park tells us what his characters are thinking -- and they are always thinking, always about themselves. The characters are introspective to a stupefying degree. They come packaged with soap opera quality backstories and they all seem intent on injecting needless drama into their lives. Perhaps the characters accurately represent the self-absorption of a significant percentage of the population, but the novel has little to say about them that isn't obvious, which makes reading about them a tedious enterprise.

Having vented my frustration with the book's characters, I should note that there are some aspects of The Light of Amsterdam that I admired. Sullen and resentful, afraid of doing the slightest thing that might call attention to himself, Jack is a keen portrayal of a teenager who is the embodiment of angst. Park's prose is lucid and his dialog is realistic. In the end, however, the story seems pointless, amounting to unresolved slices of wearisome lives, and the abrupt ending is bizarre.

NOT RECOMMENDED

Double Star by Robert Heinlein

First published in 1956

Robert Heinlein is one of the legends of science fiction for a simple reason:  he was a masterful storyteller.  There have been finer prose stylists, and a few sf writers have crafted novels of greater power than Heinlein's, but rare are the authors who have so consistently grabbed a reader and commanded rapt attention from the first scene to the last, in novel after novel.  Double Star isn't one of Heinlein's best novels, but it was good enough to win a Hugo, Heinlein's first.

Spaceman Dak Broadbent hires Lornzo Smythe to impersonate a man.  Although Lorenzo is a talented actor (just ask him!), he is more of a con artist than an accomplished thespian.  Before Dak can explain the role, Dak and Lorenzo are fleeing, having killed a Martian and a human during a shootout.  The individual Lorenzo is to impersonate turns out to an important politician -- important to Earth's relationship with Mars and to the Expansionist Party's future.  As you would expect in politics, betrayal motivated by unrealized ambition threatens exposure of Dak's scheme.  Can Lorenzo get away with it?  That's the question that drives the plot and captivates the reader.

If we're confident today that there are no Martians on Mars, it's still fun to imagine the future as Heinlein saw it:  a colonized moon and outer planets, space yachts, the strange customs of Martians and Venusians, and all the other trappings of 1950s science fiction that Heinlein helped create.  It is a future that his characters, who are living in it, naturally take for granted -- unlike some current, ego-driven sf authors who can't resist bogging down their narratives with detailed descriptions of the technological advances they envision.

Heinlein, of course, loved to pontificate, and Lorenzo's crash course in politics gave Heinlein a chance to opine on a variety of topics, from philosophy to moral instruction, from economics to political equality.  Not surprisingly, the freedom-heavy political model that Lorenzo adopts mirrors Heinlein's own:  free trade, free travel, a minimalist approach to lawmaking, the primacy of the individual (balanced by the individual's understanding that functioning communities require self-sacrifice).  Yet Heinlein's gift was his ability to put story first.  His characters pontificate because, in the context of the story, it's the natural thing for them to do.  Their opinions never get in the way of the story; in fact, they often advance it.  Heinlein always managed to convey heavy opinions with a light touch, a technique that few authors have managed with such skill.

Politics, Lorenzo learns, is a game often suited to dirty players, but what if an election is based on a hoax?  Yes, I know, conspiracy theorists and party hacks are always claiming that elections are based on hoaxes, making Double Star a novel that will always be timely.  But is it a great novel?  Double Star is an entertaining send-up of politics, making the point in stark terms that great politicians are great actors, that the difference between performance and reality is often blurred to obscurity, but the novel lacks the depth of Heinlein's best work.  The ending is a little too obvious, a little too easy.  Even second-tier Heinlein, though, is a better read than most authors can manage.  Double Star is an unpadded novel written in a breezy, fast-moving style.  More than a half century after it was written, it is a novel that both sf fans and readers of political fiction can continue to enjoy.

RECOMMENDED

Crashed by Timothy Hallinan

 

Self-published in 2010; published by Soho Crime on November 13, 2012

Some crime novels are just fun. Crashed is one of those. It's also smart, absorbing, and fast-moving. Timothy Hallinan does everything a writer should do whose goal is to keep a reader entertained from the first sentence to the last.

Crashed was originally self-published as an ebook, apparently because Hallinan's editors at HarperCollins can't recognize good writing when they see it and thus turned it down. Hallinan had the good sense to jump to Soho Crime, which has published Crashed and will soon publish the next two books in the series. The books deserve the wider audience that they'll now have.

Junior Bender is commissioned to steal a painting. The robbery goes spectacularly wrong, culminating in Bender's kidnapping at gunpoint and eventual delivery to Trey Annunziato, a young woman who is managing an enormously profitable criminal enterprise. Trey needs Bender to find out who is sabotaging the most successful porn flick that will ever be made, featuring a former child sitcom star named Thistle Downing. Trey both blackmails and threatens Bender to assure his cooperation.

Who is responsible for the sabotage? Who killed Bender's friend while the friend was watching Thistle's apartment? Why do two girls keep popping up and running away? The story works well as a mystery and it's sufficiently goofy to work as light comedy. One of the mysteries (the killer's identity) is resolved in a surprising way about three-fourths of the way into the novel, quickly followed by an explanation of the two girls. The solution to the mystery of the saboteur's identity isn't entirely unexpected, but the novel's resolution is immensely satisfying.

It's difficult to make a washed-up Hollywood junkie into a sympathetic character, but Hallinan does that with Thistle, in part by giving the reader a glimpse of Thistle's journal, a mad howl of anguish and despair coupled with a sincere desire for a better life, and in part by letting us see Thistle's downfall through the eyes of her sympathetic TV mom (her real mom, by contrast, is a barracuda). Bender, of course, is also a likable character, despite his criminal propensities. He is, in fact, a criminal with a heart, and helping Trey assure that Thistle makes a porn movie she detests causes Bender more than a few moral qualms. Despite the blackmail and threats, the reader knows that Bender will find a way to rescue Thistle.

Crashed is an unusual example of crime fiction in that the story is always believable. While other writers think shock and awe is the key to success, Hallinan knows that solid writing and appealing characters make a novel stand out. Hallinan's prose is lively and clever. This is light entertainment, the sort of novel that's often classed as a beach read, and it's an expertly crafted example of its type. Some of the scenes are played for laughs (Bender swinging from a chandelier, for instance) but Hallinan never goes so far over-the-top that the story loses credibility. Action scenes are underplayed, a refreshing departure from most crime fiction. Some scenes in Crashed are touching, many are amusing, one or two are surprisingly intense, and every bit of the tightly-plotted story is a joy to read.

RECOMMENDED