So Awesome, Then Churned Out by a Factory

This has been the biggie: I’ve started re-reading the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. Wow, talk about a trip! I had almost completely forgotten the series and its impact on me years ago. I think this was due to the excessive sequels that tarnished the creativity of the project.

But now that I’ve re-read Dragonflight, the book that started the whole Pern deal way back in 1968, I feel like I’ve discovered a lost chunk of my brain. The first book is completely crazed - it’s got dozens of science fiction ideas thrown into a wild mix of melodrama, and it explodes in six different directions at once.

Continue reading "So Awesome, Then Churned Out by a Factory"...»

I Don’t Remember, I Don’t Recall

Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown, a young adult fantasy novel from the early 1980s, always stood out in my memory as a formative read from childhood. Unfortunately I couldn’t really say what the book was about! Over the years, everything about it had faded.

The Blue Sword, which McKinley wrote earlier but is set later in the same fantasy realm, does have a scene that I remembered: it’s a sex scene, the first that I could recall reading as a kid. At least I thought it was in The Blue Sword…

Now that I’ve reread the two books, I was shocked to discover that the racy stuff actually took place in The Hero and the Crown!

Continue reading "I Don’t Remember, I Don’t Recall"...»

Starting a Series at Book 8

Now for some obvious advice: don’t start a ten book series by reading book 8!

I was well aware of this when I was a kid and I happened to pick up the eighth book in Roger Zelazny’s Amber series. But I didn’t have money to buy lots of books back then, and my local library didn’t stock much science fiction or fantasy, my main interests at the time.

So this solitary Amber book on the library shelf looked nifty and I dove right in. I admire my younger self for the sheer insanity of such a move, but I still wouldn’t recommend it.

Continue reading "Starting a Series at Book 8"...»

All-Star Childhood Memories

Nowadays I can pick up any pop cultural obsession that I want – hey, it’s the internet age and my nerdy disposable income goes a long ways. But when I was a kid, it was almost always hard to find cool stuff.

I ended up reading a whole lot of crap, since I didn’t have as much control over what I could find. In a situation like that, the formative moments are not always the ones you’d want them to be, looking back as a grown-up.

I was persistent enough, though, to find a few gems along the way, like Patricia A. McKillip’s The Riddle-Master of Hed.

Continue reading "All-Star Childhood Memories"...»

Expectations Shattered

Let’s say you’re reading a book about a boy who grows up to be a wizard. That’s a very familiar story… so do you want exactly what you’re expecting? Or are you prepared for something new and interesting?

Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous Earthsea series started with a boy wizard, but even the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, was unusual. Each subsequent book in the series got more iconoclastic - it’s surprise after surprise, but if you’re up for it as a reader, Le Guin will win you over.

Continue reading "Expectations Shattered"...»

A Pair of Killers

What makes a compelling book tick? Sometimes I find it hard to tell, especially if the story works so well that I don’t even think about the craft involved. A good way to get to know a book, especially for an otherwise quick reader like myself: listen to the audiobook.

That happened to me recently. While I always knew that I liked Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, I could never quite identify the book’s brilliance before. Now that I’ve listened to the audiobook version, I know Dick’s secret weapon: intensely subjective buildup and consequences for two brief moments of violence.

Continue reading "A Pair of Killers"...»

All People Are Sheep… Except You, Dear Reader

Flatter your reader. That sounds like a pretty solid narrative strategy! Make your audience think they are really smart, and they’ll probably come back for more. Books can do this automatically, just by the virtue of taking us into the thoughts of other people - not so easy in real life.

Some stories take us into the minds of super-smart people destined to rule everything. Funny though… it’s usually true that the masses, who are us, tend to identify with the top of the pyramid and not the bottom, the rulers and not the downtrodden. R. Scott Bakker’s The Thousandfold Thought takes this tendency and plays with it in nifty ways.

Continue reading "All People Are Sheep... Except You, Dear Reader"...»

“This Book is Too Long!”

I know of many fantasy readers (myself sometimes included) who pick what book to read next based on how long it is - for epic fantasies, the longer the better. Books like this are a huge commitment though, and so for a lot of people, the fact that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is over 800 pages long outweighs everything else about it. Does Susanna Clarke tell a good story? Is there any neat magic? If the book is too long for you to get past the first 100 pages, you might never know.

Continue reading ""This Book is Too Long!""...»

Tracing Traditions

A Soviet cosmonaut gets thrown through a strange portal in space; she ends up on a planet filled with jaguar men, stranded Earthers, sentient metal trees, lost temples and cities, buried treasures, immortal androids, extreme peril and dashing escapes.

Does all this sound vaguely familiar? It should, because Chris Roberson’s Paragaea deliberately looks back at the pulpy stuff that worked best in science fiction’s past. He tries to make it all his own too… how does that work out for him?

Continue reading "Tracing Traditions"...»

Breaking Taboos

Horror stories make people uncomfortable or scared in many ways. The most basic has always been fear of death and/or physical destruction. For example, I don’t want my body torn to shreds by zombies, so I’ll be scared if it happens to a character I empathize with.

In another sense, taboos are what’s being broken - taboo behaviour such as violence and all the other things that happen in a horror movie but not (constantly) in real life. But what happens when a zombie story breaks taboos that are unusual? If the zombies don’t eat very many brains, are they still scary?

Continue reading "Breaking Taboos"...»

Too Many Dragons

Fantasy fiction is overrun by dragons. The fiery beasts have become a way to spice up an otherwise standard book - just add dragons. When I first heard about Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series - the Napoleonic Wars, a la Hornblower, except with dragons - I sighed to myself: hasn’t this been done before? Isn’t this tired out?

But I should have taken the example of two other books I’ve looked at here on the Gutter: Butler’s Fledgling, which took a new look at vampires, and Walton’s excellent Tooth and Claw, which appeared to be a Victorian novel with dragons plopped in haphazardly, but at closer appearance had some rationale for it. A careful plot and some excellent storytelling will take you a long way, even if you’re reusing common props like vampires or dragons.

Continue reading "Too Many Dragons"...»

A Faster Pace

Is it possible to have a book with a pace that is too fast? A book with too much action? Sure, since it’s relatively easy to jettison all of the hard-to-write stuff like character and description, and just dump in a lot of violence (ironically, I think a lot of writers who set out to do this blow their chance, since you get careless if you’re writing, deliberately, at less than your best).

The hard part is a combination of fast pace with some glossy writing and intriguing characters. And I’ve noticed that this is a skill that science fiction writers are picking up. Case in point: the debut novel from Tobias S. Buckell, Crystal Rain.

Continue reading "A Faster Pace"...»

Explaining Vampires

I don’t care that much for vampire stories. It’s a reflexive dislike that’s hard to define - basically, I’m not part of the target audience of the whole vampire fascination.

Another pet peeve of mine is the amnesiac protagonist. What an absolutely lame excuse to explain everything to the audience! When I see that a book features memory loss, I put it down with scarcely another glance.

So it’s a good thing that I ignored my prejudices and read Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling, a story of a young vampire girl named Shori who wakes up in the forest with no memory of her previous life or how she got there.

Continue reading "Explaining Vampires"...»

Tundra Horror

I see writing for kids as one of the most difficult creative tasks to do well. How to judge what might appeal to a younger audience? How to make the tone convincing yet not condescending?

The difficulties seem multiplied when you add horror to the mix. It intensifies the question of age appropriateness, and then there’s the matter of taste, or in this case, what scares you. For example, try all you might, but stories of vampires and werewolves don’t scare me, but add some zombies and I’ll have nightmares for weeks.

Two books from the small Canadian imprint Tundra demonstrate this fine line.

Continue reading "Tundra Horror"...»

Smooth Meets Convoluted

When I talk about a book, I often feel like I’m comparing it to some ideal (and non-existent) book, with features that get checked off on my list. Like a formula, or like a conformist’s view of art. But should every book resemble every other book? The answer is no, obviously, and somewhere in between the two extremes is a way of judging books on their qualities, yet not cramming them into a cookie-cutter.

I thought of this because of two wildly different books I read recently: East by Edith Pattou and Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, two YA fantasies. Each are enormously frustrating books in their own way, but that might be a mark in their favour. For one thing, they’re not Harry Potter clones.

Continue reading "Smooth Meets Convoluted"...»

Cheerfully Lecherous and Unabashedly Lazy

If you had unlimited power - magical power as a wizard, or even unlimited built-in power like Superman - what would you do with it? Would you act responsibly and protect us regular folks? Or would you become greedy and try to take over the world, like a super-villain?

Pop culture takes those two extremes as the only options, and also dictates that anyone who is all-powerful has a flaw or limitation, again like Superman, with Kryptonite. It just doesn’t seem possible to tell a story any other way. What would the conflict be if there were no obstacles in the heroine’s way?

Continue reading "Cheerfully Lecherous and Unabashedly Lazy"...»

Retold

Familiar tales, like Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid or The Snow Queen, have been reused and retold countless times. Sometimes the result is a mindless rip-off, and sometimes the familiarity of the structure lets a writer riff on the story in creative and surprising ways. It’s a constant cycle, always fascinating but at times out of fashion.

Here are two award-winning revisions of The Snow Queen, one that slyly takes the story at face value, and a second that expands it into the basis for a galactic civilization, written by Eileen Kernaghan and Joan D. Vinge respectively and with the same title.

Continue reading "Retold"...»

His Dark Ending

I call it a bait and switch. The first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass, was an adventure fantasy that was fast-paced and written in an incredibly smooth style. Intrigue, danger, children in peril, armoured polar bears, witch clans at war with each other, and above all, a girl named Lyra as a feisty, smart heroine. The next book, The Subtle Knife, had some worryingly bad moments but still kept my interest and sympathy.

Things go really bonkers in the third book, The Amber Spyglass, which ruins everything that came before. Worst of all, Pullman really means it. Instead of the flawless and exciting story that came before, Pullman ends with a Big Message.

Continue reading "His Dark Ending"...»

The Never-Fail Recommendation

I get a lot of people asking me for book recommendations. That’s not all that strange, considering how much I read, and that I write a lot of reviews. All the same, I still find it hard to know what to say sometimes… tastes are so different. And I’ve been burned before by bad feedback.

I have one book that has never failed me yet. Friends, family, genre fans, non-readers, the dubious… it doesn’t matter, they all fall under the spell of this particular title.

Continue reading "The Never-Fail Recommendation"...»

Reading Backwards

I’ve always known that my reading habits are a bit odd. That was confirmed by the way I came across The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler. Most people heard of it by word of mouth or because it was on bestseller lists - the book had a lot of buzz. I found out about it because Fowler has stayed loyal to her scifi-writing friends, newfound success and all, and continues to write blurbs for the types of books I read.

Jane Austen and science fiction? As Fowler mentions in the book, the fans aren’t necessarily that different.

Continue reading "Reading Backwards"...»

The Bandwagon

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the most respected names in fantasy and science fiction. She doesn’t need to boost her career by cheap gimmicks or by following current trends.

So I was a bit shocked to read about how Le Guin’s editor had suggested she write a young adult fantasy novel - not necessarily a Harry Potter clone but for same reasons that all those other Potter clones exist - and that Le Guin agreed to take on the challenge.

Continue reading "The Bandwagon"...»

Revealing the Consequences

John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider has a fantastic ending: an unstoppable computer virus reveals all secret information. If you’ve bribed the food inspectors to ignore mad cow disease in your factory farm, now the whole world knows about it. Gone to war under false pretences? Selling designer clothes made in hidden sweatshops? Passing along government money to friends? The truth is spilling out to whoever asks for it.

Actually, I think about Brunner’s reveal-all virus quite often, because I damn well want one!

Continue reading "Revealing the Consequences"...»

Crashing the Party

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is a book that requires some warning for unsuspecting readers: it’s so wacked out and demented that it’s beyond over-the-top and way beyond anything you can take seriously. The book works because you eventually realize that Stephenson’s approach suits the future that he is talking about. By throwing literary caution to the winds, Stephenson somehow hits on an effective voice for a freaky, violent world. Nobody else has written a book quite like this, and Stephenson himself never wrote a sequel.

Continue reading "Crashing the Party"...»

Two from Tachyon

Publishing is a wacky world, with huge conglomerates controlling the big imprints, return policies that see half of all published books destroyed as a matter of course, and only a small fraction of authors making a living at what they do. Why would any sane person get involved in such a madcap enterprise, either on the business or creative end of things?

It must be love, because small presses like Tachyon of San Francisco continue to put out interesting stuff.

Continue reading "Two from Tachyon"...»

The Grouchy Snob

When people find out that I like science fiction (and write about it), they often try to find a familiar example to talk about. This is a better reaction than to say, “Oh, that crap?” or something along those lines. But recently, the example has inevitably been Star Wars - and what was up to that point a conversation motivated by polite interest threatens to go sour. Have you ever seen someone become a grouch and a snob at once? That’s me on the topic of George Lucas.

The thing is, I’m a huge fan of spaceships and lasers and stuff blowing up in space.

Continue reading "The Grouchy Snob"...»

The Trouble with Endings

I’ve noticed recently that otherwise good stories have been let down by their endings. It’s partly due to the expectations of the audience: you can imagine any kind of ending you want, but when the ending finally arrives, it’s been narrowed down to a single one of those possibilities and it might not be as good as the one in your head (I argued this was the case for Stephen King’s Dark Tower series).

The other reason for a bad ending: nobody in charge thought about it. And in the case of Minority Report, the filmmakers clearly had no freaking idea what to do with the conclusion of the story, and decided to just keep throwing more and more junk at the screen.

Continue reading "The Trouble with Endings"...»

The Cost of Creativity

What does it cost to be an artist? A writer? Any creative type?

If you are into the written word, you need, at minimum, a pencil and several pieces of paper. You could write a play or a whole book for about ten bucks. If you dance or sing, you just need a practice space. Playing music would require buying an instrument, which in most cases would be under a thousand dollars. Leaving aside the issue of distribution for the moment, it seems that artsy endeavours can be pursued on the cheap. If you want to be creative, all you have to do is go after it.

Except if you want to make movies.

Continue reading "The Cost of Creativity"...»

Most Honoured, Word for Word

At first, I resisted reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel. A guy is stranded on a raft – it sounded like a concept that had been done before. But my friends raved about the book constantly, and when I finally broke down and read it, I found that it had some of the smoothest writing I’d ever encountered. Writing that managed to convey a lot of information but still was entertaining and gorgeous.

I said to myself: if only there were a science fiction writer whose prose could live up to the standard set by Martel. Someone who could recycle an idea just like the castaway and make it readable and interesting. Science fiction is filled with ideas that get lazily reused and it’s tiring to read such half-baked stuff. Not long after, I found an answer to my dilemma. His name is Ted Chiang.

Continue reading "Most Honoured, Word for Word"...»

Stories Never Fail Us

She’s eighteen and she’s getting a little impatient with life at her boarding school. She doesn’t see her stepdad very often. She knows more about magic than the teachers at Wyverly College, but even though the school is within twenty miles of the Wall that separates mundane from magical lands, she’s never been in the Old Kingdom. Her name is Sabriel.

Then one night a dead creature stalks into the dormitory. This is a messenger, who brings her father’s magic bells and Charter-marked sword. If her dad’s not already dead, then he’s being held somehow near one of the nine gates that separates life from death. Sabriel has to find her father’s body, somewhere in the deadly Old Kingdom, and then retrieve his spirit. All in a day’s rite of passage.

Continue reading "Stories Never Fail Us"...»

Kicking Ass, Literary Style

I don’t have much patience for vampire stories, so I never felt much attraction to the Buffy and Angel universe. I could see how people would get pretty wrapped up in it: ongoing storylines, smart characterization, constant action, snappy one-liners, reportedly the whole bit. When Joss Whedon, Buffy creator, decided to do a science fiction show called Firefly, I was interested, but I could never find when it was on, and then the show got cancelled before even one season was completed.

Goodbye for good?

Continue reading "Kicking Ass, Literary Style"...»

Not So Happy Ending

Talk about a long journey. Stephen King wrote the first line of a short story called “The Gunslinger” in 1970, at the beginning of his career, and the first volume of the Dark Tower series was published in 1982. Nearly 35 years after its humble beginnings, the series has come to its conclusion with the nearly 900 pages of the seventh volume, simply called The Dark Tower. Fans have been waiting for this book for a long time, and you’d think they’d trust King to wrap things up properly. Some readers like the ending, but an equally large proportion detest it.

What’s the fuss?

Continue reading "Not So Happy Ending"...»

Fahrenheit the First

Fahrenheit 451 is one of Ray Bradbury’s most famous books, and it reads like a fever dream — intensely cinematic, directed by its own weird dream logic, and full of the quality of images that haunt you for days. The book is a cautionary tale about what happens when books are forgotten or actively suppressed, and Bradbury’s work here forms one of its own best arguments in favour of “the book” as a keystone to intellectual freedom. Fahrenheit 451 is a deceptive book too; it’s a quick read, and it seems to be about people burning books.

Continue reading "Fahrenheit the First"...»

Interstellar Empathy

Tolerance. Understanding. Empathy. Lack of prejudice towards people who are different in some way. These are all wonderful things, but they can be deadly for fiction. Or, at the very least, dry and boring. And science fiction, especially written science fiction, on top of all of its other perceived or real flaws, tends to go on about tolerance for the other. It takes a strong writer to use this theme as the basis for an entertaining story.

Continue reading "Interstellar Empathy"...»

Love Letter to NYC

Timothy Zahn is the author of the bestselling Star Wars novel of all time, which to a certain kind of critic sounds like winning a contest to be the stupidest person on the block. The book in question, Heir to the Empire, was published in 1992 and attracted so much attention that it revived what was then a near-dead Star Wars franchise. Make of that what you will, but Heir to the Empire and its two sequels proved that you can do intriguing/memorable things with pulp-based material (or at the very least, that George Lucas and his crummy prequels have lost touch with the roots of this kind of stuff).

Zahn also writes his own books, and some of them are quite good.

Continue reading "Love Letter to NYC"...»

Let’s All Panic

Six million people listen to a radio broadcast, and a quarter of them run screaming from their houses. Their frenzy and fear infect many other people who have no idea what’s going on. Mass panic! Are the Martians really invading? The streets are crowded with people who all believe it.

Continue reading "Let's All Panic"...»

Sideways Storytelling

If you’re the kind of reader who wants to know what happens next, then China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh might not be the book for you. This debut novel from 1992 has intriguing characters and a few strands of plot, but overall it operates a little more abstractly than most novels. The main character is a Daoist architect and as his graduating project he has to hold the entire plan of a house in his mind at once without getting lost in the details. It’s a pretty good analogy for how the book works.

Continue reading "Sideways Storytelling"...»

One War, Every War

You get drafted in the year 1997, your brain tortured out of its pacifism by hypnotic compulsion to kill. Many of your troopmates die in training on the icy planet of Charon, past Pluto. You spend the next thousand years, fighting a skirmish then sleeping through a trip that takes place at relativistic speeds – on your way to the next battle of course. You can’t go home because Earth society has changed too much. And why are humans fighting these alien Taurans anyway?

This is indeed the forever war.

Continue reading "One War, Every War"...»

Greed and the Fourth Dimension

Joe Cube is a regular Silicon Valley guy, worried about his relationship with his wife and the upcoming Y2K crisis. One day a fourth-dimensional being named Momo manifests in his house and she wants to make a deal: she’ll supply 4D antennae, and Joe can market cellphones that communicate instantaneously anywhere in our world. Momo also attaches a third eye to his brain, which lets him see into the fourth dimension. Joe and his wife take off to Vegas to make big bucks with his newfound powers. But soon the demon-red Wackles, also from the fourth dimension, are stealing the ill-gotten money out of his briefcase and giving him cryptic warnings. Could Momo have an ulterior motive? Is Joe caught in a transdimensional conflict?

Welcome to the world of Rudy Rucker, a mathematician in love with the trashiest elements of science fiction.

Continue reading "Greed and the Fourth Dimension"...»

Biology is a Harsh Mistress

Tooth and Claw by Jo Walton is about dragons and, to be perfectly honest, I had low expectations for this book. Too many fantasy novels have been written about dragons, and the subject has been beaten quite to death. Could it still be possible to write something interesting about these winged fire-breathing creatures of myth and legend? And Tooth and Claw is a story where all the characters are dragons, which could have been even more disastrous. But this is an ambitious book that is also quite strange and cruel. It’s essentially a Victorian novel where biology is always destiny, with dragons who are there to express the violence inherent in the society.

Continue reading "Biology is a Harsh Mistress"...»

In the City

Toronto’s downtown has been abandoned by government and police. The rich have fled to the suburbs, and put up a barrier to keep all those nasty poor people from leaving the middle of the city. Nalo Hopkinson’s first book, Brown Girl in the Ring, takes this simple and believable premise and shows us what life might be like in the Burn (as part of downtown Toronto is now called) for those either stuck there or too stubborn to leave.

Continue reading "In the City"...»

We Don’t Want Your Revolution

Yevgeny Zamiatin was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution in 1917 but by 1924 and the publication of a book ironically entitled We, he was worried that the revolution had brought not freedom but repression and conformity. After being persecuted for many years, he wrote an angry letter to Stalin himself, demanding the right to leave the Soviet Union. Incredibly, Stalin agreed, but in exile Zamiatin never wrote anything as memorable as this cheerfully deranged dystopia.

Continue reading "We Don't Want Your Revolution"...»

Bloody Culture

With his new book Ilium, Dan Simmons has written an exciting work of science fiction that is partly based on Homer’s Iliad. At first it would seem that Simmons is writing Ilium in the shadow of the Iliad — a dry and dull piece of literature, right? — as a way of garnering respect not otherwise inherent in writing science fiction (fairly or unfairly). But the situation becomes more complex when the Iliad itself is examined closely. The Trojan War has an abducted wife, feuding gods, countless deaths, betrayal and backstabbing, and just about every lurid element that has been complained about in modern lowbrow culture. If the Iliad is more violent than, say, Kill Bill, what to make of this?

Continue reading "Bloody Culture"...»

Easy Prey

Prey is the latest science fiction thriller from perennial best-selling author, Michael Crichton. It’s been a few years since I read any Crichton novels so I was curious to see if my memory of his work – topical, easy to read in the way that bestsellers have, but flat and unoriginal – holds true for his current writing. Crichton used to be a guilty pleasure for me. Does he still fulfill that function in his new book?

Continue reading "Easy Prey"...»