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Book Review: The Magicians

Sep 26

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | 4 Comments

The Magicians — Lev Grossman

Rating: 5/5

It’s uncommon these days that I indulge in rereading novels.  It’s far more usual that I have a stack of books on my nightstand (yes, I’m still a dead tree man — for now) and as soon as I finish one book it’s off to the next one.  I bought The Magicians a little over a year ago, in the late summer of 2010.  I’ve read it four times since then.

The Magicians is a character-driven, modern fantasy, but one that draws heavily from the well of nostalgia, particularly from the seven-volume Narnia series by C. S. Lewis.  Themes, parallels and references to everything from Harry Potter to Dungeons and Dragons are all part of the gumbo, but it’s clearly the idea of Narnia that this book both revolves around and is powered by.

Quentin Coldwater is a superintelligent, very socially awkward Brooklyn high school senior — a “type A test killer”, in the book’s own words — who is the perpetual third wheel in his tiny circle of friends.  He may very well be clinically depressed; at any rate, the world seems to him a grey and banal place, his retreat into fictional author Christopher Plover’s series of children’s novels set in the fantasy world of Fillory (Narnia with the serial numbers filed off) his habitual refuge.  After an abortive attempt to take an entrance exam for Princeton he is somehow diverted to Brakebills, an exclusive private college in upstate New York, to sit their entrance examination.

Of course Quentin passes, matriculates, and joins the freshman class.  Over his four years there, he learns almost unimaginable magical lore, makes terrifyingly costly mistakes, grows bonds of friendship strong enough to count as family ties, and, almost by accident, falls in love.  But despite all the personal growth, the cosmic wonder and emotional fulfillment, he can’t quite fully feel it, or believe it.  He’s still staring at the horizon, bound up in his fantasy novel idée fixe that one day, his adventure will begin and he’ll get to be the hero.

Naturally, adventure can always be sought.  But a real adventure isn’t always like the fantasy novels.  Even when it takes place in Fillory.

In The Magicians, Lev Grossman has deftly unraveled the themes and threads of the juvenile “secondary world” fantasy novels, and then rewoven them into a modern, witty, urban fantasy.  All the trappings of sorcery and society are in place — we have a college of magic, caged demons, decadent dinner parties, a journey to Antarctica while shapeshifted into geese, enough wine consumption to kill a dragon from alcohol poisoning, soul-burning backlash from uncontrolled wizardry, and the Beast.

So the setting is superb.  But the real genius here is the characterization.  The story is told in tight third person around the character of Quentin, and Grossman is adept at bringing Quentin’s friends and fellow students at Brakebills to life through Quentin’s bright, incurably romantic, and self-deprecatingly bitter perspective.  These are characters that easily survive the Eight Deadly Words — they’re vivid and three-dimensional, and you can’t help but sense that Grossman knows far more about them than you’re ever allowed to see.

Dialogue is crisp and real.  These are, for the most part, college-age men and women, even if they’re also brilliant magicians.  So a historical or linguistic discussion followed by a sequence of dick jokes is not unexpected.  Nor would a long disquisition on the virtues of the malbec grape be out of place following a catty anecdote about some unfortunate sophomore girl.  These jumps are natural, though.  The conversation flows, babbles, and leaps, as often happens amongst close friends, and never once did someone say anything that seemed to me forced or out of character.

The latter section of the book, somewhat after graduation from Brakebills, has been criticized by some other reviewers.  I tend to agree that the Fillorian sections seemed subtly off.  I attribute this to a conscious stylistic choice by Mr. Grossman, but I can’t be sure about this.  At any rate, in these sections the authorial lighting shifted just enough that I was able to see some cracks in the narrative, and although the book is still compelling and the wit and dialogue continue in full force, I just didn’t feel it was quite as masterful as the first sections of the novel.  Grossman still pilots the narrative with a sure hand, though, and the conclusion is at the same time satisfying, true to Quentin’s character, and an excellent teaser for the sequel.

I think it would be pretty hard to find someone who is more centered in the demographic crosshairs of this novel than me.  I’m old enough to get the cultural references, an omnivorous fantasy fan from way back, and I had enough personal and social characteristics in common with Quentin at the age he first appears that stepping into his character took virtually no effort at all.  But I don’t think the appeal of this book is limited to fantasy-loving geeks.  Everyone has once wished his or her life to be larger and more amazing than it really is.  Everyone has dreamed of having the power to work wonders.  Everyone has wanted the world to be a story and to be the hero of that story, even if we don’t let ourselves understand precisely what that might truly mean.  If you’ve enjoyed Harry Potter or Narnia, have a taste for the bittersweet, and want to find out what happens when a romantic runs aground on the shores of reality, I can’t recommend The Magicians highly enough.

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New Ethshar Serial Starting

Jul 13

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

After too long, Lawrence Watt-Evans is spinning up a new Ethshar serial — The Final Calling.  His Ethshar novels are excellent light fantasy, and are notable for having both a great amount of interesting, powerful magic as well as very believable, human characters that for the most part treat magic as just another phenomenon to deal with or use as they go about their lives.  They’re loosely-connected, for the most part; you can fairly easily jump in at any point.  I’ve enjoyed every one of these novels thoroughly since the first one — The Misenchanted Sword — was published when I was in high school, back in 1985.

The way these serial novels work is that every week, assuming enough contributions have come in to pay for it, he’ll post a new rough draft chapter.  Anyone in America who contributes $25 or more will receive a printed copy of the completed book (thresholds slightly higher for other countries).  It’s already paid through Chapter 11, and I haven’t sent my $25 yet, so I’m guessing this is going to be a pretty successful serial.

This seems like a pretty good way for authors to be paid to continue work on series they enjoy, and which have a strong fan base, but for some reason are not appealing to traditional publishing houses.  Lawrence Watt-Evans has used this model successfully for two Ethshar novels in the past, and is serializing a science fiction novel (a sequel to his earlier Nightside City) simultaneously.

Check it out if you enjoy light fantasy written with wit and intelligence!

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Book Review: The State of Jones

Nov 18

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

e3d7591a-a5f3-489b-88bb-d872f2b52269img100[1]The State of Jones — Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer

Rating:  4/5

The State of Jones is a Civil War history, but one from a fairly unique perspective.  The main focus of the book is Newton Knight, a barely-better-than-subsistence farmer in Jones County, Mississippi.  Mr. Knight’s grandfather was a slaveholding planter with a moderate-sized plantation, but his father was opposed to slavery and struck out on his own.  Newton grew up in a Primitive Baptist milieu, with a doctrinal emphasis on the equality of man and a distrust for the hierarchy of politicians, planters, and preachers that helped stabilize the institution of slavery in the Southern states.

It comes as no surprise that when the war came, Newton was opposed to it, but the groundswell of support for secession ensured it would take place regardless.  Newton was conscripted and served in the Confederate Army through several harrowing battles, until finally, after the particularly insane slaughter at Vicksburg, he deserted and returned home to Jones County.  He hid out in the swamps along with other deserters and runaway slaves, avoiding dogs and patrols sent to root them out and return them to service, eventually forming a band of deserters into a pro-Union militia and effectively driving the Confederates out of Jones County for a period of time.

After the war Newton Knight’s star rose high for a while.  Reconstruction-era elections ensured that the Republican party was in power, and officials sympathetic to what he had done in the war were able to reward him in certain ways.  As the North withdrew and suppression of the black vote started to turn the political tide, however, Newton Knight was increasingly put on the defensive, and eventually he stayed on watch at his family farm, presiding over two families — a white one with his wife, and a black one with Rachel, a former slave who had helped him in his swamp-running days.

The book does a great job of characterizing Newton Knight, thanks to some oral interviews he gave near the end of his life.  It also does a nice job of providing historical context for the events of the book — we know that the “Twenty Negro Law”, which effectively exempted rich planters from military service, correlated closely with an increase in desertion from the Confederate Army, as soldiers realized that the law made official what was widely known already:  that the conflict was, in the words of one soldier, “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.”

The book also goes into fairly extensive detail about the devastation inflicted on the South during the war, both by the direct assault of the Union armies and through confiscatory policies imposed by the Confederates themselves.  The effects of both of these were brutal to the farmers (mostly women) left behind to survive and try to raise families with their men off serving in uniform.  The fact that so much of this oppression was self-inflicted is particularly tragic, and the authors pull few punches in describing it.

The last section of the book, however, is the most fascinating, describing Newton Knight’s dual family and what happened to his descendants in post-Reconstruction Mississippi.  This section of the book contains much that probably seems absurd to 21st-century Americans, but should serve as a powerful reminder of the oddities and cruelties of race relations in the recent past.  One of the scenes examined is the miscegenation trial of one of Newton Knight’s descendants, which hinged on an exhaustive legal examination of how much African ancestry Rachel actually had, with witnesses asked probing questions about, among other things, how kinky her hair was.  Perhaps the most powerful image of the book is the final one:  Newton Knight, over 80 years old, still camped on his porch every night, a rifle on his lap, on a silent vigil to protect his large family from the unpredictable threat of racial violence.

This is Civil War history at the scale of individual humans, and also the story of a fascinating, obscure personality.  I think it succeeds on both levels, and I have no qualms about recommending it.

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Economic Astrology (aka Book Review: The Great Depression Ahead)

Sep 25

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

2950849303_b39feef51e[1]The Great Depression Ahead — Harry S. Dent, Jr.

Rating: 1.5/5

I can’t really claim this is a full and complete review of The Great Depression Ahead, because I didn’t finish it. I borrowed it from a friend at work, and although I made an attempt to read it and got through the first three or four chapters, there was way too much pseudoscience in here to motivate me to complete it.

Dent’s central thesis is that the economy operates according to cycles, and that these cycles are relatively regular both in amplitude and frequency. He posits the existence of multiple overlapping cycles, ranging from an every-decade stock market cycle and cycles based on our presidential election years, all the way up to a 500-year “mega innovation cycle” (his term) and even a 5000-year “civilizational advancement cycle”.

I don’t have a problem, really, with most of the short-term cyclic approach, particularly that based on demographic analysis.  I can easily see that demographic spending trends will change as large generational cohorts enter and leave the workforce, and as their aggregate family conditions change.  So far, so good.  And I’m willing to go with the empirical evidence of some of his odder cycles — given enough points that plot with regularity, you can infer the presence of at least a temporary cycle with reasonable confidence.

But these longer cycles that he anchors with one or two conveniently-chosen points are just bunk.  For example, he chooses the invention of the printing press and the rise of computers as anchor points for his 500-year innovation cycle.  But what about the steam engine?  The assembly line?  The railroad?  The telegraph?  The cotton-pickin’ cotton gin?  You could make a reasonable case for each of these as being society-transforming innovations, but since they don’t fit his 500-year model, they’re conveniently left out.

But when prediction fails, hindsight comes to the rescue!  The 60-year Kondratiev Wave cycle theory went off the rails in the 1990s, trashing some of his earlier predictions.  So, to cover himself, he posits a new, 80-year cycle.  But a one-time change in cycle length doesn’t fit his “everything can be explained by cycles” model — if cycles can arbitrarily change in length, then they weren’t really truly cyclic to begin with, and the whole premise of his analysis goes straight into the wastebasket.  So he concocts the explanation that the 60-year cycle shifts back and forth to an 80-year cycle on a schedule governed by a 250-year Revolutionary Cycle.  Fiction masquerading as truth is truly stranger than honest fiction!

So what is the predictive value of his theory?  He claims successful prediction of the Japanese slump in the 1990s.  Fine.  Let’s take that at face value.  He’s also the guy that wrote Dow 30,000.  Oops.  His most successful “predictions” appear to be immediate reads of the existing situation, more akin to psychic cold reading than any long-term prediction of market trends.  He touts the recommendations he made that paid off, and conveniently fails to mention the ones that didn’t — a classic use of confirmation bias.  The terrorist attacks of 2001 and their effects on the market took him by surprise, so now he has incorporated a nine-year “terrorism cycle” into the mix — retroactively, of course.  By this model, we’ll be “due” for a major terrorist attack in 2010, and apparently can breathe easy until then.

Folks, you can’t make this stuff up.  Economics is supposed to be a science, but for Harry Dent it’s more like astrology.  Or, if you want to be generous, it’s more along the lines of astronomy: Ptolemaic astronomy, with scads of epicycles to attempt to shoehorn ever-more-complex observed behavior into the straightjacket of a single, incorrect unifying assumption.

The irony in astronomy was that the truth, given the illumination of proper mathematics, is much simpler and more elegant than the Ptolemaic model could ever have been, and I suspect (with no proof, I admit) that the same is probably true of macroeconomics.  Possibly the greatest irony in this book, though, is on the back cover of the hardback, where (at least in my edition) he proudly features a glowing testimonial from none other than recently disgraced South Carolina governor Mark Sanford.  It’s tempting to thus just refer to Dent’s cyclic theories as the “Argentinian School” of economics, and to put it quietly back on the shelf where it belongs.

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Book Review: Last Call

Sep 22

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

pc[1]Last Call — Tim Powers

Rating:  5/5

I’m probably taking my blog’s life in my hands posting a review of another Tim Powers novel.  The earlier one, about The Anubis Gates, continues to attract an inordinate amount of spam — probably five times as much as all other posts on the blog combined.  If it’s the Tim Powers name that’s attracting them, I guess it’s time to roll out the red carpet again…

Last Call is a great book, and ranks right up with The Anubis Gates as my favorite Tim Powers works.  Like The Anubis Gates, it features a protagonist who is fundamentally a good, well-meaning guy, who gets thrust into a situation a bit over his head.  All right, way over his head — he’s used as a pawn in an ongoing battle about which he at first understands nothing.  Eventually, over the course of the novel, he learns about what’s going on and the role he can play in the action, and finally is able to stand on his own and fight for himself.

The novel starts with a quick and brutal scene as a financier / Poker player / sorcerer named Georges Leon attempts to destroy the soul of his five-year-old son, Scott, by means of a game played with Tarot cards.  Scott escapes with his mother.  She dies shortly thereafter, but not before she manages to get Scott to safety.  We then quickly flash forward about thirty-five years or so as that son, now called Scott Crane, is about to be kicked out of his house for failure to pay his mortgage.

Scott’s wife is recently dead, although he can’t quite bear to let her go, and he’s starting to see ghosts and visions that somehow seem to be related to a game of Poker he played with a deck of Tarot cards on a houseboat in Lake Mead twenty-one years ago.  Scott’s first job is to get some quick cash, and then try to figure out what the heck is going on, which will involve finding Ozzie, the adoptive father he hasn’t seen in twenty years, and then convincing him not to kill himself.

From there, things get really odd.  Several factions of hired guns are after Scott, who is learning that he has strengths as well as weaknesses in the high-stakes game that’s being played.  By enlisting the help of his adoptive sister Diana and some other reluctant participants, he’s able to work toward claiming his role as a Jack — an aspirant to the throne of the King.  But to win it, he’ll have to not only defeat the other Jacks, but unseat the reigning King — his body-swapping biological father — before his father can finish what he started so long ago:  disposing of Scott’s soul and claiming Scott’s body for his own.

The novel is a great ride, with the usual Powers-style secret history in full effect.  Ever wonder what is the cosmic significance of the exact dates Bugsy Seigel chose for opening, closing, and reopening the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas?  You’ll find out in full detail.  The characters are well-defined, the plot is tight, and the worldbuilding, as always in a Tim Powers novel, is first-rate.

I’ve now read this book through three different times, and I continue to get more out of it each time.  There’s such a density of detail that it’s very hard to pick it all up at once.  The symbology of the cards — both Tarot and traditional playing cards — is central to the novel, so the more knowledge you have about the subject the easier it is to figure out what he’s talking about.

As usual, the bad guys have a good dollop of the grotesque about them, from the over-friendly hit man to the omniphagous “Mandelbrot Man”.  If the novel wavers at all it’s in these extreme characterizations.  Powers does a good job of pulling them off, but I found my suspension of disbelief wavering at some of the outrageous behavior some of these guys displayed, in ways that even the starkly supernatural aspects of the novel didn’t trigger.

Last Call won the World Fantasy Award, and it’s easy to see why.  It’s a great novel for fans of the secret history or urban fantasy genres, and probably has appeal outside those categories as well.  I highly recommend it.

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Book Review: Anathem

Sep 11

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | 2 Comments

anathem[1]Anathem — Neil Stephenson

Rating:  5/5

It’s been a while since Neil Stephenson wrote something that could be categorized as straight science fiction.  There was Snow Crash, and The Diamond Age (both of which were outstanding, by the way), but most of the rest of his fiction has been based at least mostly in the real world (or real history), not a speculative extrapolation of it.

So it was time for him to revisit science fiction.  And while he’s been off writing other great novels, his authorial powers have only grown.  He returns triumphant to the genre, and brings one of the best, most powerful novels I’ve read in years with him.

Anathem is a novel of human beings on a world called Arbre, humans who have a long and intricate history stretching back to a man named Cnoüs, who had a vision of a perfect geometric figure — an isosceles triangle.  Cnoüs had two daughters, each of which interpreted the vision differently.  One believed he had seen a pyramidal structure in a perfect heaven, and those that followed in her interpretation revere her as the mother of religious thought on Arbre.

The other daughter believed he had seen an ideal, perfect geometric form — a window into a world of pure geometry.  Those that followed her path became known as theors, practitioners of a scientific discipline that combines aspects of pure mathematics, physics, natural history, and philosophy.

Eventually the theors, partly of their own accord and partly under coercion, retreated into Concents, monastic enclaves where participating theors (known as avout) could work uncorrupted by the Sæcular world outside, and where they would be safe from suspicion and interference.  Different theoric orders developed over time, based partly on philosophical inclination and partly on the degree of isolation to which they committed.

Unarian theors pledge to shun the influence of the outside world for a year at a time.  Decenarians pledge for ten years, Centenarians for one hundred years, and the mysterious and reclusive Millenarians for a thousand years, far longer than the lifetime of any individual theor.  Only on the pledged date will the gates of a given order open to the outside, allowing the Sæcular to come in and the avout to go out into the world.

The novel follows a young Decenarian fraa, or male avout, as the day of opening (Apert) approaches.  Erasmas believes that contact with the outside world, and the upcoming choice of order he faces, is the most significant event facing him.  Little does he know that something has arrived in orbit around Arbre — something that will cause unprecedented upheaval amongst both the Sæcular Power and the avout.

Neil Stevenson is firing on all cylinders in this novel.  All major pillars of the craft of writing are on full display:  his characters are fully-realized, warm, human, and very sympathetic; his premise and worldbuilding is top-notch; and the plot is a masterpiece.  He deftly takes you farther and farther afield than you thought you could go, until by the end he’s revealed deep insights about the structure of his universe, and about existence itself.  Perhaps only Greg Egan and Gene Wolfe amongst the science fiction authors I’ve read have reached as far, and as successfully, as what Stephenson does in Anathem, but I find Stephenson’s characters and pacing to be superior to Egan’s.

The book includes a lot of math and science, but also includes much about the fundamentals of scientific reasoning and the underpinnings of philosophy and rational thought.  It’s heavy going at times, although it never bogs down and greatly rewards the effort made to decipher the dense insights.

Honestly, it’s truly amazing to me that I was able to buy 1000 pages of this man’s crystallized thoughts for $5.00 at Costco.  Since I need to say something at least vaguely negative to make this not be a complete groveling session, I’ll say that Stevenson still ends his novels abruptly, almost jarringly, and that was a slight disappointment.  All told, though, I can’t really recommend this book strongly enough.  It’s almost a must-read for any fan of science fiction — hard or soft.

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Book Review — The Twilight Series

Aug 11

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | 2 Comments

twilight_book_cover[1]The first step is admitting you have a problem:

“Hi everyone, my name is Matt.”

“Hi, Matt.”

“I’m a 39-year old straight man, and I like Twilight.”

(applause, heckler yells “are you sure you’re straight?”)

***

The Twilight Saga, by Stephenie Meyer

Rating:  4.5/5

Although I’m pretty sure there’s not a 12-step program for Twilight addiction, I must say that this series was a true page-turner.  Stephenie Meyer has bitten into a genre that I would have said was pretty drained of potential — the “supernatural romance” — and produced what will probably (and rightfully) be seen as its preeminent work.

Vampire fiction has been popular since Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and there’s always been an element of forbidden lusts and sensual temptations involved from the outset.  Modern writers such as Anne Rice and Laurel K. Hamilton have tended to deal with the supernatural primarily as it relates to itself — Rice’s internecine feuds and vampiric politics, Hamilton’s disturbing soft-core forays into werewolf/vampire/necromancer ménage à trois, the secret wars of the Underworld movies and the World of Darkness RPGs, etc.  Humans figure in these works primarily as food, fools, or foils — seldom anything more.

Meyer takes us back to a more Bram Stoker-ish approach in the first novel of this series, Twilight.  Isabella Swan, or “Bella”, as she prefers to be called, has just moved to Forks, Washington, to live with her father Charlie.  She decided to do this, despite the fact that she hates Forks, because her flighty mother has decided to run off and tour with a minor-league baseball player and practical, independent Bella didn’t want to be the one to stand in her way.  She’s dubious and angsty about this decision partly because she’s sure she won’t fit in, partly because it means moving from a big city to a small town, and partly because Forks is one of the rainiest, most perpetually-overcast places in the country.

All this changes, though, when she first visits the lunchroom at Forks High, and encounters the five enigmatic Cullen kids.  They’re movie-star gorgeous, filthy rich, and impossibly aloof.  Aloof, that is, until Bella locks eyes with the unattached Edward, who happens to sit next to her in Biology and who seems simultaneously enraptured with and repelled by Bella in a way that is unique in her (and everyone else’s) experience.  Of course, she falls madly in love.

I’m kind of in a tough spot here; I don’t want to blow any significant plot details, but I also want to review the whole series.  It’s not really a secret that Edward and his family turn out to be vampires, or that his issues with Bella arise from a heady mix of fascination and desire, both for her self and her blood.  The Cullens have to balance their lifestyle and their need for secrecy against Edward’s growing romance with Bella, and the first three books do a good job of exploring the complexities of this relationship as Edward masters himself and Bella learns more about the supernatural world she yearns to join.  Of course, there are other factors that keep this from turning into an unopposed love story, and vampires aren’t the only monsters lurking in the dark…

And then there’s the fourth book, Breaking Dawn.  I found this last book to be by far the best of the four in terms of sheer addictiveness — Meyer has grown a lot as a writer over the five short years it took her to get these books published.  However, it’s the one of the four that leaves the concerns of the human world far behind, so it’s somewhat of a shift from the earlier novels.  And although it weighs in as the longest of the four novels, it probably should have been longer still; she left a lot of loose ends untied and there were some sections of the book that could probably have used more explanation.  Ideally she would have split it into two volumes; there was a really good breakpoint in the middle that would have served well for this purpose.

Of course, she might be holding back on us for possible sequels or spinoffs, as would be her right.

Meyer’s greatest strength, in my opinion, is her excellent use of dialogue and her vivid characterization.  There are a lot of characters in these books, yet they are all distinct, with clear motivations and well-realized personalities.  The supernatural itself doesn’t do the heavy lifting in these stories — the characters’ human (or inhuman) motivations and feelings are the real drivers, which gives these books a subtlety that other supernatural fiction lacks.

She also does a solid job with setting, plot and pacing — there really aren’t any significant weaknesses in her writing, although I wouldn’t put her in the top tier as a stylist.  Her research, on the other hand, has a hole or two — there are some passages about genetics where I think she was confused about the differences between genes and chromosomes, but that’s a very small speedbump in an otherwise excellent novel series.  All in all, I am very sanguine about recommending these books to anyone who enjoys strong character-based fiction, well-realized female protagonists, and/or supernatural novels.

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Book Review: The Anubis Gates

Jul 10

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | 2 Comments

The Anubis Gates — Tim Powers

Rating: 4.5/5

I’ve read a couple of Tim Powers novels in the past, but not nearly all of them. The Anubis Gates was one that I had been aware of and heard good things about for a long time, but never quite got around to reading. I’m glad I finally made time. The Anubis Gates is a well-researched, exceptionally tightly-plotted adventure story with a sympathetic hero, plenty of sinister villains, excellent pacing and great dialogue all bound together with Powers’ signature otherworldly style.

I know Powers has a wider range, but the books of his I’ve read have always been in the dark historical fantasy style, and The Anubis Gates is not an exception. The book is exhaustively researched, with many real-life details about the historical figures that appear in it, such as Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Like On Stranger Tides and The Stress of Her Regard, Powers flavors his historical setting with a generous serving of sorcery.

In Powers’ novels, magic isn’t the benign or straightforward pursuit of the Harry Potter novels or a Dungeons and Dragons game. Powers’ sorcery in The Anubis Gates is potent, terrible, thoroughly corrupt and unnatural, and profoundly costly to the practitioner. Immortality and the ability to kill with a quickly-spoken invocation are minor abilities, scarcely worth mentioning. The truly powerful sorcerers concern themselves with much larger-scale and darkly malign plots, such as punching a hole to the otherworld near London and bringing back the ancient Egyptian gods to scour England from the face of the world.

The book’s hero is a Virginian English professor named Brendan Doyle, a scholar of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the obscure 19th-century poet William Ashbless. He is given a bizarre job interview in London by an eccentric old millionaire dying of cancer who claims to have discovered the secret to time travel. Doyle signs up to accompany the millionaire and a group of rich tourists back to 1810 to attend a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was supposed to be a quick trip — just attend the lecture and get back. Unfortunately for Doyle, his group isn’t the only one that knows about the gates.

From there the story broadens out to include deformed beggars, werewolves, body-switching and dopplegangers, centuries-old sorcerers, a mysterious English secret society, more time travel, and at least a half-dozen diabolical plots. Doyle’s knowledge of history serves as a rough guide to him, but when a sorcerer can kidnap someone and replace him with an exact duplicate, history fails as a completely accurate guide to actual events.

Time-travel novels always seem to walk a thin line between bizarre causality paradoxes that break the reader’s sense of immersion, and an overreliance on fate and destiny that can detract from the tension of the plot. Powers walks this line quite well in The Anubis Gates. I never got the feeling that history could significantly change, but I also certainly never felt that the characters were on rails, or that their actions were irrelevant to the outcome of the story. Things were recorded as they came out, with a lot of gaps left in the explanations. Too often novels do the opposite, forcing actions to come out as they were recorded. I feel Powers’ approach is the superior one.

The latter half of the book moves at a pace just short of frenetic. New information is exposed and situations arise without much pause, and if you hadn’t been paying close attention to the foreshadowing that was set up earlier in the book, there’s quite a bit that can go over your head. I’m sure a reread would expose many more subtle hints than I actually caught on my initial read. The conclusions to the many diverse plot threads are very satisfying, and Powers provides a nice denoument at the end that, although predictable by this point, provides a perfect ending to the novel.

All in all, The Anubis Gates is a tight, quick, and fun novel that I have no qualms recommending to anyone who enjoys historical fiction, time travel, or dark fantasy. It is my favorite Powers novel that I’ve read to date.

Book Review: Iron Sunrise

Jun 30

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

Well, I finished my third Charles Stross novel a day or so ago. This time it was Iron Sunrise. Set in the same universe as Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise is not a direct sequel, although the main characters are the same and there are some references to the previous book.

Iron Sunrise — Charles Stross

Rating: 4.5/5

I’ve really enjoyed the Charles Stross novels I’ve read lately. Luckily, I still have some more to go, with the promise of more coming out soon. Iron Sunrise is the latest of his published novels in the Eschaton series.

If you are unfamiliar with this, the premise is that at some point in the fairly near future, experiments in quantum entanglement allow information to be transmitted faster than light. Due to special relativity, this implies that information is being sent into the past — in effect, time travel. When the future Internet starts receiving information from it’s own future, it quickly bootstraps itself into a quasi-godlike entity called the Eschaton, and teleports 9 billion of Earth’s 10 billion people onto various worlds throughout a 1000-parsec volume of space and over hundreds of years of time. When Earth recovers from the subsequent economic disruptions and starts venturing out into space again, they discover myriads of existing human societies scattered throughout the nearby stars.

The Eschaton wishes to preserve its own existence, and may have other motives that are subtly hinted at throughout the series. The only serious threat to an entity such as the Eschaton is uncontrolled faster-than-light travel and the attendant causality violations. The Eschaton would strongly prefer not to be edited out of existence retroactively, and has the power to defend itself with extreme prejudice. Of course, it prefers to act subtly if possible rather than obliterating uppity planets with killer asteroids and supernovas.

Iron Sunrise starts off with a bang. In fact, this may be one of the biggest opening bangs in a novel that I can remember, as the star in the Moscow system is iron-bombed by a rogue causality-violating device, inducing a tremendous nova that destroys all life in the inner system. As the outer stations are evacuated, a young girl guided by her “invisible friend” finds some odd documents and hides them before leaving. Years later, these documents cause several interstellar organizations to take a sudden and extremely unhealthy interest in that girl.

Charles Stross’s writing has been a pleasure to read in every book of his I’ve tried so far. In Iron Sunrise, his well-thought-out Eschaton setting provides the steel, his plentiful references to the cutting edges of physics and computer science serve as the flint, and his energetic writing style whacks them together to produce a lot of sparks to ignite the imagination. Stross uses FTL and instantaneous communication in his novels, as many authors do, but Stross’s extensive knowledge of some of the major gaps in modern physics give his versions of these hoary SF tropes more believability.

Like Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise is a space opera at its core. Stross has balanced his universe out very precisely in order to retain as much fidelity with known science as possible while still enabling swashbuckling interstellar adventure, and I think he succeeds fairly well. In many ways, I think Iron Sunrise is the better book. It benefits from human adversaries that are comprehensible and intelligent, unlike the Festival and the hierarchy of the New Republic from Singularity Sky, who were, respectively, not. Stross’s writing is also a bit calmer and less frenetic in this novel than the previous one, which I think improves it. Singularity Sky seemed to suffer from idea overload at times and Iron Sunrise benefits from a slightly slower and more consistent pace.

It will be interesting to see where Stross goes with the Eschaton setting after this. There are a number of questions that need answers, and a number of different directions he could take the series. At this point, it’s anyone’s guess. I would recommend Iron Sunrise to anyone that likes hard science fiction, particularly if you’ve enjoyed Stross in the past.

Book Review: Altered Carbon

Jun 26

Posted by Matt Wigdahl in Books, Reviews | No Comments

I recently finished reading Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. I’d heard a bit about this book in the past; it had made a pretty big splash for a debut novel, but I hadn’t read it. It arrived a few weeks ago in the CARE package of books my uncle Eric sent to me, and after making it to the top of the pile, I finally got to read it. It was an excellent book, reminding me of a cross between a Raymond Chandler novel and the movie Blade Runner.

Altered Carbon — Richard K. Morgan

Rating: 4.5/5

Richard K. Morgan’s debut novel, Altered Carbon, is quite an achievement. Drawing freely from the tropes of film noir, detective fiction, and cyberpunk, Altered Carbon is not only a tight mystery with excellent pacing but also a deep exploration about what it really means to be a human individual.

In Morgan’s world, death has been robbed of most of its sting by the “stack”, a small cybernetic implant that sits at the base of the skull and digitally records a person’s thoughts and sense perceptions — in effect, the complete personality. In the event of a person’s physical death, the stack can be downloaded into another “sleeve” (body), overwriting the original personality and allowing the downloaded person to live again in the new sleeve.

Of course, human nature being what it is, this doesn’t necessarily lead to a golden age for mankind. Real death through destruction of the stack is still possible, unless you are rich enough to have yourself backed up regularly. Choice bodies are expensive, and unless you are wealthy or useful, providing for your own continued existence in anything other than a virtual condo or a cheap synthetic sleeve may be beyond your means. Virtual experiences mediated by computer software are widely available, but when you are in virtual space you are completely at the mercy of the host computer system and the subject to the whims of whomever controls it.

In Morgan’s setting, humanity has managed to lever itself off of Earth, with the help of an alien legacy discovered on Mars. FTL communications allow a sort of interstellar mobility for some people, as it is possible to transmit your coded personality to another planet for “ensleevement” there. Of course, this type of travel is prohibitively expensive and only available to the fantastically wealthy or to those people with exceptional skills that are employed by the fantastically wealthy.

The main character of Altered Carbon, Takeshi Kovacs, is one of the latter. A former member of the Envoy Corps, the most elite miliary unit of the UN Protectorate, turned criminal, Kovacs is serving a long sentence in storage on the colony planet of Harlan’s World when he gets selected as an investigator for an exceptionally rich and influential man on Earth. Granted a new sleeve and a six-week lease on life, he is instructed to solve the mystery of how his patron, Laurens Bancroft, was killed. The police think the investigation is a waste of time. They’re sure it was suicide.

Any novel that deals with digitization and transfer of human consciousness has to be informed by some sort of materialistic assumptions. A belief that the mind arises solely from material causes is known as “materialistic monism”, and almost all novelists that deal with transhuman themes have to assume this in one way or another. Most, however, shy away from some of the more bizarre consequences of such a position, such as personality blending, editing, duplication and destruction, as well as the more basic issues of whether you are the same person in a 15-year-old girl’s body as you were when your mind was in the body of a 40-year-old male. Even some of the most cutting-edge, avant-garde transhumanist writers try to preserve distinct identities and mental images for their viewpoint characters, likely because it becomes very difficult to write about and identify with hive minds or entities with no fixed personality features.

Morgan does at least pay lip service to some of these issues — viruses that can perform destructive corruption of the personality feature in several places in the novel, and both editing and duplication are discussed at times. Also, he acknowledges the influence that the flesh has on the mind — romantic attraction between two personalities strongly depends on the pheromonal compatibility of the bodies they wear, and addictions to alcohol and tobacco are dependent on the habituations of the sleeve. Like most authors, however, Morgan shies away from some of the really tough questions about what this type of technology would mean for human individuality. He does this by legislating some applications (duplication) away, by not showing some of the other possibilities, and finally, by seeming to retreat to the position that the stack is the “house of the soul”, much like Descartes’ dualistic view of the pineal gland. The stack, fragile and corruptible as it is, becomes the fixed point of a person’s identity.

Morgan’s writing is pretty tight and clean, making a nice stylistic complement to the hardboiled characters and convoluted plot he serves up. He’s got a bit of everything in this novel: comedy, tragedy, greed, romance, idealism, sadism, mystery, and an illuminating and satisfying resolution. In terms of content, he reminds me favorably of Philip K. Dick, so it doesn’t surprise me that Hollywood has optioned this novel for a movie. A film version of Altered Carbon could be great if it was done with the same cinematographic sensibilities as Blade Runner. I’m certainly looking forward to reading more by Morgan in the future.

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