Posted By Will Kaufman on April 16, 2013

Jago by Kim Newman. Titan Books 2013. 734 pages (paperback). Horror.

Jago is a bit of a hodgepodge, and a bit of a muddle, and at nearly 650 pages there’s plenty of room for both. There are a lot of characters at work here: the dishonored spy from a le Carré novel, the boy with a Stephen King-esque bogeyman, a couple in a fading relationship from a Zoloft-tinted version of a Carver story, a psychic/psychokinetic who never got over her high school issues, a fascist, racist cop, a false prophet and his assorted more-or-less pure and more-or-less power hungry followers, an undead biker from hell, a sociopathic teenage girl, a few punks and hippies, and on and on.

Each chapter focuses in on one character in close third person, the main cast providing recurring viewpoints, and some side characters being put center stage just long enough to die unpleasantly. Newman is never obtuse or confusing about whose viewpoint we’re getting, and it’s easy enough to keep the primary cast straight, although I found myself quickly losing track of many of the minor supporting characters. The sheer volume of people in Jago gets a bit tiring though, especially when Newman does something like introduce and name a whole party of characters, most of whom never recur, in a bit of back-story nearly six hundred pages in.

The bigger problem is that most of these characters are in stasis for about half the book. The spy and the psychic are on assignment to keep tabs on Jago, the book’s Big Bad, so they’re mostly just waiting for something to happen; the boy with the bogeyman is trying to cope with his fear of the dark without upsetting his very masculine father; the man and woman who make up the failing couple are each working on their own creative projects while wondering whether they should break up…

While there’s a sense of menace that pervades the first half of the book, it’s inconsistently applied. Jumping between different characters’ stories means that sometimes the next chapter ratchets down the tension from the previous. More than that, it never feels like the book is building towards anything particularly unique or interesting. Jago is a focal point for Bad Things, so Bad Things happen around him, a bit like the whole town is a haunted house. Yes, some particular Bad Thing, namely a world-ending final confrontation, is going to happen, but there are several hundred pages of minor crises and holding patterns before it does start happening. Once it does start, the sense of menace and foreboding is abandoned for more visceral horrors and lots of running around. The chaff is bloodily culled and the remaining cast finally – about three quarters of the way through the book – have goals, namely surviving and stopping Jago, which are not particularly character driven motives.

Newman’s prose mostly doesn’t get in the way of the story, though his frequent similes are often clunky and forced, or even unnecessary, like the pots hanging in a kitchen being “arranged from largest to smallest like a percussionist’s fantasy.” This sort of word choice issue actually becomes a problem in one scene in particular, where the incipient horror of some sexual violence is undermined by the narrator’s insistence on referring to the character’s penis as his “knob” consistently throughout the event. Additionally, even though the book has plenty of room to expose character in scene, we are often simply told character traits or back-story in pure expository prose.

Overall, in its attempt to achieve a grandiose scope, the book gets lost, and while the revelation of the nature of the apocalypse going on is interesting, and the final quarter of the book quite fast paced, that doesn’t really make up for the meandering nature of the bulk of the book, or for the fact that all of the suggested horrors built around individual characters are subsumed by said revelation and lost in the rush to the finish.

Perhaps this novel felt fresher back in ’91, but other, earlier authors offered us more important and formative versions of the imposition-of-fantasy-on-reality mechanic that is central to this book (Philip K. Dick obviously comes to mind). Other authors build suspense and ultimately execute it much more effectively, and other authors are more capable of balancing a large cast and managing pacing over a long novel. Unless you’re a voracious reader with a burning desire for one more piece of apocalyptica flavored heavily with Judeo-Christian imagery, I can’t recommend Jago.

Categories: Bookworms
Tags: books, bookworms, fiction, horror, Jago, Kim Newman, reviews

Posted By Will Kaufman on February 26, 2013

Gun Machine by Warren Ellis. Mulholland Books, 2012. 320 pages (hardcover). Mystery/Thriller.

Gun Machine tells the story of an ornery (surprise, surprise) New York City police detective, John Tallow, who stumbles upon an apartment filled with guns that decorate the walls and floors in strange patterns. As CSU begins testing these guns they discover that each has been used in an unsolved murder. So it’s up to our detective, with his two CSU sidekicks in tow, to track down a serial killer who’s been operating unseen for twenty years. Once they start investigating, they uncover a much broader conspiracy at work, one tied to some of the most powerful people in the city.

Warren Ellis has crafted a very competent and compelling thriller. Where Crooked Little Vein was a meandering, roaming sort of story (Nerdspan has an excellent review, right here), Gun Machine is tight and profluent. Our heroes move from clue to clue in a satisfying progression, although one big break does come in the form of a rather convenient encounter outside a sandwich shop. But, hey, how often has Henning Mankell’s Wallander (who is apparently worth ten books and two television series) gotten to the end of a case without at least one felicitous happenstance? At least Ellis makes Tallow’s involvement in the convenient meeting hinge on how his character has evolved through the story thus far.

Tallow’s character and evolution are well crafted, too. The case makes him wake up, makes him challenge himself, and the isolated life he’s settled into. He does have some distinctly Spider Jerusalem moments early on (for those of you familiar with Transmetropolitan), but those are thankfully few. Tallow is no gonzo cop, he’s a man who has to be forced to live outside his own head. His sidekicks also have some traits which will be familiar to readers of Transmetropolitan and Planetary.

There are certainly moments where Ellis fans will see shades of the “filthy assistants’” snark, insubordination, and eventual love for their boss. But Ellis does manage to make these characters into their own people, and even if you haven’t been following his career you’ll be largely charmed by the character dynamics at work here. The people of this book stand on their own, filthy mouths and all, even if they are occasionally forced to be a vehicle for some of Ellis’ obligatory bodily-function/brain-disease humor.

The serial killer deserves a special mention, as he’s a great character. During some of the sections told from his perspective there are moments where we almost forget we’re not supposed to be rooting for him. Then he does something unspeakably horrible. He’s so much more than the empty, psychopathic shell or generic childhood trauma case so often set up in thrillers for a heroic white hat to hunt down.

Speaking of white hats, readers of Transmetropolitan will probably be surprised by how many policemen and people of influence and power are positively portrayed in Gun Machine. One must wonder if, like Ice-T, Ellis hasn’t gone a bit soft on authority figures as he’s gotten older. But in a lot of ways the presence of decent people just makes the everyday horrors the city steeps its inhabitants in seem so much worse, and the decent people are heroic simply for their decency.

While Gun Machine is primarily a police procedural thriller, it’s also just a little bit science fiction. It takes places in the near future, perhaps twenty or thirty years from now, but that’s not what makes it science fiction. The technology that’s on hand is essentially the same as ours, just a little more prolific. No, the main science fiction feel comes from Ellis’ Gibson-esque observations about the influence of technology. Ellis doesn’t indulge in the OCD level dissection found in, say, Pattern Recognition, but the pervasiveness of tech and it’s influence on social changes is still there. From the apartment building which can only be entered through a driveway, and the ways informational distance and physical distance don’t match up, to the creeping presence of private security supplanting police forces, to the Irish sports bar that placates its sports-starved patrons with Sumo digests piped in via satellite.

Everything is recognizable but it’s also pushed just that one step further. Ellis’ eye may not be as surgically incisive as Gibson’s, but it’s still quite good. More than that, his near future speculation is an important part of the story, as the serial killer at work is a dedicated luddite. He’s the kind of guy who traps squirrels in the park to make squirrel jerky, and goes out of his way to avoid cameras. He is, in fact, the kind of guy who hallucinates Manhattan before the white men arrived, and has trouble keeping his mind fully in the present. His success as a mass murderer creates a great tension with the security people.

Overall, Gun Machine is a very successful and entertaining novel. There are a few moments where Ellis’ prose falters, but only in moments of stillness. Ellis is proficient in his descriptive language, expressing his action vividly. He does not need pictures to tell this story for him, thank you very much, and it’s nice to see him embracing the novel form and doing things on the page that wouldn’t be possible in comic books.

Gun Machine is not a tremendous departure from Ellis’ past work, and it’s not going to change the world. There’s plenty here that will be familiar to his fans, but it’s a quantum leap from his first novel, and leaves me just as excited for his next prose project as his next graphic project. Whether or not you’re a fan, if you’re in the market for a thriller you won’t be disappointed. Unless you hate swearing.

Categories: Bookworms
Tags: Crooked Little Vein, gun machine, Mystery, Pattern Recognition, Planetary, red, science fiction, thriller, Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis, William Gibson

Posted By Will Kaufman on February 4, 2013

At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson. Small Beer Press 2012. 300 pages (trade paperback). Fantasy/Science Fiction.

Kij Johnson’s At the Mouth of the River of Bees is a collection of fantastical stories, spanning nearly two decades of the author’s career, that illuminate the strange emotional topography of our world. These stories do not concern themselves with explaining their otherworldly or impossible realities, they accept the existence of mystery and instead explore our responses to mystery. Johnson’s concern is the myriad meanings we can draw from the strange or unknown, and the ways we accept, deny, or attempt to find solutions. Moving, funny, and well-told, fans of fantasy, science fiction, and magical realism will all find something to love in At the Mouth of the River of Bees.

The book starts off with the excellent “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” a story about one woman’s time performing with a mostly-autonomous troupe of monkeys, whose big trick is to disappear from a bathtub – truly disappear, traveling somewhere she cannot follow. The story works as a metaphor for the strange process of finding home when it’s so easy to be lost. It’s also emotionally affecting, the monkeys are wonderful characters, and ends with a true-to-life ambivalence. However, the story’s sections are numbered, which seems a little superfluous, and mostly like a nod to the title. The sections are not disparate enough to be “separate monkeys,” if you will, but the move can’t detract from the experience of reading the story.

“Fox Magic” comes next, a Japanese-inspired (Asian influences are common throughout Johnson’s collection) mythical tale about a fox who falls in love with a man. It’s another lovely story, with deep emotional investment in its characters and an unflinching refusal to characterize people or actions as good or evil, but simply true to themselves. This story was published almost twenty years before “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss,” yet the two sit comfortably next to each other in the book. Johnson seems to have carried her imagination, energy, dedication, and skill effortlessly through the decades. The only real difference seems to be that she’s developed the ability to tease out ever more subtle, delicate emotional moments, and build them up to mean more than the life-or-death struggles in which her characters are so often embroiled.

In fact, where the collection is weakest is where her subtler moves are overshadowed by life-and-death. “The Horse Raiders” is a story about human colonists on a world that rotates very slowly, so that location is measured by time of day. Get too far away from the line of dawn and you’ll either freeze or burn up, which means people have adopted a nomadic lifestyle in order to survive. It’s a solid premise, but the story kicks off with such an overpowering moment of violence that the bulk of it feels like epilogue. It doesn’t help that the rest of the story tries to deal with questions of history, identity, memory and forgetfulness, and more. The nuances muddle together in the shadow of the violence and none ever really get to claim the reader’s attention.

All of the stories in this collection address death, but it’s what Johnson can do around death that makes her stories special. “Ponies,” for instance, is a brief and brutal story that’s also an illuminating look into girlhood and the desire to belong. “Spar” is a short blast of Thanatos and Eros (and sex really is just as blunt an emotional instrument as death) that’s also a wonderful meditation on grief.

There are two near-novella length stories in the collection as well. It’s great to see Johnson’s skill at unfolding a narrative over a longer span, and the ability of her imagination to provide worlds grand enough for extended exploration. However, the plots of both tend towards the predictable. The longer stories are no less enjoyable for it, but where At the Mouth of the River of Bees shines is when it concentrates the strange and familiar down into a sharp shot of ideas and emotions.

The most daring story in the collection has to be “Story Kit,” which blends Greek myth, craft essay, and memoir to explore the connection between an author’s pain and her work. It’s a sort of post-modern Freudian-reading mash-up that is sure to be the most polarizing story in the collection. For my part, I loved it for its risk-taking and honesty, and for anchoring itself in scene and never rambling off into abstract philosophizing. Your mileage may vary, but if you’re a writer or harbor authorial ambitions you’ll probably find that it resonates with at least some part of your experience.

It maybe cliched to call a book things like funny, sad, smart, moving, or any combination thereof, but At the Mouth of the River of Bees is all those things. It’s also further proof that independent presses like Small Beer Books can both attract talent and publish work that is as good or better than the talent and work coming out of the conglomerated houses.

Categories: Bookworms
Tags: At the Mouth of the River of Bees, books, bookworms, fantasy, Kij Johnson, Short Stories, Sicence Fiction

Posted By Will Kaufman on January 21, 2013

The Fractal Prince (The Quantum Thief Trilogy #2) by Hannu Rajaniemi. Tor Books 2012. 320 pages (hardcover). Science Fiction.

Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Fractal Prince is a perfect book for my first Nerdspan review because I love it, in part, for reasons that reveal exactly what kind of nerd I am. In grad school (the first time) I took a seminar in Posthuman Theory, and it clarified a lot of ideas implanted by a childhood spent reading sci-fi. This review is not the place for any sort of exegesis, so let me just recommend that you go pick up some Katherine Hayles; she’s fantastic, and she literally wrote the book on Posthumanism. For the purpose of this review, suffice it to say that Posthumanism deals with the question of how modern information technology is changing, and has already changed, human identity, consciousness, culture, etc.

Anyone who’s read much Katherine Hayles will, eventually, almost feel at home in Rajaniemi’s imagination. Anybody who’s spent much time trying very hard to think about what the future that quantum computing, nanotech, and posthuman theory suggest will be tremendously gratified by Rajaniemi’s daring. Science fiction is a tough genre right now because today’s science has made the future more unimaginable than ever before (unless you go post-apocalyptic), so it’s fantastic to see a writer projecting a future that embraces all of that uncertainty. Rajaniemi uses all the plurality of possibilities to create characters with depth, and a world with weight and history. Fortunately, Rajaniemi is talented enough to create this world efficiently, giving us in just a few hundred pages what other authors would take thousands of pages to flesh out and explain.

You know what, I’ve changed my mind: The Fractal Prince is a terrible book for my first Nerdspan review. Do you feel like I’ve been a bit vague so far, like I haven’t actually told you much about the book? You’re right. I’ve done it on purpose. One of the great pleasures of The Fractal Prince and its prequel, The Quantum Thief, is in slowly penetrating the meaning of the words and the systems of the world.

This is not hand-holding sci-fi. No convenient traveler from a different world or time wanders through the story having things explained to him. To me this obscurity, this absolute commitment to narrative immersion in the world of the story, really elevates the writing. The underlying constructions of Rajaniemi’s sentences are mundane, but are elevated by the strangeness of Rajaniemi’s future.  The artistry comes not from a unique approach to writing, but from an utter commitment to language of his world. Like his description of, “large pentagonal windows that open to the wildcode desert, a jagged landscape of fallen Sobornost technology, now overgrown with windmill trees and nameless plants, chaotic geometry broken only be the rails of soul trains,” or when he writes, “The Venusian godlings are naked, chalk-skinned shapes against the sulphur acid clouds, Sydan a tiny thing next to them on her borrowed wings. Mieli watches as they swoop and chase her, force her into a spiraling dive and knows that she is laughing, wildly and loudly.”

That may sound magical, and the book at times seems to stray towards magic, but it takes place in a world where information can be instantiated in physical media so minute and diffuse that the effect is indistinguishable to the naked eye from disembodied, omnipresent spime.  This gives Rajaniemi a great deal of freedom, but at times can be a weakness. During a few of the action sequences the jargon comes so thick and fast that it gives the feeling of magical invocation, and can prove distracting. Also, the way the Earth-bound humans have layered middle-eastern mythology over the technology – invoking magic to describe technology – is largely effective, but sometimes seems unnecessarily pointed or forced. For instance, the insistence on referring to the nanite clouds used for flying as “flying carpets,” while convenient, stuck out as being somehow both forced (who looks at a cloud and thinks “carpet?”) and too-easy (you sit on it and it flies, duh!) a connection in a book that otherwise integrates technology into its language to great effect.

Ultimately, my criticisms are few and niggling. This is an incredibly rewarding book, both in the grandeur of its world and the care taken with its characters. “The scale does not matter…It has never mattered. A con is a con, a heist is a heist. Even gods fight stupidity in vain.” These characters are shaped by their unusual future, who they are is defined by influences unfamiliar to our lives, but their needs and wants, their motivations and hopes, these are all too recognizable. Fantastically, these very human motivations drive the characters to a truly epic conclusion. I really have no idea where he’s going with the third book in this trilogy, and I can’t wait to find out.

The Fractal Prince is finally about stories, about how people are stories, and about how those stories open and close, shift, split, and merge. How those stories are both fluid and fractal. You will find stories nested within stories nested within stories, and you will sometimes lose track of your depth. To my mind this move makes perfect sense, enacting the confusion of existence in a world where minds can be copied, altered, embodied in reality or in simulation, or run in abstract or representational virtual space. Rajaniemi is the inheritor of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson and Theodore Sturgeon and any number of other greats who broke new ground both imaginatively and psychologically. I highly recommend picking up his first two books, and keeping an eye on him in the future.

Categories: Bookworms
Tags: books, bookworms, Hannu Rajaniemi, reviews, science fiction, The Fractal Prince, The Quantum Thief Trilogy