Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe (3 stars)

Boy did I not know what I was getting myself into. The first two books of The Book of the New Sun, an award-laden series by Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, were a present from a friend and I jumped in with naive gusto.

I'm really not going to be careful with spoilers, so if that bothers you stop reading now.

I loved Wolfe's description of the Citadel, and his excellent portrayal of the professionalism and dedication of the torturers to their guild, where the flaying of skin to the bone of a 'client' is discussed by master torturers in a professional and passionate manner akin to computer science professors at a top university debating the merits of a particularly interesting algorithm.

They might be intensely interested in their art, but they completely distance themselves from the justice of the essentially random and senseless punishments they are carrying out. It is explained that 'clients' arrive carrying:

...his or her papers and thus his or her fate. All of them had broken the seals and read those papers, of course; and some had destroyed them or exchanged them for another's. Those who arrived without papers would be held until some further word concerning their disposition was received - probably for the remainder of their lives. Those who had exchanged papers with someone else had exchanged fates; they would be held or released, tortured or executed, in another's stead.

Gradually hints are dropped and you come to the realisation that this society is not medieval, but set in the far far distant future on Earth as our Sun is dying and technology has peaked. Society has fallen back to a feudal level ruled by an upper class with some control over high technology, while most of the populace cannot distinguish such technology from magic. Wolfe has been called the master of the casual reveal, and I felt that many times, here's a casual line dropped by Severian:

The lights of the oubliette are of that ancient kind that is said to burn forever, though some have now gone out.

Just as I was starting to feel comfortable in this world, and ready to learn more about the Torturers, Witches and follow Severian as a journeyman, the book lurches into a series of increasingly mad, and seemingly disconnected adventures. What's going on? Here's a mini summary:

Someone in armor gives you a seed and suddenly you jump in a cab and steal the most important artifact of a religion, on the way to Hunter S. Thompson's Botanic Gardens where you wander through a desert and a naked jungle hut discussion before coming to a lake full of bodies, get collected by a guy who is searching for his dead wife with a row boat and a grappling hook for well, possibly forever, and pick the nastiest, deadliest piece of flora which will be your weapon in an upcoming fight to the death that you somehow agreed to.

So this is why you should probably read the Wolfe hints for beginners, and Neil Gaiman's advice. It feels like you're trying to solve a puzzle being described by a narrator who is fond of LSD and lying.

Now I could no longer be sure my own mind was not lying to me; all my falsehoods were recoiling on me, and I who remembered everything could not be certain those memories were more than my own dreams.

And it is a beautifully crafted and complex puzzle, which has hooked me into buying the next two books. But I have many questions in my troubled, troubled mind:

What is the nature of Severian's allegiance to Vodalus? When asked about it he says 'I saved him once' and that symbols 'invent us', with reference to the coin given to him by Vodalus. He says he 'backs into the throne', which I assume means he becomes the Autarch? Does the Autarch actually exist at present, or was this business about mirrors and light 'creating' something mean that the Autarch doesn't yet exist? Severian met the androgynous Autarch in the house of Secrets, but I really don't know what to make of that, does taking the Autarch's life mean killing him/it or something else? (note the contradiction in the meaning of the word Autarch and its use as a monarch-like figure) Or is Severian Vodalus? Oh wait, the coin has a 'worn, serene, androgynous face on its obverse' so perhaps the Autarch is real but Vodalus is a construct created by the Autarch? Dorcas and Severian are described as innocence and death, but it seems like it should be the other way around? Did Dorcas kill Jolenta?

But despite all this deep thought-provoking analysis, the truth is I definitely didn't enjoy large parts of this book. It is very very wordy, and difficult to read: it's been called the Odyssey of Science Fiction. And while there is a lot of depth and mystery, and little secrets to unlock, I'm sure not every boring and diversionary little anecdote was essential to the story:

Must it not be then that in darkness order grows ever less, flowers leaping from nothingness into a girl's fingers just as by light in spring they leap from mere filthiness into the air? Perhaps when night closes our eyes there is less order than we believe. Perhaps indeed, it is this lack of order we perceive as darkness, a randomization of the waves of energy (like a sea), the fields of energy (like a farm) that appear to our deluded eyes-set by light in an order of which they themselves are incapable-to be the real world.

Perhaps indeed, it is such passages that detract from an otherwise 5 star novel? It feels like much of the book is padding to provide nooks and crannies for Wolfe to stash his secrets. I found reading Dr. Talos's play especially painful, possibly since it reminded me of boring English classes that sucked all the enjoyment out of Shakespeare.

I've heard the books are best on your second or third re-read, but if this novel was truly great, as many claim it is, it would be great the first time. It's a remarkably interesting and complex puzzle, but not a great novel.

3 stars.

Best of 2012 as read by G

In 2012 I attempted to improve my sci-fi education. Some progress made, but still lots to do. I also upgraded to a Kindle Paperwhite and frickin love it: the light, smaller size, time to read and x-ray, in that order.

The best (5 stars):

• Hyperion by Dan Simmons
• A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge
• A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
• The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
• Wool Omnibus by Hugh Howey
• A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge

The Twelve by Justin Cronin (3 stars)

The Passage was a very strong book, what of its successor? Sadly disappointing.

I opened The Twelve to find myself back at year zero, immediately after the release of the virus. Sigh. Cronin intricately led us through the release of the virus in the first book, so I wasn't at all interested in taking two steps back.

Nevertheless, I dug in and was once again impressed with Cronin's character building: 'last stand in Denver' was brilliant, and PTSD-denial-Lily was quite well-drawn in the early novel. Although that's not to say I liked reading her passages, they were really annoying, and made me want to slap her, but that was the point. Here she is, in full-delusion mode, musing about where she could go for dinner, despite there being virals ready to eat her outside her front door:

They had a marvelous patio draped with vines of fragrant flowers, and the most wonderful chef - he had visited their table once - who had trained at Cordon Bleu. Pierre? Francois? The man could do the most amazing thing with sauces, teasing the deepest flavor from even the simples dishes...

And I thought the reasoning for her self-inflicted delusion was actually quite well constructed. Later in the book I thought she was also good in her mad queen of hearts role.

Danny the autistic busdriver I could have done without. Not only did it start to feel like the mentally ill survivors club, but Danny seemed to be copied from Tom Cullen in The Stand. In fact, I commented on the Passage being less mystical than The Stand as a good thing, but Cronin obviously read my review and took it as criticism because The Twelve is every bit as mystical as The Stand.

The worst part of this was that the storyline with Danny, 'last stand in Denver' and the pink-punk chick was unceremoniously dropped, presumably to reappear in the third book. It felt like pushing through a lot of packing material to find out someone sent you an empty box.

At least Danny was a real character. I have no idea what is up with Lore, whose character seems to be solely defined by who she is having sex with. I was assuming she was a spy for the homeland red-eyes, but it seems not, so I suspect she has some sinister Zero-related role to play in the final book.

One of my favourite parts of the book was the massacre in the field. The tension was unbelievable, it was obvious something was going to happen, but the actual events were quite unexpected and it felt like a return to form. Hardboxes, scary virals, eking out a living in the shadow of danger.

Unfortunately as the plot continues it makes less and less sense. Here come the spoilers.

After Amy visits Carter's lair, which was awesome, we descend into what feels like a screenplay sketch: there's little character development, the plot follows along in a predictable direction, and the sinister feel of the whole world just evaporates. Why did the 12 leave their armies of virals behind to join the humans for a drac convention? Sure they need a stable human population, but they have all the power, they can dictate the terms. It felt like Cronin just needed to get done with The Twelve to focus on Zero in the final book.

Don't expect to fully understand what is going on without re-reading The Passage. Despite re-reading my review, the wikipedia summary, and the clumsy biblical recap at the beginning, it wasn't enough for when Cronin finally got back to the original story 200 pages in. He expects you to recall a lot of the details and relationships from the previous novel.

I'll still read the next book, let's hope he can bring it home.

3 stars.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (4 stars)

Quick, movie's out, read the book again! Since Peter Jackson chose to stretch one small children's book into 3 long movies it turns out you can easily read the book chapters covered by the movie faster than you can watch the movie, and reading the whole book only takes a few hours.

As a children's book I think it is pretty damn good. You can see Tolkien building up ideas for Lord of the Rings: the easily-killed but numerous spiders are the building blocks for the much more sinister and powerful Shelob, the swords taken from the trolls were very reminiscent of the swords acquired from the Barrow-wight and used to kill the Nazgul, and the Battle of Five Armies is a smaller scale template for the epic battle of Helm's Deep.

On a less positive note, I found the foreshadowing fairly annoying, and I'm not sure why it is there. Maybe Tolkien thought kids needed to be reassured that everything was going to work out in the end, or needed all the dots explicitly connected?

...which shows he was a wise elf and wiser than the men of the town, though not quite right, as we shall see in the end.

...And the knotted ropes are too slender for my weight. Luckily for him that was not true, as you will see.

Great children's book, and I'm going to score it as such, I certainly loved it as a kid.

4 stars.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (4.5 stars)

Miéville drops you straight into a foot of New Crobuzon muck:

It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protuding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering...

Some people got sick of reading about how dirty New Crobuzon is, but when it is said like this, I could read it all day:

Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt.

The scene-setting and the prose are simply fantastic. If you had to look up 'troglodytic', keep your dictionary close by for 'liminal, 'autopoiesis', 'deracinated', 'stygian', and 'etiolated'. I didn't know whether to be impressed by these, or annoyed, it felt like Miéville had lost a bet and had to include half a 'word a day' calendar in the novel.

But it's hard to stay mad at a dark, dirty steampunk world with insecto-humanoids, menancing mind controlling aliens, and mechanical super-intelligences. Miéville's city-world is fantastically imagined and described. Remaking, magic-come-bio-engineering-on-LSD, is particularly horrifying and grotesque, especially when used as punishment:

A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his nose, Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a flaccid wound.

And that's not even close to the most disturbing example, think about what remaking means for a red-light district. And yes, Miéville describes it.

Isaac I liked, although I had trouble imagining him and his voice - the many 'Yag, mate' phrases could have been cockney or even Australian. I got sick of the pseudo-scientific crisis theory discussions:

So I'm a MUFTI, a Moving Unified Field Theorist. Not a SUFTI, a Static Unified...you get the idea. But then, being a MUFTI raises as many problems as it solves: if it moves how does it move? Steady gait? Punctuated inversion?

y and z were unified, bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was x, Andrej's mind, the reference point for the whole model. It was integral to the form of each that they were totalities....

But I'm totally with Isaac as regards to Palgolak:

Palgolak was a god of knowledge. He was depicted either as a fat, squat human reading in a bath, or a svelte vodyanoi doing the same, or, mystically, both at once....He rather hoped the fat bastard did exist, in some form or other. Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamoured with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across.

And I have to admit the crisis engine as a power source for the Construct Council steampunk supercomputer (punch cards!) and its minions is a storyline I wish was followed more. Steampunk skynet:

My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

I enjoyed the Aliens/Predator-style slake-moth hunt, but I felt a significant disconnect between the descriptive world-building of the early novel and the alien top-gun style dogfight battles.

So maybe the climax was a little silly, but it was definitely entertaining. The denouement was horrible though. A tacked-on boring sequence of events, a bizarre moral dilemma, and a walkout. Ending a book like this was always going to be tough, but this really detracted from the whole experience.

4.5 stars

The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi (4 stars)

Matter: what kinds of heaps its piled up in makes no difference, he said, when she asked if Sirr pleased him.

Indeed, scoffing at the physical world, and disdainful of meatspace, Rajaniemi's post-singularity caper continues. Of course if you don't like how matter is piled up, having knowledge of some secret names will let you reshape this wildcode desert:

The Names are the names of the Aun, and by calling them you control the world, access the functionality built into the foglets in Earth's atmosphere, rock and water by the ancients.

Rajaniemi evokes Arabian Nights and biblical parables with passages like 'The Story of the Wirer Boy and the Jannah of the Cannon':

Before the cry of Wrath rattled the Earth and Sobornost sank its claws into its soil, there lived a young man in the city of Sirr. He was a wirer's son, with a back and chest burnt brown by the sun, nimble in his trade; but when the night fell he would go to taverns and listen to the tales of the mutalibun - the treasure-hunters. Eyes aglow, he sighed and listened and breathed in the stories of hissing sands and rukh ships and the dark deeds that greed summons out of the hears of men.

I've waited too long to write this review, but the overall vibe I got from this book is that it was designed to fill in the world in preparation for a grand finale. Rajaniemi adds more complexity and character to the world created in the Quantum Thief: there are interesting plot reveals, some twists, and we get to know Jean and Mieli better. But I was mostly left with a feeling of anticipation. I also found myself less interested in this desert being mined for gogols than the complex society of the Oubliette.

I await the next installment eagerly.

Oh, I can fake social niceties perfectly well, but it is just slave gogols moving my face, you understand. My emotions are outsourced. My private utility functions and pleasures are...quite different from yours.

4 stars

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (4.5 stars)

Picking up The Quantum Thief reminded me a lot of the first time I read A Clockwork Orange, where there is so much unexplained slang that at first it seems barely comprehensible. But it's amazing how quickly you can pick up concepts from context, and pretty soon I was all over gevulot, exomemory, the quiet, gogols, and much more. As an aside, while Burgess drew heavily on Russian, Rajaniemi pulls words from Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic, and there is a glossary if you get stuck. I was rather surprised to encounter the word Yggdrasil again, having just read it in the Hyperion series.

While I'm on comparisons, don't expect any exposition. On a scale from Ready Player One to Neuromancer, it's jammed right up at the Neuromancer end. It is disorienting, confusing, challenging and awesome. This is definitely a book that benefits from being read in large chunks. I was nibbling at it and had to constantly backtrack a few pages to pick up the story again.

I have to admit to mostly ignoring the physics, I'm sure the references are exciting for quantum physicists, but I'm not particularly interested in constantly running to Google while I'm reading fiction. But there are plenty of other things to focus on, Rajaniemi has packed so many innovative ideas into the novel it's like he has been bottling them up for decades and had to get them all out in this debut novel.

I particularly liked gevulot, this idea of crypto-backed privacy where, even during ordinary conversations, people exchange contracts with each other to govern how the other party sees you and how much of the conversation they are allowed to remember, made possible since all memory is stored in the city-wide exomemory.

Even though the park is an open space, it is not an agora, and walking down the sandy pathways, they pass several gevulot-obscured people, their privacy fog shimmering...

Their Watches exchange a brief burst of standard shop gevulot, enough for her to know that he does not really know much about chocolate but has Time enough to afford it - and for him to glimpse public exomemories about her and the shop.

All residents of the Oubliette, the walking Martian city where the novel is set (!), are required to serve time as 'Quiet' where their virtual reality personality (gogol) is transferred into a machine and used in service to the city. As a result, time as a regular citizen becomes currency, there's a vaguely described but sinister threat outside the city, high-tech superheroes come-police, posthuman warrior clans descended from MMORPG clans, and a powerful collective with a universal proletarian Great Common Task. Not to mention a modern day Sherlock holmes and a heist. Like I said, lots of great ideas.

So what's not to like? There's a point towards the end of the novel where the artful sequence of plot reveals steps out of mazes and shadows into an action-packed climax. This transition felt a little clumsy to me, and seemed fairly shallow after the mysterious build-up. The "Luke, I am your father" (and this is your mother and we're one exciting family) moment should have been cut entirely. Compared to the clever reveals earlier in the novel it was clumsy and cheesy.

4.5 stars