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Devoured two first novels, John Scalzi's Old Man's War and Elizabeth Bear's Hammered. The first could be considered an homage to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I find Scalzi's book more readable, but then I've had trouble with the Grand Master's books for the past twenty years: to my readerly eye, his long political screeds and his attitudes toward women (yes, he wrote about smart women, but except for Podkayne to be really worthwhile they also had to be beautiful, with enormous "balconies") has increasingly repelled me. Scalzi and Bear are new on the novel scene, and though they deal with some sturdy old sfnal tropes, they bring freshness to them. And new ones as well: women in action, gayness, changes in culture, medical tech, and the world are no longer Issues, they are a part of life. These writers are young enough to have long careers ahead of them-and old enough to have read widely, thought, and experienced life, which shows in their work.

Scalzi posits a near future in which old people can sign up to go into the military, get refitted with some kind of youth treatment, and ship out to protect Earth colonies in space. The downside is, you can never return. Nobody knows why, but with aging bods, dying peers, and not much of a future, many oldsters figure it's worth a shot. The hero, John Perry, had signed up along with his wife to join. His wife died; he went anyway.

What happens to Perry kind of follows the Heinlein story, with a couple of crucial divergences. We see the old people get the mystery treatment, the aftermath, their training, and their careers--including the many deaths, either by accident or in battle, both military realities. Along the way Perry bonds with people he met happenstance: there is an emphasis on unit loyalty as a survival technique. Because even with all their physical enhancements, they soon discover that the military life is far from easy. Harrowing, in fact, in the extreme: the war portion of the novel shifts tone, launching the reader onto an emotional roller coaster. Scalzi speeds through Perry's rise in rank, touching on political and moral questions as he faces vicious aliens and heavy-duty battle. There is one question he raises that I hoped to see addressed--why put this enormous amount of money, tech, and manpower into an army that is regularly decimated, is this the only way, or the easy way, and if so why--but we don't really get an examination of the reasons, much less a resolution, we are whipped past into the heightened horror of immediate threat.

The sense is that this is a short book, though it isn't, really. It feels short because so much happens, there are many transitions and summations, there are characters who appear just to raise this or that issue then are swept away-and that is not necessarily a bad thing. The science is fascinating, the questions good ones, and there are some deft character touches (including a biggie that takes Perry utterly by surprise, and raises even more fascinating questions) leaving the reader by the last page wanting more. Scazli writes with vividness and humor, the latter quality making bearable some otherwise grim scenes. I will be keeping a watch out for his future books.

And same with Hammerred, Elizabeth Bear's first novel. I'd already discovered her writing in some short stories; the one I really liked-in fact it was my favorite of the anthology-was her zeppelin story taking place in Chinese history for Zeppelin Adventure Stories. My expectations were high, and she met them head on.

Jenny Casey is near fifty, a combat-traumatized soldier living in a very grim future Hartford, Connecticut. Her extensive cyberware is going bad, there are ugly drugs being dispersed on the streets of her town and the local ganglord-a friend of hers-was not only not selling it, he lost some of his followers to it. Her friends, a neurosurgeon, a cop, and a street fighter (ronin) named Bobbi Yee, are concerned either about Jenny, the drugs or both-at which time her sister, long and deliberately lost, shows up to yank Jenny back to Canada for treatments to save her life. But there are stings attached. Of course. There always are when you deal with either governments or big corporations, and Jenny has managed to intersect with both.

I don't want to go into too much detail, because the unfolding of the story, the connections and discoveries, are one of the pleasures. Just know that I loved the characterizations here: they are strong enough to stand against the backdrop of myriad sfnal concepts.

Virtual reality, a Mars station, discoveries kept silent, arms race, ecological disaster, A.I.s and future biotech all get examined, and Bear does not cheat by offering easy answers. This book resolves enough to be satisfying while raising all kinds of delicious questions that are sure to be explored in her next, Scardown, which will appear this summer. I plan to be first in line at my local bookstore to buy it.

9 January 2005

Caitlin Brennan's The Mountain's Call. one of the new Luna line of books that focus on melding romance and fantasy. Good, brisk pacing, an interesting world full of fascinating complexities and possibilities, intriguing characters, and though the basic outline of the story might make one think one knows where it is going, the author expertly deals out surprises. What really makes an otherwise good, polished read scintillate is the way the horses come to life. Tiny details about horse behavior, thought processes, actions, make this alien life form both accessible and fascinating. And I admired how the already awe-inspiring "dance" of the Lippizans (which I saw only in practice form just once, back in 1972, when I visited the Spanish Riding School in Vienna) takes on new magic and meaning.

Anyone who, like me, loves Jack Vance might respond like I did to Matthew Hughes' Black Brillion. Make that Jack Vance, Karl Jung, with maybe a touch of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin thrown in. Hughes does not confine himself to pastiche, he just seems to tap into the same vein of wit that Vance mined, in this adventure wherein a hapless young investigator is teamed with an old, wise thief in order to expose a much bigger con. What a fun book!

1 January 2005

Finished the Zeppelin Adventure Stories anthology, and it really is quite good. None of the stories disappointed me. What's more, I never hit overload on the theme, which has happened with so many other themed anthologies. Often not the fault of the antho in question, just that the stories, taken separately, can be enjoyable but read one after another can sometimes have too many similar themes, uses, etc. Not here. The variety of ways to get zeppelins into story form, the spectrum of tone and type of story, kept the concept fresh right to the last page.

And my favorite magazine, Black Gate, showed up with the seventh issue--lots of dark fantasy there, with a spectacularly memorable story by Todd McAulty. He writes long--novellas--which are harder to sell. That must be why his name is not all over the place. The issue also had lots of good reviews, and the comic "Knights of the Dinner Table" was delightful.

I was sick with a disgusting flu, and so I read several D.E. Stevenson books, specifically the Mrs Tim ones. Wonderful comfort reads: her observation of people is so acute, but there is an underlying sweetness, a belief in the goodness of most people, that I really like. I read Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle earlier, and again I loved it. The writing was superb, the humor wonderful, and the characters memorable. I read/skimmed Karen Joy Fowler's Jane Austen Book Club, which I really thought I'd like. Fowler is so very fine a writer, and I have admired her other work, but I think my constant rereading of Austen did not serve me well in my encounter with this book. I gradually came to feel that the storyline was far overshadowed by my memory of Austen's work, and that I disagreed with some of the assessments of the novels. However, there was one aspect that I felt worth the price of the book, and that was the splendid series of quotes from famous writers through the ages, all reacting to Austen. The best of them all was Rebecca West's. (I go into all this more fully on my blog, which has a link on my main page, if anyone is interested in the longer discussion.)

It seems to me the rest of my reading was workshop or research related . . .

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