SNARL: Pale Realms of Shade

There has been a big kerfluffle about the Hugo awards in Science Fiction this year, and most of it has been about the political and cultural implications of the works and the award process. At this point we have a set of nominees. I will be voting in August for which author will take home the coveted rocket-shaped Hugo trophy(s). This is the fourth of several actual reviews by me of those nominated works of fiction. All of these reviews may (will) contain spoilers.

I had hoped to post a review for “Flow” by Arlan Andrews Sr. before the third story by John C. Wright, but I had a little difficulty tracking down a copy of it. I now have a copy in hand, and should be able to review it soon.

This is a review of: “Pale Realms of Shade” by John C. Wright (The Book of Feasts & Seasons, Castalia House)

This story is a bad entheogenic trip trying to pretend that it is really straight, and hoping it will come down before the reader gets annoyed by the way it scratches itself in public. The best thing about it is the way it starts with the protagonist being dead and a bit of questionable grammar. Neither the story nor the protagonist ever recovers. I don’t really think this story is a science fiction or a fantasy story. I give it zero stars.

The story is a straightforward “Jesus Saves” morality lesson; like the poorly penned ones street preachers sometimes hand out. Mr Wright has added psychedelic visions to his in the hopes of making it profound. He fails.

The protagonist (a Mr Flint of Flint and Steel psychic detective agency) has died and become a poltergeist as a result of his jealousy (his widow takes up with his ex partner after his death). He flies around a bunch in what would pass for a very bad trip if he were not dead, and eventually meets a devil character. The devil character gives him the choice to blow his ex partner up (with a bunch of collateral damage), but Mr. Flint chooses not to, and then he gets to confess to the angel Gabriel who then leads him back in time to Jesus.

"Then shall he say, 'Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain; they are retained.' Without these words being spoken, no sins would be forgiven."

I love how when true believers go back to ancient Israel it is so common for them to discover everyone speaking Ye Olde English.  Just like the original Star Trek.  I bet Mary Magdalene wears a really short miniskirt like Yeoman Rand did. 

Before his death Mr Flint dealt with all sorts of miraculous stuff. Werewolves, and magic items, and exorcists, and all sorts of wild supernatural stuff populated Mr Flint's life. However the presence of this stuff did not work to make him more religious; even when -by his own recollection- he witnessed miracles that proved the power of the biblical God:

“I saw the ice crack open, and the river leap as if with joy and reach with watery fingers white as foam to drown the scowling Egyptian king, who shouted in rage as ghosts of jackals howled, unable and unwilling to believe the God of the Hebrew slaves could fell him. “

The idea that a person would become too jaded by the supernatural to find salvation in Jesus if they lived a life where religious items and magic were commonplace is not profound, and does not really make sense to me. The idea that they would then want to find salvation after an extended period of floating about in some time-soup between worlds is misguided. The idea that adding random images of psychedelic stuff will create an atmosphere worth trudging through to find out if the story goes anywhere is just bad writing; especially when the only thing perfectly clear about the images that author is pushing is that they spring from a bigoted fearful mind:

“I did not look closely at the future shadows of the city in years to come. Somehow, I did wish I could warn the living to enjoy what they had now, to give thanks, and to cherish what they were so soon to have never again, not even as memory. The people and things living and not living in times to come would make sure no undistorted record, no uncorrupted memory, would remain. There were no steeples in that future, no church bells, just thin, wailing cries from thin, ugly minarets.”

So the future is some Islamic Orwellian nightmare with too many commas?

This nightmare is foreshadowed at the very beginning of this story. This story begins with a single-sentence paragraph. This story begins with a comma splice:

“It was not the being dead that I minded, it was the hours.”

Some people do not think there is anything wrong with the comma splice. Others think of it as a way of throwing sentence structure convention to the wind in order to create an effective voice. Still others believe the comma splice is a way of invalidating the petty desire some readers have of reading a story that begins with a well-crafted sentence.

This initial paragraph could have worked well as a two-sentence paragraph:

“It was not the being dead that I minded. It was the hours.”

I can picture using a semi-colon here; because I like semicolons:

“It was not the being dead that I minded; it was the hours.”

Not everyone likes semicolons. Kurt Vonnegut famously hated semicolons:

“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, “A Man Without a Country”

 Since Mr. Vonnegut was one of the greatest writers of all time such disdain for an element of grammar cannot be capriciously dismissed, but he was wrong, and now he is dead.

SNARL: One Bright Star To Guide Them

There has been a big kerfluffle about the Hugo awards in Science Fiction this year, and most of it has been about the political and cultural implications of the works and the award process. At this point we have a set of nominees. I will be voting in August for which author will take home the coveted rocket-shaped Hugo trophy(s). This is the third of several actual reviews by me of those nominated works of fiction. All of these reviews may (will) contain spoilers.

This is a review of: “One Bright Star To Guide Them”, John C. Wright, Castalia House

I should admit at the onset that I may have been reading this book wrong. I absolutely hated this book for its many glaring defects, and even its overall tone. However, the Hugo award voting fans may not be the proper audience for this material, and so I may be judging this more harshly than I should if I were asking the broader question; “Would anyone care to read this offal?”. I think the actual answer to that question is “yes”. Let me explain before I go on to the less accommodating portions of this review.

When she was much younger AOD discovered the prolific writings of Robert L. Stine and Mary P. Osborne. She read so many so quickly that I would have worried about her capacity for comprehension had she not so willingly recounted every element of the story in incredibly excruciating detail. When she moved on to the books of Joanne K. Rowling, Clive S. Lewis, and Philip Pullman in the second grade she never really picked up another of the Stine or Osborne books. She had amassed a banker’s box or more of each, and her sister went through most of them before they were donated to the greater good. However bad I may have thought those books were, However harshly I would have reviewed them if they were up for a Hugo, however happy I was to finally hand them off en masse to the fellow at the thrift store, the fact remains that they were critically useful -almost invaluable- in the development of functional literacy in my family. I cannot thank Osborne and Stine enough for what they have done, and they deserve, and have won, awards, but not a Hugo.

Young adult (YA) fiction has a long history of recognition at the Hugos. The iconic “Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel” was nominated for a Best Novel Hugo in 1959 (the first year the Hugo trophy was the now iconic rocket); it did not win. “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” won the 2001 Hugo award for Best Novel. Some people have told me that “science fiction and fantasy is young adult fiction”; they are wrong, but there is an undeniable place for YA in SF, and at the Hugos.

One of the major challenges in writing good YA literature is not making the readers feel that you think they are stupid even though you know that so many young adults really are stupid. I don’t remember meeting John C. Wright (I may have, but I just don’t remember him), but I get the feeling he thinks I am stupid for buying his book. I can picture him taunting me with a “You own it now, Sucker!”.

It should come as no surprise that I find a book that thinks I am stupid for reading it rather awful. By the time I get done with exploring three major areas where this book fails it will have only earned 3 stars (out of 10).

The story stumbles drunkenly for several pages before the 40-year-old protagonist named “Tommy” lets off a prayer to St George and then accidentally finds a magic key around the neck of a talking black cat who was hanging out under a small rosebush. When Tommy touches the key he remembers an incredible collection of fantastical childhood adventures [“Tommy stooped and picked up the silver key. “I remember now,” he said.”]. It turns out that Tommy knows the cat, named "Tybert" like the prince of cats in the Reynard the fox stories (Was Wright’s inspiration the anti-Semitic "Van den vos Reynaerde" published in 1941?). Tybert gives Tommy a summons to adventure (“The lords of the Faerie summon you”) and then…. A little happens, but not really that much:

• Chapter 1 - Tommy talks to a cat while drunk
• Chapter 2 – Tommy talks to an old friend
• Chapter 3 – Tommy talks to three other former friends, they have a minor scuffle, and then Tommy decides NOT to jump out a window.
• Chapter 4 – Tommy talks to another old friend about all the stuff that happened after Chapter 3, and before chapter 4.
• Chapter 5 – Tommy reads a magic book near the grave of another old friend.
• Chapter 6 – Tommy steals a sword, and meets the knight of shadows. Tommy kills Tybalt the cat because Tybalt asks him to, and then reads the name “Phobos” on a page of a magic book that fell open on the floor, and that turns the sword on which turns the knight of shadows into a cloud. Then Tommy breaks the sword, and this dispels the knight of shadows.
• Chapter 7 – Tybalt comes back as super-cat, and Tommy becomes a “wise old man” to help hypothetical new kids go on fabulous adventures.

Despite the fact that very little happens “on stage” in the book the characters talk about a whole lot of stuff happening. They really talk about several novels worth of stuff happening. Think of what a good author could do with an action scene like this:

“Then his marines came into the cabin, weapons ready, wearing the mark of the Evil Eye on their brows. But I released the Knight of Shadows, opened the door of the plane, and leaped from it. The suction whirled the enemy, screaming, out into the night sky with me. Tybalt, you see, had taught me a charm to allow me to land on my feet without hurt, no matter how high the fall.”

Wright turns this action into a grocery list. 

Tybalt also teaches Tommy to climb like a cat and see in the dark. We know this because Wright says so in the beginning of a sentence where Tommy informs the reader that he “scaled the wall at night”. Remember that the above action sequences are only snippets of conversation; the above taking place in a room that would be at home on the set of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie”. Wright should get at least one star for effectively describing the scenes where all of his action fails to take place.

Much of the action is not conveyed in the style of a tweenager recounting a ninja action movie. In fact most of it uses an even more annoying “badly translated children’s book style, like this: “The perfume of the Forever Tree drove them away, past Mount Whitecrown, and into the lifeless wasteland.”. I should point out that the readers never get to gaze into the lifeless wasteland, see or visit Mount Whitecrown, or find out much about the Forever Tree; like why it is “Forever” or what type of tree it is.

Tree species are apparently important in Wright’s world, and it looks like that trips him up a bit. In one recounted passage generic tree-women sound like great things to have around.

“I remember the feast on the fields of Caer Linden, and how the tree-women came out of the forests to dance, while the faerie-folk danced in the air overhead, held up by the joy of their singing alone.”

And in another snippet of conversation a particular species of tree-woman is decidedly unwanted.

“The willow woman drew the sigils and Runes of Ice upon the blackboard, and made the children chant the worm song to ensorcell them.”

Perhaps the willow-woman was a bush willow, and we are supposed to know that bushes are bad and trees are good. Of course this is not really important information since we don’t interact with any tree-people, whether they be tree-men, or tree-women, or the tree-hermaphrodites we would expect most trees that are not gymnosperms to be.

Mount Whitecrown and the lifeless wasteland are not the only places that exist in this story only as names. We have “Caer Lindon”, and “Caer Pendewen”, and “Gloomshadow Forest”, and etc... Names sprinkled around to make it sound like we are reading something with context, but we are not.

Although Wright is happy with the idea of inventing minor place names to create context, he relies on developed mythology to create his overarching context. The name of the fantasy realm is Niblain, which is a realm related to the Norse cannon. He names the Shadow knight “Phobos” from Greek mythology. He introduces Melusine from European mythology, and does so in an interesting way.

“I would be more surprised if I had not seen the hex written into your corporate logo. Yes, I saw the witch-writing there. That is Melusine, is it not? The sea-queen, whose legs are two sea serpents. The Widow of the Waters, who promises wealth and dignities to those who slay the innocents for her.”

The most famous real corporate logo that contains Melusine is that of Starbucks. The Starbucks logo has been associated with evil by a crusade of righteous anti-gay-rights crusaders who organized a “Dump Starbucks" campaign to protest the company’s support of providing spousal benefits to the same-sex couples where one partner is employed by them. In this story it is kind of a fun way of identifying the Starbucks logo. He gets another star for his attempts at creating an inclusive atmosphere, but especially for this Starbucks nod.

One might get the impression, from what I’ve reviewed so far, that this is a children’s book, and not a YA novella. Even if Wright does not stray from the atmosphere and plot of a children’s book he does stray a bit in some –probably unnecessary- thematic elements.

In the second chapter Tommy comes into Richard’s (one of Tommy’s childhood adventure pals) office to discuss what Richard has been up to. He is hoping that there will be some explanation for a self-cutting emo gang rape of a 16-year old girl. Somehow Tommy has pieced together from “hearing” and newspapers that there was an incident that involved Richard and a group of his friends cutting themselves while raping a young girl, and something to do with the hanging corpse of a dead goat. Tommy is hoping that the dead goat does not mean that this is some evil ritual. Tommy is only really shocked when he finds out that the girl had an abortion paid for by the National Health Service.

Though he does get off a couple interesting phrases, like “priapic manifestations of the life energy”, he quickly devolves back into the rambling children’s book tone before even finishing up with the rape explanation.

“It was not a goat we found dangling over the waters of the Venom River, but a faun, our faun, old Mister Merryhoof. The one who fed us our Lady’s Day Feast.”

I think the above quote really gets to the heart of my biggest problem with this story.  Two forty-year-old educated men without significant brain damage are discussing the gang rape of a 16-year old girl, and one of them seriously uses "old Mister Merryhoof" in a sentence.  All we ever really know about Old Mister Marryhoof comes from this sentence.  He is a Catholic faun (because he coordinates the Feast of the Annunciation ritual for little boys and girls).  Fauns have been used by authors as a symbolic embodiment of unbridled sexuality for centuries, and the insertion of one into a conversation about child rape is in questionable taste.  However, in 2014, Catholics are often significant subjects in discussions about child rape. It is just a bad tone; icky even.

I do think I will keep “priapic” tucked away as a useful synonym for penis. I will wait for the right moment and whip it out and show it to people.

This story is basically a children’s book, and not a children’s book I would have read to or given to my kids when they were at the age appropriate for most of its story. There are awards for children’s stories, and I do not really feel equipped to properly review a children’s story for a Hugo. I will give this story another star as a handicap for this.

SNARL: Big Boys Don't Cry

There has been a big kerfluffle about the Hugo awards in Science Fiction this year, and most of it has been about the political and cultural implications of the works and the award process. At this point we have a set of nominees. I will be voting in August for which author will take home the coveted rocket-shaped Hugo trophy(s). This is the second of several actual reviews by me of those nominated works of fiction. All of these reviews may (will) contain spoilers.

This is a review of: "Big Boys Don’t Cry", Tom Kratman (Castalia House)

This novell is not awful. I would even call it readable. In plainer terms; after reading this novella you should not feel the desire to scoop your brains out with a plastic spoon in the hopes of removing the residue of having read it.  After the last Hugo-award-nominated novella that alone earns this story at least one star. There are other worthwhile elements of the story, and by the end of this review it will have earned a total of 3 stars (out of 10).

This story takes place in a bolo-type universe. For those of you not familiar this refers to a series of short stories written by Keith Laumer starting in 1960 with the short story “Combat Unit” (though the term "Bolo" does not appear until 1966 in the story "The Last Command"). The Bolos are huge (thousands of tons) cybernetic super tanks. They have super pre-programmed abilities, simplistic emotions, and kick major ass. One of the major drawbacks of Bolos are that they are almost unstoppable, and page-after-page of them overwhelmingly destroying much lesser opponents gets rather tedious. It was almost tedious in Laumer’s original stories, and though he earned two Hugo and four Nebula nominations, none of them were for a Bolo story.

Kratman calls his Bolos “Ratha” for some reason. A Ratha is a type of top-heavy-looking religious cart used in some Hindu festivals. In the opening battle(s) the matronly Ratha named “Maggie” (or Magnolia) fights an alien described as “slugs”; I almost thought I was in for an interesting twist with a large ceremonial cart fighting an agricultural pest. We are at a point in the development of SF where the use of a classic Boloverse could be an interesting vehicle for the examination of subtle and profound ideas (like in AI or cyberpunk). Kratman gets another star for successfully creating a Boloverse-story at a time when it might be very interesting to do so.

The story is schizophrenic. Intense battle scenes are interspersed with morality vignettes. There are a couple of places where Kratman expounds on Rathaverse technical details; like musing over the decision to use tracked or antigrav or some type of hybrid propulsion system. Then Kratman goes on to ignore plausibility without explanation to try and make the Ratha appear more badass than even traditional Bolo. For instance, he has a Ratha calculate the time of arrival of an incoming salvo to six significant figures (4.23963 seconds), and then describes the salvo as resulting in the combined impact of six to ten close detonations of Hiroshima-level atomic bombs, and then goes on to point out that more than 60% of the Ratha’s ablative armor is still intact.

“Magnolia… report … report follows. I… have sustained six… close… nuclear bursts in the fifteen to twenty-five… kiloton range. Ablative armor… down by thirty-seven percent.” – Ratha Magnolia (Maggie) reports her condition after nuclear salvo.

The battle scenes get tedious, but I do find battle scenes to be tedious for the most part. I suppose these battle scenes are less tedious than some, and so I give this story one more star for the battle scenes.

The story really starts to come apart during the morality vignettes. Several of them announce some major issue as if it makes sense, and then proceed to let the story go on as if there were no glaring questions or implications left dangling in the wind. The vignette in the first chapter describes 113 years of an anti-human genocide campaign by the fuzzy praying-mantis-like aliens called the Nighean Ruadh. The NR were destroying “Six to eight”, and as many as thirteen, entire planets every terrestrial year. After one planet (Beauharnais) falls a group of Washyorkstons kill a hundred-some-odd security guards and politicians (dragged to the lampposts) to … do what exactly? Do they start a revolution? Do they convince the political establishment of some set of unstated demands? Do they have no effect at all? Do they plunge the human world into a chaos they barely escape from? And how does any of this happen?

In another vignette a commander is a poor commander because he is too busy –presumably- having sex with a redhead than commanding.

The vignettes are not stitched together well. It is as if Kratman is trying to get across a system of morality and belief in a way that only someone with the same system of morality and belief would understand. Each vignette might stand for something if it were more developed, but developing them more might make them sound ridiculous or something? In the final analysis the part of the story where real literary impact could have at least been attempted was spent half-developing some undecipherable moral structure. He could have picked up 6 or 7 stars here, but he only gets one

Finaly the programmed-for-obedience Ratha, damaged beyond repair, frags a group of human officers. There are so many really great reasons for this Ratha to frag the officers. One could even develop a PTSD thread from the interminable battle scenes, but Kratman chooses “none of the above”. The final straw is that they wish to reclaim the metal which the Ratha was made of ;"And now they argue over who gets the price of my bones". It could even be that she resents her humans for trying to “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks”.

The end of a good SF novella is a place tailor-made for contemplation and discovery. The end of this felt more like immature retribution.

Over, and over again, this story came close to delivering, and then fell short. There was so much promise in this story. It may have gotten fewer stars from me because this failure to deliver disappointed me. However, this is a Hugo nominated work, and as such it should not fail to deliver.