dfan says

The idea is cool: the planet of the title orbits one star, which orbits another star in a very eccentric ellipse. So the planet, in addition to regular yearly seasons, has a thousands-of-years Long Season during which it goes from ice age to constant summer and back; and civilization never quite rises high enough during the summers to be able to make it through the ice ages intact. This is the first book of a trilogy, apparently set at widely separated points in that long cycle; in this one, the world is beginning to thaw and civilization is just starting to emerge again.

It was pretty neat overall, although I have a few gripes. The main one is that civilization pretty much springs into full bloom from nothing over the course of about one generation, domesticating “horses”, coming up with the idea of money, figuring out that the world goes around the sun (which goes around another one), etc. It turns out that previous go-rounds left a little help, but still. The characters are not so interesting that a lot would have been lost by spreading the advance of civilization over the course of several generations (and characters).

There’s also a totally incomprehensible element (that is, I can’t comprehend why the author put it in) of an orbiting space station from Earth which does nothing but observe the planet and the people on it (with apparently supernatural powers of observation, since it can observe individual conversations). Perhaps the point was to put in an omniscient narrator that somehow fits into the world; perhaps the reason for it becomes more clear in subsequent volumes. But here it just made me shake my head.

Good points: the world-building is very cool (I haven’t even talked about the native civilization, sort of ice-orcs who are obviously on their way out), and Aldiss has a way of narrating a primitive society that is interesting while not pretending that they’re modern people in animal skins.

I’m not sure if I would bother buying the other two books in the trilogy if I had this as a standalone, but I have an omnibus of all three volumes, so I may come back to it at some point, when and if I feel like reading something like this again. If that sounds lukewarm, I guess it is!

I read Tigana ten years ago, and mostly liked it a lot. It’s a one-volume novel set in sort of a fantasy (i.e., there’s magic) medieval Italy. The writing is good and the plot is interesting. That said, I liked it less this time around, and this reread pretty much did away with my enthusiasm for recommending it to my wife. Since this was a reread, I’m going to discard my usual attempt to be as spoiler free as possible and talk more openly about the contents of the book.

Spoilers follow!

The main problem I have with Tigana stems from the fact that the villain (Brandin) is too sympathetic. I understand that Kay was going for the whole shades-of-gray thing, but I think he tried to have it both ways and failed; the triumphant end is so undercut by the tragedy of Brandin and Dianora that it just rings false. The epilogue has a cheeriness to it that seemed so forced to me the first time I read the book that I thought it must have been intentional, but on a reread I think it’s just an authorial mistake.

The flip side of presenting a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of Brandin is showing the dark side of Alessan, the heroic prince who triumphs in the end. And he does a bunch of rather shady things, such as magically enslaving a wizard who was just minding his own business. Again, this could have been really interesting if the point was to show that maybe, if you look at it from a disinterested perspective, the “hero” isn’t necessarily any better than the “villain”. But Kay tries to have it both ways again: he gets all shades-of-gray by having Alessan enslave the wizard, but hey, Alessan feels bad about it! And broods about how hard it is to be an exiled prince who has to do what he has to do! And then eventually the wizard gets turned around to their cause, and Alessan lets him free, which shows how nice he really is! And then the wizard decides to stay with the good guys anyway! The whole plot feels like a total cop-out, like when a superhero is given the terrible ethical choice of which of two people to save — and then saves them both. What was the point of setting up a terrible decision if the person making it gets to have it both ways?

So on the one hand Kay is setting up a really interesting situation, and on the other hand he’s constantly authorially apologizing for it. Just to bring up one other example: the whole plot is about Alessan reclaiming what’s rightfully his; Brandin invaded the peninsula and now Alessan’s taking it (or at least his part of it) back. But, not to be too blunt about it, that’s just what war is: countries taking land from other countries. It’s not a battle of good vs evil, like in The Lord of the Rings, say; it’s a battle of Guy Who Got His Stuff Taken vs Guy Who Took His Stuff. It’s not so clear that Alessan has that much of a moral right to throw the entire peninsula into upheaval just to get his province back —although of course once he does, the whole peninsula wants to make him their king. Sigh.

So, overall, a lot of interesting moral ambiguity that the author didn’t seem to have the guts to fully follow through on. The first time I read it, I tried to give Kay the benefit of the doubt; this time, knowing what was coming, that was more difficult.

I picked this up probably a decade ago, because it was a novel about computer chess with some promising blurbs, but never got around to it until now. It was written in 1989, 8 years before Deep Blue beat Kasparov, and takes place in 1993, at which point the fictional best computer chess program in the world is pretty evenly matched with the fictional US junior champion.

All the chess stuff is fairly accurate, which is a nice thing to see in a literary novel, though naturally I have a few niggles (e.g., a strong player wouldn’t talk about “the twenty-seventh move” being a blunder (they’d refer to the move itself, like “knight f5″), nor would they refer to “advancing a bishop”). The portrayal of chess players and the way they think was pretty well done too.

As far as the novel itself goes, it was fine. The characters aren’t particularly sympathetic but they’re well drawn, and the themes may not be stunningly novel but they’re used well and you aren’t hit over the head with them. What I don’t really understand was the need to surround the story with two metafictional shells; the story starts out in the first person before switching to third a few chapters in, and preceding that is an introduction by yet another fictional character. They both seem totally unnecessary unless I’m missing some subtle connection, plus both characters’ voices are pretty annoying (intentionally, I’m sure, but still). Once I got to page 40 without giving up, I enjoyed the rest of the novel, but it was a weird way to start the book and subtracted from the book rather than adding to it, for me. The back cover claims that “Hence is rife with puzzles and narrative jokes in the tradition of Borges and Nabokov”, which would have been great, but except for those two extra narrative layers that I didn’t like anyway, I didn’t catch any of the promised fun.

After reading Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, I was all excited to read about some more specific topics in evolutionary theory. His The Selfish Gene was the obvious next step. The fundamental idea is a great one, although of course less revolutionary now than I guess it was in the 1970s when it was published: rather than trying to explain the evolution of traits in terms of group selection, or kin selection, or individual selection, we should turn the problem inside out and look at the actual thing that not only gets replicated perfectly but also controls the trait itself: the gene. When you do this, a lot of paradoxes of the form “how can this behavior benefit the individual?” or “how can this behavior benefit the species?” make a lot more sense.

As I said, this book was originally published 30+ years ago and it hasn’t been updated much, but I didn’t find that that affected my reading much, besides some obviously completely obsolete analogies to contemporary computing power. I don’t know how much has changed since the time it was written, but the arguments seemed to hold up pretty well.

The book was quite interesting, although I was hoping for some more quantitative analysis of various scenarios. He does analyze some situations mathematically, but there was a bit too much of “This seems to contradict the theory, but we can explain it away with this clever hypothesis,” which is too unfalsifiable for my tastes.

It isn’t until the last couple of chapters that things really take off. The penultimate chapter is about how it is possible for altruism to evolve, and the final one goes even further than to say “let’s concentrate on the gene instead of the individual as far as evolution goes”; it asks why we really have individuals at all, which is a question that really blew my mind.

The individual organism is something whose existence most biologists take for granted, probably because its parts do pull together in such a united and integrated way. Questions about life are conventionally questions about organisms. Biologists ask why organisms do this, why organisms do that. They frequently ask why organisms group themselves into societies. They don’t ask — though they should — why living matter groups itself into organisms in the first place. Why isn’t the sea still a primordial battleground of free and independent replicators? Why did the ancient replicators club together to make, and reside in, lumbering robots, and why are those robots — individual bodies, you and me — so large and so complicated?

Awesome. He goes on to list some interesting advantages that genes get by building organisms around themselves, which I will not spoil here. Apparently this last chapter is basically a summary of yet another Dawkins book, The Extended Phenotype, so at some point I suppose I have to read that too. But for now I have probably read enough evolution books for a while.

Summary: a lot of cool ideas, and a few mind-bending ones, though my ideal version of this book would have cut out 50% of the material that didn’t fit into those categories. In any case, it is a total classic of modern popular science writing (and originated the concept of memes, though it has gotten kind of corrupted since then), and is worth reading for that reason alone.

I can’t handle scary movies at all, but for some reason scary books are generally fine. This is the third Stephen King novel I’ve read, after The Shining and The Stand, which seems to cover most people’s top two King novels in some permutation.

It is immense, at 1100 pages, although that works out to about 500 pages of horror novel and 600 pages of a slice-of-life portrait of what it was like to grow up in the late 1950s in a small Maine city. (You get one guess as to who else was 11 years old in a small Maine city in 1958.) The realistic stuff was actually pretty good, as King is a better writer than most people give him credit for, but he’s not such a good writer that you actively want to wallow in his depictions of life, as I do with, say, Tolstoy or Proust. Still, I was never really tempted to skip over anything.

The horror part of it was pretty good too, although it never actually got scary enough to really frighten me. But one thing that disappointed me somewhat, as silly as it sounds, was the motivation of the Big Bad. There are a few archetypes for horror “villains”; one, for instance, is the Lovecraftian monster too horrible to even contemplate, to whom humanity is a meaningless triviality, while another is the psycho who loves to toy with the mental state of his victims. “It” is a weird amalgam of the two, and I never got a good sense of where it was really coming from. I know it’s odd to ask for psychological consistency in a monster in a horror novel, but there it is.

The good stuff: King really is a pretty good writer, and I did enjoy his depiction of the late 1950s, as well as the mid 1980s, which at this point are equally interestingly historical although of course he didn’t intend it that way at the time. I also enjoyed the structure of the book, which bounced between the two timelines in a compelling way, and the last 200 pages or so were a really well done action sequence, or actually two, since both timelines reached their climaxes in parallel. I often zone out a bit during the climactic action sequences of a book or movie, but I stayed pretty well gripped here.

So although I had some quibbles, overall I did enjoy it a lot, and never had the urge to put it down over the course of 1100 pages, which is a pretty good recommendation right there. Still, I have now probably had my fill of Stephen King for a while, especially since I seem to have already hit the high points of his career.

This is book three of the Long Price fantasy tetralogy (I reviewed the first two here), and as much as I liked the first two, this is the best one yet.  The stakes have risen even higher (as you might guess from the title) but the real interest lies not in the titular war but in the characters involved in it, in a Shakespearean way.  In fact, the one place where my interest flagged was in the third quarter, where most of the war occurs; the first half is fascinating as it sets up the situation, and the denouement is great, but in order to get from point A to point B Abraham needs to do a fair amount of letting the setup play out, which made me a bit impatient.  In general Abraham is pretty good at moving things along fairly swiftly, though, which is a regrettably rare thing to see in a fantasy novelist.

Although the book is pretty much standalone, the continuing character development really builds on what’s been set up in the earlier books in the series in a very compelling way.  It’s clear that he had the whole thing planned out well, so I’m looking forward to the finale very much.  Highly recommended, though if you’re considering starting it be aware that the last book is still only in hardcover for now.

Revolution in the Head is one of the most highly regarded critical books about the Beatles, and the Beatles have been in my mind a lot recently, having just written a game about them. My main interest regarding the Beatles is in their music itself, and in that respect the finest books that I have found are Walter Everett’s two volumes of The Beatles As Musicians, which do an amazing job of chronicling the Beatles’ musical journey from a technical perspective. Revolution in the Head occupies a middle ground between musical analysis and biography, chronologically treating each song in turn but looking at them more for their context in the Beatles’ history (and the cultural history of the 60s) than as straight musical analysis.

And it’s very interesting; despite a few caveats, I learned a lot, and MacDonald has many perceptive things to say. For one thing, partially because my knowledge of the Beatles’ history has largely been through relatively sanitized tellings such as The Beatles Anthology, it was not clear to me just how huge a role drugs played in the Beatles’ creative output. From speed to marijuana to LSD to heroin, the story of the Beatles’ music is largely (and somewhat depressingly) the story of the drugs they were taking. MacDonald also has a lot of thought-provoking things to say about the individual person-to-person relationships within the Beatles and the effect they had on their music.

Minuses: Well, MacDonald is a man of strong opinions, so you have to take care to mentally prepend “In my opinion” to many sentences, since he didn’t bother; if you don’t, you’re going to spend a lot of time rolling your eyes that could be put to better use. When this takes the form of dismissing certain Beatles songs that he doesn’t like, this isn’t so hard to do; when he dismisses all music written after 1970, it’s a little harder to take. But as long as you don’t take him overly seriously, his opinions are quite interesting.

There are probably more interesting biographies of the Beatles, since this book accomplishes its biographical functions mostly in passing; and for straight-up musical analysis, the Everett books have a lot more to say. But there’s a lot of good stuff here, and even if you don’t agree with all of it, it will at least make you reconsider a lot of your opinions, and whether you end up keeping them or changing them, thinking about them again can’t be a bad thing.

This got great reviews when it came out in 2005 and won the Hugo Award that year, but I didn’t get around to reading it until now.  It’s a science fiction novel with the premise (slight spoiler, but you find this out really early on) that the Earth has suddenly been encased in some sort of field that makes time go a hundred million times slower than the rest of the universe.  I could start mentioning the implications, but that would be a spoiler — half the fun of the book is trying to predict them.

My wife (who had read it earlier) asked if I considered this “hard sf”.  I don’t, really; although the book is largely about exploring what follows from a science premise, it doesn’t get into many technical details, and it’s just as much about the effect of the situation on the characters as it is about the situation itself.  And I thought the character stuff was pretty well handled, with the exception of the main character and narrator, who tends to remain somewhat of a cipher.  I think that’s a common problem; the author doesn’t want to risk turning readers off too much with whatever decisions he or she makes for the narrator, so that person ends up becoming a little boring or hard to read.

As often happens with genre novels, the plot ends up with a lot of action that is not easy for me to follow totally.  This gear shift can sometimes make me like the last quarter of a book a lot less than the first three-quarters, but Wilson partially gets around that by breaking up that quarter and sprinkling it throughout the book as flash-forwards.  I’m not sure it was really necessary from a structural standpoint (the plot would work fine told linearly), but it did help keep my eyes from glazing over at the end.

And the end is fine — not awesome but not disappointing.  It turns out to be the first of three books, although I don’t know if that was the plan at the time it was written.  Unfortunately, the second one has gotten fairly negative reviews, at least compared to the first, so I’m going to wait to see how the third is received before I decide whether to continue the series.

Bone is a 55-issue long comic book recently collected into a single omnibus volume.  It’s a weird hybrid between funny-animal cartoon (there’s lots of slapstick, and one of the protagonists bears a marked resemblance to Goofy) and epic fantasy (saving the world from the forces of Evil).

The comic is pretty widely revered, and one reason is probably that it blends those two genres.  But to me the blending felt artificial, and I was never really sure exactly what sort of work it was.  For example, the good guys are frequently hunted by “rat creatures”, monsters that serve the bad guys.  These encounters are portrayed as high-tension life-or-death situations —but then when they occur, half the time they’re played for laughs as the rat creatures act “hilariously” stupidly.  (I had a similar problem with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where I never got the feeling that any of the characters ever really believed they were in real danger.)  Often I like this sort of blending of high and low  — I’m a Pynchon fan, after all — but somehow it didn’t really coalesce for me in this work.

I should point out that it is drawn exceptionally well and there is a lot of pleasure to be derived just from admiring that aspect of it.  And from reading reviews, I’m clearly in the minority in my lukewarm attitude.