Martin's Booklog

The Lives of Tao — Wesley Chu

Published on July 6, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Lives of Tao

The Lives of Tao
Wesley Chu
393 pages
published in 2013

I read this because Wesley Chu was nominated for the 2014 John W. Campbell Award for best new writer and it was available in the Hugos Voters Package. I’d also seen it recommended at the local science fiction bookstore and had picked it up once or twice to sample it, though was never convinced enough to buy it. Because I was visiting my hometown for a couple of birthdays this weekend I took the opportunity of two long train journeys to read this, which worked out well.

From Myke Cole’s cover blurb — pulse-pounding, laughout-loud funny and thoughtful — you might guess that this was meant to be an action comedy story, which it was, but without the humour. This just wasn’t funny, I’m not sure it was actually ever meant to be funny and if you read this, set your expectations accordingly. The Lives of Tao actually is a geek wish fulfilment sf thriller, where the fat, underachieving, nerdy slop is taken out of his comfort zone and thrust into a worldwide conspiracy and finally gets the girl he’s been silently lusting after but was afraid to ask out. There may be a bit of pandering in this, you may have guessed.

The fat slob is Roen Tan and the way he’s trust from being just an office peon into the heart of a millions years old war between two alien factions covertly struggling to guide human history, is because one of those aliens had its host body die on it and Roen was the only one available to take him on. The alien is Tao, his previous host body was a suave James Bondesque secret agent with decades of experience and now Tao has to not only learn to work together with somebody new, but that somebody is as far from secret agent material as well, me.

The war Roen has been drafted into is between two factions of the same alien race, who crashlanded on Earth millions of years ago (and might have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs). They’re semi-corporeal, only able to survive on Earth long term by bonding with an animal. Millions of years pass, humans sort of start to get things going and the aliens start to guide human evolution with the sole goal of getting technology up to the level that they can go home. Along the way these aliens split into two factions: the Genjix, who are completely ruthless in chasing this goal and the Prophus splinter group, who are a bit more mellow and human friendly, who’ve been waging a covert war, manipulating history for centuries.

A lot of this book is setup material for what will be the rest of the series, as Roen is trained for his new role as one of the agents fighting this covert war and to help him with this he gets his own personal trainer, Sonya, who is basically the walking embodiment of the sexy, smart tough, uber capable female secret agent, there to both help the hero on his way and to serve as a trophy for his success. Chu sort of avoids some of the more skeevy aspects of this cliche; Roen falls for her and she for him as well, but they don’t get together and they become friends instead of lovers. It’s still such a cliche though and the way Sonya is consisently described, male gaze and all, is problematic too.

Much of the plot revolves around getting Roen into shape, while the Genjix are hunting for him and Tao and the latter slowly reveals to Roen his history. This is done in short paragraphs at the start of each chapter, much of which is set in the East and reveals that Tao had “possessed” e.g. Genghis Khan. As such The Lives of Tao is a typical setup book for the rest of the series, the second book of which has already been published. If you’ve read your share of thrillers and sf adventure stories, much of the shape of the story will be familiar to you, with the climax of the story being a series of set pieces.

The central idea driving the story isn’t that original either of course; giant conspiracies secretly manipulating history and historical figures being secret aliens are a dime a dozen in technothriller land. The way Chu has portrayed it here it seems all of history and anybody of historical importance was an alien, which is just one of those things you have to swallow for the sake of the story; a cool idea but which falls apart when you examine it closely. A lot of The Lives of Tao feels that way to be honest, e.g. if Roen/Tao is feared so much the Genjix pull out all stops to find him, why is he able to stay in his flat?

The Lives of Tao is not a bad book, certainly not for a first novel. It moves along quickly and Chu has a good eye for writing fight scenes, which help a lot in an adventure story like this. What lets it down are the sexual politics, especially in the climax of the story where the oh so capable Sonya becomes just another damsel in distress as well as some of the sloppy worldbuilding. As long as you’re not too annoyed by the first and can read fast enough not to stumble over the latter, this is a decent enough romp.

Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945 — Tom Jentz & Hilary Doyle

Published on June 29, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945

Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945
Tom Jentz & Hilary Doyle
48 pages
published in 1993

Osprey is one of the largest publishers of war nerd and wargaming nerd books in the world, publishing books since 1969. They pulbish roughly a dozen series, each focusing on a specific range of military subject; the New Vanguard series in which this was published is about military equipment and vehicles, but not airplanes. Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945 was the first book published in it and set the tone for the series.

The focus here is on the machine, not so much on how it was used, so there are a lot of pages about the development of the Tiger II, chronicling the minor and major differences between subvariants. Lots of details about armour thickness and gun lengths and calibres and such. Of course there’s only limited room for this in a 48 page book, much of which is also taken up by the drawings and pictures that are the main attraction, but Tom Jentz and Hilary Doyle are both very thorough writers. It’s only at page 36 that we get to the operational history of the tank.

But of course the main draw, pun intended, of these books is the artwork, in the very capable hands of Peter Sarson. Every New Vanguard book is build around the cut away illustration on the middle pages, but I personally like the three view diagrams on the preceding and following pages better. Sarson gives a good impression of the sheer mass and brute strength of the Tiger II. these are big tanks and they look it.

Much of what’s in this book is only of interest to real war nerds; the emphasis is solely on the machine, not on how it was used let alone the goals it was used for. Jentz and Doyle do a good job of making the design and production history of the Tiger II understandable. They hit the usual notes of the complicated prehistory of the design, with two competing turrets, the Porsche and Henschel, the latter ultimately winning, as well as the teething problems that the relatively quick introduction of the tank caused. They go on to describe in detail the various production variants, followed by the unit history. In the end you have a good overview of the Tiger II’s history, though it’s still only an introduction. A small library has been written about the Tiger II after all.

Fugue for a Darkening Island — Christopher Priest

Published on June 26, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Fugue for a Darkening Island

Fugue for a Darkening Island
Christopher Priest
125 pages
published in 1972

There are certain protocols you have to take into account as a reviewer when discussing the books of a new, young writer. Protocols that are still in effect when the author has aged more than forty years since the first publication of his novel and has become a grand old man in the meantime, prone to gently correcting younger writers. Anything that can be said about Fugue for a Darkening Island has to be tempered by the realisation that it is a fortytwo year old novel, not necessarily indicative of the writer Priest now is.

But the truth remains that Fugue for a Darkening Island is a problematic work, a novel with its heart I think in the right place, but which features certain unfortunate themes in Priest’s work that will return in later novels, somewhat muted. I’m thinking of last year’s The Adjacent, featuring a near future Islamic Republic of Great Britain as well as the much earlier A Dream of Wessex which had parts of Britain as a caliphate, but also of The Separation and its naive story of a better world created by a separate peace between nazi Germany and Britain. In short, Priest sometimes goes for settings you’d sooner expect to see in the stories of the more reactionary Baen writers and A Fugue for a Darkening Island is one of those novels, a near future Britain ripped straight from the front pages of National Front propaganda, as the country is flooded by a never ending stream of African refugees destroying the British way of life, its hero a decent middleclass Englishman trying to find a new home for him and his family.

If that sounds like the setup for a British version of The Turner Diaries, this wasn’t his attention according to Priest. In the introduction to the revised edition that came out a few years ago, he actually lamented the fact that what was received as a progressive story at the time of publication, became much less so over time. It is of course not alone in this; much of the earnest progressive commentary on the matters of race in the media of that time now comes across as borderline racist or worse today, if only because of a lack of input by those actually suffering from racism. Priest wanted to comment on the struggle with the birth of Britain’s multicultural society as well as the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the predicted “race wars” that were bound to happen in England through the usual science fictional exagerration. Which is what good science fiction writers should do, but when even the revised edition of your novel can still draw an admiring review from a rightwing xenophobic site, you do have to wonder if you’ve done the right thing. And for god’s sake don’t read the comments.

In Fugue for a Darkening Island a nuclear war has made much of Africa uninhabitable, leading to an exodus from the continent to better places, including Britain. The first most Brits notice of this is when bodies of refugees start wash up on their beaches (not unlike what’s been happening in the Mediterranean in real life currently). As the number of refugees increase and start to land in Britain, a rightwing government is elected to handle it; its autoritarian measures are useless though and as tensions increase, more and more white English take matters in own hand. Riots, street fights and racial conflicts lead to a general civil war as the country disintegrates and the central government disappears. All of which we see first hand through the eyes of Alan Whitman who is not the most sympathetic of narrators, a thoroughly middle class family man, regularly cheating on his wife.

The first words of his story are “I have white skin”, as he describes how he looks when the crisis first hit him and his family personally, then six months later, as the country has disintegrated. Throughout the novel we get these three distinct storylines, the first following Whitman in the present trying to survive in the aftermath of the civil war, the second telling how the refugee crisis went from background noise in his life to engulf him and the last telling the broader story of how the crisis came to be, following Whitman in his everyday life. It’s effectively done, the storylines echoing and re-echoing each other.

Whitman as said is not a sympathetic character and he comes over as flat and affectless, rarely emotional. This actually fits in well with the horrors he encounters. It also helps to counter some of the racist appeal of the scenario, avoiding lurid descriptions of racial violence. Nevertheless reading this some four decades later, the similarity with more noxious rightwing racial fantasies kept me uncomfortable throughout it.

Though this was mildly controversial when first published and made Priest known to a wider audience, Fugue for a Darkening Island is a minor work, something that points to his later, better work, but done much more clumsily and less subtle. Probably a novel you can safely skip unless you are a Priest completist.

Zero Sum Game — SL Huang

Published on June 17, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Zero Sum Game

Zero Sum Game
SL Huang
305 pages
published in 2014

If it wasn’t for her blogging about the renewed SFWA controversies back in January, I would never have heard of SL Huang or Zero Sum Game, her first novel. She’s not the first author I bought books from on the strength of their online writing. I knew Jo Walton and Charlie Stross as Usenet posters before I’d read their fiction and Ian Sales as a blogger before I read his Apollo Quartet books. It’s of course not guaranteed that somebody who’s a good blogger or poster is also a good fiction writer, but so far I haven’t been disappointed.

Zero Sum Game opens with its heroine tied down to a chair watching the fist of Rio, the one man in the whole world she trust coming at her face hard and fast enough to break her jaw. As she watches, lines of force, numbers and probabilities dance before her eyes, giving her a way to take the blow without getting more damage than a split lip. Barely a minute later she sees a way in which she can free herself, kill the four Columbian mobsters in the room and knockout Rio, all while evading the thugs’ gunfire, and takes it, escaping just as more thugs come barreling in. Jumping through the only outside window calculated in such a way as to not get herself torn to pieces, shen then doubles back to get the woman she needed to rescue from the gang, knocks out the guards outside with perfectly aimed rocks thrown to their foreheads and escapes in a hotwired jeep. All in a day’s work for Cas Russell, math savant extraordinaire.

Of course it quickly turns out that this isn’t a normal day’s work, otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. It soon turns out neither Courtney Polk, the woman she was hired to rescue, nor Dawnea, Courtney’s sister are quite who they said they are, but much worrying than that is how easily Cas believed Dawnea in the first place and how much effort it costs her to stop doing so. What started as a quick extraction turns into a nightmare in which at least two parties are hunting Cas, at least one wanting her dead and her only ally, apart from her psychopathic friend Rio, is Arthur, an ex-cop turned detective who’s too noble for his own good.

Zero Sum Game is a fast paced action story, which never stands quite still enough to let the reader ask difficult questions. It takes skill to do this, more skill to convincingly show Cas Russell’s math skills in action. Cas can calculate the flightpath of every bullet in a firefight instantaneously, then move fast enough to not be where they will end up, she can sees how to jump through a plate glass window in such a way as to not get cut to death, able to pluck business cards out of the air without looking; she’s basically a superhero. Superheroes are easy to do in comics, not so much in text and it takes a good writer to write believable, fast paced and compelling action scenes for them. SL Huang manages to do so very well:

Specular reflection. Angles of incidence. Perfect. As long as the cop wasn’t going to fire blind, I had him. Hands still raised in the air in apparent surrender, I twitched my left wrist.
At the speed of light, the glint of sunlight came in through the window, hit the bathroom mirror, and reflected in a tight beam from the polished face of my wristwatch right into the cop’s eyes.
He moved fast, blinking and ducking his head away, but I moved faster. I dodged to the side as I dove in, my right hand swinging out to take the gun off line. My fingers wrapped around his wrist and I yanked, the numbers whirling and settling to give me the perfect fulcrum as I leveraged off my grasp on his gun hand to leap upward and give him a spinning knee to the side of the head.

But just writing action scenes well doesn’t a good novel make. While the plot itself is basically an action movie, complete with supervillain, where Huang really shines is in her portrayal of Cas. Cas is not a well woman emotionally, not a well woman at all, but it takes time for you as the reader to realise this, as she doesn’t realise this herself, or doesn’t allow herself to recognise this. At first she just seems supremely confident and capable, her mathemagical abilities giving her the upper hand in almost every situation. It’s when those are challenged, when the manipulations of Dawnae Polk makes her doubt them for the first time in her life, that she starts to doubt herself.

The other thing that’s started to make her doubt herself is Arthur, the detective not turned love interest and thank god for that, because how often do you get a story like this where the heroine doesn’t fall in love with her sidekick but instead is just grateful to start a friendship? Before she met him and started to care for him she knew she was bad at dealing with people and their emotions, but she didn’t mind it, didn’t mind what they thought of her, but now she does. And that’s almost as scary as having her mind altered against her will.

Zero Sum Game isn’t perfect — there are times when it feels more like a movie script or television treatment than a novel, but it is a hugely entertaining story, one that made me eager to read on. Go buy.

The Dark Griffin — K. J. Taylor

Published on June 15, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Dark Griffin

The Dark Griffin
K. J. Taylor
369 pages
published in 2009

One of the things I’ve been trying to do more of these past five years or so has been to try out more new to me authors. K. J. Taylor is one of these authors, an Australian fantasy writer whose Black Griffin looked interesting when I was browsing the Amsterdam library shelves. I had no choice but to like a writer who said of herself: “a lot of fantasy authors take their inspiration from Tolkien. I take mine from G. R. R. Martin and Finnish metal”. A bit of research online discovered that she isn’t even thirty years old, published her first book at twenty in 2006 and has had seven books published since. Which makes her on a par with Elizabeth Bear with regards to productivity (and here I have trouble writing a blogpost sometimes…)

The Dark Griffin is the first in a fantasy trilogy, which in turn was followed by another trilogy. You may suspect therefore that this is pretty much a setup book and you may be right. What this is, is an origin story, both of the titular dark griffin (literally, as the book starts with his birth) and his ride, Arren Cardockson. As the story starts Arren is the only Northerner griffin rider in the city of Eagleholm, of far humbler origins than his fellow griffineers. His parents are freedmen, ex-slaves, while all other griffin riders are aristocrats. Nevertheless and despite the occassional tension, he feels well supported by the city’s elite. Even more so when lord Rannagon, one of the leaders of the griffiners and master of law, suggest a way for Arren to get out of his money problems.

The reason Arren has money problems is because Eluna, his griffin killed a man during a raid on a smuggler that he lead as part of his duties as overseer of the city’s market. Though he was lawfully killed, Arren still owns compensation to the killed man’s family, which he can’t afford. Luckily lord Rannagon has a solution: go and capture the wild black griffin that’s been slaughtering cows in a remote village several days travel away and sell it to the Arena for profit. They like big, wild griffins, because they can pitch them against condemned criminals and make a killing.

As experienced fantasy readers you and I would of course smell this as a trap, but Arren is nineteen and headstrong and determined to prove that even if he was raised a Northerner he can still be a goof griffineer. Completely assimilated and in any case in love with Flell, lord Rannagon’s daughter, Arren has no reason to mistrust him. So off he goes on his quest, Eluna being eager to make up for her mistake.

Naturally it all turns into a disaster; nobody sane would attempt to capture a wild griffin alone, as we saw in the first chapter, when a group of griffineers had enough problems putting down the black griffin’s mother. Arren manages to capture the griffin, but at the cost of Eluna, who died saving him from his attack. Getting back to Eagleholm he sells the griffin to the Arena, where it’s named Darkheart and promises to become the star attraction. Meanwhile Arren is now an ex-griffineer and gets to experience how the city treats normal Northerners, as slaves and barbarians who are not to be trusted.

Arren undergoes the full Monte Cristo treatment, losing everything, his griffin, his title, his home, his possessions and finally his honour as he attempts to steal a griffin. Thrown into the Arena himself, he meets up with his nemesis and together they manage to escape as they both swear vengeance against the city that has so mistreated them.

As I said, The Dark Griffin is an origin story, setting up the rest of the series. What will be interesting to see is the direction Taylor takes the rest of the series in. The easy route would be to make Arren into an antihero or outright villain and make this a revenge story, or make it a personal conflict between him and Flell. But throughout the story Taylor has shown little seeds that could make this into something bigger, in the way Northerners are treated. Arren could escape most of that treatment because he was a griffineer and his status protected him. In turn he himself denied his heritage because he had internalised the values of the city’s elite, who see Northerners as backward and barbarian; once he fell from grace it turned out they saw him the same way.

That’s a lot more sophisticated view of race and class relations than we usually see in fantasy, which often operates on a good king/bad king level of understanding. That’s not to say that it’s perfect, as Taylor doesn’t quite set up this racial tension well enough for me in the early parts of the story to make the speed with which Arren is ostracised entirely believable. It’s also the question if Taylor will follow through on this; she wouldn’t be the first Australian fantasy author to disappoint me.

If Taylor doesn’t through, what remains is a perfectly servicable fantasy story, nothing that special, though I like the use of griffins as creatures of magic rather than something more familiar like dragons. It has some rough edges, but good light entertainment.