Martin's Booklog

Blood Price — Tanya Huff

Published on May 30, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Blood Price

Blood Price
Tanya Huff
272 pages
published in 1991

Tanya Huff has quickly has become one of my favourite authors, ever since I first read Valor’s Choice two years ago. Which is why when the local secondhand bookstore turned out to have her entire Blood… urban fantasy series, I bought them all. Urban fantasy is a subgenre I can take or leave, but Huff is one of those writers of who I’ll read anything she writes. So far her novels have always been at least entertaining; Blood Price is no exception.

Vicky “Victory” Nelson is, retired from the Toronto police for health reasons, now turned private eye, is taking the subway home one night when she hears a terrible scream coming from the other platform and sees a man slumbed to the floor, dead. Taking a gamble as a train arrives, she sprints over the track to the other side to see that he’s had his throat ripped out and a shadowy figure disappearing down the underground. What Vicky witnessed is the first in what would become known as the Toronto vampire murders, as in quick succession several more people are killed this way, throat slashed and drained of blood. Though interested in the murders out of old police instincts, Vicky knows it’s not her problem anymore, not until the lover of the first victim hires her to find the vampire, as the police “insist on looking for a man”.

Meanwhile Henry Fitzroy has more personal reasons to be interested in this socalled vampire killer. He knows firsthand how dangerous the idea of a vampire loose in the city can be, not just for its victims, but also for any other vampires living in Toronto, vampires like himself. As you may have guessed from his name, Henry is the bastard son of a famous English king, Henry VIII, who was turned by his vampire lover and currently lives the life of a harmless if strangely nocturnal romance novelist. Over the centuries he, like every other vampire who wants to survive their first century, has learned to tame his bloodlust, rarely killing, merely taking enough to sustain himself and when killing to do so in much less …spectacular ways.

Inevitably they team up, once they both meet at the same time the killer strikes its latest victim. By then it becomes clear that it is not a vampire, but rather a demon they’re hunting. And if there’s a demon, somebody must be summoning it. To work together therefore makes sense: Vicky to sleuth around by day, Henry to stalk by night. Complicating matters is Vicky’s old police partner, friend and occasional lover, Mike Celluci, who has never forgiven her for chickening out the force, as he saw it. Vicky meanwhile is still resentful that her progressively worsening vision and night blindness had forced her to do so.

Compared to the Valor books, the characters here are slightly less threedimensional, both Vicky and Mike immediately familiar from cop tv series and hardboiled detectives. At times Blood Price reads more like a television script than a proper novel, which is sort of fitting as it was actually turned into a telly series a few years ago. Henry Fitzroy’s backstory meanwhile is told through various flashbacks and again is slightly stereotypical, the suave gentleman-vampire with the mesmeric effect on the ladies, a bit effete but much tougher than he looks at first.

That slightly stereotypical feel to the characters does start to disappear somewhat though during the course of the novel, with all three becoming slightly rounder characters. Huff luckily doesn’t go for the obvious solution for Vicky’s handicap, ie making her into a vampire or something stupid like that. She’s not invulnerable nor is she made invulnerable, but neither is she a damsel in distress.

In all Blood Price is a good entertaining romp with the occasional inspired flash of something deeper, as when an innocent night nurse is lynched on suspicion of being a vampire midway through the story. I also like the sense of place Huff gives Toronto, it feels like a proper city, rather than just a backdrop.

Fly by Wire — William Langewiesche

Published on May 14, 20142 Comments

Cover of Fly by Wire

Fly by Wire
William Langewiesche
193 pages
published in 2009

I bought Fly by Wire because Alex raved about it a while back. It’s subtitle, “The Geese, The Glide, The ‘Miracle’ on the Hudson” might clue you in that it’s about that US Airways flight that had to crashland in the Hudson back in 2009, after having been hit by geese. Langewiesche is a reporter who has written several books about aviation and here he explains not just what happened that day, but also what made it possible for the pilot, Captain Sullenberger, to land it the way he did and how this fits in with a more general philosophical debate on airplane controls.

An interesting subject, but to be honest I was a bit disappointed with the book as I was expecting something more in-depth after Alex’s review. What it instead reminded me off was one of those interminable New Yorker articles which take a single incident to illuminate a larger social trend. Langewiesche tracks the accident as it evolves, then cuts away to explain one aspect, goes back to the accident, cuts away, ultimately ending when Sullenberger has set down the plane and the rescue boats have brought everybody to the shore. On the whole it was decently done and not nearly as annoying to read than if it had been spread out over ten pages in an online article, but it could’ve done with a bit more depth. Also footnotes.

The main point Fly by Wire attempts to make is that the heroics of captain Sullenberger were only possible because of the airplane he was flying, the Airbus A320. This was the first commercial airliner to introduce fly by wire controls, complete with automatic flight envelope protection. This meant that it was no longer possible for pilots to overrule the flight computers, but that in dangerous situations these would automatically prevent against e.g. stalling the airplane. Pilots of course have always resisted this development, arguing that in certain circumstances these sort of automatic checks could lead to the loss of an aircraft. However, as Langewiesche reports, Airbus counters this by noting that of all accidents with their planes using fly by wire, none have been caused by these controls or the automatic protections.

In fact, Fly by Wire tries to show that it actually was the automatic safeguards that enabled captain Sullenberger to fly on the edge of the aircraft’s flight envelope, making possible the long glide that ended in the Hudson. Because the pilot could put his plane right on the edge and trust the computer to keep it there and not cross it into the danger zone and he had the experience with the type of plane to know this, he didn’t need to waste time and effort trying to find this edge.

That’s something that a lot of pilots had and have problems accepting, and that other large civil airplane manufacturer, Boeing, always refused to accept this. In their planes fly by wire auto protection protocols can always be overridden by the pilot. Which, as Langewiesche shows, has contributed to several accidents as pilots tried to do in Boeings what the computer could’ve done more easily and quicker in an Airbus.

For pilots of course those sort of protections are just another way in which their authority and prestige are lessened, in the wake of the deregulation of the American airline industry. Being a pilot is not longer glamorous nor especially well paid, while work pressure has increased immensely yet they have increasingly less flying to do in the cockpit. It’s no wonder that there was so much resistance from American pilots specifically against fly by wire controls. Langewiesche manages to explain this tension without denigrating the pilots for this resistance.

The conlusion Langewiesche comes to is perhaps inevitable that both pilot and plane were needed for that miraculous landing in the Hudson and that both could take the credit for it. As he also shows in the first chapter, dealing with the inquest to the accident, it was the pilot however who was best in grasping this opportunity, parlaying a temporary fame into financial stability for himself and his family. Which is perhaps not noble, but is sensible.

The Ship Who Sang — Anne McCaffrey

Published on May 13, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Ship Who Sang

The Ship Who Sang
Anne McCaffrey
205 pages
published in 1969

Some writers you can only appreciate if you discover them in the golden age of science fiction — twelve — because at that age you’re less likely to notice the two dimensional characters, slipshod plotting or obnoxious politics you would’ve noticed as a more experienced reader. McCaffrey is such a writer for me. I loved her books when I was twelve and reading them from the local library, but trying my hand at some of her later works ended in disappointment. There’s also the danger of rereading cherished childhood classics and finding that in hindsight, they’re not so great after all. With McCaffrey’s early Dragonriders novels I already took that gamble and got lucky, now I’ve reread perhaps her best known novel outside that series and see if The Ship Who Sang was as much of a tearjerker as I remembered.

Sentiment is an underrated emotion in science fiction, something we’re a bit embarrassed about, but which plays a greater role than you’d expect in such a “rational” genre. Quite a few classics thrive on it — “Helen O’Loy”, “Green Hills of Earth”, “Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion” all spring to mind — and as I remembered The Ship Who Sang, it positively wallowed in it, in this story of a severely disabled girl whose only hope for any sort of life was to become the “brain” of a spaceship, who then found love in the arms of her “brawn” partner only to lose him to cruel, cruel fate. The perfect sort of story for a sensitive twelve year old, but would it hold its appeal?

Sadly, no

The problems start literally from the first paragraph:

She was born a thing and as such would be condemned if she failed to pass the encephalograph test required of all newborn babies. There was always the possibility that though the limbs were twisted, the mind was not, that though the ears would hear only dimly, the eyes see vaguely, the mind behind them was receptive and alert.
The electro-encephalogram was entirely favorable, unexpectedly so, and the news was brought to the waiting, grieving parents. There was the final, harsh decision: to give their child euthanasia or permit it to become an encapsulated ‘brain’, a guiding mechanism in any one of a number of curious professions. As such, their offspring would suffer no pain, live a comfortable existence in a metal shell for several centuries, performing unusual service to Central Worlds.

That’s a fairly dodgy attitude even in a novel written at a time and in a country that had no problems with involuntary sterilisation of undesirable people and nonconsentual medical experiments, let alone now we’ve sort of managed to accept disabled people as human. To have a writer approvingly talk about euthanasia for mentally disabled babies, or lifelong servitude for those merely severely physically disabled, if their parents allow it, is a reminder of how social darwinist (or downright fascist) science fiction could be and sometimes still is.

It left a nasty taste in my mouth, though for the rest of the novel this background is never referred to again and Helva, the protagonist, is perfectly happy being a Brain. What reinforces that feeling is the way the Brains are forced into servitude to pay off the huge debts they occurred from being kept alive the way they are, which they have to work off in service to Central Worlds. What’s more, anything that Helva needs as a ship to fulfil the missions she’s sent on she needs to pay for herself, including any damage done to her in the mission. It does feel a lot like slavery, even if she does get paid for these missions as well. All of this is completely ignored in the stories that make up this novel, just part of the background, a device to get Helva to go on dangerous missions to pay off her debts.

I didn’t remember any of this from the last time I read The Ship Who Sang, decades ago; what I remembered was the romantic story at the heart of it, as Helva comes of age and gets her first partner, the “brawn” who will handle all those physical tasks on planet she can’t do herself. It’s during the party for the eight candidates that Helva gets her name as “the ship who sings”, as she reveals her ability to do just that and turns out to have a perfect voice that can do anything the best “normal” singers can do. That’s when she first meets Jennan, the only one to consistently talk to where her physical presence was located in the heart of her ship-shell, the one she immediately falls in love with and who actually dies less than ten pages later. The rest of the novel is about Helva dealing with her loss and grief, ultimately finding new love in the strangest of places.

Because this is a fixup novel however, with each story in it originally having been published as a standalone, the characterisation of Helva is rather two dimensional and that deep love and deeper grief doesn’t look so impressive anymore as it did at age twelve. The sentiment is there, but much of it has dissipated after the first two stories, McCaffrey preferring to tell perfectly good sf puzzle adventure stories for the rest of the book. These are decent enough on their own, but I missed the emotion in them I remembered.

In its place was something more nasty, a deep ingrained sexism that again I completely missed the first time around. Helva is consistently shown to be “not like other girls”, one of the boys, while other women are either victims or harpies, largely illogical and emotional, with things like logic and emotions explicitly shown in gendered terms. It’s all very Heinleinian, with McCaffrey having the same sort of this is how the world works and anybody who thinks otherwise is a fool tone in her writing her. It’s very offputting and offensive once you notice it.

Without the sexism, without the dodgy background McCaffrey gave the novel, what remains is a great idea executed through decent if not worldbeating stories. It’s typical of the science fiction of this generation that most of the interesting stuff is discarded so quickly, largely due to the length restrictions it had to labour under. This after all is a novel of barely 200 pages, which tells half a dozen of stories during it. That leaves little room for anything but plotting.

A bit of a disappointment then, another book I’d with hindsight should’ve left to memory.

Voodoo Planet — Andre Norton

Published on April 29, 20141 Comment

Cover of Voodoo Planet

Voodoo Planet
Andre Norton
192 pages
published in 1956

Genre science fiction got its start in the pulp magazines of the twenties and thirties and many of its early writers were just pulp authors writing the same old stories they’d always written, just with some sf flavourings. So instead of the brave sheriff depending on his horse and trusty six gun to fight off the bandits out in the Oklahoma badlands, you got the brave space marshall depending on his trusty rocket and raygun to take out the bandits hiding out in the Martian badlands. It’s this what fans meant when they talked about space opera, before that got co-opted for something more respectable, crappy fake science fiction stories that might just as well have been westerns. As the field matured and new writers moved in actually interested in science fiction as a genre, these stories quickly disappeared.

Even so, they never completely went away and every now and then you run across a story whose pulp roots are clearly visible, even with a writer like Andre Norton. Voodoo Planet, as you may have guessed, is one example. The sequel to Plague Ship, this is another adventure of the crew of the Solar Queen, who have been invited to a big game hunt ~~in Africa~~ Khatka, a planet settled by African colonists, where they run straight into a trap set by the resident witch doctor.

Which is just as pulpy as it sounds. Khatka is a planet that’s like the Africa out of pulp magazines, mostly untamed wilderness full of dangerous animals, while the natives are somewhat more sophisticated than in the prewar pulps. Norton is at pains to emphasise that Khatka is just as civilised a planet as any other, they just prefer the primitive life of their terran ancestors. It’s all a bit separate but equal, not very progressive even for the fifties.

The plot doesn’t help, pitting the rational crew of the Solar Queen against one of the hoariest of pulp cliches, the evil medicine man who uses superstition to oppress the hapless natives. Even though the various black characters are just as well rounded as the Solar Queen’s men, ie solidly twodimensional, that kind of plot still taps into all sorts of racist, colonial imagery. Again, Norton does seem to do her best to avoid this, but the shape of the story works against her. It remains too obviously an pulp African adventure transplanted to a science fiction setting. Not her best story.

What Makes this Book So Great — Jo Walton

Published on April 7, 20142 Comments

Cover of What Makes this Book So Great

What Makes this Book So Great
Jo Walton
446 pages
published in 2014

What Makes this Book So Great is that it’s written by Jo Walton, who has a real talent for making you both reconsider books you know well or long for books you’ve never heard of before. I’ve known Jo for almost twenty years now, from when we both independently discovered internet, usenet and rec.arts.sf.written, where it didn’t take long for her to become one of the most interesting posters there. It was no great surprise that she became a professional writer, or that Tor would ask her to do the same thing she did on usenet on their website, the end result of which is this book. You could call it the non-fiction counterpart of Jo’s Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others

What this is than is a collection of some 130 columns written for tor.com in 2008-2010, mostly discussing a single book, sometimes going into more general topics about reading books. As Jo makes clear from the start, she isn’t a critic and she’s not reviewing these books, she’s just writing about the books she’s reading and why she likes them. Because she’s been reading for a long time, because she’s a writer herself, because she’s been thinking and talking about books, about science fiction in the ways only an intelligent lifelong reader can, these columns are interesting whether or not you’ve read the books in question.

Now Jo Walton is one of the persons who’ve done a lot in shaping my own reading over the past twenty years and a lot of the novels she’s talking about here we used to discuss on usenet way back when. Reading this felt a lot like going back to those days and at times I wanted this to be an usenet discussion rather than a book just to say “yes, but” or “have you thought of”.

To be honest, because she did so much to shape my reading, because so many of the books she likes are also favourites of mine, it’s hard to be very objective about this book. Whether or not you’ll like it depends on how much you like Jo’s voice and enthusiasms. If you’ve read Among Others you’ll already know that she grew up reading science fiction in the seventies and that while she does read outside of the science fiction and fantasy genres, those are her home turf.

Her tastes, as seen in the columns collected here, run to the more literary part of the genre, rather than the hardcore Heinlein/Campbellian tradition. Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke do appear, but writers like Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Tanith Lee, Ursula LeGuin or Jack Womack get as much if not more attention. Jo also spends much time looking over less well known writers, both writing inside and outside the genre, to bring to the attention interesting books otherwise overlooked. It’s interesting to see which writers she pays the most attention to, which seem to be mostly those writers rec.arts.sf.written was in love with in the nineties: both Steve Brust’s Draegeran novels and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga get long series of reviews, as do the Alliance/Union novels of C. J. Cherryh. Other rasfw darlings like Vernor Vinge, Iain M. Banks and John Barnes also make multiple appearances.

The picture of Jo Walton you get is that of an intelligent, demanding reader who wants both intellectual stimulance as well as a good story. She doesn’t have much truck with experimental writing, or so it seems, as most of the book talked about are fairly mainstream in their construction, but doesn’t go for much pulp either, the occasional indulgence like Jerry Pournelle’s Janissaries nonewithstanding.

I’d read a lot of these columns when they first appeared on tor.com a few years ago, but rereading them was no punishment. What Makes this Book So Great made me want to reread those books I already knew about and seek out those that were new to me, which I find is the ultimate sign of a book like this: to make you curious about the books discussed.