Martin's Booklog

Komarr – Lois McMaster Bujold

Published on November 4, 20101 Comment

Cover of Komarr

Komarr
Lois McMaster Bujold
311 pages
published in 1998

Komarr was the first Miles Vorkosigan book I’d ever read, back in 1998. At the time it was the latest in the series to have been published and deliberately written as a jump on point for new readers like me. I didn’t jump in completely ignorant however, as the Vorkosigan series was one of the favourite series of rec.arts.sf.written, which each new novel thoroughly dissected and discussed. It was these discussions that prompted me to finally pick up one of the series and luckily, it was the perfect starting point.

What I missed about Komarr the first time around was how feminist it is in its own right. It’s not an overtly political book, but the heart of the story is how one woman manages to escape from a bad marriage and the gender assumptions, traditions and expectations she grew up with. It’s her story that makes Komarr special, in what otherwise would’ve been a fun but unremarkable adventure science fiction story. As I’ve realised since, Lois Bujold has always been good at infusing even her slightest science fiction with subtle sociological backgrounds, imagining what effects the usual genre props might actually have on a society. So for example, the coming of Galactic gender assignment technologies to backward Barrayar has lead to a glut of males, as tradition values male heirs more than costly daughters and every family scrambled to make sure they got their quota of males. It’s something that has happened in the real world as well, not that outrageous a prediction to be sure, but Bujold pulls that sort of thing all the time, hidden in plain view in the background to Miles’ adventures.

All You Need Is KILL – Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Published on October 11, 2010

All You Need Is KILL

All You Need Is KILL
Hiroshi Sakurazaka & Alexander O. Smith (translator)
381 pages
published in 2004

James Nicoll was casting about for science fiction books to read one day last week and got pointed in the direction of Haikasoru Books, a newish line of translated Japanese science fiction, found something to his liking and posted about it, as well as a poll on which Haikasoru title to read next. All of which explains why I was pulled towards the cover of All You Need is Kill when I saw it in a local bookstore. Since James liked the Haikasoru that he got and I trust his taste, that was enough reason for me to take a chance on this. I wasn’t disappointed.

What I got with All You Need is KILL is a fast paced, short novel (only 200 pages) that takes two old, familiar science fiction concepts and mashes them up into something new: Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day. Earth has been invaded by the alien Mimics, seemingly non-sapient but still with the ability to learn from their mistakes and most of the poorer part of the world has been overrun already. Keiji Kiriya is just one recruit given a short training, shoved into a battlesuit called a Jacket, sent out to defend Japan from the Mimics then dying in his first battle — only to wake up in his bunk the day before.

Hitler’s Empire – Mark Mazower

Published on October 3, 2010

Hitler's Empire

Hitler’s Empire: How the nazis Ruled Europe
Mark Mazower
726 pages including index and notes
published in 2008

“Germany could have racial purity or imperial domination, but it could not have both.”

That’s the fundamental paradox that Mark Mazower uncovers in Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe. On the one hand, there is the Nazi’s obsession with making Germany a pure Aryan state, expelling or murdering the lesser races within its borders. On the other, their equally compelling obsession to rule Europe, or at least “reunite” all those parts of Greater Germany outside the German borders. But with the Anschluss of Austria, the annexation of the Sudetenland, the further invasion of what was left of Czechoslovakia, not to mention the invasion of Poland, it brought not just many more Germans, but also millions of Poles, Czechs, Jews and others under Nazi control. The question was, what to do with them and the somewhat accidental empire Nazi Germany had acquired.

A question that became even harder after Germany had defeated the western allies and ruled France, Norway and the Low Countries, had subjugated Yugoslavia and Greece to come to the aid of Italy, then had invaded Russia and at a stroke added immense new territories to its empire, populated with millions upon millions of those the Reich saw as racial enemies. Nazi ideology wanted a pure state, wanted to get rid of the Jews and the Poles and all those others living in those conquered territories. At the same time the economic realities, not to mention the demands of war meant that at least in the short term these “undesirables” could not be removed. If Nazi Germany wanted to rule an efficient empire and defeat its enemies in the East and West, it could not do so without the support, coerced or not, of those “inferior” people it rather wanted to get rid off.

The High Crusade – Poul Anderson

Published on September 7, 2010

Cover of The High Crusade

The High Crusade
Poul Anderson
167 pages
published in 1960

Poul Anderson has a not undeserved reputation as a deeply pessimistic, even depressing writer, largely based on his later novels which all seemed to share the assumption that human nature is unchangable, that evil will always be amongst us, progress impossible and the future will always end badly. It must have been something to do with his gloomy Danish genes. The High Crusade shows it was not always this way. Once upon a time even Poul Anderson could write a lighthearted science fantasy romp without some great clonking moral to mess it up.

Great fun it is too. It’s the year 1345 and a small town in Lincolnshire is visited by a spaceship belonging to the Wersgorix Empire, while the local baron Sir Roger de Tourneville was busy gathering men to join king Edward III in France. Thinking the landing a French trick, he and his men storm the space ship and overwhelm and kill almost all of the aliens, who have long since grown unused to hand to hand combat. Ordering the remaining alien to take them to France, Sir Roger loads the entire town into the ship, but the alien tricks them and sets course back to the planet it came from. Lots of adventures and misunderstandings follow and it ends with Sir Roger conquering the entire Wersgorix Empire…

Farthing – Jo Walton

Published on September 5, 2010

Cover of Farthing

Farthing
Jo Walton
319 pages
published in 2006

At first glance Farthing seems to be a classic English cozy country house mystery, if set in an alternate England. There’s the locked room murder taking place during a weekend party at the Farthing country estate. There are the clues pointing all too neatly at one of the guests. There’s the doughty detective refusing to believe them and there’s the slow deduction of the real killer’s identity and motivations. It all feels like something Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey could’ve written — the latter’s unconscious class snobbery being consciously used here — but in the end Farthing turns out to be something very different from the cozy mystery or even alternate history tale it masquerades as. This is in fact a horror story, with the horror provided not by the plot or the characters, but through the setting. As Ursula Le Guin puts it in her front cover blurb: “If Le Carré scares you, try Jo Walton”.

Farthing grabbed me by the throat from the first page and didn’t let go; one of the very few books to have ever done that. As with any other alternate WWII story, part of that is due to what you know is going on in the background that the characters themselves do not know yet or only suspect. Every such Hitler wins story depends on the tension between what the reader knows happened historically and what the characters in the story know or do not know: sometimes this is done explicit, as in Fatherland, where the whole point of the book is to get the protagonist up to speed on what we as readers already know. In Farthing‘s case though things are kept implicit. What Walton does is let the essential horror of the setting speak for itself, keeping the swastikas and Gestapo goons offstage. What she does in fact is showing that England did not need these props to become a fascist state.