The Tomorrow Code by Brian Falkner
Random House, 2008
11/11/11 Category: Science Fiction

The Tomorrow Code starts out with an interesting premise: if people invent time travel in the future, why can’t they send the information back in time to certain individuals so they can invent it sooner? Call it paradox, but New Zealander teenagers Tane and Rebecca think it might work—and if their future-selves can do it, who else would they tell about it? Rebecca, a young science whiz, knows about a project that uses theoretical aspects of physics to encode information, and she and Tane tap into the data stream to find a pattern that, when decoded, turns out to be…the winning Powerball number. Their future-selves have made them rich, but surely time-travel/communication could be used for more noble purposes, right? As more and more messages arrive, Tane and Rebecca begin to piece together the parts of a mystery that, if they don’t do something about it, could cause untold destruction to the human race.

Interesting plot hook, right? And Falkner’s writing is good, considering this was his first real YA book. He deals with the complications of sending and receiving information from the future, particularly the circularity of learning something from the future only *because* you learned it from the future and later sent it to your past selves; where would the ideas have come from in the first place? The characterization is serviceable but nothing to write home about—young friendship turning into unrequited love, kids maybe a little too much smarter than the adults around them. Rebecca’s backstory of a dead scientist father and a clinically depressed mother is too large a history for the small role it plays in the story, and I’m not sure I buy how wealthy Tane’s dad is. Overall, not a bad adventure.

Would that that were true.

Rebecca is established early-on as an environmental activist, always participating in rallies and stuff like that. It’s the foundation for the main plot complication: scientists have engineered a kind of retrovirus that attacks and destroys certain complicated life forms. Specifically, humans. Chimps, our nearest biological relatives, are safe; it’s just humans who are affected, leaving the land and lower life forms untouched. Naturally, this virus—more like a living entity; I don’t care enough to go into the details and probably you don’t either—escapes from the lab where it’s being studied and drifts across the New Zealand peninsula, killing every human in its path. It’s very creepy the way Falkner describes it.

You can see where this is going, right? Yeah. According to Rebecca, the moral voice of the novel, humans DESERVE TO BE KILLED. We’re a cancer on the Earth, a virus the planet’s trying to get rid of, because we pollute and kill animals and torture fluffy bunnies for medical research and have technology and basically have lost our pure and unsullied connection to Mother Gaia. There’s no counter-perspective; the adults fighting the outbreak are Wrong (we know this because they’re willing to kill poor defenseless research animals to, I don’t know, SAVE THE HUMAN RACE), people who don’t believe in environmental causes are Wrong, all humans are ultimately Wrong because they don’t live in small towns and grow their own food. At one point Rebecca not only voices the opinion—whoops! See what I did there? Not really an opinion, coming from her—that the mysterious life form should be left to sweep the Earth clean of the human plague, but is willing to take action to let that happen.

How self-loathing. How arrogant. How stupid.

Notice that this attitude is a long way from the desire not to pollute our shared resources, not to kill unnecessarily, not to waste the wonderful richness of the natural world. This attitude says that humans, of all creatures on the earth, are somehow not natural—that our intelligence damns us, that we are the only creatures who despoil the environment or kill our own kind (neither true), or that human development equals human culpability. It also suggests the bizarre notion that any environmental damage humans do is somehow equivalent to “destroying the earth,” which is itself an arrogant notion because the so-called “destruction” amounts to making Earth unlivable for humans. In this novel, love of the environment means believing humans are pollution—and I don’t believe that’s a requirement of environmentalism in general.

What really gets me is that people who think this way (and they exist) seem to have forgotten that their leisure to agonize about philosophical pap like this depends entirely on the technological advancements of humankind, all of which have come at an environmental cost. In the book, Rebecca is a computer genius; she uses powerful tools to receive and decode this message from the future; she and Tane spend most of their lottery winnings on an advanced submarine that will let them survive the oncoming disaster. Humans may be a disease, but that doesn’t stop her taking advantage of their technologies. This also accounts for one of the flaws in the plot, because future-Rebecca sends those warning messages back in time to PREVENT the disaster…so how does that explain present-Rebecca whingeing about evil humanity?

There’s plenty of room for disagreement about the role of humans vis-à-vis the earth. My attitude is that humans are stewards of the earth who should use its resources wisely—a perspective that some would deride for being too soft and others would criticize for being too anthropocentric. But even the most hard-core moral relativist can care about environmental issues without turning to self-loathing. Rebecca’s attitude in this book represents an extreme point of view that I can’t respect—and it’s a pity that an otherwise interesting book had to hinge on such a suspect moral question.

Drinking Midnight Wine by Simon R. Green
Gollancz, 2001
11/11/11 Category: Fantasy

I think I expected something better from this book. Simon Green’s writing style is enjoyable and clever, and I liked the idea of the book—the two worlds of Veritie (the real world) and Mysterie (where magic happens), someone from our world being drawn into the other, that sort of thing. It’s not an original idea, but it hasn’t been done to death yet either. In the end, though, it just wasn’t very compelling.

For one thing, there are three different “first chapters” in a row—each chapter introduces a different subplot of the book, all of which end up connected, but each of them felt like the beginning of a new book instead. The main storyline follows this guy named Toby Dexter, a random schmoe whose extremely boring life takes him from his boring apartment to his menial job in a bookstore and back to his boring apartment again. The one bright spot in his life is a beautiful woman he sometimes sees on the train between these two locations. She’s clearly out of his league, but he imagines someday falling into conversation, finding out who she really is, and developing a relationship with her. One day, he gets his chance; it starts pouring rain just as they both get off the train, and the woman has no umbrella. But when he tries to approach her, the woman makes a door appear in the station wall, and Toby follows her…into a place that looks a lot like the real world, only the rain is gone, and the woman is extremely annoyed that she has a tagalong.

Things aren’t going well for the folks in Mysterie. The oldest evil, the Serpent in the Sun, is stirring; his son is trying to find a way to free him and remake the world; and the people who should keep this from happening, among them the mysterious woman Gayle, are at a disadvantage. Gayle reveals that Toby is the key to everything, a human with the power to change Mysterie. Toby, who as I’ve said before is a schmoe, doesn’t like this idea at all, but goes along with it because he’s in love with Gayle. Gayle warns him that she can’t love him in return, and he will get hurt, but Toby doesn’t care—so when he does get hurt by her, it’s hard to feel sympathetic. As the final confrontation approaches, nobody’s sure that Toby has what it takes to save both worlds, least of all Toby himself.

I was with the author for about the first sixty pages. There’s a lot of mythological detail in the story that interested me, and I was a little curious about how much of a whiner Toby would continue to be. When Green started dragging me around while Gayle introduced Toby to all these different people in Mysterie, all of whom had variations on the theme of “you’re the chosen one, but you’re a waste of space while I am immense and immortal,” I got bored real fast. It wasn’t a story, it was a fantasyland tour. The bad guys weren’t much better, despite being the son of the ultimate evil and an angel whose exact origins are a mystery. Lots of sitting around talking, not a lot of action. When the action finally started, it was too little, too late.

What really killed it for me was the awesome super powers of every Mysterie resident we met. There’s a point at which characters are just too powerful for a particular story, and when you have embodiments of natural forces who are, naturally, immense and immortal, it’s hard to see how they connect with ordinary human life, let alone fall in love with a human, LET ALONE a human who is as passive as Toby Dexter. Even the descendant of Thor, who was the least powerful of Toby’s allies, is still far, far beyond the average human guy. It would have been less of a stretch if Toby had ever really become someone creatures like that could respect or need, but despite the author’s trying to make him so, there wasn’t enough in the story to support the transformation. There was the kernel of an interesting story there, but if gormless British milquetoasts as heroes is what you want, you’re better off reading Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.

The Time Traveler’s Wife  by Audrey Niffenegger
MacAdam/Cage, 2003
Category:  Books people nag me about
Who nagged:  A whole bunch of women whose names I have forgotten, fortunately for them

This has to have been the most singularly unpleasant reading experience I have ever had.  Forget plot, character, theme, milieu; it exudes a low-grade psychic stench of depression from the beginning, as if Audrey Niffenegger wants her readers to be perfectly clear that this is a story without a happy ending, with every moment of objective happiness tainted by the knowledge that Life Sucks and the other shoe is not only going to drop, but grind you into the ground when it does.  I was miserable the entire time I was reading it, miserable enough to stop briefly after165 pages and ingest all of Equal Rites to remind myself that the world is still a wonderful place.  Normally I won’t continue reading anything I dislike that much, but in this case I had other motivations to finish (though I finally gave up and speed-read the last 60 pages) which I won’t go into.  No, it wasn’t for the sake of all those who now won’t have to read it.  I don’t love you people that much.

Here is why the book received so much critical and popular acclaim: it is a tragic love story read by people who have no experience of the vast canon of time-travel fiction.  It might as well be a story about a long-haul trucker whose schedule is irregular and whose marriage is a long series of meetings and departures, at the end of which he runs his rig into Hoover Dam and dies messily.  Without the cleverness of the time travel thing, this would be a tedious and all-too-common romance novel, or maybe a low-end lit-fic story.  Niffenegger seems to believe that exhaustive detail about her main characters’ surroundings and sex lives is enough to elicit empathy or identification in the reader, but she actually depends on the reader sympathizing with two people who are constantly losing each other–a genuine emotion that is tainted by a complete failure to follow through with the character development.  The major characters are empty; the minor characters are stereotypes (and therefore the only truly likeable people in the book).

But let’s talk about the time travel thing, shall we?  I’ve mentioned that one of the things I hate most in the reading world is the tendency of mainstream or literary writers to occasionally borrow an idea from speculative fiction and then sit around smugly believing they are so cool they could be used to freeze liquid nitrogen.  In reality, their efforts are usually about on a par with a kindergartener’s first smudgy drawings.  The rare exceptions (such as Children of Men or, arguably, The Sparrow) make these amateurish attempts even sadder.  I will give Niffenegger credit for mostly thinking through her time travel mechanics.  It *is* an interesting idea to write a relationship in which one person is unstuck in time; you’d have to keep track of what each of them knew, and when.  Niffenegger does this well, and I think it’s part of the appeal, because if she’d done it badly the book would have been incomprehensible.

On further examination, it starts to fall apart.  One key moment in the story is Henry and Clare’s (the protagonists) attempts to have a baby.  Clare has six miscarriages before finally carrying a child to term. The premise is that Henry’s time traveling is the result of a defective or aberrant gene, and the doctor studying him learns that embryos with the gene start time traveling in and out of the womb, where the mother’s body sees them as alien and either destroys them or dies from hemmorhage.  Clare’s successful pregnancy (because apparently Henry’s rare genetic condition BREEDS TRUE EVERY STINKING TIME) is the result of immunosuppressant therapy.  Sounds good, but it absolutely does not explain how Henry got born, without any such treatment, nor is it suggested that his mother went through the same cycle of miscarriages, even though it is quite clearly stated that this is the universal pattern with regard to time-traveling embryos.

The next problem is that Henry’s time-traveling adventures are clearly arranged by the author for the greatest possible impact.  Although Henry can travel beyond his own lifetime (he travels far enough to see his mother pregnant with himself, and beyond the year of his death) and his travels are apparently random, he conveniently doesn’t hop into the future and find out he dies at age 43 until he’s 41.  Since his death is also a conveniently manufactured event by the author, the whole thing smacks of ratcheting up the emotional tension.

Finally, there’s the ick factor of Henry at 32 dating and then at 41 making love to the teenage girl he’s not even married to yet.  Niffenegger tries to defuse this by having Clare wait for her18th birthday and then "seduce" Henry, knowing that she’ll marry him later, but there’s no getting around the Lolita vibe (and Henry being consciously aware of it enough to feel like Humbert Humbert doesn’t help either).  What really happens is that Clare, except for the brief scenes of her childhood, is always the Clare of the future.  The normal stages of a relationship are completely circumvented by Henry’s knowledge of her future self.  If she shapes him, he shapes her as well.  A story that focused more on the time travel and less on the romance might have been able to make something of it.  But no, ick.

You’re wondering how there could possibly be more at this point, right?  Is not a lack of character, a disregard for literary tradition, a circumvention of all the things that make a beautiful romance, enough that I should stop flagellating this poor first novel?  THERE’S MORE.  On top of all of this, Niffenegger tries to shoehorn in a philosophical discussion about determinism versus free will, and this is where I get seriously pissed off.  It’s a flaccid and poorly considered reiteration of the basic foundations of this very important argument–an argument that I am personally very interested in–and Niffenegger seems to think it’s enough to bring it up now and again without actually coming down on one side or another, despite the fact that her whole time travel argument depends on it.  If future-Henry literally can’t tell people in his time-traveling jaunts to the past things that will alter that behavior, why can he give them stocks to invest in, or tell them which numbers to choose in the lottery?  (Oh, yeah, he does that so he can buy his wife a big house with a real art studio.  Why they need eight million dollars for this, I don’t know.  Oh, right, because it would be too much like real life to give these people an ACTUAL, non-soap-operatic struggle like how to live on a hot time-traveling librarian’s salary.)  There’s no real consideration of indeterminacy as operant in either of the possibilities, and the issue of changing the "past" is either glossed over entirely or made to seem vitally important, depending on which is going to tug at the reader’s heartstrings more.

The reason it pisses me off is not the cavalier handling of a powerful philosophical concept.  It is that the readers of this story, who are almost certainly not well-read in either speculative fiction or Umberto Eco, may come away from this book believing they have just experienced something deep and profound, when in reality it’s no deeper than a puddle and no more profound than the late-night drunken mumblings of their college roommate.  It’s as if an entire generation of readers believed Twilight was the pinnacle of supernatural romance.  Oh, wait.  (True confession: I have serious moral and literary issues with the Twilight Saga, but at least it never made me feel like I needed to scrub my brain clean afterward.)

What a waste of time.  What a waste of talent; this is Niffenegger’s first novel, and for all its other flaws it has a brilliantly realized world, well-described and filled with the kind of detail that should have brought it to life.  If I were in a generous mood, I would say Niffenegger overreached herself.  Since I’m not, I’ll only say that if it wouldn’t leave a nasty mark on my driveway, I’d burn the book to dust.

The Girl Who Could Fly  by Victoria Forester
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008
Category: YA/Juvenile
UNFINISHED

This one looked very promising at first.  I like stories about kids with psychic powers working together, enough so that I’m willing to overlook a certain amount of cheese.  While The Girl Who Could Fly doesn’t exactly tip the cheese-o-meter, it’s definitely a kid’s book–probably not something that will appeal to adults the way many juvenile and YA novels do.  The style is average; the description of how Piper McCloud, the titular protagonist, learns to develop her talents is well done.  The author is a first-time novelist (though a long-time screenwriter) and that fact is obvious in some of her narrative choices, primarily in how she attempts to use a self-aware third-person narrator a la Roald Dahl, but doesn’t sustain that POV throughout. Readers in the eight- to twelve-year-old group will probably not notice the flaws, and the idea and descriptions are very interesting.

What is not so forgivable–and the reason I stopped reading–was a major plot twist that depended on reversing the stated meaning of earlier events.  At a key point in the story, Piper learns that Conrad, a fellow gifted student, actually knows the truth about their "school" (basically, it’s EEEEvil) and has been trying to fight against it.  This would have been an excellent plot twist, because Conrad has been nasty and antagonistic to her, and it turns out that his actions were to keep her from being lulled into somnolence and thus losing her powers.  Except for one thing.  The reason we know about how nasty Conrad was is that those scenes were told from his point of view–including his thoughts about how much he loved hurting people and how he would get so angry he needed to hurt others.  This includes, by the way, the time he plotted to kill Piper herself.  The author’s own explanation didn’t suggest that Conrad needed to control his thoughts so the bad guys wouldn’t find out, or fake thinking about being a bad guy.  Forester apparently thought it would be more dramatic and compelling if we heard Conrad plotting to hurt others, but didn’t carry this thought through to its logical conclusion.  Is this the sort of thing young readers notice?  Maybe not.  I doubt it, though.

So now I’ve reached the first book on my list that I choose not to finish.  I reached a point, years ago, where I decided that I was never going to make myself read a book that I didn’t enjoy.  I believe this for the same reason that I don’t believe in "must-read" books; that’s usually shorthand for "I liked it a lot and I think everyone is Just Like Me and should read it and if you don’t like it then you suck."  There’s no book offers such a unique experience that you can’t get that experience from some other book.  Even the books I love, and rave about, and think are amazing–some of you reading this won’t like them.  You’ll think they’re boring, or pretentious, or you can’t accept the underlying premise, or you just don’t read X genre.  And except for that last one (you may have certain genres you won’t read, and I won’t push it, but don’t expect me to be sympathetic to that excuse) you’re probably right–for you, that’s a pointless book.  If you can’t do it yet, learn to put down a book you dislike.  It’s one of the nicest gifts you can give yourself.