The third and final part of June’s 11 in 11 by 11/11/11 book reviews.

There were two books I read in June that were truly outstanding, both in different ways.

Geraldine McCaughrean is not a well-known author in the United States, which is a shame, because her young adult fiction stretches the boundaries of any genre she chooses to write in. The White Darkness is a contemporary adventure with elements of the supernatural, a journey to the bottom of the world and back. Sym has always been fascinated by Scott’s doomed expedition to reach the South Pole, and particularly by the romantic young Captain Titus Oates–throughout her childhood and teens, he’s been her imagined companion, the voice inside her head she shares all her problems with. When her uncle takes her on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Antarctica, Sym is so excited that she doesn’t pay attention to the signs that this is not an ordinary trip. When catastrophe strikes and the trip turns into a desperate fight for survival, everything Sym has ever believed is put to the test, and her connection to the imaginary Captain Oates becomes her last link to reality.

The most astonishing thing about this book is that despite the blindingly obvious hints that something is fishy about Uncle Victor, the clues that the reader interprets easily but that Sym totally misses, none of that feels annoying, like so many books where the author has heard of dramatic irony but doesn’t realize that it shouldn’t be wielded like a Louisville Slugger. Sym’s innocence is so plausible that it makes perfect sense that she wouldn’t know that Uncle Victor has been lying to her not just about the trip, but about everything, her whole life. If McCaughrean had gone the other route–of making Victor seem honest to the reader as well as to Sym until some dramatic reveal–it would have been just as much a cheat. The reasons for Victor’s behavior have to be obvious to the reader in order for the story to have an impact. I also like that Sym’s almost-total deafness isn’t revealed until several chapters in; it’s a challenge that doesn’t define her, but isn’t trivial either–and it makes possible one of the most moving events in the entire book. Personally, I like the uncertainty of the supernatural elements: is Oates’s presence in Sym’s head imaginary, or is it something more? The story doesn’t hinge on this question, so it’s possible for it to stay uncertain if the reader doesn’t want to resolve it one way or the other.

The other excellent book, of course, is Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings. I groused about this one publicly through Facebook status updates. I used to love giant fantasy epics, and then I didn’t anymore. And there’s something about Sanderson’s novels (barring the Alcatraz books) that makes me antsy and impatient, something I can’t identify. It’s not like they’re bad books; I’ve read all but Warbreaker and I like them very much. And it’s not the length; I read Anathem in almost one sitting and it’s almost as long as The Way of Kings. I don’t hate the prose, I’m interested in the plot both long- and short-term, and I mostly care about the characters. And every hundred or so pages I just had to put the book down and do something else.

In discussing the book with a friend, I realized that part of my problem was probably that I was only truly interested in one of the three plots, in the sense that it was the one I wanted to come back to. The other two, I cared about while I was reading them, but…it’s a military campaign, I’ve read about dozens of military campaigns, and the girl in the other section was an academic, a researcher, and practically a librarian, so give me a break, where did you expect my attention was going to go? So it’s possible that my impatience is a desire to get back to the story I care about, but it shows up only as low-level mental itchiness because the other two plots are at least worth reading. Usually with books like this (multi-plot stories) I either like all the plots, or I’ve got one I love and I’m bored or annoyed by the others, so my reaction is a lot more extreme. It could also be that the density of the material is just overwhelming. It took me a month to read the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo, because I’d read for a couple of days and then have to put it down before my brain exploded. And I love that book with an unseemly passion. Still, I’m sort of leaning toward the first reason.

But as much as I would have enjoyed a book that only had that one plot, The Way of Kings simply wouldn’t have worked without all three intertwined. The Stormlight Archive, of which this is the first volume, is going to be an extraordinary work of fantasy, and Sanderson is either a genius or completely off his nut to even contemplate it. I’m interested in the world, I’m interested in the mystery of what happened to it, I’m interested in where the characters will go next. I want to know what Dalinar got that was worth losing all memory of his wife. I want to know what Jasnah’s research will turn up about the world’s history. I want to know how many hints Kaladin has to have dropped on his head from a great height before he works out what kind of power he has. I’m interested enough that I will stick with the next book despite putting it down at least a dozen times before I’m done. This is a different kind of achievement than Anathem, but if Sanderson can keep it together, I expect it to be marvelous.

Next up: July’s books. More of them, and a higher number of really good ones.

Summer turned out to be too busy to keep up with the review-writing schedule, and now that summer’s over, I really don’t want to write individual reviews for all those books. (I just noticed that the last review I wrote was in July, for a book I finished end of May.) I broke this into three sections, because I love the sound of my own voice, even if it’s an imaginary sound because I’m, you know, writing it, and the whole thing got too long.

I got behind on my reading schedule in June, partly because I spent six days wading through The Way of Kings and partly because I read a lot of other things in between. Most of what I’ve read so far I’ve really liked, so if you break it down by month there’d be maybe one or two that were okay (or worse) and the rest would be very good. June’s reading was split more evenly between excellent and meh. (I do have a rating system that I keep track of in my database, but I don’t post those with the reviews because for me, the fine gradations between Super-Fabulous and Poke-My-Eye-Out-With-A-Stick are not consistent. I’ll mark a book as Enjoyable and later realize that it was actually better than that. So I don’t like associating those ratings with a public review.)

Two of the books, Death in Florence by George Alec Effinger and Armor by John Steakley, were on the lower end of the ratings spectrum I don’t post. Death in Florence is one of Effinger’s early novels, a story about a utopian experiment that, like all utopian experiments, is rotten at the core. The premise is interesting as long as you read it as absurdism, but it doesn’t feel like it goes any deeper than that.

Armor, on the other hand, is beautifully characterized, has a well-realized fictional world, and is also a kind of philosophical exploration that I think is more successful than Effinger’s. Where it loses points with me is how hard Steakley hammers on the philosophical point he’s making. This science fiction novel focuses on a soldier in a future war whose main weapon is the armored suit that gives him protection, weaponry, and life support. When his entire unit is wiped out by the enemy, a computer glitch keeps sending him on mission after mission, sometimes while he is seriously injured, simply because none of the human personnel believe that sort of thing could happen. Steakley’s point about humanity and needless war is unfortunately obscured by his unrelenting portrayal of all things military as either stupid or evil. It is a pointless war of aggression, and the high leadership is totally ignorant of the situation on the ground, but–not a single officer who shows humility or understanding? Not one leader who, with boots on the ground, can admit that the strategy is doomed to failure? I recommend reading this book in conjunction with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which uses the same basic premise but with a completely different attitude. (Armor is one of my husband’s favorites, and our disagreement about how good it was made for great tension because he wouldn’t admit I was right.

Next: the mid-range books, ones that were good but not outstanding.

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.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson
William Morrow, 2008
Category: Books bought new and never read
Time owned without reading: 850 days

See that number there? 850 days where I owned Anathem but didn’t read it? I actually tried to start it twice before forcing myself to read it for this challenge. Both times I got about six or seven pages in before setting it aside. The book opens right in the middle of a conversation between unknown people on an unfamiliar world using weird and undefined terminology. It’s about as welcoming as Virginia Woolf’s book The Waves. When I started reading it, I thought Neal Stephenson had finally become the M. Night Shyamalan of the literary world—overly impressed with his own genius, inconsiderate of his readers, using the popularity and quality of his previous books to publish something no one would ever read.

I am really, really sorry I ever thought that, Mr. Stephenson.

It’s true, Anathem is very difficult to get into. And it’s on purpose. Although Stephenson provides a helpful introduction for readers who don’t like having to figure everything out, the intent is to immerse the reader in the created world of Arbre and the avout, like learning to speak French by moving to Paris and surrounding yourself with only native speakers. It’s also true that this gambit is risky and occasionally means the author is showing off, or believes that impenetrability equals literary excellence. (There are whole university departments devoted to this principle, so maybe it’s not such a stretch.)  But the reader who sticks it out and successfully enters the world of Anathem soon realizes that Stephenson’s strategy isn’t for show; it’s essential to understanding and appreciating the vast, beautiful story he has created.

Unfortunately, it also means it’s hard to give a good synopsis of the story. Arbre is a world similar to Earth, and Stephenson uses words derived from Earth cognates that imply the same meanings while sounding just alien enough for SF: fraa or suur for the members of the quasi-monastic society, for example. The main character and narrator, Fraa Erasmus, is a young man who for the last ten years of his life has been isolated in a community of mathematicians and philosphers, given an excellent scientific education, and trained to look at the world in a certain way. We gradually learn that these communities, called maths, were organized both to allow their members to stay free from the changes of the wider world, but also to keep these brilliant minds from coming up with technologies that in the past have nearly destroyed civilization. The book opens on the eve of Avent, when the math is opened to the public and its members are allowed to leave, visit family if they have any, and basically decide if they want to sign up for another tour of one, ten, or even one hundred years. Erasmus isn’t much more than an average student, and he’s not sure if his future lies within the math, but there isn’t much outside it for him either.

Complicating matters is a mystery surrounding one of the other members of the math, Fraa Orolo, who seems to have discovered something really big—big enough that the community anathemizes him and kicks him out into the world before he can use the information. Erasmus and his close friends don’t understand why someone as brilliant and well-loved as Orolo can just be removed like that, so they begin to follow up on his research. What they discover—and here I’m going to break all the rules of good synopsizing and give the secret away, because it might help some readers want to stick with the book longer—is nothing less than an alien invasion that threatens the whole world, and suddenly the world really, really needs these strange geniuses to find a technology that will save them.

But I’m lying. No, not about what happens in the book; I’m lying that knowing any of this will be the deciding factor in whether a reader likes it or not. There are maybe three groups of readers who will enjoy this book:

1. People who are already interested in abstract discussions of philosophy, mathematical theory, alternate realities, what consciousness and thinking are really about, and the meaning of life. There is an entire section devoted to a series of dinners in which great thinkers discuss all of these things. It is at least 100 pages long.

2. People who enjoy the challenge of decoding complex literature with minimal assistance from the author—puzzle solvers, readers of Gene Wolfe, etc.

3. People who are capable of absorbing and bypassing the abstract philosophical discussions to enjoy the story behind it all—because the story, divorced from the philosophical sections, is exciting, tense, and hard to step away from.

If you know you’ll be put off by what appear to be irrelevant, boring passages in which nothing much happens, you are not the audience for this book. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a “must-read” book; that’s just a way of telling someone that you think they ought to think exactly the way you do. I loved Anathem and consider it one of the best books I’ve read this year, but that doesn’t mean that anyone who dislikes it is wrong. I would love for everyone to experience it the way I did, but that’s not possible.

One last note: if you’ve read Stephenson’s earlier books and were put off by the extremely graphic descriptions of sex and violence, particularly in the Baroque Cycle, don’t let that be what keeps you from reading Anathem. The book is so tame that if it wasn’t chock-full of philosophical theorizing, I wouldn’t have believed Stephenson had written it. It also has one of the sweetest romances in all of science fiction. Anathem is an extraordinary achievement, and if you are the right kind of reader, it will blow you away.

The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
Pyramid, 1961
Category: Science Fiction

I’ve read a couple of the books in this series, but never the first one. Turns out there’s a lot I didn’t know about how “Slippery Jim” DiGriz and the lovely Angelina got started. The Stainless Steel Rat began life as a pair of novelettes that were reworked into the opening chapters of the book. In a universe where law and order are increasingly enforced by robots and computers, and crime has been nearly eradicated, James Bolivar “Slippery Jim” DiGriz is an anomaly, a stainless steel rat making an illegal living between the walls of society. DiGriz’s career as a con man and thief comes to a halt when he’s captured by the Special Corps and offered the chance to turn his talents to catching other criminals like himself. His first target is the mysterious and criminally insane Angelina, whose new caper is starting a revolution on a backwater planet. DiGriz has to find her and arrest her, but since she’s better than he is, it’s the biggest challenge he’s ever had.

The first sections (probably the original novelettes) are the strongest, even though they ought to be kicked into Comma Splice Hell.  You can actually see where the new material was added on by how much the grammar improves. Harrison gives us a believable con man whose heists and cons are well thought out and plausible, both in themselves and as crimes in a future universe the reader isn’t part of. Unfortunately, the bigger plot surrounding Jim DiGriz’s crimes (and Angelina’s) doesn’t hold up as well. The problem is that Angelina is just a little too insane for Harrison to redeem. She’s a multiple and unrepentant murderer who doesn’t see the value of human life and nearly succeeds in killing DiGriz himself, and the later revelation that she took to her life of crime to pay for the operations that made her face as beautiful as her mind was cunning doesn’t redeem her nearly as well as Harrison thinks. The ending is completely anticlimactic—the Special Corps swoops in, arrests Angelina, reinstates DiGriz (his joining and then leaving the Corps is another unnecessary complication), and makes everything all right again. Then DiGriz’s superior Inskipp assures him that they’ll perform a bunch of personality modifications on Angelina to cure her criminal insanity, both so they can use her as an agent and so she and DiGriz can go on to have a happy married life together. Hey presto, problem solved. Never mind the question of whether criminality really is de facto insanity; it’s too facile a solution for such a serious problem. This is not the only time Harrison stoops to manipulation to make everything turn out the way he wants, and it weakens the story tremendously. In the end, what holds it together is the characters—and I’ve already mentioned that one of them gets her personality taken away, so even that isn’t a total success.

In general, the series is a lot of fun. The later books hang together better, probably because they were created as a whole and not cobbled together from pieces. The Stainless Steel Rat was only Harry Harrison’s second published novel, and he took nearly ten years to come back to the series—that made a big difference. My recommendation is to skip this first book and go straight for the later ones. They’re fun and clever adventures, quick reads, and decent science fiction.