Facets, Rock of Ages, Voice of the Whirlwind
Sorry about all this blogging at once, but I’ve gotten behind again during the move from the other blog. Last week the sci-fi section was imported and correctly formatted. If you’re looking for even more of my unpopular opinions, they’re only a click away, along with my long, dramatic struggle to finish Blue Mars. I started the sci-fi blog before this one, so my blog has suddenly aged an extra month (September 2001) - and I bet no one noticed.
So, for those of you new to the sci-fi blog category, this is where I talk about the books I’ve read. Fortunately for me, Hugo and Nebula award-winners don’t jump down your throat when you critique them - yet another advantage of real writing: real opinions. It’s an interesting question whether those people who do the throat-dive to defend fanfic writers from the imagined slights of constructive criticism will react the same way on behalf of, say, David Brin. My email address, if you have complaints, is to the right.
On to business. In the past month, the following books have piled up: Facets, Rock of Ages and Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams, The Big U by Neal Stephenson, The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Practice Effect by David Brin and a double-edition of Analog. I’ll split them up, WJW first:
Facets is a collection of short stories, my favorite of which was “No Spot of Ground”, a civil war history with General Edgar A. Poe on the front lines fighting for the South. It’s a wonderful story all by itself, but when it turns Poe’s hatred of Whitman into an explanation of the war, it touches on the sublime:
Not that inequality is sublime in itself, but the ability to sum up an alien mindset in one conversation is. For this I consider Jane Austen a great sf writer - she builds a world incredible in its alienness, in its prejudices and social pitfalls, and makes you believe it all really happened.
Among WJW’s short stories, I also enjoyed “Side Effects,” a tale of pharmaceutical testing told in little scenes from doctors’ offices. The one I liked least was “Witness;” between the anti-hero and the superheros, there wasn’t much left that I look for in a story. “Dinosaurs,” on the other hand, was a classic sci-fi tale of a young culture’s encounter with “the ultimate product of nine million years of human evolution.” Most of the rest was the usual hard-bitten cyber-crime drama that was so popular a while back - which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it. I wish more people wrote the stuff I don’t like so well that I almost like it.
Voice of the Whirlwind was more of the hard-bitten stuff I shouldn’t have liked, but enjoyed anyway. Rock of Ages reminded me of LMB, and I was quite enjoying it until it became clear that the hero wasn’t interested in marrying and settling down. Marriage isn’t something I expect to see every day in sci-fi, but when you bring the subject up in the middle of a comedy of manners you raise certain expectations. Nevertheless, it was a fun book, and part of a series about the thief-hero which might interest LMB fans.