Reviews

Brasyl Close to Perfect; Bright as Compelling as Tolkien

Jeff Vandermeer asks “How many different ways can the future be imagined?” in July 22nd issue of the Washington Post. Speaking of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl,he describes the novel as being, “… as close to perfect as any novel in recent memory. It works because of great characterization, but also because McDonald envisions Brazil as a dynamic, living place that is part postmodern trash pile, part trashy reality-TV-driven ethical abyss . . . and yet also somehow spiritual. …McDonald has found new myths for old places; in doing so, he has cemented his reputation as an amazing storyteller.”

Moving on to Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky, Jeff writes that it is, “a splendid fantasy quest as compelling as anything by Stephen R. Donaldson, Philip José Farmer or, yes, J.R.R. Tolkien.” He has some reservations about the Earth-centered sections of the novel, but concedes that, “Once in The Bright, you can actually feel the grasses and smell the smoke from the trains and experience great wonder in the cities of this impossible yet beautiful universe.” Meanwhile, over on his blog, Ecstatic Days, Jeff comments that Bright of the Sky ” could well become a classic in the field.” Which is certainly okay by us.

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Interminable Ramblings

Chris Roberson’s forthcoming Solaris title, Set the Seas on Fire,is the subject of John Berlyne’s latest review over on SFRevu. Set the Seas on Fire is actually a direct prequel to Paragaea: A Planetary Romance,which John reviewed last year. He references Paragaea again here, calling it “a hugely enjoyable pulpish adventure.” Meanwhile, he finds the new book “adds another very competent and confident story to Roberson’s ever-growing, increasingly impressive interconnected cannon – one can expect more from the characters one has met in this novel, and not necessarily in the same kind of setting.”

As John says above, Chris’s novels occur in one big, interconnected multiverse, much like those of his influences Michael Moorcock and Philip José Farmer and his contemporary Kage Baker. Chris himself expands on the relationship between these two particular novels on his blog, Roberson’s Interminable Ramble. Meanwhile, he is also interviewed over on Heidi’s Pick Six, a blog that asks an author to pick six out of fifteen standard questions. How standard? Question number three is “coffee, tea, or milk?”

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The Kaleidoscopic Mr McDonald

Over on SFSite.com, Stuart Carter reviews Ian McDonald’s Brasyl,concluding (as Ian himself has said before), that it’s not simply River of Gods 2. Instead, Stuart says, “let us try to imagine a mashup of David Mitchell’s much-lauded Cloud Atlas and Eduardo Galeano’s soul-searingly epic history of South America, Memory Of Fire, and I hope that will give you some idea of the richness and relevance contained in Brasyl. The only fitting adjective here is, once again, ‘kaleidoscopic…'”

Speaking of how the three story lines converge in a tale of parallel realities, Stuart says, “Really — this is exactly what I read science fiction for: to be shown dazzling new things, new worlds — new thoughts, even; to be immersed in unfamiliar milieux and made aware of the potential wonder of the world around us, whether in a different dimension or just a different timezone.”

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Superscience, Hypercosmology and Adventure Galore!

“It looks like her readers will have a good ride” says Tom Easton in his regular Analog magazine review column, “The Reference Library.” He’s talking about Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky, which he seems to enjoy, though be warned that he gives away a good deal of the plot of book one. Of course, the journey is as important as the destination, and, as he says, along the way “there’s superscience, hypercosmology, and adventure galore, and the characters are sufficient to maintain the reader’s interest.”

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Breakaway: Up a Few Notches

Rob H. Bedford posts his review of Joel Shepherd’s second Cassandra Kresnov novel, Breakaway,on SFFWorld today. “Joel Shepherd’s electric heroine, Cassandra ‘Sandy’ Kresnov, continues her thrill-ride of a life in the author’s second novel, Breakaway. Shepherd picks up her story shortly after the events of Crossover,and the story doesn’t miss a beat. If anything the beat gets turned up a few notches.”

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Brasyl is a Landmark

“Where other writers spend their whole lives creating fantastic imaginary worlds that have their own languages, calendars and social strata,” says Ryun Patterson of Bookgasm, “McDonald has dived headfirst into a culture that’s every bit as fantastic and also awesomely real.”

Speaking of the Quill-nominated Brasyl, Patterson says that Ian McDonald writes,”as if he were raised on the beaches of Rio. Food, language, attitudes – everything comes off as authentic,” then goes on to proclaim the importance within this lush setting of the story itself. “While science-fiction classics of the past have explored what it means to be alien or what it means to be intelligent, Brasyl is a landmark in that [it] unravels what it means to be quantum, and what might necessarily follow if quantum theory holds true. In addition, there are sweet car chases, acres of suspense, huge tracts of conspiracy, knives that cut through anything, epic battles, fight scenes worthy of Yuen Woo-Ping, and plenty of hot sex. Really, what are you waiting for?”

Good question.

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Clear Your Calendar: Salon.com Recommends Brasyl

Andrew Leonard has just put forward Ian McDonald’s Brasylin Salon.com’s List of Summer Reading Recommendations. Andrew says, “If you liked River of Gods,which performed a similar mash-up of SF tropes with full cultural immersion in India, you will delight in Brasyl. And if you’re a science fiction fan who has never read any Ian McDonald, well, then, clear your calendar.” He goes on to talk about the way that “an age of globalization” has inspired science fiction writers to investigate new-to-them territories in the here and now, concluding, “A similar wave swept through SF in the 1980s, when Japan’s emergent cultural and economic power suddenly became reflected in scores of science fiction novels. But McDonald has more fun than most of the Japanophiles did. I always wanted to visit the future. But after Brasyl, I want to book a ticket to São Paulo also.”

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Crooked Timber on Brasyl: "What more could you be looking for?"

Crooked Timber offers up some interesting thoughts on Ian McDonald’s Brasyl stating that it is “open to question whether the book is trying to present an authentic vision of what Brazil past, current and future might look like,” and further argues ” that the book is best categorized as a utopian novel, albeit one that is remarkably sneaky and indirect.”

I quite enjoyed this analysis, and look forward to the forthcoming promised longer piece. For now, Crooked Timber concludes:

“I suspect that one of the reasons why McDonald wanted to write about Brazil is because it poses questions about the globalization of culture and economics so starkly. The result is that the book has a political resonance that’s very different from the mainstream of American and UK SF. Cory Doctorow likes Brasyl enormously, and I’m not even slightly surprised. Brasyl’s argument has a lot in common with what I’ve described as BoingBoing socialism. On the one hand, Brasyl shows the downside of William Gibson’s famous dictum that ‘the street finds its own uses for things.’ On the other, it turns the phrase into a positive political manifesto. It’s also very well (at times beautifully) written and tells a great story while it’s at it. What more could you be looking for?”

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Brasyl: a Mind-Boggling Doozy

Elizabeth Vail reviews Ian McDonald’s Brasyl for Green Man Review. She calls the novel, “a dazzling, if somewhat warped, story involving three separate but somehow connected narratives that evolve across three different timelines,” and goes on to say that, “With all these ideas, and the steamy neon tropical setting of Brazil, Ian McDonald builds up to a mind-boggling doozy of a multiworld theory… McDonald gives us a Brazil that is enormous but close, filthy but pure, glossily artificial while true to itself.”

She concludes that Brasyl is “a thought-provoking science fiction novel with an evocative sense of setting and textured language. “

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A Mass of D’Ammassa

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On his website Critical Mass, author and former Science Fiction Chronicle reviewer Don D’Ammassa reviews Alexis Glynn Latner’s debut novel, Hurricane Moon, which will be coming out in just a few weeks.

“I’ve been reading short stories by Latner for about ten years now, almost all of them in Analog, and have found her to be a reliable source of interesting and accessible stories of hard science fiction. At long last we have a chance to read her at novel length, and it was worth the wait, although I hope we don’t have to wait as long for her next. It’s an old fashioned space adventure, but with more contemporary sensibilities and healthy doses of intelligent and not too abstruse science… Extremely well written, tightly plotted, full of that old fashioned sense of wonder about the universe. I hope to see much more from this author in the future.”

Meanwhile, I’ve found a host of Pyr reviews that I mostly missed in his 2006 archive. Don says that the reviews “were written for Science Fiction Chronicle, but most were never used.” So let’s look at some of them here!

Fast Forward 1, edited by Yours Truly:

“Lou Anders has put together a collection of twenty original stories, designed to be the first in an ongoing series along the lines of Terry Carr’s Universe series or Damon Knight’s Orbit collections, although the emphasis appears to be on hard SF. There are stories by some of the best known writers in that sub-genre – Stephen Baxter, Larry Niven, Ken Macleod – as well as representatives of the more literary end of the spectrum – Gene Wolfe, Paul Di Filippo, Pamela Sargent. Non-theme anthologies are almost always more readable than specialized ones and this is no exception, very high quality throughout and enough variation to reward almost any reader’s taste.”

Sagramanda (A Novel of Near-Future India) by Alan Dean Foster:

Near future India is the setting for this surprisingly low key novel, surprising because there are a lot of violent things happening in it. The central plot is the theft by a scientist of a revolutionary new, but undescribed, discovery which he is trying to sell to a competitor… Nicely understated, and a depressing and unfortunately not entirely inaccurate portrayal of the future of much of the urban world, and not just India.”

Starship: Pirate by Mike Resnick:

“Resnick combines space opera, a touch of military, more than a touch of humor, and his usual talent for creating larger than life characters in this new series. Consistently good fun from beginning to end.”

Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson:

“This one might well have been packaged as a contemporary thriller rather than SF, and it’s a good one regardless of your mind set while you’re reading it.”

Infoquake by David Louis Edelman:

“A debut novel and the first in a trilogy, set in a future when multi-national corporations have become virtual governments… Lots of interesting speculation and a plausible and interesting plot. I found the prose a bit awkward from time to time but not so much that it significantly interfered with my enjoyment of the story.”

Paragaea: A Planetary Romance by Chris Roberson:

“The cover blurbs compare this to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett, and with some justification…. a bit difficult to take seriously at times, but if you just let go and enjoy the ride, Roberson conducts a pretty rousing tour of his universe.”

New Dreams for Old by Mike Resnick:

“I am so used to thinking of Mike Resnick as primarily a novelist that it came as a surprise to read through the table of contents of this new collection and discover how many of them I remembered. And how many of them have appeared on Hugo and Nebula ballots. Although a few have been previously collected, most appear in book form for the first time… Some are funny, some are dead serious. All are nifty. This is a big, representative, and above all very satisfying selection of his short fiction.”

Resolution: Book III of the Nulapeiron Sequence by John Meaney:

“The final volume of the Nulapeiron trilogy concludes this sequence set in a future so remote and different that it is sometimes difficult to identify with the characters and situations. Technology and mental powers have advanced to the point where they are indistinguishable from magic….You’ll have to suspend your disbelief pretty radically for this one, but if you can get yourself into the story, you’ll have a wild and exciting ride ahead of you.”

The Destiny Mask by Martin Sketchley:

“Pyr Books has been reprinting quite a few British and Australian novels which had not previously appeared in the US, including this, the second in a series. The setting is an interstellar empire and the plot is one familiar to readers even outside the genre, the rivalry between two twins, separated as babies and ignorant of each other’s existence, who become pivotal players in a battle between rebels and a repressive interplanetary dictatorship. I liked this one considerably better than its predecessor, The Affinity Trap. The characters are more realistic and the plot tighter and more involving.”

The Liberty Gun by Martin Sketchley

“I had a mixed reaction to the first two novels in the Structure series, but the third is a much more satisfying space adventure that mixes time travel, aliens, military SF, and general intrigue. …the situation is considerably more complicated than any of the characters realize. It takes a while to get into the story, but once you’re there, you won’t want out.”

Genetopia by Keith Brooke:

“Pyr has reprinted several British SF novels that have not previously been available in the US, including this one from 1999. Brooke should have been discovered earlier because he has definite talent… Many of the things Flint encounters are fascinating ideas, but after a while it becomes just a parade of wonders and readers may find themselves impatient to get to the destination.”

Note: Genetopia is an original novel, first published by Pyr. Don is apparently confusing it with a previously published short story of the same name. Meanwhile, with this profusion of Pyr reviews, Don has put my own personal archive of our books’ reviews over the 500 mark. And while I’m sure I have missed some somewhere, I’m happy to report that out of some 503 reviews I’ve tracked since we launched – appearing everywhere from tiny websites I’d never previously heard of to huge venues like the Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly – I’ve only logged 27 negative ones! Which is nice.

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