Reviews

Crossover Hits the (FantasyBook) Spot

Paul at FantasyBookSpot.com calls Joel Shepherd’s Crossover “very enjoyable,” and says:

“The prominent theme of Crossover is what makes a human, well, human, and what better way to explore this than through the mind of a lifelike android. It’s been explored countless times in myriad mediums. What makes Shepherd’s take different? His characters, especially Cassandra, they are what’s worth reading for. Check out Crossover; it’s a fun sci-fi thriller that is brimming with ideas and questions.”

Paul also notes the similarities to Masamune Shirow’s excellent graphic novel, Ghost in the Shell. What always impressed me about Ghost, both manga and anime, was the seemless integration of digital telepathy into – not just one or two protagonist’s heads – but to every citizen of the entire world of the future. Shirow gave us a world where every conversation happened on multiple levels – digital images and text annotations popping up via wireless cyberbrain-to-cyberbrain communication in every dialogue. He managed to demonstrate what a paradigm shift even everyday communication becomes when we are all chipped. While much of the look and feel of Ghost in the Shell found its way into cinema in its appropriation by The Matrix, I’d not seen literary or cinematic SF deal with this singularity in verbal & nonverbal communication before. Without being derivative, Shepherd’s Crossover impressed me in being the first SF (to my knowledge) to really take this onboard. That the book is loaded with sex and action sequences certainly doesn’t hurt, and it’s got wonderful characters and great world-building, but this was the aspect that first impressed me.

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Tigers and Monsters and Critics, Oh My!

Sandy Amazeen of Monsters and Critics on Alan Dean Foster’s Sagramanda:

“…gripping thriller set in India’s not too distant future. Foster’s adroit touch weaves tradition and technology together as he develops a fascinating range of antagonists negotiating Sagramanda’s back streets and fashionable neighborhoods. India’s diverse culture adds a nice layer of depth to this enjoyable, fast moving techno drama.”

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Infoquake Lives Up to the Praise

The Armchair Anarchist has pronounced over at Futurismic that David Louis Edelman’s Infoquake lives up to the “usual amount of praise and plaudits” that is has received:

“The hyperbole surrounding this novel seems justified – drawing on cyberpunk and singularitarian themes, it boldly places a banner for what is arguably a new sub-genre of science fiction. It may not be to everyone’s taste – fans of epic space opera or futuristic military thrillers might well find themselves uninspired by the lack of ‘sense of wonder’ and involved combat and battle scenes, and the nuts and bolts of the technologies at work (of which there are plenty) are rarely mentioned more than briefly and in passing. But in the light of recent debate over the comparative merits of ‘serious’ science fiction and the sort written with pure entertainment in mind, Infoquake sits squarely in the shifting and disputed borderland between these two poles of purpose. As an engaging fictional mirror of the modern world, written from an angle rarely used, this novel definitely marks Edelman as a writer to keep an eye on.”

Earlier, the wonderful Paul Cornell, author of British Summertime as well as many other works – including new episodes of the television shows Doctor Who and Robin Hood – weighed in with his thoughts on Edelman’s book:

“It stayed with me, kept on impressing me way after I’d finished it… Infoquake is a book about future boardroom battles, company tussles. Only three shots are fired in total, but at exactly the right time, because this is a thriller like Graham Greene wrote thrillers. Its setting is something I haven’t seen for a long time, a quite distant future that is nevertheless utterly plausible, and remains connected (unlike say, Dune), through history, to our own. The businesspeople in question write and sell software for the human body. The book answers Geoff Ryman’s manifesto about ‘Mundane SF’, that is, it presents a future where no unfeasible technology or situations (faster than light drives, alien contact, telepathy) exist. People are still people, history is still history. There has been no mythological upheaval (such as ‘the singularity’) of the kind that British SF culture seems to regard as certain, a near future event, the Revolution, the Rapture. Icky reality has not gone away. There are true believers, therefore, that will assert that the novel is simply mistaken. There is still money. Someone empties the bins. The world that is built is a society of humans, based on human needs, sociability, civilisation. It is not wildly far flung. It can read on first sight as being familiar, even parochial. That is because it is flung exactly as far as it should be. The thrill of the book is a thrill familiar to those of us who do business on the net and in fandom, the thrill of being a commercial (and this is the origin of the word) adventurer, someone who ventures capital. It’s about commerce and glamour, the edges and barriers created in social situations through nothing but personality. It’s conceptually exciting, the current expressed as the future and the future as a refreshing crash through the ranks of those who say there is none. The world depicted is not an ideal: it’s a complicated mess in which characters can only do their best. Exactly like it always has been and always will be. My one caveat is that when you read the first section of the book, you’ll wonder why I made all this fuss about it. It’s not the greatest start in literature. It prepares you for a book nowhere near as good as this one. And perhaps I could have done with a bigger conceptual wallop of elevating the stakes to a new level at the end. But this is the first of a trilogy, and I await book two missing the characters, referencing things in their terms (‘a memecorp like the BBC’) expecting such an elevation, certain of it. I have faith in this Mundane masterpiece.”

Update: Steve at the Eternal Night website agrees:

“This book grabbed me from the start… This book though should appeal to a wide readership, and no one who likes futuristic Philip K. Dick-ish science fiction should not be put off reading this book just because it revolves around programmers… This book however is anything but boring – it grips you from the start and leaves you at the end of the book wishing you had book two to hand.”

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Crossover Love @ Bookgasm

Ryun Patterson of Bookgasm manages to nail exactly what I like about the book when he says, “Joel Shepherd has written a cool book in Crossover, both a kick-ass android political action tale and a deconstruction of humanity, with both aspects are equally rewarding.”

After praising the book for its “ass-whooping” (obligatory in books about hot androids, natch), Patterson says, “It turns out that Shepherd has a few interesting ideas about what it means to be human, and as character after believable character is introduced and becomes a part of the quilt of Crossover’s central message, the impossible happens, and the combat is made that much more powerful because you start caring about everyone.”

Which is further proof that butt-kicking and head-scratching need not be mutually exclusive.

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Superman Gets Off Cheap

Joel Shepherd is interviewed over on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist concerning his hot new novel Crossover. They talk about his heroine Cassandra Kresnov, the “android cliche,” awards vs readers, genre vs literary snobbery, Masamune Shirow, and what’s wrong with Superman.

On the subject of writers he admires, Joel says: “CJ Cherryh was a big influence on me growing up, she was the first writer who demonstrated to me that head-burstlingly intelligent, and wickedly entertaining, were not mutually exclusive concepts.”

Amen.

And thanks to Pat for this comment: “Pyr Books are slowly but surely establishing themselves as a quality outfit in the publishing world. More and more, the Pyr logo is associated with quality products and great reading experiences.”

Thank you – that’s very nice to hear.

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Stomach-churning Alien Love

Now that’s a blurb.

The Liberty Gun: Book Three of the Structure Series

Martin Sketchley. Pyr, $15 paper (360p) ISBN 978-1-59102-492-7

In Sketchley’s gritty third Structure novel (after The Destiny Mask and The Affinity Trap), intrepid time travelers Alexander Delgado and his former lover and intelligence officer, Ashala (aka “Ash”), must contend on the war-ravaged planet Seriatt with the conquering Sinz, a bizarre species consisting of three races—avian, amphibian and humanoid—some of whom can change shape. Delgado and Ash meet Cowell, a native vilume (“the most mysterious of the three Seriattic sexes,” not to be confused with the three Sinz races), who joins them in the battle to prevent the Sinz from attacking Earth next. That Cowell later becomes erotically attached to the humans complicates their mission. Sketchley excels at depicting the futility of endless cultural conflicts, but readers should be prepared for some stomach-churning alien love and birthing scenes. (Nov.)

–Publishers Weekly, September 18, 2006

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Sueños Nuevos Por Viejos

Steven H. Silver’s Reviews has posted an enthusiastic review of Mike Resnick’s short story collection, New Dreams for Old:

New Dreams for Old provides an excellent introduction to the range of Resnick’s writing and his interests. His transparent writing style allows the reader to fully enjoy the wide variety of stories, which range from personal introspective tales to galaxy-spanning adventures and morality plays. This collection, with ten Hugo-nominated stories (and two winners) and three Nebula-nominated stories is a wonderful addition to any sf collection and a reminder of the vast scope of modern science fiction.”

Meanwhile, just for fun, compare this cover of the Spanish language editon of New Dreams for Old, Sueños Nuevos Por Viejos, to the original cover art by Stephan Martiniere. Hmmm, something familiar about this…

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The Crooked State of Genre Reviews

Gabe Chouinard has posted at his site Urban Drift a long post that he styles a “Reviewerfesto Presented as an Excursive Essay Which May Actually Contain or Consist of a Review.” Gabe is lamenting what he sees as the sad state of online genre book reviewing, using Sean Williams’s The Crooked Letter (and to a lesser degree Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora – which I’m only about 40 pages into myself, but loving so far) as an example. Along the way he takes a few pot shots at other reviewers, including a few we’ve quoted here.

Now, I’ve got no desire to be drawn into the controversy about online reviewing to which Gabe alludes, nor is this the proper forum for it. Plus, while it’s true that I’d rather not see our own marketing copy repurposed undigested as the intro to a reviewer’s post, as a still relatively new imprint, the obstacle we face is obscurity not hyperbole. At this stage, we are grateful for every effort to help spread the word, and splitting hairs over the critical and linguistic strengths of individual critics and bloggers is best left to others. I will say I am opposed to the notion that every review must contain something negative simply for the sake of not being completely positive – and this is an opinion I formed when I was a journalist in Los Angeles in the mid-to-late 90s, not something born of my current position. At the same time, I think Gabe is essentially correct that a sea of hyperbole washes over deaf ears, whereas in-depth analysis may be more effective at driving reader interest. Certainly, Amazon maintains that good and bad reader reviews generates more curiosity about a title than straight positives – and while I don’t know how to test this, certainly there is credence to the idea being that everyone knows not every book is for every person, and controversy causes potential readers to wonder into which side of the debate they themselves would fall. I suppose a lot of it has to do with why you read reviews to begin with. I read John Clute, for example, when I want to contemplate the genre thinking eruditely about itself. This is the same impulse that lead me to subscribe to Science Fiction Studies, and the impulse behind my own nonfiction anthology Projections: Science Fiction in Literature & Film. But generally I read reviews – in conjunction with interviews – to help me keep abreast of more writers and novels that I possibly have time to read, to stay informed of what everyone else is doing, and to see if there are any new writers I might want to work with in anthologies and elsewhere. (Related: when I began working in science fiction professionally in 1995, I felt that I gave up my right to shield myself from spoilers.)

So, with the caveat that Gabe’s diatribe will have some shaking their heads in anger and others nodding theirs in agreement, and that his opinions while appreciated do not necessarily reflect my own, let’s sift through the “reviewerfesto” for some opinions about The Crooked Letter. While his review is not 100% positive – indeed a major point of his revewerfesto is to decry the 100% positive review – Gabe says some very interesting and perceptive things:

The Crooked Letter has a lot of things going for it, not least of which is its position at the fringes of generic epic fantasy. To all appearances, Williams has written a densely plot-driven adventure novel a la any comparable Gigantor Fantasy Series. Yet this is a sly and effective bit of sleight of hand, because The Crooked Letter plays in a different ballpark altogether than, say, Terry Brooks’ latest novel. Hidden beneath the gloss of genre rests a multilayered treastise that presents a rather unique version of reality and the afterlife. At its heart, epic fantasy is a very morally conservative mode of fiction, concerned with maintaining the status quo of the author’s subcreated world. Usually, such fantasy relies upon a (tired-out, naive) clearly cut distinction between Good and Evil. Occasionally, however, a novel will come along that challenges the simplistic notions of most generic fantasy by presenting a multifarious, mature examination of morality, spirituality, mythology and magic. The Crooked Letter is one of those latter novels.”

Now, it might be worth noting here that Sean Williams wrote The Crooked Letter not only as the first book of a four book quartet, collectively known as The Books of the Cataclysm, but as a backstory for three different series. Before TCL, he published (currently only in Australia) a Young Adult series called The Books of Change, which first introduced his fractured, outback world of Stone Mages and Sky Wardens, a sort of Mad Max meets Earthsea environment of wizards and dune buggies. Then he wrote The Crooked Letter, which begins in the present (or in one of those 5-minutes-into-now type presents) and which explains how our world broke to become his world. The second book in The Books of the Cataclysm, The Blood Debt, jumps ahead about a millennium to his broken desert earth, picking up as it does so some of the characters – now adults – first introduced in his Books of the Change. (Note: I read the first two books of the adult series before I read the first book of the YA series and had no trouble following. You shouldn’t either.) A series for middle readers, The Broken Land, will follow in 2007 (again, in Australia only as far as I know at this time).

So, The Crooked Letter is backstory for all three of these “trilogies.” In fact, we debated publishing it as a stand alone and making The Books of the Cataclysm a simple trilogy, but ultimately decided against this – in part because the works already existed as a quartet in their Australian mass-market editions. Another possibility would have been to have published an omnibus of The Books of the Change as book two of a Cataclysm quintet, but the tonal shift from the Vellum slash Perdido Street Station-esque sophistication of The Crooked Letter to the lighter YA narrative of The Books of the Change, as well as the book long break before the events of TCL picked back up, would probably have made for an uneven read. Anyway, that’s just roads not taken and water under the bridge, fun to think about but neither here nor there, etc… but hopefully it gives you a sense of why TCL is such a sophisticated foundational work. If I hadn’t just referenced The Silmarillion in another post, I might be tempted to invoke it here.

But where Gabe intriguies me is here, where he puts his finger on the way in which Williams gets off the Campbell bandwagon, and in so doing seems to carve out something truly mythic:

“The Crooked Letter may look and read like any other ‘epic fantasy’ on the shelves… Most fantasy borrows liberally from the archetypes mapped out by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, to the point of cliche. But Sean Williams digs deeper, creating a Jungian puzzlebox of not cultural appropriation, but cultural redistribution, cultural recombination. At once drawing upon world mythology and remixing it from a non-religious point of view, Williams manages to create a working mythology for the whole world, no matter what country the reader may hail from. Williams fills The Crooked Letter with allusions and samples compulsively, DJ Z-Trip on paper. Quotations litter the text, in epigraphs and exposition, building a separate realm that exists somewhere above and beyond the text itself, like the footnotes in Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The brothers’ journeys take the Aboriginal walkabout and transforms it into a literalized metaphor, where the spiritual journey is brought to the fore and enacted throughout the novel. For the careful reader… this journey creates a powerful exploration of the possibility of the spiritual while divorced from the dogma.”

Yes, that’s it. Particularly the line “drawing upon world mythology and remixing it from a non-religious point of view.” Williams – the atheist son of a minister with a fascination with comparative religion, set out with nothing less than the aim of constructing a believable “second realm” that could serve as the ur-reality that informed every world religion, as if his afterworld dimension leaked through imperfectly into human consciousness, and the plethora of spiritual systems that we have here is the result. In fact, and I hope he will forgive my saying so, we’ve joked about him accidentally spawning a cult. As he says, “First Church of the Cataclysm, perhaps? With the stated aim of stopping alien predators from eating our souls when we die by teaching acolytes the psychic equivalent of karate in order to prolong their afterlives? Hmmm. That’s certainly no nuttier than anything else out there. “

I’m also interested in Gabe’s thoughts about cultural redistribution, especially in light of this discussion on Vellum author Hal Duncan’s blog. (Disclaimer: I read Hal’s original post on the subject, but I link to his most recent, which is, like a lot of Hal’s pontification, lonnnnnnnnng and therefore as yet unread by me.)

But getting back to Gabe:

“Unlike stock-in-trade fantasy, The Crooked Letter has resonance, relevance. There is a message here that delves far deeper than a generic, simplistic Good is Good, Evil is Evil message. Compared to the fluffery of most fantasy on the shelves, The Crooked Letter is a masterpiece despite its minor flaws.”

Which is pretty much my opinion too, and what attracted me to this series in the first place.

Finally, Gabe also lays down some Pyr praise, which, after the long post above, I hope I can be excused for repeating here:

“Pyr has quickly and stylishly presented itself as the field’s All-New All-Good Industry Midlist, giving home to a plenitude of excellent works… Pyr represents a new kind of vitality in the field… Pyr releases, unlike most small press editions, are widely distributed to mainstream bookstores, thereby ensuring that perhaps – just perhaps – a curious reader may discover gems like Chris Roberson’s marvelous Paragaea, or the spectacular achievement of Ian McDonald’s River of Gods.”

Let’s hope. And thanks to everyone who helps spread the word, with or sans hyperbole.

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Love X 3 from the LJ

This from the LIBRARY JOURNAL September 15, 2006 Issue:

Foster, Alan Dean. Sagramanda: A Novel of Near-Future India. Pyr:Prometheus. Oct. 2006. c.290p. ISBN 1-59102-488-9. $25. SF Taneer is an Indian scientist who has stolen a secret project code from a multinational corporation. On the run from both the organization and his unforgiving father, he meets and falls for Dephali, a beautiful woman of India’s untouchable class. Add a farmer-turned-merchant, a Kali-worshipping Frenchwoman, a chief inspector, and a man-eating tiger and the result is a fast-paced urban adventure set in a near-future India of high technology and desperate people. The prolific author of the Pip and Flinx novels (his latest, Trouble Magnet, publishes in November) adds to his considerable body of work with this polished hybrid of page-turning action and taut suspense that belongs in large collections. [For another novel about a future India, see Ian McDonald’s River of Gods.-Ed.] SF/FANTASY By Jackie Cassada, Asheville Buncombe Lib. Syst., NC

Meaney, John. To Hold Infinity. Pyr: Prometheus. Sept. 2006. c.529p. ISBN 1-59102-489-7. $25. SF When newly widowed biologist Yoshiko Sunadomari travels to the planet Fulgar to reconnect with her estranged son Tetsuo, she discovers that he has run afoul of the Luculenti, the planet’s genetically changed ruling elite, and is now wanted for murder. Yoshiko undertakes a mission to clear Tetsuo’s name, putting herself directly in the path of Rafael Garcia de la Vega, whose nefarious schemes hold the planet in social and political turmoil. The author of the Nulapeiron Sequence (Paradox; Context; Resolution) has crafted a far-reaching vision of a future filled with potentials for both darkness and light, as seen through the eyes of a remarkably gifted and devoted woman. An excellent choice for most sf collections. SF/FANTASY By Jackie Cassada, Asheville Buncombe Lib. Syst., NC

Williams, Sean. The Blood Debt. Pyr: Prometheus. (Books of the Cataclysm: Two). Oct. 2006. c.476p. ISBN 1-59102-493-5. $25. FANTASY Sal Hrvati’s estranged father has brought a creature from the Void Beneath into the world, and now Sal and his friends embark on a quest to find his errant father. Their journey takes them on a search for magical artifacts on the floor of the great crack in the earth known as the Divide. The second installment in the author’s “Books of the Cataclysm” series (after The Crooked Letter) follows the adventures of three companions who battle the unknown to save their families. Set partly in the modern world and partly in a fantasy environment drawn from archetypal myths and legends, this epic belongs in most fantasy collections. SF/FANTASY By Jackie Cassada, Asheville Buncombe Lib. Syst., NC

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Justina in the NYRSF

The New York Review of Science Fiction, August 2006 issue, has this to say about Justina Robson’s Silver Screen:

“The major strength of Silver Screen is its central character, Anjuli. She is short and cubby, sure that her only talent is her eidetic memory, that she is otherwise unworthy of her role in AI research and her position among her friends. Yet, as Beckett might say, she goes on. Her confusion and insecurity make her determination more interesting than any glamour or daring would, and the novel’s focus on this character, rounded in more ways than her figure, gives it a heft that solidifies its exploration of alternate intelligences.”

Which, I think, is what makes Justina Robson’s writing so wonderful – hard SF, well crafted female characters, and, as New York Times reviewer David Itzkoff recently commented about another of her books, “the first thing a reader notices about her work is the exquisite precision and thoughtfulness of her writing.”

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