Timescape

Gregory Benford
Completed 9/28/2020, Reviewed 9/28/2020
2 stars

I did not enjoy this book.  It’s classified as hard science fiction, and yes, it’s very hard.  The author goes into excruciating detail about tachyons, hypothetical faster-than-light particles, used to communicate across time.  The book is generally about the scientists from the future attempting to send messages to scientists from the past to get them to do something to avoid an ecological collapse.  But what I felt this book was really about was scientists and their lives inside and outside the lab.  According to this book, it’s not usually pleasant.   There’s in-fighting, jealousy, power struggles, and many problems at home.  Despite this book being published in 1980, it felt more like a book out of the golden age of science fiction, with its racism, sexism, and homophobia.  These are relatively mild except for the depictions of women which are so 1950’s.  This book won the Nebula, British SF, and Campbell Awards.  It was not nominated for a Hugo.

The plot follows two timelines.  The first is 1998 where several scientists at Cambridge are sending signals in the form of Morse Code via tachyons to the second timeline, 1962 (18 years to and from the book’s publication date).  In 1998, there is an algae bloom rapidly spreading in the ocean due to certain long chain molecule pesticides and the destruction of the rain forests.  The message they are sending to 1962 contains details of the pesticides and warnings about what their effects will be on the future.  They are also trying to get funding to maintain their experiments at a time when scientific funding is hard to come by as it is being diverted to fight the ecological disaster.  In 1962, one scientist and his grad student at UC La Jolla discover these messages as interference in their own experiments, but their department head doesn’t believe in it.  The two continue gathering and studying the messages despite being warned to abandon the task and focus on eliminating the noise from their original experiment. 

I liked the basic gist of the plot.  It’s well-conceived and not badly executed.  I actually found the writing to be quite good.  I may not have enjoyed the content, but I thought it was written well.  What I didn’t care for were the subplots, particularly those revolving around the relationships of the scientist, almost all of whom were white men, and their wives, girlfriends, or sexual partners.   The wives of the British scientists were good, long-suffering housewives.  The live-in girlfriend of the American scientist came across as somewhat liberated considering they weren’t married but she was also a Barry Goldwater supporter.  There were a few women scientists, one in 1962 and one in 1998, but only the latter was featured enough to know something about her, that she was bisexual with stereotypical butch tendencies.  The worst subplot followed the despicable Ian Peterson, the government guy directly responsible for deciding the funding for the 1998 project.  He believed every woman was fair game, including the wives of the scientists he was working with. 

That brings me to characterization.  This was interesting because even though there was a lot of background given for Peterson and the main scientists, I didn’t feel like I got to know any of them.  Renfrow and Bernstein were tortured and for that matter, kind of whiny.  Bernstein has perhaps the fullest background, complete with Jewish mother and goy girlfriend conflicts.  I didn’t empathize with either one, although in the beginning, I came close with Bernstein.  I’ve already described Peterson and the women characters, all basically very cardboard. 

The racism is one incident, but it’s there and pretty offensive.  One of the main characters sees a black man hanging around people (presumably all white) waiting for a bus in the rain and the character assumes, in this case rightly so, that he’s a pickpocket.  Granted, there were probably extremely few black people in academic circles in La Jolla in 1962, but there are also none in 1998 in England or California.  The homophobia was quite stereotypical as well.  Besides the butch bisexual women, one of the characters makes reference to how all waiters are gay.  Well, at least the author didn’t comment on limp wrists and swishing behinds.  Still, ugh.

I give this book two stars out of five.  Just because the writing is decent and the science is detailed doesn’t make a book good.  I need to have engaging characters.  I need to find the subplots interesting.  I’d rather have no references at all to blacks and LGBTQ characters than offensive ones.  That way, I could have pretended that the author was writing in the 40’s or 50’s.  I can’t believe this book beat others like The Snow Queen and Shadow of theTorturer for two of the aforementioned awards.  After reading this book, I’m not likely to read anything else by Benford. 

A Spectral Hue

Craig Laurance Gidney
Completed 9/22/2020, Reviewed 9/22/2020
5 stars

When I began this book, I was a bit disoriented.  I loved Gidney’s Sea, Swallow Me and was fully expecting to love this one.  Expectations ran high.  To my dismay, it started a little slowly.  The book is told from multiple points of view and it took me quite a few chapters to really get what was going on.  Then the plot started to sink in and I got it.  I got the layers of meaning, the smart prose, and the colorful characters.  It all wove together into a terrific, non-traditional ghost story, using artistic obsession as its medium.  This book was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2019. 

There’s a museum in the tiny town of Shimmer, Maryland that features quilts, paintings, and assorted other forms of art by people who were not trained artists.  The quilts were made by a young slave woman, the paintings by a drifter with a skin condition, bottle art by someone living off the grid of the 1950s, etc.  All the art pieces have a common color in them, a purplish-pinkish hue.  The people who created the art were all obsessed with their work and this color.  People who see the art are affected in different ways.  Some see nothing but amateurish drivel.  Some see the beginnings of a modern art movement.  A select few see a magic and become obsessed artists themselves and it all points to something in the marsh that surrounds the town.

As I noted above, there are a number of characters through whom the story is told.  Xavier is a grad student who comes to Shimmer to study the quilts.  He first saw one of the quilts, made by Hazel the young slave girl, at a party and became obsessed with them.  Linc is a young gay former crystal meth addict who was kicked out of his home.  He drifts into Shimmer and becomes a janitor at the museum.  Iris was a psychic since childhood, seeing spectres and auras.  She lives in Shimmer, her ex-partner having passed away about a year before.  All these people come to experience the obsession with the art in one way or another.  There is another voice, that of the spectre itself, only known as Fuchsia, who seems to be the source of the obsession.

The character development is quite good for such a short novel.  It’s only 177 pages, but we get a lot of personality out of the characters.  In addition to the characters noted above, we also find out a lot about Hazel through the narration by Fuschia, learning how she deals with being a slave and how she comes to make the quilts. 

The book also deals with race, sexuality, and slavery.  Most of the main characters are black and gay or lesbian.  It’s not pronounced, but racism and homophobia are part of some of the characters’ experiences.  The characterization is subtly written with passing references to things like physical features and gaydar.  More dramatic is the story of Hazel’s enslavement, though she has “kind” owners who don’t whip their slaves at the drop of a hat or cut off fingers or limbs.  They “only” box their ears, sell their children, and beat them when the master’s drunk. 

I give this book five stars out of five.  I really empathized with the characters, feeling their growing compulsion to create.  I especially felt this with Iris and Linc’s stories, although I wish got more of Linc.  His story enthralled me the most, finding it an intense ride.  I loved Gidney’s descriptions of the creation of the art by the different main and secondary characters.  And I love Gidney’s writing.  His prose is spare, but he creates vivid images of the people and their art.   I think you have to read this book slowly because you don’t want to miss any of the words.  It took me about as long to read this book as the it did the last one which was a hundred pages longer.  The beginning is a slow burn, but then I didn’t want it to end.  I just wanted to savor the experiences of the creation of art and the passion of the people. 

The Lesson

Cadwell Turnbull
Completed 9/20/2020, Reviewed 9/20/2020
4 stars

I found this book by a recommendation of an author I follow on Twitter.  I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it.  It’s a first novel by an African-American native of the US Virgin Islands.  His previous works were short fiction pieces, a few of which have been included in anthologies, including Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019.   It has strong prose without being pretentious.  It has a fairly large cast of characters, much like a disaster movie of the ‘70s – well not that many, but the plot follows quite a few characters to tell the story.  It’s short, but packs a big punch with the horrors of colonialism and slavery as themes.  It wasn’t nominated for anything, but received a lot of good press, and I expect to see very good things coming from this author in the future.  I think he’s one to follow.

The story takes place on St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands.  In the very near future, an alien craft comes to earth and hovers above the island.  The aliens say they’ve come in peace, wanting to give us new cures for diseases and new technologies in return for peaceful cohabitation.  However, when someone crosses an alien, it quickly and mercilessly kills that person.  This causes misunderstanding and heightens tensions resulting in more violence.  Mera is the Ynaa ambassador to Earth.  She has been around a long time, posing as a slave and after emancipation, as a healer.  Now that the full contingent of Ynaa have arrived, she acts as an intermediary with the people of St. Thomas.  She hires Derrick, a local young man, as her secretary.  With the rise of violence and misunderstanding, Derrick is believed to be a traitor by the locals.  The story follows his childhood friend and one-time girlfriend Patrice and the members of both of their families from the few weeks before the Ynaa arrival to five years later.  It also gives us vignettes of Mera’s previous time on Earth in the 17-, 18-, and 1900s. 

The characterization is pretty good considering the number of characters and the shortness of the book (barely 290 pages).  I felt I could empathize with most of the characters, particularly Derrick, Patrice and her father Jackson.  Jackson is a teacher who retires after the arrival of the Ynaa.  He and his wife Aubrey split and Aubrey falls in love with the local veterinarian Alice.  While Aubrey has moved on with her life, Jackson struggles to find meaning and direction in his.  Mera the alien ambassador is a bit wooden, but it works in that she’s trying to maintain emotional distance from humans, and also because there’s a sort of wooden way she and the other aliens walk and move.  The aliens wear a mask of human features, but can generally be picked out of a crowd by the way they walk. 

The story is really gripping.  It starts with a brief introduction of the major characters in their lives right before the invasion, then jumps to five years later when tensions are high and humans have been murdered after attacking the aliens.  Even with the bouncing timeline to give Mera’s background on Earth for the past couple hundred years, the author maintains a brisk pace and the tensions increase. 

The metaphor for colonialism is pretty obvious, sort of the way District 9 was an obvious metaphor for apartheid.  But it works well, particularly as the author goes back to a slave revolt during the Dutch occupation of the island in the 1700s.  It also calls to question the morality of working with the occupiers in the character of Derrick who is Mera’s secretary.  He took the job because it was high paying and because he was infatuated with this first contact.  But is he the traitor that everyone says he is.  Even his grandmother kicks him out of the house for getting too close to Mera.  He’s sort of like the tax collectors of Roman-occupied Israel in Jesus’ time. 

I give this book four stars out of five.  I think it’s a terrific first contact novel with a different setting in a culture we have too little exposure to, considering it’s part of the United States.  I think the book is well written and pretty imaginative.  In the acknowledgments, Turnbull says that he was a kid with lots of strange ideas.  After reading this book, I’m hoping he gets to write down more of his strange ideas. 

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

 

Michael Chabon
Completed 9/19/2020, Reviewed 9/20/2020
4 stars 

I didn’t think I’d like this book because I disliked his Hugo and Nebula winning The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  What I disliked about that book was the prose.  It was overwrought and pretentious.  I had similar feelings with this book.  I found the prose often interfered with the story telling and dialogue, going off on tangents to provide color or context to a thought or scenario.  It still felt pretentious, but not quite as overwrought.  I thought the story was much more interesting and I was able to retain the thought or statement that was interrupted by the prose.  In high school, I went through a phase of reading a lot of Jewish-American literature as introduced by my senior year English teacher.  I loved Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth especially.  This book was right up my alley of this genre.  Speaking of genres this book was nominated for the Gaylactic Spectrum Award in 2001 and won the Pulitzer for 2000.  It’s not science fiction or fantasy.  It’s more meta, being about comic books, sort of in the same vein that Big Bang Theory is about people who love science fiction and fanasy.

The story is about Josef Kavalier, a Czech Jew whose parents send him to America to earn money to get them out of their Nazi-occupied homeland.  After a harrowing escape, he comes to live with his aunt and cousin, Sammy Klayman, in Brooklyn.  Sam discovers that Joe is a talented artist and convinces him to collaborate in creating comic books, a new craze that’s sweeping the country.  They get a job writing a comic book at the novelties company Sam works at, after convincing the owners how lucrative it would be to get into the comic book business rather than just advertising in it.  The comic is a hit and they launch their new careers.  Then life happens:  Joe struggles to raise enough money to get his family out of Prague, he falls in love, Sam struggles with figuring out his sexuality, and the US enters World War II. 

The plot is quite massive.  It covers a span of twenty years with only one leap of years.  It goes back and forth in time to give background on Joe and Sam’s childhoods.  Joe was an apprentice escape artist and magician.  Sam had a distant father who was a vaudeville and/or side-show strongman.  When Joe comes in the US, he and Sam become instant friends.  Together they navigate the world of the late 1930s.  The story continues into the 1940s when Joe joins the navy and is stationed in Antarctica and Sammy gets married to a woman.  Then it leaps to the mid-1950s, with Joe having disappeared and Sam living a suburban lifestyle with a diminishing career.

The characterization is impressive.  I really liked the main characters, Joe and Sam.  I thought they were very well fleshed out.  Joe struggles with his guilt over leaving his family behind in Prague and not becoming instantly rich enough to get them out quickly.  He seems to love his new life, but never feels like he is home.  He falls in love with an artist he meets comically when he breaks into a friend of a friend’s drawing studio.  Rosa is one of the few female characters in the book.  She’s the only major one, besides Sam’s mother who only plays a prominent role at the beginning of the book.  Sam gets a lot of development as the brains behind the duo and as a closeted gay man trying to navigate pre-Stonewall era New York.

I give this book four stars out of five.  I was actually dreading reading this book because of my previous experience with Chabon and his haughty prose.  But I actually was able to get over it within about a hundred pages and found myself only slightly annoyed with it as the book went on.  I don’t know if I would have given it the Pulitzer, but I haven’t read any of the other nominees.  It’s a long book with a sprawling story; it’s over six hundred pages long.  I was captivated by the story:  does Joe get his family out of Prague, does Sam get a guy, do they win fame and fortune from their comic, does anyone live happily ever after.  I wasn’t emotionally devastated by the book, though I had empathy for the characters, perhaps because they were emotionally disengaged a lot of the time, as was stereotypical for men, particularly in the ‘30s and ‘40s.  I would have to say, though, I would give Chabon another chance and read more of his oeuvre, even though it’s not in the science fiction/fantasy genre, or even meta. 

The Courts of Chaos

Roger Zelazny

Completed 9/13/2020, Reviewed 9/13/2020

4 stars

This was a rousing conclusion to the Corwin Cycle of the Chronicles of Amber.  It had action, adventure, magical beings, and a dramatic ultimate scene.  The prose was a little more flowery, but still pretty tight.  All the characters were well established and acted in keeping with who they are.  My only complaint was that the pacing was a little uneven in the middle.  There’s a long set of scenes where Corwin has to journey from Amber to the Courts of Chaos.  He meets many magical beings, but in between these scenes, the descriptions of the lands Corwin was going through as well as his state of being got a little dry.  Otherwise, I really enjoyed this book and found the ending to be quite exhilarating. 

Warning:  Spoilers from the previous books follow!

The book picks up with Corwin back in Amber with his father Oberon back under the guise of Ganelon.  Oberon gives orders for all his children on what to do while he tries to repair the Pattern that Brand has corrupted.  The Pattern is the design from which all realities and shadows emanate.  Oberon offers Corwin the throne of Amber, but he refuses, realizing he doesn’t really want it anymore.  So Oberon sends him off to the Courts of Chaos to do battle using the Jewel of Judgement once Oberon is done with it in his quest to repair the Pattern.  Oberon believes whether he succeeds or fails with the Pattern, the task will kill him.  Corwin begins his journey, eventually receiving the Jewel from a red raven his father created.  Thinking his father failed, he realizes he must try to create a new pattern and return the universe to normalcy.

One of my favorite parts of this book was Corwin coming across the magical beings.  In one scene, he meets a cave of leprechauns who are about to eat his horse.  In another, he makes a staff from the talking tree named Ygg, an allusion to the Yggdrasil, the tree of life, of Norse Mythology.  Then he meets and accompanied by a talking raven named Hugi, an allusion to Huginn, one of the ravens of Odin, also of Norse Mythology.  I’ve always liked how Zelazny borrowed from different religions for his books, like Greek Mythology in This Immortal and Hindu and Buddhism in Lord of Light. 

I also liked the dramatic ending of the book.  I won’t give it away, of course, but I thought Zelazny’s descriptions were very vivid for the fantastical events that took place.  The action was tightly written as well. 

Overall, this series was quite a thrill ride.  There’s definitely a change in tone as the series progresses.  The first two books, Nine Princes in Amber and The Guns of Avalon, are very typical Zelazny.  The Sign of the Unicorn, however, is the book that feels different, becoming more philosophical in nature, and a little slower paced.  The Hand of Oberon continues this philosophical tone but picks up with the action and the tightness of the prose, continuing and culminating in this final book.  My understanding is that the second half of the Chronicles, the Merlin Cycle, again has a different tone and feel, it being published after a seven-year gap, between 1985 and 1991.

I give this book four stars out of five.  The book is a worthy conclusion to an amazingly complex and imaginative work.  I’m glad I finally read it.  I think I’m going to save the Merlin Cycle for next year, giving myself a break and a chance to be open to the differences in its tone and style compared to these books. 

The Hand of Oberon

Roger Zelazny

Completed 9/10/2020, Reviewed 9/11/2020

4 stars

The fourth book of the Chronicles of Amber was better than Sign of the Unicorn, the third.  It combined the action of the first two with the introspectiveness of the third.  It’s prosy but fast-paced.  A lot happens in this book, and the intrigue is fairly intense.  Many of things we learned in book three are corrected as more of Corwin’s brothers and sisters finally begin to talk to him.  And the intrigue surrounds the possible apocalyptic end of Amber.  I really liked this book and am looking forward to the conclusion of the Corwin Cycle of the series. 

Warning:  Spoilers from the previous books follow!

In the last book, Corwin, Random, and Ganelon find the primal Pattern on which all of Amber and the Shadows are derived.  They discover that it has been damaged and this is what has created the Black Road that allows the creatures of Chaos to come through.  The damage has been caused by spilt blood.  They conclude that it was the blood of Martin, Random’s son, because they find a tarot card with Martin’s picture on it with a dagger through it.  They also realize by the style of the card that it was Brand’s card.  Random and Ganelon go searching for Martin to see if he’s still alive and Corwin tries to find out how to mend the Pattern.  He goes back to the dungeon where he was once held captive, finds the design drawn on the dungeon wall and used by the sorcerer Dworkin to teleport.  Corwin goes through the design and finds Dworkin who is in a moment of lucidity.  He presses Dworkin to explain how to fix the Pattern.  It requires the Jewel of Judgement.  Corwin goes after the Jewel, hoping to get it before Brand who seems bent on destroying Amber and recreating it so he can rule reality. 

This book is definitely intense and very complex.  I’m grateful there was a detailed summary on Wikipedia to refresh my memory on some of the details.  The book’s strength is its prose, which is still very tight, even with all the exposition.  And despite being the fourth book in the Cycle, there’s still more character development of the secondary characters.  We finally begin to get a better feel of Julian and Fiona as they explain their roles in the intrigue surrounding Brand and Eric’s battle for the throne of Amber.  There’s also a big exposition by Martin who gives us the backstory on how he grew up away from the family and then stabbed by Brand. 

One thing I missed until I read the Wikipedia article is that Zelazny makes a cameo appearance in the book.  Corwin comes upon a guard smoking a pipe and writing a book.  As the guard describes the book, it sounds a lot like a general description of the Amber books.  I had gotten that part, but missed that the guard’s name was Roger.  I guess I was reading too fast.  In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious. 

I don’t have much else to add, as is common for me when I read a series, especially one as long as this one.  I’ll just say that I give this book four stars out of five and that I look forward to reading the last book today.  Then I think I’ll take a long break before I read the Merlin Cycle, which is the last five books of the series. 

Sign of the Unicorn

Roger Zelazny

Completed 9/9/2020, Reviewed 9/9/2020

3 stars

The third book of Amber has less action than the first two.  It’s set up as a murder mystery.  It has a lot of explanations, conversations, and meetings.  I found it much slower paced and tougher to get into.  There’s a lot of tell me versus show me going on, and while it is written well, it didn’t have the excitement of the first two books.  The Amber universe is pretty much built, so there is not as much wonder.  The writing also did not seem as tight, a lot wordier in the expositions and ruminations.  I felt like Zelazny was much more introspective in this book, even being (comically) self-referential in one scene.

Warning:  Spoilers from the previous books follow!

With Eric dead from wounds acquired in the battle with the creatures of Chaos, Corwin has become the regent of Amber.  Life is still not easy for him, as he has found the body of his brother Caine, and feels that he is being set up for the murder.  He confides in Random, who gives us the back story of how he was living in a Shadow called Texorami when he received a cry for help from brother Brand.  Random went to save Brand, but was stopped by a dragon-like creature and spined human-like creatures.  Random escapes from them and hides with Flora and Corwin, as we had seen in the first book.  One of this type of spined creature is the same type that killed Caine.  Corwin gathers the remaining siblings and tries to rescue Brand, only to have him stabbed by someone as soon as they bring him back.  The siblings try to figure out who plotted Caine’s death and stabbed Brand, and possibly who killed their father Oberon.  

Although there is a lot of exposition in this book, it does provide some additional characterization.  Through it, we learn a lot more about Random and Brand.  We also get insight into Gerard during an altercation with Corwin and as he cares for the stabbed Brand.  We get a little more exposure to the sisters, but still not much.  I also felt like we lost Ganelon, Corwin’s sidekick.  He only has a few scenes, the largest of which is as a device to get Corwin to explain the complex line of succession of the siblings to the throne of Amber. 

In terms of wonder, there is one item that receives a lot of attention, the Jewel of Judgement.  It was worn by King Oberon, as well as by Eric when he claimed the throne.  Now Corwin has it.  Among its many powers is the control over the weather.  But sister Fiona warns Corwin that not all the powers are known and some are deadly.  It seems to be powered by the life force of the wearer, making people and things around him to appear to slow down.  It is said that when people turn to stone, the wearer is near death. 

I was a little disappointed with this book, perhaps because I’m reading the Corwin cycle consecutively and this book has a much different flavor than the first two books.  There are more dreams, visions, and traveling between Shadows.  I had trouble discerning these from reality several times.  And I had to read the last few pages twice to understand the setup for the next book.  Because of this as well as because of all the exposition, I give this book three stars out of five.  I’m hoping in the next book, the action picks up, now that this book has filled a lot of the knowledge gaps from the previous books.