(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although I was a huge fan of "cyberpunk" author William Gibson when younger, I must admit that I haven't read anything by him since 1996's Idoru, mostly because the four novels he's written since then have all been contemporary thrillers with little science-fiction in them, which is simply something I'm not really that interested in; so when I heard that his newest novel, last winter's The Peripheral, was a return for him to his sci-fi roots, I was excited to pick it up, and now that I have I can confidently state that I was not disappointed at all. More Virtual Light than Neuromancer, the dual storylines take place a mere 30 years in the future and 70 years after that, making great use of current cutting-edge subjects to deliver what on the one hand is a fascinating day-after-tomorrow story about an America in deep decline; but that's part of the fascinating nature of this book, that in the world of The Peripheral, a series of cataclysmic events happen soon after the storyline half that's set 30 years from now, in which the vast majority of human race dies even while the remaining few succeed in the kind of advanced science indistinguishable from magic, making the part set 100 years from now seem like far-future sci-fi, not only to us but to the hard-partying redneck military veterans we follow in the first storyline.
It's this commingling of time periods that's at the heart of this book's fascinating plot; essentially, through a development that is barely understood, the 100-year-future characters of Post-Apocalypse London figure out a way to contact and communicate with our blue-collar heroes from the 30-year-future America, even while the quantum disruption ensures that the two worlds now exist as two different alternative timelines, neatly eliminating the tricky subject of whether actions in the "past" will affect those characters currently living in the "future;" and while this is first done just as a lark by bored rich celebrities who like saying that they have a literal ghost from the past virtually acting as one of their bodyguards, soon the intrusion into each other's timelines becomes an unstoppable mess that threatens to destroy both versions of Earth. Featuring Gibson's trademarked blend of mind-blowing concepts introduced with no explanation whatsoever, his habit of humanizing high tech into the dirty, scruffy world we all actually live in, and with great metaphorical digs not only of the Tea Party but also the kinds of hipsters who obsessively collect vinyl in an age of MP3s, this is nonetheless perhaps the most accessible science-fiction novel Gibson has ever written, with a storyline that was surprisingly easy to follow despite the time-traveling nature of it all, benefiting greatly from the "Justified meets The Matrix" paradigm of its 30-year-future half. Strongly recommended, but as always to just sci-fi fans only; if you're not already a fan of the genre, this will likely make you roll your eyes every few pages.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The last book I read by author Terence Hawkins was The Rage of Achilles, a well-done novel but nothing too terribly groundbreaking (it's simply The Iliad rewritten with modern language and slang); so imagine my surprise after reading his latest, the haunting and flabbergasting American Neolithic, and realizing that it's quite literally one of the top three books I've read in the last several years, a shocker that came out of left field for me and which made it even more enjoyable. At its heart it's a speculative tale -- the story of the very last tribe of Neanderthals in existence, who through a convoluted series of events have ended up "hiding in plain sight" within a contemporary Manhattan, with one of the members being mistaken for a developmentally challenged human by a rap gang and sort of adopted as a beloved yet laughed-at member of their posse. But when a rival gang member is killed and the blame shifted onto our hapless "Blingbling," this is where the story suddenly starts getting even meatier; for it turns out we're not in contemporary Manhattan at all, but rather a near-future America that has effectively weathered a coup by the Tea Party, which among other things has made it illegal to talk about evolutionary theory in public, which suddenly makes it a national security problem when Blingbling turns out to have DNA that is utterly unlike modern human genetics. Then if this wasn't enough, the book is a hardboiled crime and courtroom procedural as well, as our hero lawyer Raleigh navigates the tricky waters of a "justice" system under a semi-fascist state, trying through black humor and shady dealings to keep his own hide afloat while not letting down this most curious new client of his.
Already an amazing novel just from the premise alone, what tips this into one of the best books of recent memory is that the entire thing is written in this beautifully poetic style, presenting a clan of cavemen in a startlingly original way that few would ever think of presenting themselves, a heartbreaking story of migration and loss that is fascinating, clever, and bleakly funny in equal measure. About as perfect as a novel gets, which is why it's receiving a rare 10 out of 10 from me, American Neolithic floored me at a moment when I was least expecting it, and it will undoubtedly be making CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year. If you're going to read only one contemporary speculative novel this year, make it this one.
Got 200 pages in before I finally gave up. Sorry, Danielewski. Never in my entire life have I seen an author force their fans to wade through so much Got 200 pages in before I finally gave up. Sorry, Danielewski. Never in my entire life have I seen an author force their fans to wade through so much bullshit just to read a mediocre Young Adult science-fiction story. Love the ambition, but despise the results....more
[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C[Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography (cclapcenter.com). I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.]
Chance Maree's Dark Matter Tiding is a perfect example of why I bother to review any self-published book that an author takes the time to send me; for while admittedly most of the time it's a chore to get through them, every so often you're rewarded with a smart and entertaining tale that justifies all the headaches that come with self-publishing to begin with. Like all the best science-fiction novels, Maree uses a Big Thing as a sort of anchor to the world-building in her particular story -- namely, that the Earth has recently started getting bombarded with more and more dark matter from the edge of the universe, which has the unfortunate side effect of making some people turn into murderous psychotics -- but then uses this milieu to instead tell a series of small, character-oriented tales within this Big Thing going on, most of them centered around or at least concerning our hero Camera Hence, a drone engineer who literally starts on chapter one by becoming horrified by the way her militaristic employer (a thinly-veiled Halliburton) has used her inventions for the mass slaughter of innocents in emerging nations, so gets her revenge by deliberately creating an "accident" with the drones during a stockholder party and demonstration that ends up killing every single executive of the company. This calls Chance's own sanity into question right from the very beginning of the book, a question we never get a definitive answer to as her storyline expands into other plots and threads (including a family ranch that is about to be foreclosed, a drug-addicted brother who owns the deed but has suddenly disappeared, his bodybuilding friend who is renting his house to a group of dark-matter psychotics who believe they are vampires and that he is their leader, an ex-hippie astrophysicist who is convinced that there is a direct correlation between dark matter and peyote, and a lot more). Like a typical William Gibson novel, all of these disparate storylines come together and reach a satisfactory resolution by the end; and I have to say, this tight, fast read was actually a lot better than many of the novels I've received in the last year even from large and established genre publishers, definitive proof that self-published work is not always a waste of your time as long as you bother to seek out the best of the best. It comes strongly recommended to fans of sci-fi and day-after-tomorrow technothrillers.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The jacket copy for Carola Dibbell's The Only Ones claims that this book proves that there's still original things to be done in the post-apocalyptic genre; and damned if that didn't turn out to be spectacularly true, although I suppose we should expect no less from the always excellent Two Dollar Radio. A novel which continues Two Dollar's habit of stories told in the first-person voice of abused but smart girls, the thing that sets this apart is the fascinatingly incomplete narration of our confused hero, a New York teenage prostitute in a world whose population has been decimated by a series of pandemic diseases, who gets hired to go on a road trip by an out-of-state customer and only very slowly comes to understand what's going on. (For what it's worth, what's "going on" is that the girl is one of the few lucky people to have been born with a natural immunity to the diseases that have wracked the human race, and her "john" is a black-market doctor who's been hired by a desperate client to see if he can't make healthy babies out of the girl's genetic material; or at least, that's the gist I got from the addictively vague way this storyline is actually parceled out by the unknowing narrator in question.) Featuring a style that can best be called "blue-collar poetry," with information that is very slowly and very deliberately dolloped out bit by bit over 375 pages, this is an easily readable, page-turning genre thriller that doubles as a smart and philosophical indie-lit novel; and although admittedly you're going to have to already be a fan of post-apocalyptic stories to really love this one, if you are then this is an absolute must-have, one of the better books of this genre that I've ever read.
Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.8 for fans of post-apocalyptic literature ...more
[DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the small press that published this book.]
I'm happy to say that CCLaP is finally getting its original books finished an[DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the small press that published this book.]
I'm happy to say that CCLaP is finally getting its original books finished and online a lot faster this year than we ever have before; and here's our title for this coming April, the first of three new story collections by Chicago authors we have coming out in 2015, all of them tied intricately to the weekly electronic magazine we've been publishing for several years now, the CCLaP Weekender at [cclapcenter.com/weekender]. Matt's a real secret weapon of our local literary community who not a lot of people outside of Chicago know about yet, a tireless penner of short stories who is frequently out in our city's infamous late-night open-mic circuit; you can think of his work as essentially a young person's version of George Saunders, with the same kind of warped, ultra-dark, science-fiction-informed sensibility but in his case tackling a lot more issues having to do with Millennials and their particular pop-culture detritus. The three Chicago short-fiction authors we're publishing this year -- Matt, Joseph G. Peterson, and Ben Tanzer -- are all going on tour together this summer, so I hope you'll have a chance to pick this up soon and then make it out to one of their appearances!
We are actively seeking lots of feedback on this particular title, so we are handing out free ebooks of this book to each and every Goodreads members who wants one. To request yours, simply drop me a line at [email protected], or just send me a message here. The finished book comes out to the public this April 13th, but the advance reading copy is available as we speak, so I hope to hear from you soon!...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
One of the things I've come to realize about myself in the last several years is that when I call myself a "science-fiction fan," that's actually a bit of a misnomer; I should instead really call myself a "science-fiction dilettante," because as I learned after attending Worldcon in Chicago a couple of years ago (my first SF convention in 25 years), there's really only a tiny layer of SF novels I genuinely enjoy in any given year, the really unusual and extra-smart stuff by writers who often have conflicted relationships with SF fandom to begin with (oh, hello there, China Mieville), but that I can't really stand the middlebrow space-opera stuff that actually makes up the majority of output of the genre in any given year, but that is the exact favorites of the kinds of super-fans who attend a lot of the conventions, vote for the Hugo Award every year, etc. Mike Resnick is one of these con-favorite authors -- in fact, he was the Worldcon Guest Of Honor the year I attended -- and his new The Fortress in Orion is exactly the kind of middlebrow stuff I'm talking about; it's not very smart but not very dumb either, not too fast-paced but not too slow, with the most stereotypical of hacky premises driving its utterly guessable three-act plot (a cocky yet effective military commander who plays by his own rules is tasked with infiltrating enemy lines on a daring spy mission, and hand-picks a series of sassy rogues and sexy criminals to pull it off), but with hardcore fans loving this stuff because it's fast to get through (a must for the kinds of core genre fans who tear through an entire middlebrow novel a day, every day, whether that's SF or fantasy or crime or romance you're talking about), and because Resnick will actually hang out with you at the next con and buy you a beer for liking his book.
Certainly not a bad novel, in the same way that a typical episode of a typical low-budget syndicated TV show on the SyFy Network isn't "bad," nonetheless it goes down with the same kind of generic smoothness, and leaves just as short of a lasting impression, a good way to kill a Saturday afternoon but with nothing much better that one can say about it. I read and review such books regularly here anyway, because I read and review any book that a publisher takes the time to send me (and to be clear, our pals at Pyr don't just put out these kinds of books, but also the kinds of amazing, mind-bending stuff that constitutes the best of this genre too); but I can't say that I'm ever excited by another of these "fan-fave paying-the-bills" mid-list titles, nor that I'll even remember the experience of reading it another six months from now. ("What do you mean, I actually watched the entire fourth season of Stargate SG-1 with you last summer? Why do I have no memory of watching the entire fourth season of Stargate SG-1 with you last summer?") This should all be kept in mind before picking up a copy yourself.
[DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the small press that published this book.]
Hey, check out what CCLaP will be publishing this January 26th! It's a darkly[DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the small press that published this book.]
Hey, check out what CCLaP will be publishing this January 26th! It's a darkly funny absurdist tale in the style and tradition of all those great bizarro authors I've had a chance to meet over the years through Goodreads, even though Stephen's has a little more of a Will-Self-style mainstream sheen to the subject matter. An unhappy employee at a celebrity gossip mag discovers a big red button on the back wall of his new place, and a random celebrity somewhere on the planet dies every time he presses it; but that's just the start of his problems, a tale that delves heavily into dopplegangers, alternative realities, psychic eyeballs in glass jars, and all kinds of other fun stuff. Stephen's an amazing writer at the start of his career who deserves a bigger audience than he currently has, so I hope all of you get a chance to check out this funny, smart, thought-provoking yet deeply weird novella of his, which can be read in its entirety in a single afternoon. And speaking of this, we are handing out free ebook copies of this title to each and every Goodreads member who wants one, in return for your promise to post your honest thoughts about it here after you're done; so just drop me a line at [email protected] if you'd like one, or simply send me a message here....more
(DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the publishing company that published this book.)
I'm happy to say that CCLaP is finally starting to get its advance rea(DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the publishing company that published this book.)
I'm happy to say that CCLaP is finally starting to get its advance reading copies done with a lot more time to spare before the book's general release: take this title, for example, Matt Fuchs' mind-blowing literary debut, a science-fiction novella called "Rise of Hypnodrome" that will be right up the alley of Philip K. Dick fans. The book itself doesn't come out to the general public until February 16th of next year, but advance reading copies are available as of this moment (November 17th), for any of you Goodreaders who promise to post a few thoughts about it here, in exchange for a free copy. Just drop me a line at ilikejason [at] gmail.com to request a copy, or message me here!...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
If Andy Weir's originally self-published The Martian (now a national phenomenon from Crown Publishing, and about to become a major motion picture from Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon) had been just a short story, it would've been perfect -- a ten-thousand-word thriller about a NASA botanist who is accidentally left for dead on Mars after a disastrous mission, when in fact he's still alive, using THE POWER OF SCIIIIIIEEEENCE!!!!!! to keep himself surviving for the several years it takes for Earth to mount and send a rescue mission. But since this is a full-length novel, I am forced to judge it on those terms; and in those terms, the book has some serious freaking problems, not the least of which is that 300 detailed pages about THE POWER OF SCIIIIIIEEEENCE!!!!!! makes for some awfully dull reading, once you get past the sheer novelty of a highly technically accurate action thriller set on another planet.
That's the main problem I had with The Martian when all is said and done, far more than the traditional literary aspects that are either missing or badly handled -- merely that I had become fatally bored with the endless jargony mumbo-jumbo by the book's midway point, especially once you realize that in good scientific-paper style (betraying the scientific background of the author), you can simply read the first paragraph and last paragraph of any chapter to know exactly what actually happens in that chapter. Granted, that can be said about a lot of genre novels out there, whether or not they're scientific in nature; but what keeps a person reading in those cases are all the other literary aspects that an author might bring to a book -- complex characterization, a mature personal style, nuances in the storyline that are only revealed in the those paragraphs between the first and last ones of each chapter -- but given that The Martian completely forgoes all these things in favor of its "all plot momentum all the time" approach so endemic of self-published genre thrillers, there's literally no reason left to read this book than to find out "what happens," and unfortunately this can be done merely by reading one out of every twenty of the tech-filled paragraphs found within, making it easy to see why its ultra-simple adaptation might be so seductive to Hollywood producers.
Ultimately The Martian reads exactly like what it is -- a polyannish ode from a scientist fan to the impossible nobility of the NASA space program, a nobility that no government agency on the planet could ever actually live up to in the real world, and an angry reaction by a scientist writer to all the dumbed-down science-fiction stories that now exist, which itself becomes dryly problematic precisely because it's an angry reaction to dumbed-down science-fiction from a person who's a scientist first and a creative writer second -- and while all this would be forgivable coming from a tiny self-published volume that an unedited author might directly send me through Smashwords for review, it's unfortunately intolerable when learning that an extra million dollars has been spent on it, and an extra hundred publishing professionals have now looked at it, in their attempt to turn it into the massive mainstream national hit it now is. Unless you're a scientist yourself, and get off on 4,000-word descriptions of aeronautical mathematical formulas interspersed with clunky, sometimes slightly homophobic "dad jokes," just do yourself a favor and wait for the movie, where this book's admittedly addictive ticking-clock plot will undoubtedly be put to better use.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Imagine a futuristic Roman Empire that spans that galaxy, working the same way the original one did -- with every new territory gaining all the benefits of any other Roman citizen after annexation, but with annexation happening whether they like it or not, including genocidal-style violence for those who resist. Now imagine that, as a way of providing the firepower to handle such a new annexation, the empire has built giant city-sized spaceships containing hundred of thousands of soldiers, run by a single AI whose consciousness has been split into dozens of zombie-like human "hosts," that allow her to be in multiple places at once and working on multiple things at once. Now imagine that it's a thousand years later, that the aggressive expansion of this empire has gone out of style, and that these massive ships are being retired in order to become permanent unarmed space stations instead, the AIs becoming nothing more than perpetually bored caretakers. If you were one of these AIs facing obsolescence, what would you do?
That's merely page one of Ann Leckie's 2013 Ancillary Justice, with the story going in unexpected new directions starting on page two; and that gives you a good idea of why over the last year, this has become one of the only books in history to win the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke Award and BSFA Award simultaneously, an unheard-of event that demands that this novel be taken seriously, no matter how silly and '70s its cover art. And indeed, after reading this it's easy to see why it's been gaining so much attention, because it's the kind of perfect blend of mind-blowing theoreticals with action-oriented adventure that represents the "holy grail" of science-fiction, a space-opera and brain-teaser rolled into one perfect story bound to satisfy all genre fans no matter who they are. Told simultaneously through three different periods of this ship's thousand-year life, the complicated storyline on display relies on surprise for maximum effect, so I won't go much into the plot itself; but along the way it poses plenty of questions about what the emotional life of an artificially sentient being might be destined to actually be, and how the moral and ethical decisions an AI might make might be heavily influenced by its non-corporeal form and profoundly longer life span than the average human, taking everything about artificially intelligent behavior we've started combining into the "conventional wisdom" and turning it all on its head, within a sweeping vista that spans hundred of planets under an empire more influenced by Indian Hinduism than anything else. The book has a few problems at the very end, which is why it's not getting a perfect score today -- in a nutshell, too much Star Wars, not enough Philip K. Dick -- but in general one can very safely say that Ancillary Justice earns every award it's received in the last year, and I'm looking forward now to reading the other two coming volumes in this heady, satisfying series, including the sequel Ancillary Sword which came out just this month.
I'm the publisher of this book, so needless to say I hope you get a chance to check it out soon -- youFTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
I'm the publisher of this book, so needless to say I hope you get a chance to check it out soon -- you can download a free electronic copy, or order a special handmade hardback paper edition, at [cclapcenter.com/onbeinghuman]. Later I'll be posting an essay here on all the reasons I myself like this book so much, as well as Karl's writing in general....more
I'm the publisher of this book, so I hope all of you have a chance to check it out, especially with thFTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
I'm the publisher of this book, so I hope all of you have a chance to check it out, especially with the ebook version being available completely for free at [cclapcenter.com/longliveus]. Soon I will post an essay here on all the reasons I loved this manuscript enough to sign it in the first place....more
I'm the publisher of this book, so I hope all of you will have a chance to check it out soon, especialFTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
I'm the publisher of this book, so I hope all of you will have a chance to check it out soon, especially since you can download the ebook version completely for free at [cclapcenter.com/sadrobot]. I will soon be publishing an essay here on all the reasons I liked "Sad Robot Stories" enough to sign it in the first place. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The Inexplicables is the fourth book I've now read in Cherie Priest's remarkable "Clockwork Century" steampunk series, and in fact a quote from one of my earlier reviews ended up making the front cover of this one; and that surprised and delighted me but also felt very natural, because this is one of my favorite genre series of all time by now, and I look forward to the point seemingly every year when Priest has a brand-new volume done and ready to come out. They all take place in a what-if Victorian America in the late 1800s with just layers upon layers of fantastical details piled on: there's a giant wall around the ruined remains of the former Seattle, for example, because a mad scientist once ruptured an underground cave during a bank heist and released a heavy gas that turns people into zombies; but like a first-person-shooter videogame, there are also miles of underground tunnels, businesses and residences under this gassed zombie wasteland, full of outlaws and Chinamen who take this gas and distill it into a heroin-like drug that is then shipped across America in giant armed dirigibles; and in the meanwhile, the Civil War is still going on decades after it did in real life, because here the South develops railroads, submarines and robots to help even out the fight; and in the latest development in this speculative universe, it turns out that none other than Bigfoot has managed to accidentally enter the walled wasteland of downtown Seattle, and that the poisonous gas is slowly turning him into an unstoppable force of violence. And that's what makes these books so delightful; for while her characterizations are not much more than minimally solid enough to pass muster, it's Priest's plotting skills that are her real forte, delivering exciting after exciting tale that in epic scope has now taken us all the way across the United States and back, this newest volume set back in the walled Seattle where the story began. Breathtaking in its pacing, and such a mega-pastiche that you'll be in awe simply over how well she melds it all together, this is the literal definition of an intellectual's guilty pleasure, and should be highly enjoyed by one and all if read with this attitude. Highly recommended, as are all her books.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
I know a number of the people involved with this book, so it wouldn't really be ethically right for me to purport to do an "objective" review of it; but I at least wanted to make a mention of it here at the blog, mostly because it finally came up to the top of my to-read list last week, after first entering way back in July. (July! Shame on me! I am so sorry to all you authors that it's taking me so long to get through your books right now; but we're about to start bringing on additional reviewers soon, so we'll finally be getting that list whittled down to size before too long.) Anyway, this is an anthology of all-new work by some incredibly impressive writers, and edited by genre heroes Sam Weller and Mort Castle, all in honor of the recently passed Ray Bradbury, a Chicago-area native (for those who didn't know) who had one of the most interesting and varied literary careers of the entire Mid-Century Modernist era. And indeed, I think a big reason why it was so easy for Weller and Castle to attract the likes of such heavy hitters as Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Alice Hoffman, Kelly Link, Audrey Niffenegger, Joe Meno, Bonnie Jo Campbell and a lot more is precisely because Bradbury had a career that was so hard to define, a man who dipped his influential toes into horror, science-fiction, crime, Young Adult, even hippie weirdness without ever being trapped in one or another, and I think it's natural for writers to be inspired by this and want to occasionally do some Bradburian walking off the beaten path themselves. It's such a fitting and loving tribute because it's so smart and dense on its own, and Weller and Castle are to be commended for putting together one of the most entertaining compilations I've read in a while. It comes strongly recommended.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
It's true: just as some people always love them some Scandinavian crime fiction, I always love me some steampunk! And in fact, this is what has directly led to me taking it easier recently on fans of subgenres I find silly, precisely from realizing that I'm a big fan of a subgenre that a lot of others find ridiculous; and there's nothing wrong with that, either, as long as you recognize that you're basically letting your fetishistic love of the accrouchements surrounding that subgenre forgive what is sometimes only mediocre storytelling, and vow to make that easy love only an occasional treat instead of the main ingredient of your reading diet. Take this charming but forgettable title, for example, which I confess even just a month between finishing it and now has already become hazy in my head, just another Sherlockian actioner containing the same beats as all the others; although certainly I haven't forgotten the great and unique central premise, the thing that's gotten it most of its press, that Payton's speculative alt-history Victorian London includes a sexually transmitted disease that turns people literally into the opposite gender, and that the resulting panic regarding human intimacy has among other things created an entire new industry of robot prostitutes. That's what makes subgenres work, after all, no matter which one you're talking about -- they mostly all concern themselves with roughly the same general type of storyline, and it's the very specific details where one book will stand out over another among readers -- and for existing fans of steampunk, Constantine has everything you could want regarding this, although it's only okay as a general piece of literature and will drive non-fans of Victoriana batsh-t crazy. This should all be kept in mind when deciding whether or not to pick up a copy yourself.
Out of 10: 8.0, or 9.0 for steampunk fans
P.S. I'll never be able to think of steampunk the same way after seeing Felicia Day's take on it in The Guild…
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Whenever I think of the term "cyberpunk," easily my favorite literary genre back in the '80s when I was a teenager, I think of a very specific combination of qualities -- four or five different storylines that all merge into one at the climax, set in a day-after-tomorrow dystopia, one where the dizzying sci-fi inventions of Mid-Century Modernism have been turned on their heads, so that what the author is really exploring is the ways that cutting-edge tech has trickled down in a corrupted and heavily modded form to the street level of the lumpen proletariat, with the story's style and characters heavily influenced by the underground culture of its times (so in the case of classic '80s cyberpunk, for example, American and British punk music, which is how the genre got its name in the first place). And all of these things can be said about Rob Ziegler's contemporary Seed as well, a superlative cyberpunk novel but one you might not even recognize as such at first; for instead of revolving around pale computer hackers in London, Seed's heroes move among the decidedly sweatier circles of Mexican skaters in the American Southwest, and instead of being obsessed with virtual reality, this book deals with the much messier proposition of intelligent wetware and the coming agricultural apocalypse. Set in a world dealing with an unnamed past catastrophe where normal plants can no longer grow properly, the plot in general is fueled by the conceit that one private company eventually became the sole saviors of the entire American populace, by being the first to create an artificial intelligence that not only could genetically engineer seeds that would grow in this post-apocalyptic environment, but also literal living buildings made out of biological skin and bone, maintained by a small army of sub-intelligent clones who all operate under a hive-mind system. The various small storylines we follow throughout the book, then, all deal in one way or another with this central conceit -- there are the scrappy Latino brothers trying to survive in an anarchic, gray-market society, there is the "manager clone" who is thinking of defecting from the company (and taking all its confidential intellectual property with it), there is the disgraced military commander who has been ordered by a now cuckolded White House to go find this runaway clone, and on and on in this vein, each of them giving us a small specific look at this grandly epic universe Ziegler has built up step by step.
Now, just to be clear, like most genre novels Seed is filled with things that will drive non-fans of that genre a little crazy -- the dialogue can be a little stilted at times, some of the characters a bit too corny, and of course you need to be into bizarre science-fictional concepts in the first place to enjoy it at all -- and let's also be clear that even SF fans that aren't necessarily into cyberpunk will find some faults with this too, a book that can sometimes fixate too much on the action sequences rather than the "big picture" topics being discussed. But if like me you are a fan of early William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross and other established cyberpunk authors, you will find this an incredibly satisfying read, nearly perfect at hitting all the beats that a story like this needs, while maintaining a fast pace and constantly offering up unique little speculative nuggets for your brain to chew on for a while. (I especially loved the reveal of who exactly is behind all these sinister goings-on at this shadowy company, but for the sake of spoilers I will leave that a surprise.) A book only for a niche audience, but a niche audience who will passionately love it for what it is, Seed will almost certainly be making CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year, and it comes strongly recommended to those who think in advance that they might be interested in it.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
This is a short but highly entertaining alt-history thriller in the style of steampunk, but actually set during the time of the alchemists and "natural philosophers" of the 1600s and 1700s; specifically, it's the memoirs of one of these alchemists, who as his "confessions" continue we learn got himself into just more and more trouble with the supernatural, as his magic-induced long life continued for decade after decade. As such, then, this is a pleasant read done in a very convincing retro voice, nothing mind-blowing but certainly worth the single afternoon and evening it takes to read it all; but perhaps this is even more important now as a cultural artifact, in that Confessions actually started life as one of the daring first e-text experiments on the web back in the mid-1990s, when author Sholder Greye (the pseudonym of author Yarrow Paisley, which I believe is a pseudonym unto itself) first offered this up for free download and invited people to make derivative stories out of the original, long before the concepts of Creative Commons or mashups had been invented. In fact, about the only complaint I have is merely a design one, which is that the generic and badly done cover doesn't give even a clue about the fussily complex Hellboy-worthy story found within; but if you can overlook this, you'll find a book well worth the time of any fan of outrageous supernaturalism. It comes recommended to that specific type of reader.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
As I've said here before, I have kind of a soft spot for authors with big visions for their books, but who end up biting off a little more than they can chew, because I always feel it's better to try something big and slightly fail than to succeed at something that ultimately doesn't matter; and there's no more perfect example of this than David Couzins' Domers, a would-be science-fiction epic that doesn't quite cross all its Ts or dot all its Is, but gets extra points merely for being so ambitious in the first place. Set in the year 2080, the main premise is that America has grown so fearful of terrorist and biological attacks that they have voluntarily converted into a fully domed society, the populace now living in millions of little impenetrable bubbles and banned by law from ever leaving them, interacting with everyone besides your family via a series of multimedia tech devices. But of course the US still needs to be physically protected from outside threats, in particular a newly aggressive Mexican army who has been conducting an increasing series of raids into now unpopulated areas of the American southwest; so that's where the Native American population comes in, who had absolutely refused to comply when the US was first setting up its conversion into a domed society, which the government eventually agreed to not challenge in return for these Indian tribes essentially becoming a guerrilla fighting force protecting the country's southern border. The actual plot, then, concerns two young lovers who are about to get married and move into a new "starter dome," one of the only times in a person's life that they actually travel out of doors; when this couple is then attacked by Mexican raiders during their transit, then rescued by Native American forces, the events serve as an excuse for Couzins to explore and expound on the expansive conceptual universe he has created for this book.
Now, let's make no mistake -- like many "high concept" sci-fi novels, Domers suffers from a series of logic problems, and the vast amount of backstory leads to a number of "exposition dumps" that slow the book's pace to a crawl. But that said, I'm specifically giving this book a half-point higher score than I normally would, expressly because I really liked this expansive backstory, a smart day-after-tomorrow extrapolation of our current times that contains a lot of originality; and I also appreciated Couzins' efforts to take this "Logan's Run" style sterile setting and incorporate much of the action into the dirty, gritty world of desert conflict and pre-industrial Native American villages. Although this particular novel has some deep flaws, and it shouldn't be mistaken for anything other than slightly above so-so, it also shows Couzins to be a writer of great promise, and I'm looking forward to the future books he might have for us down the road.
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