Neal Asher: Gridlinked

Review of the novel Gridlinked by Neal Asher.

Neal Asher has been on my radar screen as one of the biggers names in high-tech SF in this decade. He’s published nearly a dozen novels, which means I have a lot of catching up to do. (I’m reading his blog, too.) Before diving into Gridlinked I’d read a couple of his stories in the SF magazines and liked what I’d read.

Gridlinked opens with Ian Cormac, one of Earth Central Security’s top agents, pursuing a group of anarchists on the planet Cheyne III. Although he disrupts their operations, they had him ‘made’ from the beginning, since he is constantly linked into the computer grid, which has gradually dampened his emotional reactions to things over thirty years. He also fails to capture of kill the group’s ringleader, Arian Pelter, although he does kill Pelter’s sister, Angelina.

Cormac is them abruptly pulled off the mission and shipped to the planet Samarkand. Humanspace, you see, is connected by a set of matter transmitters, called runcibles, which are controlled by the governing collection of artificial intelligences which run Earth Central. Something managed to disrupt the runcible on Samarkand, destroying it and effectively dooming all life on the cold, partially-terraformed world. Moreover, his superiors decide that it’s time for Cormac to be unlinked from the grid since his detachment from humanity is making him a less effective agent. Naturally this cuts Cormac off from being able to instantly access information and communicate with the local AI, as well as forcing him to rely on his human memories. Nonetheless, he complies.

Arriving at Samarkand Cormac finds several enigmas, including some creatures which remind him of a powerful alien being he’d encountered years before, as well as a well-defended artifact buried in the ice. Unknown to Cormac, while he investigates the event, Arian Pelter, his hired mercenaries, and a cyborg psychopath called Mr. Crane have been arming themselves and following Cormac to Samarkand so that Pelter can avenge his sister.

Gridlinked can best be categorized as “high-tech suspense”, concentrated more on building the suspense and executing the action scenes which resolve the plot and less on a high ideas content. After all, the core concepts here are pretty routine: An AI government, cyborgs, linking into cyberspace, interplanetary teleportation, and a variety of supporting technologies such as antigravity and energy weapons. That’s not bad, but I had expected a more ideas-driven story a la Alastair Reynolds or Karl Schroeder.

The book’s serious demeanor and sense of mystery is what makes it enjoyable. It’s not a mystery the reader can really solve, but watching Cormac poke around on Samarkand and deal with an old adversary is fun. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what motivated the Samarkand disaster in the first place; I think the bigger ideas ended up getting swamped by the adventure and shooting and running around. The book comes to a rather abrupt, and somewhat unsatisfying, end in this regard.

The characterizations tend to be thin. Cormac himself is very much a cipher, perhaps deliberately given what being gridlinked for three decades has done to him, with little background or relationship to the other characters. Pelter and his aide Stanton are more well-drawn: Pelter pretty much goes around the bed during the story, while Stanton is a calculating but flawed mercenary who ends up in an untenable situation. None of the other characters are especially memorable (I don’t really count the mute Mr. Crane as a character, though his presence is certainly memorable).

And then I wonder why the book is titled “Gridlinked“, since Cormac of course becomes unlinked during the story, and the grid (or lack thereof) plays relatively little into the story. It feels like a marketing title, not a title truly representative of the story.

So I was rather disappointed by Gridlinked. It reads like the first novel that it is, with pieces that work and pieces that don’t, and pieces that feel out-of-place. Asher has written quite a few novels since this, and this one holds enough promise that I’m certainly going to read more of them, in the hopes that he develops both as a writer and as an idea-smith. But this one isn’t essential reading.

Charles Stross: Halting State

Review of the novel Halting State by Charles Stross.

Charles Stross’ novels have wandered all over the speculative fiction map, from fantasy/adventure to space opera to really-high-tech space opera, and now to the near future in Halting State. The book takes place in 2018, mostly in Scotland which has seceded from the United Kingdom but is still part of the European Union. The book opens with a theft at a Hayek Associates, but it’s not an ordinary theft: Hayek runs central banks for several MMORPGs, storing virtual equipment and loot securely for their virtual owners who are off adventuring elsewhere. Someone has managed to attack the company through the game and make off with a large volume of virtual assets, essentially corrupting the live database Hayek keeps in trust for its clients, and thus putting its reputation and market value at risk. The marketing director at Hayek panics and calls the local constabulary, which is how Sue, one of the three protagonists in Halting State, gets involved, as the officer who takes the call.

Hayek’s insurance company learns of the crime, and worries not only about its liability, but about its own reputation. It sends a cadre of officers to Hayek to find out what happened (and cover their asses), including the second protagonist, Elaine, who fears that she’s being positioned to provide cover for her bosses. As part of the outing, her company hires an outside programmer to help them get oriented to Hayek’s business from a technical side, and they end up with Jack, who’s recently unemployed and had a run-in with the law while on vacation in Holland, but who really knows networked computer games.

The catch is that the theft at Hayek is actually a blind for several other things going on, one of them much larger and indicative of how espionage games might be played between the major powers ten or thirty years from now, and our heroes get caught in the middle of it – along with a whole bunch of other people.

Halting State starts slow and takes a while to get moving, although once it does there are lots of little clever bits: Ways gamers put their skills to use in a world where the virtual and the actual can be blurred, as well as the disconnect between people who only deal with the “real world” and the stakes in a virtual game where virtual assets and reputations have real value. Stross has clearly thought about these issues pretty carefully, and is familiar with both the techies and the non-techies so he can portray both types of people believably.

The book’s biggest flaw is that a lot of it feels superfluous. Sue’s presence seems like a side-issue, as she rarely interacts with Elaine or Jack, and she only seems to be there to witness a couple of key scenes in the book. She doesn’t really add much value, herself. Mostly the book is Elaine’s and Jack’s, and it seems like Stross is maneuvering them to be a “team” in the same way that Rachel and Martin are a team in Stross’ earlier novels Singularity Sky and its sequel, which makes me wonder if he has sequels to Halting State in mind. (Honestly, I’d rather read more novels in the higher-tech and more interesting Singularity Sky universe.) There’s also a lot of running around, especially the big event that Sue witnesses when the EU equivalent of the Men in Black show up to try to solve the case, which effort ends in chaos but to little effect on the story. Basically, the story feels padded.

It’s also told in the second person, which at first seems like a silly little conceit, but eventually I realized that it’s evoking the feel of the text adventure games of my own youth, which are often told in this voice (“You’re standing on a road. It’s a sunny day.” “Go north”, types the player. “You’re standing at the entrance to a castle.”). The voice wears thin after a while in any event, so I still found it to be a silly little conceit. Stross likes to play with style and structure, which I usually appreciate, but he casts his net so wide that I often find his experiments to be very hit-or-miss.

I’m not generally a big fan of near-future SF, usually because I don’t find the tech level to be fantastic enough to really thrill me. Stross does his level best in Halting State to wow the reader with network security concerns, cutting-edge computer hardware, shifting geopolitical strategies, and novel ways to use resources on the network (such as the humans who are logged into it), but the story ends up being merely okay, and the climax felt like a letdown. I think too much finesse left the story feeling a little ethereal, especially since a few of the scenes of maximum excitement seemed like they didn’t move the story forward (although it’s entirely possible that I’m just not seeing a piece of the big picture).

It’s a nice try, though.

Joan D. Vinge: Dreamfall

Review of the novel Dreamfall by Joan D. Vinge.

Dreamfall is the third in Vinge’s series about the telepath, Cat. It’s the last one written so far, though it’s not intended to be a trilogy (as far as I know); rather, Vinge has been unable to write until recently due to a car accident several years ago, as explained in her Wikipedia entry.

Dreamfall feels like a counterpoint to the second novel, Catspaw, in many ways: Catspaw explores the tension between Cat’s place among the lower class and the upper class, while Dreamfall explores the tension between his human heritage and his Hydran (alien) heritage. Also, Catspaw shows Cat trying to make use of his damaged telepathic abilities, while Dreamfall shows him struggling with trying to be a professional scholar/scientist in a difficult scenario. And, Catspaw takes place on Earth while Dreamfall takes place on an alien world.

Cat is part of a team which has been summoned to the planet Refuge, where his friend Kissindre Perrymeade’s family – Tau – heads a congomerate which is exploiting the resources of the planet. The team is there to study the cloud-whales, large gaseous beings which drift across the planet and whose thoughts crystallize and form large reefs in the oceans which exhibit strange properties. However, Refuge is also one of the worlds formerly controlled by the Hydrans, and the Hydran population has been marginalized and mostly restricted to a ghetto near the main human city. As this is Cat’s first opportunity to voluntarily contact Hydrans, one evening he heads into the Hydran town, where he immediately gets wrapped up in an ongoing Hydran resistance to the human occupation of the planet, placing him at odds with the Tau security chief of the planet, Borosage, as well as outing him as a human/Hydran hybrid.

The Hydran resistance has kidnapped a young human child and may be using him as leverage against the humans, escalating tensions and forcing Cat into becoming a negotiator between the two sides. Of course, there are more than two sides: Some humans are more hard-line than others, while the official Hydran government are not affiliated with the resistance. Many humans are of course frightened by the Hydrans, who have powers of telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation, among others, but the humans also have far superior technology. Moreover, Cat is torn both between his feelings for Kissindre, and similar feelings for a Hydran woman whom he meets.

With all of these conflicting and contrasting elements, you’d think Dreamfall would be a cracking book full of adventure and emotion, but I found it to be quite slow and not very exciting. In another contrast with the previous book, Catspaw shows Cat reasoning and acting and having a profound effect on the people around him, while in Dreamfall he seems so at odds with himself that he’s far more reactive than active, struggling with his own emotions and unable to make decisions unless he’s forced into them.

For example, he gets linked to the resistance accidentally when he runs into the woman kidnapping the human child. As a result of this, Borosage’s superior forces Cat to be a negotiator with the Hydrans. Although the Hydrans are initially repulsed by this telepath whose abilities are turned off, he wins the trust of one of them, Miya, and finds himself conflicted between his feelings for her and for Kissindre. But he doesn’t really choose (or even fail to choose) between them; rather it seems like he gets railroaded by circumstance into picking one instead of the other, along with some pseudo-mystical argument about how Hydrans can tell when they’ve met the person they’re meant to be with. Through it all Cat seems bewildered and passive, which makes him a boring main character.

The first half of the book is all about building the tensions between the humans and the Hydrans, and it all comes to a head in the second half, which is more lively but only a little more satisfying. Dreamfall seems more focused on trying to craft a setting and evoke a mood (of lost causes and dying cultures). As in Catspaw the book climaxes with Cat ending up in an extremely dangerous situation, but rather than taking a big risk for a good reason, it seems like he made a few choices without really examining what he was doing which led him to a bad place. Vinge tries her utmost to convey the weight of the choices that Cat does make (he does eventually have to make the ultimate choice between being part of human society or Hydran society), but I was never convinced that he was making these decisions for good reasons, or that he was even particular aware of what he was choosing or why. The story is one of some fairly subtle shifts in Cat’s outlook and behavior, and I don’t think it managed to thread the needle of believability. The book does have a reasonable conclusion to its main conflicts (complete with a satisfying fate for one of the main heavies), but it doesn’t feel as meaningful as the ending of Catspaw.

Overall I don’t think Dreamfall either works well on its own, or deepens or broadens our understanding of Cat beyond what we saw in Catspaw. It seems to be trying to evoke more of a sense of wonder than Catspaw did, but the most wondrous elements – the cloud-whales – are mostly relegated to the background. Even the psionic elements are less interesting here than in the previous books, since Cat’s own telepathy is rarely active.

I found the book to be hard going, and not very rewarding for the effort. It’s a big step down from Catspaw, which is easily the best of the series to date.

Joan D. Vinge: Catspaw

Review of the novel Catspaw by Joan D. Vinge.

Catspaw is the sequel to Psion, following Vinge’s telepathic hero Cat on a new adventure. Cat became quite wealthy after his adventures in Psion, and used his wealth to see the galaxy and join a travelling school for the rich. While at the planet Monument, he’s kidnapped by the taMing family, who want to hire him as a telepath to protect one of their own, Lady Elnear, who’s been the subject of two assassination attempts. Since his money is running out, and the head of security, Braedee, says he can provide drugs to activate Cat’s dormant telepathy, he agrees. He travels to Earth and is inserted into high-class taMing culture, which makes neither him nor Elnear comfortable.

As the drugs slowly shake loose Cat’s telepathy, he realizes that he’s been placed in a very difficult position, not least because telepaths are hated and/or feared by most of humanity. Elnear is running for the Federation Council, the only body in humanspace with the power to act against the powerful shipping clans. The taMings themselves head Centauri Transport, one of the most powerful clans. Cat is mistrusted by most of the taMing family as soon as he arrives, despite his cover story as Elnear’s aide and surgery to alter his cat’s eyes and thus his abilities. He also learns that the taMing family has another psion in it besides Jule, but he doesn’t know who it is. And that’s just for starters.

Catspaw is a much better novel than Psion was: Rich and textured, with complex and believable characters. Cat is immediately much more interesting and sympathetic just because he became more mature and introspective in the time between the two novels. It’s an unfortunate commentary on Psion that what happened to Cat off-stage after it was more satisfying than what happened to him in it.

The book is filled with nifty characters, even the ones who don’t get a lot of screen time: Braedee starts off as a cyber-enhanced security chief but he ends up being notably reasonable and distinctive without being infallable, and he and Cat have an uneasy relationship. Daric taMing and his wife Argentyne are two of the major players, being somewhat at the fringe of the taMing family socially as well as owners of an avant-garde nightclub, which gives them feet in more than one world and thus natural allies for Cat, although ones he has a somewhat messy relationship with. Other taMing characters – Lord Charon and his wife Lazuli, and their children Jiro and Talitha – help add texture (and some drama) to the story. Really the most disappointing figure is Lady Elnear, who comes across as sort of a messiah figure and doesn’t really have a lot of depth to her. Protecting her is Cat’s main and original goal, and she opens doors for him among the classes he’s frequently with the taMings, but she doesn’t have a lot of character of her own. She’s mainly a foil and tool for Cat’s story.

Catspaw also has a nifty and complicated plot around which it’s built, and Cat’s relationship with the taMing family is woven into that plot. Lady Elnear’s life is indeed in danger, but the threat isn’t the simple one which Braedee originally explains it as. Cat is also put into a position to both improve the lot of telepaths in humanspace, and improve the lot of people bonded to Contract Labor, thanks to meeting the right people through Elnear. But of course his opportunity to do all this is threatened by the book’s main villain, who is far more adept at working in high society than Cat is, which forces Cat to make some difficult decisions and take a tremendous risk to defeat his foe.

Vinge doles out enough new-and-interesting ideas content over the course of the novel to make it feel more science fictional than just a society drama. The reader really feels Cat’s internal tension of being just sophisticated (and clueful) enough to survive in high society, while having the understanding of the underclass to have some resources that others in the taMing household don’t. He also learns something about his telepathy which lets him make some headway that no one else could have, setting up the book’s resolution. There are lots of details about the technological capabilities of Earth in Cat’s universe, too, of varying interest. By the standards of today’s science fiction it doesn’t feel quite as high-tech as it probably did when it was published, but seeing Vinge pull all the pieces together in a single novel is impressive.

The Cat novels sometimes seem to revel in the brutality Cat is subjected too, but Catspaw has the best balance of Cat being an active agent versus being a target of other peoples’ hatred, as well as a satisfying conclusion in which it feels like Cat really accomplishes something to make it all worthwhile. It’s certainly the best of the three books in the series (so far), and arguably worth reading even without first reading Psion.

Joan D. Vinge: Psion

Review of the novel Psion by Joan D. Vinge.

Psion is the first in Joan Vinge’s series of novels about a telepath living in a future starfaring society. Apparently she started writing Psion when she was a teenager, and published it years later after she’d established herself (for instance, it came out after she won a well-deserved Hugo Award for The Snow Queen). It was recently reprinted by Tor, but my copy is an earlier edition.

In the book’s universe, mankind has reached the stars, and encountered sentient alien life: The Hydrans, who are close enough to humans that the two species can interbreed, and whose psionic abilities start to emerge in humans with Hydran blood. But humanity also dominates and marginalizes the Hydrans, and is no kinder to their offspring. Our hero, Cat, is such a person, abandoned as a child in the Oldtown of the planet Ardattee, the center of the human Federation. His cat-like eyes are the only sign of his heritage, but after being arrested he narrowly escapes being forced into Contract Labor on another world by being recruited for a program to help psions understand and control their abilities. Hydrans have various psionic abilities, and Cat is profiled as a telepath, albeit one whose abilities have been repressed.

The program is run by a telekinetic, Siebeling, who develops a dislike for Cat, perhaps because Cat falls in love with his girlfriend, a teleporter and empath named Jule taMing. Cat slowly recovers his telepathic abilities even as he gradually learns how to live among more civilized people, and he learns that the Federation is using the program in part as a lure for Quicksilver, an immensely powerful psion who has been terrorizing other worlds. Quicksilver contacts Cat and Jule, but before they can be recruited Cat has a falling-out with Siebeling throws him back onto the streets and eventually into the arms of Contract Labor.

Cat is shipped across the galaxy where he ends up working in the mines of Cinder, the world which is the source of the rare mineral which makes space travel possible. There he both learns about his heritage, and what Quicksilver’s plans are. He also learns to stand up for both his friends and for what he feels is right, even if people on all sides hold him in very low esteem.

Psion has a lot of neat ideas, but it’s not a very good book. Cat is a one-dimensional protagonist, his only variation is that sometimes he gets a bit whiny about his bad fortune. That bad fortune and his background as a street rat means the story is hardly a rags-to-riches one, although you’d think that finding you’re a telepath would open doors for you, but Cat gets repeatedly beaten down, by Siebeling, by Contract Labor, and by almost everyone else around him. There’s no free lunch in this universe for anyone who isn’t rich.

The story is more one of a street rat who finds something worthwhile to live for (Jule, and his powers) and finds that his heart is in the right place, even at great cost to himself. But it’s something of a downer because Cat rarely has the chance to make decisions, and when he does he usually yanks the rug out from under himself due to his lack of sophistication or understanding of other people, but I’m not convinced that he really learned much about himself during the story. Cat runs through a series of situations mostly not of his making, but it feels a little too programmed. You feel for the guy, but not enough to make the book feel special.

I think Psion will mainly appeal to people who enjoy stories which are mainly lessons from the school of hard knocks. That’s not really my thing, so despite an interesting backdrop, I don’t recommend it.

More Journeyman

I’m sitting watching tonight’s episode of Journeyman, which I wrote about a few months ago. I’m impressed with it so far, after 8 episodes: It’s consistent and intriguing, and the story seems to be moving right along.

One unexpected bonus is that NBC has been so completely off-base in promoting most episodes: It seems like they often promote elements of the show which are sensational but pretty minor. For example, a few weeks ago the previews played up the fact that our hero, Dan Vassar, was out with his son Zack at a farmer’s market when he disappears into the past, leaving Zack alone in a crowd of strangers. Sure, it’s good copy (as they say), but it had almost nothing to do with the crux of the episode. This means that I’m usually surprised – and pleasantly so – by what really happens in the episode.

The series’ story arc is pretty nifty, too: Dan’s time-travelling ex-girlfriend Livia is gradually revealing her background and Dan’s disappearances are slowly catching up to him in the present. And there are lots of little hints that one other character might know what’s going on. The acting is also strong, especially Dan and Jack. It’s a nicely-blended mix of character drama (the Dan-Katie-Jack triangle is intense) and plot (each episode is self-contained, but the overall storyline is moving forward).

I’m usually very skeptical that a TV series has a plan and direction – almost every one I’ve ever seen is obviously plotted on-the-fly, and this becomes painfully evident after a couple of years. (I gave up on The X-Files early in the third season when this became clear for that series.) But Journeyman certainly feels like it’s got a plan behind it. And even if the direction is somewhat loose, the theme of self-determination in the face of what seems like an overwhelming cosmic force might be able to carry it for quite a while.

I’ll be pretty bummed if the series gets cancelled, or if the Hollywood writer’s strike blows the series off-course, although in principle I support the writers in their walkout. But hopefully the series will have a decent run with a satisfying conclusion. It’s got me pretty well hooked so far.

Jasper Fforde: Lost in a Good Book

Review of the novel Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde.

It’s been several years since I read The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde’s first book about Thursday Next of the British Special Operations Network, which means I’m now about four books behind. So I’d better get cracking, huh?

Lost in a Good Book spends a couple of chapters recapping the events of The Eyra Affair before launching into its own story: The Goliath Corporation wants to get back its operative Jack Schitt, who was trapped in the pages of a copy of The Raven at the end of the previous book, and naturally it also wants to find out how to get into and out of works of fiction, and Schitt’s half-brother Schitt-Hawse is convinced that Thursday knows how to do it, and he’s willing to use extreme measures to get what he wants. Thursday also notices that an awful lot of coincidences are occurring around her, and they’re not happy coincidences. Lastly, her time-travelling father turns up again and warns her that the end of the world appears to be nigh, unless one of them can figure out what’s going to happen and how to stop it. And in the middle of all this, Thursday is recruited to work for Jurisfiction, an organization of real and fictional people who work together to prevent the sorts of damage to works of fiction that Acheron Hades attempted in the first book.

Lost in a Good Book can be summed up as “more of the same” – if you enjoyed The Eyre Affair then you’ll probably enjoy this one. It does suffer from “second in a series syndrome”, though: The first book came to a decisive conclusion and a happy ending, while this one has a lot of setup for a longer storyline. Some things do get resolved (that’s right, the world doesn’t end), but the driving force behind Thursday’s angst is left hanging, and she ends up having to retreat from the world in a sort-of cliffhanger for the next novel.

My recollection of reading Eyre was that the going-into-a-fictional-work stuff was the least interesting idea in the story, and it’s certainly the least interesting idea in this one. Jurisfiction is all well and good, but whenever Thursday had popped into its world or some other book I keep wishing we could get back to the time travel and genetically engineers neanderthals and demons and stuff. It looks like it’s going to be a central element of the later books, though, so I guess I’d better get used to it if I’m going to keep reading.

I’m not that down on the book, though. Fforde’s writing style is still wry and lighthearted, which keeps the book moving along even in its darker moments. Thursday’s life is populated with a variety of entertaining characters, especially her family and her peers at work (her bosses and other bigwigs are less entertaining, and perhaps take the theme of bureaucratic oppression too far at times). I especially enjoy Spike, the occult-creature hunter who’s ostracized within SO, but who’s befriended by Thursday since they’re both outsiders of a sort.

Overall I’d say that Lost is a step backwards overall from Eyre, mainly because it mostly explores the elements from the first book I was least interested in, and it’s not as tight a novel. It’s still entertaining and is a quick read, so as sheer entertainment it works out just fine. I keep feeling like Fforde could have turned this series into something a lot more memorable if he’d just taken it in a different direction, though.

Heroes and Journeyman

So this new TV season: I’ll probably skip Bionic Woman, and not much else attracted my attention even a little bit.

Tonight we watched the first episode of the second season of Heroes. It takes place four months after the first season, and we catch up with what the characters are doing. I found the first season to be pretty slow, so I don’t know whether I’ll make it through the second season. This episode bored me when it came to the Claire-and-Noah stuff (Hayden Panettiere & Jack Coleman), and more than once I thought that I’d really just like to have a whole episode of Hiro (Masi Oka). The show spends too much time lingering on boring stuff, and the dialogue isn’t especially clever so there’s very little to carry the viewer through those scenes.

The episode kicks it up a notch at the end, though, with several intriguing scenes. If it can build on these bits rather than stepping back and taking its usual time-outs then it could keep me watching. But it has to keep moving.

I stuck around afterwards to watch the first episode of Journeyman. While watching the story of Dan Vassar, it struck me how much Kevin McKidd reminded me of Reed Diamond of Homicide, and who should show up playing Dan’s older brother Jack but – Reed Diamond. I swear, I had no clue!

In Journeyman, Dan is a journalist in San Francisco who starts disappearing from his present life and appearing in the past, apparently following the life of a man whose wife and child died some years ago. Meanwhile his marriage is falling apart since his wife Katie (Gretchen Egolf) and friends thinks he’s having trouble with drug abuse. The set-up is slightly reminiscent of the book The Time Traveler’s Wife, since Dan has no control over what’s happening to him, though at least he does travel with his clothes.

The episode started a little slowly, and I cringed a little at Dan’s encounters with people he knows in his travels to the past, but it grabbed me with two scenes late in the episode: A sudden appearance by a very unexpected character, and then taking the big step of having Dan act smart in explaining his dilemma to his wife. The implication that there’s something larger going on, and that Dan’s not going to be an oaf while forces manipulate him makes me optimistic that this could be a good series. So that leaves the biggest question of all: Is the series going to go somewhere?

Maybe not, but I’m motivated at least to watch the next couple of episodes to see.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Review of the novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

The Harry Potter series wraps up at long last: After publishing the first three books in 3 years, it took another 8 years for J.K. Rowling to write the last four. Of course, each of the four is twice as long as any of the three, so there you go.

If you’ve surfed in here and haven’t yet read the book, be advised that there are spoilers after the Read More link below, although I’ve tried to keep the first half of the review free of them.

Deathly Hallows starts, as the other books do, at the end of the summer between school years, but this time the book promptly heads off into new territory: As Harry is enemy number one where the resurrected Lord Voldemort is concerned, and since his mystical protection will evaporate as soon as he turns 17 (which is the age of maturity for wizards), the Order of the Phoenix plans to hide Harry for his protection. Not everything goes as planned, but Harry finally ends up in a safe house.

While preparing for the marriage of Ron’s brother Bill to Fleur Delacoeur, our trio of heroes (Harry, Ron and Hermione) start planning how they can go about finding the remaining Horcruxes containing fragments of Voldemort’s soul, since if they can destroy them all, then they can bring about the dark wizard’s downfall. Unfortunately, the downfall of some powerful forces on the side of good in the wizarding world leave the three on the run from the ascendant dark lord’s forces, with precious little idea of how to proceed other than trying to stay one step ahead of their pursuers.

Their adventures on the road involve personal conflicts, a variety of traps, and learning some surprising facts about Harry’s family and Dumbledore’s history. They also learn of the existence of the Deathly Hallows, some powerful magical artifacts which could turn the tide against Voldemort, but which – like the Horcruxes – are well-hidden, if they even exist at all.

I freely admit that the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, sapped my enthusiasm for the Harry Potter series. It became clear to me that J.K. Rowling was no longer being edited, and she really needed a strong editor, because she too easily fell in love with her own typing. Phoenix badly needed to be cut at least in half, and Half-Blood Prince, though better, was also too long and had long stretches of boring in it. So I didn’t approach Deathly Hallows in a very forgiving frame of mind, since it was another giant tome.

That said, Hallows has some things to recommend it. It’s a very different book from its predecessors, having very little of the “kid’s stuff” feel of those books: It’s all deadly serious, and Harry and friends are mostly left to their own devices, as Rowling puts them in the role of the “last, best hope” for the good guys. The story has finality written all over it: The stakes have never been higher, and the story revolves around Harry’s and Dumbledore’s backgrounds (much as Prince revolved around Voldemort’s), bringing a strong feeling of coming full circle.

But, dammit, the book is still too darned long. It takes nearly a quarter of the book to finally get Harry and company on the road looking for Horcruxes; the pages before are a very, very gradual build-up of elements of the story, and once again I wished Rowling would just get on with it. Heck, the whole first chapter is completely superfluous and should have been cut. I’m still of the mind that Rowling simply fell in love with the sound of her typing, and had enough clout to keep her words from being edited, even though she really, really badly needed some serious editing.

The book takes some strange turns once Harry is on the road, and some of them don’t ring true. And then it still takes quite a while before the shape of the story becomes known. Eventually, the conflict becomes not just the one between the forces of good and evil, but the temptation of the Deathly Hallows for Harry: To follow the course Dumbledore set for him to destroy the horcruxes, or to go for the seemingly-certain victory by seeking the Hallows. This is actually a surprisingly sophisticated conflict for what is otherwise not a very subtle series, and I wish more time had been spent on it, rather than the noodling around which occupies the first half of the book. (The insight into Dumbledore is not uninteresting, but it’s not essential either. A lot of it is spun out of whole cloth just to increase the suspense in this volume, with little connection to earlier volumes.)

Deathly Hallows feels so divorced from the rest of the series that it makes several of the early books feel even less relevant: Goblet of Fire can be boiled down to Voldemort returning from the dead, Order is little more than giving Harry a reason to hate Voldemort because of what he does to Sirius Black, and Prince is partly Voldemort’s backstory and partly the set-up for this book. It feels like you could read the first three books, and then just skim the next three to get to the “good stuff” that’s in here.

And as usual I think the cover of the U.K. edition (pictured above) is much better than that of the U.S. edition. Mary GrandPré’s art is not at all to my taste, so I’m glad to have the British editions instead.

The bottom line in my opinion is that this book is more suspenseful than the two before it, and feels more necessary to the overall story, but Rowling still needed to be seriously edited to cut down the volume of extraneous material and make the story more streamlined and enjoyable. She could still surprise and delight, but not like she could in the first three, shorter books. My final feeling is that I’m glad the series is over because I don’t think I could have pushed through much more of her verbiage, and that’s not a good epitaph for any series. The core magic of Harry Potter was the feeling that Harry was a normal boy who found that he was really extraordinary, but that magic is far in the past. Deathly Hallows is just a straightforward adventure story.

Beyond this point are spoilers for the book, so don’t continue if you don’t want to be spoiled!

Continue reading “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”

Kelly Link: Magic For Beginners

A short review of the collection Magic For Beginners by Kelly Link.

This collection of stories was our book for this month’s Kepler’s speculative fiction book group. I enjoyed the first story in the book, “The Faerie Handbag”, and figured it would be a charming collection of little modern fantasy vignettes. Unfortunately, I didn’t like any of the stories in the rest of the book!

By and large, these are plotless stories with obscure endings (and sometimes no endings at all): A family in an increasingly-haunted house (or are they just descending into madness?); an all-night convenience store frequented by zombies; a nested collection of semi-horror stories. None of them really go anywhere. The characters are occasionally just-barely-interesting, but are often flat and dull. The stories take odd turns for no reason and have no resolution or explanation. Many of them feel like set-ups for novels by Tim Powers – but only the set-ups. (Powers, of course, would carefully tie up all the details by the end of the story, which is exactly the opposite of Link’s tales.)

Other than “Handbag”, the title story comes the closest to being a satisifying story: A boy and his friends are fans of a bizarre fantasy television show, “The Library”. When he and his mother inherit property in Nevada from a late relative, a protracted goodbye leads to them heading out to Nevada. The story has a variety of interesting bits, and a build-up of “What the heck is going on here?”, but the story abruptly ends with no sense of a conclusion, leaving the reader entirely befuddled and frustrated. (Why the story is titled “Magic For Beginners” also seemed entirely obscure to me.)

Link does have a playful way with words, and many of the stories contain numerous humorous lines worth quoting to your friends. But beyond that element, I didn’t enjoy them, and I struggled to finish reading the book.

A pity, since I’d heard such good things about Link’s writing, but it’s clearly just not for me.