The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

I don't know if I've ever read a book quite like The Windup Girl. Normally, I try to situate a book I've just read in relation to other books, no matter how tenuous and personal the connections may be (I can't explain why I always think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a more interesting version of On the Road, for instance.)

But this, I'm at a loss. Nothing springs to mind. It so rarely happens, but The Windup Girl stands alone in my mind

And it has snuck up on me. I ended up reading this book over a long period of time, and while I never felt deeply affected by it noticeably, it ended up changing how I look at the world around me. I don't know how long it will last, but I've started to become hyperaware of waste, of packaging, of the calories that went into creating anything I use, particularly anything disposable. This wasn't a bolt from the blue, it was a slow creeping up of awareness. I make no claims that it's going to stick with me in the long-term, but it was interesting feeling how it snuck up and insinuated itself into my perceptions.

The world Bacigalupi creates is utterly unlike any I've seen, and convincing. He puts forward a post-Collapse civilization that has not fallen utterly to pieces (although it has disintegrated quite a bit), but which struggles to keep some technology going, while others campaign to limit how things can change, fearful of setting off another cataclysm. (The treadle-pump computer was mentioned only once, but illustrated so well to me the world.)

In this world, the city of Bangkok struggles to keep back the rising seas, and to do so, closes its borders in most ways to outsiders of any sort, refugees, or companies. But by the time the book has started, enough time has passed that inroads are starting to be made. Will they change the way the city exists, the politics that surround it? Yes, but probably not in the way you expect. Certainly not in any way I expected. 

In the centre of the struggles between the Environment Ministry and the Trade Ministry, which a representative of the "calorie companies' tries to exploit, there stands Emiko, the eponymous Windup Girl, a genetically modified human being, marked arbitrarily with a jerky, wind-up motion to single her out as other-than-human. Deserted in Bangkok, regarded as soulless by most of the world, subject to being composted if she is discovered without the proper bribes, Emiko suffers immense degradation, and yet, persists. Struggles. Despairs. Survives. 

I enjoyed The Windup Girl thoroughly, and it often took me by surprise. As I said, I've never read a book with quite the same feel. It's nice to be surprised.

Booklinks:

I read this book as part of an attempt to read all the Hugo Nominees

The Midwife of Venice by Roberta Rich

Welcome to another edition of Megan's Damning With Faint Praise!

This book is fine. It is readable, it didn't piss me off, I enjoyed it while I was reading it. These are things I almost always say about books I liked but inspired me to no passion, one way or another. And it's true in this case as well.

But the main problem of this book is that I don't feel the urgency - she creates a situation that should make me anxious, but I wasn't feeling it. I was wondering if it was me, but then I picked up and read about 20 pages of Guy Gavriel Kay's latest, from a section near the end, and realized, no, it's not just me. Those 20 pages contained more tension than the entire book of The Midwife of Venice. And so, partly by comparison to a truly great work of sort-of historical fiction, this book falls flat.

I think I know why - the author tells us many times that the Jews are in constant danger in the ghetto at Venice, but nothing ever happens to make that threat real. We are told that enslaved men on Malta often die from maltreatment before they are ransomed, but that never happens either. We are told that babies frequently die in childbirth, and mothers, despite the skill of the midwife, which Hannah most certainly is, but they never do while in our sight. All these threats are told about, not shown to occur, not even to characters we have no connection to. 

Telling, in this case, does not work that well. We need to see those consequences, feel them keenly, dread them happening again. 

The characters are, for the most part, well-drawn, although they did suffer at times from inconsistentitis - you know, where characters do something entirely out of character, because it's what the plot demands. The main character, Hannah, when her sister reproaches her for something entirely reasonable, and for which Hannah has already held herself responsible, decides that this is outrageous, the straw that broke the camel's back, her sister is now dead to her! Sorry? Come again? 

So that's a problem - not a huge one, for it doesn't happen that often, but a problem. 

Yet, the characters are interesting, the book held my attention while I was reading it, it was a fast and non-taxing read. It's just not more than that, and it aspires to be more. I hope Roberta Rich writes more, and puts more on the line in future books, because she has skill, but not yet craftmanship.

Gateway by Frederik Pohl

Frederik Pohl is still alive? Wow. And won a Hugo as recently as last year, for his blog. That I will have to check out. This is a guy who has been around science fiction for a long time, as a writer and as an editor. And Gateway was my first introduction to his work. Let me just go add him to the list of authors I want to read more of.... (That's not rhetorical - it's on a Sticky on my desktop.) I will want to be reading more of his work.

Gateway is a really good book - not one that knocked me over, but one that I thoroughly enjoyed, for a whole bunch of reasons. 

In a heavily overpopulated solar system, humans have discovered relics of an alien society, but only a few. One of them led people to Gateway, where Heechee ships sit with potential courses preprogrammed, but no way to really control or understand them other than picking a setting and going with it. Crew have no idea where they're going to end up, if they'll survive, or if they even have enough food or water to get where they're going and get back. So, why would anyone prospect? Well, the same reasons as the California Gold Rush - if you hit it rich, you could potentially hit it rich big time. So what if 2/3 of the ships fail to return with live crew? If you're desperate enough, it still sounds pretty appealing. 

It did for Robinette Broadhead, at least until he was faced with the prospect of actually going. 

Gateway is told by switching back and forth between Robin at his robot psychiatrist's and Robin as he first came to Gateway. Obviously suffering from some sort of trauma, Robin is combative with the psychiatrist he has freely chosen to see, and treats the sessions like games of oneupmanship. Knowing that something obviously goes horribly wrong, Robin's story on Gateway gains a subtle air of menace.

The book is also peppered with science lectures and ads from those buying and selling services to prospectors on Gateway. Some of these may be more important than they appear. Don't skip them. But even those that aren't directly related to the story at hand add important texture. 

Pohl switches elegantly between the narrative strains, and Robin is a fascinating, if sometimes annoying, character. But I was also impressed with Pohl's female characters, all of whom are well-rounded. Not perfect, as that would be as annoying as too flawed, but real people. Not cutouts who "gurgle happily" (my least favourite descriptive word for how some science fiction writers think women talk.)

And underlying the psychological makeup of Robin and his experiences, there lurks the larger mystery. Who were the Heechee? Where did they go? Why did they take most of their stuff with them, but not some things? What the heck did they even look like?

I'm looking forward to reading more of the Heechee books, and seeing if any of those questions are answered. But I like them just fine as mysteries too.

Booklinks:


I read this book as part of an attempt to read all the Hugo Nominees

How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yee

I wanted to like this book a great deal more than I did. I wanted to be moved. But in the end, it left me a little cold.

I enjoyed the premise, the set up, the notion of living already in a science fictional universe where, at certain points, the reality ratio went up, but at others, significantly down. I liked the idea of born Protagonists, and what happens to all the poor Joes in a science fictional universe who live in the background of the stories, and keep things running. Except these things were alluded to, once or twice, but never developed.

And dammit, I liked the idea of time travel as a metaphor for what we all do anyway, sometimes, which is dwelling in the past. Yu's time travellers never seem to go to the future, they go to their pasts, to the moments they find unbearable in their own personal histories, and try to change them, or simply watch. The main character lives in his time machine, repairs the time machines of others, but he is constantly looking for where his father might have gone in time, how he might have gotten unstuck, while his mother is trapped (voluntarily, at the start) in the same slice of time - dinnertime with her family, over and over again. 

And then, of course, the main character (with the same name as the author) meets himself coming out of his time travel machine one day, and shoots him. And then has to go through what he has, in many ways, gone through many times before, and leads up to being present to be shot. On the way, he reads a book as he writes, and uses this to watch some of the moments that tell him where his father might be lost.

These metaphors this books uses to tell the story are powerful, and yet somehow, at the end, I wasn't particularly moved. The ideas themselves are evocative, but I didn't feel like the writing itself helped really bring home the emotional impact. I hope Charles Yu writes more, because he has great and poignant ideas, and the seeds of being a great writer. But this book didn't quite deliver.

How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe is a good book, but not a great one. Yet it has seeds of greatness within it.

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

The Quantum Thief is bursting with so many ideas that it is an exhilarating read. What it needs is just a little more finesse, a slightly better pace for doling out information, for letting us play in this wonderful playground he's created. It is so complete, but so alien, and I needed just a little bit more of a guide. I like to flatter myself that I'm not an unperceptive reader, and I certainly don't mind it when authors don't tip their hands all at once and want me to work for it.

But where I had a few problems was where there weren't explanations (or weren't particularly good ones) of some core concepts, so later, when I was supposed to find this particular use of an idea horrifying, it didn't have the emotional punch it needed to.

Just a little bit more of not expecting all your readers to have all your specialized knowledge in the next book, Hannu Rajaniemi? Don't talk down to us, just learn how to pace your reveals about how this world works. Specifically, I'm talking about gogols. I always thought I knew what that meant, in general, but implications of that in this fictional universe, why they were and could be horrifying I could only guess at. And that made some emotional punches fall flat. 

What I'm saying is, I want to play too. But you have to explain the rules. Even if you're playing Calvinball and the rule is that the rules are constantly changing.

This reminds me very much of a show I saw some friends in, years ago. It was a comedy. They had overrehearsed. And because they had, they'd forgotten where the original laughs were, and were adding extra stuff in to make each other laugh. What this did was make it inaccessible to the audience, who hadn't been there through two+ months of rehearsals. The underlying jokes were obscured by in-jokes. And that was funny for them, but not for us. 

That aside, this is a dizzying exploration of ideas that tumble free and fast, one after another. The sheer exhilaration of the new ideas is breathtaking, when I could keep up with them. And while I find there are some first-book problems, characters are, thankfully, not one of them. I found them complex and compelling.

Jean le Flambeur, master thief, is sprung from prison by Mieli, a warrior from an Oortian culture. (A little more on what that means? The tastes we get are very interesting, but they're not much.) She is doing this to help her find a lost love, working for one of those who seem to play with reality on a galactic scale. (Again, not much detail on what this means in practice.) She takes him to the Oubliette on Mars where he has to recover information he left for himself. But to get it, he'll have to choose to pay a terrible price. Or not to pay it. 

The Oubliette was the most fleshed out concept in the book, and it was fascinating - proving Rajaniemi can explain things interestingly, and with emotional punch, when he wants to. It is a total privacy society in the midst of total surveillance. While everything is recorded, control over who can see or do what extends even to who can perceive you when walking down the street, and whether the two participants in a conversation allow each other to remember it happened at all, let alone the contents. 

And when we get into what memories might be accessible or inaccessible, what might be tainting them, and who might be behind the scenes - not to mention revelations about the nature of the Oubliette itself, I was at my most enthralled. This book turned me on my head several times. 

I've heard the next book is even better, and I hope that's true. I hope he does more of what he does so very very well in the next one, and less withholding just to withhold. This is an excellent first novel, but it's challenging, and not without fault. I love that he's trying to do so much. Next comes the skill to manage so many elements. Rajaniemi is almost there. I can taste it.

Crow Road by Iain Banks

I was enjoying the hell out of this book right up until, near the end, it decided without warning to become a murder mystery. That section felt so out of place with the rest of this meandering, detailed meditation on death and growing up.

When life was full of mysteries and strangenesses, and talking moles (the skin thing, not the animal), and unfortunate bolts of lightning and litter bins, that was the book I was enjoying reading. One that didn't need to supply an answer for everything, that bravely asserted that not every death has a meaning, and sometimes the world is tragically absurd.

And then, for several chapters, it became about Prentice, the main character, solving several murders and playing cat and mouse with the killer, and it just didn't hang together with the rest of the book. 

The book starts with Prentice's grandmother's cremation, at which she blows up. I'm not spoiling anything, that's the first line of the book. He is on the outs with his father over his lack of atheism, desperately in love with a not-cousin. (A cousin of his cousins, if that makes sense. No blood relation.) He is flunking out of school. He is a bit of an idiot. 

And Prentice continues to be a bit of an idiot for a good portion of the book, as he sulks, drinks, and pushes people away. That was a bit trying for a while, but there was enough there to keep me interested. Specifically, the wealth of detail Banks brings to his world enchanted me. It was so complete, so tactile, the details so small and odd that it felt both familiar and strange. The taillight game that Ashley plays was so precise that I was sure the author must either do that himself, or know someone who does. 

Then life dishes out the kind of irony that only exists in fiction and real life, and Prentice has to start to consider who he actually is and what he's going to do. 

And then the murder mystery part happens. It felt like a payoff that didn't live up to the mystery. As a meditation on growing up and death, I highly recommend this book. But if Banks wants to write a murder mystery, he should just write a bloody murder mystery.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

It has been over a week and a half since I last finished a book. This is so extremely unusual. I'm trying not to hold it against the collection of books I've been reading that week in a half, but at times it's hard. I find myself eyeing Ulysses suspiciously, poking The Reality Dysfunction every once in a while to see if it's moved, or tucking The Idiot in my purse to try to get through just a little more. (Does anyone else think it's odd that a 600+ Dostoyevsky book is the only one that will fit in my purse?)

And Lord Jim, which I've also had underway for most of that time. And is the first of the bunch I actually finished.

Studying masculinity as I do, it's hard to not see Lord Jim as a novel about what it means to be a man. Jim, as a young man, is the epitome of what a British sailor should be like. He looks reliable, he looks like "one of us," he's got the bearing and stature that should, if appearances mean anything, tell you that he is to be relied upon and trusted.

If, of course, appearances mean anything. Who can you trust if you can't trust a ruddy-cheeked, healthy Englishman?

But there is an incident in Jim's past, one that haunts him, that makes him, for a while, an outcast, and even after the point where everyone else might have forgotten what he did, his own inability to do so, his own consciousness that that at least once, his outward appearance was not matched by word or deed, drives him further and further away from white colonial society, and eventually to become the only white man in the depths of a Malay settlement, where he rises to be considered "Lord" Jim. But even that distance may not be enough.

What actually happened on that fateful day is shot through with ambiguity - we have Jim's version, of course. But there are doubts that he is telling the whole truth, or even that he knows the whole truth. Jim's story is such a threat to others and their own identities, who see a shadowy reflection of something they themselves might have done, that it causes it to be more harshly judged, more critically gossiped about, and the unease it engenders in one of his judges drives that judge to an extreme act of self-destruction.

If one upstanding young man can act that way, what does it mean for the masculinity of the rest?

As for the experience of reading the book, I found it dragged quite a bit for the first 50-100 pages. I had to pull myself through it by sheer force of will, as Conrad danced around the topic of what Jim had done without ever quite spelling it out. But then as it started to become clear, not necessarily the event itself, but what Conrad was examining, the instability of masculinity in a colonial world, and thus the need for it to be ever more vigilantly guarded, I became absolutely engrossed.

Then, halfway through, it started to drag again. But by the end, I was as caught up as ever. I'm not sure if the book ebbs and flows that way, or if some days I was in the mood for this one, and some days I certainly wasn't.

But the issues it raised about white male identity in a colonial world, and the betrayal of self and the long-lasting repercussions that had for both Jim and others, the actions to which it drove them, the judgements they made, (view spoiler)and the final action of Jim's life, where he atones for a second mistake in the only way he thinks he can and still retain who he is, they made this a book well worth reading.