Review - Powers

Powers
by Ursula K. Le Guin
2008 Nebula Winner for Best Novel

I was generally unimpressed with the nominees for the Nebula in the novel category this year. Three of them were YA books so, to put it politely, I was nowhere near their target audience. The other two felt like nominees more for their names than the books (I love Pratchett but I'll be the first to tell you that Making Money was not one of his best). Of all the nominees Powers was the one that I knew the least about. I knew the author and it was part of a YA fantasy series and that was it. Remembering my problems with almost everything Le Guin has written since 1975 I braced myself for the worst, flipped open the hideous cover, and started to read.

There is a young slave a pre-industrial city who has occasional visions of the future. He is being schooled so that as an adult he will be able to teach the household children but because of the schooling he gradually becomes more socially aware. Eventually a troubling event causes him to flee his masters and seek purpose.

Powers is the third book in a series. I have not read the previous two but there was nothing in this volume that was difficult to follow. Powers stands on its own easily even with a few things that were likely references to other books in the series.

The novel reminded me a lot of Le Guin's early work. That's a good thing. Unfortunately it feels like a watered down version of those early works. I suspect that has to do with the Young Adult target audience and I know that if I read this when I was twelve and reading those kinds of books I would have been much more interested.

The key to that is how moral ambuiguity and comparitive cultures are at the heart of the story. The protagonist wanders through many different locations and none of them are "perfect". This is in spite of a few of them being traditional environments for "ideal lifestyles" in SF (usually the bad novels where the author is promoting their own beliefs). There are few villains in the story. On the other hand there are a lot of characters shaped by their environment to be something inadvertantly destructive.

While he's surrounded by complex personalities the protagonist himself is a bland, generic, faultless hero cynically designed to appeal to the reader. His major "flaws" are that he's not athletic and is a sensitive soul. On the other hand he reads a lot, is kind to all living things, and strives to be normal. While he discovers moral complexity he is set apart from it. This might be effective for the bookish teen picking up the novel; as an adult who has seen this kind of thing too many times I was disinterested.

I can't say that I was excited by the plot either. While there are interesting moments it the story meandered quite a bit and didn't hold focus. The book becomes a repetition of wandering to a new place, liking it at first, seeing the flaws, and wandering off again. Toward the end Le Guin suddenly remembers that she had been developing a plot in the first quarter of the novel and resolves it quickly.

One aspect of YA books that always bothers me is that they're written for a much lower reading level than I enjoy. I recognize that this part of dealing with that market even though I am not part of it. The prose in Powers is simple, direct, and flat. I know that Le Guin can do better than this since even in her worst books I've found her prose to be pretty good.

What this adds up to is a book that isn't bad but it is not for me. It is not for adult SF fans who have literary tastes. If you enjoy light fantasy then it might hold a bit more appeal for you and I would not hesitate to give a copy of this to a kid looking for some fantasy. Of course I'd give them A Wizard of Earthsea first.

World Fantasy Award Special! The Winning Novels in Five Words or Less!

And now because one person demanded it (or something like it)! I'm giving myself five words to categorize each of the World Fantasy Award winners. The first is the broad box I'd put the book in, the last is my general reaction to the story, and between is what comes to mind.

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld - Traditional, Fairy Tale, Charming, Enjoyed
Bid Time Return - Modern, Victorian, Time Travel, Disliked
Doctor Rat - Allegorical, Anthropomorphic, Screed, Preachy, Annoyed
Our Lady of Darkness - Urban, Horror, Lovecraftian, Creepy, Pleased
Gloriana - Elizabethan, Sexual, Gormenghast-esque, Intrigued
Watchtower - Traditional, Psuedo-medieval, Commune, Quest, Bored
Little, Big - Urban, Fairies, Generational, Memoirs, Ambivalent
Nifft the Lean - Traditional, Pulpy, Lieber-esque, Novellas, Reviled
The Dragon Waiting - Traditional, Historical, Name Dropping, Okay
Bridge of Birds - Historical, Quests, China, Humorous, Loved
Mythago Woods - Allegorical, Metatextual, Post-WWII, proto-Gaiman, Positive
Song of Kali - Urban, Horror, Indian, Disturbing, Squeemish
Perfume - Historical, European, Meandering, 1800's, Dreary
Replay - Urban, Time Travel, Growth, Curious
Koko - Urban, Vietnam, Suspense, Non-Fantasy, Irritated
Lyonesse: Madous - Traditional, Coming-of-age, Fairies, Idiots, Shoddy
Only Begotten Daughter - Urban, Allegorical, Religious, Quirky, Likable
Thomas the Rhymer - Historical, Fairies, Folk Tale, Ecstatic
Boy's Life - Urban, Memoirs, Boomers, Southern, Wistful
Last Call - Urban, Games, Epic, Rollicking, Playful
Glimpses - Urban, Time Travel, Boomers, Despised
Towing Jehovah - Allegorical, Religious, Preachy, Mixed-messages, Cold
The Prestige - Historical, 1800's, Tesla, Magicians, Taken-in
The Physiognomy - Urban, Insanity, Psuedo-Victorian, Odd, Confounded
Godmother Night - Urban, Memoirs, Deadly, Coming-of-age, Satisfied
The Antelope Wife - Urban, Generational, Memoirs, Passive, Hurled
Thraxas - Traditional, Stereotypical, Unfunny, Painful, Murderous
Galveston - Urban, Post-apocalypse, Coming-of-age, Inconsistent, Weary
Declare - Historical, Espionage, Lovecraftian, Religious, Hungry
The Other Wind - Traditional, Earthsea, Wrapping-up, Fans, Indifferent
The Facts of Life - Historical, Memoirs, Coming-of-age, Family, Interested
Ombria in Shadow - Traditional, Gormenghast-esque, Intrigue, Layered, Shocked
Tooth and Claw - Other, Psuedo-Victorian, Dragons, Lifeless, Insufficient
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Historical, 1800's, Stylistized, Fairies, Sequel
Kafka on the Shore - Urban, Quirky, Coming-of-age, Fated, Pondering
Soldier of Sidon - Historical, Twisty, Mind-bending, Thoughtful, Impressed
Ysabel - Urban, Coming-of-age, YA, Unpleasant, Dissatisfied

Review - "City of Truth" and "Danny Goes to Mars"

Since congress passed that law which said that any geek who saw Star Trek this weekend must comment about it on his blog I need to say something. I've pointed out in the past that the only Star Trek series that I really enjoyed was the original and that means that the reboot really spoke to me. And I enjoyed it. I can't call it a brilliant piece of film making; it was just an entertaining SF romp.

Yes, the science is stupid. I can't complain about that since Star Trek has always used situational made-up science. You have to accept the premise of the information provided in the movie and just let any connection to the real world go. It also didn't really follow continuity and I can't say that it's a bad thing. It doesn't matter that Robert April didn't captain the Enterprise first or any of the other four dozen nitpicks I've seen attached to the line "ruined the movie for me". The film was about making a fresh start with a franchise that has been beaten to death.

What Star Trek did have was the best directed space action I've seen in a long time. I'm not talking about the quality of the effects (they were what you would expect in a big budget action movie); the selection of shots, positioning of the action, and things like that were spectacular. The actors did a great job of distilling the essence of the characters and making it their own. The movie juggled the light humorous scenes with melodrama just like the original series did.

In short, I'm now eagerly looking forward to the sequel and the last time that happened was The Lord of the Rings.

Okay, on to the Nebulas!

"City of Truth"
by James Morrow
1992 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

This was an oddly dichotomous tale. The first half is terrible. The second half is wonderful. The first half is an attempt at parody that crumbles to dust as you think about it. The second half seeks deeper meaning and conveys it well.

There is a city called Veritas where all of its citizens are conditioned to be unable to lie. In this city is a highly placed citizen charged with destroying art for its deceptions. His son is dying of a rare, inevitably fatal illness and this citizen grabs onto a desperate chance from the works that he's been burning. He wants to use the power of positive thinking to try for a miracle. The only way he can do this is to learn how to lie.

The concept of a place where everyone must tell the absolute truth is interesting but Morrow handles it so poorly that I wanted to put the story down and walk away before I was ten pages in. Instead of starting from the concept and working outward he starts with modern society and then overlays honesty onto that. A society where honestly is forced is going to be very different from our; if you go around spouting the things you try to hide then you'd have to come up with a different way of dealing with them.

A perfect example of the problems with Morrow's parody is that restaurants do not serve hamburgers and steaks; they have "murdered cow". That presupposes that a cow can be "murdered" (an ethical issue which different people may have different "truths" for), ignores the fact that it is such a narrow descriptor that it is impossible to distinguish the dozens of different kinds of food that come from beef, and the fact that a cow died to provide it is implicit in the definition of the word "hamburger". It's the kind of gag that could have been cute in moderation but the pages are filled with this kind of thing. Morrow is inconsistent with his treatment of honesty as well and the whole thing just left me with a headache. The gag names don't even hold together when viewed as a whole; why would anyone buy "adequate" goods when someone has to be honestly making "great" ones?

Once Morrow gets away from that heavy-handed parody the story improves dramatically. The gags fall into the background and it becomes a more personal tale. The good elements were there before but they were buried under people who were obligated to say the worst things when they would be "funny". With that stripped away the emotion in the story can shine through.

The second half of "City of Truth" wouldn't have been as effective without the emotional developments in the first half. And yet the jokes in the first half were so distracting and unfunny that they completely disrupted the story. That makes a recommendation tricky for me. On balance I think it's worth reading but mileage is going to vary quite a bit based on your tolerance for Morrow's humor.

"Danny Goes to Mars"
by Pamela Sargent
1992 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

Dan Quayle jokes have not aged well. With the "major political figure is an idiot" memes having a life span of only a few years we've been through a lot of them. That means that this piece of Dan Quayle fanfiction (and it's hard to describe it as anything else) doesn't have the impact that it did twenty years ago.

A breakthrough in space propulsion has allowed NASA to plan a mission to Mars that will take only a few weeks. For political grandstanding President Bush arranges to have Vice President Quayle put on the mission. Quayle takes his responsibility seriously but naturally there are complications.

Sargent presents Quayle as a good natured goof who sticks his foot in his mouth continually. This is probably for the best since it allows him to be a reasonably pleasent protagonist. Sargent also doesn't really take political shots in the story; the worst it gets is presenting Bush as a politician. This story could have easily fallen into some cheap shots and the fact that it didn't helps it be more readable today.

Unfortunately it doesn't really rise above the level of readable. It is just fanfiction that's peppered with Quayle facts and if you don't care about Dan Quayle then this story won't hold any interest for you. The plot procedes predictably, the notes it hits are the ones that you'd expect. It's a bit of inoffensive fluff and I can't recommend a story just because it didn't bother me.

My Top Five World Fantasy Award Winners

I have a rule for myself to never comment on my own posting history but I had intended for this to get done yesterday. Something very important came up, though.

Movie? What movie? I don't know what you're talking about.

Anyhow, rather than running down a list of five novels placed in somewhat arbitrary order I am keeping the list in publication order. All five of these books are well worth anyone's time.

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart fits nicely into the mold of classic adventure fiction. There's a quest and a powerful villain and monsters and a lot of other elements that you'd expect to find in the interchangeable Tolkien knock offs that fill shelves. What it does differently is dramatically overturn the point of view. Shifting the setting to ancient China and capturing the cultural attitudes are part of that. Giving one of the "heroes" "one small flaw in his character" is another. If you read the book then you probably giggled at that previous sentence and the light hearted tone that Bridge of Birds maintains also sets it apart. Finally Hughart is exceptional at fitting words together beautifully. It adds up to a magificent book that cannot be missed.


Song of Kali by Dan Simmons is a work that leaves me uneasy in ways that horror novels rarely can. It's built on fear of the others, those dirty foreigners who are beyond our borders are have their own strange ways. It's the kind of thing that rational men are supposed to be beyond and Simmons plays with it better than any author I have encountered. Other authors who use that fear are typically politicians trying to enflame their people against others which adds a deeper layer to the fear that Simmons is envoking. Also he manages to capture the poisonous atmosphere of a densely populated city that exists in the worst conditions.



Replay by Ken Grimwood is notable for the use of a simple scenario (reliving one's life over and over) and playing with all of the myriad of implications. If that was all it had I wouldn't have mentioned it here; Grimwood also focuses on how these events both change and fail to change a man. No punches are pulled with the protagonist as he does some great things and many less than noble ones over his lifetimes. And even when he is at his worst Grimwood makes sure that the reader can understand the character.




Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami is the most maginal of my five selections but I think that it was successful as an allegorical novel in a way that many mainstream authors dabbling in speculative fiction are not. The theme of fate might be the single most ancient literary concept and somehow Murakami manages to find a unique take on it. Rather than simply being a a set of quietly magical events events occurring among a cast of quirky characters Kafka on the Shore strives for deeper meaning. I think it achieved it since I doubt I'll ever forget this book.




Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe is worth reading for one major reason: the writing. The story is good enough and the characters are interesting enough but what really makes this novel stand out from the rest is how magnficent the writing is. The unreliable narrator has never been more unreliable than in Soldier of Sidon and so Wolfe turns the reader into an active participant in the story. The reader along with the narrator is working from information that is fragmented; the reader might have a better point of view but the narrator could be dishonest on some points. It makes the book incredibly compelling and Wolfe manages to make the rest of the work support that.

I haven't changed my logo to feature the World Fantasy Award winners since with all of the Hugo and Nebula winners it is already a bit large. However I still missed the mosaic image of all of the covers...

(Click to giant size it)

That's better, though I wish I didn't have to keep doing this when the number of award winners were at prime numbers.

World Fantasy Awards Recap

Looking back at the World Fantasy Award winners the thing that surprised me most was how homogeneous in broad concepts they were. I consider science fiction to be a subset of fantasy and despite that the Hugo and Nebula novels showed much more variety. With the World Fantasy Awards there are:

• Nine traditional fantasy novels (Western, pre-industrial societies with magic and quests)
• Eleven historical fantasies
• Six novels that use or explicitly mimic the nineteenth century
• Sixteen books that might be called urban fantasy
• And seven of those where novels that were essentially memoirs with an occasional odd thing happening
• Only three books looked to the horror side of fantasy
• And five novels focused on fantasy's traditional partner allegory
• And zero direct Tolkein-esque knock offs.
  

But enough about how people repeat themselves. With regard to the actual books I disliked sixteen and enjoyed twenty-four which definitely made it a set of books worth checking out.

Review - "The Tower of Babylon", "Guide Dog", "Ma Qui"

It's another two year's worth of outstanding (in both senses of the word) Nebula winners.

I need to mention something of my plans. First, I'll be following up the World Fantasy Award winners over the next few days. Then I'll be doing some Nebula catch up with this year's Nebula winners. After that I plan on mixing some Hugo stuff with reviews of a new award.

"The Tower of Babylon"
by Ted Chiang
1990 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

One of the rare pleasures for me as I read these award winning stories is to come across a story that I read a long time ago, enjoyed, and haven't seen since. I had a subscription to Omni when Ted Chiang had this appear there as his first published story and I remembered it as magnificent, haunting, and impressive. Upon revisiting it I found that my memory was accurate.

In the story the Babylonians have constructed a huge tower extending to the top of the sky and have managed to connect the heavens to the earth with it. To breach the dome of the sky and gain access to heaven they have sent for a team of miners who will spend months climbing the tower with their gear and then dig upward to seek God. So "The Tower of Babylon" is about the miner's journey upward.

When I read the story it was the first time that I had encountered an author taking ancient tales and extrapolating some natural feeling consequences out from them. Obviously Chiang was not the first person to do this but "The Tower of Babylon" might be the greatest single example of this. Once you accept the premise that a construction of mud bricks could be hundreds of miles tall and the universe was something that could be climbed through with it then the rest of the world building follows naturally. It's like science fiction from 3000 B.C.E.

Of course if the story was just page after page of cosmology and tower building descriptions then this was be a pretty lousy story. Chiang's story is really about man confronting god, living and working in harsh conditions, and how environment shapes a person. The miners climbing the tower throughout the story aren't undergoing vast spiritual changes as they progress but they are being shaped by what they find and there's always something strange and wonderous around the next corner. This story is exceptional and well worth reading.

"Guide Dog"
by Mike Conner
1991 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

Early on in "Guide Dog" I worked out the general shape of the story. I was ready for some heavy handed use of the themes and some ugly moralizing. Conner surprised me when he took this material which has been used very poorly by other storytellers and doing a pretty good job with it.

On an alien world one way that the human colony attempts to integrate is by training children to be guide dogs for the flying, bat like aliens that have lost their senses. The humans can only communicate through a cybernetic interface and since the aliens are empathic their human guides must be able to overcome the flood of emotions from them. The most promising of those trained to be guide dogs is given to an artist. The two of them bond while dealing with the complications that come from the human chafing at being thought of as a dog.

From that brief description you can probably paste on a general outline that comes pretty close to the mark. Conner manages to take some of those overworked concepts and breathe life into them by retaining the tension. All of the characters in this story are broken by their circumstances whether they aknowledge it or not. Consequently even the healing that you'd expect is distorted. It makes the whole story better than the sum of its parts and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

"Ma Qui"
by Alan Brennert
1991 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

"Ma Qui" was the worst of these three stories. Oh sure it isn't a bad story and I liked what I found in it but someone has to be on the bottom of the totem pole. It was like "The Tower of Babylon" without the spiritual aspects and in a story about ghosts the lack of spiritual aspects is a problem.

In Viet Nam a soldier is gunned down and finds himself a specter wandering loose from his body. His body vanishes into the jungle and since his fellow dead vanish as they're bodies are recovered the soldier decides that he needs to return to his in order to find his way to his eternal rest. On that journey he encounters the dead of Viet Nam who maintain their own ghostly existance according to their traditions.

That's the problem with "Ma Qui": it's a story about the mechanics of the afterlife instead of the people. I could have gotten that same information from reading the wikipedia article on the Vietnamese afterlife beliefs. I didn't find the dead soldier to be a compelling character and so "Ma Qui" didn't thrill me.

Which isn't to say it's a bad story since I found Brennert to be fairly effective with his prose. I was just left wanting more of a story in "Ma Qui". In terms of stories about the just dead (a surprisingly large subgenre) I've read much worse and I think I would have liked the story more if Brennert expanded it so that it didn't feel so much like a recitation of setting details.