Review - Perfume

Perfume
by Patrick Suskind
1987 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Novel
Translated by John E. Woods

That was... er... well... very European.

Perfume is the first of these award winning novels that was not written in English and since I do not read German above a level capable of stumbling through board game rules (barely) I resorted to an English translation.

In eighteenth century France a child is born in the middle of rotting fish and corpses who lacks an odor of his own. He defines his world by scents thanks to his supernaturally gifted sense of smell. As the child grows he finds that certain people smell a way that draws others to them and becomes obsessed with replicating that smell himself in a perfume. Unfortunately his unique viewpoint has made him into a sociopath that is more than capable of killing anyone in order to get what he desires.

So what do I mean when I call Perfume "very European"? The story is low key. It's filled with philosophical digressions. It has a certain self-important style that attempts to give the novel a greater weight. Symbolism and imagery are the most important aspects of the book. It reminded me a great deal of those European films that you can only see in tiny art houses with people who equate confusing and slow paced with quality.

Fortunately Perfume doesn't manage to crawl so far up its own navel that the only thing you can find is what you bring with you but it does come close. It's salvation is it's problem: Suskin designs his descriptions in terms of scents and so every smell that crosses the pages must carry its own deep meaning. So on one hand the descriptions are unique and give the book a completely different feel to anything else, on the other the prose hits those over and over again.

To some extent this may be the result of the translation and so I'm hesitent to criticize the prose. It is clumsy in some place but I don't know if it was really the fault of the author.

Another problem with the book is the fact that viewpoint character is an inhuman monster. His actions and reactions are not those of a person. However Suskind does craft him into a character that can be understood much in the way that one can understand the behavior of a predatory insect. There's a fascination involved in watching that does not require any empathy. I have to considder that a success since I'm certain that it was the author's intention but at the same time there are likely to be readers who have no tolerance for it.

When this character is interacting with people the book is at its best. Suskind plays up the differences between his monster and "normal" people which make these sections gripping. Unfortunately for a long section in the middle of the book he moves the character away from any human contact and the story loses much of its momentum. It does pick up again several chapters later but it is a rough speed pump in the story.

I know this seems like a lot of griping but I did when it comes down to the bottom line enjoy Perfume and I do recommend it. I just recogonize that it's a very different book from what most people enjoy. So I have to recommend it with caveats: if you have no problem with slow paced allegory, if you don't need a likable protagonist, if you're interested in a very alternative viewpoint, then you'll be able to read Perfume and enjoy it.

Looking Back at the Hugo Winning Short Fiction

What a long and strange journey that was. Even more than the novels reading the Hugo winning short stories really gives on a cross section of science fiction from the 1950's on. From the light pulp stories that began it to the psychedelic New Wave to the refinement of the literary form that followed to the fragmentation of subgenres to the fading of science fiction in favor of fantasy; the award winning stories are SF in microcosm.

Looking back through the list of winners by my count I enjoyed a bit more than 60% of the winners. I don't think that's a particularly bad average given the standards I hold the stories to.

By a few arbitrary categories:

Best Story - There really isn't any other choice than Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" which won in 1960. Not only a great story, it's acknowledged as one of the most significant short stories of the twentieth century. It's one of the stories that you can point to in order to demonstrate the significance of science fiction.

Worst Story - It's hard to select one but I have to go with "Down in the Bottomlands" by Harry Turtledove which narrowly defeats the moral bludgeoning of Ursala Le Guin's "The Word for Wold is Forst" and the goofy superhuman story of Orson Scott Card's "Eye for Eye". As bad as those other two were they lacked a character named "Evilla" whose defining characteristic was that they were evil.

Author Who I Never Want to Read Again - In my life I have read five stories by Jon Varley and of those five of them present pedophilia as a positive thing that is beneficial for everyone involved. Even in a novella that didn't involve children he managed to work it in as part of the back story. It's enough that I now considder Varley's name a warning to avoid the story.

Author Who I'll Read Whatever They Write - A much harder decision since there are three current authors whose short stories have convinced me that I'll want to read whatever they put down on the page. For quality and consistancy based solely on their Hugo winners I have to go with Ted Chiang who narrowly beats Connie Willis (who is consistantly enjoyable but tents to alternate flippant nothings with more deep stories) and Michael Resnick (who is great at presenting morally ambiguous stories). Chiang beats them because of his ability as a literary chameleon, able to shift form to always given the perfect presentation to his concepts.

Review - Song of Kali

Song of Kali
by Dan Simmons
1986 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Novel

I'm not sure what was going on with the World Fantasy Award juries back in the mid-eighties. They managed to select a set of very interesting novels their winners each completely different from the last. So after mythic China and an allegorical novel there is a horror novel based around a middle class American couple in a third world slum and he does it well.

In 1977 it was still twenty years before India would start it's economic boom and Calcutta was a warren of slums. Word of a new work by an Indian poet who mysteriously vanished a decade before brings a poet to the sprawling city. He brings his Indian wife along with him to act as translator and their infant daughter. Once the poet arrives however he finds himself confronted with stories of a cult dedicated to the worship of the goddess Kali and hints of horrors lurking just out of sight.

The real heart of Song of Kali is in its atmosphere. Simmons paints an image of Calcutta as a city that is well past the point of decay, where ten million people live in the worst of conditions in enough space for just a million of them. It's a city and people pushed into complete collapse and Simmons captures it. The book is almost a travel guide to the worst places on earth; Calcutta may not fit the description anymore but such places still exist. The bulk of the novel's consists of
those descriptions and while that could have been tedious I found that it drove the story well.

The plot itself is more intriguing than I would expect given the fact that it could have been distilled down to something around a third of the novel's length without really losing anything. Simmons impressed me with his pacing as he takes detours that feel minor, take up a great deal of time (like the descriptions mentioned before), and yet serve to draw out the tension to the straining point. He'll slide off into a side trip to a museum dedicated to a writer or a lengthy story of a young man in the big city but his prose managed to keep pulling me along to the conclusion.

And what a climax it has. I guessed part of what would occur toward the end of Song of Kali but I was still impressed.

By using the poet as the perspective character Simmons gives us a view of a man being pulled into insanity and barely holding on. He is becoming absorbed into the poisonous atmosphere of Calcutta and the reader is getting carried along with it. He is interesting as the rational man being pushed to an edge.

Song of Kali is a very interesting novel of a style that isn't seen very often these days. At one point the "civilized man in a strange and evil foreign land" theme was more common but the only recent use I can think of is the movie Babel. That's understandable since it does inherently contain tones of racism and cultural imperialism. I think that Simmons manages to sidestep those problems by making Song of Kali more about the problems that are inherent to any overpopulated third-world country than India in particular.

I found a lot to like in Song of Kali; it is creepy, depressing, and haunting. The only negative for me was that a reader who needs constant action might not enjoy it. This is a horror novel of atmopshere and it was just what I like.

Review - "A Billion Eves", "The Djinn's Wife", and "Impossible Dreams"

Donato Giancola
2007 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

And so it draws to a close. This is the last of the Hugo winning short fiction to review. It's taken me about a year to read them all. Fifty-three years worth of winners; one hundred and forty short stories covering the length of breadth of science fiction and fantasy. Even for short fiction that's a lot. I'll post a bit on the highs and lows of the reading but I can't say it is a reading project I'd recommend for all science fiction fans; getting the stories is just too much of a pain.

For my last reading I had to go to Science Fiction: The Best of the Year: 2007 Edition, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection, and the single author anthology Hart & Boot by Tim Pratt. I have to say that I'm always amused by how much the two "Best of" anthologies disagree on exactly what the "best" is. I know that it's two different editors but one chose a story that I despised for his "best" and the other chose a story that I thought was very well done for his "best". I know which of the two editors I'm more likely to trust.

"A Billion Eves"
by Robert Reed
2007 Hugo Winner for Best Novella

There are two things that break my suspension of disbelief past the point of no repair. One is poorly thought out economics. The other is poorly thought out sociology. "A Billion Eves" manages to hit both of those sticking points on a scale I rarely encounter. The general story that Reed tells isn't bad but the world building around it is so atrocious and the fact that the genuinely interesting issues raised are consistently ignored that I was driven to frustration.

There are devices called "rippers" that teleport everything within a certain radius to a random parallel earth where a particle moved a little differently at some point in the universe's history and things turned out very differently. At some point in our near future a person took two semi-trucks full of supplies, parked them next to a sorority house, and then kidnapped one hundred college aged women to use as his personal harem on an empty earth. Now what do you suppose the results of that to be:

A. He enjoyed a full life of decadant pleasures with his one hundred new sex slaves.
B. Despite having a rifle he was immediately torn apart by a mob of college aged women who outnumbered him one hundred to one and didn't care for being kidnapped to be used as sex slaves.
C. Rather than risk the gun they waited eight hours and smothered him in his sleep.
D. The college aged women decide immediately to repopulate the new Earth they find themselves on and use him as their sex slave in order to accomplish this.
E. They immediately decide to repopulate the new Earth and set up a patriarchy where women have no rights.

Now personally I would have gone with B or C since I can't see that continuation of the species being a big factor against the "kidnapped and permantly taken from everyone and everything they knew in order to be used as a sex slave" thing. Reed however assures the reader that the answer is E which is how we know that it's a science fiction story; most people in real life when suddenly abducted and deposited on a new planet wouldn't put the long term continuation of the species on that planet first.

And yet that's what the entire societal structure in "A Billion Eves" hangs upon. The idea is that people will put homo sapiens as a species ahead of society or even their own personal good. On top of that it's a religious patriarchy that's been stable for more than twenty-thousand years. With a premise so fundamentally against humanity it breaks my willingness to read the story.

Continuing on from that Reed toys with things like the problem of carrying species into new environments, though he doesn't consider the fact that an equilibrium will be reached and that a new species introduced will not automatically take over from whatever is already in that ecological niche; an introduced species is just as likely to be immediately cut down by more agressive species already there as it is to cause problems. He also touches on the concept of what manafest destiny means in a truly infinite wilderness but backs off for an ecological message based on turning around the idea that a universe that divides ten to thirty-fifth power times each picosecond is too precious to be contaminated. It's a universe that could not be harmed before it all collapses into entropy but it's apparently precious.

The annoying part is that the story that Reed wants to tell with about half of the novella isn't as bad as the world he spends the other half establishing. It's about a girl trying to break out of the mold that the nonsensical society has created. It's a bit worn as a premise though Reed handles it reasonably well. If he hadn't tied it to such terrible world building then it might have been worth reading.

"The Djinn's Wife"
by Ian McDonald
2007 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

In near future India a dancer falls in love with an AI diplomat. They have a storybook romance until the differences between humanity and computer program raise their ugly head. This is cast in the mold of a woman marrying a spirit of air and fire with strange powers.

McDonald chose a very odd prose style for "The Djinn's Wife" but in this instance where the idea of the story is ancient superstition being blended with a cyberpunk future I think it works. It's a story with many exotic viewpoints and a surplus of data. So when McDonald chooses to blend sentences together or shift tenses or go from a formal distant style to a rapid choppy one I think it conveys the concepts he's working with well.

McDonald also captures the flame of passion and the disolutionment that comes from discovering how seperate the lovers truly are extremely well. While we can never quite get inside the AI's mind the dancer and those around her reacting to the marriage are fascinating and believable characters. Consequently I have to recommend "The Djinn's Wife" as well worth reading.

"Impossible Dreams"
by Tim Pratt
2007 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story

The book story or library with books that cannot exist is a common concept in fantasy but "Impossible Dreams" is the first time where I have seen it transposed to a video store. It features a videophile who stumbles one night into a store where shelves contain Hollywood productions that have been lost or never quite came together. It's from a world where things were just different enough that slightly different movies were made. The videophile is frustrated in his attempts to view this new world of cinema and in the short time each day that he can reach the store he begins a relationship with the woman working there.

The result of this is a cute story that I wouldn't call brilliant but it is fun if you know anything about the history of Hollywood. Any film buff will pick up on many references to the productions that might have been. Still the story is more about cinematic name dropping than developing an enduring plot. I enjoyed it and I'd recommend it with those caveats.

Review - Mythago Wood

Mythago Wood
by Robert Holdstock
Tied for 1985 World Fantasy Award winner for Best Novel

It takes more than a record ice storm, widespread destruction, and five days without power in subfreezing temperatures to keep me down. Still I got a lot of reading done in the past few days as I huddled shivering in my house listening to every tree in a ten mile radius collapse.

So that brings me to Mythago Wood. I have to say that after the absolutely spectacular Bridge of Birds I thought there was no way that a book that tied with it could live up to that highwater mark. I was right in that regard; Mythago Wood isn't anywhere near as spectacular as Bridge of Birds is. On the other hand if it had been a World Fantasy Award winner any other year I wouldn't have blinked since I found Mythago Wood to be an interesting effort but not a monumental literary achievement.

In post-war England there is a tiny patch of ancient wood. The wood is just four miles across on the map but it is tied to human psyche. The old archetypes and myths live on in its boundaries, shaped from the subconcious of the people who live around it. And if one was to penetrate the maze of tracks to get deeper in they would find that the further in they went the larger the wood becomes.

Christian and Steven's father spent his entire life attempting to unravel the mysteries of the wood and seeking the first proto-hero at its heart. When he died his neglected sons discover the secret that the woods harbored. Steven falls in love with an ideal woman who emerges from the wood and when she dies he begins to obsess over entering the deep wood in order to find another version of her myth. When Steven vanished into the woods pursued by the proto-myth his brother Christian attempts to rescue him despite the fact that they are becoming wrapped in a myth of their own.

The central theme of Mythago Wood, the creation of myth and the exploration of those cycles through human history, is extremely strong. It's strong enough that I'd considder recommending it on that basis alone. Yes it's a theme that has been covered many times before (Neil Gaiman has built a career on it) but here it felt very different from other attempts. Part of that is Holdstock quickly abandons myths that would be familiar to readers for supposed "earlier forms" that he created. The transition in concepts and styles can be followed the deeper into the wood the story takes the reader through an enjoyable tour of prehistory.

A good concept isn't enough for me though. Fortunately the book's plot works just as well. The story of the father and both of his sons parallel each other and as such serve to reinforce that theme again. Their slow spiral to obsession as they are pulled deeper into the woods for reasons that are so similar between them is fascinating to read. The final act of the story is particularly worthy of note as myth surrounds the protagonists and they work to make the myth the one they want.

I did have a problem with the plot in that I felt the pacing was a bit awkward. The first half of the novel moves in jerks and sputtering motions. The pacing does get better in the second half where the form transitions to more of a traditional adventure story but those early pages were tough going initially.

The family conflicts that help tie the threads of the novel together are built on interesting character interactions. While Holdstock doesn't place heavy characterization in the forefront I appreciated his lighter touch. The characterization is done as subtle growth not giant epiphanies.

All in all Mythago Wood is pretty good. It's not quite as smoothly plotted as I would like but the other elements hold together well enough that I don't think it makes a significant difference. I can't say it was a brilliant novel but that doesn't diminish its qualities.

Review - Bridge of Birds

Bridge of Birds
by Barry Hughart
Tied for 1985 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Novel

When talking about the World Fantasy Awards I mentioned that there were a few winners that had been on my list of books that I wanted to read for years. It has drifted off and on my radar from time to time but due to things like it being out of print and impossible to find at that time or my being bogged down with other things I never quite managed to get around to it. Now that I've finally read it I have to say that I'm disappointed that I took so long. Bridge of Birds is not only a good fantasy novel, it's one of the best novels that I've ever read.

The novel takes place roughly around 600AD in a China where the myths and legends are true. All of the children in a small village are struck by a mysterious ailment and so the strong but good-hearted peasant Number Ten Ox seeks help in the city. There he finds a sage with a slight flaw in his character named Master Li and the two of them have comic misadventures as they travel through mythic China solving mysteries and seeking a cure.

There's a lot more to it than that, of course, as Hughart weaves a careful and subtle plot among the comic misadventures. If I said anything more about it, though, it would completely ruin the fun of having things quite go as expected. The only thing approaching a complaint about the novel turned into one of the central mystery's big plot twists; it was a turn so ingenious that it subverted a plot device that I normally despise (if you've read the book before I'm not referring to the revelations in the last chapters but a little bit before that).

Part of what makes the story so effective is that Bridge of Birds is broken into easily digested chunks. One could view it as a set of short novelettes however this is one of those circumstances where when the last peice falls into place at the end of the book the whole tale is greater than the sum of its parts. So Hughart has Ox and Li move to a new adventure, get in trouble, and move on and each time the cycle repeats the view becomes just a bit wider. It's masterful pacing in which the novel never slows down; even the required exposition is presented dramatically.

A significant portion of the novel's charm is how smoothly it shifts tone. Hughart can comically relate the preparation of porcupine and then add in a romantic subplot before jumping into an adventure in the underworld that culminates in a tragic loss. He juggles those moods and settings like a master and while the overall tone of the novel is humorous there is far more going on than simple comedy.

All of that wonderful plotting would be worthless without characters and Bridge of Birds is not a let down there either. Number Ten Ox and Master Li are wonderfully engrossing characters and I think part of that has to do with the fact that they are the active characters in this story. It's typical in any novel with an adventure plot that the protagonists are reactive; the villain does something and they respond. By turning that normal situation on its ear Hughart lets the characters shine through their actions more. It's a lesson that a lot of fantasy authors need to learn.

If that wasn't enough the prose itself in the book is incredibly sharp. Hughart uses some awkward constructions to make it feel more like a novel translated from Chinese and in this case I think it adds to the story's charm.

There were two more books about Number Ten Ox and Master Li and I am eagerly looking forward to reading them. Bridge of Birds left me hungry for more; I want to see more of the wonders of mythic China through Hughart's tales. The only other thing I can say is that if you have not read it yet then you need to read it now; the only flaw with the book is that you'll be angry at yourself for not reading it sooner.

Review - "Born With the Dead", "If the Stars Are Gods", and "The Day Before the Revolution"

It's one of those cruel ironies that when I finally no longer have to order three anthologies to get another year of Hugo winners that I strike a block of Nebula winners where they agreed with the Hugo winners two out of three times. I wound up having to order the next five Nebula Winners anthologies to keep things moving. Somedays it's just rough to be a collector.

"Born With the Dead"
by Robert Silverberg
1974 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

In the near future of 1990 the dead are revived and once brought back they go off to live a separate existence from those who have died. One man pursues his former wife who has been revived like this trying to find his own answers and to determine if a relationship between them would be possible in the future.

I had a major problem with this story that undermined the whole thing for me: I never understood why this separate society would form. Silverberg does give some insight very late into the novella but I spent 90% of the story wondering how this was any different from someone revived with CPR. We were assured that those who died still had the same memories and desires and yet they all abandon their past lives as soon as they get up to go live with other revived people in an alien society that they would have never encountered until their death.

It seems to me that Silverberg was too busy making his point (the dead standing in for any segregated population) to realize that his metaphor didn't stand up to even casual consideration. I suspect that the metaphor may have resonated more with readers in 1974 than it does today which would explain how it won the Nebula but I can't recommend the story.

"If the Stars Are Gods"
by Gordon Eklund and Gregory Benford
1974 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

An alien spacecraft enters orbit around the moon and the travelers on it demand to meet with an expert on the sun. The closest expert is an aging astronaut who finds that the aliens have come to commune with our sun as a benevolent god. Since the astronaut is the only man that the aliens will speak with tensions rise as they work to communicate.

I found the idea of aliens coming to us on a religious pilgrimage to be an interesting one and the authors do a wonderful job of presenting the interactions between the two species as our human viewpoint character tries to extract any information they can from the somewhat secretive aliens. They don't like to be recorded and dodge certain questions because of obvious concerns; it's not sinister, just a give and take. Unfortunately I think the spiritual aspects of the story fall short mainly because they're only defined in the broadest concepts. Still I found that the first contact portions were very well done and for that reason I'd recommend reading it.

"The Day Before the Revolution"
by Ursula K. Le Guin
1974 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

I dead seeing Le Guin's name after a story since it means that it will either be a terrific piece of human insight or it will be shrill political ranting. This story falls solidly on the terrific side of the line.

It ties into The Dispossessed but the connection is the only thing that makes this story science fiction. In "The Day Before the Revolution" the woman who founded the anarchist movement that is the center of one of the cultures in The Dispossessed has reached the end of her life. She is the old revolutionary whose work was done decades ago, watched the consequences of her civil disobedience, and now is the revered mother. This story is simply her reflections on the past and weariness of the present.

Le Guin does a wonderful job at humanizing someone who has become a legend in their own life time; whose persona has outgrown their life. It's a great reflection on the difficulty of the old revolutionary. The story may only be science fiction by way of the associative property but I've never been one to confine myself to a genre. It's definitely a story worth reading.