Review - Little, Big

Little, Big
by John Crowley
1982 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Novel

At the end of the nineteenth century an architect builds an exotic country house with a floor plan that anyone could become lost in and five faces that gave it the appearance of a completely different style depending on how you approached it. His wife's family believes that the universe consists of worlds nested within worlds and that each world within was larger than the one outside. They also believe that the boundaries between these worlds can be crossed and the residents of those deeper in are what most people think of as faeries.

Over the course of a century generations of their family live and die in the house feeling that the history of their large family is a tale that is building to something. The strange and magical lurk among them and Little, Big is the story of their lives.

This book was a monster. As you might guess I can work through books quickly but I was lucky if I could read seventy-five pages a day of Little, Big and the novel is over five hundred pages long. The complication for me was that the prose bobbed and weaved, spun in circles about the reader creating lengthy digressions that branched like the most tangled of shrub losing the thread of narrative as it wanders in its poetic labyrinth until I was exhausted from deciphering Crowley's archaic formations.

Making things more complicated is the fact that there isn't really a proper narrative to the book. One threatens to break out on occasion but the thread doesn't progress so much as spiral outward with those plots typically trailing off with only the barest hint of resolution. The reader isn't getting more than a tiny fragment of what hints at a larger picture as enter in the middle and leaving before the end. The only thing that someone can do is hold on and hope that by those last few pages that the whole thing is revealed to be greater than the sum of its parts. It's uncommon for a book to promise this and then actually deliver on it and with Little, Big I'm not entirely sure if it was successful. So much of the plot is left hanging or developed for hundreds of pages and then the reader is told that it didn't really matter that the ending was unsatisfactory but at the same time Crowley ending some aspects of his story as a whole very well.

Which comes together to make this a novel of language and structure rather than one of plot. Crowley shifts focus approximately once a page constantly building on his metaphor of worlds within worlds and the smaller containing the larger. Everything in the novel centers on those themes that seem to exist for their own purpose rather than being part of something else.

Aspects of the novel are very good but they're entangled with the wearying portions and enjoyment of the book is going to be entirely dependent on how much the reader appreciates Crowley's use of language. I can't say that I found it to be worth the effort but some people might find value in the poetic style.

Review - The Shadow of the Torturer

The Shadow of the Torturer
by Gene Wolfe
1981 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Novel

Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series has an interesting distinction: each one of the four volumes (I can't count the later continuation as part of the story) won a separate literary award. I've already reviewed the Nebula winning second volume and I'm sure I'll get around to the third and fourth books when I deal with their awards. It's the only series that has won such a variety of awards and it's made more unique by a different award for each book.

For the World Fantasy Award winner we go to the beginning of the story. The Shadow of the Torturer begins the life story of Severian who is an orphan boy raised as to be a torturer, executioner of the Autarch's laws. His life is to be dedicated to meting out punishments. Shortly after taking up his position however he becomes close to one of his prisoners who is sentenced to die in the most agonizing way possible. He grants her mercy and for that is exiled. From there his foot is placed on the path to becoming the new messiah.

You could almost copy and past my review of The Claw of the Conciliator here and it would work. Since these original four books were written together as one story the strengths and weaknesses are carried across them all. As the series progresses Wolfe starts tinkering with the theme and structure but this first novel is all about establishing his dying world.

That might be the biggest problem with Shadow; it's all prologue and little story. An arc does very slowly develop in the second half of the book moving so gently that you might not even be aware that it exists until it reaches a climax. Wolfe spends a lot of time on diversions in the novel that pan out by the end of the series but appear to drift aimlessly over the course of this book. it feels awkward since the book lays down a goal that will occupy months early on and then spends the rest of it's length covering the events of the rest of that particular day.

Despite that slothful plotting Wolfe succeeds in making his characters very compelling. Severian as a young man who was raised in the absolute morality of the jailer has to deal with the conflict between his stark view and ones of relative morality. His position as punisher of the guilty colors his actions and Wolfe recognizes the complication of the legal punisher placing themselves above the judge and society. Severian's life could keep a dozen philosphers arguing for years and no simple answer is given in the book.

At this point I've read a lot of books where civilization reached a pinacle of marvels before collapsing back into a rotting heap where the story is set. I've read a massive pile of them just going through the award winning SF and fantasy. So far I think Wolfe's vision is the most effective of them and I think that has to do with his vision of how things grew and then fell apart. The Shadow of the Torturer, for example, features a city a hundred miles long but sparsely populated except for certain neighborhoods and falling into ruin. Some of the wonders of the past age still exist matter of factly alongside what people can use. Having the world shrouded in perpetual twilight was an ingenious choice as well for mood.

When I reviewed Conciliator I mentioned how it made me determined to read the rest of the series. I did go back and finish it after I concluded reading the Nebulas and despite what I felt was a minor downturn I enjoyed it quite a bit. The Shadow of the Torturer is definitely a book I'd recommend but be prepared to read the rest of the series if you do pick it up.

Review - "The Death of Doctor Island", "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand", and "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death"

As long as I'm talking about my short fiction collection I might as well note that I have achieved the one-third mark on my set of the Nebula Award Stories anthologies in hard cover. It's interesting to me that the majority of these I have only been able to get at a reasonable price as former library books, particular since they all appear to be well read library books. They're not books that sat on the shelf for thirty years untouched until someone decided to clear up space like some others in my collection.

"The Death of Doctor Island"
by Gene Wolfe
1973 Nebula Winner for Best Novella

A group of mentally unstable individuals awaken to find themselves on a tropical beach where the island defies the laws of space and time. There they're confronted by a monster made of smoke that uproots trees and the sinister results of a mysterious project while flashing back to their lives before arriving.

No wait. That's Lost.

Despite lacking a smoke monster or mysterious initiatives "The Death of Doctor Island" does feature an ending. It does have the flashbacks, however.

It also is about just one emotionally disturbed adolescent who has just been deposited on Doctor Island, an asylum where the island itself is alive. The island acts as their doctor and speaks to the patients through the sounds of the island. The result is a very strange story that is best described as madness given form.

As I read the story I was expecting Wolfe to take certain easy steps with the psychological examination of the main character and to his credit he never did. The main character is deeply troubled young man for whom even desperate measures are unlikely to reach. The other two patients in the story aren't as well developed but since the story is about getting into one disturbed mind it didn't really bother me.

Unfortunately I just didn't find that protagonist to be particularly compelling either. Wolfe did such a great job of developing his sociopath that I couldn't empathize with him when the story required that I do. I can deal with an unlikable protagonist but I just didn't find him even interesting.

"The Death of Doctor Island" is an intriguing story and I definitely appreciate what Wolfe was doing with it but it just left me cold. So I wouldn't recommend reading it but it is a very interesting effort.

"Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand"
by Vonda N. McIntyre
1973 Nebula Winner for Best Novelette

It is impossible for me to separate this story from Dreamsnake which won both the Hugo and Nebula a few years later since the first thirty pages of Dreamsnake are this story with only the most minimal of changes.

I despised Dreamsnake.

The thing that I hated most about the novel, the perfection of its main character who is too good for her sinful world, fixes problems without effort, and tolerates the cruel stupidity of everyone else who isn't nearly as great is on display in "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" but since it's one-eighth the length of the novel at least here it can be passed off as tightening up the writing.

In these few pages the Shamanistic healer is called in to a tribe in order to cure a dying boy. Once there she has to contend with their backward ways by not showing any deference to the culture of her hosts. This is okay because they're macho, fearful, and stupid so she can put them in their place.

I cannot strongly recommend avoiding this work enough, but if you absolutely must sample it then I suppose reading the twenty-five pages of "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" is better then the full Dreamsnake.

"Love is the Plan the Plan is Death"
by James Tiptree Jr.
1973 Nebula Winner for Best Short Story

I couldn't begin to describe the plot of this story since it really only develops a traditional plot in the last few pages. Instead it is best described as a romance where its participates have extremely different life cycles from human beings. One of these beings recounts his life and wooing his mate.

There's a lot to debate regarding the perspective character but it all hinges on the gradual revelations of the story so I don't want to dig into that. I will say that I am uncertain if the story takes place on earth from an unusual vantage point or among an alien species. There are a lot of science fiction stories where the nature of the viewpoint character is hidden from the reader until the end and often they fall apart when the revelation isn't that great. Tiptree managed to handle it perfectly since it's clearly an alien viewpoint from the start (instead of trying to hide that fact) and knowledge of certain aspects of terrestrial biology adds to the depth of the story without being necessary.

The worst thing I can say about the story is that the unusual viewpoint character's distinctive speech made getting into the story a tough challenge but once that hurdle was overcome I found it to be one of the best alien love stories I've ever read. It's definitely a story worth seeking out.

The Scale of Hugo Winning Short Fiction

I was placing my biweekly Amazon order today and it has come time to order the final anthologies containing Hugo winning short fiction. Looking at the results I thought it was worth it to look at scale of this collection.

The complication for anyone who is attempting to read every single Hugo winner is the dividing line between 1994 and 1995.

You can read the entire history of the short fiction awards between 1955 and 1994 in just nine volumes comprising only about eleven inched of shelf space, though if you get paper back editions the scale increases a bit since the Hugo Winner collections that Asimov started editing in the early sixties were subdivided further. The biggest complication for any collector in this is that the Hothouse stories by Brian Aldiss are hard to acquire. The only collection of the original stories I was able to find was a leather bound Easton Press edition. An edited version of the stories is available in The Long Afternoon of Earth and that is likely to be a better solution for most readers.

In my collection these years are covered by:

The Hugo Winners Volumes 1 & 2 (in one omnibus)
Hothouse
The Hugo Winners Volume 3
The Hugo Winners Volume 4
The Hugo Winners Volume 5
The New Hugo Winners Volume 1
The New Hugo Winners Volume 2
The New Hugo Winners Volume 3
The New Hugo Winners Volume 4

There is no hardcover edition of The New Hugo Winners Volume 4 which is annoying but then many of it's descendants are only available as trade paperbacks.

After 1994 things get bad. It took me 23 books to fill out my collection through 2007 (I read the 2008 winners which I read when they were offered through some websites and they'll enter my collection once they've had some time to be anthologized). That's thirty-three inches of shelf space though in this case the anthologies purchased often contained more worth reading than just the one or two stories that won an award. The books that I acquired to complete this collection are (with authors noted for single author anthologies):

The Nebula Winners Volume 30
Stories of your Life by Ted Chiang
The Hard SF Renaissance
Quartet: Four Tales from the Crossroads by George R. R. Martin
Stories for an Enchanted Afternoon by Kristine Katharyn Rusch
New Dreams for Old by Mike Resnick
The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick
The Winds of Marble Arch by Connie Willis
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Chronospace by Allen Steele
Terraforming Earth by Jack Williamson
Inside Job by Connie Willis
Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2003
Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2007
The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realms
The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
Hart & Boot & Other Stories by Tim Pratt

The Science Fiction: Best of the Year anthologies are only available in small paperbacks while Resnick, Swanwick, and Pratt's anthologies are only available as trade paperbacks. Also two stories ("...Where Angels Fear to Tread" and "The Ultimate Earth") are only available expanded into novels.

It's the curse of being a collector I suppose that sometimes it takes a great deal of effort for very little gain but there's something to be said for completing a collection.

Review - Watchtower

Watchtower
by Elizabeth A. Lynn
1979 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Novel

A few weeks ago when I began this new list of novels I mentioned that I don't read a lot of fantasy. Watchtower is a perfect example of why I don't. It is a catalog of everything I hate in popular fantasy novels. Someone who is willing to accept genre conventions might be able to overlook the problems that I had with the book though even in that case I suspect the book might fall a bit too far on the derivative side.

The story opens with the titular watchtower falling to an invading army, it's prince captured, and its last surviving commander pressed into service to guarantee the prince's safety. Together they make an escape from their former home and run to a legendary Buddhist commune established ten years before (don't ask me; initially the book made it out like Shangra-La and then it turned out to be something recent) where the commander must overcome his prejudices in order to find assistance.

Hey, that plot sounds familiar for some reason. Probably because other than the hidden kingdom possessing a special power that the main character learns in order to overcome the invaders that he lost to at the beginning of the novel being a Buddhist communist (as opposed to a hidden village of elves or something like that) the plot seems to have been ordered ala carte from a menu of generic fantasy cliches. Sometimes this happens because the novel in question was the one that popularized the concepts but Watchtower doesn't have that excuse.

My biggest problem with the novel (and with so many others) is simple: 1300 AD is not the same as 1980 AD. This isn't a simple matter of substituting a few words; society was radically different. Even the educated people thought and acted in a manner that would be thought of as terrible today. Some authors can't pull themselves out of the modern mindset and have all of the "sympathetic" characters think and act as though they were living today. See the Buddhist commune for a perfect example of that (the book never calls them "Buddhist" but that's effectively what they are); they're presented as the ideal lifestyle compared to those people living like they were in a medieval setting.

Then there's the hypocrisy of the major characters. Just sticking with events early in the novel there are a pair of characters who are members of an organization trusted because they're neutral parties to all conflicts. It's a stretch but I can accept that. The problem is that they're willing to violate that neutrality without even thinking about it for the sake of the "right" side. It's the kind of action that should have far reaching consequences but because

Lynn does make a pretense toward having a more complicated morality (which, I suspect, is the reason that she won the World Fantasy Award) through humanizing the enemies and making the stakes in the conflict a "kingdom" that is barely bigger than a postage stamp. Unfortunately she undercuts this by repeatedly drumming the idea that because someone's ancestors centuries ago conquered a piece of land it makes it okay for someone else from that same country to repeat the action. That argument is repeatedly given by the ruler of captured kingdom.

So the plot was thin, the setting annoyed me, and the characterization finished off the final lingering thread of suspension of disbelief. I will say that Lynn is not bad with her prose. It didn't impress me but I've read much worse in published novels with effectively identical plots, characters, and settings.

If you like your fantasy novels to feature characters that might as well be modern people transplanted to something vaguely but not really resembling medieval Europe who proceed to go through derrivitive plots with no tension then thanks a lot for changing the fantasy and science fiction section of book stores into something that is a complete waste of time for me... oh, and Watchtower is a book you might enjoy. For those who want something more from their books you'll need to look elsewhere.

Review - Gloriana

Gloriana
by Michael Moorcock
1979 World Fantasy Award Winner for Best Novel

This book is exactly why I have pursued this odd project of reading all of these award winning novels. It's very different to the point of being something that I'd never pick it up on my own and it is one of the most memorable books I've ever read. I can't justifiably call it a great novel: it's incredibly heavy handed with its symbolism but it's audaciousness alone makes it something worth a look.

To describe it in one sentence Gloriana is Moorcock shoving Mervin Peake's Gormanghast moved to Elizabethan England with a lot more sex. In an England whose empire spans the globe and brings peace to every corner of it the queen rules justly and is beloved. Gloriana rules the day in a court that emphasizes the glory of chivalry while the ugly pieces of government are kept out of her view by a protective advisor.

She has one problem with her life between pagents, masques, festivals, and courtly diversions: she cannot achieve an orgasm. So at night she attempts all forms of sexual experiences and maintains a stately pleasure dome behind her chambers.

These dichotomies endure until one of the agents who does the dirty work of assassination, murder, and plotting feels slighted and becomes resolved to tear down the kingdom by corrupting the court and driving them into hedonism.

So can you find the symbolism there? You better get used to that if you read Gloriana because Moorcock lays it on thick. It's painted on in bright primary colors, pointed out by blinking neon signs, and has blaring klaxons to alert the reader. The symbolism is piled on so high I can only read it as a clumsy attempt to create a "serious novel".

On the other hand the themes that the symbolism is there for keeps things interesting. Watching the repressed sexual desires emerge and destroy the characters is fascinating and the biggest strength of the novel. Every character is split in two by their private and public lives and these divisions drive the book forward. Moorcock may work in archetypes but he's very good at bringing those archetypes to life. That's a good thing since that's what really drives the novel; the plot itself isn't much but these broken people playing off each other worked well for me.

If you haven't read Gormanghast then the descriptions of the court and the labrynthtine palace that has congeled into a maze of hidden warrens might feel very distinctive. Moorcock does a good job of replicating the feel but in the end it does feel that Gloriana borrows a bit too heavily from Peake's earlier book.

Moorcock's prose is a very hit or miss situation for me; I have read some of his stories where I enjoy it immensely and then other times he just pushed too far into the purple. He is edging on that line between poetic and purple in Gloriana but this time I think he came down on the correct side despite an opening dozen pages that had me dreading how the rest of the novel would be written. Fortunately he settles down to a more tempered tone before too long but if you pick it up and start reading the book then you may bounce off the first oddly worded chapter.

Gloriana is a book that I am going to remember for some time and for that reason alone I recommend checking it out. It's an interesting novel though some people will find its conclusion objectionable; Moorcock rewrote it in the late 90's to remove some of the objectionable content but the edition I have included the original, much better chapter. I can't promise you that you will enjoy Gloriana but it will stick with you.

Review - "The Concrete Jungle", "The Faery Handbag", and "Travels with My Cats"

Jim Burns
2005 Hugo Winner for Best Professional Artist

The painting I selected is the cover to Nancy Kress's Crucible. Interestingly enough the year after he won Burns did covers for the reissues of many award winning novels and a few of my favorite books that hadn't won awards.

It's also an interesting set of anthologies that I pulled the 2005 winners from. "The Concrete Jungle" was taken from a recently released pairing with it's novel predecessor The Atrocity Archives. Since that book has been on my "Must Read" list for a while I didn't mind picking up a copy of it. "The Faery Handbag" I read in The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm which features illustrations for each story from Charles Vess. Finally "Travels With My Cats" was read in the single author anthology New Dreams for Old.

"The Concrete Jungle"
by Charles Stross
2005 Hugo Winner for Best Novella

This sequel The Atrocity Archive left me with some mixed feelings. On the one hand, it's an interesting mash-up of espionage fiction and dark fantasy; the kind of fantasy where horrible things are done for even more terrible purposes. They play off each other very well and I'm looking forward to digging into The Atrocity Archive for more of that. On the other hand the conclusion story depends on odd leaps of logic and knowledge of British managerial styles which left me out.

There is a British espionage group that deals with all the things that go bump in the night. They're so wrapped up in secrecy, both institutional and magically enforced, that they cannot come out and tell each other anything; only hint at it so that the other person comes to understand. One of their agents specializing in information technology is sent out on an emergency call of the highest priority because an extra stone cow has appeared in an art installation off of a major highway.

To go further than that would be to damage the pacing of the good parts of the story. And for the first three-quarters it is very good. Subtle revelations pile on top of each other and Stross manages to hint at unrevealed dark secrets better than most (the trick of conveying the concept but not the details is one that escapes many writers who try to be mysterious). It falls apart when suddenly the main character has an epiphany regarding the nature of the event that I couldn't follow and wraps it all up with some business terminology that I've never encountered and isn't explained in the story.

That adds up to "The Concrete Jungle" coming across to me as an interesting effort but not quite there. I liked the concept and the characters enough to be willing to stick with it for another story but I can't really recommend this one.

"The Faery Handbag"
by Kelly Link
2005 Hugo Winner for Best Novelette

I'm going to be grossly unfair to Kelly Link so I will say this right at the start: there's nothing really wrong with "The Faery Handbag". It is a perfectly serviciable story cut from the modern mold of fairy tale magic occuring in the modern world and it bringing relatives together. The problem for me is that this is a theme that has been beaten into the ground in the past ten years.

A young woman has a mysterious aunt from Europe who tells stories about living in the distant past and having a bag that contains a magical world where one night can last a generation. While laughed off my most people in the family our protagonist comes to be believe the story.

If you like that kind of thing you'll probably enjoy "The Faery Handbag". On the other hand I just found it to be a bland retelling of a story I've heard a dozen times before. I think it is because Link is relying on the mysterious magical handbag to provide color for the tale and I've reached a point where such things fall into the background.

"Travels With My Cats"
by Michael Resnick
2005 Hugo Winner for Best Short Story

A young boy buys a travel book titled Travels With My Cats for a few pennies from a garage sale and finds himself falling in love with the story. Thirty years on he's a loser living alone with his books, stuck in a dead end job, and doing nothing with his life. Upon rereading his childhood favorite he falls in love with the descriptions of distant lands again. He then finds himself visited by the spirit of the author and they discuss their lives.

The story itself is fairly interesting but once again I felt let down by the ending. To dance around the details I felt that Resnick was going for optomistic romanticism while I viewed it through a lens of cynicism. However I have had that issue with Resnick in the past where I'm left uncertain at the end where there was a disconnect between how he as the author was intending things and how I as the reader was viewing them. Upon reflection perhaps he intended both points of view to be valid.

Which I guess makes that a recommendation for reading "Travels With My Cats". If I change my mind while I'm organizing my thoughts then it is at the very least a thoughtful story worth the effort of reading.