Walking on the Moon

I picked this up just poking around the library’s virtual shelves. I recognized the title and figured I’d catch up with a classic.

It’s a gothic ghost story and I’ve heard enough ghost stories to see the foundations here. And I know that James is often read more in subtext than in text. But for all the discursive text here I missed a lot of the context.

I do think it’s very hard to be eerie on the page. Especially so when you’re talking to someone across a century and ten levels of class. And even with all that gap, I did feel the slow ratchet of tension rising. But overall it felt like homework.

Yeah, I finally read The Martian.

I realized a few pages into it that I was going to enjoy it, but I wasn’t sure if it was just one of those books that was written especially for me or if it was really good. The early chapters had the tone of the things I do at work absent the threat of death if I get it wrong. A book about stressful problem solving seems to have a limited audience.

Weir is a writer with more range than stranding me in space, though. He does a really good job dropping the reader into a relatable character’s head in the middle of a terrifying situation and then expanding out to the larger worlds around him. No one’s found themselves struggling to stay alive on Mars, but many people have found themselves in a tough spot and gone into problem solving mode. I think it sucks people into the story. Once you’re in, when the main character gets a chance to breathe, bits of the worlds creep in, and the reader is oriented. And the rest of the worlds are believable and engaging, so you look up and find you’re caring about more characters than the stranded fellow.

Weir puts individual scenes into that structure that keep the reader in the story. Some of that is just writing exciting set-pieces. Some of that is dribbling out bits of context that form a universe. Some is pacing the whole story. He’s good all around.

It’s an adventure story, and super pro-space exploration. I like adventure and space exploration, so I’m an easy sell. But I recognize the bias. If any bit of adventure or space attracts you, this is top quality stuff.

Strongly recommended.

This is a dandy piece of genre fiction. Moreno-Garcia takes the basic set-up of Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and writes a better book. She sets it in late 19th century Mexico and puts real characters into the story. Once she’s put better elements into the scenario, she orchestrates a consistent, interesting, tense story with a satisfying outcome.

Moreno-Garcia builds a consistent real world full of characters with enough depth and ambiguity to make them interesting. She fits them into an adventure tale that consistently raises the stakes and grips the reader. Exciting read with plenty of interesting sidelights and ideas that drive the story without hijacking it.

Strongly recommended.

I picked this up on a lark. I was between holds at my library and this was on on one of the digital shelves of new well-regarded books. Something in the summary caught my eye, so I grabbed it. It was more than I expected.

Birnam stuck the landing in a way that few books I’ve read have. I thought I’d read one kind of book, and in the last few pages realized I’d read quite another. I admired the second one much more.

For obvious reasons, I don’t want to say more. Have a look at the blurbs and if it sounds remotely interesting to you, check it out.

You may reach the end and feel like it was a straight line. I think it’s probably a good read even if that’s the case. You may be surprised by and be put off. I just don’t know. But I know I think it’s quite a book.

Highly recommended.

Overall I liked The Three Body Problem. I think it’s a well executed SF novel with a lot of twists and turns. There’s enough hard science thrown around that part of the fun is deciding if this is just a near future thriller, or just where and how far things are going to come off the rails. There’s a nice tension to it that keeps you reading.

Liu sets the book primarily in China, primarily in the early 2000’s with big chunks in later 20th Century flashbacks. As an American reader, I found it interesting to see the differences and parallels between the same periods in the US and China. There’s a nice use of footnotes by the author and translator to both flesh out the world and keep the reader off-balance. Some are just “here’s a relevant fact from Chinese history or slang that you might not know” while others reference the history of the fictional world Liu is creating.

There are lots of interesting ideas to chew on about idealism and practicality, about how understanding the broad picture may not determine individual cases, and other lofty stuff that doesn’t get in the way of a fast moving plot in a shifting world.

If there’s anything I didn’t like, it might be that the characters didn’t suck me in as people. Some of that may be thematic. Liu may be treating them less as people to meet than as complex interacting systems. It’s nowhere as stark as that sentence makes it out to be. These folks are drawn with more depth than stereotypes. They have individual motivations and histories that help explain who they are and I recognize them as unique. But I also see how they’re the initial conditions of a complex system that expresses itself as this novel.

And I don’t think that’s just because I’m a nerd.

Highly recommended.

There are a lot of ethnic communities in Los Angeles. Much of what makes the city’s history fascinating is how they tussle in creating the place. In Plaza William David Estrada takes a slice through that history framed by the plaza at the center of the city.

That plaza has undergone changes from a traditional European central square to something flavored by Mexico’s emerging identity to a multi-ethnic gathering place. Not to mention how it was manipulated by the people selling a fictional Los Angeles into a tourist attraction. Other parts were just erased. I had no idea how big a part the LA plaza played in the Sun Yat -sen’s revolution in China.

Estrada takes the reader through these twists and turns with scholarship and heart. It’s still a largely academic work, but with plenty of treasures.

Recommended.

Folklore is Eric Avila’s exploration of how mega-roads like interstate freeways have affected the urban environment. Many authors have looked at how these developments have changed both how we get around cities and how we live in them. What I liked about Avila’s approach was that he extends his analysis from statistics and anecdotes to the art of the freeway.

He captures how freeways become both a canvas for art and a subject of art in other media. Taggers, muralists, public art, and advertisers all use the freeway in different ways. By integrating art with the process of traversing cities, the communities producing it can merge with the experience. It’s an interaction that’s easy to miss.

The freeway has also entered more traditional art in ways that illuminate how the freeway has affected the artists. Again, it can be surprising how artists with different experiences of the freeway use it in their expressions.

These are interesting ideas and well worth a look. You may have to dig a bit. Folklore has an academic basis and format which can be a little distancing.

Recommended.

The folks at Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone were talking about Dracula and made it sound so good that I wanted to revisit it.

It’s more interesting than fun to read. There’s a lot of the foundations of horror in there, but as a book there’s a lot more logistics than excitement to it. At some point Mina Harker mentions having memorized the train schedules of a city she’s just arrived in and I remember being surprised that all of that schedule wasn’t reproduced in Stoker’s dialog. Not to worry, plenty of other minutia are.

I can kick Dracula a lot from the position of a reader used to different prose conventions and as a viewer of tons of derivative works. The world building is all trees and no forest. The characters are pretty stock. The team seems to deliberately not communicate with one another just to advance the plot, and more.

But the bones are great.

The feeling of dread of a powerful supernatural force plotting its way to power remains chilling. The action set pieces are genuinely suspenseful and thrilling. The absence of specificity of the cause of the Evil lets adapters dress those bones in everything from a horror of temptation gone wrong to terror of encroaching otherness to comedic horror while keeping a ripping action adventure going. You have to trim some train schedules, but what’s left is such a great canvas that people keep coming back to it.

I did find it more of a trip to the vampire museum than a ripping yarn of its own, but there’s a lot to conjure with here. There are great reasons people keep coming back to the source.

Recommended.

This is the second book of E. E. Smith’s Lensmen series. I got thinking enough about Triplanetary that I figured I’d take the next bite of this series. It is a fascinating core sample of post-WWII SF.

The basic idea is that there are two advanced alien races using the galaxy as a chessboard. One race is dedicated to good and and the other evil. As humanity begins to reach outside its solar system using some annoyingly nonsensical technology the good aliens begin exerting their influence to promote civilization in the human expansion. This is countering the pre-existing and continuing evil alien influence. They do this primarily by bringing together skilled and virtuous humans and gifting them resources, including the lens in Lensmen. That device gives the owner a variety of telepathic powers. The lens is set up as both only being usable by the virtuous and acting as proof of virtue.

First Lensmen is basically the story of how the Lensmen grow and attempt to become leaders of humanity. They plan to essentially take over the fundamentally sound democratic government and military structures that have been overrun by evil alien corruption people.

There are only so many paths to power, and as the novel goes on it’s clear that the paths are independent of the virtue of the people using them. Smith doesn’t ignore that as both sides strategize about things like building military forces and manipulating public opinion in ways that are close. There is a pragmatism to the idealism that is welcome. The evil-alien-driven drug trade is basically the only tactic that’s hard to spin both ways. And though the lens grants credibility, the evil folks predictably claim its effects are hypnosis. The space fights are pretty by the numbers, but the bare knuckled elections are refreshing. There’s some Capra Corn in there as Mr. Lensman goes to Washington, but even at that it’s more interesting than the zap gun fights.

I can mostly look at it as a genre piece of its time, except for the misogyny. There’s only one female character of consequence, and a few with very minor roles. It fails the Bechdel Test without getting the nature of female interaction. No two female characters have a conversation.

The one woman character of consequence is there to verbalize her acceptance of the rule that women can’t be Lensmen though she qualifies in every other way. Then she is captured, tortured, and rescued by Lensmen. After that she basically doesn’t return for the last 100 pages of the book. Infuriating.

There are some interesting ideas to chew on in here about power and public opinion. I did find the characterization wooden at best and the plotting much the same. There are a lot of toxic males debating the merits of solutions to imaginary problems. The election stuff is more nuanced, but it’s a long way in. Overall an interesting thing to have read.

Triplanetary is the retconned beginning of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series, which I’ve always heard of as the prototypical Space Opera. I’ve been meaning to get around to reading the series and a friend recently prodded me to have a look. This is one of those books that my thoughts about it stuck with me more than reading it did. It seems to be a trend in my reviews lately.

And Triplanetary is exactly what I’ve heard it is. It is a Space Opera (primarily) written in the 1930’s about an interstellar war of first contact. The influence of the work is such that I can describe what was a pretty groundbreaking piece of genre fiction in less than 10 words and even a casual fan of the genre knows what’s going on. And I’m not going to split hairs or make claims about who created the Space Opera. Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers are running around already and I’m sure there are others. Triplanetary has the scope and shape of a Space Opera – even without the framing sequences that link it to an emerging serial – and it’s the earliest thing I’ve read that has that shape.

I really didn’t like it much.

I would tell you that I like Space Opera. Star Wars has the formative spot in my history that it has in any nerdy kid’s life who saw it when they were 10. I generally dig the Green Lantern Corps, though I don’t follow it closely. I just wrote a review this year of a Space Opera I quite enjoyed. I like big doings, broad analogies, and morality plays. But, honestly, Triplanetary has shaken me up.

I’m reading along and watching our hyper-competent heroes fighting an alien race that is violently pillaging the solar system for resources while the Big Bad lurks in the background. The good guys get captured and pull a ruse to get access to tools to make an escape, which they do, and on the way out commit a pretty blatant act of genocide. Or that’s what it reads like to me. It jarred me quite a bit.

And I don’t even think it was bad writing. It was clearly established that the bad guys were waging total war as well. They destroy Pittsburgh, where I have family. I know that in times of warfare people do terrible things. But it kind of humanized the scope for me in a way that I don’t feel like the text intended to.

Which got me to thinking about Space Opera in general. And that scale of gratuitous violence and the moral choices it imposes seems pretty baked in to me. The Empire destroys Alderaan as an interrogation tactic just so we know how bad they are. And the good guys kill a lot of folks in return. Both sides in the Space Witch Space Opera I liked are also violent on a planetary scale. And I don’t always think those were bad choices. Leaving the Death Star standing, even if it somehow doesn’t wipe out the base on Yavin isn’t really tenable.

I think that because I disliked the characters in Triplanetary I was more critical of what they had done. But when I went to defend characters I like who had done similar scale things, it wasn’t as easy as I thought. Reasons characters I liked killed a lot of people felt like excuses when I applied them to the Triplanetary characters actions. I don’t think I should let people and characters I like off the hook more easily for their choices. I owe “Doc” Smith for the wake-up call.

Back to the book. The writing is fine. It hits story beats, builds tension, and generally has the shape of a serial. As I mentioned, I didn’t like the characters much. They were pretty one-dimensional action heroes, to the point where I felt like they were on the wrong side of snobs/slobs. The misogyny of the times is on impressive display. The only female character I remember is in the story to tell the hero how manly he is and react to another gigantic loss of life caused by our protagonists.

I usually end these with a recommendation, but this has been less a review than me grappling with my reactions to it in print. Triplanetary is a 1930’s Space Opera. The writing is pedestrian, but effective. It’s influential in the genre – there’s even a board game. If that sounds good and you have a look.