Reviews and Comments

I had never read anything by Brandon Sanderson before this book, although I had heard of him. It would be impossible not to have heard of him given his recent Kickstarter in which he promised fans four new books over a year and brought in $41 million. Who needs publishers when you’ve got a fan base like that? And yet, Sanderson still publishes traditionally as well. Normally this kind of success would send me running away with the screaming heebie-jeebies because I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like to like the things everyone else likes, not to mention being a latecomer to anything. But in the interest of trying to understand what all the fuss is about, I thought I would give at least one Sanderson novel a try. I selected this winnebago of a book because it seemed to be his most popular and not in the middle of a series.

To cut this short, I enjoyed it. When I was fifteen, I would have loved it and instantly gone on to read the next two dozen books. It’s epic fantasy of the modern stripe, although Sanderson brings some of his own biases and ignores some of today’s trends, namely in his gender role segregation. He’s good at putting his characters through the wringer; in this book, Kaladin in particular goes from heartbreak to heartbreak until finally winning the day, but even then you know he’s still going to be losing something. I’ll give him a B- for worldbuilding, although there’s enough complications between how the “priests” tried to rule the world in the past and are now pariahs in leadership councils to the “play” of war by the competing nobles who sit around in their nice camps going out for small skirmishes rather than engaging the enemy. My biggest issue with the worldbuilding came from the magic system, always a hard sell for me as I tend to like my books logical, and the stormlight (and the armor, weapons, and fabrials) all seem to be rather deus ex machinery.

I likely won’t continue the series. There’s too many other things out there that I need to read. But I fully understand the appeal. I have a friend in my writing group, Peter Sartucci, who self-publishes an epic fantasy series, and his books have the same kind of appeal as these, although he has yet to achieve the same kind of success. I suspect it’s because he’s too nice to his characters (something I’ve told him in workshop), although he’s getting better at making his lead hero suffer. If you’ve run out of Sanderson to read, though, you might give his books a try.

Graham Joyce has an ability to write stories that defy easy description. This novel, which was also published under the title “Memoirs of a Master Forger,” has for a protagonist an extremely unreliable narrator who has a heart of gold but a troubled past, and the two are interconnected. He “sees” demons all around and refers to reference books in which these demons are supposedly ennumbered, but it doesn’t take long for you to start to question both the existence of the book and the demons themselves. And that inability to distinguish reality from fantasy continues throughout the book.

This book appeared in 2008 and by that time Joyce had made enough of a name for himself that his audience knew to expect strangeness and charm from his novels. Unlike debut novels, which are now required to start fast and explosively, this novel is a slow burn, enabling you to get into the life and psyche of the characters before the explosion happens (which it does, about halfway in). By that time, it’s almost anti-climactic, another bit of weird in a book filled to the brim with wonder.

I love this kind of thing, and Joyce remains—next to Jonathan Carroll—one of those writers whom I’ve never disliked anything they’ve ever written.

This book is a collection of essays (with some revision) that Dirda originally posted on The American Spectator’s blog, a thing he did for one year. As such, they are much less formal than his essays and reviews for his normal venue, The Washington Post Book World, but they are nevertheless just as erudite and interesting. In some ways, the blog format make these feel more like a conversation with Dirda, albeit one-sided. That said, I’d love the opportunity to have a real discussion with him, although I’m afraid my reading and knowledge of authors and writing pales in comparison. We must all have heroes, though, and in terms of book commentary, Dirda is one of mine.

As with any good book commentary, the danger herein is how it will greatly expand your To Be Read pile if you don’t beware. Early on I was amused because Dirda namedrops Paul di Filippo for gifting him a blank notebook, then I was surprised to find an essay about Readercon, a Boston SF convention that I’m planning to attend for the first time this year. I knew Dirda was favorable to genre work from having read Book by Book, but I wasn’t aware that he also embraced at least some of the fan community.

Because I liked this book so much, I thought I would check out The American Spectator and see who was now the book blogger, but was dismayed to discover it was a right-wing propaganda machine supporting the orange felon and dismissive of progressives in general. Because of what I saw on the home page, I didn’t even try to delve deeper to find the books section. Given my impression of Dirda’s politics, I find it strange that they would have given him a soapbox, but maybe something has changed there in the last decade.

I read this popular mystery novel prior to visiting Botswana with the idea of getting a little bit of insight into the people and places I would be visiting. The caveats of doing so were many: I hoped that my trip would not be filled with mystery, I was aware that the author was a white man from Scotland writing about an Africa and an African woman, and it’s fiction. Still, I found it rewarding and was happy to find out from some of the people we met in Botswana that the book and series (and TV series adapted from the books) are viewed positively by most of the local population.

Part of the criticism of the book (and perhaps the series) is that Smith’s portrayal of Botswana sugarcoats the more negative aspects of the country and the legacy of colonialism. His response, as expressed in an introduction to this volume, was that there are plenty of other books that deal with that aspect, whereas his goal with this book (which he hadn’t intended to be a series, but the audience response and the characters drove him to continue writing stories about Precious and her agency) was to focus on the more detailed lives of individuals living within that culture.

The book is somewhat disjointed. Readers of mysteries expecting a clear through-line to the narrative will be scratching their heads. But if you let the chapters dwell within your memory as you read, the book does have a clear character, if not plot, arc that resolves nicely at the end.

I’ve read a lot of flash fiction in the last three years, partly due to writing a lot of flash and thus needing to make a study of what makes a story under 750 words work. I found this anthology of 80 flash pieces in a Little Free Library and thought it would be interesting to see what short fiction outside of the SFF genre looked like.

And, to be frank, I was somewhat disappointed, although not surprised. Like their longer counterparts, these stories tended to rely too much on vibe or feeling rather than satisfy any requirement of characterization and plot. The editors talk about this somewhat in the introduction, wherein they compare a flash piece more to poetry than a short story because every word matters and the reader can’t skip any. I agree, but it’s the words selected by the author (and agreed upon by the editor) where we disagree. Every word needs to move the story forward; too many words in these stories simply pile on the vibe.

Out of the 80 stories, I liked about 15-20, including the first out of the gate, Don Shea’s “Jumper Down,” the title referencing the term paramedics use to describe if the building/bridge jumper is “Up” (and hasn’t jumped yet) or “Down” (and likely out). Peter Mehlman’s “Mandela Was Late” is a strange conceptual piece pondering what if Nelson Mandela had had a parole officer. Typically, I liked the more outre and surrealistic stories, like Ray Gonzalez’ “The Jalapeno Contest” or stories that played with form, like “Currents” by Hannah Bottomy which tells the story backwards. But all the stories are short (duh), so the nice thing is you don’t have to commit too much to any one before it’s done and you move on to the next, which meets today’s readers’ low attention spans.

“The Child Dreams,” Sonya Dorman — A nice poem about girls escaping boundaries. “That Only a Mother,” Judith Merril — While our worries about nuclear war and its aftermath have subsided somewhat (although the current state of Russia makes one wonder), for a time in the 40s and 50s, it was household fodder. As one of the few women writing SF at the time, Merril tackled subjects men avoided: pregnancy, childbirth, and rearing. The mother in the story, unfortunately, does show an irrational tendency common to how male writers portrayed women, although in this case, there’s plenty cause. The ending is devastating and quite effective. “Contagion,” Katherine MacLean — I really enjoyed this story although it took a bit for it to get going and I won’t comment on the worldbuilding which reflects the ideas of the time. Instead, I’ll compare it to Philip K. Dick’s “Colony” in how it develops a situation into something creepy and uncanny, without all the death in MacLean’s case. I’ve read a number of stories by MacLean in the last couple of years and think it’s unfortunate how she’s been forgotten by most in the field, as her stories are easily some of the more thought-provoking ones from that time period. “The Wind People,” Marion Zimmer Bradley — I’m a tough critic of MZB for several reasons, some of it due to having submitted stories to her magazine only to receive rejections with personal notes that were neither kind nor constructive (the fact I can remember the phrasing of some of these after twenty years attest to their impact on me). I find the setup for this story to be facile and unbelievable, but the point of it is just to justify having this young mother and her child stranded, alone, on an alien planet. What follows from there is an ambivalent story about whether or not the woman is insane a la The Yellow Wallpaper. It’s well written, just not to my personal taste. “The Ship Who Sang,” Anne McCaffrey — I know I read this back when I was a teen, but I don’t remember much about it. It’s a wonderful tale, something similar to what James Tiptree, Jr. would write a decade later. A love story, of a kind, between brain and brawn, a spaceship and its human scout, and what happens when one of them eventually dies. Quite affecting and charming. Highly recommended, especially if all you’ve read by McCaffrey is her dragon tales. “When I Was Miss Dow,” Sonya Dorman — A new wave story in which aliens take on the forms of humans. The protagonist loses her—him—itself in the process, becoming connected with the scientist it works with. There’s lots of metaphor and analogy going on here, like any good New Wave story, but I’m old school and while I appreciate the style and the idea, the execution didn’t excite me much. “The Food Farm,” Kit Reed — I’ve read a bunch of strange stories in my time, and this has to take it’s place as one of the strangest. I’m not even sure where to begin to describe this story about a woman and the singer she adores, that the nation adores, and how all he wants is the largest woman possible, and she could have been it, except her parents send her to a food rehab school, which upsets her ability to eat and now she’s all about creating some other woman for him, so he will sing again. Everything about this story is weird: the food fascination, the hold the singer has, what it all means. It’s fascinating, but I’m not sure I liked it much. “Baby, You Were Great,” Kate Wilhelm — This is a pretty high concept story, but Wilhelm focuses on the characters more than the concept and that makes it work. The idea: a scientist figures out how to record emotions from someone and transmit those to an audience. So, instead of watching and listening to an actor, you get to feel. This, of course, means actors have to actual feel things, thus presaging the whole “reality television” phenomena by a couple of decades. The problem is finding “actors” who can actually pass on emotions, and then, to feed a voracious audience, provide that actor more opportunities to feel different ones, including the ones you might not want to experience, for some people do like to experience fear or worse. The motivations of the characters here make for a fascinating study. Recommended. "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison," Carol Emshwiller — A well-done character study of how little we know about others, and ourselves. “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” Ursula K. Le Guin — This is big idea SF: a mind that is made up of all the plant life on one world. What would that mind think? What would it think when it “felt” people on it, among it, when it had never encountered anything other than itself before. Le Guin’s way of getting to this idea, and examining it, is fairly unique as well. The survey ship is made up of ten people, one of which is an empath who the others immediately take a dislike to creating a very untenable grouping. But that’s necessary to get to the understanding of what the planet is like. The ending is somewhat hand-waving, but Le Guin’s style makes this a very compelling story. “False Dawn,” Chelsea Quinn Yarbro — I’m somewhat a fan of Yarbro’s, having discovered her Saint Germain books while in high school. But this is the exact kind of post-apocalypse story that I dislike greatly, wherein the survivors are just animals in a very dog-eat-human world. Not my thing at all. “Nobody’s Home,” Joanna Russ — I’m not totally sure I understand this story. In the future, the population has been reduced (doesn’t say how) and people’s intelligences have been enhanced. Matter transmitters allow people to flit over the world, so that they could watch the sunrise 22 times in one day if they wanted to. Work is accomplished by tax, but really, everybody is free to do what they want to do. Monogamous relationships have changed into family groups, that bond and unbond frequently. (The depiction of this hedonism is close to Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time books.) Into the protagonist’s family marries Leslie Smith, who is stupid, i.e., the intelligent equivalent of you and I. She can’t get the jokes of the others, makes mistakes, and doesn’t really have anything going for her. And…that’s the story. I sense that it may have been meant as a condemnation of our current social mores, depicting a utopia that, like any good utopia, always has an unravelling thread. Interesting, but… “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,” Vonda N. McIntyre — We talk a lot in SF about worldbuilding, the creation of a unique setting for a book that is different from the world we live in. Of course, there’s always some connection to our world, for it would be impossible to understand a world that was completely new, but good worldbuilding is about changing enough for us to find a new way to examine our own thoughts and beliefs. This story by McIntyre does that splendidly and does it by showing you the world, never telling you. When writing teachers advise students to “show, don’t tell,” they should use this story as an example. Snake, the protagonist, is a healer, but of a different group than the family and sick child, and that means they struggle to understand even though they’ve asked for her help. Highly recommended.

I’m not totally sure I understand this story. In the future, the population has been reduced (doesn’t say how) and people’s intelligences have been enhanced. Matter transmitters allow people to flit over the world, so that they could watch the sunrise 22 times in one day if they wanted to. Work is accomplished by tax, but really, everybody is free to do what they want to do. Monogamous relationships have changed into family groups, that bond and unbond frequently. (The depiction of this hedonism is close to Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time books.) Into the protagonist’s family marries Leslie Smith, who is stupid, i.e., the intelligent equivalent of you and I. She can’t get the jokes of the others, makes mistakes, and doesn’t really have anything going for her. And…that’s the story. I sense that it may have been meant as a condemnation of our current social mores, depicting a utopia that, like any good utopia, always has an unravelling thread. Interesting, but…

The book came first, and then the play featuring Carol Channing as Lorelei, and then the movie starring Marilyn Monroe, and those things created the earworm “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” But the book established all that, and while it may not have the same qualities as a song, it has plenty of charm. Written as if entries into a diary, it’s all told in Lorelei’s breathless prose, which often runs on for longer than it should, complete with misspellings and repetitions that makes it seems she’s talking directly to you. You quickly discover that Lorelei isn’t as naîve as she portrays herself, but it’s her friend Dorothy who steals the show with her one liners rendered faithfully by her friend.

This is comedy in the style of P.G. Wodehouse or Thorne Smith, although favoring the latter in its playful sexual implications. (Wodehouse’s characters aren’t sexless, but sex is only a way to differentiate the characters rather than imply any kind of bedroom sport.) Lorelei and Dorothy, sometimes in their “negligays,” are much more up front with their gentlemen, although Lorelei only describes talking late into the night rather than anything more amorous. But they are somehow able to wheedle dinners, shows, nightclubs, and gifts of all kinds from their admirers. From New York to London to Paris to Vienna and back, the two girls live a life of Riley on their ability to be “charmant,” as the French say. Along the way, many “instants” happen to keep you smiling.

There’s something revealed in the book about Lorelei’s past that presages the story of the musical Chicago, in about the same manner when she describes her experience in the courtroom. And the ending is kind of a surprise but flows naturally (I won’t spoil it) from what went before. I’d hesitate to call this great literature, but it was more than a pleasant diversion and really shows Loos’ ability to construct comic scenes.