Bookpost 22

Index

Diaspora, Greg Egan

Greg Egan loves Big Ideas and theoretical physics and wants to tell everyone about it. He’s very much off doing his own thing with this book, and your response will be according to how willing you are to listen to a man describe theoretical physics.

This is a positive, on the whole. Egan’s a solid prose stylist and very good with pacing; the book flows well and is an easy breezy read if you let the physics just kinda wash over you. Short chapters and frequent section breaks means you won’t be stuck with a single topic for long, which makes the frequent conversations devoted to discussing the Conundrum du Jour a lot easier to handle. Push through a few pages more and you’ll get a reset and some space to catch your breath, or at least move on to a different topic. Some of the character moments, especially early on, are very well crafted.

I felt like the plot was lost around the time they found Swift 2/3  or so through the book), and towards the end my response was just nodding along “all right, Greg, cool, I don’t understand it but I’m glad it’s working out for you” - one of the eternal hazards with Big Idea sci fi is the ideas can get too big for the audience to meaningfully care about them. Even so, “the author is really into theoretical physics” is hardly the worst flaw a book can have.

Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown, Mike Mignola

Mignola can do more in 4 pages than most authors can do in 400, and the decades he’s spent honing his craft are evident on each and every panel of this book. He’s tapping into the old magic with this one, and in doing so makes a series of hauntings, just-so stories, reversals of fortune and other folk motifs feel so much realer and stronger than any grand architecture can.

My favorite of the collection is a pair of stories about the creation of the world - one version provided by a saint, the other by the raven. Those pieces are familiar - a garden of paradise, a great dragon, the dark things of the world before, the spirits of the earth - but presented in such a way that if I close one eye I could see it existing as some forgotten lore of a real people somewhere in history. If I close the other eye it is clearly a construct, the pieces arranged to reflect the shape of the age of its making, but that makes it a construct in the same way the stories providing the pieces were constructed. Mignola is very deliberately in conversation with both old myths and the modern world when he writes that mankind did not start in paradise, but as one beast among many that the gods found when they went out into the world beyond the Garden.

It's just plain damn good.

Grunts, Mary Gentle

DNF pg. 1/4XX

Another 1-page DNF, this time for switching tenses between the first two sentences and following with a full page of clunky, stilted description. I could see it was going into straightforward Tolkienian/D&D parody right away, and that’s rarely a place I want to be.

Journey to the West, trans. Julia Lovell

At last: a text with the courage to ask “what if a monkey had a big stick?”

Not content with answering the most pressing comedic question of our age, the book includes not one but TWO other jokes:

1. “Bureaucracy is silly”
2. “Man this Tripitaka guy is a nerd and kind of a loser”

It’s a joy to read. Those jokes have survived across centuries and cultures because they work. What if a monkey had a big stick? Wouldn’t it be funny if so-and-so got their ass kicked by a monkey with a big stick? And wouldn’t it also be funny if someone could turn the tables on the monkey, just to shake things up?

I do it a disservice, but man does that monkey love hitting dudes with a big stick and I love reading about it.

Lovell’s translation is an abridged version of about 1/4 of the full work, which is just the right size for me. I do think I probably would have gotten bored if it ran longer and I didn’t break it up with something in the middle - even really good jokes will run out of steam eventually - but that’s minimally important. It’s the epitome of the episodic picaresque, you can come and go as you please and there’s plenty of things you can and should loot for ideas.

Other highlights include:

• Lovell translating titles of the heavenly bureaucracy as if they were modern corporate positions (Office of Immortal Resources, etc)
• The deft explanation of why a superpowered character can’t immediately solve the story (Monkey could finish the journey in an instant but Tripitaka’s the one who has to make it, and he not only has no powers but the others can’t help him cheat.)
• Granting the reader immunity to any discussion of if Goku can beat someone in a fight, because Sun Wukong’s power scaling is according to the law of comedy - the winner depends on how funny it is for the other guy to lose.
• The Buddha telling his disciples “I’ll be right back, make sure no one slacks on their yoga while I’m out”, which is possibly my favorite gag in the book.

Sight Tremendous and Abhorred, Ognyen Plamen

Found this one because I follow the cover artist Goran on bluesky and he’d been sharing it around. Thought “what the hell, it’s free”.

Good move. A perfectly-proportioned cyberpunk shoot-em-up that plays the hits at a breakneck pace. Mercenary takes job, job goes south, add a few hyperviolent complicating factors and you got a stew going. It’d make a solid movie, a kickass couple episodes of Stand Alone Complex, and is all around just a fun time.

Plague of Pythons, Frederick Pohl

You know how there’s a type of sci-fi that just takes one major world-state change and runs with it to the logical end? It’s one of those. For the last two years, the world has been stricken by an epidemic of demonic possessions; at any moment, anyone might fall under the sway of an external power and go on a rampage, and Pohl’s going to do a whole lot of exploring what that’s meant for the world.

There were multiple points in the story where I thought that maybe the plot would fall into a more predictable rhythm, and each time it got yanked in a different direction just to prove that genre expectations will not save anyone. It’s refreshingly misanthropic about it, and the rug pulls never felt like a cheap gotcha.

I will warn prospective readers that it does open with the main character Chandler on trial for the sexual assault of a teenager while under possession: that said, I thought Pohl handled it with a fairly even and matter-of-fact hand. I’ve read much much worse.

The book’s only 111 pages and is freely available on Standard Ebooks.

The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith

DNF @ Nephi 1 Chap 2

I wanted to give it a fair(er) shot for public domain research purposes, but was handily defeated by the pseudo-Elizabethan word salad. Mark Twain wasn’t kidding when he said it was written chloroform, and I was reading the 1981 version with 150 years worth of edits.

It’s got that Ender’s Shadow smell about it from the beginning, desperately attempting to reassure the reader with “the main character was definitely there and he was super-important the entire time, you guys”. Knock it off, man, Vergil barely gets a pass on that and you definitely ain’t Vergil with this prose.

This is what no sex drugs and rock & roll does to a motherfucker, which is a very interesting contrast with Crowley who was nothing but sex drugs and rock & roll. I don’t know if they’d balance out into homeostatic equilibrium or cause antimatter annihilation if you combined them.

Legacy, James Schmitz

This one’s a hidden gem, don’t let the generic name put you off. Space opera adventure with a female lead from 1962, freely available on Project Gutenberg (no renewal).

I was repeatedly impressed with how well the book treats its main character, Trigger Ardee. There’s still some early-60s misogynistic background radiation throughout the book (mostly in men calling her “doll” or “girl”, and one unfortunate scene that pulls the “no you see her rejecting him means she likes him” bullshit), but I gave the book a lot more grace than most of its contemporaries would get for all the times it made the right choice. More than plenty of modern books.

Trigger’s competent and driven, but she’s also 24. When her plans go awry or she messes up, it's because she got blindsided by something outside her awareness, rather than her inexplicably making stupid choices. She takes a step back to assess high-emotion situations before she snaps to an assumption. She’s allowed by the narrative to get overwhelmed, cry a bit in frustration, and then push on to do what needs to be done of her own volition. And we’re not going to dwell on it like it’s some fundamental component of her character she needs to overcome, she’s just having a shitty day.

Probably the most impressive to me was a scene where Trigger is headed to a swanky dinner party with the local contingent of zillionaire wackos. While she’s prepping she has a conversation with herself whether or not she should wear the plain dress (fancy by her standards, distractingly low-class by the host’s) or the extremely risque one (effectively a couple vines and some tactically-placed fig leaves), and has a moment of basically “There’s no way I could pull this off… wait, hold on… can I pull this off? I think I can pull this off.”

And then the narration doesn’t ogle her for making that choice. It’s quite matter-of-fact about the entire thing and the following scene is focused on intelligence gathering at the dinner, to the point that you could easily forget that she’s wearing a couple vines and a few tactically-placed fig leaves.

The main issue with the book is a structural one; a whole lot of the story is people expositing things that happened off screen. Some of this is to be expected, since we’re with Trigger as the POV the whole way through and the story doesn’t contrive ways for her to be present at every major event (which is appreciated). But the plot is also a good deal more complex than a normal space opera adventure, and several major events did happen to Trigger but have been wiped from her memory thanks to Psychic Chicanery, so it’s in a weird middle space where it’d probably need to be a lot longer or a lot more formally experimental to make it all gel together without the exposition dumps. And it does feel kinda bad that Trigger doesn’t have more to do, because things are great when she’s an active agent in the plot.

Setting-eise, it’s interesting (to me) how four years before Star Trek the only piece of the genre that’s really missing is the rubber forehead aliens: you’ve got the postwar liberal space federation that’s superficially pretty nice but has plenty of internal conflict and skeletons in the closet both present and potential (the use and abuse of psychic powers are all over this book).

Trigger also pilots a mech suit at one point and that’s sick as hell.