David R Slayton

May12012

Big Ideas in a Vacuum: the Prefect by Alastair Reynolds

Ghosts in the machine who believe they’re alive, ten thousand space stations, each with its own government or political system, a woman whose only hope for survival is an instant decapitation: these are just a few of the big ideas floating around in Alastair Reynolds’ the Prefect.

My tour of Science Fiction brought me to the Prefect on a whim, and what a read it was. Though Reynolds constructs a complex universe, he doesn’t let the diverse concepts eclipse the central plot.

A dangerous conspiracy with vast tendrils threatens the Glitter Band, the democratic confederacy of ten thousand unique habitats. Despite the scope of the danger, murder is murder, and that’s where Prefects come in. Prefects protect the Glitter Band from crime, corruption, and other threats. Reynolds uses three points of view, the primary being that of Tom Dreyfus, a field Prefect who occasionally borders on the cliché. Thankfully, Reynolds doesn’t stress the noir theme too heavily.

The plot rocks along until nearly every thread is tied off. The most seemingly disparate elements get woven together. Reynolds injects enough action, including the ballsiest escape sequence I’ve ever read. I was pleased to learn that the Prefect is one in a much larger series, one I’m looking forward to exploring.

Feb112012

Yeah, I’m Reading Janet Evanovich, You Gotta Problem with That?

Fresh off ingesting Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict series, I’m in the mood for a little fluff. A bit of chick lit, but even then, I’m learning something about writing.

Evanovich’s long running Stephanie Plum series sets the bar for women out of their depth. Like Sookie Stackhouse, Stephanie’s got money troubles. Both characters have down to earth problems that help ground them in reality despite their outlandish adventures. Money’s a problem for Stephanie, so she stumbles her way into bounty hunting.

I’m more immediately fond of Stephanie: she’s thirty-something, more mature, with an outlandish, though believable, family and a nasty divorce under her belt.
Stephanie doesn’t pick up a gun, go after her bounty, and proceed to blow away the bad guys matrix-style. She comes across realistically: afraid of her weapon, clumsy in her pursuit, and occasionally downright stupid in her mistakes.

Evanovich moves things along with short sentences and unexpected turns of phrase that freshen up clichés. Her descriptive paragraphs have an almost staccato rhythm. Stephanie usually gets her man, but never without threat or setbacks.

A “serious” writer might argue that there’s little value in such a read. At that I stick out my tongue and get back to reading. Good writing reads quick, doesn’t mire the reader, and above all, entertains. I love a deep read, but they really make me smile. Evanovich makes me laugh out loud or cringe with concern. She provokes an emotional response, which not enough science fiction or fantasy do well.

Jan132012

Historical Mysteries Out Among the Stars

Big ideas are the foundation of a great Science Fiction story. Where fantasy enchants, science fiction inspires. I know I’ve enjoyed the read when I put down a Sci Fi book and find my brain spinning as I ponder the implication of a technology or social development.

Science Fiction isn’t an easy sell these days. Most agents won’t touch it and few publishers show interest. In a time when fantasy is thriving, largely due to the urban, Science Fiction is languishing. I suspect that a large part of the issue is that Sci Fi is often inaccessible. It isn’t easy on the brain, and stories based on science can be dull.

A good science fiction story needs neither aliens nor lasers (look at Battlestar Galactica) to work. Not that I’m opposed to aliens and lasers. I am after all, a devoted Farscape fan who never got over its cancellation, but it’s depth I’m seeking in a good science fiction novel. I want that feeling of my brain spinning, of big ideas looming on the horizon, and of course I want to be entertained.

Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict novels give me all of these things in a slick package. Alex isn’t the most highly regarded guy around: an antique dealer accused of damaging historical sites, he’s nevertheless very good at his profession. McDevitt made a good turn when he switched the point of view in the books from Alex to his partner Chase. She’s a more dynamic character and being out of the loop of Alex’s brilliant insights, is more relatable for the reader.

McDevitt places a juicy mystery at the heart of each novel, and it’s usually something Alex and Chase stumble into on their way to something else. The reveal is always bigger than life, though the victory is occasionally bittersweet.
My original intent in reading this series was to read one, review it, then read another; but I became so entranced that I ripped through the series in a couple of weeks.

I enjoyed Polaris, but find that the books get better with time.* Seeker, with its discussion of the role of history in contemporary life, captivated me. McDevitt seasons the plot with questions on government and politics. The place of religion in a cosmos where man has spread out among the stars is a major theme in all of the books, particular in Firebird, but I think my favorite so far has been the Devil’s Eye. It has everything I love in Science Fiction: the big idea, a terrible secret buried by authority, remote stellar outposts, and even an appearance by McDevitt’s one alien species, the telepathic mutes. The Devil’s Eye delves into the tensions we all face with our governments and our place in things. All of the books use quotes to start new chapters, usually these are from future books McDevitt has created. The Devil’s Eye draws heavily on a series of horror novels, and McDevitt uses them to inject some commentary on the art of writing into things.

*There’s a point I’d like to make on this, which is that mid-list authors are struggling these days. A lack of high sales is pushing a lot of writers out of writing and it’s unfortunate. McDevitt is a perfect example of a talent that needed time to mature, and he’s a great example of tenacity too.

Jan22012

Faith and Fantasy: Why You Should Read the Curse of Chalion

I was raised with a strict ban on magic, during the 80s when people thought playing Dungeons and Dragons might cause you to kill yourself. Mike Warnke’s the Satan Seller was required reading in our house, and there lurked this terrible fear that Satanists and witches lurked around every corner, ready to maim or kill you. But by banning fantasy, my mother deprived us of a mirror that might have helped us think about good versus evil and our relationship to religion. Fantasy can open the mind, and theology, as it often arises in fantasy, can lead to deep discussions on the nature of faith.

It’s easy to ascribe a coincidence to divine intervention. You think of someone you haven’t seen for a while and run into them the next day, or the person you sit next to on a plane turns out to have been in your high school class. Coincidences often demonstrate that the world is truly a little place.

In fiction coincidences are common by necessity. A good plot relies on chance encounters, connections and events driven by nothing more than the need for them to happen. Connecting plot elements through coincidence can reduce the number of extra characters and help keep the reader interested.

In the Curse of Chalion, coincidence reflects the will of the gods and their limited ability to affect the actions of mankind. I’m going to try and discuss Lois McMaster Bujold’s technique without spoiling too much, but it may not be possible to avoid giving some key elements away. Bujold’s theology holds a logical depth that goes far behind the simplistic deus ex machina employed in so many stories. The gods struggle with their own goals, which might coincide with the goals of man, but in Chalion, the gods simply cannot work upon the world. They are barred by man’s free will. To effect a change upon the world, they must find an agent who’s willing to cast their own will aside. Most often this takes the form of characters who’ve been driven far beyond their limits. Their broken nature leaves them open to the gods’ use.

The Curse of Chalion ignores many of the typical fantasy devices: there are few action scenes or swordfights. Bujold could have chosen to tell the story of the handsome young prince new to his throne, or she could have focused on the Royess Iselle, a fascinating character who despite the limitations placed on her power by her gender, is a powerful young woman who finds ways of succeeding inside those limitations. Instead Bujold chooses for her protagonist Caz, a broken man in his thirties who’s middle-aged in his society. He arrives on the scene irrevocably changed by unfortunate circumstance, unable to lift pen or sword, poor and unrecognizable to even those few nobles who might remember him. From there Bujold weaves Caz into the politics of his day. Caz finds himself caring about more than mere survival again as his spirit heals from his terrible ordeals. Yet it’s not long before he’s once again pushed past his limits, and in that space, the broken man takes actions he never would have considered before.

The Curse of Chalion is a thoughtful fantasy, the sort of story that you ponder long after the book is closed. I put it down and immediately wanted to read more theology and philosophy.

Dec172011

The Magic in the Mundane: A Home at the End of the World

Genre fiction offers escape, entertainment, and release from the boring. Reading it, we spend time with vampires and witches, sexy wizards, and complex villains. Genre fiction is often bigger than life, with an almost comic book feel. Regular life, and literary fiction, don’t usually involve the fate of the world.

Instead, the best literary books amplify. They hold a lens up to simple, common experiences, and if written well, encourage us to see them in another light. A good book can take a cliché event, polish it off, and find a new facet we haven’t seen before. That facet, often something universal, strikes a chord with us because it reflects our own lives and experiences.

Michael Cunningham’s a Home at the End of the World is such a book. Transformative, it’s a book that revels in events that could be sentimental but resists painting them with those colors. Four points of view cross and overlap at just the right intervals. Big events in the characters’ lives often occur off screen, between points of view that highlight more important, more intimate moments. What shapes these characters isn’t the death of a parent, at least not by the end. Rather, they grow through the tiniest bit of personal introspection and struggle to explain this to one another.

At its core a Home at the End of the World is dealing with a particular existential malady, one we all feel: the sense that we’re waiting for our lives to start, even as life passes us by. Yet it doesn’t try to remedy this feeling. The characters move through the decades without a resolution until the very end, when Cunningham conjures an ending for them that perfectly reflects much earlier moments while showing us that the characters have truly found a change in their internal landscape.

I read a lot of good books. A Home at the End of the World is a truly great one.

Dec112011

Failing to Fall in Love or “Just How Timelagged Are You?”

We all love certain books a bit more than others. They might not be bestsellers, or they might be critically acclaimed, but we think of them as ours, like no one else knows they even exist.

My ex used to carry a copy of Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog around almost constantly. His copy was dog-eared and worn, yet he’d faithfully re-read it, annually. For perhaps that reason, like I felt that I’d be trespassing on his devotion, I didn’t read the book until now.

What I found was a novel of comic misadventure and wonderful misdirection as two time travelers stumble about the Victorian era, trying to find a hideous piece of sculpture whose whereabouts are responsible for a possible melting of the continuum. No pressure. And yet, the contemporary Victorian characters, completely oblivious to the situation, thwart the travelers through all their eccentric meandering.

The book satisfied, particularly at the denouement. Pets, who I think don’t get enough presence in fiction, are a large part of it all. Mysteries compound and resolve. As much as I enjoyed the story, I didn’t love the book. I can analyze it to death: the tension took a bit too long. I was never as caught up in the circumstances as I wanted to be. Willis’ characters are clever. The end really wrapped it all up nicely. I think this is what agents mean when they reject a manuscript with the confusing statement “I just didn’t fall in love.”

To Say Nothing of the Dog is a good book, one I’m glad I finally read. Yet it definitely didn’t inspire in me the devotion it does in Brian. Conversely, I know that trying to explain my love of Gail Carriger or Margaret Atwood and convince people to read their books doesn’t always go very well.

What drives us to fall in love with a book? What makes a book so important to one person but completely passable to another? I don’t think there’s a good answer, which is what makes that agent response so frustrating to the aspiring author. It’s as an ineffable quality as what makes us love a person. Sometimes, to the outside observer, it’s something only we can see.

Dec42011

Safe Flying, Anne McCaffrey

Time flying, chronal refugees, eugenics, lost and found heirs to great houses, sexual politics, and of course, dragons. These were all elements of the Dragonriders of Pern, Anne McCaffrey’s wonderful series.

In the eighties science fiction and fantasy were dominated by women: McCaffrey’s books stood beside those of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton, C.J. Cherryh, Melanie Rawn, and Margaret Weiss (though I must fairly mention Tracy Hickman). Many of these writers discarded the tired retread of Tolkien’s conventions and mashed Sci-fi into their fantasy creations. Pern was such a world.

I haven’t been to Pern in a while, though I can picture the covers in my mind as though I were still a kid browsing my local Waldenbooks. I found out today McCaffrey had died at the age of 85. She had a long run, a long life, which I’d hope for anyone. She was a prolific author with a decorous career.

Safe flying, Anne. We’ll miss you. Thank you for the stories.

Nov252011

A Mirror Too Dark?

I wasn’t too kind to Richard K. Morgan’s the Steel Remains when I read it, and yet I found myself eager for its sequel, the Cold Commands. What happened? The initial shock of Morgan’s brutal world wore off, and I saw past my expectations for his protagonists. I say protagonists, and not heroes, because there is often little about these characters that’s heroic. They don’t stride victoriously through Morgan’s world. They survive it, and what that takes out of them makes them often highly unlikeable people.

Morgan’s trio are war heroes who’ve seen better days. As in the first book, their separate plot lines eventually converge. Along the way the world gets built up from the foundations laid in the first volume. We learn history at the hands of a sentient, sarcastic, and possibly disingenuous machine. There’s raw sex and enough adult language to make the writers of Deadwood sit up and take notice. The gods multiply, remain enigmatic, and perplex with their deus ex machina intervention. Magic is madness-inducing, or possibly just madness on the part of its wielder; and the action is fierce and bloody. Morgan knows how to turn a phrase and some of the dialogue made me chuckle out loud.

Yet as I read the Cold Commands, I often found myself asking if a protagonist needs to be likable? The main doubt for me surrounds Ringil, the swordsman whose homosexuality makes him hated where he should be famed. Early in the book, Ringil pays a slaver back by allowing her repeated gang rape at the hands of the mercenaries under his command. This choice strongly overshadowed any pity I wanted to feel for Gil. Yet I still followed his story to the end.

I’ve often thought that good fantasy should hold a mirror up to life, provide us with questions we ask ourselves, and take us down roads that we’ll never follow in reality. Compelling characters cross lines, inside themselves, outside themselves, and we watch them do this out of admiration or shock.

Gil, and his companions, cross every line imaginable. While not likeable, Morgan’s trio are more proactive than many protagonists, and it makes them compelling. They make the hard choices, bleed for it, and most definitely don’t walk away unscathed.

I suspect I’ll ponder this book for a good while, just as I pondered its predecessor, and about the time third volume is ready for purchase, I’ll be ready for it.

Nov182011

In Keeping With the Theme of Birds: The Engines of a Story

I recently finished Gordon Dahlquist’s the Glass Books of the Dream Eaters, and while I felt like it took a while for things to get moving, I was struck by the fundamental sense of change overcoming the protagonists.

Dahlquist is using three main characters. They overlap, interact, and separate. By volume two’s midpoint, I realize that what’s compelling me to keep reading is that the characters are changing. This far in, they aren’t who they started as, and the story isn’t leaving them any choice in the matter.

It’s led me to ponder that change is the engine of a story. In fantasy, the change is usually portrayed as a journey, the door that opens, the answered call to a quest. Home is left behind or outright destroyed.

Baby characters get a violent kick out of the nest of their comfort zone. That’s certainly where Dahlquist’s heroine, Miss Celeste Temple, starts. Her engagement to one Roger Bascombe ends without explanation, and with a determined behavior we’d call stalking in our century, she sets off to track down his unstated reason. Where this investigation takes her is far past the point of safe, into a world of intrigue and danger, where a powerful cabal threatens to upend Victorian society.

And all through it, Celeste and her compatriots change. When traumatized by her adventures, Celeste’s reaction isn’t to linger overly long about it. She reacts. She researches. She gets back into motion to discern exactly what it is she has uncovered. What occurred left a mark on her.

It seems like such a simple thing: but in fiction, characters can change so much more readily than we can in real life. You hear people say “he’s changed,” but how often is it true? Time and life can certainly make a difference in people, and definitely alter our perception or understanding of a person; but actual change doesn’t come naturally. In fiction, it’s entirely possible that a character become someone different. The story drives them to it, forces it on them. That’s the power and effect of fiction: something is possible that isn’t easy in real life.

Nov162011

When is a Beginning not a Beginning?

You’re at a party. The hostess wants to tell you a story, but while the anecdote itself has a stellar punch line, she insists upon giving you a lot of tangential detail as set up. The story itself would have been funny, but by the time it really starts, you’re distracted. Why did she mention the pony if the pony doesn’t play a part?

A beginning is not a beginning when it feels like one for the reader and not the character. Put another way, if there’s going to be a pony, it really needs to matter.

I’ve always felt that a high fantasy writer has a bit more work to do than one writing urban fantasy: we’ve got to weave it all from whole cloth. Both writers have a particular challenge in that they must begin and explain without looking like they’re instructing you.

And I think this is why fantasy queries to agents fail so often: an elevator pitch is damn hard if the world intrudes upon the hook too much. Airships and dragons are familiar concepts. We can face those without too much explanation, but if gravity doesn’t work the same and the sky is pink, we’re going to need a little more to work with. So the world must intrude, and do you see where I’m going with this: balance, balance, balance…

That said, make no mistake, backstory can be the bane of any novel, and the amount of it required to get the story started is directly proportional to the risk of losing the reader’s interest.

The story should start when the hostess’ anecdote is getting good, not during the preamble. That’s when the tale starts for the character.

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