31 January, 2002: Schismatrix
Bruce Sterling has a weakness for the picaresque. When he's got his A-game going, in his top-notch work like Holy Fire and Distraction, he can create dizzying and plausible visions of futures that are inhabited by real, fascinating, plausible people. When he's not on, as in Islands in the Net and Zeitgeist, he just creates dizzying visions of the future. He still puts out books with an immense idea-to-page ratio, but the characters recede behind the details of his fictional world; sometimes they vanish altogether. Schismatrix is a novel in the second mode, but it's about as well-executed an example as I can think of. (more...)
1:41 am 
23 January, 2002: Corrupting Dr. Nice
Corrupting Dr. Nice is a bifurcated book. On the one hand, it's screwball comedy: an explicit refashioning of the classic Preston Sturgess movie The Lady Eve as a zany time travel escapade reminiscent of Connie Willis' work. On the other hand, as a John Kessel s.f. novel, it's trying to say something about American culture; his best known work (short stories like "The Pure Product" and "Mrs. Shummel Exits a Winner") are, as the title of "The Pure Product" might indicate, responses to an America gone crazy. The melding is interesting, if not entirely successful. (more...)
10:51 pm
21 January, 2002: A Deadly Shade of Gold
A lesser entry in the Travis McGee canon, A Deadly Shade of Gold suffers from comparison not just with the rest of the series but also with real life. The elements of the novel -- a beautiful damsel, an old debt Travis owes, a map to sunken treasure -- are there, but something just sees off. Part of it is that the book is slightly off; buried treasure and Dead Calm boating scenes aren't quite right for the Travis milleu. Part of it is the villain, whose madness just doesn't seem as terrifying as it might have twenty-five years ago. It's that fabled desensitization process Tipper Gore warned us about! (Not to mention that having a main character mentally ill in precisely that manner just doesn't ring true.) I'd recommend everyone but real McGee fanatics give this one a pass.
10:41 pm
15 January, 2002: True Jaguar
You can't swing a cat in the fantasy section of your local bookstore without hitting a dozen horrible books in which Celtic mythology intersects with the workaday world. I read lots of these up until eighth grade or so, when I realized just how bad most of them were. Perhaps it's just because I'm not looking, but Warren Norwood's True Jaguar is one of only two modern fantasies I've read to draw on Mayan mythology. (The other is Lewis Shiner's Deserted Cities of the Heart.) Jesus Martinez O'Hara is a Mexican-Irish computer programmer kidnapped by a Guatemalan shaman. O'Hara is descended from the heroes of the Popol Vuh, and only he and his companions can descend to the underworld to challenge the Lords of the Dead to a game to decide the fate of the world. This is a slight book, but enjoyable -- half the fun is from how odd the Quiche myths seem, and half is from the idea of modern, foul-mouthed Lords of Xibalba, who play basketball and hire Italian mercenaries. The juxtapositions seem much more incongruous and much less twee in True Jaguar than in those Celtic books, and I'm not sure if it's Norwood's skills or the refreshingly un-Irish setting.
12:02 am
5 January, 2002: The Mourner
Donald Westlake's Parker books (written under the pen name Richard Stark), featuring Parker, a sociopathic and violent crook relentlessly focused on getting the job done, are slowly coming back into print. The first three (including The Hunter, made into John Boorman's Point Break) reappeared a few years ago, and Westlake has published two new ones after a twenty-year hiatus. The Mourner is the fourth Parker novel, and I found it a bit lacking compared to the first two. (more...)
2:08 pm
2 January, 2002: The Judas Goat
The Judas Goat was the last of the great early Spenser books that I read in my marathon of Spenser reading a few months ago. And a few months ago, I thought that the plot, in which Spenser is hired to hunt down a group of European terrorists who killed a millionaire's family in a bombing, hadn't aged well. Things change, and the depths of anger exhibited by a man with nothing left to live for ring a little more true. Other than that, this book is most notable for being the book where Hawk -- a truly great character; not for nothing did people suggest chucking Robert Urich off the television series and leaving Susan and Hawk to entertain viewers -- really comes into his own. After a supporting role as Spenser's opponent's hired muscle in the earlier Promised Land, Hawk and Spenser work together in this one. He's a show-stealer; there's lots of fun back and forth between the two that sugarcoats what's actually a rather dull, bloody plot.
12:28 am