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Minireview: The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

It’s received a lot of praise and there is an upcoming movie based on it, so I thought it was high time I read The Lovely Bones. I’m glad I did… even though the book isn’t quite as good as the hype would suggest, it is a very good tale and quite an unusual one.

By the time the story starts, the 14-year protagonist Susie Salmon is already dead, having been raped and murdered, and later dismembered. Now, this might sound like the beginning of a grisly horror tale – but that’s not at all what this book is about. Susie observes things from her heaven, and tells the story of how her death affected everyone (including her murderer). That’s one of the unusual things about this book: even though the subject matter is horrible, the tone is generally gentle and understanding. Another unusual touch is the “heaven” Susie is in. It’s completely her own world, and it’s also completely devoid of religious overtones.

Susie is an interesting character, and her observations on her loved ones illuminate many things about her neighborhood (both good and bad). Her father gets obsessive about finding the murderer, while her mother retreats into denial. Her almost-boyfriend is a murder suspect in the beginning, her friends suspect she might still hang around in some form, and her murderer… well, I’ll not spoil that.

It’s a ghost story without the typical ghost story trappings, it’s the tale of the rape and murder of a child told with a gentle tone of voice. All that makes it well worth reading. It does bog down in the middle a bit; even though it’s a quick read it doesn’t quite pull its weight the whole of the time. Still, it’s worth the praise. Part of the buzz around the book comes, of course, with the fact that it’s one of Alice Sebolds ways of coming to terms with her own rape (detailed in the non-fiction book “Lucky”)… and taking that into account, the tone of the book is even more noteworthy.

Comments should now work (again)

Ok, seems that the new Typo version has a small bug with comments and the sort of url-prefix setup I’m using. Made a quick & dirty hack which should potentially fix things, and also submitted a bug report so hopefully it’ll get fixed in the trunk code too.

Minireview: The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner

John Brunner was never exactly known for his shiny happy stories, most of his best-known books are quite grim affairs and often feature warnings of future doom. In the case of Stand on Zanzibar it was overpopulation (among other things), in The Sheep Look Up it’s ecological collapse. While a common theme nowadays, it was more of a prophetic warning when this book was written in 1972.

Though it does feature his trademark pitch-black humor in places, it’s a fairly grim book. The Earth’s ecosystem has broken down under strain from pollution, most animal species have died off, and things are spiraling out of control. The population routinely uses breathing masks to filter out the pollution (breathing unfiltered air is extremely unhealthy), drinking tap water is a sure way to catch any of a dozen dangerous diseases, and getting anything even remotely healthy to eat is becoming difficult. Even the rich are slowly feeling the strain, while the poor have been dying off from the poisons for a long while.

In this eco-disaster dystopia some voices of sanity have been heard now and then – one Austin Train tried to raise awareness of the impending disaster when he was younger, then watched as his call to arms was taken up by a new generation and slowly twisted. When the story begins, Train has disappeared underground and scores of “Trainites” practice near-terrorism, sometimes with limited understanding of why they are doing what they do. Austin himself has more or less given up.

It’s a book with an ensemble cast, and told in Brunner’s trademark style of stacatto switches in viewpoints. There is no protagonist as such and the story is somewhat confusing in the beginning – but as usual with Brunner, out of the seeming chaos emerges a very coherent story.

It’s not a shiny happy book, quite the opposite in fact. But it is very topical today and a reminder of where we don’t want to go. Even though some eco-fanatics can take things a bit too far nowadays, it’s good to keep in mind that their base cause is a good one. This book is a warning, and if anything more relevant now than when it was originally written.

Minireview: Black Man, by Richard Morgan

Black Man (renamed to Th1rt33n in the States for some political correctness bullshit reason) is a newish (2007) book by Richard Morgan. It’s separate from his “Takeshi Kovaks” stories and is set in a future world not too far removed from our own. Mankind has expanded to some parts of the solar system, but it’s no paradise out there. Nor is it paradise at home. The U.S. and some adjoining countries have realigned into “Jesusland” (backward, theocratic) and “the Rim” (technologically advanced) – there are some hints given in the text that China had something to do with this split, but it’s not totally spelled out. Geopolitics is as much of a mess as it has always been, and a series of small-scale but vicious wars hasn’t improved things.

The protagonist is Carl Marsalis, a “variant thirteen” generically engineered “alpha male”. The original idea was to create a hyper-aggressive man without the useless trappings of civilization, for use as a soldier… but of course it backfired. The Thirteens were much too hard to control, and after the wars wound to a close, could not really deal with peacetime. Most of them were shipped off to Mars, which is a dusty hellhole. Some refused (and were hunted down), some made deals with various powers, some did… other things. Carl is one of the dealmakers, working for the U.N. as a sort of hit man, hunting down other Thirteens. He is not a nice person, for most meanings of “nice”.

The story kicks off with Carl getting arrested in “Jesusland” (Miami) for trying to help a girl get an abortion, and the simultaenous commandeering and crash landing of a spacecraft into the ocean by an (apparently) mentally unstable Thirteen. Carl gets bailed out of jail by government officials, who want him to track down this new Thirteen in return. While initially just planning on bailing out of the whole mess, Carl gets sucked in my events and by growing respect for his new cop partner. And of course, things are never what they seem on the surface.

It’s a bit of a problematic book. It makes good comments on racism and prejudice in general - Carl is literally black (as in skin color), but that sort of racism is long gone in the civilized world (i.e. outside “Jesusland”). On the other hand, this racism has been replaced by generic racism, with most people thinking of him and the other Thirteens as monsters (arguably with good reason). This is all fine and good, but the book gets a bit too preachy at times, and tries a bit too hard to make its point. Also, it’s a big book and gets very long to really get going – I get the feeling that it could have been condesed quite a bit. Added to this is the problem of the protagonist: he really isn’t very sympathetic. This is of course by design, since he is meant to be a genetically enhanced asshole “alpha male”, giving the finger to most forms of civilized behaviour and killing people just because they looked at him funny. To the book’s credit, he remains mostly an asshole for the duration of the book – while you do come to understand him, it’s hard to really like him.

So… dunno. It’s worth reading, especially if you like Morgan’s other books, but it’s far from his best work. It’s a very ambitious book in scope, but it doesn’t really work on all levels.

New version of Typo

Upgraded to the latest version of Typo (the blog engine I'm running), mainly because the newest stable version of Ruby (1.8.7) isn't compatible with the version of Rails the older Typo was using. Sigh.

Seems to work, more or less, and the admin interface is nicer at least (though the article writing interface seems to be a bit funky). Will have to play around with it.

Minireview: Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King

I generally like Stephen King, though I haven’t read all that much of his later work. When he’s good he’s very good, and when he’s mediocre he’s usually at least readable (if a bit meandering). His strength is his characters – he has the ability to create characters who you care about… and then he has horrible things happen to said characters. This, incidentally, is the reason most films based on King’s books totally fail to work; it’s hard to do good character development in the few hours you’re given in a movie, and the actual plot in King’s stories isn’t usually anything all that special.

Hearts in Atlantis is somewhat unusual for a King book. It’s mostly devoid of the supernatural, and deals with the 1960s in the U.S. and the legacy of those times. The book is actually formed from five interlinked stories – two longer novellas and three shorter stories. They share some characters, but otherwise are very different from each other. The first one, “Low Men in Yellow Coats”, is the most “typical” King story, and is also a tie-in with the Dark Tower series. I read Dark Tower before I read this so I missed some links there, but having read Dark Tower it’s quite easy to figure out the backstory here. It’s a good tale, concerning an old man who moves into the neighborhood and a young boy who befriends him. The old man is apparently on the run from something, but what that something is… well, that’s part of the story. This is the only story in the bunch to directly feature supernatural elements, by the way.

The second long story is the title story “Hearts in Atlantis”, and it’s also good. It’s the tale of a bunch of students (among them a character from the first story) who more or less demolish their studies by playing cards with fanatic devotion, while the Vietnam War (and accompanying threat of the draft) lurks in the background. It’s a somewhat unusual look at the effects of the war on the home front, while not actually dealing directly with the war.

The last three stories are more of a mixed bag, but they are all ok. The last story ties some of the loose story threads together and is nicely bittersweet.

While not King’s best work, all in all it’s a pretty good book, and recommended especially to people who think that King deals only with “horror” and “supernatural” themes. There is little of that here, replaced by an air of melancholy and a sense of innocence lost.

Minireview: Caprice Book Two: Liberati Sourcebook - Freedom for All (Heavy Gear)

The Liberati Sourcebook describes the “other half” of Caprice, the “Liberati” freedom fighters. The Liberati (as a resistance group) came into being (or were formed) when the CEF invaded the Caprice system. The Caprice govenment realized they had no chance of real immediate resistance, so they surrendered at once – much to the surprise of the invading force, which had come in expecting a fight. At the same time, long-term plans for reistance were set in motion, all quite deniable by the government. In the long run this has proved to be a wise course of action. Only a limited number of lives were lost during the invasion, and the Liberati guerillas have been a constant thorn in CEF’s side. While “officially” the Liberati were killed off in a staged “last stand battle”, they are very much alive and active – something that only some in the CEF suspect, most attributing the sabotage to random dissident elements. In addition to all this, the arrival of the Black Talon teams from Terra Nova has kicked things into gear. The Liberati give the Terra Novans some much-needed local support, and the Terra Novans bring with them both hope and firepower.

An additional factor adding to the confusion is that the word “Liberati” is also used to denote the freelancer miners who roam the surface, so even if the CEF gets word of “Liberati operations”, they have no hard and fast way of figuring out what that actually means. This sourcebook describes both the freedom fighter “Liberati” and the miner “Liberati” groups (which have some overlap).

The book is a typical Heavy Gear book (in a good way). We’re given the relevant pieces of history, and then a description of the current situation. The Liberati culture (both the freeroaming miners and the resistance folks) is described, along with a bunch of NPCs. There’s a list of equipment and vehicles, some campaign seeds, all the usual stuff.

Caprice is a quite an interesting setting and this book adds some welcome detail (begun with the two previous Caprice books). The whole “planet under military occupation” thing is rife with story possibilities, as I’ve noted before.