Tag Archives: recs

Scifi book club recap: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

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First, an announcement: for June only, the Scifi book club meeting will be at 6pm on the SECOND Tuesday, June 14, instead of the normal first Tuesday. We will be reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, which is the book that Jane Austen parodied in Northanger Abbey, and was also one of Edgar Allen Poe’s major inspirations.

So, Shades of Grey. This was our favorite book so far, with an average score over 8.5/10. Unfortunately, this was also our only book so far that no one finished by the meeting - one person got within 30 pages and just didn’t quite squeak by the deadline. Despite that, we were all pleased with the intricacy of Fforde’s world and the humor woven into the story. I finished it on Wednesday, and the plot really picks up in the second half of the book. Eddie starts seriously investigating the weird happenings in the village, and, by extension, the mysteries underlying his world.

In the far future of Shades of Grey, hundreds of years after the Something That Happened, society is rigidly segregated based on acuteness of color perception. Order is rigorously maintained by adhering to the Rules of Munsell, an extraordinarily thorough collection of edicts governing almost every aspect of life. For example, the Rules specifying which articles may be manufactured left spoons off the list, so spoons are valued heirlooms, passed down through generations and jealously hoarded. Loopholery is a respected art and the only method of getting anything done. Also, most damagingly, there are periodic Leapbacks and DeFactings, reducing the level of technology and the amount of knowledge available each time. The most recent Leapback removed mechanical tractors, zippers, and yoyos, among other things, leaving people dependent on trains and Model Ts for transportation. It is, in many ways, a dismal place to live.

Although the book is indeed very funny - I even literally laughed out loud a few times - the best part is that almost none of it is funny to the characters. Fforde walks a delicate balance of pathos and lightheartedness. The situation of the characters and the world itself is deeply sad, but due to the fact that they are inside the world, the characters have no perspective to compare the world to anything else. Except one: the female protagonist, Jane.

Jane’s setup reminded me very much of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. She busts into the normal, boring world of our loser protagonist, Eddie Russett, and, by being surly and uninterested in him, causes him to fall in love with her (and her extremely retroussé nose.) In a novel all about the metaphor of vision, she is the one person with perspective. It makes her violently angry, all the time, often in situations where it would benefit her to just keep her head down. As her character develops, her anger and lack of self-control reminded us of the protagonist from The Darkship Thieves, which we read earlier in the year. Jane ends up more interesting and sympathetic than either Ramona of Scott Pilgrim or the protagonist of The Darkship Thieves, because “a quirky working-class girl fighting the Establishment” is much more fun than either “a quirky emo girl whining about her life” or “a rich heiress fighting the establishment”.

If you’ve read any of my reviews before, you’ve likely noticed that I’m always keeping a running tab in my head of the Bechdel test - 1) are there two named female characters, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a guy? This book has lots of female characters, and a pleasing number of them are in positions of authority. It meets the conversational criteria in a couple of places - but every female character is a total bitch. There are Society matrons scheming for arranged marriages and committee politics, female cops with no compassion or concept of bending the rules, young women using sex as leverage and double-crossing their lovers at every turn. Granted, most of the guys are jerks, too.

The only exceptions to the “every major character is a jerk” trope are Eddie and his dad, the Librarians, and the Apocryphal Man, who is (or was) a historian. A few technicians also seem pretty okay - maintenance workers and so on. The symbolic representatives of knowledge are sympathetic characters, many working underground to share their knowledge, whether it’s Morse code bedtime stories or questions answered in exchange for Loganberry Jam. Except for Jane, who is the omega bitch, and the ambiguously moral but always polite Color Man.

Shades of Grey touches on such a wide range of subjects that we found ourselves circling back to it naturally no matter how far off-topic we wandered. For example, there is a throwaway joke about retail sales - “buy one get one free” vs. “half off”. What would you rather have, something for half price or something for free? One character, Tommo, speculates that there used to be a whole science of selling, which they, of course, have lost. Eddie’s hobby is advanced queuing systems; in this world, “take a number” counts as a radical new idea. But when they discuss their ideas, each greets the other’s with disinterest and/or skepticism.

There were many parallels with Lois Lowry’s The Giver. A society removes color perception from the general population as part of a system to suppress individuality and conflict. Those with color perception are singled out for special privileges but also isolated from the rest of the community. Planned life stages result in strictly controlled birth rates and euthanasia in old age. There were even specific moments of congruence, such as the protagonists both seeing red hair on their girlfriends. It’s like Fforde read The Giver and decided it would be a much better book if it were funny. (He may be right.)

One caveat - on literally the last page of the book, Eddie is forced to make an ambiguous moral choice. While I don’t object to the principle, it’s a seriously contrived, last-minute, deus ex machina sort of problem manufactured to lend a sense of urgency to the forthcoming sequels. Personally, I have decided the incident simply didn’t happen, and the book ended two pages earlier.

Shades of Grey comes highly recommended, and we still have a couple of copies in the store at 20% off – grab one while we’ve got them. :)

Departed Angels

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Jessica’s mini-review: We just got a used Departed Angels (Jack Kerouac: The Lost Paintings) yesterday, and it looks pretty cool.

The first half is just a collection of Jack Kerouac’s terrible drawings and paintings. It’s kind of hilarious; the drawings range from awful to passable, but you could never accuse Kerouac of timidity, so despite his lack of skill, some of the paintings could pass as bold experiments in modern art (of the splash-that-paint-all-up-on-there school). Luckily the second half of the book has a lot of really interesting critical commentary on Kerouac’s writing and the organic relationship between doodles and writing in his notebooks.

Definitely recommended for Kerouac fans, and worth a read-through just for the lulz.

Hugo & Nebula Awards!

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It’s that time of year again; the grass is turning green, the trees are budding out, the Nebula awards ceremony is coming up and the Hugo award nominees have been announced! The Nebula nominations were announced in February, of course.

I haven’t read any of them myself (sad day!) but I’m about to start Boneshaker - a steampunk zombie adventure. How could you go wrong? I love zombie movies, and Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and I even liked Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (in defiance of the box office, movie critics, and the opinion of everyone I know).

Also! One of the nominees for the Andre Norton YA Scifi Award (presented with the Nebulas) is actually a free online novel: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making How cool is that?

Even if you’re one of those who “don’t read scifi,” there are plenty of boundary-defying books on the lists to satisfy you. Some of them, like Palimpsest and The Love We Share Without Knowing, aren’t even marketed as scifi or fantasy.

Did you like The Time Traveller’s Wife or The Lovely Bones? Or anything by Haruki Murakami or Kenzaburo Oe? The Love We Share Without Knowing is a very Japanese collection of strangers awakening to the strangeness and connection of everyday life. Or you might go for Palimpsest, where sleep takes you to a dream-city populated by other dreamers.

How do you feel about police and crime procedurals, like CSI on TV or maybe Anne Rule? China Mieville’s The City and the City is the story of a cop in the Extreme Crimes Division solving a murder in a universe right next door, with just hints of the supernatural for flavor. I’ve heard it’s a good match for fans of Jim Butcher or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, too.

Similarly, for the mystery buffs out there, Finch is a noir mystery set in a city under occupation. Reviewers have compared the setting to modern-day Kabul or Baghdad - this could be a good choice for fans of military fiction or thrillers like David Baldacci or Preston & Child.

Or maybe you enjoyed the post-apocalyptic dystopias of The Road or The Book of Eli. Julian Comstock would be a good bet, taking place after a series of disasters that drastically reduced the world population. The Wind-Up girl has a similar mood, though it takes place in a much more overtly-scifi urban environment.

The nominations for best new writers are also exciting - Gail Carriger’s sassy Victorian paranormal mysteries will appeal to fans of light-hearted paranormal romance or maybe the Stephanie Plum novels. Seanan McGuire’s paranormal mysteries are similar but closer to Kim Harrison or Jim Butcher - a little darker, with a little more action.
The Hugo ballot has six novels and the Nebula ballot has five. I’m always interested to see which selections, if any, overlap. It’s usually a good indication of excellence. This year there are two:
The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey, May09)
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor, Sep09)

The Nebula team also has these three on their list:
The Love We Share Without Knowing, Christopher Barzak (Bantam, Nov08)
Flesh and Fire, Laura Anne Gilman (Pocket, Oct09)
Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland Press, Oct09)

And the Hugo has these three:
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog)
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

I think we’ll be getting most of these in the store over the next few weeks - check them out and expand your horizons!

Pattern Recognition

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It’s been a while since William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognition came out, and I still haven’t managed to read it. I enjoyed Neuromancer very much, but haven’t been impressed by some of his other work.

Nevertheless, this interview in the Blackbird Archive is fantastic. Most of it, you’ll notice, is an extended meditation on what constitutes Science Fiction. This is important. I know I can’t give a real answer as to why it is- many more eloquent than me have tried. But I get so tired of the dismissive, “oh, I don’t read scifi.”

There is an extraordinary body of work that satisfies all the requirements of science fiction but is not marketed as such. The Time Traveler’s Wife is about a time traveler, for example, but it’s still in the Contemporary Lit section so everyone reads it. Likewise Gregory MacGuire‘s fairytale re-imaginings like Wicked would be perfectly at home in the scifi section - you wouldn’t even have to change the covers. Hundreds of CIA and crime thrillers deal with future weapons and genetic engineering and spy technology - but they have lots of guns, so that’s okay.

But more than the tropes listed above, science fiction is a way of thinking.

As the review says;

The next matter to be settled is genre. William Gibson is a science fiction writer, so is this science fiction? The answer is yes and no. Unlike Vonnegut, who goes to some pains to say he’s not writing science fiction even when he is, Gibson never shies from the label, even though he’s perfectly aware it’s not so simple a tag as it once was. Pattern Recognition is set in the present with no aliens or secret technologies. The plot turns on nothing more exotic technologically than chat rooms and posted film clips in a very recognizable Internet. Recently, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptomonicon, as fat as Pattern Recognition is lean, was largely treated as a science fiction novel by reviewers, bookdealers, and readers, even nominated for sf awards, though the main action involves the breaking of the Enigma code of World War II and isn’t science fiction in the usual sense. China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, on another end of the spectrum, seems science fictional even though it takes place in a Dickensian steampunk world with no connection to ours.

Science fiction, in effect, has become a narrative strategy, a way of approaching story, in which not only characters must be invented, but the world and its ways as well, without resorting to magic or the supernatural, where the fantasy folks work. A realist wrestling with the woes of the middle class can leave the world out of it by and large except for an occasional swipe at the shallowness of suburbia. A science fiction writer must invent the world where the story takes place, often from the ground up, a process usually called world-building. In other words, in a science fiction novel, the world itself is a distinctive and crucial character in the plot, without whom the story could not take place, whether it’s the world of Dune or Neuromancer or 1984. The world is the story as much as the story is in the world. Part of Gibson’s point (and Stephenson’s too for that matter) is that we live in a time of such accelerated change and layered realities, that we’re all in that boat, like it or not. A novel set in the “real world” now has to answer the question, “Which one?”

Via Science Fictional. That post also has a link to this interview with William Gibson, equally interesting.

First person smart-ass

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It always surprises me when people like the books I like for the same reasons I like them. I don’t know why it should; I suppose my tastes are not so very esoteric. For example, on tor.com, I’ve come across a number of blog posts and comments about Steven Brust, who is perhaps my favorite author. (As you may remember from my previous post on this blog, about The Phoenix Guards.) And, in a bizarre turn, the author of my favorite webcomic Penny Arcade is also deeply fond of Brust.

This post discusses the structure of Brust’s Vlad Taltos series and the futility of reading them in chronological order. I’ve had almost this exact discussion with a friend about the virtues of publication order versus internal chronological order. Or this post which discusses the terrors of terrible science fiction covers, with particular emphasis on why it’s worth reading the Vlad books anyway.

When trying to sell people on the Vlad Taltos series I generally describe them as “imagine if Corwin from Zelazny’s Amber books was the hero of Ocean’s Eleven”. So you can imagine my surprise to find articles and comments agreeing with me; Rojer Zelazny’s Amber books probably started the trend of the “First Person Smartass” POV. The combination of a smart guy with a cutting wit and endless competence gets me every time. I simply adore Brust’s Dragaera and Zelazny’s Amber. Megan Whalen Turner’s Gen series (The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, and The King of Attolia) is my current obsession.

I must admit that I love that kind of character even when he’s not the hero of the story. Before I came across the term “First Person Smartass” I generally used the (less-pithy) “guy who’s a total jerk but is so good at what he does that he gets away with it.

For example, in David Eddings’ Belgariad/Mallorean series both Silk and Belgarath are totally that guy (and in The Redemption of Althalus the titular character is basically Silk and Belgarath smushed together into one guy anyway). All my favorite movies have that guy too, although I realize that can’t exactly be called first person; Ocean’s Eleven, Catch Me if You Can, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Pitch Black, The Princess Bride… Captain Kirk in the new Startrek movie is arguably that guy. Or again on TV, Dr. House is that guy.

It’s interesting to note, now that I look at the list, that there aren’t a lot of female First-Person Smartasses out there. Maybe the heroine of Janet Evanovich’s mysteries? Or the heroine of Laurel K. Hamilton’s paranormal romances? Elizabeth Moon has some really tough, competent heroines in Paksenarrion or Ky Vatta… but none of these really have that cutting humor I’m talking about. Robert Heinlein’s Friday might qualify (other problems with the book aside).

So who am I missing on the list? I’d be particularly interested to hear any more female names.

Re-reading a Childhood Favorite: Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell

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Recently, due to a class on Adolescent’s Literature, I had the opportunity to reread one of my favorite books from my childhood. At first I was hesitant, as I thought that perhaps I would not enjoy the book as I once did, or that my fond memories of it would be dashed. I got over my concerns and reread Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell. This short novel for 8-12 year olds won the Newberry Award in 1961. It has also been named one of the Top Ten Young Adult Books of the Past 200 Years, which is quite a statement, as there are many wonderful YA books available.
This novel follows Karana as she builds a new life for herself after she is left behind when her entire tribe leaves their island. This is loosely based on the actual events of a Native American woman who lived alone on an island off the California coast for 18 years. Karana not only survives, but thrives, during her time alone. When her tribe leaves the island, Karana realizes her brother is not on the ship, and she jumps overboard to join him back on their island. He dies shortly after, and she is alone. She expects that someone will return for her, but they never do. (In reality, the entire tribe was decimated by disease and were completely wiped out.) Karana has many adventures on the island, including taming and befriending a wild dog, avoiding sea otter hunters, and sewing a skirt from cormorant feathers. She remains on the island completely alone for eighteen years. In the end, Karana is discovered and “saved” from her island. The irony is that her “rescuers” end up inadvertantly causing her death 7 weeks after bringing her to the mainland, due to disease and dietary issues. The story of Karana allows youngsters to find power within themselves and to see themselves as individuals who are capable of making independent decisions that matter.

Twenty years have passed since I first read Island of the Blue Dolphins, but the themes of family, isolation and identity still resonate with me. I still love the book, and I am glad I chose it for my re-read. I got to re-experience my childhood but I also got to enjoy the book from a new perspective. My husband is an archaeologist and I couldn’t help but notice all the details that are historically accurate based on artifact evidence found from this culture. It was interesting to see how O’Dell interwove historical data with storytelling to create this wonderful story which seems so lifelike. I had forgotten that the book is based (however loosely) on the true story of a Native American woman who lived alone on this island. As an adult, I have access to the internet (which was not available in the mid-80s) and I looked up (on Wikipedia) information about the actual island and the woman who lived there. I found it heart-wrenching to discover the island is now used as a weapons testing site for the US Navy, and that her cormorant skirt (which was real) was given to the Vatican and they lost it. I’m glad I did not know these things when I was younger. The themes of adventure that resonated with me as a child changed into themes of isolation and identity as I re-read. I could feel the loneliness of the main character, as a person alone on an island, but also the more poignant loneliness of being the last of her family, her tribe, her culture. I think that one of the reasons I enjoyed this book so much as a child was because I identified with that sense of being alone in the world. I think all kids have this feeling to some extent, and that is probably why they relate to this book. I also love that Scott O’Dell chooses to write about female protagonists. This is one of the few books when I was young that had a realistic, strong female rather than a Pollyanna-type main character. I am glad I got the chance to revisit this book and it has inspired me to reread some of my other favorites from when I was young to see how my experience with them will change and develop.

Have you read any books from your past lately? If so, which ones? What is your reaction to them now?

If you have not, which one would you choose? What did it mean to you when you were a child?

I would love to hear your thoughts!

Laura