Monday, May 31, 2010

The Killing of Words


TITLE: Succession (Risen Empire/Killing of Worlds)
AUTHOR: Scott Westerfeld
PUBLISHER: TOR

RATING
5/5 "Obsession/Nonagression (tie)"; 4/5 "Expression"; 3/5 "Impression"; 2/5 "Recession"; 1/5 "Depression"
SCORE 3/5

So much SF gets garishly tarted up in a bid to make it more appealing to 'mature' audiences, only for the end result to turn out like a five-year-old getting into Mommy's jewelry and make-up (anyone for midi-chlorians?). This is cute with kids, squirmingly embarrassing with adults.

So when author Scott Westerfeld proudly proclaims he wrote "Succession" as a space opera "for [his] 14-year-old self", the teenage part of my brain lights up like a video game played by preschooler after three cans of Red Bull. While "Succession" stays on this caffeine high for most of its first half, it crashes badly in the second half with some misjudged material and poor handling of pacing.

The key to impressing boys is, in a vulcanized, carbon-fiber machine-actuated cyber-nutshell: Cool Stuff. And early on, Mr Westerfeld delivers cool by the ice bucket.

In the fine tradition of space opera, Mr Westerfeld drops us straight into the middle of the action, as Laurent Zai, captain on the imperial frigate Lynx, prepares a mission to rescue the Child Empress held hostage by the cyborg Rix on the planet Legis XV below. Mr Westerfeld gleefully pushes us to the logical extremes of both technological and human capabilities, teetering just on the edge of scientific plausibility: millimeter-scale remote spy drones, orbital drops by imperial space marines embalmed in shock-absorbent gel, spaceships controlled via deliberately induced synesthesia (the perception of one sense being felt in another—seeing sounds as colors, for example).

The central Cool Thing in all of this is Laurent Zai's Emperor, who happens to be dead, and has been for quite some time. This slows the Emperor down less than you'd think, because 1,600 years ago he discovered a means of reanimating the dead by implanting something known as a Lazarus symbiont, which not only restores life but also keeps the risen dead in perfect health. For example the Emperor's sister, the aforementioned Child Empress being held hostage, is physically a child but over a millennia old.

The ever-growing ranks of the undead have produced an unstable, two-tier society in the Empire, which the recent Rix attacks threaten to tear completely asunder. A second strand of the novel, intercut with the action above Legis XV, revolves around empathic Senator Nara Oxham as she leads a sort of "loyal opposition' political faction against the aristocracy of the dead. Additional chapters taking place 10 years before the main action of the novel cover the romantic history between Zai and Oxham.

The cuts between characters come thick an fast, keeping the action zipping along like an overexcited nerve cell, spitting out new ideas and technologies on every page. The weightier questions hanging on Oxham's story—is death necessary for progress? Do new ideas only arise because the older generations pass away?—form a nice complement to the shoot-'em-up frenzy of Zai's rescue mission.

The neurons begin to misfire in the second half, however, as once-perky ideas are replaced with sluggish technobabble. There is much talk about virtual matter involving "quantum wells", hardly the space adventure fare the target audience is looking for. Oh hell, even if they were begging for it, it's still dreadfully dreary. To fill the gap, a subplot involving a self-building, sentient house suddenly gets more air time, which is about as exciting as it sounds. The already fractured plot speeds up, skipping whole blocks of time, before juddering to a sudden halt that positively screams for a sequel, though as of June 2010 none has been forthcoming.

In short, "Succession" is hugely fun when it acts its age, a bit of a bore when it puts on grown-up airs.

Friday, May 7, 2010

More Fiction, Less History Please

TITLE: Conspirata
AUTHOR: Robert Harris
PUBLISHER: Simon and Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Plot to kill Hitler"; 4/5 "Gunpowder plot"; 3/5 "Garden plot"; 2/5 "Plot device"; 1/5 "Excel scatter plot"
SCORE: 3/5

Halfway through "Conspirata", I had one of those terrible epiphanies, the sort that usually only strike middle-aged men in dead-end jobs just before they either leap out the window or take up organic farming. And the epiphany was this: There really is no point to this.

"Conspirata" is the second in a series of novels by British author and former political correspondent Robert Harris, based on the life of famous Roman statesman and orator, Marcus Cicero. The first book, "Imperium", charted his rise from ambitious lawyer to his election as consul, the highest political office in Rome. The narrator in both books is Tiro, a slave owned by Cicero and something of a historical figure himself, thanks to his purported invention of a system of shorthand (though Mr Harris erroneously also attributes the invention of the ampersand, "&" to him).

Readers drawn by the martial-looking eagle on the cover, or who assume any Roman epic is going to involve gladiators, orgies and crucifixions will be cruelly disappointed. "West Wing" fans will be pleased, though. This is a political drama, proudly all talk and no action, where the climactic scenes take place on the rostra, not the colliseum. The single, solitary episode of toga-lifting naughtiness, a tryst between Tiro and a slave of another household, takes place firmly off-camera.

Instead, Mr Harris throws us headlong into the political arena, when Cicero uncovers evidence of a plot against both himself and the City of Rome. The plotters are never much of a mystery, and the focus is instead on how to outmaneuver them. Once they are defeated, the focus in the second half of the novel shifts to Cicero's diminished status once his term of office ends, and on the rise of a fellow named Julius Ceasar in the ensuing vacuum.

Mr Harris displays a casual knowledge of the inner workings of Roman government, but despite the notes provided at the end of the book it can sometimes be a headache to keep your praetors separated from your tribunes, your augurs from your pontifex, your Metelli from your Claudians. Indeed, there is precious little description of anything outside of Senate speeches and private intrigues. The storytelling is competent but uninspiring. Certainly, no Cicero.

I say the novel is "based on" the life of Cicero, but this is doing Mr Harris a disservice. Hell, this is the life of Cicero. "Conspirata" is first-rate history, which sadly sometimes makes it second-rate entertainment. Ostensibly a novel, the story line hews so closely to historical fact that five minutes on Wikipedia ruined the entire plot for me. For a work of historical fiction, this is too much history, too little fiction. Mr Harris neither alters nor adds to the facts, never suggests an alternative interpretation, never illustrates some unrecorded adventure. The whole thing soon becomes a bit like being cornered at a party by a dreadfully earnest history professor.

This flaw is exacerbated by Mr Harris's choice of Tiro as narrator and Cicero as subject. Particularly during the second half of the book, once Cicero's term as consul is over, he is reduced to mere bystander in greater events. That makes our man Tiro peripheral to the periphery, a third-hand news source doubly removed from all the action. Here you have Julius Ceasar, Rome's most ambitious and ruthless man, Pompey, her greatest general, and Crassus, her richest man, seizing control of the republic, but we see none of it.

It was then that the epiphany hit me. Why bother reading "Conspirata", when a history book would achieve much the same end?

The limited insights Mr Harris offers us are that Cicero was patriotic, Ceasar unscrupulous, Pompey vain and Crassus dim. What is the point of historical fiction, if not to make suggestions, interpretations or changes, to fill in the missing pages or otherwise doodle in the margins of history's textbooks? Why write a novel if not to present us with a work of fiction? This is not a bad book; the plot plows along straightforwardly, characterization is consistent if a little thin. Mr Harris just doesn't seem to have anyting particularly interesting to say about any of it.

Now if you will excuse me, I have some organic vegetables to tend to.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Rick of Conscience

TITLE: Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944
AUTHOR: Rick Atkinson
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

RATING
5/5 "Battle of Hoth"; 4/5 "Battle of Wits"; 3/5 "Battle of the Sexes"; 2/5 "Battle of the Bands"; 1/5 "Battle for Terra"
SCORE: 4/5

World War 2 is our low-fat war. One we can indulge in as much as we want, secure in the knowledge that the glorious fallen do not remain to lard our consciences, but rather have been transported to light, airy heaven. With other wars, we may have to rationalize, but there's little doubt that fighting the Nazis was the Right thing to do.

When you get to the question of when and where we fought them, though, things get a little stickier. Not every battle or campaign is so easy to justify, and as Rick Atkinson shows in "Day of Battle", the Allied invasion of Sicily and Italy is the ten-pound ball of deep-fried butter ruining our no-guilt diet. The campaign left 100,000 soldiers dead, perhaps four times that many wounded, without striking any decisive blow against the Germans or sufficiently distracting them from other theaters. Was it worth it?

Mr Atkinson equivocates on the question, but he does so beautifully. "Day of Battle" forms the second of Mr Atkinson's planned "Liberation" trilogy following the history of US armies in the major European campaigns of World War 2. The series began with 2002's Pulitzer Prize-winning "An Army at Dawn", an engaging, in-depth history chronicling the US landings in North Africa. "Day of Battle" maintains this high standard of writing, even if it lacks the former book's driving narrative.

Mr Atkinson brings a humanist touch and eye for detail to the little-studied invasion of Italy. His book combines memoirs, first-hand as well as official accounts, and stacks of letters to from soldiers to those waiting at home. This intimate look at the war, combined with a heavy dose of poetic license, makes this a surprisingly readable book despite its 600-page-plus length. The only fault in the style is the aforementioned poetic license, which crops up in Mr Atkinson's tendency to embellish his descriptions. "The dappled sea stretched to the shore in patches of turquoise and indigo," he says, which is nice to read but hardly good history.

The supporting maps are likewise something of a mixed bunch. While clean and informative for the most part, in the paperback edition I read a number of printing errors had left some names with missing letters, so that "Monte Lungo" is rendered "Lun o" and Major-General Hawkesworth "Awke w r".

The level of detail of Mr Atkinson's account is, however, amazing, covering the US involvement in the campaign from the Anglo-American conference in May 1943 where it was conceived, to its climax in the fall of Rome in June 1944. Altghough the descriptions of acutal battle are sometimes a little vague, "thrusts met stout resistance", "a flanking attack ... unhinged the German line", Mr Atkinson's coverage of the leading personalities, from US commanders George Patton and Mark Clark, to divisional commanders like Lucian Truscott and even more junior officers, is much stronger. Mr Atkinson projects genuine respect and admiration for these men, though you feel he might be too easy on them sometimes. Mr Atkinson lists their ailments and worries sympathetically, but I can't stomach commanders sleeping in sprawling Italian villas and complaining about stress or tiredness, when a dozen kilometers away their men are getting dismembered by the truckload. Clark in particular gets off lightly, despite coming across as slighly insubordinate and egocentric.

Rather, Mr Atkinson saves his venom for the real enemy: the British. "Day of Battle" is a fine account of the campaign, provided you are utterly uninterested in the involvement of the British, Canadians, Polish, New Zealanders, Indians and other nationalities who made up the Allied force. Whenever the "cousins" do pop up, they soon disappear under a barrage of criticism for poor leadership, lack of offensive spirit, and failure to support or appreciate their American allies enough.

The most troubling part of the book, however, is Mr Atkinson's attempt to justify the campaign as a whole. In "An Army at Dawn", he convincingly argued that the African campaign helped steel US forces for the war in Europe. The argument doesn't work as well here, especially as he himself notes that soldiers not killed or wounded tended to become psychiatric casualties after 200-240 days; men can only be tempered so far before they break. Instead, Mr Atkinson falls back on the stale comfort that, in the words of war correspondent George Biddle, certain qualities "give war its justification, meaning, romance and beauty. The qualities of valor, sacrifice, discipline, a sense of duty". This flies in the face of the evidence Mr Atkinson presents in the previous 600 pages, that the war was horrible, meaningless, savage and hellish.

Far better is another quote by Biddle, "I wish the people at home, instead of thinking of their boys in terms of football stars, would think of them in terms of miners trapped underground or suffocating to death in a tenth-story fire." Sometimes, I think, it's only right that our consciences should be troubled.