When I told Adam Greenfield on Twitter that I had never read any Ballard, but that I had Concrete Island lined up to get my feet wet, his advice was "Go thou back and acquire Crash," so I could get the "distilled" Ballard effect. Crash won't be an option for probably another month or more (and I absolutely loathed the Cronengberg film, so despite Adam's insistence that the film is "immaterial," I'm still reluctant). Concrete Island will have to do for now. And besides, it's a fascinating premise.

The premise is this: Richard Maitland, an adulterous middle-class asshole (yeah, I have no class prejudices at all, do I?) is distracted on his drive home from a rendezvous with his mistress and hits a concrete barrier near an expressway ramp. He goes off the road and onto a large traffic island, where his wrecked Jaguar is hidden from the cars driving past. Maitland doesn't make it out of the crash in one piece; his leg is injured, and when he finally comes to, he gets hit by another car while trying to flag down some help. After that he's too weak and too badly injured to climb back out, trapped in a quasi-urban no-man's land for days.

I'd heard that many gritty, contemporary science fiction authors were heavily influenced by Ballard, and I can definitely see it here. The texture, the level of detail is clearly echoed in William Gibson's work, for example, but so is the attention to social codes, things like brand names, vocabulary, clothing. Concrete Island isn't one of Ballard's science fiction novels, but it shows many of the same concerns as a lot of science fiction, especially if you think of science fiction as a narrative strategy rather than simply a genre.

Maitland isn't alone on the island, but he's there for several days before he realizes it, suffering from fever, starvation, dehydration, and a variety of other difficulties related to the crash. He tries in vain to signal to passing motorists, at one point even lighting his car on fire to create smoke, all to no avail. He begins to see things, or to imagine that he sees things, the island becoming a reflection of his inner self. And it ain't pretty. It's interesting—and more than a little disturbing—to watch as he abandons ethics entirely and uses his superior ability to read and manipulate social codes to dominate (in part, by making false appeals to their moral sensibilities) the "native islanders." Perhaps most disturbing is that, though never a particularly moral or ethical man (he was an adulterer, after all), at the end of the novel, Maitland doesn't even to return to that original state. It's difficult not to think of him as a psychopath or a sociopath, and it's frightening to imagine what he will do once he returns to society.

Next up is Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson.

There is a concept called "the Singularity" that is of special concern to science fiction authors. It is the moment when an artificial intelligence becomes so intelligent, so self-aware, that it no longer needs us to create more and better intelligences. When it begins to evolve independently, like a biological organism (I'm sure there is a more technical definition, but this is close enough for most science fiction, and close enough for William Gibson). That's what Gibson was writing about in the Sprawl Trilogy. Wintermute and Neuromancer connecting to become this other thing; that moment is a Singularity. It sounds like it could all be good fun, but it can be unsettling. You've seen the unsettling version on television and in the movies. Think SkyNet, think The Matrix. That's ultimately what was behind the whole of the Sprawl Trilogy. Recently I've been seeing the word used to describe something more broad. It's not just related to artificial intelligence, but to any technology that changes things to the point where it is difficult for folks to make direct, logical connections between the world that was before that change, and the world that came after. Neal Stephenson wrote an excellent novel called The Diamond Age, which took place in a society that had been entirely reshaped by a nanotech Singularity. The ability to quickly and cheaply build more or less anything molecule by molecule alters how people live in the world in ways that simply can't be comprehended. The Diamond Age is a thing apart. I'm not entirely sure how you could describe it, except in terms of itself. Both the Sprawl Trilogy and the Bridge Trilogy, up until certain key moments in Mona Lisa Overdrive and All Tomorrow's Parties, were about a whole society organized to prevent the Singularity from coming.

Berry Rydell, much to my great pleasure, is back as a major player in All Tomorrow's Parties, and so are Chevette and the Bridge. Rydell works as security for a globally franchised convenience store called Lucky Dragon, which is as brilliant a thing as any I've seen in a cyberpunk novel. It's tremendous satire, made all the better because it could be played straight even if it appeared in some other novel in almost identical detail. It's a fixture running through the background of the whole novel, a clear sign of import in any William Gibson book, but no matter how many times I read All Tomorrow's Parties it never twigs for me until the last minute. But I was talking about Rydell. This time he's going fishing on behalf of Laney, who is both disintegrating as a human being, living out of a cardboard box in a Tokyo subway station, and playing an elaborate chess game with Cody Harwood, the ostensible villain of the novel. Somewhere out there is a man who doesn't show up on the board, who Laney can't see in the flow of data, except as a conspicuous absence. It is Rydell's job to go to the Bridge, collect a very special package, and draw the man out.

In the meantime, there's Chevette Washington. She'd left Rydell after the thing with Cops in Trouble fell apart yet again, deciding that she wanted someone more together, which almost inevitably means a wealthier man with an almost pathologically robust self image. "Almost pathologically" was probably the wrong phrase to use, because it turns out the guy is an actual psychopath, his obsession with clothes and personal appearance making him a subtle echo of Christian Bale's business-card fixated character in American Psycho. She eventually pierces through the veneer, leaves him, and he pursues. What's great is that Gibson somehow makes this triangle seem like something other than the the most stale plot on Earth. It feels like the natural progression of these characters' lives, the thing that would have happened to these particular people if they existed in the real world. (And besides, bitter experience has taught me that clichés don't become clichés for no reason.) Chevette moves in with a commune of media student house-sitters, but when her predatory ex shows up at the door, her friend Tessa convinces Chevette to flee with her, since she (Tessa) would have been leaving the following morning to film a documentary anyway. Rydell collects his package at a Lucky Dragon, and surprise surprise, the whole lot of them find their way to the Bridge, narrowly missing serendipitous reunions in a way that might have been comical in the hands of a lesser author.

The package is Rei Toei, the idoru. Whatever was meant to happen on the island at the end of Idoru failed to happen, or happened in a way that nobody expected, and she has abandoned Rez, and to a lesser extent her teacher Laney (although this is a vague point; Laney seems to know what happened to her, but at other times not know—I'm not sure if this is a property of Laney's diminished capacity, or a strategy to keep Rydell from behaving rashly; it seems too smooth to be a mistake on Gibson's part). Her trip to the Bridge is the next stage of her becoming, and nobody, not even Laney understands what that means (and only Hardwood believes he knows, but he does not).

There are a handful of subplots going on. Fontaine figures much more heavily than he did in Virtual Light, taking in a stray who thinks of himself as Silencio, and who is a kind of distillation of Colin Laney's gift, his special sense for patterns made flesh. There are the mercenaries, and there is Konrad (like Hideo from Neuromancer, but more autonomous, and far, far scarier), whose attention Rydell has been trying to attract, and there is Boomzilla and some others.

Starting with Mona Lisa Overdrive, but not being fully realized until Pattern Recognition, Gibson has been subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, undermining the conventions of the techno-thriller that have provided the structure for his plots. There is violence at the end of All Tomorrow's Parties, but not the neat, definitive violence that readers would expect from how the various threads of the plot have woven together. It is not Rydell who rescues Chevette from her psycho ex (though he tries), but rather the mysterious Konrad. Nor is there ever a confrontation between Konrad and Rydell, an event that was foreshadowed countless times on the path to their meeting. There is a messy battle with the mercenaries, but it happens mostly off-stage (or, this being a William Gibson novel, off-screen), and it fails utterly to be the point where the novel reaches critical mass. Instead, there is a watch, a hard drive on a satellite, and a new kiosk at Lucky Dragon. The true point where All Tomorrow's Parties reaches critical mass is when the Bridge begins to burn. It's not just the last, desperate hope of the mercenaries to claim their prize, but the clearing of underbrush and the tilling of soil. In the Bridge Trilogy Gibson built for us a new world on the ruined ground of what we, as readers, already knew, but it was makeshift, temporary, contingent. When the Bridge goes up in flames and Rei Toei steps out of Lucky Dragon—every Lucky Dragon, everywhere—as flesh and blood, a nanotech Singularity, a new world rises with her, one that simply cannot be fathomed. We are too busy on the Bridge, trying to put out the flames, to notice, or to comprehend, or even to care, really. But it happens all the same.

There are lessons here still, from the old world, from even before the Bridge. It is the careful, compassionate, and (fundamentally) formally-organized government of Northern California that saves the Bridge, diverting aerial fresh-water tankers bound for Los Angeles or some other city, using them as emergency water-bombers. It was a plan put in place long before the fire, because everyone, even those who exist only in the interstitial spaces—and perhaps especially them—is dependent on the outside in some way, whether they know it or not, and whether they like it or not.

It's worth noting too, that while it is often praised for more economical use of language than the previous two Bridge novels, the prose of All Tomorrow's Parties can be startlingly poetic at times. It contains my favourite passage in all of Gibson's novels, in fact:

He feels it as a single indescribable shape, something brailled out for him against a ground or backdrop of he knows not what, and it hurts him, in the poet's phrase, like the world hurts God. Within this, he palps nodes of potentiality, strung along lines that are histories of the happened becoming the not-yet. He is very near, he thinks, to a vision in which past and future are one and the same; his present, when he is forced to reinhabit it, seems increasingly arbitrary, its placement upon the time line that is Colin Laney more a matter of convenience than of any absolute now.

The poet, of course, is Sylvia Plath, though I haven't read the whole poem, and couldn't begin to tell you what the line means in that context. I can't remember exactly the reasons why, but this paragraph always struck me as inhabiting my own sense of how I lived within a particular romantic relationship, not being able to look at it directly, knowing its effects as much from the space they left behind as from their direct action, feeling both wounded and empowered at the same time. Heady stuff, and not at all an easy mix of emotions to explain. There is even a story I wrote, languishing five years now in its first draft, still burning too intense for me to look at, called "Like the World Hurts God," named for this passage rather than for Plath's lines, a tale of glory and betrayal and delusion. But anyway.

All Tomorrow's Parties was my twenty-first selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Concrete Island, by J.G. Ballard.

I'm curious as to why, in his first five solo novels (he drops the convention for All Tomorrow's Parties, and it was largely irrelevant in The Difference Engine, the collaboration with Bruce Sterling that came between Mona Lisa Overdrive and Virtual Light), Gibson uses a phonetic spelling of the Japanese pronunciation of words borrowed from English. The Idoru of the title is a Japanese borrowing of the English word "idol," and it's not uncommon for Gibson to write "sarariman" when he means "salaryman." Perhaps it's to indicate that, while these words have been borrowed from English, the concept has been altered, formalized or radicalized enough, to the point where it's no longer quite the same thing as it would be in English (a process that words go through quite regularly in the English language's gluttonous drive to expand its lexicon). If that's so, then why drop most of the terms in favour of conventional English in All Tomorrow's Parties? Perhaps it was a decision made by his editor or publisher.

An idoru, a Japanese pop idol, is a different thing than the pop idols we have here in North America, even after the advent of programs like American Idol and Canadian Idol. Their careers are generally more varied, even more manufactured (if you can believe it), and significantly shorter. They are also almost exclusively young women (not so many Justin Biebers there). Rei Toei has been built from the ground up to be the ultimate idoru. Her appearance, her personality, perhaps even her music all shifts to accommodate the specific likes and wants of any one of her fans. But she learns, and she becomes. While Rei Toei's AI is not quite on the level of Wintermute and Neuromancer of the Sprawl Trilogy, her identity is equally about process. She is an emergent consciousness rather than a constructed one, greater than the sum her parts. She is growing all the time, so densely packed with information that Colin Laney, a savant with a sort of chemically induced mild autism, a data-whisperer, if you can forgive me that construction, can't even bear to look at her. The catalyst for most of the action of Idoru comes from her impending marriage to Rez, a rock star who has managed to stay on top for decades, whose wealth and stardom has taken on a life of its own, autonomous in a way that suggests that, given enough time, something like Rei Toei herself may emerge from the data it generates, or perhaps it already has, and Rez is merely a species of vestigial limb or organ, like an appendix. None of the characters seem to understand the point of the marriage, though to be fair even I had difficulty figuring out what Gibson was trying to say after he'd filtered it through Rez's rock star-grade philosophy. I think that when Rez and Rei are together neither possesses a stable identity (as far as such a thing goes), but rather move into the realm of pure process. There are ripples here of Sharon Apple and Motoko Kusanagi.

Poor Colin Laney. Gibson writes a number of characters who have special relationships to information, like Marly in Count Zero and Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition, but I think Laney is the closest to a contemporary "power user" of the Internet, though he is also the only one who has been altered or augmented in any way. He has access to considerably more and different kinds of information than we do, but anyone who has gone looking for an innocuous piece of information only to find themselves locked in an intense, quasi-addictive and profoundly focused state, traveling from link to link and eventually seeing things that probably aren't that innocuous, anyone who has experienced that will have no difficulty understanding the sometimes dramatic leaps in logic Laney makes when sifting through the detritus of someone else life, looking for "nodal points" (I have an example from my own life in mind, but it's creepy as hell, and was entirely innocent/accidental, but there's no possible way to explain it that will sound innocent/accidental, so the anecdote must remain untold). There are paths through the information out there, and what's required to navigate them is a considerable gift for a certain kind of intuition. Colin Laney is just such a pathfinder.

And speaking of occult information, the Bridge isn't the only architecture in the Bridge Trilogy inspired by Kowloon Walled City. There is also a digital structure, a kind of communal (yet paradoxically private) data haven, so directly influenced by it that its creators have simply taken the name "Walled City." Walled city is where any number of different pathways in Idoru converge, which is interesting if for no other reason than because it's a community founded on the principle that no roads, physical or metaphorical, should ever lead there. The online Walled City is in part responsible for Rydell losing his job at IntenSecure (though Rydell barely figures in Idoru). They are hackers, idealists, otaku, Laney without the augmentation, without the bullshit. They are the ones who find Chia Pet Mackenzie (yes, Chia Pet Mackenzie) so that all the pieces can fall into place.

Chia's name is one of those ridiculous stories that you think could only happen in a William Gibson novel, but that anyone who's read Freakonomics would understand, so I won't get into it here, but she's another of Gibson's lost girls and boys, out in the world doing something just a half step away from normal and getting caught up in a massive conspiracy. Chia is the closest thing North America has to an Otaku, and she's been drafted to travel to Japan on behalf of her local chapter of the international Lo/Rez fanclub to learn the truth of what's going on between Rez and Rei Toei. She's never really traveled before, and she's gone without permission, and those things make her a target. She's manipulated into being an unwitting mule, and things just kind of go to hell from there. An organization called the Kombinat, a kind of mafia/government hybrid operating out of Russia, is after her, the smugglers are after her, and all because she accidentally intercepted a small grey case containing a nano-machine factory. The kind of thing they used to rebuild Tokyo, and were planning to use on San Francisco in Virtual Light. The kind of thing that Rez and Rei Toei believe can make their marriage happen. Nobody is entirely sure how, but as Idoru closes, a new island rises from the murk of Tokyo bay...

Idoru (which features my favourite of all William Gibson covers) was my twentieth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is All Tomorrow's Parties, the last William Gibson book for a little while.

Berry Rydell is the most likable character in Gibson's oeuvre. He's not an innocent (he's a cop who used lethal force without authorization, though he had good reason), but he's somehow avoided becoming rough, or crude, or cynical. He's Southern without being a Good Ol' Boy, reminding me a bit of Timothy Olyphant in Justified or Deadwood, or of Ray Tatum in T.R. Pearson's novels. Simple, even noble, somehow, without trying, without being ridiculous. Doing the right thing, mainly because in the long run it's less complicated. This, of course, gets him into monumental amounts of trouble, just as it would in our world. He gets let go from the Knoxville police force almost as soon as he's hired, loses his job as a rent-a-cop with IntenSecure because a hacker prank (which may have been orchestrated by a husband trying to catch his wife with the pool boy) manipulates him into doing the morally correct, but pragmatically wrong, thing. The job his old boss lines up for him with Lucius Warbaby looks like it may work out for him, because he seems to be good at it, but given its dubious legal status, we know right away that Rydell's instincts will make him fuck it up somehow.

Chevette Washington is how he fucks it up. She's a kid from Oregon who walked out of a bad life and into an uncertain one, nearly dying of exposure until Skinner (a short story about Skinner was the inspiration for the entire Bridge Trilogy, of which Virtual Light is the first volume) took her in and got her healthy again. She lives with him on the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge and works as a bike messenger in the city (San Francisco, not Oakland), and taking care of Skinner as he ages, at least until she finds herself at a party she really shouldn't be attending, and steals some guy's sunglasses because he was being a dick. All hell rains down on her after that. Lucius Warbaby, who is clearly bad news, is hired to find her after the guy she stole the glasses from winds up dead, and the two Russian cops (pretty much all the cops in this particular dystopic future—or past, since I think Virtual Light is supposed to take place somewhere around 2005—are Russian expatriates) he's working with look like they're even worse news. Chevette's fellow bike messenger sums up the nature of Chevette's problem quite nicely:

There's only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they're one kind. We're the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore, we proj their messages on. We get paid for it. We try not to drip on the carpet. And we get by, okay? But what happens on the interface? What happens when we touch?

Well, what happens on the interface is fairly simple. The poor do what they're told, or the rich gut them like fish, literally or figuratively. Much like today, actually. In this particular instance, it turns out that the sunglasses Chevette stole were not sunglasses, but a Virtual Light unit (they transmit visual images directly to the brain, without photons—vision without light, so "virtual light") that costs about as much as a small car, and is being used as part of a sneakernet to transport information vital to the future of San Francisco. Rydell is sent onto the Bridge (more on the Bridge shortly, but yes, it gets a capital letter) to find Chevette, and he succeeds, at a grimy little bar called Cognitive Dissidents. But when he hands her over to the cops, and realizes that they aren't looking to arrest her, his sense of right and wrong kicks in, and suddenly it's the two of them on the run instead of just Chevette.

So the Bridge. A few years before Virtual Light opens, a series of earthquakes hit Tokyo and San Francisco, destroying a good deal of the infrastructure of both cities. The Japanese rebuild by dumping all the rubble into the ocean and letting nano-machines loose, not rebuilding so much as growing a new city. The resulting buildings somehow feel both organic and artificial at the same time. In San Francisco, things are different. That community prefers to rebuild the old-fashioned way, but the San Francisco - Oakland Bay Bridge is beyond repair and subsequently abandoned. One night the city's underclass storms the barbed-wire fencing that isolates the Bridge, and take up residence. The Bridge becomes a makeshift, almost lawless shanty town, inspired by Kowloon Walled City. The Bridge is like Tokyo, in that it's a city of new technologies built on top of the ruins of an old city, but instead of being cutting-edge, expensive, centrally managed technology, it's improvised, decentralized, a blend of the old and new. It may be the most amazing place in all of Gibson's work. The Bridge is a character as much as a setting, or a metaphor, or the embodiment of a theme. There is even a Japanese sociology student (an "existential sociologist"), Shinya Yamazaki, who has come to San Francisco to study the Bridge. He takes over Chevette's role as Skinner's helpmeet when Chevette flees with Rydell.

Unlike with a great many of Gibson's novels, the central conflict of Virtual Light is between ideologies rather than organizations or individuals. The data that Chevette has stolen details a plan to rebuild San Francisco the way Tokyo has been rebuilt. While this would be amazing for the wealthy property developers, it would be an absolute disaster for the majority of the city's population, the denizens of the Bridge in particular (it just occurred to me: there's a version of the Bridge in the disastrous 1995 film adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic). Rydell (and later, Rydell and Chevette) attract the attention of a reality television show called Cops in Trouble, and it's in his exploitation by the producers (and Gibson's over the top satire of television production) where the struggle for the individual to live a fundamentally moral (or ethical) life in a society that is slipping—or being driven, by folks like the Cops in Trouble producers—from amorality into immorality stands out most clearly. On the Bridge, folks look out for themselves, but they also look out for each other. In the outside world, there are only predators and prey.

Virtual Light was my nineteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Idoru, by William Gibson.

For reasons unknown I am always confusing Mona Lisa Overdrive with one of the Bridge Trilogy novels, conflating some of its plot elements with bits of Idoru (most notably the portable AI known as Colin, and the nanotech assembler), which is odd, because Kumiko Yanaka and Chia Pet Mackenzie (yes, really) couldn't be any more different as characters, but the confusion always stems from plot elements relating to them.

Mona Lisa Overdrive didn't get quite as good a critical reception as Neuromancer and Count Zero, and it's not difficult to see why. It lacks the focus of the other two books, and the characters are not as central to the events as science fiction and fantasy generally demands. Instead, Bobby and Angie excepted, they nibble away at the edges, sometimes pushed around like pawns, and sometimes acting as channels for greater forces that are making moves in a game that neither they nor the reader can see the shape of. It's actually the condition that makes the most sense in Gibson's fictions, where the level of paranoia shoots through the roof and unheard of sums of money and strange, beautiful technology makes the rich and powerful into the gods of ancient Greek drama. Childish in their desires and their moods, cunning, sophisticated, and brutal in their scheming to see those desires realized. Science fiction is very much about change, and science fiction fans like their characters to be at the very centre of that change; it's not that difficult to see why it would be harder for them to accept a novel in which the most active characters are merely caught up in it, largely inconsequential to the outcomes. It is very literary, though.

The novel opens seven years after the events of Count Zero, and fourteen after the events of Neuromancer. Molly Millions is here, under the alias Sally Shears, and so is the Finn, dead now, but manifesting as an oracular AI with a laser rifle, a local god in some back-alley of the Sprawl. Bobby and Angie are here too, their love and their lives collapsing because of the demands of a corporate media with opaque ends beyond even the massive power of an entertainment empire, Bobby's stubborn pursuit of the console cowboy mythos that nearly cost him his life in the opening pages of Count Zero, and the jealous intervention of what's left of Lady 3Jane. The titular character is street prostitute Mona Lisa, who like Kumiko Yanaka is so removed from the causes of her shifting circumstances that even if the people moving her on the board were to explain things to her (not that they could, being themselves ignorant of the first causes), she would simply be unable to understand. The whole book is about not being in control, and about not being able to understand why. But that's the Singularity, isn't it? That's the whole point. The hackers call it "When It Changed," but even they can't tell you how or why. There's a character, Gentry, who has escaped to Dog Solitude to find the Shape, the greater outward form of the Matrix, believing he'll find a kind of Truth there. That, in effect, is what nearly all the characters in Mona Lisa Overdrive are trying to do: see the shape of the world they live in. Except perhaps, for Bobby, who is plugged into the aleph (a digital universe in a bottle, a direct and somewhat obvious Borges reference, missed in every single article I've ever seen about this novel) and trying, like the readers of the Sprawl Trilogy itself, to piece together the story of When It Changed by escaping into a false world and connecting the various histories and narratives as best he can.

Kumiko's story is the most interesting to me, perhaps because she is the least consequential, and serves mainly as another reader analog, an excuse to use Sally as a tour guide not just to future-London and the Sprawl, but to the tissue that connects most of the physical elements of Mona Lisa Overdrive's plot. One hopes that Sally/Molly finds some measure of happiness somewhere after the closing pages of the trilogy, as twice now she's had it in her grasp and lost it (first with Johnny in the short story, "Johnny Mnemonic", and then with Case in Neuromancer). She's rough and tumble, violent yet graceful, always on the move and with a richer, deeper story than even the other characters dare look too closely at, but she is easy to like, and easy to trust, for all that. (And I have to ask: does anyone else think that Porphyre used to be one of the Panther Moderns from Neuromancer, like Lupus Yonderboy? He has that same kind of reshaped, shark-cartilage skull...) Anyway, Kumiko still has what the reader should recognize as child-like innocence, something that virtually no other character in any of Gibson's novels has, and she gets to wander through London playing spy with gruff-but-lovable toughs who have names like Petal, Colin at her side, the ultimate guidebook/toy/imaginary friend. Kumiko and Colin are grittier precursors to Nell and A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from Stephenson's 1995 novel, The Diamond Age.

I'm not entirely certain what happens at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive. Mona is clearly going to go on to become the next Angela Mitchell (who was once the next Tally Isham, and so on), Slick and Cherry are going to have themselves a good time in Cleveland, Kumiko will return to her father, and Sally/Molly gets her longed-for anonymity, but what happens to Gentry? And really, what about Bobby and Angie? They both die, in a way, and enter the aleph, but two contrary things are implied: first, that they have access to the Matrix as a whole (something that wasn't true of the aleph earlier in the novel), and so therefore will continue to live on as constructs or AIs themselves, inside the Matrix, but also that their consciousnesses are actually contained only inside the aleph, the model universe, and that even though they are going to connect with the other Matrix in Centauri that the Wintermute/Neuromancer AI made contact with at the end of Neuromancer, they will not survive once the battery runs out, about a year, by Slick's estimation. It's the sort of ending that could be sad and hopeful all at once, stubbornly refusing to provide closure.

Mona Lisa Overdrive was my eighteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Virtual Light, by William Gibson.

There are a couple of things about Count Zero that have never quite ticked over for me. It's not that they don't make sense, it's more that they don't make the right kind of sense to sustain my willing suspension of disbelief. The idea is that you can find anything in the Sprawl, and I suppose they fall under that umbrella, but Gibson doesn't strike me as the kind of writer who does things just because he can.

The first of those two things is the least significant, and that's Bobby Newmark's mother. Gibson's narrators are always third person in his novels, so we never get the unfiltered personality of any of his characters, but it's pretty clear that we see Bobby's (Count Zero's) mother the way he sees her, and two things are plain: she's a lost cause, spending all her time drinking and jacked into serial simstims on her Hitachi, the Sprawl equivalent of the daytime soaps, and that she doesn't have a job. Bobby's father isn't in the picture, hasn't ever been in the picture, to hear him tell it, and Gibson's Sprawl, of which Bobby seems to live in some kind of tertiary, low-income, low-density annex, is not the kind of place with public health insurance and welfare cheques. The Sprawl borders on outright anarchy, and even in a place like Barrytown, things cost money. How does she pay for rent and simstim? How does she pay for the trip out (I couldn't find the passage, a tangential remark, a background broadcast making it temporarily through to Bobby's consciousness) to what I think was a casino with friends, that ultimately saves her life? I have friends today who manage to live that way, travel all over and go to bars and restaurants, but never seem to have a job. I don't know where the money comes from, and it's equally unclear when it comes to Bobby and his mom.

The other thing is the loa. Now, I know what the loa are. In Neuromancer, bits of the two Tessier-Ashpool AIs were capable of acting more or less autonomously, parts of a whole that wanted to become parts of an even greater whole, a joining that has no human analog. If the unsophisticated Tessier-Ashpool AIs (unsophisticated in relation to what they became) were able to break off into distinct functional units, it makes perfect sense that the thing that came of their union, the artificial entity that some of the console cowboys think of as the god of cyberspace, would be capable of doing the same thing, especially after what it found at the end of Neuromancer, what it touched. But why would it latch itself on to the hacker Vodou culture? Why masquerade as the loa? (A more interesting question, though: did the various AI fragments eventually come to see themselves as the loa, defined by how Lucas, Jackie, Rhea and Beauvoir saw them?) The choice of Vodou (as Gibson spells it) as the religion of the Matrix makes a little bit of sense, because as one of them explains, the other religions are like the Yakuza or the big corporations, playing so big a game that your problems will have to be absolutely huge before they will even notice your pleas, never mind decide to act on them, whereas Vodou is about getting things done down at the level of the street, probably the single most important part of life in the Sprawl.

I am surprised that there's no real discussion about whether or not seventeen year old Angie is human. She's been genetically engineered unknowingly by her "father" at the behest of the loa-AIs (it's unclear to me whether or not she has a mother, or if she's just straight up vat-grown; Angie's own recollections are not to be trusted in this matter, and everything about her life before the instant she meets Turner happens "off stage," as it were), built with biological constructs inside her that are invisible to most scans but are tumor-like, and allow her to access cyberspace in a kind of dream-state, not with much in the way of conscious control, but rather so that she can be ridden by the loa, provide flesh and blood access to the flesh and blood world. Young and pretty or not (and it isn't until Turner's reaction to her, long after she's entered the picture, that by "young" they mean "young adult" and not "child"), can such a creature really be human? Gibson doesn't seem interested in that question, which is a little odd, because it's the sort of question that one would think he'd be all over. Count Zero is a lot more about blowing things up and being on the run than Neuromancer was, so maybe he had other things on his mind. Thinking about it now, Angie could be a kind of dry run at Rei Toei, the artificial idoru of, well, Idoru, an entity on a personhood spectrum, closer in this case to the "traditional person" end of the spectrum, built to meet the expectations and uses of artificial life, but eventually taking control of her own destiny by becoming an aspect of cyberspace in Mona Lisa Overdrive. (Rei Toei being on the opposite end of the spectrum, an artificial person created to meet the needs of flesh and blood people, who takes control of her destiny by becoming flesh and blood in All Tomorrow's Parties.)

There are two other characters in this story who could be considered dry runs for characters who show up in later Gibson books. Marly is quite clearly a prototype of Cayce from Pattern Recognition, a character type that reaches its logical extreme in Colin Laney from Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. She's been hired to find the origins of Cornell-like boxes (though in Count Zero, Cornell boxes take on a whole other significance, being the work of an artist, but at the same time representing also the rote digital creation of an image of physical space by a machine and the faithful rendering, through the juxtaposition of physical objects, of subtle human emotion), and she does, up in the old clean rooms of Straylight, where the Tessier-Ashpool corporate servers were housed, the boxes the result of squatters tapping into an echo of the Singularity Case and Molly triggered in Neuromancer.

The other dry run is Josef Virek, a man nearly as wealthy as Lady 3Jane's whole corporate clan, his wealth allowing him to survive as he becomes less and less human in a Stockholm support vat, his body ravaged by an exotic cancer that's turning him into a creature like Tetsuo at the end of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, a metaphor, perhaps, for what his wealth has already done to him. Virek is seeking immortality in the bodiless Matrix (the kind of immortality achieved by the Wintermute and Neuromancer AIs, or Rei Toei, who he resembles in that he has many choices as to how he may manifest). He manipulates his employees, who sometimes find themselves working at odds, towards ends that the reader knows (or can guess at) but that are rarely clear to others in the novel. He is a bloated, extreme, inhuman version of Hubertus Bigend of Blue Ant from Pattern Recognition.

Count Zero ends happily for nearly all the surviving protagonists (it's a truly ensemble cast), but such happiness is mostly conditional. Turner raises a child with his brother's sort-of girlfriend, but their relationship (and the child) are the result of Turner's emotional betrayal of his brother when he visits him seeking shelter for Angie, that visit being the direct cause of his death. Marly owns her own gallery in Paris, but must do so with the knowledge that perhaps the most profound art she has ever encountered in her life was created by an unthinking, unfeeling machine, not even a simulation of consciousness, but the echo of a simulation. Bobby and Angie are dropped into every teenager's fantasy of sex, wealth, and fame, but... well, their but is the subject of the third Sprawl novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Count Zero was my seventeenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson.

Were I asked (and I never have been), I would have to say that William Gibson is my favourite science fiction author, mostly likely my favourite "genre" author of all time, across all genres not labeled "literary", though I think that after Pattern Recognition, anyone trying to keep his work in the science fiction ghetto is a fool. You're going to want to read this post about genre classifications before we go any further. (A novel set in the "real world" now has to answer the question, "Which one?") Trust me. Go now, I'll wait.

I don't need to tell you that Neuromancer is the single most famous cyberpunk novel, not quite the first of its kind, but the one that changed everything. It's been heavily criticized because at the time Gibson knew more or less nothing about computers, and so his depictions of computer technology and hacker culture, while exciting and inventive, don't have much to do with how things actually worked at the time (see the "3MB of hot RAM" that Case is trying to fence in the opening chapter). I was only five years old when it came out, so I can't really say what it was like to see something like that hit, but it certainly made an impression on me. I burned through all of Gibson's books in less than a week (you can do that when you've got no job and only have fifteen hours of class a week), and I've never been the same. It wasn't the noir elements, the chaneling of Raymond Chandler (though that helped), it was the concept of an underclass that wasn't just techno-literate, but was actually on the cutting edge of technology, taking whatever was at hand and making their own world with it. Makeshift, stuck together with chewing gum and piano wire. I've never been much for building things (a little basic carpentry, and some HTML/CSS madness, but that's about it), but I find the sociological implications of a community like that unimaginably compelling. The idea's been living in my head ever since.

Gibson also had an interesting take on the Singularity, though I'm not certain it's original to him. Rather than hastening the day, rushing towards it like some techno-fetishist's wet dream, the world of the Sprawl has locked down computer intelligence, strictly limiting their development with the Turing Police, preventing it, hopefully, indefinitely. But Gibson isn't interested in the status quo. The world is a rotting corpse, the policies of folks like Thatcher taken to their logical conclusion, the middle class eradicated and the gap between the rich and the poor greater than ever before, corporations having grown so large and powerful from deregulation that they've all but entirely usurped the authority of the nation states they grew up under. And then there's Straylight, home to the stunted, incestuous Tessier-Ashpool clan, makers of their own world, so rich they aren't even really human anymore. Honestly I don't know what's not to love.

Gibson has one advantage over many of his visionary predecessors: Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert and others can match Gibson on the abstract, philosophical level, but few of them can go toe to toe with him as a stylist (certainly not Dick, mad genius though he was). He has a knack for being able to drag us kicking and screaming through blood and shit, violence and decay, and making us feel it like poetry.

There's so much life in this novel. The Sprawl is a high-tech dystopia, but every square inch of it teems with life, eating, sweating, fucking, getting high and making deals, and Gibson captures it all. Neuromancer sometimes doesn't feel like it's been written, but rather constructed, built up, molecule by molecule, out of an infinite number of overlapping textures. Like Blade Runner, but even more dense.

Density is one of four key concepts of Gibson's pre-Pattern Recognition novels, I think (with the possible exception of The Difference Engine, his 1990 collaboration with Bruce Sterling, which I haven't read recently enough to have an opinion on). Density, movement, violence, and grace. Case, Molly Millions, the Finn, Peter, even the construct Dixie Flatline and the two AIs, Wintermute and Neuromancer operate on those thematic levels. The characters who don't (like the Tessier-Ashpools, who have forsaken movement—Lady 3Jane comes out on top, because she struggles to move) are largely in a destructive spiral, or entirely insignificant.

Neuromancer was my sixteenth selection for the Third Canadian Book Challenge. Next up is Count Zero, by William Gibson.

If The Atrocity Archives was on the horror end of the spectrum of genres Charlie Stross has mashed together, then The Jennifer Morgue is pretty squarely on the spy thriller end. Bob Howard, agent of The Laundry, finds himself sent out on a mission to the Caribbean with the beautiful, seductive, and sexually predatory—literally, she's being possessed by a succubus who kills the men she has sex with and eats their souls—Ramona, agent of the Black Chamber, the American version of The Laundry, with no idea what it is he must accomplish. He's given a tuxedo, a bizarre array of gadgets, and instructions from Ramona to play some baccarat and get himself invited to the yacht of the millionaire (or is it billionaire?) industrialist with a fluffy white cat...

Are you rolling your eyes yet? The Jennifer Morgue is meant to be a pastiche of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, via a weird practical application of Terry Pratchett's law of narrative causality ("if a story or legend is told often enough and believed by enough people, it becomes true"), but it's actually a pastiche of the films. There's an essay in the back of the book in which Stross explains the influence of Bond on the book, though his reading of the Bond mythos is both superficial and intensely flawed, with numerous factual errors conflating elements of the books and films (the gadget thing, for one, is a feature prominent in the films, but is something the Bond of the novels despises, the Bond of the novels being every bit a self-hating, self-destructive alcoholic as he is a misogynist—more perhaps, as his misogyny appears to be partly a symptom of his self-loathing—but anyway, I'm getting off track).

The Bond thing ruined it for me, really. The Jennifer Morgue was still kind of fun, especially with the introduction of Deep Ones at the bottom of the Pacific, introduced via a fictionalized account of Project Azorian (from which the novel takes its name), but the Bond elements were so schlocky, and handled so poorly, that what could have been an excellent parody was just a drag on the rest of the plot.

Ramona is kind of a problem. She's one of those problems where it's difficult to figure out where to start explaining why she's a problem. So let's start with sex. Ramona is... well, it would spoil it to tell you exactly what she is, but let's just say she's a person who has been drafted against her will to serve as an agent of the Black Chamber, an American Laundry-style agency so secret it doesn't even have an official name ("the Black Chamber" is just a nickname based on the US' cryptography unit during the Second World War), and she's being kept under control by being sort of subconsciously possessed by a succubus. In Stross' world, Succubi are creatures from another universe who take up residence in the skull of a living person, and have to have sex on a regular basis in order to kill and consume the souls of the people they are having sex with, otherwise they will eat the souls of their hosts. You would think, having been tied to something like this for quite a while before the novel opens, that Ramona would not really be all that into sex. She'd be having a lot of it, but probably not enjoying it all that much. And you'd be right, sort of. But only sort of. Ramona doesn't appear to enjoy the act of feeding on men's souls, but otherwise she revels in her sexuality. At least, that's the impression I feel like I'm supposed to get. Ramona and Bob are tied together through some magical "destiny entanglement" thing, so they are getting closer and closer to becoming a single entity as the book goes on, but there are times, lots of times, when Ramona's sexuality, and the whole conceit of the succubus, seem to exist only to a) tease, torture, or humiliate Bob, b) complicate Bob's personal life with Mo, and c) provide the required sex scenes for the Bond pastiche. In other words, Ramona's sexuality is all about Bob.

She, and a handful of other characters, go a long way in showing how tone-deaf Stross can be about some things. Ramona, among other characters in the novel, like Ellis Billington (the guy with the fluffy white cat) are supposed be, not just rich, but rich and elegant. Stross, coming from a computer science background, ought to, believe it or not, know what elegance is. It baffles me that a lot of techies don't seem to be able to get a handle on elegance in other arenas, as "elegant" used to the be highest compliment one could give to code. Elegance is about beauty, sophistication, simplicity (yes, those can go hand in hand; sophistication is not the same as complexity), and understatement. Elegnant clothes are not elaborate and showy, not meant to be seen. They are meant to draw out the finest features of the wearer, make them appear as their best selves. The finest suit in the world is one that will never be noticed. Stross' elegant characters do not have a clue what understatement is. They make menacing remarks, wear elaborate clothes (Ramona goes about her daily business, wearing gowns and "dripping with jewels"), and have basically the same sense of humour as Bob. There is absolutely zero subtlety in them. (Speaking of lacking subtlety, if you thought, like I did, that Mo was too perfect in The Atrocity Archives, wait until you see her in this.)

The Jennifer Morgue was fun, but not as fun as the first book, and I actually enjoyed the short story in the back ("Pimpf") more than the novel itself. That, at least, had a little more humanity to it. Given how much of a fan I am of Stross' blog, how clear-eyed he is, how willing to cut through the bullshit, I was very disappointed by how superficial this book could be, and how dramatically off and skin-deep his reading of the Bond mythos was. That being said, the world of the Laundry is still compelling, and several of Stross' other projects look interesting as well. This will not be the last Charlie Stross book reviewed on vestige.org.

Next up is Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

I've been blabbing on about Charlie's excellent blog for a while now, both here and on Twitter, so it should come as no surprise that I'd eventually get around to reading some of his books. I figured I'd start with the Laundry series (named for the nickname of the super secret British bureaucracy/counter-espionage agency/counter-nameless-many-tentacled-horrors-from-beyond-spacetime agency that employs Bob Howard, the series' protagonist) because the premise sounded interesting, and because like a lot of genre fiction, it's bloody hard to find copies of his books that aren't those horribly shitty, fall-apart-if-you-look-at-them mass market paperbacks, and the two Laundry books were the only ones I could get trade or hardcover copies of.

So, the premise: mathematics and magic are, on some level, more or less the same thing. This actually makes a certain amount of sense the way Stross explains it. I'm going to quote about two and a half pages of the book, because it's really the only way to get a handle on it (and it's a good introduction to Stross' writing style):

For the most part, the universe really does work the way most of the guys with Ph.D.s after their names think it works. Molecules are made out of atoms which are made out of electrons, neutrons, and protons—of which the latter two are made out of quarks—and quarks are made out of leptoquarks, and so on. It's turtles all the way down, so to speak. And you can't find the longest common prime factors of a number with many digits in it without either spending several times the life of the entire universe, or using a quantum computer (which is cheating). And there really are no signals from sentient organisms locked up in tape racks at Arecibo, and there really are no flying saucers in storage at Area 51 (apart from the USAF superblack research projects, which don't count because they run on aviation fuel).

But that isn't the full story.

[ ... ]

I could wibble on about Crowley and Dee and mystics down the ages but, basically, most self-styled magicians know shit. The fact of the matter is that most traditional magic doesn't work. In fact, it would all be irrelevant, were it not for the Turing theorem—named after Alan Turing, who you'll have heard of if you know anything about computers.

That kind of magic works. Unfortunately.

[ ... ]

The theorem is a hack on discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves the Church-Turing hypothesis (wave if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into P-complete ones. This has several consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms—translation: all your bank account are belong to us—and ending with the ability to computationally generate a Dho-Nha geometry curve in real time.

This latter item is just slightly less dangerous than allowing nerds with laptops to wave a magic wand and turn them into hydrogen bombs at will. Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct—except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of other universes there are things that listen, and talk back—see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, et cetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, except when a suitable incantation in the platonic realm of mathematics—computerised or otherwise—draws them forth. (And you thought running that fractal screensaver was good for your computer?)

Oh, and did I mention that the inhabitants of those other universes don't play by our rulebook?

Just solving certain theorems makes waves in the Platonic over-space. Pump lots of power through a grid tuned carefully in accordance with the right parameters—which fall naturally out of the geometry curve I mentioned, which in turn falls easily out of the Turing theorem—and you can actually amplify these waves, until they rip honking great holes in spacetime and let congruent segments of otherwise-separate universes merge. You really don't want to be standing at ground zero when that happens.

Which is why we have the Laundry... (p. 16-18)

That's a lot, especially if you don't speak Geek (I don't speak it like a native, but I have enough to get the gist—Conversational Geek, if you will), but generally the idea is that you can use computers, your municipal power grid, a dash or two of blood, and the right kind of math to summon Lovecraftian terrors from other realms to suck brains, destroy sanity, or even dramatically speed up the eventual heat-death of the universe. There are various CIA/NSA/MI-6 analogs around the world who try to keep this from happening, but also try to harness some of the powers to better play out local power games (where "local" means "on planet Earth"). It's an interesting blend of the horror, spy, and science fiction genres, and as you can see from the long passages I quoted above, there's no shortage of smart-ass Geek humour either. (In fact, far from there being a shortage, there's often too much. What comes off as clever in a 2,000 word blog post can get awfully grating across a three hundred page novel.)

The good news is that Stross does his level best to keep the techno-illiterate afloat, and for the most part it's uniquely good fun. Our protagonist, Bob Howard, is a civil servant who works mostly in departmental IT, and he has to deal with the bureaucracy that comes with that, but he's also becoming a field agent, for which he is almost completely unprepared. His narration is a good balance between learned guide and fish-out-of-water reader-analog, and even though he's a snarky jackass half the time, he's kind of likable.

There are some things that Stross just doesn't do very well, though, or at least, doesn't do well in such a way as to open up the book for a more general audience (Bob Howard, a pale, graceless, mildly obsessive technophile with zero taste and only slightly better than zero social skills is pretty much Stross' target audience distilled), and a lot of that has to do with the spy thriller aspects of the series, but we'll get to that when we talk about The Jennifer Morgue, when it's more central to the plot. For right now, I want to talk about characters.

There is a trope in science fiction that goes back almost all the way to the beginning (or at least to the early 20^th Century) of the scientist or engineer as hero. It's not quite a Mary Sue (a brand of authorial wish-fulfillment of particular concern to the science fiction community), but it's close enough to be problematic, in my estimation. The archetype shows up in a lot of Neal Stephenson's fiction, though generally heavily adapted for context, and with substantially less critical distance in some of Cory Doctorow's work, to name some contemporary examples (the appallingly bad "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" from Overclocked is a particularly egregious example of this, and a big part of why I think Doctorow is such a hack). The idea is that an engineer or scientist (regardless of discipline, really) can take a handful of basic tools and a predilection for logic and pure reason, and save the Earth, get the girl, and/or spearhead the reconstruction of human society, his or her skillset being so clearly more useful than anyone else's that folks will fall in line behind him. This is actually not so far off from the way a lot of my computer/engineering geek friends see themselves (though, of course, not all), but it's complete and utter bullshit in the real world. There's no accounting at all made for psychology, emotions, politics, or even the simple fact that a knack for logic doesn't translate in the ability to master every sort of utilitarian skill. Life just doesn't work like that, but science fiction, unfortunately, sometimes does. Now Bob isn't a rigid example of this archetype, but he is cast from a flawed version of that mold. After following the blog, it's clear that he has a set of skills Stross values, and has little use or knowledge of the skills Stross doesn't see value in (particularly skills that operate on a purely quantitative or social level; he refers to makeup as "warpaint" at one point, and while that is a way to read it, a not very nuanced, Feminist Primer for Practical Men kind of way, it ignores about a billion other things that are going on, including the power that mastering its application can sometimes grant, and Howard doesn't feel the need to look at it any deeper, because Stross doesn't feel the need to look at it any deeper). Bob Howard doesn't know when to shut up, has an unsubtle (geeky, but unsubtle) sense of humour, has a believably fucked up relationship with his ex, and is more than a little neurotic, but he believes (and Stross clearly believes it, because it's what happens) that if you gave him a multi-tool and a Palm Pilot, he could Fix Things. Considering that The Atrocity Archives is written by a computer geek (Stross is, to hear him tell it, the reason robots.txt exists), Bob Howard is about as close to a Mary Sue as a character can get before actually becoming one. (Hardcore Stross fans: I look forward to your letters.)

The other character I want to talk about is Mo, or rather Doctor Dominique O'Brien, The Atrocity Archives' female lead and, naturally, Bob Howard's eventual love interest. Mo is an almost perfect example of a female character in the vein of the Canadian Indie Style, which means it probably comes from some kind of impulse that's less localized than I first imagined. As far as I can tell, the only quality she lacks from my tentative definition is bisexuality, but that's more of a "yet to be determined" thing than a definite "no." Her first appearance goes like this:

Mo is striking. She's a good six feet tall, for starters. Strong features, high cheekbones, freckles, hair that looks like you could wrap it in insulation and run the national grid through it. She's got these big dangly silver earrings with glass eyeballs, and she's wearing combat pants, a plain white top, and a jacket that is so artfully casual that it probably costs more than I earn in a month. Oh, and there's a copy of Philosophical Transactions on Uncertainty Theory in her left hand ...

You see where this is going, right? Mo is the smart, tough, capable (but beautiful—the tall redhead, a kind of Red Sonja/Amazon type, is an extremely popular idealized female body type with male geeks in the various geek communities I exist on the fringe of) female scientist (or in this case, philosopher, but in a sciency way) who has Discovered Something Worth Killing Over who must now be rescued, but who will nonetheless be the aggressor in forming a romantic and sexually exciting relationship with the pasty, snarky, socially awkward (but really smart!) guy in the pocket protector. She suppresses her femininity (or rejects most—not all, remember the jangly earrings—conventional displays of femininity) in favour of the functional, going so far as to discard her interesting, multi-syllabic given name in favour of a single-syllable masculine one. While Bob Howard smells vaguely of geek wish fulfillment, Mo fairly reeks of it. She even dresses up in Ren-Faire chic for a classy night on the town. Stross makes Mo so clearly attractive and capable a character for his core audience that I found I didn't much like her. She was just too perfect. It read like Stross was swapping the perfect male hero with the perfect female heroin, but leaving her in the role of princess in the castle (more on this when we get to The Jennifer Morgue).

For someone like me, who sees books like The Atrocity Archives as a diversion from more serious reading (not just from more serious literary reading, but more serious genre reading as well), this is a book with a lot of problems that still manages to present a fascinating world with a secret history that's a lot of fun to escape to. As far as those problems go, however, I am clearly an edge case for Stross; interested, but not part of his core audience. He's simply not writing for me. I should also probably mention that my copy of The Atrocity Archives included a short Bob Howard novella called "The Concrete Jungle," and a very interesting essay on the origins of the Laundry series called "Inside the Fear Factory."

Next up is The Jennifer Morgue, by Charles Stross.

Having somehow become hooked on certain kinds of historical adventure fiction (sea stories and Viking-era England, apparently), I spent several months scouring bookstores trying to snuffle out a used or remaindered or overstock (and therefore affordable to me) copy of Bernard Cornwell's latest installment of his Saxon stories. My father had left the first four books with me, and they had captured the swash-buckling bits of my imagination.

The Burning Land is nowhere near as good as those others. I don't know if Cornwell's writing fell off, or if I'm just getting too used to the tropes he's using (that can happen, especially in a series; you don't want to read the same thing over and over again, even when you sort of do), but I was disappointed in what I felt was an over-reliance on shorthand and established characterization. Sure, five books in readers should already be pretty familiar with the characters, but that doesn't mean you stop developing them altogether. Characters in The Burning Land were treading water between fight scenes, arguing inconsequentially about the same goals they've been arguing about since book one, the same conflicting loyalties, blah blah blah. Edward was the only interesting new character, though more for his potential than anything else, and while it was good to see Æthelflaed take a stronger, more active role (which Cornwell feels the need to justify in the historical note at the back), I'm bothered by the fact that she reads so much like a direct lift of the "strong woman" archetype in trashy high fantasy fiction, like David Eddings' Belgariad books. Here, as in those other books, she's more the strong-woman-as-plot-device rather than because of the interesting things it can do for her as a character, and I don't see that as a positive direction for this series. I'll read the next one (no doubt due out next year, or possibly even later this year, given Cornwell's insane pace), but he's going to have to step up the quality to hold my interest much after that.

Next up is The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross.