2005-03-05: Jenna Starborn
Review: Jenna Starborn, by Sharon Shinn
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: April 2002
ISBN: 0-441-01029-6
Pages: 369
I must admit to an embarassing flaw in my classical education and
experience as a reader, one that makes it difficult to write a useful
review of this book. I've never read Jane Eyre.
See, Jenna Starborn is a retelling of Jane Eyre in a science
fiction setting, and by retelling, I don't mean that it takes the same
basic story and explores it from a different viewpoint or with different
sensibilities. I mean that the plot is a nearly exact copy of the plot of
Jane Eyre from beginning to end, most of the characters are renamed
but otherwise identical, the culture has been tweaked to be very similar to
that of the mid-1800s, and the issues the book raises are pretty much
exactly the same. If you have read and remember Jane Eyre, very
little here will surprise you.
Therein lies my dilemma. I found Jenna Starborn to be a charming,
easily readable romance novel. I liked the title character a great deal, I
enjoyed the romantic banter, and the writing was engrossing and well-paced.
I just have no idea whether there's any point in reading this book rather
than just reading Jane Eyre, or whether I would find Jane
Eyre even better. Certainly, this is a painless way to learn the story,
better than Cliff Notes any day, but if you're better read than I, you may
toss it aside in disgust as an inferior version of an old favorite. At
some point, I'll have to read the original and find out.
What I can say is that this isn't really a science fiction story, even if
I'd have to classify it there and I'm sure it would be shelved there. The
conceit is a telling of Jane Eyre in a far-future world, with
various appropriate substitutions of skills, political situations, and
personal backgrounds, but the science fiction setting stays firmly out of
the way and has been heavily tweaked so that the story doesn't have to
change. Future politics have been carefully rigged to produce concerns and
sensibilities remarkably close to Victorian England. The title character
is a generator technician rather than a governess, but she falls into a
remarkably similar position in the household. There are other
substitutions in the area of religion, location, and method of insanity,
but the background never loses its feeling of being artificially designed
around these characters who aren't naturally central to it. This is, in
some ways, a feature, since Shinn is clearly having fun working out how to
justify the story and the reader can play along.
This is, therefore, a romance novel with some gothic overtones given an
SFnal coat of paint. If you know that going in and that's the sort of book
you're looking for, I think it's a pretty good one. It has much of the
appeal of a Regency romance, most notably a abundance of banter, while
featuring a considerable reduction in the parade of clothing descriptions,
fewer mind-numbing titles, and a world that, as an SF reader, feels more
familiar and predictable than the Regency period. All in all, an enjoyable
bit of fluff.
If you've read Jane Eyre, remember it well, and read this book, I'm
curious what you think of it. If, like me, you haven't, I'm not sure
whether to tell you to go read the original or recommend this book, but I
enjoyed it quite a bit. There may only be a few of us who like an
occasional witty romance but would rather that all the old English
trappings be replaced with a stock SF setting, but for however many of us
there are, this is a book targetted directly at us.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2005-03-07: Latest haul
I was once again unable to resist the lure of the on-line bookstore, and
finally all the packages have arrived (but one, which is coming from the
UK). I was proud of myself for having held out for a whole month. *heh*.
Heavy on non-fiction and graphic novels this time.
Kelley Armstrong -- Bitten (sff)
Brian Michael Bendis, et al. -- Ultimate Fantastic Four
(graphic novel)
A.S. Byatt -- The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (sff)
G.K. Chesterton -- The Man Who Was Thursday (classic)
Neil Gaiman -- Adventures in the Dream Trade (sff &
nf)
Neil Gaiman & Yoshitaka Amano -- The Sandman: The Dream
Hunters (graphic novel)
Anthony Grafton -- The Footnote: A Curious History (nf)
Nicola Griffith -- Slow River (sff)
Douglas R. Hofstadter -- Godel, Escher, Bach (nf)
David Langford -- The Silence of the Langford (nf)
Ursula K. LeGuin -- The Telling (sff)
Stanislaw Lem -- Solaris (sff)
Scott McCloud -- Understanding Comics (nf)
Scott McCloud -- Reinventing Comics (nf)
Sean McMullen -- Souls in the Great Machine (sff)
David Mitchell -- Cloud Atlas (sff)
Michael Moorcock -- Wizardry & Wild Romance (nf)
Chris Moriarty -- Spin State (sff)
Robert Reed -- Marrow (sff)
Keith Roberts -- Pavane (sff)
Kim Stanley Robinson -- Green Mars (sff)
Theodore Roszak -- The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein
(sff)
Karl Sabbagh -- Dr. Reimann's Zeros (nf)
Dan Simmons -- Ilium (sff)
Dan Simmons -- Worlds Enough & Time (sff)
Jeff Smith -- Bone: One Volume Edition (graphic novel)
Robin Wilson -- Four Colors Suffice (nf)
Understanding Comics is to replace a copy I gave to a friend a long
time back. The one-volume edition of Bone is, um, huge.
2005-03-21: Consider Phlebas
Review: Consider Phlebas, by Iain M. Banks
Publisher: Orbit
Copyright: 1987
ISBN: 1-85723-138-4
Pages: 471
Feeling a bit bogged down in Little, Big, I decided to take a break
with some space opera and started on the Banks I'd not read. This is his
first SF novel and the first book set in the Culture universe, a far future
of universal prosperity and machine intelligences most notable for its
wonderfully named spaceship AIs and its look at what one does when one can
do anything.
This book, though, isn't set in the Culture directly. The events of
Consider Phlebas happen around the edges of the Culture's war with
the Iridians, a race of fanatically religious, biologically immortal, and
very loud creatures whose belief system is never particularly
well-explained. The viewpoint character is a spy and mimic working for the
Iridians against the Culture, mostly because he deeply distrusts the power
the Culture has given to intelligent machines. Skulduggery, untrustworthy
characters, dramatic escapes, and impressive mass destruction ensue,
building up to an extended set piece involving trains, radioactivity,
buried command bunkers, and an excess of personal weaponry.
In short, it's a space opera, and a reasonably enjoyable one, although I do
have some quibbles with the pacing. Most of the book moves along fairly
well, but the plot then comes to a screeching halt before the last three
chapters and meanders about while tension is painstakingly built and people
are moved into place for the repeatedly foreshadowed set piece finale. To
add insult to injury, said finale ends up being rather unsatisfying; it was
apt, and added an interesting bit of depth and a nice epilogue, but still I
couldn't escape the feeling that the universe let out a long breath and
said, "Well, now that's over with, on with more interesting business."
Maybe I've been spoiled by having already read Excession and
Look
to Windward, but Consider Phlebas had the feeling of a collection
of interesting ideas that failed somehow to come off completely. Partly I
think that's because it had a bit of a staged feel to it, with the
characters moving from one unrelated setting to another. There were always
solid plot-related reasons for their actions, of course, but however
impressive the locations seem oddly disjoint and often irrelevant to the
conclusion of the story. The island inhabited by a bizarre and utterly
disgusting religious cult, on which the hero was stranded for a chapter or
so, was the most egregious example for me. The scene is memorable mostly
for its horror, but looking back on it from the end of the book, it was
extraneous to anything else that happened and had no thematic connection or
character development reason to have happened. Maybe I just missed
something.
That being said, some of those unrelated settings contained great ideas and
memorable images (I loved the card game), and the book as a whole was an
enjoyable diversion. It satisfied my craving for space opera and managed
to put a mildly thought-provoking twist on the ending (and then Banks
tacked on a highly enjoyable set of appendices giving the story of the war
from different perspectives). I'm very glad Banks went on to write books
more focused on the bits that I find fascinating about his future world,
most of which get cameo roles at best here, but this is a decent book if
you're not expecting too much.
Rating: 7 out of 10
2005-03-26: Little, Big
Review: Little, Big, by John Crowley
Publisher: Perennial
Copyright: 1981
ISBN: 0-06-093793-9
Pages: 538
Smokey Barnable is walking to be married, a wedding to a tall, quiet girl
he was introduced to by a friend. He's walking because Daily Alice, his
bride-to-be, lives in an oddly unknown place in the middle of the country,
some distance from the City where they met. He's also walking because
that's how he was told to arrive, for reasons that were never quite clear
to him, or the wedding wouldn't be right. Soon, he will join an eccentric
family in Edgewood, a huge house of varying architectural styles, losing
the anonymity that he's had his entire life. He will try to understand,
and then simply accept, a family that shares secrets and a Tale that they
would explain except that there's never quite any way to talk about it.
This is how Little, Big opens, and from there it sprawls out into a
multi-generational family saga, covering events from the founding of the
family and the building of Edgewood by Daily's great-grandfather to the
life of Smokey and Daily's children and particularly their youngest son.
While there are individual stories, and even moments of drama,
Little, Big is more of an atmosphere than a story, a book that one
lives in rather than reads through, that refuses to be hurried or give up
its secrets easily. The influence and presence of fairy is unmistakable
and sometimes directly present, but remains elusive. There is a certain
magical logic to everything that happens, a weaving into a larger Tale and
a balancing of cost and benefit, of risk and reward, but never is this
accounting obvious or clearly explained. The Drinkwater family, in all of
its many branches, lives on the edge of the wood, sometimes heading out
into the world, misunderstanding it and changing it deeply, and sometimes
wandering into the deeper woods, seeing things that are left unexplained
and glimpsing patterns that are too deep to talk about.
This is a beautiful, evocative book that I found difficult to get through.
I appreciate what Crowley is doing, and his mastery of language, setting,
and character shines through every page. Still, Little, Big can
also be frustrating and painfully slow, as events persistantly refuse to
collect themselves into a clear story and the narrative rarely gathers
enough momentum to build traditional suspense. It is full of ideas,
images, characters, and moments, hints at something larger. Some of them
seemed to slip away into irrelevance while others turned out to be very
important later, and not only did I do a poor job distinguishing between
the two, I'm certain that I completely missed the point of some of the
apparently irrelevant ones.
This is one of those books that I feel I didn't quite get, in a way that I
tend to blame more on myself than on the book. If only I were better read,
if I were a little more attentive, if I had a slightly better memory, if I
were a touch more perceptive.... But reading only along the surface that I
followed, the plot didn't have quite enough motion and drama to carry me
along. I spent much of the first hundred pages feeling confused and
constantly paging back to the abbreviated family tree to try to understand
what generation of the family was being talked about, and while this
improves later, the large cast combined with subtle references to secondary
characters and previous events remained a bit frustrating throughout. I
loved the language and poetry of the story while I was reading it, but I
found myself reluctant to pick it up again; reading it took three or four
times longer than I normally take to read a book this length.
The atmosphere is the strongest part of this book. Crowley creates the
feeling of being constantly on the edge of something huge, surrounded by
ancient and wild magic, fitting into a barely perceived pattern, swept away
by events that one never understands. Little, Big never gives up
its secrets, never tears through that curtain that hides the other world.
The ending is just as strange, haunting, and ambiguous as the rest of the
book. You may find this frustrating; at times, I certainly did.
However, if one can accept the atmosphere for what it is and let one's
thoughts flow with the story, the depth to both the setting and the
characters is astonishing. I felt like I knew these characters, understood
how they felt, what they cared about, their bafflement or acceptance of the
world. There are several beautiful moments late in the book, between
Smokey and Auberon among others, where subtle and nearly unnoticed
character construction throughout the whole story pay off in moments of
pure recognition, where the reader goes "Aha!" and suddenly a character's
life and perspective makes perfect sense even if the events surrounding
them are still obscure. The slow build-up is very much worth it for those
moments.
If you love atmospheric fantasy, the fairy of deep woods and creatures seen
out of the corner of the eye, and rules of Story that tend towards
bittersweet loss, quiet balances, and the undramatic drift of time, I
recommend this book very highly. Patience is required, as Little,
Big refuses to be read quickly and Crowley's use of language works best
when savored. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a clear plot, a
conclusion that wraps up all the loose ends, or comprehensible explanations
of a world, I expect you'll be frustrated. Personally, I'm torn; I loved
the atmosphere but felt impatient and frustrated by the style. Still, I
will remember this one for a long time.
Rating: 7 out of 10
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