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Fast Forward 2 is an above average anthology. So far, it has collected a fair share of rave reviews -- and nominations: some of its stories, like Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow´s True Names and Paolo Bacigalupi´s The Gambler, were nominated for this year´s Hugo Award. FF2 is also the sole anthology running this year for the PKD Award.

Though I´m not familiar with the nomination criteria for the PKDs, my guess is that FF2 was chosen because of its variety. This is not a theme-oriented anthology, like Ann and Jeff VanderMeer´s The New Weird and Steampunk, for example, two other excellent anthologies, but what it would possibly lacks in focus it more than compensates for in strength and quality. Am I being too vague? Ok, then let´s move to the stories. I assure you they are everything but vague.

The anthology opens with a steampunk space adventure. In Catherine Drewe, Paul Cornell tells the story of Hamilton, a seasoned Irish Major in the service of the British Empire, who is comissioned to do an out-of-uniform job. He must go to Mars and kill revolutionary Catherine Drewe, who is working with Russian mercenaries to take over the red planet from the Czar and topple down the domination of the House of Savoy in the Solar System. It´s an intriguing story, in part because of its kind of "counter-steampunk" style: technology here has advanced to cloning and nanotech, though mores and fashion are pretty much Victorian/Edwardian. Maybe not likely, but what the hell! It is appealing, it is beaufitul, and it is believable on the page. It can´t get much better than this.

Kay Kenyon´s Cyto Couture also reminds us of a steampunk-ish setting, but not enough to make us yawn and think, oh, same stuff again? Definitely not. Nat is a trash boy who, after his mom´s death, goes to work in the plantation great house. He is going to be servant to the astonishingly beautiful Lorelei, first daughter of the plantation and designer of haute couture. She makes garments of living tissue, and gives Nat a job taking care of the mitos, somers, and golgi, basically pillars of synthetic flesh bathed in nutrients and that exsude clothing. But he treats them so well that he creates a bonding with them, and, together with fat, ugly Deri, second daughter of the plantation, he will (though in spite of himself, for he´s dumb as a doorknob) change things there forever.

In The Sun Also Explodes, Chris Nakashima-Brown pays a beautiful homage to Ernest Hemingway, telling the story of an impotent man in a far future of posthuman beings where everybody can be (and have) whatever he/she/it desires, and shows that size (not even performance) matters after all - but to be master of your own desires is the most important thing in the all-too-real end. The scenery and the endless, movable posthuman feasts are a treat to the eyes, to the palate, and to the imagination. Nakashima-Brown does a beautiful job with words in this story.

The Kindness of Strangers is one more reason why I love Nancy Kress. She has the ability of telling a story as if it was a real, daily affair - even though it involved major posthuman genetic mutations (Beggars in Spain) or strange alien invasions (the novel Steal Across The Sky, which I just read and it´s soon to be reviewed here). In this story, Kress tells us the end of mankind as we know it. One day, suddenly, every major city in the world is vaporized. Aliens in human form arrive and treat the survivors with exceeding kindness, offering food and shelter. Humans, of course, despise them, and even try to kill them, but they are indestructible (if they are holograms of if they have powerful force fields, it´s far beyond our understanding). Jenny, a woman in one of the refugee camps, caught in the middle of all this pain, suffering, and confusion, must cope with the growing anger of his lover, Eric, who left wife and child to die in Chicago only to make peace with her after a breakup. Jenny must keep her head straight and do all her best to help when things start hitting the fan and people start getting hurt. The Kindness... reads like a classic, top-notch Twilight Zone episode. And I´m a huge fan of the classic series.

Along with David Marusek, Jack Skillingstead is one of the most intriguing authors I have met in the past few years via the pages of Asimov´s. Alone with an Inconvenient Companion is almost a slipstream story, but it keeps nagging at you with that strange feeling you have only know for real when you have known too many hotels in unknown cities (I have); Douglas Fulcher is in a hotel bar, supposedly for a convention, minding his own business, when he is approached by a much younger woman from another convention who just wants to make conversation. He´s not much in the mood, but complies all the same. And, when he starts talking to her about his fervent belief in a sort of "cyborg conspiracy" among us, well, you can´t blame him. If the story was just about that, we would call it a slipstream and that would be that. But there is more (with Skillingstead, as with Marusek, there´s always more). Nothing too fancy, nothing too miraculous. But it´s definitely something that keeps disturbing us long after we finished reading the story.

True Names, by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow, is, along with Chris Nakashima-Brown´s story, another major feat of the written word. In the extremely far future, a being called Beebe (who apparently contains inside herself - the use of the pronoun here is arbitrary, obviously - a plethora of information, a veritable universe of it) is threatened by a former version of herself, who calls himself Brobdignag. It´s a cosmic, eternal (from human POV) battle for dominance. This battle, as we watch the dialogue of Nadja and Alonso (both non-human filters), have already happened many times before - epic apocalypses in a post-human continuum of a very far (and uncomprehensible) future. Cory Doctorow is one of the best names of his generation. He is one the very few writers who knows how to conjure words of technique and make them real, because they are, and them integrate them in science-fictional systems. He pulls a sort of Greg-Eganism, only without all the math and quantum mechanics - or with all of it, but wrapped in a different package. True Names mixes hard sf, mythopoetics, opera (and space opera, to an extent) and a flavor of the 19th Century with a Modernist language - something akin to what the Dada and the Surrealists did, but with a sense. It also has a taste of the French feuilletons of old, like The Count of Monte Cristo - with sockpuppets! References are also apparently abundant: characters like Nadia reminded me of André Breton´s classic Surrealist novel, and wouldn´t Alonzo be a tribute to famous mathematician Alonzo Church? A complex, multilayered story, which should be read not one, but several times.

In the short Molly's Kids, Jack McDevitt plays deliciously with the Frankenstein Complex (or it would be the Hal Complex?), throwing us in the middle of a story (the launching of the first AI probe to a distant system) where not everything is what it seems to be, for the probe happens to be a very reluctant one and must be coaxed in a very convincingly way in order to get off. Ok, maybe all of you will think, "oh, I been down this road before. It´s something Matrix-like, right? No, it´s not. And it´s not the Wachoswki Brothers, it´s Jack McDevitt. Respect! This story, short as it was, gave me the creeps and made me think of Harlan Ellison and his classic I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Molly's Kids gave me what every short story should give his/her readers: awe.

Paul McAuley´s Adventure is a welcome respite after the emotional rollercoasters of the previous two stories. It is a very short piece featuring some years in the life of Ian Brown, a British guy whose family was killed in the Third World War and who won a ticket in the emigration lottery, a place in one of the arks to the colony world First Foot. He was no hero, but simply a civil servant, who wanted to live an easy, cozy life. Soon after arriving at the planet, he married an American woman he met on the ark, and they settled down, for a quite tranquil, adventureless life. So adventureless that, seven years later, Brown looks around and sees that his life has amounted for nothing. Will he be able to change it? Will he have time yet?

Not Quite Alone in the Dream Quarter is a Mike Resnick and Pat Cadigan collaboration. It´s a kind of noir story with elements of Outer Limits/Twilight Zone. Apparently it´s a typical murder scenario: a man wakes up with a dead body and he has no remembrance of who the dead is. But he knows one thing: it is not a human being: it is a Dream. For this is a world in which Dreams have substance, and they inhabit it along with "normal" humans, who has no jurisdiction over them. They look like humans, they bleed like humans, they can be killed like humans, but other than that they are very alien.
All in all, a good, a bit terrifying story, but it lacks something in the end. It´s as if if - maybe just as the Dreams themselves - they lackes resolution, and also closure.

In Eligible Boy, Ian McDonald returns to his Future India setting of stories like Sanjeev and Robotwallah with this homage (at least in its title) to Vikram Seth´s A Suitable Boy, McDonald tells the exploits of shallow Jasbir Dayal, a boy whose only thought is to be beautiful in 21st Century India. He must take an exceedingly good care of himself and his body, for in a Delhi of twenty million people, "and a middle class with four times as many males as females", things are tough, and if he wants to find the wife of his dreams, then he must fight for her with all his weapons. His parents will go even to the trouble to hire him a matchmaker, but this is only not too disgraceful too him, but also unfashionable, and for Jasbir, as for all Eligible Boys, fashion is of the essence. What Jasbir couldn´t expect is that his housemate, Sujay, also an artificial-intelligence designer for Indian soap-operas, would create just for him a persona to help him winning the hearts of a suitable girl. The aeai "Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace, and Gentlemanliness" will then teach etiquette, discipline, and even Tango lessons to Jasbir. And then he meets Shulka, a very interesting girl with whom he starts a game of seduction - with some interesting, clever twists. It´s a very nice story, with only the appearance of shallowness and suddenly an almost bottomless pit opening from beneath the reader´s feet right at the end.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch´s SeniorSource is an old-fashioned detective story - and old means old. SeniorSource is a Moon-based company which outsources "all kinds of highly skilled jobs, from laser surgery to art restoration. Even detective work, with its combination of interrogation, observation, and forensic skills, could
succeed from a distance." And it did: the no-name protagonist, one of the younger elderly workers for the company (because that´s what SeniorSource is all about: hiring retirees who nobody wants anymore on Earth, because they would be literally dead weight down there), finds a corpse - a little boy, son of Shane Proctor, head of the largest mining company on the Moon. The thing is: he has to be not only a detective but also an expert scientist, a lawyer, and an authority on the Moon in just a few short hours - for his own sake, for the tiniest mistake in determining the causa mortis of the kid could mean his being sent back to Earth. And, after five years living on the Moon, that would mean certain death to him. SeniorSource is an intriguing, well-told story not only on whodunits and forensics, but most of all on ethics and morality.

Karl Schroeder and Tobias S. Buckell´s Mitigation takes the ecological proactive approach the hard way. Almost in a Kim-Stanley-Robinson fashion (that´s a compliment, by the way), they tell the story of two men, a Caribbean and an Inuit, caught in the middle of greedy companies, ecoterrorists, and UN regulations in the middle of a now ravaged Arctic Ocean and trying to make a difference - but not necessarily being the good guys: they associate with a scientist plus the Russian mafia to steal some patented DNA samples of extinct grains so they can thrive far from the greedy claws of these corporations. But, naturally, things never are what they seem to be: Mitigation reads like a mix of James Bond plus Indiana Jones story. Fast-pacing, action-packed, choose your high-octane adjective and there you go. A hell of an adventure tale.

In Long Eyes, Jeff Carlson reminded me of Anne McCaffrey´s The Ship Who Sang, but only in its basic idea: a spaceship directly connected to the brain of its pilot. All else differs: Clara, the pilot, still a homo sapiens despite being "a human-shaped component in a cradle of gel and splice-wire", was in fact a failed experiment, "grown ex utero, originally gene-crafted to be an asteroid mining dock controller". Then she convinces her creators to let her go, and they fit her into a ram ship, where she become a sort of USS Enterprise of one, boldly going where no one has gone before, in a mission that is already six hundred years old at the beginning of the story. Eventually she gets in touch with human colonies, but she never seems quite to fit, preferring to stay apart - until she finds the wreckage of a ship in an habitable planet, but its survivors, or their descendants, were reduced to the condition of savages, becoming, in a way, less human than her. This is a quite common trope in science fiction, a classical one indeed, but Carlson does a very nice job here, and his portrayal of Clara is so credible that sometimes we tend to forget she´s a post-human entity.

The volume closes with Paolo Bacigalupi´s The Gambler. The story takes place in the near future America, where Ong, a exile from Laos, must use all his gambling skills (inherited from his father) to survive as a journalist interested in feature really interesting ecological and poltical stories. The question is - is the people, so much into popularity, "karma points" and such, still buying human interest stories? Ong will compromise to get what he wants and interview Kulaap, a famous actress from his country who is the talk of the town - and who he despises. But he will play the game - even though, and that´s the supreme irony of the story - he is no gambler at all. And that´s what makes this story a pungent one.

The reason I took so long to review this anthology is that I wanted to read it at least twice so I could review all of their stories the way they deserved to be reviewed. Lou Anders has outdone himself as an editor, and all that I have to say is that I´m looking forward to FF 3.

Opens today in the U.S. (June 3rd in the U.K., June 5th in Brazil).

Check the excellent trailers in the official site. (Embedding in YouTube turned off, sorry.)

And don´t miss my review of Alan Dean Foster´s excellent novelization of the movie at Fantasy Book Critic.

This was perhaps the most eagerly awaited novel by the SF/Fantasy community in 2009.

It was worth the wait.

China Miéville´s The City and The City may very well be his best novel since his classic Perdido Street Station.

The story does not take place in his Bas-Lag Universe, home of Perdido and also of The Scar and Iron Council, although the name of the fictitious city reminds us a little of it: Beszel, a Eastern Europe country not unlike Hungary, in fact, so similar in names and language that it could be almost a parallel one.

Aside from this "small" detail, this is a modern-day world, where people use computers, MySpace, cellphones, and well-known references abound (David Beckham and Star Wars are just a couple of them). This could very well be our world, for all that we know. But, as in any masterful work of literary imagination, can we say that the "real" world of The City... would be by any chance our world?

Miéville creates a very credible city and then some - this "some" is another city whose borders not so much touch as clash with Beszel: Ul Qoma. Both cities are separated by a grand, twisted building, strangely called Copula Hall. Like (and at the same time unlike) the old Berlin Wall, Copula Hall is the only legal way station between the cities.

Which can be a little disturbing to unaccustomed foreigners who can´t ignore the fact that both cities coexist in the same space.

Beszel and Ul Qoma are one and the same, intertwined. The denizens of one city must learn since childhood the hard and high art of unseeing buildings and people from the other, for not to incur in penalties from this and perhaps other world: as if all the laws forbidding contact between cities without proper permits weren´t enough, there is also another thing to be concerned at all times: the Breach.

Nobody knows exactly what the Breach is. But everyone knows very well what it does: it fixes things. It may return a stray person to his/her original city, for example. (It will probably do it to a foreigner person - even the Breach seems to want to avoid diplomatic incidents) Or it may take the person away. For good.

When Inspector Tyador Borlú, of the Extreme Crime Squad of Beszel, finds the body of a cruelly murdered foreign girl in the outskirts of the city, it looks like she was a victim of an assault - but soon enough the evidences begin to point to conspiracies involving radical political groups and end up leading him to the other city: Ul Qoma.

As if all of this were not enough, Borlú must also deal with what lies (or what some people thinks that lies, which, when you deal with mad people and conspiracy theory types, sometimes can be the same thing) between the city and the city: a third city. Orciny. An entire territory which is an urban legend in itself. A myth ancient and at the same time invisible, even more unseeable than the inhabitants of Beszel to those of Ul Qoma and vice-versa - but it also may be the key to the murder of the girl. And Borlú becomes too much involved in this to turn back now. He must find Orciny at all costs, even if it doesn´t exist.

The details of the narrative are a must; Miéville specially crafted a bad English for the writings of Inspector Borlú, a very intelligent man who just happens to not know English enough to be a master of style, but who can translate quite well his thoughts. (Though it´s strange even for me, a non-native speaker; I wonder what kind of estrangement you, my Anglo reader, will feel then?)

As far as strangeness go, we don´t get to see anything as flamboyant as the Remades of the Bas-Lag Universe, for instance, but on the other hand, we learn of the existence of the insiles, exiles inside the cities, between them. And what about the topolgangers - doppelganger places, zones that are the same for the denizens of both cities, but that each see in a different mindset?

If Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño (2666, The Savage Detectives) were alive, he would be a serious candidate to be the Julio Cortazar of the XXI Century. China Miéville is on the same league, but in a slightly different key: he may as well be a Borges for the XXI Century. The City & The City is not to be missed.

There are cyberpunks and there are cyberpunks. Then, there are cyberpunks.

You could more or less easily categorize these authors in some tentative "coca-cola-style" subcategories, namely: Classic Cyberpunk, Vanilla Cyberpunk, Decaf Cyberpunk, and, as they say in France and in Brazil, Cyberpunk de boutique, that is, le fake du fake.

But even this "fake cyberpunk" is fake that knows that is fake. Take The Fifth Element, for instance. Luc Besson directed a bande dessinée movie, a legit French SF, and a satyrical one at that.

More recently, we had, also from France, Maurice G. Dantec´s Babylon Babies, which was adapted to the silver screen featuring Vin Diesel.

But real cyberpunk is dead. Cyberpunk has moved on. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan - all of them (and many, many more - multitudes of authors, like Paul Di Filippo, Rudy Rucker, Tom Maddox, Marc Laidlaw, Lewis Shiner and still others) are doing other things entirely. Because everything change.

Even if you want to write a cyberpunk story today, however, there´s no guidebook or stylebook to tell you can´t - but if you decide to do that, keep in mind that the cyberpunk of the eighties belong there - in the eighties. We´re in the oughts, and some of the classic tropes doesn´t apply anymore.

David Walton´s Terminal Mind is a beautiful tribute to the cyberpunk of the eighties (I´ve even read part of the book listening to Siouxsie and the Banshees, and it felt good), but it didn´t feel quite right. Because it was written now.

There is an excess of clichés in this book - think in a scarred landscape, a divided America, a couple of young hackers intent on doing some damage to the system, a young Amish-like girl, more-or-less innocent, who gets kicked out of her community and must strive in the megalopolis, and, most important of all, a virtual personality (called a "slicer", because it´s made from scanned brain slices) who doesn´t know it´s not alive, has the mind of a four-year boy and talks like one.

The young hackers, a rich kid (a Rimmer, from the privileged area of crater rim in central Philadelphia) called Mark McGovern, and a poor kid (a Comber, from the inner city) called Darin Kinskey. Both have their grudges against the system: Mark despises his rich father, a scientist/politician whose inventions have caused many people to lose their jobs (even though he defends passionately his father when talking to Darin); Darin has a mentally and physically challenged brother who suffered a major breakdown after a mod surgery with bad celgel that made his DNA rot.

They inadvertently cause an explosion in the Franklin Dam - that explosion, however, wasn´t caused directly by them, but by a slicer (the abovementioned 4-y.o., whose irritating baby-talk opens each chapter) misguided by his "father", an evil scientist called Alastair Tremayne who researched immortality but gave it up and now it´s quite content with world (of at least Philadelphia, a major power after the big conflict that fragmented America six decades before) domination. Tremayne is a trigger-happy man: not only is has a slicer under his command, but he is also starting to do the same process using a frozen embryo he managed to steal years before from the same donor of the original slicer: Marie Coleson, a software programmer for the Navy who lost her husband and infant son in an accident. Coincidentally, her husband happened to work for Tremayne at the time.

After the Franklin Dam accident (in which hundreds are killed), both Mark and Darin are on the run - but Mark is freed from charges because of his father´s political clout, while Darin must burrow deeper into the underground and join a radical group, the Black Hands, in order both to hide and to overthrow the regime.

The relationships that form are so easily paired that sometimes they seem to come from the pages of old "sword and planet" stories. Lydia, the outside girl who comes suddenly to Philadelphia, meets Darin first, but soon after that she also meets Mark, and she will see that, even though Darin is being framed and he must be helped (which she does, because she is a good girl) he is such a radical guy that she quickly starts falling for Mark.

The cyberpunk environment Walton creates is much too crude and black-and-white. The politics is manicheist: either you are good or you are evil. There is room for doubt, granted, but only if you are a good person, intent on repenting, which you eventually do, and so (naturally) you are forgiven for your sins. All ends well - that is, if you don´t believe things can be made right and your wronged friends can be saved, for instance.

We´ven seen that before, many times. Terminal Mind doesn´t bring us anything new, unfortunaelty. It can´t seem to decide even if it is a YA novel or an adult one.

In the original cyberpunk stories, you had all that pent-up truly punk energy. You don´t have it here, sadly. It is a regular, vanilla story. Maybe it can be an interesting entry level story for teens interested in cyberpunk - but I´d still stick to the original stuff.

Agatha Christie with muscles - that´s a first.

How can you define un-blurbly-like Adam-Troy Castro´s Emissaries from the Dead? That´s a hard task.

Even having read Castro´s stories before, I wasn´t impressed by the pocket book when I ran into it in my local bookstore - even though Chris McGrath´s cover is beautifully done, and its somber quality had me thinking of old weird stories. (This, by the way, led to an e-mail exchange with Castro about who should play Cort in a movie version of Emissaries - I kept on picturing in my mind a mix of Selma Blair / Katie Holmes in the role of Andrea - but Selma Blair kicks ass, so she won the competition in my mind after all. For the record, Castro also found Blair agreeable, though he would also go for LIFE´s Sarah Shahi.)

But then I bought the book and started reading. And I was held in thrall by the Monster.

Associate Legal Counsel for the Homo Sapiens Confederacy Diplomatic Corps Judge Advocate Andrea Cort (this is the right title, though she prefers simply Counselor) is the only survivor of a massacre. At the age of eight, she witnessed the death of her parents and of an entire colony of humans and aliens in the world of Bocai, caused by something nobody could discover until now and that turned every single being into a murderer, making him/her killing each other in a bloodthirsty frenzy.

Andrea is the only survivor - but that doesn´t mean she also didn´t do her share of killing. So she was found guilty of murder and also considered a mass murderer (dubbed the Monster) by human and Bocaian standards, even though she knows that´s not the truth. The colonists were "invaded" by something nobody could figure out - and that she nicknamed, for want of a better name, as the unseen demons. She is obsessed by them.

Now, decades, later, even living in the artificial ecosystem of New London, in the Hom.Sap Confederacy, she lives as much apart from the human race as she can, having had her death penalty commuted in order to serve humankind. So she travels from world to world to solve conflicts for the Dip Corps.

Because, after everything she came through, Andrea Cort became a cold, no-nonsense, very harsh person, and she will do whatever it is she´s got to do to fulfill her duties - simply because she does not feel empathy for her fellow human beings. Humans, for their part, aren´t much excited by the prospect of meeting the Monster (she´s become famous throughtout the galaxy).

That means she acts like a diplomat but also kicks butt. She is not afraid of making enemies - and she does all too often, as is the case in this mission.

She goes to the cylinder world One One One, a station created and maintained by the alien independent software intelligences known as the AIsource to investigate the deaths of two human researchers, apparently non-related. Naturally, that´s not what Andrea thinks. Wary of human nature (and very wary of alien and machine nature, far more difficult to analyze), she meets human representatives Stuart Gibb and Peyrin Lastogne, who may prove more of a pain in the ass than of helping hands in her investigation.

But Andrea will have more to worry about than just the average uncooperative person or persons; One One One is not a human-friendly environment at all. Much larger than New London, it already had two indigenous carbon-based species, totally engineered by the AIsource: one of them is the sloth-like Brachiators, who live in the Uppergrowth, vertical forested slopes in the upper half of the cylinder (the habitable half), and who their own culture and can even communicate with humans, even though they don´t like it. They consider humans dead beings, and the few people who manage to gain their respect, usually through painful rituals, are considered "emissaries from the dead".

Humans in One One One live in Hammocktown, which is exactly what the name implies - a kind of compound made entirely of hammocks. The AIsource won´t let humans build anything other than these hammocks, though they are made of ultrastrong materials. Which didn´t prevent Cristina Santiago, one of the human researchers, of having her hammock cut, and to have an horrible death falling kilometers and dying in freefall in the high-pressure regions where the second engineered race, flying beast similar to the dragons of Earth lore.

Cynthia Warmuth, the other victim, was found hanging from the Uppergrowth, her body ripped open by Brachiator claws.

The thing is, these deaths seem to have been staged only for the benefit of Dip Corps, in Cort´s opinion. She can´t dismiss the possibility that they could also have been caused by the AIsource to scare humans off One One One - or just to make humans accuse the AIs of murder, and then perhaps create not only a mere diplomatic incident, but an all-out war and human extinction.

Andrea Cort can´t even begin to fathom the motivation of the machine intelligences. The only thing she knows - and this is something the AIsource itself tells her during her stay in One One One - is that the unseen demons of her past may be not only real, but also responsible for the massacre at Bocai - and maybe, in part, for the deaths there at the cylinder. And that´s what motivates her to go on, even after attempts on her life.

In the course of the investigation, she will also be helped by Oscin and Skye Porrinyard, a cylinked couple who gave up both separate personalities long ago to become a fully integrated being with only two different bodies. They will help Andrea in her investigation, save her life - and maybe more. The strange relationship Andrea begins to experience with the Porrinyards is very intriguing, and not without a little excitement.

Emissaries from the Dead, despite the Agatha-Christie-ish flavor, is more than the sum of its parts of influences. It is indeed a weird future tale in deep space, when plenty of people (and machines) can hear you scream, but why the hell should they care?

Emissaries from the Dead is a page-turner, and Andrea Cort is one of the strongest characters (both male and female, both SFnal and mystery) I´ve ever had the pleasure to meet between the pages of a book. I´m already reading the second Andrea Cort novel, The Third Claw of God, soon to be reviewed here.

Jeff Carlson almost didn´t make it - he got into the final ballot at the last minute (right after the last minute, in fact). I had just published the list of nominees when Lou Anders sent an e-mail telling that Kristine Smith's Endgame was ineligible because it was published by the end of 2007, and not in 2008. So, it was removed from the list, and replaced with Carlson's Plague War.

There´s a thing to be said about this novel and other PKD nominee, Karen Traviss´s Judge (to be reviewed here very soon), and the thing is: sequels. Judge is the last book of a six-part series, while Plague War is the second novel of a trilogy (the third is still being written). That is, first you have to read the other books if you really want to know what´s going on after all.

In Carlson´s case, however, things are not that difficult, as Plague War is just the second installment, and the flashbacks are few and straight to the point. Anyway, first books first: since both books aren´t that big (less than 300 pages each), I will review both here, with a special focus on Plague War.

Plague Year is a strong, heavy book. What else could one expect of a book that begins with "They ate Jorgensen first"? Tarantino would go ballistic - except it´s no laughing matter. Plague Year is not exactly about survival of the fittest - it´s also about survival of the fastest.

In the near future, a nanotech device was created supposedly to cure cancer. It just had one setback: it also killed its subjects - and contaminated anybody else around very fast. Five billion people died of the machine plague. The survivors took advantage of the only weakness of the nanomachines: the altitude. The nanotech selfdestructs above ten thousand feet. Most of the survivors are located in China, Tibet, Middle East, Canada and America. When Plague Year starts, though, eleven months have passed, and people are none the wiser on what really have caused the plague and if it´s already safe to go down (or if it will ever be someday).

The story focus initially on a band of survivors struggling (barely) for life in the high California Sierra, east of Sacramento. Ex-ski patrolman Cam Najarro and a ragtag group of five people lost in the mountains when the plague struck managed to make camp and now are facing a terrible winter, with no food and water. And, as with usually happens with most groups of people in those unfortunate circumstances, they must control themselves all the time to maintain a semblance of community life. The group is barely kept on balance by Cam and another man, harsh, mysterious Sawyer, who appears to know more than he is telling.

But not everything are rumours. The International Space Station has been doing a lot of progress in finding a cure of sorts for the machine plague. Its chief researcher, Dr. Ruth Goldman, almost got there, but she will need more equipment - equipment that can be only accessed and used on Earth. At some point soon the astronauts will have to get down as well, for they don´t have enough supplies or technology to live in orbit indefinitely.

Plague Year alternate the stories of Cam and Ruth and their respective groups. Cam´s group finally venture outside their redoubt (a small peak in the Sierras) when they receive a visitor from other camp, who has a radio and news from outside. Even though the visitor reaches them, he is already much too contaminated by the plague to survive, but the message he delivers is clear: there´s life out there, and if they get prepared, there´s a chance they will survive. So they start a difficult journey along the range, trying as hard as they can not to cross the invisible frontier of the 10.000 ft.

Meanwhile, Ruth and her colleagues get cheerful messages from Earth: there is a place in Colorado that survived in good shape the machine plague and can receive them. In fact, the city of Leadville, after the demise of the President of the USA, has become the seat of the government of America, and they pretty much insist that they land there. They manage to do so using the shuttle Endeavour, and they are really most welcome there - with two casualties from the landing itself and a riot caused by a rebel sniper that almost got Ruth herself killed (she ends up only with a broken arm).

Soon Ruth sees that she´s not a hero, and things are not in black and white. There is a war in the making, and the Leadville government want her to help them develop not only a cure for the machine plague, but also a deadlier variety of it to eradicate their enemies. She doesn´t want to do it, but she knows she must comply at least until she find a way to defect to Canada, where (at least as far as rumours go) they only want a cure, no bioweapon attached to it.

When Cam´s group finally get to a place where there is a working long-range radio, Sawyer, whose health is getting worse every day because of the contagion to which they had to submit themselves in the way to the higher peaks, asks to talk to Leadville and reveals his true identity: he is one of the creators of the nanomachines. Given his equipment and capable assistants, he said he could reverse-engineer the machines and disable them.

A rescue mission is organized from Leadville to California to get Sawyer and take his equipment. Ruth, plus a Special Forces team, travel to the California Sierra, and take Cam and Sawyer with them. They go to Sacramento to pick the schematics of the nanomachines.

If only it was that easy. Now not only they must face a division in their own Special Forces unit, as Sawyer gets caught in the line of fire and dies. He already had a sort of experimental vaccine developed, and Cam, Ruth and a few troops get innoculated before all hell breaks loose in the streets of Sacramento when Leadville sends their fighters with the "snowflake" (the even-deadlier strain of the plague) to kill the rebels (not to mention the collateral damage).

That said, Plague War could easily be Part II of the same novel, not a sequel. You can close one book and open the second at once, and the story doesn´t change the pace.

This part is much harder than the first one. Now, for instance, we see Cam through the eyes of Ruth. Cam Najarro is a good guy, one of the really few good guys in the story, so we always tend to see him in a good light, and with good looks. But he is ugly, or: he was made ugly by the plague. Ruth is sickened by his vision, but at the same time she is attracted to him.

Together, with Special Forces Sergeant Newcombe, they are trying to run away from the Sacramento area to carry the nanotech to survivors everywhere. After the innoculation with the experimental vaccine, their bodies now are mostly immune to the machine plague, and they are the only hope for mankind.

But this is not a "blurb sentence"; that´s the plain, simple truth - as is the fact that they will have to walk hundreds of miles and face dangers typical of post-holocaust settings, as the hordes of bugs and ants carpeting the streets of Sacramento, their reproductive cycle gone haywire. Imagine, if you will, the rage of red ants in Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but worse. And this in the first twenty pages of Plague War.

This book is less about politics (and a little bit less about science) and more about survival. This unlikely trio must go for the mountains - but not to Leadville - , but can they trust each other? And, even if they can, will they be able to survive in the middle of the war that just began between what´s left of America and Canada plus the Russians and the Chinese.

The only apparently weak point of this novel is the characterization of the Russians and the Chinese as being sly, ruthless enemies who destroy and vaporize first and ask questions later (if any). Carlson does his best to counter this Tom-Clancy-esque approach presenting the thoughtful, considerate Commander Nikola Ulinov, who worked with Ruth Goldman in the International Space Station and who tries to negotiate a peace of sorts with the American government. And, to show us that all-American guys aren´t necessarily always the good ones, he also introduces us to Senator Lawrence Kendricks, who definitely is not the best President in a state of emergency America would want to have.

But this doesn´t do a thing to spoil the novel. The war gets ugly to a point of (almost) total destruction, while Ruth, Cam and Newcombe meet other small groups along their way - including boy scouts! - and are finally rescued, but not by Leadville neither by Canadians ou Russians. Ruth is forced to create a new "snowflake" for the remnant of the American government - but will it be for long? Not if Cam will have his way.

Jeff Carlson is a no-nonsense writer. He cuts to the chase, and he really (thank God) is not interesting in selling us military propaganda. I confess I feared that in the beginning of the first book, but my fears were soon dispelled. Both Plague Year and its sequel, Plague War, focus on the human angle, that is: how would we really react in face of such horrors? For, as much as many of us would like to, we can´t fight major threats alone. We are not Walker, Texas Ranger, John McClane, or whatever one-man/woman-army Hollywood insists on selling us as the flavor of the month.

You can check an interview I did with Jeff Carlson last January here.

I miss Octavia Butler.

The first time I read her, it was in the late Brazilian version of Isaac Asimov´s Magazine. Her short story Bloodchild gave me the creeps. I had already heard of her before that, but that was in the eighties, and we didn´t have the Web, and on the top of all that I didn´t have enough money to have her books sent to me from abroad.

So I had to wait more than a decade to read another story written by her.

This time, though, it wasn´t just a short story. A friend of mine gave me the Xenogenesis Trilogy (later renamed as Lilith´s Brood): I read Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago in a few days.

And I fell in love with Octavia Butler.

Sometimes, be it in this blog, be it in others, I approached the matter of alterity, that is, what does it mean to be the other. Octavia Butler does it brilliantly putting humankind as the other when in confront with an alien species (as the Oankali in the Lilith´s Brood series), and in her dualogy Parable of the Sower / Parable of the Talents.

In Parable of the Sower, humankind is its own alien species. After a global social-economic collapse, in the early 21st century, America is a poor, divided country, living in a new depression. A time of fear and despair, when the US are facing the very real possibility of having a religious fanatic in the White House, viewed by many as the only man who can save America from foreigners and cultists - that is, from everything that is different, everything that is other than the followers of his denomination (not surprisingly, he is also a televangelist) consider right.

Living in a kind of walled enclave in California, the Afro-American family of the Olaminas struggle to survive peacefully and keep their dignity through these hard times. Raised in a caring home, in a big family, 15-year-old Lauren Olamina comes of age seeing the world changes around her - always for the worse.

Even though she is raised with love by a caring father who also happens to be a Baptist minister, Lauren can´t bring herself to believe in God - at least, not in the God of the Bible. But she does believe in something: and that something is change.

Slowly, she starts writing in notebooks (paper ones, that is - in her world, personal computers do exist, but only rich people and universities still can afford them, and so the Internet is out of her reach) poems and thoughts that will become the basis not only for a creed of her own, but also for her philosophy/religion, Earthseed. The notes will become The Books of The Living, a clear allusion of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The book opens with the following poem:

All that you touch
You Change,

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

Lauren Olamina goes with the flow; she does not - and will not - preach; she affirms that she did not invent Earthseed; rather, she discovered it, through patient observation of herself, people around her, and her surroundings. The book begins in the day of her fifteenth birthday, and coincidentally her father´s fifty-fifth. She tries to ber a good daughter, but she knows she will hurt his father very much if she shows him his notebooks and tells him of her beliefs.

So, Lauren must do her chores as everyone in the house - including firearms training, since the neighborhood is very dangerous, and every now and then they must face menaces ranging from packs of feral dogs (Born in 2009, Lauren can´t believe people ever used to have dogs as pets) to bands of religious fanatics or gangs of people addicted in pyro, a drug that causes people to have pleasure starting fires - in places as well as in people.

Thing is, Lauren is not a normal girl of her age - and by this I don´t mean she is much too smart for her years: she has an intense hyperempathy (or "organic delusional syndrome", as the doctors call it), caused by her mother´s addiction to Paracetco, a drug designed to make people smarter. Despite what the doctors say, she really feels other people´s pain, in a physical sense. (She used even to bleed as a child, but these kind of "empathic stigmatas" - my expression - stopped when she reached puberty.) Lauren can also feel other people´s pleasure - but, as she says:

(...) there isn´t much pleasure around these days. About the only pleasure I´ve found that I enjoy sharing is sex. I get the guy´s good feeling and my own. I almost wish I didn´t. I live in a tiny, walled fish-bowl cul-de-sac community, and I´m the preacher´s daughter. There´s a real limit to what I can do as far as sex goes.

But there is no limit to her imagination - and to her dreams. Even as she reads the news and witnesses the end of the American space program (as they were just beginning to explore Mars), Lauren Olamina thinks harder about change and its consequences, and what one must do in order to shape change into bring good to the world. For her, not only God is Change, but we can shape Change, that is, we can shape God. And we can aim for the stars in the future, when the crisis is over - for everything ends, and therefore the bad times will too.

But things will get much worse before they get better. In 2027, when Lauren is eighteen, her father vanishes in his way home, never to come back. Soon after that, her walled enclave is breached by one of those much feared pyro addicts. Along with two other survivors of the massacre that ensues (in which she loses her stepmother and her brothers), Lauren ends up becoming the leader of a mixed group who is trying to cross America in its way to Canada, where they think they can find a way to a better living. She will find new friends and learn to rely on them - enough to tell them about her condition and also about Earthseed.

Her goal then changes slowly, painfully, into creating a community where she can put into practice everything she has been taught herself. Lauren Olamina suffers all kinds of pain on the road (physical, mental, emotional); she even falls in love, for a man older than her father, and who doesn´t believe in Earthseed, but learns to respect it. Together, they will try to survive. And Lauren will, by herself, try to make Earthseed happen.

Parable of the Sower is a book about limits, how to break them, and the price to pay for doing this. Naturally, this is a very limited definition, and this reviewer absolutely refuses to say it´s the only possible or even wanted interpretation of the novel, because there is much more to be said about an Octavia Butler´s book - any book written by her.

What I´m trying to say is: Octavia Butler is not for beginners. Even if it should be. Beginners in the strange ways of SF should definitely read her. Beginners in the (even today, alas) hard ways of racial tolerance and acceptance should most definitely read her. Beginners in the hardships of life really should read her.

All things considered, Parable of the Sower may as well be a good introduction to the works of Octavia Butler.

Bonus: Parable of the Talents

Since I already had the sequel to Parable of the Sower and was already late in reviewing it, I thought it was a waste of time not to review it as well.

It is a very strong sequel - a study in the deconstruction of myths. Part of the book is Earthseed, that is, Lauren Olamina´s diaries six years after Parable of the Sower. Her journal´s entries are intervowen with her daughter´s memories, decades later - a daughter who virtually never knew her mother, and who has mixed feelings about her.

Olamina describes, in this novel, how Acorn, the small community she creates with her husband, Taylor Franklin Bankole, and the little band of survivors she meets in the road in Parable of the Sower, strives, grows - and it´s utterly destroyed in one night by the fury of religious fundamentalists.

Many of her friends she met on the road in Sower are raped, killed or are driven insane by their new owners. Her husband dies. And her daughter, less than one year old, is taken from her.

This is a more complex novel than the first one. The Daughter´s Narrative (let´s call it so for now) is totally biased against Lauren, blaming her and her fundamentalist views about Earthseed as the , and accusing her of never committing herself with all her heart to the search for her daughter.

But that´s not what we read in Lauren´s journals. What we see is a woman much changed for life, but a woman who never lose her convictions and her hopes - and who did her best to find her daughter.

Instead, she finds a brother who she thought was dead - a brother who eventually will shut her out of his life because (even though she saves him from slavery and prostitution) he thinks she is a pagan cultist and that her ways are wrong. He will run out of Acorn not long before its destruction, and in the years after their paths will cross several times, even if it means more pain than joy for both.

Parable of the Talents shows us more of America´s fall and reconstruction. While the first novel encompasses only four years, this second book spans decades. We will see many of Lauren´s dreams become real - but not all of them, and not even one of them given free, but through hard work and strength of spirit.

This novel reminded me slightly of Margaret Atwood´s The Handmaid´s Tale - which also brought to my mind the movie version, starred by recently deceased actress Natasha Richardson, whose earliest performance in Ken Russell´s Gothic I had watched again just last month. My deepest condolences to her family.

Thanks to my friend Ivo Heinz, that gave me this book even before I knew its first part would be read in the Blogger Book Club.

And, speaking of the Blogger Book Club, my deepest thanks to Larry Nolen for having created it, and my heartfelt apologies as well for having in some way helped him to declare it dead. Even though he decided it may not be a good idea to keep it going for lack of members (myself included - I´m publishing this review two weeks late), I´m still for it, and I urge you, my eventual Reader, to go to his blog (which is getting better and better, by the way - he is reading and reviewing more than ever now) and ask him to ressurrect the Club from the dead - and join us. Who knows? It may be fun.

(Update March 31st: you can read here Larry´s excellent review of Parable of the Sower.)

For some time now, I´ve been unable to finish writing reviews. I really don´t know why - I´ve been a writer for more than fifteen years and I never had writer´s block.

I´m still reading a lot, though - I just can´t seem to concatenate my thoughts around a text. My personal theory blames the absolutely INSANE weather in Brazil since early January. We´ve been experiencing massive heat waves followed by heavy rains - here in São Paulo, where I live, we´re getting every single day the following weather schedule: warm mornings, stiflingly hot afternoons, and downpours that usually start right at rush hour and go well into the night.

To all our readers, as well as Eugie and Robert, my heartfelt apologies. Doing my best down here to cool down and write back.

And you, our Faithful Reader? Have you ever suffered of this strange ailment?

Today is the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe´s birth. Poe, the master poet and writer, considered one of the great names of Gothic horror and the father of the modern Fantastic literature. Among his progeny are also science fiction and detective stories.

Post-Weird Thoughts is celebrating the life and works of Poe with a special Poe Week, featuring reviews of some of his most famous stories, a biography, and two recent works dedicated to his figure. Later today, a review of Peter Ackroyd´s solid biography Poe - A Life Cut Short.

One of the major differences between a review and a criticism is not specifically the quality, but the content. One must be able not to say simply I liked this story / I didn´t like this story.

Be as it may, many reviewers/bloggers/writers before me has already threaded upon this way, and much better. So I´ll try to do my best and change a little my way to do things and improve my reviewing technique, trying to turn it into a critical approach. And there is no best work to begin right now than the first two books of David Louis Edelman´s Jump 225 Trilogy: Infoquake and Multireal.

These novels are all about worldbuilding, but not in the widest sense of the word. The Jump 225 Trilogy is, first and foremost, about economy. Both about the economy of worldbuilding and the economics in worldbuilding.

That is, creating a timeline along with a new geopolitics is not an easy feat. One is often tempted to simply extrapolate from the daily facts, also doing a bit of research to fill in the expected blanks. Anglo-American writers, however, tend to put the US in the center of the discussions, even fifty or a hundred years from now. Keep in mind I´m not saying it´s a flaw, but maybe, with all the world conflicts and also the global response to them, both via heinous terrorist acts or by means of meetings and summits such as the World Social Forum, it´s time to acknowledge the existence of other global powers, both good and bad, some of them intent on dialogue, some not, but different cultures which finally came to the forefront, and just can´t be ignored anymore. Any science fiction story that tries to circumvent this by putting the US (ou even the European Union) still in the vanguard of progress after 2020 or 2030 is risking all its money in an old, tired horse. (A recent example I´ll write about later is the Time Odyssey series written by late master Arthur C. Clarke with Stephen Baxter, where, in 2037, US still take the lead, and major conflicts simply doesn´t seem to be happening, aside from minor conflagrations in Afghanistan.)

Earth in 2009 C.E. is a strange place. And I´m not even mentioning the conflict in Gaza: we are living in a world where people do care more about their smartphones and computers than with their neighbor - but then, human beings were always like that, weren´t they? Aside from that, we are witnessing a paradigm shift (seriously, this is no management-level pep talk) from the days of well-centered governments with agendas written in stone to more fluid ones (or liquid, if we want to use the term coined by Zygmunt Bauman).

Extrapolation to the near future is now more difficult than it ever was. Only now we are really starting to assimilate this major change, following the quotidian actions of the younger generations who follow the lead of Richard Stallman (the father of copyleft) and Bruce Sterling ("information wants to be free") and who are taking the future in their hands. They are in control - or at least they are really trying, and that´s something we didn´t see since the Paris barricades of May 1968 (an epochal event that unfolded in several countries, including Brazil and Japan).

All this friction and its consequences are present in Edelman´s books, even though they take place (very wisely) in the far future. The discontents of our civilization are very much alive in the world he created circa four hundred years in the future. Starting with the geopolitical arena, which is not restricted to a country anymore, because the concept of countries has just disapparead, to be substituted by a new, updated version of ancient city-states. This fragmentation (or better, this rearrangement of the pieces of the puzzle) is much more convincing than to expect that any of the current world powers will continue to prevail for so long.

But some things doesn´t seem to change ever - and that´s what Edelman shows us in the opening of Infoquake.

The epigraph, borrowed from Karel Capek´s R.U.R., should serve as a caveat lector:

The product of an engineer is technically at a higher pitch of perfection than a product of nature.

Of course, such saying must be taken with a grain of salt. In the play, who says this sentence is the owner of Rossum´s Universal Robots, trying to justify his work. In the end, though, his work will be so close to perfection (by human cultural standards, that is) that the robots develop autonomous intelligences and destroy humankind.

Infoquake is not about the Frankenstein Complex, but about Faust. Natch (only Natch, no last name) is a famous programmer and owner of Natch Personal Programming Fiefcorp, and his only concern at the moment we first see him is to be Number One on Primo´s, a kind of Fortune 500 for developers of bio/logics applications.

The infodump starts right in the beginning, and it´s almost perfectly intelligible. We can understand and relate to the situation right away - it´s a corporate meeting. The SFnal element is in everything around Natch and his employees, Horvil and Jara, both of whom aren´t in Natch´s apartment in the flash, but in multi, a mix of virtual and telepresence projection. Along with this, we soon notice that bio/logics is the next step of nanotechnology, for they can download almost anything they want to their systems, from research data to patches that emulate behaviors and stimulate body and mind (apps like PokerFace and NiteFocus would certainly have a market right now).

Natch´s Fiefcorp is specializing in creating some of the best bio/logics apps ever in the Data Sea (the Web of the future, much more pervasive and efficient than the Internet), and his main goal in the beginning is just to render the competition obsolete.

But things doesn´t happen the way Natch wants. He will be Number One on Primo´s, but then it won´t matter anymore, because he will be involved in something much more interesting - specially to him. Natch is an orphan who had to open his way through the bio/logics market using all kinds of strategies - and he couldn´t care less for ethics. Even though Natch is our protagonist, he is very far from being a hero, or a good guy. He is a shark. But, then, who is a good guy in the corporate world?

But all his competence and attitude will not go unnoticed. Margaret Surina, the heiress of Creed Surina, one of the most prominent organizations of his time, becomes very interested in Natch, and coopts him to help her launch a brand-new technology called MultiReal, which combines Multi projection with quantum manipulation of probabilities. Naturally, there´s no thing as a free lunch: Natch will pay a very high price for this offering. This first novel ends with a terrible event called the infoquake, a lethal burst of energy that disrupts the bio/logic networks and causes a huge damage all over the world. Natch is one of the suspects behind the infoquake, and he will have to prove his innocence.

Infoquake provides us not only with a good, well-thought narrative, with convincing dialogue and characters (the plights of Natch remember, in a way, those of Victor Hugo or Émile Zola´s characters, and that´s a compliment - Edelman manages to create realistic figures almost to the point of melodrama, but keeping a balance so they have internal coherence, filled with purpose but being at the same time contradictory in their choices and actions. (The relationship between Jara and Natch is a vivid example of this inner tension.)

In Multireal, the reader is swept right to the eye of the hurricane. This time, the epigraph is from Walt Whitman´s Song of Myself:

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Natch is missing, and he is wanted as a dangerous felon by the Defense and Wellness Council, which is (I´m quoting from the excellent glossary at the end of both novels) "the governmental entity responsible for military, security, and intelligence operations throughout the system." Meanwhile, Margaret Surina, grand-daughter of the great Sheldon Surina, creator of bio/logics and daughter of Marcus Surina, researcher of the science of teleportation, must fend off the attacks of High Executive Len Borda (who may have something to do with Marcus´s untimely death many years back) and who want to take control of Creed Surina for political and economic purposes.

By then, the Surina/Natch MultiReal Fiefcorp, created by Natch and Margaret to exploit MultiReal technology, is all but finished, his members dead of disbanded across the globe. But every member of the former fiefcorp, that is, Horvil, Jana, and the newbies Merri and Benyamin, will do their best not to lose face and to survive all this, under the new leadership of Jana.

Things will converge to a major showdown between Natch, Len Borda, and a figure from Natch´s past, an ex-colleague who he almost killed as a child and with whom he now decided to make a very risky alliance. MultiReal ends in a clever cliffhanger, making the reader crave for the third and last book of the series, Geosynchron, due to early 2010.

Infoquake and MultiReal are very refreshing novels. For one thing, their characters are not twodimensional. They don´t function like clockwork, because this is just what you can´t do when creating believable characters. Jorge Luis Borges used to say that you can´t explain everything to perfection, because then the story ends up being unbelievable. You must always leave some space to chance. Or to a pseudo-random sort of attitude, for that matter.

While William Gibson was interested in obtaining aesthetical and narrative effects, his friend Bruce Sterling was more into politics. Edelman took this Sterling-esque trend and stretched it as far as he could - and he did a hell of a job.

Because Edelman focus in economics. Which is always a great thing to think about in business, because almost all the far future novels we read use to focus in the social and historical aspects of humankind (or our relationship to alien species), but very few turn its attention to the economical aspects of future worlds. Few books that do it successfully come to my mind now: Kim Stanley Robinson´s Mars trilogy and Jack Vance´s The Languages of Pao are good examples.

Many authors like to create a universe where not everything is explained. This because they intend to explain it fully in further installments or simply to maintain the suspense (or the suspension of disbelief). David Louis Edelman´s Jump 225 Trilogy has been compared so far to Dune. Frank Herbert´s magnum opus has certainly several points in common with Edelman´s trilogy, specially in the visible part, as in the glossary, for example.

But, aside from that, Edelman´s story doesn´t really have so much in common with Dune. Herbert deliberately created a universe so distant in the future that he end up creating interstices between which everybody could write something to fill in the many blanks. (That is, by the way, what Brian Herbert, with Kevin J. Anderson, have been exploiting for the past decades - although I would discuss the quality of some of their stories, I´m also ready to admit, as a Dune fan, that I´ve been reading it all along. But, as a fan, everything goes.)

This is not the case here. In Infoquake and Multireal, Edelman has strived for a well-thought, really thorough examination of politics and society of the universe he created. A good writer can do no less when setting out to do something in that level.

This time of the year is always hectic - Christmas preparations all over Brazil (me and my wife have a Golden Rule: never, EVER, enter in a mall (any mall) until the holidays are done) and correcting students´s final exams.

Following the principles of the Blogger Book Club created by Larry in October, when we read and discussed Thomas M. Disch´s Camp Concentration, I offered to choose the next book for the scheduled discussion date on various participating blogs the week of December 8-12.

The book, as Larry kindly reminded our co-reviewers, is Bruce Sterling´s Schismatrix Plus.

Just like Larry, I´m also very curious to know who else is planning to participate in this discussion or who might be interested in participating in the third installment, with chooser and book to be determined in the near future.

Larry hinted in his latest blog entry yesterday:

if you mention your willingness to participate, Fábio might be more likely to choose you to select the next book ;))

And he´s right. ;-)

Everyone is welcome to hop in! There is no need whatsoever to have participated in the previous installment. Just read the book, write your review, and let us know, so we can link your review to our blogs.

Where do ideas come from? That is the second most asked question in Literature (the first one being, naturally, what is science fiction after all?). There is no single, definite, mathematic answer to that question. Tolstoy, for instance, witnessed a woman jump in front of a train, and this suicide led him to write Anna Karenina; Ian Fleming wrote James Bond partly based in his experience for the British secret service during World War II, but chose the name of his agent 007 in a textbook on bird watching, written by a certain ornithologist called James Bond.

Sometimes simple, daily things can do the trick fairly well. Such is the case in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. One day, Gaiman was watching his son Michael strolling around in his tricyle in a cemetery near their home--and suddenly he thought, what if Mowgli (from Kipling´s The Jungle Book) hadn't been raised in a jungle in India, but in a cemetery in England?

That was the premise behind The Graveyard Book. As simple as that.

But things are never that simple with Neil Gaiman. "It just took me twenty-something years to write it." The wait, however, was worth it.

"There as a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife," the story begins. The hand belongs to an assassin, hired to murder an entire family. And that's what he does--except for the youngest son, a toddler who manages to escape from his cradle and crawl all the way to a cemetery nearby. There, he is welcomed (sort of) by the ghosts of the deceased (most of them more than two centuries old, and one or two far older than that). The spirit of his mother, still confused, begs to the ghosts there to take care of her son, and they feel obliged to do so.

Time passes, and the young boy (now appropriately named Nobody Owens--the last name due to the family who raises him, an old married couple of dead humble people from the 18th Century) becomes an expert on the cemetery, becoming familiar with every nook and cranny and every grave, even the lost ones including an old pre-historic tomb inside a hill. During almost all of his exploits and little adventures, he is being watched by Silas, his guardian, a being who is neither living nor dead, and the only one besides Nobody who can leave the space of the graveyard.

Nobody receives all the education ancient ghosts can give him--grammar and math (both old style, which doesn't really help him), but also some very cool phantom-like tricks including Fading, Sliding and Dreamwalking. In the beginning of his education, he becomes friends with another living person, a girl his age called Scarlett Amber Perkins, and that encounter makes him very happy.

That is the event that will make him more adventurous, more willing to explore what's beyond the cemetery. From then on he will make incursions to the city--but dangerous incursions at that, because he will attract the attention of Jack, the murderer of his family. Ultimately, Nobody will learn the truth behind who he is and what Jack wanted with him and his parents...

This is not Harry Potter at all. But then, I didn't have to tell you that did I? Not if you already know Gaiman's work from Sandman to Coraline, but also encompassing Stardust, Interworld, Fragile Things, and MirrorMask. "The Graveyard Book" is not about the dead; ultimately it is about the living, about life and what you choose to do with it. Nobody Owens learns about the basic things of life and death (after living many thrilling, bloodcurdling adventures, both in town and in other worlds), and undergoes a rite of passage that will make a man out of him. It's not a hymn to life, but a bittersweet ballad. And it's a good book...

(This review was also published in Fantasy Book Critic)

(First published in Fantasy Book Critic)

The Drowned Life is the newest collection by Jeffrey Ford, one of the most acclaimed writers in the field, especially recognized for his short stories. There are sixteen stories in The Drowned Life, distributed over 290 pages. Some of them are pure fantasy, while others have no speculative elements of note. Most of them though, could be put in the magic realism field, or stories that are grounded in reality but not quite so. In other words, some unexplainable things do happen in the character's lives, but those same things are not as terrible or shocking as the events of daily life.

This is more evident in stories like "Present From the Past", "What's Sure to Come", "The Scribble Mind" and "The Golden Dragon", pieces in which magic is depicted subtly--for instance, a ghostly presence, a card divination, the memory of the uterus, and a curse--and it's definitely not as disturbing as mundane occurrences like family reunions, greed or drug addiction. But that next layer of unreality is there, for those who look for them. Not the cause, nor the consequence, just another fact of life.

Other titles such as "The Drowned Life" and "The Night Whiskey" make some bizarre facts completely acceptable and quotidian. In the former, the character literally "goes under", to a drowned city where suicides perpetually rot underwater, but maintain a quite normal society. In the latter, people from a small city drink a certain beverage and make contact with the afterlife year after year . . . until a homicide destroys their lives.

Ford subverts the concept of "strange facts disrupt reality and characters either rationalize it or try to bring their lives back to the former condition". The biggest example of this can be seen in "The Dreaming Wind", in which a city is ravaged every year by a wind that blows southward and causes havoc, such as turning people into chairs, or balloons. When the wind stops coming though, simple life makes them miserable.

But there is also "traditional" fantasy and science fiction in Ford's collection. In "The Manticore Spell", the corpse of the mythical monster is captured by a wizard and his pupil, both of whom will be changed by the creature's magic. In "The Dismantled Invention of Fate", there's enough for a whole novel: a space explorer, an alien trapped inside her dreams, a robot hunter and a machine to save the universe's fate.

One story didn't work for me: "The Bedroom Light", which lacks the tension of reality and the strangeness of magic present in the other fifteen awesome stories. On the opposite side, "Under the Bottom of the Lake" is surely one of the best short stories I have read this year. Metafictional, beautiful, magical and, what's best, simple, "Under the Bottom of the Lake" is a lesson in storytelling and style.

In the end, The Drowned Life is a book that shows off the strength of Jeffrey Ford's diverse imagination and will surely please all fans of good literature, regardless of tastes...

According to Frank Cottrell Boyce's blurb on the back cover of The Knife of Never Letting Go, the new Patrick Ness novel has one of the best first sentences he has ever read "and a book that lives up to it."

The sentence in question is:

"The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don't got nothing to say."

Boyce is right, but I would stretch his comment further and tell you the names of the chapters are also among the best ones I've ever read. The Choices of a Knife and The Night of No Apologies, for example, reminded me of hardboiled novels like The Maltese Falcon. Of course, The Knife of Never Letting Go is no hardboiled novel. It is in fact Patrick Ness' debut in the YA market. An extremely auspicious debut by the way. I just couldn't stop reading it.

It may sound clichéd, or reductionist, to simply compare a book with others in order to review it. A good book should be more than the sum of its parts (or chapters, or characters), but the comparison is made so that the reader can have an idea of the time-honored tradition in which the said book is inserted.

Having said that, let's move further and say, for argument's sake, that the reading of The Knife of Never Letting Go (a simply beautiful title for a novel - Ness is a craftsman with words) was, for me, an experience reminiscent of some the best stories written by Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, adding a pinch of Philip Wylie to the mix.

Why is that? Well, some people (I'm including myself in the list) still have some prejudice with YA stories. The fact is, they really don't know what they are talking about. The young adult literature of today is very different to the books we used to read when we were teens (in my case, thirty-some years ago).

The honorable exceptions to that rule being the aforementioned writers. Ray Bradbury in his short fantasy stories and in novels like Something Wicked This Way Comes, in which he respects the intelligence of the reader--never minding his/her age.

The same can be said of Stephen King in the story of "The Body" for example, or in The Dark Tower series, featuring children and/or teenagers in dangerous situations that serve as rites of passage to adulthood. And, as rites of passages go, there is lots of pain and suffering--but there is also a light at the end of the tunnel.

The story of The Knife of Never Letting Go is deceptively simple: Todd Hewitt, a thirteen-year-old boy, living in a very small, old-fashioned American town by a swamp, suffers a lot because he is the only boy his age, and none of the older boys will talk to him. That happens because of a sort of manhood ritual every boy must undergo at his fourteenth birthday. And, in a month, it will be Todd Hewitt's time.

The first thing you notice is there are no women whatsoever in the town. Every single one of them died because of an alien disease . . . and then we discover that they are not even on Earth, but in a colony which was occupied approximately three decades before.

Upon reaching his home in Prentisstown, where he is raised by two guys who were friends with his parents (both dead now), Todd is suddenly told that he must run away from there, because he simply can't undergo the rite of passage.

Todd doesn't want to flee, and demands to know why this is being asked of him. But there's something else: the same disease that took the lives of the colony's women has also turned every man (and animals, at that) into telepaths. That means Todd can't be told why he must go; Ben and Cillian, his foster parents, can't even think it, for their Noise (that's how they call their thoughts) would be promptly detected by the band of Mayor Prentiss, who rules Prentisstown with an iron fist.

From then on, everything happens so fast it's just impossible to put the book aside. That's because The Knife of Never Letting Go is a page-turner, and that's not simply a cliché. Every ten or fifteen pages, something important happens. A new datum (or packet of data) drops on our laps and we can't ignore it, so we keep on reading the book, following the narrative as if we were right at Todd's side, running away with him. In this respect, Ness follows the tradition founded in science fiction by A.E. Van Vogt, who systematized his writing method, using scenes of 800 words or so where a new complication was added or something resolved. Patrick Ness does the same, and brilliantly.

Ness´ use of language is pretty good. The personality of Todd Hewitt is also very well-balanced, and, even though he can be a pain in the neck sometimes, the reader sympathizes with him because of all his suffering. Sadly, I can't write more than that, because the novel is so dense and intricate (and at the same time so easy to read) that everything one writes about it can turn out to be a spoiler. But take it easy, readers: I barely touched the surface of the book. There's so much more than the first 60 pages I described--after all, the novel has approximately 470 pages, and many a thing will happen that you won't be expecting.

The Knife of Never Letting Go is also reminiscent of the classic Philip Wylie duology about the end of the world, When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide. More so of the second novel, which features as its bottom line the following question: What happens when you arrive at a new world to colonize it and everything goes wrong?

In conclusion, I finished The Knife of Never Letting Go eager to know what happens next. And since this is the first book of a trilogy, we've only skimmed the surface of the story and have so much territory to cover yet in the following two novels...

(This review also appeared in Fantasy Book Critic.)

King´s latest short story collection, Just After Sunset, reviewed by M. John Harrison in The Guardian. Good review, interesting book.

The newest accomplishment of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, master anthologists, the pirate anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails, reviewed on The Fix.

Otis Adelbert Kline. Did any of you ever heard that name before? (If you are a pulp fiction buff, that question doesn´t apply to you, smartass. :-)

Imagine, if you will (and now I know you all will, because you all are SF/Fantasy buffs, as I am), an alternate Earth where Edgar Rice Burroughs never existed. It would be a poorer universe for sure, because we would never have Tarzan of the Apes, or John Carter of Mars, or even Pellucidar, for that matter.

We would keep on having Sword and Planet stories, of course, because at his time, he was hardly the only one to write them - and to write them well. We had C.L.Moore, Leigh Brackett, and Henry Kuttner as well: the cream of the crop of space opera and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

But, even so, our universe also was a poorer one. At least until now, with the reprinting of the classic Kline novel The Swordsman of Mars.

Written in 1933, that is, after most of the Burroughs´s Barsoom novels had already been written, The Swordsman of Mars follows the then already classic Burroughs formula of picking a man from Earth and basically catapulting him to the red planet, but at the same time taking the utmost care not to disrupt any laws of physics. Which is not to say they couldn´t circumvent them through "psychic laws", using telepathy, for instance, as a means of transportation to another planet.

That´s what happens to former adventurer Harry Thorne. Bored, after having roamed the entire world in search of thrills, he was engaged to a girl who caused him to be disowned by his family and then left him to elope with his best friend. Decided to commit suicide, he is approached by the strange Dr. Morgan, who offers him "a world of romance and un-dreamed of adventure." That is, swapping minds with a Martian warrior by means of telepathy!

The prospect intrigues Thorne, who considers that there is nothing else for him on Earth. So he accepts. And he is transported (and us with him) to a fantastic Mars where danger is always close, and death is at hand at all times. Soon he gets involved in a plot of war, love, lust, intrigue, and fighting (pretty much of it, mostly with swords). Blood and romance: it can´t get much better than this. Especially when you simply can´t stop reading the book!

The few people who had any knowledge of Kline until this new edition of The Swordsman of Mars believed, for the most part, that Kline and Burroughs had a kind of "novelistic feud", because it´s impossible not to remember John Carter when you read the exploits of Harry Thorne. In his introduction to the novel, however, Michael Moorcock explains that this feud probably never happened, and the dispute over the market niche was greatly exaggerated by Sam Moskowitz in his accounts of early science fiction.

Burroughs and Kline died a few years from each other (Kline in 1946, Burroughs in 1950), but Kline wrote much less than Burroughs - approximately ten novels and one short story collection, which is a drop in the ocean compared to the cyclopean production of Burroughs (he wrote eleven Barsoom stories, not to mention the Tarzan novels, the Pellucidar, the Venusian cycle, the western stories and many others).
According to Moorcock, Burroughs was, even in his time, considered the best of the two because of the quality of his prose. Point taken - but come on, we´re talking Sword and Planet here! Fast-paced, hi-octane adventure! Who really wants style?

Even though those last sentences may be also an exaggeration, when one opens The Swordsman of Mars and starts reading the great adventure lived by bored, heart-broken adventurer Harry Thorne, you simply can´t help but keep turning the pages. Why? Because it is so good! Kline has great care to explain to the reader everything he can in scientific terms for the common man. (His theory of mind-exchange through telepathy is better than the transmigration hypothesis Burroughs offered for explaining the presence of John Carter in the red planet in A Princess of Mars.)

The action is non-stop, and the characters (not only the humanoid Martians but also the monsters, like bird-beasts and marsh serpents) are very much believable, inasmuch as any Lovecraft, Howard, or Burroughs character can be believed.

The Planet Stories edition is the first complete one since 1933; it is the original version of the Weird Tales serial, as opposed to the first Ace book edition, which is an abridged version, cutting many of the political undertones of the book (as, for instance, a bitter criticism of Communism).

Moorcock is absolutely right in his introduction: it would be a shame if Kline remained unknown to today´s readers - he is really a good writer, and his prose, though not so stylish as Burroughs, is almost mesmerizing: The Swordsman of Mars is a honest-to-God page-turner. Real fun, and more than that: it makes us want to write - and, naturally, makes us want to read more of Kline´s novels. (We will have the chance of reading at least one more next February, The Outlaws of Mars.)

(This review was also published in Fantasy Book Critic.)

Algirdas Jonas Budrys was an underrated writer. In his long career, he didn´t write much - nine novels, nine collections of stories and essays - but he wrote some of the best novels of his time. Maybe his best novel is Rogue Moon (a title that was imposed to him by his publishing house at the time, 1960, and that later he could change more to his liking, as The Death Machine)

Rogue Moon was nominated for the 1961 Hugo Award, but lost to Walter M. Miller´s A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was only fair: Miller´s novel was a vast tapestry of stories encompassing nothing less than 1800 years in the history of humankind, a race doomed to repeat its fate of nuclear holocaust because it never learned its lesson well.

Even so, Rogue Moon wasn´t a petty achievement. If it lacks the scope of A Canticle for Leibowitz, on the other hand it explores the human relations as few books did it at that time - specially in a hard SF novel. The plight of Edward Hawks and his search for the "perfect" man to go to the Moon in a mission which brings certain death is a hard one. The big difference in Rogue Moon is that the "hero" is an adventurer whose morals are twisted - that is, assuming that he has morals at all. A wealthy, bright and strong man, he lost a leg in an extreme adventure and wears a prosthesis. One of the best definitions of Al Barker is delivered in his face by Hawks:

"You´re a suicide," Hawks said. "I´m a murderer." Hawks turned to go. "I´m going to have to kill you over and over again, in various unbelievable ways. I can only hope that you will, indeed, bring as much love to it as you think.

This is no mere boasting. Hawks is sending Barker to the Moon not in a rocket, but by "teleporting" him - scanning his body, duplicating it and transferring a copy of his consciousness to another body who will be built on the Moon. The original body will remain on Earth, but by means of an unexplained "telepathy", both minds will sometimes overlap, and this accounts for strange behavior in the travelers. Barker is the last one in a rather long chain of teleportated men who were killed or came back insane.

For the teleportation is not the only danger Barker must face - after all, he is going to the Moon not only to be there and conquer it before the Soviets (remember, we were in the Cold War then), but also to explore a strange structure that the scientists found on the dark side. A structure that kills coldly, matter-of-factly any human being who enters it.

No character is intrinsically good in Rogue Moon. Cottington, the man of Human Resources who finds Barker, is a alcoholic, overdependent of the motherly figure of the beautiful Claire Park, ladyfriend of Barker´s, a cold-hearted, ironic woman who openly flirts with him -- and with Hawkes as well, in a game of seduction that leads them to nowhere. Barker is a selfish, egocentric man who isn´t afraid of dying (in fact, he probably have suicidal tendencies - and that, according to Hawkes, may be as well really the man for the job precisely because he isn´t a decent man. Hawkes is the epitome of the cold-blooded, calculist scientist, who must get things done no matter what. And they get done.

Rogue Moon is reminiscent of Jack London´s A Thousand Deaths and of Arthur C. Clarke´s 2001 (but this last one was written only eight years later). It´s a fundamental reading for anyone who wants to know better Budrys´s work - and a great hard science fiction classic that deals not only with equipment and theories (analogic equipment that today could be seen as "analogicpunk" or "valvepunk", maybe?), but with human beings as well.

Rogue Moon - Algys Budrys

334 - Thomas M. Disch

Schismatrix Plus - Bruce Sterling

I´m doing reviews of the first two ones in here. The Sterling book is for our Blogger Book Club in the week of December 8-12, as you can read here.

What happened if you found out that the story of Cain and Abel--or, at least, a very important part of it--was true? That, when Cain murdered Abel, he used a weapon that may still exist and, according to the Bible and other sources, may confer to its user a great power?

That is the premise of Brad Meltzer's new novel, The Book of Lies. A lightweight conspiracy story, The Book of Lies presents us with interesting, enjoyable characters, though more biased to the bi-dimensional end of the spectrum. The protagonist, Calvin Harper, is a social worker who still lives in sorrow and guilt years after he witnessed the "accidental" murder of his mother by his own father, and is a skeptical guy who can't bring himself to believe in anything or anyone. The only guy who he considers a real friend is former priest Roosevelt, a peaceful, hippie-like man who helps him pick up homeless people out of the streets and takes them back to shelters.

So, when he learns that his father Lloyd got out of jail a long time ago, but didn't even try to contact him until now when he needs Cal to find this artifact, you already know what will happen. An unhealthy (and sometimes predictable, boring) family fight, complete with car chases, and the occasional murder by Ellis, an independent agent tattooed with the marks of Cain but perpetually disguised as a cop who, with his faithful dog Benoni, tracks Cal and his father until he can get the artifact and bring it to the secret society of which he is an acolyte.

This search will take them from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to a certain house in Cleveland, more specifically the former home of Jerry Siegel, who happens to be the creator of Superman. When Jerry was a child, his father Mitchell died of a heart attack--or did he? They will uncover a somber truth: Mitchell was murdered because he knew too much. He knew about the artifact and was confronted by the secret society. But not before he passed on the secret to Jerry...

Now, seventy years later, it's up to Cal, Lloyd and his lady friend Serena to find the artifact before Ellis does.

Even though Meltzer is an accomplished writer, The Book of Lies has a comic book feeling all over it. Of course, one can easily think that this feeling is due to the fact that Meltzer indeed deals with comic book culture in the story, and this is where things work best.

The references to comics and pop culture are very well plotted and keeps us interested throughout the book. It's like seeing an alternate version of Umberto Eco´s Foucault´s Pendulum, writing for the sake of entertainment instead of intellectuality--which is also an excellent thing to do, make no mistake; but Meltzer chose what I would call an upgraded version of the Robert Ludlum Approach (and that's a compliment): an action-packed story but with plenty of well-thought.

One of the big attractions of the story is the relation to Jerry Siegel and Superman. It's interesting to know that the story of Siegel is much more related to Batman (his father was murdered, though in all probability not in front of him, like Bruce Wayne's parents). And Meltzer uses this fact very cleverly.

Another interesting thing is to find out that the 1938 Superman wasn't the first one--Siegel & Shuster wrote two previous versions before the one we all know, and, in a way not dissimilar to what Umberto Eco does in another book of his, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Meltzer fills the pages with fac-similar reproductions of some pages (though some of them are fake, drawn exclusively for Meltzer's story), thus offering to the readers a visual mapping of the conspiracy territory in which he enfolds them.

But the thing that can be very bothersome is the use of language. It's as if Meltzer was writing this book already with an eye on a movie or TV adaptation. In a story that features deceit and murder, it doesn't stand to reason that all the characters should avoid at all costs the use of profanity. "Craparoo", "bullcrap", and all crap-related words you can possibly think of abound in the book.

All in all, however, The Book of Lies is a good book. Not an excellent one, but an intriguing, theme-oriented narrative which delivers to the readers what it promises. Thinking of The Book of Fate (which is not related to The Book of Lies, except for the choice of theme) I wonder if there will be a third installment and what kind of book it would be.

(This review also appeared in Fantasy Book Critic)