Elf Sternberg

This is going to be an unfair review, because it is a comparison of writing styles based upon a recommendation. An acquaintance of mine familiar with my appreciation of the David Weber Honor Harrington series, recommended that rather than read "those atrocious Hornblower In Space books," I read Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series. Campbell, he explained, was a former Naval officer himself and had a far better grip on what it means to describe leadership and command than a wanker like Weber.

I've read the first book, The Lost Fleet: Dauntless, and I have to say that I'm generally underwhelmed.

The premise of Dauntless is this: Captain John Geary, now known as "Black Jack Geary," was lost in action a century ago when the peace-loving laissez-faire Alliance was attacked by the money-grubbing corporatist Syndicate. Geary led the very first successful battle against the attacking Syndics, as they came to be known, but his ship was destroyed shortly after he sent out what became known as Black Jack's Last Order: "Close with the enemy!"

A century later, Geary is rescued by the Alliance Main Expeditionary Fleet from a cryogenic survival pod. The pod is rated for two people and only fifty years, but he was the only occupant, and the power cell lasted longer than anyone should have expected. There was barely a year left on it, the enigneers tell him. Worse, the Fleet has just been smashed by the Syndics, dealt an entirely possible fatal blow, and all of the commanders have been killed. Captain John "Black Jack" Geary, by dint of seniority, has command of the fleet. Some take this as A Sign From Above.

Okay, let's start off with this: that's about as hokey as it gets.

It gets sillier. Black Jack's Last Order has become standard doctrine. There is no military discipline within the fleet. Over the century, the war has become a ragged stalemate with each side throwing ships and crews at one another, and all the "old hands," not just Geary, were killed in the first years of the assault. Nobody in the Alliance thought to hold back experienced commanders to train the next generation. Ships leap forward to slug it out with their counterparts without any thought to tactics, inter-ship coordination, long-term strategic goals, or even personal survival. Tactical planning to maximize your own chance of survival has become an act of cowardice. Admirals just shout Black Jack's Last Order and hope their flagship takes less damage than the enemy's. Over the century of warfare, weapons have become marginally better and ships marginally more efficient, but the Alliance military traditions have decayed to little better than well-organized pirate crews. The Alliance tradition of treating enemy combatants with respect and giving them a chance to survive after their ships have been disabled has fallen by the wayside, and survival pods are used for target practice. Equally unlikely, the Syndic crews have suffered the same disintegration of skill and discipline.

The Alliance is depicted as a vast, vibrant collection of worlds, with two "allied" smaller multi-star nations along for the ride (this gives Campbell plenty of time to deliver "As you know" messages from Geary to the leader of those allies' ships that are with the fleet). Campbell wants me to swallow that nobody, anywhere, in any position of authority, thought to consider military discipline important?

Geary comes out of cryo and, trading his "hero" status for command authority, starts to try and forge real military discipline. But his tradition involves real maneuvers; some ships must stay behind to guard the tender and repair ships; some ships won't get a shot at the enemy; sometimes real tactical thinking involves not attacking; treating prisoners of war as human beings worthy of respect. These changes annoy the current generation of Captains in the fleet, and there are stresses within his command.

Dauntless is therefore a by-the-numbers Star Trek level of plot, with all the set pieces predictable even before the story begins. There are no surprises.

Campbell is terrible at tension, about foreshadowing problems within Geary's command and then springing those problems on Geary. On the one hand, readers know the numbers Campbell is plotting by; on the other, Campbell isn't doing a good job of setting those numbers up. The removal of problem officers, combat with the Syndics, and so on plod along with no real highs or lows.

Part of this is because Campbell has chosen to keep to a single POV, namely Geary's. We get a lot of Geary's weariness, and all of his concerns about the fleet, and we get the ocassional Greek chorus to Geary about the current state of the fleet from the commander he trusts. But weariness and angst are not tension.

The Syndics are even more mustache-twirling than Weber's Havenites; Syndic starship commanders are called "CEOs," they're resource-wasting corporatists who fall into three categories: management, voluntary labor, and involuntary labor (which was "voluntary labor" that became incapable of paying its dues.) The conflict is so jejune as to be embarrassing.

Connie Willis once said that foreshadowing was the soul of writing. If that's true, then Campbell's work is soulless. There's a great opportunity halfway through the story for Campbell to hold fast one of his great foreshadowed secrets, but no, he has to spill the beans right there. At an abandoned mining camp, they discover that the computers have not only been wiped, they've been trashed; and the safe has been broken into with drill bits of no known size manufactured in known space. An investigator on the crew proposes maybe the criminals wanted the bits to be untraceable, but Geary tells him that using the most common drill bits would be even more untraceable since there are millions of them in space. So why would someone use non-standard drill bits? Hmm... And then Campbell gives away the whole store. Bummer, that.

Reviewers have been breathless about Campbell's "accurate consideration of relativistic physics," but I didn't get that from the story. What I got was a lot of handwaving about relativistic effects in a way that told the reader, "At least I've thought about the effects of combat at 0.1c; when was the last time you read something like that, huh!?" Well, actually, I have read stories where relativistic effects were taken seriously: Greg Egan comes to mind.

Campbell's work is pedestrian and even-keeled, and that's unfortunate in military SF. Military SF needs serious highs and lows; there needs to be something more at risk than "just lives." Military SF typically throws away lives with abandon. Readers want more than that.

Telling me this is better than Weber misses the point. The genius of David Weber is that he gives us multiple points of view. He shows us what other characters are thinking, and his take on the weight of command and the structure of military life contains as much nuance as Campbell's. If Weber's characters are idealized heroes and Campbell is trying to show us what happens when an idealized hero gets stuck dealing with the realities of the position, then both writers are doing their jobs. I like Jack Geary; he does seem more human, less inevitable, than Honor Harrington. But the writer is just kinda hacking along, presenting problems too insignificant and solutions too pat, to do more than be entertaining. He really should have kept his mystery a secret.

I have bought the second book, and I'll read it (although Egan's Incandescence is next, now that I have time), but unless something improves soon, I probably won't go on to the third and fourth books of the series. On the other hand, a single POV and a limited time frame make these books much smaller and quicker reads than the Weber-ian Expository Monolith.

I read Saturn's Children by Charlie Stross last week, and after having thought about it some, I've come to the conclusion that the book is shallower than I wanted it to be.

The book follows the adventures of Freya Nakamichi, a sex 'droid designed to please her human masters. Unfortunately for Freya, human beings have been extinct for two centuries or so, leaving us with a character with no idea what to do with her life. Most robots designed to serve human beings were cute, anime-like designs for household use, but Freya's shaped like the real deal, a tall ogre out of place in a world of short bishi and chibi designs. Depressed and despondent, she takes a job as a courier, winds up in all kinds of trouble, and ends up careering around the solar system, gets possessed by the spirit of her dead sisters, and eventually comes face-to-face with the biggest dream and fear every robot has: meeting a real live human being.

Unfortunately, this book falls off the end of the world toward the last chapters. Up until the info-dump where Freya reveals the true nature of robot devotion to human beings, a ham-handed scene if ever there was one (although fortunately the worst of it is ob skene), I was convinced that Charlie was going somewhere interesting with the book. Charlie mentioned that the book is an homage to Robert Heinlein (and the final set piece of the book is set in Heinleingrad, Eris), and the end of the book is as unconvincing as the ending of Freya's namesake novel, Heinlein's Friday. At the end of Friday, you might recall, the titular character ends up marrying the guy who raped her at the beginning of the book ("it was just business") and running away to some far away stellar colony, leaving Earth to collapse under its own corruption. The ending of Saturn's Children ends with a very similar, and even more serious problem, left unresolved: robots who are honest with themselves about their origins are terrified that H. Sapiens might someday re-emerge and assert their right to rule, disrupting the free will of the machines. It's presented as the central conflict of the main character, emerging throughout the book, growing in intensity as Freya gets closer and closer to meeting an authentic H. sap, only to be ignored in the final two chapters in favor of pyrotechnics and "aww, aren't they sweet" moments.

Charlie's ability to create engaging, intense, and intensely clever tight spots from which his heroine must escape, often with that classic transition, frying pan, fire, is here in all its glory. He does a great job of cranking up both the threat and the resolution, over and over again, while weaving a Sol-spanning conspiracy that should ultimately leave you breathless. Charlie knows how to dress the stage and then set the furniture ablaze a la Jack Bickham, and his technical hard SF knowledge is second to none. But if Saturn's Children is a Heinlein pastiche and an Asimov homage, it's also unfortunately got something else: A Neal Stephenson ending.

Trial of Flowers is one of those new books in the "steampunk and decadence" genre that seems to have become popular since the emergence of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Trial follows the adventures of three men: Jason the Factor, Imago of Lockwood, and Bijaz the Dwarf, as the three of them face the rising old and corrupt gods and their magick that threatens to either overwhelm their beloved City Imperishable, or attract the attention of neighboring nations determined to raze the City to the ground before the gods can gather their full strength. The City is a place of "eletricks" and "hedge mages," of "poor magicks" and "boxed dwarves," of steam and iron. It might be New Orleans, or Casablanca, or Shanghai, with the last magics and the first difference engines vying for attention.

Jason is a mercantile agent who works for the city's most powerful mage and who has a secret torture chamber under his warehouse, Imago a shifty lawyer who's lost one case too many and owes money to legbreakers, and Bijaz is a "made dwarf," his body artificially stunted in its growth, trained as an accountant, with a taste for snuff theatre. These three don't necessarily get along as they each fumble their way toward saving themselves, and maybe the city as well.

As I mentioned, the inevitable comparison to China Mieville is there, but if there's one thing Jay Lake does better than China, it's this: Jay does not flinch. Not for a second. Heck, Steven R. Donaldson, once hailed as the modern master of characters wallowing in their own degradation, was never quite as skilled at not flinching the way Jay does not flinch. Thomas Covenant's self-loathing was never quite as pointed or tangible as Bijaz's.

That said, the issues involved do make it hard to care about Jason, Bijaz and, to a lesser extent, Imago. These aren't nice people, and the scatological hells through which Jay metaphorically and literally drags them, often face-down, is tough reading. The expected redemptions aren't as rewarding as we might hope. This ain't no book for the beach. But they're all done so well and so artfully that once you're into the book, once you've accepted the humane ugliness that Jay has decided to show you, you'll be hooked.

Trial of Flowers isn't a perfect book. There's a sense of isolation to the City Imperishable; its presence on a world full of people never quite feels right. Even Moorcock's Melnibone' felt more attached to its wider world than the City Imperishable, and I sensed that discordance more than once. But the wider world isn't what the book is about, so once you've stepped into the City Imperishable, there really is only one way out. You'll just have to travel through the city's sewers, pursued by eyeless, frog-tongued children and accompanied by two mad dwarves, each insane in his own way, to get there.

Highly recommended to readers of the "new weird," urban steampunk, and good literary fantasy.

The second Grey Knights novel is Dark Adeptus, which I managed to find at Half-Price, lucky me, and read in about three days. Pretty good considering it's 400 pages long.

Brother Alaric is joined by Inquisitor Nyxos to the Borosis star system, which has mysteriously gone silent. There, they discover a whole planet that has mysteriously emerged from the Chaos and seems to be overwhelmed by biomechanical life-forms of hideous and corrupt intent. Their mission is to get down to the surface, find the source of the corruption, and kill it.

Counter does as good a job here as he did with the previous book. He makes a strong case that Alaric is clever and creative, not features normally found in a Grey Knight, and is as skilled at using his mind as he is at his magic or his halberd. The ending is particularly satisfying as Alaric, confronted with a situation he cannot win, figures out how to change the rules in mid-game to his favor. He's a more sympathetic person in this book, worrying much more about civilians he's worked with, and perhaps we could argue needs.

On the one hand, it's not as satisfying as the first book. The villain at its core doesn't seem as all-consuming. The conspiracy isn't as big, the threat not as convincing. Counter doesn't do as good a job convincing us the threat posed by Ukrathos is real, mostly because Ukrathos is away from center-stage most of the time, doesn't corrupt those around himself effectively, and only makes boastful claims rather than showing us the effects he might have. It weakens the real threat of the plot.

There's a description in chapter six that made me grin:

The city's towers soared out of the chasms below, masses of flesh like tentacles wrapped around them as if holding them upright. The towers were in the half-Gothic, half-industrial style of the Adeptus Mechanicus but all similarity to an Imperial city ended there. The black steel spires were fused with the city's biological mass, so that some were like massive teeth sticking out from rancid gums or huge steel leg bones, skinned and wrapped in greyish muscle. Bulbous growths fused obscenely with sheer-sided skyscrapers.

My first thought upon reading this was, "Yeah, I saw Bubblegum Crisis, too." A lot of Counter's writing is like that: he does a very good job with his cinematic descriptions, as if you can see into his head and watch him replaying the best grotesqueries of anime or cinema he's ever absorbed. That's okay, I do it too.

All in all, a fine middle book. I'll see how the third book pans out next week.

A few weeks ago I blogged about Justina Robson's Living Next Door To The God Of Love, which I thought was okay. In that book, a thing called The Unity exists, and although it is ineffable, it has agents that have created weird, extant, alternative realities for human beings, a search space whereby Unity searches for meaning, often by absorbing the distinctiveness of individuals into itself. It has one major agent running around, and a lot of human beings trying hard to find the key that will unlever Unity's power over humanity. Unity is a seething mass of all the things its ever absorbed; a great storm of "seethe" broke away, called itself Jaeleka (the nominal titular character), and things got weird.

I just finished the book that came before Living Next Door..., Natural History, and it leaves me with this one strong impression: while I can see how Robson got from Natural History to Living Next Door..., I really, really wish she hadn't.

The second book had wonderful, complex characters and lovely set pieces, but it didn't all add up to a meaningful story; Natural History, on the other hand, not only has the same complicated, wonderful, lovely characters you come to love or hate, but it does have a meaningful story with a highly charged and yet satisfying ending.

Robson starts with a world where human beings have genetically engineered thousands of species of human/machine hybrids, the Forged, who do the dangerous, dirty, environmentally challenging, or merely drudge work. Spaceships, ocean explorers, asteroid miners, Jovian gas harvesters, each is an individual human being whose structure has been pushed to absurd, extreme limits. The naming scheme for these people is wonderful, complex, and creative. Robson did marvelous work.

Crippled by an accident, Forged interstellar explorer Voyager Lonestar Isol finds something that gets named Stuff, which allows her to repair herself and travel instantly anywhere in the galaxy. She returns to Earth where she tells the Forged Independence Movement that she has the power to take them "away from the monkeys," to a world of their own. She says she has found such a world, and allows one human visitor, Zephyr Duquesnse, to go there, to assess whether the Forged or "all humanity" should lay claim to it.

But Stuff is not just wish-fulfillment technologies. And when we learn what it is, we learn what it can do for us, but the price for some may be just too damned high.

What annoys me now more than ever is the amount of mythology she crammed into Living Next Door... to try and make it consistent with this book. Natural History was good enough. Robson could have written another book, a better book, without relying on the Stuff mythology and then tacking on all the extra elves, mystical engines, and past lives crap.

Everyone in Natural History book is brilliantly thought-out and realized: Zephyr, Isol, Gritter, Tatresi, Corvax, even Bob The Collie. If you like your SF literary, this book might just you cry. Robson plays a bit fast and loose with her science (transitions from Jovian to Terran space seem to take only a few hours even for fusion-based STL craft, for example) but it's okay: it's all in service to an excellent story.

I read this book because it was listed as one of the two most "deeply sick and depraved" books of SF, at least according to the readers of rec.arts.sf.written. Unfortunately, it's not really that depraved. Or if it was, I was so overwhelmingly bored by it that the supposed sickness didn't make much of an impression.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about I, Weapon is that it isn't a novel at all; it's the plotter's synopsis for a Marvel comic about the same year as the book. Doing a synopsis of the synopsis will be difficult, but here goes: it is The Future. The Morlocks-- excuse me, the Progs-- live on the Moon and on habitats about Jupiter. Their agents, the Stafi and Landed, do the grunt work and raise the Eloi-- excuse me, the Unguls-- humans so mutated after Terra's first nuclear war that they are fit only as foodstock. Humanity had spread throughout the galaxy, only to be forced back to a few dozen worlds by the villainous Vim. A desperate Prog, consulting The Computer, learns that the only possibility of success is a breeding cycle to create a godlike human who can crush the Vim. The first half of the book deals with her struggles to reach her goal: she has to collect the sperm of an Ungul, an Unchanged, and an "Evolutionary Variant", mix them all together, and then carry the product to term herself all "the old-fashioned way, without the use of a breeding tank or gene equipment," The Computer tells her. The end of the book is an unchallenging narrative of her offspring's heroic success after success. I won't spoil the ending, such as it is, for you.

Is it "depraved?" It certainly may have been once upon a time: we have flat, drab, colorless passion meandering across the page as our blue-skinned, bug-eyed heroine (the lights are low in those sublunarian bases to preserve power) mates with these various creatures. Runyon takes particular delight in displaying the ranches where human-stock meat is raised and butchered, and spends inordinate amounts of time when the hero starts making it with a Vim female.

So: you got your cannibalism, your pornography, your vague sense of bestiality. There's even a snuff scene for those with that kind of bent. There's a hint of lesbianism when the logic-driven Prog heroine tries to describe her feelings for her oh-so-useful-and-beautiful (illegally gengineered to be a sex toy, but now free and educated) Stafi assistant, but then puts them aside as irrational and never acts on them-- pity, as the Stafi seems to be the only real human in the place.

But it's all so boring! Runyon is a complete hack; his exposition goes on for page after page after page. His dialogue is completely "as you know, Bob." When the hero gets into Vim territory he discovers that he is carrying a "psychic inhibitor"; without it, he is a God and an unimaginative one at that, and the book is really over when Runyon has another 80 pages or so to fill. Terrible read.

Greg Egan used to be one of my favorite writers. I say "used to be" because Egan opened my eyes to the wonderfully evocative power of truly hard science fiction, only to eventually have him throw it all away with his own ham-handed politics and pecadillos. For a while, since the publication of Schild's Ladder, Egan hasn't written much, but now he's back with a new series, the Amalgam stories, the first of which was "Riding the Crocodile" (link leads to full text of story), and which is the setting for his next novel, Incandescence.

A new Amalgam story, "Glory" (link leads to PDF of full story), appears in the anthology The New Space Opera, and has been published for free at Eos books' website.

"Glory" is an awful story.

My reaction to "Riding the Crocodile" was that it was Greg Egan pandering to the bulk of his audience: those of us too lazy to actually follow the physics of Schild's Ladder, but willing to be thrilled at a certain level of mastery of physics and willing to buy a certain amount of handwavery as long as it seemed plausible. "Riding the Crocodile" is also pandering in that it proposes a posthuman, "AI's are people too" universe in which people flit about from starsystem to starsystem via fast-as-light radio transmissions, switching from arbitrary digital existence to biological instantiation without a second thought.

"Glory" takes this pandering one step further. His opening scene wants to be one of those masterpieces of physics handwaving, in which he shows his Amalgam civilization throwing a one kilogram weight almost up to lightspeed fast enough that it will go all the way through its target star, in the process setting up shock waves so that the star, in its wake, is briefly turned into a nanomachine factory that creates primitive devices for listening for radio waves and converting nearby matter into useful tools, which the Amalgam can then operate by remote control. I don't buy it; neither space nor the insides of stars is that predictable. His description of the matter/antimatter engine is amazing; his attempt to convince you that it'll all work in the end pure nonsense.

What follows from that is, well, it's not really a Greg Egan story. Instead, it's more like a Greg Egan fanfic. All of the elements of Egan's own hangups are there. There's absolutely no possibility of intimate relationships; Egan has written a species with a reproductive urge so limited and incapable just so he won't have to write about it or think about it. (At this point, I have to admit that I kinda miss the manipulative, teenage Greg Egan of such passionate works as "Mind Vampires" and "The Demon's Passage.") The only thing that matters is mathematics; anyone obsessed with anything else, like art or politics, is either a fool, a knave, or a villain.

( Spoiler. And the point to this review. )

I call bullshit. This story completely failed to move me, either in a sensawunda depiction of a technological application of known physics (one of Egan's true strong suits), or in his story, which is a phoned-in Heinleinesque "the right man in the right place to make the right decision," only in this case Egan's characters are more shallow than usual, their convinctions contrived, and the ending a pale shadow that imparts no meaning or message.

(My thanks to fallenpegasus for also reading the story and giving me his reactions to it, which mirrored my own in many places.)

My beloved friend shemayazi enjoys trashy, tacky romances as much as I do, and she recently gave me a tall stack of anthologies, each with four novellas on a theme: four Victoriana stories, or four Regencies, or Twins, Changelings, and finally Alien Encounters.

I flipped through the first two stories with a blah sort of reaction, then stumbled with some delight into the novella Some Assembly Required (by "Dominique Tomas", although the copyright is assigned to "Michelle Levigne." Hmmm.) It opens with something halfway between a good premise and a good promise.

The heroine, Rahzel (not a bad name, a skiffy mangling of Rachel but okay) is a rare and troublemaking specialist: she is one of the few "mind divers" in a civilization that lives underground after some unspecified ecological disaster. Mind divers provide the cybernetic systems that keep them all alive with consciousness and reactivity, something which the machines cannot provide themselves. The biggest fear Bunker people have is that there will be a breach and the toxins of the outside world will get inside.

Rahzel is unusual in that Mind Divers go through several stages of evolution: after training and implanation of their cyberwear, they go their apartment where they will live the rest of their lives without any physical contact with another human being. Their lives are dedicated to sleep, self-maintainence, and keeping their civilization running. Eventually, a mind-diver transitions to existence as a brain in a vat. Rahzel has steadfastly refused that last stage. She likes living. She cooks for herself rather than suffer with the yeast cakes (a woman after my own heart!).

Rahzel's life becomes interesting when one of the many satellites that still watch over the Earth and the solar system sends down a communications block over a channel that hasn't been used for centuries. Circuits that haven't been activated for all that time come to life, and nobody inside the Bunker knows what's happening. All of the mind-divers who try to get inside that part of the network and understand what's happening report disturbing hallucinations.

Only Rahzel is able to continue to interact with the network segment that the data has awakened and now occupies. The hallucinations are more vivid for her than anyone else, but she can handle them because she's still in the habit of having a body and the hallucinations are all about touch and sensation, things no woman (there are no men, we learn late in the story) in the dome has experienced since childhood and all have been rigorously trained to avoid to prevent infection and contamination and so on.

Up until this point, the writer had me convinced that she knew what she was doing. That she had done her homework, that she understood a little about cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, and singularity fiction. I mean, so far, the author's done the same thing I did with my Visitor and Hiver story arcs, but she's doing it differently, she's a different writer. I think I handled my origins better, but so far she's doing rather well.

But then it all fell apart in a bad, silly, run-on love scene in which the inexplicably apostrophed hero La'rus magically appears in her little cubicle, teaches her the meaning of real, physical love, magically whisks away her cyberwear but, oh yeah, she can still "command the resources of the Bunker and the world with a mere thought!", and tells her that despite her constant access to the Bunker and its network of satellites that everything she's ever seen of the outside world is a lie, it's actually kinda nice, men and women survive out there in peace and love and harmony, using primitive tools and wind power and maybe steam if they need to cross an ocean, and they can run off and live happily ever after.

No explanation. No origin. No solid grasp on the science. Nothing. A movie-informed excuse to show people boinking. She watched Ghost in the Shell and thought, "I can write something like that."

Oh, bleah. I'm so disappointed.

I seem to be dropping a lot of things on the table with the "I don't care what happens next" attitude. I had that toward Matrix: Revolutions, and with a few books, and now with the "Erotic High Fantasy" series Dark Elves, by Jet Mykles. Most of the reviews on the cover are from fellow writers at LooseId, and many complement the author on her use of illustration-- which is mostly really bad and unimaginative Poserporn^[?]. I got about ten pages into the first volume, Taken, and just dropped it.

A long time ago, I had a friend who worked for Williams Pinball. He was just a technician, but he helped make some great machines, like Black Knight and Hyperball. And he explained to me once that pinball designers had two terms that could not really be defined, but if you'd ever experienced them you knew what they were: "clatter" and "clank". Jet Mykles' story is nothing but clatter and clank. I haven't even gotten to the erotic part of the story, and already I'm completely turned off. An example:

Although the twisted oaks and soaring elms that lined the path were gorgeous, there was a sinister cast to them. With true night fast approaching, Gala became certain that eyes were upon them. The forest closed in around them. Sunlight was left behind. Evidence of plenty of wildlife grew around them.

"These people are insane," Diana said suddenly, gesturing toward a covey of quail that scurried boldly across the road. "This place is a wealth of game."

Gala stirred at the change of subject, but only nodded. She adjusted her seat in the saddle, yawning to shed the apathy caused by the gentle roll of her horse's gait.

"Where's this `dark danger' we were warned of?" Diana scoffed as the last vestiges of sunlight disappeared and plunged them into thick, gray twilight. Even so, Gala saw her friend's hand drift toward the sword at her belt.

The characters here are completely divorced from the writer: they're pawns of the writer's goal, not actual characters about whom we should care. Gala doesn't love and admire these woods for their fecundity, their resilience, their beauty; instead, Mykles just tells us the woods "are gorgeous." Gala doesn't feel threatened, doesn't have a sense of wrongness, can't pick out discordance that makes her uneasy; instead, the woods "are sinister." All of the sentences in the first paragraph contain linking verbs. Gala should feel something toward the woods, and the woods should give off impressions. All this passive crap sucks the life out of the story. The description of "thick twilight" after a cool, sunny day is so awkward I hurt just to read it. The whole first chapter is full of clatter and clank: Mykles just wants to get to the sex scene, and doesn't care how she gets there. Her carelessness hurts her readers (and I hope her sales).

Oh, and it gets better. Sex scene!

Diana saw Gala from the corner of her eye. A part of her mind suggested that this should stop. But the beautiful black man's hand was caressing her face. She turned to catch his gaze, riveted on her despite Gala's ministrations to his sex. Murmuring something she didn't understand, he gently pried her lips apart with his thumb, then eased the thick digit into the wet recess of her mouth.

Is it just me, or is there some lack of racial sensibility going on in this scene? "But," I can here the author saying, "There's no implication of race at all in this scene! The guy's a fucking elf, okay? He just happens to be black." [Link goes to George Carlin's brilliant routine, "Happens to be black."]

Modern sensibilities being what they are, playing with race in a fantasy setting is a risky proposition, and Mykles simply isn't smart enough to do it with anything approaching thought, much less aplomb.

Greg Egan's latest novella, Riding the Crocodile, is available from his website, shows him trying to reach out in a new direction with a fast-as-light space opera universe, and build a new setting.

Riding the Crocodile is an interesting little adventure story, but it doesn't give us anything new. The technology he shows is his usual up-to-snuff, but he isn't doing anything interesting with it. This book feels more like slumming, as if Egan isn't writing what he wants to write, but is writing for the fans of Diaspora who wanted more, who wanted to see what the universe in which Carter-Zimmerman finally settled down, the stable universe of the Star Striders and the Contingency Handlers, would be like.

Riding the Crocodile is Greg Egan, low on ideas.

He's getting a little better at depicting human beings. Leila and Jasim aren't exactly cardboard, but they're not full-fleshed people. Their inner lives, their love and dedication one to another, feels contrived and unconvincing. The economics of the universe he shows us lacks any justification for working the way he says it does: it just does, by authorial fiat, a strange cobbled-together vision of utopianism, transhumanism, and post-abundance economies.

I feel sad. Greg Egan once gave me a greater sense of wonder than almost any writer out there, but posthumanist literature has passed by Egan, and he doesn't seem to know quite how to catch up.