Review of The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

I generally do not go in for Arthurian legend. While I recognize it's a critical piece of England's history and lore, and therefore of my own as an American, I subconsciously, and apparently consciously, don't jump with excitement seeing a book appear with an overt Arthurian theme. But descriptions of Lev Grossman's 2024 The Bright Sword, particularly the fact it seemed to brim with adventure and was in fact set in a time post-Arthur's passing, seemed to lend hope it might be more. Let's see how bright.

The Bright Sword follows the meta-quest of one Ser Collum to become a knight of the round table. Growing up parent-less in the northern isles, he eventually steals a set of armor and sword and sets off on a journey to Camelot. Now that Arthur is dead and gone, Collum finds only rough camaraderie among the motley crew of knights who are now at loose ends around the round table. But when a green knight shows up one day with tidings that one of the knight's of Arthur's table yet lives, the group sets off on a quest to find said knight. Adventure, as they say, ensues.

Review of Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is quietly the most original science fiction writer of the past two decades. From societies with headless people to salt planet anarchies, domiciles in Earth's stratosphere to people who feed on light, secret Stalin science fiction projects to democratic armies (think about it), even to uncategorizable books like The This, Purgatory Mount, or The Thing Itself, Roberts has ensured that each of his books is radically different than anything else he's written, and if nothing else, will at least be an obtuse take on something the market takes for granted. Roberts latest offering Lake of Darkness (2024) is no different. Black holes, psychosis, AI, and human power hierarchies have never before been ingredients in such a stew.

The plot of Lake of Darkness is difficult to summarize in a neat paragraph. Structurally, it's the same story told twice in a row. For the first go around (the very short go around) the reader hears the tale of Raine, member of a nine-person, two-ship excursion to the edge of a black hole. Upon arriving at the event horizon, Raine does a most astonishing thing: he brutally murders all other crew members onboard. And when members of the other ship come board to investigate—after much philosophizing on the relative merits of such an attempt, he does the same. Mass murder virtually extinct in the story's utopian setting, the event is significant. It falls to a scholar of 20th century mass murder, a woman named Saccade, to get to the bottom of Raine's actions. In doing so, her story forms the second tale (the unpacked go around) of how Raine came to his actions.

Why the Excitement?: Hollywood's Adaptation of Joe R. Lansdale's The Thicket

My ears perk up when I hear that a novel I enjoyed will be adapted to the big screen. Not sure why. Fool me once, your fault. Fool me a hundred times, my fault. Maybe I get excited because the few films which do capture a book's character are so good? Regardless, I went into Elliot Lester's adaptation of Joe Lansdale's The Thicket with hope. With the right actors and script, they could do justice to Lansdale's twisting, irreverent Western. Alas, the only justice is this blog post.

At cloud level, the Hollywood adaptation follows the formula and journey of Lansdale's The Thicket. A gang kidnaps a sister, triggering the brother to hunt them down. On their trail he forms an unlikley posse: a dwarf, black man, and prostitute. Things get hairier and hairier, leading to a showdown at the titular thicket. At the ground level, however, the film departs from Lansdale's story at a couple key points, points critical to the film's success.

Review of The Unsleeping Eye (alt. title The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe) by D.G. Compton

Note: this book was published under two titles: The Unsleeping Eye in the US and The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe in the UK. To keep this review simple, I will refer to the book by the title of the version I own: The Unsleeping Eye.

It's worthwhile taking a step back to consider how quietly and quickly cameras have become an everyday part of private life. How many photos do you take of quotidian, personal things—per day? More broadly, what percentage of online content is based around private lives published in the public space? Regardless the actual percent, the underlying message seems: intentional voyeurism sells. There is something that wants to both present and consume private lives—the more dramatic the better, we animals us. Riffing off this atavistic aspect of human nature is D.G. Compton's quiet masterpiece The Unsleeping Eye (1974).

The Unsleeping Eye predominantly rotates around two characters. First is Katherine Mortenhoe. What would in modern parlance be called a romance AI prompter, Katherine uses computer algorithms to generate romance fiction, and is one of the most well known and popular for it. At the start of the novel she learns she is terminally ill, with only 4 weeks to live. The other main character is Roddie. He is an NTV television reporter who, unbeknownst to everyone save his producer, has had an invisible camera installed in his eye that records everything he sees. Terminal illness a thing of the past in the book's future, Roddie's producer has the brilliant idea of inserting Roddie into Katherine's life and creating a documentary of her final days—the sadness, grief, drama, and all. Thing is, Katherine is not interested in signing the agreements which would give NTV the rights to film and broadcast, meaning NTV need to find alternate ways of getting the footage.

Review of Gogmagog by Steve Beard & Jeff Noon

Johnny, where's that soapbox? Get it out. We've got an important message needs repeating. Seems it's not getting through. Little to the left... Ok there, good. <umph> Listen up, readers out there. Style matters! Where so much fantastika these days gets filtered through Clarion workshops or MFA writing programs before arriving at our eyeball-tips, we're losing sight of how voice, tone, style, mood, verve and other aspects of technique matter to story. Like a fingerprint, a reader used to be able to pick out a writer by their style. These days it's rice vanilla soup. Style matters! Thank you, that's all. Time to get down now, back to my hearth and quilt...

Speculiction does indeed harp on about the importance of style. As we get closer to AI novels on bookshelves, style is the one thing that humans can cling to as their own. Dear ChapGPT: please write a book in the style of David Mitchell. I'm not sure that (today) it could. But it could 100% write a book in the style of Martha Wells, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and many, many others. I don't discredit these writers' imaginations or success, only that their writing lacks a certain spark, an intimation the writer knows that you know that they know this word is being used because... This is all a long winded way of saying, Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's 2024 novel Gogmagog will likely not show up on bestseller lists, but if mood and style are as important to you as imagination and story, read on.

Gogmagog is the cantankerous tale of cantankerous Cady Mead. A tough old bat, she is an irascible, foul-mouthed, pipe-smoking sloop captain with a mysterious past. Though retired and in her cups, she is one day convinced to help transport two strangers downriver to the city of Ludwich. The river alive with creatures both real and ethereal, Cady knows it's only her knowledge and experience which can get the boat through the toughest spots and avoid the most dangerous hazards. What she doesn't count on, however, is the unexpected appearance of one of her oldest enemies haunting the river.

Review of Land of the Headless by Adam Roberts

I almost didn't read Adam Roberts' novel Land of the Headless (2007). The plot's main conceit was so lacking in subtlety and so ripe with potential for comic book cheese that I was prepared to immediately return it should the first few pages live up to my concerns. The title to be taken literally, it tells the story of a planet where capitol punishment removes the guilty's head but does not take their life. They live on, headless, through the wonders of technology. Something from the pulp era of sf, yes? No...

Land of the Headless is the tale of the poet Jon Cavala. An amorous youth, he forms a tryst with an aristocrat's daughter over the course of a summer. They willingly share a bed outside of marriage, but only to be found out. The daughter and her family betray Cavala, and he is punished for his impatient penis. For in Cavala's draconian society, murder, blasphemy, and in this case “rape”, are cause for capitol punishment. And so the story kicks off with Cavala's beheading. A device attached to the spine prior captures Cavala's mind state—consciousness more or less—so that even after his noggin is lopped off he goes on living. He buys a cheap pair of electronic eyes and ears with what little money he has left and so sets off to live a new life. The headless are shunned and the going is tough. Cavala falls in with a trio of other headless, and together they agree to travel to a nearby city by foot. What Cavala does not tell his comrades is that he goes to meet the daughter who betrayed him.

“Critically Acclaimed”: What a Difference a Couple Decades Makes

It wasn't so long ago that the words “critically acclaimed” meant: people with background and experience in literature, who read and review books professionally, recommend this. Perhaps your definition of 'critically acclaimed' differs slightly, and perhaps your opinion would differ from an individual critic's, but the idea that the book had been scrutinized from a variety of angles with an eye toward objectivity was core. It wasn't a hot take, or how cool the magic system is, or whether the book checks the right DEI boxes, yaddah yaddah yaddah. It was something more fundamental, a basic litmus test. The result was, books you may not personally enjoy will have the 'critically acclaimed' sticker but those books at least do fundamentals correctly, likely with something a little more. In today's world “critically acclaimed” means little.

People much more famous than me have stated that the internet is the democratization of worldviews. What I take this to mean is that popular opinion holds sway. How much? Hard to say. But what can be said with certainty is that the voice of critics with the clout to proclaim acclaim has dwindled in power due to the internet. Anybody with a youtube account or Reddit login can be a critic these days and get as many if not more eyes. I lament that much of this content, if not the majority of it, does not have the background, experience, or objective mindset that being a book critic requires. The bell curve of quality has been flattened.

Review of Polostan by Neal Stephenson

2021's Termination Shock was a bit of a return for Neal Stephenson—a bit, just a bit. Where his prior two novels Seveneves and Readme abandoned the idea of minimalist prose and efficient storytelling, Termination Shock held echoes of Stephenson's earlier books, faster paced affairs like Zodiac, The Cobweb, and even a little Snow Crash. But Stephenson's latest offering, Polostan (2024), hearkens back to a different fertile period in his oeuvre: the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon.

Where the Baroque Cycle looked into the dawn of the enlightenment, Newtonian physics, early computing, and the birth of the stock market, Polostan digs into primitive nuclear physics, early communism, and global 1930s industrialization. Stephenson happily wallows in this historical period through the bright eyes of a young woman caught between East and West named Dawn/Avrora (depending which hemisphere she is in). Though born Avrora in the wild steppe of Russia in the early 20th century, as a child she ends up as Dawn in the wild west of the US after her mother runs away from Stalin's brand of utopia to start a new life. A rough life, Dawn has many an adventure in Montana, in the labor strikes of Washington D.C., in the Chicago World's Fair, and in the backwoods of the midwest after getting caught by a gang of rednecks who care more for her paycheck than her wellbeing. But it's physics, particularly nuclear physics, which Dawn's life seems to return to time and again. Capitalists pulling her one way and communists the other, Dawn must eventually decide how to best play one side against the other.

Review of The Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey

I think James S.A. Corey's Expanse series earned the right to be considered for top 10 space opera all time. It realizes its solar system setting well, balances blasters and space ships with plot development, and does a good job basing its action and drama in characters that occasionally put their toe over the line of 3D. The Expanse complete, what would the writer duo come up for their next science fiction project? 2024's The Mercy of Gods.

The Mercy of Gods begins on Azean. An extra-terrestrial planet, humanity has nevertheless terraformed it by finding ways of conflating local gene structures with the plants and animals that humans require to exist. The story follows the crack team of researchers who accomplished this major gene-splicing feat. A (figurative and literal) alarm goes off when one of the researchers discovers an anomaly in their work that can only be extra-extraterrestrial—truly alien in nature. It isn't long after the Carryx and their slave species invade Azean and take humanity captive. The research team's adaptation, or not, to captivity is the story that follows.

Review of White Light by Rudy Rucker

Bruce Sterling, rogue that he was (is?), once lobbied to change the moniker of 'science fiction' to 'transreal fiction'. And while his semantics were solid and the argument sound, there is no disagreeing with several decades of common parlance. Core human behavior (i.e. lemming DNA) means that almost fifty years later we still say 'science fiction' (and we know what it is when we say it <wink>). Marching beside Sterling, perhaps in earnest, perhaps out of moral support, was friend Rudy Rucker. Rucker, also a newcomer to scientific romance at the time, wanted to likewise put his own brand on things, and did so with a style of sf that can only be diplomatically referred to as 'transreal'. The bars and back alleys would more likely call it 'gonzo sf', and Rucker's debut novel White Light (1980) is the perfect example. If the Killer Bs (Greg Bear, Greg Benford, and David Brin) were the Bruce Springsteens and Duran Durans of the 80s, then Rucker is the The Flaming Lips, Butthole Surfers, and Devos rolled into one.

White Light tells the anything-but-mundane story of mathematics professor Felix Rayman. Facing a dead-end job and marriage headed to divorce, Rayman attempts to spice things up by trying lucid dreaming. Though successful, his sense of reality begins to slip. When he should be preparing a lecture, visions appear.  While he's trying to research Cantor's continuum hypothesis, gods and devils do, too. Rayman eventually calls upon Jesus for help, and is promptly tasked with taking a ghost named Kathy to Cimon, which is a place/existence permeated with the forms of infinity. Oh, Rayman fulfills Jesus' task.  But that is just the tip of the boot that kicks the reader in the ass, sending them into the bizarreness of Cimon. Don't hang on for the ride; spread your wings and soar.