Books

Dragons of Babel, by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Patrick

AwesomeThis nov­el arrived in the mail about a day before I head­ed west, after I’d wait­ed the bet­ter part of two weeks for it (and even longer, if you fac­tor in the fact that I pre-ordered it, but that’s a whole ‘nother sto­ry, as they say).

I start­ed read­ing it on the train, and I fin­ished it in the base­ment liv­ing room of my sis­ter-in-law’s house. It’s an engross­ing read; as I neared the end, I had to force myself to slow down, to not miss any of the fan­tas­tic* details hid­den in very near­ly every sin­gle sentence.

The nov­el­’s set in the same indus­tri­al-faerie uni­verse as The Iron Drag­on’s Daugh­ter, but it’s by no means a sequel. The sto­ry starts off with Will le Fey watch­ing war drag­ons arc across the sky over his small vil­lage, bound for con­flict in some unimag­in­able war. One is shot down, and drags itself, flight­less, to Will’s vil­lage, where it declares itself ruler. It makes Will its lieu­tenant, in part because Will, unlike any­one else in town, is half-human.

Will par­takes in the priv­i­leges and the awful respon­si­bil­i­ties of his role, and in short order the entire vil­lage is set against him. When the drag­on’s grip on the vil­lage is final­ly bro­ken, Will is sent into exile.

He makes his way across a Faërie beset by the rav­ages of war, and winds up in a refugee camp. From there he trav­els to Babel itself, the great tow­er that stands high as Heav­en, and joins in a con­fi­dence game that trades on the iden­ti­ty of the absen­tee King of Babel to make a lot of mon­ey. But there’s a twist; there’s always a twist…

This book is dense with infor­ma­tion, and every sen­tence serves to nudge the plot for­ward. There’s a depth and a human­i­ty to the char­ac­ters, and we see peo­ple at their best and at their very worst, some­times on the same page. Noth­ing is irrel­e­vant; every detail has its place and its pur­pose. The world of Babel is rife with betray­als, dis­ap­point­ments, tri­umphs, and tragedies.

Michael Swan­wick very much needs to be more well-known than he is. It’s a shame that hard­ly any­one will have heard of this book, much less read it.

______

* In every sense of the word.

Unpleasant realization

Posted on by Patrick

From the front mat­ter of Steven Brust’s Fire­fly fan-fic(ish) nov­el (found via Scalz­i’s What­ev­er):

For peo­ple who care about such things, the book was writ­ten in emacs on a box run­ning Man­drake Lin­ux, then I used OpenOf­fice to for­mat it for print­ing. The final lay­out for online pub­li­ca­tion was cre­at­ed with Microsoft Word and Adobe Acro­bat. Peo­ple who care about such things need to get a life. 

I got to the last sen­tence and thought, Aw, that’s me.

(Of course, when I read the first sen­tence, I thought, Good heav­ens, man, there’s One True text edi­tor, and that’s vi. Go go gad­get :%s/]*>//gi .

It would seem that I’m a nerd.)

I’m such a slacker

Posted on by Patrick

Ok, so here’s the sec­ond half of the William Gib­son Week­end sto­ry. Told as a Thurs­day Thir­teen, because that way I can kill two birds with one stone.

Signed copy
  1. That same night, there was a mul­ti-author read­ing, titled “Encoun­ters”, on the Main­stage. Six authors were on the dock­et, though one could­n’t make it.
  2. Quot­ing from the programme:

    Lawrence Hill and Lin­da Lei­th move char­ac­ters through chang­ing land­scapes. Bren­da Hasiuk, David Char­iandy, and Marie-Claire Blais [who was the no-show, IIRC] gath­er inter­sect­ing char­ac­ters in one space. William Gib­son hooks these two ends of the spec­trum and com­pli­cates it with vir­tu­al dimensions.

  3. They ran three authors, then had an inter­mis­sion, fol­lowed by the last two authors. As things were get­ting set up I saw Gib­son come in and sit in the audi­ence, over the in corner.
  4. The first three authors read from their works: Lin­da Lei­th from The Desert Lake, David Char­iandy from Soucouyant, and Bren­da Hasiuk from Where the Rocks Say Your Name. All were inter­est­ing; I par­tic­u­lar­ly liked Char­iandy and Hasiuk.
  5. At the inter­mis­sion, I went up onto the stage, and had a chat with David Char­iandy, who is per­haps my age. He’s a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at SFU (Simon Fras­er, not San Fran­cis­co). He was polite and enthu­si­as­tic. I also told Bren­da Hasiuk that I’d enjoyed her read­ing — her descrip­tion of rid­ing around a fron­tier town in a pick­up truck rung true, and I could almost feel the fab­ric of the seat­belt as she read.
  6. After this I glanced down into the audi­ence. William Gib­son was still sit­ting there in his chair, and there was still no one around him. What the hell, I thought, and went down into the row in front of him. I intro­duced myself, told him I’d always enjoyed his work — I read Count Zero when I was fif­teen or so, and it told me there was a whole new kind of sci­ence fic­tion, some­thing I’d nev­er read before. It hooked me.
  7. We had a brief chat, most­ly cen­tered on a) me try­ing not to say “Ohmy­godIlovey­our­work” over and over again and b) how Gib­son’s work has come clos­er and clos­er to the present.
  8. Con­sid­er: The Sprawl tril­o­gy was set in what I assume would be the 2080s or so, giv­en lit­tle hints in the nar­ra­tive. The Bridge tril­o­gy was prob­a­bly clos­er to about 2030 or so, if I had to guess. But his two lat­est works — Pat­tern Recog­ni­tion and Spook Coun­try are set in the present. The past, in fact: Spook Coun­try takes place in late 2006.
  9. Gib­son made the point that, real­ly, the world we live in now is at least as sci­ence-fic­tion­al as any­thing he’s come up with in his nov­els. Con­stant per­son­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty, the world-wide web and the Inter­net it over­lays: it reads, in some ways, like some­thing out of Neu­ro­mancer. Just add some hus­tlers and an unhealthy dose of street drugs.
  10. (True sto­ry: My sis­ter bought me Ting Ting Dja­he gin­ger can­dies for Christ­mas one year. They looked and tast­ed exact­ly as I’d expect­ed from their descrip­tion as Julius Deane’s can­dy of choice in Neu­ro­mancer.)
  11. Gib­son was very gra­cious, and I sure hope I did­n’t come across as a rav­ing fan­boy. He was very approach­able, and I kind of wish I’d have stayed longer, talk­ing, but I did­n’t want to wear out my wel­come. So I went back to my seat, and wait­ed for inter­mis­sion to end.
  12. McNal­ly Robin­son had a table set up, sell­ing the books from the authors that night, so when he came up to read, Gib­son just grabbed a copy of Spook Coun­try off the table. He reads in a bit of a monot­o­ne, some­thing I knew to expect from hav­ing seen him read on TV. What I was­n’t ready for, though, was his accent: soft and South­ern. After all, we may claim him as a Cana­di­an, but he was born in South Car­oli­na and grew up in Virginia.
  13. And that’s my William Gib­son story.

Whirlwind Weekend

Posted on by Patrick

This week­end I: saw, and had a brief chat with, William Gib­son; did nage-no-kata with the head of the Cana­di­an Grad­ing Board for judo, and also had a brief intro to the first set of ju-no-kata; drew Darth Vad­er in Cray­ola cray­on; and heard the cutest ver­sion of the ABC song I think I’ll ever hear.

Fri­day
I took the day off, since I want­ed to be able to get to the read­ing at 2:30 PM. I left town about 11:30 AM, a lit­tle lat­er than I meant to, but isn’t that always the way? Bar­reled down the high­way, got into the city at about 1:15 PM or so, then made my way through the tail end of the noon rush to Portage Place. The read­ing was at the McNal­ly Robin­son book­store on the main floor, in the lit­tle eatery there. I got into the store, and the food smelled so good. I regret­ted eat­ing at McDon­ald’s in Portage, but I’d been hun­gry.

There weren’t any tables free. There were, how­ev­er, quite a few tables with one per­son at them, and most of them looked like they were there for the read­ing. I was just try­ing to fig­ure out who I was going to approach when two women got up from a table direct­ly in front of the read­ing area and said they were leav­ing, and I could have their table if I want­ed. Uh, yes. Thanks.

So I sat down, and the wait­er came around, brought me a water and a menu. I ordered a root beer and wait­ed. It was 2:00 PM, half an hour yet to go. A girl showed up, look­ing like she need­ed a seat, so I offered her a spot at my table. We chat­ted about writ­ing for a while, then the read­ing began.

William Gibson and John Havelda
William Gib­son (L) and John Havelda 

Gib­son read from his lat­est book, Spook Coun­try, which I fin­ished read­ing last week, and thor­ough­ly enjoyed. It’s set in the present day; as he’s said in recent inter­views, the present is pret­ty much sci­ence fic­tion these days. After he and the poet John Havel­da did their read­ings, there was about a half an hour Q&A with the audi­ence. Some good ques­tions were asked, on the nature of lan­guage (both authors like to play with lan­guage; Gib­son, after all, coined the term cyber­space back in nine­teen-eighty-what-have-you, and Havel­da is (IIRC) a Hun­gar­i­an poet, raised in Eng­land, now liv­ing in Por­tu­gal with his Por­tugese wife), on the future of books, and the like. After­wards I was one of the first in line, and I got my beat-up old copy of Mona Lisa Over­drive* signed by Gib­son.

to be continued…

________

* I could­n’t find my copy of Neu­ro­mancer.

Thin Air

Posted on by Patrick

…is the name of the Win­nipeg Writ­ers Fes­ti­val, and this year one of the speak­ers is William Gibson.

I ful­ly intend to be there for at least one of his events.

Bone

Posted on by Patrick

If you haven’t read Bone yet, you real­ly should.

I won’t say any more*, because I should be writ­ing my own zom­bie-lawyer epic, but here are pas­sel of reviews.

* Except this: I did­n’t want it to end. As I approached page 1200**, I found myself torn: I could­n’t wait to turn the page and see just how every­one was going to get out of this jam, but I want­ed to pace myself, because I did­n’t want to get to the end­ing. No mat­ter how good an end­ing it was (and I feel it was just about per­fect), it would still be The End. I want­ed to stay with all of them—the Bone cousins, Thorn, Gran’­ma Ben, the red drag­on, even the stu­pid, stu­pid rat creatures—just a lit­tle longer.

It’s been almost for­ev­er since I read a book that made me feel that way.

** Yes. It’s a com­ic. Yes. It’s clear of 1300 pages long.

Lamb

Posted on by Patrick

Lamb, a nov­el by Christo­pher Moore.

The sub­ti­tle on this one is “The Gospel accord­ing to Biff, Christ’s child­hood pal”, so right off you should know if you’re the type that will enjoy this sto­ry, or the kind that maybe should­n’t pick it up. Me, I’m the type that would enjoy this story.

Hav­ing read Moore’s nov­el Coy­ote Blue years ago, I knew that he was fun­ny. Appar­ent­ly I’d for­got­ten how fun­ny. I chor­tled all the way through this book (well, till I got to the last sec­tion, titled “The Passion”).

The sto­ry is large­ly con­cerned with the “miss­ing years” of Christ’s life. Biff (whose real name is Levi bar Alphaeus) and Christ (whose real name is Joshua bar Joseph) grow up togeth­er, fall in love with the same girl (Mary the Mag­da­lene, referred to here as “Mag­gie”), and have all kinds of adven­tures and mis­ad­ven­tures togeth­er. When events con­spire to put Mag­gie beyond their reach for­ev­er, Joshua and Biff sad­dle up and head off to the East, look­ing for the Wise Men that had showed up on the night of Josh’s birth.

They track down Balthasar, Mel­chior, and Gas­par, traips­ing from Israel to Afghanistan, Chi­na, and India in the process, learn­ing kung fu, Zen Bud­dhism, and Hin­du asceti­cism along the way. (Well, Josh learns; Biff is more into the ladies, and he learns quite a few items from them, most­ly relat­ed to the Kama Sutra.)

The sto­ry is packed with laughs, both overt and sly (at one point, Biff says to Josh, as they trav­el toward Dam­as­cus, “Well it’s not just going to come to you in a flash here on the Dam­as­cus road, Josh. That sort of thing does­n’t happen.”

As good as he is at telling the fun­ny stuff, Moore does­n’t flinch when he tells the sad sto­ries; the grim and grue­some parts of the tale are equal­ly well-told. The Pas­sion and the Cru­ci­fix­ion are espe­cial­ly heart-rend­ing when told in the voice of a man forced to watch his clos­est friend die.

When I came to the epi­logue, I found myself wish­ing there was more, much more. I think I’ll have to get some more Christo­pher Moore nov­els into my house.

Thirteen Literary Wonders

Posted on by Patrick

Inspired by Doug’s post on his favourite books, here are thir­teen pieces of text that I read in school. Some I liked, some I didn’t.

    Ones I liked
  1. There were sev­er­al Norse Myths in one of the read­ers that I had in about Grade Five or so. They were there as sort of a com­pare and con­trast with a cou­ple of Greek myths. The only one that I remem­ber for sure being there was the myth of how Loki gave away–and then recovered–Idunn’s gold­en apples. To this day I still love the Norse myths. I think maybe it’s some­thing about Rag­narok that draws me to them, the knowl­edge that some­day, all the gods die.
  2. Mack Reynolds’ short sto­ry Burnt Toast fea­tures an inter­est­ing twist on the “sell your soul to the Dev­il” sto­ry. A man, des­per­ate for mon­ey, is giv­en this chal­lenge by a demon: drink one of thir­teen shots of liquor, one of which is spiked with poi­son. If you get the poi­son, I get your soul. For each drink that you fire back, you get an amount of mon­ey that goes up expo­nen­tial­ly (the first glass is worth $100, the sec­ond $200, the third $400, and so forth). The man accepts the chal­lenge, and keeps com­ing back for more. As the num­ber of shot glass­es dwin­dles, and the amount get high­er, the ten­sion mounts, until there’s only two glass­es left. What comes next? Ask me nice and I might tell you. [edit: Appar­ent­ly this sto­ry was first pub­lished in a 1955 Play­boy. I read it in a read­er at school. Really.]
  3. The only Shake­speare play I’ve ever read, to date, is Mac­beth. It was all right. I watched the blood­less BBC ver­sion of it, and it was not all right. At the end, when Mac­duff holds Mac­beth’s head aloft, it’s got red yarn hang­ing down from it.
  4. I much pre­ferred George Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm to its longer cousin, 1984. Then one day I was in a moun­taineer­ing store in Cal­gary, and there was a dis­play of walk­ing sticks. The ad cam­paign for them made me laugh: “Four legs good, two legs bad”.
  5. I know it sounds cheesy when peo­ple say things like “It real­ly makes you appre­ci­ate what you have”, but for me, the book that this sen­tence applies to is One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso­vich, by Solzhenitsyn.
  6. In the tenth grade, I read Ray Brad­bury’s Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, and quite enjoyed it. Years lat­er, some­one com­pared my writ­ing to Brad­bury’s. Hmmm.…
  7. Arthur Miller’s The Cru­cible had an impact on me. Espe­cial­ly Giles Corey’s death, off-scene, pressed by stones. His last words were “More weight”, and then he expired.
  8. When I was about nine years old, my moth­er, a for­mer teacher, did an extend­ed stint sub­bing in one of the junior high class­es. They were read­ing Incred­i­ble Jour­ney, and some of the stu­dents were com­plain­ing bit­ter­ly about hav­ing to read it. Mom brought home a copy for me, and I burned through it in a few days. The next time some­one com­plained in class, she point­ed out that her nine-year-old son had read it, and that appar­ent­ly shut them up.
  9. There are sev­er­al comix (actu­al­ly, I sup­pose, they’re more accu­rate­ly ban­des dess­inées) that I used to read dur­ing library peri­od at my elementary/junior high school. It was a French immer­sion school, so we were encour­aged (read forced) to read French books in the library. The loop­hole was that there was a hefty col­lec­tion of Schtroumpfs and Astérix et Obélix comics in the library. There were a lot of jokes in the char­ac­ters’ names in Astérix–the dog’s name, en français, was Idé­fixe (in Eng­lish, he goes by Dogmatix).
  10. Speak White by Michèle Lalonde, a poem about the oppres­sion of the French lan­guage in North Amer­i­ca (if I remem­ber cor­rect­ly). I took this in first-year uni­ver­si­ty French.

    11. Not So Much

  11. Pret­ty much any­thing by Gabrielle Roy. She takes a long time to say… noth­ing. I sup­pose this might be an indict­ment of lit­er­a­ture in gen­er­al, but heav­en help me, GR was, in my view, the queen of boring.
  12. Aldous Hux­ley’s Brave New World. I have friends who insist I should give it anoth­er shot, and I may yet. The sto­ry did­n’t appeal to me the first time, though. Then again, it was­n’t till my sec­ond read of Dune that I got into the story…
  13. See Dick Run. My grand­moth­er’s favourite sto­ry about me is that, once, to prove to some­one that I could read (at the age of three), she had me read a Dick & Jane book. I read it cov­er to cov­er, closed it, and said, “Well, that was a stu­pid sto­ry.” And now I think every­one I’ve ever met knows that story.

Oth­er 13ers:

Tech­no­rati: Thurs­day Thirteen

Censoring Dennis Lee?

Posted on by Patrick

Some days, it just don’t pay to read the news.

CBC Arts: N.S. edu­ca­tors can’t see humour in ‘Brat­ty Broth­er’ poem

Review­ers of one of my favourite poems from my childhood–“The Brat­ty Broth­er” by Den­nis Lee–are hav­ing issues with the poem’s inclu­sion in a book dis­trib­uted to every first-grad­er in Cana­da to pro­mote literacy.

The poem, “Brat­ty Broth­er”, is a vio­lent poem and the humour of it escapes our review­ers. Some par­ents may also respond neg­a­tive­ly to the poem…

Per­haps the review­ers need to read this poem as a child would, rather than as a lit­i­ga­tion-fear­ing no-fun-allowed suit would.

Besides,

The poem is more than 30 years old and the poet him­self says he’s had noth­ing but pos­i­tive feed­back from par­ents, who actu­al­ly say the book helps kids with younger ‘brat­ty’ broth­ers under­stand that they aren’t the only ones hav­ing these problems.

Here is part of the poem, repro­duced from memory:

I dumped the brat­ty brother
In the shark-infest­ed sea,
By dusk the sea was empty
And the brat was home with me.
…
I wept, and hurled the brat­ty brother
Off the CN Tower;
He lol­loped through the liv­ing room
In less than half an hour.

Of course, when I read it, I sub­sti­tut­ed “sis­ter” for “broth­er”, as I have two sis­ters and not a sin­gle brother.

I mean real­ly.  What’s next?  Do we ban “Alli­ga­tor Pie” on the off-chance that some­one los­es a leg try­ing to snare some lunch?

Iron Sunrise

Posted on by Patrick

A while ago I read Acceleran­do by Charles Stross, a whirl­wind tour of the solar sys­tem and beyond before, dur­ing, and after a Tech­no­log­i­cal Sin­gu­lar­i­ty. It was an enjoy­able read at a break­neck pace. So when I was in Chap­ters in Win­nipeg, I picked up Iron Sun­rise, which fea­tures a dif­fer­ent Sin­gu­lar­i­ty and a dif­fer­ent future. It was anoth­er enjoy­able and break­neck read, though a cou­ple things both­ered me–Stross real­ly likes his adverbs, and they had a ten­den­cy to stand out for me, for what­ev­er rea­son; and the book is actu­al­ly a sequel to his Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Sky, but I had to go online to find that out. Nowhere on the cov­ers or inside the book is this lit­tle fact men­tioned. Had it been, I prob­a­bly would have picked up Sin­gu­lar­i­ty Sky instead. (Oh well. It’s not the first time I’ve start­ed in the mid­dle of a series; I read William Gib­son’s Sprawl tril­o­gy 2–1‑3.)
Con­tin­ue read­ing “Iron Sun­rise” →