Staving Off the Battlestar Galactica Twitchies: Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Though this book's been out for a couple of years, I just heard about it from Bookshelves of Doom, and it sounded like good methadone for The Hunger Games series.

I had no idea it would help me get through the next 24 hours until the series finale of Battlestar Galactica.

Like The Hunger Games, Unwind is set in a futuristic, post-war United States. Only here, the "Heartland Wars," were fought between pro-life and pro-choice factions, who eventually settle upon a highly untidy compromise.

Abortion becomes completely illegal, but when children are between the ages of 13 and 18, their parents or guardians can choose to have them "unwound." Unwinding doesn't end a "life" because, technically, the child's parts are surgically implanted into a living human being - organs, limbs, skin, hair - 99.4% of the kid will wind up somewhere else. Transplanting and grafting have become so technologically advanced that the sky's the limit. Need a lung? They can do that. Want a new arm, a different color eyes, a full head of hair? They can do that.

Kids who get unwound tend to fall into a few different categories: juvenile delinquents, wards of the state, unwanted children, and, children born into certain religious sects, called "tithes."

In Unwind, Shusterman follows a number of these kids on a journey that ought to lead immediately to a "harvest camp," but doesn't. One way or another, the kids here escape, go AWOL, and either through their own ingenuity or the kindness of strangers, end up somewhere quite different. I don't want to say too much more about the book, because it's quite twisty and suspenseful, but this leads us to Battlestar Galactica.

Let's just say that there's a character in the book called The Admiral.

And he's taken it upon himself to shepherd a number of scared, refugee kids slated for certain doom. And he puts them up in a place that's secure, though harsh and physically demanding. And his face is marked with scars, and he has perfectly straight, white teeth, and he is possessed of a demeanor that is stern, yet eminently warm and understanding. He has known great pain and great loss, and is somewhat damaged as a result. He doesn't always trust the right people, but he has an instinct for character.

I could not read Unwind without imagining The Admiral as anyone other than Edward James Olmos, aka, Admiral Adama. And that made the book all the better.

I don't know if Shusterman is a BSG fan, but if he is, this is a great homage (a tribute, and most definitely NOT a rip-off). If he's not, well, then he should be. I think he'd dig it the most.

It's a terrific book that delivers big action while at the same time providing nuanced ideas about where life begins, where it ends, and what it all means.

So say we all.

Zombie Summer Reading: It's People! PEOPLE!

I'll admit it: Almost nothing makes me happier than the literary equivalent of an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. If Tom Servo and the gang ever started recording commentary on audio books, I'd probably keel over from sheer joy.

Mary knows of my addiction, and from time to time she picks up some truly sublime crap for my amusement. A couple of weeks ago, she emailed me from work - indecently pleased with herself - to tell me that she'd be bringing home Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!, perhaps better known as the book upon which they based that most often mocked entry in the Charlton Heston oeuvre, Soylent Green.*

Oh happy day.

So imagine my surprise and consternation when I finish the book and nowhere in it has anyone screamed "It's people!!" In fact, there is no sinister plot in which people are ground up and pressed into tasty wafers at all. The titular green crackers are made from seaweed, and "It's made of Kelp! KEEEEELLLLLLP!!" just isn't very likely to inspire much dread or revulsion.

In fact, the only soylent in Make Room! Make Room! comes in the form of soylent steaks (soylent = soy + lentil). I can get those at the Ralph's down the street; again, not so scary unless you count the price of corn these days. (Zing!)

All griping aside, it may turn out that the price of corn actually is the scariest thing about Harrison's novel. Written at a time when the population explosion was the apocalypse du jour, the book's dystopian vision of the U.S. in 1999 - overcrowded, starving, and Hobbesian in the extreme - is certainly unnerving: homeless families crowded into abandoned parking garages to live in abandoned cars, water shortages, food shortages, utterly overwhelmed civic institutions, refugees living on fleets of cargo ships permanently converted into floating cities in the NY harbor, etc.

The plot - your basic cop-on-a-murder-case story - is pretty unremarkable and serves mostly an excuse to explore Harrison's starved new world. Likewise, the characterization is also fairly underwhelming. Our Hero is a bit of a cipher and the rest of the players relentlessly conform to stock types: fallen woman with a heart of tarnished gold, honorable mob bodyguard, crotchety old man sidekick, impoverished kid in over his head. Like a lot of third-tier science fiction, this is a novel written at the intersection of "pretty great idea for a book" and "not the world's greatest writer."

Still, it's worth taking on the bus if sci-fi dystopia is your thing. For one, it makes for an interesting noir companion to Issac Asimov's trio of Elijah Bailey novels. Harrison has a far more bleak vision of a terminally overcrowded Earth than Asimov, but it's interesting to see what the two writers do with the same basic premise.

And of course, given that the book and the film part ways around page 50 you can go into it without knowing the ending, which - sadly - is not this:



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*Also, oddly enough, this makes another movie adaptation of the work of a Zombie Summer Reading author that stars Edward G. Robinson as a cop. He's the Kevin Bacon of the golden age of cinema, apparently. I think that we must schedule a Soylent Green/Harness Bull double feature.

This Blade for Hire: The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe

The Sword-Edged Blonde by Alex Bledsoe

First-time novelist Alex Bledsoe's The Sword-Edged Blonde is a genre mash-up of hardboiled detective and fantasy quest novels, which sounds odd until you consider the similarities that these kinds of stories tend to share share: grizzled, wise-cracking, fiercely independent protagonists who live by their own code, and spend a good quarter of any book being knocked unconscious. And whether it's the Pasadena mansions, flophouses, and seedy bars of a Chandler novel or the castles, alehouses, and rogues' dens of a fantasy novel, our heroes have to traverse their landscapes, uncovering the right secrets and cracking the right heads to achieve their ends. Bledsoe's clearly onto something here.

Like many classic hardboiled heroes, Eddie LaCrosse has cut himself off from the past in an effort to shake off the personal demons lurking there, and is holed up in a seedy, backwater town taking any job that comes his way. The book gets off to a shaky start when Eddie is enlisted to track down a kidnapped princess, an exposition-heavy plot thread that's, fortunately, tied up rather quickly.

The real fun begins when Eddie is contacted by his childhood best friend, now the ruler of a neighboring kingdom, for some discreet assistance in solving a grisly crime. The king's infant son has been horribly murdered (it's gruesome), and the queen is the most likely suspect. And despite her insistence to the contrary, Eddie just can't shake the feeling that he's met her somewhere before, under bloody circumstances.

In order to solve the mystery of the Queen's identity and her son's murder, Eddie has to reexamine his past, venturing to places on the map, and in his own psyche, that he hasn't visited in years. Through the effective use of flashbacks, dark secrets are gradually teased out, and old wounds opened, and Eddie realizes that the evil he's trying to track down is older, deeper, and more unbelievable than he'd ever imagined.

Once this plot gathers its momentum, it's unstoppable, and filled with fantastic twists and surprises, and a satisfying finish. However, the book's success is hampered by that most insidious quality of fantasy fiction, the casual sexism. I almost hate to single Bledsoe out for this, as I've encountered it in most of the depictions of female characters in science fiction and fantasy written by men, but it bothered me enough that I felt it was worth remarking on.

Considering that Eddie's character isn't established as a rake or a letch, it's odd that he ogles nearly every female character in the book that crosses his path, in prose that's often cringe-inducing. Upon meeting one of the book's more incidental characters, Eddie thinks, "For such a prolific breeder, Shana Vint was still very attractive in an earthy, sensual way that went well beyond physical appearance. I imagined that, had I married her, she'd have spent a lot of time knocked up, too." Another character is described as wearing a dress "so tight you could count her freckles" (what does that even mean?).

This type of description extends to the book's central female characters as well, relying on that well-worn trope that a woman in fantasy can be tough, independent, and strong, provided that's she's also gorgeous, sensual, and hot for our hero.

The conventions of gender and objectification in fantasy fiction are done to death, and Bledsoe is too fine a writer to be taking them up. In The Sword-Edged Blonde, he's crafted a memorable world, an engaging hero, and a tight, razor-sharp plot. I hope that, in his next book, we see a lot more of this, without all those stale, busty serving wenches.

Bits and Pieces

The always incredible "David House" in Hancock Park is aglow in all its holiday splendor.

The 1947project offers a selection of gift ideas for the criminally minded.

In a rant against the wussy, oversexualized Disney Princesses, Barbara Ehrenreich stops just short of calling the Disney Corporation a bunch of pederasts.

And finally, Arthur C. Clarke reflects upon the space age, extraterrestrial life, his 90 orbits of the planet here.

Mordor or Los Angeles?

"Far away now rising towards the South the sun, piercing the smokes and haze, burned ominous, a dull bleared disc of red. . ."

Okay, clearly, it's Mordor, but due to the haze and smoke caused by the massive wildfires, I've been half expecting Smaug or a Nazgul or something to go flying by the window. It's looked like about 30 minutes before sunset all day, and now that it gets closer to evening it's starting to look like Caprica City, if you know what I mean.

And if you do: Greetings, fellow dork! Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go flush out my sinuses. Ack.

Cementing My Geek Cred. . .

. . .in more way than one. This isn't exactly book related, but I came across it and had to post it, because Star Trek + Monty Python = wicked cool, as they used to say.

I Meant To Go To Sleep an Hour Ago. . .

. . .but alas, I found myself a scant hundred or so pages from the end of Scott Lynch's Red Skies Under Red Seas.

And given that the new semester doesn't start until Monday, and seeing as how I had the new New Pornographers album to keep me company, it seems that completion was the better part of valor.

Now, I can't really say much about the novel now in terms of a full-blown review, because Mary hasn't read it yet and the merest suggestion of plot points or spoilers will land me in marital stocks, so to speak, like a Pilgrim who mooned Plymouth Rock. But I can say the following:

A) I laughed aloud (p. 534, 2nd paragraph from the subheading break).
B) I teared up (the paragraph that spans p. 509-510).
C) The Lies of Locke Lamora (the preceding novel in this series) was great fun, but this one does what Lies did and then some. The beats of the former novel were quite inventive, but in the long run somewhat familiar. This one found me - someone used to the usual plot twists in novels like this - wholly adrift and wondering what the heck could happen next at several points, and when it did tread familiar ground, it did so with perhaps a page and a half of warning in a manner that, in retrospect, I realize was set up chapters and chapters before.
D) This is, to pull a wholly lame reviewing trick, the Pulp Fiction to the previous novel's Reservoir Dogs. (I use this particular analogy because the author has a rather Tarantino-esque facility with jumping around temporally inside of a story.)

Sure, I'm gushing. It's late, I put Red Seas down about fifteen minutes ago, and I'll admit that my credibility as a reviewer is thus somewhat suspect. Even worse, I may be guilty of the kind of reviewing that sets up future readers for inevitable disappointment. If the latter is the case, let me say the following about my tastes and critical acumen: I sincerely and unironically love Neil Diamond, the laziest and most phoned-in of Dash Hammett's writing, the Star Trek episode where Kirk and company meet Abraham Lincoln, and certain tracks on the Gin Blossom's second album. I am, as it turns out, a cheap date at times.

Still, in closing:

Dang.

Neil Gaiman Lurves Books, But Don't We All

Ah, YouTube. What would I do without you? (Work, probably.)

Check out this clip in which an audience member at Comic Con asks Neil Gaiman how he got his imagination, apparently hoping that Neil will let slip the source of his Secret Writer Mojo (tm), so that said audience member can also become a well-regarded writer of fantasy novels, comics, screenplays, etc.

Gaiman, of course, fails to give the guy a straight answer. But then again, everybody knows that the best way to take someone's powers and add them to your own is to pluck their heart out of their chest, like in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. (Omnumshibah!) So you can see why Neil might not want to broadcast that sort of thing.*

Don't forget, Stardust (based on an enjoyable, if somewhat twee Gaiman novel) opens up this weekend.

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* You know, this was funnier in my head. As it is, it kind of reads a little weird. Ah well.

(Note to Mr. Gaiman's lawyers: I'm totally kidding about the whole "Temple of Doom" thing. Besides, if a few semesters of college Anthropology taught me anything, it's that shrinking heads is actually the best way to gain the powers of your foes.)

Little Red Men

I realize I've been somewhat silent on the Zombie Summer Reading front, but that's because....well....I been busy, what with the research, the writing, the statistics tutoring, and the re-learning how to play the piano.

But that ends today, because what I have to show you is so incredibly awesome that I could keep its awesome secret no longer.

(See? Words are failing me.)

Three words, comrades: Bolshevik Science Fiction.

Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia was first published in 1908, republished a few times up until the late twenties, and then fell off the map for a while. The first English translation appeared in the early Eighties, and the edition I found also contains a prequel story and an introductory essay on "Fantasy and Revolution". So basically what we have here is an embarrassment of riches, only redistributed.

As it happens, Martian society is quite a bit older than Earth society, and consequently it's already gone through the stages of history that we Earthlings are mired in, and the Martian proletariat has triumphed and created a collectivist utopia among the canals. The novel follows the adventures of the most progressive Bolshevik in Russia, who's abducted and taken to Mars to be shown the social future, as it were, so that he can eventually act as an ambassador between the worlds.

It's actually a very readable tale, apart from its value as a historical artifact. Red Star shares a lot with classic sci-fi tales like The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which our baser human instincts are pitted against our desire to advance as a society, only with a Marxist (not Leninist or Stalinist) twist. It reads like The Communist Manifesto, only with spaceships.

There's a lot more I could say about this book, which is both endearingly dogged in its celebration of the collective good over the wants of the individual and surprisingly clear-eyed about the kinds of problems likely to arise in such a society. But instead, I'll just leave you with this:

Communist Martians.

Awesome.

Mary Is Now +2 to Strike

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch

I really loved this book. And if, like me, you don't read any fantasy except for the horribly obvious titles, this is not a half bad place to start, especially if you're on the lookout for Harry Potter methadone.

Despite not reading much fantasy I had certain, not entirely unfounded ideas about it -- books thick enough to stop bullets, populated with humorless muscle-bound D&D characters and serving wenches in leather bikinis wielding elven blades. Gag.

But not only can Scott Lynch pull together an ass-kicking and eminently charming Ocean's Eleven-esque plot, the man also appears to be a card-carrying feminist.*

Can anyone recommend more titles like this? Low magic fantasy with strong female characters, and more focus on the brains than the brawn? I'd be ever so grateful for your assistance in facilitating my transformation to Queen of the Geeks.
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* Check out his post on the new Bond movie, reminding critics that before they get all misty-eyed about the franchise's return to Ian Fleming's Bond, they would do well to remember that Ian Fleming's Bond is a misogynist rat.

We Have Met the Spacemen, and They are Graduate Students

Hari Seldon is the Scotty of the social sciences: a science fiction character who embodies our particular brand of geek's idealized sense of self, the ultimate in wish fulfillment for the Chi-Square crowd. While Montgomery Scott taught the indoor children of the physics persuasion that sometimes the engineer saved the ship, got the girl, and beat the hell out of a bunch of Klingons who couldn't hold their liquor, with the Foundation series, Issac Asimov teaches us that we, the bastard children of Cassandra and Emil Durkheim, were right all along, and if everyone would listen to us, we could fix society.

And also: we would have spaceships and nuclear blasters.

Seldon is the inventor of "psychohistory" - a kind of demography/political sociology/ group psychology on an interplanetary scale that can predict the broad sweep of history with amazing accuracy. Crunching the numbers shows him that the Empire is about to collapse and galactic society is about to fall into a dark ages that will last 30,000 years. However, Seldon has also figured out how to shorten that interregnum to 1,000 years via subtly planning out the course of the future, and establishes a foundation of scholars on a tiny planet out in the galactic boonies to carry out "the Seldon Plan".*

Overall Seldon is more of a mythic figure than a protagonist per se and he may be a bit of a trickster, as it becomes more and more clear that he arguably set up a double-blind experiment where the outcome is the fate of humanity and the confederates are hard to tell from the dupes. The series follows several centuries of the Plan, and if anyone can be said to be the hero of the story arc it's the Seldon Foundation itself. Over the course of the series, several forces arise to challenge the Foundation, and not all of them were predicted by Seldon.

Of the books, my favorite are those that cover the early leaders of the Foundation, as they resort to ever-sneakier and more inventive diplomacy to take on interplanetary warlords, the remnants of the dying Empire, and internal political intrigue. Asimov also does a nice job keeping the characters engaging, which is very necessesary when one of the basic conceits of your story is that the mass actions of humanity render their individual choices and actions more or less irrelevant.**

Plus, at the end of each crisis the Foundation faces, a little Hari Seldon hologram pops up in their town hall and explains how he'd had all of this predicted with an alpha = .05, given that he set up the Foundation when, where, and how he did. The series eventually starts to exhibit diminishing returns, but I think it stays pretty solid all the way up to Foundation's Edge.

If you like...
States and Social Revolution by Theda Skocpol,***
Guns, Germs, and Steel or Collapse by Jared Diamond,****
those old Star Trek episodes where Kirk and the gang find some planet run by a computer, or an alien dressed up like a 19th century dandy, or the Romans or something,

These books are for you.
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*In regards to the amazing predictive power and causal heft of Seldon's Plan, he's also kind of the Golden Fleece of sociology as well, but that's neither here nor there.
**The duality of structure, determinism vs. agency - does this sound familiar to anyone else?
*** Come to think of it, given the logic of the plot, admirers of Barrington Moore might like it more.
****This Jared is not, FYI, the Subway guy.

Mazer Rackham Built My Hot Rod

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

"General Levy has no pity for anyone. All the videos say so. But don't hurt this boy."
"Are you joking?"
"I mean, don't hurt him more than you have to."

MM: When I began the "Great Science Fiction Odyssey of 2006," Brady was like, "Ooh, ooh, ooh. This one, this one." And having not been led astray by him with Isaac Asimov, I took it. And the next few days are kind of a blur. I read this book on the bus, while eating dinner, and really, any moment that I was not otherwise engaged in paid labor or unconsciousness.

To sum up, a generation or two before our story begins, an alien race (known throughout the book as 'buggers') darn near wiped out earth, and the only thing that prevented its utter annihilation was the quick-thinking action of a young fleet commander named Mazer Rackham (truly a name worthy of Airwolf). The leaders of Earth know they got incredibly lucky with Rackham, and immediately set about preparing an elite command for the next invasion. They monitor small children, plucking up the ones that show an aptitude for military leadership, and ship them off to Battle School, where they spend a few years leading platoons and zapping each other with freeze rays in zero gravity war scenarios.

As you might imagine, this can really mess a little kid up. Some of the kids rise to the occasion, some are broken beyond repair, and some become psychotic little monsters. Enter Ender.

BP: Ender is kind of a eugenics Goldilocks. His parents, having good genes, were - depite an overpopulation problem - allowed to have 3 kids. Their first, Peter, was too psychotic. Their second, Valentine, was too kind. Ender, on the other hand, is juuuust right. They figure this out when, having been hit by a bully, Ender knocks him flat and then beats him to a pulp while he is down. Peter would have killed him, Valentine would have turned the other cheek, but Ender knew that preventing further reprisals meant dirty pool, as it were. What makes Ender sympathetic is that knows that, even though he was (tactically) right he also knows that he was wrong to do it.

The majority of the book is taken up with Ender's time in Battle School, where he is jumped through hoop after hoop. You'd think this would get boring, but it doesn't. On the one hand, Ender is such a strategist that it's hard to imagine him losing a scenario. On the other hand, the fate of the human race is at stake and his officers stoop to unbelievable depths to try and humiliate, defeat, and break a six year old. Ender makes friends? Turn them against him. Ender wins scenarios? Change the rules. Ender still wins and gets respect? Use it to isolate him. By the time he's ten, and shipped off to Command School, Ender is edging towards the kind of stoic loneliness and isolation of world savior types like, say, a fully grown Superman.

MM: Sometimes it's easy to forget that Ender's just a little boy, much younger, yet somehow much more together than Peter Parker ever managed to be. But even though Ender's brain is pretty much adult from the beginning, Card still manages to trace his maturation, charting some kind of childhood development for a childhood that has certainly never existed. Watching Ender grow up is one of the best - and most tragic- things about the book.

As Brady mentioned, the non-stop war room scenarios should get tedious, but don't. This is because, on top of the increasing inventiveness of each series of battle tactics, there's also a side plot on Earth, involving the seriously creepy Peter and the logical, yet emotional Valentine (imagine if Hermione was a Vulcan). I won't tell you much, but the side plot later ties in rather importantly to the larger story, and it involves a pair of adolescents hatching a plan for world domination. They're Ender's siblings... so you know they'll probably come up with something interesting.

BP: To say more would be criminal, as there are a few late in the game twists that ratchet up the emotional heft of Ender's plight without sacrificing the momentum of the plot. Though I figured out relatively quickly that Verbal Kent was Keyzer Soze and that Bruce Willis had already taken the big dirt nap, I had to backtrack a few pages in several cases: the text had me reading so fast I did the mental equivalent of a double-take, and then had to go back and make sure I hadn't misread something.

After the last "Mary Meets The Spacemen," Mary remarked that it was a shame that some people respond to stories like these by saying they're too far-fetched, or not real enough. My response was "Yeah, because that family in The Corrections really existed." But if I had to locate this book in the realm of more ostensibly realist fiction, I'd call it a boarding school coming-of-age: something like A Separate Peace, or maybe even Ferrol Sams's The Whisper of the River, with a dash of Lord of the Flies thrown in.

And spaceships.

Mary Meets the Spacemen

Brady here.

Science fiction in general gets kind of a bad rap. Sure, it's good for summer blockbusters and tv, if it's been gussied up with pretty people and lots of explosions, but most literary critics treat sci-fi like...well, like the cool kids in high school treat the Babylon 5 fans that speak Klingon at lunch.

So, the other day Mary and I were talking about books, and I asked her if she had ever read any science fiction. None, she says. Mary reads a lot of books. Like, five at a time, weekly. She's probably read ten thousand books (seriously). And not one example of science or "speculative" fiction, with the predictable "high school reading list" exemptions: Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, 1984.

This is a shame, and I immediately shoved Issac Asimov's The Caves of Steel in her face and refused to take it away until she read it and agreed to review it here. (It's got detectives in it, which helped.) So without further ado, here's our illustrious blogmistress:

MM: For the record, I agreed to this series of sci-fi posts mostly because Brady just would not let it go. Finally, I'm like, "Okay, give me an Asimov book or whatever, and I will read it because I love you and because it will probably make you stop bugging me."

At first, I was not impressed. Asimov's vision of the future in this book looks a little something like the Jetsons, if the Jetsons were Morlocks. But then, Asimov won me over with a simple little passage. Our hero does something, a something so insignificant that it's practically a nothing, that utterly crushes his wife. He doesn't mean to, consciously at least, and they stay happily married and all, but never so happily as they were. It's a nice touch. I was tentatively intrigued.

BP: I'll say this. Asimov's strengths are not those of the prose stylist. When it comes to putting sentences together, he's as dry as Mars in summer. Sometimes his characters take a while to round out, and some of them never do. But Asimov's real secret weapon - along with the occasional nice touches like the one Mary mentions - are his ideas, which are big.

Some plots are driven by the characters, and some narratives are driven by the plot. Asimov's stories are driven by ideas. In The Caves of Steel, half the fun is seeing the broad strokes of what has become of humanity: living underground, having abolished anything like real privacy while retaining vaguely American middle-class mores, increasingly lifelike robots taking retail jobs away from humans, farming yeast to feed the teeming masses, and living in constant fear of being "declassified" and thus spending the rest of your life sleeping in the community barracks. Oh, and everyone is deeply agoraphobic.

MM: The city dwellers are also highly xenophobic. In addition to the anti-robot sentiment - a near riot breaks out at a shoe store that has just leased robot shoe salesmen - the city dwellers also hate the Spacers, the humans who were sent out to colonize the outer planets. The Spacers maintain an outpost on Earth, wear noseplugs when they come into contact with city folk, and decontaminate themselves after associating with them. This is, of course, perceived as a slight.

A Spacer is murdered at the outpost, most likely by city folk, and our hero - Elijah Bailey, a detective with the NYPD - is enlisted to solve the crime, and partnered with a Spacer robot for the job.

BP:Poor Elijah has a lot to deal with. His witnesses are convinced he carries the plague, his new partner is a robot who was built by the murder victim to look exactly like the murder victim, and the first time he stages a "parlour scene" to lay out exactly whodunit and solve the case, he accuses the one person who absolutely could not have had anything to do with it. In front of his own boss, who is not amused. If Elijah can't solve the case, it's declassification for him and his family.

Oh, and the future of space colonization kind of depends on him solving the thing, as the Spacers are in a position to quarantine, if not destroy, the Earth if the killer can't be found.

The book does start a little slow, but picks up steam as Elijah and R.(Robot) Daneel Olivaw track down the killer, venturing out into the city. We're treated to radical blocs of yeast farmers, "man-jams" on moving highways where commuters stand still while the road under them moves at forty-five miles per hour, and status heirarchies based on things like being allowed to have your own kitchen instead of using the community cafeteria.

I like to call this stuff "social science fiction," because what's really interesting here isn't the technology, but the changes in everyday life. Overcrowding is, to our hero, the "warm, living pulsation of the city" while actual motorways, deserted and only used for emergency vehicles and the like, are miles of "indecent emptiness" that depress Elijah.

And of course, on top of all the speculative fiction you get a murder mystery: two genres for the price of one.

MM: It occurs to me that science fiction is really not so different from other fiction, except for the kind of imagination that writers employ to carry it off. There's the kind of imagination that allows Jonathan Franzen to convey a character's dementia or Jeffrey Eugenides to create an incestuous family saga, and then there's the kind of imagination that gives you robots in a yeast-eating dystopia.

I think I like that kind of imagination. It takes itself very seriously at the same time it throws everything we know to be true and real and serious over the wall, and sometimes, into outer space. When you think about it, that's kind of cool.

Asimov: 1
Mary's Preconceived Notions: 0

Next time... Ender's Game.

Chimps in the Hands of an Angry God

God's Grace by Bernard Malamud

The Goods: The significantly named Calvin Cohn and his chimp, Buz, emerge from their submarine at the bottom of the ocean to find that God has destroyed all of His creation. Or rather, allowed it to destroy itself in a thermonuclear war. God comes to Cohn to deliver a message, which is, "I regret to say it was through a minuscule error that you escaped destruction." Cohn makes a rather convincing case for his survival - he did, after all, study for the rabbinate. But God is not swayed. No Noah this time.

God does, however, agree to give him a little bit of time before killing him. And Cohn decides to use that time to prove to God that humanity deserves to exist.

This is perhaps the least fantastic part of the book. I guess when God decides to destroy the world for its wickedness, all bets are off, because Buz starts talking. Then a bunch of other chimps show up on the desert island, and they can all talk, too. And Cohn decides to teach them the Torah.

The chimps get into it, although they're not always the most obedient pupils. Some of them are decidedly New Testament chimps and find the Hebrew Bible to be a real downer. But still, they manage to form something approaching a moral society. Cohn even writes up a set of commandments for them (although there are only seven, including 'Blessed are those who divide the fruit equally'). However, Cohn's society is tenuous and when it breaks down, it breaks down horribly.

Thoughts: This was Malamud's last novel, and it is nothing like anything else he ever wrote. It is gruesome and cruel. It is not a nice book at all. However, it is magnetic and engrossing and it is very very good. And really, sometimes you look at the world and think, "God is love. God is good." And other times, you hear about something that just makes you go, "If God exists, He's just messing with us."

This book is that side of the story.

If you liked...: Lord of the Flies, Robinson Crusoe, Y: The Last Man, or the infamous issue #31 of Powers by Brian Michael Bendis, this book is for you.

There's No "I" In Apocalypse

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

It's important to bear in mind that bringing the son of Satan to earth in human form in order to launch a war between heaven and hell and wipe out the human race is very much a team effort. It takes a convent of Satanic nuns, angels, demons, and the Four Bikers of the Apocalypse (War, Famine, Death, and Pollution... when penicillin was discovered, Pestilence threw up his hands and quit in a huff).

At the same time, trying to stop the Apocalypse are an angel and a demon stationed on earth who have, over the years, become rather good buddies, a band of small children, a witch-finder, a witch, and a handy little book of nice and accurate prophecies written by one Agnes Nutter, an exceptionally batty Dark Ages prophetess.

In addition to being a ripping good yarn, and gut-bustingly funny besides, this book makes me wish that Neil Gaiman had written about twenty more novels that I could run out and buy right now, and makes me glad that Terry Pratchett has.

If you liked...: Douglas Adams, the funny bits of Tom Robbins books, or Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and other works of fiction that aren't afraid to take a detour by way of the footnote, this book is for you.