The Angel of Darkness

I first encountered author Caleb Carr's work through his best-known novel, The Alienist. A police procedural, The Alienist centers on a group of modern-minded sleuths, from both inside and outside the formal police department, who combine their skills and talents to solve a series of grisly murders in 1896 New York City. The book is thickly populated with actual historical figures (Theodore Roosevelt is practically a first-tier major character) and lovingly described locations.

More than that, the book struck me as an ingenious piece of work: it was essentially a technothriller that happened to be set a century in the past. The core group of investigators are at the forefront of crime-fighting technology, and are ready and willing to try out cutting-edge methods.

At one point they attempt to employ the new science of 'fingerprinting', the idea that each person's fingerprints are unique, and that a person's presence at a scene could be established by the prints he had left behind. And at another point, they attempt a different unproven science: they remove a murder victim's eyes and process them back in the lab, in the hope that the last images the victim saw before his death can be extracted from the eyeballs like pictures can be developed from film in a camera.

Fingerprinting and eyeball-image-developing are presented as similarly unproven, barely tested technologies, and our heroes have no way of knowing ahead of time which will yield fruitful results and which is a dead end. I liked that. It made The Alienist feel like science fiction, even though the narrative stayed firmly grounded in the 1890s. It made me wonder if Carr had ever written a novel that was actually science fiction.

I'm not going to name names. I'm not going to go into any detail about my next Carr-ian reading experience. But let's all just agree to agree that Caleb Carr has never written a book in the science fiction genre. And, if any of you happen to be in a bookstore or library and you think you see a science fiction novel by Caleb Carr, just leave it on the shelf and walk away. Trust me on this. You really don't want to investigate any further.

It's too bad Caleb Carr never wrote any novels that were explicitly science fiction. It's too bad they never made any sequels to The Matrix.

My confidence in Carr badly shaken by the reading experience I will not discuss, I bought The Angel of Darkness a while later. It is a sequel, reuniting most of the main characters of The Alienist and presenting an adventure that unfolds along similar lines. A baby is kidnapped from the wife of a Spanish diplomat in New York City, in the tense period that preceded the Spanish-American War, and the investigation spearheaded by chief protagonist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler turns up a gruesome trail of dead children connected to the suspected baby-snatcher.

The narrator from the first book (and Watson figure to Dr. Kreizler's Holmes), New York Times journalist John Moore, is demoted to comic relief status. The new narrator is Stevie, the rescued street urchin who was a supporting character in the first book.

The Angel of Darkness is not a bad book. It's a fairly exciting page-turner (it had better be, at over 600 pages) and is intelligently written. But I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as The Alienist. And I think a lot of the reason why has to do with my attitude towards sequels.

I like sequels that break new ground. Or, I like sequels that stand on their own just as much as the original story. I do not care for 'The whole gang is back to go on another adventure!' stories. And unfortunately, The Angel of Darkness is very much that kind of book.

Part of it is the perhaps unavoidable fact that, with The Alienist, I felt like old tropes had been assembled into a new and exciting form. But with The Angel of Darkness, the form was a familiar one. Also, in The Alienist, it felt like anything could happen. Obviously Teddy Roosevelt was going to survive, as were the characters who appeared in the 1919 frame story. But the other fictional named characters really seemed in mortal danger, and there was one death that genuinely shocked and surprised me. Contrast with The Angel of Darkness. I'm going to spoil it for you: even though The Angel of Darkness is a fairly bloody book, every 'good guy' who returns from the first book will survive the second. But that's not even much of a spoiler, since I never felt like any of the 'old friends' were ever in any danger.

Finally, it would be interesting to discuss the portrayal of certain non-white characters in the novel. I'm not certain if one character in particular really crossed the line into offensive territory, but I'm going to go with 'probably yes'.

Spring Fun

Spring Fun is about a young Taiwanese woman who has just committed suicide. The novel traces her life and the influences upon her thinking, that have led her to this final step.

The novel focuses both on the protagonist, who spent much of her childhood in Amsterdam, and several of her friends, who show different sides of being female and Taiwanese.

Lynn-Yuling Tzeng's novel (purchased here in Taiwan, although I can't recall exactly where) is an interesting, locally-published creation. For the first time I can remember, I have a book with no publishing information to be found anywhere on it, and Internet searches come up with very scanty results. Even tiny publishing houses generally put their brands on books they publish, so Tzeng's novel is something of an interesting anomaly. I wish I could remember how it came into our possession.

This is going to sound unkinder than I mean it, but here goes: This book clearly never saw a professional editor. It's not just that the prose makes me think it was written by a non-native English speaker and then proofread by a native speaker who didn't feel at liberty to edit on a large scale. It's also the odd and inconsistent use of footnotes, and a generally not-quite-polished style.

And that's not meant as negativity -- I rather liked the slight clunkiness. It brought me feeling a bit closer to the author, as if I was reading a manuscript. It didn't take me long to get accustomed to the style, and then I felt perfectly at ease with it.

I just have one negative thing to say about the novel. I know it's explicitly a feminist work. I'm not even going to say there's nothing wrong with that -- that would just sound condescending -- but rather, I like that; I like reading books written by people who are not coming from my own viewpoint. That said, I wish there had been male characters in this universe who weren't jerks. That's all.

Usurper of the Sun

My first Japanese SF novel, Housuke Nojiri's Usurper of the Sun starts off with high school astronomy buff Aki becoming one of the first to view an astonishing new phenomenon: someone or something is disassembling the planet Mercury in order to create a gigantic ring around the Sun.

Over the next few years, Aki goes on to become one of the world's most well-respected experts on the Ring, as the situation on Earth goes from bad to worse. The Ring grows so thick it drastically reduces the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth. The resulting climate change causes crop failures and famines that kill a billion people.

So when a crewed spaceship is prepared to visit the Ring to find out what humans can do about the situation, Aki is of course one of the four chosen to make the journey. I found the novel at this point readable but not exceptionally compelling. The first third of the novel reads like your standard Big Dumb Object story, the kind of hard SF that I respect but don't consider to be my favorite subset of science fiction.

My interest perked up considerably when, with 2/3 of the book left to go, the Earth people's mission to the Ring turns out to be unexpectedly productive. The Ring is destroyed, and Earth is saved. For the time being, that is. Aki and crew return to an Earth which now needs to prepare itself, logistically and psychologically, for the possible arrival of possibly very angry aliens.

This is where Usurper of the Sun becomes the sort of speculative fiction I like. Glimpses of an Earth simultaneously giddy with accomplishment and very apprehensive about the future struck me as fairly realistically done.

What really intrigued me, though, were the philosophical questions raised by the utter inscrutability of the aliens. This was some of the best speculation I've seen yet about aliens who really might not think like human beings. Rather than aliens who merely don't appear to come from an Anglo-Saxon-derived culture, which is what we get all too often in science fiction.

(Note to future SF writers: The mindset of an actual alien from another star system is likely to be less comprehensible to the average human, than the mindset of a human with autism. Autistic people are human too. Space aliens aren't. Housuke Nojiri gets this.)

I wasn't terribly happy when, at novel's end, the aliens turned from incomprehensible to comprehensible far too easily. I know it wrapped up the novel nicely, and to his credit, the author did justify it pretty well in-universe. It's just... after so much talk devoted to how alien the aliens were, I felt like they shouldn't have been rendered knowable so quickly.

That said, the philosophical musings of the final two thirds were enough for me to enjoy Usurper of the Sun. I'm well aware this recommendation probably won't get people rushing in droves to buy the book. (Unlike certain extraterrestrial civilizations, I'm not mind-blind.) But hey, it's what I enjoyed.

Jeeves Takes Charge

I've never seen the 1990s TV show based on P.G. Wodehouse's stories, Jeeves and Wooster. But I know of its existence, and I have two things to say about it.

First, of course Jeeves and Wooster were played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. I mean, that's pretty obvious. Read the stories and you'll notice that Wodehouse clearly had Fry and Laurie in mind as he was writing. The fact that neither man had been born yet is just testament to Wodehouse's genius: he wasn't stuck within a one-way arrow of time, remembering only the past.

Second, even though I haven't seen the TV show, when I read Wodehouse's prose I hear Hugh Laurie's voice in my head, as if he's narrating the audiobook. I haven't seen Laurie play Bertie Wooster, but I have seen him on the latter two seasons of Black Adder, and I assume the mannerisms and voice he used were pretty similar.

(All this probably sounds quite peculiar if you know Hugh Laurie primarily as Dr. House.)

Jeeves Takes Charge is not so much a novel as it is a series of short stories strung together, but there is enough continuity that I don't feel too uncomfortable foisting the title of 'novel' on it.

Reading Wodehouse, I am struck with a bit of cognitive dissonance:

1. Wodehouse is supposed to be one of the foundations of modern British comedy. He's the guy who influenced Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and countless others.

2. But his plots remind me of low-brow American sitcoms, complete with tropes and cliches that would not be out of place on Gilligan's Island. (There is, at one point, a perfectly formed example of what TV Tropes calls the 'Gilligan Cut'.)

Solution:

I'm a snob. I'm making the mistake of thinking, If it reminds me of American sitcoms, it can't be good. Because I think sitcoms are Not Sufficiently Cool.

Wodehouse scoured the history of comedy for his plots, some of which are based on Ancient Greek comedies. The same plots and tropes get re-used again and again, to the point that many modern-day American sitcoms employ plot developments that had their origins over two thousand years ago. There's nothing new under the sun.

Or, another way of looking at it is, we don't read Wodehouse today so much for his plotting as his dialogue and his use of language, particularly that which comes from the fictional mouth of Bertie Wooster, possibly my new favorite first-person narrator.

The Seven Per Cent Solution

Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is an odd beast of a novel. Essentially a feature-length bit of Sherlock Holmes fanfic (I use the word with none of its pejorative associations), Meyer's book played with my expectations.

I can't really say how without including massive spoilers. So, spoilers aplenty from this point forth.

We think of Professor Moriarty as Sherlock Holmes' arch-nemesis. The first well-known supervillain in world literature. The funny thing is, Moriarty is much more prominent outside of Conan Doyle's stories than within them.

Moriarty only shows up at all in two of Conan Doyle's original Sherlock Holmes stories. (That's the same number of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes that center around the Trek universe's version ofMoriarty. But nobody thinks of Moriarty as a Star Trek villain.)

What's more, for Moriarty's introduction, in 'The Final Problem', Conan Doyle performs a narrative trick that would have people rolling their eyes if someone tried it today. He doesn't bother to establish Moriarty as a supervillain at all; instead he just has Holmes show up and state that Moriarty's this evil genius. Moriarty's the greatest bad guy in England because Conan Doyle tells us so, not because of anything that we see him do.

Moriarty is famous, but when you go back to the source material you see that he is quite probably the most overrated supervillain in the history of fictional bad guys.

Nicholas Meyer probably wrote The Seven-Per-Cent Solution thinking much the same thing.

Moriarty is indeed very much in evidence in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. He seeks out Dr. Watson and complains that Sherlock Holmes is hallucinating that he's this fabulous criminal mastermind, when in reality he's just a meek mathematics teacher.

Now, every reader is probably thinking at this point, Aha! Dr. Watson will of course fall for Moriarty's ruse -- but Holmes will see right through it and foil his plans in the end!

And every reader would be wrong. Within the universe of this novel, Moriarty really is a mild-mannered math teacher, and Sherlock Holmes is a crazed cocaine addict who's imagining things. (Told you there'd be spoilers.)

Nicholas Meyer spends the first half of the novel subverting and defusing Holmes' most famous antagonist. He has Holmes visit Sigmund Freud in Vienna, in order to receive treatment for his cocaine addition. Then he gives Holmes and Freud a case to solve together.

Now, if you define the 'plot' of a Holmes story to be the actual case that Holmes and Watson solve, then the plot of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution actually begins when the novel is more than half over. This may frustrate and annoy some readers.

On the other hand, Nicholas Meyer intends for the main plot to be character-based: Sherlock Holmes' journey from cocaine-induced paranoid fantasy to clear and sober thinking. In that respect, the book works much better.

I'm satisfied with what Meyer has done here, even if my expectations got a bad case of whiplash.

VALIS

It's rather astonishing that, almost thirty years after his death, Philip K. Dick's short stories and novels have inspired so many Hollywood movies. Compared to other prominent American science fiction authors, Dick wasn't exactly mainstream. He was often bizarre. A let's-explore-the-labyrinthine-workings-of-the-inside-of-Dick's-own-head kind of bizarre.

I once read a collection of short stories from across Dick's entire career. His early stories were pleasingly quirky, but as the Sixties and Seventies wore on, the tone of his writing just became more and more out-there.

It's easy to say that Dick slowly went insane. Indeed, looking at his biography, that does appear to be the case. But if he went insane, he was well aware of the fact as it was happening.

What sort of novel would a highly intelligent, well-read person whose mind is turning inside out write? Well, he would write VALIS.

I actually started VALIS last year, but put it down again because I was in the mood for something more akin to a traditional novel. VALIS reads more like a couple of characters discussing difficult, abstruse philosophy, in the context of 1970s California.

There was one bit that I gleaned from my first attempt, that I absolutely loved. I learned about the two-proposition self-cancelling structure. In layman's terms, this is an argument of the form 'A. Also, B.' where B looks like it reinforces A, but in fact it negates it.

For example:

1. God does not exist.

2. And what's more, he's stupid.

Everybody go have fun looking for real-life examples of this structure.

The plot, to the extent that there is one, concerns main character Horselover Fat's attempts to build a valid philosophy based on Gnosticism after a friend of his commits suicide. Gnosticism is an ancient philosophy I have a hard time getting my head around, even though I know it's got elements in common with Hinduism and Buddhism and also resembles many quite modern ways of looking at the universe. I still can't say I retained very much of Horselover Fat's philosophy.

VALIS is narrated in the first person by Phil. Phil is Philip K. Dick. Within the narrative Phil even mentions real-life books he's written in the past. Horselover Fat, the main protagonist, is also Philip K. Dick. This is made very clear at several points in the narrative. Phil and Horselover Fat share many conversations about philosophy. There's one point where Horselover Fat travels the world and sends letters back to Phil back in California. Go ponder that and report back to me when you're finished.

My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs and Shakespeare

Will Shakespeare Greenberg is a pot-smoking slacker grad student in Santa Cruz in 1986 whose primary passion, apart from getting high and having sex, is Shakespeare. Despite knowing quite a bit of Shakespeare's work by heart, Will is having a difficult time getting his Master's thesis finished (or started, to tell the truth), in large part due to his pot-and-psychedelic-mushroom-addled lifestyle.

Will Shakespeare is a young Latin teacher in Stratford in 1582 whose primary passion, apart from bedding local women, is composing witty satirical verse. His family's deep Catholic roots will land him in hot water.

Jess Winfield's novel, which recounts turning points in the parallel lives of the two protagonists, is something of an odd beast. The target audience would appear to be fans of Shakespeare who are knowledgable enough to get most of the references (many of which I think went right over my head), but who also don't mind reading a stoner comedy with extremely explicit sex scenes written largely for laughs. If you were to compose a Venn diagram of the two very different groups of readers Winfield's trying to attract, it's not clear how much overlap you'd get.

But while Winfield's novel is a weird hybrid beast, it's a beast that's extremely well crafted. Winfield knows his stuff. He's one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. (The novel's 1980s narrative may contain a fictionalized version of the RSC's beginning, although Winfield has said Will Greenberg isn't supposed to be himself.) He's clearly done a tremendous amount of research into Elizabethan England and what little is known of Shakespeare's early life.

In the end, I have to say this is as good as any pothead sex comedy set in 1980s California and starring William Shakespeare you care to name. Winfield has tried something very strange here, and he's largely succeeded.

And thus ends my duo of Shakespeare books for November. I may try to polish off some of his actual plays next year. Cultural literacy and all that.

Total Oblivion, More or Less

Macy Palmer is a contemporary sixteen-year-old living in suburban Minnesota, whose life is turned upside down when...

wait for it...

...the United States crumbles as waves of Scythian warriors on horseback start rampaging out of the frozen North, looting and pillaging and burning as they go. In the south the Empire musters its forces to repel the Scythian threat.

Macy and her family become refugees, traveling south along the Mississippi on a riverboat. The Plague breaks out. Dogs can talk -- at least, there's one dog who can talk, but he has a good reason.

Macy's old life is gone forever. The future, no one can predict.

Yeah. Alan DeNiro's Total Oblivion, More or Less is like that.

So how did we get from Point A (the world of today) to Point B (mounted Scythian warriors pillage suburbia)? I'm going to spoil the end for you, just a little: there's never any explanation for the world being turned upside down.

So what gives?

You can read the author's thoughts on what it all means here.

Here's my interpretation. This isn't why I think all this stuff happened in-universe. Speculating on that would be besides the point. Rather, this is how I choose to interpret the novel as a whole.

Throughout history, people thought they lived in stable communities. If your family has lived in the village for generations, and you haven't witnessed dramatic change and upheaval in your own lifetime, then you'll naturally expect that while people will come and go, local businesses will change hands, and bits and pieces of everyday minutiae will undergo a slow turnover, the big picture will never change.

Especially in premodern societies, people thought like that. And they were often right. A village might stay in more or less the same state for several generations. People would live and die without ever venturing far from their homes. You would have no reason to doubt that things would continue on the way 'they always had'.

And then everything would fall apart. No matter where in the pre-modern world you were situated, the dislocation would eventually come, as waves of Mongol or Germanic or Bantu or Hunnish or Spanish or Arab or Turkic warriors would come tearing into your ancestral lands and turn your life upside down. Then they would recede (or become the new distant imperial overlords) and a new normal would be established. Except you might be dead. Or a refugee in a distant land where things don't make sense.

We 'modern people' think we're past all that. True, we worry about our civilization collapsing around us, but there are certain ways in which we think it's likely to happen (meteor strike, plague, nuclear war, etc).

We don't think our civilization is going to undergo catastrophic change that we're unable to wrap our minds around even while it's happening.

Macy and her family and her suburban American civilization thought they had a handle on what their future was going to be like. Turns out they were no better off than anyone else in human history.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Every scene in this book has the feel of an Edward Gorey illustration.

Anyway.

After King, Queen, Knave, I continued the theme of novels mocking the upper classes of pre-World War II Europe with Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, knowing nothing of the novel or the plot beyond the fact that a well-known Alfred Hitchcock film had been based on it.

As it turns out, Rebecca is the story of a naive young nameless heroine, who marries a much older English landed aristocrat and goes off to live at his immense estate. She is never able to escape the disapproving looks of the estate's staff, led by Mrs. Danvers, who can't help comparing her unfavorably to Rebecca, her husband's dead first wife and the novel's title character.

Unfortunately, the protagonist suffers from what TV Tropes, with its talent for description, calls Wrong Genre Savvy. She thinks she's the lead character in a fairly standard romantic story, and believes that her husband is still pining after his dead wife. She thinks her role is to convince her husband that he should let Rebecca go and he should live for the future, and to find a way to make peace with mean old Mrs. Danvers.

The, when the novel's half finished, some fundamentally game-changing bits of information come to light.

I was able to read Rebecca totally unspoiled, so I got to spend the first half of the novel raging at the heroine for being such a spineless wilting nonentity who let Mrs. Danvers bully her to her heart's content, and the second half fascinated to find out how the suddenly much more compelling plot would play itself out.

Never having seen the Hitchcock film, I imagined Mrs. Danvers as looking like a malevolent version of Professor McGonagall as played by Maggie Smith in the last Harry Potter movie -- basically, a strong, imperious old lady. Apparently in the film version her character's interpreted quite differently, by Dame Judith Anderson. She's quite younger (Anderson was in her 40s), and rather than coming across as a vengeful mother figure who has lost her child (as in the novel), her relationship with Rebecca has lesbian undertones instead. Either interpretation works, I suppose, but they're mutually exclusive (one would hope).

If I do see the movie version, I'm sure the alternative Mrs. Danvers will find an equal home in my imagination.

King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov

King, Queen, Knave was originally published in 1928, when Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian emigre living in Germany. It was not translated into English until the 1960s, when Nabokov and his son Dmitri translated it together as a father-son team.

Because the Nabokovs made it clear that they altered the novel to a significant degree, I'm not sure how much of what I read really dated to the 1920s. I assumed the English version was faithful in the small details to the original, and I enjoyed the little everyday details of life in what would retroactively be called Weimar Germany.

The plot, in broad strokes, is as follows. A country boy comes to Berlin, to work in his uncle's department store. The nephew and the uncle's wife really hit it off, to the point that they begin a steamy love affair, which the uncle remains cheerfully oblivious to.

Queen and Knave conspire to murder the King, despite both being quite inexperienced at planning and carrying out a crime of this magnitude. Psychological tension and fatal complications ensue.

The plot, as the author readily admits, is not terribly innovative. It's the prose (even if the reader is never quite sure if any given snippet of English prose came from the elder or younger Nabokov) and the macabre atmosphere that make the novel worth reading.

I never trained myself to intelligently discuss prose the way a literature professor might, so I feel somewhat hobbled when talking about modern literary writers like Nabokov.

To me, King Queen, Knave provides a look at life in 1920s Germany. It lets me play at deducing what was the same in the original 1928 Russian-language edition, and what was changed in the 1960s. But it's been two months since I actually read the thing (while traveling in southern Turkey in late August), so I can't quite recall the prose enough to discuss it at any length.

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

It took me a long time to get into Terry Pratchett's Discworld universe, a fact I attribute to my aversion to long series, particularly in the fantasy / SF genres. Generally I approach a series in one of two ways: either I read the first book and end it there, pretending the sequels never existed (and savoring any unanswered questions I've got as proof of the mysterious vastness of the universe). Or I read the entire series all at once as one long novel. That's what I did with Harry Potter the summer the last book came out. It only works when you've got a finished series, though.

So I was a bit apprehensive about the Discworld books, even as they approached massive popularity with more and more fans, including several of my friends. In the USA, Pratchett has fully caught up with Douglas Adams as the face of modern British fantastical drollery. Finally I gave in and started buying his books as they appeared at used bookstores.

My first Discworld book was Jingo, which probably was not the best choice for a beginner, as it focuses on a group of characters it assumes you're already familiar with (Sam Vimes and his cohort).

My second Discworld book was Monstrous Regiment, which was published later but is probably a better choice for a beginner. It's firmly set within the Discworld universe but it's more of a standalone, as it introduces a brand-new group of protagonists.

Both of these books were written after Pratchett had been writing Discworld books for a while. He'd settled into a comfortable groove, in which he parodies the tropes of several different genres within a single novel.

That said, I think it's a mistake to consider the mature Discworld novels to be parodies first and foremost. To me, a parody isn't just any humorous work that can be slotted comfortably into a particular genre. A parody is a humorous work that derives most of its humor from mocking the tropes of a particular genre. But most of the humor of the later Discworld books is character-based.

So, for example, while Monstrous Regiment does indeed parody (verb) many military fiction tropes (and thoroughly deconstructs the hoary 'brave young girl disguises herself as a man so she can enlist in the army' trope), you can't just label the novel as a whole a parody (noun). That's so limiting.

Anyway. My third Discworld book was the very first Discworld book: The Colour of Magic. As one can expect from the very first installment of a long-running series, The Colour of Magic features loads and loads of what TVTropes calls 'Early Installment Weirdness'. The novel is divided into chapters (each subsequent Discworld book would be one continuous undivided story), the story is much more episodic and disjointed than later books, stupid jokes and cheap humor are much more in evidence, and everything's a parody! Every segment of the episodic plot is a parody of a different sub-genre of fantasy.

That said, The Colour of Magic isn't a bad book. It's well-written, and Rincewind and Twoflower are both very nicely done comic characters. But it's not typical Discworld.

Which brings me to The Light Fantastic, #2 in the Discworld series. The Light Fantastic has much in common with its predecessor. Later Discworld novels would each be self-contained stories set in a well-established universe with recurring characters, but The Light Fantastic is a direct sequel to The Colour of Magic, beginning seconds after the first book ended with Rincewind and Twoflower launched off the edge of the world. The two books are one episodic novel split in half.

It's interesting to view the book as a snapshot of Discworld evolution. #2 continues the plot from #1, and like #1 it contains its share of painful jokes. (Upon hearing that the civil unrest has resulted in a mob ransacking the city's music stores, Rincewind shakes his head. 'Luters', he mutters.) It's also not all that great with its female characters; every woman in the book is a parody of a particular fantasy trope, and gets little character development beyond that. (Pratchett would get much, much better at writing women in his later books -- see Monstrous Regiment as proof of that.)

And while there's plenty of character-based humor, in The Light Fantastic it seems like Pratchett is more likely to, say, describe some aspect of Twoflower's personality in a humorous way, rather than have Twoflower actually do something humorous that fits his personality.

But there are also signs in #2 that Pratchett is settling into the groove he would ride so successfully (and profitably) in the years ahead. The Light Fantastic comes much closer to giving its readers a single cohesive story than its predecessor. It's not divided into chapters. And people who are far more serious Pratchett fans than I am claim that many of the long-running elements of the Discworld series get their start in The Light Fantastic.

I'll take their word for it -- after all, so far I've only read four novels out of -- let me check Wikipedia -- wow, 39 in total so far. Ever since I read Jingo in 2008, I've read the Discworld books at a rate of one a year. I find Pratchett to be a pleasant enough read, but I'm not sure if I'll increase my Discworld novel consumption speed.

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon

As he explains in the Afterword, Michael Chabon originally intended to call this novel Jews With Swords. That would have been a perfectly accurate title, although he is perhaps correct that readers would then have jumped to the conclusion that it was a broad ethnic comedy. Rather, it is... a somewhat more sophisticated ethnic comedy, perhaps?

It's the tenth century A.D. and we're in that part of the world that would, over a thousand years later, become modern-day Iran, Azerbaijan, and Russia. Our story focuses on two street-smart bandits and swindlers, the Jews With Swords of the almost-title (although to be precise, one prefers to wield an enormous Viking battleaxe instead), who fall in with a hunted fugitive from the Khazar royal family. The throne of an empire is decided.

This is practically the very definition of 'swashbuckling'. It was originally a 15-part serial running in the New York Times Magazine. It also comes with illustrations by Gary Gianni, who also does the Prince Valiant comic. The overall effect is of a nineteenth-century swashbuckler. But the language is modern, if the prose densely purple.

I brought it as it seemed appropriate, as we're traveling in the old heart of the Byzantine Empire, if not on the frontier where the action is set. The novel is short, although Chabon's prose isn't as quick a read as some authors. I enjoyed it while it lasted, although it might have been better drawn out in serial form.

Empress by Shan Sa

Heavenlight, our protagonist, is the daughter of a relatively well-off merchant and government official who had personal ties to the Emperor of China. When the (now overthrown) emperor dies, Heavenlight's father collapses of grief and dies as well. When Heavenlight is thirteen, she is invited to become a concubine of the new Emperor, after impressing a senior official she'd met during her father's funeral ceremonies. In her career as a concubine, the Emperor never notices her. However, she and the Emperor's youngest legitimate son, Little Phoenix, become lovers.

When Heavenlight is twenty-five, the Emperor dies and Little Phoenix succeeds him, the imperial succession generally being decided by politics rather than birth order. Heavenlight is sent to a nunnery, as is usual for concubines of dead emperors. She is brought back, however, on orders of the Empress. The imperial marriage between Little Phoenix and the Empress is an unhappy and childless one, and Little Phoenix much prefers his chief concubine, the Resplendent Wife, Xiao. Heavenlight is meant to distract the sovereign away from Xiao. The scheme backfires, Little Phoenix prefers Heavenlight, and Xiao and the Empress are both deposed and eventually executed. At age thirty-one, Heavenlight becomes Empress Consort of China.

As Empress Consort, Heavenlight is an effective administrator, much more so than her husband. She produces four sons and one daughter that live to maturity. The first son, Splendor, dies before his father. The second son, Wisdom, plots to overthrow his parents, and so he is exiled.

When Heavenlight is fifty-nine, Little Phoenix dies and the third son, Future, succeeds to the throne. Heavenlight is dissatisfied with Future's conduct as Emperor. After just a few weeks she removes him and installs her youngest son, Miracle. The new Emperor has no desire to run a country, and everyone knows that Heavenlight is the real ruler. When Heavenlight is sixty-six, she does away with all pretense and, her son gracefully abdicating, she becomes the only reigning Empress in all of Chinese history.

Heavenlight reigns as sole ruler for fifteen years, managing both the Empire and quarrels within her own family, notably between her own direct descendants and her father's grandchildren over succession rights. At age eighty-one, when she is overthrown in a coup (and her young lovers slaughtered), she loses the will to live; she dies later that same year.

I've left out Western calendar dates in this account of the life of Empress Wu Zetian, not only because they would have been anachronistic in this context, but because they would cause eyes to glaze over in all but a few history buffs. During the period the novel Empress covers, Western Europe was a cultural and political backwater and the most powerful Christian state was the Byzantine Empire, itself much weaker than it had been a century earlier. Heavenlight's lifetime occurred as Western Civilization was at its most globally inconsequential, its absolute nadir. In contrast, Shan Sa has shown us the world of the political and cultural rulers of China, at that time indisputably the world's most powerful civilization.

Shan Sa and translator Adriana Hunter (Empress was written in French) have Anglicized most of the Chinese names, leading to some entertaining hunts as I compared the goings-on in the book with the historical record as interpreted by Wikipedia. The two matched quite closely; everybody in the novel is a major historical figure, and it is fun to identify Heavenlight, Little Phoenix, Splendor, Wisdom, Future, Miracle, and so on.

It was fascinating to see the very alien conceptions of morality in the imperial Chinese court, both sexual and otherwise. Starting with sex: Of course there was a double standard, and the Emperor could bed as many concubines as he pleased while the Empress couldn't fool around with men. But it wasn't perceived this way. Heavenlight did not have to stifle jealousy when Little Phoenix bedded other women. It wouldn't have occurred to her to feel jealous; there was never any expectation of male monogamy. It's worth noting that for Heavenlight to take female lovers was never frowned upon, and once she was no longer capable of conceiving a child, taking sturdy young men into her bedchamber was practically encouraged by the Court, the better to keep her strong and youthful.

As for other sorts of morality, let me just say that to succeed in the environment in which Heavenlight thrived, you have to be, to use highly anachronistic language, extremely badass. Several times in the book Heavenlight commits acts that, in another time, another context, would be considered evil. Was she an evil person? That's probably for others to decide. But you don't become the only Empress Regnant in all of Chinese history by being a nice old lady.

UFO In Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo

Silver Hill Village is an isolated backwater in Hunan where, on September 11, 2012, a flying saucer zips over the head of illiterate peasant woman Kwok Yun. Soon afterwards, she comes across an injured Westerner in the fields. She takes him home and treats his wound, but he disappears before the authorities arrive.

The UFO and the Westerner have vanished, but village chief Chang is not going to let this opportunity pass by. As an investigator from Beijing arrives to interview the townspeople, Chang lays out her extremely ambitious plans to use the incident to fulfill her dreams for Silver Hill. Meanwhile, Kwok Yun remains baffled by developments.

Xiaolu Guo's UFO In Her Eyes is an effective satire of China's reckless leaps into what certain people consider to be modernity. As I've mentioned before, I've barely been to the People's Republic, but what I've read about the manner of its development suggest that the events of UFO are barely exaggerated. The flying saucer and the near-future setting give the book a veneer of speculative fiction, but I suspect China's got plenty of real-life Silver Hills, towns that due to luck and happenstance have had the opportunity to plunge head-first into disconcertingly fast changes according to what local elites thought was desirable.

On a totally different note, I love buying used books; they often carry their histories with them. I bought UFO at a used bookstore in Taipei. Stuck between its pages was the movie ticket stub the previous owner had been using as a bookmark. The ticket stub was for Monga (a Taiwanese movie) and was from a cinema in Berlin, Germany. Something about that pleases me immensely.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Changez is a brilliant young Pakistani in America who graduates from Princeton, begins a love affair with an American woman, and finds a well-paying job in the world of finance. But he is already becoming dissatisfied with his work, feeling he is aiding and abetting an American domination of the world that he feels very uneasy about.

Then September 11, 2001 comes. Then relations between Pakistan and India deteriorate and nuclear war on the subcontinent appears likely. Changez grows to hate what he sees as U.S. interference in South Asia (and everywhere else). Meanwhile his girlfriend vanishes into her own difficulties and suicidal thoughts.

Less is more. Mohsin Hamid leaves a lot unsaid.The Reluctant Fundamentalist uses a frame story, in which Changez is relating his story to an American businessman (government agent?) he meets at a Lahore market. The exact nature of the American acquaintance is left up to the reader to decide, as well as whether Changez is an completely reliable narrator, particularly as he tells the latter part of his story, after he has entirely renounced his adoptive country.

I write this blog post having deliberately avoided reading any online reviews or reactions to Hamid's novel. So much is left unsaid, and there is so much room for the individual reader's interpretation, that I feel as if once I read what others had to say my mind will be no longer pristine. (I'll almost certainly succumb to temptation once I finish writing this.)

If I make this novel sound impossibly vague, I don't mean to. It's good exposure for Westerners to the non-Western, perhaps even anti-Western point of view. Just because you try to understand a particular viewpoint doesn't mean you have to agree with it. (And of course, anyone who automatically assumes Changez = Mohsin Hamid is making a grave mistake and needs to go back to Reading Fiction 101.)

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

Zhuang Xiao Qiao, Z for short, arrives in London from her home in Zhejiang Province, China to spend a year learning English. Naive and with limited language skills, Z soon begins an affair with a much older nameless Englishman who happens to be something of a drifter.

Her English improving by the day, Z and her English lover spend several months together, although they also grow to quarrel quite often. With her nameless lover's blessing, Z takes off to spend a few weeks traveling around Europe alone, during which time she has an affair or two (or three). She and the Englishman are clearly not meant to be together. Z returns to China at the end, with much improved English and with a much broader worldview.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers would have annoyed the hell out of me if the author were a Westerner, even a Westerner of Chinese descent. Z's early thoughts on the English language and what it implies about cultural differences struck me as unconvincing, more likely the product of a Westerner imagining how a Chinese person might think than that of an actual Chinese person. As it happens, though, Xiaolu Guo was born and raised in China, thus rendering my objections on those grounds rather silly.

Guo writes her novel in Z's broken English, with the linguistic proficiency growing more with each passing chapter as Z's linguistic ability grows. The book is modest and relatively short. It's hardly the most consequential book I've read this year, but it's well-done, and Guo has hit what she aimed for.

Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny

Francis Sandow is:

1) Enormously, obscenely, filthily rich, and living in preposterous comfort on his own planet in a galaxy filled with aliens;

2) The only homo sapiens alive who actually remembers the 20th century, as he spent most of his early centuries cryogenically frozen on one starship after another, and thus lived long enough to reap the benefits of radical life extension technology once it was invented; and

3) The avatar of a god in an extraterrestrial pantheon. When the book introduces this point you need to PAY ATTENTION because it turns out to be really important later, unlike some of the scenery setting early on which doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond giving some local color to the universe.

Isle of the Dead was my first-ever Roger Zelazny novel, picked up in a used bookstore when I recognized the name and thought, "Zelazny? Sounds familiar. I think I ought to read him".

It's only 190 pages, but it packs more weird ideas than most SF novels three times its length. It could so easily have been padded out, and in today's market it almost certainly would've been. Heck, if I found out that Isle of the Dead had originally been 600 pages and its current length was a result of merciless editing, I would've believed it. As it is, I feel like I've read a delightful artifact from an earlier time when being succinct was nothing to be ashamed of.

The last two used SF paperbacks I read, the Harrison and the Sheckley, were both written as light fluffy comedies, and I'm not dissing that. I like light fluffy comedies. Zelazny, though, delivered a short little novel written with some mighty literary style. That meant I couldn't just breeze through it as quickly as I'd planned, but I'm not complaining. Zelazny has impressed me, and now that I have a better idea of what to expect from him I'm looking forward to reading some more.

The Laughing Sutra by Mark Salzman

Hsun-ching is an orphan, growing up in the care of the elderly monk Wei-ching. Wei-ching has made a lifetime study of Buddhist texts, but there is one that has eluded him: the nearly legendary Laughing Sutra. Only one copy is known to exist, and it is in far away America. Wei-ching is too old to make the trip, so his young apprentice Hsun-ching, after nearly a decade separated from his master due to the unpredictable vagaries of the 20th-century Chinese history they're living through, decides to travel to San Francisco in his place.

Accompanying him on this Journey to the West is the immortal, immensely strong Colonel Sun, who missed most of the 20th Century lurking in his cave behind a waterfall, but who proves himself surprisingly adaptable...

I first encountered author Mark Salzman through his memoir Iron and Silk, his tale of living in Hunan in the early 1980s. I've only made short trips to the People's Republic myself, never venturing beyond Beijing, Hong Kong and Macau, but I have an appetite for historically recent tales of life there. The 1980s were a time when China was just beginning to cast off the insanity of the 1960s and 1970s, and Salzman relates tales of official paranoia and bureaucratic obstructionism as well as anyone who was in China at the time.

Now, The Laughing Sutra is a work of fiction. It is a comedy, often a dark one, and is downright chilling in its early sections when the Cultural Revolution is dealt with unflinchingly. The latter half of the book, set in the United States, is much lighter, crossing almost into sitcom-style comedy territory, but the book works well as an overall unit. Intended for Western readers, The Laughing Sutra has a good deal to teach about late 20th century Chinese history, certain strands of Eastern philosophy, and the pragmatism with which, it seems, Chinese culture can interpret and react to Western culture if official propaganda and existing assumptions are overcome.

And, of course, there's a retelling of the "Journey to the West" (often titled "Monkey" in English translation), one of those literary classics that's as famous as Shakespeare on one side of Eurasia and almost unknown on the other. That story inspired this one.

The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison

Barney Hendrickson is a third-rate movie director working at a third-rate studio that's about to go under. Help arrives in the form of a time machine invented by local eccentric scientist Dr. Hewitt. With the help of the time machine - which looks just like how a Hollywood time machine should look, because it was fancied up to serve as a prop in the mad scientist movie the studio was just finishing up on - the studio plans a Viking epic to be filmed on location in the Orkneys and in Vinland in Viking times. Hilarity ensues, but the movie is completed, and Barney Hendrickson inadvertently becomes famous.

Fortunately Harry Harrison wrote the 1967 novel The Technicolor Time Machine as a very broad comedy, and it's clear from the start that the sense of general preposterousness is fully deliberate. Harrison's got a long career writing comic SF; he's probably best known for the Stainless Steel Rat books, of which I've read the first three. They're pretty good examples of the "ludicrously competent interstellar hero thwarts the bad guys and saves the day" genre. He also wrote the book the movie Soylent Green is very, very loosely derived from.

The Technicolor Time Machine is amusing, although much of its humor is a satire of the Hollywood of the 1960s, already somewhat out of date and getting more so all the time. (In fact, I'd wager that with the accelerating evolution of entertainment media, the next 15 years might well alter the business side of how movies are made more than the past 40 years have. Kids these days won't understand the older generation's satires of Ye Olde Hollywoode.) And characters like L. M. Greenspan and Ruf Hawk are comedy tropes you've surely seen a dozen times before.

So what about the science fiction side of things? The book's got some neat moments, but it doesn't really do anything new or mind-blowing with the time travel trope. Yes, I remember it was published in 1967 and Back to the Future was still nearly two decades away, but written science fiction has always been more imaginative and daring than its celluloid cousin, and Robert A. Heinlein's rather more mind-blowing short story "All You Zombies" predates this book by eight years. To sum up: use of time travel trope, competent but not extraordinary.

And what's with this piece of dialogue toward the end of the book?

Barney clutched the paper. "Let me get this straight. Are you telling me that I can make the film after the deadline, then return to a time before the deadline to deliver the film?"

"I am."

"It sounds nuts."

"But Barney's been zipping back and forth in a time machine for the WHOLE DAMN BOOK!" said the reader.

That last line was my addition.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

There's an old observation that novelists who honed their craft in universities tend to write an awful lot about middle-aged academics contemplating adultery. With that in mind...

At the center of Zadie Smith's On Beauty is Howard Belsey, a middle-aged academic teaching in the humanities at Wellington College, a fictitious liberal arts college on the outskirts of Boston. The nice thing about Boston is that it's got so many well-known academic institutions already that you can give it another whole college without worrying about changing its character. Wellington's got a reputation in this universe as a den of left-leaning academics, and Howard, a British art history professor who married an African-American woman and has three mixed-race children, is everyone's dream caricature of a liberal academician. His archnemesis is Montague Kipps, a Jamaican-born black British academic who is going to be lecturing at Wellington this year. Professor Kipps is a well-known leader in reactionary political circles and a darling of the American right. He has brought his wife Carlene and one of his two children with him. That's where I'll arbitrarily stop, before I get further into the tangled connections between the many major characters.

On Beauty is at its most amusing when accurately (I imagine) satirizing liberal arts academia. It also deals well with issues of cultural identity, particularly circling around Howard's teenage son Levi. Zadie Smith has a great ear for dialogue, particularly characters who are rather less than articulate (Levi) or characters who are ridiculously full of themselves (too many to mention). I also have to applaud Smith's very, very British sense of humor in creating social awkwardness for your dignified characters.

That said, I got a strong impression that the characters, as realistic and entertaining as their dialogue can be, are really just game pieces being moved around the board. You must remember that the universe of On Beauty contains no more than two dozen or so actual people, who bounce off of each other in a slow sort of Brownian motion. Just keep that in mind, and your mind won't be blown by the coincidences that dog this story, particularly the big one in the final section, involving a painting.