The Eternal Prison

So I'm re-reading the Avery Cates series. I never re-read things. But the Avery Cates series is totally worth it.
I'm at The Eternal Prison. Man, for hard-boiled sci-fi noir, it sure gets into Absalom Absalom territory. There is a brilliant narrative change in the story which even when I knew was coming still blew me away.

Apparently what I think and what the tastemakers' think are polar opposites. But this series would make a great, dark, noir, TV-show. Each novel would be a 13-episode season.
Avery Cates is a great character because he's really far from being a superman. He's a journeyman hitman. But he's got a lot of rules he lives by and although he admittedly gets lucky he, as a character, has a great deal of what the kids nowadays call "agency". His decisions are the turning-points in the story.
Yeah, I'm gushing. And yes, I've made feature films stealing or borrowing ideas from these books (I even named a character after the author, Jeff Somers). But there really is that much there, that much depth, and that much excitement on each page coupled with a graceful literateness which makes the noir all that much better.

Fire and Fury

Prologue

I'm a Harry Connolly partisan. Basically he could tell me he's doing a re-write of the phone book and I'd sign up for his Kickstarter campaign. So maybe there's something wrong with his writing that I just can't see. No, that isn't it. Everything he produces is perfect.
His previous series was the 20 Palaces series and it was just freaking awesome. Indeed, the first book of the series starts off in such a way that I think it should be used as a model for how novels should start.
Comparatively speaking, his new novel The Way Into Chaos starts out slowly. I think everything doesn't explode until about page 3.

I love the imperfection of the characters. They're just exactly wrong. Indeed many of the characters are written such that you instantly dislike them but then they grow, and grow on you too.
The magic "technology" in the book is pretty fascinating. And the story is structured such that the exact way the magic works is revealed in sort of a logical, rather than a pedantic, way.

Judging a Book by its Cover

I am not proud of myself for thinking this, but I sure do like the feel of this book. How nice books feel is one of the things which has kept me away from an e-reader all this time. This paperback has a particularly soft and silky feel which I really really like.

Coda

The Way Into Chaos, of course, ends on a cliffhanger.* Somehow, stupidly, I did not back the project such that I would get the entire trilogy, just the first book. So yeah, I could read the other parts if/when I get a Kindle Voyage, but I won't be able to pet the covers on the way to the studio and back.

*Uh. Spoiler alert?

Robot. Aye.

Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel was first published in '58. And yeah, there's some stuff in it which is kinda creaky. It didn't age 100% well. The computers in it, for instance, are comically slow. 

It's basically the story I Robot (the movie) was based on, even though there's another book called I Robot. So there's that. And it's a good story about a detective who hates robots who is (naturally) assigned a robot partner.

This was the art on the copy I read. If you like book covers which have nothing at all to do with the actual content of the book, this is the cover for you.

One thing I thought interesting.There is, essentially, a Voight Kamf test which takes place in the book. It's not to test whether someone is a robot but rather whether a robot has a working 1st Law of Robotics in place.

The Stars My Dispatches

So I'm reading two books right now. Dispatches by Michael Herr and The Stars My Destination  by Alfred Bester.

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Here's a friendly tip: don't read Dispatches unless you're heavily medicated. It's a fascinating book, but it'll royally piss you off. Herr's writing style became essentially the voice we think of in our heads of the American experience in the Vietnam War. He did, after all, co-write the screenplays of both Apocalypse Now as well as Full Metal Jacket.
His deconstruction of the sheer amount of bullshit shoveled on the American public by the Army, the Marines, General Westmoreland, and the whole gang of idiots running that show is just astounding.
Like science-fiction + madness levels of astounding. The book is bad for your blood pressure.
The writing style is somewhat trippy and in the "you are here" poetry of the "new journalism" of the time. But honestly, what he's saying is so crazy you can't write about it without talking about the metaphor of a snake which winds from Washington DC through Saigon to I Corps. The whole war was just nuts. Off the wall head banging screaming in the middle of the night nuts.
And if you want to read about it, read Dispatches.

There's a Marine named "Day Tripper". That's such an awesome name we have to use it somewhere.

Now, this The Stars, My Destination is a shockingly modern-seeming book. And it cooks along at quite a clip too. It's also about madness, but lucky for us it's just one dude's madness and it's a long time from now.

Apparently, I have Terrible Taste

So, I'm kind of done going to Book Court. You know, I figure I should go to local independent bookstores. I'm so wrong.
I asked about a couple books, neither of which they had. One was The Wind-Up Girl. They were out and they didn't bother to pick up the paperback version of it.
The other book was the new Cherie Priest novel which I knew had been published because I read an interview about it.

When the guy at the counter finally found the book he said. "Oh yeah, I remember this book. I think we passed on it. That's... not any reflection on your taste. We're just more of a literary book store."
So yeah, I'll be going to the non-literary book stores from now on.
Although maybe they passed on the book because the heroine has such clearly bad trigger discipline.

There Be Spoilers Here

Spoilers about Warhammer books and about Cherie Priest's Dreadnought and Boneshaker.
+++++

So I've been reading these Warhammer 40K books. And so far the ideas have been awesome but the writing has been... terrible.
I mean, how could you mess up a story about a Demon Hunter, a sexy Imperial Assassin, a space-Dwarf, and an interstellar Navigator who has a third eye in the middle of his forehead with which he can see the Warp in space through which he's piloting? Those characters sound really cool. But oof.

So then I started reading Cherie Priest's Dreadnought and I was almost in tears about how well it's written. And heck, it even has a lot of the same stuff in it -- giant walking battle-'bots, zombies (well, I guess there are no zombies in the Warhammer universe but you get the idea.)

Dreadnought is an alternate history where the Civil War lasts 20 years and both sides develop all kinds of very cyberpunk technology. Texas remains an independent Republic. Most of the Confederate States free their slaves (with the exception of Alabama and Mississippi of course.) And the men at the front start using a mysterious drug which eventually turns them into flesh-eating zombies.
But that's not the cool part. The cool part is that right at the beginning the heroine meets Clara Barton. That's awesome.
Now here's a thing about alternate histories and period novels: we're following a particularly independent white woman who's a Southerner (and whose husband fought in a Union uniform and died in Andersonville, the cultural weight of that is not fully explained in the book but if you know some Civil War history it's kind of like saying he was at the Confederate version of Dachau or some such.) And in the book we follow this woman who isn't terribly prejudiced, indeed has sympathies for the North and the South considering her working in a Confederate hospital and having a Union husband. She is working - class. But, y'know, for accuracy the narrator describes different characters as "mulatto", "colored", "chinamen", and even suggests that the heroine thought for a minute the words "house-nigger" to describe a former slave who was a cook.
And boy, those words sure have a lot of cultural weight to them, don't they?
Now, the lead character herself -- she doesn't ascribe to the racist tendencies of many of the other characters (there's a bit of anti-Catholicism in there too. I don't think anyone even mentions the Jews.) And the "narrator" (who is 3rd person) clearly writes from a modern perspective, doesn't use the term "colored" derisively -- indeed the heroine meets people of a wide range of complexions and typically sees the color of their skin as a part of their description literally rather than "racially". Skin is lighter or darker than her own.
And there is a very interesting pair of moments when, as a working - class woman (a nurse) she at first feels "outclassed" by a mulatto woman who is wealthy, and then by a very snobbish (and presumably wealthy) white northern woman.
So one has little doubt about the politics of the author, and indeed the protagonist is shown in a better light simply because of her refusal to buy into the racial politics of the time. Still... there are those words. "Colored" being the most popular.
I thought to myself: OK, so what if you brought a mid-19th-Century African American to 2010 America? First of all you be all like "Hey, we don't say "colored" anymore, we call them "black". To which he'd respond "There is no need to be so rude, sir. I am a "colored" man. A negro. And I am proud of my heritage."
Then you'd have to be all like "No, dude, in the late 1960's, "colored" people took up the word "black" to describe themselves in defiance of the white/colored nomenclature. It's all because of this guy Malcom X you see..."
"If you're going to talk to me, I insist you use a respectful term."
"No, dude, really -- like the President of the United States is black. He wouldn't call himself "colored". It's archaic and considered rude."
"Well when I was your age, a respectful person would never refer to me as "black". "Colored" is the word."
"Oh man, please don't make me teach you how a computer works."
Just then a guy walking up Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn accosts your time-travelling African American, thinking he knows him, with a "Yo niggah! Whassup!"
You just turn away in shame and walk away...
But getting back to my point (maybe I should have another drink first) using "colored", even when historically accurate, just... rubs me the wrong way. I'm not saying it's wrong. And I'm not saying that Cherie Priest wasn't doing the right thing. It just makes me gnash my teeth (metaphorically) for a moment.
And I don't really know what more to think about that.
So here's a bunny with a flower... disapproving...