Book notes, part 2

 Back in June I decided to take some time off from writing in this blog.  I was still working my old job, which demanded a lot of hours, and I was not feeling inspired to keep up with much.  However, as I kept reading, I made some notes about the books.  They aren’t much, some are just impressions, but this includes some books that I would have liked to have explored more fully in posts.  I thought that I would post a collection of these here and maybe this will inspire me to go back and write more about them.

Note: I ended up with more than I thought for some of these so I decided to split them up.  Here are 4 more of them.

Artemis by Andy Weir

Andy Weir loves smart ass narrators.  The protagonist/narrator of Artemis shares a lot of personality traits with Mark Watney, the protagonist of Weir’s debut novel The Martian.  Like Watney, Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is foul-mouthed, resourceful, and ridiculously competent.  Jazz makes a living on Artemis, the first city built on the Moon, as a porter and sometimes-smuggler.  She gets drawn into a larger scheme of industrial sabotage that ends up endangering the whole city.  

Despite having a larger cast of characters who all seem to love Jazz, this novel has less heart than The Martian and Jazz’s antics are less endearing.  Whereas Watney struggled for his survival against tremendous odds, he did it through no fault of his own, so the more grating aspects of his personality were more forgivable, seemed more in keeping with the tone of the novel and the stakes of the narrative.  Artemis doesn’t have the same heart.  In some ways, Weir raises the stakes by putting the entire city in danger instead of one lone man, but this also abstracts it.  Rather than thinking of this as Jazz’s success in saving the city, it is hard to forget that she is also the one who brought the underlying dangers to a head.  It is true that there were some criminal elements that would likely have brought about a similar end, but then it would have been someone else’s fault.  Just because it could have been someone else’s fault doesn’t mean that Jazz is any less to blame.  

Weir does balance out the thriller narrative with the same kind of hard science detail that made The Martian successful.  He also creates an interestingly layered city in Artemis.  Perhaps the most interesting parts of the novel are those in which Jazz describes the living conditions and the ultra-capitalist founding of the city.  The populace is also deeply stratified and Jazz is constantly aware of the socio-economic realities that make a city on the Moon possible, namely tourist dollars, exploitation of natural resources, and exploitation of immigrant labor.  

I liked the book overall but look forward to the Weir novel that has a more down to Earth narrator.

Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders

This collection of short stories and one novella by George Saunders is pretty typical fare for those familiar with his work.  Usually the stories involve some sort of speculative of soft sci-fi premise, people with some sort of physical deformity, or some kind of mental deficiency.  He recombines a lot of elements that can, at times, be very defeatist.  About halfway through this book I thought it might be getting a little too down for me, which was an odd feeling for me because there was a time in my life when this would have fired a lot of synapses for me.

But I got to Bounty, the novella at the end of the novel and it turned around a bit.  The story is about enslavement of “flaweds,” people with physical mutations, in a post-collapse America.  This story is about the escape of one of these flaweds, his search for his sister, and his eventual journey to join an armed rebellion.  The content of the story didn’t differ so much from many of Saunders’ other works but the overall approach was different enough and struck just enough of a hopeful chord that it turned me around on the book.

The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

I have gotten more interested in reading books about writing in the last few years.  I read a number of these back when I was taking creative writing classes in college (undergrad years) but had strayed from it since then.  Dillard’s book is short and ponderous.  She uses observations and personal stories to write about the experience of writing.  There are some powerful moments in the the book and I found portions of this to be very inspiring.  One of the things that stuck out to me is the way that she builds writing into daily life and also the way that she views this life as one of artistry that is removed form experience.  For Dillard, the writer is someone who is separate from the romanticized image of a worldly person experiencing all of life, but is actually a person who spends a lot of time alone in a room imagining these experiences.  

The best piece of advice that I took from this book is to put everything into the current project.  She advises against holding back for the next project or for some later date.  Use it up, I am paraphrasing, and the next project will take care of itself.

The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders

Not a bad book.  There is a lot of really creative world-building in this novel about human life adapting to a new planet.  Anders sets the novel in the late stages of an Earth settlement on January.  The people of two cities, Xiosphant and Argela, survive in very different ways, according to the customs of the city and the Earthly heritage of the occupants.  But things are on the decline as the environment deteriorates around them.  One of the central characters makes contact with an alien intelligence, and rebellion starts breaking out everywhere.

There is a lot of adventure in this and the descriptions are lush.  This book might edge a little closer to fantasy than I normally care for, but it was a good read.  

The Expanse, pt. 3: Abaddon's Gate

This post is going to be a little off-the-cuff because I finished this book about a week ago and I am beginning to lose some of the details.  I won't get too bogged down in the specifics of plot and so forth, but will stick to the broad themes and my impressions.
This is the third novel in The Expanse series and it does begin to feel like it is settling in.  The first novel, Leviathan Wakes, sets the stage for a densely populated and fast-paced sci-fi/adventure/detective story.  These elements seemed to be a little crammed together until I had a realization about the series that I will come back to in a bit.  That first novel was very satisfying and showed a lot of potential.
The second novel, Caliban's War, opened with a bang and started off very strong.  It got a little logy and recycled some plot elements from the first novel in a way that was not quite as satisfying as it could have been.  Familiar characters played their familiar parts in a satisfying way and the introduction of a few new personalities kept it fresh. 
The third novel of the series, Abaddon's Gate, takes a bit of a turn in a way that helped to renew the series' direction.  This book veered away from the lost-little-girl MacGuffin of the first two books to pursue a new course.  In the first two books the reader is introduced to the protomolecule, a piece of alien bioware that was first weaponized by humans and then seemed to become sentient.  At the opening of the third novel, the protomolecule has stationed itself as a gate among the outer planets and seems to react to a ship flying into it.
What follows is a three-way standoff between the forces of Mars, Earth, and the Outer Planets Alliance as they each attempts to cordon off and, ultimately, control the portal.  Holden and his crew, having been framed for sparking a hot war, are the first to enter the gate in their attempt to evade the other forces.  This is as far as I am going with plot summary.
The entry into the gate is the first major departure from a relatively realistic sci-fi world.  So far in The Expanse, the alien protomolecule is the only thing to really push the boundaries of suspension of disbelief.  There are the standard near-relativistic speeds that are currently out of our grasp and other space technologies, but these are part and parcel of most mainstream sci-fi and don't push credulity too much.  I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is hard sci-fi, but it keeps things pretty restrained. 
Here is the big difference for me: once the Rocinante passes through the gate, it experiences different physical laws of the universe.  The protomolecule is able to alter laws of physics, and this is a major shift from the preceding books.
In this regard, this series reminds me of Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy in which humans make contact with alien civilization who are able to alter physics.  That trilogy, like The Expanse, remains relatively realistic up to this point (Liu includes some medical/cryo tech that strains suspension of disbelief, but I mean this in a general way). 
For both series, the turn from realistic, if still fantastic, sci-fi, also marks a turning point for the characters in the story.  For Liu, this marks, literally, the end of the world as the characters perceive it.  For the characters of The Expanse, the future is less certain.  There are still a lot of books to come after this and this changes the nature of the world within this fiction.  I leave this book more interested to see where the series will go than at the end of the second book.

So, here is the realization that I hinted at earlier.  While listening to an episode of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders' fantastic podcast Our Opinions are Correct about pulp fiction, I realized what it is about The Expanse that is simultaneously engrossing and a bit frustrating.  This series, it seems to me, takes many of its cues from adventure pulp.  James Holden, so far the central figure of the world of The Expanse, is a no-nonsense captain of a certain type.  He is unflaggingly tied to his sense of ethics and is a steadfast friend to his crew.  He plays a sort of moral center in this world that is largely built on his notions of integrity.  He maintains this sense of morality even as he kills and steals.  The books do recognize his flaws, but he persistently overcomes, and then reverts back to his own personality.  This is an energizing narrative to read.  He gets into jams with his crew, and they fight and cogitate their way out.  The serial nature of the books lends itself to the pulp aesthetic, as well.  I know that there are a lot of books left in the series and though I am not positive that Holden and his crew will continue intact through them all, I sort of suspect that they will, or that most of the characters will remain constant.  At a certain point, I would think that the appeal of the characters and their dynamic is as much a part of the appeal as the sci-fi elements. 
I have more books to go to see if this prediction bears out. 
Of course, none of this is to say that the books are worse, or weaker for it.  This just helps me to contextualize the world in a different way.  The series has been good so far and I will continue to read these for as long as I enjoy them.  In a way, I hope that I am wrong and that I will find in these books what I found in Liu's, but I am okay just enjoying the adventure for what it is for now.