Full Throttle

Joe Hill's newest short story collection, Full Throttle, is as eclectic and fast-paced as 20th Century Ghosts.  I think that 20th Century Ghosts was among my favorite books that I read last year.  That book is chilling and thought-provoking at the same time.
This collection has some great high-points, but there are also some stories that left me wanting a little more.  Hill proves that he is a writer who thinks about process every bit as much as his father, Stephen King, as he provides both an introduction to the collection and notes to each of the stories.  In some ways I liked reading about Hill's relationship with reading and writing and the way that he thinks about process even more than some of the stories.  It is clear that he knows his influences and is a very conscientious artist.  The clarity that he brings to these explanatory notes borders on some of the best writing advice that I gleaned from King's On Writing. 
Rather than bumping through each of the stories, I am just going to hit upon a few that I liked the most and/or struck me in some way.

Probably my favorite story of the collection is "All I Care about is You," a futuristic, sci-fi story about a girl who pays for a robot companion on her birthday.  The story hits a lot of notes that I really like in sci-fi: the world is lived in and shows signs of wear, it is not enamored of the future and isn't afraid to show some of it's ugly parts.  For whatever technology may bring, there is still unhappiness and disappointment in the world.  For an author, like Hill, who is not primarily a sci-fi writer, this is a profound stroke.  There is a great turn in the story that I don't want to ruin here, but the interplay between the girl and the robot, and in particular the way that Hill writes the robot's simulated sincerity is very deep and well written.

"Late Returns" is ostensibly a story about a man grieving the deaths of his parents while working through a change in his life, taking a job driving a bookmobile.  But this story is also about the relationship that readers have to their books and the way that they can draw us and touch us.  This is something of a ghost story, but played in a low-key way that is very reminiscent of the story "20th Century Ghosts" from the book of the same name.  In both stories, Hill draws a line from aesthetics to life and death that is fascinating to consider. 

"Faun" is a great adventure/fantasy story with another good turn.  Hill shows his skills with classic mis-direction and connects folklore with a critique of privilege in a not-overbearing way.  This story has great momentum and offers compelling character studies of two of its key players.

In addition to all of the stories that work really well in this book, there are two that fell flat for me, and both because of the structure/conceit because there are great core ideas behind them.  The first, "The Devil on the Staircase," is written in "staircases" instead of paragraphs.  The story is pretty good but the structure is jarring and makes it difficult to read.  The pages look like those that a terrified Wendy Torrance finds in Kubrik's adaptation of The Shining.  In the note to this story, Hill bets his reader that they have never read a story written this way before.  True, I haven't, but that isn't enough to recommend it.

"Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" is similarly bound up in its conceit.  The entire story is written in tweets from a teenage girl on a family road trip.  The family stumble into a circus that contains real zombies.  Again, this is a neat story, but the structuring makes it difficult to read and, ultimately, doesn't add much to the story itself.  I would rather have read a more straight-forward narrative that was peppered with tweets, or one that was more thematically about social media than just the structure.

The remainder of the stories are good and vary in their depth.  The collection, overall, is a quality one and worth the read, however, I would still rank 20th Century Ghosts a little higher.  I still have not yet read one of Hill's novels, though I have a couple of these on my next up pile.

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.

Planet of No Return

One of the first posts I made on this blog was about sci-fi books that I used to find in the laundry room of the apartment building where I used to live.  Someone had dropped a bunch of pulp books from '70s down there and I liberated a bunch when I moved out.  One of these is titled The Worlds of Poul Anderson and contains three of his novels.  To be honest, I had not heard of Poul Anderson before but the books looked cool, so I took this one.  I have seen the name pop up a lot since that time and now, after having read the first novel in the book, Planet of No Return, I am a little surprised that I have not heard more about him. 
His writing is like a lot of sci-fi authors from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.  It is somewhat spare and straightforward.  There are fantastical elements, to be sure, but they are related in an earnest way that actually downplays the invention in it.  There is almost a reportage style that Anderson uses (Heinlein does this some, too) that mirrors some aspects of American Modernism. 

Planet of No Return is a novel of ideas, the plot being rather simple.  The primary conceit is that humans have developed a means of faster-than-light speed travel that can take them out into the stars.  The crew of one ship makes an expedition to a planet that a previous ship had gone to but gotten lost.  This expedition is partly to try to discover what happened to the first mission and partly to fulfill the purpose of the first mission, which was to judge the planet for suitability for colonization. 
Upon arrival, the crew finds that the planet is already populated by Rorvan, a seemingly primitive civilization.  As they try to learn the language, the crew ends up traveling a circuitous path with the Rorvan to the seat of their civilization.  It ends up that the Rorvan are actually far advanced compared with Earth humans and they have set up a ruse to try to dissuade the colonization.  Once the crew discovers this, they have to decide whether they are going to expose the plan or keep the secret and leave the planet alone.  A pretty cool idea. 
One of the big wrinkles in this is that one member of the crew, Avery, had actually been on the first expedition and was working in concert with the Rorvan.  See, Avery had been a member of a cabal on Earth that was, itself, attempting to work against outer space colonization because they perceived diverging arcs of history for humankind.  One arc leads to outer-space colonization and a decline of human civilization because they never need to learn to solve the problems of a home planet.  The second arc keeps humans on Earth for long enough to mature as a species and work together.  Avery sides with the more utopian sect that wants to remain on Earth longer. 
I like this idea because it removes the Rorvan from the equation.  They just happened to want the same thing that Avery's folks did.  The true conflict is between two visions of humanity's future, and it is not revealed until the very final pages of this short book.  But Anderson builds the tension in such a way that it does come as a surprise.
There is one last twist, and that is that the members of the crew who must decide the fate of humanity are of the opinion that venturing out into space is the way of freedom and that remaining on Earth according to Avery's plan (which does, to be fair, involve deception) is a limitation on this freedom.  This sort of frontiersmanship fits in with the libertarian philosophy of someone like Robert Heinlein.  Avery is cast as paternalistic because of his desire to shield humanity from outside influence and escapism, but he ultimately works against extraterrestrial colonialism and a far greater potential for paternalistic oppression.
The answers are not simple in this text and Anderson leaves this up to the reader.  No character's perspective stands out as the obvious answer but the question is left open as to the best course of action for humanity.

Foundation, Part 4: Second Foundation

This is part four of an ongoing series about Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series.  I cover the first two books with varying degrees of detail here and here, provide a bit of an intro to this blog series here, and have an essay that I am quite proud of posted on tor.com here.
I don't want to retread too much ground here that I have already covered.  But I will warn that the tor.com piece is about Enlightenment philosophy and encyclopedias, and it is likely that I am going to return to these topics.

The first couple of novels plot out the downfall of the vast Galactic Empire as predicted by Hari Seldon and the science of psychohistory.  Seldon sets up an institution called the Foundation that is meant to serve as a chronicler of the collected knowledge of mankind, but covertly works as a bulwark against the Empire's fall.  This is all meant to shorten a dark age in the power vacuum that would have lasted for 30,000 years, but can be gotten over with in 1,000, thanks to Seldon's psychohistory.  This is a lot to get through, but the broad strokes don't matter too much right now.
Second Foundation opens with the Mule, the villain from Foundation and Empire, seeking out a legendary Second Foundation that is believed to exist as a plan B to the Foundation.  There is some notion that Seldon built the Second Foundation on the opposite side of the galaxy as Foundation in order to safeguard it.  This novel covers the fall of the Mule.  This character initially comes to power because he is a mutant who can control the emotions of others.  This helps him to force and keep loyalty in anyone he meets and, it is intimated, he is able to use emotion to counter and win out against science.  The Second Foundation beats the Mule and the original Foundation comes back to power.  There is a bit of a confusing power struggle wherein the Second Foundation remains hidden and the Foundation begins to suspect that the Second Foundation, also built around emotion, is trying to overtake it.  Again, these are just broad strokes intended to get to some more interesting parts.

I was first interested in the idea of the tension between emotion and science, or reason.  It seems an odd tension for Asimov to build into this series because these are not really counters at all, but complements.  What is it about emotional control that should be a threat to science in the first place?  There is also nothing necessary in the Second Foundation being any different from the first Foundation.  They could, and it seems logical that they would, be built upon the same principles.

I also found it interesting that Asimov plays more with the mythical rendering of Seldon's Plan.  In the earlier books, the characters had readier access to Seldon's ideas and plans but, by this point hundreds of years later, they have begun to regard the Plan itself as an agent.  This abstraction from the Plan actually works with the science of psychohistory as defined by Asimov because the knowledge of psychohistory disrupts its working.

One of the best parts of the series so far is the way that the whole science of psychohistory plays with the "great man" theory of history, both confirming and challenging it.
On one hand, Seldon continues to influence.  People still puzzle over his plan and the second foundation.  They also worry that the Mule was not predicted and unpredictable, so ruined the plan.
On the other hand, psychohistory is concerned with masses, billions of people.  Individual efforts don't matter.  Only mass, civilization-scale, activities have influence.  Except for Seldon, of course.

Doctor Sleep

I missed this book when it first came out a few years ago but came across it during the recent promotional campaign for the movie.  This book fits in with so many other of Stephen King's books for me: I like the story and the characters but they are just too long. 
This book is a sequel to The Shining in the sense that it picks up Danny Torrence's life as an adult.  He continues to shine and he has come to deal with both that and the problems that plagued his father.
We learn that he has been able to deal with some parts of what happened at the Overlook, and others he has had to lock away from himself in his own mind.
This book encapsulates something else about King's books that has become more apparent to me as I have gotten older.  King is interested in family legacy and the things that we seem to have thrust upon us.  Danny is an alcoholic like his father, and this has long been a theme in King's work.  But there is more.  Danny, now "Dan" as an adult, also has to deal with his own anger and find a way to reconnect with people.  He talks a lot about his mother and he thinks about Dick Halorann a lot.  The book is as much about his need to get out from under what happened to him when he was young as it is about anything.  He does this through the main action of the book, which is something that is unrelated to The Shining and not something I really want to get into here. 
Doctor Sleep is about dispelling the notion that there are things that are inevitable.  Dan sees signs of his own death at one point in the novel, but he is able to dodge his demise.  The novel deals more directly with alcoholism than some of King's other work, giving the reader some AA aphorisms and narrating meetings that Dan attends, as well as defining his relationship with his sponsor.  The elements of AA that seep in walk a line between individual choice and inevitability.  As it is presented in the text, AA is about staving off the inevitable, and accepting that for paradox that it is. 
I don't think that there is really a good comparison with The Shining in this novel.  The books are too different and are trying to do different things.  The Shining is a tighter novel, but it is also a less skillfully executed novel.  It requires a different sort of imagination than Doctor Sleep does because King seems more likely to fill in the gaps in his later work than when he was a younger writer.  His early novels left spaces for the reader to fill with their own fears.  More recent work seems to define the unknown a bit more.  This is not a judgement either way, just an observation. 
I have not yet seen the movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep, but am curious to see how it translates to the screen.  Adaptations of King's novels are always a mixed bag, but the quality of them has improved over time.  The last big question for me, though, is how an adaptation of this novel will stack up against Stanley Kubrik's adaptation of The Shining.