Not that long ago, I sampled another anthology of alternate history, Other Earths. Now I’m dipping into this specialized sub-genre again with Roads Not Taken. The premise is similar, but in this case the stories were all previously published in either Analog or Amazing. Though I’m disappointed that not one of the ten contributors is a woman, the stories themselves are much more thoughtful and interesting than those I encountered in Other Earths.

“Must and Shall” is a Harry Turtledove story. It diverges during the American Civil War, an all-too-popular event in alternate history. In this case, a stray Confederate bullet kills Lincoln in his first term as he peers over the battlements, so his vice president inherits and the Civil War becomes a much bloodier affair. What makes this story stand out against all the other Civil War alternative history is how Turtledove then jumps towards the present day and shows the consequences of this divergence. The South is a much less forgiving place; the United States are not so much united as held together by the iron fist of the North. It’s intriguing, because Turtledove taps into the cultural tension that is still present, to some extent, in the United States today.

Robert Silverberg’s“An Outpost of the Empire” posits that the Roman empire never fell. Instead, it swallows the Byzantine empire in a single, mighty gulp! The protagonist of this story is a rich, single woman in Venice, watching the Romans move in to occupy her city. She becomes a target of affection for the new consul and aims to seduce him, only to discover that foreigners are more complex than they appear. It’s a slow and thoughtful meditation on the conflict between occupier and occupied.

In “We Could Do Worse”, Gregory Benford paints a chilling picture of a United States in which Joe McCarthy becomes president. This is an America where the Constitution is no longer worth the paper it’s printed on, and civil liberties is a dirty phrase. I couldn’t connect personally with this story, since I’m too young to remember McCarthyism, but I can understand the type of dread it’s supposed to instil. It’s not the most gripping story of the collection, though.

“Over There”, by Mike Resnick, sees Teddy Roosevelt blackmail Woodrow Wilson into resurrecting the Rough Riders division and taking them into World War I. It’s a fabulous concept, but as with“We Could Do Worse”, I wasn’t very intrigued. It was obvious from the beginning that Roosevelt could not achieve the glory he sought. There isn’t much depth here.

A.A. Attansio’s “Ink from the New Moon” reminds me of Bridge of Ancient Birds, in that it has the Chinese visiting North America before the Europeans do. In this time they make contact with the indigenous inhabitants and set up a trading network, scooping the Europeans (also known as the “Big Noses"). It’s a cool concept, and Attansio does a good job developing a main character who is flawed but likable.

“Southpaw” is somewhat similar to “Over There” in that it follows a single character’s divergent path through history. Bruce McAllister wonders what would have happened if Fidel Castro came to play baseball in the United States instead of becoming a revolutionary in Cuba. This story is an excellent example of how alternative history can allow introspection. It shines a light on the paradox of immigrating to a nation like the United States, allowing people who are not migrants to sympathize with the conflicting emotions that migrants face on a daily basis.

Greg Costykian’s “The West is Red” takes us to an alternative universe where communism succeeds and capitalism fails. Central planning is all the rage, even in the United States. This story captivated the technophile in me: Costykian posits that because communism is so obsessed with centralization, it would retard the development of personal computers in favour of large, centralized supercomputers accessed through dumb terminals. I’m not sure it’s that simple, but it’s an intriguing thought that allows him to construct a wholly different technological background to that of our society.

“The Forest of Time” is a story about universe-hopping. A man invents a method to travel to different universes. But the act of travelling itself creates different universes, altering the distance between universes. He ends up in a radically different North America, one where the colonies never unified, and the prisoner of a suspicious Pennsylvanian scout. Michael Flynn sets an interesting dilemma for the main characters, who struggle with whether to believe the traveller. I did find that having some of the names begin with the same letter really confused me with this story, for some reason. That’s really the only criticism though. Otherwise, Flynn does a good job highlighting how fascinating this concept of divergent and convergent universes is.

But now we come to “Aristotle and the Gun”, my favourite story of the entire collection. The other stories were all fine, but none of them really stood out for me. I can’t explain why this one seems so much better than the others, but L. Sprague de Camp somehow manages to make me invest in the main character’s struggle. I think it’s just the fascinating relationship we see develop between the main character and Aristotle. That, and a level of sympathy for his desire to advance science more quickly (and the irony that it didn’t quite work out that way). Though de Camp doesn’t depart from the conventions of time travel and alternate history that much, he embraces them and uses them so well that the result is a predictable yet gripping and fun adventure.

Gene Wolfe finishes up with “How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion". This is best described as “fun”, in a similar vein to the Fidel Castro story above. The main character and his friend are fans of tabletop strategy games. The two World Wars are just games that they designed in this universe. Instead, the “German invasion” of the title is the threat of German cars surpassing British-made ones. The protagonist helps Churchill avert this eventuality in a devious, underhanded competition.

Roads Not Taken has some good alternative history between its cover. I think I’m done with such anthologies for a good long while now. Binging on alternative history is exhausting and can result in a bit of a headache. I’d rather sample a longer work next. Reading so many short stories in a row just makes it harder to appreciate novelty when it does come around.

For most people, computers are magic. Which is to say, they are technology sufficiently advanced to the point of mystification. I include myself in this camp, for despite my comfort with computers and my fluency in programming, a great deal of mystery still surrounds them. With the emergence of the Internet into the public sphere and the rise of the Web, computers and the phone system are now fundamentally intertwined, and vast swathes of our infrastructure are dependent on them. The dangers of cyberwarfare are very real. At the same time, however, it's important that we don't exaggerate or misrepresent this threat. Movies and television sensationalize the abilities and proclivities of hackers for the sake of drama and entertainment. Real hackers are quite different, and their motives and actions are as diverse and varied as the people they hack. Real hacking is independent of platform and technology; it's often more of a case of appealing to the weakest element in the system: the human.

Ghost in the Wires is the autobiography of Kevin Mitnick, “the world's most wanted hacker”. His is a fascinating, even bizarre tale of the convergence of law enforcement, ego, and addiction. Thanks to Mitnick’s impressive abilities, equally impressive capacity for self-delusion and self-denial, and the media’s tendency to think the worst, exploits and escapades that start as harmless fun result in a years-long manhunt and nearly a decade of jail time.

Mitnick's gateway into hacking is “phone phreaking”, unauthorized access to the phone company’s systems. This was in the days before the Web, before even personal computers, when computing itself involved entering programs line-by-line into computer memory and watching the read-outs on a printer, not a screen. It’s an era utterly alien to someone of my generation, let alone younger readers—and I love reading about how people interacted with computers at that stage.

As computers and phones become more advanced, so too does Mitnick. He explains how he acquires the ability to clone cell phone numbers, and how he uses space in dormant accounts on university and company servers to store source code he steals from companies like Sun, Novell, and Motorola. He obtains access to the IRS and DMV records, which later becomes instrumental as he creates false identities and goes on the run.

Mitnick keeps the structure of the book strictly chronological, with just enough foreshadowing to whet our appetites in anticipation of future events. However, some common themes quickly emerge. After his first few brushes with law enforcement over his hacking, Mitnick attempts to “straighten out” and quit, only to relapse time and again. In this sense, hacking is an addiction—it’s a challenge that provides a cognitive reward. No matter how hard he tries to give it up, he returns to it. This inability to rein himself in, even when he recognizes the dangers and the possibility of overreaching, is one of the reasons he eventually gets caught and goes to jail.

Mitnick also faces a revolving door of betrayal. Best friends and confidantes turn coat and rat him out to get lighter punishments; people he thought he could rely on turn against him. I sympathize. However, these accounts are necessarily one-sided, and I get the sense from reading between the lines that there was a lot about Mitnick as a person that contributed to these changes of heart.

Ghost in the Wires is a hefty book, especially as a paperback, and the pace is very slow. Mitnick enjoys teasing out every detail of his latest hack or discovery. Yet I never tired of hearing about it; I seldom wanted to put this book down. I just wanted to know what happened next: what was the next hack, the next run-in with the law, the next problem Mitnick had to overcome? Even before he becomes a fugitive, there is a sense of danger always around the corner. Though he spends a lot of time celebrating his ability to outwit and evade security employees from the telephone companies, he also gives due credit to those people who manage to outwit him. Once in a while, a technician or sysadmin catches on and boots him out. My reading pace is different for every book, but I literally did not want to stop reading this, stealing every possible opportunity to read as much as I could each day. There is just never a dull moment in the book.

It’s also truly terrifying to see how quickly rumours become exaggerated and become part of the legal record. Mitnick stresses throughout the book that he never hacked for profit or out of malice. For him, it was merely an exercise in ego. That doesn’t excuse the actions, but it does mean that charges amounting to terrorism are unjust. The ignorance of the law enforcement and judicial officials involved in this case is staggering. The overreactions—not letting Mitnick have any access to a phone for national security reasons—are a sobering reminder of how easy it is to mislead people who are less informed. When those people are in positions of power, they can abuse or misuse that power unwittingly, under the impression they are acting in the interests of public safety.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation in this book isn’t a technical one at all. Rather, Mitnick accomplishes some of his most daring hacks through social engineering. It’s incredible how willing people are to help him cirumvent their own company’s security procedures. With a little research and some guile, Mitnick poses as an employee from another office, tells a plausible story, and gets remote access or other information that people shouldn’t be so ready to divulge.

The weakest link in our cybersecurity is not the technology. It’s us. The trusting operator, the cheerful colleague … these are all parts of being human and having positive interactions every day. But the best, most secure systems are worthless if all you need to do is sweet-talk someone into reseting an account’s password. Mitnick’s approach still works today. Just ask Mat Honan, who had his Amazon and Apple accounts hacked through social-engineering of customer support representatives, and from there, the hackers disassembled the rest of his digital existence.

Ghost in the Wires is that sweet spot of books about technology. It’s accessible to everyone. At times Mitnick’s terminology definitely becomes a little technical and specialized—I don’t know enough about how our phone system works to pretend to follow his explanations of how he tricks the system into rerouting calls and letting him listen into private conversations. But that didn’t affect my enjoyment of the book or my ability to follow what he was achieving. It also has a strong social message. Mitnick’s relationship with hacking is an addiction just as damaging to his life as an addiction to drugs or alcohol. Moreover, the book is a warning that unless we make sure people in positions of power are better-educated about the capabilities of technology, we run the risk of innocent lives being ruined by misinformed authorities.

The majority of Mitnick’s tale takes place in the 1980s and 1990s, in the infancy of the World Wide Web. There was no Facebook or Twitter, no Amazon or Google. Now we spend more and more of our lives online. Mitnick might have been the world’s first “most wanted hacker”, but I doubt he will be the last. And we’re all going to have to get a little more clued-in, or we will be in for a rough time.

This book is a work of art.

I say this knowing that Douglas Coupland is as much an artist as he is a writer. It shows in his novels. His works very deliberately play with the same themes and variations across the decades. Having read, and enjoyed, the majority of his novels, it’s hard not to see all the recurring character types, set pieces, and plot elements. Microserfs and JPod riff on the cognitive dissonance of the software industry, while Generation A, Girlfriend in a Coma, and Player One toss unlikely groups of people together to ride out visions of apocalypse. Now, with Worst. Person. Ever., Coupland takes aim at this familiar territory, setting out once again to shock and awe.

That’s what I mean when I call Worst. Person. Ever. a work of art: it is an offensive and perhaps shocking book, but deliberately so. As the title and cover copy promise, Raymond Gunt is a terrible person. And the profanity! It’s not just your everyday, run-of-the-mill profanity of F-bombs and the like; no, Coupland delivers crude imagery on the order of “the universe delivered unto me a searing hot kebab of vasectomy leftovers drizzled in donkey jizz”. (That’s from the second page, by the way. He’s up front about what this book is like.) Thanks a lot, Coupland.

So for me, reading Worst. Person. Ever. was like staring at those types of photos or paintings that you know are trying to provoke you. I spent six years working at an art gallery—which provides me with exactly nothing in the way of qualification or expertise to discuss art. But I saw a good many exhibitions come and go along the way, and while visual art does not push my buttons the way literature does, I have some sense of how and why artists use visual media to provoke the audience. For these artists, art must go beyond the aesthetic, must be about more than form and function and beauty. Art can offend to educate and to inculcate a desire to question and learn.

Some people just won’t get it. They’ll look at the donkey jizz kebab of page two (and really, page two only goes downhill from there—the words “leathery cumdump” also make an appearance), and if that doesn’t make them hit the eject button, then the coke-tinged, profanity-laced conversation between Raymond and his ex-wife, Fiona, that comprises the remainder of the chapter would definitely set them running. These are the people who see offensive art only for its offensive qualities and don’t stop to question why it’s trying to be offensive. Worst. Person. Ever. is not for them.

The journey of Raymond Gunt is an incredibly unlikely, even nonsensical one. It involves twists of fate and reversals that would please the playwrights of the sixteenth century, and the sudden introduction or redaction of characters at a speed that would make soap opera writers’ heads spin. Raymond makes it to ground zero of an atomic bomb detonation, which very nearly touches off another one of Coupland’s apocalypses. When he makes it back to "civilization"—an island in Kiribati where they are filming a reality TV show—he finds himself stuck in a drama that should be a reality TV show.

The situations in which Coupland’s characters find themselves are almost always implausible, no matter the novel. His writing is always on the precipice of the surreal. It’s in this liminal space that Coupland excels at mirroring and critiquing contemporary culture. Replete with pop culture references, his novels are always steeped in the present.

This is problematic from a posterity point of view. Topical novels always run the risk of burning brightly in their era before fading swiftly. I’m not sure we should be so quick to judge, however, simply because there are plenty of now-classic books that were probably considered (or still are considered) topical for their times and that have their own, albeit more subtle, types of pop culture reference. Reading a book from a previous era will always be, in some ways, an exercise in cultural anthropology. In this sense, I don’t think Coupland is much worse off than another writer. Worst. Person. Ever. also ameliorates the situation through periodic asides that explain, in the form of asides that mimic the most sardonic of Wikipedia articles. These certainly helped me, since some of the references date to before I was born.

Coupland seems interested in probing the transition zone between fake and genuine in our culture. What makes people “fake” to one another rather than genuine? Are we ever really genuine, or do we always put on some kind of act to get what we want, whether it’s sex, a job, or simply a piece of red plastic?

Raymond is particularly critical of the disposable and processed artifacts of our culture. With faux-British snobbery, he and Neal pan the preservative-laden food they find in American airports. They don’t actually eat a healthy meal for most of the novel, subsisting mainly on packages of macadamia nuts (to which Raymond is violently allergic). Similarly, Raymond laments the seemingly-arbitrary rules imposed by travel and federal authorities with regards to alcohol consumption—rules that never seem to bother or inconvenience others, just him.

Neal, on the other hand, never seems inconvenienced by anything. Plucked from a life on the streets by Raymond to be his personal assistant (read: slave), Neal soon proves to be irresistible to women and far more successful than Raymond. Unlike our cameraman protagonist, Neal is unassuming and equanimous. He takes life as it comes, and it seems that “going with the flow” leaves him happier and better-adjusted than Raymond, who is more like a cat—unwilling to do anything that someone else wants it to do, even if it would like that thing.

Witnessing the story unfold is rather like watching a cartoon through a series of increasingly funky funhouse mirrors. It starts off innocently enough, with Raymond landing the job on the reality TV show. Before the halfway point, whether he and Neal will ever get to Kiribati starts looking like a dubious proposition.

You would think that, with his penchant for poking at pop culture, Coupland would ride the reality TV trope hard. He only indulges once or twice, though. There’s a memorable scene where Fiona and Neal choose replacement cast members for the show based on their attractiveness and ability to fulfil stereotypical roles; and there’s a parody of the sadistic qualities of these shows in the form of a contest to eat plates of live, wriggling insects. For the most part, however, Coupland avoids the low-hanging fruit of satirizing reality television in favour of satirizing reality itself (which is, let’s face it, disappointingly unrealistic most of the time).

Although I laughed out loud at a few points throughout the book, I wouldn’t say that Worst. Person. Ever. is hilarious in the same vein that I found JPod. Then again, neither is most of Coupland’s work. There’s a solemnity to some of his absurdism that reminds me more of Kurt Vonnegut than Douglas Adams. These authors, too, wrote books that I would consider deliberately offensive, albeit not quite to the crude extent that Coupland presents here. Then again, they weren’t living in the time of the MTV Video Music Awards, of Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus. It’s not necessarily harder to be offensive these days, but the signal-to-noise ratio is much lower.

This isn’t the meditative masterpiece that I consider Player One, which I’m teaching to my sixth form students this year, to be. It isn’t as emotionally touching as Eleanor Rigby or Girlfriend in a Coma. It is, however, characteristically Coupland. You can like it or you can hate it (it is, as Coupland comments on reality TV itself, binary); it is not fair to say, however, that it’s just “more of the same”. Coupland is an author who manages to play with the same ideas over and over yet always reinvent himself along the way. Worst. Person. Ever. is the latest iteration, brave and bold and in-your-face and not necessarily to everyone’s liking. So kudos to him for not playing it safe, and for giving me an entertaining weekend read.

When I was a child, I remember tuning into re-runs of seaQuest DSV on the Space channel in Canada. (I was alive when it first broadcast, but it was in re-runs by the time I started paying attention.) I never watched the series regularly, but I’d happily sit in front of an episode if it happened to be on. I was captivated by the idea of a tricked-out submarine exploring the deeps of the ocean on our own planet Earth. I seem to remember the first season, especially, focused on the scientific parts of such exploration. (Eventually Michael Ironside showed up, which is fantastic for him, but the show wasn’t the same.) And say what you will about the show itself, the concept is brilliant. Even now, fifteen years on, we are still groping in the dark when it comes to investigating our oceans. Samples from James Cameron’s record-breaking descent into the Challenger Deep might yield new forms of life that could help treat illnesses or break down plastics. There is a "final frontier" here on our own planet, and while I’m all in favour of space exploration, I don’t think we should neglect what is right in front of our eyes.

So that’s where I’m coming from as I read Katya’s World. It isn’t similar to seaQuest DSV at all, except that both feature people in submarines. Yet Jonathan L. Howard strives towards that same sense of wonder when it comes to oceans and their relationship with humanity. As Kane stresses to Katya repeatedly, the Russalkin might have formed a distinct culture after three generations, but they are still human, and the way they interact with the ocean is rooted in this fact. From their technology to their mythology, their life on Russalka is not just a product of the immediate planetary environment but the culmination of thousands of years of seafaring, exploration, and naval warfare.

With a name like Katya’s World, and coming from an imprint like Strange Chemistry, you’d be expecting a book about a colony on another world. And it is. But Russalka happens to be a world without any dry land, and so its settlers have constructed underwater habitats. So Howard has written a science fiction book that is also a submarine thriller, with thematic echoes of Cold War spy games and piratical hijinks. There are a few technological innovations—sidearm masers are standard issue, since they are much safer in an enclosed environment; and mention of interstellar starships and the like, of course—but for the most part, the science and technology are very familiar. Howard confidently wields a vocabulary that immerses the reader in the story and slickly defines the unfamiliar terms while still advancing the plot.

So aside from the fact that it’s set on an alien world with slightly advanced technology, Katya’s World could very well take place in the oceans of Earth. The pirates and the FMA are two competing factions, or countries. Katya and her uncle are the innocent civilians caught in the middle of a wider power struggle. Meanwhile, a sea monster stalks both parties, intent on eliminating those who have awakened it from its slumber in the deep. And every time Katya or anyone else has a brilliant idea to solve their current problem, the stakes change, and the situation somehow worsens. There’s never a dull moment.

Thanks to these changing circumstances and tightly-written scenes, Howards maintains interest through what is otherwise a somewhat long, flat book. In other words, he kept me hooked, but I confess to wondering throughout what the bigger picture was. I was sure he was building to something more than just, "Escape the evil pirates" as the endgame. And to be fair, there is such a picture, but it’s dangled as a carrot beyond the end of the book. If you go into this looking for vast political machinations, you will be disappointed. The only resolution we get is on the level of family and personal relationships.

Fortunately, the protagonist is up to the task of connecting with the reader at that level. Katya is smart and competent, but not to a Mary Sue extent: she very often is the one who comes up with ideas, or makes a key cognitive leap at a critical moment. However, her solutions are never panaceas, and rather than have everyone stand around dumbstruck while Katya has to explain her leaps, Howard usually demonstrates that the people around her can arrive at the same conclusion, albeit after a few more seconds. In this way, he creates a heroine who is independent and self-assured but not unrealistically capable. On an ocean world, anyone who isn’t intelligent is probably going to die pretty quickly.

Katya isn’t the chosen one. She’s not particularly special. Vampires could read her thoughts, and she isn’t the last scion of a diminished faerie house. She just happens to be in the wrong (or right) place at the wrong (or right) time, and she makes the best of her situation. This is what makes for interesting fiction. All that other stuff is merely decoration, and sometimes I feel like the rabid and hyperactive buyers—by which I mean the publishers and agents who trade in it, not the readers—of young adult fiction lose sight of this fact.

I have nothing against young adult novels, or novels of any stripe, in which the protagonist is special, chosen, or destined for greatness. If she happens to have some special quality that brings all the boys to her yard, all the more power to her. These narratives are important, particularly for youth, because the real world is harsh and often anonymizing, and these special qualities of heroes help us feel more distinct in our individuality.

Still, it is so refreshing to have a young adult novel in which a young woman succeeds because of her knowledge of science and quick thinking. Even more shocking, there are no love interests in sight! There are no cocky rival navigators just her age, ready to step in and infantilize her for a trivial navigation error. There are no slightly-older-just-to-the-point-of-creepy mentors who taker her under their wing with only the slightest of leers. Katya spends the majority of the book in predominantly male company, it seems; at times she schools them, and at times they school her. It’s almost like Howard is claiming that everyone can learn something from everyone else.

In short, Katya’s World is an original novel with a fantastic setting, compelling plot, and likable characters. Howard knows how to create a balance between too little and too much exposition, which allows him to impart a fairly detailled sense of Russalka’s origins and its relationship with Earth. Principally through dialogue, Howard educates us about submarine travel and what life might be like beneath an ocean. And while he does this, pirates and an insane submarine warship threaten our protagonist from all sides.

I’ve been making a slow tour through Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence for a few months now. It’s undeniably an important series in the fantasy canon, but my personal reaction to it has been more ambivalent. I have been rather disappointed with the novels as stories. They’re brilliant examples of methodical mythological remixing. Yet in adjusting the tone of the books to aim them to her younger audience, Cooper also seems to feel it’s necessary to remove a great deal of the complexity and subtlety that makes novels such an interesting literary form. Novels, to me, are interesting beasts. Their ability to ensnare and divert readers through twisting passages of description and narration make them far craftier and less trustworthy than their dramatic and poetic cousins; novels aim to make a meal out of the reader. The best writers are those who can harness this predatory nature to craft stories that absorb the reader by tickling us with the hints and harsh edges of the darkness at the edge of the light.

The previous volumes of this series lack that complexity and that depth of conflict required to sustain that interest. I haven’t read these as a child, so I can’t speak to how I might like or dislike them. But children understand darkness a lot more than many people give them credit for doing. Their lives are not the perfect, innocent world we often want them to be. So I think we do them a disservice when we insist that the fiction we give them ignores real-and-present darkness in favour of more abstract, "kid-safe" versions. Ironically, given that most of its conflict concerns the battle between the Light and the Dark, The Dark is Rising sequence is mostly the latter. With few exceptions, these are books where the main characters fight the powers of darkness on their holidays, on the side, and danger never seems to be more serious than having to run away from a bad man.

So, prior to reading it, I admit to being rather baffled by the fact that The Grey King won the Newberry. This just goes to show that prior performance can’t always predict future success: this book is a long sight better than the previous ones in the series. For Cooper deigns to put Will and his sidekick in far deeper waters than she has ever dared previously, and the payoff is immediate and gratifying. The Grey King edges ever closer to being the tricksy type of creature a novel should be.

Will visits some relatives in Wales as he recovers from an illness. (I don’t think this kid ever actually goes to school.) It’s implied the illness might be an attempt by the Dark to derail him, since for a little while he seems to have forgotten the rhyme he learned at the end of Greenwitch. If so, the attempt backfired in a big way, since Will ends up visiting the exact place he needs to be to find the Golden Harp and wake the Sleepers. Destiny for the win!

Cooper experiments with structure as well, dividing the book into two parts that concern the two quests Will undertakes while in Wales. The previous stories were all quests of some sort, but this one has much more focus. Merriman continues to pop in and out in that annoying Gandalfian way of his, but it’s much less frequent and intrusive than it has been in the past. The Grey King feels like Will’s story, more so even than The Dark is Rising.

Except it’s also kind of Bran’s story.

A new character, Bran is special in terms of his heritage. However, Cooper manages to strike a balance between building Bran up and giving Will enough to do to justify his presence as an Old One. The two work as a complementary duo: Bran has a certain amount of fortitude and, of course, local knowledge, while Will has his own specialized knowledge as an Old One and the sense of indomitable spirit that has allowed him to succeed in the past. Neither could stand against the Grey King by himself; together, they make a compelling team.

This is the first of the Dark is Rising books that feels like it gives the protagonists enough to do and provides a meaningful threat. The previous books had intriguing puzzles and interesting main characters. But the stakes, despite ostensibly involving the fate of the world, never quite seemed high enough. In contrast, Cooper puts her protagonists in more danger here, with stakes that include their own lives and lives of trusted companions. Never has the Dark seemed like a more dangerous enemy than in this book.

One more to go. Silver on the Tree has a lot it must deliver, as the last novel in this sequence, and the surprising quality of The Grey King compared to its predecessors only enhances my expectations for the last book. Though I continue to enjoy Cooper’s writing and her use of British mythology in her stories, I hope the trend towards complexity seen here continues.

My reviews of the Dark is Rising sequence:
←Greenwitch | Silver on the Tree →

Well, here we are, at the end of a very long journey. I can see now why The Dark is Rising sequence is packaged, well, as a sequence. The individual novels are quite short--some of them closer to novellas than anything else. The five-book stories are in fact a single story, but packaged together, they take up nearly 800 pages of very small print. It's an adult-sized story aimed at young adults and children, and I imagine the omnibus edition is intimidating. I found it intimidating, which is why I've been taking it one book at a time.

When I started reading this series, I was fairly dismissive of Susan Cooper's ideas and writing. Over Sea, Under Stone isn't a very well-developed book, and I stand by the problems I had with its plotting and characterization. In some respects, these criticisms have never completely evaporated. Though the novels steadily improve, my complaints about each of them are, by and large, very similar. However, I feel somewhat hobbled in the sense that I don't think I'm the appropriate audience for these books. I think that older children and young adults would devour these without fail, and it's not really fair for me to press adult sensibilities upon such fare.

The last two books, The Grey King and this one, Silver on the Tree, have forced me to reevaluate Cooper. These are the best books in the series, not the least because they contain genuine peril and high stakes. Both take on a more complex structure, with Cooper resorting to parts as well as chapters to organize everything. Silver on the Tree is the climax and the resolution; the forces of Dark are rising to make one final attempt to take control of our world, and the Light, led by Will Stanton, must stand against the Dark.

It's all very exciting. I'm still uncomfortable, though, by the extent to which Cooper leans on destiny. And this isn't unique to her; it's an issue a lot of strong fantasy writers seem to struggle with. Relying too much on destiny and prophecy and "knowledge" acquired through arcane means irks me in a fantasy novel, because it spoils some of the mystery of the story. Barring a very downer ending (which we obviously wouldn't see here), we know the protagonists have to succeed. It's not about whether they win; it's about how. But if so much of it is choreographed by destiny, down to the point where our protagonists almost can't fail, then the story becames a cutscene in a rails shooter, and it starts to lose its appeal.

That's an issue when the two sides are called "Light" and "Dark". They are simplistic in a way that appeals to kids and even to some adults. But when all the heroes are unfaltering in their allegiance to the Light, it gets boring. The most intense parts of these books occur when other characters have to make the choice to side with the Light or the Dark. One of these moments happens in Silver on the Tree, when John Rowlands must rule whether Bran belongs in the present time and, therefore, is able to help the Light push back the Dark. Both sides are bound by the Higher Magic, and they mutually empower John as the adjudicator. The Dark tempts John with his wife in a rather heartbreaking way. And he still chooses for the Light--which, again, is not much of a surprise. But hey, at least we had some dramatic tension.

(And then, because the Light is paternalistic as shit, after John can't decide whether to keep his memory of these strange events, the Lady decides for him and makes him forget. Why not just make everyone except the Old Ones and Bran forget? Why do Barney, Simon, and Jane need to remember?)

I'm glad I read this series, because now I know what people are talking about when they extol its role in their lives. I've had similar books--for me, the Belgariad was my gateway to epic fantasy in a way Lord of the Rings never was, even though the latter is arguably better. I am, without a doubt, a literary snob, albeit one who occasionally tries to mend his ways. And in such a gesture, it's necessary to note that a book doesn't have to be "good" to also be influential (that vampire book ring any bells?). Yet our definition of "good" is always going to vary. I do, in fact, consider The Dark is Rising as a whole a good series, but one with much variation within that category. I can't personally attest to its greatness or claim it has left much of a lasting impression on me. But I can see the potential for it to do so, in another time and another place.

My reviews of The Dark is Rising sequence:
← The Grey King

I read this omnibus edition. I have reviewed each book separately:

* Over Sea, Under Stone
* The Dark is Rising
* Greenwitch
* The Grey King
* Silver on the Tree

This is a book I wouldn’t ordinarily give a second glance on a library shelf. It’s an ambitious attempt to combine a western with the "hunter" subgenre of urban fantasy. I’m just not a fan of the western tropes or, in fact, the time period or setting. I don’t sympathize with the dangerous, romanticized nostalgia for a “simpler” time on the “frontier” when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were … nowhere to be seen. So had The Dead of Winter offered itself to me on a library shelf, I would have moved it along. But because I subscribe to Angry Robot’s offerings, I try to read most, if not all, of what this entitles me to download. So I trudged on through The Dead of Winter and quickly found myself enjoying it.

On the surface, combining a western with supernatural hunters is a no-brainer. (Indeed, the TV series Supernatural is an example, as it embraces much of the western ethos and has explicitly borrowed elements of the western in some of its stories.) The western as a genre has much in common with science fiction. Both are heavily "genre" in the sense that they tend to exist within literary ghettos. Science fiction in many forms, or at least its pulpiest, is the western, but in space—this is how Star Trek was often pitched in its early days. Such comparisons don’t quite do these genres justice, though. The western and SF are similar because they are both settings, within which any story is possible, given enough imagination and careful planning.

The Dead of Winter works because Lee Collins has one goal and pursues it whole-heartedly. His sole purpose is to introduce us to Cora Oglesby and her husband, Ben. They are hunters of the supernatural in late-1800s America. This goal is ambitious enough, but because he doesn’t try to do too much, the end product is very focused and quite fun. For instance, he doesn’t spend too much time explaining the various types of monsters found in this universe. Obviously there are vampires, which come in two specific subspecies; there are also werewolves and wendigos, and I’m sure he mentioned one or two others. Aside from exposition on the nature of vampires, though, which is totally relevant to the plot, Collins resists the temptation to worldbuild through unnecessary infodumps. The result is clean, crisp prose and plot. This quality of writing is exactly what’s required to overcome a reader’s (mine) prejudice of a novel’s apparent genre or setting.

Also, Cora is an excellent protagonist. Collins’ characterization of her is masterful: he just drops things on us with a matter-of-fact attitude. I had no idea Cora was scarring her face as a mark of her kills until she does it after disposing of the wendigo. In that scene, Ben stands in for the reader in his obvious distaste and squeamishness over Cora’s actions: not only does he not enjoy the sight of her blood, but he obviously doesn’t like that she does this to herself. Cora kicks ass: she isn’t afraid to speak her mind, and she’s a tough fighter. She’s also flawed—a little too fond of drink, a little too hot-headed. But she recognizes these qualities in herself and has tried to compensate for them in Ben. This idea of a husband-wife team of hunters, one the scholar and one the warrior, really intrigued me.

Which is why I simultaneously hate and love Collins for the twist midway through the book.

It’s a twist worthy of Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, which currently holds my personal record for most effective, most shattering plot twist. I’m not going to spoil it. Suffice it to say that, in hindsight, it’s obvious. In fact, in contrast to Harkaway, who just pulls the rug out from under the reader without any sympathy, Collins telegraphs it quite a bit before he makes it explicit. He needles the reader, forcing us to doubt Cora and start wondering exactly what’s wrong, before he reveals the details of the situation. My only critique is that this would have been even more effective in first-person; first-person unreliable narrators are much more convincing than third-person ones.

Collins also does vampires right. No sparkles or veganism here. Vampires in The Dead of Winter are nasty, brutish animals—yet the nosferatu variety are also cunning and terrifying. I wasn’t all that impressed with the antagonist; he didn’t seem half as clever as he thought he was, and I never much worried that Cora would fail against him. Perhaps that’s why Collins sets it in Leadville—even if the reader doesn’t worry about Cora, they can worry about the casualty count in the town, as I did.

This is a world where the supernatural is real and present. Vampires and werewolves are facts of life on the frontier; you just pray they don’t bother your little homestead. But if they do, you need someone like Cora, with her blessed blade and her silver bullets, to back you up.

There is much to be said for reading books within your comfort zone. But I love when I take a chance on something I’m not enthusiastic about and the chance pays off. I can’t promise The Dead of Winter will work similarly for you, but I encourage you to take a chance on some book. You never know. I’m still not going to read straight-up westerns any time soon, but Cora’s next adventure is certainly on my list.

With a book called The Assassin’s Curse, you might expect this to be about the curse of an assassin on their victim. But no, this is about a curse on an assassin when his target saves his life. And with this twist, Cassandra Clare sends us rocketing off on a bizarre adventure through a vibrant fantasy world of pirates, deserts, and high-stakes pursuit by supernatural beings.

Ananna doesn’t want to get married, or at least not to the suitor her parents have selected. So she hops on a camel at the market and runs away, severing all ties with her family and the family of her betrothed. His family sends an assassin after her—and in this world, assassins are a big deal. Ananna is the daughter of a captain in the Confederacy of Pirates. She knows ships and sea like the back of her hand. Navigating her way around a desert city is more difficult.

When she manages to save the life of the assassin sent after her, she unknowingly places him in her debt. He is bound to protect her from harm, and the rest of the book follows the two of them as they try to find a cure to his curse. Supernatural beings from another world called the Mists are hunting Naji, the assassin, and now Ananna is on their radar too.

Clare grabs you from the beginning and doesn’t let you go. The phrase “never a dull moment” springs to mind: even at apparent lulls in the action, something happens to upset the status quo and force Naji and Ananna to change their plans. Nothing ever goes smoothly, and they are constantly making mistakes and falling over each other. Because their ways of operating are so different, and their motives are not always the same, they aren’t always on the same page.

The budding relationship between Naji and Ananna is the crux of this adventure. I’m not sold on it as a romantic relationship. Clare doesn’t spend enough time showing us how Ananna could fall in love with Naji (I don’t know how Naji feels about her). However, the sometimes-adversarial, sometimes-aligned aspect of their relationship leads to good conflict and humorous moments.

I also can’t fault Clare for getting the story off to such a quick start. Yet I would have liked to see more of the Confederacy before we left it behind. Ananna does get a chance to return to the seas as she temporarily serves on the crew of a ship that’s giving them passage. But it isn’t the same as seeing her aboard her family’s vessel. To be fair, Clare shares plenty of flashbacks and memories from Ananna to help flesh out her character.

The threat of the Mists is often a powerful one, but it’s also ambiguous. I enjoyed how the various characters Ananna and Naji encountered often seemed to be of the trickster variety. But Clare plays these cards close to her chest, with the result that it’s difficult to understand the stakes involved, beyond Naji and Ananna’s personal welfare. Do the Mists have some kind of plan that threatens the world itself? Or are they merely interested in something that Naji has done? He promises to explain this to Ananna, but it isn’t made clear.

The Assassin’s Curse definitely entertained me, but it didn’t amaze me. Clare has created a cool world and a good main character, but the story itself didn’t convince me to stick around longer than it took to read the last page. I’ll read the sequel, because I have a Strange Chemistry subscription, and because Clare’s writing is strong enough that it shows potential for greater things.

So far I’ve been reading George Eliot’s work in a reverse-chronological order. For my third experience I’ve chosen Adam Bede, her first novel. I didn’t realize this until I read the introduction after finishing the book. In hindsight, I can see how her style is less polished than her later works; however, at the time, I was captivated by all the hallmarks of Eliot’s writing that make her my favourite Victorian novelist.

The plot of Adam Bede really is one of the simplest of all time (though it takes a while to become evident). The titular character is an upright and eligible young carpenter. He is a paragon of responsibility and moral propinquity. A major incident early in the book concerns Adam having to make up work left unfinished by his ailing father, who has succumbed to alcoholism in his later years. Adam’s plainspoken attitude, amplified by Eliot’s use of a strong dialect, casts him as someone who views life in very plain, black-and-white terms. He is not someone I’d like to disappoint. Throughout the novel, Eliot uses him as a pillar of stability during trying times in the village. It’s only when Adam himself undergoes a crisis that we get to glimpse the more flawed side of his character.

This crisis is personified in Hetty Sorel, the love interest. She’s a young, impoverished girl living with her aunt and uncle, the Poysers. Eliot talks up her appearance as the kind of beauty that only comes along once or twice in a generation. It’s not a beauty striking so much as it is innocent and, as Eliot describes Hetty, kittenish. It’s the type of beauty that makes other people feel sorry for her and do things for her. And all this goes to Hetty’s otherwise empty head, creating a small pocket of vanity that blossoms under the tender ministrations of the carefree Arthur Donnithorne. Hers and Arthur’s romance is of the flirtatious yet forbidden variety, for they are separated by too wide a class divide to make marriage practicable in those times. Yet it is Hetty’s relationship with Arthur that ultimately scuttles Adam’s hopes for happiness with her as his bride.

The advantage of using such a time-worn plot, of course, is that it allows Eliot to sit back and focus on developing her characters and her setting. The reader, whether contemporary or modern, knows what to expect of the roles the characters will play. But this very expectation heightens the enjoyment of the story: we know Arthur is going to lead Hetty towards a bad end; we know Hetty will end up dashing Adam’s hopes at the last minute in a desperate, selfish bid for a freedom that can never be hers. It’s this very foreknowledge that keeps us on the edge of our seats in happy anticipation as we watch these people spiral towards the inevitable climax around Hetty’s trial.

Even in her first novel, Eliot demonstrates the deft ability for description that won me over in Middlemarch. She has such a way with words, an ability to capture not just descriptions of external environments but also the hearts and minds of people. She writes with a keen awareness of that the sensibilities of her time are fleeting and prone to change; her narration takes on a perspective that is, in some senses, archaeological, as it attempts to chronicle and capture the emotions of a past era. (This is perhaps aided by the fact that, technically, Eliot is engaged in writing historical fiction here, and so she too has the benefit of hindsight, albeit at less of a remove than us.) Eliot presents the contours of rural English life at the height of the Napoleonic wars, mixing news of distant world events with the slow turn of the wheel on a more local level. These distant events intersect the characters’ lives—Arthur is in the military; Seth would have had to serve had Adam not paid a significant amount of money in his stead—but for the most part, there is a sense of isolation impossible to achieve in the burgeoning cities that were then in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. This isolation is especially evident in those moments when someone like Adam or Hetty is walking for a distance alone. Having now lived in England for some time, I appreciate how things here are much closer together than they might be in, say, Canada … yet I still don’t think I’m all that interested in walking for several miles now that I have access to cars and buses and trains. Oh, how spoiled we are….

Much like the scenery and setting, Eliot’s characters are themselves delightful studies of the sort I love finding in Victorian works. Adam himself, alas, is a rather flat character. He doesn’t actually do much, and I find his love for Hetty rather perfunctorily developed, as if Eliot is more concerned with the consequences of this plot than its inception. More interesting are the supporting characters—they make the novel. Mr Irwine, the local pastor and magistrate, is a magnificent combination of wisdom and fallibility. During his tense conversation with Arthur, who desires to make a confession about his dealings with Hetty but isn’t sure how he can broach it, Irwine bungles the job by being far too forward and prodding. Once again, Eliot’s masterful ability to penetrate the thoughts of her characters and portray, in parallel, two people’s thinking processes is put to good use here. We see simultaneously Irwine’s deductions about why Arthur might have visited and Arthur’s struggle with whether to turn the conversation to more personal matters.

Arthur is perhaps the “villain” of Adam Bede, so much as it is possible for the novel to have a villain. I appreciate how Eliot goes to lengths to make none of her characters caricatures. Yes, Arthur behaves recklessly and reprehensibly when it comes to Hetty. He should be more sensitive as to how their difference in class compromises her status in the village. But Eliot is quick to establish that he is a good, well-meaning person: he was not consciously using Hetty so much as genuinely ignorant of the profound ramifications of their dalliance. And I think this is a more effective and more accurate portrayal of a nineteenth-century country dandy than a moustache-twirling rake would be. Arthur is a man who makes mistakes, stumbles, and tries repeatedly to make amends.

Hetty herself is a character who can be the source of much ambivalence. On one hand, there is a genuine lack of sensitivity within her: she is very self-involved, very aware of herself and her appearance. On the other hand, no one seems to have educated her on the dangers of becoming involved with someone like Arthur; she is naive as to so many aspects of the real world, such as the cost of simply journeying from Hayslope to Windsor. So she is sympathetic and pitiable but not entirely innocent: her downfall is a product of her own indiscretions made worse by how others have used her. At the risk of speculating about Eliot’s intentions, it seems like Eliot is striving to examine the difficult realities of a woman in Hetty’s position.

The only part of Adam Bede that I can’t truly appreciate is the ending. It isn’t so much abrupt as it is discontinuous from the rest of the novel. After so many ups and downs, Eliot steadfastly pursues a happy ending. I only wish it seemed more credible. This is perhaps where the relative weakness of Adam’s characterization comes to the fore again: until now, there hasn’t been much of a hint as to his feelings for anyone else; it seems like it’s only the fact that his name is on the cover that he receives such good fortune. I feel a little mean for wishing Adam more unhappiness. Yet the swift and contrived method of rendering him once more content undermines the careful work Eliot has done throughout the rest of the book.

Middlemarch blew me away, affecting me in the way few novels have done before or since. I didn’t think The Mill on the Floss could top that—but it did. So I went into Adam Bede unsure of what to expect, but knowing better than to think that I had seen the best of George Eliot. Well, this isn’t my new favourite of hers. It’s rougher than those other two books, more prototypical in many ways. But it was enough to make me reflect while reading, "Ah, it’s so good to be reading another Eliot novel again". Some authors seem like old friends: it doesn’t matter which of their books you pick up; you’re just happen, for a brief time, to be immersed again in their writing, their thoughts, and their stories. Eliot is this way with me, and Adam Bede has created more fond memories for me.