You’re just going about your daily business, healing people and whatnot, and then what happens? The plague. Suddenly everyone in town is accusing you of being a witch and clamouring for the witch-finder to hang you for consorting with Satan and dancing naked with demons and whatnot. Isn’t that always the way of things? Don’t you hate how people are just so close-minded, even in as enlightened an age as the 1620s? Just because someone might be a witch doesn’t mean she worships Satan! Witches can be good and pure and use their powers only to help and heal!

Except, in this case, witches do derive their powers from Satan (or at least, some of the darkest ones). That’s what finally sealed the deal for me with The Witch’s Daughter: though it’s not really a twist, I loved that Paula Brackston added that price to the character of Bess Hawksmith. She had magic, could perform small charms and help in small ways, without resorting to the dark arts. But to save herself, to become immortal and escape sharing her mother’s fate, she had to call upon demons and devils. This witch isn’t so innocent after all.

Brackston provides us with several snapshots of Bess’ nearly four hundred years of life. First we learn about her origins in the small town of Batchcombe, 1628. Next she’s Dr. Elisabeth Hawksmith, assisting with surgeries in 1888 and investigating brutal murders of prostitutes. Finally, she’s Elise Hawksmith, registered nurse dispatched to a small frontier hospital at Passchendaele. Bess doesn’t move around and “change” her name just to avoid raising suspicions, what with the whole not aging thing—she’s on the run from another immortal, a warlock named Gideon who taught her everything she knows. Bess’ mother made Bess promise to seek out Gideon and learn magic from him, because that would be the only way to ensure Bess’ safety. But Bess didn’t want to walk the dark path, and Gideon seems like an obsessed pyscho ex-boyfriend—one who can kill you, mind-rape you, and rape you. It’s called a Book of Shadows for a reason!

This actually a rather dark book, and I guess in retrospect that’s evident from the inside cover copy, but I didn’t envision it that way when I began reading. It’s billed as “part historical romance”, but there doesn’t seem to be any hero to our heroine. In her two subsequent flashbacks, Bess does fall for two other men, but that doesn’t work out. And I certainly wouldn’t call Gideon her one true love! So I will beg to differ with the book’s cover copy: The Witch’s Daughter isn’t much in the way of a romance, and that is probably a good thing.

This book does not open strongly so much as with a sombre attempt at something like mediocrity. Something about the epistolary style of the chapters set in the present day left me cold: there was nothing interesting about this Elizabeth character, and why the hell should I care if she’s taken a liking to a new girl, Tegan, and decided to teach her some witchcraft? I was beginning to regret taking a gamble on it from the New Books shelf at the library—but then Brackston began telling me about Bess’ first steps toward witchcraft in 1628, and I was hooked.

The Elizabeth of present day is a very unsatisfying character, but Bess Hawskmith is brilliant. A little bit naïve, but she grows from an innocent girl into a self-possessed, tragically bereaved woman. Her entire family, with the exception of her mother, dies in the plague. Then she loses her mother because of what we recognize to be short-sightedness, selfishness, and superstition among the townfolk. Then, in that lovely twist, Brackston makes us question whether it was really superstitious of them at all. Bess begins learning from Gideon but reneges on their relationship, beginning a centuries-long game of hide-and-seek. I just have one quibble: why was her name always some version of “Elizabeth” followed by the surname “Hawksmith”? Wouldn’t that be a little too obvious? She could have at least used some more creative aliases!

Between the flashbacks, Elizabeth’s relationship with Tegan develops—though at a distance, because we see this all from her diary. I wish Brackston had more thoroughly explained what makes Tegan so special, why Elizabeth is just now deciding to teach her craft to someone else. She doesn’t ever seem to worry that this might put Tegan in harm’s way, might make her a target for Gideon’s cruelty. This problem compounds as we approach the end of The Witch’s Daughter and the climactic confrontation between Elizabeth and Gideon. Firstly, Tegan, writing in Elizabeth’s diary, tells us all about it in hindsight. (To her credit, Brackston effects the change in voice very well.) Secondly, the climax happens way too fast, with very little justification for how it happens. After all the hardship Elizabeth has endured in her various identities, and after everything Gideon has put her through, I didn’t get enough closure. I don’t know how she feels. The ending, with Tegan’s optimistic evaluation of the situation, felt rather flippant compared to the earlier, darker moments of this book.

So The Witch’s Daughter is a little all over the map. It has these great, shining moments of insight into the nature of loss and suffering. Brackston’s perspective on witchcraft is, while not all that original, rather refreshing in tone. And parts of Elizabeth’s historical narrative were truly fascinating. Alas, all of this must be balanced against a story that starts off too sparse and eventually, somehow, beyond all my comprehension, becomes too compressed. This is one of the few times I wish a book had been longer. I wish Brackston had given us more exposition, more scenes between Elizabeth and Tegan, more snapshots of Elizabeth’s life. The Witch’s Daughter is a good book, and the flaws it has are the types of flaws to which good books all too often succumb.

Full disclosure: I received this book as a gift from the author.

There's something refreshing about a boots-on-the-ground alien invasion of Earth. When aliens darken our doorstep, they seldom need to send troops down to pacify the population, probably because any species advanced enough to have interstellar spaceflight capability will also have some pretty terrible weapons. Why send wave after wave of soldiers when some well-placed bombs and a few destroyed satellites will accomplish the same goal? That's the conundrum at the core of Dawn of Destiny, the first book in the Epic series. Three alien species—the Bakma, the Ceratopians, and the Ithini—and their minions have been haranguing the Earth Defense Network (EDEN) for nine years now, but to what end?

Scott Remington, the protagonist, rises quickly through the ranks after facing several pitched battles from which he manages to emerge the hero (or at least not die). This earns him the admiration of his fellow grunts and begrudging respect from most officers—but not all. Scott's competence could quickly grow annoying; thankfully, Stephen compensates by including plenty of people who think that, "Remington is overestimated by everyone." And when Scott does save the day, it's always with a plan that makes sense in the context of the situation, managing to make fantastic battle scenes seem realistic. This balanced perspective keeps Scott from becoming a larger-than-life action hero and plays counterpoint to the book's science fiction conflict of human versus alien.

In general, I loved Stephen's characterization. Scott's companions have diverse background stories and interesting but not one-dimensional personalities and quirks. Some of them, like Jayden, start out stoic and gradually warm up, even manage to find a girl. Others, like the experienced cop, David, and Scott himself, already have signficant others and must struggle to balance their long-distance relationships with their lives in EDEN. And then you've got Becan, who verges on succumbing to the "lovable Irish rascal" trope except that he has genuine moments of weakness—and tenderness too.

As antagonists, the Bakma aren't characters so much as character devices. We really only get to interact with one, and it has a bit part. Indeed, although this book concerns an "Alien War," the aliens play a small role in it. This perplexes even the main characters, who spend a great deal of time speculating on the motives of the Bakma and their fellow aliens—why wage a ground war when they clearly have the ability to simply wipe out humanity from orbit? Dawn of Destiny sets the stage for the rest of the series to explore this all-too-important question, but at the expense of reducing the primary villain to an abstraction. As a result, throughout the numerous combat scenes I couldn't shake the comparison with Starship Troopers out of my head, unfair though it is.

There are a couple of humans who serve as articulate antagonists in the aliens' stead, however. EDEN's highest level is a council of "judges," who are desperately searching for a technological edge over the highly-advanced aliens. Intrigue among the council causes the death of one judge after he stumbles onto a secret his colleague apparently wants to keep secret. I'm looking forward to discovering what this secret is, and what ramifications it's going to have for Scott and his friends. Also, there's the taciturn and unapologetically brutal General Thoor. Borderline psychotic, and definitely a sociopath, he's one piece of bad road, doing whatever it takes to ensure victory. The order to promote Scott to epsilon comes from Thoor himself, pointing toward a creepy, and rocky, future relationship between these two.

Aside from its presentation of the Bakma, Dawn of Destiny falls short in one more aspect of characterization: there's a dearth of badass female heroines. Yes, there's a couple of developed female characters, but they always seem to have support roles—combat medic and wife. And we all know doctors can't fight (wives sure can, but that's neither here nor there...). I wouldn't mind seeing a couple of capable women added to the roster alongside Scott and his current cadre.

I don't want to make a big deal out of this, but also absent are major expletives, which have been downsized and replaced with less profane alternatives, such as "flick" and "veck." This blatant attempt to avoid profanity sticks out like a sore thumb against the otherwise honest and gritty landscape of war. Characters get their fingers blown off, but they don't swear (or at least, Jim, it's not swearing as we know it). Set in the far future, or far far away (BSG and Farscape, I'm looking at you) this would be acceptable and even clever. As it is, it got distracting, particularly during some of the scenes that were supposed to evoke suspense and dread. In one scene, the protagonists are hunting flesh-eating bug aliens in an abandoned school—no power, no plans, no backup. It's the perfect recipe for horror, old-school B-movie alien horror, and then suddenly the characters start saying things like, "I hope to flickin' God" and the moment is gone.

Stephen could also work on his exposition. Occasionally, it's oddly-timed and awkwardly-poised as paragraphs dumped by the narrator after the subject comes up in dialogue. Although this is subjective, I actually prefer it when the exposition is light in the first half the book and then gets heavier later on, once my attention has been captivated by the characters and the story itself. Drop me just enough hints to keep me interested, but I don't need to know about, say, the comparative xenobiology of the Bakma, Ceratopians, and Ithini. It's not a big issue, in that it never compromises the story's unity or breaks up the frequent action scenes that tend to crop up once every couple of chapters. Still, it's something I hope improves as the series continues.

In that same vein, I would have liked to learn more about Earth's culture in this universe. We get some minimal glimpses at what the media is like when Scott does a press conference after winning a prestigious military award; beyond that, we get precious little idea of what civilian life is like on war-torn Earth. How are people coping with nine years of constant alien attacks on major cities? What's this doing to the global unity supposedly in place when the aliens first showed up? Did world peace come with a three-for-one deal, bringing us solutions to world poverty and world hunger as well? Or does humanity face more than just the threat of alien invasion? Certainly, I don't expect Dawn of Destiny to spell everything out for me. In some areas, however, it's rather sparse.

By far, the best part of this book is its action. Stephen writes a mean combat scene. Eschewing overly-flowery descriptions of scenery in favour of clear, crisp tactical overviews of a situation, Stephen's action scenes are always fast paced and high stake. From the moment Scott and his comrades enter the combat zone, we know they're in danger; with each new mission, however, Stephen manages to keep the challenges varied enough that it doesn't get boring. I've been known to get lost during combat scenes because I don't have a good conception of how the battle is unfolding ... not so here; I feel like I'm there, watching through someone's HUD. In many ways, Dawn of Destiny is a favourable mix of movie and video game, a little bit cutscene and a little bit rock and roll—er, I mean action. It's intense and everything you expect from a book in a series called Epic.

So far, the Alien War is more an excuse for conflict, which provides a backdrop for combat scenes and character development. Dawn of Destiny comes in a shiny sci-fi package, but it's more properly a military thriller than thought-provoking science fiction. Did Dawn of Destiny wow me? No. But it did make me laugh at times, and it did provide me with a good afternoon read.

My reviews of the Epic series:
Outlaw Trigger →

From the first line, this book hooked me: "The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd." A post-Singularity descendant of humanity, the Festival, arrives in orbit around the backwater Rochard's World. The Festival's willingness to share anything in return for information results in economic and social upheaval as the repressed citizens of Rochard's World find they can have anything they want: technology, money, even power. As a result, the New Republic decides to launch a battle fleet to deal with the threat of the Festival.

But their strategy calls for a causality violation gambit, which could be a problem. A capricious and unknowable artificial intelligence, the Eschaton, does not tolerate such time travel ventures, which could imperil its own existence. The Eschaton has been known to retaliate with excessive force—planet-crunching, supernova-type force—and so two human agents hope to intervene before it all goes apocalyptic.

Charles Stross does a wonderful job at contrasting different styles of government and cultures influenced by how they embraced the upheaval of the technological Singularity. The New Republic is modelled after eighteenth-century Russia: technologically and socially conservative, with a strong government enforced by devastating mores and sinister secret police. Then there's Earth, homeworld of our protagonists Martin Springfield and Rachel Mansour. The only entity recognizable as a planetary government would be the United Nations, but as Springfield points out:

It's not the government of Earth; it's just the only remaining relic of Earth's governments that [the New Republic:] can recognize. The bit that does the common-good jobs that everyone needs to subscribe to. World-wide vaccination programs, trade agreements with extrasolar governments, insurer of last resort for major disasters, that srot of thing. The point is, for the most part, the UN doesn't actually do anything; it doesn't have a foreign policy.... Sometimes somebody or another uses the UN as a front when they need to do something credible-looking, but trying to get a consensus vote out of the Security Council is like herding cats.

The conflict of values between the New Republic's agents, specifically its naval officers and an inexperienced secret policeman, and Terrans, specifically Springfield and Mansour, fuels most of the conflict of the book. The rest of the conflict comes from the alien nature of the Festival; the New Republic insists on treating it like an ordinary human government with recognizable motivations and strategy. That turns out to be a costly mistake:

The Festival isn't human, it isn't remotely human. You people are thinking in terms of people with people-type motivations.... You can no more declare war on the Festival than you can declare a war against sleep. It's a self-replicating information network.

Stross also packs the book with the ramifications of technology on cultures: the Festival is an "upload society," where minds are stored in virtual worlds and physical forms are transitory. It's diverged so far from its common ancestry with humans that it's no longer human, as mentioned above, but something else, something that we can't really comprehend. In that way, it's even more alien than the Eschaton, a truly alien entity, but one that at least deigns to communicate with humans on a comprehensible level (once and a while). Unlike too much Singularity fiction, Singularity Sky mixes transhuman, posthuman, and human cultures in a way that makes for interesting but still understandable interaction.

Similarly, while this book is packed to the brim with technobabble and discussions of relativity and quantum mechanics, it never feels too heavy. I love how the characters use entangled qubits for "acausal communication" and the Eschaton one day just decided to relocate 90% o the Earth's population to various planets via wormhole. Maybe that's just because I love theoretical physics more than is healthy; I can see how people less familiar with hard science fiction or physics in general might find the exposition in Singularity Sky daunting. On the other hand, maybe it'll be educational. And to Stross' credit, all of the exposition is relevant to the plot.

As much as I must praise Stross' ideas, I can't in good conscience do the same for the story. The pacing is heavily tilted toward the end (as it should be), but the bulk of its ideas and themes reside in its beginning. As a result, Singularity Sky starts off strong—like I said, it pulled me in—but eventually that siren call of awesomeness asking me not to put down the book petered out. The sense of conflict and suspense just doesn't last, and after the New Republic fleet reaches Rochard's World, the protagonists' plot diverges from that of the fleet, and I never really feel like they're in real danger. With any sense of high stakes obviated, the story withers away into the background.

Singularity Sky starts off strong but ultimately fails to deliver. It has the same great ideas of [a:Alastair Reynolds|51204|Alastair Reynolds|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1244781695p2/51204.jpg]' [b:House of Suns|1126719|House of Suns (Gollancz)|Alastair Reynolds|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51McGtwH5pL._SL75_.jpg|2020929] or [a:Richard K. Morgan|16496|Richard K. Morgan|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1175224722p2/16496.jpg]'s [b:Altered Carbon|40445|Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1)|Richard K. Morgan|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1169434986s/40445.jpg|2095852] but none of their pulse-pounding action and complex mystery subplots that make those books great. People like me, who breathe physics and ponder the possibilities of faster-than-light travel, will find Singularity Sky interesting but come away from the book feeling like it had so much more potential.

Time travel is a sexy science-fiction trope. It's right up there with faster-than-light travel (the two are, in fact, inextricably related, and chances are you if you invent one then you'll have invented both) as something that, as far as our current understanding of the universe works, is impossible. There are some fascinating loopholes involving wormholes and general relativity, but in order to get it working you need metric shit-joules of energy and something called exotic matter, and it would probably kill you. Besides, even if you got your cosmic time machine working, you wouldn't be able to travel back to a time before you built the time machine. But once you get beyond the physics of time travel and whether it's possible, then the real fun begins. Because time travel creates a headache for those of us mired in the swamps of linear time, and inevitably, time travel stories demonstrate why it's a good thing we don't have to comprehend paradoxes in real life.

Connie Willis doesn't go into too much depth regarding how time travel is accomplished in her 2060 version of Oxford, where historians visit the past on research assignments. There's some kind of device that creates a "net", which is probably some kind of fancy space-time fold that wraps around the traveller and sends him or her to different "spatiotemporal coordinates". The location where the traveller arrives is his or her "drop", which the traveller must reach to return to Oxford. Rather than dropping this upon us the moment the story begins, Willis does the right thing and gradually introduces us to her theory of time travel. We get some very intriguing hints and speculation about whether historians can alter the past (the prevailing theory is that they can't, but some theorists beg to differ) and some mutterings about "slippage". This is how Willis gets away with using the "meanwhile, in the future" device (TVTropes alert), which is probably the one thing I hate most about time travel stories. We'll look at whether slippage is enough to mollify me later, but first let me talk about World War II.

Blackout starts at a disadvantage for me personally, because I don't particularly like WWII fiction. I will read it once in a while, but I don't go out of my way to find historical fiction set during that period. So keep that in mind when I endorse the atmosphere that Willis creates in Blackout, which is clearly (sometimes too clearly) (TVTropes alert) the product of meticulous research. Polly, Eileen, and Mike all visit different parts of England in 1940: Polly is in London to observe the beginning of the Blitz; Eileen is a maid at a manor that has taken in evacuees; Mike is at Dover to observe the evacuation from Dunkirk. Eventually they all converge on Polly and the Blitz. I love the details Willis includes in her depiction of the period, from the differences between American and British English idioms to the expectations for dress and the excuses one might need for being out after the sirens go off. Willis successfully conveys that the Blitz, and England in general during wartime when the threat of German invasion loomed, was more than just a different time; it possessed an entirely different mentality, one that I don't think those of us lucky enough never to have lived through a war that threatens one's country can grasp.

Before I read Blackout, I knew in general what the Blitz was and that Londoners would often take shelter in Underground stations. That was about it. I didn't know anything about boarding arrangements, about the effects the Blitz had on department stores, and I knew very little about the rationing that went on during the war (I knew that it existed, and that was about it). It was really refreshing to read a book that didn't focus on the military aspects or the Holocaust but instead on civilian life (and the life of women ambulance drivers in the FANY). During the Blitz, any sort of lapse in communications with loved ones meant that one's mind immediately assumed the worst: they hadn't made it to the shelter in time; they were hit by a bomb or by shrapnel; they were caught in a fire … the Nazis never managed to land on English soil, but they inflicted casualties on London and its citizens all the same. When someone I care about doesn't show up, I just assume he or she got stuck in traffic; the citizens of London in 1940 did not have that luxury. Practically every night involved sheltering underground and listening to bombs going off overhead, wondering if one would return home after the all clear only to find that one no longer has a home. Or a place of employment. The historical fiction parts of Blackout are fascinating and immensely satisfying.

As a time travel novel, Blackout runs into problems about halfway through, once Polly, Mike, and Eileen start worrying that they are stranded in 1940. None of their drops open, so they all have the same idea to find one another and use that person's drop. When they realize they all had the same problem, they wait for a retrieval team from the future to arrive—all the while wondering why the team hasn't already arrived (because it's time travel, so there should be no need to wait). Being stranded in the past begins to test our three historians' nerves, because they are trapped in the middle of the Blitz! Polly memorized the dates of bombings, which buildings were hit, and that sort of thing, but only up until the end of the year—she didn't think she would need to know them for the entire Blitz. So there's a very palpable, somewhat ironic fear here, because in a way these three are more frightened of the Blitz than the stalwart contemporaries (or "contemps" as the historians call them). They are so used to knowing when and where bombs will hit that not knowing is a lot more unusual than it is for the contemps, who never had such foreknowledge. Worse still, even though everything they have ever learned about time travel theory insists historians cannot alter the past, each of them harbours his or her own doubts. Every possible discrepancy becomes a source of concern until it's revealed not to be a discrepancy, and each wonders if he or she has done something that causes the Allies to lose the war.

I can grok their fears. I'd hate to be stranded in the Blitz too, knowing there's some kind of future possible, knowing that I could know the dates and places that were bombed but just didn't have that knowledge on me. So for a moment, there's a justifiable and interesting suspense. Unfortunately, Willis attempts to sustain that suspense entirely too long, and my mood moved from sympathetic to annoyed to aggravated as my sympathy for the characters diminished. Kemper's review provides an excellent explanation as to why. If your connection is so slow you don't want to load another page (and that is the only excuse for not reading his review right now), allow me to summarize: all the characters in this book are ninnies, or as Kemper puts it:

Almost the entire book is their inner dialogues which consist solely of fretting about stupid trivial crap, wild speculation that turns out to be completely wrong and repeatedly asking, “Oh, when will the retrieval team arrive?”

You’d think that time travelers should be hardy adventurers with the ability to improvise and adapt to problems. These dumbasses can’t complete the simplest of tasks without it becoming a story of epic proportions.

I couldn't agree more. Leaving aside the government-inquiry-level incompetence of the Oxford time travelling history department (or whatever it's called), which apparently can't be bothered to send historians to the past with the proper preparation, none of the three main characters accomplish anything in Blackout. They complain about the retrieval team not showing up and they lie to each other and keep secrets to avoid "worrying" each other unnecessarily. Seriously? The three of you are time travellers stuck in 1940, and you don't come clean in your very first conversation, say, "I have a deadline; I was here at V-E day and can't cross my own timeline" (Polly)? You know that is only going to lead to trouble, but you do it anyway! I know you guys are only human, and you're flawed and whatnot, but there should be some sort of mandatory certification test for time travel.

But no, Mike, Polly, and Eileen spend the rest of Blackout working "together" even as they work a bit at cross-purposes. This leads to all sorts of close misses and coincidences, the type of events that are funny the first time it happens and then just repetitive each time thereafter. The same goes for their rationalizations as to why the retrieval team hasn't arrived. The only explanation that makes sense in their current theory of time travel is that the "slippage" has increased. Slippage is a phenomenon whereby the time-travel net does not send someone to the precise time and location intended. Instead, for some reason, the net "slips" in space or time (but usually not both), and theorists reason this is the universe's way of preventing historians from protecting "divergence points" and preventing passersby from observing the visual manifestation of the historian and his or her drop. Slippage is a safety mechanism, then, of the universe, and time travellers shouldn't be able to alter the past. Willis leaves us wondering if this interpretation is true, or if there is something else happening, and I admit I want to know the answer. Of course, I am writing this from a future when I am already halfway through All Clear, and so far that entire book seems unnecessary. But that's another review….

Find out the stunning conclusion to the review begun here!

Ben's review of All Clear

Fresh from the worldbuilding present in Perdido Street Station, it's not surprising that Shadow of the Scorpion's worldbuilding does not impress me much. This is straight genre fiction—and that is not a bad thing. It appeals to the ardent science fiction fan in me by using standard tropes or settings like artificial intelligences running the society; a "space army" composed of infantry, marine troops, etc.; an alien enemy that is distinctly non-human in both form and thought; and a lone protagonist influenced to lead his life in a certain way by events during his childhood. There's very little unique or original about the mythology of Shadow of the Scorpion. Hence, it's Neal Asher's writing, and what he does with this standard-fare mythology, that makes this book appealing.

Asher takes the concept of memory editing and applies it to the psychological aftermath of war. It makes sense that some soldiers, and even civilians, would choose to remove memories of painful events. Ian Cormac's mother, however, goes further and edits his childhood memories. Asher attempts to deal with the moral consequences of these issues—not always successfully, as we're usually interrupted by the relentless call of the main plot, and not with any degree of subtlety. Even so, and maybe just because I'm fascinated by the concept of memory in general, I still find this part of the book enduring and interesting. Since the editing of Cormac's memories happened when he was a child, it has contributed to the person he has become today, the person who must now decide how to react to the memories that were removed. It's the sort of uber-complicated situation that tends to crop up in sci-fi.

Beyond psychological issues, however, there's plenty of action. In fact, the main plot consists of a manhunt for Cormac's former squad-mate, Carl Thrace. Asher writes action scenes like they're going out of style, which has both advantages and drawbacks. On one hand, they're both detailed and intense. One of the difficulties of writing action scenes for a science fiction story is balancing the technology (and technobabble) with the . . . well, action. It's easy, especially with the level of advanced technology available to Asher in his Polity universe, to succumb to the temptation to press a button and kill all the bad guys. (We see this a lot in Star Trek.) At the same time, an author can't always discard technology altogether so his or her protagonist is forced to use wholly primitive means of survival. Striking the balance is tough, but Asher manages to do so consistently, delivering fresh action filled with firefights, superpowered soldiers, gruesome injuries, and plenty of explosions.

In fact, sometimes it seems like action is the only good part of Shadow of the Scorpion. The more mellow scenes are, by comparison, just so slow and expository. The scenes alone are not bad, but they don't compare in quality to the action wrapped around them. It's as if there are two different stories at war in Shadow of the Scorpion: the intense manhunt for Carl, and Cormac's exploration of his personal history and destiny. Despite being strong individually, the two stories never come together to form a completely whole narrative.

At the end, the former story doesn't deliver the resolution I was expecting. Cormac's confrontation with Carl lacks much in the way of suspense or even creative conflict. And Carl, of course, commits the classic faux pas of talking when he should be shooting. A threatening villain this book does not have.

There's a lot to recommend about Shadow of the Scorpion. This was my first Asher book, and I'll read more of his Polity/Agent Cormac novels now, because this one wasn't bad. It lacks the spark of something more, something sublime enough to make it a great book instead of just a good one. Yet if you're interested in this type of action-oriented science fiction, you can't go wrong here.

Corporations are legally people—how long before they become nation-states? Some of them own islands, or indeed, virtually entire countries. I’m not as pessimistic as some about our short-term survival odds in the coming century. Sure, we have problems, but we’ll muddle through—somehow. Yet if I had to pick which chilling dystopian vision of the future I feel is most likely, the corporations-own-us-all future is the one I’d choose. It’s feudalism all over again, baby—party like it’s 1214. Corporations wield increasing influence over our democratic processes. Governments, either through fear of losing big donors come election time or simple greed and corruption, are increasingly unwilling to stand up to behaviours and business practices that are counterproductive and dangerous in the long run. And so it goes.

This train of thought has become more prominent of late thanks to protests like the Occupy Wall Street movement. And I’m glad for it, because there’s a sense of complacency in some developed countries. We evangelize democracy in Africa, the Middle East, and southeast Asia … but when it comes to our own internal affairs, we turn a blind eye to the abuses of power politicians and corporations commit. We are unwilling to admit that ours is a hollow democracy, a frayed and decaying process. We have freedoms—but for how long?

One striking feature of Moxyland is that, while it picks up the corporate dystopian visions of its cyberpunk predecessors, it does so not in Canada, or the United States, or the UK, or even Japan. No, it’s set in South Africa. Its characters are artists and criminals, freelance bloggers and refugees, corporate citizens and self-proclaimed freedom fighters. The people in this book aren’t politicians, CEOs, or even protestors in the usual sense. And this isn’t about Wall Street, the 2008 meltdown, corporate lobbies on Capitol Hill, or News of the World. Lauren Beukes challenges us to look up from our Westernized tunnel vision of the world’s problems and consider that other countries are struggling with the same issues.

It’s notable that the only manifestation of governance we see in Moxyland is the police service. (And it isn’t clear whether they are publicly-run or outsourced to a corporate outfit.) The corporations are, if not in principle, then in practice the law. One of my favourite parts of the book happens early on, when Lerato is detained going through customs because someone reported her suspicious cough. She waves her shiny corporate ID and receives obsequious apologies, and as she walks away, she mutters that corporations should just go ahead and issue passports, make it official. After all, Lerato’s employer already assigns her roommate and pre-approves her dating pool. Why not go ahead and become a full citizen of the corporation?

Instead of the big picture, bird’s eye view of the world, Beukes takes onto the streets. We see everything from the level of the pawns of this game. Toby is the observer, somewhat above everything—but also inextricably involved, much to his dismay. Tendeka is the hot-headed idealist whose partner tries, very hard, to provide the balanced opinions he needs. Kendra is the artist in love with her anachronisms, using them to take refuge from a nihilistic worldview that threatens to swallow her up. And Lerato is the antihero, the corporate sympathizer—at least she admits she’s biased—who nevertheless has the kind of console cowboy flair that makes her an attractive character.

Truth be told, there is little to like about any of these characters. I can sympathize with their problems but not with their attitudes. Some of them, like Toby and, to some extent, Lerato, are fatalistic in their approach to the world: life sucks, corporations rule, deal with it. They do what they can to get their thrills. Kendra, on the other hand, is spinning her wheels. She’s trapped in a dead-end relationship and allows herself to get talked into a sponsorship deal she never really wanted. Her story, in my opinion, is the most tragic of all, and if any of the characters were my favourite, it would be her.

Its characters might not be likable, but they are diverse and richly portrayed. Like her world, Beukes spends considerable effort developing perspectives to deliver her story. Unfortunately, Moxyland falters in its execution of plot. It demonstrates that plot is more than a sequence of events; in this book, one thing happens after another, but there’s a distinct lack of any sense of causality. These characters seem to go stumbling around from one problem to the next with little motivation—they react, rather than act. The grand conspiracy at the end, while clever, is somewhat trite and not all that satisfying.

Moxyland is pregnant with possibility, but it never quite manages to realize much. I like its depiction of the corporate dystopia. Beukes’ extrapolation of current technologies—and how we use them—is modest in a very effective way. But a setting can only take a story so far, and Moxyland is adrift without a plot. Good books can be entertaining or thought-provoking—great books have to be both.

We begin at the beginning, because the beginning is awesome and foreshadows the epic quality of Pandora's Star, as well as the sense of humour, levity, and gravity that Peter F. Hamilton uses to create an incredibly compelling and vast narrative.

Wilson Kime is the pilot of the first manned Mars lander. The mission crew steps onto the surface and raises the United States flag, only to be interrupted by a stranger in a home-made space suit. That suit is attached to a pressure hose providing a breathing supply, and the hose runs through a wormhole back into a college physics lab on Earth. Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaac have just successfully demonstrated their invention of wormhole technology in front of the entire world, making manned spaceflight obsolete in the process.

I did not appreciate the brilliance of this opening at first. Don't get me wrong: I liked Pandora's Star from the start, but my enjoyment slowly ramped up from, "this is good" to "this is good" and then it plateaued somewhere around, "OMG, why didn't I know about this book earlier?" But it was slow at the beginning. The cast is almost as large as the book itself, and for the first several chapters (almost a hundred pages in this paperback edition), we do not return to any previously-established character.

In a similarly sprawling, nonchalant fashion, Hamilton introduces a cornucopia of subplots. Many of them seem irrelevant to the main plot at first, and it is easy to wonder what purpose they serve. The murder of Tara Jennifer Shaheef and Wyobie Cotal was like this for me. Even when one of the main characters, Paula Myo, was assigned to the case, I still didn't think its role in building her characters was sufficient to justify its inclusion. Then Hamilton surprised me by taking the shallow, self-centred, immature Mellanie and turning her into a much more important figure. And suddenly it started making sense.

Hamilton surprised me a lot in Pandora's Star. This is the first book I have read by him, so I didn't know what to expect. Although the slow pace at the beginning of the book disappointed me at first, the rest of the book more than makes up for it. If you are willing to invest the time required to read it, Pandora's Star has so much to offer.

For instance, there is the Sentient Intelligence. I have a thing for implacable, neutral, powerful artificial entities. The Eschaton from Singularity Sky qualifies as one, and I like the SI even more. Artificial intelligence in general intrigues me. More than that, there's just something so fun in watching an antagonist realize he or she is up against the SI and its sheer ability. It makes me giggle aloud, to the delight of people around me. During a terrorist attack on the facility where the faster-than-light starship is being built, something starts breaking through the firewalls a terrorist techie has set up around the systems they've hijacked:

"It's going to fall, oh man, half the format codes have been cracked already. No way. I mean no fucking way! Do you know what kind of encryption I used for that thing? Eighty dimensional geometry. Eighty! That should take like a century to break, if you're lucky." He seemed more angry than worried by the event.

Rob was starting to get a real bad feeling about the mission. "So what can crack that kind of encryption?"

The tech became very still. "The SI." His gaze found a ceiling camera that was lined up on his console, and he looked straight into the tiny lens. "Oh shit."

The SI is supposedly neutral in the sense that it is independent of humanity, and human affairs do not concern it, although it likes getting data from us. However, one of the themes of Pandora's Star is how the unknown causes different groups to work together to explore and push back ignorance for mutual edification and survival. The SI is curious about the mystery of the barriers around the Dyson Pair, and it won't let any terrorists interfere with a starship that might actually go visit the barrier.

Once the Second Chance arrives at the barrier around Dyson Alpha, the barrier inexplicably deactivates, revealing a thriving civilization in the enclosed solar system. And the Prime civilization, as it calls itself, is even more alien than the SI, the Silfen, the High Angel, or any other species Hamilton has introduced thus far. It's easy to populate your science-fiction universe with vague, humanoid-like aliens. In books, which don't suffer from a make up and digital effects budget, one can even describe improbable and nonhumanoid forms. It takes real skill, however, to portray truly alien thought processes. Hamilton succeeds when he describes the development of MorningLightMountain, an entity that eventually becomes the entire Prime civilization.

As an antagonist, MorningLightMountain is scary. It is essentially a meme. Prime society consists of intelligent/sentient but immobile entities known as immotiles. They are tended by motile units under their control in a sort of queen/drone fashion. The immotiles expand in networks of discrete immotile units, and the overall immotile personality is a kind of collective mind formed from the memories and senses of its member immotiles. MorningLightMountain is the Napoleon of its kind, swiftly gaining swaths of territory on the Prime homeworld. When the Primes develop space travel and colonize the nearby Dyson Beta system, they discover that the time lag in communications means the immotile copies of themselves sent to Beta have diverged. They are now alienPrimes! This gives us our first glimpse into the true depth of the Prime revulsion for the Other, and indeed, MorningLightMountain's xenophobia for anything other than itself.

Then a quantum barrier goes up around Dyson Alpha, and MorningLightMountain and the Primes are cut off from the universe for a millennium. When the barrier drops and MorningLightMountain observes the Second Chance's wormhole-powered hyperdrive, it starts thinking about faster-than-light travel, learns about the Commonwealth, and begins plotting its expansion into the rest of the galaxy. It's taking over, and it's killing everything that isn't it.

Yeah, humanity is in trouble. And it's not the most morally ambiguous of villains, but it is scary. Besides, Hamilton throws plenty of ambiguity—moral and otherwise—into his human characters. Those terrorists I mentioned earlier are the Guardians of Selfhood. Their leader, Bradley Jonasson, believes an alien called the Starflyer is manipulating humanity towards a malign end. At first, Hamilton portrays Jonasson as delusional and the Guardians as straight-up crackpot terrorists. As the story progresses, however, more and more rational characters begin believing the Starflyer might be real. Finally, we the readers have to accept the possibility that the Starflyer might be real. Suddenly the conspiracy theory is reified, and Hamilton has pulled off a very careful plot twist. Bravo!

But that's a result of great characterization in general. Consider Ozzie, the counterpart to Nigel Sheldon. He's a loner, a rich recluse with a personal wormhole, and that gives him considerable power. So Hamilton strands him in the wilderness with a backwater kid and no electronics on a quest for more information about the Dyson barrier. It's a great way to build the mythology of the character but limit his ability to just zap his way out of any situation. Hamilton balances the abilities of his futuristic society with real peril. When the Primes invade Commonwealth space, we get treated to an epic battle in which Nigel Sheldon, with the help of the SI, uses wormholes to collapse MorningLightMountain's wormholes. But even with the invasion curtailed, the Commonwealth loses several planets to MorningLightMountain's motile forces, suffering a terrible setback with no real way to defend itself against future attacks.

All of the main characters are involved in some way in the invasion drama, but the one that surprised me the most is Mellanie. I discounted her as a minor supporting character, one whose antagonism toward Paula Myo was supposed to make us dislike her. Yet Hamilton turned her into an ambiguous protagonist who, while opportunistic, his also intelligent, compassionate, and cool in a crisis. Thanks to a deal she struck with the SI to further her career as a journalist, she is the only one on Elan with access to the cybersphere after the Prime attack. So she coordinates an evacuation of the remote Randtown, putting herself in danger multiple times to ensure everyone escapes alive. Hamilton then impresses me with his deft characterization by dropping gentle reminders that Mellanie has not suddenly become an altruist. She's still seeking an angle, still wondering how she can leverage her newfound abilities for her own advancement. She's complex, and I like that.

In addition to the SI and wormhole travel, there is an awfully long laundry list of technology that Hamilton shows off in his future society. For the most part, he does a good job addressing the moral implications such technology has. Unlike some science-fiction novels that progress from a single technology, like the ability to download into a new body after death, Hamilton doesn't quite focus on any one technology and its implications. In that sense, it is a little too broad to go into a lot of depth. Also, there is not a lot of exposition to be had in Pandora's Star; it took me a while to figure out what exactly the Sentient Intelligence or the High Angel were. However, Hamilton's broad strokes have the advantage of presenting an entire society with multiple technological innovations, and their resulting social ramifications, rather than extrapolation from a single technology.

Citizens of the Commonwealth can rejuvenate when they grow old, essentially making them immortal. This has interesting implications for family and relationships: marriage is a much less permanent; first-lifers are considered less emotionally mature in comparison to people who have lived for a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred years. Living three lifetimes can build up a lot of memories of course, so memory manipulation and storage is big in Pandora's Star. None of the questions this technology raises are unique to this book; rather, they are standard SF fare: is the clone with an upload of your memories a continuation of you, or is it just a copy? How does being able to edit out the fact that you murdered someone affect your culpability? And so on. Hamilton is not breaking any new ground, but he does manage to integrate these ideas into an interesting, dynamic society. To that he adds a story with an exciting conflict, a challenging enemy, and great interstellar politics.

Basically, Pandora's Star is space opera on crack. Like Charles Stross and Vernor Vinge, Peter F. Hamilton can come up with cool ideas and spin a good tale. Hence, even though this book weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages, that's 1,000 pages of quality storytelling. And yeah, there are wormholes and weird alien creatures and people getting killed and re-lifed. But science fiction is just a setting, and Pandora's Star is really about murder, revenge, and jealousy; it's about our relentless drive to explore versus the dangers of the unknown; and it's an epic tale of humanity's survival as we are threatened from an external force and our own internal ideological struggles. It's simply grand, and it's really good.

Some books are just made for readers. Embassytown, with its focus on the way language shapes our perceptions and our thoughts, is one such book. As readers we are conoisseurs of language, we inhale it and revel in it and cultivate it and all of its diversity. Language informs us, sways us, entertains us, engages us … it is everything to us.

Science fiction seems, to me, like a perfect vehicle for exploring our dependence upon language. After all, there has been a great deal of speculation about how we would communicate, if at all, with other intelligent forms of life. Assuming we could recognize that they are intelligent, how do we establish a common frame of reference? It’s not like learning a new human language, where we have common memes and ideas, not to mention a shared neurology and physiology that makes our languages quite similar.

(I’m trying to come up with other examples of fascinating twists on language but drawing a blank on this hot summer day. There’s the episode of TNG featuring a language based entirely on metaphors. Feel free to add more examples in the comments!)

OK, I dug out the fan and am ready to continue.

Basically, Embassytown is about the quixotic relationship between humans and the Arieke, or Hosts. Unlike any other species thus far discovered, the Arieke vocalize out of two holes instead of one. Their simultaneous vocalization forms singular words and phrases—and for the Arieke, Language is literal in the sense that words don’t actually signify anything other than themselves. As a consequence, Arieke cannot lie, because they can only speak of what is. They don’t have the words to do otherwise. To use figurative, comparative language, they need living examples—similes. These are people who do or have done something that can serve as a comparison for the state the Arieke wants to refer to, but that person has to be present when the Arieke wants to make such a statement.

Avice Benner Cho grows up somewhat feral on the streets of Embassytown. When she reaches adulthood, she becomes an immerser—some kind of spaceship pilot or navigator—and leaves the planet behind, returning only at the behest of a man she meets and marries, because he is obsessed with the Hosts and Language. Through Avice we see the complicated relationships between the people of Embassytown, the Staff at the embassy, and the clone Ambassadors who replicate Language as best as humans can. Avice is a simile; she is an outsider; and she is also a native.

I struggled a lot with Embassytown. Newcomers to Miéville might chalk that up to his writing and to the difficulty of understanding what he means as he discusses Language and the ways the Hosts differ from us. I know better, though—it’s not Miéville’s ideas at all that are the problem; they are grand and wonderful and truly thought-provoking at times. No, it’s his characters. At least for me, the problem has and always will be his characters. I don’t know if it existed in Perdido Street Station and I’ve only gradually clued into it, but I noticed it with Bellis in The Scar, and it was far too obvious in Iron Council.

Avice just spends most of the book not doing anything.

She has an interesting, albeit confusing incident at the beginning of the book as a child. Then she skips planet for a few years, growing older, meeting people, returning to Embassytown with Scile in tow. But she’s always on the edge of the story, watching things happen, passive. It annoys me, these sorts of protagonists. I want to run up to them on the street, grab them by their shoulders, and say, “You’re letting the story pass you by! Go do something!”

Eventually, towards the end of the book, Avice takes my advice. She finally clears her head, realizes there is a crisis going on, and develops a plan. It’s a damn fine plan, if I say so myself, and what’s even better is that it works … mostly. Watching Avice step up, take charge, and take the lead was the best part of this book, and it really recharged my flagging interest. I just wish it had happened a lot sooner.

The crisis, by the way, is also quite clever. Somewhat reminiscient of Snow Crash, it involves rendering the Language into a kind of drug that infects the Arieke (not to mention their genetically-engineered technology). This dramatically changes the status quo on the planet in a way not even the instigators of the plot had predicted, destabilizing diplomatic relations and leading to the brink of war—as well as civil war. Avice’s solution involves radical alterations to the way Arieke use Language. It’s revolutionary but necessary.

In this respect it’s obvious that the Arieke are in for a big change as a result of Avice’s interference. Yet I never got a clear sense of what they are leaving behind. Miéville describes the Arieke language and the barriers to communication it creates, but he spends precious little time devoted to descriptions of Arieke culture and society. How are they stratified? What is their history like? Do they have spaceflight of their own? The only cultural event we ever see is the Festival of Lies, and that is an artifact of human–Arieke contact, not something indigenous to them. Without delving deeper into the nature of Arieke society, Miéville’s portrayal of them is little more than the background necessary for flogging his linguistic speculations.

Embassytown has all the makings of a good book, but I just didn’t enjoy it as a story. Miéville is a great storyteller—he knows how to break people down and build them up again; and he can make bad things happen like no one’s business. But in this case, there was nothing here into which I really sank my teeth. Avice was not, for the most part of the book, compelling as a protagonist. None of the minor characters held my attention. So I wandered, bereft of an anchor, through a sea of explanation and exposition about the Arieke and Language. It was like reading an interesting but fictional textbook on an alien culture.

Judging from other reviews, there’s definitely love to be had here if you can rustle up more sympathy for the characters or more interest in what’s happening. I just kind of let it pass me by. I suppose this lack of enthusiasm is what everyone who regularly does not enjoy China Miéville books feels. There were good moments, exciting moments, but for the most part Embassytown read somewhat like the Language it’s about: words without a lot of meaning.

Few things are probably scarier than suddenly being utterly and totally alone. Robert J. Sawyer reminds us of that fact by transposing Ponter Boddit, a Neanderthal physicist, from the parallel universe in which he resides to our universe, where Neanderthals have been extinct for tens of thousands of years. Aside from having instant celebrity status—including the paparazzi that come with it—Ponter must face the fact that he might never return to his own universe. And back in his universe, this has ramifications for people he cares about. As the consequences of Ponter's transposition unfold in two universes, Sawyer shows us what might have been if evolution had happened differently, and he presents an interesting contrast to contemporary human society.

I am disappointed with Sawyer's use of physics—more accurately, with his explanations—in Hominids. He gets the premise, quantum computing breaching a parallel universe, as a freebie. With such an intriguing premise, however, I would have expected a more thorough look at the physics behind quantum computing and parallel universes. Instead, we get a watered-down conversation between a physicist and a geneticist that compares the "Copenhagen interpretation" and the many-worlds hypothesis.

Sawyer's explanation of the Copenhagen interpretation is quite misleading. Yes, quantum mechanics is complex, so I don't expect more than a simple explanation of anything—yet Sawyer has demonstrated in other books that he's up to the challenge. Firstly, there is no one explicit "Copenhagen interpretation." It's actually an umbrella term for several related, sometimes contradictory interpretations. Secondly, the Copenhagen interpretation does not strictly rely on a conscious observer; rather, the act of observing a system alters the system. Some interpretations pair Copenhagen with a conscious observer, but not all.

Of course, the more I read Sawyer's work, the more I realize that his underlying theme is one of consciousness. Specifically, Sawyer's interested in what makes us conscious and the implications that consciousness has for human development. I saw this in [b:Wake|4418395|Wake (WWW, #1)|Robert J. Sawyer|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255816204s/4418395.jpg|4466559], in which Sawyer juxtaposes a new emergent consciousness with human consciousness; in [b:Flashforward|337132|Flashforward|Robert J. Sawyer|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173853613s/337132.jpg|327550], consciousness is a key component of the reason behind the eponymous global event.

In Hominids, consciousness is a dichotomous moment: in our universe, Homo sapiens received the quantum fluke of consciousness, as Sawyer interprets it here; in Ponter's universe, Homo neanderthalensis achieved consciousness. That event caused the first divergence of the universe, and since then it's consciousness (specifically, having it) that has made all the difference. But these two conscious species, while both achieving success and dominance on the planet, have developed very distinct societies.

The description of Neanderthal society is probably the most intriguing aspect of Hominids. Everything from the non-agricultural, decimal system of timekeeping to the Companion and alibi archive technology is both different yet familiar. Sawyer manages to take disparate, well-used ideas, like that of a "surveillance society" and combine them in order to create a well-realized, seemingly functional society filled with Neanderthals. Ponter's world has almost no crime and is arguably more environmentally conscious. However, it has its problems too, as we see from Adikor's almost capricious encounter with the judicial system. The parts of this book that take place in Ponter's universe are the best parts, because they're interesting and also exciting.

Would that the rest of the book could keep up! It's an unfortunate consequence of the nature of a linear narrative that authors must occasionally compress the span of events. Otherwise, I don't think that our Earth would have accepted so quickly the idea that Ponter is from a parallel universe; likewise, there would have been more inquiry into exactly what happened to Ponter when he reappeared in his universe. Sawyer presents interesting snippets of news articles that let us know how the wider world is reacting to his plot development, but his scenes are never global in scope. Instead, he focuses on individuals, usually of limited authority, close to the centre of the crisis.

Unfortunately, most of the human characters leave much to be desired. The main character, Mary Vaughan, is raped in her opening scene, doesn't report the rape (because the plot requires it), but tells Ponter about it moments before he leaves to return to his universe. And she apparently manages to fall in love with him because he's attractive and flustered by humanity's paradoxical approach to ethics. I've no doubt that Sawyer's put in a good effort to forge the relationships he needs to explore his larger issues of consciousness, religion, and inter-species romance. But it just comes off as very contrived and even, dare I say, stereotypical, particularly when it comes to how Mary copes with being raped. The fact that the major relationship in this series is shallow does not help Hominids and will not help the other two books.

There's no question here: I heartily recommend Hominids to anyone interested in a glimpse at a world where Neanderthals became the dominant species. As with any Sawyer book I've read, this is a fast read; Sawyer keeps the plot moving and keeps you wanting more. While I can't always laud the results, Sawyer does know what he's doing as a writer, and Hominids demonstrates that with every page.

My father gave me this book for Christmas of 2009, and it has been sitting on my to-read shelf ever since. I suppose I have been avoiding it, probably because I had (and still have) better things to read. However, in my quest to empty my to-read shelf before I replenish it with books from the overflow bin, I changed that.

I didn't read this book in 2009, but I did read Flashforward. Stephen King reminds me a little of Robert J. Sawyer, and Under the Dome made me think of Flashforward—more, however, of the short-lived ABC television series based on the book rather than the book itself. Like the TV version of FlashForward, Under the Dome has everything working in its favour from the start: it's a novel by one of the most successful fiction authors of our era; it has a great premise that King explores faithfully to its logical extremes; and it has a large cast of characters with conflicting beliefs and motives. All the signs point to Under the Dome being great, if not mind-blowing and awesome.

I'm sure some people found it to be so, just as some people drooled over each episode of FlashForward and made "Save FlashForward!" websites after ABC cancelled the show. My dad and I ridiculed FlashForward far more than we ridicule Smallville (and we love to ridicule Smallville), because although the show's premiere was promising, it rapidly took a nosedive. FlashForward had bad acting and bad writing, and as the season progressed, the plot made less and less sense. The situations in which the characters found themselves were far too contrived, and as a result we had to listen to pages of dialogue as the characters supplied flimsy justifications or reasoning for what was happening. The story kind of imploded under its own weight.

My experience with Under the Dome is similar. I love the premise, and there are certainly scenes in this book that I enjoyed. King certainly knows how to create and maintain mood and atmosphere; he can manipulate a scene until it evokes exactly the right combination of terror, dread, horror, and suspense (all of which are distinct yet overlapping emotions that lesser writers tend to conflate). He fine-tunes his chapters until they are well-oiled thrill machines, and then he straps in the reader, pulls the "start" lever, and we're off. There is no turning back, and there is no slowing down.

Despite its cumbersome length, Under the Dome is not a slow book in its pacing. Some, though not many, of its scenes feel redundant, but I won't get too snarky about its editing or its length. That being said, if ever you were considering trying out eBooks, you could start with this one. Your arms would thank you.

But I digress. Under the Dome has an exciting start and maintains an excellent pace, but soon the cracks begin to appear. After the town of Chester's Mill becomes mysteriously encased in a force-field of unknown origin or properties, the inhabitants find themselves the cast of a Lord of the Flies-esque descent into demagogy and tyranny. The town's most powerful man, "Big" Jim Rennie, sees the Dome as an opportunity to gain even more power and rule Chester's Mill with an iron fist. He's vain, self-centred, and hates when anyone shows him up. Depending on how you interpret him, he might be more than a little mad.

Big Jim and his minions are certainly the logical choice of antagonist for this book's plot. I mean, what else would one write about when one traps a town beneath an impenetrable dome? In that situation, it makes sense that the power-hungry would try to seize control and manipulate the citizens of the town. But does King really have to go on as much as he does about how bad Big Jim is, how much he and all the other bad guys hate women, how they're doing Big Bad Things? This is where we get into that redundancy I mentioned. We get quite a few scenes where either the protagonists are discussing how bad things are going to get the longer Big Jim stays in power or Big Jim himself is gloating about his plans for the town. It's repetitive, and it is not subtle. I am always suspicious when my literature becomes too obvious in its themes, because it's an indication that the author is worried we won't get it. And that's disappointing at best and disrespectful of the reader at worst.

Even giving King the benefit of a doubt, this repetition means that we essentially learn everything we need to know about the antagonists in the first 200 or so pages of the book. Their dastardly deeds consistently escalate from nasty to ugly to insane, but there are no surprises when it comes to their characterization. The protagonists are not that much better: not only does each character fit into a rather obvious mould, but King lampshades himself about it:

Joe covered his mouth, coughed. Behind them, the fans roared and roared. Behind them, the fans roared and roared. "I'm a smart kid. You know that? I mean, I'm not bragging, but … I'm smart."

Barbie thought of the video feed the kid had set up near the site of the missile strike. "No argument, Joe."

"In a Spielberg movie, it's the smart kid who'd come up with the last-minute solution, isn't that right?"

Barbie felt Julia stir again. Both eyes were open now, and she was regarding Joe gravely.

Tears were trickling down the boy's cheeks. "Some Spielberg kid I turned out to be. If we were in Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs would eat us for sure."

This is on page 1032, quite close to the end of the book, long after King has already shown us that Joe is smart. Lest we forget it, however, he feels the need to remind us by having Joe say it. And then he points out how Joe isn't a Spielberg kid and this isn't a Spielberg movie; if they are going to get out of this, they will have to find another solution. But if Joe's not the Spielberg kid, he is certainly "the smart kid." Barbie's the retired army veteran who just wants to be left alone. There's even a nosy reporter, for heaven's sake!

The personalities of these characters, protagonists and antagonists alike, are similarly stereotypical. Under the Dome awakened a latent sense of anti-Americanism that I did not want to admit I have. Although I am not a fan of what the United States government has done in the past few decades, particularly when it comes to foreign policy, I like to think I recognize that I can't judge the entire American population based on that behaviour. But I'm loath to say it's because "I have American friends," because after all, racists love to explain why they aren't racist by prefacing everything with, "Some of my closest friends are Blacks" (or if you are Donald Trump, "the Blacks"). Of course, I don't want people to judge me by the actions of Stephen Harper, so it goes both ways.

Anyway, I would like to think I'm not anti-American. But I couldn't help thinking that Under the Dome could only have played out this way in a rural American town. Oh, sure, if this had happened anywhere else, the same general type of panic and fear would have ensued. No one likes being caged. Nevertheless, the alacrity and intensity of the panic—the fervour, if you will—is very American. It is a result of its setting, and thus of the climate in the United States since the September 11, 2001 attacks. And King populates Chester's Mill with stereotypical rural hicks of all flavours, from Richard Killian, a gross chicken farmer, to Lester Coggins, an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian preacher. Chester's Mill has a very high number of young men who think women ought to be treated like personal objects, and, oh yes, raped. Love the rape, they do! And they are all too happy to join the police force after the Dome appears.

I've never been to Maine, but I am almost certain this is exaggeration. According to Wikipedia, New England "voters have voted more often for liberal candidates at the state and federal level than those of any other region in the United States," and "due to the liberal lean of the region, the state Republican parties and the elected Republican officials have been more politically and socially moderate than the national Republican Party." This explains Barbie's repetitive snide remarks about Julia, a self-proclaimed Republican who publishes the town's newspaper, the Democrat, not sounding like a Republican.

So King stacks the deck ridiculously in his favour when it comes to ensuring the situation goes FUBAR as fast as possible. In order to do so, however, he's created a town that is as much science fiction as the Dome itself. While this makes his polemic stronger (read: less subtle, because apparently Subtlety Is Bad), it also weakens King's exploration of human nature and behaviour. Since this town is rather improbable altogether, never mind the Dome descending upon it, one can't help but wonder what would have happened somewhere else.

I much prefer [a:John Irving's|3075|John Irving|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1257375547p2/3075.jpg] portrayals of New England, which tend to feature wrestling, bears, deadly accidents, and writers. Sometimes it even has all these things. (Though, regrettably, seldom deadly accidents of writers owing to wrestling a bear. I live in hope.)

I'm also puzzled by the fantastic elements of Under the Dome. For the most part, King treats these as straight science fiction. There are various theories about the Dome's origin, from a government or military conspiracy to extraterrestrial experiments. Thanks to the way King reveals the answer, one can even, if one desires, interpret the answer as a delusion by the inhabitants of Chester's Mill and insert an alternative theory instead. It's not as if the book sticks around to explain every last detail. Every fantastic element, however, can be attributed to sufficiently advanced science—except one. Horace sees dead people. Horace is a dog, and dogs, as the omniscient third-person narrator explains, see and hear dead people regularly. Since this information comes from an omniscient narrator and not a character, it is more difficult to justify dismissing this as some kind of delusion. That suggests a supernatural or paranormal element at work in this world. And so I have to file Under the Dome under both science fiction and fantasy. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wonder why King employed so much ambiguity only to make an exception for a single, small part of the story.

I will conclude with one final complaint that has nothing to do with King's writing. The dusk jacket of my hardcover edition has no summary or cover copy whatsoever. They don't forget to include the price, of course, but they don't breathe a word of what the book might be about. I don't know if the publisher just assumes that people will buy it because Stephen King wrote it, but I think it's silly not to put cover copy on a book. Perhaps the real King fans will buy any book with his name on it, but I'm sure there are casual readers who prefer to browse. And there are probably even people out there who have never read novel by Stephen King.

In fact, Under the Dome is the first novel by King that I've read. Like the book itself, I suppose I have been avoiding him, because I have better things to read—both in the sense of superior quality and writing as well as just a more enjoyable experience for me, personally. Many of my friends consider King a favourite, if not their most favourite, author, and that is a high accolade. Yet I've always had a suspicion that King and I would not click, that his style just does not work with me, as a reader. And Under the Dome confirmed that. I have read [b:On Writing|10569|On Writing|Stephen King|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166254200s/10569.jpg|150292], and while I found much of his advice insightful and sensible, having read some of his actual fiction, I can see where he and I differ. And I can see why many people like him. I don't think King is a great writer, but he is skilled at aspects of the craft, particularly, as I said at the beginning of this review, the manipulation of mood. King can create a great setting, even if his characters leave something to be desired.

Obviously, I can't compare Under the Dome to any of his other work, but as a King neophyte, I liked it. I doubt it has much re-read value for me. For all the criticism I've delivered, however, it is difficult to fault this novel. It is an open, unassuming polemic delivered in a fancy fiction wrapper. Or, to use a Doctor Who metaphor, Under the Dome is to great literature what a Vortex Manipulator is to the TARDIS: both do the same job, but one of them gets you there in style.