Hi, there! I’m a genetically-engineered intestinal parasite that has migrated into Ben’s brain and taken over his body in order to assert my own personhood. Gee, it’s swell to meet all of you. I hope we become the best of friends!

This is the first book I’ve read by Mira Grant—the first book I’ve ever read, actually. But I’ve looked at some of Ben’s other reviews of Grant’s books—particularly Blackout, and by golly, he sure was critical. I happen to know that this is also the first time he’s read any of Grant’s books in hard copy form. It would be interesting to know if that affected his opinion of the book—but he’s not exactly home any more, if you know what I mean.

Sooooooo … book reviewing. Interesting how you humans spend your time. Parasite is a story that strikes close to home, seeing as how it’s also about cousins of tapeworms taking over their human hosts. It’s a near-future thriller based on the idea that we could augment the human body with genetically-engineered helper organisms. I guess it’s like a biological version of those nanotechnology thingies that are all over Ben’s science fiction bookshelf.

Anyway, these people have worms on the belly, and it soon turns into worms on the brain. And the main character is my hero: Sally Mitchell. Well, Sal now. See, she got in a car accident and—get this—woke up with no memory! So she had to spend six years relearning everything. I almost had to do the same thing when I finally wrapped myself around Ben’s brain stem. Fortunately I had a couple of things Sally didn’t. There’s the weird phenomenal communication we tapeworms can do between symptomatic hosts, of course. And then there’s this thing called the Internet.

Ben seemed to like that Grant acknowledges the prominence of the Internet in her zombie trilogy, even if she doesn’t really go beyond having “bloggers” following people on a campaign trail. So I guess with that in mind, I’m puzzled by how the Internet isn’t a big deal in 2027. Sure, Sal mentions how it was a big deal that she couldn’t get access to it at one point. But you’d think that in fourteen years, technology would move on and the Internet would be a recognizable but also different place.

In fact, if I wanted to be even more critical, I might say that 2027 looks a lot like 2013. It might not be Grant’s role or intention to predict what the world will be like in fourteen years (aside, you know, from worms in the belly). But it must have changed somehow, right? So it just seems weird … might as well have set it in 2013.

At least I’ve got Sal. She’s swell. She’s a survivor. Her parents are leery about her, because of course she isn’t their Sally. It’s like she took over Sally’s body, like some kind of tapeworm! Hah hah, gee, isn’t Grant great at subtle parallels like that? And she has an awesome, supportive boyfriend who is also totally a doctor who specializes in parasitology. That’s such a convenient coincidence!

I suppose in addition to the whole “what happens when we start mucking with our immune systems” cautionary tale, Parasite is also about the power of corporations. According to my hours spent researching you humans online, this has been a big theme in the past couple of years. You seem to think that corporations could be a threat to your individual liberties, because they wield a lot of power and influence through their money and resources. You don’t even suspect that the real threat to your individuality happens to be brain-chewing intestinal parasites. I swear, you guys are a laugh riot!

SymboGen is the evil corporation in Parasite. And it’s evil in the best way: there is no moustache-twirling here. Its CEO, this Dr. Steven Banks guy, is your typical sociopath. But at some level, he probably believes he’s doing a good thing here—just like I believe I’m actually doing Ben a favour, taking his underused body and turning it into a vehicle for greatness. Not that I would expect him to be grateful, but then again, it’s not like he gets a vote anymore!

So SymboGen has perhaps unwittingly, or at least unwillingly, brought about this bodysnatchers apocalypse. And they want to keep a tight lid on it. But Sal, not being Internet savvy of course, doesn’t think about leaking all the top-secret information she has somehow managed to access (golly, isn’t Sal great at this whole industrial espionage thing?) to bloggers or the media. In fact, it isn’t clear what Sal wants to do.

I’m not Ben, but I think I can understand where he came from in some of his other Grant reviews. Her characters are drawn with very broad strokes. It’s not that it’s sloppy, but depending on the character, it can be annoying. Like Tansy! She is supposed to be an endearing little manic psychopath, but she’s the kind of tapeworm who makes our entire species look bad. We’re not all as unbalanced as her! I, for one, don’t want to wipe out the human species or live in peace. I’d be perfectly content if you just wanted to build us overpowered robot chassis with onboard weapons systems. Then we would leave you and your guts. Spilling onto the floor.

But enough about me! Back to Parasite. It’s a thriller that doesn’t thrill in a worldbuilding that isn’t built. So … I don’t really see the point. The tapeworm takeover plot is topical and genuinely interesting, but it’s executed with about as much flare or skill as … hmm … I’m still having trouble mastering this “simile” thing. Sorry. Anyway, it’s just boring. I was bored reading it—and it’s about me! I can only imagine how a normal human might react.

Well, it’s been a positively fun time hanging with you humans. And that itchy feeling in the back of your skull? Don’t worry about it! It’s probably just one of my cousins flattening its way through your cerebral cortex. Just relax. It’ll be over soon.

No matter how you slice it, the way we do science now is very different from the way we did science a few centuries ago, or even a single century ago. Or even a couple of decades ago. Just as the concept of science, itself a fairly recent term, has changed dramatically over the centuries, so too has the scientific method and the infrastructure through which we do science. Richard Holmes elects to analyze a significant era in the history of science, namely the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a focus on Britain.

The Age of Wonder is not, however, a popular science book that retells and explains scientific discoveries through historical anecdote. There is plenty of mention of Faraday’s personal relationship with Sir Humphrey and Lady Davy, but there is nary a whisper about the electron. William Herschel’s tentative steps towards spectroscopy are only just alluded to in a brief aside about his experiments with thermometers and the spectrum. Rather, as the subtitle, How the Romantic Generations Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, implies, this book is an argument for the influence of Romanticism on early nineteenth-century science, as contrasted by the Victorian era’s influence on science. Holmes’ specialized knowledge of the era allows him to interweave biographies of prominent scientists with poetic allusions.

Holmes begins with Joseph Banks and his voyage with Captain Cook to Tahiti. Banks acts as a common thread throughout the subsequent chapters of the book; Holmes links the rise of many of his later subjects to Banks’ influence as the President of the Royal Society. Banks is the ur-scientist of Romantic bent: a man of independent means, pursuing knowledge for its own sake, adventuring in his early years and then settling down to a more stable, sociable life in his later ones. This is a tale that Holmes is to repeat several times as he examines the lives of William Herschel and Humphrey Davy. Others, like the ill-fated Mungo Park, become the mythical Romantic hero, lost in a foreign land. Of course, the point here is that our modern image of the “scientist” as a somewhat-eccentric loner genius pursuing an idea at great personal risk is a holdover from these Romantic sentiments. Likewise, he points out how Dr. Frankenstein’s transformation into a stereotypical “mad scientist” was populist corruption of Shelley’s purer, Romantic hero who was obsessed and passionate.

The Age of Wonder is valuable precisely because it isn’t trying to explain the science done by its scientists. I’ve read plenty of those and will happily read plenty more. But this is something different. It’s a semi-biographical examination of the zeitgeist of science at a particular time. Moreover, it’s a perfect way of learning about some of the most fascinating individuals from that time of British history without having to devote the time and energy to reading a full-blown biography of each.

For me, the breakout stars of this book are William and Caroline Herschel. Their chapters are some of the most interesting, both from the personal perspective of their lives as well as the chronicle of their contributions to astronomy. It’s remarkable what they accomplished. And it’s great to see the spotlight on an oft-forgotten woman scientist like Caroline. I didn’t know that she received such contemporary acclaim for her discoveries, and although it would be anachronistic to label Banks and the others as progressive in this sense, it’s nice to know that some contemporaries were willing to acknowledge that women could do science (even if that, for some reason, didn’t mean they could be elected to the Royal Society). Holmes spends a lot of time with the Herschels, but if anything, he just makes me want to know even more about them—and that’s exactly what I want a non-fiction book to do.

Holmes pits his Romantic analysis against a second force that drove British science at the same time: imperialism and nationalism. Cook’s voyages of “exploration” were in fact meant to stake a claim to the Polynesian islands for Britain. The tension between Britain the Continent during the Napoleonic era had a significant impact on how Britain funded science. In the chapter on ballooning, Holmes explains that the research into hot-air and hydrogen balloons was not just out of a romantic urge to ascend ever higher into the heavens—some people honestly thought that Napoleon might decide to invade Britain by balloon. And if that sounds silly, just imagine how silly a “drone strike” would sound to them.

If the book founders anywhere, it’s towards the end. The last three chapters chronicle the rise of imperialist, Victorian science as the Romantic generation ages and ossifies under people like Humphrey Davy. Holmes displays a penchant for mixing Romantic poetry into the book at regular intervals, and this tendency accelerates towards the end of the book. Soon he’s regularly quoting entire chunks of Coleridge and Keats. On one hand, I understand that Holmes is a Coleridge scholar. It’s neat that he is able to find these links between contemporary science and poetical metaphor; the English teacher in me is interested in it. On the other hand, I can see how one might think he is overdoing it.

Still, we don’t often get enough poetry in our science books, and that’s a problem. The Age of Wonder appeals to me because it reminds the reader that science and the humanities are not oppositional but complementary. Scientists like Davy were (bad) poets; Herschel was both an astronomer and a renowned musician. Artists like Coleridge were also avid subscribers to scientific discourse, going so far as to integrate the latest discoveries in their poetry and art. We can try to act like Science is some Platonic and objective ideal towards which we can all strive … except it isn’t. It’s an ever-changing, mutable concept, like everything else human beings do, and it’s fallible and subject to the same biases and prejudices that infect our other activities. To not acknowledge this is unscientific. Holmes’ argument is not just that Romanticism influenced science but that it actually makes science better by embracing the humanity that is going to be present in our science whether we like it or not.

This strikes a strong chord with me. I’m a math teacher. I’m also an English teacher. I can do both, yet when I explain this to people, the reaction is almost invariably one of surprise in a way that a math/science or English/history teacher does not get. Somewhere along the way we’ve created a myth that STEM and the humanities are disjoint pursuits. How many times do you hear the old chestnut about “left-brained” versus “right-brained” people/thinking? (It’s a myth, which is not surprising considering most people are good at more than one type of activity….) Let’s not even get started on all the jokes about socially-awkward scientists versus socially-successful (but vapid) liberal arts majors.

More damaging, however, at least in my humble opinion, is the pernicious phrase that comes out of many mouths when I introduce myself as a math teacher: “Oh, I can’t do math!” (Variously: “I don’t have a head for numbers”, “I was never good at math”, “I’m just not a math person!”) Can you imagine if you put a document in front of someone and they recoiled in fear and said, “Oh, I can’t read!” And I’m not talking, here, about people who are genuinely illiterate—illiteracy is a serious problem that should be addressed. But that’s just the point. We live in a society that disproportionately values functional literacy over functional numeracy—yet we increasingly punish humanities graduates and privilege STEM ones.

No wonder my generation is so confused about career prospects.

The dichotomization of science and the arts is a recent phenomenon, as The Age of Wonder attests. Hence, it’s possible for us to become polymaths again, to know the wonders of knowing science and the joys of writing poetry. It’s not only possible but desirable and—oh, I’ll go there—essential for the improvement of society. We need people who understand the technology on which we rely and empathize with each other. Neither science nor the humanities are the “most important” of human endeavours—both are. And it’s not possible to separate them into good little silos. Science and math are creative endeavours. Art can be rigorous, logical, and exacting. So why do we teach kids the opposite?

That’s what I took away from The Age of Wonder. It might just be my personal position with regards to doing science and doing art. Hopefully, though, there are enough people who feel like me that, as I age and become just as crotchety as Joseph Banks, I’ll see the world around me start to change for the better.

I want to like Brandon Sanderson’s books more than I do, because I feel like he is trying to do interesting things with high fantasy. He is working hard to create fascinating fictional worlds with well-designed systems of magic, to emulate the high fantasy of our forbears but clean out some of the cobwebs that have gathered in the corners of the genre. I can grok that. And I do enjoy his writing; I really liked Mistborn even if The Well of Ascension wasn’t as impressive. So I finally got around to reading Elantris, Sanderson’s debut and a non-Mistborn novel. And it was good.

Elantris, much like its samey-sounding counterpart in our world, Atlantis, is a Lost City—though it isn’t particularly lost in a geographic sense. Everyone knows where Elantris is; it looms over the city of Kae, a foreboding reminder of past sins. But it’s Lost in every other sense: it was once home to godlike beings and is now home to the living dead.

Wait … well … not “living dead” like “zombies”. Though they don’t need to eat, and mortal injuries don’t kill them….

Oh my god the Elantrians are totally zombies.

Brandon Sanderson wrote a fantasy novel about intelligent zombies trying to win back their access to the magical powers they used to oppress the world.

I’m sure that’s not the typical way to interpret Elantris, but I’m going to go with it.

Sanderson drives the plot forward through several characters: Raoden, Sarene, and Hrathen. I found Raoden a little too … perfect … for my tastes. Even his self-doubting was so … perfect. I wanted to smack him. Sarene, on the other hand, was a fun character right from the start. But I didn’t like the handling of the romance towards the end. Hrathen is my favourite: it was a pleasure to watch Sanderson turn what could have been a stereotypical evil zealot into a doubting priest who wants to avoid bloodshed. Marvelous!

Elantris stands out because it has many of the hallmarks of fantasy but is actually more of a political thriller than an epic battle between good and evil. You see this kind of thing in other genres (urban fantasy’s crossover with mystery is almost a given these days), but it’s harder to pull off as your fantasy gets progressively higher. Other authors—Scott Lynch and Lisa Shearin spring to mind—are attempting similar things. Political machinations between and within nations are themselves interesting, so if you throw in some crazy zombie magic and a religious crusade, you’ve got yourself a party.

Where Elantris stumbles is generally its pacing and some clunky twists. My interest began to flag towards the middle of the book, particularly when Raoden repeatedly lies to Sarene in different situations rather than coming clean to her the first time (or even second time) that they meet. I understand that lies are a subtle form of conflict and, hence, they help drive the story. But I always hate it when it seems like characters are lying to each other for contrived reasons. Anyway, the ending picks up quite a bit towards the climax, but the resolution is awfully rushed.

Similarly, Sanderson throws a few curveballs that probably wouldn’t get him thrown out but would at least cause some angry calls from the umpire. They just aren’t as smoothly integrated into the story as I would like. On a related note, Sanderson is almost too fond of fleshing out his secondary characters and wrapping everything up in a neat little bow (I’m thinking of the revelations about Kiin to be specific).

Honestly, though, it’s hard to find major flaws in Elantris. It isn’t terribly ambitious, but it is creative enough to be amusing and entertaining. It has some good characters and a reasonably good story. I can’t call this essential reading—you would probably be better off with the Mistborn series—but if you have a rainy day and a library card, don’t cross this one off your list.

Seriously, Raoden and his friends are all zombies. I can totally see the sequel being about how everyone was stupid to trust the Elantrians not to eat their braaaaaaains.

This summer saw the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge splash onto social media. ALS terrifies me. A deadly disease that slowly robs you of your ability to move but doesn’t affect your reasoning? I’m not particularly fond of physical activities, but I like embodiment; I like being able to engage with the world actively. The idea of being unable to do that but remaining sound of mind sounds like a terrible way to go.

Lock In is a thriller set in a world ravaged by a disease superficially similar to ALS. Haden’s syndrome lays waste to the voluntary nervous system, and worse, it isn’t genetic but instead infectious! It’s like a deadly flu that paralyzes some people. The incident rate is high enough to spur research into brain-computer interfaces and cybernetics, resulting in Hadens (people who have become “locked in” as a result of Haden’s syndrome) being able to interact online with each other and in person through personal transports colloquially known as “threeps”. In even rarer cases, someone who contracts Haden’s doesn’t get locked in but instead becomes an Integrator, someone who can host a Haden consciousness for a limited time in their body.

Several other reviews have likened Lock In to Philip K. Dick. I didn’t make that connection myself, but in hindsight it’s apt. Much like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (aka Blade Runner), Lock In is a science-fiction novel that foregrounds a mystery thriller plot. You can’t quite ignore the science-fictional elements; they are essential to the plot. However, this novel exemplifies the idea that science fiction, rather than being a genre, is in fact a setting.

There’s a lot to like about this book, both from a science fiction and a mystery perspective. Haden’s syndrome provides an interesting point of divergence from which Scalzi creates this entire future. One of the major background issues is who foots the bill for Haden care in the United States; a new law has just passed that essentially shuts down government funding for Haden care. (Does this sound at all familiar or topical?) Tensions between the Hadens and non-Hadens are running high. And, of course, various corporations stand to lose or benefit from this new law….

The viewpoint protagonist is Chris Shane, an FBI agent and a famous Haden. Scalzi uses Shane’s “locked in” nature to good effect. Shane is embodied only by a threep, and as such can travel across the country very quickly if there is a threep waiting on the other end to act as host. While Shane’s partner is following up a local lead, Shane often ends up chasing connections in Arizona or LA. One thing I hate about science-fiction thrillers is when the author doesn’t take into account the new capabilities or consequences of a change they have made. Scalzi definitely does this.

In general, Lock In once again demonstrates Scalzi’s versatility. He is comfortable writing so-called military science-fiction adventures for his Old Man’s War universe. But he can also do the near-future thrillers, like The Android’s Dream and now this. And Redshirts was a fun departure as well. I always enjoy seeing a different facet of a writer.

For all these reasons, I want to love Lock In. Alas, I only like it.

In the end, it was a bit of a disappointment, as far as the plot goes. Shane is a great protagonist. I love Vann as well. There is plenty of humour between them; the dialogue is definitely Scalzi’s. But the plot … the villain of the piece is obvious almost from the moment they appear. There is no subtlety, no ingenuity to this mystery. The details of its implementation, sure, that’s clever. But the motives, the human element of the mystery? Predictable. Bland. Uninteresting.

For the entire time I was reading it, I enjoyed Lock In. It’s a good ride, and that includes the conclusion. I think Scalzi is one of the best writers of “unadorned, unapologetic crowning moments of awesome”. But there comes a point where so many such moments together start to feel like overindulging on candy. And just like binging on candy, you’re left feeling both sick and wired. And that’s not a great feeling.

So Lock In is a fun novel. I liked it. I recommend it. But for all the murder and intrigue it contains, it lacks the chewy centre that would make it worth more than an afternoon’s read. The mystery was not all that complex, and the thoughts it provoked were transitory. I don’t find myself ruminating on it much. By all means, pick it up, but it does not quite measure up to what I want to see from Scalzi.

One of the best parts of any fantasy series, for me, is when the author finally explicates the way in which magic works in his or her universe. Is it spell-based? Song-based? Dance-fight-based? Sometimes this happens right away, almost as soon as the main character discovers he or she is a wizard. Sometimes it unfolds gradually, as the characters become more familiar with their powers. But the diversity of magical systems is one of the most captivating parts of the fantasy genre. A fascinating system of magic can be the difference between a novel that’s merely run-of-the-mill and one that is bursting with creativity and high-stakes adventure. A poorly-conceived, derivative conception of magic can doom a novel to mediocrity. With magic, it’s not enough simply to have it or to use it—there have to be rules, consequences, and of course, origin myths.

I remain ambivalent towards Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. It was predictable and a little too trite, lacking something of substance beneath what is otherwise a very careful and competent deconstruction of fantasy. It is very much a product of its time, enabled by the high level of awareness about fantasy present in pop culture thanks to books like Harry Potter. With all of the hype it has garnered, it became easy to point out its many flaws—but if we’re being honest, it was also kind of fun at times. So without too many expectations or high hopes, I decided I would read The Magician King.

The origins of magic in the multiverse are a subject of speculation in The Magicians. Grossman deigns to make this central to the story of The Magician King, and I loved it. His idea that magicians are to the universe as hackers are to computers is almost intoxicating in the way it spiritually connects fantasy to the almost magical depictions of hacking common in cyberpunk—i.e., Neuromancer. More broadly, it’s the type of story that recurs across cultures and across history: magic, technology, fire … these are things humans obtained illicitly, behind the backs of the gods, things we are not supposed to have and should not be using. And what happens when the gods decide to take it back?

Quentin and his comrades stumble on to this conundrum when Quentin goes looking for trouble. He’s not satisfied living the good life as a King of Fillory; he needs adventure. He needs to be the hero. Quentin gets his wish—in the “be careful what you wish for” mode—and more. After embarking on what is supposed to be a simple mission to collect some taxes, he decides to play with a magic key, and ends up stranded back on Earth, with Julia. As they search for a way to return to Fillory—because on Earth they are just a couple of high-functioning screw-ups, not even fit for proper magical company—Grossman begins to fill in the gaps in Julia’s backstory. This was something I complained about in my review of The Magicians, and I’m glad to see Grossman listened! Although he doesn’t quite address how Julia finally meets up with Eliot, Janet, and Josh, he adequately addresses how she went from failing the Brakebills entrance exam to teaching herself magic on the streets.

Julia’s story is by far the best parts of the narrative. Quentin’s hipster-like commitment to callous apathy and annoyance with everything cannot hold a candle to Julia’s tale of dragging herself up from the most basic whiffs of magic to the power-levelling search for apotheosis that proves to be her ultimate destination. The quirk by which she manages to retain some of her memories of the existence of both Brakebills and magic effectively ruins her chances of living a normal life, and Julia throws herself into finding evidence of magic in the wild. She stumbles onto the street scene and begins building her cred. Ultimately, this gets her noticed by a group that uses the street scene as a way of looking for promising magical talent. Having mastered what they deem are all the basic, fundamental skills, they are now looking for the next level—for a bigger “power source” that will elevate their abilities beyond anything they can presently dream of doing.

Grossman, like many authors before him, likens magic to a powerful drug. It is, for Julia, an addiction that destroys her old self. She almost manages to get away from it, and I kind of hate myself for being glad she didn’t (because then there would be no story). Now, along with her group of magic-junkie friends, she is searching for the next big hit, something that will give her a really great high. And like some of the more educated and sophisticated drug addicts, Julia and her friends are doing it in a highly scientific manner, surveying history, myth, and legend for hints at what lies beyond the magic humanity has thus far been able to tap.

I love Julia’s arc. It probably helps that, unlike Quentin, she doesn’t get everything handed to her and then immediately finds it somehow inadequate or unsatisfactory. Julia is always looking for more, always learning, and Grossman conveys that thirst for knowledge as something she fears losing. Just prior to meeting her like-minded group of magicians, she fears she is about to plateau. Instead, she helps guide the group into a line of inquiry that yields their prize—and their deaths.

I’m studding this review with spoilers, so hopefully you aren’t regretting ignoring that little warning if you haven’t read this book! I decided that I definitely want to talk about two very spoiler-ish parts of this book, though: the origin of magic, and Julia’s rape. The latter is the culmination of Julia’s story of how she went from Brakebills discard to powerful hedge-witch. My initial reaction, as I was reading the scene in which Reynard the Fox proceeds to brutally murder all of her comrades (minus Asmodeus), was, “Oh, sure, gratuitous rape. Because clearly that’s the worst possible thing that could happen to Julia at this point, so why not throw it in?” (TVTropes). It grated. Upon further reflection, though, the rape is not just a gratuitous way to further scar Julia. It’s all about the latent cultural symbolism in that scene: they have mined the local culture for clues as to how to summon this goddess, and they end up with a demonic demigod in the visage of a fox instead. When Julia exchanges her life for Asmodeus’, she essentially makes a deal with the devil. Traditionally, witches sealed such bargains with … yeah.

So Grossman went there. The fact that there is a reason for its inclusion doesn’t make it any less grating. And it still kind of feels out of place, just like Julia’s sudden deus ex apotheosis toward the end of the book feels out of place. I’m still not sure why Reynard could or would convey upon her this promise of becoming the daughter of the goddess. Moreover, beyond the flashbacks that examine Julia’s backstory, we do not get much access to Julia’s perspective in the present. She remains as frustratingly opaque as the rest of the characters, leaving us only with Quentin as company—and he’s not much fun at all. He’s an eighty-year-old trapped in a twenty-something’s body, with magic powers and a serious desire to play hero regardless of the consequences.

If Julia’s story is compelling and evocative, then Quentin’s is almost the opposite. It’s rushed and still feels like it’s stuffed with filler. It makes little sense, and mostly consists of shoutouts to characters from The Magicians: Dean Fogg, Josh, Penny, etc. Quentin spends about half the time whining and the other half demanding, through some bizarre sense of Fillorian entitlement, that he be handed the answers to everything (and a Coke). If I had to participate in some kind of fantasy quest and needed to choose a literary character to accompany me, I would not pick Quentin. We would have … differences … that probably wouldn’t be very productive. I’d go for Julia instead, or maybe Poppy. Though I don’t know what she sees in Quentin, and Grossman’s portrayal of her “exotic” Australian come-what-may attitude borders on yuppie-like, Poppy was a nice breath of fresh character in a novel that otherwise stagnates in its own gene pool.

There just aren’t that many new characters to be found here. It’s as if Grossman budgeted his entire novel and ran out of money for character development after spending all of it on Julia. Most are returning cast from The Magicians, and even they have tiny roles. The new characters who contribute to the plot are extremely minor and poorly-fleshed out (I’m talking about Benedict, Bingle, Abigail, etc.). And no one sticks around for long: Janet has a few scenes; Eliot pops in and out as required; Penny shows up for one scene that is interesting only for its exposition. For such an involved, quest-style story, The Magician King has more the feel of a stage play than of an epic summer blockbuster.

There are times when I almost wish I had reread The Magicians prior to reading this, though I’m sure that would have been a bad idea. I wish I remembered more about Penny, because that would probably help with the scene in which Quentin and Poppy encounter him as a new member of the Order that maintains the Neitherlands. Still, I love how Grossman floats this idea that free will erodes as one becomes more powerful:

“I don’t think they can change their minds. When you get to that level of power and knowledge and perfection, the question of what you should do next gets increasingly obvious. Everything is very rule-governed. All you can ever do in any given situation is the most gloriously perfect thing, and there’s only one of them. Finally there aren’t any choices left to make at all.”

“You’re saying the gods don’t have free will.”

“The power to make mistakes,” Penny said. “Only we have that. Mortals.”

This is an awesome, potent idea. However, I wish Grossman had gone on to unpack it further. So what if humans are using magic? Why should the gods care that we hacked the system? What’s so important about the multiverse? Maybe it seems obvious to the gods that shutting down the loophole that makes magic possible is the only thing to do … but it’s not obvious to me. I guess it’s not necessary to know, strictly speaking, for the plot to work. But it would have satisfied my curiosity!

Grossman’s invocation of the gods as the behind-the-scenes antagonists of The Magician King is electrifying. He confirms the origin of magic, and Dean Fogg’s speculation that magic is not something humans are meant to have, and not only does that drive the plot for this novel, but it opens the door to so many other questions. Indeed, The Magician King begs for a sequel even more than The Magicians did: Grossman pulls back the curtain just enough to entice with a glimpse at the possibilities beyond before dropping it back into place and escorting us off the premises. There’s so much potential here—it worries me, because I’m not sure Grossman is going to be able to deliver something really great with the substandard cast of characters he has so far constructed! But it’s enough, for now, to keep me reading.

Also, Quentin gets totally screwed at the end by finally getting to be a hero and pay the price. I’m OK with that.

My reviews of The Magicians series:
← The Magicians | The Magician’s Land →

On one hand, I love science fiction that examines how new technology can completely disrupt society. Few people, two centuries ago, could envision the way we live today, so many of us spending our time punching buttons on the side of a flat box so that words show up on a screen a few centimetres away. Technological advancement is driven by and drives changes in society. On the other hand, it’s always nice to see books that dial back the disruption to focus on what doesn’ change. In the case of Slow River, Nicola Griffith asserts that wireless payment and other near-future advancements will hail neither a post-scarcity utopia nor a totalitarian dystopia in which children fight to the death (aww). Instead, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and those caught in between continue to do what it takes to survive.

Slow River has an interesting dual structure. Throughout each chapter, Griffith alternates between a third-person Lore, set a few years to months in the past, and a present-day, first-person Lore. The former story follows Lore as she recovers from an horrific kidnapping. Heiress to one of the wealthiest families in the world, Lore is a child of privilege. She was raised with the best education and experiences that money can buy. After learning, or thinking she has learned, certain secrets about her family, Lore decides she cannot return after she escapes from her abductors. She goes underground instead, meeting Spanner, a small-time criminal and hacker who takes pity on her. The latter story focuses on Lore’s attempts to get a “normal” life after leaving Spanner and striking out on her own. Armed with a false identity chip and her own knowledge of water purification processes, Lore gets a job at the local plant, only to find herself in the deep end. Occasionally, Griffith adds a third perspective: Lore as a child, growing up and navigating the waters of adolescence.

The title says it all: this is not a book that takes things lightly, nor does it move at a breezy pace. Griffith lingers over events, tracing and re-tracing them throughout the book. She is particularly keen on taste and smell, senses too often neglected at the expense of the more easily imagined sight, sound, and even touch. The result is writing raw and energetic yet also relaxed, almost effortless. It almost has the quality of a stage play rather than a novel. Beyond the small core cast, Griffith doesn’t both making the supporting characters feel very real. But this works, because ultimately Slow River is a character-driven piece, Lore’s journey from self-exile to some kind of understanding, if not acceptance, of her past and her identity.

I won’t go into too much detail and spoil anything, but it’s apparent from very close to the beginning that someone close to Lore sexually abuses her as a child. There is a scene involving a “monster” and putting a lock on her bedroom door. Lore’s sister Stella, the wandering child of the family, commits suicide just prior to Lore’s kidnapping. So on one level, Lore should have it all: riches, power, an interesting career as one of the heads of a company specializing in biological solutions to purification problems. Yet her family is riven by mistrust, by mutual dislike, by the dark secrets and the monsters that no one is willing to speak of aloud. Lore’s kidnapping and escape are also traumatic enough that, by the time she emerges onto the streets shivering and injured, she has no desire to face her family and try to work things out.

Griffith plays with ideas that Lore is both a victim as well as a perpetrator. As a victim, she has suffered at the hands of those who wronged her. Then, however, she falls in with Spanner, who claims that her petty slate theft is “victimless crime”, even though it soon becomes apparent it is anything but. The Lore who recovers under Spanner’s watch is a much more jaded, more cynical Lore than the one who came before. There’s a very memorable scene where Lore dyes her hair for the first time. She has grey hair, a sign of her wealth. (It goes like this: pigmentless hair leaves people prone to skin cancer, so the hair is a sign that Lore’s family can afford the medical nanotechnology required to prevent such an ailment.) This would be a dead giveaway in someone Lore’s age, so she must dye it. Spanner rejects her first choice, brown, because it looks too good on her. She is still too perfect, not broken enough to mix and mingle with the rest of this seedy world. Lore has to go with red, brutally alter her physical appearance in a way that affects her psychologically. From then on, she is broken, and it feels like she has much less agency.

In effect, there are two Lores in this book. Past!Lore goes along with Spanner’s schemes, caught up in the latter’s wake, craving her love and attention and, for once, relieved not to have any responsibility. Present!Lore is desperate to sort out her life, to start acting like someone normal, to forget how being with Spanner made her feel powerless and guilty. I love this parallel story and the arc Griffith forges with it. The end result is a powerful and moving book. Though set nominally in the future and featuring certain technologies we don’t quite have, Slow River is science-fiction in setting only. It eminently represents the best use of science fiction as a psychological tool for interrogating the ways we create and interpret our own and others’ identities. It’s not a book that many people might casually pick up—all the more the loss for them.

I wasn’t going to go out of my way to read The Magician’s Land. I’m so ambivalent about this series. But there it was on my library’s New Books shelf … it seemed almost rude not to borrow it. At the very least I was hoping to find closure. Honestly, I got more than that. This is a series that has steadily improved over the three books, with The Magician’s Land probably offering the most stable and enjoyable story.

My issues with The Magicians and The Magician King could be summarized as: “So what?” So what if being an adult magician in the real world sucks? So what if Fillory is real but you got kicked out? Quentin Coldwater was an annoying, unsympathetic protagonist who whined because his life didn’t make any sense. As if it was supposed to in the first place.

The other dimension of my disappointment was that I clearly retained nothing between books. I barely remembered who was whom. (And it doesn’t help that there are so many people whose names begin with the same letter: Poppy and Plum and Penny, oh my! Josh and Julia and Janet, oh my! Don’t be a dick, Grossman.) As the concluding entry in this trilogy, The Magician’s Land ties together a lot of the plots begun in either of its two predecessors—but I didn’t remember anything about them. And I didn’t really care.

I don’t know why I am so apathetic about these books. I don’t think I can explain it without going back and re-reading the other two—which I am not going to do! But I can tell you why I liked this book a lot more: Quentin is much more tolerable.

At thirty years old, he has actually grown up. He is taking his expulsion from Fillory in stride. He picks himself up, dusts himself off, and gets a real job. Sure, he still makes mistakes. He’s still obsessive. He bites off more than he can chew. But no longer does he whine, pout, or make excuses for himself. This is obviously intentional, as Grossman later has Quentin point out to others how he has changed. Quentin is a much more likable character in this book, and that makes a huge difference.

Because, hell, Grossman can write. He has a talent for packing entire books’ worth of ideas into a sentence or paragraph. Here’s an example:

… some of the dragons survived. They will repopulate, if they can remember how. I believe it has been several millennia since any of them had sex. We in the order have been assisting them with the research.

That’s Penny on the aftermath of the dragon–god war. Imagine it, though: creatures so old and long-lived that they have forgotten how to reproduce. In a few slick sentences Grossman conjures up an entire world’s worth of ideas, and I’m a little envious.

It’s just a shame that I don’t like his style of characterization more. The Magician’s Land is still frustrating at times, particularly the conclusion, which is rushed and even trite. Grossman just can’t resist tying up every little loose end. Quentin even finds his plant in the end. Insert eyeroll here. I’m supposed to care that Fillory is dying because all these others care, but they suck at trying to figure out how to stop the apocalypse. I have never seen such a laid-back, casual group of protagonists. And all the while Grossman is feeding them lines of dialogue that make them sound like magic-wielding royal hipsters.

Quentin might actually be the most likeable of them all. Imagine that.

So here we are, at the end of the trilogy (though I wouldn’t put it past Grossman to milk a spin-off series or two from this). And I guess, overall, I just can’t bring myself to get worked up about this series. I recognize that, on one level, Grossman is trying to put his unique stamp on portal fantasy while simultaneously deconstructing our fascination with magical worlds that are layered atop our own. But there is a level of metafictional winking happening here, where it is as if he is turning to the reader and going, “See what I did there? Eh? See that? That’s gold,” and expecting us to share in his private little genre joke. But that’s not really what I signed up for.

I’m calling it: Lev Grossman is the hipsterest of all fantasy writers. If you like ironic fantasy, then by all means, this series is for you. For me, though, it just never quite gels into a cohesive, compelling story. That’s a shame, but that’s how it is.

My reviews of The Magicians trilogy:
← The Magician King

Why did no one tell me this book existed until now????!!!!111

Seriously, it took a careful browsing of the library’s New Paperbacks section to discover the second and third books in this series. A quick hop to the nearby computer (which I think is running some kind of locked-down Ubuntu if the font anti-aliasing is anything to go by) to check the library’s catalogue, and sure enough, Phoenix Rising was in the stacks of that branch. Have I mentioned how much I love my library?

A quick glance at the description for these books was enough to convince me that I must read them all and now. That’s not to say I was convinced I would love them, or even that I loved Phoenix Rising all that much. It actually isn’t very impressive. Nevertheless, I could tell on sight that this was the steampunky equivalent of a beach read: light and frothy and satisfying.

Let’s start with the title. I hate titles of the form x Rising. I think they’re stupid. I have no rational argument for this bias; it’s just the way I feel, and you are welcome to disagree with me on it (but I will cut you).

Wellington Books and Eliza Braun are an unlikely pair of agents for the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences, thrust together by chance and the whims of the ministry’s mysterious director, Doctor Sound. I’ll let you guess which one is the brains and which is the … er … brawn. They end up investigating the Phoenix Society, the rumblings of which are getting louder (hence the title). Oh, and the society is also responsible for driving Eliza’s former partner into the clutches of Bedlam.

Ballantine and Morris rely a great deal on the odd couple pairing of Books and Braun. So your mileage of the book’s humour will rest largely on that. It didn’t do much for me, mostly because they don’t do anything new with the trope. Wellington seems to get the share of character development while we learn comparatively less about Eliza. I will, grudgingly, admit that in the broad strokes the pairing works. Just.

What works a lot better for me is the alternative steampunk London in which Phoenix Rising takes place. Ballantine and Morris do a great job at dropping subtle reminders that this is a different London from the one we’re used to. Wellington has somehow constructed Babbage’s analytical engine for himself (though that seems to be a one-time thing). Complicated gramophones and self-service bars exist. Oh, yeah, and there are obviously airships (TVTropes). (Sidenote: I’d love to see a steampunk alternative history that intentionally and viciously doesn’t invoke the airship trope. Like, just totally slaughters any notion that even in a steampunk world airship travel might be viable.) While not subtle, these technological references are presented as normal, everyday parts of life in this alternative world (with the exception of the Gatling-equipped killer robots, obviously).

The emphasis on technology and its role in the plans of the antagonists highlights how Phoenix Rising straddles the steampunk–urban fantasy divide. Technically it falls into the DMZ of speculative fiction, what I like to call agnostic fantasy. There are plenty of mentions of stories or myths about magical artifacts but no actual magic on page. So it remains to be seen whether magic is real in this world or merely very advanced, steam-powered science. On the other hand, there is a shadowy Big Bad behind the Phoenix Society, the House of Usher. (And, you know, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if it turns out to be a sentient house.)

Books and Braun’s bickering might be formulaic, but it gives Ballantine and Morris a way to spin out an already short book for a few more hundred pages. The story doesn’t really pick up until our intrepid duo go undercover to infiltrate the Phoenix Society. Oh, there’s also some kind of subplot involving a mole in the Ministry. It doesn’t go anywhere, which suggests it’s more of a series arc—and it’s good to know, at least, that Ballantine and Morris have some kind of overall vision for the series.

As I said above, I knew before I read it that Phoenix Rising would be light entertainment. Nothing about the book changed my mind on that score. It’s good steampunk in an alternative world.

One of the pleasures of reading often and reading widely is the capacity for books to surprise me. A book I think I’ll enjoy turns out to be rubbish, while other books exceed expectations. This book delighted and invigorated me. I didn’t expect much from When We Wake. It’s not because it’s YA. It’s because it’s set in Australia.

I’m totally kidding. It’s totally because it’s YA. Specifically, dystopian YA. I’ve been burned enough times by it before. There’s something about the allegory of dystopian fiction that YA authors seem to grasp but don’t necessarily execute with the finesse I demand, leaving their worlds hollow and potentially nonsensical. (Pure is a good example.) So when Karen Healey says her book is about a socially-conscious teenager who dies and wakes up after a hundred years of cryonic suspension, forgive me if I’m sceptical.

I just summarized the plot for you above (did you blink and miss it?). Basically, a century from now sees the effects of global warming become more pronounced, and balances of power shift. Australia has isolated and insulated itself from refugees from worse-off places. Resources like water and meat are regulated or culturally frowned upon, respectively, while technology, education, and drugs are free and cheap. It isn’t exactly the end of the world (yet) so much as a dramatic enhancement of the rich—poor gap.

It’s a scarily realistic picture of how we’ll end up if we continue to pursue our agenda to USE ALL THE FUELS.

Socially-conscious SF is great; socially-conscious young adult SF is even better. Ambiguous post-apocalyptic dystopias like The Hunger Games have their place. However, When We Wake has the benefit of originating from our present, our world. Tegan’s admonishment that she expected the people of the future to “be better” is aimed not at them but at us, the readers of her present. We create the future. It is not fixed in place, but it is up to us to work together and change the course before it becomes too late and too difficult to shift.

Healey accomplishes this without being too preachy, however, because of her relatable protagonist. Tegan is great. She is far from perfect, making numerous mistakes like you would expect anyone to after a hundred-year sleep. But she also has remarkable, fierce independence and integrity. She doesn’t let anyone use her. I kept contrasting her to Katniss from Mockingjay, who seemed so defeated and robbed of agency and ready to serve merely as a figurehead for the larger resistance movement. Tegan isn’t having any of it. She doesn’t cooperate with Colonel Dawson; she doesn’t cooperate with Carl Hurfest; she doesn’t cooperate with the Father of the Inheritors of the Earth. She is her own person, and she might be an unwilling celebrity—the Living Dead Girl!—but damned if that means she isn’t going to speak her mind.

When We Wake also delivers a fairly big dose of realism. Activism and change is hard. It leads to arrests. The government doesn’t like to be challenged. And unlike what movies and books often portray, the general public doesn’t rise up in revolt every time a journalist exposes a scandal. Just think about some of the “shocking” revelations we’ve learned in the past few years that people have largely learned to live with. Has anything materially changed now that we have proof the NSA is watching everyone and everything? No. Because most of us are too lazy and too happy with the convenience of our computers and our Internet. I know I am.

Tegan is not some messiah, not some symbol, at least not yet. She is a sixteen-year-old fugitive from the past who has taken on an enemy much bigger and meaner than her. The ending of the book leaves her fate open for the sequel, and I respect that. It would have been too convenient, too easy, if Healey had wrapped everything up in three hundred pages. Life, change, and revolution don’t work that way.

For a book set over a century into the future, however, When We Wake doesn’t do a very good job of worldbuilding. What, flexible computers and designer drugs, but no self-driving cars? It is too easy to dismiss this as a side-effect of Tegan’s limited narrative voice and culture shock. This is, again, something I tend to encounter in YA that assumes a first-person perspective: in the author’s need to establish a conversational or confessional rapport with the audience, description and exposition fall by the wayside. That being said, Healey at least makes an effort here. Tegan describes future supermarkets, for example, and gives us a little of a primer on what is happening with the rest of the world. It isn’t accurate to say that Healey’s vision of the future is vague so much as it is inconsistent. There’s casual mention of nanotechnology and artificial skin, and they can build (prototype) spaceships. But no one has improved on water reclamation, figured out cold fusion, or invented a new form of media in the past century? While I understand that Healey’s purpose is not to speculate or extrapolate but merely establish a setting for her allegory, the SF nerd in me is disappointed by this lopsided vision of tomorrow.

Still, this book is damn good. It’s the kind of YA I want to read and the kind I want to recommend to younger people; I’m really looking forward to the sequel. Tegan is great. There is no contrived or abusive love triangle in sight; there is a love interest, but the romance is comfortably on the backburner considering, you know, they are running for their lives. A girl’s got to have priorities, right?

Perhaps something for older readers of the book might be Tegan’s adoration of the Beatles. Let’s put it this way: she can sing entire albums (in order) from memory. I don’t think I could sing an entire song, by any artist I like, from memory (I can sing along, but that’s a different type of skill altogether). She has put some time into her Beatles love—and keep in mind she was born in 2011. But the way she speaks about the Beatles as a phenomenon has more in common with someone who lived through them. I could go into a long digression about the way Healey uses the Beatles music and culture as a way to advance both Tegan’s characterization and the plot, but I’m not into that. Suffice it to say that she works some serious cultural allusion mojo here. I like the Beatles, but only casually; I don’t actually own any of their songs or listen to them regularly, and I still really enjoyed this dimension to the book. So I can only imagine how actual Beatles fans will react.

I’m trying to read more YA (and preferably more good YA) to stay in touch with what students I might one day be teaching (if I can get a job!) might be interested in reading. When We Wake is an excellent example of good YA. It has a great female protagonist, but its appeal is for a broad audience of any gender. It’s set in a future, but a future recognizably derived from ours rather than a post-apocalyptic what-if land. And it is alternatingly terrifying and reassuring, which is the best thing for a science-fiction story to be.

I shouldn’t like A Fistful of Sky as much as I did. It’s a weird book. Nina Kiriki Hoffman is able to bend all the tropes of fantasy novels set in the contemporary world ever so slightly. The end result is something odd, strange, but no less wonderful. Gypsum LaZelle and her family are an interesting group of people for whom magic is supposed to be a gift—except when it’s not.

The idea of a magical family reminds me somewhat of Tanya Huff’s Gale women. It’s not the same in practice, but the ways in which the two families use their magic are similar. The LaZelles don’t fight crime or battle supernatural entities. They use their magic to bake, travel, do make-up, breed plants, and festoon their house with Christmas lights. A Fistful of Sky is decidedly small-scale fantasy in this respect: the fate of the world makes nary a cameo here.

The point where I explicitly recognized I was loving the book, despite or because of its oddness, came when Beryl invites Gyp to curse her. Unbeknownst to Gyp, Beryl is mad enough at her sister to throw up a shield, and Gyp’s hasty utterance of “Ultimate Fashion Sense!” reflects back to herself. What ensues is hilarity, coupled with a certain amount of cultural awareness. Juxtaposed with the seriousness of Gyp’s situation—trying to control a curse power that has to be used and almost always turns sour—the scene is so light-hearted it should be awkward. But Hoffman makes it work. Go figure.

Every time I expected this book to do one thing, or go in one direction, it would go in another, better direction. I love it when books surprise me like that. For example, I kept waiting for Altria to become a Big Bad, for Gypsum and her family to somehow have to combine powers and work together to expel Altria from their lives. Instead, Hoffman takes an entirely different tack—one which results in a resolution somewhat bizarre and very postmodern in its open-endedness but is no more bizarre than the rest of the book.

There are several elements that didn’t do much for me. As much as I appreciated that Gyp had a supportive boyfriend, Ian took the whole “I have magical powers” revelation unrealistically well. And he has about as much personality as a wet rag. The “subdued, supportive boyfriend” is just as much of a boring stereotype as the “douchebag boyfriend” even if he is a hell of a lot more palatable. Similarly, Gyp supposedly has this friend named Claire, but we really only see her once. For the rest of the novel, Gyp is (perhaps understandably) confined to interacting with her large immediate family. While this makes sense, it limits how we see Gyp in relation to the rest of the world. She has some awkward conversations with her boss and a weird stalky rapist guy, and that’s about it.

Seriously, this book is almost-down-the-rabbithole-weird. And yet it works.

I’m not sure to whom I’d recommend A Fistful of Sky. Well, that’s not true—I’m going to recommend it to my landlady, because it reminds me a little of Charles de Lint—not in its adherence or allusions to myths and legends, but in the way Hoffman writes people doing magic as if they are perfectly ordinary. There is nothing witchy about these witches. But there is plenty of delicious subtext—Gypsum has a very complicated relationship with her mother, who herself has baggage from her own youth that has resulted in an overbearing, over-possessive streak the extent to which we only realize towards the climax. At the same time though, it’s clear Gyp still loves her mother (and vice versa). Hoffman perfectly captures the complexity of family life, that ability to both love and hate one’s siblings and parents simultaneously.

If you are looking for a straightforward save-the-cheerleader-save-the-world type narrative, then this book is not for you. It meanders through a plot more lackadaisically than Tony Stark approaches running a multi-billion—dollar company. On the other hand, if you want a restful yet also stimulating story about a family with magic and a girl who doesn’t quite fit, then A Fistful of Sky might work for you.