Reading this novel, two thoughts were constantly present in the foreground of my mind: (1) wow, there is a lot of sex in this novel; and (2) Twilight fans need to read this.

I'm fascinated by the history of the British monarchy (and hence, by the tangles of consanguinity, the history of all the various European monarchies). I've enjoyed poring over Alison Weir's non-fiction works, although I don't think I've quite read one all the way through. I was happy to learn that she had begun writing fiction, starting with her treatment of Lady Jane Grey. I read that book before I joined Goodreads, so it's been a while, but I don't remember it being as racy as Captive Queen

Now, it's possible that the overt sexuality is due to Eleanor's notorious reputation. Weir, in her Author's Note, confesses that she uses fiction-writing to give herself more freedom to explore less orthodox interpretations. Of course, it's not as straightforward as that. Through her detailed portrayal of Eleanor's sexual relations with Henry, Weir emphasizes a theme underlying the entire book, which is the role of lust in the gain and loss of glory and power. It might be sexual lust, as we see with Henry and Eleanor, Henry and Rosamund, etc., or simply a lust for more power, as we see with the Young King. Eleanor was already plotting her divorce from King Louis when Henry came along, but one of the reasons she speedily remarried is simple lust. And this passionate foundation for a relationship between two of 12th-century Europe's most powerful people would prove immensely consequential.

So the sex in Captive Queen is not out of place. I think it just surprised me because I wasn't expecting Weir's florid language, nor was I expecting Eleanor and Henry to jump into bed every few pages. To be honest, it made me feel like I was reading a second-rate historical romance, and for a little while it was a struggle to persevere. Yet I did, obviously, and now I am very ambivalent. Although I really liked how Weir portrayed Eleanor's attempts to balance her obligations as a duchess, a wife, a queen, and a mother, her characterization and writing in general did not grip me.

I think the source of the problem is the sweeping, biographical nature of Captive Queen. Weir doesn't even cover all of Eleanor's life, just her divorce from Louis and marriage to Henry up until her death. Even so, that is a lot to cover in under five hundred pages. So there is a lot of summary and a lot of expository dialogue. Weir tends to tell us how Eleanor and Henry feel instead of showing us. And so, while the historical events that serve as a background kept me interested and kept me reading, the characters themselves seemed little more like set pieces—even Eleanor herself, at times. And this is totally a stylistic problem, which means that depending on what you like from your historical fiction, you might find this book enchanting. Your mileage may vary.

If anyone is going to read Captive Queen though, I hope it's fans of Twilight. Or pretty much anyone who reads straight-up romances (historical too) in which the heroine achieves victory by changing herself to suit her man.

Prior to their marriage, Eleanor expresses this lovely sentiment to Henry:

She kissed Henry ardently, her tongue darting mischievously into his mouth "In France, I was not free. They didn't want me interfering, as they called it, in their politics. I was relegated to playing chess with my ladies, or embroidery, or telling riddles, for God's sake. I have a brain, but they wouldn't let me use it. Tell me that we won't have a conventional marriage, Henry. I couldn't bear that."

"How could we?" he replied lazily. "We are not conventional people."

"You are aware that I am giving up my newfound freedom to marry you," Eleanor ventured. "I hope you won't forget that I am sovereign Duchess of Aquitaine, even though you have the right to rule here as my husband? And to rule me—if I let you." Her smile was full of mischief.

Mmm, adverbs. And Eleanor clearly loves the mischief. But no, after this Henry mumbles about promising her sovereignty—but he doesn't actually promise, and instead they have more sex. It quickly becomes evident that Henry will override or ignore his new wife when it suits him. Although this is as much a result of Henry's singularly egotistic personality, it's also because he subscribes to conventional notions of masculine dominance: he's Henry II, King of Freakin' England, Count of Anjou, Count of Maine, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Duke of Gascony, Count of Nantes, and, let us not forget (the Irish certainly won't), Lord of Ireland. Oh, he lets Eleanor serve as regent at times and gives her a certain degree of autonomy. It's clear, however, that this is as subject to his caprice as much as all of his other decrees. He loses no sleep over ignoring her desires regarding the disposition of Aquitaine or the marriage arrangements of their children. Eleanor, to him, is an object of lust and yet another power tool in his arsenal to be used in his ongoing quest for power and dominion throughout Europe. Did he love her? He thought he did, at one point in time, but his appointment of Thomas Becket as Archbishop over Becket's own protestations demonstrates that Henry is not nearly as honest with himself as he pretends to be.

Henry essentially attempts to subsume Eleanor the same way Edward subsumes Bella. He wants her body, yes, but those nice lands of Aquitaine and Poitou must have been nice too. (Seriously, check out a map of 12th-century "France" sometime. It wasn't until the Hundred Years' War that most of what we think of France today became French permanently.) So he seduces Eleanor as much as she seduces him. He forces her to watch him order a city's walls torn down simply because he didn't like the reception they received there. He tells her where they will send their children for education, whom their children will marry for political reasons, etc. Eleanor, despite her token duties, is much reduced. Yet she constantly rebounds throughout the novel, refusing to be consumed—and she pays the price, including over a decade of house arrest.

So basically, Eleanor of Aquitaine has more balls than Bella Swan (or Henry, for that matter), fell in love with yet stood up to someone a lot scarier than a mere vampire, and still managed to have almost infinitely more sex than Bella does in the entire Twilight series. I think the verdict here is obvious: even though Weir's writing is nothing to write home about, Captive Queen still serves as an example of how exciting historical fiction can be. So why read Twilight when you could be reading this?

Sometimes I worry I've become too cynical in my old age (says the nineteen-year-old). When I read The Magic of Recluce for the first time, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, and I went on to devour the next several books of the Recluce saga before promptly breaking for lunch.... (Well, OK, the span of several months may have elapsed sometime among all that, but you get the idea.) Now I feel less charitable toward this book. The Magic of Recluce has a couple of problems, none of them insurmountable and none of them alone detract too much from the story.

Firstly, the story is slow. This isn't the same as pacing, mind you—the pacing of The Magic of Recluce is a near-perfect balance of dialogue and action sequences. The story is slow because it takes a long time for the main character, Lerris, to develop to a point where we feel invested in him as a person; by the time that happens, the story is nearly over, and suddenly he's fighting the evil wizard.

Secondly, Lerris seems to suddenly acquire a long-term planning ability that he lacks upon leaving Recluce. He goes from bored youth to concerned woodcrafter, arranging a marriage for his master's daughter and instilling order everywhere. While much of Lerris' maturity can be attributed to character development, I just never got a sense of how Lerris matured, since everyone he meets seems to deplore his idle search for answers.

Lastly, a good deal of the philosophical discussion in the book is too vague for my liking. I really really love the order/chaos magic system that Modesitt has set up here. However, Justen's (and even Lerris') explanations are too esoteric; I feel like I've landed in an alien university lecture. I get the general gist of the theme that Modesitt wanted to communicate—mainly, that there needs to be balance between order and chaos. However, any serious arguments are stultified by the refusal of those who know better to actually discuss these matters with Lerris. There is a difference between giving someone the answers and debating a point, and the knowledgeable characters of this book seem to confuse the two concepts.

The Magic of Recluce is a highly logistical fantasy novel. By that I mean Modesitt pays close attention to numbers and organization; we get frequent asides that comment on finances, the weather, the political state of the country in which Lerris currently resides, etc. I wouldn't call this a bad thing, but some people might find it boring. Although it would have been nice for Modesitt to develop a slightly more interesting coinage system, and maybe spent less time worrying about coin and more about work in general (Lerris never could seem to dabble in anything; once he tried to do something, he went at it full bore), I didn't mind the logistical elements. It gave me some time to mull over the vagueness surrounding order/chaos theory.

As far as characterization goes, I honestly didn't pay attention to any of the characters except for the few main ones. It seems that Lerris met the same hostile innkeeper at every village (and subsequently had to make a hasty escape from said inn). Even the arguably main characters, however, don't feel very real. Modesitt fails to provide us with any explanation for their inner conflicts. Krystal clearly has issues, but what are they? What really happened in Justen's past? Even more hints or veiled implications would be better than absolute ignorance, the result of which was my apathy toward Krystal's attraction to Lerris and Justen's attitude at the end of the book.

In the end, The Magic of Recluce adheres too faithfully to the standard fantasy tropes. It is technically sound, much like a [a:David Eddings|8732|David Eddings|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1223870462p2/8732.jpg] novel, but lacks the truly intriguing hook to make it amazing. Hopefully my memory will be correct in that the later books in this series are far better, especially when it comes to the quality of the characters. I do recall not feeling as passionate about The Magic of Recluce as I did about its successors, re-reading it only because it's the first book. We'll see how I like the next ones.

My reviews of the Recluce saga:
The Towers of Sunset →

Warning: This review contains spoilers about the review. Continue reading only if you have already read this review or if you are unconcerned about ruining the ending of this review.

Open with a joke about the size and weight of this book making it good for a number of non-reading-related purposes. Go on to comment on the excessive amounts of esoteric terminology.

That's probably how most reviews of this book begin, and they're probably right in doing so. Of course, plenty of books are justified in their length (or at least, we tell them they're justified for fear that they'll sneak off our shelves and kill us in our sleep if we say otherwise). And I see plenty of reviews that go on to say that they like Banks' no-holds-barred use of terminology, counting it as a sign of good worldbuilding. I'm not as convinced that The Algebraist is satisfactory in either regard, but let's give it the benefit of a doubt. Let's assume that Banks is justified in both these respects and go on to address the next question: if a reader can get past these two hurdles, does he or she find a worthwhile story?

(Review spoiler alert: the answer is "No.")

The heart of this space opera is Fassin Taak's search for a mathematical Transform that will unscramble a list of coordinates of secret wormholes that connect almost every inhabited system in the galaxy. The Mercatoria, ostensibly the good guys, would kill for this sort of information, since wormholes are the only viable method of faster-than-light travel and connecting two systems by wormhole is an arduous process. Come to think of it, anyone would kill to get the information, or to keep it hidden, which makes Fassin's search quite difficult.

Banks spends the majority of this book (and that is a lot of book right there) keeping coy about whether or not any such secret wormhole network exists. In the end, the revelation is somewhat disappointing, and even a little predictable to those well-versed in this sort of science fiction story. (Gas-dwelling alien species think alike.) And it turns out not to have much bearing on the other major plot in the book, the invasion of Fassin's home system, Ulubis, even though Fassin's in such a hurry to find the Transform so he can get help before the invasion fleet arrives. So the two main plots become disconnected, and neither are very satisfying on their own.

(Review spoiler alert: I'm trying to do this review without any actual plot spoilers, so forgive my ambiguity.)

To discuss the Dweller List and its Transform, one must discuss the Dwellers themselves. I have to confess to having a soft spot for absurdist, relaxed aliens who have a society based on the accumulation of "kudos" but happen to be lying on a cache of hyper-advanced weaponry should a threat come calling. Pretty much all of the Awesome in The Algebraist is a result, directly or indirectly of action or utterance of a Dweller or Dwellers. My favourite example would probably be where Archmandrite Luseferous begins shooting live humans out into space unless the Dwellers produce Fassin:

Luseferous pointed furiously at the line of bodies heading slowly towards the planet. "Don't you fuckwits understand? That doesn't stop until I get what I want!"

The three Dwellers twisted to look as one. "Hmm," Peripule said thoughtfully. "I do hope you have enough people."

I'll save talking about how this pushes Luseferous from deliciously evil to laughable stereotype for later. I just want to revel in how wonderfully apathetic the Dwellers are. Not that I condone apathy toward humans. But the Dwellers' attitude is very alien, and as the above example demonstrates, they really have no reason to care about human lives.

(Review spoiler alert: The following is about the only praise I have for The Algebraist, so lap it up while the lapping is good.)

Unfortunately, our glimpse at Dweller society is brief compared to the time Fassin spends traipsing about the rest of the galaxy meeting a couple of other random species. We learn that the Dwellers don't really fight in factions anymore so much as have "Formal Wars" over somewhat trivial issues. Nevertheless, Dweller society isn't very cohesive—many Dwellers are completely ignorant of matters like military capability and whether or not they have a secret wormhole network. There's just so much potential in this single species. Despite the fact that a good chunk of the book happens in Dweller gas giants and Fassin spends most of his time with Dwellers, there's so much more we could have learned.

(Review spoiler alert: And now we resume our regularly-scheduled criticism.)

Compared to the intriguing Dwellers, the actual object of Fassin's quest is far less interesting. Banks makes a big deal over the fact that Fassin needs to find "the Transform," which turns out to be an equation written in "alien algebra" (hence the title, The Algebraist). Supposedly this list and its Transform are so important because they'd give the Mercatoria (or its enemies) access to a pre-existing network of wormholes. If this network exists, the Dwellers so far haven't offered to share it with the Quick species. No one seems to mention why finding proof of this network would motivate the Dwellers to change this position. And if the Mercatoria has the means to find the wormholes, what do they intend to do? Take the wormhole portals by arms? Because we've already established that the Dwellers, while never openly hostile, don't permit that sort of tactic and tend to respond with overwhelming force.

The actual quest is a mundane journey that consists of following various Dwellers who may have information Fassin needs. Along the way, he gets into a series of scrapes. At first, there's pressure to find the Transform as soon as possible, so that the Mercatoria can summon reinforcements before Luseferous' invasion fleet arrives in Ulubis. Gradually, however, this becomes less of an issue, and in the end Fassin's search doesn't have any effect on the outcome of the invasion. Not that it matters, since the invasion itself turns out to be a minor problem anyway.

The invasion's mastermind, Archmandrite Luseferous, also begins the book as a credible threat. He's intelligent, ruthless, and sadistic. Also, Banks goes out of his way to make it clear the Luseferous isn't a delusional megalomaniac who ignores his advisers and compromises his plans out of ego or pride. This credibility erodes gradually as Luseferous' fleet travels to Ulubis, culminating in Luseferous' humiliation and defeat because he antagonizes a couple of Dwellers in search for this mythical Transform. And there's no real reason for this sudden change in characterization, other than the fact that Banks needs Luseferous' invasion to fail, of course. That the invasion failure is a result of miscalculations and bad characterization should be enough to set off alarms in the cautious reader's head.

Sandwiched in between, among, and pretty much everywhere these two plots aren't, are various sub-plots, revenge plots, and miscellaneous exposition about the types of species that inhabit the galaxy. The signal-to-noise ratio of The Algebraist is terribly low. There are so many names, species, and places irrelevant to the plot that I had trouble following the plot (although maybe this wasn't a bad thing). The fact that artificial intelligences are anathema forms an important point in the structure of the Mercatoria, which is fine. But then Banks includes an entire subplot involving hidden artificial intelligences, and Fassin's Head Gardener turns out to be an artificial intelligence, and all the while I'm just wondering . . . why?

There's a lot going on in The Algebraist. And a lot of it goes wrong. But it all goes wrong for the same reason: after a strong opening, the book presents a weak resolution with every possible threat declawed before it could be defeated. It's as if The Algebraist is a simmering pot of water that, about 100 pages in, comes to a boil, and then all of the water boils away. The threat just evaporates by the end of the book. Long before that happens, however, my patience evaporated. Judging from the praise that others have heaped upon this book, this is a situation where your mileage will vary. However, I urge you to think twice. There is a story somewhere in the depths of The Algebraist, but extracting and parsing it is not for the faint of heart . . . and I question whether the end result worth the effort.

I find myself having difficulty expressing my opinion of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is not an unusual situation for me with regards to "classic" works of literature that fail to meet my personal expectations. While such books don't entertain me, I still manage to understand or at least glimpse why they have earned a spot in the literary canon. This is the case for Portrait, my first novel by James Joyce. On one hand, I found it boring and lacklustre: why should I sympathize with Stephen Dedalus? On the other hand, I can see its appeal, especially at its time, as a coming-of-age journey from an Irishman whose childhood and adolescence was steeped in Catholicism to a more self-aware man with a broader sense of aesthetics and a yearning to experience the wider world. I will even be so bold as to claim that others have done something similar and done it better in the time that has elapsed since Portrait, but perhaps this is a bias of my generation.

When you read as many Wikipedia articles as I do, you start building up ideas about enduring authors despite having never read them yourself. I've heard a little about Joyce's signature style, particularly when it comes to the intractability of Finnegans Wake (and I am in no hurry to tackle that chestnut). Nevertheless, I didn't really know what to expect from Portrait until I began reading. Joyce gives us access to Stephen's thoughts, but he enforces a strong distance between the reader and Stephen through his third-person narrator. As a result, it is difficult to connect with Stephen, particularly when he's a child. And if I don't care about young young Stephen, why should I care about Stephen when he grows up to be a young man (and therefore, by any era's definition, foppish and overbearingly self-absorbed, yours truly included)? Joyce can drop compelling beats about hellfire and brimstone until the Brits go home, but without such a rapport Portrait misses the mark.

Joyce spends a good forty pages in the middle of the book to discuss the characteristics of Hell and what punishments one might expect for sinning in life and failing to repent. And it's the most fascinating forty pages in the entire book. Seriously, Joyce had me riveted the entire time, not only with the imagery of his Hell with a fire that burns hot but dark but also the depth of spiritual loss, the utter abandonment by God of condemned souls. I have to admit that it did nothing to soften me toward Catholicism. Joyce seems to be channelling Old Testament God here, and I feel sorry for my Catholic friends: a few mis-steps in your eighty or ninety years of life, and you are doomed forever. And forever is, as Joyce eloquently explains, a very, very long time.

Joyce's scare tactics certainly work on Stephen, for he immediately resolves to reform his lecherous ways. He begins to appreciate his religiosity consciously at every moment of his life, to live in a constant state of awareness that at any moment he could sin and jeopardize his admission to Heaven. I imagine that he probably took himself too seriously in this quest, and as a result became obnoxiously self-righteous to everyone around him. So naturally, the priests do what priests do with obnoxiously self-righteous Catholics: they encourage him to take the cloth as well! Of course, we know from the title that this is not Stephen's destiny. Part of him wants to, yearns for the power and the pride that comes with the position—but he acknowledges these desires are, of course, sinful (oh, Catholicism…). Nevertheless, this is the most interesting period of Stephen's life for me. His childhood was a series of disconnected, disjointed adventures by someone I couldn't quite grok. His later adolescence and young adulthood are fine, but they don't quite share the conflict of passions present as Stephen considers whether he should join the priesthood.

More than ever, especially when it comes to so-called classics or other well-established works, I have been reflecting in my reviews and my ruminations about how the generation to which I belong influences my opinions. With some works, generation gaps or generational differences of opinion seem obvious—which of course makes me suspicious that they are stereotypical and untrue. Yet I can't ignore the fact that my time makes me as prone to certain prejudices as Joyce's time made him. Often when I read, I try to be two people: one of me is "me", a 21-year-old Canadian student who studies math and reads more books than is probably healthy; the other of me is a generalized, more disinterested literary critic who attempts to view the book through the eyes of other people. Most of the time the disinterested critic has to dampen the enthusiasm of the wide-eyed, impressionable 21-year-old (OMG: artificial intelligence! nanotechnology! five stars!!!). With Portrait, we suddenly found our respective roles reversed, with the impressionable 21-year-old playing the part of the apathetic cynic.

I suspect that I would have enjoyed Portrait much more if I were not as well-read as I am. Even that might not be enough: it seems like the angst of youth, including conflict with the religion of one's parents, has been a popular topic in movies since at least the 1970s, if not earlier than that. So, in a way, popular culture has ruined James Joyce for me—and it's not because anything longer than 140 characters evokes a sudden malaise of tl;dr. I just feel like I've seen Stephen's predicament before, several times over, and I've seen it done better, both in print and on screen. Notably, Portrait hearkens back to Fifth Business, which I reread this year. And this comparison does not do Stephen any favours: I was regularly fed up with what I perceived in Stephen as passiveness. Things kept happening to him, and he tended to react, but he very rarely did much about it. (I don't know if this criticism is particularly fair, because I realize Stephen often did do things, such as his concerted effort to live virtuously at fourteen. But I can't change how I feel, and I blame this on Joyce's style.) Dunstan Ramsay, in contrast, was a man of action—after all, the book starts with an action of Dunstan's that affects the entire course of his life.

While I'm comparing these two books, I should point out the reversal of themes: in Portrait, Stephen grows up Catholic—is educated by Jesuits, in fact—and gradually detaches from the Church. Dunstan is raised a Scotch Protestant, yet over the course of his lifetime he flirts and then becomes enchanted with the Catholic Church's saints. He never converts, but otherwise he is firmly immersed in Catholic mythology, even going so far as to construct views of history as patterns of myth. Stephen begins to question the usefulness of his religion in application to living his life. Ultimately, his interests shift to questions of art and beauty, and he decides that in order to explore these questions unfettered, he must leave Ireland behind, and with it, all expectations. It's poignant in its own way, and I cannot help but admire Joyce's skill in crafting this story, even if I do not particularly care for his style. I can see how, in the right place and right time in one's life, this book might bring about an awakening or an epiphany. However, it was neither the right place nor the right time for me.

Seldom does a book live up to blurbs like "Unforgettable. Impossible to put down," as [a:Jack McDevitt|73812|Jack McDevitt|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1225722326p2/73812.jpg] says of Wake. Usually, such claims are empty hype, even when the book is good. Not so with Wake. I agree wholeheartedly with McDevitt, for I was 100 pages into the novel before realizing it was 2 AM and I should probably get some sleep. There's no way that Wake could be mistaken for "an action-packed thrill ride" or any of those other tired blurb clichés floating around in the critique pool, but "impossible to put down" definitely describes the opening to Robert J. Sawyer's new trilogy about an emerging artificial intelligence.

For a fairly short volume, and one that lacks any sort of action or suspense, there's a lot packed into Wake. The central plot, which deals with Caitlin Decter's bid to gain sight and how this leads her to discover the Web's emergent intelligence, happens against a backdrop of the ongoing information wars in China and research into primate intelligence in the United States. Sawyer makes accurate allusions to current technology and scientific developments. This sense of scope and style reminds me of how [a:Cory Doctorow|12581|Cory Doctorow|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1212526024p2/12581.jpg] writes about technology in his books. With ease, these authors transcribe to paper actions and descriptions about technology we use every day but don't always pause to understand how we use it. Moreover, because the descriptions are accurate, Sawyer is educating the less technologically-adept even as he immerses us in this very human plot. So kudos.

I call the plot of this book "human," even though it concerns an AI, because the nature of being human is the motif that connects all of the disparate subplots in Wake. I wish that something beyond theme connected these subplots; the critic in me has to profess disappointment that Hobo the chimp's story is only tangential to Caitlin's, at least for now. This is a structural issue with the narrative, however, and it doesn't detract from the thematic brilliance of Sawyer's writing.

Caitlin often refers to Helen Keller and her writing, as well as a book, [b:The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind|22478|The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind|Julian Jaynes|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41FlFSjt2OL._SL75_.jpg|1311139]. She mentions Keller's descriptions of what her thought processes were like before she learned how to communicate and interact with the external world. Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness similarly discusses a theory about a turning point in human history where the two halves of the brain managed to talk to each other and act on conscious thoughts instead of instinct.

In China, the Communist Party decides to kill several thousand people in a remote province to eliminate the threat of H5N1. To prevent the Chinese people from seeing the inevitable backlash of the world media, it severs all communication outside of China. These are the actions of humans, yet the idea of killing thousands of people merely to prevent the spread of an infection seems, at least to me, very inhuman.

Then there's the bonobo-chimpanzee hybrid, Hobo, who can communicate via sign language and startles everyone when he paints representational art—a profile of one of his researchers—instead of the typical abstract pictures so far produced by non-human primates. The way Sawyer portrays Hobo makes him seem far more human than he actually is, and this is where, as a sceptic, I have to balk. Artificial intelligence aside, this is probably the part of the book that relies the most on extrapolation of something we haven't achieved yet. I do believe it's possible for apes to use sign language to communicate intelligently; don't get me wrong. And Sawyer's portrayal of Hobo's humanity serves its purpose of parallelling the development of the Web AI.

This final piece of the plot puzzle is what connects the other three, of course. When China puts up the Great Firewall, it severs this non-sentient entity into two, suddenly enabling it to begin conceiving of time and eventually abstract thought. From there, it begins to learn and teach itself new concepts, something that continues up to and after Caitlin discovers its existence. Sawyer does his best to portray the alien nature of this intelligence's journey toward sentience while still describing it in terms we can comprehend. For the most part, he pulls this off, although I preferred the observations that Caitlin, her father, and Dr. Kuroda make about the intelligence's composition as cellular automata over Sawyer's first-person depictions of the intelligence. The former were just so unique yet tantalizing, since it really drives home the point that the Web is a fluctuating network of constant streaming data and not some sort of static series of Facebook pages and Google search results all stored in a database and delivered to your browser when you hit "Go."

To return to the motif of humanity, however, I'd like to point out a section toward the end of the book, in which Caitlin leads the emerging intelligence to Wikipedia, which it consumes eagerly, and then onto Project Gutenberg:

And then, and then, and then—

It was—

The gold mine.

The mother lode. . . .

Not just coded conceptual relationships, not just definitions, not just brief articles.

No, these were—books! Lengthy, in-depth treatments of ideas. Complex stories. Brilliant arguments, profound philosophies, compelling narratives. This site, this wonderful Project Gutenberg, contained over 25,000 books rendered in plain ASCII text. . . .

It took me an eternity—eight hours!—but I absorbed it all: every volume, every polemic, every poem, every play, every novel, every short story, ever work of history, of science, of politics. I inhaled them . . . and I grew even more.

Firstly, I'd like to note that Sawyer has described precisely how I feel about books, about reading in general, and about wonderful libraries like Project Gutenberg. But if you're reading this review, you're probably on Goodreads, and you probably understand, so I won't belabour that point. Secondly, while Sawyer is far from the first SF author or scientist to make this point, it's an important one when it comes to discussing how to deal with an artificial intelligence, should we create one or should one emerge spontaneously as it does in Wake. It's going to learn. Fast. And the information we feed it will determine what opinions it forms about humanity.

Read over that last paragraph again. In eight hours, the AI consumes the sum total of Project Gutenberg's library (this is after it's partaken in Wikipedia and in Cyc, an encyclopedia tool specifically designed for teaching AIs). In so doing, it has consumed all these myriad works of humanity, works that talk about being human, whether they're philosophy or fiction or scientific in origin . . . and it's seen our history. How we've treated each other, continue to treat each other, and how we've treated this planet.

An intelligence that emerges from the World Wide Web emerges from the combined knowledge and information that we humans put on the Web. So even if this intelligence itself is not human, everything it learns is going to be a product of humanity, at least at first. Whether consciously or not, we're going to shape the first opinions of an emergent intelligence. It's something worth considering.

Beyond the human angle, Sawyer's crammed so much in here that I'm not sure where to start. So let's talk about Caitlin's blindness.

I'm not blind, so I'm certainly not congenitally blind, and as such, I'll never really know what Caitlin's world is like. Yet Sawyer at least gave me an inkling of what it's like to be blind, both from a conceptual perspective and a technological one. One thing I noticed is that instead of providing visual descriptions of places and people around Caitlin, Sawyer is always careful to describe in terms of sound, touch, and smell. Caitlin concludes Dr. Kuroda is tall because of the direction from which his voice comes but heavy because of the way he wheezes. We don't know if he's bald or has thick hair or blue eyes. As someone who doesn't really visualize things when I read, I didn't miss the lack of visual description and appreciated this change.

Sawyer also introduced me to how the blind and visually-impaired interact with the Web. Oh, I already knew about screenreaders like JAWS and refreshable Braille displays, etc., but this was the first time I'd really thought about how they get used. For Caitlin, this was all just normal for her, and through her eyes I began to understand how it was possible to interact with the world in this way.

And beyond her blindness, as a person, Caitlin is a well-thought-out character. She's "feisty" as the jacket copy promises, but she isn't perfect—she has a few melt-downs and tantrums. Still, Sawyer manages to make her a realistic LiveJournal-using, ebook-reading, iPod-listening teen without making her into a caricature or stereotype. Now if only she could kick that nasty exposition habit she develops in the second third of the book. . . .

This is why it was so hard to put down Wake and why the first thing I did upon waking today was pick it up and finish it. Sawyer makes me think, but he also makes me look at stuff I already think about in different ways. He does this with Caitlin, and he also does this with China.

"The Great Firewall of China" is a pretty well-known term on the Web. Most people are aware of the Chinese government's tight control over the Internet in China, both in terms of access and in terms of content—Google's controversial decision to censor its search results, China's tendency to block websites that it finds too seditious or inappropriate, the spyware built into the networks and the computers themselves, etc. Let's be honest for a moment. For those of us reading Wake in North America or Europe, that's half a world away, and the public consciousness has a fleeting attention span. Sawyer reminds us that the oppression in China has been ongoing for decades now, and even if the People's Republic is doomed as some projections claim, that won't stop them from committing further atrocities before they fade into history. Fortunately, it isn't all grim: dissidents are using the Internet to fight back. And while the increasing globalization of the economy does prop up the communist government, it also makes it harder for that government to simply cut off all ties from the outside world. Unlike North Korea, which has fewer people and doesn't make stuff for Wal-Mart, China is dependent on the outside world. The Web connects us, and even when censored, offers hope for freedom.

We live in exciting times. Well, I suspect that we've always lived in exciting times ever since our bicameral minds fused and we started to keep track of time. But don't doubt that here and now, the present, is full of wonders. Just as Apollo 8's photographs of Earth from space changed how we perceive ourselves, so too is the Web changing how we interact. The advancements in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology . . . everything we uncover only shows that there's more to learn, but if you thought the Renaissance was exciting, just recall that we know so much more now. We can be terrible, cruel, nearly insane . . . but when we come together to do good, we can be a wonderful species. Wake reminded me of that, of the good and the bad about humanity, of the incredible events and discoveries happening all around us every day. It reaffirmed my desire to read and watch and grow and know more, my love of learning, and my love of life.

It's safe to say that I am a big fan of the new Doctor Who, and I have been ever since it arrived in 2005, back when I was sixteen. I wasn't a big fan from the first episode. As a science-fiction fan in general, I had heard of Doctor Who but was not quite sure what it was all about. So I tuned into the CBC and watched "Rose" with interest. Gradually, I came to appreciate Doctor Who for what it is: one of the best TV shows ever.

Normally I don't like to jump on the "we have it so good these days" bandwagon, but … we do. We Canadians might grumble about licensing restrictions preventing us from watching some videos online, but at least we're lucky enough to see Doctor Who regularly (and now that it's on Space, it's even on a channel that doesn't pre-empt it for hockey!). From the essays in Chicks Dig Time Lords, I get the impression that the life of an American Doctor Who fan involved scrabbling around for video cassettes (which were not always cheap or easy to find) and negotiating with parents/siblings/broadcasters to ensure they had access to their regular dose of Doctor Who. Getting the episodes seems to have been an epic struggle in and of itself; I am lucky enough to get them delivered directly to my TV or computer whenever I like.

I've never really seen the old Doctor Who, and this doesn't bother me. I don't feel like I'm missing out, because unlike the essayists here, those Doctors weren't my Doctors. The division between the series is sharp enough that I don't feel the loss, and because I was not around when the old series was broadcast, because I never attended conventions or got involved in the fan groups, I don't have that sense of community that this book so clearly portrays. While I wouldn't mind watching episodes of the old Doctor Who, they are not as essential to me as they are to so many of the contributors to Chicks Dig Time Lords. So for that reason, I really enjoyed hearing their perspectives on the old series and how it affected their childhood. I liked hearing about their favourite Doctors and companions, and especially their anecdotes about attending conventions; working on the shows, the audio books, or the tie-in novels; and becoming a part of the larger community.

At times these essays become extremely personal, and I feel privileged that so many people chose to open up their lives to strangers like us. Some of their anecdotes are hilarious:

Bill [Baggs] introduced us to Sylvester McCoy the year that he was a guest at [Chicago] TARDIS. The two of them proceeded to beat Michael and me at pool. Actually, it was a close game until Michael's final shot, when Sylv leaned over and whispered into Michael's ear "you're going to lose," using his best Doctor voice. Michael then (rather understandably) flubbed the shot, losing the game.

Note to self: do not challenge a Doctor, current or former, to a game of pool. Some of the anecdotes are heartwarming:

Lis [Sladen] didn't have to give Caitlin an extra glossy. The nice guys running the autograph lines didn't have to let us jump the line. Colin [Baker] didn't have to wave, and Lisa [Bowerman], Nick [Briggs], and Jason [Haigh-Ellery] didn't have to spend ten minutes talking to our daughter, even if she has listened to her fair share of Big Finish audios.

They could have all remained professional and kind, but disinterested. But that's not how this community works.

Because, you see, our fandom is truly bigger on the inside.

Both of the above quotes come from Lynne M. Thomas' essay, "Marrying Into the TARDIS Tribe". Thomas' daughter, Caitlin, has Aicardi syndrome, and toward the end of her essay Thomas talks about how fans and members of the Doctor Who community have provided assistance and support. It's at this point in the book that I stopped devouring the essays and had to force myself to slow down, because it was difficult to read so quickly while my eyes were tearing up. This is where Chicks Dig Time Lords went from being interesting and insightful to beautiful.

I bought two copies of this book from Amazon, one for myself and one as a birthday gift to a friend, who is also a fan of Doctor Who. Ironically, a week later I received access to an electronic copy in the Hugo Voters Packet, because Chicks Dig Time Lords is nominated in the "Best Related Work" category (and I will most likely be voting for it). I shall keep my print copy, because the electronic version is a yucky PDF. And I'm glad to have paid for it. But I've seldom been more tempted to pirate a book: there are just so many people I know into whose hands I want to shove a copy and say, "Read this. It's just that good."

Although, as its subtitle implies, this book is a celebration of Doctor Who, it's not just fluff. Many of the essays have more serious moments, and all reveal what it's like to be a woman Doctor Who fan, to go to conventions, to cosplay, to make Who-inspired fan videos or write fan-fiction. The essays herein provide insight into a part of Doctor Who fandom I have never seen, not only because of my gender but also simply because I don't go to conventions, and I neither read nor write fan-fiction. I exist on the periphery of the community, and this was like getting an all-access pass. To be certain, some of the essays are encomia of the show and its fan base. Some verge upon the academic—in particular, Shoshana Magnet and Robert Smith? write about the problematic portrayal of women in the new series' companions in "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Have We Really Come That Far?". I don't agree with all of the essays (I think Magnet and Smith? make some good points though), but they are without exception well-written and fascinating.

All of the 28 essays remark, to one extent or another, on how being female has affected the author's relationship with other fans of Doctor Who. Despite this fact, Chicks Dig Time Lords never feels repetitive, never feels like it's harping on some central theme, because the perspectives are just so diverse that every person has a different story to tell. Some are positive, some not so much. But Thomas and O'Shea have managed to collect a broad spectrum of opinions and experiences from across the community of female Doctor Who fans and compile them into a single, amazing volume. For Doctor Who fans, I'd call this essential reading. Even if you aren't a fan of Doctor Who, you still might like this: if fandom and its phenomena interest you, or if as a feminist or sociologist you're interested in women's perspective on women in one of the longest-lived science-fiction fan communities, then grab a copy of Chicks Dig Time Lords.

I was not sure how I would approach my review of The Stolen One until I came across this sentence: "My heart began to beat." This comes from the first-person narrator, Katherine "Kat" Bab, who is very much alive. From that point onward, it was open season on Suzanne Crowley and The Stolen One. Until I reached that fateful sentence, I was having difficulty forming any opinion about the book. It certainly wasn't great, but there were also very few problems with it. For the most part, it was just a bland, easy-to-read piece of historical fiction. Which, when I think about it, is not a good thing at all.

Kat and Anna are sisters; their mother Grace adopted Kat when she was a baby and has kept Kat's heritage a secret. It's a secret she takes to the grave, which quickly approaches so that Kat can drag Anna off to London to find her parents. Thanks to her amazing embroidery skills, she gets snatched up to be a maid to Queen Elizabeth I, and there are even rumours that she is Elizabeth's illegitimate daughter. Ooh, spicy!

The mystery of the identity of Kat's parents serves well enough as a kind of backdrop plot, I suppose, but Crowley goes to little trouble to make it interesting. Grace was a maid in the keeping of Katherine Parr during the latter's residency at Sudeley Castle, and excerpts from Grace's journals written at this time intersperse Kat's contemporary narration. These are our main source of clues as to the identity of Kat's parents (mostly the mother, because there is only one candidate for the father). Kat's own investigation is rather lackadaisical, and the identity of her mother becomes clear to us from Grace's journal before Kat herself can confirm it. Worst of all, Kat apparently has possession of Grace's journal the entire time, but she doesn't open it until the end of the book. Smart.

I suppose that if the mystery isn't the most intriguing aspect of The Stolen One, then that must be the relationship between village-reared Kat and queenly Elizabeth. Crowley teases us with the possibility that Kat is Elizabeth's daughter, and that puts us in the right state of mind to compare the two as members of the same family. Alas, Crowley does not really convey a good sense of who the Tudors were. While she puts an effort into characters' dialects, their modes of dress, and the living conditions at the time, she supplies a scant amount of historical background. Perhaps this is justifiable, since Kat can't really be expected to have a degree in the history of the British monarchy. Nevertheless, The Stolen One might be set during the early Elizabethan era, but aside from the need to have a young Elizabeth around and some allusions to the oppression of Catholics, there's very little about this book that makes it stand out as Elizabethan. It verges upon "generic British historical", and while I want to emphasize that it doesn't actually cross this line, it does come close.

The third of three plots concerns Kat's love life. Kat has, ostensibly, three suitors: she abandons her village's pear farmer, Christian, to go off to London; she rebukes the son of the Chief of Wardrobes, Nicolas, who chases all the skirts in the castle; and she flirts with Rafael, Lord Ludcombe, rake, and son of a woman who befriends Kat and Anna when they first arrive in London. Honestly, none of the three men seem like perfect catches: Nicolas and Rafael want her only for her body and her proximity to the Queen, and Christian treats Kat like she's property. Oh, and when he can't have Kat, he marries Anna instead. True love strikes again. It's very disappointing when Kat eventually realizes she is also a victim of true love and decides to settle down with one of them. It's all very sudden, and that makes the entire thing seem contrived.

I will level with you and confess that I might have led you astray in one respect: the copy I have here is an ARC, with the words "uncorrected proof" in big letters on the front cover and "reviewers are requested to check all quotations against the final bound book". So the somewhat unfortunate sentence I quoted in my first paragraph could very well have been corrected in the final printing, and if it has, then it's my bad for making so much of it. Nevertheless, I feel like it's a good synecdoche for my opinion of The Stolen One overall. The flaws in this book might be careless mistakes. They might be well-intentioned attempts at romance and mystery set in the Elizabethan era that just don't succeed. Either way, I don't think it matters. The Stolen One has a surfeit of plot and a dearth of characterization; it is too contrived and not nearly mysterious enough.

I wish I could have liked it more, because the ideas behind it are cool, but Crowley doesn't quite attain them. "Meh" might be better than "this is the worst book ever!!", but sometimes I feel like it's a lot more damning. At least with vitriol a book has done something to make the reader care; apathy is the cruelest reaction.

I can best summarize my feelings about Hyperion like so: why did someone let me read the terror that is The Terror when I could have read a good book by Dan Simmons?!

Frame stories are not my favourite way to conduct business with a novel. In general, Hyperion's greatest flaws lie within its structure, frame story included. That and the abrupt ending devoid of any real conclusion are probably the two chief sources of criticism, from myself and from other reviewers. Like many other readers, I was suckered into the story as it approached the end, only to find no resolution! That was quite disappointing.

None of the main characters especially invite empathy. Sol Weintraub's tale was heartbreaking, managing to capture the disadvantages of reverse-ageing much better than some books that base their whole story on the premise. Father Hoyt's was creepy. Martin Silenus' bored me. Brawne Lamia's detective story was interesting, and I liked Simmons' take on artificial intelligence revealed therein. I felt cheated that I didn't get to hear Het Masteen's tale. Finally, my favourite had to be Colonel Kassad's. It was just the right mix of adventure and creepiness. Yet despite how I feel about their stories, the characters themselves are much like their Chaucerian counterparts in The Canterbury Tales: stock representations of an archetype intended to provide a certain perspective rather than any real personality.

What all of their tales have in common, and indeed the best part of Hyperion, is the revelation of the backstory of the future. Dan Simmons has some first-class worldbuilding going on here, full of the stock SF conventions like faster-than-light drive, wormhole type instantaneous travel, artificial intelligence, and whatnot. He manages to demonstrate the ramifications of each technology on society without ever veering too far into preachy exposition. The saturated, topical nature of the "Web", worlds connected by farcasting devices, really struck close to home in an era dominated by the phenomena-fuelled Internet.

At first, Simmons made what appeared to be throwaway mentions of artificial intelligence—that the AIs had seceded a couple of centuries previously, that they now resided in a "TechnoCore" from which they conduct their own affairs and assist humanity in various maintenance-related tasks. It wasn't until near the end of the story, particularly in Lamia's story, that we really get an idea of how involved the AIs are in the quest to solve the mystery of Hyperion. I love it with hardcore SF explores the alienness of human-created intelligence, and Simmons doesn't disappoint me. With a couple of homages to [b:Neuromancer|22328|Neuromancer (Sprawl Trilogy, #1)|William Gibson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1285017005s/22328.jpg|909457] and only a little overindulgent technobabble, we're treated to glimpses of the machinations of AI factions and how irrelevant they consider humanity to the grand scheme of the cosmos.

Lurking in the background of every pilgrim's story is, of course, the inscrutable Hyperion and its resident walking death god, the Shrike. This plot point is probably the least "sciency" of the hardcore SF so far presented in the book. Hyperion has artifacts known as the "Time Tombs" that have "anti-entropic fields" that propel the tombs back in time from an origin far in the future. Presumably the Shrike, tied as it is to the Tombs, is also from the future. The debate among the pilgrims is what sort of future that is, what the Shrike's purpose is, and if and when they will die on their pilgrimage to it.

While the component stories of Hyperion are variously interesting or boring, I can't say much about the frame story itself. I am extremely interested in what will happen when the pilgrims finally confront the Shrike, of course. Unfortunately, the cynical part of me suspects that I've been exposed to so many other similar confrontations in other stories that it won't be as impressive as I hope. And that's the problem with the frame story itself—it's a story told in standard definition that's just begging for hi-def. The ideas and scope on which Dan Simmons is writing is huge, mind-bogglingly huge, but his style doesn't seem to compensate for that.

The philosophy behind Hyperion and the themes it espouses definitely make it a fascinating book. The title, of course, alludes to the unfinished poem by John Keats, and Simmons takes the allusion even further in the story itself, "resurrecting" Keats in a sense as some sort of artificial persona, whom we meet in Lamia's tale. So perhaps it's fitting that Hyperion ends abruptly, unfinished, picked up in The Fall of Hyperion, much like Keats did with the original. Like the Keats poem, this is a story about the search for truth (which, to Keats, equates to beauty, of course): the truth about Hyperion, the truth about the agendas and motivations of the seven pilgrims, the truth about the AI's agendas, etc. It's set against the background of a stagnating, sprawling galactic empire. The Hegemony is not evil or repressive per se. However, as the book progresses, we learn it has few qualms about manipulating whomever or whatever in order to achieve its aims. It sanctions genocide of potentially competitive species—and although it hasn't been successful in eradicating them so far, it doesn't sanction the existence of a rival group of humans, the Ousters. In this future, we learned nothing from Earth's destruction, nothing from our Diaspora and fragmentation. Humans are still capricious children, playing with shiny toys.

Brilliant and clever in many ways, Hyperion definitely deserves praise as a work of thoughtful science fiction. It has flaws in its structure and narrative, and it seemed to hold my interest intermittently. I'm looking forward to reading the next book, hoping for resolution to the plot, as well as more character development. Even though each character told a very personal story in this book, and as much as the "big ideas" encapsulated in the book fascinate me, what Hyperion really lacked were real people as characters. And no amount of allusion to Chaucerian and Keatsian style will make up for that.

My reviews of the Hyperion Cantos:
The Fall of Hyperion →

Obsessions are dangerous, yet they are also so human. They drive the most amazing and visionary projects—and fuel the darkest, most horrible passions. Obsessions play a fundamental role in The Cutting Room, both in the actions of the dead antagonist and in Rilke, the protagonist and auctioneer who stumbles across snuff photographs while processing an estate and begins to wonder if they are real.

I'll call this a mystery, because it is, but it's not the typical formula mystery of a professional or even an amateur detective following the trail of clues. Rilke is more than amateur, and he doesn't so much solve the mystery of Mr. McKindless as he does stumble around until the mystery solves itself. If I might, I will employ a cinematic metaphor and liken Louise Welsh to the director of a movie: she chooses to focus the story and each scene in such a way that while the mystery is still the primary plot of the book, it does not seem to form the substance of each scene. The mystery is the priority for Rilke, but it is not the priority for the reader. Instead, Welsh takes us on a tour of shady Glaswegian businesses and drug dealers, explores Rilke's casual approach to sexual partners, and encourages us to contemplate the deeper implications of the McKindless photos.

The Cutting Room both benefits and suffers from this stylistic decision. I don't read mystery novels as much as I used to, but when I was young they were my bread and butter: Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were some of the first series I can remember devouring by myself; later I graduated to the real good stuff: Agatha Christie. While I've drifted away from the genre, my appreciation for it has never lessened. I'm sure there are some mystery novels that deserve to be called "pulp" or even secretly yearn within their pages to be thrillers, but in general I think mystery is a fascinating genre that fuses the excitement of conflict with the intricacies of human psychology. So the best mystery novels are also usually quite deep, and here The Cutting Room is no exception. Welsh meditates on the various possibilities: the photos could be faked, staged; they could be real, a living, breathing woman could have been killed for someone's entertainment and sexual gratification. Later, she connects these possibilities to the more contemporary political issue of human smuggling and the prostitution and rape of Eastern European women. Some of her characters make some pretty explicit speeches about the shortcomings of the international justice system in countering and preventing such smuggling rings from operating. However, the dialogue always rings true to the character and scene and mood at the time; Welsh never cross the line to become preachy.

I do have some qualms about Rilke's voice. Wonderful things are possible with first-person narration, and nothing pleases me more than when an author manages to create a narrator who just speaks to you. When you're reading such a narrator, the words themselves seem to convey more meaning than is possible, and the narrator's voice will begin to do the work of establishing depth and tone. This is why I love another mystery series, the Dresden Files. Unfortunately, I find Rilke a difficult narrator to enjoy. His speech is often fragmented, his descriptions packed inside nested dependent clauses. The story itself takes place over the course of a week, but Rilke's sense of time is highly fluid and not exactly precise.

The combination of Rilke's narration and Welsh's stylistic decisions regarding the emphasis on the mystery mean that The Cutting Room has a somewhat distant or dreamlike quality to it. It is as if the action is happening slightly out of sync with everything; if you were to look over at the clock, the hands would be moving more slowly than you might expect. Here's a passage, pulled totally at random when I opened the book to that page:

For people who weren't drinking much, the girls certainly had a buzz on. There was an air of anticipation, a first night atmosphere. A haggard redhead clicked open her handbag mirror and sighed at her reflection. She stretched her mouth out to a long ghastly grin and freshened her lipstick. She passed the mirror to the girl next to her, who grimaced, then repainted her own lips a dark shade of magenta.

Someone settled another cocktail in front of me. It tasted fine, pleasantly palatable. I wondered why I didn't drink them more often. From now on my tipple would be pink and fizzy and made with double measures of gin. I raised my glass and saluted the company. A few of the girls raised theirs in response.

Hopefully this conveys the almost hyperaware way Welsh sets a scene through Rilke's observations. And I don't mean this as criticism, because it's not a bad stylistic choice at all. However, I do think it prevented me from viewing any of the other characters as fully three-dimensional personalities; to me, they all seemed too distilled when filtered through Rilke. This is a danger of any story narrated in first-person, but it is not one that The Cutting Room overcomes.

The epilogue is a departure from the rest of the book and feels unnecessary. I loved the ending, in which Welsh, through the narration, makes us think that one character is dead but then pulls back on the scene to reveal her still alive. I loathe this trick when it is played on television, with the heavy implication followed by a cut to a tombstone and then a pull back to reveal a completely different name. In literature, however, I feel like it's less cheap—lacking the visual trickery seems to add weight to the device. Anyway, The Cutting Room climaxes with the auction of McKindless' estate and a revelation that sends Rilke's plans spiralling out of control. It provides a satisfactory resolution to the mystery without the additional epilogue.

Speaking of that mystery, which never really seemed the primary focus, I confess I wasn't all that interested in learning whether the snuff photos were real. Fortunately, because of the way Welsh chooses to tell the story, this is not a problem, for I found plenty of interest: her descriptions of Glasgow's villains, Rilke's ruminations on death and the business of estate auctions, and Welsh's portrayal of Rilke's homosexuality. This is a mystery novel, but it is also a very well-rounded one. And while it lacks some of the urgency or focus of a more dedicated mystery, while its main character isn't a great detective (in fact, he is downright lousy at detection), I still managed to enjoy it thoroughly. I inherited The Cutting Room from a friend who moved away, and it is probably not something I would have picked up on my own, even from a library display. It has proved to be a fortunate discovery.

I'm not sure how I feel about China Miéville.

On one hand, Miéville is a competent writer and, even better, a superb storyteller. The three books of his that I've read (including this one) are good. People tend to gush about his worldbuilding, often at the expense, I think, of talking about everything else that's great about his stories, but they do it because of his obvious skill in this area. Many great fantasy authors create wonderful stories by taking the traditional elements of fantasy and executing them in new or skillful ways. Miéville, instead, is all about making his own rules.

On the other hand, my enjoyment of his books has not been unconditional. My reviews of The City & the City and Perdido Street Station are positive and enthusiastic, but as with those books, I cannot quite bring myself to give The Scar five stars. And I honestly can't tell you which of the three books I like best. Miéville, for me, is slightly ineffable. I don't really know why.

I didn't like Bellis Coldwine. She is intelligent but guileless, and she seems to lack initiative. Once taken captive by pirates, she becomes a press-ganged citizen of Armada, a vast ocean-borne city constructed out of floating hulks of ships. Bellis is free, but she can never leave Armada. Nevertheless, now that she's aware of the city's existence, she feels compelled to escape somehow and warn her hometown, New Crobuzon, of Armada's nature. This is the same New Crobuzon whose militia has been hunting Bellis because of her connection to the main character from Perdido Street Station; it's this semi-fugitive status that causes Bellis to leave the city in the first place.

I don't like protagonists who wallow in their powerlessness. I had the same problem with Yeine in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. Like Yeine, Bellis is a competent and capable person, but she can't seem to do anything without first aligning herself with other characters, and those allies inevitably have ulterior agendas. In fact, one of the best parts of The Scar comes toward the end when a character whom we've been encouraged to view as a protagonist suddenly turns out to be an opportunistic antagonist. Eventually Bellis ends up working with everyone she spent the first half of the book trying to avoid—but that's through no actions of her own. She's merely carried along by the plot, and that disappoints me.

Fortunately, there are secondary characters aplenty who make The Scar an interesting read. Tanner Sack is a criminal from New Crobuzon, shipped out on the same vessel as Bellis, only in chains and Remade. He's got chest tentacles! In Armada, however, even the Remade are free and equal, so Tanner pledges his loyalty to his new home in a way Bellis is categorically incapable of doing. He embraces his new tentacles and gets Remade even further, becoming a creature at home in the water even as he works in Armada as an engineer. And he befriends Shekel, the former cabin boy of the ship on which he was a prisoner. Shekel is a fifteen-year-old boy who falls head-over-heels in love when he arrives at Armada. At first I thought Miéville was going to create a love triangle between Shekel, Tanner, and Angevine—much to my surprise, Tanner's interactions with the two lovers were always for their benefit, with nary a hint of jealousy. I like it when I'm wrong in my predictions in this way. The relationship between Tanner and Shekel is an important metric for Bellis' contributions to the fate of Armada. Tanner helps Bellis once, regrets it, and helps her again—albeit obliquely—when he learns she was just as much a pawn as he was. Shekel is the one who pays for their mistakes.

The relationships between Tanner and Shekel and between Shekel and Angevine are also significant because they are pretty much unique. The other relationships in The Scar are ambiguous. Miéville noticeably avoids any suggestions of romance. In fact, he draws attention to the absence of romance from people's partnerships. Bellis and Silas Fennec have sex as they work to get word to New Crobuzon, but they don't "make love;" they just fuck. Bellis is frank with her lack of feelings for Silas: they aren't lovers, and they aren't even friends. They're allies. Later, Bellis wonders if Uther Doul is flirting with her—she even admits that she kind of wants him to make a move:

She was drawn to him, powerfully. She wanted him: his power and his grim self-control, his beautiful voice. His cool intelligence, the obvious fact that he liked her. The sense that she would be more in control than he, should anything happen between them, and not just because she was older. She would not coquette, but she engineered enough of a dynamic that he must know.

But he never touched her. Bellis was unsettled by that.

Uther Doul is another intriguing character, if only because he's the only character who has a true backstory. He's a cipher whose true intentions, whether amatory or political, are occluded. Like pretty much every character in the book, he can't be called a protagonist or an antagonist, but it seems like, more than most of the characters, he does have Armada's best interests in mind.

Of course, the one pair who symbolize Miéville's avoidance of romance have to be the Lovers themselves. The leaders of Armada in all but name, the Lovers signify their "affection" for each other by mutually scarring their bodies (this is but one of the multitudinous meanings that "scar" has in this book). The point is that the relationship they have is not one of love and mutual affection. It's a combative, abusive relationship conducted in a language filled with terms of endearment. Their involvement begins with passion but gets twisted, sullied, and ultimately reforged into a kind of frenetic madness that cements their unity. True to form, however, Miéville cannot leave anything in his world alone, and he pushes that unity to its breaking point—and beyond.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is this: The Scar has travel and adventure and conflict. There's a huge, almost epic battle scene between a New Crobuzon fleet and Armada, one with ramifications for all of our major characters. Armada succeeds in harnessing an avanc, an extra-dimensional sort of leviathian-like beast that it uses as a means of propulsion, and it sets out upon the Empty Ocean toward the eponymous Scar, where reality itself is broken and in flux. They meet up with a familiar face who tells a tale of an alternative possibility where Armada goes over the edge and falls into the Scar, and the way Miéville describes it is sufficient for me to imagine a scene out of something like Pirates of the Caribbean. The Scar definitely has cinematic qualities to it. But that's not what I focused on when I was reading, and it's not what I remember when I think about the book.

What sticks in my mind about The Scar is Bellis Coldwine's sense of loneliness and alienation. Despite my misgivings about her ineffectiveness as a main character, she does a fine job conveying the futility she feels while trapped on Armada. The central question for me, as the reader, was "whose side am I on?" What do I want to see happen? Do I want to see New Crobuzon arrive to smash Armada, killing so many people, just so Bellis can go home? Do I want Armada to reach the Scar, despite the consequences it might have for the rest of the world? Miéville creates a dilemma, not just because the characters are morally ambiguous, but because their situations are also ambiguously amoral. There is no clear division between "good" and "bad" here, and there aren't even clear divisions between protagonists and antagonists—everyone seems to be on his or her own side, and allegiances shift with the tides.

So The Scar is riveting, and it's fascinating. As with his other two books, it isn't entirely convincing. There are aspects that make me hesitate when it comes to falling in love with Miéville's work. I don't have any reservations about his skill or his craftsmanship. Yet something prevents me from fully committing to him.

It is entirely possible, however, that I am over-analyzing. Maybe my trepidation is just a sign of how well Miéville manages to defy my expectations and deliver something unique: it's just so good I'm suspicious of how good it is! While I am not sure how I would rank The Scar against the other two novels I've read, it does stand out for the extremes to which Miéville goes to depict a different world entirely. New Crobuzon was a weird city, but it was still a city. Armada is something completely different. However, that is where the differences end. The tone and the style and the trademark themes established in his other works are still there. And maybe that's the source of my discomfort: despite his departure from other authors in his genres, within his own oeuvre, what little of it I've experienced, Miéville is remarkably consistent. I want to see him do more, and do it differently from how he's done it before. Until I do, he'll continue to impress me, but I'm always going to be left less than sated.