This is the third in a somewhat unintentional trio of books set (or partially set) in seventeenth-century England. It’s “somewhat” because once I got them all from the library, I decided to read them consecutively and see how such a thematic grouping affected my perception of them. Alas, all three have been somewhat disappointing. I find Elizabethan England fascinating, and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about the reigns of James I, Charles I, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, etc. However, I was expecting a little more depth from this book.

I had actually intended to read Volume 1 first, but the titles as they were entered into the library’s database were identical, so this was the one that I put on hold. Oh well! I don’t hold that against it; this is also a fine period in English history, which in general I find so fascinating. The British Isles have been invaded so many times, and as Robert Lacey notes in his introduction, these events have gone a long way to defining Britain as a nation and shaping its people. Even after the Norman conquest caused things to settle down, England was far from a stable place: it seems like almost every monarch faced some sort of challenge or another. In fantasy, we often get this idea that most monarchs are firmly ensconced, with decades or centuries of ancestors on the throne (and sometimes, thanks to magical means, this is the case). Not so for England! And the various claimants might be related to each other in confusing and, frankly, disturbing ways.

Lacey covers England from 1387 to 1687, beginning with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and concluding with Sir Isaac Newton. He spends most of his time on the Tudor and Elizabethan era, however, describing in some detail the break from Rome and the subsequent confusion over what sort of Protestant country England is, or if it is even Protestant at all. In many ways, I found Great Tales very helpful: I had a vague idea about certain aspects of this time period, such as the oppression of Catholics, but Lacey fleshed that out with specifics. Similarly, I learned about items that don’t always come up in, say, historical fiction: Lacey discusses the creation of the King James Bible, although that also features in Hell and Earth. This is definitely an enlightening book.

So why do I say I expected more depth? Well, the stories are each quite short: most seem to be about five or six pages long. Lacey has broken up 300 years of English history into a series of very short vignettes—I could see each becoming perhaps a fifteen-minute episode to air on History Television. This is a perfectly legitimate decision on Lacey’s part, and it might well work for some people. However, I found that it prevented me from immersing myself in the narrative behind the story. I couldn’t get attached to the characters, if you will. As much as this book provided me with interesting facts, they are all presented in the form of mere anecdotes. I would be much better served reading several longer, more comprehensive stories about specific parts of English history.

This disappointment is entirely a result of a difference between what I expected and what the book turned out to be, and it’s not because the book is poorly written. If you want a survey of England from the late fourteenth century up until Isaac Newton’s ascendancy to scientific stardom, then Great Tales from English History (Volume 2) will deliver. If you are looking for something that goes beyond the surface and presents specific tales at a more sedate pace, then I would recommend finding a book that focuses on that tale and getting it from your local library (or a nearby bookstore).

So this appears to be the last book, at least for now, of Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age series. The series is actually two loose duologies: Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water are set in the modern day; Ink and Steel and this book are part of the Stratford Man duology, set in a Faerie-infested Elizabethan England. As my previous reviews of books in this series make clear, I am incredibly ambivalent. Bear’s commitment to detail is obvious, but the sheer intricacy and convoluted nature of her plots make these novels somewhat of a chore. Ink and Steel alleviated that by way of setting: I was just utterly fascinated by the way Bear took familiar historical figures, like Shakespeare and Marlowe, and weaved them into her complex tapestry of war and intrigue among Faerie, England, and Hell.

Hell and Earth concludes the story of Kit Marlowe, dead poet and spy now living in Faerie, and William Shakespeare, master playwright and sorcerer loyal to England and to Elizabeth. Marlowe and Shakespeare square off against members of their own Promethean Club, which has fractured into various factions who are all vying for power and prestige. Bear mixes fact with fantasy quite liberally—the end of the book includes an Author’s Note outlining where she altered the historical record or embellished it, which was quite a bit. Marlowe, of course, is very much alive, albeit somewhat worse for wear. The King James Bible becomes a poetic masterpiece of magic. And Shakespeare becomes instrumental in defeating the Gunpowder Plot. (From my own reading on the subject—i.e., an intense ten-second session of Googling—it seems like Shakespeare was connected to many of the conspirators, which makes sense, but did not play so large a role in defusing the conspiracy.)

It has been over two years since I read the previous book in this series, so I am somewhat foggy on the details! That didn’t work to my advantage as I read Hell and Earth, which is intimately connected to Ink and Steel—they are very close to being a single book. Of course, this didn’t do much for my opinion of the story or the plot, both of which are hard to follow. In particular, Bear’s idea of exposition is somewhat loquacious but unhelpful: the characters say a lot, but I don’t comprehend much of it. This did not become problematic until the climax, where understanding the actions of Lucifer is central to understanding the events. (I still don’t know what was really going on there, and if you feel you can explain it to me, please comment!) So there were parts of this book that I didn’t skim but I felt as if I had skimmed. I think this is how I felt like much of the first two Promethean Age books (except I distinctly remember disliking those books as well, which isn’t quite the case here). I hope that I have established enough “street cred” as a reviewer to make these complaints meaningful and more than just idle whining. There is a plot to Hell and Earth, but its complexities escape me.

In fact, reading this book was kind of like dunking my head underwater and holding my breath while I travelled back in time four hundred years. Bear portrays the setting in a very interesting way: her visual descriptions are sparse, but her use of language and description of the relationships between characters more than make up for this. In the end, what we get is a very conceptual and emotional grasp of England at the beginning of the seventeenth century: Elizabeth’s power is waning, and after she dies, a Scottish king assumes the throne. There’s a great deal of uncertainty, particularly when it comes to religious freedom and the growing influence of the Puritans. Oh, and don’t forget the plague. Nasty stuff, that.

If, like me, you are partial to this period of English history, and especially interested in fantastic portrayals of Shakespeare and his literary contemporaries, then these two books hold something for you. Bear has done her research, even though she often deviates from history for her own purposes. Whatever background knowledge one brings to the book will only serve to augment the experience; for those with little knowledge, it might seem heavy on the name soup, but it will still be an interesting glimpse into a history that never was.

I wish I could provide a more pertinent review of Hell and Earth. It deserves one. There are some great themes here: Marlowe’s love for and loyalty to Will are tested; Will himself must choose between Elizabeth or England; and we glimpse the burdens of ruling Faerie or Hell. There are some deep moments to this book, the kind of weighty moments that only happen when there is an extensive, enchanting mythology to rely upon. All these details are excellent, but they also create a lot of noise, and that’s where my memories of this book begin and end.

Another, albeit much more recent, addition to my to-read shelf courtesy of io9, Machine Man is sardonic exploration of the symbiotic relationship between humans and technology. I happened to see a copy on the library’s “New Books” shelf, so I took the opportunity and grabbed it. Unlike Fragment, Machine Man seems a little more plausible, which makes it much scarier. Max Barry’s main character isn’t someone with whom everyone will identify—he’s rather asocial and unable to empathize—but I think we share more in common with him than we would care to admit. In general, I had a very visceral, conflicted reaction to the ideas and questions raised by Machine Man, and that went a long way to helping with an otherwise mediocre plot.

I wear a prosthesis: I wear glasses. It’s a device I attach to my body to correct for a loss of function. Although not as invasive as contact lenses or, say, an entire prosthetic limb, my prosthesis is still a sign of disability and a significant part of my identity. I have resisted getting contacts both because I’m not comfortable with the idea of slipping something against my eye, and because I just don’t want them: “I wear glasses” is a core attribute of how I see myself. I’ve had the same pair of frames since grade 8; they are somewhat worse for wear, but I am going to keep them for as long as possible, because they are a part of me.

Now, the onset of my vision problems (near-sightedness) was gradual. I had trouble seeing the blackboard from a distance; I had trouble reading text if it was a certain distance from my face; suddenly people looked blurry if they weren’t close to me. (I don’t know my “20” rating, but my eyes are pretty weak. Other people try my prescription and go, “whoa”.) And glasses are a fairly advanced and stable technology, as far as prosthetics go: one trip to the optometrist, and I could see again. It’s miraculous, in a way. So unlike Charles Neumann’s accident in Machine Man, my experience wasn’t sudden and traumatic. Charles chooses to cope with the loss of his leg in a very original way: he builds a better leg. Not just “better” than the prosthesis, but a leg that is better than human legs. Because we can do that now. Our legs could have WiFi!

Many people do not have any prostheses (although, at least in developed countries, I feel like that number is shrinking, depending on how one defines prosthesis, as our technology advances). However, for those who don’t, how many are dependent on, say, a smartphone? That number is going up too. Barry begins to get us thinking about the relationship between humans and our technology with a simple event: Charles can’t find his phone. And he’s lost without it. The poignant part is that Charles doesn’t actually use his phone to make or receive calls—when this happens later in the book, he is puzzled by the sound his phone is making—he just depends on his phone to provide him with information, such as news. In fact, it’s this obsession with finding his phone that causes the inattention and results in the accident where he loses a leg.

I wouldn’t say I’m as desperate as Charles when I’m without my phone. I’m now accustomed to having a smartphone, so I would miss it, but it helps that I’m in class for several hours during the day and do not actually check it, except between classes or during a break. Nevertheless, I can certainly empathize with Charles’ discomfort when he does not have his phone: we become accustomed to using certain technologies as extensions of our minds and bodies, and when those technologies change or go missing, we struggle and flail before we adapt. Losing one’s phone is, for some people, like losing a limb.

There is really only one place to go after building a better leg, of course: build a matching leg. Charles realizes this quickly, and it is the start of a somewhat unsurprising slippery slope. This is where Machine Man becomes, for me, less interesting as a novel. None of the characters are quite real; to Barry’s credit they are dynamic people who grow and change, but I can’t shake the feeling that they are more like archetypes than individuals—most obviously, the CEO being called “the Manager” and being demonstrably an interchangeable cog in the corporate machine. (Austin Grossman provides a blurb for the back cover, and that’s so appropriate, because this novel’s style reminds me a lot of Soon I Will Be Invincible). The veil between the big ideas in Machine Man and the plot itself is just so thin that the very weight of those ideas overwhelms the story. Of course the company’s going to misuse Charles’ research! Of course Charles is going to become the company’s “property” in some way. Of course he’s eventually going to go on the run. There are very few surprises in Machine Man, at least in terms of the story.

So bear that in mind when I say that there are parts of this book I can’t shake off. It’s rather like my experience with The Dervish House, where I eventually decided to give it five stars because I could not stop thinking about it. Machine Man isn’t quite that good, but like McDonald, Barry discusses the choices we face as a society and as individuals that I feel are particularly relevant to us today. Although much of the technology in Machine Man is exaggerated, the spirit of Charles is very much something that is happening now, and our technology will get there soon. Already we must confront the use of performance-enhancing drugs in athletics, as well as decide which types of prosthesis convey an unfair advantage. The question usually becomes one of distinction: where do we draw that line between “fair” and “unfair”. How much assistance is just enough and how much is too much? Should we just care about replicating the human experience with a prosthetic limb, or should we, like Charles, perhaps think about augmenting and improving upon that experience?

This are all huge issues, and they aren’t, if you will forgive my turn of phrase, science fiction. Brain-computer interfaces are also an item of hot discussion these days, and as those improve, so too will our capabilities to augment ourselves cybernetically. All those jokes about being connected directly to the Internet? Those might not be jokes in a decade or two.

Personally, I find this terrifying.

That might sound weird coming from a self-confessed technology geek. I should clarify right away that terrifying does not inherently mean “bad”; I’m not saying that we “must stop this at all costs!” Of course, one of the reasons this change is so terrifying is precisely that we can’t halt it. Humans love to innovate, and if the idea and knowledge is there, we will build it. It is only a matter of time and resources.

So here’s the thing: I love technology, and I dislike biology. The fact that I’m a squishy bag of water freaks me out constantly: thinking about how fragile and necessarily ad hoc my respiratory and circulatory systems are, contemplating the various fluids and other things my body excretes, and of course, sex. Corporeal existence is weird and sometimes very inconvenient. So why aren’t I the first in line for mind uploading? Why don’t I want to wire myself for WiFi?

Despite my reservations about this whole sack of meat thing, I am equally weirded out by the idea of putting technological devices into that body. It might be a fear of the implantation itself, the surgery, but I think on a larger level it’s just that we use technology and love technology, but we can’t trust technology. I’ll give my body kudos: it is remarkably resilient. It regenerates itself constantly; its capacity for healing is amazing, and it is in many ways very redundant. Simply put, we still can’t really design a “better body”. We might be able to design better parts, but the execution remains problematic.

All of this speaks from a specific socialized viewpoint. The next generation, or the generation after that, might view me as an outmoded conservative, even as they are downloading music directly into their cortices. But I want to illustrate why Machine Man strikes a chord with me: these choices might not be imminent yet, but they are lurking beneath the surface of our society. We are entering a period of sustained tension between biology and technology, and it will be interesting to see how we navigate that.

The actual experience of sitting down and reading this book was extremely moving—and perhaps, in a way, the predictability of the plot freed me up cognitively to consider the implications of Charles’ radical self-modification agenda. I have probably spent more time ruminating on these ideas than discussing the novel itself. That happens. Usually it happens because the novel broaches these ideas, and I get so carried away with them that it eclipses the story itself. That’s the case here: Machine Man was entertaining, but its substance is nothing compared to its subtext. Great novels manage to include both of these elements in abundance; managing one out of two is still good, especially when it’s a subtext like this. Machine Man is not an amazing book, but it is a product of a stunning imagination and fruitful food for thought.

Once upon a time I sat down to read a book called Liars and Saints, which I had noticed in a piece in TIME magazine. I had bought the book with the intent of giving it as a gift, but after reading it I thought better: although not completely terrible, Liars and Saints possessed nothing to recommend it, inhabiting that wasteland of contrived implausibilities that seems to be the home of so much literary fiction. Generations pass in a matter of pages, sex is had, and babies get made. It was rather standard, rather bland fare for that type of novel.

Apparently I am a robot who merely follows his to-read list unquestioningly: A Family Daughter was on the list; it was available at my library; I borrowed it. I didn’t look at the description, so it wasn’t until I started reading and saw the names “Abby” and “Yvette”. Those sounded vaguely familiar—was this a sequel? A prequel? What had I gotten myself into?

It turns out A Family Daughter is related to Maile Meloy’s previous novel, but not in the conventional sense. Instead, it swallows the universe of Liars and Saint, which turns out to be a somewhat-fictional family history as written by this book’s version of Abby Collins! This is very meta, and normally I love metafiction. Maybe it’s a holdover from my days of high school drama class and a perverse fascination with breaking the fourth wall; certainly I like when authors self-deprecatingly portray themselves or their own work in the story. However, the simple metafictional nature of A Family Daughter is nowhere near intriguing enough to save it from its numerous flaws.

I got out the sticky notes around page 6. I don’t ordinarily take notes while reading, resorting to a sticky only when I need to ensure I can find a specific page—usually for a quotation. Sometimes I use stickies while reading non-fiction, in order to remind myself of points I want to address in my review. When I break out the stickies en masse for fiction, it’s usually a bad sign: I’m not just going to criticize this book; I’m going to itemize my criticism.

The sticky on page 6 reads, “One-line descriptions” and was prompted by this passage:

Yvette stood at the kitchen counter wondering what part of her daughter’s selfishness was her fault. Had she not given Clarissa enough attention when she was Abby’s age? Had her other children distracted her—Margot, who was older and perfect, and Jamie, who was younger and troubled?

I don’t want to make too much of this, because all writers make choices, and sometimes the best choice is the most expedient one. And I admit that my recollection of Liars and Saints did not leave me favourably disposed to this book. However, I still balk when I read the above passage, not because it’s particularly bad writing, but because it just seems to pigeonhole this book as “literary” more than any genre snobbery on my part could. Through these pithy and simplistic descriptions, Meloy reminds us that we don’t really need to pay attention to these characters, because they are all just stereotypes and caricatures. In general, the characters in this book are either flat and unremarkable—like Peter, the TA and Abby’s sometime love interest—or completely unbelievable—like Saffron, Katya, et al. Teddy, the Santerre family patriarch, is a textbook case of the crotchety old man:

The receptionist had a nice voice, and dark hair. Teddy made an appointment on a computer screen to have somebody’s grandson put a sonic probe into his eyes and then suck out the lens and put in a folded-up new one, and he gave the pretty woman Yvette’s e-mail address. He had begun life, he reflected, with the radio, the telegraph, and the Victrola, and he had been perfectly happy with those.

(I swear it wasn’t just because of that last line that I chose to highlight this passage, although it does make the technophile in me cringe.) I think Meloy is trying to be funny here, or at least cute, with such turns of phrase as “somebody’s grandson”. Alas, it falls flat, because it might be entertaining, but it does nothing to deepen Teddy’s character. Throughout the book, he is this one-note instrument: he’s disappointed with his son for never making anything of his life; he’s chronically unable to perceive Clarissa’s flirtation with lesbianism; he has, in general, checked out of much of family life because of his aging senses.

I’ll say this for Liars and Saints: at least the stories of more of its characters were accessible. A Family Daughter follows mostly Abby and Jamie, with brief but unsatisfying detours toward Clarissa and a therapist (more on her later). We get a glimpse at Teddy’s backstory, and a little more from Yvette, but that’s about it. This is not the multigenerational story that Liars and Saints aspired to be—and that would be fine, if it stood alone. Since it seems to inhabit a parallel universe, I feel adrift: how much do I really know about this Teddy? How much can I assume is the same as what I learned about him in Liars and Saints? There are all these echoes in my mind, and I’m not sure what’s real.

I kind of like the therapist character, if only because it’s so rare for a book with characters in therapy to show us the other side of the table, so to speak. Meloy writes, “Leila Tirrett was a psychologist with a Ph.D. and problems of her own”, and aside from attempting to sound ironic, I like that she humanizes the character this way. Suddenly she’s no longer just a third party who listens to Abby’s problems and confessions: she’s a real person, with her own issues, and Abby is just the latest patient in her life.

Small moments like the one above prevent me from condemning A Family Daughter completely. Like Liars and Saints, it is not so much terrible as just unremarkable. That might sound weird, considering that this book is full of improbable events. There’s a Romanian orphan who turns out to be the son of a Hungarian prostitute—who wants him back. Jamie ends up marrying the mother and adopting the orphan, and they move from Argentina to the United States to attempt a happily ever after ending (I will let you guess how that works for them). There’s a reason that we say truth is often stranger than fiction, for we tend to require our fiction be realistic, that events flow logically from their cause. When they don’t, it becomes absurd. Mixing absurdism with attempts to create powerful dramas is a dangerous business. Adept authors can come up with something akin to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but most of the time, you get something more along the lines of The Hitman Diaries. I know where A Family Daughter lies along this spectrum.

I would like to think that Meloy is attempting something clever and, yes, risky. Her metafictional novel-within-the-novel, while not entirely novel to me, is still an intriguing premise that should have gone a long way to making me enjoy this book. Unfortunately, the plot and characters themselves are just so literary in the most pretentious sense of that term; their problems are larger than life. I don’t want to sound like I’m coming down on all literary fiction everywhere. However, this book demonstrates some of the common flaws in literary fiction that will make me harder on a book of its ilk. Nobody ever stops having sex. Nobody ever says, “Gee, I could avoid this drama if I just talk to someone.” To her credit, Meloy keeps the drama below “hysterical” levels, and so A Family Daughter feels only contrived, not truly absurd. Much with Liars and Saints, this is a bland novel whose structure is intriguing but whose semiotics remain insufferable.

I’ve long been a fan of anthropomorphized versions of Death. This is probably not surprising, since we have been doing this for thousands of years to varying degrees of sophistication. And some do it better than others. I’m a big fan of Julian Richings’ portrayal of Death on Supernatural. He captures the eerie, inhuman quality of Death as a force of nature older than God so well, managing to appear suave and completely cold at the same time. (Plus, he kind of looks the part.)

In On a Pale Horse, Death is slightly less ineffable. He’s just another everyday working joe, an ordinary human in a somewhat extraordinary office. Zane, having been bilked out of his savings by an unscrupulous merchant in enchanted stones, commits suicide out of despair for his position in life. His soul is balanced—his good deeds and bad deeds cancelling each other out—requiring the person of Death to retrieve his soul and weigh it manually. Except Zane accidentally kills Death, and in so doing, becomes Death. As the story develops, we learn that Zane’s promotion was not entirely accidentally, and that in fact his a player and a pawn in a much larger game.

This is where the whimsy of the writer takes over and transforms an idea into a breathing work of fiction. Some writers could take the description above and create a gritty, noir thriller. Piers Anthony writes with a sort of dry, tongue-in-cheek consideration toward how a society steeped in both science and magic might work. Satan buys advertising on billboards and the radio; people use enchantments and stones regularly even as they drive cars, fly carpets, and ride airplanes. Purgatory is an intense bureaucracy with sassy computers and bored receptionists. It is very surreal and, considering that Anthony, although born in England, moved to the United States as a child, oddly British in texture and tone.

Although I can easily praise the world Anthony depicts, enjoyment of On a Pale Horse probably lives and dies with how much one enjoys the protagonist, Zane. On one hand, he has much to recommend him: despite being so manipulated by the other Incarnations, he often takes risks and is dedicated to fulfilling the office of Death in his own way. He is his own person, and that is admirable. He’s also not a Marty Stu; he is fallible, flawed, and vulnerable—there are times when he comes very close to admitting defeat. On the other hand, especially in the beginning of the book, Zane is a whiny and indecisive moron. So, you know, your mileage may vary.

Indeed, I didn’t quite expect the theme of fate versus self-determination: to what extent are our lives directed by external forces? Yet in retrospect it seems very appropriate to the world Anthony has created, where various forces of nature are incarnated. These forces, while having plenty of leeway in how they perform their duties—Zane spares many people by persuading them not to take their lives and directing them to get back on track—are bound by certain rules. Zane only personally collects those souls that are in balance; he can only affect so many people. And his sphere of influence is limited to death, just as Chronos’ is to time and Mars’ is to war—they can help each other but shouldn’t interfere with each other. It’s always interesting to see how an author constrains a character after giving them superhuman powers. Often, with pantheons, I get frustrated by the very arbitrary division of powers; I think Anthony makes the right call in limiting the number of incarnations and their roles to only a small amount. (I want to make a small shout-out to Fred Saberhagen’s Book of the Gods series, in which the Greek gods are “faces” worn by human avatars. I don’t remember a lot about it, because I read it when I was much, much younger, but the concept was very interesting to my young, mythology-obsessed self.)

Zane is an interesting case when it comes to free will, because he is essentially set up. A magician pays off Fate to get Zane into the position of Death, because he wants Zane to protect his daughter, who has personally attracted the attention of Satan. In return, the magician has done his best to sow the seeds of a relationship between his daughter and Zane (Zane has the first “option” is how he puts it). Zane has no idea what he’s doing, of course. To his credit he doesn’t exactly jump at the opportunity to make the magician’s daughter, Luna, fall in love with him or try to use the Lovestone on her to inflame her passions. But he still feels bound to protect her, such as he can. By the end of the story, we learn the true extent to which Zane has been manipulated; as much as he annoys me at times, I can’t help but feeling sorry for him too.

Related to the fate/self-determination issue, particularly when it comes to death, is the nature of morality. What does it mean to be moral? Most organized religions impose an absolutist, external system of morality on their adherents (and, alas, on the rest of the world). Some people take an opposite stance and claim that morality is entirely relative (this also has its dangers). The weighing of one’s good and evil actions, and the balance of those actions in one’s soul, is a huge deal in On a Pale Horse. Zane’s got these little stones that act as soul-analysis tools: wave them over someone, and they tell you the person’s balance of good and evil actions. On the surface that seems like a neat plot device, a way to give the person of Death something to do. However, it also raises the question of exactly how these stones are analyzing one’s soul and one’s actions—exactly who decides which actions are good and which ones are evil? Because it seems that, in the book, a person’s belief influences the fate of one’s immortal soul: atheists, at least, stop existing after death.

These are not so much flaws in the book and its world-building as they are questions raised by how Anthony portrays society in On a Pale Horse. I can’t really let the book off, of course, because as much as I liked both the concept and the story, On a Pale Horse falls short in several respects.

Anthony portrays women—and the attitudes of men toward women—in ways that are very problematic. It’s probably because I’ve been thinking about this so much lately in other areas (as well as on Goodreads), but this is one of the first things I noticed while reading. It’s right there in the opening chapter, where Zane purchases a wealthstone instead of a lovestone from a magic stone merchant. Zane pays for the former by using the latter to find his intended love, then letting the merchant make the connection instead, thus essentially treating the woman as an object lucky to be wooed. Later on, we learn that even more powerful lovestones can actually inspire their users and targets to lust after each other. It is just another spin on the “love potion” motif, but it’s also very unsettling. I know we are raised, in this society, to find the idea of a “one true love” an attractive and romantic ideal. The proposition itself is rather untestable, but the divorce rates in the United States and Canada indicate that either it is false or we, as humans, are spectacularly bad at finding our one true loves. It all comes back to the question of agency and fate/self-determination: I don’t want an external agency telling me I am destined to love this person.

Luna is a very capable character who somewhat mitigates my above gripes. She faces off against a dragon, and she stands up both to Zane (when he’s being an idiot) and to Satan and Satan’s minions. So that’s cool and tough; I actually like Luna a lot more than I like Zane. That being said, Luna is still as much of a pawn as Zane is, with the added bonus of being expected to fall in love with him as a “reward” for his “protection”. I’m not sure I can adequately convey the many levels of trust issues and issues of power abuse that this raises. All I can really do is say that On a Pale Horse does a very good job of demonstrating why traditional romance (in the medieval sense) and fantasy tropes are often creepy or downright offensive by today’s standards. (I can’t wait to see what future generations make of our writing.) And while this is speculation on my part, I think that those tropes are one of the sources for this book’s flawed use of its female cast. Anthony is very much drawing from traditional, Western ideas about the afterlife, Death personified, etc., and with those ideas come problematic portrayals of women, etc. There is, essentially, a missed opportunity to deconstruct those ideas that I could easily see happening in this decade by another, more subversive author.

Finally, On a Pale Horse has a very dense narrative style that just did not work well with my reading habits and inclinations. Anthony describes a great deal of the scene, as well as his characters’ internal motivations, and the result is a 230 page book that feels much longer. There is a lot in here, in terms of content and reflection, and I think that could appeal to many readers. For me, however, it took a lot of focus. Anthony’s styles of exposition and narration just don’t achieve the unity I expect, though I admit I have rather spoiled myself by reading the likes of Umberto Eco. It’s a minor complaint in many ways, but I suspect many people would agree with me about the significance it plays in one’s enjoyment of a book: if I abandon a book, it’s usually because of the writing style, not the contents.

Fortunately that did not happen here. You won’t see me demanding any awards for On a Pale Horse—it was OK bordering on good, with an extra helping of interesting worldbuilding on the side. I am ambivalent about continuing the series—something tells me it will be a lot more of the same. I’m thinking the Xanth series looks more interesting.

I knew Cormac McCarthy and I were going to have differences from the moment I opened The Road and discovered the dearth of quotation marks. Yes, I’m one of those readers, and this is going to be that type of review. Exits are located on both sides. For those of you who choose to remain on board, please fasten your seatbelts. In the event the review experiences a sudden loss in pressure, an oxygen mask will erupt from your computer in a disturbing fashion. If you have an infant, well, you only get the one mask, so I guess you have a tough choice to make.

A copy of The Road was finally available during my most recent trip to the library. Prior to that, all of the library copies were on hold or checked out when I visited. I wasn’t in a hurry to read this book, however, so I was content to wait. Having finally procured a copy, my feelings were largely indifferent. I had heard it is unapologetically bleak and sparse. I had also heard The Road is some kind of seminal work of post-apocalyptic fiction that has been responsible for numerous mind-blowing literary orgasms. Which brings me to my first …

Ways to Improve The Road: Read it aloud while having sex. I have not verified this myself, but it seems like this might improve many books. Plus it’s multi-tasking, and so many people say they don’t have enough time to read for pleasure these days.

There is a tone to The Road. Some people call it poetic, and at a stretch one might even say it’s melodious, but whatever one might call it, the tone is definitely there, and as a result, this novel sounds different from most novels. McCarthy creates the tone through the way he has structured the entire narrative, from the frequent transitions in time and place to the short, clipped dialogue unfettered by those oppressive quotation marks. Everything about the style of The Road is calculated to cultivate a certain atmosphere, one that is both distancing and intimate. I understand why some people find this book hauntingly beautiful or strangely enchanting—but I do not share that opinion.

There comes a point in every reader’s life when he or she comes up against a book that forces a choice: when does a book’s stylistic idiosyncrasies preclude any enjoyment of story or plot? This point is different for everyone. As of this writing, two of the five books on my “did not finish” shelf are there because, try as I might, the way the book had been written interfered with my ability to read and enjoy it. I was particularly harsh on Blindness, which also eschews the use of quotation marks. (McCarthy, to his credit, loves his paragraphs.) For many people, this is not a problem. For some people, like me, a book that abandons quotation marks instantly becomes a quagmire of lawlessness in which anything is possible: human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together … mass hysteria. It’s bad Road.

Ways to Improve The Road: Add quotation marks. Stating the obvious, I know, but I feel like I should include this one, because it really is a simple fix. Just throw them in there so I know what’s dialogue and what’s narration. We can do wonderful things with ebooks these days … create a special quotation-marked edition! You can charge more, because the book has “bonus content”!

Realistically speaking, I acknowledge that the lack of quotation marks is a deliberate choice, and to change that would be to alter the statement McCarthy is making. Fine. I accept that, and we will indeed move on in a moment. I just needed to establish how much this small choice affected my reading of this book. I skimmed all but the first 30 pages, because they were pretty much the same. I might still have skimmed if there were quotation marks … but maybe not as much?

I say the majority of the book was “pretty much the same” in the sense that there is very little variation in the types of events that transpire prior to the climax. This is partly because of the bleakness in tone, which is the result of a lonely, oppressive sense of sameness that pervades the story. No matter how far the man and his son travel, the situation is the same: few or no people, scarce resources, no civilisation. Their universe has shrunk so much. In this microcosm McCarthy creates the conflict: survival is ever-increasingly a struggle, and for what reason are they trying to survive? The contemplation of suicide is never far from the man’s mind, and not just because that is what happened to his wife. This is not the type of post-apocalyptic fiction where a large group of survivors bands together to rebuild their shattered lives: these two characters are, for all intents and purposes, castaways; they are marooned in their own homeland.

Ways to Improve The Road: Listen to a version read by Werner Herzog. There’s just something about the way he reads, the combination of his accent and his intonation and his utterly dry approach to something like Where’s Waldo. I think it would both highlight and improve the tone of The Road.

McCarthy never specifies the mechanism of this particular apocalypse. I am totally cool with that. However, I would have liked to know more about how the man became so distrustful of strangers. Why did he never find a small group of people he could call a family—neighbours, coworkers, etc.? I’m sure there is a sensible reason, but without something to call an anchor, the man’s insistent distrust of every other human being seems more pathologically antisocial than anything else. In general, the interaction between the man and the boy irks me because of the way the man does nothing but talk in vague generalities. He tells the boy that they are “good guys” who still “carry the fire” and need to avoid “bad guys”. Yet he never seems to improve upon this shaky moral framework. We seldom witness him instructing his son on survival tactics. They just blunder from one place to the next with only the destination of the coast in mind.

I can’t say with certainty what I would do if I found myself alone with a son in the middle of the wilderness and no smartphone. The more I read about post-apocalyptic or zombie fiction or see games like Fallout 3, the more I realize I am not cut out for a life that does not involve several hours of reading and web-surfing followed by one or more Star Trek re-runs: if The Road or its ilk are what life will be like after someone hits the button, then I hope I don’t survive the opening salvo. I’d like to think I would be the guy who retains or re-invents knowledge vital to my group’s survival, but I think we all know I’d probably just be the redshirt. Still, on the off chance that I do survive the actual apocalypse, I will not be using The Road as my survival guide.

Ways to Improve The Road: Add a subplot. Any subplot.The Road is about the relationship between father and son. Though they labour constantly under the the threat of external conflict and confrontation, most of the book’s conflict comes from an existential angst. The father knows (or suspects) early in the book that he is dying, but he tries to hide this from his son for as long as possible. So most of the book is a chronicle of the hardships these two face as they travel southwest toward the coast, where they hope to find a more hospitable winter habitation.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find this chronicle very riveting: the hardships are episodic and not all that interesting; the ending is predictable but extremely well-written. I just wish there were more here. I’m not sure how else to put that. The book doesn’t feel shallow, but it does feel like it could be denser. It could use some more substance—for example, more flashbacks to the man, his wife, and their infant, more about their story before she left and the world became so dark. Yes … more context.

I rather suspected that I wouldn’t fall head-over-heels in love with The Road, and I didn’t expect to hate it, so I guess this book met my lukewarm expectations. It’s not bad, but it fails to engage me on that fundamental emotional level necessary for a book that’s all about the visceral. The somewhat experimental stylistic choices McCarthy makes actually undermine my enjoyment of the book—and while that is a very personal judgement on my part, it’s something to bear in mind: what’s essential to one reader’s enjoyment is a hindrance to another’s. On Goodreads I am always reminded of the diversity of opinions on any book; I love that I can be exposed to so many different tastes and points of view here! This is particularly true of The Road, and whatever its flaws may be, it merits the type of discussion it’s been getting.

Ways to Improve The Road: Read it with a friend or friends. Discuss (preferably over pie)!

It’s 2000, and a strongly moralistic conservative movement is sweeping the United States of America. Blaming natural disasters and the declining economy on “unsavoury” elements of American society, the American Alliance wants to restore morality and “family values”. Does this sound familiar? In some ways, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is ten-years-too-early yet eerily prescient. There is so much in here that rings true, which is terrible. At the same time, it is a deeply flawed book with a simplistic plot that belies its attempt to tell a haunting and worthy story. I really wish I could love and laud this book, but every time I thought I had figured it out, it just got weirder.

Though mostly set in 2000, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall begins in 1959, when Carolyn Crespin goes off to college and befriends a diverse group of young women. They decide to form the “Decline and Fall Club”, or DFC, with the stated intention that they will meet every year and pledge never to decline nor to fall—that is, to be themselves, make their own decisions, and remain strong in the face of the adversity, misogyny, and sexism that remains a part of their society. When we catch up with them again at the turn of the millennium, they are now middle-aged. Carolyn became a lawyer, as she intended, and married for love rather than the cousin her aunts and mother intended for her. She has retired now, but her daughter persuades her to take one more case: Lolly, a fifteen-year-old girl who allegedly abandoned her baby in a Dumpster after giving birth. It’s up to Carolyn to defend Lolly, for if she is guilty she could be sentenced to life in a suspension pod.

Yeah, according to this book, by the year 2000 law enforcement will be imprisoning people in a primitive form of suspended animation. Minor offences merit “STOP”, where the person remains conscious but unable to move. More long-term incarceration is a matter of SLEEP, where the person is unconscious but continues to metabolize and age at a normal rate. As Tepper points out, this system might seem strange to us, but it does come with several benefits. Still, this is a very odd extrapolation to make from a novel being written only four years prior. This, as well as some mentions of greater environmental distress than was apparent in 2000, almost push Gibbon’s Decline and Fall into the territory of alternative history. Even later, there are elements that made me seriously debate whether I should shelve it as fantasy or as science fiction.

All this is academic, though. At its heart, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is almost a thriller. This brings a lot of benefits—despite a fair amount of courtroom drama, the story zips along at a brisk pace. Alas, it also has a few big drawbacks: namely, villains that are larger than life, and not in a good way. Ultimately, this is a huge problem for this book and its theme.

Tepper is concerned with the status of women, and understandably so! She does not pull any punches as she evaluates the difficulties, both emotional and physical, that women face all over the world. The members of the DFC each have their own personal challenges to face. I wasn’t too fond of the almost-comical stereotypical hick family of the Crespins. However, I did find Agnes most intriguing. Her life-long relationship with the Catholic Church, culminating in taking the habit, has resulted in her internalizing a lot of the sexism promulgated by that Church. In the face of her fellow DFC members she puts up constant resistance, taking a highly conservative and traditional stance. I like that Tepper did not oversimplify the matter by making it “women” versus “men”; there are women who uphold traditional gender roles, just as there are men, like Carolyn’s husband, who are allies in the struggle for gender equality.

Unfortunately, this is the exception rather than the rule when it comes to characterization. Tepper’s antagonists resonate a lot with the contemporary rise of the “grassroots” Tea Party movement in the United States. Now, there are many good conservative Americans out there, and I’m sure that there are even many honest members of this Tea Party who believe its intentions are noble and good. But when this is the same party that courts politicians who claim God causes hurricanes and earthquakes to punish us for immorality or poor economic policy, something is wrong. We’re not supposed to be living in the fifteenth century any more, people.

So the situation presented in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall does feel a little too close to reality for comfort. And I’m sure that there are a few people out there who are like Jake Jagger. Nevertheless, I worry that Tepper’s antagonists are ultimately only straw men; hence, they actually undermine her arguments rather than strengthening them. Yeah, there are plenty of men who are just flat out misogynistic and openly abusive. But it seems like all the men in this book fall into that role or into the role of ally, like Hal and Jose are. There is no grey area, no in-between men who are blinded by their privilege but not openly hostile. In Tepper’s world, you are either enlightened or you are the enemy.

Although the book opens on a strong note, its inner thriller becomes more apparent as Lolly’s trial approaches. There are bugged phones, burglaries, desert retreats, helicopter pursuits, and maniacal plans for the subjugation of all womankind. Carolyn and the DFC eventually decide to pool their efforts into locating Sophy, the most eccentric and enigmatic member of the DFC. They had thought she committed suicide, but after experiencing almost spiritual visions of her for the past few weeks, they are determined to find out if she is still alive. At this point, Tepper throws in a twist that I honestly didn’t see coming. It’s very well foreshadowed, and I guess it sort of works, but … I didn’t like it.

Then the book gets even stranger, culminating in Carolyn having to make a choice on behalf of all humanity. And that broke me. Sorry, but as much as I admire what Tepper is trying to do here, I cannot countenance giving a single person that responsibility. Carolyn has no right to make a decision that would utterly change the nature of our species; it doesn’t matter that she is a “good” or “wise” person. No one should have that power. At that point, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall had run from science fiction to fantasy and back, from thriller to something more … epic … and I just wasn’t willing to follow it there.

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall has its good moments. Its protagonist is a likable and strong character; tragically, she seems to have been transplanted to a world of caricature, cardboard villains and friends. This is an obstacle neither she nor the book can overcome, and what started as a promising journey ended as a disappointing shadow of what it could have been. There is some excellent commentary on gender roles and relationships here, but it’s lost in the noise created by an unbelievable, untenable story.

Africa is this huge, Africa-shaped continent south of Eurasia and kind of east of South America. It’s well known for many reasons, such as elephants, lions (but not tigers or bears), and cheetahs. It’s the place where modern hominins evolved … yet now, millions of years later, it is one of the most impoverished places on Earth. Of course, I’m speaking broadly here. As anyone who has actually done much work on or in Africa will tell you, and as Dambisa Moyo points out in her book, “Africa” is a convenient political fiction. There is such a diversity of nations, people, languages, cultures, and societies in Africa. Some countries are prospering even as they deal with a crisis in HIV/AIDS. Some countries are mired in years of dictatorial rule, torn by civil war, hungry from years of regular famine.

Of course, you already know this. It’s hard not to know it—though it might slip to the back of our incredibly cluttered consciousnesses until recalled by one of those TV ads. You know the ones I mean, with the images of malnourished children accompanied by a voiceover telling us how we can help with “only $1 a day”. Meanwhile, we’re told that our governments are not sending enough money to Africa, not investing enough in aid, not helping to meet various development goals. We’d fix the problem, if only we committed to more aid.

But why hasn’t the existing aid worked? What if sending less aid is the solution? That’s what Dambisa Moyo proposes in Dead Aid, and on the surface it seems counterintuitive. Yet there are also some readily apparent arguments for her thesis. Firstly, imposing an external solution on Africa (mostly by attaching various “conditionalities” to our aid, not to mention deciding which nations get that aid) isn’t going to work, and it’s just an extension of the colonialism that is partly what contributed to the mess in the first place. Secondly, there are many countries that have received metaphorical truckloads of money—yet their citizens remain in poverty, their infrastructure is underdeveloped, and their government officials are corrupt. There is an inverse correlation between amount of aid received and an African nation’s prosperity, and according to Moyo, this correlation is actually causation at work.

Do I believe her? I don’t know. Honestly, economics is still over my head, despite the fact that I can run circles around the differential equations it employs. I can do the math, but the meaning behind it is lost on me; with more work I could probably learn more, but I don’t find it all that interesting. And that’s a shame, because I understand (begrudgingly) how important it is.

Moyo’s argument has some convincing features. She begins by examining the history of aid to Africa and follows up by speculating what would happen if we “turned off the tap” gradually over five years. Her ultimate hope is that a mixture of foreign investment—as we’ve seen from China—and emerging free markets would allow the economies of many African nations to recover. It’s the economy, she claims, that is essential to the spread of democracy, freedom, and wellbeing the continent over, not the other way around.

By the way, if you do understand the economics behind the math, then Moyo can hook you up: Dead Aid is full of statistics and figures and a cogent (at least from my limited perspective) analysis of the facts. It’s impressive, but at the same time I’m glad the book is as short as it is.

There are some salient points to Moyo’s argument with which I completely agree. For instance, it is outrageous that countries in Africa often have to borrow more money (i.e., accept more aid) to pay back the interest owed on previous aid. It’s a vicious cycle, and suddenly all that chatter I heard as a child about “forgiving debt” makes a lot more sense. I don’t see how anyone expects these countries to work their way back into the black if we’re constantly pushing them into the red with demands for aid repaid plus interest. If we give aid because we have this idea that all the African countries need is enough money to get them standing on their own, then that idea is wrong.

I think Moyo is right, however, when she conjectures that we often give aid because it is habitual and because it looks good. Giving aid makes us feel better, even if it isn’t actually effective. (When I say “aid” here, like Moyo I am talking about money lent by foreign governments and funds like the World Bank and the IMF, not emergency relief from organizations like the Red Cross.) Giving aid can also be competitive; no one wants to be the first country to stop giving aid! So just as the African countries are trapped in a vicious cycle, so too are the governments and organizations dedicated to helping them.

Moyo seems awfully optimistic about the potential for free market solutions. She thinks aid is in many ways harmful: it breeds corruption, curtails export income, and costs taxpayers money because the government still has to pay interest whether or not it uses the aid. Remove aid from the equation, and she says that homegrown solutions will emerge, citing numerous micro-finance schemes that lend to groups of borrowers who use trust as collateral. She even mentions M-Pesa, which I had previously heard about on an episode of Spark. (Interestingly, she does not mention that M-Pesa was initially funded by the UK’s Department for International Development.)

I can’t quite muster Moyo’s enthusiasm, but I agree with her on one component of the argument: solutions for Africa are more likely to come from Africans and people who have lived in Africa for much of their lives. I don’t know much about the sociopolitical nature of Africa; Moyo mentions countries I had never heard of prior to reading Dead Aid. It’s obvious, though, that there are unique challenges in climate, terrain, and population distribution that Africans are more familiar with. Therefore, they are better equipped to develop innovative ways of overcoming these obstacles—mobile micro-finance is but one of them. While we should not abandon Africa and leave it to its own devices, it is clear that the current system does not work. Pumping more money into it will not work. Rather, we should look at how we can help Africans regain their own agency—and this is Moyo’s particular solution. Sometimes I think she waxes slightly idealistic: for example, I sincerely doubt that her proposals to reduce subsidies to farmers in developed countries will be met with much acclaim. There is just so much pressure to buy local food. Moyo has some good ideas, but she does tackle the problem from a narrow, very market-centric perspective.

Niall Ferguson, whose Ascent of Money I’ve read, provides the foreword for Dead Aid. He opens by talking about how most of the discussion about Africa and aid has been done by non-African white men, saying, “The simple fact that Dead Aid is the work of an African black woman is the least of the reasons why you should read it. But it is a good reason nonetheless.” Well, I think he could have phrased it better, but he’s right. Just look at who gets invited to debates about how “we” should “help Africa”; look at the economists who advise various government aid departments. Ultimately, as Moyo articulates with a palpable sense of frustration on her part, if we want to see Africans succeed, the rest of the world needs to stop treating them like children—and that includes pumping unlimited money into the country in the hope that it will somehow make things better.

So I guess you could say that Dead Aid moved me and provoked me to think, and that is always a good thing for a book to do. I don’t agree with Moyo entirely, and her book isn’t perfect: its length is an advantage for the reader, but it means she has to summarize where she might prefer to rhapsodize. She succeeds in convincing me that aid can be more harmful than helpful, and that a more nuanced view of the situation is necessary if we are going to improve it. I’m not sure all her proposed solutions are sound, but at least she is trying to come up with some.

Contrary to what the title of this book implies to any sensible reader, this book is not about River Song. Disappointing, I know.

I ended up liking this book much more than I expected. To be perfectly honest, I did not want to like The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s a popular book, a “pop lit” book that has appropriated something so dear to science fiction and turned it into a gimmick for a romance. I had resolved to read it so I would know what others are talking about, and be armed with reasons why I dislike it. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, I found myself entranced by the way Audrey Niffenegger has ruthlessly pursued this idea of two lovers literally out of sync with each other. She is quick to establish consistent rules about Henry’s time travelling, and there is a singular pleasure to watching the timeline wrap around itself as we see an event Clare witnessed as a young girl from the eyes of the much older, temporally-displaced Henry. In short, Niffenegger takes what could have been a gimmick and, through an obvious effort and maybe even some talent, turns it into a great story.

That’s not to say the time travel in this story is perfect. After all, the reason that Henry travels through time unwillingly is kind of silly—it’s genetic. As if there are certain alleles that somehow cause our bodies to opt out of the space-time continuum. On the surface it’s an intriguing premise, and Niffenegger at least tries to make it sound scientific. Nothing but Henry’s body travels with him, so he always arrives nude—as he remarks, it’s a good thing he doesn’t wear glasses. But how does this phenomenon know what is part of Henry’s body? If it’s anything with the time-travelling DNA, then that would leave behind his hair, not to mention all those lovely bacteria on and inside our bodies that keep us alive and healthy. Any way you slice it, Niffenegger’s explanations for Henry’s condition are implausible—but her attempts at plausibility are sincere enough that I’ll be generous and call this science fiction, not fantasy. It’s such a fine line!

Once we grant Henry his miracle exception to hop through time, we can finely immerse ourselves in the story—or stories. We get to see both Henry and Clare’s perspectives of events, sometimes of the same events; sometimes we even see the perspective from two different Henrys when they meet up. This is particularly fascinating during the first part of the novel, when Henry recounts the first time he can remember time-travelling, and all the times his older self taught him survival tactics: pickpocketing, fighting, etc. (Randomly materializing in the nude is a dangerous hobby.) Niffenegger comes up with all of these interesting consequences of Henry’s singular ability, both for Henry and for the woman he is destined to love.

Clare meets Henry when she is young (six, I think), but he is already in his forties. Henry won’t meet the contemporary Clare until he is 28 and she is 21, so for the first two decades of her life, Clare must content herself with Henry’s sporadic visits to a meadow near her parents’ luxurious home. At the very beginning of the story, Henry’s visits to Clare are a little creepy: naked middle-aged man shows up and begins spending quality time with a young girl. Niffenegger lampshades this concern during their first visit, but there is still something problematic about the way Clare essentially imprints upon Henry. It makes one wonder if either of them had any choice in the matter.

If there is one deeper theme I’d take away from The Time Traveler’s Wife, it has to be the meditation upon free will: act like you have it, even if you (probably) don’t. Henry talks about how he is unable to change the past, how even when he tries, he feels constrained somehow. (I find the description and explanation rather unsatisfying, but again, credit to Niffenegger for establishing ground rules.) This means that if he sees his older self do something, he is bound to repeat that action when he becomes that person, no matter how hard he tries. If that is the case, it seems to me like Henry’s entire life—and by extension, everyone’s lives—are predestined. Niffenegger doesn’t explore this as explicitly as I would like, but it is fairly well-developed through the course of the plot itself.

Henry and Clare’s relationship is in many ways like that of the Doctor and River Song. The older time traveller appears to a young girl and influences her in a big way; she falls in love with him. They continue to meet; he gets younger, and she gets older. They have adventures together out of order. Both The Time Traveler’s Wife and Doctor Who explore how confusing and interesting such a relationship would be, and neither shies away from the fact that it’s very messed up. Henry’s presence during Clare’s formative years essentially means she has little choice but to fall in love with him. Later, she finds the contemporary version of him, showing him her little diary with all the dates of his visits, and tells him they are destined to be together. Sometimes I lament our linear existence, but I have to say, I can see the benefits to having everyone experience events in the same order.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is not quite the sappy romance I feared it would be. Henry and Clare’s relationship is, most of the time, genuinely touching. I suppose one could complain about the way Clare eternally pines for Henry, but I think Niffenegger makes it clear that, however the relationship came about in the first place, both of them love each other unconditionally. Still, if it weren’t for the time travelling, the story would be fairly ho-hum and conventional. It’s the unchronological nature of events that rescues this book—that, and occasionally brilliant moments of writing from Niffenegger. I particularly loved the mood she captures when Henry is meeting Clare’s family for the first time, Christmas 1991. The squabbling and bickering feels very real, even if the supporting characters (the oddly stereotypically-dictioned servants) do not.

There is only one major thorn in this otherwise pleasant surprise: the ending. Specifically, the last two acts of the book. By this time the novelty of Henry’s time-travelling has worn off, and we are fast approaching the point where something has to give. Nevertheless, I was kind of expecting … I don’t know. Something more than what we get. Something deeper, more meaningful. I’m not going to spoil it, but essentially my problem is that there are no surprises in store for us: it does happen exactly the way Henry tells us it will happen. I wasn’t hoping for a last-minute reprieve, but I put the book down without any sense of being changed for it. And that, to me, is unsatisfying.

So I don’t quite think The Time Traveler’s Wife deserves all its accolades, but maybe that’s just me. It’s a good book, one that I enjoyed, and one that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to certain people. What could easily have been a poorly-executed gimmick is actually the core of the book. Yet for all the big issues raised by time travel—like free will—this book remains a stubborn biography of two people rather than slipping loose to become something bigger. I was party to the experience of The Time Traveler’s Wife but not really part of the experience.

So after finishing The Time Traveler’s Wife I realized that the next book on my shelf was Family Matters. The last Rohinton Mistry book I read cut me up, so I decided that before I attempted this next one, I would need something I was guaranteed to enjoy. Fortunately, my awesome limited edition of Palimpsest had just arrived from Subterranean Press. I first read Palimpsest when it was a nominee for the Hugo Award for Best Novella. It subsequently won, deservedly, the award, and so when I heard that Subterranean Press was coming out with a hardcover edition, I jumped to pre-order it.

Time travel is weird, confusing, and inconsistent. There is no way to avoid that—and embracing this fact is the key to good time-travel fiction. Whether it’s Doctor Who or Primer, the method and mood of this mad embrace can be quite varied, but the end result is the same: a time travel story, when done properly, should blow your mind.

Where most authors go wrong in their time travel plots is a desire to make sense. So they go to the trouble of establishing various rules that attempt to compel their non-linear story into a linear box, forgetting all the while that once you break causality, there is no going back. Palimpsest is a refreshing change, because Charles Stross doesn’t try to make sense. He acknowledges and works with the utter insanity that would be a universe where time travel is possible. This allows him to accomplish wonderful things, but it also demands a great deal of tolerance from the reader. I can understand why some would reject this book as too confusing and too brief.

The novella opens with Pierce describing, in the second-person narration that Stross uses as an interstitial technique, how he has to kill his own grandfather (TVTropes) as the beginning of his training for the Stasis. The Stasis is a group of time travellers, pledged to manipulate history and reseed humanity each time it goes extinct on Earth. (Humanity, Stross explains, always goes extinct.) They go to incredible lengths to achieve this goal. Stross lyrically describes how they tinker with the ultimate fate of the Earth and solar system on a cosmic scale and literally manipulate the rise and fall of civilization to serve their own ends. Though Stasis’ stated goal is the ultimate good—survival of the human species—they sure do seem authoritarian about it.

As he undergoes his two-decade-long training period, Pierce develops a fascination with palimpsests. These are periods of history that have been rewritten so many times that it becomes very difficult to access any given version of history. (The Stasis has a Library that exists at the end of the Earth, which is protected from all changes to the timeline and therefore records various versions of history. This frustrates new agents who haven’t yet learned that the Library lies.) After Pierce survives an assassination attempt, presumably from someone out to prevent something he will do in his own future, he convalesces in a science empire of the far future, marries a native, and has a family. When he makes a quick trip to the Library to sort out an academic dispute, he discovers that period of history has been turned into a palimpsest, and he might never see his family again.

Pierce eventually becomes drawn into a much larger plot threatening the existence of Stasis itself. We, along with Pierce, are kept in the dark about the nature of this plot until close to the end of the book. But without going into spoilers, I can fairly succinctly describe the nature of the resistance: the name “Stasis” should be a clue. Though Stasis has humanity’s preservation at heart, it enforces this survival in a draconian and single-minded way. There is no room in Stasis’ agenda for extraterrestrial intelligence, space exploration, or indeed any type of development or growth that does not ultimately support Stasis. This meta-social construct has turned into a kind of symbiotic organism relying on the entirety of human history to exist.

Palimpsest isn’t perfect, and if I could wish for one improvement, it would be an extension to novel length. There is just so much going on here, an entire vocabulary and way of life that Stross can only barely explore. The events that take place evoke so many classics of science fiction and of time travel stories—for example, Pierce dies multiple times, even causing his own death at times. What does this mean for the nature of self, for our identity or even, if you believe in such a thing, our souls? These questions all linger in the back of one’s mind, but more so because I am already aware of them and know to apply them to these circumstances. They remain frustratingly unexplored, even somewhat unasked, because there just isn’t enough space.

Similarly, Pierce himself is kind of a lacklustre protagonist. Oh, don’t get me wrong. He’s an OK kind of guy, though I would have liked to learn more about him. But for most of the novella he gets dragged along with the plot rather than actually showing much initiative—and when he does show initiative, it tends to backfire! So readers who are waiting for Pierce to step up and own the story might be disappointed—or pleasantly surprised. I can’t say…. And to be fair, Stross acknowledges the powerlessness Pierce feels: when Pierce comes face-to-face with the person running the plot against Stasis, he confesses that he feels just as manipulated as when he was collaborating with the Stasis Internal Affairs department. Both sides are manipulating Pierce, and this becomes key to the novella’s final, profound pages.

I won’t deny that this book pushes my buttons in all the right ways, and for that reason, I am more than ready to overlook any flaws. I love Palimpsest so much because I feel like Stross has created a realistic portrayal of time travel, and in so doing demonstrated why time travel shouldn’t be possible. If it were, our universe would be an even crazier place than it already is. Because if it were possible to rewrite history, then everyone would be running around, killing their past selves and grandfathers and Hitler—that, or some form of the Novikov self-consistency principle would result in time travel erasing the timeline where time travel is invented. Confused yet? Good. This is your brain on time travel. Don’t do it!

But if time travel were possible, then it would also present us with staggering choice. The very mutability of the continuum would mean that history would never be constant. Foiled plots one moment could be successful coups the next, and vice versa if you work for the other side. You can join the time agency and then, if you tire of the work, go back in time and prevent yourself from joining—or just erase yourself from history altogether! In short, time travel as Stross portrays it in Palimpsest is the ultimate chaotic vector. This is the final message of Palimpsest, and it is simultaneously invigorating and terrifying.