I have had Kate Quinn’s debut novel, Mistress of Rome, on my to-read shelf since January 2010! And I totally forgot about it—this is why I love my to-read shelf. I don’t remember how I learned about it, so it’s serendipitous that I found Daughters of Rome, which has whet my appetite even more for Mistress. I saw this book on the “New Books” shelf at my library and decided to “give it a chance”. That’s a code phrase for “I’m not really sure I’ll enjoy this, but it is within my sphere of interest”—in this case, fiction set in ancient Rome. Rome, like Tudor England, is a setting for which I have some affinity—in particular, I like the Roman Empire in its early years. So Daughters of Rome went home with me. The title and some of its packaging make it seem like it’s aiming at the romance audience, or at least at whoever decided “chick lit” is a viable genre label. Don’t be fooled: Daughters of Rome is 100% grade-A straight up historical fiction, and it is awesome.

I have a friend who is a classics/archaeology expert, my go-to Rome expert, and who has also read this book. And I said to her, “I can see why you liked this book. The women are lascivious, but in a self-possessed way, not merely in a way that involves words like turgid….” Yeah, there are romantic aspects to this book (some of which are my least favourite things about it), but the four female main characters pursue these relationships for their own reasons, not merely because they are there for a male lead or leads to conquer. Roman patrician (upper class) women were subject to the will of the paterfamilias, or male family head of the household—but as Quinn demonstrates, they often found interesting ways to subvert or rebel against such rule.

Daughters of Rome is set during the tumultous Year of the Four Emperors, and Quinn sensibly divides the book into sections covering each emperor’s reign. Following Nero’s death in AD 68, the Senate put Galba on the throne. But after Galba chooses Cornelia’s husband as his heir, Senator Otho successfully carries off a coup, killing Galba and Cornelia’s husband and seizing the throne for himself. Cornelia is grief-stricken and even, at one point, suicidal. Her cousin Lollia, who has had a revolving door of marriages made by her grandfather for their advantage, finds herself divorced—again—and married to Otho’s odious right-hand man. Marcella, Cornelia’s sister, undergoes a metamorphosis from writer of histories to chronicler of history to a shadowy manipulator of history. Finally, my favourite, Diana: another cousin who eschews political machinations for an obsession with the chariot races, their horses, and a radical lack of giving a shit. She is a honey badger, and it is awesome.

Quinn sets herself an ambitious task. Not only does she have four main characters, but she tells their story in less than 400 pages. Some authors write thousand-page epics following two or three characters, and they still don’t pull it off. Somehow Quinn manages to create four different women who all have their own obsessions, foibles, and goals. Together they give us an excellent picture of the diversity among a single patrician family in the Roman Empire, all set against the backdrop of the tremendous political change happening in Rome.

And if political intrigue is your thing, then Daughters of Rome delivers on that too. In general, all four sisters are very aware of the tension in Rome following Galba’s assassination. Associated as they were with his heir, they worry about their status under Otho—hence Lollia’s hasty remarriage. This pattern repeats itself when Vitellius takes the throne, and so on with Vespasian. As the tides turn, all of Rome scrambles to find favour, and this family is no exception.

Marcella’s plot follows her awakening, if you will, as she realizes the inadvertent role she might have played in the deaths of two emperors. This motivates her to plot the downfall of a third and fourth. She becomes very withdrawn and almost secretive, and watching her hubris and subsequent fall is simultaneously one of the most satisfying and most tragic parts of this book. I loved that Diana, whom Marcella dismisses as “stupid but observant”, is the one who connects all the dots for her cousins when it comes to Marcella’s actions. I loved the conversation Marcella has with Marcus Norbanus, who earlier in the book implied some interest in her and her scholarly endeavours. He essentially rejects any notion of further association with her, saying outright, “I find I don’t like you anymore.” That change perfectly captures Marcella’s turn toward the dark side.

Cornelia dabbles in political plotting as well, determined to obtain revenge for Otho’s role in her husband’s death. However, she eventually becomes focused on a new lover. I kind of wish Quinn didn’t go for the “patrician girl falls for the centurion” story, because it seems trite and clichéd. Indeed, there isn’t much I can say in favour of this particular plot. I recognize that Quinn is placing Cornelia in a situation that her former self would have condemned for its lack of propriety. But this consumes her character so completely that it’s difficult not to describe it as anything other than the “romance” label I so emphatically discarded earlier in this review. Daughters of Rome is a complex book, and I think it will appeal to different people for many different reasons.

I haven’t said much about Lollia. She’s a source of those “romance novel” vibes as well, because Quinn describes her sexual affairs and proclivities in great detail. However, it’s not all fun and games. There is a heartfelt moment where we learn that Lollia trusts her grandfather, a former slave who has risen to a position of wealth, above all else, and she tolerates the way he manages her marriages because she knows he has always acted like it’s “them against the world”. Lollia and Marcella’s domestic situations illustrate the brutality that could easily spoil the seemingly-placid lifestyle of the patrician woman. Lollia treats her marriage to Fabius Valens like all her others, some kind of game, and happily continues having sex with her man-slave—until Fabius has him whipped and then backhands Lollia’s three-year-old daughter. Quinn has this ability to turn the tone of a scene on a dime, and she uses it to great effect. Daughters of Rome has lots of romance-like aspects to it, but there are deeper moments that explore the social situation and the role of women in the Roman Empire, and it’s awesome.

For the most part, Quinn seems to adhere to the history as we know it fairly well. I am not familiar enough with the history of this period to spot any but the most egregious errors, but Wikipedia does help. And Quinn is rather open in her historical note about what she changed—for instance, Lollia and Diana are both fictitious characters. With Diana, this seems rather obvious, because I question whether such a rebellious girl would be allowed in a patrician household—and even if she had existed, I doubt she would have driven in a chariot race and been so celebrated. Diana is the character who almost transforms Daughters of Rome into one of those larger-than-life “we made a movie set in ancient Rome” movies, the kind where men are real men and women wear diaphonous garments and all the dialogue makes you want to cringe because it seems so desperate to communicate that it is “ancient times”. She is over the top. And I can’t help but love her.

Diana does not let anyone push her around. She mouths off to emperors and ignores imprecations and opprobria. She does not care about finding a husband. At one point her cousins question her about her relationship with a British horse-breeder (he has secretly been teaching her to drive chariots). They ask, “Do you love him?”, and Diana replies something along the lines of, “At one point I thought I might, but now I don’t think so.” And that’s just such a refreshing, believable sentiment: she doesn’t meet this mysterious foreigner who shares her affinity for horses and fall into his arms. They become friends, but it’s not the type of magnetic romance that ruined my enjoyment of Cordelia. Diana is just a marvelous, fun character, even if she might be somewhat unrealistic.

That’s OK: Quinn has earned her creative license with everything else that Daughters of Rome delivers. This is the type of historical fiction I like, and this is the quality of fiction I demand.

I know the line between science fiction and fantasy, if one exists at all, is tenuous, as is any genre brinksmanship one cares to play. I do try, however foolishly, to draw one, if only for my own personal cataloguing efforts. And I could go more into how I agree with the camp that views science fiction as a setting rather than a genre, but that’s not pertinent to my point. In science fiction, what happens is a result of science—albeit science that doesn’t quite work in our world—and, hence, is reproducible and reliable. There is no willpower or faith involved. In contrast, fantasy usually means magic of some kind, which is science if science played favourites, required innate ability (other than intelligence), and changed the rules when you weren’t looking.

But there are times, as the venerable Sir Arthur C. Clarke noted, when the science depicted becomes so “advanced” that it starts to look an awful lot like magic. Few subgenres embody this as well as posthumanism, with machines altering us on a cellular level and artificial intelligences helping us to upload our minds to a computer—or into a nice, new body. So posthumanism is like fantasy, and the more I think about it, posthumanism most resembles urban fantasy. Both involve “magic” in an environment that resembles, at least in some fashion, the urban-oriented civilization of today. Both have characters who are transhuman, either because of technological advances or because of mutations, magic, and mythology. Finally, I feel like the most common tone and pacing in urban fantasy—slightly gritty, fast-paced—translates well to posthumanism. Posthumanism is thrilling when done well.

Singularity’s Ring made me think about this correlation. It feels a little like a fantasy thriller. Our protagonist, Apollo, is actually five individuals who can share memories and thoughts chemically, to function as a single “pod”. After attempts on Apollo’s life, he becomes a fugitive, returning to the fold only to learn he has to help hunt down a psychopath. So, not your ordinary protagonist, and not exactly a great day to be the protagonist! Aside from a brief by enjoyable jaunt into orbit, the action in this book is confined to the surface of the Earth, which is a refreshing change from most posthuman fiction. Apollo even spends some time trekking up the Amazon, as well as several days in the woods with semi-sentient bears.

Yeah, it’s that sort of book.

Paul Melko demonstrates the successful recipe to good science fiction. Take one or two Big Ideas and drop them front-and-centre. In this case, it’s the pod humans like Apollo. They are now the dominant life-form on Earth after the departure of the Community, with singleton humans relegated to ghetto-like enclaves where they can’t cause as much trouble. So, the Big Idea is the first ingredient. Next, take several additional science-fiction concepts and scatter them through the background, midground, and foreground. That’s the setting I was talking about—science fiction makes it happen. Here, we have the eponymous Ring, the concept of a Singularity and a Nerd Rapture, and the Community.

At first the Community sounded like some kind of weird alien species that befriended humanity, then left. But no: the Community was a group of humans who joined together by “jacking in” with neural interfaces. They planned a technological ascension to a higher stage of being—a Nerd Rapture!—and subsequently disappeared. Well, their consciousnesses did. Their bodies just died. No one really knows what happened to the Community, whether they did ascend or just died or whatnot. Only one member of the Community is left; he missed the Exodus because his body was in suspended animation aboard the Ring, being repaired, and he becomes Singularity’s Ring’s principal antagonist.

So there is a lot going on here, but it never becomes overwhelming. As much as Melko mentions Singularity-type events, it’s not the principal focus. Any other book, any other day, and that might disappoint me. But the main plot of Singularity’s Ring is more than enough to make up for that. This is a story of survival, but it has a very unique protagonist. I suspect that one’s enjoyment of the book hangs almost entirely on how much one likes the multiple-persons persona of Apollo Papadopulos: Strom, Meda, Quant, Manuel, and Moira. Melko tells the story in chapters from the point of view of each of these constituents of Apollo, and while the concept seems confusing at first, you get used to it.

Then there are the bears. The bears are delightful. After escaping certain death a few times, Apollo winds up back in the same area where they had some near-fatal survival training. Strom, the tactically-oriented member of the pod, rescued the rest of the pod with the help of some very intelligent bears, whom he believed had been a pod themselves. Of course, the idea of a pod of bears was dismissed. But Apollo decides that if he is going to be a fugitive, he might as well look for these bears—and he finds them. It’s just a great part of the book, and like most of the book, so very fun.

Singularity’s Ring was almost five stars for me. Sometimes the pacing seemed to get bogged down in certain details—or maybe I just wasn’t paying enough attention to what was happening. Similarly, there are times when Melko departs from his convention of narrative to delve into memories or play with who is narrating. He always does this for a reason, but it is another way in which he interrupts the coherence of the writing. So while Singularity’s Ring had a great story, there is definite room for improvement in how it was put down on the page.

That’s a bagatelle, though. Really, I could see the argument for giving this book five stars, because the ending is amazing. It is utterly predictable yet so poignant and emotional. Somehow, Melko manages to turn a moment that should have been trite into something that made me shed tears—probably because of the strength of his characterization of Apollo’s pod members. Moreover, the ending truly exceeds the otherwise intimate scope of the novel to become epic. Although tragic for Apollo—and thus for the reader—it is also extremely hopeful. It leaves an opening for more novels in this universe, and I want them. I will pay good money for them. Or, you know, use gift cards people give me when they realize I like books. Or borrow them from the library. Or steal them from tiny, science-fiction reading babies in lieu of candy theft. (I am a terrible person, yes, but what is a baby doing reading science fiction in the first place? Huh? Think about it!)

This book is not about physics.

Of course, if you are not shallow (like me) and did more than just judged the book by its title and cover, you would know this. And don’t take this as an indictment of the book for its non-physics focus. I just thought I should warn anyone who, like me, mistakenly begins reading the book by thinking it’s about physics. It isn’t.

Attempting to describe this book to people as I read it was a baffling experience. Well, to be honest, I am terrible at talking about books I’m reading, or have read, any time. (Excellent at writing about them, but terrible at speaking.) Special Topics in Calamity Physics presented me with a particular challenge, because it seems to be so many things. Then, by the time I arrived at the end, I was wondering if it was any of those things at all.

In fact, if I had to judge this book by its cover, I should have gone off the back cover. It sports a blurb from Sir Literary Author Himself, Jonathan Franzen, Esq. I have nothing against Jonathan Franzen and will in fact shortly be reading my first Franzen novel … but he says of Special Topics, “Beneath the foam of this exuberant debut is a dark, strong drink.” And if that’s not a warning sign that we are about to enter the land of silly over-extended metaphors, then I don’t know what is.

See, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is not just literary. It is OMG, LITERARY literary, with neon lights and pink glitter and embarrassingly ill-fitting pantsuits. Not a sentence goes by without some sort of allusion to a book, movie, or television show—complete with actual citation. Blue van Meer, our protagonist, is just that kind of girl. She describes everything in an overwrought, self-annotated technicolor. As a reader, one can either take this book seriously, at face value—and very probably enjoy it—or one just has to laugh at its earnestness. Marisha Pessl tries to create a “dark, strong drink” by turning it into a strange brew, and the result is … patchy.

I feel like Pessl wants to keep one guessing as long as possible about what type of book Special Topics might be—she wants to avoid collapsing the wavefunction, if you will, for as long as possible. And like anything of indeterminate shape or texture, this is not very interesting. The book meanders drunkenly from genre to genre. First it’s your typical “bookish new girl falls in with wrong crowd at high school” story; I didn’t ever expect it to stay that way. Yet it takes strange turns. Pessl has characters of questionable motivation—oh, she supplies more than enough motives for every character, but the difficulty becomes selecting which motives are true. Instead of a straightforward linear narrative, Pessl attempts to use ambiguity to create a sense of choice where there isn’t any. It is an intriguing attempt, but I’m not so sure it’s successful. Essentially, Pessl inverts the trope of unreliable narrator, giving us an unreliable story in which the narrator is desperately groping for some semblance of reality.

Thanks to Goodreads, I recently learned that Umberto Eco has a new novel out. I love Umberto Eco. He is one of my favourite authors, and in particular, Foucault’s Pendulum left me awestruck in a way few novels have, before or since. Believe it or not, Special Topics shares something in common with that book, for both involve conspiracy theories that become more real as the sceptics spin them. There is something almost but not quite metafictional happening. But Pessl is not Eco, and Special Topics is not Foucault’s Pendulum. Eco has subtlety and a deep, placid sensibility that is manifest in his writing. Pessl has skill—I won’t deny that—but it’s the skill of a raw, wild, passionate young writer. Special Topics is a story that has not been honed in the way it should have been—one can tell this just from the length, if nothing else.

The other contribution to this book’s “please notice my literaryness” comes from its narrator. Blue is ridiculously well-read and ridiculously skilled at writing. (She also has a vast and nebulous forest of daddy issues.) I like her well enough, and while she sometimes gets on my nerves, she is really the only interesting character in the book. The others—including Hannah and Blue’s Dad—are devices that belong wholly to the story. Any idea that they might have volition of their own is absurd. No, Blue is the only actor on this stage. At times her narration is a delight, but for the most part it is the purplest of prose.

This book took me a long time to read. Some of that isn’t the book’s fault; this has been a busy, stressful week for me. I probably should have picked a different book to read. But as I approached the middle of Special Topics, any interest I had in it seemed to flicker, gutter, and come perilously close to extinguishing. I had to push myself to read, when normally I will happily spend hours devouring a book if I have the time. The last fifty pages seem to go downhill, as Pessl becomes more and more evasive with the “truth” behind this story; also, I skimmed about twenty pages prior to that, tired of Blue’s endless descriptions of her impromptu detective work.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics wore out its welcome with me. I wish I could say nicer things about it, because it isn’t a bad book. It isn’t pointless or even poorly written, and I could probably see someone making a case that it is inspired and, yes, suitably literary. Alas, Special Topics is also relentless, unforgiving, even uncooperative. We tussled, this book and I, and I do not feel all that much improved for it.

I guess I fail the final exam?

I entered the Metaverse ignorant of the fact that Snow Crash was first published in 1992 (i.e., pre-Internet). Hence, it took some time for the book to endear itself to me, because my reaction to the Metaverse, a virtual reality, was filtered through my experiences with the Internet. As such, I first found Neal Stephenson's depiction of virtual reality as camp, reminding me much of [b:Net Force|957376|Net Force (Tom Clancy's Net Force, #1)|Steve Perry|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1223633404s/957376.jpg|2467543] and its ilk. In other words, Snow Crash presents a dated version of cyberpunk. I had to compensate for my exposure to more advanced technology before I could enjoy this book.

The plot of Snow Crash entranced me once I figured out what was going on. Aside from the fact that Stephenson reveals it mostly through exposition, the plot and themes were quite interesting. While I suspect he was quite liberal in his interpretation of Sumerian history, he nevertheless weaves that interpretation into a compelling story, complete with heroism, high-risk sword combat, and crazy technological gambits to take over the world. The book has nary a dull moment, beginning with an epic pizza delivery (yes, pizza delivery can be epic when the Mafia owns your pizza franchise!) and concluding with a helicopter/aircraft carrier battle and escape. Somewhere along the way, Stephenson infuses archaeology and a little linguistic mysticism ... and it works, which may be the most surprising observation of all.

The primary protagonist, named Hiro Protagonist for reasons I never quite comprehended, isn't a great character. He's an uncomfortable mix of competent and idiotic, and his relationship with the Love Interest, Juanita, is uninteresting. As an Action Hero, Hiro works. He can swordfight and program. In this respect, I think that Snow Crash's target audience, the wannabe-cool hackers of the '90s, would identify a great deal with Hiro. Now, however, he just seems obnoxious.

The secondary protagonist, Y.T., is more interesting. She's a fifteen-year-old street smart skater (a Kourier) who's smarter and perhaps even bolder than Hiro. Maybe it was her gender, or her youth, or just the fact that I liked her better than Hiro, but I always felt more concerned when she was captured by the villain than when Hiro's life was threatened.

My favourite part of Snow Crash, however, lies in the secondary characters, namely Uncle Enzo, L. Bob Rife, and the Librarian. Uncle Enzo is the head of the Mafia, which is the epitome of a "family business." He befriends Y.T. (and, by extension, Hiro), transforming slowly from unknown quantity to respected ally. The reader is led to believe at first that Uncle Enzo may be a potential antagonist, but we then learn that's not the case; Enzo plays a pivotal role in the climax leading to our protagonists' triumph over the villainous L. Bob Rife.

Rife represents a particularly nasty form of capitalism, one which compromises the wellbeing of its workers in order to exploit maximum profits. Rife recognizes the instability of his business, however, and stumbles across a way to solve the problem: he intends to remake the world by rewriting the infrastructure of our brains. Within the context of the story, the threat seems believable. And with Rife's monopoly on telecommunications, beating him is a tall order. Fortunately, Hiro has help on his side: a wise sidekick in the form of a program called the Librarian.

The Librarian is the primary vehicle of exposition for Snow Crash's main plot, although Hiro himself explains to us the entire, assembled puzzle closer to the climax of the story. One could also make the argument that the Librarian is the direct hero of Snow Crash, since he reads out the syllables that foil Rife's plans. My distaste for excess exposition aside, I enjoyed the Librarian. He was a nifty guy.

A shout-out to Fido, aka Rat Thing number B-782! Unfortunately for Fido, Stephenson's ability to incorporate disparate characters can occasionally lose coherence. He introduces several minor characters who turn out to have absolutely zero bearing on the plot itself; sometimes he does this fort he sake of perspective, i.e., we get to see the character's reaction to something Hiro or Y.T. does. This is occasionally effective but mostly feels redundant, as in the scene when Hiro buys a motorcycle.

A larger problem with Snow Crash is the resolution, or lack thereof. The climax is satisfactory, but the book abruptly concludes without much wrap-up. Although I wouldn't want a lengthy Lord of the Rings-style thirty page epilogue, I was looking forward to some closure regarding the future of Hiro, Juanita, and Y.T. Do Hiro and Juanita live happily ever after? Do Hiro and Y.T. stay in business together? Does Da5id ever recover from the Snow Crash virus? Unfortunately, we don't get the answers to those questions.

Snow Crash is all the more impressive today, now that we have a working sort of "Metaverse" (the Internet) to compare to Stephenson's model. While its flaws are somewhat obvious, they mar the book more as an artistic work than as an entertainment device. Stephenson depicts a wonderfully exaggerated post-capitalist dystopia, where the Mafia delivers pizzas to "burbclaves" and bulletproof cars are a must. I suspect that if similar works dealing with simulated reality, such as The Matrix, hadn't launched when they did, Snow Crash would have been made into a successful film.

Without a doubt the Second World War is one of the most influential and significant events to occur in the past hundred years. The scope of this war was magnified and bigger than ever in every way: in the countries involved, in the technology and tactics developed and deployed, and in the atrocities committed. And so World War II has seared itself onto the collective consciousness of our species as something never to be forgotten. It was a watershed time, and it acted as a catalyst for some of the most dramatic changes in our society. Were it not for World War II, the twentieth century would have progressed differently—but exactly how that might have happened isn’t necessarily straightforward. No doubt that’s why World War II is such a powerful lure for authors of alternate history.

Alternate history, of course, is kind of Harry Turtledove’s thing. He’s written enough of it—and in sufficient quality—to be called “the Master of Alternate History” by some critics. Such titles do not get bestowed lightly. Yet my own recent experience with Turtledove left me less than lukewarm. I kept Worldwar on my list, though, because I have vague memories from when I was younger of reading another book about Lizard-like aliens called the Race on Earth—I suspect it was part of Turtledove’s Colonization trilogy. So I decided to go back to where the series begin: World War II, 1941, with the Race arriving in orbit to make Earth the fourth world in its stultifying empire.

They find this a tad difficult, because their 800-year-old intelligence is out of date. They were expecting to be facing armoured knights, swords, maybe some extremely primitive forms of gunpowder-based weaponry. Unlike the Race, however, which thinks in terms of millennia and changes even more slowly, humanity advances in fits and starts. In 800 years we’ve managed to get to the point where we are speculating about nuclear weapons. And none of this bodes well for the Race’s invasion fleet.

Turtledove tells his story through a large cast of characters from around the world. First, props to Turtledove for including a Chinese character. We spent a lot of time in World War II in Grade 10 history, and it was admittedly Canadian-centric for a good reason. But you know what? I know almost nothing about China during World War II. I knew that Japan invaded, but that was it. So as someone who recognizes this gap in my knowledge but was a little too lazy to do anything more than look it up on Wikipedia, I commend Turtledove for including this perspective, as limited as it might be.

Juggling so many characters can be challenging, both for the author and for the reader. I kept wanting to follow some of the characters for longer periods of time—and of course, there were a few I would be happy never to see again. Also, with so many different characters, their voices start to sound the same. I don’t really question Turtledove’s decision to include such a large cast—it’s about the only way he could cover so much territory—but the price is a narrative that, at times, is very flat. Combined with what I feel is a somewhat indulgent length, this means that Worldwar: In the Balance is not necessarily a smooth read. However, depending on your own tastes, there could be a few mitigating factors.

Firstly, of course, there’s how much you’re interested in World War II. Turtledove had obviously done his research. He provides a glimpse into the wartime operations along various fronts: Britain, France, Russia, China, and the United States. Even though the war itself gets put on hold to fight the alien threat, this is still a world where the war is happening, with all the attendant nationalistic impulses, cultural enmities, and political tensions. Those are what make the temporary alliances between, say, Russia and Germany, so fascinating.

I have to confess I’m not all that into World War II, either its history or its non-history. I recognize its significance as an event and will read the occasional book set during it, but it’s not exactly a setting I seek out. It’s difficult to articulate my reasons for this, although I am sure it is partly the result of how meticulous true World War II fans are about their details. I’m not a details person when it comes to history; I like the grand, sweeping, political intrigue of it all. Give me a king marrying six women in succession, and we’ll tango.

Secondly, Worldwar: In the Balance is very much still a story of war, even if it’s no longer the same war. Instead of Allies versus Nazis, it’s humans versus the Race. I have to admit that I’m rather disappointed with the armament the Race brought: their technology seems only marginally superior to the stuff the humans are using. This is a species that can cross the gaps between stars at half the speed of light! Sure, I understand that their pace of technological innovation is slower than humanity’s—but even so, we tend to assume that anyone who has managed feasible interstellar travel is going to have better technology than bullets, tanks, and helicopters. Turtledove has set up what makes for the most interesting fight instead of what is perhaps the most plausible scenario from a science-fiction standpoint.

Finally, Worldwar: In the Balance ends on a cliffhanger. There is no resolution to the overall conflict. This disappointed me, after over 500 dense pages of incredibly detailed descriptions and back and forth. I really could have used a nice denouement: not necessarily something that ties up every loose end, but enough for the work to stand alone. As it is, I probably will read the sequel—but not any time soon, and probably not before I try another Turtledove series that might be more to my liking. Still, if cliffhangers entice you, this book might be a nice match.

These factors combined to tempt me to dismiss this book. Little of its content or characterization grabs me or my interests. Yet, objectively speaking, it isn’t that bad. As a work of alternate history both its premise and its execution offer a compelling story: really, what would have happened if an alien threat arrived while we were in the middle of World War II? How would the Allies, the Nazis, Russia, and Japan have reacted? And really, how would the aliens react if they were expecting a much different Earth than the one they got? In a way that reminds me of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Turtledove engages in fascinating speculation as to how Earth’s topology and climate influenced the rapid development of our species vis-à-vis the more sedate pace of the Race. Does our tendency for conflict—not to mention our ability to love—give us an edge? By raising such questions, both explicitly and implicitly, Turtledove elevates Worldwar: In the Balance from a mere “what if” story to a work that truly represents the nature of alternate history. I cannot say I loved this book, but neither can I deny its power or its presence as a work of speculative fiction.

My two teachables, the subjects which I will be qualified to teach when I graduate from my education program in May, are mathematics and English. When I tell people this, they usually express surprise, saying something like, “Well, aren’t those very different subjects!”

And it irks me so.

They’re not, not really. Firstly, mathematics and English are both forms of communication. Both rely on the manipulation of symbols to tell a tale. As with writers of English, writers of mathematics have styles: some are elegant yet terse, seemingly expending little effort while getting their point across with an admirable economy of symbols; others are expansive and eloquent, elaborating at some length in order to furnish the reader with an adequate explanation. Secondly, as with English, mathematics is very much grounded in philosophy and history, and it is a subject that is open to deep, almost spiritual interpretation.

If you balk at that last idea, don’t worry. You’ve probably had it drilled into your head since elementary school that in mathematics there is only one correct answer! How could such a reassuringly logical subject be open to interpretation? Despite its apparent objectivity, mathematics is just another human endeavour, and like all our mortal works, it is vulnerable to our flaws, foibles, and fits of passion. Mathematicians can be just as stubborn and argumentative, if not more, than other people. There are many famous follies and feuds in the history of mathematics, and that is one of the reasons I enjoy learning about it so much.

Infinity is one of the mathematical concepts most central to those feuds. It’s one of the areas where math rubs up against the spiritual realm—for, as some mathematicians and philosophers have wondered, what is infinity if not God or some kind of greater being? So it seems natural to look at our shifting views on the infinite along the continuum of the history of maths. In A Brief History of Infinity, Brian Clegg does just that, following the classical, somewhat Eurocentric development of math from Greece to Rome, then zig-zagging down to the Middle East and India before flying back to Britain, France, and Germany.

As with most tricky math concepts, the trouble with infinity begins with its definition. One must be very careful with definitions in math—for example, it is not enough merely to say that infinity means “goes on without end”. After all, the surface of the Earth has no “end”, but that does not mean the Earth has infinite surface area! Rather, the surface of the Earth is unbounded. Grasping the idea of infinity as “not finite” is easy enough, though: there is no “last” counting number, because you can always add one to the largest number you can conceive, and suddenly you have a new largest number. So infinity is a quicksilver of a concept: intuitive and easy to grasp, yet also elusive and far too fluid for some mathematicians to handle. The Greeks, with their mathematics strictly confined to the geometric figure, would have no dealings with the infinite. Infinity confused Galileo, who nevertheless bravely meditated upon it in his final days. And the shadow of infinity hangs over the controversy of the calculus that caused the divide between Newton and Leibniz, and correspondingly, between Britain and the Continent.

The story of infinity gets even more interesting after that. In general, I love the history of mathematics during the 1700s and 1800s. So many brilliant minds pop up during that time: as Newton and Leibniz exit, Euler and Gauss enter. Later, Cauchy and Weierstrass formalize the concept of the limit, which does away with any need for infinity in calculus at all! There are plenty of names and plenty of stories—and this is where A Brief History of Infinity starts to lose its edge.

The first few chapters of this book are fascinating. Clegg devotes a lot more space to the Greek philosophers than others might, going so far as to mention some of the more obscure ones, like Anaxagoras. He provides a considerably detailed development of Zeno’s paradox (well, paradoxes) and a nice, if basic, grounding in the idea of an infinite series. Clegg lays the ground well for what will come in later chapters, all the while emphasizing the reluctance of the Greek philosophers to abandon the solidity of numbers found in the real world.

But as we get closer to those magical two centuries following the great Newton–Leibniz schism, the story of infinity gets more complicated as more people get involved. This book is very similar to Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. In my review of Zero, I praised the author’s ability to stay focused:

The story intersects with the lives of many famous mathematicians, but the obvious slimness of this book testifies that Seife managed to distill only what was necessary about their lives in his quest to explain the mystery of zero.

To be fair to Clegg, this book is almost as slim as Zero. And although he happens to go off on many a tangent, he at least has the ability to find his way back on track quickly enough—that is, his tangents are interesting and informative. He sometimes seems to go into more detail than is strictly necessary to get the point across, and once in a while he waxes melodramatic—as is the case when he links Cantor’s madness to his study of infinity. Overall, however, Clegg’s writing is crisp and clear.

I’m also impressed by the detail and depth of Clegg’s explanation of the math. He goes so far as to list and briefly elaborate upon each of the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory! I was half expecting him to mention the Banach–Tarski paradox after that—he doesn’t quite get there, but he does explain the difference between ordinals and cardinals, develop the continuum hypothesis, and even mention Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. He tackles whether imaginary numbers are truly all they’re cracked up to be. And he even discusses nonstandard analysis—we didn’t even learn about that in university.

Don’t let my awe scare you away, though. Rather, think of it like this: if you are not particularly mathematical and read this book, you will gain a wealth of knowledge. You will be fun at parties! If you are particularly mathematical, then depending on how much you like the history of math, you might already be familiar with most of these anecdotes. But the book will still be fun to read, and chances are you will learn at least one or two new things.

So I would recommend A Brief History of Infinity to most people—perhaps not with the same zeal that I do Charles Seife’s Zero, but with a similar hope in mind. I hope this book, or at least my review of this book, demonstrates why I find math, as well as the history of math, so fascinating. It’s not just all about numbers, solving for x, and finding the One True Solution. Mathematics is a subject with a long and storied past, one that is fun to explore by looking at the humans who progressed—or regressed—throughout the centuries. A Brief History of Infinity is a book in this mould. While its organization and its focus leaves something to be desired, its scope and ambition do not.

I am "on a mission", if you will, to re-read the Recluce saga in order, because I most of the first eleven books when I was younger and then lost touch with the series, and now I'm "reconnecting with my fantasy roots". Note, however, that this is one series where the order—at least at first—doesn't matter all that much. One can pick up any of the first three books and feel equally comfortable reading the other two afterward. L.E. Modesitt, Jr. hops around the chronology of his universe; the first book, The Magic of Recluce, is set after the second and third books. The elapsed time is on the order of centuries, however, allowing for enough distance that events from previous books are always distant memories and legends. Indeed, one could make the argument that The Magic Engineer is a better starting point for newcomers than The Magic of Recluce.

Both of these books are extremely similar, so if you are familiar with Modesitt and are inexplicably hoping for something new … then you aren't very familiar with Modesitt. Replace "Dorrin" with "Lerris" and "smithing" with "woodworking", and you almost have a copy of The Magic of Recluce. I'm being tongue-in-cheek here; there are significant differences between the two—the external conflict in The Magic Engineer is a lot more developed, as are Dorrin's friendships—but the substance remains the same: a rebellious youth gets exiled from orderly Recluce only to take up a craft and become an ordermaster. In so doing, he upsets various people who are steeped in chaos, and conflict ensues. Oh, and every single thing gets accounted for. Want to buy something? Modesitt is going to make you haggle down to the last copper. Want to have a meal? Modesitt is going to list the entire menu and then force you to listen to the character deliberate over how to be the most frugal. Modesitt's scrupulousness when it comes to the logistics of his world is one of the reasons he stands out as a fantasy writer, but it definitely begins to grate after a while.

I could go on about how this book disappoints me in all the same ways the previous two books do, especially considering what an impression this series made on me when I was younger. After struggling with how to express what I dislike about these books, however, I've had an epiphany about why I dislike them: they remind me of how I wrote when I made my first attempts at writing fantasy. Indeed, I suspect that these books served as unconscious templates for a lot of what I wrote. This might be a weird remark, but I think the catalyst for this revelation is the names. There is just something about the names in the Recluce saga that jar me and remind me of my own first attempts in that area. I don't mentally "sound out" most of the words when reading a book to myself, but I do sound out names in my head. I don't know why; maybe I worry that if I am ever magically transported into the book I'll need to know how to pronounce everyone's name to prove I'm not some kind of demon. What? It could happen. But I digress. The names sound weird; they don't often come easily off my tongue. And there are many of them, because Modesitt likes to name his characters, even the most minor ones who show up for a page and then get killed off because they couldn't afford the coin for redberry at the next inn.

I don't want to go as far as to say that Modesitt writes like a 15-year-old. These books are still much better than anything I managed to produce. Nevertheless, the final product feels quite different from most of the other fantasy fare I gluttonously consume. Modesitt, much like his characters, is a very technical writer. His books are not formulaic, but they still read as if they were crafted from smaller components. Everything, from the logistics of living to the order/chaos magic system is logical and carefully explained. When a writer does this, the result is exactly something like The Magic Engineer: nearly flawless in its technical execution but lacking in that subtle essence that allows me to connect to it on an emotional level. (I say nearly flawless because there is a bewildering editing oversight. Early in the book, some dialogue between Dorrin and his father gets repeated verbatim in a subsequent conversation. It's very odd.) Intellectually, I grasped everything about Dorrin's conflicts, about the moral conundrum of using order as a tool for force and violence in defence against chaos, about having to protect the people of Diev even though they have come to fear him for his powers. Emotionally, however, I had a hard time caring for Dorrin, for Brede, or for Kadara.

With most books, one knows at the beginning that the protagonist is going to survive. In rare cases, that doesn't happen, although it is usually foreshadowed. So I think it's safe and non-spoiling to mention that, yes, Dorrin doesn't die (sorry if that truly spoils your experience). Somehow though, all those other books whose protagonists survive manage to make me feel that the character's struggle is worth something. The protagonist might survive, but it's always at some cost; there is always another personal sacrifice or loss that drives the resolution. This seems to be absent from The Magic Engineer, and it's related to the very careful and technical way the book seems to have been written. Rather than surviving because he earns it, Dorrin survives only because it has been predestined from the story's beginning. As a result, Dorrin and all the rest of the characters lack free will and become mere mouthpieces for Modesitt's exposition of his order/chaos system.

I know: it's ridiculous to talk about fictional characters having free will! (Or is it?) Yet this seems like the best way to express my criticism: in a truly fulfilling story, that author must convince the reader that the characters have volition. Modesitt is very careful to ensure that his characters' actions seem to follow logically from their motives, but there's something missing, something just a little bit off. Take the White Wizards, for instance. We get brief, snippet-like chapters that give us a glimpse into their machinations—and these chapters are by far the worst parts of The Magic Engineer, just as they were in The Towers of Sunset. The White Wizards are one-dimensional and Evil. They want to dominate and destroy. Oh, and they pontificate about that to each other, always pointing out each other's actions. (It actually feels like the White Wizards are playing a big game of "I see what you did there" where if one does not explain the other person's schemes to that person, one has failed and will be incinerated.)

The same problem afflicts the other chapters, though perhaps to a lesser degree. Here's an example from very early in the book.

He takes a sip of the redberry, warmer than he prefers. "If it's not intruding … what's your family like?"

She finishes crunching a mixture of celery and sliced fennel before answering. "My father is a trader in wools. My mother was a singer from Suthya. I don't have any brothers or sisters yet."

Dorrin frowns. The words imply that her mother is dead, and that her father has another wife who may yet have children.

I particularly love the phrase "the words imply". Not only is Modesitt spelling it out for us, but he is almost condescending about it, as if he is worried that we are going to miss this subtlety if he does not do his best to un-subtleify it. (And it's not like the person with whom Dorrin is speaking is a major character or anything. This has no effect on the rest of the plot.)

The Magic Engineer has not changed my opinion of the Recluce saga. With each book in the series that I re-read, however, I am gaining a new perspective on that opinion and better understanding it. I wish that opinion could be higher, because this series means a lot to me. Unfortunately, despite that significance and the link it provides to my past, I cannot put the Recluce saga among my favourites.

My Reviews of the Recluce saga:
← The Towers of Sunset | The Order War →

Jonathan Franzen seems to be all the rage these days, though according to the timeline one can glean from his Wikipedia article, he seems to have been around for quite a while. Nevertheless, he was featured in TIME around the time his novel Freedom was released, and I undertook to add The Corrections to my to-read list. Then my friend Vivike (bless her heart), who has read it, gave it to me for Christmas last year. Even with this kindness I was not in a hurry to read it, for I knew deep in my heart that the almost-inevitable result would be the work you see before you now.

Despite this declaration of pessimism, I want to stress that I did not set out to dislike The Corrections or Franzen on purpose. I want to say that I began reading with an open mind, as I usually do, but I’m not sure that is entirely honest—let’s say instead that, while I was sceptical, I was willing to be persuaded to the side of Team Corrections. That never quite happened. However, I’m not going to say that The Corrections is a terrible novel, and I won’t call Franzen a bad writer or a hack. No, my dissatisfaction is more subtle than that; our differences are more toward the stylistic. Suffice it to say that Franzen is operating in a literary paradigm for which I have very little use, and while it’s a valid paradigm in its own right, I probably wouldn’t missed it if it disappeared overnight.

All those good intentions to give The Corrections a fair and honest hearing began to crumble from the beginning. I just cannot stand Franzen’s writing style. His syntax is not so much florid as it is frenetic. He determinedly crams as much information into a single sentence as possible by abusing the dash and semi-colon until they, like my eyes, cry out for mercy on the very page. I hold up two examples, the first from page 11 and the second from pages 17–18, to demonstrate why I find this so objectionable. The first example is actually quite brief:

In the streaklessly clean windows of the dining room there was chaos. The berserk wind, the negating shadows.

That’s right: the windows weren’t just clean, they were streaklessly clean! Yet somehow they contained “chaos”. Followed by a fragment (which is fine in fiction) that does little but embellish this half-formed idea. Alone, this passage isn’t all that bad. There’s nothing wrong with indulging one’s desire to set the scene, and perhaps in another novel by another writer I might have overlooked this. By page 11, however, I was already beginning to groan beneath the weight of Franzen’s prose, and that sentence stuck with me for the rest of the book. It seems to scream, “I am a writer and I am writing and this is me, showing you that I can write!” And it reminds me of those poor people who find themselves graduates of a masters program in creative writing, which forces them to overwrite everything they create lest they fail to show the world that they are, in fact, writers.

There is a distinct emphasis on quantity over quality in The Corrections. This is hopefully evident in the second example:

And since Chip had no association with the Wall Street Journal—the publication to which he made unpaid contributions was the Warren Street Journal: A Monthly of the Transgressive Arts; he’d also very recently completed a screenplay, and he’d been working part-time as a legal proofreader at Bragg Knuter & Speigh for the nearly two years since he’d lost his assistant professorship in Textual Artifacts at D—— College, in Connecticut, as a result of an offense involving a female undergraduate which had fallen just short of the legally actionable and which, though his parents never learned of it, had interrupted the parade of accomplishments that his mother could brag about, back home in St. Jude; he’d told his parents that he’d quite teaching in order to pursue a career in writing, and when, more recently, his mother had pressed him for details, he’d mentioned the Warren Street Journal, the name of which his mother had misheard and instantly begun to trumpet to her friends Esther Root and Bea Meisner and Mary Beth Schumpert, and though Chip in his monthly phone calls home had had many opportunities to disabuse her he’d instead actively fostered the misunderstanding; and here things became rather complex, not only because the Wall Street Journal was available in St. Jude and his mother had never mentioned looking for his work and failing to find it (meaning that some part of her knew perfectly well that he didn’t write for the paper) but also because the author of articles like ”Creative Adultery” and “Let Us Now Praise Scuzzy Motels’ was conspiring to preserve, in his mother, precisely the kind of illusion that the Warren Street Journal was dedicated to exploding, and he was thirty-nine years old, and he blamed his parents for the person he had become—he was happy when his mother let the subject drop.

That is one sentence. I am thankful I can type at a frightful 100 wpm, because otherwise I might have been here all night. Just take a moment to trudge through that behemoth, however, to get a feeling for the way Franzen communicates information. Because there is no way this sentence was accidental; there was no reason those semi-colons couldn’t have been periods or that the clauses couldn’t have been torn down and rebuilt as friendly, shorter sentences with much simpler syntax. No, Franzen made a deliberate choice to write like this. It’s a valid choice, but there are two problems: firstly, Mr. Franzen is not Stuart McLean; secondly, Mr. Franzen is not George Eliot.

Stuart McLean, the host of The Vinyl Cafe, is an expansive storyteller with a similar penchant for going off on tangents almost midsentence. Even McLean, however, knows enough to put a period in once in a while. Likewise, Franzen’s style reminded me of The Mill on the Floss, which I had recently finished reading. Eliot and her nineteenth-century contemporaries were much less prone to paragraph breaks than most twentieth- and twenty-first century writers, and they even hesitated when it came to concluding their sentences. Like Franzen, they enjoyed including as much information as they could in each sentence. Yet Eliot manages to do so in a way that does not leave me gasping for air. I’m not entirely certain if it’s her word choice or just that the irony in her tone is much more to my liking. In any event, sentences like the one above were one reason I struggled through The Corrections.

The Corrections feels like it is several novels rolled—or perhaps coerced—into one. Denise is trapped in a somewhat off-key imitation of John Irving. Chip’s plight, and his ill-conceived entrance into the Lithuanian fraud business, is something I would expect to see in a Douglas Coupland novel. (In fact, The Corrections reminded me a great deal of All Families Are Psychotic. But again, the weightiness of the prose made it difficult for me to laugh at the characters; their situations are decidedly serious even if their dysfunctionality is supposed to make it seem absurd.) Alone, I might have been interested in any of these novels (and they would make for a much shorter book). I’d love to read a novel about an American college professor who gets roped into helping a Lithuanian politician run a fraud scheme. I’d even be happy with a novel about a woman who trains as a chef and then finds herself in a series of increasingly unlikely adulterous relationships as she attempts to redefine her sexual identity. I’d probably be OK with a novel about a guy who is struggling with the possibility that he is depressed, even as he attempts to balance his obligations to his parents with the expectations of his wife and children. All of these are perfectly good plots on their own—but taken together as subplots of this novel, and they are a little much. It probably says a lot about Franzen’s ability as a writer that he manages to keep the novel as structured as it is—though I have to confess, I still see no reason for providing Robin’s entire back story. She is a minor character, after all….

So I have some serious criticisms of The Corrections’ style, pacing, and even plot. But what about the characters and the themes they embody? Is what Franzen has to say about dysfunctional families worth it, or is this truly one of those meandering pieces of pretentious fiction that has so egregiously elevated itself to the title of Literature to the exclusion of all other forms of fiction? Although some people praise Franzen’s style, most of the positive reviews I have read focus on the characters and the story. They praise Franzen for creating a story they like even as he shows them characters they vehemently dislike. They praise The Corrections for portraying a family that, if not true, could be true; in this, they feel, Franzen has captured something accurate about the state of American society by focusing on the microcosm of a single family.

The Corrections, then, is not so much a Great American Novel as it is a Family Story. It’s true that the book’s characters are almost entirely unlikeable, or at least very unsympathetic. It takes guts to write a book where all the characters are like that—I will give Franzen that much. The Corrections is also moving (and somewhat depressing). Yet it’s moving in such an obvious way; I knew the whole time that Franzen was manipulating me, and I didn’t like it. I wasn’t particularly invested in any of these characters or their plights (perhaps, somewhat, because of the way Franzen would dwell upon them in paragraph-long sentences), so as their situations evolved throughout the course of the book, which very length tested my patience, I found myself drawn more toward apathy than sympathy or empathy. The Corrections is not boring, but it does not seem to inspire much more emotion than a reader is initially willing to give it. Hence, I suspect that some people were much more willing to go along with the type of story Franzen chooses to tell here—and that’s fine. Alas, he never quite manages to go beyond that point and sweep up those reluctant readers who are merely keeping pace (and keeping time).

I like to try to pretend I’m not a literature snob. I like to try to pretend that all I care about in a book is a good story, that genres are meaningless, and that authors who are experimental or who go to great lengths to show off their vast intellects are, generally, more trouble than they are worth. I like peeling back the layers of hype and praise piled upon popular books and to get at the soft nougat of story at the centre and judge it based on the quality of that alone.

Except all that pretending not to be pretentious falls apart the moment I have to talk about Umberto Eco.

I can’t quite call him my favourite author, because that is an absolute I don’t feel comfortable using. How does one necessarily compare and rank two authors whose style and range are completely different? No, Eco is not my all-time favourite, but he is unquestionably a writer of the highest calibre, a literary juggernaut with all the pretentious baggage such a label implies. Whenever I read something by Umberto Eco, I am always struck by how incredibly smart he is. His books are practically saturated with knowledge and intellect in such a way that I am immediately confronted with how little I know—and I love that feeling. More importantly, Eco doesn’t make me feel stupid as a result of this ignorance. Instead, his books display an evident love for knowledge, a joy for life and literature—a feeling so close to what I feel when I read, that it’s probably not a surprise I would feel so at home with these books.

For my fourth annual Eco read I chose The Prague Cemetery purely because it was published in English this year. I feel a little more connected by reading a book that is so recent, and it definitely affected how I interpreted the story. The Prague Cemetery seems, almost from the beginning, like it is more accessible than some of Eco’s other novels. It certainly isn’t as lengthy or as dense as The Name of the Rose or Foucault’s Pendulum. Yet there is a dark and very difficult aspect to The Prague Cemetery that almost made me hesitate with it.

This book is venomous. It opens with a misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic rant by the main character, Captain Simonini. Simonini, an expatriate Italian living in France as a forger and sometime-espionage expert begins recounting his childhood in Italy in the form of a diary. We learn the genesis of his hatred for Jews, his first involvement in forgery and espionage, and eventually, how he came to end up in Paris, France. This autobiographical narrative is as fascinating as it is repugnant. Simonini’s anti-Semitism latches onto everything he touches, spreading into his every endeavour like a virulent and pernicious weed. I found several passages difficult to read, because Eco does not cut corners and does not hold back: he creates a main character who is, in no uncertain times, unlikable and unsympathetic. And I still somehow found myself hoping he wouldn’t get killed. (He is really bad at the espionage thing.)

Then we come to chapter 5, in which the narration gets taken up by Abbé Dalla Piccola. And here’s where it gets interesting. Who is Piccola? Is he an alter-ego of Simonini’s? Or is he a person in his own right? Simonini keeps waking with gaps in his memories and reading these notes from Piccola, whose apartment is connected to his by a long, dank corridor filled with makeup and costumes. Yet as Simonini recalls his life story, there are mentions of a Piccola external to him. And so the identities of Simonini and Piccola and their relationship is ambiguous, at least at first. Ultimately Eco resolves it with uncharacteristic clarity. Until then, however, Piccola along with the Narrator complete the novel’s triumvirate of (unreliable) narrative voices. Together, these two manage to balance out the vitriolic Simonini and make the narrative more interesting.

The Prague Cemetery is intimately connected to European history, particularly that of Italy, Germany, and France, in the late nineteenth century. Those of us whose educations are sorely lacking in this area will feel somewhat lost, which is why Wikipedia is such a valuable resource. Reading about the unification of Italy and France under Napoleon III gave me a glimpse into why Eco might be so fascinated by conspiracy theory. Sensationalist rhetoric of authors like Dan Brown aside, conspiracy underpins much of European history, never far away as one reads about the intricate intrigue that brought down kings and queens, priests and pontiffs. And Eco places Simonini right in the middle of it: first embedding him with the Carbonari and Garibaldi’s red shorts, then transplanting him to France on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war.

Simonini’s experience as a forger means that his superiors expected him to produce evidence that would support the agenda of the month. Communists, socialists, or monarchists—it didn’t matter: you name them, and Simonini would fabricate something to implicate them. He goes as far as actually constructing conspiracies of his own in order to expose them to his superiors. Simonini is delightfully devious—much too devious, in fact, for his own good. He invariably incurs the displeasure of his superiors, which is why he found himself in France in the first place.

Ultimately Simonini becomes obsessed with marketing a manuscript. This manuscript finally becomes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a real fraudulent document. Set in the eponymous and eerie cemetery in Prague, the manuscript purports to disclose the plans of Jewish leaders for world domination. This is Simonini’s masterpiece, a story woven from ideas culled from fiction and non-fiction throughout the past century, created in such a way as to appear legitimate enough for those who might have a use for anti-Semitic propaganda. And though he knows it is his own fabrication, Simonini is utterly convinced of the document’s veracity in spirit. He does not doubt that a Zionist conspiracy for world domination exists and is in motion, and so he feels justified in manufacturing evidence that exposes this “truth”. Eco brilliantly takes us into the mind of a conspiracy theorist and an anti-Semite, exposing the psychology of such a person.

The document that becomes The Protocols is but one example of the larger set of conspiracies that bloom in the shadows of European politics. Through Simonini we see how various groups, from intelligence offices to the Jesuits, make use of conspiracy theories and propaganda to suit their own ends—essentially, Eco weaves conspiracies about conspiracies. And the most successful participants in these political games are those who do not have (or at least do not indulge) their personal enmities toward different groups. Simonini’s passionate hatred of Jews is a liability, because it warps his every action and provides a motivation that could sometimes be political inconvenient. Even as his Russian contacts discuss using the Jews as scapegoats because they happen to be around, Simonini’s French handler initially tells him that they aren’t interested in pursuing anti-Semitic propaganda “for now”. There's a cold-blooded, calculated, ruthless side to all this hate speech that often seems to get lost (at least in my opinion) when viewed through the lens of the world after the Second World War. For some of these people, hating Jews wasn’t personal; it was just part of the job, and only when expedient.

Although it ends about thirty years prior to the rise of the Nazis, The Prague Cemetery foreshadows the rising wave of anti-Semitism in Europe. World War II is rather like a singularity, in that sometimes it is difficult to look at the history leading up to it and not be influenced by what came after. We concentrated so much on anti-Semitism during and after World War II that we never really discussed how it was already a regular feature in Europe by the time Hitler came on the scene. So I appreciate being reminded of this fact and seeing a depiction of anti-Semitic attitudes prior to the Holocaust. The Prague Cemetery offers an interesting historical perspective in addition to all its fascinating fixations with conspiracy and religion.

Finally, we have the mystery surrounding Simonini himself. Who is he, and how is he related to the Abbé Dalla Piccola? The Prague Cemetery reminded me of The Island of the Day Before. Both feature a character who might be imaginary; in both, the narrative is the reconstruction by an unnamed Narrator of papers written by the main character. And there are echoes of Eco’s other works as well, his recurring themes running strongly throughout this book. For all that is recognizably Eco, however, The Prague Cemetery remains fresh and original.

Eco’s books are difficult. There’s no question about that. I mean, he’s a semiotician, so he is fascinated by symbols and meaning, and that’s obvious from the way his works experiment with the nature of storytelling and of fiction itself. In his postscript to The Name of the Rose he talks about how the first hundred pages were designed to “construct the reader” he needed for the rest of the novel—and yeah, that’s a little condescending. So I can see why people would be unwilling to invest the mental effort needed to digest Eco’s books, and I don’t blame them. But you don’t know what you might be missing until you try. So at the risk of destroying my illusions that I am anything other than a literature snob, I have to extol Umberto Eco as a writer. Because, for me, the feeling I get reading an Eco book is as close to the feeling I imagine I should have reading any book. I don’t know if that makes any sense … there’s just something about the way Eco writes that makes me hyper-aware of the act of reading yet does not detract from my enjoyment of the text itself. Eco’s books embody the pleasure that should be implicit in the act of reading, and I can think of no higher praise to give a writer.

I had a good time reading Consider Phlebas. Iain M. Banks manages to mix technobabble with description and dialogue to come out with fascinating societies and intense action sequences. The plot was simple, and pretty linear, but it got the characters where they needed to go and blow things up. Beneath it all, there were the questions Banks raises about what it means to be human, about how we plan to interact with machines when they are just as intelligent as—more intelligent than—we are. My elation and excitement began to dissipate after the climax, however, melting away into a small amount of confusion and the bittersweet realization that nothing that happens in this book really matters.

First, a minor spoiler that's more about Banks' universe than the plot of Consider Phlebas. When I started reading, I assumed that the Culture is the product of humans from Earth and that this book takes place in the far future. The appendix clarifies the timeline; the Idiran-Culture War during which this book takes place is actually concurrent with 14th century Earth. The Culture's origins lie in a group of humanoid species, and contacts Earth around 2100, nearly eight hundred years after the events in Consider Phlebas. Again, this has no bearing on the plot, but it's a good reminder of one way in which Banks manipulates our sense of scale.

The fact that the Idiran-Culture war is "the most significant conflict of the past fifty-thousand years" of galactic history is buried at the end of the appendix, but it's one of the most interesting and important observations in this book. Imagine considering fifty-thousand-year swathes of history. Fifty thousand years ago, humans were still stumbling out of Africa and spreading throughout the world. We really have only about, what, 6000 years of recorded civilization? By setting his work in a world where civilizations like the Culture consider a couple of millennia a mere blink of the eye, Banks immediately puts us on uncertain ground and forces us to re-evaluate our conceptions about history and how individuals and even civilizations influence the outcome of events.

Consider Phlebas is a classic "rescue mission" plot, somewhat inverted in that the protagonist is working for the stranded Mind's enemies, trying to steal it away before its comrades can retrieve it. Horza has plenty of opportunities to explain why he dislikes the Culture and has sided with the Idirans; frankly, I have to admit I'm on the Culture's side in this one. I'm ready to accept my synthetic overlords. And it's pretty clear that Banks thinks the Culture is a very stable, largely beneficial society. So throughout the book, I was hoping that somehow Horza would lose, that the Culture agent Perosteck Balveda would recover the Mind and return with it to the Culture. . . . In retrospect, I should have been more careful with my wishes.

OK, here's the spoiler. The back cover copy says "It was the fate of Horza . . . and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries . . . actually to find it, and with it their own destruction." I thought that was just some hyperbole on the part of the publisher to sucker ambivalent readers into the story.

I was wrong. Almost everyone dies toward the end, and one of the survivors later commits suicide. The events in this book aren't part of a great turning point in the Idiran-Culture war, and none of the characters have any significant impact on galactic events. Which brings me back to scale and how Banks distorts our conceptions of "a long time" to humble us.

On an individual, human level, Horza's actions are important. He's fighting the Culture out of personal convictions, and even when he has the opportunity to go off and forget his obligations to the Idirans, he gets his mission back on track and sets off to retrieve the Mind. In the process, he falls in love with Yalson and conceives a child with her . . . and when she dies, something in Horza breaks, and he pushes himself over the edge trying to take revenge. Although I didn't agree with Horza's ideology, I understood that he was struggling to find a place and keep some sense of purpose. This is no easy task, especially not in a society that exists on an interstellar level, as Banks reminds us.

Ultimately, the Idiran-Culture war concludes some time after the events of Consider Phlebas. The story's only bearing the war itself is that the rescued Mind gets installed in a Culture ship and names itself after Horza. As a result, Banks leaves us with the bitter taste of futility in our mouths at the book's end. There was no real reason for all those people to die; they did, however, and not in some blaze of glory like so many war movies. They were extinguished in Horza's failed attempt to steal something that ended up having no influence on the outcome of the war and robbed him of everything he cared about.

The only conclusion I can draw that makes any sense is that this is Banks' justification for the Culture's reliance on machines, a refutation of Horza's claim that the human-machine alliance is a hollow, stagnant one. Only Minds possess the combination of boundless intelligence and longevity. Humans in the Culture, and even the Idirans, are nearly immortal, but immortality itself does not beget wisdom. The Minds are nearly immortal as well as wise, and as such, they are the only beings in the Culture capable of understanding events on a galactic scale and reacting to them. Hence, the Culture needs its machines because humans—with a few exceptions—can't comprehend events on such a large, lengthy scale. I'd have to say that Banks is right on this one.

The less lofty aspects of Consider Phlebas aren't any less impressive. Although we don't actually see many Culture-controlled areas, we learn a good deal about the Culture, and Banks does a lot of world-building. I particularly enjoyed how he describes the Damage tournament that takes place on Vavatch Orbital prior to its destruction. Damage is the sort of game that we like to imagine existing in the post-apocalyptic type of world we often envision alongside any sort of posthumanism—the ultimately sign, perhaps, that all conventional morality has gone out the window. And Banks stays true to this idea, for the most part.

Also, I couldn't help but imagining all of the drones in Consider Phlebas as having British accents. Maybe it's the bad influence of 343 Guilty Spark from the Halo series, but there's just something about the snarky superiority of the drones, particularly Unaha-Closp, that fits with the British stereotype of the elite, upper-class gentleman with perfect diction and manners used to disguise discourtesy. Anyway, the parts where we got a glimpse at the workings of the drones' minds were a definite treat.

Where Banks is less successful is the main plot of the book itself. Sometimes the action wandered, and there were parts that seem unnecessary (and unpleasant—I'm thinking of Horza's encounter with Fwi Song). Horza's approach fluctuates from calm and calculated to insanely risk-taking, and I never quite get a handle on what makes that switch inside him flip. I continued reading because I knew eventually they would wind up on Schar's World and try to find the Mind, but Banks seldom succeeds in interesting me in what happens in between the beginning of the story and its end. I was hooked on the societies, and maybe a couple of the characters, and I wanted to know how it all turned out!

Consider Phlebas has an edge to it. Without any prior experience in Banks' Culture universe (nor, indeed, with any of Banks' other work), I didn't realize this until the end of the book. Whispering rather than shouting, Consider Phlebas still manages to describe the scale on which its grand imagination must play out. Yet it doesn't always deliver a similarly-scaled narrative, not successfully anyway. I recommend it, but with the warning that this isn't "feel-good" fiction. And although the space pirates, antimatter bombs, and sex may make this sound like an action-oriented space opera, there's something deadly serious about Consider Phlebas.

My reviews of the Culture series:
The Player of Games →