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viktor_haagFInished two SF books on the weekend, both on the rather popular (populist) end of SF: Sawyer's "Wake" and Scalzi's "The Ghost Brigades". They were both reasonably quick reads, and reasonably decent stories, but not really remarkable much.
Wake: A young blind girl with a specific sort of blindness submits herself to an experimental procedure to restore her sight. It works, in a way. It also has unintended consequences -- it contributes to the birth of something new. Sawyer's book is colloquial, friendly, and easy to read, but it is not without it's flaws. The dialog seems flat in spots, not quite ringing true. Much of the setting seems also in the same mode: there's little reason to be able to spot flaws with the setting if you don't live in Waterloo, Ontario (home of the Perimeter Institute), except by implication in the technique that Sawyer employs to achieve verisimilitude. He throws around brands and proper nouns like rice at a wedding.
Sometimes this rings false for those who know. Slightly more often than sometimes, it can be a bit annoying, in the same way that nobody in the Star Trek universe eats chocolate pudding: they always eat Rigelian Chocolate Pudding™. Does the name-dropping help to seat the narrative firmly in a time and a place? Maybe -- but it extends the same kind of feeling that you get when you see product placement in movies: it has an odd unexpected wrenching effect on the viewer. The narrative is not the real world, nor does the observer, want it to be, fundamentally. In the long run, the product placement intrudes on the narrative: it doesn't belong there, because the story told is not happening in the observer's frame of reference. With speculative fiction that pretends to take place fifteen minutes from tomorrow this is a tricky thing to negotiate, but Sawyer doesn't do it effectively.
The other thing that "Wake" suffers from is first-book-ness. In the end it rather feels like it's all setup and no payoff. It feels like it ought to be the first part in a single volume. Is there conflict of some sort going on? Not really: there's a problem to be solved (the girl's sight and figuring out how it works and what it's implications are); there's a mystery to be plumbed (what exactly is to be made of the frequent interjections in the narrative that document the becoming of something), but there's not really much of import that comes away from this book that's self contained. The protagonist is changed, profoundly. But it still feels a bit like a canon episode of a prime-time thriller series: at the end there's more questioning expectation on the table than resolution.
"Wake" is a pleasant enough read: it's about a B. Don't expect fireworks and you won't be disappointed. Sawyer is not, in my opinion, Canada's strongest SF author (and, really, I don't read all that much Canadian SF, but I feel if you want stronger books with stronger writing and stronger themes, you be better advised to turn to Robert Charles Wilson), but "Wake" is a lot better than an example of his earlier work that I had read, and is a pretty solid beach book, I guess.
The Ghost Brigades: Another quick read after John Scalzi's "Old Man's War", set in the same setting, with some familiar characters. This book answers some of the questions about what are, exactly, the Special Forces soldiers in Scalzi's CDF universe. It reveals a bit more of the real-politik of the setting. It has just as many smoothly written moments as "Old Man's War": humorous training scenes that don't quite over-stay their welcome; interesting and reasonably clever solutions to puzzles; clues dropped for the reader that retain their irony; competently depicted action (brutal and otherwise).
On the other hand, it's somehow not nearly as connectable as "Old Man's War". I put down this one and had to go back to it and pick it up several times in order to finish it. I suspect that the reason why is that, unlike "Old Man's War", most of the characters in "Ghost Brigades" are pretty alien and thus hard to empathize with. John Perry and his friends in "Old Man's War" are, quintessentially, us: we learn about the CDF setting pretty much at their pace, and this revelation has interest in and of itself.
"Ghost Brigades" is not a weak retread sequel: Scalzi at least (reasonably skilfully) spares us from that. But neither does it have the impact or empathy of the former. It stands well on its own two feet, and it works well enough that it does lead me to think I'll probably buy and read the next one from this setting ("The Last Colony"), but mostly because it feels like easy-to-consume meat-and-potatoes SF. It's a solid B+, and if you like early-Imperial mil-tinged SF in the mode of Heinlein, Haldeman, and at a stretch, Asimov, then you might like these books by Scalzi. As with the Sawyer, it presents a pleasant beach read that passes quickly, inoffensively, somewhat heartily.
Don't approach it with out-sized expectations, and you won't be disappointed: sometimes a good corned-beef on rye with a frosty pilsner on the side is in fact what you really want.
Wake: A young blind girl with a specific sort of blindness submits herself to an experimental procedure to restore her sight. It works, in a way. It also has unintended consequences -- it contributes to the birth of something new. Sawyer's book is colloquial, friendly, and easy to read, but it is not without it's flaws. The dialog seems flat in spots, not quite ringing true. Much of the setting seems also in the same mode: there's little reason to be able to spot flaws with the setting if you don't live in Waterloo, Ontario (home of the Perimeter Institute), except by implication in the technique that Sawyer employs to achieve verisimilitude. He throws around brands and proper nouns like rice at a wedding.
Sometimes this rings false for those who know. Slightly more often than sometimes, it can be a bit annoying, in the same way that nobody in the Star Trek universe eats chocolate pudding: they always eat Rigelian Chocolate Pudding™. Does the name-dropping help to seat the narrative firmly in a time and a place? Maybe -- but it extends the same kind of feeling that you get when you see product placement in movies: it has an odd unexpected wrenching effect on the viewer. The narrative is not the real world, nor does the observer, want it to be, fundamentally. In the long run, the product placement intrudes on the narrative: it doesn't belong there, because the story told is not happening in the observer's frame of reference. With speculative fiction that pretends to take place fifteen minutes from tomorrow this is a tricky thing to negotiate, but Sawyer doesn't do it effectively.
The other thing that "Wake" suffers from is first-book-ness. In the end it rather feels like it's all setup and no payoff. It feels like it ought to be the first part in a single volume. Is there conflict of some sort going on? Not really: there's a problem to be solved (the girl's sight and figuring out how it works and what it's implications are); there's a mystery to be plumbed (what exactly is to be made of the frequent interjections in the narrative that document the becoming of something), but there's not really much of import that comes away from this book that's self contained. The protagonist is changed, profoundly. But it still feels a bit like a canon episode of a prime-time thriller series: at the end there's more questioning expectation on the table than resolution.
"Wake" is a pleasant enough read: it's about a B. Don't expect fireworks and you won't be disappointed. Sawyer is not, in my opinion, Canada's strongest SF author (and, really, I don't read all that much Canadian SF, but I feel if you want stronger books with stronger writing and stronger themes, you be better advised to turn to Robert Charles Wilson), but "Wake" is a lot better than an example of his earlier work that I had read, and is a pretty solid beach book, I guess.
The Ghost Brigades: Another quick read after John Scalzi's "Old Man's War", set in the same setting, with some familiar characters. This book answers some of the questions about what are, exactly, the Special Forces soldiers in Scalzi's CDF universe. It reveals a bit more of the real-politik of the setting. It has just as many smoothly written moments as "Old Man's War": humorous training scenes that don't quite over-stay their welcome; interesting and reasonably clever solutions to puzzles; clues dropped for the reader that retain their irony; competently depicted action (brutal and otherwise).
On the other hand, it's somehow not nearly as connectable as "Old Man's War". I put down this one and had to go back to it and pick it up several times in order to finish it. I suspect that the reason why is that, unlike "Old Man's War", most of the characters in "Ghost Brigades" are pretty alien and thus hard to empathize with. John Perry and his friends in "Old Man's War" are, quintessentially, us: we learn about the CDF setting pretty much at their pace, and this revelation has interest in and of itself.
"Ghost Brigades" is not a weak retread sequel: Scalzi at least (reasonably skilfully) spares us from that. But neither does it have the impact or empathy of the former. It stands well on its own two feet, and it works well enough that it does lead me to think I'll probably buy and read the next one from this setting ("The Last Colony"), but mostly because it feels like easy-to-consume meat-and-potatoes SF. It's a solid B+, and if you like early-Imperial mil-tinged SF in the mode of Heinlein, Haldeman, and at a stretch, Asimov, then you might like these books by Scalzi. As with the Sawyer, it presents a pleasant beach read that passes quickly, inoffensively, somewhat heartily.
Don't approach it with out-sized expectations, and you won't be disappointed: sometimes a good corned-beef on rye with a frosty pilsner on the side is in fact what you really want.
