Words are inadequate

Hal Duncan, Vellum

The prologue is absolutely amazing: a fractured narrative of a university student who tracks down a book that may or not have been written by God. Highly atmospheric, chock-full of conspiracies and esoterica. Excellent.

Shame the rest of the book didn't continue in that vein. Instead we get a compelling enough retelling of a Sumerian myth and a lot of interesting stuff about names, and reality, and creatures that may be gods, or angels, or demons. Then it shifts gears into a retelling of Prometheus Bound in several different timelines, and at about that point I got fed up with having been badly misled by the prologue. Into the go-away pile.

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Walter Jon Williams, Dread Empire's Fall: The Sundering

Continuation of very good space opera; devoured in the space of about eight hours, with various breaks. Spoilers follow.

Midway through the book the two viewpoint characters, who have been smoldering at each other despite a communication screwup early in book 1, get together, and it is brilliant and incandescent and I loved it. Then they have another falling-out due to Secrets Being Kept and Not Speaking To Each Other, and spend the rest of the book blaming each other and obsessing. Which, argh. It keeps them from being in the same place for the rest of the series, and it is perfectly realistic, and if I never see this particular plot device again I will die happy. I just want to shake them both.

Apart from that frustration, still very good.

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Eden of the East

Anime. Picked this up awhile ago because the back cover copy looked promising: conspiracies, amnesia, all that good stuff. Two episodes in and it is a romance between two irritating people with random conspiracy stuff thrown in at times. Based on the Wikipedia summary it will continue to irritate me for another nine episodes as the conspiracy stuff gets more random. Bah. Into the go-away pile.

Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death

I read Okorafor's Zahra the Windseeker a few months ago and thought it was a deeply original and imaginative YA / middle-grade novel, with a plot that didn't hold up at all. Who Fears Death is her first adult book. It maintains the originality and tones down the imagination a bit, and has a plot that hangs together pretty well too. It's that peculiar breed of fantasy that's set on what might be a future Earth, with magic and advanced tech coexisting more or less peacefully.

It's also about rape, and race, and rage, and growing up and learning who you are. I am really not sure what else to say about this: it's like nothing else I've read. Recommended. (It's also got a callback to Zahra the Windseeker, for good measure.)

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Nancy Kress, Steal Across the Sky

Near-future SF. In the first half aliens arrive and tell us that ten thousand years ago they picked up some number of humans and dropped them on other planets as an experiment. Now they want to atone for experimenting on us, so they take a handful of human visitors to the other planets and drop them there to figure out what it is the aliens are atoning for. This is kind of a bombshell revelation, and the second half of the book is humanity dealing with that revelation.

Solid characters; fascinating alien cultures; questionable science; shaky post-revelation plot. Interesting, but more interesting than good.

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Emma Bull, Falcon

Falcon reads like two short books that happen to have been published under the same cover.

The first book follows Dominic 'Niki' Glyndwyr-Jones, wastrel youngest son of the ruling dynasty on a colony founded by the Welsh, as his planet's economy collapses and turns into a police state. Niki develops a social conscience, starts sneaking out at night to help the resistance, uncovers a far-reaching plot to destabilise his planet's government, and barely escapes offworld with his life.

The second book picks up some years later. It's a sequel to the first so far as it has some of the same characters and explains a few of the mysteries left behind in the wake of Niki's flight. Niki Falcon is now an experimental pilot, the last of his program. He takes on a contract to a planet that's in some jeopardy, and political hijinks ensue. Ultimately he unravels the plot and does a bit of growing up.

The trouble with these books is that they're both so thin. There's just enough worldbuilding and secondary character development to carry the story, but not (quite) enough for the emotional payoff. I wanted more: more of Niki's relations with his family, more of what the resistance is doing, maybe more of the other gestalt pilots (though, maybe not). There are bits that I remember as being deeply affecting: Spin's ship, Laura's last hurrah. Most of that effect is from memory, and from how it resonates for the rest of the book. It deserves more impact in the moment.

Which is not to say that Falcon is a bad book: far from it. I think I read it because I didn't want to reread Growing Up Weightless yet again, and it served well enough. But I wanted it to be so much more.

Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

A very modern novel, and very strange throughout. E.g.: the narrator, who for much of the book cannot recall his own name, spends a great deal of time in conversation with his soul, who has no name; "For convenience I called him Joe." Filled with bicycles, questionable metaphysics, and footnotes and asides about the nonexistent works of a fictitious philosopher named De Selby. It doesn't say a whole lot, I think, but the way it says it is at least entertaining. I could hear O'Brien's Irish brogue in my head the entire time I was reading the book. I think I would have loved it to death had I the good fortune to encounter it in high school.

Saladin Ahmed, Throne of the Crescent Moon

Fantasy derived from Arabic cultures rather than European, featuring an old wizard and his young paladin sidekick. Light and fun. It reminded me a great deal of the Master Li & Number Ten Ox books, and of Lloyd Alexander's The First Two Lives of Lukas-Kasha. If you're in the market for a popcorn fantasy novel you could do a lot worse; if you're looking for something substantive, this is unlikely to do the trick. Unfortunately I'm mostly looking for substance in my fiction these days. I get all the fluff I need from television. Speaking of which...

Ronald D. Moore (dev.), Battlestar Galactica: Season 1

Military SF concerned with how the military system can coexist with the civilians it's there to protect. Individual episodes range from "okay" to "pretty good;" nothing's blown me away yet, and the things that I've objected to aren't so problematic that I'll stop watching. The humans and the episode-to-episode plots are good. Big problems that I can foresee include 1) the religio-mysticism is currently getting on my third-to-last nerve and seems to be growing more prevalent, and 2) I cannot see any rhyme or reason to the Cylons' actions. (As a friend said, "There are many copies, and they have a plan... but the writers don't.")

Ralph Fiennes (dir.), Coriolanus

( Imagine Ian McKellen's Richard III with no sense of humor. )

Links go to trailers:

• In Bruges: a heartwarming Christmas tale of two UK hitmen laying low in a scenic Belgian town after a hit gone wrong. Only for "heartwarming" read "dark and thoughtful and sometimes quite funny and always, always, dark." I enjoyed it, I think; would watch again but not for another year or two. (See also: F***ing Bruges, a 90-second clip of all the swearing in the movie.)
  
• Young Adult: a character study of the kind of woman who was popular in high school and never had to learn how to be an adult. Also funny but that's not really the point. I've enjoyed all of Jason Reitman's other films (Thank You For Smoking, Juno, and the sublime Up In The Air) so I figured, why not? Well done and discomforting and I'm not sure I'd see it again. (I didn't so much care for Juno either, which makes me think I just don't get on with Diablo Cody's scripts.)
  
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: a slow-moving Cold War espionage thriller starring an almost unrecognizable Gary Oldman. I loved it but I'm a sucker for twisty plots and watching people put pieces together, and this had those in spades.
  
• The Artist: there's really no point in making a black-and-white silent movie in 2011 unless it a) is about late-twenties and early-thirties Hollywood and b) uses its lack of sound as commentary. The Artist does both, quite well. I'm glad I saw it, and even more glad I saw it in a theatre: it seems the kind of thing that's a little pointless to watch in the privacy of one's home.

In front of those I got a bunch of forgettable trailers, plus one for Ralph Fiennes's modern-day Coriolanus which I will probably see, and one for a Margaret Thatcher biopic to which I said, out loud, "You have got to be kidding me." I really don't feel like I'm missing anything by not indulging in more pop culture, especially not at $13 a pop for a matinee.

Over Xmas I also read all of Azzarello & Risso's 100 Bullets because I never did get around to finishing it, and then for good measure reread Ennis & Dillon's Asshole Irish Vampire Preacher, neither of which moved me as much as I'd hoped. Cassidy's "Ye're a wanker, aren't ye?" is still the greatest thing one can say to a goth, and 100 Bullets has its own crowning moments of cool ("You can't feel numb. You can only be numb." Or, "...they'll tell you about some noble bullshit that killed her." "How do you know?" "I'm noble bullshit.") but ... I dunno. The glimmers of interesting depth are drowned in gore and patriarchial crap.

The interesting thing about the end of Preacher is that at the end of it... nothing's changed. Tulip and Jesse are back together, and Cassidy's out doing whatever Cassidy does. Sure, the Grail's broken, and God's been shot, but honestly? None of that affects the characters at all. We're /told/ that Jesse and Cassidy have grown up some but we don't actually see it.

I seem to be less impressed with comics than I used to be. I'm almost afraid to reread Sandman, it's been so long.

( Among Others )

Oh, and the potential sequel has a title. Because what else could the sequel to Among Others possibly be called?