Words are inadequate

John M. Ford, Growing Up Weightless

Growing Up Weightless is a damnably opaque book, even for Ford. On the surface it's the story of Matt, a kid on a Lunar colony who wants to go to space; he and his role-playing friends sneak off for a week-long train trip, and at the end of it he unexpectedly, almost accidentally, achieves his desire. And behind and underneath that... I have read the book maybe a half dozen times now and I am not sure I could explain the "plot," which I think revolves around Luna's push for self-sufficiency and the Vaccuum Corporation of Earth's attempts to exert control. (I believe that at one point Mike said something like "No one in Weightless knows all of what's going on. At the end of the book Albin constructs a narrative of events, that's plausible from his perspective.")

And the last twenty pages still make me cry every damned time. I suspect that's as simple as seeing Matt get the freedom he so badly wants, and how that affects his (supportive but hurt) family and (wildly varied) friends. It's a Me Thing, is I guess what I'm saying.

I mentally file Weightless as a companion piece with The Last Hot Time, which is only right in that they're both about growing up (different angles on it, though). I think it's really that they both invoke Orwell at the end, almost in passing: "The object of power is power, and the object of torture is torture."

I don't love Growing Up Weightless. I like the well-thought-out worldbuilding (except for the overly compressed timescale), I like the depictions of role-playing and of one-sixth-gravity theatre. I'm happy to spend time with the characters, and to keep trying to tease out the "plot." But I reread Weightless for catharsis. It's a personal book for me, and I expect most people to say "huh" or "that was neat" and be done with it. I'm okay with that.

The Tor (and Ace) Doubles are a great idea. They're a way for longer short stories (~100pp) to find an audience, you get two books for the price of one cheap paperback, and they've got that neat flip-effect going on. (Plus, two covers! Don't like one? Store it so you see the other!) Of course these days the Reading Public wants six-hundred-page bricks for their seven bucks, so there's no real market anymore. But still.

John M. Ford, Fugue State

This book is made of confusion.

It apparently began life as a short story, and was expanded for publication here. Joel Rosenberg, on hearing this, said "Oh good, you're clearing up some of the ambiguities, then?" and JMF replied "No; adding new ones."

There are three or four, or maybe five (six?) stories going on, all with what are probably the same characters and concerning similar events. There are weirdnesses with memory, and what might be as full an explanation as possible at the end.

It is amazing and almost comprehensible. Even the title is a multilayered thing of beauty, in ways that aren't wholly clear until you've come out the other side and have some space for reflection.

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Gene Wolfe, The Death of Dr. Island

I've read this before, in The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories And Other Stories (yes). Unlike Fugue State, the only ambiguities are in the rather clever title. That doesn't make it any less brilliant, though. The titular doctor is a therapist with ultimate control over his environment (somewhere in the asteroid belt, I think). He has three patients, whom he helps to varying degrees.

Conceit: brilliant. Plot: quite good. Characters: of the four, two are fully realised, and two are drawn as they are mostly to support the theme. Which theme is my main problem with the book: the willingness of Dr. Island to play God with his patients unsettles me quite a bit. On the other hand, without that arrogance there'd be no book at all, and in the context of the book his methods are at least fifty percent effective.

John M. Ford, From the End of the Twentieth Century

Of /course/ it's brilliant, of /course/ you should find a copy and read it. Pieces that made a serious impact include:

• "A Little Scene To Monarchize," in which various Elizabethan playwrights perform poems and songs in the guise of monarchs from the Wars of the Roses. Richard III's "A Usurper's Lot Is Not A Happy One" may be the best of the bunch but it's a close thing.
  
• "All Our Propagation: A Play for Instruments," which is what you get when you write about Voyager as though you're writing Dylan Thomas's "Under Milk Wood." The language is of course a bit difficult, but bits of it delighted me roughly every other line. "Forgot me already, did you? Well. Hugs parallel to all my prosy robots. Remember me, forget death."
  
• "The Lost Dialogue," alternating speeches by Daedalus the artificer and his presumed-lost son, "Lefty." Made me catch my breath a few times.

And so many more . . . the title piece is a meditation on trains, theatre, and the role of art; its companion, "To the Tsiolkovsky Station," goes into great (perhaps excruciating) detail on the lunar rail system in Growing Up Weightless. There's a bit about the space shuttle, a few Liavek and Alternities stories, the eminently creepy "Preflash" ("Regret dies last. But everything dies") . . . I'm happy to have it.

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Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things

I dunno. Nothing hit me as hard as the pieces from Smoke and Mirrors. It may be that I'd seen some of the strongest pieces elsewhere ("Study in Emerald," "Monarch of the Glen," "The Problem of Susan"), or maybe just that I've moved beyond. "October in the Chair" was good and atmospheric, as was "Miss Finch." Mostly they just felt lighter than I'd wanted. Nothing as impressive as "The Goldfish Pool" or "Murder Mysteries," or even "Chivalry." Oh well. Still good stuff, but not amazingly so.

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Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

An eight-story collection with three Nebulas and a Hugo (and a withdrawn Hugo nomination as well). So, yeah, pretty much everything in here is brilliant. The first story concerns the building of the Tower of Babel, in what looks an awful lot like a Ptolemaic universe. There's also one that does /very/ interesting things with golems and the concept of sperm as tiny people brought to life and sentience by a womb, one that explores what happens if arithmetic is proven demonstrably false, and a beautiful exploration of religion in a world where "faith" isn't an issue. Having read this, I understand why, as John Scalzi put it, "every SF/F writer gets all hushed and respectful speaking Ted Chiang's name." The guy is /good/, in the same way that water is damp.

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Ursula K. Le Guin, Searoad

A collection of stories about a small village on the Oregon coast. Reading it I was constantly struck by a sense of unrelenting bleakness. I could practically see the cloud-dark sky over the beach, the wind whipping the reeds, the harsh chill of the breakers. The people have an underlying despair that they don't even recognise. They can see the need to do something different but they can't possibly change anything about their lives. The last piece, a long one, follows several generations of women from the last 1800s through about 1973, and is the least bleak of them: there's still not much hope but the people are cheerier about it. In general this was a difficult book to read. Very good, wonderfully human characters, but difficult. Or maybe I just should have picked up something else while waiting for Granddad.

Christopher Priest, The Prestige

A novel about magic, illusion, identity, and duality. Two (four?) magicians, one trick done two ways, one woman between them.

There's a framing story set in the late twentieth century, but the main action takes place in period documents: first, in a memoir of one magician, and then in the diary of a second. Two performers in the late nineteenth century, forced by bad luck to become vicious rivals and, ultimately, to instigate each other's downfall.

The book was interesting and well-written until the first . . . interruption, I suppose, in Alfred's narrative. (Roughly page 50 of 300.) At that point it became downright compelling. Every few pages I would ask myself "What the devil is going on?" oblivious to the fact that the answer was staring me in the face all the time.

I'm still not sure what to make of the ending, or of the "twin." I suppose I'll have to reread the book in a year or so and try again. Darn.

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Tim Powers, Three Days to Never

In a lot of ways this feels like a pale imitation of _Declare_, Powers's previous spy novel. There are several decent action scenes (though nothing as good as the opening clusterf*** of _Declare_), and the espionage code games now strike me as amusing, or sometimes irritating, rather than "Here's a list" brilliant. The scale is smaller, too: the Mossad operatives are nearly all you see of their operation, rather than the host of MI6 folk.

The magic and such have a more scientific background than is usual in his works (which makes sense, given that Einstein is one of the major background characters). But there are several very nifty supernatural gimmicks: Oren Lepidopt's curse (the sensation of "I'll never do this again before I die" after certain experiences, like hearing a phone ring) adds a degree of tension to color everything he does. And blind Charlotte's ability to see out of other people's eyes starts off just being a neat trick, but then Powers handles the ramifications of it so very well . . . reading, for instance, or just spending time around people when you don't want to give it away.

Lepidopt and the elder Marrity are among his best characters to date; twelve-year-old Daphne is good as well but a bit too mature for twelve. Oddly for a Powers book, it's the plot that let me down. Maybe it's too tightly focused (one family, three days). Maybe it's that I just didn't care about most of the characters. I dunno. This one didn't grab me, not like _Declare_ or _Last Call_ or _Anubis Gates_.

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John M. Ford, The Last Hot Time

This is the second time I've read _Hot Time_ and I feel like I understand it only slightly better this time through. It's a fast read, and a wonderful tale of modern fantasy (elves on motorcycles and all that), made believable by a character who's an outsider and a sometimes bewildering lack of "As you know, Bob"ism. The action flies by so quickly that if you blink you'll miss the nuclear explosion that went off in Miami, or why Cloudhunter Who Keeps His Sisters' Counsel wanted to go to the museum . . . and what, precisely, has been going on with magic anyway.

I'm babbling. I'm overloaded. This book has all the trappings of a bog-standard urban fantasy set in what looks like Prohibition Chicago, but under the surface there is so much /more/.

Read this. It'll take you a day or two at most, and is well worth the investment.