Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

From The Week of July 23, 2012
Though history flatters the kings and warlords, emperors and conquerers, by remembering their names and standing in awe of their deeds, it has forgotten those men who ensured that these luminaries rose to their positions of prominence. History has forgotten the creatures who carried out their wills, brought about their plans and softened their rages. It has forgotten the servants who made sure that the pettiness of tyrants did not destroy the world they knew. For imagine, for a moment, the mind of a king, raised from birth to rule. Would he truly be fair and wise? Or would all his learning merely fall upon a mind already flush with entitlement and power, self-importance and majesty? Where is there any chance to experience that special kind of humility that brings out the best of us? There is none. And so wisdom and moderation must come from elsewhere. And this is a truth winningly captured by Hilary Mantel in this worthy second chapter in the life of a king's minder.

Few who knew Thomas Cromwell as a youth would have ever imagined that he would someday be the second most powerful man in the infamous reign of Henry VIII. Having spent his youth being knocked about by his father, only to fetch up in Italy with only a sharp mind to keep him above water, he would, with good fortune and keen ambition, rise in status and power until, with the death of Cardinal Wolsey, that staunch catholic who was executed on the orders of his king for failing to expeditiously arrange the monarch's divorce from Katherine of Aragon, become the private secretary to the king of England. From this most powerful desk, Cromwell was viewed as the voice of the king, acting with the full measure of his authority, constrained only by the knowledge that,t o overstep himself and displease his monarch, would bring an end as swift as his rise.

Having masterminded the creation of the Anglican church and the taking of the monasteries, Cromwell has cemented himself in the king's inner circle. But as the final years of the king's marriage to Anne Boleyn unfold, his position becomes tenuous. For as the king's inability to beget a male heir upon Anne Boleyn eats away at him, the fortunes of everyone around him are put in flux. Henry must have an heir, for himself and for the realm. And if Anne Boleyn, for all her legendary powers of beguilement, cannot deliver that to him, then someone else must. As fortunes at court shift and churn, Cromwell plays the great game with but three goals in mind, to preserve the reputation of the king, the health of the realm and the fortunes of his son Gregory, the only relation to whom he can bequeath all that he has made. Will his star be dragged down by Anne Boleyn as she has promised him, or will he survive this latest twist in the life of a king?

A worthy, if less luminous, successor to Wolf Hall, Bring Up The Bodies is excellent historical fiction. Ms. Mantel, one of the genre's most decorated figures, rejects the cheap romanticism espoused by many in the field, attempting, instead, to construct a realistic version of the events of Anne Boleyn's fall, as they might have transpired, while infusing the characters in her drama with intelligence, menace and selfishness. For it is this last quality that is so often missing in such chronicles, a substantial oversight given that most humans, then and now, are masters in its practice. Consequently, her players transcend their era to be universally recognizable as people who, though they've been stamped by their time, nonetheless harbor the same flaws of character that we do. This realism does wonders for the relatability of her work.

More than the boldness of portraying Henry as something of a child, and the sharpness of her characterization of Anne Boleyn as a cunning if limited queen, Ms. Mantel's star is unquestionably Cromwell. He has evolved splendidly across this duology, but not in the manner of most characters. For his was not a descent from innocence into cynicism and servitude. Instead, Cromwell becomes what most men must when placed in a precarious position of power and compelled, from that perch, to do the hard things. He surrenders as much of himself as he can to both the king and necessity, while maintaining, for himself, the very core of his being around which he can put up armor against the harshness of his duties. In this way, he does what he must do while preserving some measure of decency for himself, some love for Gregory and his dead wife and children, and some honor for England which he unswervingly serves. It is an exquisite portrait o a man looking necessity in the eye and making with a bargain whose sacrifice is an emotionally fulfilling life but whose gain is the capacity to do what must be done.

Bring Up The Bodies lacks the punch of Wolf Hall, but none of its the tone or class. Anyone who enjoyed the Man-booker-winning predecessor to this novel will certainly enjoy it as well, all while lamenting the end of a rewarding journey between author and character. (4/5 Stars)

Metatropolis by John Scalzi Et Al

From The Week of July 23, 2012Though there remains much argument over the extent of the resource crisis and the degree to which it will impact our lives, there can be no doubt that human civilization is not resource neutral. Not only do we rarely recycle the raw materials we dig out of the ground and refine into useful products, we lack the requisite knowledge to reduce many of those finished products back to their constituent elements for re-use. If we lived on a planet of infinite resources, or had some feasible means of extracting them from elsewhere and bringing them to Earth, this would not be a problem. But such a utopia is precisely that, a fantasy with which reality does not truck. We do live on a planet with finite resources and we don't know how to replenish them from elsewhere. Thus, eventually, we will run out of stuff.

What will happen to our civilization when we fall off the resource cliff? When a lack of supply drives the prices into the stratosphere, how will the billions of demanding humans respond? Will they riot, feverishly snatching what little remains and hording that surplus as currency? Or will they approach the problem rationally by shifting to a resource-neutral economy that will stabilize prices and create a lasting blueprint for prosperity on a planet sucked dry? These are the questions that Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, John Scalzi and Karl Schroeder grapple with in this collection of short stories on the nature of the cities of the near future. They fascinate and terrify.

Thirty years from now, the world is unrecognizable by those of us alive today. Where we live and thrive in sprawling cities, where we enjoy unmetered water and cheap electricity, where we think nothing of driving gasoline-power cars and shrug at the news of oil spills, those who descend from us will either dismiss such legends as fantasies, loose talk around warm fires, or they will rage, knowing that our profligacy has contributed to their current state. For in the years between now and then, a series of crises, from the political to the economic, from the climate to the materialistic, will ravage civilization, angering populations, weakening governments, and gnawing away at the social ties that bind us all. Wars will spark up from these many, potent frictions, and the fallout from such conflicts will be the death knell for the nation state, replacing it with chaos, at first. But slowly, gradually, communities will reform, organizing around different principles, different necessities.

In this changed world, the hungry and the hopeless strive for the basics of food and shelter. In Detroit, they bounce for bars and turk for lawyers, courier messages and fight for the future of their children, all while laboring in the heart of a burnt out city. In New St. Louis, they work for co-opts and fill out militias, all in the hopes of creating and maintaining a totally self-sufficient city capable of growing its own food and engineering its own products. In Cascadia, that mountainous corridor between Vancouver and Seattle, they cook and they clean, philosophize and stand guard, trying to imagine and ignite a new society that, even if it takes generations to actualize, will re-shape the world into something better. The world over, new frontiers are being explored from the digital to the oceanic, the new bobbing up to try to fill the vacuum left by the old. And yet, many powerful remnants of the old world remain, military units and corporate boards both of which are more than willing to ruthlessly strongarm this new world into conforming to their vision of the future.

A collaboration between five of science fiction's talented voices, Metatropolis is an engrossing, if fatalistic, glimpse of an increasingly probable future. Having begun from the premise that life cannot continue as it has, the reckoning they envision is devastating, leaving behind only the bones of the world we know and replacing it with a grimmer, sleeker version that, though it packs a mean bite, augurs some promise for the future. After all, humans, when not pressed by necessity, are highly resistant to change and to the voices that warn of its coming. But when necessity does come, and the choices are evolve or die, the explosive powers of change are unleashed and trained upon re-imagining a stagnated world. The result, as envisioned by these authors, is as mysterious as it is sheened in hope.

For all its intrigue and its consistency of vision, it must be stressed that this is but one possible outcome. The authors don't appear to give much credence to the equally plausible notion that the advancement of technology will outstrip the depletion of resources, creating machines capable of solving the resource problem for us. In such a case, civilization will still have to adapt, but with far less turmoil. This notion is eschewed for the darker, more cynical view, that humans are foolish when not compelled by circumstance to change. This is understandable -- this is fiction after all --, but it is perhaps less than honest. For there is, playing out all around us, a race against time, to see whether or not technology can reach a critical threshold before the humans propelling it burn themselves out. Should that threshold be reached, we will find these problems negligible when viewed in the context of what we can do with our new machines.

Interesting work, but its negativity is strongly suggestive of paranoia and pessimism more than reality. (3/5 Stars)

Inside The Pakistan Army by Carey Schofield

From The Week of July 23, 2012
Though at times prone to bureaucratic gridlock and systematic corruption, political influence and misguided decision making, institutions remain powerful beacons of truth and stability to countless humans. For however problematic they can be, they remain the closest tangible manifestation of order we have, symbols of unity that promise us a place to belong and a mission to adopt. There is something deeply nourishing about belonging to a whole greater than oneself, a superstructure of which one can be proud. And yet, these virtues are, to some degree, illusions, myths enshrined by the extent to which the institution's members want to believe them and the institution's leaders find them useful. And though myths can be sometimes made reality, they do, at other times, paper over cracks in the foundation that will eventually bring the institution down. Ms. Schofield's work is a vivid demonstration of this truth.

Hampered by the vicissitudes of history and troubled by an unstable democracy, Pakistan is a nation laboring to tread water in the 21st century. Religious extremism, volatile borders and entrenched corruption eat away at the country's potential, grievous sins made worse by a legendarily tempestuous climate capable, from time to time, of producing widespread disasters that claim thousands of lives. Add into the mix a handful of humiliating territorial defeats which remain thorns in the paws of the people and there is little room left for precious prosperity.

But however much the country is burdened by its history and its circumstances, the Pakistan army is immune to such shortcomings. A rare, beneficial legacy of the British Empire, its regimented world offers hope to all Pakistanis. For regardless of religious affiliation or class background, one can find companionship and advancement in this most honorable body. For here, a man advances on his own merits, on the back of his conduct and his talent, his loyalty and his bravery. Given that such avenues to success are, to say the least, exceedingly broken in every other aspect of Pakistani society, it's no wonder that the army has come to be invested with the honor of the country, a symbol of a better tomorrow that the people can only imagine.

From its structures to its campaigns, from its politics to its position in society, Ms. Schofield, a British journalist, having embedded herself with one of the most vital forces in the War on Terror, narrates the often troubled history of the Pakistan Army. This 200-plus page expose describes her time with the army's grunts and its leadership, revealing her admiration for it's many honorable men while expressing her concerns over its capacity to bear the great burden it's been forced to shoulder. For few institutions have the necessary vision and capacity to hold together a country threatening to split apart at the seams, least of all one that has been riddled with accusations, from both the West and from within Pakistan, that its intelligence arm (ISI) has been cooperating with those same terrorists so eagerly sought after by the United States.

Ms. Schofield makes few bones of her positivity towards the army. She respects its traditions and admires the degree to which it inspires men to lead good lives. However, her account fails to infect her readers with her enthusiasm. For while every institution is filled out with men and women who believe in the mission, who adopt wholeheartedly the honorable code of conduct it espouses, this promise is misleading. For citizens should not have to adopt an institution's values in order to feel as though they are leading productive lives. These values should be pervasive at every level of society. After all, this is the only signal we have to determine the social health of the nation. That Pakistan's young men feel such a powerful need to take on the honorable shroud of the army is a condemnation of Pakistani society. Rather than reassure us of the army's capacity, it compels us to understand the truth, that it is the only properly functioning institution of consequence in that country. And for that institution to be the military, a machine designed to kill and destroy, is both sobering and depressing.

Inside The Pakistan Army is as thorough as it is engaging, giving readers an inside glimpse of the challenges of fighting terrorism and maintaining a semblance of cohesion in a wounded nation, but it is difficult to imagine a happy ending here. For all the honor in the world can't erase the purpose of an army, and that is not to be honorable. It is to kill. Challenging work... (3/5 Stars)

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

From The Week of July 23, 2012
Progress is a mysterious stew. For though we have some idea of the proper ingredients that contribute to its ignition -- good science, staunch capitalism, and steely determination to name but a few --, we lack the knowledge of how to mix these virtues together to create the special sauce that drives civilization onward. Instead, we throw into the pot those virtues we think best, set the concoction on high and hope for success, knowing that a great deal rides on our creation. For there are few powers in the world more transformative than progress which, though it lurches alarmingly from advancement to advancement, nonetheless, when galvanized, possesses the power to thrust back the gloom of the unknown and light the world with an understanding that betters us all. This is extensively demonstrated in Mr. Holmes' captivating biography of one of humanity's most important scientific awakenings. It is a performance few of its witnesses will soon forget.

However far we advance as a species, 18th century England will be remembered as a nexus point in human history. For on that particularly chilly island, at that particularly tempestuous time, social and scientific changes were afoot that would go on to re-shape the world. Out of England's schools and coffee shops, battlefields and farmfields, poured poets and revolutionaries, heros and innovators who, collectively, would come to be identified as representing the Romantic era. Cresting on the waves of fortune, challenged by only the power of Napoleonic France, these visionaries were mapping the world and pleading for the downtrodden, working on theories of science and evolution and harnessing the explosive potential of fossil fuels. They were giving form to revolutions in industry, science and thought that within 100 years, would see the world utterly remade.

Representing the two halves of this Romantic period were two scientists whose discoveries would fire minds and inquiries for decades to come. William Herschel, German by birth, was an astronomer who, after coming to england in the late 1700s, would go onto refine and reimagine the study of stars through the creation of new telescopes powerful enough to find, in the heavens, secrets stretching back to the dawn of time. Though he would eventually be remembered as the discoverer of Uranus, then thought to be the seventh planet in the solar system, his pioneering work in the field of astronomy directly lead to the challenging of dogmas revealed, by his work, to be frauds.

Humphrey Davy, meanwhile, was the embodiment of the Romantic era. A chemist by training, he invented the Davy lamp, discovered many elements on the Periodic Table, sponsored numerous understudies whose careers would prove to burn as brightly as his own, and do this all while possessing the heart of a poet. His many verses, though not bringing him anywhere near the fame that the presidency of the Royal Society did, secured him an active social life which would lead to marriage, children and a startlingly swift rise into high society. Though his accomplishments, along with those of his contemporaries, would later be somewhat eclipsed, at least in fame, by those of Charles Darwin, they would characterize an era of science, one that can rightfully claim to have laid down the cornerstones of inquiry that would later blossom into the society we enjoy today.

The Age of Wonder is an engrossing and inspiring journey into perhaps the most critical period of scientific progress our world has ever known. For though the rise out of dogmatic ignorance that had so dominated the prior centuries had already begun, in England and elsewhere, they were scattered and diffuse. In england, the proximity of so many powerful minds caused these revolutions to feed upon themselves, to spark new revelations that electrified the world into the age of power and headlong progress. Though the Romantic Era produced numerous other scientists who would have surely represented this era as winningly as Herschel and Davy, Mr. Holmes chose well. For the dour but dogged Herschel is a wonderful contrast to the quixotic Davy, a man as taken by ego and self-expression as he was with science. That progress can be represented by two such different but brilliant subjects is both enlightening and heartening.

But as much as Herschel and Davy star here, it is their supporting casts who truly shine. Caroline Herschel and Michael Faraday, brilliant in their own rights, nonetheless stand as blazing symbols of the tides of change rippling through the world at this time. Caroline, a tiny, unwanted daughter of an extensive family, became her brother's invaluable right hand, going on to make numerous discoveries of her own as she helped actualize many of her brother's experiments. Faraday, meanwhile, was born to a blacksmith's apprentice and yet became, thanks in part to Davy's tutilage, one of the key figures in the understanding and harnessing of electricity. Mr. Holmes lovingly tends to both understudies, bestowing upon them the same attention to detail as he gave his main subjects.

The Age of Wonder is brilliant work. For Mr. Holmes has chosen to narrate the history of an era through the examination of a handful of brilliant minds who stood at the heart of a remarkable web, strands connecting them to many more figures worthy of their own biographies. In his care, we come to understand the human element as well as the science, a blend that will surely inspire inquisitive minds to greater study of the subjects captured here so well.

A winning combination of humans and history... (5/5 Stars)

As Though She Were Sleeping by Elias Khoury

From The Week of July 16, 2012

All that we've built, from the roads to the towers, from the places of learning to the places of worship, the entire edifice of civilization, would not be possible without communication. It is the means by which we not only understand one another, but the means by which we cooperate, pooling our talents and our efforts in the realization of a single goal we could not have achieved individually. But what is the best form of communication?

Language stakes a compelling claim. After all, we can speak it swiftly and dynamically, allowing for complex ideas to be reduced to fairly simple verbal codes. But language is also fragmentary, subject to a kind of geographic drift that causes its codes to mutate until they mean different things to different people. Symbols, meanwhile, are equally potent but also equally challenging. For as much as they benefit from a simplicity of form, allowing the mind to ruminate on their essences without needing linguistics to parse their meanings, this makes them even more malleable. For symbols might end up meaning entirely different things to siblings, let alone to strangers. Which leaves us with dreams, those ephemeral voyages through the armed and dangerous subconscious, a place where truth is rife if it can only be properly interpreted. Perhaps we require all of these methods to communicate, or perhaps life is a battle to see which will be dominant. Mr. Khoury has, here, much to say on this question.

In a rapidly changing Middle East, where borders are literally being redrawn in response to the political tornados kicked up by World War II, life is evolving far too quickly for the millions impacted by such swiftly changing realities. Out of the sands of British-controlled Palestine has erupted the Jewish state, an event which has sent out turbulent shockwaves throughout the region. In the years to come, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine will gain and lose territory, acquire and discard western masters, and adhere to or reject kings, the chaos of which will see them plunged into a modern world that bears chillingly few similarities with the reassuringly familiar past.

Dropped into this uncertainty are Meelya and mansour, a young Lebanese couple who straddle two very different generations. Married in 1946, their parents were subjects of the ottoman empire and their children will be governed by Hezzbollah, placing them at the heart of events that will transform the 20th century for the Middle East. How Meelya and Mansour will navigate both these changes and their own lives, though, will test their love and their sanity. For whereas mansour believes in the power of poetry to create unity, and even victory, out of division and tumult, Meelya, rejects this view. To her, words mean almost nothing next to the power of the vivid and jumbled dreams that have characterized her entire life. These vivid experiences are so powerful that they draw Meelya out of the real world, painting for her a continuum of past, present and future that is subject to nothing more than the laws of the imagination.

Their battle of competing views revolves around Meelya's painful pregnancy which appears, at times, to mirror that of Christ's birth. As Meelya slips deeper into her dreamworld, Mansour tries to reach down and pull her to what he considers safety. But for Meelya, the world of dreams is a world of knowledge and power, a place where she can walk with giants.

Originally published in Arabic in 2007, As Though She Were Sleeping is a challenging novel. Mr. Khoury uses Meelya's dreams to toy with time in a way that demands the reader relinquish his conventional notions of reality so that he might be drawn down into a transient world seething with non-linear events. This dreamscape, if embraced, becomes a rewarding place, a canvas upon which the author can express his lyrical notions of language and politics for which the physical world has proven to be too rigid. Such is Mr. Khoury's talent that, though this world is anathema to the structured manner in which many of us think, he succeeds in conveying both its power and its danger. For as much as we come to understand the ways in which Meelya gains wisdom from her dreaming, we also see the extent to which it drives her husband mad. Meelya is inaccessible to him, a creature whose mind might as well be located on the moon for as much as he can engage with it. This clearly results in a less than ideal partnership.

There's a kind of insanity in Meelya, a dreamy drifting from moment to moment, event to event, that has permanently unmoored her from reality. While she walks with monks and saints, gods and their crucified children, the rest of us live in a world ruled by physical laws that are as well-understood as they are unbreakable. What's more, Meelya's dreaming robs those around her from knowing her in any meaningful way. For she has withdrawn to a world that, though ti is dynamic, cannot be shared. In this, despite the shortcomings of his own preferred poetry, Mansour's means of expressing himself has much more potential for personal reward and lasting, cultural change. But then, we get the sense that Meelya could not care less. For she is content in her knowing in a way the rest of us will never be.

As Though She Were Sleeping was banned throughout much of the Middle East for some of its steamier passages. Though all such bans are ridiculous, Mr. Khoury's case is particularly so. For this is infinitely more a contemplation of knowledge and expression than it is an attempt at erotica. But then try explaining this to the narrowminded censors to whom the literary page is nothing more than a collection of inked words, some of which have the distinction of being taboo to the ignorant.

A surrealist's dream... For the rest of us, an interesting exercise, but one that requires perhaps too much effort on the part of the reader to temporarily abandon his conceptions of reality. (3/5 Stars)

The Hour Between Dog And Wolf by John Coates

From The Week of July 16, 2012

Of them any virtues bestowed upon us by curiosity, the desire to understand root causes must be considered one of the most consequential. For it has driven us to tease out the secrets of our universe, from the composition of the stars that shine in our skies to the meaning of the lives we live here on Earth. And it is precisely this desire to know, to understand, that has lead civilization on a steady march out of the ignorance of our past and into the hopeful promise of our technological future. But is this relentless search always to the good? For instance, does it guarantee us the right answer, or just an answer? And if it's just an answer, might we not be mislead by our conclusions, seduced into looking past the obvious to fixate on the data we've unearthed? I fear that this is precisely what Mr. Coates has done in this, his scientific analysis of the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Sparked by fears the world's largest banks might be holding billions of dollars worth of nearly worthless subprime mortgages, the 2008 Financial Crisis nearly dismantled our modern-day financial system. As fear of these bad securities spread through Wall Street, the credit markets, upon which investment banks depend on to make payroll each night, froze, causing the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the shock waves of which further churned up the already white-capped waters of the financial sector. Within a matter of months, the cancer spread not only to other American industries, but across the globe, a metastasization that would eventually lead to controversial federal bailouts of industries from insurance to automotive. This dour outcome has not only lead to the electoral overthrow of governments, it not only lead to the ignition of political movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, it has fostered a widespread distrust of the financial sector which is no longer viewed as operating in the interests of society.

So just how did this problem come about? What lead bankers to securitize -- that is to create a tradable commodity from -- dubious mortgages? Moreover, what caused otherwise self-interested traders on Wall Street to believe in these securities to the extent that they bet their fortunes and their futures on their longterm health? Mr. Coates, a Wall Street trader turned scientist, grapples with this consequential question of human behavior in The Hour Between Dog And Wolf, concluding that man is far from the commanding creature he considers himself to be. Drawing upon several studies, some of which he himself authored, Mr. Coates reveals the extent to which stock-trading causes humans to rely upon primitive fight-or-flight responses that, having evolved to help us survive the assaults of predators like bears and wolves, is poorly engineered for coping with the strange vicissitudes of financial markets. Instead of promoting prudence while on winning streaks or injecting confidence when on losing streaks, this primitive wiring fills winners with irrational and reckless confidence while imprisoning losers in the paralysis of indecision. Either outcome is, to say the least, far from ideal.

While The Hour Between Dog And Wolf is both thorough and learned, while it intensively speaks to the potential impact hormones have on human behavior, it is necessarily a defense of the conduct of the many men, and some women, who, having surrendered to the seductions of greed and selfishness, nearly drove the global economy off a cliff. The author summons every tool of scientific investigation to try to understand and explain the biological forces acting on these individuals, but with each justification, with every passing page, it becomes unavoidably clear that this attempt, for all its nobility, fails to state the obvious.

However much we are influenced by our biology, we remain in control of, and responsible for, our actions. No amount of dopamine or testosterone changes the fact we own all of what we do. For to deny this fundamental truth of human conduct is to call into question the fundamentals of personal responsibility. It is to excuse the actions of anyone who commits what society considers to be a crime. Imagine if Mr. Coates had set out to write a book explaining the biological, neurological and genetic underpinnings of pedophilia. We would have to acknowledge the science, but we in no way have to acknowledge the degree to which, by implication, the science exculpates pedophiles from the harm they selfishly do to those members of society who are too young to make their own choices. The pedophile, like the trader, might well try to argue that the science proves they were being seduced by their own wiring into committing crimes, that they are not responsible. But they must be! TO think otherwise is to not only allow them off the hook, it is to diminish the noble conduct of everyone who resists the urge to commit crimes even though they to are subject to the same wiring.

There can be no doubt that Mr. Coates has penned a fascinating analysis of stress and how humans operate under its influence, but the implication, however subtle, that this liberates them from owning the damage they've selfishly done is on the brink of being offensive. More importantly, it gives the next generation of traders a license to take the same foolish risks their forefathers did, a pattern which, at some point in the future, will force a systematic re-imagining of the financial trading system.

Fascinating but flawed work... (3/5 Stars)

Sisters In War by Christina Asquith

From The Week of July 16, 2012

There can be no doubt that war is the most chaotic activity in which humanity has taken part. Its capacity to blight the land, annihilate industry, devastate families and cripple public services is spectacular and sobering, certainly sufficient the wreck once proud civilizations. It is understandable then that, notwithstanding the degree to which it advances certain technologies and philosophies, it must be a tool of last resort, a means by which the desperate and the wronged, the provoked and the beleaguered, re-adjust their circumstances. For to engage it for any less significant a purpose is to sell the innocent into a kind of unending nightmare from which their lives will never completely recover. After all, displacement and disease, joblessness and homelessness, are antithetical to a stable existence. Ms. Asquith vividly demonstrates these potent truths in this captivating work.

Helmed by an infamous despot who had famously resisted a previous effort to be ousted by the united States, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was the perfect target for a wounded America needing a victory and a purpose in the post-9/11 world. Having suffered for more than a decade under stifling sanctions that plunged most of its millions of citizens into poverty, Iraq's bark had far outstripped its bite, as the Americans demonstrated when, in 2003, they invaded the oil-rich country and conquered its ruling regime in a matter of weeks. But rather than spark widespread hopes for a new, democratic Iraq, free of the burdensome shadow of Saddam Hussein's four decades of autocratic rule, this swift victory galvanized an organized and vicious insurgency which ignited a campaign of indiscriminate slaughter in hopes of sapping the will of the Coalition to fully realize their goals in the beleaguered country. For four long years, this Al-Qaeda-supported insurgency flourished, using suicide bombings to kill thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Coalition soldiers, reducing large swaths of Iraq to armed camps plagued by fear and distrust.

However much the insurgency may have been effective against the Coalition it sought to remove, it was infinitely more effective at destroying both the lives and the sense of normalcy of everyday Iraqis. As pitiless bomb attacks are paired with gruesome beheadings of aidworkers and journalists, as Iraqis cooperating with the Coalition are identified, labelled as traitors and threatened with death, Iraqi society disintegrates. Jobs are lost, families are scattered, schools are shut down and neighborhoods surrendered to extremists, realities which lead many Iraqis to depressingly conclude that they are worse off under the Coalition than they were under the cruel dictator who tortured and disenfranchised them. For the good and the bad, the earnest and the passive, the brave and the cowardly, life will never be the same.

Through the eyes of an American-Palestinian aidworker, an Iraqi journalist and an American soldier, Sisters in War allows us to watch the disaster of postwar Iraq unfold in terrifying slow motion. Imbued with the wisdom of hindsight, Ms. Asquith relates the tragic efforts of three courageous women, from entirely different backgrounds, in entirely different circumstances, to make something lastingly good come from a shattering conflict. But though armed with Coalition funds and passionate desires to make positive change, their various projects -- creating womens centers, providing basic services to Iraqi citizens, and reporting on the real news in a country newly liberated from tyranny -- self-destruct. For in this new Iraq, money and will are insufficient to overcome both the nihilism of the insurgency and the immobility of the American bureaucracy which governed the country until 2005. As a result, their goodwill, thought to be depthless, is exhausted, their spirits deflated by ignorance and inertia; truly a toxic brew.

Ms. Asquith is a talented narrative journalist. Surrendering her voice entirely to her three compelling subjects, she taps into the power of the memoir without sacrificing the journalistic framework that allows her to communicate the broad strokes of those early postwar years, covering off the key incidents for those who are less familiar with the transitional period. The resulting product is both informative and emotionally engaging. For our eyes are invariably trained on the only place that matters, the ground floor of this 21st century war and all the social decay it is responsible for.

None of this would be possible, though, without Ms. Asquith's three subjects, each of whom possess wills in proportion to their courage. Their desire to forge ahead despite having the deck stacked so heavily against them is as inspiring as the insurgency is deflating. Their hardened innocence juxtaposed with the irredeemable barbarity of the terrorists leaves the reader with a powerful portrait of war's inevitable fallout.

Masterful work... The best and worst of humanity lives in these pages. (5/5 Stars)

The Trade Pact Trilogy by Julie E. Czerneda

From The Week of July 09, 2012

We all crave power. Its promise of mastery and conquest, new frontiers and new horizons, is a seductive song that we are ill-equipped to resist. For who would not wish to command all that he surveys? Who would not desire to rise above his fellows, singled out as a chief among men? To be greater is to be heeded and respected, flattered and obeyed, while to be lesser is to be ignored, lost in a sea of anonymity.

But power also has its costs. For not only does it entice the wielder to capture more of it, regardless of the price to his soul, his ethics, it distances him from his more ordinary fellows. It places him on a lonely pedestal from which he looks down upon the world. It would not take long for a man at such a remove to turn coldly calculating, having lost any means of sustaining his empathy, his compassion. So how can the powerful remain human? How can they hold onto their warmth and their morality? Ms. Czerneda speculates in her futuristic epic.

In the distant future, humanity has long since spread from Earth to join a galactic community of numerous alien races known as the Trade Pact. Spread across dozens of worlds, this concordia of races, founded on principles of non-interference, by and large permits its member races to act as they see fit, compelling them only to maintain spaceports on their homeworlds, through which trade can flow, and to permit the Trade Pact to enforce galactic law both in these spaceports and along all the many links in the chain of commerce.

Interwoven into the DNA of the Trade Pact are the Clan, a mysterious strain of humanoids who have the power to tap into a hyperdimensional void, a metaphysical conduit through which they can both instantaneously travel and communicate. The Clan believe that they created the M'hir, that the talent to manipulate it manifested in but a fraction of their population, and that it was this fundamental difference that lead to Stratification, a process by which the talented among the Clan left their homeworld, abandoning their untalented brothers to their pathetically ordinary lives. Considering that they are but a thousand amongst billions, that to expose themselves and the full extent of their powers would be suicidal, the Clan take to the shadows, manipulating interstellar events with quiet and deadly grace.

In A Thousand Word For Stranger, the trilogy's opening volume, we meet Sira, a frightened and bewildered Clanswoman who, seemingly thanks to a violent assault on a Trade Pact world, is suffering the debilitating effects of amnesia. Her mind is an empty void save for a strange compulsion to seek out the human captain of a cargo ship capable of delivering her from the cold and miserable world upon which she's been stranded. Hiring on as a hindmost crewman, Sira slowly begins to recover her memories, but not in time to figure out why the Clan and enforcers from the Trade Pact are madly chasing after her, seeking to recover her from the troubled clutches of Jason Morgan, the alternately dangerous and charming spacer to whom Sira has hitched her wagon.

As events unfold and Sira staggers from danger to danger, captor to captor, she begins to realize a terrifying truth, that the future of her race depends upon her and that a renegade Clansman is perfectly willing to hijack her destiny, using her as a means of exponentially increasing his own power. Will Sira remember enough of who she was to thwart the designs of a madman set on galactic conquest? For if she fails, her mind will be sundered, her body and her talent left to the whimsey of the certifiable.

In Tides of Power, the trilogy's second instalment, the Clan's dirty laundry is further dragged into the light when the full extent of the genetic trap into which they've bound themselves becomes clear. The long-lived Clan must unlock their reproductive powers by Joining with a member of their race of similar talent to their own. A mismatched joining, that is one in which one member of the potential couple is of a significantly different talent level than the other, often leads to both man and woman being sucked into the M'hir, their essences forever scattered across an unimaginable voidscape. For a race who numbered even a million, this would not be a problem. Outliers a the top and the bottom of the talent scale would simply die off without being able to find a match while everyone else in the middle matched, reproduced and sustained the population. But with their numbers now vanishingly small, the Clan faces extinction thanks to the foolishness of their leaders who keep trying to breed stronger and stronger pairings. This policy has only served to produce an increasing number of incompatible pairings which only worsens their population problem.

A faction within the Clan has fixed upon a foul solution to this problem. They will harvest the reproductive organs of their most powerful and use the science of the lab to sustain their population. But when their schemes are uncovered by the vengeful captain Morgan, through connections with his tortured past, they will have to be exceedingly careful. For is he is permitted to unleash his obliterating rage upon them, they will have wished the M'hir had taken them.

In To Trade The Stars, the trilogy's concluding work, the Clan is rocked by yet another scandal when its most powerful member is enlisted, against her will, in a misguided attempt to repair a wrong in the M'hir where a generational dispute between conflicting alien races has lead to a world being cut off from the pathways that the Clan tread through the M'hir. While her friends race to save the Clanswoman from danger, the fate of a entire world hangs in the balance, harboring a secret that will surely force everyone, Clan included, to re-imagine the universe that shelters them.

Though Ms. Czerneda never quite realizes the full promise of her premise, and though the trilogy, at times, succumbs to the dark side of romantic melodrama, The Trade Pact is an entertaining romp across the landscape of what we might called the standard model of science fiction. Drawing on the robotic, comedic and moralistic tropes of Star Trek, the author lays down a framework exceedingly familiar to even the mildest fans of SF. However, this unchallenging foundation takes a promising turn when Ms. Czerneda builds in the complexity of the Clan, a race of highly political creatures through which she can explore the nature of power and the extent to which it can lead even the most intelligent into a wasteland of immorality and treacherousness. Their arrogance, their presumptuousness and their desire for quiet but pervasive dominance leads them to not only accelerate the pace of their own extinction, but willfully ignore the myriad signs suggesting that they are far from the all-conquering beings they purport to be. Such delusions serves the story well while providing us a classic example of abuse of power.

The work's other major theme is identity. Who are we? Are we the gestalt of our memories which are in turn merely records of our experiences? Or are we more than this, the fundamentals of our personalities hardwired into us by biochemistry and neurology? The former is arguably the more optimistic view. It suggests that we can change who we are by merely reprogramming, or re-conditioning, our memories, altering them by building new memories upon them. This process of gradual sedimentation might well lead to positive changes in who we are. The latter view, however, offers encouragement to those who have lost memories. For though we might no longer have the records of our experiences, we know that we can eventually arrive back at roughly where we were, lead there by a consistency of behavior that sees us make the same choices the second time round as we did the first. Both identity and power help buffer the reader against the worse excesses of ms. Czerneda's bodice-ripper romanticism.

Beyond the themes and the tropes, the technology and the romance, Ms. Czerneda has crafted an intriguing roster of characters to populate her epic. The Clan allow her to indulge in penning some truly monstrous beings who give no heed to the feelings of others, so consumed are they in fulfilling their own desires and aims. Moreover, this spectacularly egotistical backdrop serves as an excellent means of contrasting the behaviors of the trilogy's heroes, most of whom, in one way or another, are in the process of learning how to treat their fellow intelligent beings with decency and respect. The gradual development of these individuals must be considered the author's greatest achievement, for her subtlety here allows us to think of her heroes as living creatures, capable of elevating themselves beyond their ingrained prejudices.

Ultimately, though, The Trade Pact Trilogy is derivative fare. It is more than ample sustenance for a reader seeking a pleasant diversion, but there's nothing innovative here, nothing grand, nothing that compels us to stretch our imaginations or our moralities. In this way, it is a pale shadow next to the brilliance of the genre's leading minds, past and present. Ms. Czerneda simply holds too closely to the rescue fantasies of princesses, trucks too much with the thoroughly abused notion of the close call, to have her work considered more than middling.

Entertaining but nothing more... (3/5 Stars)

The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

From The Week of July 09, 2012

Humans set great store by good character. Virtues from kindness to generosity are understandably packaged up and sold as a commendable ideal to which we'd all do well to strive. Those who succeed in earning this elusive monicker are heralded as paragons of the community, dependable souls who keep the world turning, while those who fall sinfully short are dismissed as wretched creatures, disappointing offspring who weigh society down with their weak wills and their depraved souls.

Notwithstanding its judgmental nature, there are no surprises here. Communities should self-select for virtuousness over sinfulness. They should cultivate integrity, honesty and drive. But what if these virtues are not teachable? What if they aren't innate? What if they can be realized and relinquished, attained and discarded, by the same human based on nothing more than circumstance? Society would implode, torn apart by an untenable realization that virtue is malleable and that trustworthiness is situational. And yet this is precisely the contention advanced by Mr. Zimbardo's excellent rumination on the nature of evil.

In 1971, while a young grad student at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo conceived of an experiment that would shake the ivory towers of psychology departments the world over. Selecting two-dozen paid volunteers from a pool of nearly a hundred, Zimbardo established a life-like prison in the basement of the university's psychology building into which he poured his willing participants, each of whom was given a role as either a guard or a prisoner. Guards were bestowed with nightsticks and uniforms, anonymizing sunglasses and supreme authority. The only check on their power was a prohibition against physically abusing any of their charges. Prisoners, meanwhile, were, like their real-world counterparts, compelled to let go of their individuality by adopting a uniform outfit and dehumanizing numerical designations. They were caged and malnourished, also like real prisoners, and warned that disobedience would be punished. If the experiment became too intense, they were free to quit at any time.

This was a college experiment, staged on college grounds, directed by a college graduate and performed by college students. It ought to have been, in every sense, a controlled and controllable experiment. And yet, over the next six days of the scheduled two-week experiment, the experiment's designers witnessed, in the abusive guards, the degraded prisoners and the wardens who allowed the many acts of humiliation to take place, a shocking, nightmarish truth about human nature, that human decency is situational, that good people, when endowed with extraordinary authority, are capable of equally extraordinary cruelty, that those who are deprived of their liberty quickly become cognitively captured by the degradation of their environment, and that those involved in such power scenarios are completely oblivious to these profound shifts in behavior. Simply put, while we can be said to have baseline personalities that are the gestalt of all of our experiences, these personalities are made utterly malleable by the demands and the temptations of authority to the extent that, when placed in altered circumstances, they are re-shaped to fit a newer and darker reality.

Reflecting on this seminal experiment and those that came after it, Mr. Zimbardo, in The Lucifer Effect not only examines the chilling degree to which we can be made monsters by circumstance, he applies these experimental results to the horrors of the Abu Grabe prison scandal which rocked the US military during the early stages of the most recent Iraq War. He details how, for humans, normal is a variable, not a constant. It can be shaped and toyed with, stretched and manipulated, such that not even the humans affected by it comprehend that their normal has changed. While Mr. Zimbardo points out that this logic can be beneficial, used to elevate dark normalities by slowly lifting them into the light, he acknowledges that this is vanishingly rare compared to the frequency with which kings and warlords, revolutionaries and drug-traffickers, prey upon human malleability to debase the noble and silence the unwilling.

Though burdened at times by Mr. Zimbardo's oppressive humility, The Lucifer Effect is a captivating journey through human nature. His premise, that institutional circumstances made good apples bad, rather than the common view that bad apples sour good barrels, claims both the ring of truth and the solidity of good research to support it. All other contentions appear to fall well short of convincing when set against the terrifying evidence of both Mr. Zimbardo's revolutionary experiment and Abu Grabe, it's real-world counterpart.

However, more fascinating than even the monsters and the revelations unleashed here are Mr. Zimbardo's reflections on the nature of heroism. He spends a considerable portion of his work contemplating why some among us appear to be largely immune to the seductions of authority. Indeed, such paragons appear to actively resist such authority, fully aware that to do so is to profoundly jeopardize their own self-interests and even their safety. And yet these individuals do so anyway, secure in the knowledge that right is right and that no darkness can separate them from virtue. After being chilled to the bone by the author's analysis of authority's power, the notion that, to some degree, goodness stands beyond and above temptation is as heartening as it is mystifying.

No 600-page, autobiographical text on human psychology has the capacity to be gripping. But if such work can ever claim to be revelatory in a meaningful way, The Lucifer Effect claims the mantle. For it compels its readers to re-imagine not only human nature in general but the suffocating nature of prisons and the extent to which they leech from both guards and prisoners alike hope and humanity. Well done... (4/5 Stars)

Tamerlane by Harold Lamb

From The Week of July 09, 2012

Human history has produced some bloody chapters, periods of profound violence and upheaval that have not only altered the fortunes of those millions who lived through them, but that, in reverberating down through subsequent generations, have changed the very course of human civilization. Empires have been smashed and raised up, peoples celebrated and exterminated as a consequence of such chapters which have unleashed every imaginable plague, from the human to the fecal, upon the unsuspecting world. How are we to interpret the deeds of those who drenched these periods in blood? Should they be venerated for the order they formed, or reviled for the destruction they sowed? Should they be remembered as they clearly wished to be, or forgotten as a reminder to those who might take inspiration from them and attempt to improve upon their deathly designs? These are some of the questions we are forced to consider while consuming Mr. Lamb's biography of arguably the world's greatest conquerer.

In 1336, in what is now Uzbekistan, Tamerlane, known contemporarily as Timur, was born without fanfare to a family of inconsequential landowners in an Asia still reverberating from the conquests of Genghis Khan. Sixty-eight years later, he would die, in the heart of an empire that he himself had forged, having outlived his enemies, his wives, and, tragically, many of his own children. In the nearly seven decades between, in which he rode across half the world, he created a people, conquered much of Asia, terrified Europe, and waged wars of unimaginable cost in human lives to civilizations still recovering from the aftereffects of plague and ignorance. He built cities, made roads, appointed judges and laid down laws. But he did so on the still smoking ashes of his own conquests, not so much bringing order as re-shaping it into an image that pleased and properly honored the grace, the power and the dignity of the great Tamerlane, conquerer of the world that mattered.

Forced to draw from but a few contemporaneous sources, Mr. Lamb, a noted narrative historian, is at his imaginative best in Tamerlane. Capturing the richness of the palaces and the lushness of the gardens, the horror of the battlefields and the terror of the vanquished, he pulls from the clutches of legend and infamy a man of contradictions. For Timur was both of his time and ahead of it; a man of faith and a man of mass-murder; a man of principle and a man who allowed his men to drink deeply of the rapacious cup of pillage. He was a force for both widespread creation and mass destruction, making him one of history's most chaotic forces.

Mr. Lamb makes no apologies for the conquerer. While he asks his readers to consider Timur of his own time, he acknowledges that the man was ruthless when crossed and merciless when acted against, detailing the voluminous incidents in which Timur practiced his bloody form of justice. And yet, the author is careful to catalogue the glimpses of the man's humanity in his civilization-building: the art, the order, the scholars, the books. Most intriguingly, he chronicles the life and death of the young Timur's first wife, the only creature who seemed capable of restraining him, leaving the reader to imagine a future in which she had lived to temper Timur's iron with the softness of society.

While such biographies are entertaining, they fall short of edifying. Too many vital sources have been lost, leaving even the scholars among us to speculate over the fragmented truths that have descended to us from the intervening centuries. Nonetheless, considering that Timur succeeded where Napoleon failed, and capitalized where Alexander did not, an examination of his deeds and his time are an instructive chapter in the history of our bloody development. (3/5 Stars)

A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

From The Week of July 02, 2012

For those of us blessed by fortune to have long lives, we will greet the dawn tens of thousands of times. We will wake from dreams and perform our jobs. We will consume our favorite foods and our favorite entertainment. We will ponder what's ahead while reflecting on what we've long since left behind. And in the midst of all of this thought, this life, we will try to understand our essential selves, to separate hype from truth, socially inspired flattery from real identity, to tease out that one fundamental kernel of personality that governs our actions.

Who are we truly? And which version of ourselves is the truest version? And if we're lucky enough to recognize that version, to understand it, to seize it, how can we hold onto it when the merciless abrasions of time are so good at wearing us down until we've released what we know into the chaos of the world beyond us? Ms. Egan considers in her ephemeral novel.

Though time stands still for no one, it has moved with particularly cruel speed in the world of rock music. From the exceptionally creative heights of the 1960s and 1970s to the soulless, corporate control of the more recent past, it has known the sweetest highs and the most decrepit lows in its journey to speak to the people about their lives and how they plug into the broader, complex world. It has endured deaths and drugs, breakups and lawsuits, file-digitizing and file-sharing, but though it lives on, is it relevant? Is it meaningful?

To a loosely connected circle of people who, at one time or another, live and work in New York City, the answer is ambiguous. For instance, Benny and Scott, once best friends and bandmates who fell out over a girl, hold opposite views. The former is now a powerful rock producer, president of his own company and a force listened to. Scott, meanwhile, is a vagabond, an aimless, damaged soul whose talent sparked up and died out in one chaotic night of rock glory now decades in the past. And yet Benny is the man struggling with his disenchantment while Scott lives free of such doubt. All around them, meanwhile, spin the lives of their friends and wives, assistants and children, orbits uniting and separating, merging and clashing as they too try to come to grips with the devastation of growing old in a world obsessed with the young and the new.

A rumination on the nature of time and lost selves, A Visit From The Goon Squad is a fascinating if insubstantial novel that manifests as quickly as it evaporates. A collection of formative experiences that span nearly as many decades as characters, it speaks to the nature of fame and relationships, notoriety and war, as a means of divining some measure of understanding about a life which is increasingly bombarded by false sentiments, false transcendence, false fame. In depicting the cutting betrayals and the life-altering bustups, the moments of painful truth and the moments of absolute fear, it directs us to hold on more preciously to the days and hours that pass us, to treasure them as dearly as we do our loved ones. For soon, they will only exist as phantoms in our memories which will grow increasingly unreliable as we decay into old age.

More interesting than the novel's plot, which at times borders on the brink of non-existence, is its structure. A Visit From The Goon Squad is comprised of shortstories that, while interconnected, could easily stand on their own as individually packaged set pieces. Consequently, Ms. Egan has permitted her novel's structure to hang so loose that the ordinary governors of plot, a notionally linear progression of time and events, are overturned, discarded in favor of a narrative that is unstuck in both time and perspective. This ambitious play largely pays off thanks to a cast of embittered characters who each entertain the reader with their quirky and self-destructive takes on a life that permits us very little by way of control.

However, though the structure largely succeeds in re-enforcing the themes of fame and decay that pervade the work, it fails when its characters fail. Ms. Egan has winningly rendered the divergent paths of Benny the sellout and Scott the authentic musician, but some of the peripheral players who have been touched by them never take flight. Rather than exposing us to their problems and their burdens, they merely delay a return to the work's centerpieces. Some readers are bound to have affinities for most of these actors, but rare will be the reader who has affinity for all, obligating us to wade through unenlightening segments for a very minimal payoff.

A Visit From The Goon Squad is a piece of literary art, an experiment in style, and a rumination on cultural trends. In this, it is pleasingly done. But the intentional weakness of the work's plot prevents it from making any lasting impressions. For an award-winning novel, it feels exceedingly forgettable. (3/5 Stars)

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi

From The Week of July 02, 2012

What criteria must we meet in order to be considered human? Must we be creatures of flesh and blood, bone and organ, intelligence and wit? Must we adhere to the path laid down for us by evolution, or can we still be considered part of the species if we use science to accelerate our genetic development? For us, such questions remain in the realm of the arbitrary, providing more nourishment to philosophers than to the people. And yet we may soon reach the point at which science has sufficiently advanced to eliminate death and disease, hunger and heartbreak. Will it still be trivial when we intersect with this future and are forced to weigh how much of what makes us human we are willing to sacrifice in order to attain our place among the stars? What will come of us when our society is overtaken by these technologies? Will there be any going back? Mr. Rajaniemi ruminates in his challenging and exciting novel.

The third millennium is halfway over and humanity is utterly unrecognizable as the species that so long ago feared for its survival on the plains of Africa. Having undergone a quantum revolution that has opened the door to unimaginable technologies, humans have digitized their minds, uploading their souls to unspeakably powerful systems as a means of achieving both enlightenment and immortality. When they have need of flesh and blood, they have merely to create a body from various forms of intelligent matter, swelling themselves with awesome augmentations that span the spectrum from the incredible to the exotic. But though this expansion of known science has pushed humanity through the resource bottleneck that for so long hampered the species, it has not eliminated the need for power which continues to fuel the tides of war.

Fought out between individualists and collectivists, between posthumans who wanted to maintain the sanctity of their own minds and posthumans who continue to seek a single, organized metaconsciousness that will collaborate in the exploration and the conquest of the known galaxy, the protocol War devastated the solar system and, worse, failed to yield up a clear victor in this battle of technologies and ideologies. The result, then, is a glacial peace that could turn into a hot war at any moment if the soboronost have their way. For driven by their mission to curate every human mind in the solar system, these collectivists will stop at nothing to wipe out the last measure of individualist resistance which has coalesced on Mars in glorious, floating cities that are constantly on the move, avoiding Soboronost threats.

Into this toxic stew is dropped Jean le Flambeur, a legendary thief who, unexpectedly, is liberated from his long stay in a horrific virtual reality prison in which he's forced to play the same treacherous game on an infinite, punitive loop. Sprung by an agent of one of the seven Soboronost Founders who requires Flambeur's unique skillset to steal something of vital importance to her, he must first retrieve memories he's hidden even from himself before he can be of any use to the vicious and manipulative Founder. Minded by Mieli, the Founder's winged agent and a warrior with individualist sympathies, Flambeur returns to the scene of one of his many crimes, the free cities on Mars where reassembling his past will mean reintroducing himself to the people he harmed and abandoned 20 years ago. Will Flambeur betray them once more, or will revenge prompt them to turn the tables on their old friend and give him some of his own treacherous medicine?

The Quantum Thief is exceptional science fiction. Harnessing the cynicism and the wit of Iain Banks and the hard science of Alastair Reynolds, Mr. Rajaniemi has established, with but one book, a place for himself among the greats of the genre. For in all of its imaginative force, this first entry in a proposed trilogy is as fantastically plotted as it is concisely told. From the philosophy of humanism to the quantum technologies of the far future, the author hardly even needs a plot, so vivid is his world of demons and power plays, angels and dominance.

Mr. Rajaniemi's tale is energized by two sizeable gambles, both of which pay off in spectacular fashion. Firstly, he bets on the intelligence of his readers to suss out for themselves the intricacies of tech and plot that underpin the novel. In this, he follows in the hallowed footsteps of giants like William Gibson who refused to break character to explain even the most trivial elements of their glittering mindspaces, requiring the reader to mentally and emotionally engage on a level far more profound than the relatively shallow playgrounds in which most fiction cavorts. Secondly, at no time does he allow us to rest from an assault of ideas and concepts that are hurled at at us with ballistic force. Mr. Rajaniemi not only demands that his readers come to grips with the death of humanity as a biological species, he envisions a future Internet based on publicly accessible memories that, should it come into being, will forever transform communication and socialization far past the point of recognition. Under other circumstances, this intellectual denseness might be bothersome, but in the author's skillful hands such revelations merely add to the complexity of the world, opening up new vistas to be considered and pulled apart.

There is, unquestionably, a steep learning curve for The Quantum Thief. But while the reader is adjusting to a world of exotic matter and stolen minds, MMORPG guilds and terrifying war machines, he's being subjected to a steady supply of wit and charm that pull him down into the story until, slowly, inevitably, it clicks into place. A truly remarkable first effort and, even without the science and the factional fighting, a memorable mystery. One of my favorite reads this year... (5/5 Stars)

I Am America And So Can You by Stephen Colbert

From The Week of July 02, 2012

Satire is a powerful tool. By mocking that which is ridiculous, it can entertain while highlighting the many discordant notes that dominate the symphony of society. But whereas straight criticism can be, at times, pompous and strident, factious and political, satire nudges gently. With a wink, it teases us into a deeper examination of the absurdism that pervades our civilization. It's a craft well-harnessed by Mr. Colbert.

Originally a cast member of The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert has risen, in the last decade, to be one of the world's most influential comedians. His program, The Colbert Report, which was spun off from his appearances on The Daily Show, adopts the trappings of conservative punditry to give form to the absurdity of such media products as The O'Reilly Factor, making fun by adopting extremist positions that rely largely on illogical constructs. I Am America and So Can You brings Colbert's cult of personality to literature, summoning his bombastic and unapologetic facade to harpoon all the creatures of the left. Everyone from hipsters to gays, atheists to Hispanics, feel the sting of his comic arrows which, in hitting home, bring to life the nonsensical and even hurtful rationale upon which they are based.

Clocking in at a brisk 100-odd pages, I Am America And So Can You is an amusing romp through the cultural trappings of American life. From religion to the military, entertainment to the economy, Mr. Colbert lays out his unrestrained vision of the future which is, of course, dominated by the whimsical and inexplicable use of American power in every conceivable arena at home and abroad. But for as humorous as Mr. Colbert makes such absurdity, the kernel of truth upon which all good satire is based remains, reminding his readers that versions of these truths, obviously less varnished in humor, are out there, percolating through the world, spreading dismay and destruction with every impact on a soft target. And though Undermining these damaging arguments with comedy may well be the best means by which to drain the poison from such extremism, it remains a bellicose force that should concern us all.

This is an entertaining distraction, a charming reprieve from a world not glossed in such harmless absurdity. Were that all pundits as hapless as the hapless Stephen Colbert of Colbert Report fame. (3/5 Stars)

Dancing In The Dark by Morris Dickstein

From The Week of July 02, 2012

For all that it degrades and demeans, debilitates and destroys, deprivation does have one virtue. For while it rips apart those too weak of character to hold together under its stresses, it strengthens the wills of the resilient to go on, transforming them into spiritually hardened warriors able to endure any challenge. It provokes the resourceful to generate new methods and alternatives, new standards and practices, that will keep churning the wheels of society in the hope of a better tomorrow. In no aspect of our culture is this more apparent than in the arts which have always been utterly recast and refocused by hard dips in the fortunes of civilization. This point is vividly demonstrated in Mr. Dickstein's cultural history of the Great Depression.

From the stock crash of 1929 to the dawn of World War II, human civilization was convulsed by one of the worst economic downturns in its history. Triggered by a series of catastrophic decisions by both government and enterprise, this severe recession, later to be termed the Great Depression, not only erased the life-savings of millions of individuals, its toxicity directly contributed to the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of what remains, 70 years on, the costliest war in the history of man. Though economists are divided on precisely what extricated the world economy from this depression, they agree on this much. It was a devastating shock to the capitalist system which, by empowering its critics, altered the course of human events while leaving its mark upon all those it touched.

But while the most obvious externality of this economic crash (WWII) has been exhaustively covered by every form of media, less known is the degree to which it impacted the culture of this tumultuous era. From Michael Gold to Frank Capra, from John Steinbeck to Astaire and Rogers, Mr. Dickstein, a cultural historian and professor of English and Theatre, delves into the literature, the cinema and the stageplays of these twelve tortured years to create a captivatingly bleak portrait of an unimaginable time. He demonstrates how the Depression created room for eviscerating critiques of capitalism, thunderous condemnations of cold corporate giants, and sweeping works of cultural and societal reform which, in the united States, helped catalyzed a remarkable shift towards modernization in all aspects of civilization. It's little wonder, then, that this remains, at least for Americans, the golden age of literature and film.

Though hampered at times by the sprawling nature of its subject, Dancing In The Dark largely succeeds in realizing its grand ambitions. In bringing together artists both treasured and ignored by history, he summons the era's loudest critics and unleashes their words upon the reader at a time when the world is feeling the aftershocks of its own contemporary financial crisis. This point of unfortunate synergy causes the artistic voices vivified here to take on prophetic tones that have the power to both chill and enchant.

By and large, Dancing In The Dark reads like an exceptionally long review, in this case, of a culture and how it performed while being battered by a tempest the likes of which its victims had never seen. Mr. Dickstein's thorough understanding of the politicized tracts that shaped the era leaves the reader with the strong impression that the author has spent years toiling in the basements of uncounted libraries, unearthing the gems that are winningly recounted here. This vision, coupled with strong prose that never loses its sense of flow, makes digestible this 600-plus-page read which would have otherwise been both interminable and uninteresting.

However, for all its thoroughness, for all that we are made aware of the dominance of Bing Crosby and Cary Grant, George Gershwin and Katherine Hepburn, his account devotes too much time to the period's literary history. While the socially charged texts of a dozen authors are cleverly and expansively picked apart, we learn almost nothing about the theatre during a time when, prior to television, it was culturally dominant. Music, too, receives fairly short shrift, shoved aside for yet more books, some of which appear to have been ignored in their own times, much less in ours. It is difficult to blame Mr. Dickstein for this decision when the written word is clearly the most expeditious vehicle for social criticism. And yet I can't help but think that some brilliant plays were unfairly dropped from what is otherwise a pleasingly thorough chronicle.

This is a difficult but rewarding work with the power to leave the reader both amazed and depressed, humbled and disheartened. For it clearly communicates the reality that our socioeconomic problems have happened before and will happen again, a challenging thought to come to grips with considering that it leaves us largely helpless to permanently repair what is so eminently breakable. But while it is delivering this proverbial gutpunch, it is encouraging us with the universal notion that the human spirit is not so easily cowed. In fact, it is safe to say that it may well be our greatest and most enduring strength. (3/5 Stars)

The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

From The Week of June 25, 2012

Loyalty is a fascinating virtue. A necessary substrate in the psychology of social animals, it is capable of compelling us to act against our own best interests in order to lend aid to those for whom we have this feeling. It's not difficult to imagine how such a powerful force helps bind us to families and communities, but does it have a place in modern life? Our world seems ever-more-dominated by self-interest, by analytics that seek to reduce to economics the unquantifiable magic of relationships and the emotions that underpin them. Loyalty is a leap of faith, an act of generosity given in gratitude,or in hope of a return. How can that be quantified? Clearly Mr. Bacigalupi is musing over this question as well for it dominates this blood-soaked companion to Ship Breaker.

In a future America ravaged by environmental decay, political collapse and tribal warfare, life along the Potomac river is as humid as it is difficult. Every inch of ground for hundreds of miles around the capital of the sundered United States is claimed territory, turf for gangs and warlords to hold, abuse and contest until their dying breaths. Efforts by foreign governments, who've had more success weathering the decline of human civilization, to intervene on behalf of the innocents, to bring order and peace to a war-torn land, have spectacularly failed. And now those assets have been withdrawn, leaving behind a tangled web of hardcore capitalists who can find a market for anything from kidneys to salvaged steel.

The biological product of happier times, when the UN and China were still attempting to disarm the warring factions, Mahlia is a castoff, a half-American, half-Chinese female left behind by the exodus. Her parents, who once traded in art and souvenirs from the Accelerated Age, are gone now, dropping her out of the relative privilege of her upbringing and into an adolescence of hardship and turmoil as a nursing assistant to a humanitarian doctor practicing on contested ground. When her best friend, Mouse, is taken hostage by a half-man, a transhuman hybrid trained up to be a super soldier, Mahlia's so desperate to liberate her friend that she does not pay the proper respect to the soldier boys who've encamped at the doctor's practice. And so, when she resists them and all they want from her, she begins a long and troublesome odyssey that will take her to the heart of the old America in search of the only boy whose ever earned her trust.

Though the author, at times, does his best to wear out his work's central theme, The Drowned Cities is, nonetheless, emotive science fiction. Mr. Bacigalupi is a talented builder of worlds, conveying cultures of meaning with but a few telling paragraphs. The result is an engrossing experience that will leave only the most cynical readers unmoved by the hardships the novel's characters are forced to endure. The cities of the novel's dramatic title refer to the metropoli that once dominated the southeastern United States, cities now swallowed by rising tides, swollen rivers and unimaginable storms that rip and tear at the Atlantic coast. The images of streets and squares, office towers and highways, transformed into 22nd century swamps are haunting suggestions of a possible future.

For all of the novel's imagistic force, Mahlia is its most potent weapon. An innocent plunged into a degraded world, she is an outsider, a creature branded as much by her Asian appearance as by her humanity. But as much as she might appear to be naive and exploitable, her will is formidable. Setting great store by human decency, she is loathed to surrender anyone who has demonstrated to her a measure of kindness and gentleness in a world of harshness and war. This steely determination rescues Mahlia from the trope of the princess in rags and positions her as a futuristic heroine, a creature of necessity who refuses to abandon her humanity.

For all its virtues, The Drowned Cities is a more laborious novel than the smoother Ship Breaker. Here, Mr. Bacigalupi has essentially two aims; to perform an autopsy on loyalty and to give his western readers an idea of how the other half live. The former manifests in the form of Mahlia's quest to save Mouse after he'd once saved her from a brutal fate at the hands of zealous soldiers. The latter resides in Mouse who is forced to be a child soldier in a rebel army. The former seeks to understand what we owe to those who've been kind to us. The latter tries to demonstrate the anatomy of an army fuelled by all of the recklessness of untamed adolescence, their cunning and their savagery. With these two strands, the author has summoned the spector of the LRA, packaged it into science fiction and used it to tell a tale about the nature of humanity and kindness that, while effective, is heavy-handed.

There's brilliance here, passages that fans of Mr. Bacigalupi's work will devour. But there are low lights as well, lulls that I have not seen in his other fiction. Still, well worth the read, especially for those interested in a science-fictional take on some of the darkness that stalks our own world. (3/5 Stars)

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

From The Week of June 25, 2012

Despite all the truths, about our world and our place in it, that science and self-discovery have helped us to acquire, most of us still reject the essential randomness of organic life. As beings of reason and intelligence, of ambition and progress, we hunger to believe in an order greater than ourselves, a grand design that can superimpose meaning upon all our actions. After all, such belief would explain so much of what's both unfair and unknown about life. It illustrates why some are born into miserable circumstances -- these are spiritual tests of ones faith in the divine -- and it assigns an incentive to goodness -- for surely the reward of a painless peace in the afterlife will entice us into conduct more noble than our natures.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we know the truth, that life is fundamentally chaotic, that the circumstances of our birth are uncontrollable, and that the lives we wind up living are, if not predetermined, slotted into tracks that our backgrounds will not allow us to escape. This is a cruel and unsentimental worldview, hence its unpopularity, but this is what lives beyond our doors. And it is a truth Mr. Bacigalupi exemplifies in his near-future novel.

The apex of human civilization has come and gone, its jetplanes and its spaceships, its nuclear weapons and its supercomputers sucked into the depths of ever-rising oceans and consigned to the memories of the very old or the very learned. The glories of the Accelerated Age have been replaced by the ultra-utilitarian reality of the present, life on a hot, humid, environmentally unstable planet where human innovation has given way to the practicalities of economic and spiritual survival. Everything new is recycled from the old, the bones of drowned cities and beached oiltankers stripped for metal and spare parts, wires and electronics. This detritus of the old times are scavenged and sold at criminally low costs to mammoth multinationals, corporations whose boardroom battles are so far removed from life on the beaches that they might as well be taking place on another world.

In this world of humid decay, Nailer, a diminutive but wiry teenager, fights to hold on against the rising tide. Part of a light crew that strips copper out of oiltankers, he contends with both an abusive father and his own growing size to keep his job and his meager profits. For to lose either in this cutthroat world means certain death. And so, when, after a category six storm, known as a citykiller, hurls an unimaginable fortune, in the form of a fully tricked-out clipper ship, onto his little stretch of beach, he can be forgiven for exulting. His lucky strike has finally landed in the form of salvage that will net him a ticket out of this life. There's just one problem. The owner of the broken clipper, dripping with gold and silver, isn't dead. Moreover, she's wanted by powerful corporates willing to kill to get her back, proving to Nailer, once and for all, that life is neither fair or simple.

Underpinned by a potent blend of philosophy and economics, Ship Breaker harnesses the best aspects of imaginative science fiction to weave a memorable, dystopic tale about life, its pains and its pleasures. Mr. Bacigalupi, who dazzled with the atmospheric The Windup Girl, is equally effective here at envisioning a future tortured by a tragically decaying environment and unimaginable economic inequality, both of which conspire to consign all but the upperclasses to lives of hardship and toil. The social stresses that always existed beneath the surface of life in the United States have finally busted into the open, tearing rungs out of the social ladder, leaving behind cavernous gulfs that no one from the dregs can forge. The resulting despair leads to widespread criminality and lawlessness that the government is incapable of combating.

And yet, despite this grim background, Ship Breaker is not a bitter novel. Energized by the youthful vitality of its protagonist, it is buoyed by a kind of adolescent optimism. For as much as life is difficult, it takes a very great deal to separate the young from their hope. The flame can be made to flicker under a deluge of injustice and ruthlessness, but it will not out, not before the cynicism of middle age has set in. Nailer, consequently, elevates the novel on the ropey muscles of his scarred shoulders, his goodness and his enthusiasm the vehicle through which readers can judge the selfishness of all those he encounters.

But for a troublesome third act in which the author clumsily wastes 50 pages in an unnecessary effort to justify the denouement, this is lovely and thoughtful work that will be welcomed by those open to reading about an increasingly probable future. (3/5 Stars)

Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen

From The Week of June 25, 2012

While, yes, we are awash in axioms about power, its virtues, its drawbacks and its responsibilities, there can be no doubt that they are, from the witty to the corny, all profoundly true. For power does attract the avaricious, and it does corrupt the young, and it does burden the few with the problems of the many. Which is why, above all other things, it must be both feared and respected. It's tendency to corrupt must be recognized; it's eagerness to be wielded must be checked; and its willingness to be used as a shield against numerous grievous sins mustn't be ignored. For to do so is to acknowledge, to everyone, that we are ruled by power and, as a result, by those who wield power. And yielding ground, both moral and societal, to them is to consign ourselves to lives in which we are deceived, dissembled and dismissed by the authorities who claim to act in our interests. This is a point movingly made in Ms. Iversen's captivating memoir.

For nearly four decades, the Rocky Flats nuclear facility operated less than fifty miles from Denver, Colorado, one of America's most populous metropolitan areas. A manufacturer of Plutonium triggers for the nations' arsenal of nuclear bombs, it was a privately operated, government-funded site whose true purpose was concealed from the public on the grounds of national security. It harbored hundreds of employees drawn from nearby towns to work its cafeterias, fill out its first-responder teams, staff its cleaning services and guard its premises, all in the name of securing the national defense. And yet, for much of the 30-plus years it was operational, it burned, spilled, dumped and discharged, into the environment, some of the deadliest particles known to science.

Ms. Iversen was raised in the shadow of Rocky Flats. She drank water in adjacent streams, rode her horse through nearby fields, and suffered in her neighboring house the dignities and the sorrows of growing up in a home fractured by alcoholism and broken dreams. While she went to school and attended parties, learn to ride and kissed boys, Rocky Flats was being grossly mismanaged, enduring two massive fires, first in the 1960s and then later in the 1980s, either of which could have resulted in Chernobyl-level contamination to the surrounding area. The 1969 fire
was particularly bad and could have easily rendered the greater Denver area uninhabitable were it not for the bravery of the firefighters who battled the blaze and the good fortune of a few random events that kept it from raging out of control. Later, when Ms. Iversen moved away, to attend school, marry, have children and live her life, many of her childhood acquaintances, along with employees at the facility, would suffer cancer and worse. And though no official investigation would ever be launched, by the government or otherwise, it seems likely that at least some of these cancers were caused by the criminal laxness that was standard policy at this most secret institution.

Though at times plagued by awkward framing, Full Body Burden is an emotive document that demonstrates the extent to which the intersection of power and complicity can give rise to extraordinary crimes. Ms. Iversen, an author of non-fiction and a professor of literature, draws upon interviews with numerous key men at the heart of Rocky Flats' many disasters to describe, in chilling detail, how the government's desire to create a ridiculous number of nuclear bombs lead to the passage of a law that inoculated the companies contracted to make said bombs from any responsibility for the environmental damage that resulted from their processes. The natural result of this cart-blanch protection was mass-negligence on the part of the facility's operators, negligence that lead to the secret mass-dumping of highly hazardous materials into an inhabited environment. Despite an FBI raid that caught the facility red-handed, no prosecution of the facility's operators has yet stood, allowing them to escape entirely from a noose they, in all their blithe ignorance, happily fitted about the necks of unsuspecting victims.

Ms. Iversen juxtaposes her emotionally charged childhood with a surgically cold history of Rocky Flats to create a rare fusion of history and memoir that is both effective and moving. But though her walk through the facility's history is profoundly instructive, documenting the fires, the raids, the grand juries and the cleanups, her decision to weave herself into this tale is, at times, problematic. There's no doubt that the aching humanity of her difficult adolescence serves to lend a human face to what would otherwise be a cold story about a corrupt institution at a monolithic remove from the people it harmed. But after Ms. Iversen leaves home to go to college, her half of the story falls away for some fifteen years, leaving the formerly bipedal narrative to limp along on one leg for a considerable portion of the work. Ms. Iversen is welcome to her own privacy, of course, but having included what seemed like every detail of her life up to the age of 20 and then to essentially return to us in her mid-thirties is unavoidably jarring.

Notwithstanding its rough edges, Full Body Burden is, at times, mesmerizing and eviscerating, a captivating demonstration of how men and women, companies and governments, are willing to stoop to any level in order to cover up their sins. This is going to linger with me for some time. (4/5 Stars)