A tortured man in a tormented land in Lawrence In Arabia

From the week of June 9th, 2014

Mythology plays a strange and complex role in the legacies of history's legendary figures. Heroes and villains both find themselves subjected to its whimsical powers, the former elevated out of the mists of obscurity to shine like the essence of virtue, an example to all those who follow, and the latter shrouded in the darkness of devilry, their cruel deeds used to assure present-day citizens that they aren't so barbaric. Without mythology to generationally resurrect the stories of the past, we might never have heard of such figures, let alone learned their lessons. And yet, this historical airbrushing is so deeply rooted in the cultural prejudices that have shaped and carried them that, often, very little of the actual person is left for us to study. Fortunately, for Mr. Anderson, his subject has only suffered a century of such treatment. The rest of the mythological sediment the author himself expertly scrapes away to reveal a character of endless fascination.

Born into less than reputable circumstances, at least by the measure of his Victorian era, T. E. Lawrence rose from the obscurity of a difficult childhood to become arguably the most famous figure of World War I. An archaeologist with a particular fondness for the Arab world, he was initially tapped by the British Government to survey the Middle East which became a battleground in the Great War when the Ottoman Empire refused to side with the Entente powers. Keen to protect its colonial interests in the region, not to mention the vital oil reserves necessary to fuel their ships, Britain needed to understand not only the strategic situation in the region but the cultural one as well.

Lawrence might have remained a historical footnote, nothing more than a consultant on Arabic affairs, were it not for Britain's shambolic defeat at Gallipoli, a foolish engagement that not only swept into the sea the lives of thousands of young men from both Commonwealth and Turkey, but robbed Britain of any territorial advantage. Forced to rely on key figures in the Arab world, Britain turned to Lawrence to liaison with the region's tribal leaders. Not only would Lawrence come to cherish these relationships, they would serve to highlight the faithlessness of his own imperialistic government, truths that would permanently change his view of the western world. Lawrence would persist in his task, however. For he believed in an Arab world for the Arabs. And to achieve that, the ottomans would have to be defeated, the doing of which would make him a legend of history.

A superlative work of non-fiction, Lawrence in Arabia is a thorough, spellbinding account of the man, the myth and the world that spawned him. Scott Anderson, an author and journalist, exhibits, here, prose of the first order that not only drills down into Lawrence and the lives of the regional figures who encountered him, but also more-than-capably withdraws to a more global remove to discuss the political and militaristic maneuverings of the involved powers. His descriptions of Lawrence's labors are so wonderfully enmeshed into the overarching narrative of imperialistic exploitation and notions of smug, European superiority that the reader, made breathless by western perfidy, looks on in wonder at an unfolding tragedy of the first order, horrific events that, though they occurred a hundred years ago, nonetheless maintain sad echoes of the present. That the author so ably and effortlessly evokes such comparisons is a credit to his grasp of the subject.

There are actors here, other than Lawrence himself, that garner attention. William Yale, the prospector for Standard oil; Faisal Ibn Hussein, a warlord and Lawrence's primary ally; and Mark Sykes, an infamous British noble and diplomat whose corrosive whimsy wound up destroying Arab faith in the west. Each man, in his own right, is a creature of fascination and complexity. And yet, none hold a candle to Lawrence whose problematic-unto-abusive childhood drove him to lengths of ascetic self-denial that verged on the fanatical. His capacity to endure suffering is as breathtaking as his transformation from creature of self-contained interests and passions into an individual possessed of both the arrogance and the will to believe that his view of what was just could be imposed upon the western world. That he failed is not surprising. But that he thought he might succeed says more about the man than all his trials combined.

It is impossible to read such books without being enriched by them, not only in the events themselves but in how they characterize the broader tides of history. There's a palpable sense of tragedy that hangs over this work, a perpetual sense that human civilization, for all its brilliant advancements, is heart-breakingly prone to collective acts of senseless violence. From the indescribable idiocy of the Great War itself, down through all the self-interested decisions spawned by it, we come to understand some measure of the cultural disdain and suspicion the Middle East has for the West. It is there, for all to see, in the actions of our fathers and our forefathers, what we are capable of doing so long as our interests appear to demand it. Until we break that habit, until we establish, for all time, the notion that there are simply actions too manipulative, too duplicitous, too heinous, to carry out for the sake of necessity, we will just repeat these mistakes over and over. This is the lesson of the Great War, or it ought to be.

Splendid work. First-rate biographical history... (5/5 Stars)

A delightfully creepy journey through a twisted world in Annihilation

From The Week of March 10, 2014

In life, there are few certainties. Seven-billion humans stuck on an unpredictable world that is largely governed by chance ensures that much. But one thing we can be certain of is the sanctity of our own minds. These sublimely tuned systems of pattern recognition sort reality from fiction, friend from foe, even wisdom from foolishness, so effortlessly, so reliably, that we're often barely even aware these assessments are taking place. Our minds are the gatekeepers of sanity, providing boundaries without which the world would not make sense. Remove the mind's capacity to make these distinctions, damage its ability to see clearly, and the world becomes a foggy morass of which nothing can be certain, not even the fidelity of our own thoughts. This is a truth chillingly explored in this first entry in a new trilogy from Jeff Vandermeer.

Located just off a stretch of unpopulated coast in one of Earth's more tropical climes, Area X is a deadly and torturous enigma. A place of undefined borders, it appears to be populated by some kind of organizing intelligence made manifest in the behavior of the animals residing there. And yet, but for a handful of chilling encounters, few have ever seen physical agents of this most hidden and pervasive power. Which is not to say that humans haven't felt its presence. Repeatedly, governments have dispatched expeditions to Area X, in hopes of learning its secrets, only to have these highly trained professionals returned to them in extraordinary disarray. For some, their memories are gone, others, their health. But one constant remains. None come back unscarred.

The twelfth and most recent expedition is no exception. Comprised of four women, a biologist, a surveyor, a psychologist and an anthropologist, they are given training, equipment and a mission, to investigate Area X, in particular, a tower that seems to shaft deep into the earth. At first, they seem to be making progress in understanding this twisted place, but then soon events begin to proceed out of their control and, beforelong, nothing will be familiar, not even their own minds. There will be no comfort in this place without rules.

As creepy as it is swift, Annihilation is an entertaining piece of weird fiction. Mr. Vandermeer, who rose to prominence with a series of stories set in the strange city of Ambergris, has channeled his talent for creepy fantasy and carved out a foothold for it on our own world. This proximity, this sense that the rot now exists in a place we hold dear, invests the work with anxiety and urgency, neither of which the author wastes as he marches the reader down into his dark, infested imagination.

Of its many accomplishments, Annihilation's most important achievement is the degree to which it teases the reader into accepting that the line between sanity and madness is whisper thin. The governor of this line, the mind, can be tricked and influenced in so many ways that it's rather surprising that madness isn't a more pervasive problem for society. After all, how could anyone function if they could not trust their senses? Their memories? Their actions? How does anyone distinguish what must be fought from what must be loved when there is no cognitive anchor to hold onto? When there is only Area X, its lies and its mysteries laid bare in the warped light.

Mr. Vandermeer has always excelled at presenting his characters with an environment capable of driving them mad, of tormenting them with things they cannot understand until they have no safe ground left upon which to tread. Annihilation is no exception. But where this volume joins those in its power to entrance, it fails to back that up with compelling characters. In some sense, this is intentional. For Area X leaves no more room for personal identity than it does for personal freedom, devouring all before its strange, expansive threats. However, the reader is left to quietly rue these omissions, as none of the human wills present here amount to much more than their archetypical foundations. Certainly, the creeping sense of otherness makes up for this absence, but only just.

More delicious than disappointing... Weird promises to be an exciting genre for some time to come, particularly with minds like Mr. Vandermeer to guide it. (3/5 Stars)

A riveting conclusion to an epic fight for survival in Dust

From The Week of March 3, 2014

For all of society's many virtues, for all that it is the mechanism by which civilization is thrust onward, it would grind to a halt without our lies to lubricate it. From secret projects to marital harmony, lies arm us with the means to avoid awkward confrontations with the truth that might tear apart our missions and our relationships, diverting what would otherwise be deathly blows into glancing hits that are soon abandoned to the trash heap that is our past. But while lies may normalize what could otherwise sunder us, they carry with them a terrible price. For each time they are used in the name of the good, they chip away at the trust of those we use them on until, eventually, their faith has been rubbled, leaving only anger stoked by being played the fool. Rarely has this rageful backlash been deployed better than in the conclusion to Hugh Howey's creepy and gripping series.

For the men and women of the Silos, the world is steel and stone. Having lived and died for centuries within 50 hermetically sealed arcologies, built 130-stories deep in the earth of a ruined world, they have no concept of Africa and America, of lions and monkeys, of snow and sun. After all, it is death to leave the silo, death to go out to the decayed remnants of what came before. And anyway, they have within their silos everything they could ever want: power, food, life and love. What could anyone else ask for?

But now, after centuries, the lies that have underpinned their lives are slowly being revealed, peeled back like layers of sediment to expose the whys and hows that lead them into these sealed lives, these stale existences proscribed by another's power. But rather than finding truths that will set them free, the people of the silos find only the ugliness of a plan so vile, so pervasive, that they will never be the same, knowledge so pernicious that it will spark a revolution that no one, not even the great men who set this scheme into motion, could have planned for. The result of this war will shape the world for millennia to come.

A worthy conclusion to one of the most successful pieces of terrifying science fiction ever penned, Dust is a work of beautiful dystopia. Eschewing the gory horror of the many previous works that have flirted with SciFi, and its nearly infinite capacity to imagine new and twisted worlds, Mr. Howey has brought to life a creepily, self-contained world, married it with a truly horrific premise and watched as his dark creation spawned stories to freeze the blood. Repeatedly, the reader is forced to look on helplessly as the people of the silos are battered by an enemy unfathomable to them, an omnipotent, controlling entity for which they have no analogue. Their collapse before its superior weapons and its mysterious knowledge is as inevitable as it is tragic, an all-too-familiar outcome when the strong clash with the weak.

And yet, where in past works the silos have lacked the tools to fight back, here, in Wool's endgame, the lies are seen for what they are. Precious knowledge that, hoarded for so long by the silos' overlords, has trickled out until the resourceful have glimpsed some measure of their master plan and used that knowledge to make, for the first time, plans of their own, to seize their autonomy, to realize that the truth actually can set them free. All of which would have been empty without Wool's previous works in which readers watched the silos bend under the weight of ignorance until it seemed as though they might all break and leave the world without hope. But with such a foundation in place, their outrage, their keen hunger for revenge, puts a fire in these pages that no criticism can douse, that no convenient turn of plot can reduce, that no force of the old world can stop. And it is a privilege to watch it all unfold.

Dust is not a revolution. Quite the contrary. It draws upon many established tropes to craft its tale. But where Mr. Howey supersedes those who've come before him is in the sheer terror he can instill in his environments. The doom, the claustrophobia, of the silos leaves the reader yearning for sunlight, for open spaces, for the world he knows. It leaves him wondering who will be the next character to fall in a war he can't possibly relate to. And in this, the author shows us the true power of knowledge. There are no clever villains spitting pithy lines about how knowledge is power. He doesn't need them. This truth scores every page and leaves no doubt that, short of the suns that give us life, knowledge has no peer.

For anyone remotely interested in scares and society, in prisons of the mind and the burdens of the heart, Wool is the bible you've been waiting for. Read it and its wonderful conclusion and thrill to literature done with style and cold steel. (5/5 Stars)

A tragicomic romp through a vivid world in the sublime Sharps

From The Week of February 24, 2014

For all but a powerful few, we are pawns in another's game, our lives subject to forces we'll never comprehend. The potent influences of politicians and CEOs, diplomats and warlords, may not seep to the surface of our daily existences, but they are there, nudging us in directions of another's choosing. Part of this shaping is indirect, the ripple effects created by the wakes of society's prime movers, but a significant component is conscious, the tangible result of men and women who believe they are in the right and who are not afraid of acting on that belief. But what if those beliefs are wrong? What if those plans are too cruel to be tolerated? When do we, as the pawns in their games, decide to take ourselves from the board and make our own choices? K. J. Parker poses these very questions in her fascinating, political adventure. The dark energy generated from their answers is enough to make this one of 2012's finest reads.

In a world of merchant banks and triumphant generals, of powerful priests and corrupted nobles, Permia and the Republic of Scheria endure an uneasy peace. The two countries have little in common. Their skills, their gods, even their politics are completely different, leaving little room for common ground. No surprise, then, that the two bickering nations have recently concluded a decades-long war that destroyed the economies of both countries and was only ended thanks to the brilliance, and the brutality, of Scheria's legendary general, Herec Carnufex, infamously known as the Irrigator. However much they may hate one another, though, they do share a love of fencing, a sport which is of fanatical importance in both lands and can perhaps serve as a bridge by which to heal old wounds.

That appears to be the idea behind a mutually agreed-upon tour in which Scheria's finest fencers will be escorted through passionate Permia and set against its greatest swordsmen, in an ostensibly symbolic display of skill and glory. But when Scheria's prime movers select a band of misfits to represent them, more than a few eyebrows are raised in influential circles. A woman? An accidental murderer? A veteran of the Permian war haunted by his service? The Irrigator's second son who seems far more interested in books than blades? This is hardly a team to be feared. So why have they been sent into an unfamiliar land, with foreign customs and unstable politics? Why do they all get the sense that they are taking part in a game none of them understand? As Permia erupts in revolt, they will have to find answers quickly or else full-on war may resume. And this time, there may not be anything left to salvage when the guns have ceased their firing.

Delightful and dour, Sharps is a sublime work of fantasy fiction from an author whose relative obscurity is entirely undeserved. Ms. Bishop does a masterful job of layering her plots with interconnected schemes that slowly, tragicomically unwind through the narrative, ensnaring her characters in webs of lies and powerplays that rarely end well. This sophistication, in both its understanding of the selfishness of human nature and of the corrosiveness of politics, provides the fertile ground from which her complex characters grow.

This is hardly the first time that misfits have been asked to, in some sense, save the world, but rarely has it been done with such class and verve. It is an easy thing to assemble a cast of clowns and watch them bumble their way towards an inevitable conclusion. It is entirely another matter to animate a company of selfish smart-asses, secretive heroes and foolish businessmen, who not only attract the reader's interest and fondness, but who also succeed in elevating themselves from their darkly humorous circumstances to be rounded, plausible individuals, endowed with the tragic desire to do right, to fulfil their own kind of justice. A misstep of any significance on Ms. Bishop's part and Sharps would have slid into the ditch of farcical absurdity, a world in which the outcome loses all mass. That she has avoided as much here is a credit to her skill.

No review of Sharps specifically, and Ms. Bishop's work generally, would be complete without commenting on the mountains of research and experience from which these tales benefit. The author has a complex understanding of banking and trade that surely flows from an inquisitive mind open to the training and the knowledge of numerous disciplines. But these economic principles are mere icing on the cake that is her familiarity with fencing without which the novel would be a pale shadow. The author speaks fluently of not just the moves but the mentality of the fencer, of the fears and moments of explosive action that characterize it. This expertise deeply enriches the work.

Sharps' only flaw is that it is not the beginning of a series, a greater whole for the eager to devour. We must content ourselves with this unmystical gem that, for all its dirty politics, shines like the sun. (5/5 Stars)

Immigrant communities and the future Local in the dystopic On Such A Full Sea

From The Week of January 6th, 2014

Customs and traditions, laws and codes, shape our cultures, giving them their definition, their structure and their uniqueness. And yet, to us the culture simply is, the ever-present framework in which we have the experiences that make up our lives. It is as familiar to us as our friends, and so its trials and tribulations are taken as what must be, the tapestry of our individual existences. It's only when we absorb the strangeness of other cultures, either ones with which we share a world, or the ones that fell before our times, that we come to understand that what we assume to be normative, customary, is not so because it is the right way. Rather, it is simply the way it is done, for us and no one else. This is a powerful truth. For it grants us perspective not only on the human capacity to acclimatize, but it teaches us that nothing is as it must be, that everything is subject to change, to evolution, to improvement. This, if little else, is a point delightfully made in Chang-Rae Lee's dystopian novel.

In a near-future world blighted by widespread, environmental upheaval, life for the many has become difficult and often brutal. In the region formally known as the United States, society has devolved into three distinct groups which are characterized by varying degrees of autonomy and economic power. The Facilities are coastal communities, agrarian settlements that have grown up in the hollowed-out cores of former seaboard metropoli. They are nourished by trade with the Charters, a collection of seemingly powerful and healthy enclaves made prosperous by their isolation from the rest of the world. Occupying the wild, untamed lands between these two kinds of communities are the Open Counties, a seemingly lawless region of broken land in which the unfortunates of the world eke out a meager existence and to which tourists from more stable lands visit out of anthropological curiosity.

A resident of a Facility which has grown out of old Baltimore, Fan is a Tank Girl, a laborer tasked with ensuring the livelihood of the Facility's stock of essential sealife. She seems largely content with her existence until, one day, her boyfriend disappears into the Open Counties, to where and what end no one knows. Fearing for him, Fan decides to follow in his footsteps, forsaking the relative safety of her familiar little world and entering into the great, dangerous beyond. Repeatedly beset by powers much more ruthless and potent than she, Fan must continually scrabble for a foothold in this strange place, little knowing if the winds of fate will carry her to or from the boy she loves.

A fascinating treatise on the nature of expectations and human malleability, On Such A Full Sea is, nonetheless, a failure as a work of entertainment. Mr. Lee, an author and professor of literature, has fashioned a darkly captivating world full of half-glimpsed political machines and well-thought-out immigrant communities which have adapted to the violent tides of history by coalescing into their own, largely self-sufficient units. In this, they convey one of the work's most powerful ideas, that power is fundamentally local, that the global superstructure we've managed to erect over the last century is fragile, and that any significant disruption to the world order will plunge us back into a world where community is everything and where banishment from the collective is a punishment worse than death. In the hands of a skilled author, this is a notion brought vividly to life in this richly imagined future.

However, in almost every other way, On Such A Full Sea is an irritating bore. Its most frustrating element by far is its composition. Written in a kind of observational prose, the narration is from the perspective of an omnipotent first person, a collective we that hovers over Fan and her quest while remaining removed enough to provide the reader with details of the world that Fan may not know. This style certainly helps Mr. Lee make broader points about class and culture, and it absolutely lends the work a literary polish rarely seen in genre fiction, but it also precludes us from feeling any emotion from, much less for, the actors on its elegantly wrought stage. On Such A Full Sea is the literary equivalent of buying the worst ticket to a 50,000-seat house. We are left to watch from the nosebleeds while tiny ants down below execute their intricate skills, every nuance of detail and emotion occluded by distance. Worse in this case because while purchasing the ticket is a conscious act, a voluntary imposition, here, it is imposed on us for negligible gain. Mr. Lee could've illustrated his broader points without reducing Fan from a living, breathing person into a tiny puppet, propelled by the winds of plot and fate.

It pains me to be so critical of such a rare work. For infrequent is the genre novel with aspirations of being more than a pulpy adventure. On Such A Full Sea is as much sociological study as it is an adventure novel, and anything that bucks the norm should be welcomed. But enjoyment here is made all-but-impossible by the work's tone which suppresses the value of the individual to such a degree that caring about anyone is difficult at best. A fascinating failure... (2/5 Stars)

Scams, corruption and the new Africa in Ferguson's 419

From The Week of April 8, 2013

What do we owe one another? More than seven billion people inhabit our planet, seven billion souls who dream as we do, work as we do, fail as we do. They possess different personalities, different goals, different cultural ethics, but they are fundamentally beings built from the same blueprint, individuals who descend from a common place and a common time. And yet, with this being true, we still fight one another, steal from one another, denigrate one another, all in the hopes of reserving for ourselves the largest portion of available resources and privileges possible. Some might argue this is right and proper. After all, of those seven billion, we will only ever meet a vanishingly small fraction. And we don't owe anything to people we'll never meet. Or do we? What are the costs of acting against those we'll never know? Will Ferguson ruminates in his intriguing novel of modern reality.

Known colloquially as a 419 scheme, drawing its name from the section of the Nigerian criminal code that prohibits it, this infamous practice attempts to defraud an individual of their savings by making the victim an offer temptation won't allow them to refuse. Having risen to prominence with the popularization of email, the Nigerian Scam is the most famous strain of this disease. Though it has various derivations, the scam generally offers the victim a lucrative payout if they will wire the scammer a substantial sum of money, ostensibly used by the scammer to unlock an even greater sum of money such as an inheritance. In reality, however, the scammer has no intention of paying back the victim. For the entire enterprise is a fiction used merely to capture the victim's initial investment. Though the odds of success are low for the scammer, the rewards are high enough for them to persist until they find someone credulous enough to fall for their lies.

Laura Curtis, a copy-editor living in Canada, is made painfully aware of the price of this scam when, after her father's death in a car accident, his bank accounts and email history reveal a devastating truth, that he is only of 419's victims. Preying on his chivalry, the scammer has defrauded the elder Curtis out of not only his savings but the money from a loan Curtis took out to aid a fictional girl. Though Laura's brother is enraged, haplessly threatening to sue everyone involved, Laura is the only one determined to act. Driven by grief, she attempts to track down the specific scammer, traveling to Nigeria where she is immersed in a world utterly foreign to her, a world of vicious criminal gangs, ruthless government troops, cold-hearted oil companies and beleaguered natives of the Nigeria delta trying to survive in a hellish, ever-changing environment.

A slow and steady build towards a darkly moving crescendo, 419 is at times laborious and mesmerizing. Mr. Ferguson deploys three primary protagonists, a Nigerian scammer, a native of the Nigerian delta and a beleaguered, pregnant girl from inner Africa, to draw the reader into a noisy world as utterly foreign to the West as it is harsh on its inhabitants. As the narrative switches between Lagos, the delta and the dubious roads and polluting oil derricks that connect them, we can feel modern Africa in all of its post-colonial splendor and corruption. Through the eyes of these partially empowered actors, we come to understand not only the heavy burden of colonialism's legacy left on the souls and the societies of this continent, but the razor-sharp keenness of the Resource Curse that afflicts Nigeria, miring it in so much corruption that it's nearly impossible for the country to lift itself out of economic chaos.

For all of the emotive power of 419's African characters, Laura Curtis is the novel's driving force. Sharing with the reader both culture and ethics, Curtis channels the reader's empathy and outrage which she shapes into a cold sword of justice. She is a bright spot of familiarity and vengeance amidst a sea of foreign ways and means. And yet, for all that she is the reader's port in the storm, she is also the novel's downfall. For Mr. Ferguson is never able to bring Laura to life in the same way he does the Nigerian cast. He tries to inject her with grief and rage, but these powerful emotions seem to slide off of her impenetrable exterior, leaving behind an austere shell. We sympathize with her plight and cheer on her desire for action, but this never coalesces into anything like a human being we'd recognize.

With an engaging cast of characters, cinematic prose and an expanse of quality research into both Nigeria and 419, Mr. Ferguson has produced an interesting read that pays off those who persist with it. However, periods of inactivity and the occasional slide into spiritualism prevent it from truly standing out. (3/5 Stars

A beautiful, bleak tragedy slowly unfurled in Hugh Howey's Wool Series

From The Week of march 4, 2013
Our lies are always with us. For as much as we try to extricate ourselves from them, their stains linger so long as the truths sequestered by their telling remain obscured. And even though it is within our power to remove such a stain with a simple, straightforward confession, most of us cannot bring ourselves to do so. For with the passing of every moment, a lie grows in power, accreting in proportion with the damage it would cause when revealed. For most of us, this is a relatively small problem confined to relationships which operate almost entirely on trust, trust that is undermined with every falsehood. But what about the big lies? The lies institutions sell, the lies societies nurture, the lies governments spin? What if a lie is so monstrously large that the confessing of it would break the world? Mr. Howey uses this question to wonderful advantage in his engrossing and creepy series.

Centuries from now, Earth has become a wasteland. Soaring cities and resplendent nature have been rubbled and ruined by human hubris. What form this hubris may have taken has been obscured by time, by the passing of generations absorbed by the rhythms of life. And yet, the evidence of that ancient disaster remains, the images of gray skies, vicious winds and dead earth beamed into the silo that now harbors what is left of humanity. Outside, the world is cold and decayed, but within the Silo it is warm and vibrant, 144 floors of orderly existence shafting deep into the earth where oil and nitrogen, the essentials of life, can be mined and used to empower civilization.

From all outward appearances, the Silo is quite a harmonious place. Modelled on a small American town, it deploys a hierarchical power structure to safeguard the survival of the species. Its many trades, from engineering to portering, are clearly delineated, their talent pools refreshed by a well-organized cast system that, though not completely rigid, ensures that vocational knowledge is largely past down through families instead of being lost in the chaos of self-determination. This eliminates the need for universities. For aside from some basic knowledge, children grow up absorbing what they need to know from their friends, their family and their environment, a perfect incubator for the generation to follow.

This harmony, however, is a facade. For within the Silo, knowledge is tightly controlled, the rebellious sins of the past erased by not just censorship, but the pact each individual makes with the Silo's collective, that he or she will obey the laws and will avoid heretical questions about the past and the outside, the contemplation of which can lead to disaster. The Silo is largely successful in maintaining this pact, but when the wife of its sheriff is broken by the discovery of one of the Silo's most terrible secrets, the Silo's lawman initiates an investigation, the consequences of which will rock the Silo for generations to come.

One of the first major, sustainable successes in self-publishing, The Wool Series is a riveting collection of short stories which re-imagines the post-apocalyptic drama for the 21st century. Harnessing the most terrifying elements of horror, mystery and science fiction, Mr. Howey manages to infest the reader with a powerful sense of creeping wrongness, of gnawing claustrophobia, of crushing bleakness which, though potent, is rarely off-putting. This is a serious alchemical achievement. For activating such emotions can, when overcooked, provoke in the reader an antipathy that, when conjured, is all-but impossible to suppress. That Mr. Howey has found the proper balance here exemplifies his skill.

Though the series adopts a fairly novel approach to an old premise, the notion of a civilization in a bottle, this is not its only virtue. Mr. Howey has imbued his characters with winning personalities that rarely stray into two-dimensional caricatures. What at first appears to be overly simplistic blacks and whites eventually evolve into far more complicated grays whose ambiguities please far more than they irritate. Moreover, the author's sense of cause and effect is delightful. For its clear that the entire plot of the series is kicked off by a single, subtle action, one that creates a subsequent chain that ignites wholesale changes in the author's universe. Instead of fighting this, or even modulating it, Mr. Howey appears only to encourage the eruption, to follow eagerly where the falling dominos lead him. This is a refreshing development for a fairly stale genre.

For all its virtues, though, The Wool Series is not without its flaws. Some of its ex-post justifications for how the world came to be so twisted are decidedly threadbare, revealing gaps in logic that are troublesome. Moreover, after the first five stories, which grapple with the lives of those within the Silo, the series branches out to try to animate the days leading up to the disaster that created this dark world. This fails both theatrically and as a character study. For not only are the near-future characters decidedly less interesting than those who populate the Silo, the premature revelation of how the Silo came to be robs us of one of the series' most successful features, that the reader knew only as much as the Silo's characters knew, a reality which allowed us to unknot the mystery of its secrets and its origins alongside them. Granting us this omnipotent perspective severs this intimate connection with the Silo. It's clear that the author did this with an eye towards converging past and present at the climax of his tale, but the price he has paid for this is, to my mind, too high.

This is excellent, cross-disciplinary science fiction with the power to keep one up at night with dreams of a dark, authoritarian future. It would be worthy of your hard-earned even if each tale wasn't priced at $1, a supreme value that lights the way to the future of publishing, a little coin from a mass audience. One of the most inventive reads in some time... (4/5 Stars)

The depths of human endurance explored in Moorehead's A Train in Winter

From The Week of February 18, 2013
As much as we plan out our lives, the colleges we attend, the jobs we want, the people we attach ourselves to, control over our futures is nothing more than an illusion. For while some of us may have the fortune of executing their plans without incident, others have their hopes and dreams shattered by circumstances beyond their mastery: car accidents and pink slips, assaults and terminal illnesses. These are not foreseeable pitfalls. They are unanticipatable traps that, when sprung, have the power to devastate not just our lives, but the lives of those we love. And if they cannot be avoided, then they can happen to any of us, at any time, dreams broken on the altars of powers beyond our command and our imagination. This decidedly grim theme runs right through Ms. Moorehead's engaging, if bleak, micro history.

The year is 1940 and Europe is exploding into war. The French army has been humiliated by the German Wehrmacht which has subsequently blitzkrieged its way all the way to Paris. There, aided by a puppet government and the collaborative French police, the Third Reich establishes France as a civilized German territory, using its absolute power to slowly roust France's Jews, communists and other dissidents from places of authority. At first, the arrests lead only to imprisonment, but as the war progresses, the Third Reich reaches for a more permanent solution for those who it considers dead weight. Undesirables are taken from their homes and their workplaces and packed into trains which relocate them to brutal concentration camps in which these unfortunates suffer an unimaginable combination of humiliation and forced labor that not only takes the lives of millions, but reduces the survivors to but shadows of what they were.

Though many of France's key institutions shamefully capitulate to the will of the German occupation, in particular its police forces which pursue Nazi-approved targets with sycophantic zealousness, some lone voices speak out against the gradual dissolution of their country. From academics to laborers, these brave souls organize a resistance which endeavors to both disrupt Nazi operations in France and carve a path for a revival of the French army under Charles de Gaulle. Men and women band together to write speeches and create pamphlets, to pool cash and plot attacks, designed to advance the cause of a free France. However, before many of their schemes can come to fruition, the French police attack these dissident networks, making mass arrests of their own countrymen who are in turn deported to Germany deathcamps. These are their stories, of resistance and survival, of degradation and regret.

Though at times relentlessly tragic, A Train in Winter is an unforgettable examination of the French resistance and all that its members suffered at the hands of both the Nazis and the Vichy government. Focusing in particular on a group of young, sympathetic French women who wrote speeches and distributed pamphlets for the movement, Ms. Moorehead captures the essence of the resister. For to be such is to embrace a life of sacrifice, to put above ones own self-interest the rights and freedoms of a nation, and to pay for these beliefs with blood and servitude. Many of the women did not enter the resistance expecting to be captured and killed, but they knew these were possibilities. And yet, instead of standing by, instead of taking the easy path, these individuals chose to risk their precious lives for a future they held in their hearts. Moreover, they did so knowing that they stood to lose not only their lives, but the health and safety of their loved ones, spouses, parents, even sons and daughters.

But though the stories of the women Ms. Moorehead has singled out here are interesting enough, her work ascends to the truly mesmerizing when it chronicles the depravities and the spinelessness of the collaborators. Every occupying force needs them. For no land can be understood and operated without them. And so every occupier incentivizes men and women in key positions to keep their jobs and do their work, placing them into an ethical bind that is by no means easy to escape. But the degree to which these collaborators performed their tasks, oftentimes going above and beyond the call of duty simply to exercise their power, or, worse, to impress their masters, is as startling as it is revolting. The lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of brave souls who sacrificed all for their country were ruined by men and women bent on self-preservation at all costs, making a Faustian bargain with the Nazis for which, sadly, they never had to adequately pay.

As a history of a particular group of women, Ms. Moorehead's tale leaves a lot to be desired. She is too often interested in hailing their virtues, in celebrating their bond, than in truly examining their lives. Moreover, most of these events are now nearly 70 years in the past, making details decidedly blurrier than they appear here. However, as an exemplar of the triumphs and perils of the resisters, as a chronicle of Nazi cruelty and as an enduring statement about the nature of endurance in the face of unimaginable degradation, this is admirable work. Well worth the read... (3/5 Stars)x

First two volumes of Malazan Book of The Fallen begin a dark and brutal adventure

From The Week of February 11, 2013
It's comforting for humans to believe in free will. For self-determinism means that our actions, from the bold to the boneheaded, are our own. In a world where we are all equally empowered to choose, we can celebrate our triumphs and decry our failures, knowing that we are solely responsible for the full spectrum of these outcomes. After all, how would we learn and grow if all our choices were seconded to another? What would be the point if we were all being guided to some predestined fate? And yet, for all that we enjoy this free will, most of us also believe in gods, omnipotent beings who, to greater and lesser degrees, take a hand in temporal events, steering us to certain outcomes. But what if the world was nothing more than this? Divine schemes that made of us nothing but pawns for their pleasure? What if we simply existed to act out their games? Mr. Erikson imagines in the first two instalments of his epic series.

In a world of magic and death, empires and war, gods play for keeps. Empowered by the copiousness and zealousness of their worshippers, they spin out plots millennia in the making, willing to even make themselves physically manifest in the world if it advances their unimaginable aims. Their subjects, a collection of intelligent races predisposed to war, act out their cosmic contests, most without even being aware that they are creatures of a much greater game.

In this difficult world, so often plagued by suffering and death, an empire has risen from the ashes of the old to impose order upon the tribes and clans, fiefdoms and city states, that chaotically comprise the known world. Helmed by the empress Laseen, an assassin who may or may not have had a hand in the death of her predecessor, Kellanved, the Malazan empire is set on bloody conquest, an iron-fisted and often cruel subjugation of not only the continent from which it sprang, but every other continent of which it has knowledge. Its all-conquering armies, numbering thirteen in all, trudge through storm and desert, forest and tundra, to carry out the will of their powerful empress, knowing that their lives are nothing next to the achievement of her goals.

Populated by an expansive roster of grim characters, and characterized by a show-don't-tell style of prose that often leaves the reader adrift in a mysterious world of unfamiliar customs, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a challenging, even confrontational read that spares no prisoners. Mr. Erikson interweaves moments of philosophy with long skeins of bloody slaughter to create the tapestry of a world beleaguered by rampaging armies and vengeful gods. This energy, this vibe, is so consistently depicted that it leaves the reader wondering if the world itself is coming apart at the seams, as it experiences the opening salvos of an apocalypse that will see it reduced to ash and bone.

Though burdened by the often overwhelming task of establishing such a vivid world, Gardens of The Moon and The Deadhouse Gates, the first two instalments of this epic adventure, are both successful works that, for the most part, live up to the ambitious dreams of the man who authored them. Their plots, though appearing at first to be overly convoluted, are, in the main, straightforward attempts by the Malazan empress to ruthlessly expand her empire with no thought or care for those who stand in her way. Though she has powerful mages at her disposal, her goals are primarily enacted through her exceptional armies who will often stay on campaign, in foreign lands, for years at a time, knowing more of their brothers in arms and their missions than they do of their lands and their families back home. In this, the Malazan empire is clearly inspired by ancient Rome with which it shares a similar structure, an equally voracious thirst for power, and a technical brilliance that helps it to impose its will and its customs upon those unwilling peoples who fall beneath its ravenous shadow.

However, this is where allusions to our world effectively end. For in every other respect, Malazan Book of The Fallen is a masterwork of imagination that can never quite escape the deus-ex-machina of its numerous gods. While its divine actors aid the series by lending it a unique blend of menace and weirdness, they are also its downfall. For the reader comes to understand that Mr. Erikson's characters are not ultimately in control of their own lives. They are subject to the whims of others infinitely more powerful than they. And though occasionally they luck into positions of leverage that allow them to thwart these gods, most often they become pawns of prophecy, a reality which robs them of too much of their agency. In order to emotionally invest in a tale's outcome, the reader has to possess some belief that the prime movers have some capacity to choose for themselves. Otherwise, they are merely puppets for beings we rarely see and cannot fathom. They might as well represent the author's whimsy in which case Mr. Erikson's puppeteering becomes far too apparent.

Make no mistake. This is a work of profound skill, imagination and ambition. Credit is often heaped on other creators of modern fantasy fiction, Jordan and Martin to name but two, for manifesting complex worlds. But these are all-too-recognizable as distorted reflections of our own, alternate realities that rely upon our myths, our symbols, to convey lessons we already comprehend. Malazan Book of The Fallen is, but for a few exceptions, something altogether foreign from everything we know. It is the purest manifestation of sheer creativity that I've encountered in some time. It is a shame then that it is bestowed with such a narrow slice of the emotional spectrum. Its first two volumes are works almost entirely of rage and revenge. There is no light to balance the darkness.

A promising beginning to a remarkable, if problematic, niche product. (4/5 Stars)

Dragon Sea by Frank Pope

From The Week of November 5, 2012

Though many would argue otherwise, there are few among us who can resist the lure of the glorious score, that incredible, transformative moment in which one's life fortunes are completely changed, vaulting them into the stratosphere of wealth and status. In our classist world, the rewards are simply too rich, too plentiful, for anyone short of a saint to turn down the opportunity to abandon drudgery for the soft lap of luxury. However, such moments rarely just arrive on one's doorstep. They have to be sought out and pursued, wooed with a mixture of prudence and persistence. They have to be planned for, every detail anticipated, if success it to be achieved. And even then, Lady Luck has her say. Thus are the many fortune-seekers weeded out, the soft bark falling away to reveal the hardness within. What kind of mind does such a treasure-hunter possess? And is all the planning and the yearning worth it? Mr. Pope is deeply qualified to answer this question. He does so with thoughtful skill in Dragon Sea.

Packed to the gills with Vietnamese pottery, the Hoi An was a 15th-century merchant vessel that plied the warm seas of Southeast Asia. Sunk before it could deliver its payload, the wreck spent 500 years entombed under more than 200 feet of water, just 22 miles off the coast of Vietnam, until it was chanced upon by fishermen in the 1990s. The discovery was a fateful one for the Hoi an and its long-dead crew. For its re-emergence caused it to tumble onto the radars of treasure-hunters and archaeologists, pragmatists and idealists, each of whom wanted nothing more than to get their hands on this ancient prize. But recovering artifacts from a 500-year-old wreck, half-buried in the ocean floor is no simple feat.

Enter Ong Soo Hin, a Malaysian businessman with a hunger for profit and mastery. Enchanted by both the retrieval of the wreck, and all that it would earn him, Hin sought out and received the blessing of the Vietnam government, assembled a diving team, chartered a pricy boat as his base of operations and, with collaborations from archaeologists and conservationists, began to pull up what had lain buried for so long. But no sooner was the pottery rising to the surface then problems began to plague the mission, a series of calamities that not only sapped the morale of the expedition's members, but culminated in profound disharmonies between Hin and the mission's lead archaeologist which would eventually leave both men feeling as though they'd been betrayed by the other. An appropriately Shakespearian end to a tragic enterprise...

From its re-discovery to the epic calamity of the sale of its goods, Dragon Sea is an engrossing journey into the world of treasure-hunting. Something of an understudy to the expedition's archaeologist, Mr. Pope is by no means an objective narrator. For he spent months with the international dive team that retrieved the Vietnamese pottery, helping to catalogue it all while being sheltered by the very man (Hin) who was trying to sell it. However, for all that we must take Mr. Pope's account of events with a grain of salt, his detailed description of the treasure-hunter's life is as vivid as it is enlightening. In the course of his tale, the author not only elucidates the history of diving and the saturation system that allowed Hin's team to retrieve valuables under conditions that would kill an unprotected human, he generates dynamic profiles of the divers and academics, the businessmen and the thrill-seekers, who made up the expedition's roster. In this, he admirably entwines edification with entertainment to create an excellent product.

For all this, Dragon Sea is not without its blindspots. Though Mr. Pope touches on the moral dilemmas inherent in allowing treasure-seekers to claim salvage of cultural relics, selling off substantial amounts of invaluable art to pay for their expenses en-route to filling their pockets with profit, he fails to touch on the degree to which looting shipwrecks is, for all intents and purposes, graverobbing. People died on the Hoi An. Some were even buried with it. And yet no one, from the moneymen to the academics hesitate for even a moment to consider that, were this graveyard on land, no one would allow them to sell off grave goods to the highest bidder, on Ebay of all places. Instead, it's simply accepted that, because treasures at sea are harder to get to, and consequently more expensive to fetch, a compromise has to be made; some loot is given to the expeditions' backers to sell and other pieces go to the academics and the museums to study and display. This is not only insensitive, it's narrowminded. Even If we assume, for a moment, that it's morally acceptable to loot the wreck, then ban all public sales of the relics. Compel museums to contract with treasure-hunters to retrieve the loot and hand it on to the museums. The excuse that museums cannot fund such projects seems incompatible with a world in which substantial sums are frequently raised for all manner of projects consequential and otherwise.

This is quality work. Mr. Pope pulls back the curtain on a dark and sleazy world we'd do well to familiarize ourselves with. For perhaps then its practices would be all the cleaner for the scrutiny. (3/5 Stars)

The Expanse: Books 1 and 2 by James S.A. Corey

From The Week of September 24, 2012 While many, in our civilization, have rightfully blamed religion for much of the chaos and war that have tormented the last 2,000 years of human history, science is equally capable of enshrouding the world in death and darkness. For science without morality is not a tool by which progress is made through rationality; it is nothing more than a systemic means by which the few exploit the many in the name of the greater good. Good science, then, must adhere to the same standard that drives good religion, a positive, ethical framework that always places the rights of the individual above the welfare of the masses, knowing that, to do so, guarantees the rights of everyone. This is a difficult lesson, one that requires us all to overlook our biases to glimpse a deeper, more universal truth about human behavior. It is a lesson devastatingly taught in these first two volumes of a fascinating and disturbing trilogy.

Centuries from now, humanity will not have solved all of the problems that plague it today. There will not be medical cure-alls that dispel all diseases; there will not be wonderful technologies that obviate the need for extractive economies; there will not be political structures that promote good works while discouraging corruption. Instead, there will exist a species much like our own. Oh, humans will have invented interplanetary engines that will allow them to settle on the planets and moons of our solar system. They will even have made discoveries in genetic engineering that will allow them to grow useful crops on these inhospitable rocks, allowing humans to live and breathe in any of a dozen habitats beyond the orbit of Earth. But the underlying inequities will remain. The shortsighted sins that have hobbled our species for the whole of recorded history will still be with us, only now the greedy and the lustful, the powerful and the ambitious, will be armed with weapons and engines capable of destroying entire civilizations.

In Leviathan Wakes, the series' opening salvo, we meet two very different individuals trying to live in this dangerous, complicated universe. James Holden is the executive officer of the Canterbury, a spaceship designed to retrieve water, in the form of ice, from the solar system's less hospitable zones and deliver it to human habitats where it can be bought and consumed by the some 40-billion humans who now live and flourish in the glow of our star. An idealist, formerly of the UNN, the naval arm of the United Nations armed services, Holden endeavors always to act in the best interests of his crew and of humanity. And if that means he must trumpet dangerous truths from the deck of his ship to the rest of the solar system then that is how it must be. Consequences be damned... For truth must always triumph over secrecy. There is no other way for justice to prevail over corruption.

Joe Miller is Holden's polar opposite. A middle-aged detective thoroughly captured by the harsh demands of policework, he has been beaten down by thirty years of investigations and arrests that never seem to make a dent in the crime he's been contracted to control. No matter what he does, no matter what he says, vice will continue to flourish in a society plagued by inequities and broken dreams. His life takes a decidedly sharp turn, however, when he is asked to retrieve a wayward rich girl from the slums of the asteroid belt and forceably return her to the wealth and privilege of her Martian parents. For in accepting this contract, he stumbles upon a terrible secret. Someone is playing with genetics in a way so foul that it disgusts even the hard-hearted Miller who, through circumstance and good fortune, teams up with a grieving and infuriated Holden to get at the heart of a most grotesque mystery. Someone has unleashed a terrifying virus upon humanity. But why? And to what end? In Caliban's War, the series' second instalment, ambition has once again endangered the human race. The protomolecule, that most alien and incomprehensible virus that ignited so much death and chaos in Leviathan Wakes, has resurfaced in two vastly different ways. The most obvious strand is currently feverishly reconfiguring Venus, transforming it from a Hellish hothouse into a planet of unimaginable design and destiny. The subtler strain is at work in a secret laboratory on Ganymede, a populated moon of Jupiter, where the theft of some immuno-compromised children has gone entirely unnoticed thanks to a quick but brutal shooting war between troops loyal to Mars and Earth. When the dust has settled and Ganymede lays in ruins, sixteen missing children is hardly a priority except for one man, the desperate father of one f the girls who'll do anything to get her back. Holden and his crew, made frantic by the protomolecule's re emergence, adopt the father's mission in hopes of it leading them to the powers who insist on risking humanity's very existence.

Dominated by blood and war, zombies and viruses, The Expanse is exquisite, cinematic science fiction. James Corey, the pen name for a collaborative effort between Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, has assembled from numerous inspirations two powerful, winningly original novels that are as painfully realistic as they are unflinchingly gory. Many influences are made manifest here, from the horror of Dean Koontz to the institutional corruption of Richard Morgan, to the space-combat realism of C. J. Cherryh, to the biological realism of Paul McAuley. But The Expanse is neither a re-imagination of, nor dependent upon, these influences. On the contrary, it rises well above the fray, rejecting the derivative destinies of most works of its kind to chart its own ambitious and exhilarating course.

There is plenty here for everyone: political corruption, institutional mismanagement, zombie horrors and creepy alien technology. There are wars and firefights, terraforming and genetic engineering, but in the end the series' genius lies in its characters who were as carefully laid out as they are stunningly realized. Holden's idealism set against Miller's cynicism is the most obvious and successful polarization, but Abraham and Franck have taken just as much care with their world's secondary characters, animating them with a power that can be both delightful and terrifying. There is an exquisite exactitude here, a vanishingly rare attention to character detail that makes every single one of the actors in this drama come to life to a degree that puts to shame the efforts of lesser lights.

There is no question in my mind that The Expanse is the kind of science fiction that could be successfully brought to the silver screen, causing a new generation of TV-viewers to fall in love with the genre. For like the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, The Expanse puts the fiction before the science. It cares more about its characters and the ethical dilemmas they are confronted with than it does about the science which, nonetheless, is successfully welded atop this foundation of character. It is a futuristic war shaped by a Wikileaks-style debate over the control of information and the ambition of institutions to do as they please. In this, it cannot but be relatable to our masses.

Winning work. Occasionally a bit too preoccupied with gore, but in every other respect extraordinary. (5/5 Stars)

The Bridge Of D'Arnath by Carol Berg

From The Week of September 17, 2012 Though we endeavor, throughout our lives, to exert as much control over our destinies as possible, Fate is always there, ready to spoil our well-made plans. For while we may find it within ourselves to plot our own futures, we cannot dictate broader events. these are the gestalt of other actors who, in chaotic concert, weave a tapestry of action upon which we must work. Most of us will be indifferent to this fateful intersection of individual and world; after all, most of us experience customary lives which lack the mass to change the pattern of life. and yet, those rare few who do stand at the heart of things will find themselves utterly changed by Fate's hand, a caress that will steer them far from happy lassitude and into painful turmoil. Ms. Berg illustrates in her four-part epic.

Connected by an ancient, mystical bridge that spans the unfathomable void between their two worlds, the lands of Leiran and D'Arnath should have much in common. For centuries, D'Arnathy sorcerers have mingled in medieval Leiran, restoring its sick to health and filling its land with life. but where magic comes easily to the sons and daughters of D'Arnath, it has never been found in the bloodlines of Leiran families, an absence that has encouraged suspicion within the Leiran nobility, suspicions that the realm's priesthood has galvanized into prohibition. Eventually, a ban on sorcerers is found to be insufficient. Now, nothing short of a gruesome death shall be the punishment of any mage found to beoperating within Leiran lands.

One might imagine that the D'Arnathy, superior in every imaginable way to the Leiran, would simply depart, leaving their inferior cousins to their ignorance, but an ancient war with demigods on their own world has reduced 90 percent of their homeland to rack and ruin. what was once beautiful and green is now deserted and brown, the consequence of the wielding of unimaginable power. The D'Arnathy, then, are a people in peril, a people on the brink of homelessness, a people of peace made into the children of war who may yet be wiped clear of the canvas of history.

In The Son of Avonar, the epic's opening volley, we meet Lady Serriana of Leiran, a duchess who has accepted disgrace for living in sin with a D'Arnathy healer. having found in her lover only kindness and steadfastness, her life is shattered when the truth of his identity is publicly revealed and he is put to death in a most cruel fashion. This, coupled with the death of her son by this same man, compels Serriana to reject her life and her station, to withdraw to a distant cottage and spend the rest of her days in solitude.

this reverie, however, is broken when a young man barges into her world. Deeply damaged, he seems not to know his own name, let alone possess any capacity to sensibly communicate with the woman whose life he's interrupted. despite the barriers separating them, though, Serriana comes to believe that this stranger may well come to play a key role in the consequential events to come. For the bridge that has long-connected Leiran with D'Arnath is crumbling. and its falling may well spell the end of freedom on both worlds.

In Guardians of The Keep, the epic's second volume, Serriana's life is once again skewered by fate. having been pardoned by the Leiran king for her relationship with a D'Arnathy, she has returned to Conigor, the keep of her birth, to settle the affairs of her dead brother. duke Tomas' son, however, soon acquires her full attention. for in addition to being somber and sullen, he is deeply suspicious of his aunt who he's been taught to despise. when he fatefully runs away from Conigor, Serriana endeavors to bring him home, but she and her friends are too late. Her brother's son has been welcomed into the arms of the Lords of Zhev'Na, the destructive enemies of the D'Arnathy and they are ready to make of him a god of chaos to stand with them in the ruination of the worlds.

In The Soul Weaver, the epic's third entry, Serriana is again tapped by fate to intercede on behalf of her land when the queen of Leiran herself seeks her out to plead for her aid. the king of Leiran has been incapacitated by agents of the Zhev'Na, a crime which may or may not be connected to the disappearance of their daughter. Serriana agrees to help them even though she is burdened by her own labors. her family, such as it is, is set to be ended by the culmination of the destructive plans of the Zhev'Na. Only a miracle can save them, and Leiran, from ruination.

In Daughter of The Ancients, the final instalment in the epic, the arrival of a thousand-years-dead princess from the wastelands of the Zhev'Na throws the slowly recovering world of the D'Arnathy into chaos. How will she, the eldest heir to the D'Arnathy throne be integrated into the existing ruling structure? Is she as innocent and wronged as she seems, or is she the last ditch ploy of dying gods for one final measure of revenge.? Serriana and her family endeavor to discover the Princess' ultimate purpose while the fates of three worlds hang in the balance.

a sweeping epic, full of consequential deeds and unimaginable dangers, The Bridge of D'Arnath is a difficult, messy adventure. Ms. Berg commands a lyrical pen that does wonderful credit to her work here, blessing it with prose nearly as fine as poetry. But while her facility with language is second to very few, her plots leave a great deal to be desired. Events in this epic lurch from apocalyptic catastrophe to apocalyptic catastrophe, rarely pausing to allow its actors, let alone its readers, to catch their breath. Worse than its implausibility, though, is the degree to which the all-too-frequent explosions, like a bad summer blockbuster, numb the reader, inoculating him to the drama of the piece.

More than the troubled plot, though, Ms. Berg's epic is hobbled by a cast of characters who are rarely allowed to be themselves. Minds are sundered, identities are stolen, and souls are forced into the bodies of those who do not want them. And while these devices allow Ms. Berg to play with ideas of fate and consequence, of identity and personality, they leave the reader with little grasp of what these people are like when they aren't being bombarded by any number of mystical forces. It is, then, no surprise that Serriana is the series' most successful character. for in addition to being a strong-willed heroine worthy of the thousands of pages devoted to her, she is the only one who does not, at some juncture, have her mind scrambled by one godlike force or another.

Let there be no doubt that there is quality here. for all its flaws, The Bridge of D'Arnath bears strong resemblances to the giants of fantasy whose works inspired it. but instead of coalescing from its source materials into its own, distinct being, it is a Frankenstein of Tolkienian questing, Martinian betrayals and Jordanian beauty. It's as if the author conjured up a heroine and welded onto this framework her favorite bits of any number of her own heroes. Unfortunately for her, the weld points are all-too visible to the naked eye.

Interesting work, but the degree to which it is bedeviled by a bloated plot and deformed characters prevents it from taking flight and ascending to the upper echelons of the genre. (2/5 Stars)

The Coldfire Trilogy by C. S. Friedman

From The Week of August 20, 2012
As much as we yearn to know ourselves and our loved ones as profoundly as possible, divining the depths of the human soul is a dangerous and oftentimes scarring experience. For down in that abysmal chasm churns the darkness of our grim nightmares, our secret desires, and our raw emotions, none of which should ever be allowed to rise up into the light of day. For these are the antecedents of our animalistic heritage, the leftovers of our primal urges that have been tamed by both the strictures and the structures of civilization. They are the ghostly shadows of who we might have been had we been born a million years ago, when there existed nothing other than the law of the jungle.

What if they were brought into the light? What if all of our worst thoughts and fears, needs and passions, were given form, made reality by nothing more than the wishing of it? What kind of world would result from such unleashed animae? Ms. Friedman speculates in her sprawling trilogy.

On a world thousands of lightyears from Earth, life has evolved along profoundly different lines. For while some conventional animals prowl the surface of Erna, these are but offspring of an immense, unknowable force that emanates from the very heart of this enigmatic world. In ways unfathomable to anyone else, Erna is alive, its eminently malleable power distributed along spiritual and physical faultlines that cover the planet's surface, ever changing to perfectly reflect the wishes and the needs of the creatures that call Erna home.

e Having known only tranquility for millennia, this power is profoundly disturbed when human colonists first descend upon this strange new world. Refugees from thousands of years of cold sleep, this small band of men and women were lead to Erna by the judgement of their ship's AI which, having been designed to comb the galaxy for worlds habitable to humans, decided that Erna was hospitable to human life. But the AI could have never imagined the threat into which it sold its creators. For Erna's lifeforce can now learn the patterns of the nightmares fostered by human fears, turning once peaceful Erna into a dangerous world of darkness and despair.

In Black Sun Rising, the trilogy's opening salvo, more than a thousand years have elapsed since humanity's disastrous arrival on Erna and, though humans have lost the knowledge and the use of the advanced technology that delivered them to this exotic world, life has stabilized. For not only has humanity managed, to a limited degree, to work these energies unique to Erna, a powerful church has also risen to impose order upon the chaos of human civilization, teaching its followers to control their emotions and their dreams, to redirect those energies to a benevolent divine. It's clear that this divine does not exist, not initially, but if sufficient numbers believe in him, then he too shall be conjured into being by Erna in the same way the vampires and ghosts, demons and ghouls, have been.

A ranking member of this church, Rev. Damien Vryce is one of the sorcerous few who can influence the native Fae, a fact which earns him nothing but suspicion and standoffishness from the notoriously anti-Fae church. Still, the church will require Damien's specialized talents if they are to discover just what kind of nightmare is stalking the streets of its capital and devouring the memories of some of its citizens' brightest minds. Taking on the duty to find and kill this nightmare, Vryce initially sets his sights on the legendary Hunter, a vampire-like nobleman who has fed off of the fears of young, impressionable women to stay alive for centuries. But when the answer to this mystery proves to be far more profound, Damien is forced to make unpleasant alliances in order to cross half the world to find and uproot the source of this destructive evil.

In When True Night Falls, the trilogy's second instalment, Rev. Vryce finds himself at the heart of an even more insidious web. For his most recent mission has revealed that a deeper game is afoot, one that will require he and the Hunter to leave everything they know to travel east, into an empire from which no westerner has returned in living memory. Received warmly by the empire's matriarchal version of the Church, Vryce is initially taken by the peace and the cohesion the Church has managed to exert over the notoriously fickle subconsciousnesses of its human subjects. But when a series of shocking revelations expose the truth of this place, Vryce embarks upon a dangerous journey south, into the very lair of a demon, in hopes of averting a war that will drench his world in blood.

In Crown of Shadows, the trilogy's concluding work, events come to a climactic head when Rev. Vryce discovers that a class of powerful demons has been ruthlessly manipulating recent disasters, conjuring threats that have not only cost Vryce his friends but the support of his Church. Left isolated by his enemy's maneuverings, Vryce is forced to once again draw upon the knowledge and the power of the hated Hunter to try to steer the world from the demonic vision of the future his enemies are trying to bring about, one in which everything he knows and cares for is sold into slavery to a dark power made manifest by their own dark desires. What hope have two almost men have against a thing that can draw power from the pain of millions?

Though troubled, at times, by poor pacing and burdened, throughout, by an over-reliance on quests, The Coldfire Trilogy is imaginative work that withstands the test of time. In her attempt to externalize, to make real, the fears of mankind, Ms. Friedman has conceived of a darkly fascinating world with the atmosphere of Gothic, Victorian England married to the tropes of the classic, questing high-fantasy novel, the union of which has produced a series that is as readable as it is chilling. The Fae as manifestation of human emotion is not precisely novel, but the vigor with which it is applied here causes the work to rise well above the fray, confronting, head-on, the profound costs, to our environment and our fellows, of the arrogance of the human-centric worldview.

Ms. Friedman is, here, positively ruthless. Whereas many authors of fantasy shield their heroes from not only the worst of what their evil enemies have to offer, but the consequences of their own actions, she is willing to pervert what is pure, to defile what is holy, to end what is innocent. She compels her characters to compromise themselves in every imaginable way and then she demands they surrender yet more of their humanity in a kind of cosmic test of their endurance, to see how much they can take before they break under her remorseless hands. In this, she is well ahead of her time. For this work, initially published in the early 1990s, calls to mind trends from much later in that decade, and the next, in which authors and television-show creators tested their heroes on the wrack of their wills, pushing them beyond their stress limits, demanding that they take more, more, more, until they, and the illusions they were responsible for, give way. We are meant to love what is unclean and rebel against what is pure, not as an exercise in simple, dumb hedonism, but in order to shed our prejudices and our blinders, to embrace ourselves in all our flawed glory.

But whereas Ms. Friedman excels at dark storytelling, each work in this trilogy is troubled by lethargic pacing and relentless questing. Each novel is easily a hundred pages too long, bloated by repetitive details that do nothing to deepen the already rich mythology, or advance the already elaborate story. They serve only to hammer away at the grimness of the reality which has been already thoroughly established. Moreover, the high-fantasy conceit of a quest to save the world seems decidedly out of place in a story this dark. Yes, they are handled well in each volume, but Ms. Friedman is a talented enough storyteller to leave aside this tired structure that, anyway, poorly fits her world. The against-all-odds questing merely serves to re-enforce the specialness of her characters, none of whom require such gilding.

The Coldfire Trilogy is engrossing work. It establishes a challenging world and sticks to it with enviable consistency. Moreover, its characters are as flawed as its environment is Gothic, a fact which should please anyone who appreciates darkly flavored fantasy. Well ahead of its time... (4/5 Stars)

I Am A Soldier Too by Rick Bragg

From The Week of August 20, 2012
Though the realities of war and disease, cruelty and selfishness, bombard us with evidence to the contrary, life is a precious gift. For notwithstanding the unsubstantiated beliefs of religionists, we are all afforded but one lifetime, one chance to love and be loved, to influence and be influenced, to inspire and be inspired. This is self-evident. And yet wars are still waged, crimes still committed, sins yet spun into existence, all of which are actions that violate the principle of preciousness.

There is but one conclusion that can be drawn from this paradox, that we consider the lives of others to be cheaper than our own, that we are willing to do onto others what we would not want done to us, that we do not recognize that most enduring truth about life. That it can be taken from us in an instant, leaving us broken and bewildered on its merciless horns... Few people are more aware of this than Jessica Lynch. Mr. Bragg elaborates in this captivating biography.

On March 23rd, 2003, life as Jessica Lynch knew it was shattered. A 20-year-old private in the 507th maintenance company of the United States Army, she was part of a supply convoy, supporting the US military's invasion of Iraq, that was ambushed by enemy combatants in the Iraqi city of Nasiriyah. Having been lead into danger by the navigational errors of the convoy's commanding officer and the failure of other nearby military units to alert them to the danger, the convoy was trapped and cut to pieces by enemy fire which claimed the lives of dozens of US personnel. Lynch, who was riding in the back of a vehicle driven by her best friend, remembers very little of the next three hours of her life, recalling only that her weapon, the notoriously fickle M16, jammed just prior to a firefight that would claim the lives of her friends and the sanctity of her body which, over the next several hours, was subjected to torments her conscious mind cannot recall.

Ms. Lynch would come back to herself in an Iraqi hospital, being tended to by Iraqi medical practitioners, in the heart of an Iraqi city being bombed back to the stone age by American warplanes. Over the next eight days, she would lie in her hospital bed, semi-conscious, being kept alive by the Iraqis until a dramatic April 1st rescue by US special forces returned her to her family and the small town in West Virginia that she had called home for the totality of her life. Having enlisted in the military to pay for college, she could have never imagined her life being ripped apart on that fateful day in Iraq. She was a country girl, who wanted to teach elementary school. And now she was a wounded veteran of a politically tempestuous war, made, without her knowing, into a symbol of patriotism, none of which would help her to heal her many, grievous wounds of body and soul.

Published eighteen months after her sensational rescue, I Am A Soldier Too is an arresting biography. Mr. Bragg, an award-winning American journalist, is welcomed into the lives of the Lynches, recounting here not only Jessica's harrowing crucible in Iraq but the torments of her family and friends who were forced, over the eight days of her disappearance, to hang on every phone call, every shred of news, every glimmer of hope. He chronicles the town's prayers for a miracle, a miracle for a girl most of them didn't even know, prior to her being reported missing on that fateful day in March. And he captures their unrestrained joy at her rescue, an event around which her hometown rallied and celebrated, that is, until they were made aware of the severity of her circumstance.

It would be easy to criticize Mr. Bragg's account, to label it a sappy, saccharine love letter to the beautiful ideal of small-town America. But such a critic would have to have a heart of stone. For this slim volume has captured an astonishing degree of kindness, a generosity of spirit unleashed by Jessica Lynch's ordeal that easily possesses the capacity to temporarily convert the most hardened cynic into a dewy-eyed optimist. If the men and women of Palestine, West Virginia, weren't building Ms. Lynch a new, wheelchair-accessible home, they were supporting her family and throwing parades in her honor, any gesture that might ease the pain of a girl coming to grips with not only her broken body but the loss of her best friend cut down in the sands of Iraq. It is true that such communal good feeling is notoriously brief, lasting only as long as the difficulties of every day life can be set aside, but awareness of this fact does nothing to diminish the display of human solidarity that ought to make a mockery of the war that made it necessary.

From her dreams to her rehab, from Iraq to West Virginia, Mr. Bragg has put together a moving document that cannot but convince us of the preciousness of life. For not only can it be taken from us at any time, it can be broken as well, turned into brittle shards of a whole we once loved and now can only lament. Captivating work that serves as much as a reminder as an edifier... (4/5 Stars)

Gardens Of The Sun by Paul McAuley

From The Week of August 13, 2012

Tyranny has always been a powerful and destructive force. For it gives over to the one the authority and the freedom of the many, an authority which can then be used as a powerbase from which the tyrant can impose his ideas, his values and his will upon the world. But until recently, tyranny has been hobbled by certain limitations, chiefly, the tyrant's inability to directly command those who are not within his immediate vicinity. After all, a tyrant's will is considerably less fearsome when it is conveyed by letter, or by messenger, and not in person where the receiver can be influenced by all the trappings of the tyrant's station.

With the dawn of the technological age, however, the rules of the game have changed. With instantaneous communication across the length and breadth of the world, tyrants can impose their wills like never before. They can augment their powerbases with technologies that manipulate media, suppress dissent and annihilate resistance. And if such is possible today, what will be possible tomorrow? What will be possible in a century? Can democracy survive such powerful tools falling into the hands of tyrants? Mr. McAuley speculates in a novel that brings to a close the saga begun in The Quiet War.

It is the 23rd century and humanity has reached the stars. Fuelled by enormous leaps in genetic engineering, which have made possible the growing of crops in non-traditional environments, planets and moons from Mars to Saturn, Io to Titan, have been colonized by explorers and adventurers, philosophers and fortune-seekers, all of whom have fled Earth's political corruption and environmental decay. The Outers, as they come to be called, found their communities on utopian ideals of democracy and free will which help to harness the powers of experimentation and creativity which allow them to make huge, technological strides. They consider themselves the future of humanity, a species capable of adapting to any environment, of taking on any guise, of embarking on any adventure.

On Earth, meanwhile, the necessities of repairing a broken climate have nudged Earth-bound humans in an entirely more authoritarian direction. A toxic combination of radical greens, opposed to any form of genetic engineering, and hardline militarists, intent upon holding the reins of power, have abolished all forms of democracy and due process, replacing them with various strains of fascism that range from simple dictatorships to political clans. And so, while the people scrub and scrape at the torn, gray earth, trying to inject life into the corrupted soil, the powerful descend deeper and deeper into intolerance. Finding that they can no longer abide the democratic threat of the Outers, they move against them with nukes and warships, trying to impose upon them the fascism and slavery in such vogue on Earth.

But though the Outers are vanishingly few compared to the billions on Earth, and though they have been decisively defeated in the opening salvos of the Quiet War, they possess what the Earth powers do not, freedom, freedom to change, freedom to adapt, freedom to think beyond the narrow confines of their world. Their weapons are their ideas, viruses that, once they take hold, are almost impossible to uproot. But can these weapons work fast enough? Can they bear fruit before the last of the Outers are wiped out? Only time will tell.

Though at times troubled by aimlessness, Gardens of The Sun nonetheless builds on the creative successes of the work that gave it form. Where The Quiet War preoccupied itself with familiarizing the reader with the various influential factions in the author's fascist future, Gardens of The Sun is much more of a rumination on rebellion and the pros and cons of various forms of government. Here, the environmental alarmism of the first novel gives way to a re-imagination of a kind of American Revolution 23rd-century style, with a band of overmatched freedom fighters trying to live beyond the clutches of a corrupt and cruel aristocracy. All the characters from The Quiet War reappear, though, it's by no means essential to have read that novel. For, here, time moves much more swiftly, covering decades where the prior work managed only months.

For as much as Gardens of The Sun brings this duology to a satisfying conclusion, it is equally clear that Mr. McAuley was, in large part, at a loss as to how to reach the ending he envisioned. Substantial swaths of the work read like summaries of events that either needed to be covered in far more depth or ignored altogether. For the middle road the author has chosen causes the work to read like a book review more than a work of literature. Moreover, in as much as the novel's conclusion is pleasing, it is one of the least earned endings to a successful series I've ever encountered. After spending hundreds of pages building up to the series' political climax, events proceed without hardly any agency being exercised by any of the author's characters. They are, like the readers, left to look on while the world radically changes around them. Perhaps Mr. McAuley was endeavoring to make a point about the nature of change, that it takes whatever form it desires, ignoring the wishes of its prime movers, but it seems far more likely that he did not know how to bring about his denouement.

For all of the work's flaws, let there be no doubt that Mr. McAuley possesses a formidable intellect and a passion for biology. Any science junkie will be well-entertained by this duology while most political animals will find, here, much to maintain their interest. But these talents cannot, here, make up for the deep-seated flaws in plot that prevent the work from reaching anything like its full potential. Solid but disappointing... (2/5 Stars)

The Apotheosis Trilogy by S. Andrew Swan

From The Week of August 06, 2012

Through science, humanity has gained access to unimaginable power. It has conveyed the knowledge to level cities and decode genes, measure the stars and explore the ocean depths. It has even allowed us to create synthetic life while blunting the attacks of terrifying diseases. From healing to history, from war to wealth, all has been made possible through science except for one critical element. Science cannot grant wisdom. Science cannot bestow the kindness to deploy its secrets only for good. Science cannot transmit morality. It has no tests to pass, no thresholds to meet. Knowledge simply is, waiting for anyone to harness it. This has been a difficult lesson for humanity to learn. It has come at the cost of nuked cities and experiments gone terribly awry. And even then we are left to wonder how long the lessons stay learned. Mr. Swan ruminates in his expansive and fantastic space opera.

The year is 2525 and, despite numerous, bone-jarring bumps along the way, humanity has survived its rocky ascendance into an interstellar civilization. Dictatorial Revolutions and interspecies wars have come and gone, leaving behind a legacy of fear, paranoia and religiosity. For experiments with genetic engineering, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence have all ended badly enough that a species-wide taboo has grown up to ban their use. Nonetheless, remnants of these experimental eras live on, not only in the fearsome tiger men of Grimalkin but in the optimalized humans of Dakota. They persist in the posthuman mindscapes of the Proteans and in the generational memories of the lost colonies. These unsubtle reminders of humanity's boldly investigative past have bequeathed the 26th century with a tangled knot of desires and prohibitions that have fractured human space into three basic factions.

Siding with Earth and it's surrounding systems is the Roman Catholic church. The only institution to have survived the various upheavals of the last three centuries, it has effectively become Earth's government, providing moral guidance while rigorously enforcing its various bans on forbidden technologies. Locked in a cold and polarizing alliance with the church is the Caliphate, a cluster of Islamic worlds which have overcome the political chaos of their turbulent past to cohere around a notionally liberal interpretation of both Islam and its law. Between these two frictional forces reside various unaligned worlds, planets where political, economic and societal experiments have been allowed to unfold, adding to the diversity of life in this corner of the galaxy.

In Prophets, the trilogy's first instalment, this delicate balance of powers is unsettled by two seemingly unrelated but eminently disturbing revelations. First is the re-discovery of a series of lost human colonies which have kept themselves separate from the rest of the galaxy for nearly 200 years. This self-imposed seclusion is shattered when a protean egg ship, a vessel containing a theatre of digitized minds, crashes onto the surface of one such colony, bearing a terrifying message, that, in the course of its mission to transport the minds to their eventual destination, it stopped to investigate an anomaly around CY Virginis, a nearby star. Its encounter with the unknown force nearly destroyed the powerful Protean egg, forcing it to limp away in hopes of finding a safe harbor to repair itself.

Thought to be a threat, the colony distrusts the Protean warning. For two other ships have arrived on the heels of the egg, not only further violating its seclusion but dispelling any notion amongst the colonists that the egg was acting alone. The first of these visiting vessels is composed of mercenaries captained by a banned intelligence that has been lured to the lost colony by a foe thought long dead. The second ship proves to be of far greater concern to the wider human community when it is revealed to be a new class of Caliphate vessel, one that has made a quantum leap forward in sophistication. Where did the knowledge to make such sudden and remarkable progress come from and does it have anything to do with the thing that attacked the Protean egg? Actors from each of the human factions converge upon the lost colony to bear witness to a new, dark era of humanity. In Heretics, the trilogy's second volume, Adam, the name given to the enemy threatening all of human space, has, with a single, incomprehensible stroke, damaged many of the vessels, communications networks and political alliances that once gave order to the region. The resulting chaos has prevented anything like a concerted resistance from forming against Adam's relentless march of destruction. Unleashing his energies against overmatched worlds, the humans who have witnessed his atrocities can only look on as he forceably redesigns entire civilizations, first reducing them to rubble and then rebuilding them into a configuration pleasing to him. This awesome application of force causes increasing numbers of frightened members of all factions to join him, become a small faction of Adam's overall essence, diversity to be added to the ideal new world he will create when he is through annihilating the old.

Despite Adam's best efforts, however, Father Malory, an agent of the Vatican who conned his way into the mercenary crew that first witnessed Adam's coming, has escaped back to Bakunin, a free world where there is at least some assets to deploy against this overwhelming threat. His efforts to create an alliance among the notoriously individualistic residents of Bacumin, however, prove fruitless until new developments properly convey the urgency of the moment. For Adam has finally reachedEarth and there seems little hope of stopping him from crushing the cradle of humanity.

In Messiah, the trilogy's climactic entry, the war for human space reaches its zenith when Adam's advance is momentarily halted by a loose alliance of human and posthuman forces resisting his tyranny. The rebellion, which is bound together by nothing more than the desire to survive free of Adam's destructive will, threatens, on any number of occasions, to fragment under Adam's relentless pressure. But every moment they fight extends a meager window of time in which a small group of mercenaries and scientists can burrow under the surface of Bacunin, desperately searching for answers to an power left behind by an ancient civilization. Perhaps, if it's power can be harnessed, Adam can be turned back. After all, should they fail, there will be nothing, for anyone, but servitude or death.

Though Mr. Swan relies too much upon the tropes of the genre, and though he is perhaps too fond of the religious allegories that underpin his story, Apotheosis is nonetheless outstanding science fiction. It possesses the moralizing of Star Trek and the nihilism of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, the pomposity of religion and the geekiness of futurism, stirring these heady ingredients into an unholy stew of entertainment and philosophy that thrills far more than it bores. Yes, the author's characters trend towards the archetypical, and his plot twists succumb too often to the obvious, but these deficits are more than offset by his consistency of vision and his relentlessness of execution. For when it's time for Mr. Swan to play his difficult cards, to compel his audience to endure the same devastation imposed upon his characters, he does not shy away. He acts with the resoluteness of a hangman, shoving us far from the redemption offered by the easy path. In all of this, he has earned my respect.

A review of this trilogy would be incomplete were it not to comment upon its two primary virtues. Firstly, Mr. Swan rejects the all-too-common deployment of religion in science fiction. Instead of casting it as the extremist boogeyman against which his individualistic heroes can act, he takes the more nuanced approach that religion will still likely possess its moral authority in the centuries to come. It may lose all else to science, but when tragedy strikes and humanity requires something solid and ancient to fallback on, our various faiths will be there to fill that gap. And should the tragedies be of sufficient devastation, doctrinal faith might well take back the mantle of power, promising to steward humanity through an immoral time. Secondly, Mr. Swan's discussion of banned technologies and the taboos that will inevitably arise from their misuse, while not in any way new -- Frank Herbert has him beat by 40 years -- nonetheless holds the reader's attention. The author's refusal to give voice to his own position on the matter allows the reader to pick a side in the inevitable war between the forces that wish to advance swiftly and those who wish to do so cautiously. This allows his chronicle to be different things to different readers, a pleasing outcome given the degree to which science fiction can oftentimes be polemical and narrowminded.

Apotheosis is not perfect, but the degree to which it strives to be different while relying upon the trappings of the old bestows upon it a freshness that is exceedingly welcome in a space rife with derivations. Bold work... (4/5 Stars)