First Sentence: They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.
Thoughts: The Sprawl series hits its sophomore slump in Count Zero. Instead on focusing on one group of characters, this time we have three different plots that are supposed to fit together at the end but don’t.
The first plot is about Turner. He’s a mercenary for Hosaka Corporation who gets blown up in the first paragraph. The various bits of him are rescued and put back together in the Chiba City labs. Once he’s back together he goes to Mexico to recuperate. There he meets a nice lady and has a relationship with her. Then a Hosaka corporate ship appears on the horizon. Turns out the nice lady was actually a corporate psych and she’s just released Turner back to active duty. And what is that duty? Go to Arizona to pick up a scientist who’s defecting from Maas Biolabs. This particular scientist, Mitchell, has developed a biochip that will allow people to access the Matrix without a cyberdeck. Off Turner goes to the Arizona desert to meet his motley crew.
The second story is about Marly, a disgraced Parisian art dealer. She was in all the newsfeeds recently when she got caught selling a counterfeit collage box. Now she has a chance at a new job hunting down a mysterious artist who creates anonymous collage boxes. Her new employer is notorious billionaire Herr Josef Virek. Virek only meets Marly in a reality he’s constructed within the Matrix for the excellent reason that his physical form is a pile of goo in a vat in the vast metropolis of Undisclosed Location. Marly takes the job and quickly realizes that Virek’s motives for finding the artist are increasingly sinister.
The third plot is about Count Zero himself. His real name is Bobby Newmark and he’s a teenager in over his head. He wants to be a cyber cowboy and now, thanks to his contact Two-a-Day, he has his first job cracking corporate ice. Unfortunately it goes bad and Bobby dies. Fortunately his death was noted by something within the Matrix and it revives him. Now Bobby’s on the run because he knows the company he tried to hack knows what he did and where he lives. His fears are confirmed when the apartment complex he lived in blows up shortly after he leaves. He goes into the slums of New Jersey to find Two-a-Day and ask him what the hell. When he finds him, Two-a-Day is very nervous and not because of the two crimelords in his apartment with him. They want to talk to Bobby about the voice that revived him. Why? Because the voice was one of the loas that have appeared in the Matrix.
These plots meander around separately until Angela Mitchell shows up. She’s the daughter of the defecting scientist in Arizona. Turns out her father never planned to get out himself, he just wanted to get Angie away from Maas Biolabs. He had implanted his biochips in her brain, which gives her strange powers as far as the Matrix goes. For instance, she can connect with the loas that the bosses that caught Bobby are interested in. Eventually Turner, Angie, and Bobby end up in New York to find out more about the gods in the machine while Marly goes to the Spire from Neuromancer where she supposedly ties up a few loose ends from the rogue AI plot. According to legend, this is where the three plots all snap together but I’ll be darned if I can figure out how.
First Sentence: Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.
Thoughts: Winston Niles Rumsfoord and his dog Kazak were on a quick jaunt to Mars when they got caught up in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum. They became part of a wave phenomenon and began appearing at his mansion on Earth every nine days. It became quite an event, mainly because Winston’s wife Beatrice wouldn’t let anyone on the grounds during his manifestations. Only one person was allowed to come in to talk to him: the world’s richest man, Malachi Constant.
The reason was that Winston wanted to tell Malachi his future. Soon Malachi would go to Mars, then Mercury, then end up on Saturn’s moon Titan. He was going to marry Winston’s wife Beatrice and they’d have a son named Chrono. To sweeten the pot, Winston showed Malachi a photo of the Sirens of Titan, three spectacularly beautiful women lying in a pool.
After Winston’s prophecy, Malachi lost his fortune. He went back to the hotel where his father made that fortune to figure out what he was going to do next. Two strange men approached him and offered him a job in the Army of Mars. Malachi agreed and left that night. No one on Earth knew what happened to him for over a decade.
By then the Martians had attacked Earth. Earth won, but felt horrible guilt about it because the Martian Army was so poorly trained and by the end they were sending women and children to fight. One of those final ships contained Beatrice and her son Chrono. They crashed in the Amazon rainforest and had to befriend the tribes there to survive until they could get back to the United States.
Meanwhile Malachi and another soldier had landed on Mercury. They couldn’t leave because their ship set them down in the caverns underneath the surface. Eventually Malachi figured out how to escape and returned to Earth. There he found things had changed. After the Martian War, Winston Rumsfoord had founded the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent which not only revolutionized humanity’s outlook on life, it had turned Malachi Constant into Satan. When he came back home, he was immediately exiled to Titan. Beatrice and Chrono joined him. Guilt by association and all that.
When they got to Titan, Rumsfoord, the master manipulator, was waiting for them.
This is my favorite kind of science fiction: the kind with a wacky sense of humor. Douglas Adams was obviously a Vonnegut fan. There are all kinds of weird aliens, hard science, and hard truths about ourselves wrapped up in a hilarious and highly entertaining story that, despite the subplot about founding a church, doesn’t get preachy.
First Sentence: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Thoughts: Case was once a hotshot cyber-cowboy, able to jack into the Matrix and steal data from anyone, anywhere. Then he got greedy and his bosses burnt him out so he couldn’t connect to the Matrix anymore. Now he lives in Chiba City dealing (and doing) drugs and selling contraband on the street. Then he noticed a weird woman with silver eyes who kept following him wherever he went. He thought he got away until he went back to his coffin room. She was waiting for him there. She introduced herself as Molly and told him her boss, Armitage, wanted to meet him.
Armitage gave Case an offer he couldn’t refuse: surgery to rebuild his shattered nervous system so he could jack in again. Oh, and to replace his pancreas since it was shot from all the drugs he was taking. Once he recovered, Case would repay him by running the greatest heist of all time: liberating an AI from corporate captivity.
Molly and Case build up a team in the real world and the Matrix from their former friends and colleagues. They traveled around the globe and into space, running minor heists in both worlds until they were ready for the final job at the home of the Tessier-Ashpools who run the corporation keeping the AI prisoner. Then Wintermute, the AI, got involved itself.
It’s a fun sci-fi adventure that has aged both well and poorly. Gibson mentioned in the introduction that the lack of cell phones was a major flaw, especially since pay phones play a key role in a couple of crucial scenes. But who could have predicted smartphones in 1984? In the world of the novel, the pay phones make sense. It’s not “now,” but a fictional “now” based in the early 1980s. Gibson is not Nostradamus. Of course, Nostradamus wasn’t Nostradamus either, so there’s that. In any case, the novel is also a warning about relying too much on technology. Maybe, by the time we have AI like in the book, we won’t have destroyed the natural world so that the skies are still blue instead of staticky.
Thoughts: Over the millennia, certain people have been born with a mutation that makes them immortal. They don’t age like everyone else because their cells can regenerate, regrowing hair and teeth as they wear out (but not limbs—they’re human, not lizards). After one normal lifetime they generally take on new identities and go into hiding, willingly or not.
The oldest immortal is Hanno, a Phoenician man born 5000 years ago. He encounters other immortals over the centuries, and eventually begins to seek them out to see how they’re living and make connections, fleeting or otherwise, with his own kind. Over time most of the immortals either will themselves to death or get killed until there are only eight left. That’s when they decide to go public. Their genetic secrets are revealed and made accessible to the rest of the world. Now everyone is immortal. The eight originals don’t like what humanity has become, so they build a spaceship and set off to find a new planet to populate.
What’s glossed over in the above summary is the fact that this is actually two books written by two different men. The first was written by Poul Anderson the historical fiction author. The second was written by Poul Anderson the science fiction author. The first book is a collection of short stories about the immortals and how they survive among their shorter-lived brethren. The second one annoyed me.
The second book begins in 1975. Hanno is now a successful businessman in the United States. Several businessmen, in fact, since he has multiple identities operating at the same time. One of his personas runs a biological lab testing his and the other immortals’ genetic material to find out what makes them tick. As his research progresses, he collect the other seven immortals and they go off to a remote corner of the globe until they decide humanity is ready to learn their secrets.
We rejoin them an unspecified length of time after that revelation. They all regret what they’ve done. Now that everyone is immortal, humanity is in stasis. No one wants to go exploring or do anything except indulge their hedonism. And so the original eight board their spacecraft and head out to see what’s going on in the rest of the universe. They encounter various aliens on their journey before finding just the right planet to settle down on.
And that’s the part that annoyed me so much. The space journey, that is. They spent the entire trip bickering with each other. For. Centuries. I felt like I was trapped in the back of the minivan on a long family car trip with no adult in the front to threaten to pull this car over to the side of the road. I really wish there had been an adult because I was ready to slap the everlasting out of all eight of the characters by the end.
First Sentence: The age of a thing is in the feel of it.
Thoughts: June is a niche anthropologist. She specializes in automata, specifically their preservation and repair. She’s in a Russian monastery in Oregon for her latest job, looking over a little girl automaton they have in their archives. The mechanism inside has been damaged so it doesn’t work any more, but after a bit of tinkering June thinks she can fix it. She takes out her travel 3D printer and makes a replacement part. Now let’s see what she can do.
Write, apparently. They put a pen in the automaton’s hand and a piece of paper in front of her and she starts writing in Russian. June’s interpreter, Oleg, freaks out when he reads what she’s writing, as do the monks. It’s a message to Tsar Peter the Great from the “avtomats,” which Oleg translates as robot. The monks snatch up the automaton and toss Oleg and June out on their ears. Back at the motel things get even stranger. Some guy breaks in and kills Oleg. June takes off running, only to be picked up by another strange man who fights the first guy, revealing that they’re both avtomat.
The story switches between June in the present and Peter’s life since 1709 when he woke up in a workshop in the Tsar’s palace. He wasn’t alone there. Along with the man who fixed him, there was another avtomat, a little girl named Elena. They served Tsar Peter until his death when his wife chased them out of Russia. The pair traveled to England where they hid out for several centuries. Elena, who was ruled by logic, was intrigued by their brief encounters with other avtomat and began researching their origins. What she discovered drove a wedge between her and Peter.
Peter, who was ruled by pravda, or truth, was confused by all this. It didn’t fit in with his view of the world, so he went back to his warrior training and hired himself out to fight various wars all the way up to WWII where he met June’s grandfather and dropped a strange metal piece that Grandpa picked up and bequeathed to June. She calls it her “relic” and wears it on a chain around her neck.
That relic is why June is now fair game in the hidden war among the avtomat. It’s actually a piece of an avtomat, the most vital piece that gives it life. And it doesn’t belong to just any avtomat, but the father of all of them who has been missing for millennia. Peter was charged with guarding it in time immemorial, but now it’s time to remember it and bring it back to its owner before the avtomat queen destroys them all.
It’s a fun action-packed adventure tale, but the real gift of this book is that it sent me on a quest to find automata videos. Real automata, not the robots in this book, but they’re still neat. Some of my favorites:
First Sentence: In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final worrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old woman came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul.
Thoughts: And so begins the greatest science fiction of all times. I judge people by this series. If you like it, we are of the same tribe. If you don’t, I’m sorry for your loss. And if you appreciate the Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson books as well we’re buddies. If you’re a pretentious jerk who doesn’t like them, well I think I just made my opinion of you known.
Anyway. In the beginning House Atreides lived on Caladan, an ocean world. Due to political machinations, they were given control of the desert planet Arrakis, aka Dune, the source of the spice melange which was the greatest source of wealth in the known universe. It enabled people to live longer and healthier than they would have naturally and the Spacing Guild used it to fold space. There were other uses as well, but those were mostly kept secret for various reasons.
Paul, the scion of House Atreides, was known to have special powers. For example, he’s been having prophetic dreams lately. The Bene Gesserit sent one of their Reverend Mothers to test Paul to see how special he was and if his mother Jessica’s manipulations had screwed up their breeding program. (She was supposed to have a girl instead of a boy.) And so Paul faces the gom jabbar, a poisoned needle held to his neck as he keeps his hand in a box of pain.* He passes with flying colors and is declared Human.
When they reach Arrakis, Paul’s abilities take a new dimension. He knows things before he knows them, like the proper way to put on a Fremen stillsuit. It doesn’t help that the locals think he might be the promised one of legend. (OR DOES IT?) Jessica uncovers messages left from the previous Bene Gesserit representative that there is a traitor in their midst. Meanwhile Duke Leto, knowing that his enemies in House Harkonnen have left nasty surprises for him on their new planet, sends his best men out to uncover them and make alliances with the Fremen natives.
And then the Harkonnens strike. Leto is killed, but Paul and Jessica escape. Paul, overwhelmed by prescience, foresees a terrible future where he leads a jihad across the inhabited planets. They meet up with Liet Kynes, leader of the Fremen, who sends them into the desert to take refuge with the “wild” Fremen tribes. They meet up with Stilgar’s tribe. To prove their worth to their captors/saviors, Jessica undergoes the ordeal of the Water of Life, which awakens her fetal daughter’s awareness long before it should have appeared. But it works out thanks to the assistance of the tribe’s Reverend Mother who helps Jessica calm her daughter’s mind and take over as the new Sayyadina.
After defeating a Fremen in a knife fight, Paul fuses Imperial and Fremen fighting styles to help the Fremen attack the Harkonnens, who have retaken the planet. But his visions of the coming jihad are becoming more disturbing. He tries desperately to find a way to avert the war, until the only way out is to overdose on spice so he can open his mind to its fullest extent. And so Paul Muad-dib Atreides, Usul to his tribe, becomes the Kwisatz Haderach.
Dune is a dense novel covering environmentalism, conservation, the rule of law, corruption, honor, native rights, drug use and abuse, and fate. You can find something new every time you read it (I do). There are plots within plots, which I think qualifies it as Literature. It will outlive us all.
*Both Gom Jabbar and Box of Pain would be great names for metal bands.
First Sentence: Now the rumbling of the great organ swelled to a roar, pressing, like a rising giant, against the vaulted ceiling to burst through it.
Thoughts: One day I was flipping through the Dover Publications catalog I noticed a book called Metropolis. “I wonder if this has anything to do with the movie,” I wondered. Why yes, it does. It’s the novelization of my favorite movie of all time so of course I had to put down my hard-earned money to buy it.
To be honest, I was fully prepared for this to suck, even if it was written by one of the people who wrote the screenplay. Movie novelizations are not known to be the highest form of literature. Sure, I liked the novelization of Willow back in the day, but that was mostly because it had pictures of Val Kilmer as Madmartigan inside and he was smokin’ hot in that movie.
Metropolis: The Book did not suck. It added depth and dimension to a film already layered with it.
It’s not an exact retelling of the movie, and I didn’t really expect it to be. As we’ve discussed many times before, what works on film doesn’t always work on the page and vice versa. Big explosive scenes are great on film. Introspection is great on the page. The movie gave us big explosive scenes and the book gave us the introspection behind it, as well as more backstory than can be visually expressed.
For example: the cathedral. In the movie it was just a set piece for Freder to have nightmares about until the big dramatic final fight scene on the roof. In the book, though, it’s one of the only remnants of the old city before it was modernized into Metropolis, preserved only through the determination (and mild insanity) of an old monk who lives inside. The only other link to the old city is Rotwang’s house, but it’s a symbol of the darkness of the past expressed through the medium of the Sorcerer with Red Shoes who disappeared into the catacombs.
The novel has a lot of symbolism. A lot. Most everything in it is a symbol, mainly Christian. I never realized the significance of Maria’s name in the movie. Duh, of course, she’s the Roman Catholic version of the Virgin Mary interceding between the sinners (the workers) and God (Joh Frederson) by appealing to the Son (Freder). The fact that Freder’s mother’s name was Hel also fits into this somehow, but I haven’t figured that part out yet.
Certain scenes have also been changed, deleted, or added. Josaphat’s reaction to his firing is different, there’s a whole sequence where he flies out of Metropolis and crashes into a field that isn’t in the movie, and the dramatic scene where Freder, Josaphat, and Maria escort the children out of the flooding Lower City has been changed to Maria saving the children on her own while Josaphat and Freder fight their way through all the cars and planes that crashed when the Heart Machine went offline.
The ending and main point of the story is the same in both versions, though: The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.
First Sentence: Ivan’s door buzzer sounded at close to Komarran midnight, just when he was unwinding enough from lingering jump lag, his screwed-up diurnal rhythm, and the day’s labors to consider sleep.
Thoughts: I messed up and got our of order in the chronology of the Vorkosigan Saga. This book takes place before Cryoburn, but it really doesn’t matter since Miles only shows up in passing. He and his family spend most of the story visiting his parents on Sergyar. That’s okay, that way we get to spend more time with Ivan.
So far we’ve only seen Ivan through Miles’ eyes and he is not an unbiased observer. Miles sees Ivan as a blunderer who spends most of his time thinking with his lower brain. Which is unfair because Ivan is actually a cool guy. He’s also much more important than we’ve been led to believe. Everyone knew the Vorkosigans were second in line if anything happened to Emperor Gregor, which meant that Miles was next in line for the throne until Gregor had children of his own. Thing is, thanks to the Barrayaran prejudice against mutations and anything that appeared to be a mutation, Miles would never be accepted as the emperor. Which means the actual next in line would be the one who was next in line to Miles which is Ivan. Which Ivan knows and doesn’t like because he doesn’t want that kind of responsibility. He’s perfectly happy being the aide-de-camp to the head of Ops. His job isn’t thrilling but that’s the way he likes it. Ivan likes order and organizing things.
My man.
So, of course, you know that his life is about to devolve into some serious chaos and disrupt that nice orderly order he has going. It begins on page one when his other cousin, Byerly Vorrutyer, shows up at his door in the middle of the night with a proposition for Ivan. No, not that kind.
Byerly’s current covert assignment involves a couple of young Vor men who are suspected of conspiring to commit shady activities against the empire. Which they’re doing, of course. Over the course of the shady dealings, a young woman living on Komarr who has plenty of the wrong kind of people interested in her. By wants Ivan to use his famous charm on Nanja, the woman in question, and find out what’s going on. He tells Ivan where she lives and where she works and leaves so Ivan can get some sleep before he has to go to work in the morning.
After work (preparing for the annual Komarran fleet inspection, which is why he’s on Komarr in the first place. In case you were wondering.), Ivan goes to Nanja’s place of business where he tries and fails to charm her. She goes home and finds Ivan waiting outside for her. Fine, he can come in, she says. He does so and is immediately shot by her roommate. Stunned actually, and not just by the fact that Nanja’s roommate looks like she was carved out of lapis lazuli. The women tie Ivan to a chair and discuss what to do with him. He finds out that not only is Nanja actually named Tej, she and her roommate Rish are on the run from some Very Bad People. They decide to leave Ivan tied up for the night and go to bed.
That night some of the Very Bad People break into the apartment to try to kidnap Tej and Rish. Ivan foils their schemes, helps the women escape, and hides them at his apartment until he figures out what the hell. He doesn’t have much time to think about it because the Very Bad People launch their next attack immediately: getting Immigration after the women. The next morning Ivan finds himself in a spot. Byerly’s back, Immigration is banging on his door, Tej and Rish are preparing to jump off the balcony, and his commander is blowing up his phone. Ivan tosses his wrist-comm in the fridge and announces his plan to stop all this nonsense: throw a box of instant groats on the floor and marry Tej. (Barrayaran wedding customs are weird.) Once they’re married, Tej will be Lady Vorpatril and protected by Barrayaran law.
And…it works?
Of course this isn’t meant to be a permanent marriage. Tej has to get to Escobar to find her brother, so they’ll get divorced once they get back to Barrayar and Ivan talks to the count, his cousin. They don’t count on Ivan’s mother Lady Alys. She’s very much in favor of Ivan being married, as is everyone else including the count his cousin who refuses to grant the divorce.
Then the in-laws show up. Turns out Tej is a member of a minor Jacksonian house that was just overthrown by another Jacksonian house because that’s how they politic in the Whole. Now Tej’s brothers, sisters, parents, and grandmother have arrived on Barrayar. What’s worse, Tej’s grandmother is a haut lady from Cetaganda who was foisted off on a ghem lord way back during the Cetagandan occupation of Barrayar. Which means Gramma Haut was on Barrayar during the occupation and knows where the bodies are buried. And by “bodies” I mean the genetics lab where Gramma Haut worked which was also where the Cetagandans hid their wealth before they were kicked off the planet. Some of that wealth would be very useful for regaining their position when they return to Jackson’s Whole. So they check the coordinates and make their way to the location of the secret lab.
It’s under the ImpSec building. Oh boy.
What follows is one of the most entertaining adventures in the whole saga. Ivan has no clue what he’s gotten himself into. It only gets worse once his stepfather, former ImpSec chief Simon Ilyan, gets involved because he’s bored. It all works out in the end, but not before Ivan gets trapped in a small, enclosed space (a “perfectly reasonable” fear he’s had since Brothers in Arms), the Jacksonian in-laws almost destroy the ecology of the planet and have to talk very, very fast to keep from getting torn apart by an angry mob, Haut Gramma finds the treasure she was most interested in, Ivan and Tej admit that they really are in love and want to stay married, the ImpSec building sinks, the problem of Byerly is dealt with once and for all, and Emperor Gregor gets quite a few gray hairs.
Poor Gregor. No wonder Ivan doesn’t want his job. And I can’t help feeling a twinge of sympathy for Miles after the epilogue where we find out who bought the sunken ImpSec building (Mark) and what he plans to do with it (HAHAHAHAHAHA). I wish there were drabbles at the end of this book like in Cryoburn so we could have seen Miles’ reaction first-hand. I’m sure he was lit up.
And so the Vorkosigan Saga ends. Yes, I know Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen technically ends the sries, but I dnf’ed that one three chapters in. I am not going to be present for the Master Robintonization of Cordelia. Just pretend it all ends with Cryoburn and save yourself a lot of aggravation and an extraordinarily awkward scene in the men’s room at a sperm bank. I wish someone had given me the warning I’m giving you so that scene won’t be haunting me until my death.
First Sentence: Angels were falling all over the place.
Thoughts: When we join Miles at the beginning of the story, he’s high as a kite. He just escaped from an attempted kidnapping attempt where he was given drugs that were supposed to sedate him but instead made him hyper and hallucinatory. Now he’s wandering through the cryocombs of Kibou-Daini. The cryocombs are where they keep the frozen bodies of their almost-dead because Kibou-Dainians are obsessed with cheating death thry cryogenics. Miles makes his way to the surface of the planet where he’s rescued by one of his hallucinations. When he wakes up the next morning he discovers that his rescuer was an eleven-year-old boy named Jin. Jin lives alone on the top of an abandoned building with a menagerie of pets. Where are his parents? His father is dead, his mother is…he doesn’t want to talk about what happened to her.
Meanwhile Miles’ armsman, Roic, is also waking up. He was kidnapped by the same people who tried to get miles. They turn out to be fanatics opposed to Kibou-Daini’s cryogenics obsession. Roic manages to escape with Raven Durona, another kidnap victim. Raven is one of those Duronas who saved Miles after his death in Mirror Dance. He, like the Barrayarans, was on Kibou-Daini for a big cryogenics conference.
Now Raven is an expert on cryogenic revival so his attendance at the conference is understandable, but why was Miles there? Because Empress Laisa was suspicious about a cryogenics company that was trying to set up shop on her home planet Komarr. Happy wife, happy life, so Emperor Gregor dispatched Miles to find out just why this Komarran deal smells and possibly extract the dead mouse from inside the walls of this business plan.
And this is where the whole thing falls down. The whole WhiteCrys scheme didn’t make sense. Maybe because I’m not a financial expert, or even a numbers person, but the whole voting shares thing remains opaque to me. All I know is that it was a Bad Thing because the book told me so and because Miles spoked the WhiteCrys corporate wheels pretty quickly. Once that’s done, he can turn his attention to the B investigation: What happened to Jin’s mother.
Miles has four children now, so he’s become a soft touch for kids in trouble. When Jin and his sister ask him to help them find Mom, he can’t say no. So he starts digging and he finds a mystery that’s more interesting than the one he was sent to deal with.
Turns out Jin’s mother Lisa was also against the cryogenics corporations. Not because she was morally opposed to freezing the dead before they die all the way like the kidnappers, but because the corporations only provided their services to those who could pay. (This is a corporate dystopia novel, by the way.) The company she was fighting was New Egypt. She uncovered something shady there that the execs were so desperate to hide they kidnapped her and had her frozen.
Miles & Co retrieve Lisa’s corpse only to find out it’s not her. Also, the woman they found is dead-dead. Something went wrong with the prep and now her brain is mush. A little more digging and they find the right body, thaw her out, and find out the truth that New Egypt’s been trying to hide. Then Mark and Kareen show up to save the day.
This is one of the lesser Vorkosigan adventures, mainly because I could never figure out how the whole Kibou-Dainian society was supposed to work. However, I liked the ending. Specifically the six drabbles (100-word stories) that detail how major characters dealt with a major development that happened in the final sentence. Not to give anything away but le comte est mort, vive le comte.
First Sentence: For a week Mr. R. Childan had been anxiously watching the mail.
Thoughts: This is the first Philip K. Dick book I’ve ever read and I’m not in a hurry to add a second one to the list. The premise was interesting, but the execution went absolutely nowhere. Other than a few David Lynchian scenes near the end, the whole book was a boring slog through an alternate universe.
Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I was high while I read it. We’ll never know because the Devil’s Lettuce and I don’t get along.
In this universe, the U.S. lost WWII and was subsequently split into three parts. The east coast was now Nazi territory where slavery was re-legalized. The center became the Rocky Mountain States, aka the remnant of free America. The west coast is now part of Imperial Japan and is where most of the book takes place.
The first problem I have with this book: It suffers from Game of Thrones-itis before GOT-itis was a thing. There are entirely too many characters and we don’t spend enough time with any of them to really care about who they are and what they’re doing. They’re pretty much all stereotypes the author enlisted to Make A Point About Various Things. They are:
Robert Childan, the man from the first sentence. He owns an antique shop specializing in Americana, which is basically any historical knickknack from before the war. The Japanese are obsessed with collecting anything from posters to bottle caps to Colt revolvers. Childan is the most annoying character. He spends all his time trying to ingratiate himself with the Japanese elite but he only succeeds in making a pest of himself. You know the kind. He’s a self-involved twit whose only purpose is to make a long, boring speech about what historical value actually is and I hate him.
Then there’s Frank Frink, a closeted Jew who’s still hung up on his ex-wife. He gets fired from his job and starts a new business with his former supervisor making jewelry. They try to get Childan to sell their jewelry, but he tries to take all the credit and ends up getting Frank arrested and almost deported to the Nazis.
Juliana is the ex-wife Frank’s hung up on. She’s now living in the Rocky Mountain States working as a judo instructor. She meets a truck driver named Joe, sleeps with him, and agrees to go on a road trip with him to meet the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel about an alternate universe where the U.S. won WWII. Oh for f…I haaaaaaaaaate when books get meta like this. It’s a very tricky thing to get right and let me tell you right now Philip K. Dick is no Italo Calvino.
Oh, and there’s also Baynes, a supposed Swedish businessman, who’s trying to set up a meeting with a Japanese businessman named Tagomi and a mysterious figure. Tagomi, who’s the only character with anything resembling sense, quickly realizes that Baynes is a spy, but he goes along with the meeting because what else is there to do. When the mysterious figure arrives (after entirely too much delay) chaos ensues, Tagomi shoots a couple of guys, and then goes off to have a David Lynch moment.
Before we go, I must warn you about the I Ching. All the characters use it to make all their decisions for whatever reasons. It’s not too bad at first but then you get to the Big Reveal at the end which I am going to halfway spoil for you: a certain person has also been using the I Ching to help them with a task and it is completely stupid. Nothing good comes from Juliana’s road trip is all I’m going to say about that.
The Eclectic Reviewer 