The Epic of Gilgamesh (2003)
translated by Andrew George
The Epic of Gilgamesh is among the first literary works of humankind preserved to this day, albeit in fragmented form. Looking at it with modern day sensibilities is not the smartest thing to do, the people who created and read or heard it thousands of years ago were different in so many ways to us today, that the right approach to this material would probably to study them and their culture, become a historian and try a translation of the original clay tablets yourself. Albeit, as I have not that much time or even the incentive, I’ll go the less smart way.
Reading this stuff, Gilgamesh comes of as a glory hound who goes off to kill some beast in a faraway forest for his own fame. His friend Enkidu is a whiner, who has much narrative potential, but all he does in life is follow Gilgamesh until it’s his time to die by degree of the gods. He becomes a whiner, after his death Gilgamesh becomes emo. That’s one way of reading it.
As I said, it’s a very fragmented text, even to this day. The book by Andrew George is as much about the epic as it’s about the work that went and still goes into reconstructing this old text and what the present situation is of this reconstruction. Parts are missing and each new part surfacing can shift the meaning of entire passages. What we see before us is incomplete, so every reading might miss important aspects. So far, the epic of Gilgamesh feels to me like a story skeleton that implies more than can be seen in the available text. It might be like what I said above or I might be completely off. Maybe there were good reasons for killing the ogre of the Cedar Forest. At times it feels like parts and a massive amount of detail is missing, in more than the obvious sense of missing fragments. The original titles of the epic, He who Saw the Deep and Surpassing All Other Kings, evoke images in my mind that the plain reconstructed text doesn’t do justice. Maybe what we have are just scribbled down stories of a much richer and expansive oral tradition that hasn’t survived.
So, while I wasn’t too enamored from the Gilgamesh epic, I’m still glad that so much work has been done to unearth one of the earliest stories and preserve it. Because storytelling and fiction grows from building on other stuff, taking elements from what came before and the most diverse these source are the better for all fiction. Maybe one day I’ll read a retelling or an influenced work by someone that blows my mind.
Dreamwaver’s Dilemma (1996)
by Lois McMaster Bujold
A neat collection of stories and essays by Lois McMaster Bujold that shows that she’s even good at the short form. There’s an excellent Sherlock Holmes pastiche, an excellent Miles Vorkosigan story and some other good pieces. There’s a unobtrusive, but warm humor in many of them, a kindness that pervades most of Bujold’s fiction. Even her non-fiction pieces give you the image of someone who enjoys life, enjoys writing and communicating with other people. She’s a writer who makes reading easy and fun.
This collection is also an image of Bujold’s growth as a writer. If you compare the last fiction piece in the collection, The Mountains of Mourning to the other stories, you can see how she has retained all the enjoyable elements of her earlier stories and yet has gained a depth previously unseen. Most writers seem to lose a certain lightness in their fiction when they try themselves on heavier topics. Bujold hasn’t, which might explain her great success.
Rating: 5/5
American Gods (2001)
by Neil Gaiman
The ideal situation going into a book would be to know nothing about it and don’t have any preconceptions. But the title or the name of the author can often be enough to void this ideal situation. And if the book doesn’t fit into the hypothetical mold you’ve created in your mind, what it should be about or what it should be like, things are off to a bad start. Few books survive this onslaught of preconceived notions about them well. But a few utterly defeat these preconceptions by giving you something even better.
American Gods was one of these books for me. The title made me expect a story about modern gods utterly rooted in modern, american culture, like a fast food god or a god of baseball or similar stuff. And to some extend some of these turn up and play a role, but they are far from the focus of the books. It’s about the old, european gods who went (or at least copies of them) with the first settlers to the shores of the new continent and have since struggled to survive in the new world.
It’s not what I expected, but in the end I liked it far more than what I wanted from it first. Part of that is that I really liked the main character, an ex-convict who has reached a kind of dead end in his life and is trying to figure out where to go from there. He’s the silent but thoughtful type of character, who doesn’t lament his personal tragedies out loud, but works through them in his own ways. Which can take time and may seem a bit cold from the outside, but Gaiman allows the reader an in depth look which makes him far more sympathetic.
Rating: 5/5
Earth Made of Glass (1999)
by John Barnes
2nd Thousand Cultures novel
Two colonies on the same world feasting on perpetual hate for each other, slowly sliding toward a violent eruption that will annihilate both. This dissolution is mirrored on the personal level of the main characters, albeit with less violence and less clear-cut reasons, at least to Giraut, whose marriage seems to break at the seams with him unable to figure out the reason why.
Where One Million Open Doors was just an excellent, entertaining, smart read, Earth Made of Glass is this bit better that makes it brilliant. One warning up front, Barnes can be a mean bastard and here he is full on in bastard mode. This book is a gut-wrenching, painful yet incredible compelling read. Near the end some parts of it make you feel like walking over broken glass. Part of it is that everyone is trying, and the possibility of success always remains, even if you see Barnes setting everything up for a big fall. The outcome is never clear and the reader always hoping that the worst doesn’t come to pass. And then it gets even worse. At times it’s painful to go on, but hard to put down.
Rating: 5/5
Making Money (2007)
by Terry Pratchett
36th Discworld novel
Making Money sees Moist von Lipwig, the hero of Going Postal, on another attempt at renovating an old but barely working institution, a bank. The patrician has used Moist successfully in the past to install a modern information infrastructure, now he puts him up to create a functioning financing infrastructure to generate enough money for the modernization of the whole city. The book hints that next might be the tax system.
It’s always interesting to see how far the Discworlds novels have strayed from the fun but mostly harmless initial novels of the series, and yet remain as assessable and fun as those early parts. There hasn’t be a Discworld novel I didn’t liked, which makes me the worst judge of them. Pratchett’s style, his sense of humor, his philosophical musing, all that is part of his fiction, just resonates with my likes. Can’t wait for the next one.
Rating: 5/5
The Dream Hunters (1999)
by Neil Gaiman, Art by Yoshitaka Amano
part of the Sandman setting
A truly wonderful short novel about the encounter between a monk and a fox and what follows from there, that reads like an old, japanese folk tale. Gaiman, with the aid of excellent art by Yoshitaka Amano, captures the style and the mood of these kind if tales nearly perfectly. Yet despite feeling like an old folk tale, he spins a yarn that feels like it is infused with a modern sensibilities. Also he neatly integrates his Sandman character into the story, without making it a Sandman story. He is a background character, important for some elements of the story, but not as prominent as the monk and the fox.
Rating: 5/5
A Million Open Doors (1992)
by John Barnes
1st Thousand Cultures novel
AMOD is a nice implementation of the unreliable narrator, a trick Barnes has often and to great effect deployed in his fiction. It’s about a young man leaving his world for a stupid reason, only to get a better view on his previous life and his own culture. It’s partly a coming-of-age novel, where the hero is forced to grow up and confront his own inadequacies.
On the not so personal level AMOD is often seen as an analogy to globalization and how this effects individual societies, but there are other questions raised that seem even more crucial than globalization to me. For example how AMOD and its sequels explore the nature of the concept culture and its significance to humans and the meta-civilization of the Thousand Cultures. If you aren’t even sure that the concept of culture has any meaning in a post-scarcity meta-civilization like the Thousand Cultures, then the effect of globalization on individual cultures becomes less significant. Which, at least to me, shows that the Thousand Cultures series is more than just a globalization analogy and about problems that have no (or not yet) a simile in our world. But that’s how all good SF is, not just a mirror of the present, but an attempt to trace the shape of the future.
Rating: 5/5
Gaudeamus (2004)
by John Barnes
Gaudeamus is a strange beast. It’s an extremely fun book that mixes science fiction with a light element of meta-fiction. The author John Barnes is one of the main characters, whose friend Travis Bismarck tells him a strange story about conspiracies, super-science and first contact. Each time Travis visits Barnes, he tells a piece of the story and each time it’s even more outrageous than the previous part.
In the hands of a lesser writers this may have turned into the worst kind of navel gazing. As it happens, Barnes description of his own fictional self is not too kind and thus makes everything more or less believable. It also makes it fun to play the game of comparing the real and the fictional Barnes. The juxtaposition of the mundane existence of Barnes and the amazing adventures of his friend makes Gaudeamus work. The mundane elements ground the whole book and the weird stuff Travis tells gives everything the extra kick of tension and adventure. While everything is told in a lightweight tone, there are serious elements to the story, like the analogy of native Americans selling their land and how they were still bound by something they barely understood or thought a joke in the first place. But above everything, it’s an entertaining read that enthralls you from first to the last page.
Rating: 5/5
Halting State (2007)
by Charles Stross
Halting State scratches the same itch as Accelerando and Glasshouse did, even if it’s so much near future that it feels like being right around the corner. Just blink for a second and its future will have arrived. It’s the novel Rainbows Ends wanted to be, but failed to be, or to say it another way, if William Gibson would be still writing science fiction, he might have written it. It’s the most relevant near future SF book I’ve read for some time.
It’s a world of heavily augmented realities and multiplayer online games invading everyday-reality to the point that both can’t be neatly separated anymore. Those technologies have changed the future as deeply as the internet and mobile phones have the present, even if those changes wouldn’t be apparent to some time traveler from an earlier century (the book explains this at some point very nicely) and thus makes an important observation. Real change is often not something big and flashy, like flying cars or strange clothes, but something that doesn’t look like much, but runs deep.
Apart from all the geek/high-tech buzzword bingo Stross rolls out to woe the audience that already liked Accelerando and Glasshouse, one of the main strengths is that he makes characters you can care about. Despite all the high-tech geekery, despite all the smart observation about change and brilliant ideas like tapping a ubiquitous source (multiplayer online games) for real world purposes, it’s the characters that make the heart of the novel and propel the reader from start to finish.
It’s also a SF novel where the transition from being immensely relevant to very much completely out-dated will happen sooner than later (compared to other SF). It’ll be fun to see how much he got right and how much he got wrong.
Rating: 5/5
Crescent City Rhapsody (2000)
by Kathleen Ann Goonan
1th novel of the Nanotech-Quartet
A rhapsody was a work of many pieces stitched together. This sentence on the last page of the novel explains so much about my reaction to the book. The whole narrative and theme of the nanotech-quartet is informed by Jazz, a form of music I can’t stand the least. In this particular case the book is also structured like a rhapsody, which I admit is, whether done consciously or nor, a clever trick. But it doesn’t mean it’s successful at making this a better book. But as I said, I can’t stand Jazz (I’m more a metal guy) and this might be the reason why I didn’t enjoy reading it as much. I wonder if people who like Jazz are better accustomed to appreciate the structure of the book.
Crescent City Rhapsody is a prequel, written after the first two books in the nanotech-jazz sequence, but set in the very beginning. It follows a wide cast of people who live through the onset of the nanotech-change that utterly transforms the world. It has some very fascinating and novel ideas, and it’s cool to see the world transformed by nanotech-plagues. It’s a postapocalpytic-nanotech-run-amok novel. That’s the good thing.
The start of the novel is perfect, one of the main (and more interesting) characters gets killed and soon revived. But after that the pacing slows down to a crawl and we have to follow the lives of too many different people, who always get cut short when it becomes interesting following their lives. Until around page 300 the book is rather tedious to follow, even if it’s well written. Then the really interesting things start to happen, which Kyoto infected by a nanotech-surge that makes people into zombies and events starting to spiral out of control. But even despite the plot becoming more interesting, the book lacks an emotional core, trying to make the reader invested in too many people and ending up with no one caring at all about any character. I really appreciated the setting and the nanocalypse, but would have liked a less-is-more approach on the character and subplot front.
Rating: 3/5
