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Patti Smith – Just Kids (Book Review)

Just Kids cover

Patti Smith - Just Kids

An autobiographical tale intended to be about another person, Just Kids is an unusual sort of dual memoir. It’s really about the author, Patti Smith, but told through a lens where the main thing that mattered in her life was Robert Mapplethorpe. The atmosphere of the book is defined by their relationship to each other, and the years they are apart slip by as if irrelevant. Really, showing how one’s own life was defined by another person is a much more sincere and moving tribute than simply writing a book about them.

It’s a beautiful story on its own, of course, with an inside view of New York City’s arts scene to add to the human interest, but the book’s hook comes from who these two people were: In their own ways, each became one of the defining artists of the 20th century, but the bulk of the story takes place before this. The reader’s knowledge of their success contrasts with the simple, desperate lives the two were actually living, just as foreknowledge of tragedy (the book opens on the scene of Mapplethorpe’s death) gives weight to every scene.

Smith is a poet, but not an author. Accordingly, her prose is lyrical and captivating, but the story sometimes feels frustratingly incomplete. Every person she pays tribute to throughout book, and there are many, come alive as beautiful and meaningful friends, even when prosaic descriptions would have made them seem strange or pathetic. But at times, it becomes apparent that many pieces of her life have been glossed over without that attention. For example, when she first visits CBGB, she casually mentions that she’d hung out nearby at Hunter S. Thompson’s house many times. She is often painfully honest and self-revealing, which makes the coyness about some stretches of life, relationships, and sex seem strange. The lasting impression is a pointillistic vision of life defined through vibrant events, but often with holes between them. However, that is probably a more honest portrayal of memory than more complete memoirs provide, and it certainly feels as if Smith’s choices are focusing on the elements that are truly important to her.

I read this book over the course of a month, and finished it another month ago, but nearly every scene is easily recalled to memory and comes alive again when I page through the book. That’s a rare thing, and a sign that Smith’s approach was the right one for her.

Mapplethorpe’s evolving art style and eventual rise to fame is told excellently, with Smith describing both it and its impact on her. As a very close observer, she provides one of the best possible introductions to and celebrations of his work. It touches them both in the same way as the many people who played roles in their lives. Smith’s own artistic development seems less deep, though. Whether it’s so second-nature to her that she doesn’t think to describe it, or she still can’t believe in her transition to a rock star, the mentions of this seem more matter-of-fact than personal. While the reader never forgets Mapplethorpe’s obsession with art, sometimes it’s surprising to be reminded that Smith was doing her own work at this time. It would probably take another person with a close, but still outside, view to do for her career what she does for Mapplethorpe’s. Otherwise, they are both described thoroughly as people.

Just Kids is a rare thing, largely in how successfully it conveys the author’s vision and mood. That this personal vision also provides a sensitive window into public figures’ lives is a bonus. The celebrity memoir and personal story complement each other without getting in the way. Whether the reader is a fan of one, both, or neither of these artists, the book is educational and affecting.

Grade: A-


2011
12/06
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Thoughts on Lovecraft

The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of the Horror and the Macabre

H.P. Lovecraft’s stories are well-known, but not frequently read. I personally had only read a few before I went through the Bloodcurdling Tales short story collection last month. Given that, I’m more interested in discussing the stories than giving them a formal review.

So, in brief: This is a collection of classic horror stories that often manage to be atmospheric and creepy. They seem clichéd, though, with flowery prose and predictable last-paragraph twists. As with many classics, the aspects that made it influential can be found everywhere now, and the flaws (as well as the things that simply didn’t age well) have been left behind in those new works. You can still see what made these stories so great, but they aren’t the must-reads they once were.

Grade: C+

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, here are my thoughts on these stories. Basic familiarity with Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos is assumed, but this should be pretty easy to follow even for those (many) people who haven’t read them.

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2011
11/27
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Rebecca Skloot – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Book Review)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks cover

Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks was a poor black woman who died of an unusually aggressive cancer in 1951. So aggressive, in fact, that a sample taken from her became the first line of “immortal” cells scientists were able to curate, still growing and being used in research today. This cell line, known as “HeLa”, has been grown so extensively that the statistics sound impossible to believe, and they’ve been vital to many of the major medical advances over the past half century. For all their importance, though, the cells were taken without Henrietta’s knowledge, and the Lacks family didn’t even learn about this for more than twenty years after Henrietta’s death. The story of HeLa is well-known throughout the medical world, but author Rebecca Skloot brings this to the common reader by recognizing that the personal stories and ethical quandaries are just as rich a topic as the scientific marvels.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is written in a deceptively simple style, with an accessibility and sometimes glibness that makes it feel like a very long magazine article. Beneath this simple appearance, though, Skloot manages to take the reader in many unexpected directions and humanize an abstract concept. This is a rare, and much-needed, style of science writing.

The biggest contribution to “HeLa literature” is the unprecedented access Skloot got to the woman’s family and friends. Opening with a vibrant portrayal of Henrietta’s life (and a surprisingly disturbing account of her death), the book quickly establishes its sympathies and draws the reader in. After that, it’s free to jump around between a wide array of topics and times: The progress of the HeLa line through the scientific community contrasts with the unchanging state of the poor Lacks family, while Skloot’s present-day interest in the story brings her in touch with both groups. Skloot herself is a character in the book, her white, scientific, atheistic perspective being completely at odds with these people who still don’t understand what a “cell” is and are afraid to trust doctors even when they desperately need care. Don’t expect this to be just a dry, clinical book. Though there are chapters devoted to the scientific side, by the end, it is clear that the main story is that of the Lacks’ family’s journey towards closure with their mother’s legacy and recognition from the scientific community.

It’s a fascinating story, especially with all the factors intertwined. Debates and scandals within the medical community come up regularly, side-by-side with advances that sound like science fiction and the daily concerns of normal people. Harvesting Henrietta’s cells without her knowledge was only the first of many ethical lapses that appear in the story of HeLa, and they couldn’t have been better paced if this were a work of fiction. In fact, the revelations about what researchers may be doing with your tissue samples at this very moment will shock and outrage many readers. There are no easy answers to these still-unresolved questions, but this book does a great service by bringing them to popular attention.

The Lacks’ family is poor, uneducated, and most modern readers will be surprised by how close they still are to their subsistence farming roots. (In fact, the details it reveals about their lives feel like awkward breaches of privacy at times. Skloot is quick to reassure us that they asked her to bring the whole story to light, and I haven’t found anything on the internet to dispute that.) It is no small task making them come across as relatable characters to even privileged readers, but this book even makes conspiracy stories (Johns Hopkins kidnaps black children for experiments!) understandable from their point of view. That family would normally not belong in a book that also focuses on the elite scientists doing cutting-edge work, but the story of HeLa connects them both. In fact, all science can be tied to real life. This is something that we often forget, but Skloot’s writing brings the everyday relevance of science into focus.

Grade: B+


2011
09/30
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Suzanne Collins – The Hunger Games (Book Review)

The Hunger Games cover

Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games

There’s a lot of buzz around The Hunger Games right now, with the entertainment industry hoping that will be the next Harry Potter– or Twilight-style phenomena. I’ll be surprised if it reaches that level, but it’s easy to see the appeal of this young adult book about a dystopian system that drafts random children into deathmatches. It’s Battle Royale with the rough edges sanded down and made (just barely) appropriate for a younger audience. Quite an audacious idea, really.

While the novel’s prose is nothing memorable, it is definitely a page-turner. Author Suzanne Collins has a great sense of pacing, and fills the story with more events than the simple premise leads one to expect. The tension ratchets up throughout the story, and this can be a very difficult book to put down. She also has an incredible character in Katniss, the narrator. Katniss is a tough, practical 16-year-old girl who has had to support her family in what is effectively a third-world country, and as such she doesn’t seem at all like a typical female protagonist. It only takes a couple pages for the book to establish her as shockingly unsentimental and out of touch with our “civilized” morality, but also to put that in context with her harsh living conditions and love for her family.

Most of the book is developed with the same eye to a strong and original characterization, though it is rarely fleshed out as well as Katniss’. It was never clear to me why the government drafts children into an annual fight to the death. The explanation is that they do it to keep the people of the “Districts” down and remind them that they are under the thumb of the “Capitol”, but this seems to be an ineffectual method that would cause more resentment than compliance. To the privileged people of the Capitol (who are portrayed as one-dimensional characters, obnoxious in every way), this is a thrilling televised contest. In fact, Katniss spends more time in the book trying to appease a fickle audience than she does focusing on the other children who are trying to kill her. Depicting these deathmatches through the lens of reality TV is a good approach for the novel, as it gives the readers a distraction from the violence while also highlighting its pointlessness. But it’s not clear what factors make the show successful for the audience, when most of the people watching are poor District citizens being forced to view it against their will. Somehow, being an interesting character can lead to sponsors airdropping gifts just at the right time to advance the plot or resolve a conflict.

The disparities between the enslaved Districts and the rich Capitol set up a political theme that looks to be the focus of the rest of the trilogy. At least so far, the logistics of this tyranny seem to be simplistic even by the standards of young adult books. I hope that this is simply a reflection of Katniss’ limited knowledge, and not really the extent of the worldbuilding. I’ll find out in the next book, but fortunately it is not a major problem now: The Hunger Games is focused on an immediate fight for survival, and the half-drawn world we are introduced to stays in the background.

Katniss’ immediate world is easier to accept. Her district and its people paint exactly the picture needed to make us accept this desperate, scrappy girl. She is believable despite the many coincidences and unexpected kindnesses that help her throughout the story. And the battle itself takes place over weeks in a large forest, which becomes a fully realized setting through Katniss’ search for water, shelter, and food.

While The Hunger Gameshas both serious strengths and weaknesses, Collins designed the book to take advantage of the strengths. This is a surprising character study, a brutal battle for survival, and an exciting novel that I didn’t want to stop reading. I have no idea if I’ll continue to like the series once it broadens its scope, but this is a great, memorable book on its own. Read this book now while everyone’s talking about it, not just for that reason, but because it’s actually worth talking about.

Grade: B+

2011
09/09
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Scott Westerfield – Behemoth (Book Review)

Behemoth cover

Scott Westerfield - Behemoth

It takes some real talent to make alternate history, steampunk, and weird science all seem perfectly comprehensible, especially in a young adult book. But Scott Westerfield pulled it off and combined it with an exciting adventure, making Leviathan one of the best novels I read last year. In some respects, the sequel can’t help but fall short of the standards set by the initial book. Behemoth has to remain in a world that is now familiar, rather than dazzling its audience with new ideas in every chapter. However, that doesn’t mean it disappoints, either. This is a worthy sequel to a very good book.

Behemoth continues a story that, from a brief description, sounds like a pretty formulaic young adult book: A prince is in hiding from the conspiracy that killed his parents, and a young girl is disguised as a boy in order to enter the military. Though they should be on opposite sides of the war, they overcome their differences, become friends, and succeed at more adventures than any person (child or adult) should ever run into. This somewhat clichéd core is what grounds an otherwise too original book, though: This is an alternate-history World War One, in which the Germans and their allies have a strong steampunk culture, and the British side has perfected the biological arts to the point where even their warships are giant animals.

This technology was well thought-out and thoroughly examined in Leviathan, providing enough technical and cultural details to suspend any disbelief. It was aided immensely by Keith Thompson’s illustrations, done in the style of children’s novels from around the WWI era. The straightforward depictions of one or two scenes per chapter gave a face to all the marvels that the readers were being asked to accept. In some situations, a picture really can be worth one thousand words, and in this case, Thompson made all these elements work by effectively provided another novel’s worth of world-building.

Unfortunately for Behemoth, it doesn’t have an entire new world to flesh out, and it can’t help but suffer in comparison.That’s not to say that it doesn’t try, though. The warring powers continue to roll out new technology, and the heroes visit the exotic city of Istanbul. The way this city has incorporated both the biological and mechanical sciences into its culture, along with historically-based interactions between it and the warring powers, make this a fascinating addition to Westerfield’s world. He already proved that he can build a compelling system that is consistent down to the details, but here he manages the tricky task of expanding on an entire book’s worth of details while honoring the ones already established.

The plot is, of course, breezy and exciting. It focuses heavily on a self-contained plot arc, with new elements introduced at the start of the book and resolved by the end, but it still definitely is the second book of a trilogy. The overarching plots, both personal and world-shaking, all progress without ending, and the uneasy alliance between the Austrian and British characters is tested without being broken nor resolved. It’s fun, but it’s obviously setting up for the big payoff in the next book. Most of the plot, including the major struggle within Instanbul, is important in theory, but could probably be ignored without dulling the impact of the upcoming conclusion.

Yes, Behemoth suffers from a bit of a sophomore slump. There’s no real way around that, though, when the originality was part of what made the first book so great. Thankfully, that wasn’t the only thing that made Leviathan work, and all of the action, character building, and respect for the details of the world are present in this sequel. Behemoth adds as many new ideas as it can manage without seeming like a betrayal of the world it already established. For fans of the first book, there is no reason not to read this one.

Grade: B

2011
08/30
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Gods Behaving Badly (Book Review)

Gods Behaving Badly cover

Gods Behaving Badly

Obsolete gods withering away after their time has passed; It’s a well-worn idea in fantasy literature. In Gods Behaving Badly, though, Marie Phillips gets some mileage out of this concept by putting the Greek gods in modern London. The broad strokes of the plot feel like they could easily fit in with the classic myths if not for their new setting. However, the original myths rarely went into details about the petty bickering and foolish mistakes that typified these characters. By fleshing out those particulars, as well as devoting half of the time to the humans’ side of the story, we get a very different view of the Greek gods.

Phillips can write in a laugh-out-loud, Douglas Adams-esque style when she wants. See the first chapter (in which Artemis talks to a mortal recently turned into a tree) for the best example. However, this isn’t her default mode. Instead, she plays most of the book straight, allowing the epic powers, juvenile sulking, and casual incest to give the story an absurdist air.

The result is a fun, light read. It doesn’t always work if you stop to think about it too much (despite the gods’ waning powers, it’s difficult to believe that they couldn’t have gotten better jobs and avoided some of the traps they find themselves in), but it’s easy not to overthink it. After all, this is the story of Aphrodite making Apollo fall in love with their housekeeper to avenge a minor insult. It’s not designed for deep thought.

That said, Phillips does a great job in portraying their views and motivations. The gods are immortal, but bored and lazy, and have lost most of what they believe is their due. While they aren’t necessarily vengeful, normal people matter to them about as much as a plant would to us. The novel gets inside their heads and actually justifies this boredom and self-importance by showing us how differently they react to normal situations. In one memorable scene, Artemis considers what she would do if she “only” had another century to live. Faced with such an immediate fate, she realizes that she would move out of the dysfunctional family house. With the timescales they think in, it’s hard to believe that human lives matter. Also of note, repeated sex scenes with Apollo and Aphrodite start out interesting, but eventually demonstrate how anything can become mundane and pointless after millennia. The chapters that focus on the human characters are a more straightforward, cute love story, but the contrast shows the gulf that exists between the mortals and immortals.

There are still some frustrating aspects that took me out of the book. Much of the plot hinges on the repeated inability of intelligent people to recognize the Greek gods even when all the evidence is right in front of them. Then at the end, the resolution to the conflict is based on something that is so fundamental to this sort of story that it felt unfair to have the characters come up with it thousands of years late. Whether your frame of reference for fantasy is more Pratchett, Gaiman, or Eddings, this is something that will occur to you long before it occurs to the gods whose existence depends on it. That marred an otherwise solid portrayal of unusual characters.

Gods Behaving Badly provides a fun, subtly humorous story that makes the Greek gods into more robust characters. The story is sympathetic overall, but be warned that the obscenity and casual cruelty that mark the original myths are not glossed over. It’s necessary to overlook some flaws at times and let the novel dictate the terms of the story, especially at the end. But despite all that, Phillips is a strong character writer, and makes the journey worthwhile.

Grade: B-

2011
08/27
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Embassytown (Book Review)

Embassytown cover

Embassytown

China Miéville is a restless author who resists being pigeonholed from book to book. The one constant element, though, is his love for unexpected and truly unusual ideas. From that perspective, Embassytown is on the same end of the spectrum as The City and The City, having just a couple new ideas that are worth taking the entire book to develop. Embassytown probably doesn’t have the crossover potential of The City and The City, though. While that new book was structured as a more easily-accessible police procedural, this new one is unashamedly science fiction.

In a way, it’s disappointing to see Miéville work in a traditional science fiction space. His irreverent experimentation sent shockwaves through the fantasy community a decade ago, but it seems perfectly normal on the SF side of the fence. However, this is the story of humans figuring out a strange alien race, and that subgenre plays perfectly to Miéville’s strengths.

The titular Embassytown is a human settlement on a planet populated by the Ariekei, an alien race whose language requires one to make sounds out of two mouths at once. It only sounds right to them if a single being is making both sets of sounds, so they simply can’t comprehend speech coming from a machine or from two humans working together. The human settlement can only communicate through “Ambassadors”, pairs of people whose brains have been altered to give them such a strong connection to each other that the Ariekei accept them as a single being.

The premise sounds hard to accept, like one of the minor races that a typical space opera would just mention in passing. In Embassytown, though, this concept is explained and expanded upon so carefully that it becomes meaty enough for an entire book. There are a number of interesting quirks to this system, of course. The Ambassadors’ lives and positions within society are important (as is the way this colony planet relates back to its parent empire – Miéville’s books always involve some cynical politics).The Ariekei, meanwhile, are born with an innate knowledge of their “Language”, but are unable to comprehend that any other forms of communication exist. The Language is so fundamental to them that they aren’t even able to lie, and the fact that humans can speak untruths is fascinating to them. To even use something as abstract as a simile, the Ariekei need to create that simile in real life. For this reason, the narrator of the book once took place in a carefully-orchestrated ceremony to become “the girl who ate what was given to her”. The narrator, Alice Cho, is unable to speak Ariekei Language despite being a part of it, and has no understanding of what meaning she now has in their alien minds.

All of this, with culture, the mysteries of alien language, and a little bit about space travel through the futuristic empire, makes the first half of the book fascinating. Mysteries slowly start to unravel, though human understanding remains imperfect. For a time, it seems like it may be one of Miéville’s most fascinating and original works yet. However, the novel’s real conflict becomes clear about halfway through, and these mysteries are all put aside in favor of simple survival. Miéville does not write about fear, crisis, and war as convincingly as he brings strange ideas to life, so even as both the human and alien civilizations begin to collapse, the danger feels abstract to the reader. It’s not an uncommon problem for Miéville – his strengths lie in the way he can build up worlds for us, but he personally is more interested in tearing them down – but it is more obvious in this book than in most, since the particular crisis the characters face makes it impossible to keep learning more about the fascinating Ariekei and their Language.

Fortunately, it all does come together again in the final chapters of the book, with the ideas that had been building at the beginning providing the answers at the end. Embassytown may have the tightest and most satisfying conclusion of any Miéville book yet, which should be a very reassuring sign to his fans.

That dragging section in the latter half of the novel is significant, but it really is the only fault in what would otherwise be one of the best science fiction works of recent years. With its original, weird, but still well-justified ideas, Embassytown is well worth experiencing.

Grade: B

2011
08/20
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The Blind Assassin (Book Review)

The Blind Assassin

It’s always strange to see how genre literature is filtered through the sensibilities of other writers. Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin tells us of the planet Zycron, culminating in the war between a superstitious barbarian tribe and the advanced but corrupt city of Sakiel-Norn. However, it is presented as a story-within-a-story-within-another-story. This metafictional conceit allowed the novel to be taken seriously by the critics.

Fortunately, the three-layered story is clever: According to Atwood’s book, heiress Laura Chase wrote a novel in 1945 before driving off a bridge in an apparent suicide. That novel, which hints at a real-life affair, includes the pulp story as the bedroom talk that a coarse Marxist revolutionary uses to keep the attention of a sheltered upper-class lady. The themes of each layer (real life, the novel about the affair, and the pulp story of Zycron) are reflected cleverly in the others. Meanwhile, newspaper clippings give details about major events in the lives of Laura Chase and her family, while providing tantalizing hints of the untold stories behind the news.

By the mid-point of the novel, though, the stories-within-stories have lost steam. The fantasy about Sakiel-Norn is only ever interesting when it sets the scene, with a culture informed by real-world class struggles and a conflict that highlights the tension between the lovers in the middle story. But every time it is about to actually provide some plot or character-building, it rushes through the actual story in order to reach the next significant piece of scenery. Meanwhile, the book “written” by Laura is interesting only to the extent that it gives us a view of the real-life characters’ secrets. The idea that it could have become famous on its own, let alone remembered fifty years later, makes it harder to believe the otherwise realistic main story.

By this time, the only truly interesting story-within-a-story is the one at the outer level. Iris, the sister to novelist Laura, is recounting the events of her life for us. The jumps between the elderly Iris’ current state, with her sharp wit and bitter outlook, contrast sharply with the young self she recalls: The only children of a successful industrialist, Iris and Laura were raised in privilege and never prepared for adulthood in an unforgiving world. The tragic trajectory is obvious (the book opens on the scene of Laura’s death) but the details are a compelling mystery.

As always, Atwood’s prose is masterful. Iris’ tale finds the right turns of phrase to capture herself at all ages, bringing alive their small Canadian town, the culture of the early 20th century, and the adult world as seen through children’s eyes. The history of the Chase family is filled with mistakes and tragedy, but after a lifetime of experience, Iris’ portrayal finds compassion for all but a few villains who ruined her life directly.

The story is unique. Laura is a strange child (possibly autistic?), while Iris is quiet, distant, and seems to have no agency in the story she herself is telling. Their idillic, privileged childhood seems wrong from the beginning, and sets them on an unusual course through life. Iris’ unhappy arranged marriage dominates half of the book, but this book does not put feminism front and center in the way that Atwood’s novels like The Handmaid’s Tale did. It’s impossible to avoid a feminist angle when discussing this book, but it’s thrown into the mix along with many other elements. Chief among them is the mysteries of Iris and Laura’s lives, which are slowly revealed throughout the book. Though I complained that the inner stories (as well as the newspaper articles) aren’t very satisfying on their own, they do allow the secrets to be revealed in an interesting way: The reader receiving a high-level glimpse of the future from newspaper clippings, a few more hints from the elderly Iris’ comments and Laura’s novel, and finally the complete story when the flashback scenes catch up to that point. Even when the final pieces are obvious (as they are in the last few chapters), it is an enjoyable way to structure the novel.

In short, though, the inner stories of The Blind Assassin mainly provide an interesting hook at the start. They never become satisfying on their own. The outer one features the  interesting characters and compelling plot. Despite Atwood’s reputation as a respected author who isn’t afraid to work with science fiction and fantasy, it’s her rich vision of the real world that make this novel worth reading.

Grade: B

2011
07/17
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Fight Club (Book Review)

Fight Club cover

Fight Club

After reading Noise, I really wanted to try Fight Club. Both stories are nominally wish fulfillment tales about violent young men, but neither actually intends for you to root for them all the way through. Strangely, even though Fight Club is one of the best movies of the last generation, I’d never read the book. It was interesting to read something that was so familiar in some ways (almost all of the voice-overs and speeches are lifted verbatim from the novel), but new in others. I haven’t had an experience like this since I read the novel version of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest more than a decade ago. But where the Cuckoo’s Nest book immediately supplanted the movie for me, the movie version of Fight Club is still definitely my favorite. There is little if anything of import in the book that the movie didn’t also cover, and the prose never put me there in the same visceral way that the movie did. (In contrast, the text in Cuckoo’s Nest offered much that the movie was missing, and its incredible prose was even better than the movie’s acting.)

That’s not to say that the book wasn’t still good. With most of the movie’s text and plot coming from it, how could it not be?

From this point on, there are spoilers for the story.

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2011
06/11
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The Half-Made World (Book Review)

The Half-Made World

The Half-Made World

I’ve long argued that the “New Weird” is not a distinct genre. Its founder, China Miéville, wrote Perdido Street Station explicitly to show that the line between science fiction and fantasy was an illusion and that both genres deserved more creativity. It’s missing the point to create a separate category for these works. However, after reading Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World, I’m starting to accept that New Weird has become its own sub-genre. Just like steampunk or High Fantasy, it definitely has its own expectations, aesthetics, and fanbase.

Fortunately, the New Weird is not likely to become a stagnant literary ghetto like High Fantasy. After all, its central tenet is wild inventiveness and the undermining of any clichéd expectations. The Half-Made World uses the American Western as a foundation for its setting, but with little-understood spirits twisting the familiar archetypes into something new. The larger-than-life outlaws are servants of a demonic cabal named The Gun. The railroads may be bringing civilization and order to the land, but under the auspices of a force called The Line, which sees humans as no more than disposable cogs in a machine. These two sides are at war, and the ordinary people who live in simple, dusty towns have no love for either of the destructive powers.

While the setting is entirely his own invention, Gilman is definitely inspired by Miéville. Not only is the world the book’s biggest selling point, but it rejects the simple answers and black-and-white morality of most fantasy. (The three main characters are an Agent of the Gun, an Agent of the Line, and a prim woman from civilized lands. Needless to say, they do not get along.) The narrative sympathies are humanistic and anti-authoritarian, but even in his fantasy the author worries that evil will triumph. And the story isn’t afraid to disrupt the status quo, no matter how the reader may want to see it continue. Unfortunately, some of Miéville’s weaknesses come through as well: The plot is slight and driven by coincidence, and the the conclusion is unsatisfying. (In fact, Gilman seems to have made a conscious effort to avoid wrapping anything up neatly.)

What truly makes this New Weird is that the setting becomes less familiar as the book progresses. Rather than doing some world-building and then moving on with the plot, it turns out that the similarities to our Old West exist on the surface only. This setting has centuries of history, and the land becomes stranger and less bound to physical laws (literally “half-made”) the further west one goes. Gilman’s prose does a masterful job of setting the scene, laying out just enough details to bring these strange elements alive, and slowly building up the concepts that underpin the world so that the reader comes to appreciate them without needing them explicitly explained. (This is also true of the characters, who remain interesting and reveal themselves through action rather than narration.)

A great environment, good characters, fair plot, and mediocre ending: That’s a pretty concise summary of the New Weird. And despite its weaknesses, The Half-Made World is a stunning and memorable book. I would love to read more stories set in this world. I may wish that innovations like this had been more integrated into standard genre writing instead of forming a new sub-category, but I can still enjoy the results that it produces.

Grade: B

2011
05/26
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