READ FOR THE FIRST TIME: SCIENCE FICTION
See also, in the series post, Baker and Henderson. See also, in the
fantasy post, collections by Lake, Palwick, Phillips, and arguably
Baker and Ray. There's also science fiction in the re-reading post,
mostly without comments, by Bradshaw, Bujold, Eskridge, Gould, Harris,
Longyear, MacDonald (arguably), McCaffrey, Moon, and Willis (with and
without Felice).
Catherine Asaro
* (April) <Primary Inversion>, 1995
Nominee, 1996 Compton Crook Award
(April-May) 0 <Catch the Lightning>, 1996, and <The Last Hawk>, 1997,
skimmed
<Catch the Lightning> nominee, 1998 Sapphire Award; <The Last Hawk>
nomine, 1999 Nebula Award for Novel
Various other books, lightly skimmed at libraries and bookstores
"The Saga of the Skolian Empire" runs to plots that include
a) romances between telepaths, with the tedious gushing that tends to
involve, and b) villains who either are, or are motivated by, the
"Traders", a caste who get sexual pleasure from empaths' and
telepaths' pain, and who have managed to conquer much of the galaxy
for no particularly obvious reason. The "Skolian Empire" is much of
what the Traders *haven't* conquered (Earth and its colonies are much
of the rest), and most of the telepaths we meet are from a family
that's heavily involved with the Skolian government. This summary
makes the series sound like the epitome of silliness, but it's
actually not entirely so.
In fact, I really liked the first book, and went chasing after more.
But I've now dug into enough of the series to persuade myself that the
political efforts that pervade Asaro's books are "sound and fury,
signifying nothing"; that at some level, the hope offered in the first
book for *progress* is delusive, because progress would interfere with
Asaro's dynastic machine for continuing the series. (She ought to
learn from how Anne McCaffrey did Pern; McCaffrey's a considerably
worse writer, by any of several measures, but still managed a more
intellectually respectable method for constructing a twenty-book
series. The contrast with Bujold's Vorkosigan books, to which Asaro's
are sometimes compared, is also notable.) Besides, I've gotten bored
with the romance novel conventions (though I note that <Spherical
Harmonic>, 2001, skimmed, seems to lack these). I may or may not look
further into this series, and will probably skip several volumes if I
do. No idea whether I'll look at Asaro's other books.
These books have contributed a good bit to my growing discomfort with
psionics, which all too freaking often seems to be an sf writer's
convenient way to have something be total: total love, or total
intimidation (see Campbell below), or whatever, an easy cop-out route
to something nobody would believe otherwise.
Elizabeth Bear
Winner, 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
(January-February) <The Chains That You Refuse>, 2000-2006, first
compiled as such 2006
"Two Dreams on Trains" nominee, 2006 British SF Award for Short
Fiction
(January-February) <Hammered>, 2005, <Scardown>, 2005, and
<Worldwired>, 2005
Collectively winner, 2006 Locus Award for First Novel
(February) <Carnival>, 2006
Nominee and Special Citation, 2007 Philip K. Dick Award
I got interested in Bear because of what I'd heard about <Blood and
Iron>, so of course that was the one book I couldn't find at any
library at the time. Imagine my surprise that *everything* else was
science fiction... OK, well, except a bunch of the stories.
While I'm not absolutely certain I properly read through the "Jenny
Casey Trilogy", I am sure I liked it a lot, though Bear is at the
harsh edge of my range of tolerance for When Bad Things Happen to Good
Characters. ("Gone to Flowers", in <Chains>, is a prequel, best read
after at least the first volume.) <Carnival> is interesting as a book
that has Setup for Open-Ended Series written all over it, but seems
fairly clearly to end in a whole succession of ways that preclude that
outcome; a gutsy move on Bear's part. (She takes pains, on her
website [URL below], to note that the science fiction novels she has
forthcoming are *not* related to this book or to each other.) All I
remembered about <The Chains That You Refuse> is that it's a
collection of short stories that establishes that Bear is smarter than
I am, something I'm not used to finding too often any more; I wound up
looking at a lot of websites about it trying to work out when the
stories originally appeared without access to a copy of the book, and
was surprised to see how many had taken up residence in the vast
recesses of my Unattached Short Story Recollection Archive. (Compare,
if you will, Kit Reed below.)
Oh, sigh, I suppose I should do some level of plot summary of the
novels? The trilogy is essentially a depiction of the early stages of
a Singularity appearing despite the bleakness of its near future
setting, full of science fictional action and largely from the
perspective of a reasonably interesting heroine (Casey), a bitter
retired member of a cyborg military unit. <Carnival> depicts two men
from a moderately patriarchal interstellar civilisation, visiting a
matriarchy on an espionage mission (and the romance subplots thus
generated, by the way, are not remotely the ones you now expect). Its
ending unexpectedly but convincingly resolves a lot of issues that had
looked like part of the background. This book is quite a read. Bear,
in general, looks to me like a must-read author for the near future;
if she continues to get better, she may be a must-read author
indefinitely.
Oh, and trivially, in <Worldwired> we have machine-mediated telepathy
done *sensibly*, which tends to show up Syne Mitchell's approach, or
even (to some extent) Catherine Asaro's.
<http://www.elizabethbear.com/>, last seen September 2, 2007
John Campbell, Jr.
(February and/or March) <A New Dawn>, 1935-1940, first compiled as
such 2003
This collects Campbell's most famous fiction - the subtitle is "The
Complete Don A. Stuart Stories" because Campbell, having established
himself as a writer of cheerful adventures or some such under his own
name, used his wife's (she was born Dona Stuart) to write these much
darker stories. The sources for several famous movies of the 1950s
are here. I don't think I'd read any before. So, drumroll please,
and ... ?
Eh. I hadn't realised Campbell had been obsessed with psionics that
far back. Lemme tell you, between straight psionics and telepathy by
machines, I've just about OD'd enough on psionics to give in to those
annoying claims that the <Foundation> series is fantasy...
OK, so anyway: Some of these worked for me, but on the whole, this
further reinforced my sense that 1930s magazine science fiction
generally does not live today and does not have a bright future. I
haven't re-read Doc Smith in years, but if there's a major exception,
he's it; hometown pride aside, I'm confident Stanley Weinbaum is not,
and Heinlein's 1930s output, for example, doesn't count.
Cory Doctorow
Winner, 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
(June) <A Place So Foreign and 8 More>, 1998-2003, first compiled as
such 2003
"Craphound" nominee, 1999 Sturgeon Award and 1999 Aurora Award for
Short-Form Work in English; "0wnz0red" nominee, 2004 Nebula for
Novelette; collection winner, 2004 Sunburst Award
Huh. Now I know why there's so much noise about Doctorow. (Though in
fact this book holds less than half of the short fiction that won him
the Campbell award.)
But I'm not sure why I remember him being described as "slipstream".
Of the nine stories in this book, only the title story and especially
"Return to Pleasure Island" strike me as being disputable as science
fiction. What I find more interesting is a different question. I
read these stories, as best I could, in publication order. Only "All
Day Sucker", four pages long and evidently new in this book, appeared
later than Doctorow's first novel. Now, I had the strong sense that
the stories got *better* over the few years in question, but in
preferring "0wnz0red" and "The Super Man and the Bugout" and "To
Market, to Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey" over "Return" and
"Home Again, Home Again" and "Craphound", am I reacting to actual
improvement in the writing, or only to their brassier, less depressing
protagonists and surfaces? The later-published stories *feel*
considerably cheerier, but in fact, "Craphound" preaches forgiveness
where "All Day Sucker" and "Rebranding" exult in revenge, and while
"Super Man" is easily better than anything else I'd read from <On
Spec>, a magazine of which I once made the mistake of reading two
entire issues [a], it's about as optimistic as the average number of
<The Baffler>. I suppose, at any rate, the plot reversals of
"0wnz0red" are considerably smoother than the emotional reversals of
"Craphound" or "Home Again"; but I'm not sure I should take Doctorow's
transition from writing about relatively schmucky men to writing about
relatively less schmucky ones as any kind of æsthetic improvement.
George Eliot (in the other fiction post) would certainly urge
otherwise.
Whatever. The truth remains that this is writing way outside my usual
fare, and I can already predict that my memory for these stories, not
too much later, will be far from exact.
[a] To be perfectly fair I should note that this was in 1998, and so
before Holly Phillips was associated with <On Spec> either as
contributor or as editor. Though I note that none of her <On Spec>
stories is collected in her first and so far only collection, so I
can't say whether any of them is actually any better than "Super Man"
either.
(June-July) <Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom>, 2003
Winner, 2004 Locus Award for First Novel; nominee, 2005 Nebula Award
for Novel
This was a hard book for me to finish properly - in fact I took a week
or three off after skimming it, basically because it's the tale of a
semi-schmuck who undergoes both emotional *and* plot reversals right,
left, and centre. But I do respect the way Doctorow uses his story.
Just like <Pacific Edge>, this is the story of the least happy man in
Utopia; but not only does Doctorow avoid Robinson's blandness, he also
uses that man's unhappiness to ask searching questions about the
ostensible Utopia, instead of Robinson's reaffirmation. In the
Future, post-death, post-scarcity, Wired "Bitchun Society", reputation
("Whuffie") affects more than Google ranking of web pages; it's
replaced money. Ahem: a backtrack. Explicitly, the society is
*mostly* post-scarcity; implicitly, things like attention, love, and
any form of permanence remain as scarce as ever. So while I strongly
suspect Doctorow *would* like to see this Future, his story's about
what could lead his protagonist to lose faith in it.
Sigh. I've already mentioned that most of my discussions of books
read after I started this log run long, so maybe it'll look like I'm
disparaging this one by writing short. Well, lessee. It's set mostly
in or near Disney World, save the opening chapter; the title fairly
accurately describes much of the second half (in which, among other
things, Our Hero's implanted net connection is usually down). It's
first person POV, and even has a built-in rationale for the tale's
being told. The date is apparently between 2100 and 2150. The book
is short. Enough. Honestly, if I'm not the last reader of rasfw to
read it (fantasy-only readers aside), I oughta be, short review or no.
(July) <eastern standard tribe>, 2004
*This* book is set in either 2012 or 2022, depending on which page you
believe, and mostly in London, Massachusetts, and Toronto. In other
words, it's only mildly science fictional, except the eponymous social
idea: Our Hero, a "born arguer", has adopted as the core of his life
a "tribe" devoted to the supremacy of Eastern Standard Time ways of
life, companies, etc. (This means, in practice, New York, Boston, and
Toronto - which strikes me as a mildly unwieldy mixture already - but
at least Doctorow doesn't try to add in Michigan, South Carolina,
Puerto Rico, or Perú!) He spends much of the book as an EST
saboteur, a consultant in London feeding garbage to British (GMT)
managers. In some chapters, he speaks in the first person, usually
present tense; in others, third person, past tense. This enables him
to start in medias res, and so make us aware that he's been betrayed
before we meet the betrayers, and aware of their identities before
they act, and ...
Oh, yes, betrayers. Belatedly it dawns on me that betrayal is
something of a standard theme for Doctorow, as is cutthroat workplace
competition (both inter- and intra-group, for groups at every level
from "team" to corporation). Betrayal is central to at least five of
the nine stories in <A Place>, usually at the level of individual vs.
individual. It would be a spoiler to say much about betrayal in <Down
and Out>, but the overt plot of that book from early on is about
workplace competition, both personal and inter-group. Here, betrayal
and workplace competition are inextricably mingled (consider the
narrator's job, after all), operating at pretty much every scale from
the personal to the mega-corporate, and lacking most of the
consolations that mitigate them in <Down and Out>.
Nevertheless I raced through this book, in sharp contrast to how I
read <Down and Out>; the split in the story means things never seem as
hopeless as in that book. Still, I find this one the lesser of the
two. Our Hero delivers a six-page rant halfway through justifying the
cockamamie Time/tribe idea; thanks to his profession, "user
experience" work, Doctorow gets to toss ideas off left, right and
center, and also uses the narrator's business activities to justify
some (brief) rants of Doctorow's own (for example, against the
intellectual property maximalists). One entire plotline can be read
as an ongoing rant against the mental health system. All this would
be easy to forgive if there were something new or deep here. Indeed,
the narrator, in an opening chapter ranting against literary criticism
(his own concern, or the author's?), claims that the book is about
whether it's better to be smart or happy. But smartness and happiness
correlate pretty closely in this book, so that's a crock. Formally,
while the split story is a good idea, it's not as though Doctorow
lacked proven abilities in either third or first person; thematically,
competition and betrayal are old news in his fiction, and a
book-length treatment that explicitly piles on paranoia just doesn't
strike me as revelatory.
Kelley Eskridge [1] [2]
(September) <Dangerous Space>, 1990-2007, first compiled as such 2007
"And Salome Danced" nominee, 1996 Tiptree Award; "Alien Jane" nominee,
1996 Nebula Award for Short Story
This book collects the six stories <Locus> and Mr. Contento know
Eskridge to have published in the 1990s, plus the title novella, which
is apparently new, and which is therefore the only story known to me
that Eskridge has (presumably) written since her novel <Solitaire>,
listed in the re-reading post.
I read three of the stories as fantasy, three as science fiction
(slightly longer, which is why this entry is here and not in the
fantasy post), and one as neither (even though its title is "Alien
Jane"). Two of the earliest are in tight third-person POV; the rest
are first person. And three of those are narrated by a character
named Mars, who is, in each story, closely associated with a woman
named Lucky, and who, in each story, falls dangerously in love with
some combination of artist and art. (The art in question being in one
case acting, in another arguably fighting, and in the third music.) I
take two of those stories as fantasy and one as science fiction, but
I'm deeply unconvinced that Eskridge cares about the distinctions; if
"Strings", one of the third-person stories and also about music, is
science fictional, it's at least as much a fable, something that might
once have appeared in <Galaxy> or have been written by Bradbury or
Vonnegut or late Tiptree. (And Datlow and Windling, not Dozois,
collected it at year's end.)
I tend, when looking at <Solitaire>, to look only at the final part,
and so I tend to forget how hard it is to read it from the beginning,
to remain attentive amid the suffering narrated. Kelley Eskridge
writes clearly enough (though the one early first-person story,
"Somewhere Down the Diamondback Road", shows her acquitting herself
reasonably well with Prime Books -ish prose), but her stories aren't
light reading. She emphasises, especially in the Mars stories, that
it costs work to make art; I remember discussions here that suggest
some would disagree with me, but I think it also costs work to
appreciate her art.
Later, trying to answer my own "Where are they now?" questions, I
looked at her website, and a mock interview there (URL below), linked
to the publication of this book, confirms her uninterest in
subdividing "speculative fiction" (she even offers "slipstream" as a
label for herself). And while I didn't find anything that directly
explains her relative silence of recent years, she does say "In the
last year I've rediscovered my joy in writing". However difficult her
stories are to read, I hope to see more of them in the next years.
<http://www.kelleyeskridge.com/Interviews/AboutWritingDangerousSpace.htm>,
seen September 7, 2007
Robert Heinlein
* (September 2006, or October) <Four Frontiers>, 1947-1950, compiled
as such not later than 2005
An omnibus of <Rocket Ship Galileo>, <Space Cadet>, <Red Planet>, and
<Farmer in the Sky>. I liked reading this once and have since
revisited the last-named book; I'd like to read on in Heinlein's
juveniles, but haven't gotten hold of the rest. (Ones I'd already
read include, lemme see, <Tunnel in the Sky>, which is one of those
books I've mentioned before as irritating me on first reading but
stunning me on much later re-reading; <The Rolling Stones>, which is
not; and I think one other, but can't remember which.) I assume I can
skip plot summary and such here?
Jay Lake [2]
(July) <Rocket Science>, 2005
This is an rasfw favourite. And it deserves to be.
Just in case I wasn't the last rasfw-er to read it: It's set entirely
in southeastern Kansas in, I think, 1945, and its plot distantly
resembles John Varley's <Red Thunder>'s, which is as much as I think I
can say without adding spoilers. But this isn't a triumphal story at
all: "Even though I felt like a circus freak - see the Unlucky Man,
displayed for your edification ladies and gentlemen..." It's told in
the first person POV of Vernon Dunham, whose polio, less crippling
than FDR's, had still kept him out of World War II, and who spends
most of the book focused on practicalities, but also worrying about
those he cares about; he sounds much like the narrator of a classic
Heinlein book, only a lot less confident. I'm sorry to have to report
that he's pretty much the only consistently decent human in the book,
but by book's end he's not the only one *you'll* care about; and
arguably he manages to thread the needles to the one conclusion that
holds any hope of his *not* staying the Unlucky Man. It's a book well
worth reading.
So go read it.
Minor complaint: In case of any reprints, past or future, I devoutly
hope the slew of errors, missed by Fairwood Press in the first
edition, is greatly reduced. They aren't typos exactly: most often,
they're quasi-grammatical, as though if this phrase had an extra word
or two in, and strike me as probably artifacts of revision.
Speaking of errors, I've now seen <Mainspring>, 2007, also by Lake.
Based on the dust jacket blurbs, I'd probably have put that in the
fantasy post if I'd read it by now. But I'm bringing it up not for
its content, but for something Tor did in publishing it: *on the dust
jacket*, Greg Bear is quoted as calling it Lake's "debut novel".
While this preserves some deniability for Tor, it's much worse than
the equivalent statement by Carol Berg about Catherynne Valente's <In
the Night Garden>, mentioned in the fantasy post: Bantam did quote
that, but also made a couple of efforts to offset it, particularly
leaving the offending phrase off the cover; Tor nowhere contradicts
Bear in any copy of <Mainspring> I've seen. Someone oughta contact
the FTC and see whether this sort of lying-by-proxy is going to
continue to get worse. I can just imagine: in 2080, on the cover of
Jim Schmuck's new posthumous "collaboration" with Robert A.
Heinlein®: "Four billion readers have loved Heinlein's debut novel!
Be the next one!" After all, that doesn't mean the *publisher* is
actually saying *this* is Heinlein's debut novel - it could just be
four billion people all of whom are coincidentally wrong, or they
could actually mean <Methuselah's Children> or even <The Devil Makes
the Law> (huh?) - or they *could* even mean *Murgatroyd* Heinlein's
2064 debut, a Western, right?
Syne Mitchell [1] [2]
(April) <Murphy's Gambit>, 2000
Winner, 2001 Compton Crook Award
(April or May) <Technogenesis>, 2002
I had the impression that Mitchell's newest book begins a fantasy
series, so I wanted to read her earlier ones and see if I could grasp
at least one case of "Science Fiction Writer Becomes Fantasist! No
Surprise at All!" More on the initial impression below.
Anyway, Mitchell, as of the second of these books, was a good writer
of paperback science fiction, who might or might not become more. I'm
pretty sure these books are vulnerable to attack on moderate to loose
definitions of "Mary Sue", though not on tight ones. Each of these
books' heroines changes her world, and in the first by more than I
find plausible. In the first book, a woman is drummed out of an
interstellar police training academy and deals with the consequences,
gradually becoming a political figure; in the second, a woman is
drummed out of, well, normal life (in the nearish future), and becomes
a key player in human interaction with collective intelligence. (See
comments above about machine-mediated telepathy.)
Eric Nylund, now Mitchell's husband, is quoted on the cover of
<Murphy's Gambit> as claiming that the book is "adamantine-hard"
science fiction. Um, for a book whose plot *revolves* around FTL
travel, that's certainly an interesting claim. But given that adamant
is a *fantasy* concept, it's at least consistently phrased!
(May) <The Changeling Plague>, 2003
Nominee, 2004 Campbell Award
This book is still paperback science fiction, but Mitchell has
extended her range a bunch. She shows three protagonists, who
sometimes work at cross purposes; her world (again near future) also
becomes denser by intermittent reminders that not everything revolves
around these protagonists. None of the three is remotely Mary Sue (in
fact, two are deeply transgressive and profoundly isolated men). She
retains her central interest in depicting moments of Big Change, but
here pays a lot more attention to the costs of change than in her
previous books. Oh, the plot? Well, "drummed out" remains a sort of
focus: given that the McGuffin here is a runaway plague of a
gene-rewriting virus, characters spend a lot of time in, and attention
on, various forms of quarantine, which is in a sense an ultimate
drumming out, no?
(May) <End in Fire>, 2005
Here Mitchell breaks out of what might be called her apprenticeship
straitjackets; what I'm less sure of is whether she moves further than
the breaking-out. We are back to a single main viewpoint character,
who is crew on a space station, working on the final setup of a solar
power satellite, when a nuclear war breaks out over the last remaining
oilfield. (Other viewpoint characters include her husband,
throughout, and a few people clumsily used early on to inform us
mostly about the war.) Our Heroine makes a bunch of wise decisions,
at least two really dumb ones, and some decisions whose wisdom is
challenged, probably unanswerably, by other characters; in other
respects, such as her love life, she also isn't much of a Mary Sue.
However, she *is* *seen* as a hero, as the book progresses, partly for
radio messages from orbit that prevent various governments from
covering up, I wish I were joking, the fact of nuclear war. So
Mitchell has not entirely shed the desire to give her protagonists
profoundly improbable credit; but she's well beyond the sheer
stupidity of the Mary Sue.
In any event, while SPS could certainly be a Big Change, it is here
far from central; survival, an element in each previous book, is here
front and centre. Five American astronauts are well characterised,
one each from China and Japan somewhat less so. There is much about
what's involved in leadership. The fact that the major characters are
mostly astronauts stranded in space does, obviously, invite comparison
with the "drumming[s] out" described above.
This strikes me as the book in which Mitchell unequivocally earns that
"hard science fiction" label her first book received (given that the
McGuffins of the previous two are still vulnerable to charges of
handwavium).
I was thinking after the previous books that Mitchell seemed to be
aiming sort of towards the direction of Jack McDevitt's writing; this
book only strengthens that opinion. She has not, however, equaled
McDevitt's ability to intermix the Big and the small in soul-stirring
ways. But to be fair, I'm not sure the more manipulative aspects of
his soul-stirring are, in fact, part of her goal. I do think Big
Change really is core to her approach, and God knows the world *does*
need science fiction writers who want to think Big, so more power to
her. I hope she continues to progress as a writer, and does not
simply settle into the techno-thriller plateau whose edge this book
could represent.
(May, but weeks later than the previous ones) <The Last Mortal Man>,
2006
This book is explicitly on the front cover "Book One of the
Deathless".
Nevertheless, my initial impression was wrong. So far, at least, we
actually have that extraordinary and quasi-mythical creature, a
science fiction writer who has *not* crossed over to fantasy.
However, we *are*, here, back to something that seems awfully close to
magic technology; in this case, "nano-biology".
If <End in Fire> was Mitchell's exit from apprenticeship, then she
spent a very short time as a journeyman, because this series bids fair
to be a masterpiece, in the old sense: a work showing that the worker
knows her trade. She re-uses, here, the McGuffins of *each* of her
previous three books - the worldwide computer network and
machine-mediated telepathy of The Future (here, somewhat older than in
<Technogenesis>, and kids are growing up who learn no natural
language...); plague, again striking at the genes; and apocalypse.
But she uses them, first of all, to deliver a relentlessly exciting
book - as I write these words, I'm up an hour later than I should have
been, with nothing done that I needed to do, because I could not stop
reading, even *after* skipping to the end. But at the same time as it
delivers that Quest for Survival à la <End in Fire>, the book also
delivers Big Change. As this book *opens*, immortality is available
to human beings: its advent is not the Big Change that interests
Mitchell here, but what happens *afterwards* certainly is.
A scene from this book appeared at the end of <End in Fire>, but here
that scene doesn't arrive until page 95. Those first near-hundred
pages revolve largely around Alexa DuBois, who comes from a poor,
cancer-ridden family in an increasingly utopian world, and Lucius
Sterling, the owner of the nano-biology patents and controller of
immortality. She meets him planning to assassinate him, but instead
becomes (minor spoiler) his most valued bodyguard. We watch as
Sterling lives for 144 years making enemies with abandon, and we know
the chickens will come home to roost; we just don't know how. (Well,
unless we've been stupid enough to read the back cover, that is...) I
will not further describe the plot of the rest of the book. It is, in
any event, the first in a series; I thought I remembered that trilogy
was threatened, but in fact the cover's carefully unclear on this
issue. My take on things is that Mitchell shouldn't need more than
one more book to take care of what she's already laid out, but given
her Big Change agenda, it would not shock me if the second book
complicated things enough to justify a third, or conceivably more.
(Compare the Bear trilogy, whose second book certainly justified its
third.)
Meanwhile, a couple of notes. She's now master enough to deliver a
line as Heinlein-efficient as (spoken to a US Senator, early in the
book) "You are one senator out of fifty, for a waning superpower, with
a maximum term of eight years." She's also still careless enough to
set that line, unexplained, in the year 2034. Worse, not much later
in the book, a child goes from conception to his first birthday in,
near as I can tell, just over four months. (Mitchell actually
*names*, in a page of acknowledgements, the copy editor who presumably
missed that: one Jan McInroy.) From a writer who clearly at least
*aspires* to hard science fiction, such innumeracy is jarring. I
think what I'm trying to say here is that Mitchell *is* now a master;
her books should be coming out in hard covers, and they should be
competently copy edited. They're worth it.
Unfortunately, her publisher disagrees strongly: according to the
desultory "blog" (URL below) which is the only even vaguely up to date
part of her website (like I should talk!), they dropped her
mid-series, and she's now working, without a publisher, on a book
*not* the sequel to this one.
Mitchell is clearly the most important "find" of the year from my
policy of reading mass market originals preferentially, the way Naomi
Kritzer (who *still* hasn't broken out of the mass market ghetto she
never belonged in) was some years ago. None of the other candidates
(Brennan, Hines, McCullough, or Moira Moore) comes close, though Bear
(whom I first heard about for a trade paperback, but whose first four
books were mass markets) if anything surpasses Mitchell. I have mixed
feelings about the fact that Bear and Mitchell both have written
primarily science fiction: it's a pleasing sign of that genre's being
healthier than I'd thought, but also a reminder of how freaking hard
it is to find enough good fantasy to read in Seattle. OTOH, Bear's
website (one of the many consulted to date her short stories, URL
above) indicates most of her next bunch of books will be fantasies.
Bear is certainly the more accomplished writer, so far, and in
particular her characters are substantially more real. (Character
plausibility is perhaps the most obvious way <The Last Mortal Man>
does *not* improve on Mitchell's previous two books.) But if Mitchell
*can* catch up in conventional writing prowess, she could end up with
the bigger impact on the field, from her fairly narrow focus on
science fiction usually of Big Ideas; I don't read enough science
fiction these days to know whether her takes on these Big Ideas are
original, but they certainly feel that way to me.
<http://blog.synemitchell.com>, seen (for the second time) October 8,
2007
Audrey Niffenegger
(April) <The Time Traveler's Wife>, 2003
Nominee, 2005 Campbell and Clarke Awards
I haven't seen much on rasfw about this book. I suspect this is
largely because it was published in the mainstream - and why not?
after all, it's set mostly in and around late-20th-century Chicago -
and partly because it's fundamentally a fantasy novel in structure:
in patterns that reek of handwavium, the titular time traveller, who
has no control over when and where he goes, nevertheless tends to
return to the same places and/or people over and over, which allows
Niffenegger to approach particular incidents both through multiple
points of view, and through strongly heightened importance, using them
to structure the book as a whole in a way straight out of the fantasy
toolkit. But if you want to get mode-technical, it's actually
unequivocally science fiction (the novum turns out to be genetic, and
is reproduced in mice; some scenes hint that come the 21st century
it's being genetically engineered in people). It's not particularly
impressive *as* either sf or fantasy - Niffenegger does bring up
issues of paradox, but only to breeze past them, for example - but
it's still worth a lot of attention as fiction - not least for
Niffenegger's fluid and fascinating first-person style. (There are
two narrators, the time traveller and the wife; I think he gets the
majority of the total pages, but the book is largely, not entirely,
chronologically structured by her timeline.) Given which virtues this
book has, I can't really argue with the local library's decision
(which I strongly suspect matches many other libraries') to shelve it
in regular adult fiction; I just want to argue with the spec-fic
community's parallel decisions to ignore it.
There is a woman on the other coast whom I met at seventeen, who, when
last I spoke with her, was still single, and in whom I've never
fundamentally given up hope. But my *rational* mind knows by now that
whoever I marry, if anyone, will have no direct experience of most of
my past (and this would even be true of the woman I just mentioned).
She will probably see only a minority of my life, and to judge by my
experience of middle age so far, she will probably miss an even larger
share of the strong emotions and vivid incidents I consider as
defining who I am, except as filtered through my words or those of
such people from my earlier life as she meets. At some basic level,
she will know *about* me (I hope!) but she may not *know* me. I'm not
sure that at that level, anyone will; I have only one friendship left
from high school, whose survival is thanks largely to our *not* being
*too* close most of the time, and I'm not all that close with my
family.
While this experience, this particular form of alienation, isn't
universal - there are still lots of people out there who married young
and stayed together, for example - it's also not unique; indeed, it's
also not all that new, since it's a core element of what in America is
often called "the immigrant experience". Niffenegger here has written
what is perhaps the definitive spec-ficnalisation of it (yes, even
eclipsing Cordwainer Smith's "The Lady Who Sailed the <Soul>"), in her
story of a woman who first meets her husband when she is 6, and he 36,
though *he* first meets *her* when he's 28, and she 20. The book is a
rich depiction of a, um, mentorship, that becomes a romance, that
becomes a marriage, with its effects on the characters' friends and
friendships, their daily lives, and their work - and, in particular,
the *differences* between its effects on her and on him; and it uses
the tools of fantasy mentioned above to turn that depiction
holographic, enriching it much as Geoff Ryman's (much harder to read)
holography enriches <The Child Garden>.
I will not know anytime soon whether this is a great novel, and it
pushes enough of my buttons that I may never be a particularly good
judge of that. On a second reading (after buying a copy) I'm struck
by the fact that the two narrators don't result in two *styles*, have
voices rather less distinct than Monette's two narrators mentioned in
the fantasy post - but is this lack of skill, or a careful
representation of how much one has influenced the other? Flipside, on
a second reading I'm also impressed by just how many unobtrusive ways
Niffenegger finds to weave meditations on the interactions of time
with love into her prose; while I wouldn't pretend to any confidence
as to whether she actually makes of this a Theme on which she has
either a wise conclusion or magisterial Variations, it certainly
suggests that the book *may* have such a virtue. Anyway I've
hesitated a few times in these posts over whether books "could be
considered" great; I have no doubt that this book *could* sanely be
considered great, that it is the most *obviously* superior of the
books in the "read for the first time" posts.
Rebecca Ore
Nominee, 1987 and 1988 John W. Campbell Awards for Best New Writer
(September) <Outlaw School>, 2000
Ore is one of the writers about whom Michael Swanwick's "In the
Tradition ..." first informed me; I wound up reading the
oeuvres-to-date of several, which in Ore's case alone meant reading
mostly science fiction. Later I became acquainted with her in the
news.* hierarchy, where we usually came into conflict. But in 2002 I
wrote a fairly lame "novels of" post in response to someone who was
faulting her as a writer, based on a bad review of this very book, the
review itself apparently written in Seattle; how's that for
coincidences? I'm amused to see that others from that generation of
news.* figure in the acknowledgements of both this and her next novel.
That next novel is what prompted me to read this one - I'd already
read everything previous.
Anyway, what of this book? <Outlaw School> is a medium-length novel,
and I read it in five hours while horrendously sleep-deprived. I
trust that makes it obvious both that I found it a kick-ass story, and
that my judgement concerning it was impaired. But here's what I'll
try to say: It's the story of Jayne, whose surname (near's I can tell
the next day) we never learn, and whom we first meet as a child (or
anyway as someone remembering childhood) and last meet as an old
woman. She grows up in a college town in North Carolina, and settles
in Philadelphia; in between we see shorter scenes from her youth in
South Carolina (a sort of internship during college) and Brooklyn
(during her twenties). I can't pin down the date, but when Jayne's a
teenager, my best guess is that we're in the 2030s or so. POV is
always 3rd person, tight on Jayne.
For about the first half of the book, it's very clear what the story
is: Jayne is an incipient rebel against a remarkably oppressive
America. Information overload, among other problems, was solved by
the simple expedient of making much knowledge private property,
subject to copyright, licensing, and caste restrictions. Large
sections of the population have been eliminated by removal to
ancestral countries and euthanasia; those undesirables who remain
actually sometimes have a freer life - prostitution is now legal, for
example. But crucially, it's become all the rage among upper middle
class girls to become "Judicious" (as they call it), or "Judas" (as
others do): One eye is removed and replaced with video monitoring
equipment, which encourages them to keep their promise to stay on the
straight and narrow, and simplifies the jobs of the morality police as
regards everyone they come into contact with, too. OK, then, given
this fairly improbable future, so: Our Heroine becomes a teenaged
unwed mother, and then, as the title hints, an outlaw teacher,
bootlegging knowledge to the unwashed masses. Will she and her
fellows in the Movement succeed in changing things? Or will fascism
just roll over them relentlessly? Oh, yes, this is a familiar story.
Except that, well, oops, it isn't. I suppose it's something of a
spoiler to say so, but I won't say more, except to note that the
truest statement remains the simplest: this is the story of Jayne.
And well worth reading.
(September) <Time's Child>, 2007
Interestingly, the deep argument I see <Outlaw School> as making,
<Time's Child> contradicts. Whether this means I'm wrong about the
arguments, or about what they mean to Ore, or Ore's views actually
changed in the intervening years, I couldn't guess. But it's worth
noting that in many ways <Time's Child> is a book about Usenet. It's
easier to see the author as defending a vision of Usenet very close to
the one I always had in this sort of writing, than in her posts which
so often annoyed me.
The premise is that in 2308, long after plagues wiped out most of
humanity, which at least slowed global warming down to a survivable
level, Philadelphia has been given a time machine from the (a) future.
Researchers at the Archives there use it to bring people out of the
past, both to learn about the past and for medical purposes (learning
about immune systems, possibly replenishing the gene pool).
Relatively few survive, let alone survive sanely. Our POV characters
are three who do: Benedetta, who had been an artillery man's wife and
who had spent a lot of time hanging out with Leonardo da Vinci; Ivar,
who had drowned as a teenager on his way from Norway to Iceland in
Harald Fairhair's day; and Jonah Kirkpatrick, who'd been an accountant
but devoted his spare time to hacking, security consulting, and being
a troll, "Fluffy", on Usenet. (On some parts of news.*, "Fluffy"'s is
a considerable name; I'd bet Ore actually *does* know the real name
behind it, but she misspells the other Usenet name she gives, which I
take as her hint that the real name *isn't* "Jonah Kirkpatrick".) We
get several flashbacks from Benedetta's life, and in chapter 8 Jonah
talks with researchers into Usenet "performance art". But mostly the
book follows these three people through the next several years of the
24th century.
This is a book about Usenet not just because of Jonah's reminiscences,
but in a much deeper sense: It's a book about free agents,
cooperating or conflicting with limited oversight. The plagues have
created a world of city-states, whose various governments try to
police the citizens much as news-admins used to try to police users,
but they've also encouraged people to become much more independent
than we are nowadays. Ore's views on trolls have aroused a lot of
controversy on news.*, but I find her use of the concept of "trolling"
beyond the nets persuasive here (and she designs her time travel in a
way that well reflects her distinction between trolls and "mission
posters" - locally, that would mean, between Terry Austin and Sound of
Trumpet).
I find this book's ending less convincing than <Outlaw School>'s, in
particular because of changes I've seen in news.* in the past few
years, which leave me with real doubts about Ore's vision, the one I
opened this review by mentioning that I shared. All the same, this,
rather than <Outlaw School>, is the one I'm likely to re-read as
comfort reading, in the future.
Kit Reed
Nominee, 1959 Hugo for New Author of 1958
(February) <The Baby Merchant>, 2006
I forgot until July that I'd read this. At that time, I wasn't
actually sure any more that this *was* science fiction; I *remembered*
it as giving us a US whose laws and institutions vis-à-vis pregnancy
have changed from those now existing, but remembered nothing else
sfnal about it except, well, the titular character. Which would have
made this a case where the Seattle library's habit of putting spec-fic
into the regular shelves was not, after all, at fault. But in
September I went and looked, and actually, a *major* element of the
background, which drives the motivations of several characters and
figures in the foreground plot several times, is a not-yet-existent
extrapolation of several recent trends; the book really is science
fiction. More on this below.
This is essentially the story of a duel, and as such, it has two main
POV characters. Our opponents are 1) a pregnant art student who, at
the book's start, intends to give her child up for adoption so she can
go back to school, and who desperately needs to hide her pregnancy
from her tyrannical family, and 2) a man who makes his living by
occasionally kidnapping babies for rich childless couples unable to
adopt, and who, at the book's start, is blackmailed into going after
character #1's baby, after which, like a gunslinger in the average
Western, he intends to retire, since his cover is blown. The book
studies them, and their incidental characters (the blackmailing
couple; the student's matriarch, and her baby's father), in the
crucibles that result; our duelists' moral trajectories, in many ways
parallel, lead them to opposite destinies. Considering how long I
forgot *about* it, I'm impressed with Reed for how much *of* it I
remember, thinking back. It's a powerful story, and if Reed offers
her characters little mercy, she certainly offers them justice.
0 (February?) <Other Stories and ... The Attack of the Giant Baby>,
1959-1981, first compiled as such 1981
As I wrote the above paragraphs, I vaguely remembered having also read
a book of Reed's short stories, and looking at the list of contents in
<Locus>/Contento, I'm pretty sure this is the book in question.
(Library due date slips don't list it.) I've owned a copy for years
and years but never read it (one of these two books, in whichever
month, is the first Reed book I ever read); I remember only a couple
of the stories at all, even prompted by that list, and those not well.
Well, the Seattle Public Library's catalogue doesn't remember it
either. This opens two possibilities: the book may have been sold;
or it may originally have been one of those uncatalogued books the
introductory post mentioned. In any event, I discovered this because
when I checked in September whether I'd correctly classified <The Baby
Merchant>, I found other misclassed books, and this led me to look
Reed up in the catalogue so I could produce a comprehensive report. I
can now attest that the SPL and I disagree on the spec-ficness of:
<Seven for the Apocalypse>, 1990-1998, compiled 1999 (a collection one
of whose stories got a Tiptree nomination), <Weird Women, Wired
Women>, 1958-1998, compiled 1998 (another collection, intro by Connie
Willis), and possibly <Bronze: A Tale of Terror>, 2005 (but if it
really is horror, perhaps it belongs in mainstream because that's
where the library puts other horror). On the other hand, we do agree
on the spec-ficness of <Dogs of Truth>, 2001-2005, compiled 2005, and
<Thinner Than Thou>, 2004; and we do agree on the *non*-spec-ficness
of <J. Eden>, 1996, <Cry of the Daughter>, 1971 (and imagine my
surprise that Reed was breaking out of the genre that early! but this
looks like one of those generations-of-a-family novels), and (in an
astonishing display of SPL perspicacity - compare Frost in the other
fiction post) <@expectations>, 2000, a novel about online obsession.
Justina Robson
(July) <Silver Screen>, 1999
Nominee, 2000 Clarke and British SF, and 2006 Philip K. Dick, Awards
Another rasfw favourite, read the day after I read Bear's <Blood and
Iron>... Well, but I can probably speak less spoilerishly about this
one. It's set in the early or mid 2060s, in a world which has not
fallen apart and is recognisable in (too) many respects. (The
narrator is familiar with old movie stars; granted, she doesn't refer
to any post-1960, so it's not unreasonable that she doesn't name any
post-1999, but still.) The first chapter is probably set in the
mid-2050s, with Our Heroine and her friends children; in the rest of
the book they're young adults mostly working on AI research. Of
course, real AI has been operational for at least twenty years, so
this isn't the same sort of thing as AI research today, and has
various legal, high financial, and ultimately political implications
(complete with violence), after the plot gets started with Our
Heroine's oldest friend dying.
At another level, the book has an element of bildungsroman. The
narrator tells us in the first chapter what she thinks is wrong with
herself; by the end of the book, perhaps she's come to peace with it.
The opening line, "We were good friends", she immediately contradicts,
but by book's end, perhaps she could truthfully say those words. This
is all greatly underplayed, though, which is a refreshing change. But
there's one false note in it: An AI-related experience partway
through the book is shown (and told) as turning her into more of a
strategic and tactical thinker, more sure of herself. However,
*after* that experience, and *not* before, she's prone to severe
depression. Um: depression takes many forms, but I find this one
hard to swallow.
Still, an intriguing story, whose status in regard to the implied
incipient Singularity is never made clear.
(July) <Mappa Mundi>, 2001
Nominee, 2002 Clarke Award
This book, apparently originally published in October 2001, was as
spectacularly overtaken by events as <Russian Spring>: It is 2010,
and since our long (inter)national nightmare of peace and prosperity
did *not* end, remarkably implausibly Great Strides have been made in
nanotechnology, biochemistry and especially neurochemistry. The
question, then, is who shall control these advances? Who shall write
the software of the human brain?
Well, let me back up a bit. The book comes in four sections; when I
first looked at the table of contents, I feared I was being threatened
with a map and a glossary, but in fact, "Map" is the core story, over
four hundred pages in the edition I read. Before it we find
"Legends", which introduces four POV characters in childhood or youth,
one in adulthood, and one more biographically (a defensible
distinction; all six are in essence origin stories); then "Compass
Rose", which introduces the seventh and last POV character (and
arguably the author's own stance), not long before "Map" begins. At
the end a few pages of "Update" cynically confirm both optimistic and
pessimistic characters' views, most strongly the opinion of a minor
character right near "Map"'s start.
So I dunno. I don't think Singularity is on offer here; transcendence
is, but not with the usual awe. I do find more convincing here than
in <Silver Screen> the following: Robson's plot, her take on the
survival chances of people who get involved in Big Change, and her
characterisation of POV characters. (Her ability to establish that
her villains are not entirely so, move in worlds occupied by still
worse, is particularly appealing.) All in all, I don't understand
rasfw posters who say this is an inferior book. But then, I've always
liked <Russian Spring> best of the Spinrad books I've read.
(Currently five, none pre-1980.)
But one trivial complaint: it would've been nice if, at least in the
American edition, someone had gotten the American characters to speak
American English. Of several surprising slips, the really jarring one
is a metaphor in an interior monologue: "had him sent off the pitch",
chapter 12 of "Map". I'm an American myself, so I'm not sure, but
isn't that from cricket? Would cancelling 9/11 really have resulted
in American women following cricket by 2010?
Kristine Kathryn Rusch [1] [2]
Winner, 1990 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
(May) <The Retrieval Artist and Other Stories>, 1991-2002, first
compiled as such 2002
"The Retrieval Artist" nominee, 2001 Hugo Award for Novella
(May) <Extremes>, 2003, lightly skimmed
(May) <Consequences>, 2004, skimmed
(May) <Buried Deep>, 2005, skimmed
(May) <Paloma>, 2006, skimmed
I'm not usually much for mysteries, and Rusch, even when not writing
mysteries, tends to be even harsher than Bear. So I'm not surprised I
didn't finish these. Oddly, I find her aliens (prominent in
<Consequences> and <Buried Deep>, less so in the other two) sometimes
*too* alien here: I might be more interested in a book set among
aliens who were a little easier for us humans to understand. (She has
aliens playing bit parts who seem to fit this description, so this is
not just a complaint but also, well, a suggestion.)
But I'm pretty sure that as science fiction mysteries go, these are
very good, though the human side of things tends not to be that sfnal
(there's a massacre in one book straight out of the 19th century, for
example); these are not extraordinarily *innovative* science fiction
mysteries, just good ones. "The Retrieval Artist", 2000, seems to be
the only shorter entry, and doesn't fit into the overall plotline near
as I can see; the first book in the "Retrieval Artist" series proper
is <The Disappeared>, 2002. And if I'd been able to get hold of a
copy of that book, I might have simply forced myself to read straight
through.
No comment on the other stories in the collection.
Bruce Sterling
Nominee, 1978 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
0* (May) <A Good Old-Fashioned Future>, probably 1993-1998, first
compiled as such 1999
"Deep Eddy" nominee, 1994 Hugo Award for Novelette; "Bicycle Repairman"
winner, 1997 Hugo for Novelette; "Maneki Neko" nominee, 1999 Hugo
Award for Short Story and 1999 Sturgeon Award; "Taklamakan" winner,
1999 Hugo and Locus Awards for Novelette, and nominee, 2000 Nebula
Award for Novelette
"Maneki Neko", the first story, originally appeared in Japanese, and
this appearance isn't dated in the usual places, but I doubt it was
earlier than 1993. At least three of the stories - "Deep Eddy",
"Bicycle Repairman", and "Taklamakan" - constitute, by themselves, a
loose series (minor character in one story becomes protagonist of the
next); I don't know whether that series includes other stories.
I read all of this except "The Littlest Jackal" (which is the longest
story in the book by a few pages, and which I skipped because it comes
fairly late in a *different* series). Initially I picked it simply as
a cheap book at the library book sale, and was somewhat chagrined on
getting home to find that I already had a copy in storage. Anyway,
though, it continues to surprise me to what extent Sterling can hold
my attention despite doing essentially none of the things that usually
please me. Everything from his preferred characters, to his plot
shapes, to his preoccupations contrasts sharply with the sorts of
things that I'm used to thinking I like, and I note that I've never
actually re-read <Islands in the Net>, the other book of his I've
read. But for years I kept thinking of <Islands> as a really superb
novel that I *should* re-read sometime; and I'm still trying to figure
out just how much of his other writing I want to investigate. (In
other words, should I try again with the Mechanist/Shaper stories, or
should I just look at the more recent stuff, such as, well, that
series that includes "The Littlest Jackal" ?)
Presumably the fact that he can appeal to me so very much against type
indicates he's a really good writer. Hmmm.
S. M. Stirling
(June-July) <The Sky People>, 2006, skimmed
This is a book that looks like a singleton, and is clearly unrelated
to the double trilogies [b] that, in turn, seem to be related to the
Draka multiverse. You could read it as alt-history for the first
hundred pages or so, but only by straining; as the divergences grow
this gets harder and harder. So anyway: in a universe where Barsoom
really has canals and Venus jungles, this is an adventure story set on
Venus in 1988, amid the lasting détente created by the space race.
This particular jungly Venus has dinosaurs, sabertooths, and
Neanderthals; its ecology seems to be heavily selected for *sexy*
extinct creatures, in fact, which is problematic to the eventual
resolution of the plot. The adventure doesn't actually get started
until nearly a hundred pages have passed, and, well, that's exactly
where I started skimming. The characters aren't particularly well
developed, nor their romances; there's plenty of life-and-death
activity, though. The very last pages offer retribution where I'm not
at all convinced it's deserved, and seem like cheap shots. Admittedly
I'm judging without proper reading, but I doubt this is one of
Stirling's better books. But it did serve well as a counterweight,
while finishing the George Eliot book.
[b] OK, OK, I now see that one of them is reproducing.
John Varley
Nominee, 1975 and 1976 John W. Campbell Awards for Best New Writer
(March) <Red Lightning>, 2006
I'm not sure whether this belongs here or in the series post, because
while I have no evidence that I also re-read <Red Thunder>, 2003, that
would be my usual behaviour. See, I'd forgotten reading this at all
until I found the due date slip hiding under my bed in September. So
I really haven't anything much to say about it, except that I vaguely
remember finding it worth reading, but not especially so.
Scott Westerfeld
(March or April) <The Risen Empire>, 2003
(April) <The Killing of Worlds>, 2003, skimmed
These books clearly do deserve much of the shouting about them, in
their vivid depiction of interstellar empire and war in a universe
*without* FTL. But after the first book I couldn't convince myself to
read the second straight through, particularly once skimming
established that these were nowhere near the end of the story of
"Succession" (and years later, no further volumes seem to be in
sight).
Movies that would, if books, fit in this post:
* <Galaxy Quest>, 1999 (wow! that was more fun than I've had in
ages!);
* <MIIB: Men in Black II>, 2002;
<Koi... Mil Gaya>, Hindi, 2003 (Bollywood Does First Contact! claims
to be "the first sci-fi film made in Hindi", which I suspect may be
true; more comments below);
* <The Incredibles>, 2004 (derivative but still enjoyable);
<Æonflux>, 2005.
Although <Half a Sixpence>, 1969, is based on an H. G. Wells novel, it
is *not* science fiction; see the other fiction post. But do see
also, in the re-reading post, <Earth Girls Are Easy>, 1989; <The
Rocketeer>, 1991; <Dark City>, 1998; <Josie and the Pussycats>, 2001;
<Spy Kids>, 2001; <Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams>, 2002; <Spy
Kids 3-D: Game Over>, 2003; <Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind>,
2004.
As to <Koi... Mil Gaya>. I had written five paragraphs of comments on
it after watching it, but then found that Mark Leeper had anticipated
enough of my points in a review posted to (among other places)
rec.arts.sf.movies, on August 10, 2003, that it made no sense to keep
them. So I'll confine myself to a detail neither he nor the DVD box
mentions - it's *long* (165 minutes) - and a couple of updates. 1)
This, and probably its sequel, <Krrish>, 2006, should be added to the
list of science fiction musicals compiled in a thread in spring 2006.
2) Oh, yeah, sequel: there's another due in 2008, too. The summaries
given by the IMDB suggest that they *might* be significantly more
sci-fi-ish than <Koi... Mil Gaya> itself; but it's never safe to
underestimate Bollywood's power to reduce all genres to romance
musicals.
Message-ID for Mark Leeper's review: <***@optonline.net>.
--
Joe Bernstein, file clerk, bookkeeper, and writer ***@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/>