Friday, October 25, 2013
Four Short Reviews: Dan Simmons' "The Abominable" and Mark von Schlegell's Three Superb Solar System Books (by Liviu Suciu)
"It's 1926, and the
desire to summit the world's highest mountain has reached a fever-pitch
among adventurers. Three young friends, eager to take their shot at the
top, accept funding from a grieving mother whose son fell to his death
on Mt. Everest two years earlier. But she refuses to believe he's dead,
and wants them to bring him back alive.
As they set off toward Everest, the men encounter other hikers who are seeking the boy's body for their own mysterious reasons. What valuable item could he have been carrying? What is the truth behind the many disappearances on the mountain? As they journey to the top of the world, the three friends face abominable choices, actions--and possibly creatures. A bone-chilling, pulse-pounding story of supernatural suspense, THE ABOMINABLE is Dan Simmons at his best."
As they set off toward Everest, the men encounter other hikers who are seeking the boy's body for their own mysterious reasons. What valuable item could he have been carrying? What is the truth behind the many disappearances on the mountain? As they journey to the top of the world, the three friends face abominable choices, actions--and possibly creatures. A bone-chilling, pulse-pounding story of supernatural suspense, THE ABOMINABLE is Dan Simmons at his best."
With a blurb that is both factually wrong - as the action takes place in 1925 - and misleading as the novel while having a lot of a suspense true, has nothing of the supernatural, The Abominable is one of the prime example of how a potentially awesome and memorable novel is ruined by conventional action that lacks any imagination or subtlety.
For about
500 pages, The Abominable is an extremely engrossing story of mountaineering with lots of
technical details that ground it in reality, showing once again that
what's possible really depends a lot of what level of technology we are
at. Incidentally the book made me read a little about the Mt. Everest
expeditions and how today what was once a dangerous adventure for the
very few became a relatively common place thing at least for fit people
with enough cash to pay for equipment and permits, and this is quite
cheering as I expect similar things to happen with near space travel...
But then The Abominable becomes the worst sort of "dumb Nazi supermen" against plucky
heroes, not to speak of all the cliches regarding the heroes themselves and the Shangri La ending. In addition, the book is set in 1925 when Adolf Hitler was a blip
on the horizon - a lunatic with charisma and dangerous ideas, but there
were tons of such across history and only very specific circumstances - essentially the sudden impoverishment of the developed world after the
1929 crash - brought him to power, while other specific circumstances - the Carthaginian peace of Versailles against what is by nature the most
powerful nation of Europe since after all there was a reason the French,
Spanish and later Habsurgs tried and succeeded in keeping Germany a
dis-united war zone for so many centuries, while even after the complete
devastation of 1945, in under 10 years Germany became the most
prosperous nation in Europe again, truncated and all - allowed him to try
and conquer the world and implement his genocidal policies, so the
whole Nazi stuff is even stupider than if the book were set in 1938 for
example a la Indiana Jones and this last at least was brainless entertainment
and never aspired to more, but The Abominable was supposed to be an interesting
novel...
This being so, the extraordinary writing skills of the
author and the narrative momentum of the novel, still made The Abominable a
recommended book, but with even a little more subtlety in its last 150
pages it could have been an excellent and possibly awesome one...
**********************************************************************
"It's
2133. A priceless Vermeer is making its way back to Earth. Freelance
Spacer Nick Wesley is charged with protecting the painting as it comes
on board The Polly-Ann, the eccentrically re-fit cross system
space-hauler of notorious Count Simwe Skaw. With Skaw poised to make a
move, Nick secures the masterpiece with a so-called quantum lock.
Meanwhile, back on Earth riots in Equator City are threatening stability
of the C. Clarke Elevator. Even if he manages to outwit Skaw and his
minions, Nick just might not make it back for Nora's Sunday Brunch on
Penobscot Bay...
High Wichita is a key novelette in Mark von Schlegell's still un-winding science fiction future history, The System Series. A missing link between the novels Venusia (2005) and Mercury Station (2009), High Wichita is both a love-letter to pulp fiction and a pot-boiling caper story of its own."
High Wichita is a key novelette in Mark von Schlegell's still un-winding science fiction future history, The System Series. A missing link between the novels Venusia (2005) and Mercury Station (2009), High Wichita is both a love-letter to pulp fiction and a pot-boiling caper story of its own."
High Wichita is
a mind bending novella set in the
universe of Venusia and Mercury Station and it is nicely illustrated too. Excellent stuff that contains quite a lot within 55 pages, mostly taking place across a Solar System liner of the author's imaginative 22nd century and is self-contained as its action goes, but it is directly related to the author's two novels set in the same universe, most notably, Mercury Station. Excellent stuff overall and here is a quote to illustrate the richness of the setting, while you can read more in the sample at Smashwords:
"Painting is a perfect pastime for the long hours of space travel. As the Lunar linershuttle came into equal velocity with the Polly-Ann, Nick Wesley was just putting the finishing touches on a rather successful paint-by-numbers portrait of his adorable wife. Now he laid his brush on the toppler and strolled to the windowmirror to take a gander at that legendary ship.
Four thousand kilometers over Luna City, Count Skaw's refit grainovator bulged with eccentricity and complication. The hull's quasicrystal skin shoneyellow like a Chinese fish. Broad swaths of lightsuckers wrapped off and around the diamond barnacles of the sparkling, parasite autonomies, the stuck-on eateries, brothels, casinos, churches, markets and hotels, by which Polly-Ann paid for her own passage. The heraldry of the Concerns was not to be found among her bangles and baudles. Captain Count burned energy as he saw fit, without undue interference."
**********************************************************************
"Primitive literacy is
redundant. Mere words are expelled. We inaugurate a world of pure
presence. The mind, that intrudes itself between ourselves and those
memories too terrible to know, must keep us moving beyond the grasp of
their claw. To control the flow, it will be necessary that political
order be imposed always temporarily. The state shall enjoy direct,
creative access to the real.It's the end of the twenty-third century.
Earth has violently self-destructed. Venusia, an experimental off-world
colony, survives under the enlightened totalitarianism of the Princeps
Crittendon regime. Using industrialized narcotics, holographic
entertainment, and memory control, Crittendon has turned Venusia into a
self-sustaining system of relative historical inertia. But when
mild-mannered junk dealer Rogers Collectibles finds a book about early
Venusian history, the colony -- once fully immersed in the present --
begins losing its grip on the real. With his Reality-V girlfriend Martha
Dobbs, neuroscop operator Sylvia Yang, his midget friend Niftus
Norrington, and a sentient plant, Rogers wages a war to alter the shape
of spacetime, and in the process, revisions the whole human (and
vegetable) condition"
Chronologically the first novel of Mark von Schlegell published in his extremely imaginative near future universe, Venusia truly made my head spin and I felt dizzy though sitting on a bench when I was trying to imagine the landscape of the novel.
I quite enjoyed
it overall - weird is too banal a word for this one, both in style - modernistic a la MJ Harrison - and in content - from sentient plants to
multidimensional twisting of reality - with the drawback is that you have to
immerse yourself and not nitpick. If you like your sf to be truly crazy, forget Hannu Rajaniemi and read Mark von Schlegell instead, or maybe read both...
**********************************************************************
"Published by
Semiotext(e) in 2005, Mark von Schlegell's debut novel Venusia was
hailed in the sci-fi and literary worlds as a "breathtaking excursion"
and "heady kaleidoscopic trip," establishing him as an important
practitioner of vanguard science fiction. Mercury Station, the second
book in Von Schlegell's System Series, continues the journey into a
dystopian literary future. It is 2150. Eddard J. Ryan was born in a
laboratory off Luna City, an orphan raised by the Black Rose Army, a
radical post-Earth Irish revolutionary movement. But his first bombing
went wrong and he's been stuck in a borstal on Mercury for decades.
System Space has collapsed and most of human civilization with it, but
Eddie Ryan and his fellow prisoners continue to suffer the
remote-control domination of the borstal and its condescending central
authority, the qompURE MERKUR, programmed to treat them as adolescents.
Yet things could be worse. With little human supervision, the qompURE
can be fooled. There's food and whiskey, and best of all, the girl of
Eddie Ryan's dreams, his long-time friend and comrade Kor? McAllister,
is in the same prison. When his old boss, rich and eccentric chrononaut
Count Reginald Skaw shows up in orbit with an entire interstation
cruiser at his disposal, there's even the possibility of escape....back
in time. Like Venusia, Mercury Station tells a compelling story, drawn
through a labyrinth of future-history sci-fi, medieval hard fantasy, and
cascading samplings of high and low culture. The book is a brilliant
literary assault against the singularity of self and its imprisonment in
Einsteinian spacetime."
Mercury Station is closer to what one would call "essential
sf" than things usually labeled such; it is innovative in quite a few ways,
and while Venusia was weird but with a sort-of-clear-plot/action and I
have not decided yet if Mercury Station truly makes sense plot-wise, the
things thrown in almost casually from a chrono-dynamics theory, to
Quantum computers, to Medieval imagery and action combined with 22nd
century Solar System intrigue, all in a package that will make you a bit
dizzy but still compel you to turn pages, should make this one a must
for any sf-lover. Highly, highly recommended!
9:58 AM | 
Posted by
Liviu |
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1 comments:
You should read Mike Miller's "The Yeti" for a superior "treasure-hunting soldiers vs. mythological snow monster" story:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/149289544X
While I liked Simmons' "The Terror," his "The Abominable" was very slow and very disappointing.