The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (1980-1983)

The Color That Is Darker Than Black

Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is the best thing I've read in ten years, since the first time I read The Lord of the Rings. In fact, professional critics have placed it right alongside that work. If that doesn't grab your attention enough, let me also state that it's the most metal book I've ever read.

The most key point to explain what makes this book so great is captured in a cover quote from the third volume: "The most extraordinary hero in the history of the heroic epic" (Washington Post Book World). Roger Ebert famously stated that only good villains separate good stories from bad, because heroes are all the same, but that is definitely not the case here. Severian begins as an apprentice in the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, the guild of the torturers. They carry out judicial punishments ranging from all manner of torture to execution. He, like most members of his guild, has no family. He has a strong sense of justice, like all heroes, and the torturers' philosophy to justify their actions is well-considered. But he also does some rather unsavory things along his journey. He is prone to mercy, but can also be quite ruthless. Peculiarly, he often repeats that he remembers everything, and doesn't know what it's like to forget.

Gene Wolfe: The Shadow of the Torturer (1980)

This weekend, I finished reading the first book in Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series, The Shadow of the Torturer. I'll do a full review of the series when I'm finished with it, but a few things jump out at me immediately that demand mention.

1. I can't tell whether it's science fiction or fantasy.

2. How the hell has there not been a movie made of this?

3. Parts of it are grim as fvkk.

4. The main character was raised in the guild of the torturers, which is exactly what it sounds like.

5. Like The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings, the book is ostensibly written by a major character from the book. He uses an execution as a metaphor for writing a book.

I'll be detouring from the series to read a book that was sent to me for review, but if this intrigues you, stay tuned.

I'm a Nerd Wannabe

An Examination of My Nerd Pursuits

Given the crossover between metal and a whole lot of nerd pursuits, I don't think it will come as any surprise to anyone that I've been into some really nerdy things in my 31 years. When I say that, I'm referring to the kinds of things usually mean when they say "nerdy," even though people can be nerds about anything.

The weird thing is, I've never been able to fully commit to nerdery, or any other subculture for that matter. I've often said I'm a wannabe nerd, because I want to do the things that nerds do, but I fall short. I've got some theories on that, but it's better to start at the beginning.

Science Fiction

Of course, the ultimate nerd thing is science fiction, and that's where I started. Here, I'm using the term broadly to encompass true sci-fi as well as stories that take place in space or the future.

It started with Star Wars. What else? I grew up with it. Every year some channel would play all three movies in three nights, and so we would miss the first one and record Empire and Jedi. My brother and I watched those VHS tapes every day for a whole summer. I drew space battles all the time in 2nd grade.

By the fifth grade, I was reading the Robotech novelizations, and a year later I was on to the BattleTech books. There was a pretty dry spell there for a while, but late in college I started onto classic science fiction books, which I still read today. Dune and the Hyperion Cantos are great examples. I discovered Firefly late (thank you, Aaron!), and love it intensely.

But otherwise, there's a lot about sci-fi that I can't commit to. I've never really cared for Star Trek, because it's objectively terrible. I've never watched Dr. Who or Battlestar Galactica. And Star Wars was ruined, that's a matter of public record. A big part of me wants to be the guy who dresses up like a Storm Trooper, but aside from building a model AT-AT I just can't do that.

Comic Books

Comic books were my next nerd pursuit, but I never made it very far. I had a subscription to the G.I. Joe comic for a while, until it ended, and had a few issues of some TMNT comics. But, as you can tell, that interest was just collateral to my interest in the worlds surrounding my toys. I also had Spawn #6, which had excellent art, but I never got around to getting another issue. My brother and I did have some Marvel trading cards, but that wasn't out of any affinity for the characters.

Some of the art is cool, and I like the movies, but that's mainstream. Something about comic books makes them the least appealing form of nerdiness to me.

Video Games

I played video games almost as far back as I can remember. We had an Atari 2600. But, seeing that I skipped the 8-bit generation (other than playing at friends' houses) I didn't get into it until the Sega Genesis. Streets of Rage 2 was my first game. But the Final Fantasy series has almost always been my favorite since I watched my cousins play the original. Unfortunately, I had to play them with friends until the Playstation era. I faithfully played the games until XI. I tried it, but less than a month into that grueling experience I quit.

Mainspring by Jay Lake (2007)

I recently finished reading Mainspring by Jay Lake. It is a definite steampunk novel with a very interesting premise. Nearly all steampunk is set in an alternate history setting, but this one is set in a completely alternate world: The Earth literally orbits the Sun on gears, the Moon orbits the Earth in the same way, and a giant gear at the equator (it extends 100 miles from the surface) makes the northern and southern hemispheres almost entirely isolated from one another. It's orrery-as-reality. The major conflict is introduced in the first chapter, when Gabriel appears to the protagonist to inform him the world's mainspring is running down, and tasks him with traveling halfway across the world to wind the mainspring. You find out early on that this is one of the things Jesus is believed to have done (although the evidence is apocryphal).

At its core, the book is merely an exercise in worldbuilding. Most speculative fiction has at least some element of worldbuilding, but in this particular book, the world is so compelling that I would be willing to follow just about any journey into it. In other words, the characters and plot are of secondary importance. Which is not to say they're not worthwhile. Most of the characters are flat, and there are groups of them which are mostly undifferentiated, but they are all believable, acting in consistent ways. The plot does have some moments which could be accused of being Deus ex machina (excuse the pun), but they all make sense in context (in any case, I think there was just a tiny bit less foreshadowing than I would have liked).

My biggest complaint is, as with my last book review, the love story. Here it's not because it's unbelievable, or not compelling, or that it fails to advance the story. It's just weird. I mean, really freaking weird. It turns out to be necessary to the plot, but there are at least a few ways Lake could have written around it. Some of them would have required making the book longer, but anything would have been an improvement. Even with this very weird element, the rest of the book is so compelling that I could easily get past it.

Now, I feel I have to address some of the characterizations of the book as blasphemy, as some reviewers have done. I think it's better understood as taking the speculation in the speculative fiction to its logical extreme. Here, that means asking the question, "What kind of God would make a world like this?" or "If we change the world in this way, how would God treat the world differently?" It's not all that different from C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, where he asked, "What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia . . . ?" Which is not to say Lake was asking that question. Indeed, he does not wholeheartedly embrace any single alternate theology. As in the real world, the characters are not given plain answers to those questions.

In sum, the world is extremely compelling and absolutely unique, the characters are believable, and the plot is intriguing. In all, I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Waking the Moon

Oddly enough, I have never done a book review on this site. I'll make an effort to do them whenever I read them from now on. This time, it's Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand. I discovered it by looking at one of the top 100 lists over at The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

First, the good points. The primary conflict is an interesting story of a power struggle by an Illuminati-inspired group against a sort of pagan Christ figure or avatar, told mostly through the eyes of parties who are seemingly incidental to the whole thing. The narrative is split into two parts which represent (1) the origin and (2) the ministry of this avatar; whether a similarity to the canonical Gospels was intended is a matter of speculation. Hand can really draw you in with her narrative, with her descriptions often as good as Clive Barker's. The vision of angels she provides is quite possibly the best I have ever read, and some of the more dramatic scenes are very powerful.

However, there are many problems with the book. Sometimes her descriptions seem to be a way to show off her personal taste in things rather than to add any value to the scene, and other times she seems to want to impress you with how much research she has done into the topic of goddess worship. There are about seven or eight characters I can keep straight in my head, but all of the characters are flat. Near the middle of the book, Hand introduces some characters solely for the purpose of killing one of them off in an interesting way without advancing the story; others are introduced seemingly for no purpose at all. There is also a lot of needlessly-inserted drug use and deviant sexuality.

But my biggest quibble with the book is the love story intertwined with the greater narrative, to the extent the love story is the primary vehicle for advancing the story. Had I known this was how the story was told, I never would have picked it up. In any case, the love story seems to make sense and serve a purpose in the first major story arc. However, in the second story arc, Hand seems to try to repeat the pattern, but it neither makes sense nor serves a purpose. And the resolution to the story which finally comes is unsatisfying: Though it was foreshadowed a little bit, it still feels like Deus ex machina. In fact, the whole thing seems plot driven, which is usually a very bad thing.

I suspect female readers of fantasy will enjoy it a great deal. I tried to enjoy it, I thought I was going to enjoy it, and Hand kept luring me along through the story with promises of really cool things that could happen. In fact, the first story arc was exceptionally well-written and compelling, despite its flaws. It's the second story arc that ruins the whole thing. Like I said, she did a great job of drawing you in--but there is no payoff. All in all, I give it 1 out of 5 stars.