Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Liminal States

My introduction to Liminal States was having one of my friends tell me that they strongly disliked the ending but that I should read it because they would like to hear my opinion.  Oh, and it was a pretty good ride up until that ending.  Intrigued, I made some time in my reading schedule and gave it a try.


Zack Parsons wrote what is basically a trilogy in one book.  There are three clearly defined parts with the characters that do overlap having gone through significant emotional changes through the parts.  The first part is a western, and while it is a little unusual for the genre, it has a lot of the western tropes including a sheriff's posse and a train robbery.  The second part is a 1950's detective story, once again a little strange but with many of the appropriate cliches.  The final part is set in 2006 and is just basically an action thriller.

While I try not to discuss plot elements of the books I talk about on here, since the back cover gives away the following point and the book sounds very disjointed without it... One of the main characters in the book is an outlaw who discovers a secret way to be immortal.  Because he discovers this, and some of the other implications that this creates, lead to significant divergences from our timeline, so the book takes place in an alternate history, hence the science fiction label.

The book is extremely graphic in parts.  For example, in the aforementioned train robbery, the train gets derailed.  The book goes into detail describing how many on the train die.  In then goes on to talk about how the derailing upset a wasp nest and how those wasps go and sting the survivors.  The author just seems to enjoy writing about that sort of thing.  Though it makes certain sections seem like the literary equivalent to a Saw movie.

You are probably wondering how I liked the ending.  It was certainly unexpected. There is a point where, as the reader, you realize that there is no way that it can end up the way you had been expecting.  I do wish certain aspects of the end had been changed, but overall I was satisfied.  The real problem with it was that the third person limited narrative left a lot of things unexplained and beyond that, there seemed to be quite a few loose ends that were just dropped.  While this did make the book more unpredictable, it seems like there was a lot of narrative possibility that was just wasted. 

Overall, the book is certainly interesting and while it is definitely a lot more science fiction than it is horror, there are some horror themed aspects to it.  Honestly, there are parts of this that will appeal to fans of almost any genre.  However, as a whole, it would have benefited from a little more smoothing.  I would give this book a 84%.

NOTE: This book is part of a "alternate reality narrative" and there are a lot of multimedia things including a related short story (it takes place entirely before the book, but it does not matter at all to the plot until the third part) on liminalstates.com.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Time Enough For Love

I have said it before on this blog, and in the future I will probably say again, I like cohesive canons.  Time Enough for Love is (arguably) the final chapter in Hienlein's Future History series.  Most of the rest of which is collected in The Past Through Tomorrow which is an interesting read in its own right.  Most of the stories can be ignored, except for the last one which is basically a prologue to Time Enough for Love.

The main character of the book, Lazarus Long, is a very interesting man.  The basic premise is that he has been living for thousands of years and seen most of what humanity and the galaxy have to offer.  Basically, as sort of his last act before he gives up on life he tells some vignettes from his past.  In this way, the first half of the book is basically a collection of short stories.  It also contains excerpts from his "notebooks" which are insightful and humorous.


The book has a lot of sexual parts in it.  The main character practices polyamory quite a bit and (partially because he has lived so long he is related to most people) has incestuous relations as well.  This leads to a talk of "defectives" on multiple different occasions and Lazarus discusses his distaste for them and how he feels humanity should get rid of them.  That sort of talk makes me uncomfortable.  While I do think that eugenics has interesting possibilities, I would never have it enacted in such a way that people were killed to improve the gene pool (more of the Bene Gesserit style). 

If you can get past some of the less mainstream sexual bits and Lazarus' ocean of self-pity in the first part of the book.  This is a really fun read full of interesting quotes and tidbits.  It is almost unnecessarily referential to the story Methuselah's Children (which is the last story in the above mentioned collection) so it is probably a good idea to read that before you start in on this book.  I would give this book an 83%.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

The Wind Through the Keyhole

When I was significantly younger, my uncle lent my mother a copy of Stephen King's The Gunslinger as an audiobook on the way back from New Jersey.  About 45 minutes in there was a sex scene and my mother shut it off (I cannot really blame her.  I am not sure that I would want to listen to a sex scene with my single digit age child).  However, the idea of a cowboy trekking across a desert stuck with me.  Then when I was in high school, I went through a phase where I would spend a lot of time at the local library reading whatever piqued my interest.  There I found The Gunslinger again and all the other books in the Dark Tower series.  I found the series greatly entertaining despite some of its flaws and the protagonist, Roland, was a hero I could get behind, especially in the fourth book Wizard and Glass which recounts an adventure from his younger days.  In addition, the way that the series ends in book seven was really, at the time, quite novel to me.

In March of last year, Stephen King, one of the most prolific authors, announced that he was going to be producing a book to come in between the 4th and 5th books in the time line entitled The Wind Through the Keyhole.  My initial reaction was excitement because I am a sucker for a continuing story.  My love of the Star Wars canon probably stems in a large part from the fact that it is one long continuing story.  However, that was overtaken by trepidation, was this just some publicity trick?  It has been a while since I read the series, but I don't remember much space between 4 and 5.  However, being the faithful fan, I preordered it and avoided most of the information about it.

When I finally read it, I realized that it had a very interesting format.  There is a frame story about the series' protagonists listening to Roland tell a story about his younger days.  However, as part of that story, he tells a story he heard as a child to someone else and the readers must dutifully follow him into a frame story within a frame story and then back out, one level at a time.  (kinda Inception-esque)  Not that this is bad, but I am not sure that I have ever read a book with (relatively long) stories three layers deep.

I thought that the story that was at the middle level was significantly better than the other two and wished that it had been fleshed out more.  On reading, it is pretty obvious that the deepest story is the one that he really wanted to tell but he wanted to tie it to characters that people would recognize from the other books.

If you are a fan of Stephen King in general and are picking this up to read something in his style, I would not recommend it.  It is more like his normal fare than the other Dark Tower books but it is certainly not horror or even suspense.  If you are hoping for a normal science fiction or fantasy story, however, this really isn't one of those either. There are a lot of things that go pretty much unexplained unless you have read the other books (and some that are weird even if you have).  However, if you liked the world of the Dark Tower, this a great reminder of what it was like.  Little things like the lexicon and the way that certain events happened were a great throwback to the last time that I read them and brought me many happy memories.

Perhaps this will get more people interested in the Dark Tower series but I cannot honestly believe that it will.  If someone was interested in reading the Dark Tower series, I would definitely hand them The Gunslinger first without even thinking about The Wind Through the Keyhole.  It is the difference between teaching someone to swim in a wading pool or in the deep end with weights on their legs.

In short, if you enjoyed the Dark Tower, you probably owe this a read.  If you are interested in the Dark Tower, read at least the first four books first, if not the seven who have come out before this.  I would give this book a 79%.