Saturday, June 29, 2013

Caliban's War

Warning: While this post contains only minor spoilers for Caliban's War, it does have more major spoilers for Leviathan Wakes, the previous book in the series.

On one of the interviews with the authors, they talked about how they wanted to make each book in the series a slightly different genre.  Caliban's War is certainly sci-fi but this one is definitely lacking the noir aspects of the previous one.  It has a much more action movie feel than Leviathan Wakes, which I guess is what happens when you replace the detective character with a marine, a politician, and a scientist.

Unlike the last book, which flipped back and forth evenly between Miller and Holden, this book has no set order to the characters and so sometimes the readers can go a while with out seeing one.  Holden is still certainly the star of the show but I enjoyed the politician's chapters a great deal.  She is a well done female character.  A lot of times (especially in stories written by men) the female characters can be simply "men with boobs" but this character is convincingly female while also being nowhere close to being the other stereotype: the damsel in distress.





While the overall tone was enjoyable, I felt that the plot of this one was a little too derivative of that of the first book.  However, unlike the first book, this one gave us a view of the political underpinnings of the event, which made it still a good read.  Holden's conflict with his "inner Miller" was tedious and, combined with his self-righteous attitude make it a lot harder to like him this time around.  It seems that the authors are going to make him the main character of the whole series and I am glad that most of his personal issues are out of the way by the end of this book.

The series is obviously building towards something, however this book just feels a lot like the scaffolding.  Hopefully the next installment pushes the overarching plot along a little more.  However, for the people who gobbled up the first book, unless Miller was your favorite character, they will probably gobble up this one too.

Overall, I would give this book a 90%.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Leviathan Wakes

I picked this book up as part of my flurry of buying books on December 31st, 2012 (I had a four hour layover).  This book came personally recommended by George R. R. Martin and being a Science Fiction fan as well as a GRRM fan, I knew that I would have to pick it up at some point.  After receiving it, the book languished on my shelf for a few months because I wanted to read the entire series together in one go.  After the third book came out, I started reading this one (though it appears that there are a few more in the works).

James S. A. Corey is the penname of the writing team of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.  Daniel Abraham is a relatively well known sci-fi and fantasy author while Ty Franck is GRRM's assistant.  It seemed an odd paring and I wondered if the recommendation by GRRM was not quite as honest as it could have been.  However, my distrust was misplaced.

In short, this is a really good book.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The action is well done and the setting is interesting.  In an interview in the back of the book they say that most sci-fi falls into two categories: the near future with only a few changes or the far future where there are basically an incomprehensible number of changes.  This book aims to fall in between the two.  There are human settlements on Mars, the asteroid belt, and a few places beyond but the only real technobabble technology is the drive that the ships use to make travel times a little more reasonable.  It is by no means faster than light, it just means that a trip from Earth to Mars can take weeks rather than months.



Similar to A Song of Ice and Fire (or The Gap Cycle, since this is sci-fi), each chapter follows a viewpoint character from the third person limited perspective.  Unlike the previous two, this book (with the exception of the prologue) alternates back and forth between two characters.  In the beginning this was frustrating because I was far more interested in the character that involved spaceships than the one living on an asteroid.  Since the most recent series I read in this format was ASOIAF, it was slightly disconcerting because in ASOIAF all of the characters generally trend towards separating whereas in this book from 100 pages in it becomes clear that the characters are going to meet up pretty early on.




One of the other interesting parts about this novel was that it was certainly science fiction (hard to have a book with spaceships shooting at each other that isn't) but it also has elements of horror stories and detective stories which make it different than some other sci-fi novels.  It is not hard sci-fi like Vernor Vinge or Alistair Reynolds, but it is pretty close.

This book was very fun read and I sped through it.  I have high hopes for the sequels.

Overall, I would give this book a 96%.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

The Short Novels of John Steinbeck

This book was a Christmas gift, from the same Christmas that Gravity's Rainbow came from.  Luckily, this book was much more enjoyable.  The book (as the title implies) is a collection of some of Steinbeck's novellas, none of which are more than ~100 pages.  There are six novels in the book and, because I love to order things, I ranked them in amount I liked them from most to least.

1. The Moon Is Down
2. Cannery Row
3. Tortilla Flat
4. Of Mice and Men
5. The Pearl
6. The Red Pony

Since this book is really six novels, I will do a mini review of each one in the order that they are in the book (which is the order they were published in, not they order they were written in).

Tortilla Flat - I started this book with a little trepidation.  Every time I start reading a book by a famous author, I feel slightly worried that I won't like it.  How can I consider myself a good reader if I don't like famous author X?  However, I was gratified when I liked this story.  It is divided up into 17 bite sized chapters and they chronicle the adventures of a group of friends in the town of Tortilla Flat.  It was an enjoyable read and the way the characters were written it seemed a little like br'er rabbit but with people.

The Red Pony - This book was really five short books.  They all had the same characters but they wee relatively unrelated.  It follows the adventures of a young boy on his family's farm.  When I started it, I had hoped it would be similar to Shane.  However, there was no such luck.  None of the stories have the boy coming out very much the winner and that, combined with the less than happy ending of Tortilla Flat made me wonder if no Steinbeck story was going to end on a positive note.  The end of Tortilla Flat was passable because it was one part of the whole story but The Red Pony just threw repeated trials and pains at the kid and it just kept getting worse for him.  While it is certainly well written, it is hard to enjoy something where the main character's life just keeps going downhill.

Of Mice and Men - This is arguably the Steinbeck novel, either this or The Grapes of Wrath (which I haven't read yet).  I was surprised at how short it was, clocking in at less than 60 pages.  Perhaps that just shows how little space he needs to make his ideas known.  The story was interesting and unique, certainly an artifact of its time.  The lifestyle of his characters is uncommon in modern society.  However, after reading the previous two stories immediately before it, the ending tone the ending was going to take was apparent from early on. I will admit that the ending was slightly spoiled by 11/22/63where they put on a play version of the novel.  Despite this, the ending still had its surprises.

The Moon Is Down - In my opinion, this was the stand out novel in the collection.  To be fair, this is the closest to the genre I normally read of any in the book.  It is a story about a small town that gets invaded.  The exact sides are kept obscured, though from some clues in the story (and the time it was written) it seems like it is a German invasion of a French town.  The conversion of a normal people to guerrillas a bit at a time is fascinating to watch.  In this story, the end is at least marginally more positive.

Cannery Row - This story is the majority of the book, pages-wise.  It follows the inhabitants of a part of a town and their day to day trials and experiences.  He makes the metaphor of the stories being like a flatworm crawling into a scientist's collection plate.  They do add up to a coherent narrative, though there are some offshoots that don't really add anything. Because this story has so many characters, there are some likable characters for everyone.  This novel closes out with for the most part, positive feelings, a first for this book.  I am sure I will read the sequel, Sweet Thursday, at some point in the near future.

The Pearl - The final novel of the book felt a little like a letdown.  After the (relatively) lengthy epic that was Cannery Row this shorter story that was very tight and concise had a very different tone and feel.  As I prefer lengthy epics, this was somewhat less enjoyable.  In addition, I found the characters and their situation somewhat hard to emphasize with, which always detracts from my enjoyment.

The book as a whole was very enjoyable.  The two that I liked the least (The Pearl and The Red Pony) took up only about 20% of the book.  However, the book would have been worth it even it was only those two stories and The Moon Is Down, which was superb.  One complaint I had with the formatting of this book was that each page contained two justified columns of text rather than the normal full page.  This was not really a problem it just made physically reading it slightly more awkward.

In the back of my copy of this book (which was from a used bookstore), there is a quote from Steinbeck, followed by "2:18:58".  I don't know what the numbers mean.  I considered date started or finished (the book came out in 1953) and also time started or finished but both of those seemed silly.  Another option could have been the quotes location in the book but the quote is from another of Steinbeck's works and is not even found within the pages of this book let alone at 58 words into the 18th line of the second novel.  The most logical choice seems to be time spent reading the book.  It would be an interesting idea to time myself while I read but I feel like there are too many variables to get any meaningful data out of it.

Overall, I would give this book an 89%.