Not long ago I had half an hour to spare and, being the person I am, thought Waterstone’s was a good place to while away the time. I came across The Atrocity Archives and, having seen the cover before but not read the back, I checked out the blurb and the first page. I got the impression from that The Atrocity Archives would be another present day fantasy fiction with magic and some technology advances. The writing seemed informal, witty and the blurb had enough to hook me. I was expecting Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files meets Computers For Dummies.
There is plenty of the first. For those of you who haven’t read any of the Dresden Files, it is characterised by the main guy, Dresden, who tells the story with a lot of wit and humour. You can tell things about his character simply by the way he says things – for instance, he can joke and being quite blasé about very scary subjects which means he’s brave and possibly a bit of an idiot. And, to an extent Stross has this in Bob Howard. His charm lies in the same ‘not good with authority’ way as Dresden and, as mentioned, the wit with which the story is told. But Stross is not in Butcher’s league. Where Butcher will put in perhaps one or two references to things you might not get – TV show references from the 70s and 80s for instance –, Stross litters them across every page. I’m lost already and I’m only seventeen pages in.
For those of you who want a plot, here’s a summary of what I understand so far: Bob works in an obscure branch of the government who deal with magic and alternate dimensions – don’t expect Tinkerbell or dragons though – as a computer repair man. Then, he gets promoted and has some fun with field work. Where it all goes wrong. (Except the bit where it all goes wrong takes a long time to appear. Nothing substantial really happens for almost the first third of the book.)
I’m not a computer nerd, I’ll admit that. I know how to defragment my computer and I can write basic html but I get totally lost with Stross’s explanations of things, or lack of explanation. What, for instance, is a node when it’s at home? He mentions ‘the Turning result’ but doesn’t explain what that is for another six pages, by which I’ve entirely forgotten what the point of the conversation was when it was first mentioned. What’s worse, no-one knows what the Turning result is, because he made it up, so no-one could possibly know what the reference is to.
The worst offender by far, though, (that is, the worst offender in the seventeen pages I’ve struggled through so far) is this: ‘The theorem is a hack on a discrete number theory that simultaneously disproves Church-Turing hypothesis (wave your hand if you understood that) and worse, permits NP-complete problems to be converted into p-complete ones.’
First off, that wave comment, that’s part of the quote. And I found myself slightly upset that Stross was either talking to the few people who understood what he meant and no-one else or that he was intentionally flagging up the fact no-one’s meant to understand it, in which case, why put it in there? I felt totally alienated. (If anyone reading this does feel they could wave their hand, I’d love to know what on earth it all means.) The other problem I have is…well it’s with his problems. What is an NP-complete problem? The only thing I can think of is ‘no problem’ but that doesn’t really work. A No Problem complete problem?
((Having read a little further after writing this, I found this and felt the need to share.) ‘Most of it boils down to the application of Kaluza-Klein theory in a Linde universe constrained by an information conservation rule, or so they tell me when I ask.’ )
There’s another snag. If you haven’t read H.P. Lovecraft, you’re not going to get the references to his work, such as Shoggoth. I’ve read some Lovecraft but I’ve not heard of that one. Similarly, do you, without looking at Google, know who Knuth, Dijkstra or Al-Hazred are? I’ve never heard of them but apparently I should have because Stross uses them to suggest a person’s character by the material he’s reading.
All this is building up to one very large, very unmoveable difficulty. I cannot follow what’s happening. There’s computer jargon being thrown around, mixed in with philosophy, mathematics, an awful lots of theories and some pretty heavy ideas, none of which I understand. I get the physical things that are going on – he’s walking over there, now he’s hacking a computer – but if the ending hinges on a concept I can’t grasp, what’s the point in reading any further than page seventeen?
Perhaps I’m being unkind and judgemental. Perhaps that isn’t enough material to judge the whole book by. But still, there’s that niggling doubt that if I can’t get the basic premise, all hope is lost.
I always try to judge a book by how friendly it is to the reader. That is, in terms of how accessible it is, not how nicely it can compliment your hair. And, granted, there will be science fiction that’s out of my range. But I’m not sure how many sci-fi fans would enjoy this either. And that’s what it comes down to: an author tries to sell books, which will be difficult if he’s alienated all by a tiny slice of his readership.
Fail, Mister Stross. Fail.
Wednesday 21 September 2011
Monday 5 September 2011
Heaven's Shadow
(Minor Spoilers on the line, delays expected)
I don’t read much sci-fi, I’ll admit that right from the off. I dabble but most space-set novels put me off by their jargon, science or pseudo-science and the general size which tends to come under ‘tome’.
But I picked up Heaven’s Shadow. The blurb was quite exciting. A near-earth-object starts venting air and it quickly becomes obvious there’s a reason for it. ’But by whom – and for what purpose?
Heaven’s Shadow is written by David S. Goyer, a comic book writer, screenwriter and director and Michael Cassutt, author, TV producer and screenwriter. The fact that Goyer and Cassutt work most in visual media is obvious and perhaps Heaven’s Shadow would have made a good film.
It does not make a good book.
The story starts off at a pace that would make a glacier look speedy and while it does manage to up the pace in places, Heaven’s Shadow ruins it all by shooting at it’s feet, with bullets made of long, dull sections where nothing happens and a habit of switching characters.
Talking of characters, there are way too many and a lot of them are introduced together. It doesn’t surprise me that they feel the need to include a character list at the front and I found myself having to refer to it a lot. There are four astronauts and four cosmonauts, various family members, scientists, a large group of people who work for NASA and a girl called Amy who appears, as far as I can see, without explanation. Said girl is meant to be a friend of the main character’s daughter but why Amy is allowed to run around the NASA site with her friend, unchecked, is unclear.
This might all be fine, just, if the author’s had stuck with one name to one character. Yvonne Hall, for instance was introduced as Yvonne but is, at points, called Hall and I had to go look at the character list to who out who Hall was.
The other problem with this huge cast is that the viewpoint moves between quite a few of them. It’s a bit like sharing a bottle of vodka with seventeen people – no-one can really taste it in the coke and no-one gets tipsy. The characters feel like templates at best and the main character is one of the worst hit. There are three things I know about him – his wife is dead, he has a temperamental teenage daughter and he’s an astronaut. That is what defines him. Personality you ask? Well…um…nope, I’ve no idea. If he died horribly, screaming, on the next page I wouldn’t mind because I really couldn’t care less about this 2D, cardboard cut out of a character. A few of the more minor characters manage to rise above it slightly but only slightly and while they might possess a hint of personality, I’m still not given enough to ever care about them.
Which spawns another complication. If I don’t care who lives and who dies, or, indeed, if any live at all, where’s the excitement, the drama, the gripping fear my favourite character is going to be eaten alive?
The other strange thing about Heaven’s Shadow is it’s habit of starting the chapter with a few lines of gripping dialogue and then scrabbling to explain the context in an immediate flashback. It actually does this for the whole first part of the book. We get the excitement of being aboard the space craft before they touch down but for the next few chapters after, it bumbles around some dull, dreary back story. A few snapshot flashbacks, no more than a page long would have been sufficient. Once I’d started noticing it, I realise they do a lot. It’s fine, ooo, once or twice but when they continue it chapter after chapter, it gets on my internal organs.
My last rant point is that the dialogue has some truly botched lines that just don’t
make sense. I even re-read them and I still couldn’t work out who was talking. Again, I wonder if this is because both writers are more used to mediums with visual qualities. Where the confusion isn’t applicable because we can see who’s talking.
Can I recommend Heaven’s Shadow? Well, perhaps if you’re into space sci-fi you might be able to look past its flaws to the juicy ideas beneath. But I’d recommend putting it below some of the better examples and using it as a last resort. A ‘it’s-this-or-watching-golf’ sort of thing.
I don’t read much sci-fi, I’ll admit that right from the off. I dabble but most space-set novels put me off by their jargon, science or pseudo-science and the general size which tends to come under ‘tome’.
But I picked up Heaven’s Shadow. The blurb was quite exciting. A near-earth-object starts venting air and it quickly becomes obvious there’s a reason for it. ’But by whom – and for what purpose?
Heaven’s Shadow is written by David S. Goyer, a comic book writer, screenwriter and director and Michael Cassutt, author, TV producer and screenwriter. The fact that Goyer and Cassutt work most in visual media is obvious and perhaps Heaven’s Shadow would have made a good film.
It does not make a good book.
The story starts off at a pace that would make a glacier look speedy and while it does manage to up the pace in places, Heaven’s Shadow ruins it all by shooting at it’s feet, with bullets made of long, dull sections where nothing happens and a habit of switching characters.
Talking of characters, there are way too many and a lot of them are introduced together. It doesn’t surprise me that they feel the need to include a character list at the front and I found myself having to refer to it a lot. There are four astronauts and four cosmonauts, various family members, scientists, a large group of people who work for NASA and a girl called Amy who appears, as far as I can see, without explanation. Said girl is meant to be a friend of the main character’s daughter but why Amy is allowed to run around the NASA site with her friend, unchecked, is unclear.
This might all be fine, just, if the author’s had stuck with one name to one character. Yvonne Hall, for instance was introduced as Yvonne but is, at points, called Hall and I had to go look at the character list to who out who Hall was.
The other problem with this huge cast is that the viewpoint moves between quite a few of them. It’s a bit like sharing a bottle of vodka with seventeen people – no-one can really taste it in the coke and no-one gets tipsy. The characters feel like templates at best and the main character is one of the worst hit. There are three things I know about him – his wife is dead, he has a temperamental teenage daughter and he’s an astronaut. That is what defines him. Personality you ask? Well…um…nope, I’ve no idea. If he died horribly, screaming, on the next page I wouldn’t mind because I really couldn’t care less about this 2D, cardboard cut out of a character. A few of the more minor characters manage to rise above it slightly but only slightly and while they might possess a hint of personality, I’m still not given enough to ever care about them.
Which spawns another complication. If I don’t care who lives and who dies, or, indeed, if any live at all, where’s the excitement, the drama, the gripping fear my favourite character is going to be eaten alive?
The other strange thing about Heaven’s Shadow is it’s habit of starting the chapter with a few lines of gripping dialogue and then scrabbling to explain the context in an immediate flashback. It actually does this for the whole first part of the book. We get the excitement of being aboard the space craft before they touch down but for the next few chapters after, it bumbles around some dull, dreary back story. A few snapshot flashbacks, no more than a page long would have been sufficient. Once I’d started noticing it, I realise they do a lot. It’s fine, ooo, once or twice but when they continue it chapter after chapter, it gets on my internal organs.
My last rant point is that the dialogue has some truly botched lines that just don’t
make sense. I even re-read them and I still couldn’t work out who was talking. Again, I wonder if this is because both writers are more used to mediums with visual qualities. Where the confusion isn’t applicable because we can see who’s talking.
Can I recommend Heaven’s Shadow? Well, perhaps if you’re into space sci-fi you might be able to look past its flaws to the juicy ideas beneath. But I’d recommend putting it below some of the better examples and using it as a last resort. A ‘it’s-this-or-watching-golf’ sort of thing.
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