pReviews.

A lovely Saturday here in Vancouver, sunny and double digit temperatures, so after finishing my laundry, off I went into the afternoon sunshine to do some shopping.  After taking advantage of the apparently constant sale at Sears by picking up three shirts for work, I decided to celebrate the raise at my new job by crossing the street to Chapters and having a go at the science fiction and fantasy sections.

However, first I took a pass through the Reduced section, often the home of unregarded trifles, and never made it any further into the store. I've been trying to cut back on my hardcover purchases, but if they're going to sell them for less than the cost of the paperback editions, it's very difficult to say no!  As a result I walked away with four books* sharing space with my new shirts - no need to increase our petroleum debt by using another plastic bag.  

The books that I purchased are:  Matter, by Iain M. Banks; The Heart of Valor, by Tanya Huff; The New Moon's Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson; and Hell and Earth, by Elizabeth Bear.  Now, I realize that you're not supposed to review books until after reading them, but in this case I thought I could at least offer an explanation as to why I picked these four novels, and my expectations of them.

Iain M. Banks is a fabulous writer, if a slightly schizophrenic one - his non-SF work is published as Iain Banks, no initial.  (There's a reason for this, but I leave it to my readers to research that as an extra credit assignment.)  Banks, who has become the front man for the Scottish / British SF boom of the last decade, is best known for his Culture books.  

How to describe the Culture?  The Culture is a hedonistic, non-materialistic futuristic society that exists on a galactic level and creates on a macro scale, with the greater burden of maintenance and warfare falling upon artificial intelligences of varying capabilities.  In spite of its apparent softness, Banks portrays the Culture as having a core of brutal, almost cruel realism, and the combination of these elements gives his stories a disturbing ambiguity.  Matter is the latest Culture novel, and when I saw it on the shelf I picked it up instantly - Banks has never failed to entertain, amuse and startle me.

I actually have a casual nodding acquaintanceship with Tanya Huff from her years as an employee at Bakka Books in Toronto.  To be honest, that's why I purchased the first book in her Valor series when it came out in 2000.  However, the series has turned out to be a good, solid, well-crafted addition to the sub-genre of military science fiction, and as such I expect this third book in the series to be an entertaining read.

Huff is probably the only person on this page that non-fans might be familiar with, whether knowingly or not.  Her Blood books, a vampire - detective series set in Toronto, were adapted for TV under the title of Blood Ties. It's currently in syndication and shows up now and then on whichever cable channels are looking for Canadian content.

Nalo Hopkinson is the closest thing to a wild card in my selections.  She's a strong talent, and a rising one, but so far I've only read her short work without having picked up either of her breakthrough novels: Midnight Robber or Brown Girl in the Ring.  Hopkinson's work draws heavily upon her Jamaican heritage for both story-telling style and inspiration, resulting in a unique and special flavour to her writing.

The New Moon's Arms continues this approach, with the story actually being set on a Caribbean island.  Since it won both an Aurora Award and a Sunburst Award when it was originally published in 2008, I have every reason to expect it to be a suitable introduction to Hopkinson's longer work.

Although Elizabeth Bear had her first story published in 1996, I've only started reading her books within the last year  - regular readers may remember her name from my posting about representations of Canada in SF.

I find Bear's writing to be odd in that she is quite a good descriptive author, handles character, action and dialogue extremely well, but her end game is somehow lacking.  It's as if she puts so much into the initial stages of her stories that there's no room to raise the energy level at the end, resulting in something that's more like the slope down to that flat bit at the end of a roller coaster than a real loop-the-loop. (If you want to be technical, it's all denouement, no climax.)  Regardless, she is a very good writer, and I'm willing to accept that there may not be a cymbal clash at the end of this book, and simply enjoy the ride.

The sad part for me about all of this is that when you have a lot of experience as a reader, it can be difficult to expand your horizons - obviously I have a clear idea of what to expect from these books in spite of the fact that I haven't cracked a single cover.  Sometimes when I'm in a used book store, if it's not busy I'll ask the counter staff to recommend something that they've found to be a great read.  If it's a place where they know my buying habits, sometimes they'll try to tailor their suggestions to what they've seen me buy, but I discourage them from taking that route.  After all, I already know what I like - that's the problem. 

- Sid

* If you can no longer grip your book selections with one hand, you have too many.  This is a useful rule which has saved me from overspending in the past, although after years of shopping in this fashion I can probably span well over an octave on a piano.