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Have you ever read a review of a book from a trusted source that gushed about a book, how utterly fantastic, original, funny, quirky it is (fill in the blanks with the descriptive words that make you say omg I have to read this book)? Of course you have. And have you then gone out and either bought it or borrowed it from the library, brought it home in a great excitement of anticipation, opened the cover, dove in and about halfway through realized the book was not even close to the heights of delight you thought it would be and in fact got lost somewhere in the foothills? Of course you have. And did you keep reading it anyway because you thought that maybe the big payoff came at the end, oh please let there be a big payoff at the end to have made it all worthwhile? Of course you have. And then when you got to the end and closed the cover did you sigh, not with satisfaction but with sadness because the payoff never came? Of course you have.

I seem to be having some difficulty with books lately. First the Prose book I have set aside and probably will never finish, and now A Highly Unlikely Scenario Or, A Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide to Saving the World by Rachel Cantor, which I did finish. The book held such promise.

The story takes place in an unspecified future where the world is run by fast food companies that faction themselves into different philosophical traditions. For instance Neetsa Pizza, the company our hero Leonard works for, governs itself and its food by Pythagorean precepts. Leonard’s sister, Carol, works for a Scottish fast food company called the Jack-o-Bites. There are also Heraclitans, Cathars, (Roger) Baconians, neo-Maoists, and a host of other competing fast food ideologies.

But the book is not about fast food, that’s just the setting. The book is about Leonard whose gift is his receptivity and ability to listen. He sits in an all white room and takes calls from unhappy Neetsa Pizza customers, helps them feel better and gives them coupons. He has a training book on hand to help with likely scenarios. But one day he gets a call that turns out to be an unlikely scenario that sets him on a journey in which he saves the world, finds love, and travels through time. It is completely bonkers, but given that his love turns out to be Sally who is a librarian and Baconian whose job is to guard the Voynich manuscript and, who has managed to decipher some of it, the book was looking to be promising.

Does the Voynich manuscript sound familiar to you? It has been in the news lately. Cantor’s book was published in 2013 before the latest news about the manuscript. The Voynich, was supposedly composed by Roger Bacon in the 13th century and discovered in 1912 by Wilfred Voynich. The book is written in a code no one, not even top cryptologists, has been able to crack. This has many believing the book is a hoax. Though a University of Bedfordshire applied linguistics professor has recently claimed to have cracked the code.

The news added to the promise of the book, but the book did not deliver. Dancing letters, talks in the present with historical personages from the past, Jewish mysticism, time travel, Isaac the Blind, and Abulafia never melded into a story that made much sense. Sure, the world was supposed to be in danger because Abulafia got Felix, Leonard’s nephew who could stop time, to go back in time where he, Abulafia, planned on using Felix to bring on the end of days. But given that Felix comes from the future there isn’t much sense of peril because we know the outcome even though there are hints that the future might be changed.

The book could have been a fun story about finding and using your gifts to make the world a better place but all that gets lost amidst the quirkiness and fighting between the fast food companies and the mysticism. As far as I can tell, this is Cantor’s first novel. She has previously published a number of short stories in literary journals. There appear to be enough to make a short story collection and if she goes that direction I would definitely read it. The writing itself is good and her style is fun. She creates interesting characters and knows how to keep the pace moving. And she is original and obviously creative. However, all these pluses end up fighting against each other. I hope she writes another novel because she does have potential if she can manage to get all of her skills working together instead of competing for top billing.

Oh, how I loved MaddAddam, the conclusion to Margaret Atwood’s series of books that began with Oryx and Crake. It had been awhile since I read the other two and I was a little worried my memory would be fuzzy. It was fuzzy on the details, which is a shame because the details are so very good. But for the big picture, I did okay especially since there is a lovely synopsis of the first two books helpfully provided at the start of MaddAddam

If you have read the first two books you will know that they both end at the same place. The story in Oryx and Crake and Year of the Flood take place during the same time period but are just told from two different points of view, the insider view of Jimmy and the outsider view of Toby and God’s Gardeners. MaddAddam starts right where the first two end. Our narrator, once again is Toby, a member of the God’s Gardener group, late thirties to early forties, and one resilient woman. I love Toby. I often like characters in books, though it is never a requirement, however, I rarely love them or identify with them. But Toby, sometimes I thought, if things were different, I could totally be her. I’d want to be her. Or her best friend. We could pull weeds in the garden together and talk to the bees. We’d get on really well.

Here is an easy, non-spoiler way to tell you what the book is about:

There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

All of these things are woven seamlessly throughout the book and you can see it all unfolding, and it is a wonderful and amazing thing. I didn’t notice them right away, but when it started to dawn on me what was going on it greatly increased my pleasure.

And then there is Atwood’s humor. I laughed out loud so many times, especially once the helpful Fuck was introduced. When you call out “Oh Fuck!” he rushes immediately to your aid. Toby had to make up a story about Fuck for the Crakers, the bioengineered and completely innocent humans created to populate the earth after a plague designed to kill the rest of the humans was unleashed on the world. Believe me, it’s a hoot. In fact, many of the interactions between the human humans and the Crakers are funny.

Given the end of the world as we know it scenario the book plays out you’d think it might be depressing. While there are deadly serious parts of the story, the book ends on a hopeful note. No, humans and the world will never be the same again, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

One of the scary things about the series of books though is that Atwood based everything in them on real technology and real-world events. She may have taken some of it beyond what is currently possible, but she does it in a logical way so the reader isn’t left thinking, “No way! That’s impossible!” You can see the seeds of much of it in her Flipboard MaddAddam’s World.

I am sad the series is done, I enjoyed it so much. I plan to read it all again sometime, one after the other, instead of having to wait a few years in between. Meanwhile, I look forward to finding out what’s up her sleeve for her next book.

I just finished Lexicon by Max Barry and what a fun book it is. It starts off with a man named Wil waking up while two other men are poking a needle into his eye. Ouch! From there we have an escape and chase and capture and then another escape and a long and varied chase before a final escape. Except Wil ends up escaping with Eliot, one of the men who stuck the needle in his eye. Confusing? A little. But it is supposed to be because it is told from Wil’s point of view so we learn what’s going on as he discovers it.

But Wil’s is not the only narrative voice in the book. We also have Emily Ruff, a sixteen-year-old street kid who survives on her wits and her fast hands. She is good at parting people from their money by laying out cards and asking the unlucky mark where the queen is. She is discovered and taken off the streets by a mysterious man who gives her a plane ticket to a private school in Washington DC. But this school is not like any other. At this school students learn to use the power of words to compromise people and get them to do what they want.

The best graduates of the school become Poets, sort of like secret agents except they work for no one but themselves. It is never clear why they do what they do or what their ultimate goal is. I suppose I could surmise it is to be a check and balance to power, but they have their own power problems within their ranks and don’t even realize it until much too late.

The story jumps back and forth between Wil who is in the present and Emily who is in the near past. The two narratives bounce off each other, filling in the blanks for the reader until they finally meet up. In Wil’s present Emily is known as Virginia Woolf. She is the best Poet at hunting and attack and she is after Eliot (as in T.S.) and Wil. Wil is in danger because he is what is called an Outlier, someone who is immune to the power of the Poets and their words. Woolf had released a very powerful word in a small town in middle of nowhere Australia and all 3,000 inhabitants, except Wil, died. Why Woolf did what she did we learn as we go along and we think we find out the truth of the matter but, but, well, this is a sort of science fiction thriller so I don’t want to give anything away.

The pacing in the book is good. Barry manages to say some interesting things about language and tell a good story. That the Poets are given names based on their abilities is rather humorous. I chuckled throughout that Woolf and Eliot were trying to kill each other after starting off as friends. Woolf is innovative and always manages to find the right word to get the job done. Eliot is impenetrable. The head of the Poets is named Yeats and he terrifies everyone with his dead eyes. But he has a certain fetish for good shoes and it turns out to be his weakness. His assistant is Plath who, as the novel progresses, is increasing noted to be more and more neurotic and unstable. There are others but you have to find out for yourself.

Lexicon is a fun book, a suspense novel for the bookish crowd. It’s a light, quick read. Not perfect, but enjoyable nonetheless.

The tendonitis in my hand and wrist is getting better. Yay! Thanks for all the well wishes from everyone. Hopefully with a bit more rest, in a few days all will be completely better. Between resting and the horrible heatwave that has settled down upon my fair city making even normally non-strenuous activity seem just too much, and the Independence Day holiday on Wednesday, posting might be spotty this week.

Today though, I want to toss out some tantalizing tidbits from the “Science Fiction” issue of the New Yorker magazine (June 4 & 11). I wasn’t really interested in the fiction pieces, what I found most interesting were the nonfiction essays both long and short. Here we had Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin singing the same songs: Atwood still insisting that she doesn’t write SF and Le Guin complaining about those who write SF who refuse to accept the label. No names were named but it seems these two are never going to agree on a definition of SF. Not that they have to, but while a small childish part of me wants to stand around the two combatants on the playground chanting, “fight! fight! fight!” the grown up part of rolls her eyes and mumbles, “really? Still gnawing on the same bone?”

I very much enjoyed William Gibson’s short piece in which he reminisces about his father’s Oldsmobile Rocket 88 in the 1950s and how he’d imagine blasting off into space. Then there is Colson Whitehead’s longer essay talking about all the horror films he watched as a kid in the 1970s and how they influenced him. Karen Russell has a short but sad piece about being in 5th grade and participating in a reading program sponsored by Pizza Hut in which she’d win a coupon for free pizza for every ten books she read. She devoured Terry Brook’s “Sword of Shannara” series and was so proud that she was going to be taking her family out to dinner until her mother, upon seeing the list of books she read, made a belittling remark about them. After that, Russell kept reading fantasy but on her list of books she read would write titles like Little Women instead.

China Mieville’s short essay is the one that really got me thinking though. His is written as a letter to a young SF fan, to himself as a kid. He says he is often asked by people how he got into “this stuff” and explains:

Of course, the stories that got you all to hush, in kindergarten, were the ones that contained exactly those elements which you still seek out. In that class full of six-year-olds, everyone was into dinosaurs and/ or magic and/ or Saturday-morning monsters, just like you. By your teens, though, you are indeed in the minority. Sure, some readers, especially after the hip discover Dick, Butler, Gibson, will come to the field later. But they’re rarities. Mostly those, ‘into this’ are those who simply never leave. So you can answer your interlocutors’ question with another, How did you get out of it?

He goes on to talk about how SF and fantasy led him later to other books with fantastic elements in them, books by Charlotte Bronte, Ionesco, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, as well as the writing of Julian of Norwich and Hidegard of Bingen.

What interested me most though was that passage. How, as kids we love stories of the fantastic. I continued to love those kinds of stories in my teens and still love them today. I get a charge from books that are squarely SF and fantasy but also books that are mostly realistic but then get “weird” like Murakami weird or Raw Shark Texts weird, the kind of books in which reality shifts just enough to make one question one’s perception and the nature of things. As a kid books like The Wizard of Oz and Willie Wonka scared me not because they were weird but because there were adults in them that were unpredictable (the Wizard and Willie Wonka) and cruel. The weird worlds, Oz

All you wonderful women out there who are feminists and SF readers, have you heard about the new column at Tor, Sleeps With Monsters?

You can expect me to look at the successes and failures of media in terms of portraying women. You can expect me to occasionally mention videogames. You can expect me to touch on the history of women in the genre, riffing off the SF Mistressworks project. You can expect me to highlight discussions about women and genre in the blogosphere — if your not-so-humble correspondent fails to miss them. You can expect me to look at recurring tropes that turn up in genre, often to our detriment. And you can expect me to pop up, yelling, “Feminism WOO YAY!” once or twice a month. (Like a bad penny.)

The first post has loads of links to online feminist geek/SF/genre goodness to keep me busy for days. And, Bourke promises to write about lots of feminist genre writers and their books, so TBR piles beware!

One of the most amazing things about this post, however, is the comments. Usually one can expect some real trolls to turn up with stuff like this. And while there were some challenging males that did make an appearance the general tone did not degrade to name calling and mud slinging.

Sadly, it looks like it is only going to be a twice a month column but I am still pleased. Go check it out and add it to your feed reader.

And while I am on the topic of feminism, have you heard the sad news that Susan Gubar, co-author of Madwoman in the Attic and author and co-author of many other books and articles, is dying of ovarian cancer? She has managed to write a memoir, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, that was just published April 30th. I’m number 33 in line for it at the library so will probably find myself reading it in the middle of summer. Of course I will post about it.

I started reading The Map of Time by Felix Palma over the weekend. I expected a good whirlwind of a romp – the book is about time travel after all – and was brought up short by the sluggish pace, the annoyingly intrusive narrator and sometimes clunky writing. It also didn’t help that around page 40 the main character, Andrew Harrington, falls in love with a Whitechapel prostitute named Marie Kelly. That’s fine, but when he buys her for the night she miraculously learns what love really is:

When at last she lay naked, Andrew made love to her so respectfully, caressed her body with such tenderness that Marie Kelly could feel the hard shell she had carefully built to protect her soul begin to crack, that layer of ice preventing anything from seeping into her skin, keeping everything locked behind the door, out there where it could not hurt her. To her surprise, Andrew’s kisses marking her body like a pleasurable itch made her own caresses less and less mechanical, and she quickly discovered it was no longer a whore lying on the bed, but the woman crying out for affection that she had always been.

And it goes on and on until the whole scene is so cliched and lifeless I almost stopped reading right there.

But no, I’ll give it a chance and keep reading just a bit longer. I have read until page 102 hoping that something other than Marie Kelly being killed by Jack the Ripper would happen. But nothing has happened. The sentences just drag on and on in interminable detail that, far from bringing a scene to life, makes it incredibly dull. But the book is supposed to be good so I thought maybe the plot is about to take off and if the plot takes off I can put up with the rest of it.

I didn’t want to read another 50 pages and still be thinking it was about to get going, so I searched for some reviews. I found one that said it didn’t get going until after 200 pages. 200 pages! A book that takes 200 pages to get going is in desperate need of an editor. But the person liked the book a lot. As did quite a number of other people. Still, there is no lack of reviews that didn’t like the book, noting some of the same complaints I have.

After awhile of looking at various reviews I realized that I was hoping to be convinced that I should keep reading. None of the glowing reviews convinced me. All of the negative reviews had me nodding my head in agreement. It then became obvious that I am not going to like this book. We were not meant for each other. I am glad there are so many who have enjoyed the book, I wanted to be amongst them, but it’s just not going to happen. So my bookmark is removed and the book will go back to the library so the next person in the hold queue can read it. On the positive side, it is one library book I don’t have to worry about any longer.

Neal Stephenson, science fiction writer and author of the totally awesome Cryptonomicon, has been making the rounds asking scifi writers to stop being so pessimistic. Stephenson laments the demise of the innovative, hopeful vision sort of scifi that imagines big things and inspires scientists to figure out how to really create them.

In an essay in The World Policy Journal, he talks about a speech he gave at the 2011 Future Tense conference. He believes that scifi is still relevant for two reasons:

1. The Inspiration Theory. SF inspires people to choose science and engineering as careers. This much is undoubtedly true, and somewhat obvious.

2. The Hieroglyph Theory. Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs—simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

So as not to be all talk, Stephenson has launched the Hieroglyph Project to encourage scifi writers to think big and think optimistic. The project will be publishing a scifi anthology in 2014 with new stories about scientists working on big projects.

Scifi has always had a dystopian pocket in it, but I think Stephenson is right that is has grown very large and overshadows other possibilities. While I have enjoyed my share of dystopian scifi, I do really enjoy the stories that have big ideas in them. So much of what older scifi writers have dreamed up has become reality. Granted, I still don’t have my flying car and we have yet to colonize Mars, but that’s ok. I am an optimistic person and so I like Stephenson’s optimism. And in scifi the possibilities of science are only limited by the writer’s imagination. I am looking forward to that anthology but I hope Stephenson’s Hieroglyph Project does something in the mean time. 2014 is a long time to wait.

Are there many people who haven’t seen one of the many adaptations of H.G. Wells’ book War of the Worlds? When I was a kid I saw the old black and white movie version on some Saturday afternoon TV program that ran old movies. I also knew about the Orson Welles’ radio adaptation that scared the pants off quite a few people when it aired because they had missed the beginning and thought it was real. And then of course there is the movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension in which it is discovered that Welles’ radio play was not fiction, but that aliens had indeed landed and have been living among us. And even if you have never seen a movie version you still probably know the plot:

Martians invade. Kill a lot of people. Humans are helpless against them. Things look grim. But then the Martians catch the flu or the common cold or some other earthly bug and they all keel over. Humanity wins!

While the book is definitely a fun, and short, Victorian page-turner, there are still some interesting things that go on in it. Humanity doesn’t have the ability to fight back. Our weapons are pretty much useless against the Martians and their heat-ray and black clouds that kill instantly. And at one point the narrator has an epiphany:

For that moment I touched an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow and suddenly confronted by the work of a dozen busy navvies digging the foundations of a house. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently grew quite clear in my mind, that oppressed me for many days, a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away.

But while he feels beaten down he is still determined to survive. He spends time with a curate who goes increasingly insane wondering what sins humanity had committed to deserve such wrath from God. Our narrator ends up aiding in the curate’s death by Martian and only feels mildly guilty about it because he had done it in order to save his own life.

Our narrator also spends time with an artilleryman who has escaped death and who goes on and on about how the two of them will put together a rebel group of humans who will live underground and survive while all the people who are “useless and cumbersome and mischievous” can just die. Our narrator goes along for a little while until he realizes that the artilleryman is as nutty as the curate.

When the Martians finally die, the epiphany goes out the window. Suddenly humans deserved to live because we had been fighting a war already for all those hundreds of years against the bacteria that killed the Martians. Humans deserved to live because

By the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain.

And then our narrator imagines the human race going out into space and conquering new worlds!

The one thing that bothered me about the book is that the narrator dumps his wife at the cousin’s in Leatherhead and then spends the rest of the book without her. Oh, he insists that he is trying to get to Leatherhead but each time he says that he ends up going in the opposite direction and eventually ends up in London where he still is when the Martians die and where he still insists that he is trying to get to Leatherhead. His wife survives. He goes to their house near Woking and she shows up looking to see if he is still alive. We are then supposed to believe