Recent Reading Roundup 33

The last recent reading roundup chronicled several months of slow reading.  This one covers several weeks of fast reading (a period that also included the Clarke shortlist, reviewed elsewhere).  There are several books here that I would have liked to write full-length reviews of, but I read them in such quick succession with several others that any chance of disentangling my thoughts enough for that is now lost.  Here, then, are some shorter reactions.

• Anno Dracula by Kim Newman - Newman's much-loved vampire novel, originally published in 1992 and reissued, with a snazzy new cover design, a few years ago, has a crackerjack premise that is simultaneously the best and worst thing about it.  Best simply because it's so much fun: Newman posits a world in which not only do the historical and literary figures of the Victorian era rub shoulders--in which Fredrick Abberline serves on the same police force as Inspector Lestrade, for instance--but the ending of Bram Stoker's Dracula is radically altered.  In this world, Van Helsing and his allies failed to defeat the Count, who cemented his hold on England by seducing and turning Queen Victoria.  When the story opens, a few years later, vampirism is openly acknowledged and running rampant.  The rich turn in order to curry favor with the vampire ruling class, while the poor are turned as a result of predation, and often starve because of it.  Newman does a good job of folding the supernatural into Victorian poverty and misery--in the novel's world, a person can turn into a vampire if they're drunk from too often, so East End prostitutes who open their veins to their customers can find themselves turning, cut off from that income stream just as they develop a new thirst for blood that they can't afford to slake.  Being a vampire, in this setting, isn't a ticket to power and control as it is in other stories, simply because there are so many vampires, and the privilege of the rich and powerful still applies.  This is still a world of law, even if that law is unfair and exploitative--none of the newly-minted poor vampires, for example, are running wild feeding off their social superiors, no more than the real Victorian London played host to a class war--and Dracula's influence is merely exacerbating the inequality that ran rampant in Victorian London.
  
  This intricate worldbuilding also feels like the book's greatest weakness, however, because Newman often seems not to be interested in anything else, and especially not in a plot.  Anno Dracula was expanded from a novella, "Red Reign," in which one of the defeated characters from Dracula turns out to be Jack the Ripper.  But in doing so Newman doesn't seem to have expanded or complicated the story, so his characters--Charles Beauregard, a proto-James Bond employed by the Diogenes Club, and Geneviève Dieudonné, a vampire not of Dracula's line who is trying to alleviate the suffering he's brought to London--spend most of the novel in a holding pattern.  The readers find out who the Ripper is in the novel's prologue, but the characters don't even seem to be working hard at their investigation until a few chapters from book's end, and the actual conclusion, exciting as it is, feels disconnected from the novel's action, most of which seems to exist mainly so Newman can introduce characters who will recur in Anno Dracula's many sequels (two of which have already been published, with another coming later this year).  It's tempting to say that Anno Dracula has such a great premise that you wish someone had done something better with it, but that's obviously the thinking that got Newman to expand the original novella to begin with, and the result is a fascinating world and a lackluster story, so maybe keeping it short and sweet was the way to go.
  
  
• Child of Light by Muriel Sparks - The chapter on Frankenstein in The Madwoman in the Attic left me curious to find out more about Mary Shelley, and though I'm not quite sure who pointed me at Muriel Sparks's biography (originally published in 1951, revised and republished in 1987), I'm glad that it's the one I chose, and not just because of this recent article in the Times Literary Supplement arguing that it is partly responsible for the modern recognition of Shelley as a major figure in the history of the novel.  Sparks's short biography is split into two segments, a biography of Shelley's life and a critical reading of her major works.  The first places Shelley in the context of her reformer parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and moves on to her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley and her life after his death.  Sparks is perhaps a little sentimental about the marriage between Percy and Mary--to the extent that the bulk of the biography segment seems dedicated to this marriage even though Mary lived for decades after Percy's death--but she does make a compelling argument for its having been a genuine marriage of equals, who respected and encouraged each other's intellectual and literary pursuits, and does a good job of sketching not only Percy, but the other important figures of the Shelleys' married life, such as Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, and of course Lord Byron.  The criticism segment feels less grounded to someone who has only read Frankenstein, but it did leave me interested in reading more of Shelley's writing, in particular The Last Man, a post-apocalyptic novel that, according to her foreword, was out of print until Sparks drew attention to it.  I'm sure that in the intervening decades there have been more in-depth, less fond biographies of Shelley, but as an introduction to her life, and as a work of advocacy for a writer who has too often been dismissed as a footnote to her husband's accomplishments, Child of Light was exactly what I needed.
  
  
• The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates - This sprawling, baggy novel has got to be one of the most delightfully weird things I've read in years.  It's also almost indescribable, and the closest that I can come to explaining its loopy charm is to compare it to the similarly indescribable House of Leaves.  Like Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental novel, The Accursed is a multithreaded, metafictional horror story that often seems just on the cusp of solving itself--of revealing some underlying original sin that will explain the terror and misfortune that have infected its characters' lives, or some act of appeasement or redemption that its characters can perform in order to bring the story to a neat conclusion--only to veer off again into chaos, and the sense that the characters are trapped by forces too great to even notice them or their feeble attempts to fight back.  Where Danielewski played with the basic building blocks of the novel, however, down to the font and writing direction, Oates has written an outwardly more conventional work, a piece of historical fiction and literary pastiche, comprising letters, journal entries, and newspaper reports as well as straightforward narrative.  It's in the substance of what she describes that Oates lets the madness of her story shine through.
  
  The setting is Princeton, New Jersey, in the early years of the 20th century and the drawing rooms of the town's rich, aristocratic, almost incestuously interconnected ruling class.  Over the course of a year, the influential, respected Slade family experiences a stream of supernatural misfortunes, ranging from a "demon lover" who steals the oldest Slade granddaughter from her wedding to her young cousin being turned into stone.  Meanwhile, the friends, neighbors, and relatives of the Slade family also find themselves at the mercy of supernatural forces, seduced, driven mad, and murdered in ways that the community, so intent on not seeing and not speaking about certain things, can only barely acknowledge.  Oates draws a connection between the unspeakable hauntings and other transgressions which the aristocrats of Princeton will not see or speak of--lynchings just at the edge of town, the kidnapping and murder of a poor girl, the unhappiness and misfortune of servants which their masters remain oblivious to--but this is to suggest a relatively straightforward tale of supernatural comeuppance, of demons and ghosts appearing to claim the justice they were too weak to demand in life.  The Accursed is much weirder and more slippery than that, and at the points where it seems about to reduce itself to such a simple story Oates takes care to veer off into historical recreation (figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain rub shoulders with the fictional characters) or literary pastiche (virtually no major work or author of the late 19th century escapes being namechecked by the characters or referenced by the narrative, with the notable exception of Dracula, which seems at points to be the novel's template, and at others its antithesis).  The result is that The Accursed is never one thing or one story, and that even at the moments where it seems to wrap up its narrative it takes care to unravel a few loose ends that leave the reader wondering and uncertain.  It's a baffling read, and as I've said already almost indescribable, but it's also a hell of a lot of fun, and especially recommended to readers who enjoy scratching their heads over a novel long after they've turned the last page.
  
  
• The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes - If I had to pick a single word with which to describe Lauren Beukes's third novel, it would be "calculated."  A much more tame version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with heavy lashings of The Time Traveler's Wife thrown in, it seems to have been designed to cash in on the success of both works (and is certainly being marketed accordingly).  This, in itself, isn't a point against the novel--a good, effective thriller is worth reading even if it's derivative, and to my knowledge the meeting of serial killer thriller and time travel story hasn't been attempted before.  Beukes's execution, however, leaves too much to be desired.  As a thriller, The Shining Girls is no more than serviceable.  Serial killer Harper Curtis is moved to destroy women who "shine"--who have some potential for greatness, such a talent for art or science, or who try to change their community for the better.  It's a broad message that the book does very little with, as if merely laying out its fundamental misogyny would be enough.  The victims themselves tend to blur together--since they're all introduced shortly before Harper kills them, it quickly becomes obvious that it's pointless for the reader to invest in them.  This tends to reflect back on Harper, whose MO with almost everyone he meets, not just the shining girls, is to kill them almost immediately, which quickly makes him seem more boring than scary.  The book's other protagonist is Kirby Mazrachi, a shining girl who survived Harper's attack and is now trying to leverage an internship at a newsroom into an investigation of her case.  She's clearly meant to be the novel's Lisbeth Salander--edgy, punky, a little unbalanced--but Beukes's construction of her is too tame, too obviously intended to be outrageous without ever really crossing the line of audience identification, that Kirby comes off, at her worst, like a brat, and at her best, like a plucky girl reporter (which, given the kind of character she's meant to be, is probably worse than a brat).  It certainly doesn't help that her main relationship in the novel is a romance with a much older colleague.
  
  As for the time travel that gives the novel its unique edge, this comes from a house that Harper discovers in the 1930s, whose door opens onto various time periods where he can find the shining girls.  For this reason, the police don't connect his various murders, and even when they happen in close succession don't realize that they could be the work of a single killer because the regular pattern of escalation and specialization that is common to serial killers has been jumbled up.  Beukes uses the time travel conceit to jumble up her story as well, giving us Harker and Kirby's narratives in a relatively non-linear fashion, but this is actually a lot easier to follow than you might think, and given how by the numbers the thriller story is it's hard not to suspect that the non-linear narrative is there mainly to obscure that fact for as long as possible.  There's certainly no attempt in the novel to address time travel as anything more than a McGuffin that makes the plot possible and a little more complicated than it might be.  There are none of the fun closed loops, or scary questioning of free will, that you tend to find in good time travel stories.  In one scene, Harper dumps a body in the future, and finds the body of another person he knows already in the same spot.  You might expect Beukes to make the story of how the other body got there a circuitous tale of predestination, of people achieving certain results by trying to avoid them.  But instead, Harper simply meets his future victim, whom he doesn't really care about, and, since he's a psychopath who has already killed half a dozen people by that point, kills him with no compunction, and dumps him where he knows he'll be dumped.  Instead of playing with causality and free will (something that a serial killer story might very well find some interesting things to say about) time travel is merely a way of making it a great deal easier for Harper to do exactly what he was going to do anyway.  When Beukes finally reveals what's special about the house, it's similarly underwhelming (and not at all SFnal)--the house exists because it needed to exist, because otherwise Beukes wouldn't have had a story.  Or rather, she wouldn't have been able to conceal how familiar her story is, and how run of the mill her execution of it.
  
  
• Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson - Wilson's well-received debut novel takes place in an unnamed Emirate, where a young hacker called Alif is dumped by his girlfriend and then receives from her a manuscript that turns out to have ties both to the world of the spirits from the One Thousand and One Nights and to computer programming, unlocking a language that allows him to hack reality itself.  The setting, with its focus on the intersection between Islamic dictatorship and computer hackers, is vividly described, and though I can't speak to its accuracy Wilson's handling of the position of women in such a society is intriguingly nuanced, presenting characters who work within the limitations of such a society and others who even draw power from them, while also acknowledging how precarious a woman's position in the novel's world is.  The freshness of the setting doesn't quite do enough, however, to make up for the predictability of the plot, which is essentially a less vibrant, less fun recapitulation of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (albeit, and despite the centrality of computer hacking, from a fantastic perspective, as more emphasis is placed in the novel on magical creatures, and the plot is moved more through their powers than through Alif's hacking).
  
  Alif himself is a familiar figure, a callow, self-absorbed young man who is too busy feeling sorry for himself to notice how much the people (mostly women) around him do to make his life easier.  That he grows into maturity over the course of the novel never quite makes up for the fact that I wasn't that interested in reading a story about such a character to begin with, especially since that growth includes Alif learning to reject one "bad" love interest--the girl whose breakup with him precipitates the novel's plot, whom he learns to think of as shallow and greedy--and to love the "good" one.  This character, Alif's neighbor Dina, is the most interesting in the novel, strong-willed, resourceful, and possessing an unerring moral compass that is rooted but not summed up by her devout Muslim faith.  But she spends too much of the novel either working to help Alif or completely sidelined from the story, and the way that the novel contrasts her and Alif's other love interest--who at the end of the story returns to beg Alif to take her back, only for him to turn her away with superior detachment and go back to Dina--plays into some very poisonous virgin/whore narratives.  When the uproar about the all-male Clarke shortlist erupted a few weeks ago, Alif the Unseen was one of the titles most frequently mentioned as a deserving potential nominee that could have prevented the problem.  There are two or three books on the shortlist that I disliked enough that Alif would have made a reasonable replacement for them (even though it is only barely SFnal), but I don't think its presence would have made the shortlist much stronger, and it certainly wouldn't have deserved to win.
  
  
• The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord - For a while now I've been trying to put into words my reaction to Lord's second novel, and the best I can come up with is "puzzled."  Not so much because of the novel's project--a sort of quasi-Le Guin-ian, episodic social SF story whose disparate segments are tied together by a romance--as by its execution, which is steeped in romance tropes that leave me almost entirely cold.  The setting is a future in which several sub-species of humans coexist more or less peacefully and have colonized many planets (Lord is rather vague on the history of this setting or its broader shape outside of the one planet we see, but the story is so insular to that planet that this lack of detail isn't a problem).  In the novel's prologue, one of these sub-species, the Sadiri, who are renowned for their intelligence, emotional control, and powerful psychic powers (as several reviewers have by now pointed out, the Sadiri are essentially Vulcans), suffers a near-genocidal attack in which their home planet is rendered uninhabitable.  The novel's narrator is Grace Delarua, a government functionary on a planet that plays home to several genetically and culturally distinct types of humans, where the surviving, and mostly male, Sadiri arrive looking to intermarry into a community sufficiently similar, genetically and culturally, to their own, so that they can preserve their culture and way of life.  The novel's structure, then, is a wife search, as Grace joins a delegation made up of Sadiri representatives and her fellow bureaurcrats, who together visit various communities looking for one where the Sadiri can find suitable wives.  That search, however, seems intended mainly as a justification for throwing Lord's characters together.  Her focus is more on sketching the communities the expedition encounters and on the trouble they get into along their journey, and even more so, on a romance that develops between Grace and her opposite number, a Sadiri called Dllenahkh.
  
  My core difficulty with The Best of All Possible Worlds is that a lot of its emotional beats make no sense to me.  I understand why Grace falls for Dllenahkh--he is, in many ways, the epitome of the romance hero, stoic yet wounded, emotionally reserved except where our heroine is concerned--and if the reasons for his attraction to her are less obvious, Lord does a good enough job of positioning Grace as the heroine of a romantic story that it's obvious that someone--someone central and interesting--is going to fall for her, and Dllenahkh is the novel's top prize.  But aside from the fact that they are obviously intended for one another, Grace and Dllenahkh aren't a terribly compelling couple, and almost everything that happens around them, in the tangled interpersonal relationships that build up in the expedition, or in the communities they visit, is opaque and unconvincing.  Grace narrates the novel in a brisk, chatty voice, frank about her own foibles and obsessive about the details of the expedition, but her alleged perceptiveness, especially where emotions are concerned, doesn't come through the page.  Too often, Lord has characters interpret a line of dialogue, or an action, as conveying deep emotional turmoil, but the even, lighthearted tone of her narration (which tends to report speech, but drown out or downplay inflection and body language) means that this interpretation, though it always turns out to be accurate, isn't persuasive.  The characters come off as ridiculously oversensitive, and the author as telling rather than showing.  In one scene, for example, the expedition's security officer says something sarcastic to Grace, to which she responds that he has never liked her and is now riding her even harder.  But this is a novel in which all the characters (except the Sadiri) are sarcastic to one another all the time, and despite this exchange happening near the end of the novel this is the first we've heard that the security chief doesn't like Grace, so her sudden reaction to a throwaway and, ultimately, rather gentle prod feels completely overblown--at best, it makes Grace look bad; at worst, it drives home the feeling that we've been missing most of the story.
  
  For all that, the reason that The Best of All Possible Worlds leaves me merely puzzled, rather than straight-up disappointed, is that I'm pretty sure that Lord is deliberately reaching for reading protocols that I don't possess.  I've encountered the same style before in other romance stories (and been baffled by it there as well), which makes my inability to connect with the novel seem more like my problem than Lord's.  That said, I have other problems with the novel that can't be explained by its genre.  Lord's emphasis on Grace and Dllenahkh's relationship has the effect of drowning out the questions raised by her premise--what do the Sadiri mean when they say they want to preserve their culture?  Is that kind of chauvinism really an uncomplicated good?  Should they be more open to new ideas and customs?  Is it even possible for these not to seep into Sadiri culture as a result of intermarriage?--and of obscuring how problematic the Sadiri project, which often seems to view the sought-after wives as merely the means to an end, can come to seem (for example, the fact that hardly any Sadiri women were off-planet when the attack occurred, or the tossed-off reference to a project to grow Sadiri women from frozen embryos so that they can become the second wives of the long-lived male survivors after their human wives die).  Even when it comes to her main characters, Lord can be surprisingly casual about revelations that feel as if they could have fueled a novel in their own right.  In one interlude, Grace visits her family, and through Dllenahkh's interference realizes that her ex-fiancee, now her brother in law, has undisclosed psychic powers and has been using them to control her, her sister, and their children.  The revelation itself is one of the most successful in the novel, because for once Grace's opaqueness and inconsistent emotional reactions are deliberate signs that something is wrong, but the aftermath is handled almost glibly, with Grace continuing her journey while the rest of her family have (completely understandable) nervous breakdowns.  And towards the end of the novel, Grace discovers that Dllenahkh's first marriage ended because his wife was unfaithful to him, and that he broke her lover's jaw in response.  You might expect a woman--especially someone who has been described as level-headed and even-tempered, as Grace has been--to be taken aback by the revelation that her lover has such a propensity for violence, but Grace's reaction is merely to feel sorry for Dllenahkh for experiencing that kind of betrayal.  There are aspects of The Best of All Possible Worlds that I'm willing to excuse on the grounds of its genre even though they don't work for me at all, but the way that Lord leaves vast, and often very troubling, swathes of her premise and characters unexplored in order to give the romance room to breathe is, for me, a dealbreaker.
  
  
• Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker - Barker's 2007 novel Darkmans was another work, like House of Leaves and The Accursed, that I loved despite not being able to say why, or even having a very strong sense of what happened in it.  It left me eager to read more of Barker, but also a little nervous--what could possibly measure up to Darkmans's zany goodness?  Burley Cross Postbox Theft is thus a perfect place to start with Barker's remaining bibliography.  It's not as good as Darkmans, but it's so different from it that the comparison seems less urgent.  It's also a much more straightforward novel, one that not only unravels itself in the final chapter, but whose structure seems designed for ease of consumption.  As the title suggests, the central event is the theft of the contents of a postbox from the small English village of Burley Cross.  The local policeman charged with investigating the crime presents his report in the form of the letters themselves, recovered from a nearby dumpster, reasoning that one of them might provide the motive for the theft, but this framing story doesn't seem to hold even Barker's interest for very long (for one thing, as the constable himself points out, if the purpose of the theft was to retrieve a letter, then it's unlikely to have been recovered).
  
  The actual purpose of the novel seems to be to paint a highly satirical portrait of Burley Cross, and by extension of the English village, riven by family feuds, failing businesses, local politics, and sordid affairs.  The tone throughout the letters is relentlessly comedic and exaggerated.  In one letter, a villager spends pages upon pages detailing his feud with a neighbor over whether he should pick up his dog's feces from the moor.  Another is a translation, commissioned by the police, of a letter written in French by an African ex-pat, whose translator transforms a melancholy family reminiscence into a planned drug deal.  It's all a bit much, but Barker's satire is so brazen and over the top, and her ability to switch styles and tones so expert, that even her exaggerations are a delight.  It's a bit of a shame, then, when the framing story reasserts itself, and the investigating policeman presents a solution to the mystery that not only ties the letters together but simmers the novel's satire down to a more naturalistic, and almost sentimental, conclusion in which order is restored to the village.  That same benevolence underpinned Darkmans and made its excesses palatable, but in Burley Cross Postbox Theft, a novel that until its final chapter seemed merciless in its skewering of the villagers and their petty disputes, Barker's sudden shift towards sentiment feels less grounded, and maybe even like a loss of nerve.  Still, finding Barker writing something so conventional (for certain values of conventional that would still be quite weird for any other writer) leaves me a little less nervous about exploring the rest of her bibliography.  Even if none of it lives up to Darkmans, there will certainly be some worthwhile reading there.

The (Belated) Pilots of Spring

The original plan was for this post to go up a month or so ago, when all of these shows were really at the pilot phase or just a bit after it.  But with one thing and another, here we are already at summer's doorstep (and thus, at the doorstep of the summer pilot season), and some of the new shows I'm about to write about have already wrapped up their debut seasons.  Still, there's a lot here to talk about--some interesting ideas even if the execution sometimes leaves a bit to be desired, and several venues that I hadn't been paying much attention to and which now might be worth a closer look.

• In the Flesh - Despite its unnaturally long afterlife, the zombie craze is at least five years past its peak, so it's a bit surprising to find anyone, much less the BBC, trying to put a fresh spin on it.  Still, the premise that In the Flesh comes up with is at least a little bit different, as its focus isn't on surviving the zombie uprising (which has already happened, and been quelled, by the time the series begins) but on one zombie's reintegration into society.  In the series's world, zombies are actually suffering from Partially Deceased Syndrome, and can be returned to their old selves (if not to full life) with regular courses of medication.  Teenager Kieran (Luke Newberry) is one such PDS sufferer, and at the series's beginning he is reunited with his family and returns with them to a small, insular Northern village, whose leaders--particularly Bill (Steve Evets), the head of the anti-zombie militia which emerged during the rising and who is now missing the respect and social status he gained during that period--are unhappy that Kieran and his kind are being released back into the population.  To begin with, there's some interesting handling of the villagers' hostility to the policy of reintegrating PDS sufferers.  In particular, the choice to fold that reaction into a historical distrust that rural Northerners feel towards Southern government (which, we're told, left the countryside to fend for itself during the worst of the rising, concentrating the army in the cities) feels nicely nuanced, since after all, not wanting Kieran and people like him in the neighborhood isn't an entirely unreasonable stance--he did kill people, and could return to his feral state at any time if he went off his meds.  In fact, the series's opening scenes reveal that there are zombies who are choosing to do just that.
  
  Before long, however, In the Flesh comes down on the side that sees anti-zombie sentiment as narrow-minded prejudice, and specifically an extension of the kind of small-town conformity that made the sensitive, weird, artistically-inclined Kieran feel out of place in his home town even before his undeath.  The show finally draws a parallel between hatred of zombies and homophobia, as it slowly and delicately reveals that Kieran was involved with Bill's son Rick (David Walmsley), and committed suicide after Rick was killed in Afghanistan.  When Rick turns out to be a PDS sufferer as well, the show gets to draw attention to the way that prejudice can sometimes seem irrationally distributed.  Rick, who can perform traditional masculinity, gets a pass on his father's, and the town's, hostility, even though everyone knows that he's just as dead (and just as gay) as Kieran, and despite being vocal in Kieran's defense.  The hypocrisy of forcing Kieran to sit in a designated PDS area at the local pub until Rick insists that he be allowed to sit with everyone (and Rick's hypocrisy in downing drinks he can't digest, and which make him sick, just to seem alive) draw attention to the fact that prejudice is sometimes less about what people are and more about how they present themselves--Rick is tolerated because he's "properly" ashamed of what he is and tries to perform normalcy, while Kieran is ostracized for not hiding it. 
  
  None of that, however, gets around the core problem of paralleling gays and zombies, which is the same core problem of any work that tries to parallel a discriminated-against group of humans with supernatural creatures who have the potential to be extraordinarily dangerous--works which nevertheless keep being made with no acknowledgement of how flawed their premise is.  Not helping matters is the fact that In the Flesh is weirdly coy about actually using the G word, and won't even come out and say that Kieran and Rick were lovers even though there's no other way to interpret its insinuations.  The result feels weirdly retrograde--as if we were back in the day when naming homosexuality on TV was impossible, and so PDS was needed as a metaphor for it.  That's not to say that there's nothing worth watching for here.  Kieran's arc of returning to life, going from numb and monosyllabic when he first returns home to a slow rediscovery of his emotions, his sense of humor, and his rebellious streak, is well handled, especially by Newberry, and a joy to watch (and all the more impressive given that it's accomplished over a mere three episodes).  His relationships with his family--parents who are burying their pain and anger over his suicide beneath social niceties, and a sister who is torn between loyalty to her family and her new role as Bill's anti-zombie disciple--are meaty and affecting, and the suppressed yearning between him and Rick almost palpable.  But when it comes down to it, it's hard to understand why In the Flesh needed to be a zombie story, and the most likely reason seems to be that if you told the same story about young gay people in a small, conservative town, it would come off as familiar to the point of being trite, and its ending tragic in a way that is nowadays considered exploitative and melodramatic.  The series's end leaves some open threads, and it's possible that a second season will better develop the zombie side of the story, but as it stands In the Flesh feels like a well-made miscalculation.


• Rectify - Part of the reason that I'm coming down so hard on In the Flesh is that I'm writing this piece after having watched Rectify, one of the first original series produced by The Sundance Channel, which tells a very similar story without resorting to a genre twist that it isn't ultimately very interested in, and ends up doing much more with it.  After nineteen years on death row, Daniel Holden (Aden Young) is released when DNA evidence sheds doubt on his conviction for the rape and murder of his teenage girlfriend.  Like In the Flesh, Rectify is a series about a character who is returning to life, rediscovering not only the world he's been locked away from, but feelings and aspects of his humanity that had been allowed to whither during his years of incarceration.  And as in the BBC's zombie show, the small Georgia town that Daniel returns to is not entirely welcoming, with many townspeople still convinced of his guilt, either because even as a teenager Daniel was an oddball who never quite fit in, or because their careers have been made on the back of his conviction (the premise of Rectify obviously draws very strongly on the West Memphis Three case, which makes it rather disappointing that the series's creators opted to replace the victims in that case with a raped girl).  Even as he enjoys his newfound freedom, the authorities are planning to retry Daniel, and other townspeople might take the law into their own hands.
  
  The focus of the first, six-episode long season (which spans the first six days after Daniel's release) is less on these developments, however, and more on Daniel's rough reintegration back into the world, and on his family's attempts to reconnect with him and help him with that process.  The result can sometimes be a little stagey--Daniel in particular is prone to making long speeches that spell out his inner turmoil and the shock of being out in the world after having resigned himself to death--and the show sometimes can't seem to decide whether Daniel is suffering from arrested development, still the eighteen year old who was locked up all those years ago, or whether those years have allowed him to grow learned and introspective (his primary activity in prison, we see, was reading), only for the bustle of the real world to knock his serenity aside.  But Young is a strong performer in either case, and the low-key, often dialogue-light scripts give him plenty of scope to convey how painful, and yet also wonderful, it is for Daniel to be back in the world after being locked up for so long.  Rectify is at its best when it shows us Daniel experiencing the world--lying in the grass, or riding a bicycle with his teenage brother--or trying, and often failing, to process what's happened to him--at the instigation of his sister-in-law, he decides to be baptized, hoping to wash away the ugliness of what's happened to him, but the feeling of exhilaration proves temporary, and his interest turns out be more in the woman than in God.  (The show is equally strong at showing the reactions of Daniel's bewildered, well-meaning family to his unexpected return, with Abigail Spencer and J. Smith-Cameron in particular shining as his sister and mother.)  Rectify is less convincing at constructing the story of Daniel's new trial, or teasing the mystery of who really killed his girlfriend (including the question of whether Daniel might not, after all, be guilty), and towards the end of the season these plot strands veer towards the melodramatic, sharply contrasting with the low key naturalism of Daniel's regrowth.  I'm a little concerned, given the events of the season's end, that the just-greenlit second season will veer more towards this melodrama, but for the time being I'm content to admire Rectify as a narrowly focused character drama, a window onto how the soul can be brutalized by incarceration, and how it can return to life.


• Top of the Lake - Continuing our theme of repressive small towns and the misfits who are victimized by them, the New Zealand-produced miniseries Top of the Lake begins with the attempted suicide of twelve-year-old Tui (Jacqueline Joe), who is discovered to be pregnant.  When the girl disappears soon after, the  police call in Robin Griffin (Elizabeth Moss), a former local who now works for the Australian police investigating sex crimes in minors, and who has returned to New Zealand to nurse her dying mother.  The premise sounds like the beginning of a mystery, and in terms of its style and atmosphere Top of the Lake does share a lot with the moody, miserabilist Scandinavian sex crime mysteries that are all the rage these days.  But the show's focus isn't really on the mystery (which anyway isn't a murder--Tui runs off on her own, and though the characters repeatedly stress how dangerous that is in her condition, she seems able to look after herself in the wild) so much as it is on the town of Laketop and its secrets, most of which touch on gender relations.  Tui's father, Matt (Peter Mullan), is the town's local crime-lord, used to getting his own way in all things, and happy to resort to violence to get it, but driven by an abusive relationship with his mother.  At the beginning of the series he's incensed because a lakefront plot of land called Paradise, where his mother is buried, has been sold out from under his nose to a commune of middle-aged big city women who have followed an androgynous guru (Holly Hunter) on a voyage of self-discovery, and find Matt's bluster and intimidation both ineffective and typical of what they came to Paradise to escape.  Matt's youngest son, Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), and the only one to get out of the family business, is Robin's high school sweetheart, who like her is haunted by the night on which she was raped by several older men, who were never prosecuted.  The police officer in charge at the time, Al (David Wenham), is Robin's current boss, who despite his urbane exterior is in too deep with Matt, and prefers to run the town according to an old-fashioned, eye-for-an-eye code of propriety rather than Robin's law and order approach.
  
  The result is that Top of the Lake feels patchy--various plot strands, such as Matt's lingering dysfunction where his mother is concerned, or Robin's strained relationship with her mother, who compelled her to carry the baby conceived by her rape, are raised but neither delved into nor resolved--and a lot like a crash course in rape culture 101.  Sometimes this can work, as the ways that the characters are shaped, and deformed, by the expectations of gendered behavior and roles they were raised with feel fresh and organic--when Johnno finds himself incapable of confessing his love to Robin until he runs the ringleader in her rape out of town, or when Al proudly tells her that her rapists "got theirs" because after she left town, he and several other men gave them a whuppin', and clearly expects her to be satisfied by this act (something, he explains, that Robin's father would have done if he had been alive).  At other points the story is intriguingly slippery in the way it handles gender roles--in one scene, one of Hunter's disciples walks into the local bar and imperiously offers to pay for a quickie that takes place entirely on her terms, and the man who abides quite happily with those terms turns out to be Robin's chief rapist.  But for the most part, Top of the Lake feels like it's parroting the basic talking points of your average feminist internet discussion, as when a boy who is the town misfit turns out to be gay, or when Matt, searching for the worst possible insult to hurl at the commune women, finally settles on "unfuckable."
  
  It's no doubt a little churlish to complain at this obviousness, since for a lot of people the ideas that Top of the Lake handles are by no means obvious, and it lobs them at the screen with such speed that viewers who have never heard the term "rape culture" will no doubt feel overwhelmed by how baldly co-creators Jane Campion and Gerard Lee boil the balance of power in Laketown down to gender and the essentialist, supposedly chivalrous but really pernicious attitudes of the men in charge of it.  On top of which, the show is beautifully shot, making excellent use of the New Zealand scenery, and often quite tense, and it delivers a moving performance from Moss, as a tough woman who has never been allowed to process a terrible trauma, who falls apart when forced to confront it again and then has to put herself back together.  But none of that gets around the fact that to someone who has a bit of grounding in these issues, Top of the Lake doesn't feel as revelatory as it clearly wants to be, and that in the absence of that revelation, it's easier to notice how lackadaisical its approach to its central mystery is, how slack the pacing is in some of its episodes, and how abrupt its ending is.  I don't want to come down too hard on Top of the Lake, because there isn't a lot of TV that is even trying to deal with issues of rape in a way that is non-sensationalist, and that recognizes it as a sickness of the whole community, not a single perpetrator.  But on top of this admirable accomplishment, I wish that Top of the Lake were also better TV.


• Hannibal - Of all the many things that are weird about this prequel series to Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, perhaps the weirdest is how of a piece it feels with showrunner Bryan Fuller's still-lamented Pushing Daisies.  Like that show (and Fuller's earlier Wonderfalls), Hannibal is an intensely visual series, one that often concentrates on interiors, and on the quirky, idiosyncratic design elements that some hardworking set designer has painstakingly collected and arranged just so within them--a weird labyrinth pattern on a bathroom tile that no sane person would ever want in their house, some beautifully carved wall paneling.  One could, in fact, argue that the two shows have the same visual sensibility with different color palettes, Hannibal's being much darker and gloomier (that shift certainly expresses itself in the two shows' fondness for food porn--Pushing Daisies was all technicolor desserts while Hannibal is all meaty main courses in dark reds and browns, but both are somewhat disturbingly mouth-watering).  And the truth is, for all the supposed difference in their subject matters, Pushing Daisies was arguably as preoccupied with death and darkness as Hannibal is, and its main character was, like Hannibal's (and despite the latter's title) a young man with an affinity for death that he doesn't fully understand, and which has warped his life.  In Hannibal this is Will Graham (Hugh Dancy), a character from Red Dragon who is preternaturally empathetic towards violent killers--in Thomas Harris's version of the story, because he's just on the cusp of being one himself, though Hannibal is less convincing on this point.  Emotionally fragile and rattled by the horrors that chasing serial killers confronts him with, Will resists the FBI's top profiler Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne) when he tries to return him to active duty, so Jack suggests a release valve in the form of sessions with a psychiatrist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), who quickly becomes entangled with the entire FBI team.
  
  Hannibal is beautifully shot, well-acted, and has sharp, witty scripts that often riff in interesting ways on the canon established in Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, but seven episodes into the season, I'm still not clear on what it's trying to do.  Fuller has stated that he doesn't plan to tell the story of Lecter's capture until the show's second season (which at the moment seems an uncertain prospect), but that leaves the question of what story he's trying to tell in his first season.  At various points in the season so far, Lecter has tried to hobble the FBI's investigation of his murders, drive a wedge between Jack and Will, torment Jack over the death of an FBI trainee, and encourage Will to give in to his murderous urges.  But he hops between these schemes haphazardly, dropping one half-finished and picking up another, and sometimes seeming perfectly happy to actually help the FBI in their inquiries.  There's no sense of what Lecter wants, or indeed of who he is as a person.  This is a problem that afflicts Will as well--for all the show's harping on it, his growing disconnect from reality and alleged propensity for murder don't feel as urgent or as convincing as Hannibal needs them to be.  (The only character who escapes this sense of malaise and comes off seeming like a real human being is Jack, and Fishburne's performance is surprisingly nuanced, especially to someone who has gotten used to thinking of him as little more than Morpheus.) 
  
  The result is a show made up of great scenes that don't seem to add up to any sort of whole.  Most of the time, it feels as if Hannibal is putting all its eggs in the atmosphere and visuals basket, and here's where the comparison to Pushing Daisies makes Hannibal look not only like the lesser show, but like a heartless one.  Pushing Daisies presented its audience with an over the top, heavily stylized visual aesthetic, and then pushed through it to reveal the real, raw emotions pulsing beneath all that carefully arranged set dressing--pain, grief, anger, yearning.  Hannibal takes those emotions, and the terrible acts of murder and mutilation that express them or cause them, and reduces them to aesthetics.  A major component of the show's visual style is how it arranges the bodies of murdered people--one killer uses his barely-alive victims as a growing medium for fungus, and the camera lingers over the grotesque sight of naked bodies with mushrooms sprouting out of them; another skins his victims' backs and rearranges the strips of flesh to resemble wings.  It's all beautifully shot, of course, but also emotionally numb--we're not meant to feel pity for the victims of these mutilations, or even for their killers for being compelled to such horrible acts; we're just meant to feel awed (and a little horrified) at their inventiveness.  With the invention of Hannibal Lecter Thomas Harris is largely responsible for pop culture's fascination with the urbane, sophisticated, impossibly intelligent serial killer, despite the fact that in reality most serial killers are pathetic mouth-breathers who get off on murders that are as unimaginative as they are cruel.  Hannibal seems to be taking that fascination to its illogical conclusion, asking us to not only sympathize with Lecter (something that Harris's original books did already, by having Lecter target people who are rude or unpleasant) but to see human beings as he does--as pieces of meat to be artfully arranged and then eaten.  The result is a smart, compelling show that I can't let myself think too much about, because when I do I find myself getting rather sick.


• Defiance - SyFy (and the various media sites that have been publicizing it like crazy) has proudly touted Defiance as a return to proper, future-set science fiction, with aliens, spaceships, and futuristic technology.  And "return" does feel like the right way to describe the show, since despite an original premise, there's almost nothing about Defiance that isn't depressingly derivative.  That premise is that several decades ago, a convoy carrying refugees from several alien species arrived on Earth, and promptly began terraforming the planet to suit their needs.  A war ensued but ended indecisively, and now the transformed Earth is home to humans and aliens, who sometimes manage to live peacefully and sometimes not.  There's an enormous amount of potential here: you've got an alien planet that is also Earth; humans living on a world that both is and isn't theirs; alien cultures forced to rub shoulders in the wake of an unforgivable violation.  So it's sad but, given the venue, somehow unsurprising that instead of trying to explore this premise and all the questions it raises about the concept of alienness, what Defiance does instead is repeat the basic plot of Eureka--a sarcastic, bull-headed outsider (Grant Bowler) rolls into the titular weird town with his aggro daughter (Stephanie Leonidas), clashes with the goody-two-shoes, rule-following female leader (Julie Benz) who sees him as nothing but an oaf, and somehow manages to save the day through the sheer power of his masculinity, which leads to him being made the head of local law enforcement.
  
  There's a healthy dollop of Firefly sprinkled over, so the hero is Mal Reynolds-ish ex-soldier and lout, his daughter is actually an adopted alien who has mad martial arts skills and psychic powers, the town is a ramshackle frontier settlement struggling to survive alien hordes and stay independent from surrounding empires, and one of the main characters is a madam (Mia Kirshner).  (As an aside, when the time comes to sum up Joss Whedon's contribution to feminism in pop culture, let it not be forgotten that he has single-handedly convinced an entire generation of writers that no futuristic setting is complete without a Miss Kitty.)  None of this, however, does much to conceal how conventional Defiance's storytelling ultimately is.  This is a series whose main source of tension, so far, comes from local politics--a squabble for power between the town's two premier businessmen.  That one of these characters is an alien and the other is excavating the ruins of St. Louis turns out to matter a lot less than you'd expect.  In itself, of course, this needn't be a bad thing--a lot of science fiction series have gotten mileage out of telling entirely mundane stories in an alien setting.  But to do that, you need sharp writing and well-drawn characters, and Defiance is derivative and unoriginal all the way down.  In four episodes, there hasn't been a single surprising moment or character beat.  Even stories that touch on alien cultures are thoroughly conventional--in one episode, human and alien authorities clash over an alien ritual that the humans see as cruel, but the story progresses with depressing predictability, and with no recognition of the fact that these are invading aliens we're talking about.
  
  Only two characters on the show--Irisa, the hero's adopted alien daughter, and Stahma (Jaime Murray), the wife of the alien businessman who turns out to be the brains of his operation--feel like more than obvious types, but on their own they can't combat the predictability of the rest of the cast and the show's storytelling.  Especially since, when given the chances to shade in these predictable characters, Defiance resolutely backs away.  The most recent episode had the opportunity to portray the stick-in-the-mud mayor, Amanda, as an ambiguous figure when it reveals that she has for years lied to her sister about their mother's death--in reality, the mother chose not to go back through an alien attack to retrieve the younger sister, and told Amanda to meet her at prearranged location, which Amanda didn't do.  Instead of suggesting that Amanda's good qualities, such as her devotion to her sister, come from the same rigid, unforgiving place that led her to cut all ties with her mother, the episode reaches the most simplistic conclusion, painting Amanda as a saint and her mother as a villain.  It's an approach that is sadly typical of Defiance's storytelling, and doesn't leave me with much hope that this show will find--or that it is even searching for--its own identity.


• Orphan Black - For all of Defiance's inexplicably positive reception, the undisputed winner of the spring's genre show buzz wars is BBC America's Orphan Black.  The show begins with Sarah (Tatiana Maslany), a grifter and ne'er-do-well who has just left her drug dealer boyfriend and stolen his stash of drugs, witnessing the suicide of Beth, a woman who looks just like her.  She immediately switches identities with Beth, scheming to empty her bank accounts, but soon discovers that the dead woman was one of several doppelgangers, or rather clones, who are now being hunted and killed off.  It's easy to imagine that the idea for Orphan Black came from someone watching Dollhouse and wondering what that show would have been like with someone who could actually switch personalities on a dime in the lead role, and Maslany is indeed the chameleon that Eliza Dushku wasn't, so convincing as several very different people that it's sometimes easy to forget that these characters are being played by the same actress (especially when the clones appear in the same scene together, which is handled seamlessly not only by the production but again by Maslany, who has to act against herself and carries off this task, too, as if it were effortless).  Impressive as this is, however, what it amounts to is an acting exercise, and when called upon to wrap that exercise in a plot, Orphan Black stumbles.  To begin with, Sarah, though impressive for her quick thinking and resourcefulness as she insinuates herself into Beth's life, is frustratingly short-sighted.  It takes her forever to realize that something strange was going on in Beth's life, or to fully commit to investigating her other clones.  For the most part this is because of her focus on getting at Beth's money, but this too is in service of a short-sighted goal--Sarah wants to regain custody of the daughter she abandoned, and doesn't realize that merely having a lot of money isn't enough to make her a good mother.  Later in the first season, Sarah grows as a person and starts caring about people other than herself (well, technically, since the people she comes to care about are her clones, she still is concerned only with herself), but this redemption arc feels unearned--no one whose first response to witnessing a suicide is robbing the dead should find it so easy to rediscover their moral compass.
  
  What's particularly disappointing about this is that Orphan Black had the chance to do something different and new with the reformed grifter premise.  The encounter with her clones could have spurred Sarah to introspection, to wondering what makes her who she is, and what kind of person she would be if she'd grown up in different circumstances.  Instead, Orphan Black's writers don't seem to have considered the importance of the fact that their main characters are genetically identical, fundamentally the same person.  They've taken the Dollhouse approach, in which the clones are merely masks to be worn--a cop, a housewife, a scientist--and in constructing these characters they've often plumped for the most stereotypical versions of these types.  So Alison, the affluent housewife, is uptight and a little bit racist, and Cosima, the scientist, is geeky and slightly weird.  Maslany brings both of these characters to life--Alison, in particular, is a delight, barely tamping down on her rage at the fact that her picture perfect life is being disrupted by her being a freak of nature--but she can't find the common thread that lies at both their cores, because it doesn't exist.  Orphan Black had the opportunity to ask some interesting questions about identity--what does it mean, for example, that Cosima is attracted to women while none of the other clones are?--but its choice to construct its characters from stereotypes scuttles that chance--Cosima's queerness feels like yet another trope, like the fact that, as a scientist, she naturally wears glasses even though none of the other clones seem to need corrective lenses.  What's left, then, is a technothriller, and an effective and interesting one at that, and I suppose that it's not fair for me to criticize a show for not telling the story I would have liked it to tell.  Still, I can't help but wish that the most successful new genre show of the year had a little more ambition.

Crooked Timber Seminar on Felix Gilman's Half-Made World Books

If you haven't yet discovered the group blog Crooked Timber's book seminars, in which several participants are invited to write essays about a certain book, you're in for a treat.  Previous seminar subjects include Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, China Miéville's Iron Council, and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. 

The latest seminar focuses on Felix Gilman's duology The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City, which I previously reviewed for Strange Horizons, and to my great surprise and pleasure I was asked to participate.  My entry, "On the Meeting of Epic Fantasy and Western in Felix Gilman's Half-Made World Duology," appears today.

Don't forget to check out previous entries by Francis Spufford, John Holbo, and Lizarbreath, with future pieces from Miriam Burstein, Henry Farrell, and Maria Farrell yet to come.

The 2013 Clarke Award Shortlist Reviewed + SpecFic '12

This evening will see the announcement of the winner of the 2013 Clarke Award, after the more than normally contentious response to this year's shortlist.  At Strange Horizons, I take on the traditional task of reviewing the shortlist (in two parts)--for the first time since 2008, which means I've had five years to forget how exhausting a task this is, but also how much fun.  At the Strange Horizons blog, Niall Harrison has collected other reviews of the nominated books (including several others from Strange Horizons), as well as the various responses to the shortlist that have appeared in the last month (in three parts).

In other self-promotion news, my review of Frances Hardinge's A Face Like Glass was selected to appear in the inaugural volume of SpecFic, a series seeking to highlight online genre criticism, with the first volume edited by Justin Landon and Jared Shurin (as were several Strange Horizons reviews).  A full list of contributors can be found here, and the book itself can be purchased here, with proceeds going to the charity Room to Read.  SpecFic '13 is already in the works, and if you'd like to suggest works for that anthology, editors Ana Grilo and Thea James have set up a website--my first (and admittedly, not terribly original) choices are Sophia McDougall's utterly essential "The Rape of James," which I'll be referring to from now whenever the question of "realism" in grimdark fantasy crops up, and Jonathan McCalmont's "How to Fix (Discussion of) the Hugo Awards," which says a lot of what I would have said about this year's Hugo nominations, and the depressingly toxic conversation that has emerged around them, if I'd had the energy to wade into it.

Short Fiction Snapshot #2

The second installment of Short Fiction Snapshot (see here) is live at Strange Horizons.  This time my topic was Tori Truslow's "Boat in Shadows, Crossing" from Beneath Ceaseless Skies.  As before, you're invited to read the story and join in a discussion in the comments.

Review: The Rise of Ransom City by Felix Gilman

Over at Strange Horizons, I review Felix Gilman's The Rise of Ransom City, following up on my review of the first volume in (what I assume is) this duology, The Half-Made World.  I enjoyed The Rise of Ransom City very much (it was even on my Hugo ballot) and there's a lot that Gilman is doing that I don't think anyone else currently writing fantasy is interested in, which I hope to write more about in the near future.  But nevertheless, there are problems with this sequence, and the way it fantasizes American Western expansion, that can't be ignored.

Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks

My progress through Iain M. Banks's science fiction novels, and particularly his Culture sequence, has been deliberately haphazard.  I've picked the books up as they came to me, in used bookstores, convention dealers' rooms, and my trips abroad.  It's one of the strengths of the Culture sequence that the universe it describes is so broad and full of storytelling potential, and yet underpinned by basic rules that are so straightforward and clearly defined, that you can pick it up at almost any point and in almost any order without diminishing your experience of either the individual books or the sequence as a whole (in that sense, though I wonder if either author would thank me for the comparison, it reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Discworld).  In my last few forays into the Culture, however, with Matter and Surface Detail, there's been a growing sense that I've been missing something, and comments to my reviews of both novels have cited the importance of Look to Windward in understanding the focus and preoccupations of the later Culture books.  So for the first time since I started reading Banks in 2005, I've made the point of seeking out a particular one of his novels.

Look to Windward is, famously, the novel about what happens when the Culture gets it wrong.  Previous books established the Culture as a society of hedonistic do-gooders, so persuaded by the rightness of their anything goes, post-scarcity, radically egalitarian way of life that they seek to export it--often through diplomacy, but sometimes also through subterfuge and interference in the inner workings of alien societies meant to direct them towards more peaceful, more progressive social modes.  In Look to Windward, that interference has exploded in the Culture's face.  Seeking to improve the lot of the Chelgrians, a relatively powerful race whose society has for thousands of years been governed by a carefully stratified caste system, the lowest rungs of which are treated as barely human, the Culture manipulated Chelgrian politics so that a low-caste person was elected to high office and began to implement reforms to the caste system.  Instead of leading to peaceful equality, however, the lower castes, having gained control of the military, immediately launched a short but brutal war of revenge against the higher castes, which ended only after the Culture admitted its culpability, but not before claiming the lives of five billion Chelgrians.  Now former Chelgrian soldier Quilan, whose wife was killed in the war, is traveling to the Culture orbital Masaq', ostensibly to convince the composer Ziller, who exiled himself from Chel in protest of the caste system before the war, to return home.  His real mission, however, is one of vengeance.

When you get a decent way into a sequence as rich, varied, and original as the Culture books (and Look to Windward is the seventh of the nine books that I've read), there's a pretty strong impulse towards taxonomy.  For example, while Banks has always been a discursive, freewheeling author, fond of gonzo inventiveness for its own sake and always willing to pause his story in order to take it in, the Culture novels can nevertheless be divided into those--like The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, and Matter--that are purpose-driven, whose characters are proceeding towards the fulfillment of some task or mission which gives the novel its shape, and those--like Consider Phlebas, Excession, and Surface Detail--that are more about the journey, with the actual action of the novel taking place far above the main characters' sphere.   

Look to Windward is very much of the latter type.  Its action alternates, for the most part, between Ziller and Quilan, but the former chapters are, as has become typical of Culture novels of this type, a travelogue.  The irascible Ziller, made bitter by the realization that he can't live with his society's ingrained injustice, but lacks the strength to stay home and fight it, travels, accompanied by another of Masaq's alien residents, Kabe, to see the orbital's most astonishing and exotic sights, many of them venues for the extreme, and occasionally lethal, sports for which Masaq' has become famous.  Which gives Ziller and Kabe the opportunity to ponder the Culture.  What does it mean that people who live in utter safety and comfort seek out the terror and danger of, say, rafting along a river of lava?  Would the experience be any different in a VR simulation, especially given that even those who undertake it for real are under the care of the Mind who acts as Masaq's hub, who could whisk them away from danger in an instant?  Does courting danger in the knowledge that your personality is backed-up and that even if you die, you'll be be reactivated in a new body, constitute cheating?  Or is it wasteful and childish to engage in extreme sports without a backup, risking a meaningless, unnecessary death?

By the third or fourth time that Ziller and Kabe have had this conversation, it's pretty easy to guess that they are harping on one of the novel's important Themes.  And, though at that point one begins to feel a niggling wish that Banks would get to the point, at least the sights that the two tourists observe are imbued with typical Banks-ian verve and inventiveness.  Other Themes are less elegantly introduced: a long infodump, coming seemingly out of nowhere, discusses the art of building AIs, or Minds, and the way that these beings will always reflect their society's core traits and assumptions, no matter how different and more advanced their thought processes are from the creatures who built them (this segment also introduces the intriguing notion that a Mind built purposefully to have no cultural baggage--known as a "Perfect AI"--will always and immediately choose to Sublime, leaving the physical plane of the galaxy for the unknown, a truism that the Culture "more or less alone, seemed to find [...] almost a personal insult"); another introduces the Chelgrian-Puen, a segment of Chelgrian society who have Sublimed, and now spend their time maintaining and controlling the Chelgrian heaven, into which they admit Chelgrians whose personalities were backed up upon death if they're deemed worthy (a concept that Banks would go on to explore further in Surface Detail).  Both of these concepts turn out to be crucial to the novel's plot--Quilan's mission, for example, to destroy the Mind that acts as Masaq's hub, which will cause the deaths of about ten percent of the orbital's inhabitants in the ensuing chaos, has been made necessary by the Chelgrian-Puen, who have decreed that the war dead will not be admitted into heaven unless they are avenged by an equal number of Culture deaths.  Nevertheless, there is a sense while reading Look to Windward that it is less a story than a construction project, its pieces slowly falling into place--the chapters told from Quilan's point of view, for example, reveal his mission and his training process in dribs and drabs as he remembers them (he has been induced to forget his real mission, to protect against having his mind read)--until the final piece makes sense of the whole edifice.

Until that happens, Look to Windward feels very unsatisfying.  As a discussion of the Culture's right to intervene in the affairs of other races, the Chelgrian incident isn't quite fit for purpose.  It's pretty easy, after all, to say that the Culture was wrong to intervene in a situation in which that intervention had unforeseen, negative consequences to the tune of billions of deaths--a result that, as even this book points out, is vanishingly rare.  The real question should be whether the Culture is right to intervene, period, even when everything goes according to plan.  Don't the races it affects have the right to develop on their own, to perhaps find their way to a free, egalitarian equilibrium that doesn't necessarily reflect every one of the Culture's values (a point that I think was made much more successfully in Use of Weapons)?

On that level, in fact, the Chelgrians feel like a very bad example of a situation in which the Culture was wrong to interfere.  From what we see of them through Quilan's eyes, they were clearly never going to change on their own, especially not with the Chelgrian-Puen enforcing the caste system, literally, from heaven.  They've taken no lesson from the war about the caste system's problems (as Ziller points out, this is partly the Culture's doing--being able to blame someone else for the war means that the Chelgrians don't have to examine their own behavior--but that unexamined stance, as we hear from the exclusively high-caste membership of the conspiracy against the Culture, is an unremitting belief that the caste system is naturally ordained).  And, as we see in a scene in which Quilan witnesses one of his superiors bait, bully, and finally murder a helpless low-caste servant, whatever delusions they have about the caste system protecting all members of society equally are just that.  After getting a long, hard look at Chelgrian society through Quilan's eyes, it's hard not to conclude that the only thing wrong with the Culture's choice to meddle with it was having bungled the job, but even that doesn't feel like a meaningful criticism.  Trying to undermine millennia-old social stratification through a single change of the person at the top is such a childishly heavy-handed approach, completely out of step with the more subtle, long-term interference seen in novels like Use of Weapons and The Player of Games, that it's hard to take it seriously as an examination of the Culture's limitations.

If Look to Windward is nevertheless a more successful and engaging novel than other grand tour Culture novels like Consider Phlebas and Excession, it is mainly because of Quilan.  Banks isn't exactly known for his deft character work, but nevertheless Quilan's grief for his wife, whose death happened too suddenly even for her personality to be recorded and taken to heaven, is affecting.  Quilan wishes for the same oblivion--the reason that he accepted the mission to Masaq'--and a sizable portion of the memories he recovers have to do with his debates with counselors, spiritual advisers, and his superiors over whether that desire, and his unwillingness to even try to let go of his grief, is selfish or masochistic.  It's unusual for Banks's SF to focus so much on the human aspect of his story, and particularly on emotions like grief (the only other example that occurs to me is the strand in Excession in which a woman fuming over a failed relationship stays pregnant for forty years, and though this didn't strike me at the time of reading the novel I've since read reactions from women who have actually been pregnant that lead me to give that plotline quite the side-eye).  Banks underscores that grief by interspersing Quilan's recent memories with recollections of his life with his wife, which help to make the character, and Quilan's loss, more real (these also go some way--though by no means all the way--towards alleviating the problem of a novel whose only major female character dies in its opening pages, a death that is, if not quite a refrigeration, certainly the prime motivator for one of the novel's major male characters). 

Somewhat more prosaically, the Quilan chapters are also engaging for their slow reveal of the full extent of his mission, which alternate from horror to a sort of deranged logic--after all, if the godlike beings who control your heaven are refusing to let the dead of your civil war in, it only makes sense to commit mass murder--and back again.  There's also a growing sense of dread in these chapters, as Quilan gets close and closer to achieving his goal, combined with disbelief.  This is the Culture, after all.  Surely they saw Quilan coming.  Surely they've already acted to circumvent his plan.

Which is, in fact, exactly what happens, as Quilan's moment of triumph turns into a damp squib, courtesy of the Masaq' hub.  I'm sure that I'm not the first person to make this observation, but it's pretty easy to separate the nine Culture novels into three distinct "eras," divided both chronologically and thematically, as if Banks had come up with an idea that he wanted to explore through the Culture setting, written three novels about it, and then paused for a few years until a new idea occurred to him.  So the first trilogy--Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), and Use of Weapons (1990)--introduces the Culture and its core conflict between spoiled hedonism and the impulse to spread its blessings, while the most recent one--Matter (2008), Surface Detail (2010), and The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)--views the Culture from the outside.  Look to Windward, which was published in 2000, belongs to a group that also includes Excession (1996) and Inversions (1998), whose focus seems to be (I say, without having read Inversions) on the Minds that run the Culture, and on the chilling realization that while its human citizens may think of themselves as movers and shakers, it's these beings who are actually calling the shots, and usually several dozen steps ahead of the characters whom the novels are ostensibly about--in Look to Windward, for example, there is a minor subplot about a Culture citizen who happens to find out about the plot against Masaq' and sets out to save the day, but he dies almost as soon as he begins his journey, and his actions have no bearing on the story's outcome.  It's only in its final chapters, despite the fact that it was present throughout Ziller and Kabe's explorations, and working hard to make Quilan's stay on Masaq' pleasant, that we realize that Look to Windward had another main character, the Masaq' hub itself, and that much of the novel's seemingly aimless explorations of the orbital were actually aimed at giving us glimpses of this ancient, powerful creature's history and personality.

Look to Windward begins with the light of an eight hundred-year-old supernova--induced by the Idirans in the last stages of their war against the Culture--reaching Masaq'.  In a few weeks' time, the light of a second such nova will reach the orbital, and the hub has decreed that the interval should be a period of reflection, culminating with a new symphony, commissioned from Ziller.  Initially, it seems that bringing up the Idiran war, and the loss of life that occurred because of the Culture's determination on it, is another way of reflecting on its failure with the Chelgrians, but the parallel that Banks is actually drawing is between Quilan and the hub--both old soldiers (the hub, as we learn through its interactions with Ziller, Kabe, and Quilan, fought in the Idiran war), both haunted by what they did (or, in Quilan's case, will do) in the war, both mourning a loss in that war (for the hub, its twin Mind), and both craving oblivion.  The Culture--or rather the Masaq' Mind--does indeed see Quilan coming, but his mission turns out to be identical to its plan to commit suicide at the moment that the light of the second nova reaches Masaq' (albeit, with safeguards in place to ensure that the hub's disappearance will not cause any loss of human life).  Look to Windward ends with the two of them stepping into nothingness together.

At the end of the novel, Quilan's companion Huyler, the personality of a deceased Chelgrian general who is housed in Quilan's mind to act as his minder, muses that while he understands Quilan's desire for death, "I find it hard to understand how something as fabulously complicated and comprehensively able intellectually as a Mind might also want to destroy itself."  But really, all of Look to Windward is the answer to that question, and it is here, not in the failure on Chel, that we find the novel's true indictment of the Culture's culture of interference.  When Quilan wonders whether the people his actions will kill can really be said to be responsible for the deaths in the Chelgrian war, Huyler reminds him of the Culture's bone-deep, society-wide commitment to interference, and how, even in the face of a failure like the one on Chel, the Culture remains persuaded in the rightness of its cause: "have you heard even one of them suggest that they might disband Contact?  Or reign in SC?  Have we heard any of them even suggesting thinking about that?"

Already in Consider Phlebas, Banks introduced the idea that the one need that the Culture couldn't fulfill within itself was its citizens' need for meaning.  Look to Windward takes that concept even further.  It suggests that for its human citizens, the Culture's interference in the affairs of other races is on the same level as their love of extreme sports--that it is an entertainment, meant to give their lives flavor and just a hint of danger (this, by the way, goes some way towards explaining the ham-fistedness of the Culture's actions on Chel--as Huyler theorizes, "They have become so blasé about such matters that they try to interfere with as few ships as possible, with as few resources as possible, in search of a sort of mathematical elegance").  It's the Minds, of course, whose personality is shaped by the humans of the Culture, and whose very purpose is to make those humans feel happy and fulfilled, who implement this policy, and it is they who, like the Masaq' hub, have to live with the consequences of that policy.  While the humans who desired this interference shrug off those consequences after a short interlude of sadness, or escape it after a relatively brief life, the Minds have to live with what they did, on behalf of their citizens, with a level of comprehension that is far above what a human could ever experience.  What Look to Windward seems to be saying is that, after centuries of living with the cost of giving the citizens of the Culture what they wanted, even something as fabulously complicated and comprehensibly able as a Mind would choose oblivion.

It's a bleak message, and somewhat predictably, one that I'm not entirely pleased with.  I was dissatisfied with The Player of Games for being too pro-Culture, and now I'm dissatisfied with Look to Windward for being too anti-Culture.  It's both the beauty and the most frustrating trait of the Culture sequence that, like the society it describes, it can never be entirely captured by either of these stances.  The Culture is both a force for goodness, freedom, and happiness in the galaxy, and an engine of its citizens' selfish, childish needs to imbue their lives with meaning, to which end they will cause any amount of suffering, including to the beings who ostensibly run their society.  Both are true, and both are reductive, and to fall on either side is inevitably to tell a less than entirely satisfying story.  Which is OK, actually--as we've established in previous reviews, no Culture novel is perfect, and this too is both the series's beauty and its most frustrating trait.  Look to Windward is better than some Culture novels in having such a decisive and carefully constructed message, and worse than others in that neither it nor that message come together until after you've turned the novel's final page.  It's certainly a novel that I needed to read to understand the Culture better, though now that I've read it, I'm wondering why Banks felt the need to write any more in the sequence--its conclusion feels definitive.  Still, write more he did, so look to these pages some time in the future, to see me wrestling with him and with his greatest creation yet again.