Reamde by Neal Stephenson

It would be both accurate and misleading to describe Neal Stephenson's latest novel Reamde as Cryptonomicon: The Sequel.  Accurate because, like Stephenson's 1999 breakout novel, Reamde is a multi-threaded, globe-spanning technothriller whose SFnal quality is derived not from invention but from a preoccupation with the role that technology plays in its present moment--the dot com boom and World War II in Cryptonomicon, the Facebook era and the War on Terror in Reamde.  Misleading because where Cryptonomicon was a thrilling, exhilarating reading experiences, whose segues and meanderings were as fun and fascinating as the meat of its plot, Reamde is rather mediocre, its fun moments offset by long stretches of tedium.  What's worse, Reamde is the sort of novel that makes you take a long, hard look at its author's previous output--even the parts of it you loved, like Cryptonomicon--and wonder whether it's Stephenson who has changed, or whether we're just now seeing him clearly.

Like many Stephenson novels, Reamde has a large cast of characters that only seems to proliferate over the book's thousand-page span.  Two characters, however, act as its lynchpins.  Richard Forthrast is a draft dodger turned marijuana smuggler turned ski resort manager turned MMORPG entrepreneur.  Zula Forthrast is his twentysomething niece, a recent college graduate who has taken a job with Richard's company.  Richard is the creator of the World of Warcraft-esque T'Rain, whose most unusual characteristic--and possibly the root of its success--is that instead of discouraging gold farming and persecuting the players who do it, it courts them and their business by incorporating economic and profit-generating activities into the game, and by making it very easy to convert game currency into the real-world variety.  This also makes T'Rain a popular vector for money-laundering, a deliberate choice by the somewhat shady Richard.  As Reamde opens, however, T'Rain is being rocked by the War of Realignment, a player rebellion in which the game-imposed conflict between Good and Evil is discarded in favor of a conflict between those players who have hacked their characters' appearance to display garish colors (the Forces of Brightness) and those who have stuck with the game's official, more sedate palette (the Earthtone Coalition).  Zula, meanwhile, is launched into a world of trouble by her boyfriend, Peter, a former hacker who has tried to get out from under a crippling mortgage by selling credit card numbers to mobsters.  Unfortunately, his contact turns out to be an avid T'Rain player, and the transfer of goods coincides with the outbreak of the virus that gives the novel its name, which encrypts every piece of data on the infected computer and holds them for ransom.  The numbers' intended recipient, a Russian called Ivanov, swoops in and kidnaps Zula and Peter, forcing them to help him track down the virus's creators.  These turn out to be in China, living next door to an Al Qaeda cell led by Abdallah Jones, the most wanted terrorist in the world, and when Ivanov's strike against the hackers accidentally rousts and destroys that cell, Zula ends up in Jones's clutches.

Just from that plot description, it's pretty easy to see what Reamde's core flaw is. One of Stephenson's greatest strengths as a writer is his ability to make the most minute details of the most mundane topics seem endlessly fascinating, but even he can't convincingly argue that we should feel equally fascinated by, on the one hand, operational hiccups in the running of an online role-playing game, and on the other hand, a character who is kidnapped by a terrorist and becomes part of his plan to carry out an attack on US soil.  What's interesting, though, is that for a significant portion of Reamde it's actually Richard's strand that is more engaging, more obviously Stephenson-ian.  As he delves into Richard's history and the genesis of T'Rain, Stephenson produces a familiar blend of outrageous (if, quite often, highly stereotypical) personalities and situations--a biker gang with the unlikely name of Septentrion Paladins, a home-schooled geology maven with (of course) Asperger's Syndrome. One high concept set-piece, which later becomes known as the apostropocalypse, involves a tense dinner table confrontation between the two fantasy authors whom Richard has engaged to craft T'Rain's mythology--Donald Cameron, a technophobic Cambridge don who writes the first drafts of his novels in the invented language spoken by their characters, and Devin Skraelin, his American counterpart whose prose is as inelegant as his output is prolific, and who is so fat he can barely fit through the door of his trailer--during which Donald ruthlessly extracts, on the grounds of their having no philological justification, most of the apostrophes that Devin has so liberally sprinkled through T'Rain's species and place names.  At the core of all this zaniness, however, are deeply practical and businesslike motivations, and when Richard stops to explain how T'Rain has been designed from the bottom up to appeal to gold-mining Chinese teenagers, and, more broadly, to allow its users to find their own applications for its money-changing capabilities, we get a strong sense of how an inherently silly enterprise like T'Rain can be deadly serious at its core

That bedrock of practicality is missing from the early portions of Zula's plot strand, which tries to hang a lantern on the irrationality of Ivanov's behavior--he could easily have ransomed his data for a piddling sum, but instead embarks on an international murder and kidnapping spree--but can't quite get out from under it, and this contributes to the imbalance between Zula's story and Richard's.  When Jones turns up, however, he raises the stakes to a point that seems to justify the absurdity of everything happening to and around Zula.  It's at this point, also, that Zula's plot strand fractures into several points of view--Sokolov, Ivanov's increasingly dubious security consultant who conceives protective feelings towards Zula and pursues her after she's kidnapped by Jones; Csongor, a Hungarian hacker recruited by Ivanov to help find the virus's creator; Marlon, that selfsame creator; Yuxia, a young Chinese peddler employed as a guide by Ivanov and forced to participate in his plot; Olivia, an MI6 agent on Jones's tail; and Seamus, an American ex-soldier and security wonk stationed in the Philippines, also in pursuit of Jones--who scatter in the wake of the disastrous attack on Marlon's operation and the (literally) explosive destruction of Jones's cell, each to their own involved adventure.  Even as Richard's story is winding down--we have, by this point, covered all of T'Rain's origin story and are just marking time making slow and desultory progress with Reamde and the War of Realignment--the China-set portion of the novel starts delivering attacks, escapes, chases, and fights, all of which are very well done.  It's hard not to resent being taken away from all this fun and derring-do to catch up with Richard who, still blissfully unaware of Zula's disappearance, is mostly concerned with things that now seem utterly beside the point. 

When he does realize that something has happened to Zula, Richard naturally drops these matters to concentrate on finding her, which has several unfortunate effects on the novel.  First, it means that everything that's happened in the T'Rain strand quickly becomes irrelevant.  Richard sets events in motion that might resolve the War of Realignment, but this resolution, if it happens, happens off-page, and what's more important, neither the characters nor the readers actually care about it.  Second, Richard, who in the novel's earlier chapters had been a wellspring of new, inventive bits of information as Stephenson introduced us to T'Rain and its storied history, is suddenly behind the curve.  He spends the rest of Reamde playing catch up, deducing Zula's movements hundreds of pages after we'd witnessed them (in one case, he is on the verge of flying to China, several days after Zula has left it, and Stephenson has to parachute Olivia in to inform him of this).  Third, and most importantly, almost everything that's fun and engaging about Stephenson as a writer fades from the novel.  As T'Rain and all other discussions of technology are sidelined, Reamde devolves from a technothriller to a plain thriller, and not a terribly thrilling one at that.  The China segment turns out to have been the highpoint of the novel.  As Zula and the other characters make their way back to North America the novel frequently becomes bogged down in long, tedious passages--a play by play description of Jones and his cohorts soundproofing a bedroom for Zula in an RV they've stolen reads like a home improvement manual; the frequent descriptions of the Canadian wilderness in which they camp, like particularly dull travel writing.  The novel's final sequence, in which the entire cast converges on Richard's old marijuana smuggling route, which Jones plans to use to get into the US from Canada, feels interminable--too many characters spread out over too many locations, all doing essentially the same thing, trying to stay alive and kill terrorists (and, along the way, indulging in some strange and completely avoidable continuity errors--Olivia, who introduced herself to Richard and his brothers under an assumed name, is greeted by them by her real one; Richard meets Seamus in real life and forgets that they met in T'Rain only a few days ago).  There's very little tension--even if Stephenson had given the impression of being willing to kill major sympathetic characters, he rarely puts them in enough danger to warrant that concern--and the only nagging question is who gets to kill Jones, which Stephenson takes forever to answer.  It's a damp squib of a conclusion to a story that has worn out its welcome by hundreds of pages.

Reamde's prevailing concern--and the only theme that seems to tie the T'Rain and kidnapping strands to one another--is with tribalism.  In the T'Rain story, the War of Realignment has divided those tribes along objectively meaningless lines, as Richard tries to argue to Devin--who, Richard suspects, has sparked the war in an attempt to wrest control of T'Rain's mythology from Donald.  Devin responds that it was the original division written into the game, between Good and Evil, that was meaningless--Good and Evil players, he points out, did exactly the same things but were still classed in different groups.  The current dispute, according to Devin, actually reflects a true, ingrained division between T'Rain's players.

you did it yourself when you saw the billboard at the airport.  "Ugh!  Blue hair!  How tasteless!" ... it has been the case for a long time that those people we have lately started calling the Earthtone Coalition have always looked at the ones we now call the Forces of Brightness and seen them as tacky, uncultured, not really playing the game in character.  And what happened in the last few months was the F.O.B types just got tired of it and rose up and, you know, asserted their pride in their identity, kind of like the gay rights movement with those goddamned rainbow flags.

That reference to gay rights aside, what Devin is essentially talking about is some strange commingling of class and the culture wars.  It's a division that the rest of the novel keeps returning to, whether in the familiar guise of the red/blue state divide--on her way to the American end of Richard's smuggling route in rural Idaho, Olivia passes through a town that "had all the indicia--brewpub, art gallery, Pilates, Thai restaurant--of a place where Blue State people would go to enjoy a high standard of living while maintaining nonstop connectivity and assuaging their guilty consciences in re global warming, fair trade, and the regrettable side effects of Manifest Destiny"--or in more exotic forms--musing about a split in his gold-mining group, Marlon reflects that "really it boiled down to pride.  Some of the miners were ashamed that they were living in crowded apartments and doing this kind of work for a living ... Marlon's group, on the other hand, was fine with what they were doing.  They saw it as no worse than any other occupation"--and ultimately serves to tie the two plot strands, however loosely, together.  Where T'Rain's players reject a division between Good and Evil for being arbitrary and choose to focus on cultural differences, the real-world strand--whose action scenes grow increasingly video game-like as the novel progresses--sees characters from disparate backgrounds, including Richard's survivalist brother Jake and his neighbors, setting their cultural differences aside to join together in the fight against Jones's evil.

Which sounds like a heartening message, but this is to ignore how muddled, and how frequently dismissive, Stephenson's handling of tribalism is.  What the intersection of class, cultural preferences, interests, and opinions that distinguishes approved characters from mockable ones boils down to is a distinction that Stephenson has made before, between Doers and Talkers, those who are concerned with concrete matters and those who natter on about meaningless ones.  But that's a false distinction that doesn't hold up very well, even in a universe that Stephenson has built to support it.  When she's first kidnapped, Zula muses that Peter and Csongor, having made their own way in the world

had a kind of confidence about [them] that was not often found in young men who had followed the recommended path through high school to college and postgraduate training ... This quality that she had seen in Peter and now saw in Csongor was--and she flinched from the word, but there seemed little point in trying to distance herself from it through layers of self-conscious irony--masculine.  And along with it came both good and bad.  She saw the same quality in some of the men of her family, most notably Uncle Richard.

Bear in mind, as Zula is thinking this, she's in the clutches of Russian gangsters, and has her confident, "masculine" boyfriend to blame for that predicament.  And yet despite her sop to the potential negative effects of "masculinity" (here defined as competence and confidence, even though there are plenty of competent, confident women in the novel), it is for the most part held up as a positive--when Peter, later in the novel, turns out to be a coward and abandons Zula, the narrative suddenly decides that he is stupid and lacks a firm grasp on his situation.  Zula is exasperated with him (and Csongor, who admittedly is portrayed more positively) for "trying to solve the technical problem of locating the [hacker].  Which might have been Ivanov's problem, but wasn't theirs.  Theirs was Ivanov."  And Sokolov muses that "Peter would, sooner or later, do something stupid and cause enormous trouble.  Peter would do this because he believed he was clever and thought only of himself."

What Stephenson is doing is trying to depict competence as a function of character.  When really it's almost always a situational trait--a person may be extraordinarily competent in one setting and helpless in another, may have a firm grasp of their situation in one instance, and a completely unrealistic confidence in their abilities in another.  Reamde, which valorizes confidence and the general competence that has been a hallmark of, yes, masculinity, in all of Stephenson's novels, doesn't quite know what to do when that confidence turns out to have been unfounded.  In Peter's case, its response is to decide that he must not have been terribly masculine--which is to say, competent, intelligent, possessed of a firm grip on reality--to begin with.  But in Richard's case, Stephenson's approach is to double down, to continue to insist that Richard is, as Zula thinks of him, the epitome of masculinity, even as he piles on the evidence to the contrary.

Most of the reviews I've read of Reamde have found Richard charming or heroic, but to my mind he is one of Stephenson's most aggravating creations, if only because it's not at all clear whether we're meant to be aggravated by him.  Richard is a perpetual fish out of water--a black sheep among his staid, law-abiding, Midwestern family, but too steeped in their values to fit in among West Coast liberals or his fellow board members.  In another man, this perennial ambivalence might have led to humility, a willingness to see the other guy's point of view.  Richard uses it as a justification for feeling superior to everyone around him--to his Red State relations and his Blue State colleagues, to the fuddy-duddy Donald and the trailer trash Devin, to the Forces of Brightness and the Earthtone Coalition, to his young, gadget- and Facebook-obsessed cousins and his old, computer-illiterate ones.  It is "a belief that had been inculcated in him from the get-go," we are told, "that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood."  But for Richard, that objective reality seems to mean whatever he thinks about the world, as when he loftily explains to Zula why T'Rain, a game aimed as much at Asian customers as Western ones, draws solely from Western mythology.

"Elves and dwarves, c'mon, how could you be so Eurocentric?" Zula said.

"Exactly, but in a way it's almost more patronizing to the Chinese to assume that, just because they are from China, they can't relate to elves and dwarves."

Something I haven't mentioned yet about Zula is that she was born in Eritrea, orphaned during the war with Ethiopia, taken to a refugee camp, adopted from there by Richard's sister and brother-in-law, and raised in Ohio where she spent a portion of her teenage years calling herself Sue.  So it's likely that she has a better grasp than Richard on the whole issue of cultural imperialism and its effects.  And yet she doesn't call him on the enormous straw man he just dropped in her lap.  Which is, in a nutshell, the core of my frustration with Richard--he is so obviously a buffoon that it seems impossible that Stephenson hasn't written him so deliberately, and yet the narrative never calls him on it.  What are we to make, for example, of Richard's repeated musing, in the novel's early chapters, that he doesn't want to come off as creepy in his attentions to Zula?  Surely Stephenson realizes that this is creepy in and of itself, and yet nothing is made of it after Zula's kidnapping, and Richard ends the novel by stepping into a more prominent parental role in her life.

Contributing to my confusion over how Reamde intends for us to see Richard is its treatment of Sokolov, who is in many ways Richard's opposite.  Where Richard has happily curdled into a middle aged complacency that mistakes his perspective for "objective reality," Sokolov is defined by his ability to sympathize with those who are different from him and get into their heads: "Sokolov owed his life--his survival in Afghanistan, in Chechnya--to his ability to see things through the eyes of the adversary ... This reversal of perspective was not always easy.  One frequently had to work at it for some days, observing the other, gathering data, even conducting little experiments to see how the other reacted to things."  (Richard, meanwhile, whose ex-girlfriend "had barely been able to make through a paragraph without invoking the O-word ... always writhed uncomfortably during O-word conversations, since he had the general feeling, which he could not quite prove, that certain people used it as a kind of intellectual duct tape.")  We get the chance to see Sokolov in action during the China chapters, in which the city is seen mainly through his constantly evaluating eyes, and conclusion are drawn about culture, social organization, and customs.  This helps him to become what is probably the most competent character in the novel, who can make his way out of a massive security cordon thrown by a decidedly unfriendly government, secure travel around the world, show up in Idaho in the time to save the day, and along the way kill a lot of bad guys in terrifyingly effective ways.  And yet it's Sokolov who is treated to Reamde's sole concession to the point that confidence is not a virtue in its own right, when he lambastes one of the goons he used in his original capture of Peter and Zula, who has stolen from their apartment and is now in trouble.

"Doing time.  Getting in trouble.  All very normal for a man who breaks into another man's house and steals his computer and his rifle.  If you had just followed my orders--"

"Why should I take orders from you, motherfucker?"

"Because I actually know what I am doing."

"Then how did you end up in this fucking situation?"

It was a fair question, and it rocked Sokolov for a moment.

By any reasonable standard, Sokolov is much more of a hero than Richard--who for all his posturing and gnashing of teeth spends the novel constantly scrambling to catch up, who contributes nothing to Zula's rescue besides his very existence, as Zula uses the promise of his money and knowledge of a bootlegging route to the US to buy her life from Jones after they arrive in Canada, and who, when he is inevitably captured by Jones, does the least of any of the novel's characters who spend time in captivity to resist, subvert Jones's plans, or try to escape--and a much better exemplar of Reamde's version of masculinity.  But not only is Richard's certainty that there is an "objective reality" on which he has a handle never punctured, while Sokolov's more (but by no means entirely) justified confidence is, in the novel's climactic battle between Jones and the rest of the cast, Sokolov makes good account of himself and is sidelined, while Richard, of all the many characters who have sworn vengeance against Jones--Zula, Yuxia, Olivia, Seamus, and Sokolov himself, most of whom have far greater reasons to hate him than Richard--gets to deliver the coup de grace.

It's possible that Richard's triumph at the end of Reamde is intended as a sort of ironic joke, a sly puncturing of the conventions of the technothriller which sees a hapless, self-satisfied, useless man lauded by those he has done little or nothing to save.  But that sort of irony has never characterized Stephenson's writing, and if that was his intention with Reamde then the rest of the novel, which does so little to question its core assumptions, and whose other characters, particularly Zula, are entirely earnest, can't support it.  So we're left with Richard as our hero, and the purveyor of what is presumably Stephenson-approved wisdom.

Which brings us back to that supposedly heartwarming climax in which British spies, Chinese hackers, and American survivalists band together to thwart a terrorist plot, and the realization that that erasing of cultural difference is cut from the same cloth as Richard's supercilious dismissal of Zula's accusation of Eurocentrism--I'm not being Eurocentric, I'm just giving non-Europeans the credit of assuming that they are capable of embracing my culture.  Stephenson wants us to realize that deep down, we're all the same, but that same has a suspiciously Western, technophilic, geeky cast (the sole outlier, Yuxia, is sidelined for much of the novel's second half).  Zula, for example, rarely draws on her experiences as a war orphan, or on her life before coming the US, for solace or guidance during her captivity, and it's probably no coincidence that so many of the novel's characters, even those who aren't connected to Richard and Zula, are either gamers at its outset or become gamers over the course of its events (and that all of them play T'Rain).  Genuine attempts to understand the other, as exemplified by Sokolov, are rejected in favor of the assumption that the other doesn't really exist, or that if they tried hard enough they could be just like us.

None of this, of course, is new.  In my review of Anathem, I took Stephenson to task for constructing a world in which the Platonic ideal of humanity consisted solely of Western civilization, and Cryptonomicon famously presages Reamde's casual dismissal, to the point of erasure, of anyone who is not technically- and practically-minded in an opening scene in which Randy Waterhouse (who feels a bit like a younger Richard, or rather Richard feels like one of the worst versions of what Randy might become) listens exasperatedly to his academic girlfriend's insufferable friends as they enact every cliché of the out-of-touch, ivory tower liberal intellectual.  In Reamde itself, we could also note the handling of women, which gives the definite impression that Stephenson has read the many accusations that he is unable to write women as actors (particularly in response to Anathem), and that though he wants to prove them wrong, he can't quite overcome his antipathy towards the people who voiced those accusations and their ideology.  So we get smart, strong-willed, level-headed characters like Zula, Yuxia, and Olivia, but also an incessant stream of snide comments about feminism--"Yuxia was not the type to deploy terminology like "feminist" or "matriarchal," but the picture was clear enough to Zula"; "Feminist thinkers might argue with social conservatives as to whether women's tendency to be extremely self-conscious about personal appearance was a natural trait--the result of Darwinian forces--or an arbitrary, socially constructed habit"; Olivia's casual assurance that Richard and his flunkies can call her "chick": "I shan't file a complaint"; Zula's rejection, noted above, of any reticence towards equating competence and masculinity as "self-conscious irony"--as if to assure us that women can be kickass without any of that silly feminism guff.  (Not helping matters is the fact that all three women end the novel in romances--two of them with much older men--which are seen solely through the eyes of their male paramours, all three of whom make decisions about the relationship without ever consulting or discussing matters with the object of their affection.)

The truth is, Stephenson's novels have always been characterized by a sort of snide condescension towards those who don't share his interests and worldview.  Which raises the question: am I so down on Reamde because Stephenson's crankiness towards anyone outside his narrow box of approved interests and attitudes has turned a corner, or because Reamde is poor enough stuff that there's nothing in it to compensate for that crankiness, or because this time around, it feels as if that crankiness is directed at me?  That's a question that I've found myself asking more and more often in the last few years, as artists I'd previously held in high regard--people like Aaron Sorkin and Steven Moffat--have started producing work that I've found risible and deeply insulting (judging by the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan may be the next across that threshold, and no, I don't think it's a coincidence that these are all men known for clever, cerebral work, who have trouble writing well, or at all, for women).  Am I growing less indulgent, or are these writers growing more cantankerous, digging further into stances that originally gave me pause, and now stop me in my tracks?  Perhaps a more generous way of phrasing that question is, what is it that I saw in these men's writing that made it easy to look past its serious flaws?  In Stephenson's case, the answer is, to a great extent, fun--the sheer exuberant joy of inventing a new world or discovering an existing one, in all its glorious complexity.  It is that sense of fun and joy that is missing from Reamde and makes it so much easier to see Stephenson's limitations in other areas.  Perhaps he'll rediscover it in his next work, but who knows if I'll be able to keep turning a blind eye to what this novel has laid bare.

Strange Horizons Reviews, November 28-December 2

William Mingin kicks off this week's reviews with a look at two collections of Robert E. Howard's non-Conan stories, Conan's Brethren and Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures, concluding that they illustrate the breadth of Howard's interests and his still-potent appeal.  Marina Berlin reviews the art-house SF film Another Earth, and though she finds much to praise she is also disappointed by the film's ultimately glancing treatment of its SFnal premise and character interactions.  Sofia Samatar reviews Egyptian bestseller Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik, a bleak vision of that country in the near future, and comes away with mixed reactions, admiring the novel's aim and message but dubious about its use of rape to deliver that message, and of its construction of female characters.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges.

Embassytown by China Miéville

So China Miéville has written a science fiction novel, and it is... well, it is many things, but perhaps we'll start with "Old School."  Miéville is the author who took the top off fantasy ten years ago, and his next to last novel, The City & The City, was so sui generis that it won awards for both science fiction (the British Science Fiction Award, the Clarke) and fantasy (the World Fantasy Award, the Locus Award for best fantasy novel), despite containing no non-realist elements whatsoever.  But Miéville's latest novel, Embassytown, though in many ways as dazzlingly original as anything he's written, is positively retro.  It's a planetary romance, a far future SF story about a time when humans have spread through the galaxy with the help of vaguely explained FTL technology, a story of contact with winged, eye-stalked aliens.  It is, in short, that increasingly rare, increasingly unfashionable artifact, a core SF story, and its tropes are pure Golden Age.  Perhaps the avant garde has simply come full circle.

The titular town is a human colony at the heart of an alien city on the planet Arieka, a trading post on a backwater notable for two things--lying at the very edge of known space, and the bizarre linguistics of its native inhabitants, colloquially known as Hosts.  The Ariekene language--called simply Language, its own thing unlike all others--is not simply a collection of phonemes assembled into shapes and given meaning by consensus.  To understand Language, Ariekei must hear it spoken by a sentient person who understands its meaning and imbues their speech with it--"Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen."  This has two implications.  One, the Ariekei can't conceive of any abstract concept unless there exists an embodiment of it somewhere on their world, and therefore they also cannot lie.  Two, because Ariekei speak simultaneously from two mouths, a single human can't communicate with them, nor can two people speaking in tandem, because the singular intent isn't there.

Embassytown has thus adapted to both serve the Ariekei and position its staff as their sole alien interlocutors.  For generations, it has been breeding Ambassadors--cloned pairs who are psychologically molded to think of themselves as a single person, and whose empathy is enhanced by technological means to enable them to speak to the Hosts.  And, as the Ariekei become exposed to new concepts through their interactions with offworlders, they require physical manifestations of those concepts in order to speak them.  This is one of the earliest experiences of our narrator, Avice Benner Cho, who as a girl is turned into a simile--the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her, an image of making do--by playing out that experience.  Later in her life, Avice leaves Arieka to become an "immerser," one of the few who can crew spaceships through the subspace that makes interstellar travel possible.  As Embassytown opens, however, she's been back for a while, at the behest of her offworlder, linguist husband Silce, from whom she is now estranged for reasons that Miéville spends much of the novel's first hundred pages explaining.

Embassytown is a smart, well-written novel that constructs its world, plot, and central concepts with impressive panache.  But of all the many things it does well, perhaps the best is its recreation of the company outpost in outer space.  The small town politics of such postings, the battles for supremacy between local authority and the government back home, the oligarchy of clerks and lifelong staffers who actually run the operation, the carefully stratified social structure--all are recreated on an alien planet.  Embassytown resonates with its canonical, 19th and early 20th century antecedents, complete with swanky staff parties where everyone is trying to search out a juicy bit of gossip or political leverage, and long-held, impossibly baroque feuds in whose wake the bitter losers bide their time until they can stick the knife in and maybe even regain the upper hand--but all with good manners, and with half an eye on the canapé tray.  (In addition to being quite funny, these references elicit the company outpost's associations of Empire, of corruption, and of course of exploitative colonialism, which the remainder of the novel both plays with and contravenes.)  But Embassytown also makes sense within the futuristic, far-flung setting that Miéville has created--for example, the ingrained taboos against referring to paired Ambassadors as individuals rather than a single person or trying to tell them apart (which extend to cutesy, portmanteau names like CalVin or MagDa), and the deference that ordinary Embassytowners (called "commoners") like Avice feel towards them.  Avice, who is both an insider and an outsider to this community, provides the perfect viewpoint on it.  She's seen enough of the outside world to know how small Embassytown is and how parochial its habits and conventions are (and is therefore often perversely driven to defy them), but she's also a native, capable of understanding those habits and conventions in a way that Silce, or the new government representative Wyatt, can't.

It's Wyatt who sets the novel's events in motion when, as a power play against the local embassy staff, who have been parlaying their control over the Ambassadors into a power base and a possible bid for independence, he brings in his own, non-native Ambassador to Arieka.  EzRa--a seemingly impossible pairing of two genetically different individuals rather than clones--defy Embassytown politesse by referring to themselves as distinct persons rather than a singular entity, but all seems to be going well until they speak to the Ariekei for the first time: "The Hosts were swaying as if they were at sea. One spasmed its giftwing and its fanwing, another kept them unnaturally still. One opened and closed its membranes several times in neurotic repetition."  EzRa's connection, it transpires, is close enough to singularity that the Ariekei can understand them, but far enough from it that their essential separateness registers.  The impossibility of this contradiction, that there-not-there unity, intoxicates the Hosts, and they transmit that addiction to others.  Before long, Embassytown is surrounded by addicts, craving a drug that will eventually kill them, and willing to kill for their next fix.  The colonists must trade poison for their survival, but when some Ariekei find way to escape their addiction and march on Embassytown intent on its destruction, the slaughter of all humans seems imminent.

For a novel that loads itself up with so much meaty material--the very concept of Language, the way that it shapes the Ariekei's habits of thought, the way that humans' thoughts are shaped by their own use of language, the thorny moral dilemma the Embassytowners find themselves in when the scope of the Ariekei's addiction becomes known, and, in flashback chapters that chart the reasons for Silce and Avice's breakup, the emergence of a fascination among Ariekei with lies, and of a group who try to train themselves to do so--Embassytown is a curiously weightless exercise.  Not bad, but nowhere near as dramatic and impactful as these plot summaries suggest.  Partly this is down to Avice, whose voice is too flat and too impersonal to give the novel emotional weight.  Over the course of Embassytown Avice loses her husband, her lover, and her best friend, witnesses the collapse of her community, the breakdown of Ariekene civilization, the exposure of the lies that have underpinned Embassytown's way of life for generations, and seemingly endless amounts of death and carnage, and spends long stretches utterly convinced of her impending death.  Some of this registers--in particular, the collapse of Ariekene society, right down to their infrastructure (the architecture and technology are all biological, and they become addicted along with the Ariekei), and the despair that sweeps through Embassytown and especially the Ambassadors when the full scope of the disaster becomes clear, are deeply horrifying--but not enough, and a lot of this emotional battery seems to bypass Avice, who keeps functioning for no apparent reason other than that Miéville needs her to.

Avice is a good viewpoint character--clever, observant, and as I've said, perfectly situated between thoughtless adherence to Embassytown customs and ignorance of them--but Miéville never really bothers to make a person out of her.  It's never clear, for example, just why she works so hard to insinuate herself into the upper echelons of Embassytown's staff when the novel's events kick into gear.  A self-described "floaker"--someone who does just enough to get by without becoming burdened with unwanted responsibility--Avice seems content, after returning to Embassytown, to live off her savings and accrued coolness points as a former immerser and someone who has been offworld.  And yet when the plot gets rolling, she's constantly at the center of it, or trying to get there.  Her efforts to find out the meaning of EzRa's effect on the Ariekei at the beginning of the novel, and to manage the situation when its full extent becomes clear, are only explainable if we think of her as Miéville's stand-in, someone who can witness or set in motions the events necessary to get the plot where it's going, but not a person in her own right.  (There are, however, instances in which Avice's emotional flatness feels gratifying.  Her marriage to Silce is matter-of-factly introduced to us as a sexless, but nevertheless affectionate, union; later in the novel she becomes sexually involved with another character, and though the relationship is obviously important to both of them, it is only mentioned as an aside.  It's nice, especially for a novel with a female lead, that Miéville has managed to write sex and romance in a way that recognizes their importance without making them the crux of the story.)

Another possible reason that the stakes in Embassytown never seem as high as they ought to be is that Language never feels as believable, or as thought out, as Miéville and his characters insist it is.  Miéville hangs a lantern on this early in the novel, when he has Silce exasperatedly exclaim

"Does it ever occur to you that this language is impossible, Avice?" he said. "Im, poss, ih, bul. It makes no sense. They don't have polysemy. Words don't signify: they are their referents. How can they be sentient and not have symbolic language? How do their numbers work? It makes no sense. And Ambassadors are twins, not single people. There's not one mind behind Language when they speak it..."

But raising the question only serves to draw attention to the fact that Embassytown can't come up with a persuasive answer.  How can the Ariekei be sentient without symbolic language?  How can they have created a vastly advanced, technological society with complex social customs when they have to struggle towards even the simplest of abstract concepts?  It doesn't help that in constructing Language Miéville piles one implausibility on top of another with only the most tenuous connections between them: not only the double mouth, but the seemingly psychic ability to detect whether a speaker is sentient or not, whether they understand Language or are simply mimicking its sounds (Miéville compounds this by deciding, in order to make the plot work later in the book, that Ariekei can understand recorded speech, so long as it was originally spoken by a person who knows Language), and on top of all this, the inability to lie or express oneself symbolically, to see words as more than their referents.  I'm not sufficiently versed in the philosophy of language to say whether these attributes naturally flow from one another, or whether there's even a persuasive argument that they should, but building that argument feels like something the novel ought to have done.

In his review of Embassytown at the London Review of Books, Sam Thompson argues that this isn't the novel's concern: "like H.G. Wells in The Invisible Man or The Island of Doctor Moreau, Miéville takes an impossible proposition and works through its implications with rigour."  But that isn't actually an accurate description of the novel.  Rather than working through Language's implications, Miéville's preoccupation is with the way that humans change it--the Ariekei's fascination with lies, which extends to festivals in which they compete to see who can come closest to uttering a non-truth (one Ambassador describes this to Avice as "an extreme sport"), and later on, the way that EzRa corrupts it.  Language itself, and its implications, are obscured by these effects, where a less event-laden novel might have developed them into a more believable--and thus more engaging--central concept.  (In contrast, the reason that The City & The City worked for me despite having an equally implausible premise is that that novel was dedicated to rigorously working through its premise.)

But the main reason, I think, for Embassytown's centerlessness is that, like the repeated scenes in which wannabe liar Ariekei struggle to stretch similes into something broader and less literal, reading the novel is an exercise in recognition and contrast--of the novels, the touchstones of SF, that Miéville is echoing and recalling, and of the ways in which he diverges from their tropes.  Embassytown is like Mary Gentle's duology Golden Witchbreed and Ancient Light, another story of well-meaning human colonists who royally fuck things up, but its aliens are less differentiated, and their personalities less vivid.  It's like the work of Ursula K. Le Guin (whose The Left Hand of Darkness also feels like the inspiration for Golden Witchbreed) in that it looks at a supposedly soft science like linguistics through SFnal glasses, but unlike Darkness, human interference on Arieka disrupts its society rather than being subsumed into the planet's existing political matrix.  The novel's middle segments, in which social roles and conventions break down under the stress of the colony's peril, feel like a siege novel along the lines of J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (which is itself both a comment and a complication of siege novels published in the immediate wake of the Indian Rebellion in the mid-19th century), but here the besiegers are unambiguously the victims, and the besieged clearly complicit in their predicament and morally compromised by their attempts to survive it.  In the religious fervor that Silce develops towards the Ariekei, and his conviction that those among them who are learning to lie are agents of evil, Embassytown is like A Case of Conscience, but reversed--here the aliens are angels, not devils, and humans are the serpent offering forbidden knowledge.  At no point does Miéville resort to outright cribbing--recognition, here, is always mingled with contrast--but these moments are jarring nevertheless.  I found myself constantly thinking of what Embassytown was like, rather than what it was.

It's hard to know how much of this recognition is a product of deliberate references by Miéville (though the siege novel reference feels quite deliberate given how much Embassytown is made to resemble a colonial outpost), and how much the result of Embassytown's being, as I've said, a very Old School novel treading on familiar ground.  Nevertheless, the effect is that Embassytown often feels more like a virtuoso mimicry and recombination of familiar tropes than a thing in its own right.  Which may be intentional.  The process of storying, of altering and repurposing story, and of recognizing one story in another, is something that Embassytown is very concerned with.  It's what Avice is doing--what she admits to doing on more than one occasion--in her own narrative (when she explains her plan to save the day to another character but conceals it from us, she justifies doing so by saying that "Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you").  It's what she resents another simile for when he tells the story of what he had to endure at the hands of the Ariekei--"I hated that when he took his own turn, described terrible things done to enLanguage him, Hasser, who had been opened and closed again, modulated his voice and timed his delivery and turned it, true as it was, into a story."  During the siege, the humans rifle through their cultural archives and find what is clearly recognizable, even through Avice's garbled description, as Dawn of the Dead, into which they pour their own meaning--"We read the story as ours, of course."  Turning uninflected truth into story, and one story into another, is an artifact of our ability to use symbolic language, metaphor, and imagery, of the "slippage between word and referent" that Language lacks.  At the end of the novel, when the Ariekei discover this space, one of them tells the others a story of how that change came about and what it means, and through that telling, makes the story--and the vision for the future couched in it--true.

But perhaps the most important comment on story, storying, and the way that they can affect and shape reality comes relatively early in the novel, when Avice visits Wyatt shortly after EzRa's first, disastrous meeting with the Ariekei, and wonders if the Embassy hasn't committed a disastrous faux pas.

"This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he's on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops we said the wrong thing, but they’re really all about how ridiculous natives overreact." He laughed and shook his head. "Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn't lose our shit, did we? The Ariekei—and the Kedis, and Shur'asi, and Cymar and what-have-you, pretty much all the exots I've ever dealt with—are perfectly capable of understanding when an insult's intended, and when it's a misunderstanding."

What's interesting here isn't that Wyatt is right, which of course he is, but that even as he's making this thoroughly logical, persuasive argument, we know that he's wrong.  Not because of anything that's happened, or even because of Avice's dubiousness of his assurances, but because we know what kind of story we're reading.  The setup is too blatant, too calculated to recall Empire and its excesses.  The references to the Fall and the temptation of knowledge overlaid on this setup only cement our conviction that the humans are going to damage the Ariekei horribly.  That awareness, of the inevitability of a catastrophic fuckup, of some insurmountable cultural difference that is going to lead to disaster, permeates Embassytown.  It has the effect of leeching it of much of its tension (Avice, for example, takes nearly half the novel to figure out what EzRa's effect on the Ariekei is, but anyone who is a little genre aware will have figured it out after their first or second meeting).  But it also has the very strange effect of obscuring, or maybe dampening, the fact that this isn't what ends up happening at all.

Miéville is known for playing with genre expectations--the ending of Perdido Street Station famously relies on both the readers and the main character having imposed a fairy tale narrative on another character, only to discover a gruesome, un-fairy tale-ish truth--and in Embassytown he seems to be playing with the gruesome, tragic expectations of all the novels that this novel recalls.  Human presence on Arieka does have a disastrous effect on its inhabitants, cultural contamination does occur, a horrible misunderstanding does send humans and aliens to the very brink of annihilation, Adam and Eve do eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge.  But this disaster turns out to be survivable, maybe even, ultimately, a good thing.  Ariekene society is irretrievably altered, the Ariekei learn to speak lies and will never be the same, but this opens their minds to new possibilities, and lays those possibilities before humans as well.  The novel ends on a note not merely of hope, but of staunch belief in the bright future and humans and Ariekei are going to build together, now that they've left the Garden of Eden.

Along with the mindbending concept of Language, this hopeful confounding of our expectations is where Embassytown is most its own creation, rather than a repurposing of known tropes.  But like Language, it doesn't quite work.  Perhaps because Miéville has, somewhat manipulatively, constructed his premise so that the eradication of Language, of the Ariekei's unique cultural heritage, by alien interlopers is ultimately held up as a good thing.  Or because the means by which Language is done away with stretch that already implausible concept well past its breaking point, suggesting that an entire species can be taught to think symbolically in a matter of months.  Or simply because I'm a cynic, and more likely to accept corrupted fairy tales than averted tragedies.  Whatever the reason, the result is a novel that never quite manages to overcome its referents.  Embassytown is a smart, engaging novel and a fine read.  There's no part of it, aside perhaps from a slow beginning and a dull narrator, that even comes close to being badly done.  But when all's said and done, it feels like less than the sum of its parts.

For the last few days I've been engaged in a very frustrating conversation over at The Millions, where Kim Wright has followed up her article Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting Into Genre? with The Genre Games.  In both pieces, Wright tries to address her frustration at a publishing industry that seems to arbitrarily impose genre labels on books for pure marketing reasons--an understandable frustration, and something that authors might reasonably be concerned about--by arguing that genre doesn't actually exist.  I've tried, again and again, to protest that this is a dismissive approach that, in the name of so-called inclusiveness, effaces entire literary traditions, but so far I've met with little success.  Embassytown was the perfect accompaniment to this discussion.  On the one hand, it's a reminder, if one was needed, of the unique perspective that the science fiction genre offers authors and readers, and of the richness of the tradition that Wright dismisses, and that Miéville so joyfully revels is.  But on the other hand, it's a reminder of the danger of reveling in that tradition too much.  Embassytown is Golden Age, Old School SF.  It's Big Idea SF.  It's social SF.  It's a smart and thought-provoking novel, but it doesn't quite work.  There's too much mimicry here, too much recalling of earlier work, not enough emphasis on developing new ideas.  The avant garde, as it turns out, can't come full circle.  That doesn't mean that Embassytown isn't worth a read, but in a way, maybe I like it better for what it signifies than for what it is.

Strange Horizons Reviews, November 21-25

The week's first review is by Matt Hilliard, who looks at Rob Ziegler's debut novel Seed, a post environmental collapse novel.  Though he questions Ziegler's environmental model, Matt finds much to admire about Seed's depiction of a slowly collapsing world.  Lila Garrott is disappointed with Lisa Goldstein's The Uncertain Places, arguing that it does little that is new or original with its fairy tale components, and that its characters are unconvincing.  Nathaniel Katz is ambivalent about Robert McCammon's The Wolf's Hour, a reprinted novel from 1989, and The Hunter From the Woods, a collection of stories starring the same main character.  Though he admires the pizzazz of this character, a werewolf James Bond who kills Nazis, he finds the execution, and particularly the two books' frequent sex scenes, rather tedious.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Snuff by Terry Pratchett

After six years of writing about him, it feels as if I've developed a certain patter where Terry Pratchett, and particularly his Discworld novels, are concerned.  Though I've liked some of his novels better and others worse, my reaction to them in the years since I've been keeping this blog has been a near-uniform mix of fondness and exasperation, the former in recognition of the sheer breadth of accomplishment that is Discworld, and of the inventiveness that still goes into it, and the latter in sad cognizance that the series is growing increasingly stale, and that its inventiveness is, more and more often, watered down with recycled themes, gags, and character arcs.  This has been especially true of the books featuring Sam Vimes, arguably Pratchett's most enduring, most iconic character.  More than any of the other Discworld series, the Vimes novels stick closely to a formula, which sees the erstwhile policeman thrust into unfamiliar settings to investigate murders that just happen to shed a light on prejudice and regressive social practices.  In recent years, Pratchett himself seemed to realize that he'd gone to this well too many times, and Vimes has been relegated to supporting, if not entirely supportive, roles in novels featuring newer characters, like Making Money, Unseen Academicals, and I Shall Wear Midnight.  So when I heard that Snuff, the latest Discworld novel, was another straight-up Vimes novel, I couldn't suppress a sigh, anticipating a by-the-numbers plot, familiar character beats, with just the barest hint of newness to justify them.  I wish I'd been right in my expectations, because sadly Snuff is something so much worse than familiar, recycled Pratchett--it's just plain bad.

By that I mean, first and foremost, badly written.  Pratchett has never been a great stylist but he's always had a distinctive style, a sardonic, wildly inventive, and of course quite funny narrative voice with which he establishes a setting, a character, and a mood in a few quick sentences or a line of dialogue.  That sharpness is missing from Snuff, and particularly from its first hundred pages, in which its scene and premise are established.  Instead we get long, belabored paragraphs that lay their information before us inelegantly and with little flair.  Take, for example, the following bit of dialogue:

"I have no objection to people taking substances that make them feel better or more contented, or, for that matter, see little dancing purple fairies--or even their god if it comes to it.  It's their brain, after all, and society can have no claim on it, providing they're not operating heavy machinery at the time.  However, to sell drugs to trolls that actually make their heads explode is simply murder, the capital crime.  I am glad to say that Commander Vimes fully agrees with me on this issue."

There are a number of things wrong with this paragraph.  First, and most obviously, it's not funny, and what little bit of joke there was to begin with is smothered to death by the long, circuitous, increasingly pious route that the argument takes on its way to the punchline, piling sub-clause upon sub-clause in its haste to establish the Correct position on drugs.  Then there's the completely overblown, overemphasized conclusion--did you know that selling people a substance that kills them is murder, and that murder is a crime?  And that this is a stance on which one would be glad to find others in agreement with one?  And then the obvious deck-stacking involved in the implausible, economically untenable concept of a drug that makes its users' heads explode (later in the novel we're told that this only happens after several hits, but that's still a pretty shoddy business model when you consider that trafficking in these drugs is punishable by death), which is paid off later in the novel when the villains turn out to be drug dealers, whom we can now hate without compromising our libertarian principles.

But what's really wrong with this paragraph is that it is spoken by Vetinari.  The man who in other Discworld novels conveys volumes with a word or even a raised eyebrow is here reduced to so much empty drivel.  Nor is he alone--Snuff is characterized by a tendency to use fifty words where ten would have made the point so much better.  When we first see Vimes, he is miserably trying to alleviate the itching caused by his socks.  A previous Discworld novel would have deemed it sufficient tell us that "For the hundredth time he considered telling his wife that among her sterling qualities, and they were many, knitting did not feature" and leave us to draw the obvious conclusion from the fact that Vimes doesn't.  Snuff not only feels it incumbent upon it to explain that to malign her knitting would break Sybil's heart, but goes on to explain that

Samuel Vimes, who had never gone into a place of worship with religious aforethought, worshiped Lady Sybil, and not a day went past without his being amazed that she seemed to do the same to him.  He had made her his wife and she had made him a millionaire; with her behind him the sad, desolate, penniless and cynical copper was a rich and powerful duke.

Even if we take this as a potted introduction to both characters, it's terribly awkward and creates an impression of them that is sadly borne out by the rest of the book, in which the Vimes marriage, delicately established in previous books as a loving bond between two complicated people who value and respect each other's individuality, is turned into a no less loving, but much more aggravating, stream of marital clichés--Sybil is "a higher power," Vimes muses that there is "no point in arguing with Sybil, because even if you thought that you'd won, it would turn out, by some magic unavailable to husbands, that you had, in fact, been totally misinformed" while Sybil "took the view that her darling husband's word was law for the City Watch while, in her own case, it was a polite suggestion to be graciously considered", and much is made of her ironclad control over Vimes's diet.

Snuff begins with Sybil having exerted her Little Woman powers to shanghai Vimes into a vacation in the country, where she is a major landowner.  Or rather, where Vimes is the landowner, Sybil having transferred her estates to him upon their marriage.  At first glance, this is actually a rather brilliant premise.  Vimes's trajectory throughout the Discworld series has been one of meteoric ascent, from Captain to Commander, from Commander to Knight, from Knight to Duke.  These last two should pose a problem for the staunchly republican Vimes, but Pratchett has been careful to use his elevated circumstances to bring Vimes in contact with an increasingly prominent class of criminals.  Every time he rises in rank, his opponents rise as well--as Sir Samuel, he bumps heads with the Ankh Morpork aristocracy; as His Grace, the Duke of Ankh, he deals with foreign heads of state--and they treat him with the same familiar disdain, thus validating Vimes's self-image as an underdog, and justifying his participation in the aristocratic system by arguing that the title opens doors and enables his police work (from which, to Vimes's mind, his only true authority stems).  Snuff reverses this trend.  It strips the vacationing Vimes of his policeman's badge and confronts him with people who are not only his social inferiors but his actual tenants.  Which is obviously a very meaty, fresh angle on the character, and when Jethro, the local blacksmith, confronts Vimes, who is gingerly trying on the role of magnanimous landlord, with the simple fact that he has become something he used to hate, and challenges him to explain by what right he should have so much while others have so little, it really seems as if the novel might do something new with the character.

Unfortunately, doing something new with Vimes doesn't seem to be on Pratchett's to do list.  He undercuts Jethro by depicting him as a bullying oaf, and by showing us that many of the people he claims to speak for actually value the feudal system (which is, obviously, an important part of the debate about class, but not when that debate is as one-sided as it is in Snuff).  Later, when the novel's actual plot emerges, the class issue is shoved to the side.  Jethro is kidnapped, Vimes rescues him, and it turns out that his dislike of nobility stems from a run-in with the other, bad aristocrats, who just happen to be the villains of the novel and the people Vimes is about to arrest. True, at Snuff's end, Jethro is still distrustful of the aristocracy.  But he's also become a local constable and accepts Vimes's superiority as a policeman.  The message seems to be that as long as there is a law, and that law is applied equally to rich and poor alike, it doesn't matter if one man lives in a castle and the other in a hovel, or if the class system tells both that one is better than the other.  This is iffy in itself, but it also has the effect of making Vimes seem like a smaller, pettier person than he used to be.  He spends the early portions of the novel halfheartedly poking at the injustice of the feudal system, but it soon becomes clear that what's bothering him is the possibility that someone might mistake him for a willing, rather than grudging, participant in it.  When a tenant recalls his grandfather's gratitude to the former lord for giving him a half-dollar, Vimes "squirmed inside, knowing that the supposedly generous old drunkard would have had more money than you could ever imagine, and here was a working man pathetically grateful for a hand-out from the old piss artist." The rage that characterizes Vimes is replaced with this squirming embarrassment, which prioritizes his own ability to feel good about himself over the question of whether there actually is something to feel good about.

In light of this, it's perhaps fortunate that the class warfare angle is dropped almost as soon as it is introduced (nor is this the only plot element in Snuff to be so unceremoniously discarded; an early scene acts as an extended Pride and Prejudice parody and even involves Vimes inspiring the Discworld equivalent of Jane Austen, but all the characters involved disappear until the novel's epilogue, where their sole purpose is to be part of an especially clunky joke).  This is in favor of that perennial Discworld, and particularly Sam Vimes, theme, A Reviled Non-Human Species is Oppressed, Now Let's Learn That Prejudice is Wrong.  Having gone over this ground with dwarfs, trolls, golems, vampires, werewolves, zombies, gnomes, orcs, and even women, Pratchett seems content to throw a few of the template's greatest hits at the page, and the result is muddled and contradictory.

The Reviled Non-Human Species this time around are goblins, who are apparently viewed as vermin for their disgusting superstitions about bodily fluids.  Or maybe they're viewed as vermin because their desperate conditions force them to live in squalor.  Several characters comment on the goblins' downtrodden demeanor, the way that they've bought into society's disdain for them, but then a local author informs Vimes that they actually have a rich, complicated culture that they conceal from humans (naturally, she disappears from the narrative after imparting this information).  Slavery comes into the story at one point, but so halfheartedly that its sole purpose seems to be to make the rather obvious point that Slavery is Wrong, without exploring any of the reasons that it is nevertheless tolerated--despite drawing a connection between slavery and luxury goods like tobacco, Snuff avoids the question of society's complicity in slavery, and by embracing the canonical, 18th and 19th century form of slavery is lets its readers, most of whom benefit from slave labor, off the hook.  Instead, Snuff roots slavery in the dehumanization of the goblins, who are viewed so universally as un-people that it is necessary to pass a law that makes it illegal to enslave them.  But then it tells us that it is possible to reverse this prejudice in a single night, when Sybil arranges for a concert of goblin music, which is apparently ethereally beautiful.

It would have been possible, I suppose, to weave these contradictory strands together into a whole, but Pratchett doesn't seem terribly interested in creating a coherent, compelling goblin culture (there are, for example, very few speaking goblin characters in the novel, and most of the ones we get are rather bland).  The goblins are merely an excuse, a justification for Vimes to do his thing, and a means of his further glorification.  Most of Snuff is spent extolling the virtues of Sam Vimes--her simpering adoration of him is one of the many ways in which the novel lobotomizes Sybil--and many insufferable passages are given over to achieving this end.  In a particularly galling instance, the local constable, Feeney, arrives at the hall to arrest Vimes on a trumped-up charge.  Vimes responds with what is essentially "do you know who I am, boy?" to which Feeney responds by quoting a speech by Vimes to new policemen telling them exactly where that kind of statement should be stuffed.  And yet somehow, Vimes not only feels no shame at having been called out in this manner, but manages to wrest the moral high ground away from Feeney, and is later validated in this by both the young constable and the narrative.  Pratchett seems to feel that he can counteract this celebration of all things Vimes by stressing Vimes's awareness of the darkness that lies within him.

It was just his own human darkness and internal enemy, which knew his every thought, which knew that every time Commander Vimes dragged some vicious and inventive murderer to such mercy or justice as the law in its erratic wisdom determined, there was another Vimes, a ghost Vimes, whose urge to chop that creature into pieces  on the spot had to be chained.  This, regrettably, was harder every time, and he wondered if one day that darkness would break out and claim its heritage, and he wouldn't know ... the brakes and chains and doors and locks in his head would have vanished and he wouldn't know.

The problem is that we've heard this too many times before.  It wasn't terribly believable the first time--Pratchett almost certainly wasn't going to drag his favorite character so low--and by now we know that Vimes isn't going to give into his darkness, and especially not in a novel in which that darkness, and Vimes's signature rage, feel so muted and so paper-thin.  The effect is to make both Vimes and Pratchett seem like posers, who like to talk about darkness but have no real idea of what it is.  And, of course, it means that there's no contrast to the entirely pro-Vimes slant of the rest of the novel.

As that paragraph demonstrates, Snuff's prose stabilizes quite a bit after its first hundred pages--with fewer infodumps and character and setting introductions, Pratchett settles into a by-now familiar rhythm.  But this doesn't make Snuff a particularly funny novel.  The main recurring gag involves Vimes's manservant Wilkins.  Originally introduced as a caricature of the proper English butler who could just barely suppress his sneer at Vimes's uncouthness and his gauche insistence on doing things like shaving himself, Wilkins was transformed into a gung-ho soldier in 1997's Jingo, and in Snuff he's a former street tough whose propriety is a thin gloss concealing terrifyingly inventive killer instincts, and whose main function is as Vimes's bodyguard.  Though I found the Jingo-era Wilkins more interesting than the effortlessly lethal Wilkins in Snuff, I might have been willing to tolerate him on the grounds that this sort of drift is common to secondary characters in Pratchett novels.  But on top of being overused as a plot device (particularly as a way of allowing Vimes to avoid ethical quandaries without letting the bad guys get away unpunished), Wilkins is overused as a joke.  When you consider that the first "proper English butler is actually a berserk street tough" joke about this character was made three Vimes books and fourteen years ago, harping on it again and again throughout Snuff just seems lazy.  The freshest jokes in Snuff revolve around Young Sam, here a scientifically-minded, poo-obsessed six-year-old, but they have the effect of recalling the superior use of this character in the previous Vimes novel, Thud!, where another of his obsessions (with the picture book Where's My Cow?) drew roars of laughter where Snuff's repeated scenes of Young Sam searching out exotic specimens of excrement elicit only chuckles.

I fell in love with Terry Pratchett's writing nearly twenty years ago, but that infatuation has faded, and for the better part of the last decade I've felt a little like someone who lets fondness and the memory of better days blind her to the fact that the spark isn't there any more.  I don't know if Snuff is my breakup novel.  Maybe I'll stop reading Pratchett entirely.  Maybe I'll stop reading Vimes novels.  And maybe by the time his next book comes out the good memories will have won out over the bad.  What I do know is that after this book I'll never be able to approach a Pratchett novel with the same expectations--modest as they were--that I did before, and that there's a part of me that wishes I'd given him up before this book, and left myself with rosier memories.

Strange Horizons Reviews, November 14-18

This week's first review is by T.S. Miller, who takes a look at Future Media, a collection of stories and essays by Rick Wilber examining the ways that media has and is changing.  Tim finds much to enjoy but wonders if Wilber and his contributors might have more to say about the past than the future and the shape that future media might take.  Sarah Frost reviews Infidel, the sequel to God's War by Kameron Hurley, and like Dan Hartland with War, is impressed with what she finds.  Rhiannon Lassiter reviews two books by Philip Palmer, last year's Version 43 and this year's Hellship, and, though she expresses admiration for Palmer in general, is more enamored of the first than the second.

This month also sees the latest installment of John Clute's column Scores.  This time John's subjects are Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson, the sequel to Spin and Axis, and Daryl Gregory's latest novel, Raising Stony Mayhall.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Strange Horizons Reviews, November 7-11

This week's reviews kick off with disappointment.  First, Phoebe North is unimpressed with Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse, lamenting its dull plot, poor prose, and flat characters.  Maureen Kincaid Speller is no more won over by Mira Grant's Deadline, the sequel to Feed, which she finds suffering from many of its predecessor's flaws, chiefly an unwillingness to examine the dishonesty and narcissism of its supposedly brave, truth-seeking blogger protagonists.  Shaun Duke's Friday review of Leon Jenner's Bricks, meanwhile, is more ambivalent.  A history of the Roman conquest of Britain told from the point of view of a seemingly immortal Druid, Shaun finds Bricks promising and difficult, but ultimately a bit of a letdown.  Nevertheless, he finds much to recommend about it.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Strange Horizons Reviews, October 31-November 4

Strange Horizons's Halloween review is Farah Mendlesohn's long, detailed look at the essay collection 21st Century Gothic, edited by Danel Olson.  Farah finds the collection extremely variable, containing excellent pieces alongside terrible ones, but her review also acts as an introduction to several titles that one wouldn't necessarily associate with the Gothic descriptor, some of which sound very enticing.  My own review of Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus appeared on Wednesday.  Friday's review is by Erin Horáková, who takes a look at Tansy Rayner Roberts's collection of linked stories Love and Romanpunk and is quite disappointed by what she finds, wondering if Roberts has prioritized Girl Power over a more thoughtful type of feminism.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Review: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Over at Strange Horizons, I look at two of this year's circus-set fantasies, Genevieve Valentine's Mechanique and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus.  These two books take very different approaches to very similar premises, and I found things to like and dislike about each of them--so much so that I think they might work better as a paired reading than on their own.

You can also read Niall Harrison's thoughts on The Night Circus at the Strange Horizons blog.

The Weekend's Films

Isn't it just the way: you go weeks without seeing the inside of a movie theater and then two movies you want to see come out on the same weekend.  That timing proved to be fortuitous, though, as the two films have in common a preoccupation with our world and our present moment, though one of them filters that concern through science fiction while the other makes a virtue out of being mimetic.  Only one of these approaches works, and it wasn't the one I was expecting.

• Contagion - Steven Soderbergh's latest is a smart, effective, utterly engrossing movie that gets a lot of things right, but nevertheless I have trouble calling it a good film.  To get to the good stuff first, at its most basic level the film is gratifying simply for the things that it isn't.  There's very little hysteria here as a new strain of flu spreads quickly and lethally all over the planet, and very little emphasis on emotional dramas as a window on the epidemic--though the film features star-crossed lovers, crumbling marriages, and strained parent-child relationships, none of these are the point of the story, and at no point is it suggested that they, and not the millions of people dying, are the real tragedy.  Instead, Contagion focuses on professionals--World Health Organization officials, CDC researchers and administrators, DHS agents and military officers--as they matter-of-factly go about their jobs trying to identify the virus, figure out where it came from, and create a vaccine.  Nor does the film revel in the breakdown of civilization and its niceties--in fact, if anything, Contagion's version of social breakdown in the wake of an epidemic is a little too nice.  Matt Damon's character, whose wife and stepson are among the virus's earliest victims, spends the second half of the film trying and repeatedly failing to get food, but he and his daughter never look hungry or disheveled, and the film also severely downplays the economic consequences of the virus, as businesses, schools, factories, and international travel are shut down for fear of infection.  In contrast, what Contagion does stress are mostly acts of individual heroism and self-sacrifice--from Jennifer Ehle's epidemiologist character testing her vaccine on herself to prove that it works without waiting for approval for human trials, to Damon helping a woman who has been given MREs fight off looters even though he has no food.  Which is not to say that Contagion is triumphant or that its characters are too good to be true--Lawrence Fishburne's staunch CDC director, for example, shows his feet of clay when he alerts his girlfriend about an upcoming quarantine of her state--but more that it is a film about professionals, who try to put the responsibility that comes with their job ahead of their own interests.  Paradoxically, Contagion's muted tone, its refusal to surrender to full-on tragedy, actually intensify our awareness, and terrified reactions to, its events.  There's no comforting buffer of genre storytelling to stress that this is fiction.  The plot and characters behave in so believable a fashion that one can't escape the realization that this could and might happen to us.  There's a compelling argument for reading Contagion as a horror film, and probably one of the scariest I've ever seen.
  
  At the same time, that believability leaves Contagion feeling story-less.  What, in the end, is the film about?  Is its intended effect really nothing more than that supremely terrifying, because so plausible, sense of horror, or is the film trying to say something more?  A late scene in which Fishburne's character explains the origin of the custom of shaking hands (it shows that you're not carrying concealed weapons) suggests that Contagion is a film about human connection as a double-edged sword--in the reality imposed by the virus, contact with other people can end your life, but without that contact, is life worth living?  The opening scenes stress this dilemma by focusing on mundane, sometimes affectionate actions--handing your credit card over to pay a bar tab, hugging your child, helping a stranger when they collapse in the street--and imbuing them with a sense of menace as each one carries the virus to another unsuspecting victim.  This is even further suggested when it is revealed that Damon's wife, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), the virus's first human carrier, infected so many people and sent the virus to so many corners of the world because she was a warm, gregarious person.  In flashbacks to her last night on a business trip, spent partying at a casino in Macau, we see her putting her arm around a Japanese businessman who has given her gambling tips, gratefully pressing the hand of a Ukranian model who noticed that Beth had dropped her cell phone.  On her way home, she engages in another sort of intimacy when she meets an old boyfriend for an adulterous liaison.  Within days, all of these people are dead--personal connection has become toxic.  (Meanwhile, another form of impersonal connection is shown to be toxic in its own way, as Jude Law, the film's only purely villainous character--and perhaps its only real misstep--uses his conspiracy theory blog to plug an herbal remedy as the cure that authorities don't want people to know about, thus fueling a panic and making himself rich, then tries to persuade his readers not to take the government's vaccine.)
  
  The problem is that while Contagion is very good at making the benign and affectionate seem sinister, it doesn't have enough heart to argue convincingly for the necessity of emotion and connection.  When, at the end of the film, Damon's character finds Beth's camera with photos from her last trip and breaks down crying, we know academically what is happening--not only is Damon finally letting himself process his wife's death after months of thinking only of his and his daughter's survival, but he's forgiving his wife for betraying him before her death.  But for all of Damon's fine work--and he is one of the standouts in a top-notch cast that also features very good performances by Ehle and Kate Winslet--his grief doesn't carry through the screen.  The film is a little too cold and too schematic to support it.  More powerful is its final shot, in which the genesis of the virus is revealed and fingers are pointed back at humanity (albeit in a typically reserved fashion; though terrorism, Chinese chauvinism, and American capitalism are all suggested as the virus's possible cause, the real reason turns out to be a combination of factors that leaves no one blameless).  That cynicism feels much closer to Contagion's heart than any of its attempts to be heartfelt.


• In Time - Andrew Niccol's 1997 film Gattaca is generally hailed as one of the best science fiction films of the last two decades.  I don't disagree with that assessment, but I also think that it is something of a backhanded compliment.  Gattaca is highly praised precisely because it's a film.  In mediums where science fiction is a more developed, more sophisticated genre, it would be considered middling at best.  Its core flaw--a fascination with its central conceit that nearly leads the film to simplify itself and its world into oblivion--is emblematic of highbrow SF cinema, but because of strong characters (and equally strong performances) and a surprising soulfulness, Gattaca works.  In Time, Niccol's first foray into science fiction since Gattaca, lacks these saving graces, and dives headlong into the pitfalls that Gattaca so nearly avoided.  On the other hand, it has a lot more car chases and shootouts.  The central concept this time around is that attainable immortality has turned time into a currency.  At the age of 25 your aging stops, and a clock (handily displayed on your forearm, which several Israeli reviewers have taken as a Holocaust reference but somehow didn't ping me that way at all) starts counting down from a year.  You can use that time to buy goods and services and earn more of it by working, but if the clock runs out, you die.
  
  The metaphor is clear.  Paolo Bacigalupi did something similar in his calorie universe stories, in which he tries to draw attention to resource scarcity and global food shortages by turning calories into currency.  Niccol's focus is income inequality, so he creates a world in which the rich have eons in the bank while the poor are lucky to scrounge together a few days, and where the connection between destitution and death is immediate.  Where Bacigalupi used the calorie economy to create a vibrant, complex world, however, Niccol spends most of the movie making puns--the regions divided according to their occupants' wealth are "time zones," criminals who siphon off time from the weak and helpless are "minutemen," the policemen who regulate the flow of time are "timekeepers," the poor who can't get ahead of their debts are "living day to day."  In the whole of In Time, there's only one truly resonant exploration of its premise, the observation that the poor do everything quickly so as not to waste their precious minutes, while languor and dalliance have become status symbols for the rich (however, when this observation clashes with Niccol's passion for fine attire, it produces several moments of presumably unintentional comedy; despite speed being such an important attribute to the poor characters that they spend several scenes literally running for their lives, hoping to reach a charge-up point or someone who can top them up before their clock runs out, every woman in the film, rich or poor, wears slinky dresses and stiletto heels).  This single, affecting note aside, In Time brays its message, the better to stress the real world parallels of its nightmare economy.
  
  Justin Timberlake plays Will Salas, a poor man who is given 100 years by a suicidal tycoon (whose claim that death is necessary for the human soul is only one of the many avenues of its premise that In Time fails to explore; the film isn't even particularly good at creating characters who are trapped in much younger bodies--Olivia Wilde, Vincent Kartheiser, and Matt Bomer are completely unconvincing as middle aged or ancient people).  This is such a disruption to the system that the timekeepers, led by Raymond Leon (Cillian Murphy) are dispatched to arrest him, allegedly because they believe he stole the time, but really because they fear he might give it away to the poor and upend a balance that allows a precious few to live forever while the multitudes die.  Leon is the film's best character, a true believer despite the fact that the system benefits him only slightly, but the film squanders him--his purpose is either to spout speeches meant to illustrate how evil and exploitative the system is or act as an audience to Kartheiser's even more villainous speeches about same (the phrase "Darwinian Capitalism" is uttered with an entirely straight face).
  
  Having established the weighty parallel with real-world economic hardship, Niccol takes it in the most predictable, cloying direction possible.  Shortly into the film, Will kidnaps Kartheiser's daughter Sylvia (Amanda Seyfried), and the two quickly fall into a romance and embark on a Bonnie and Clyde-style robbery spree, distributing stolen time to the poor.  But both the romance and the robberies are thin stuff, and the latter in particular call attention to the plot's many holes.  In Time is, if you'll forgive the pun, a timely film--the injustices it rages against are on everybody's lips as Europe teeters on the verge of bankruptcy, social protests emerge all over the world, and income inequality becomes a buzzword--but beyond pointing out this unfairness Niccol turns out to have little to say about it.  His simplistic world might strain the viewer's patience, but the Robin Hood solution he posits to it insults our intelligence.  In Time's characters repeatedly tell us that there is nothing worse than wasting time, but the film's failure to say much of anything about such a relevant topic suggests that it is a far worse thing to waste good timing.

Strange Horizons Reviews, October 24-28

The first of this week's reviews is Richard Larson's take on Jesse Bullington's The Enterprise of Death.  Richard is impressed with Enterprise, both as a fantasy and as a piece of historical fiction.  Liz Bourke is similarly impressed with Erin Hoffman's debut fantasy Sword of Fire and Sea, though she notes some problems with the book's characters and plot.  Sofia Samatar is intrigued by Nina Allan's collection of linked stories, The Silver Wind, though she wonders if the cumulative effect of the book, in which the same characters appear in different situations and with different backgrounds, as if they were alternate versions of each other, isn't ultimately more alienating than engaging.  See also Niall Harrison's thoughts on The Silver Wind at the Strange Horizons blog.

As part of the project to redesign the Strange Horizons website, we're holding a design competition for a new logo.  Details about the competition, its rules and prizes, can be found here.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges. 

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2011 Edition, Part 3

As fall draws into winter, the new TV pilots grow less frequent and more prestigious.  By which I mean more expensive and featuring more high concepts, but not, as the following write-ups demonstrate, necessarily better. In fact, it's been a lackluster fall.  2 Broke Girls and Pan Am have disappointed me.  Ringer and Revenge haven't, but my expectations from them were never very high.  There's only one new show this fall that is genuinely good (see below), and though that's hardly a tragedy--my TV dance card is too full already--it's depressing that this is the best the medium can come up with.

• Homeland - For various reasons, I ended up banking the first three episodes of Homeland until my holiday last week, and then real-life events caught up with me in a way that made watching the show without preconceptions and emotional baggage utterly impossible.  Homeland is based on an Israeli series, Chatufim (Prisoners of War), which addressed the national trauma and media circus surrounding the various hostage crises of the last decade.  The latest of these was brought to a profoundly moving close last Tuesday with the release of Gilad Shalit, an event that is probably going to be one of those "where were you when" moments for my generation of Israelis (answer: in front of the TV, in tears).  In the wake of which, I found it very difficult to watch a story in which the rescued captive, Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), is the bad guy, or at least a victim who has been coerced and brainwashed into doing bad things.  It's even harder to see the show take such a matter-of-fact approach to the indifference and cynicism with which Brody is treated by his military superiors and the political establishment, the total lack of medical and psychological support he receives from the military, and the press's disrespect for his and his family's privacy.  I don't know how realistically Homeland depicts the reaction to the rescue of a kidnapped American soldier--at least some of these devices are clearly ways of making the plot flow more smoothly, and a few, such as the military's desire to use Brody as a morale-booster, are components of the show's ambivalent portrait of the military and the government--but with the image of the frail, overwhelmed Shalit before me (especially during his exploitative, invasive interview with Egyptian TV before being handed over to Israeli representatives; the Israeli establishment and press have, thankfully, been a great deal more respectful of his privacy and of his medical and psychological needs), it's hard not to react much more strongly and much more negatively than the show obviously expects me to at the sight of Brody's mistreatment.
  
  It took a while for me to overcome these visceral reactions, but when I did I found a smart, engaging espionage thriller that not only asks some pointed questions about the surveillance state, as Brody's house is rigged with cameras and microphones that record his and his family's every move, but points an accusing finger at the audience as well, for our voyeuristic desire to know the details of the Brodys' reacclimitization, even as we shake our heads over the press's voracious hounding of them.  In a way, Homeland is a show within a show--a family drama about a damaged man returning from a terrible ordeal and the family who have moved on without him and now must struggle to reintegrate him into their lives, and a spy thriller about a lone wolf CIA analyst who is convinced that he has been turned by his captors, and observes him in the hopes of finding proof.  That character, Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), is Homeland's greatest asset.  She reminds me a lot of Battlestar Galactica's Starbuck--both fearless, self-destructive, casually promiscuous, and suffering from some sort of personality disorder (in Carrie's case, an actual mental illness that she conceals from her superiors and medicates with anti-psychotics).  Like Starbuck, Carrie is very good at her job but tends to burn through professional and personal relationships in her zeal to do what she believes is right and her conviction that she alone has a handle on the truth, and Danes and the script do a great job of balancing her competence with genuinely off-putting behavior.  Carrie is a less overwrought portrait of this type than Starbuck, however (she's a great deal less self-absorbed, and less prone to subjecting others to her dysfunction), and Homeland gives us more space to feel ambivalent about her, which to my mind makes her not only more bearable but more interesting.  This is a boon in a show that, on the one hand, positions Carrie as a hero, and on the other hand, gives us little in the way of confirmation that Brody has indeed been turned.  It's unlikely that the whole premise of the series will turn out to be a figment of Carrie's fevered mind, but the show's ambivalence towards both of them, and even more than that, its hints that these two damaged people have more in common with one another than with their friends and loved ones, gives it an extra hint of complexity.


• Boss - Since the end of The West Wing, political storytelling in American television has tended to focus on the relatively smaller scale of local politics.  Shows like The Good Wife, Treme, and Boardwalk Empire convincingly argue that politics is not a matter of who can come up with the best policy or deliver the most convincing rhetoric, but of who can best maneuver the complicated maze of conflicting personalities and tribal affiliations, amassing enough power to get their own way.  Boss is the latest entry in this group, set, like The Good Wife, in Chicago, and focusing on that grand, often corrupt and byzantine city's mayor, Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer).  As the pilot opens, Kane is diagnosed with an untreatable, Alzheimer's-like degenerative illness, and instead of stepping down sets about, with redoubled enthusiasm, to cement his legacy: untying the endless red tape (and some legitimate objections) standing in the path of new runways at O'Hare airport, and putting a young up-and-comer in the Illinois governor's office.  The show is fast-paced and talky, and won me over with a willingness to demand intelligence from both its audience and its characters as it charts the various interest groups and power centers whom Kane negotiates and strong-arms.  But there are also some of the familiar pitfalls of "serious" cable dramas in the pilot--gratuitous nudity and sex, of course, and also a cynicism about Boss's subject that may cross the line from realism to the kind of faux-realism that glorifies "darkness" as an end in its own right.  The main problem in the Boss pilot is how violent it is, and how unbelievable that violence is in the show's context.  Not only does Kane physically assault a political operative who has displeased him in front of several aides, who neither try to stop him nor react as if he's done anything out of the ordinary, and not only does he "gently remind" his doctor to keep his career-killing diagnosis to herself by dispatching a man to assault her, but the episode ends with him receiving confirmation that the man who has thrown the latest impediment in the path of the new runways has been suitably chastised, in the form of that man's severed ears.  I don't know whether the overdone violence of the pilot is evidence of teething problems or an indication of the tone the show intends to strike, and there's enough that appeals to me about Boss that I'm willing to take another episode or two to find out, but if the violence doesn't tone down very quickly, it'll become impossible for me to take Boss's more intelligent aspects at all seriously.


• American Horror Story - Last year, FX engaged in the curious experiment of trying to draw out the familiar beats of the boxing movie over a 13-episode season.  I lasted only a few episodes into Lights Out, but most of the reactions to it I saw took the form of complaints that there simply wasn't enough story in this hoary plot to fill out a whole season of TV.  American Horror Story is a similar experiment--its basic plot, dysfunctional family moves into haunted house, is mostly the stuff of movies, and on paper the project of porting it to a television series seems implausible.  Perhaps anticipating this difficulty, Glee creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk try to avoid it by cramming seemingly every single haunted house story in existence into a single location.  Three episodes into the show, the house at its center has been revealed to have been the home of a mad scientist, an illegal abortionist, a family destroyer, a murderous woman scorned, and a gay couple who die by murder-suicide (along the way a psychotic killer drops by to kill two nurses).  This makes, predictably, for some very gruesome and effectively staged murder scenes, and even outside of these--when it focuses on Ben and Vivien Harmon's crumbling marriage, or their daughter Violet's increasing alienation, or the deranged people who have survived living in or near the house but have been affected by it--American Horror Story is very stylish and atmospheric.  It achieves those effects, however, without ever reaching for an emotion as raw as horror, or indeed for anything resembling compassion, empathy, or even interest in most of its characters.  The murders are not events that happen to real people but well-staged tableaux, and though this might be acceptable in a horror story, the living characters, and especially the central family, are equally inhuman and hard to care about, and only become more so as their relationships grow more overwrought under the house's baleful influence.  As if that were not enough, American Horror Story is breathtakingly misogynistic, with every single woman in the series reduced to a shrill, often over-sexualized lunatic, and expresses a weirdly regressive disability fetish in the form of a woman with Down's Syndrome who has a psychic connection to the house.  That device feels so out of place in 2011 that one almost suspects Murphy and Falchuk of having a laugh.  Even if they are, the character is still very offensive, but that uncertainty about how seriously we're expected to take anything that happens on the show is the source of its weird appeal.  As it piles gruesome murders, kinky sex scenes, and utterly absurd character interactions one on top of the other--all while looking like, and probably costing, a million bucks--American Horror Story achieves, deliberately or not, a level of camp that renders it oddly compelling.  It's bad, but it's never boring.  I don't have much hope that the haunted house story will resolve in a satisfying or interesting way by the end of the season (or at all), but it will be interesting to see if the show can sustain its gonzo tone, and my half-disgusted, half-delighted interest, for 13 episodes.


• Once Upon a Time and Grimm - If effective horror is relatively common in film and TV, effective fantasy--especially the kind that requires elaborate worldbuilding--is fairly uncommon, and the filmed examples of the genre tend to either fall into the trap of cutesiness, or veer into horror, as these two shows, both of which imagine that the heroes and villains of fairy tales are real and living in the real world, respectively demonstrate.  As its name suggests, Once Upon a Time takes the Disney approach to fairy tales.  In one of the pilot's plot strands, bounty hunter Emma Swan (Jennifer Morrison, who seems, like Lisa Edelstein and Olivia Wilde, to be cashing in on her karmic payback for having played a female character on House for so long; she's not very good in Once Upon a Time, but then the show doesn't give her much to work with) is contacted by the son she gave up for adoption ten years ago (played by a child actor who is either bad or needs elocution lessons, possibly both) and travels with him to Storybrooke, Maine, where he insists that the townspeople are enchanted fairy tale characters who need Emma to rescue them.  In the second plot strand, Snow White and Prince Charming's wedding is crashed by the Evil Queen, who promises to curse them and "take away all your happy endings."  Their only hope, offered to them by the morally ambiguous Rumplestiltskin (Robert Carlyle, proving that your career can actually go downhill from Stargate: Universe), is to spirit away their child, Emma, so she can return and rescue them.  If this sounds more like a prologue than the stuff of a whole pilot, then I've come close to describing how slack and underperforming Once Upon a Time's opening hour is, but that's not even the show's greatest fault.  That would be the infuriating laziness of the fairy tale world's construction, which amounts to little more than a few snazzy costumes, and in all other respects not only looks like a Hallmark movie, but is characterized by the same tone-deaf earnestness that renders these so completely inert.  The show's creators put so little work into winning us over to the storybook world, or creating a sense of wonder and numisnousness, that when characters say things like "I can't believe it!  Evil can't win!" they seem as ridiculous as that line does in print.  In the real world, meanwhile, there's no sense of what Storybrooke is like as a town, nor why living there is such a punishment for the fairy tale characters.  It may be that later episodes will illuminate the town and show us its dark underbelly (though that is not only something the pilot should have done, but had more than enough room for), but so far the show seems to be saying that hell on earth is an affluent, picturesque small town, which is actually quite insulting to people who live in genuine poverty and hardship.
  
  On the other hand, Once Upon a Time does establish that the three major players in its story--Emma, Snow White, and the Evil Queen--are all women, while in Grimm women are, with only one exception, victims, villains (and not even boss villains but their lackeys), or oblivious, endangered love interests.  As that description suggests, Grimm is essentially a retread of Supernatural, with main character Nick Burckhardt (David Giuntoli) learning that he is descended from the Brothers Grimm, and thus endowed with magical powers that allow him to battle and destroy evil fairy tale monsters.  Predictably, given the horror-tinged take on its subject, Grimm is a lot more effective at creating atmosphere than Once Upon a Time, but it's also a lot wittier about combining fairy tales with the modern world.  There's more punch to the pilot's opening minutes, in which a jogger in a red hoodie is attacked as she runs through the woods while the Eurythmics's "Sweet Dreams" blares on the soundtrack, than there is in all of the Once Upon a Time pilot.  On the other hand, the pilot's actual plot, in which Nick investigates the jogger's murder, is soporific, and the scenes in which he discovers his legacy--imparted to him by his aunt, a former monster-killer who might turn out to be an interesting character, but who spends the pilot either dying or comatose--are so by the numbers that I might have scripted them myself.  In the end, for all its atmosphere, Grimm's flaws are the same as Once Upon a Time's--a thin plot and even thinner characters, and an apparent reliance on its fantastic premise winning it an audience without actually doing any work to develop that premise into something new or interesting.

Strange Horizons Reviews, October 17-21

In the first of this week's reviews, Indrapramit Das dives into Neal Stephenson's latest doorstop, Reamde, and finds novel with definite airport thriller qualities that nevertheless is not only entertaining, but suggests that the present setting of these sorts of novels has become SFnal.  Katherine Farmar reviews the putative next big thing in the YA fantasy circle, Rae Carson's Fire and Thorns (The Girl of Fire and Thorns in the US) and likes what she finds, though she wishes for a more complex handling of the story's religious aspects.  Finally, Chris Kammerud reviews the latest literary zombie novel, Colson Whitehead's Zone One, which takes a slightly different approach to the topic by setting its story some time after the struggle for survival has ended and with its characters desultorily cleaning up a ravaged world in anticipation of civilization's return, and wondering if that's a good thing.

Shoutout to Erin Hodges.