Used Books Blog

Foop! by Chris Genoa is an appealing science-fiction farce with healthy doses of amusing social commentary. I liked Foop! but wanted to like it more. All the ingredients were there, and it did taste good, but I couldn’t help but think that a dash more of this and a little less of that would have really made it a great read.

The story follows a rather overwhelmed and juvenile Joe, a time travel tour guide. We join Joe in crisis, having to step in for John Wilkes Booth and assassinate Abraham Lincoln. (I can’t help but think of Sarah Vowell right out of the gate and have to believe she’s read Foop!) It’s in these first few chapters that we’re introduced to how time travel works in Foop! and the ’shaved cat’ principle that ensures that any changes made in the past do not effect the future. Or do they?

The story pinballs, nay, ricochets from character to character and wacky, odd-ball scene to the next. There’s Joe’s macho yet tender boss Burk; Martini, an Eeyore-like needy co-worker; Ba Hubba Tree Bob, a new age religious leader; and Boogedy and Nibbles, a mute alien Laurel and Hardy team that stalk Joe throughout time. Genoa stitches these scenes together artfully, particularly since the plot isn’t exactly the cohesive force it could be in the novel.

The vaudeville like tone to Foop! is enjoyable and you can feel a Christopher Moore vibe going on. And perhaps it’s because Moore is so accomplished, or that Tim Scott was successful in doing something similar, that makes me want more from Foop! It’s like early Neal Stephenson, he knew how to start, but had problems really closing the deal. Because there are some deeper messages buried in Foop!, about how we live, about being connected to those around us, and about the general conduct of humans.

But there was too much of the crude Judd Apatow (Superbad, 40 Year Old Virgin) humor steeped in genitalia and bodily orifice jokes. Once in a while and it can be humorous. Frequent use makes me feel like I’m listening to a 14 year-old trying (and failing) to have adult conversation. In addition, the main character seemed a bit uneven, oscillating from spineless stunted geek to acerbic dominant bully.

So, at the end of the day I liked Foop! but hope that, like many first time authors, Chris Genoa turns out an even better sophomore effort.

Outrageous Fortune by Tim Scott is a rare blend of action, humor, absurdity, science-fiction and personal insight. You know things are going to be interesting when the first word of Outrageous Fortune is ‘Fuckers’, uttered by main character, Johnny X67. He has every right to be pissed. His house has just been stolen. But that’s not even in the Top 10 of strange things that Johnny encounters in this non-stop adventure.

The world that Tim Scott creates is a fantastic collection of interesting ideas, vivid imagery and incisive social commentary. On top of that he’s laid out a riotous action plot coupled with interludes of penetrating observations. I knew I was hooked when he described a city that had been divided by music genres. Such a brilliant concept I’m green with envy!

The Classical section is high-brow and well maintained with sound ordinances and large signs that chide the noisy with large flashing ’shhhhh’ signs. In Jazz you have all sorts of strange free-form architecture but can’t be sure to get a decent pizza since they might be ‘experimenting’ with an ‘all olive’ phase. Or visit Compilation, the haven for those pale, boring souls who don’t have taste enough to identify with any one type of music. And stay away from Holiday Song, an area with perpetual snow and roaming, ho-ho-ho-ing Santas.

Scott takes readers on a fast-paced ride that reminds me of the movie After Hours and Brazil. It’s a desperate, funny, bizarre world where you (and the characters) are struggling to catch-up and digest what is going on. You don’t want to put the book down because you know something else is going to happen in the next few pages.

The only thing that distracted me was the mix of English and American phrases and places. Scott is English and that comes through unmistakably through his prose. However, the novel takes place in America in some sort of composite of Santa Cruz, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Perhaps the cultural collision is intentional and part of the alternate reality Scott wants to create. I don’t know, but it jolted me out of the regular reading and flow of the story.

Amid the Monty Python meets Philip K. Dick prose are amazing reflections on relationships, religion, reality and happiness.

On relationships:

I watched her character shrink before me and I felt so helpless. The spirit I’d loved her for had turned into fear, so that she no longer thought she could cope with the world; was so scared of the thought of being on her own that she crushed the present, suffocating any joy from life, and turned everything into a battle for survival. I knew this was not right - not for us, not for people who had a house and food and friends. And the more she clung to me, the more we both drowned, sinking under an invisible sea of desperation.

On religion:

Now the emphasis was on seeking peace rather than clinging to spurious explanations for our existence - and once the focus moved toward peace, religion seemed to lose a lot of its hold over the masses. Religions never had been interested in peace that much, anyway.

On happiness:

What mattered was regaining who I was, because the pleasure of being alive is not pining for different lives, or different things, but just being.

For every talking elevator who tells bad jokes there is a literary gem. Tim Scott gives readers both sizzle and steak; swashbuckling science-opera and high-minded literature. Read Outrageous Fortune and then wait for Scott’s next novel.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald is a bloated, confused novel that obscures an otherwise interesting story. Reading Brasyl was a struggle and I had to fight off the urge to put it down nearly every time I picked it up. The novel is composed of three different stories, one in the past, one in the present and one in the future. The plot revolves around the nature of the universe, or in this case the ‘multiverse’, and how these different stories converge and intersect.

I have never read Ian McDonald before and I’m not sure I will again. He’s received a lot of praise and some nice awards. I can only hope that his body of work that made it difficult for an editor to take a red pen to Brasyl. I’m not a writer (well I am, but I don’t get paid for it) nor an editor, nor an ivory tower literati. However, I think I can spot poor writing when I read it - and Brasyl has it in spades.

The warm humidity help and amplified smells; the fruity, blousy sickliness of the bougainvilleas that overhung the fundacao’s fighting yard, the rank smokiness of the oil from the lamps that defined the roda, the honey-salt sweetness of the sweat that ran down Marcelina’s upraised arm, the fecund, nurturing sourness of her armpit.

That’s but a sample of the overblown prose that litters the pages of Brasyl. McDonald can’t help but attach not one but (at least) two adjectives to every noun. More adjectives do not make better descriptions! McDonald does this repeatedly, not trusting the reader to use his or her imagination to fill in the blanks.

In addition, McDonald overuses native language. Again, it seems McDonald worked to put at least one native word per sentence. I’m not opposed to it as a rule, but in this instance it does little to enhance the story and makes it even more difficult to read. I know he’s trying to reach for Burgess or Gibson like dialects, but it simply never comes together.

McDonald also misses in his use of pop culture references. The mention of Mentos in Diet Coke is lame and far too ephemeral; the use of ‘alt dot’ is dated and misplaced; and the DJ competition scenes are unauthentic. Most of these are contained in the insipid, present day storyline that follows reality-programming producer Marcelina Hoffman.

The future storyline has some interesting elements, but they’re lost amid the prose and a flat romantic plot. Brasyl shines the most when in the past, following Father Luis Quinn and Dr. Robert Falcon into the Amazon. They are the most fully formed characters and their relationship is a strong point in the novel. It’s in this section that you get a (very) faint echo of the great Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

I can’t recommend Brasyl by Ian McDonald. It’s muddled, indulgent prose hides what might be an interesting story. Perhaps someone can comment on whether his earlier works merit reading.

Spook Country by William Gibson is a satisfying book, but it’s not the best of Gibson’s work and not even close to his science fiction masterpiece - Neuromancer. Spook Country flirts with some of what made Neuromancer such a fantastic read, a complete immersion in a strange, fascinating world that explored technology and how it could alter society.

It actually seemed like it was headed that way as Hollis Henry, minor-celebrity from her days in an alternative band, delved into the the new ‘locative arts’ scene. Essentially, creating art on a GPS enabled virtual dimension. Easiest way to think of it is if you were to walk down Sunset outside of the Viper room and could still see River Phoenix dead on the sidewalk.

The technology was interesting, and bumped up against the avatar like representation that Neal Stephenson presented in Snow Crash. So, I was intrigued and read on quickly. But it turned out that this was simply a plot device for the real story, which is a shadowy race to find and retrieve a shipping container with some unknown mystery inside.

The story is told from numerous points of view and, in a somewhat rote way, they all wind up converging toward the end of the book. Outside of the Hollis Henry thread there’s Tito, a Russo-Cuban trained by his family as a spy and Milgram, a prescription drug addict who is being held by Brown, a Blackwater type mercenary. Each story does have its moments and there’s no question that Gibson is a fine writer.

Be forewarned, there’s also a very strong 9/11, anti-Bush administration overtone to the entire novel. That’s not a problem for me, but it might be for you.

An added boost to my enjoyment of Spook Country is how it wove into my own life. I commute into the city on BART. I often put my book down to stare down at West Oakland and then the shipping yard full of containers with names like Yang Ming and “K” line and Maersk. I marvel at the landscape and think about what it’s like to work there and what kind of lives they all lead. Gibson unknowingly tapped into this curiosity which helps me give Spook Country a moderate recommendation.

Th1rte3n by Richard K. Morgan is a satisfying blend of his previous novels, equal parts of his hard-boiled Kovacs series and Market Forces, his recent Road Warrior meets Halliburton social treatise. If Andrew Vachss wrote science-fiction, this is what he’d write.

As with all of Morgan’s work, you’ll get a healthy dose of pulse-pounding action sequences and grisly crime descriptions. I’m not a horror buff and I don’t generally like gore. However, Morgan makes it accessible by delivering these sequences without the giddy glee or overly dramatic flair others employ. It’s a very straight-forward factual description - a nearly academic deconstruction of the brutality of what he’s envisioning. You’ll understand the appeal if you like CSI or Criminal Minds.

Th1rte3n continues Morgan’s science-fiction detective genre and delivers Carl Marsalis, a ‘Thirteen’, or genetically altered human who works as a hard-case bounty hunter. The back cover of the uncorrected proofs I obtained calls Marsalis “a hit man who has lost his desire to kill.” This, frankly, isn’t accurate. Marsalis is a genetically-modified soldier with increased aggression and machismo. He’s built to kill, is damn good at it, and doesn’t mind doing so for profit or revenge. It’s not a perfect life, but it’s the hand he’s been dealt and he’s a realist.

Marsalis is hired by agents of the governing body of Mars after one of their spaceships is ‘compromised’ by another Thirteen. The ship splashes into the ocean, filled with the remains of the other passengers, eaten by the renegade Thirteen. Using genetic trace the team has linked the escaped Thirteen to numerous seemingly unrelated murders across the country. Marsalis is the necessary evil they turn to as the body count rises without any further progress on capturing their suspect.

There’s a bit of rote material, necessary for the full plot, in which Marsalis bonds with his new ‘partner’, Sevgi Ertekin. It’s a satisfying tale of sleuth as the two follow the tangents, misdirection and clues to arrive at a final epiphany. In the end, the whole crime feels a little bit like a stretch, but the rest of the novel is strong enough to overcome this obstacle.

The world Morgan creates is a future fractured by racism and religion. Unlike his Kovacs novels, Morgan’s dialog is often a direct discussion of the topics he wishes to analyze and present to readers. Th1rte3n isn’t for you if you’re turned off by topics like the nature of man, of how society evolved, of Fundamentalism, of nature versus nurture and the corrupting influence of power. These direct miniature essays are peppered within the dialog, bringing introspection and intelligence to the inventive future world and hard-edge action sequences.

I recommend Richard K. Morgan’s Th1rte3n as a good way to introduce yourself to Morgan’s work. If you’re entertained and provoked, you’ll have plenty of great reading ahead of you by delving into his prior work.

Wasp by Eric Frank Russell is the first in what I’m calling a Retro Review. These are books that I’ve read in the past instead of recently and are most likely older books that aren’t currently in popular circulation. I’m also using the cover art for the edition I have on my bookshelf. Thank you to the Denver Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club from which I sourced this image.

The artwork was a big reason why I picked this out ages ago when I was in my teens. My dad had - still has - a large collection of science-fiction paperbacks in the basement. So, when I wanted something to read I’d go down and leaf through the musty books looking for something interesting. I’d often look for some of the names I’d come to rely upon: Heinlein, Laumer, Aldiss. But I could also be persuaded by a cool looking cover. Wasp was appealing (particularly the finger print font) and the quick teaser got me to open up the book and trudge up the stairs to start reading.

Wasp is about “intergalactic guerrilla warfare” and is based on the idea that small things can have big effects. The analogy is about how a wasp, “under half an ounce … killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap.” Furrowing your brow on that one? The scenario is that the driver is stung by a wasp and loses control of the car and crashes.

We follow James Mowry - reluctant hero - who is recruited as a wasp in the war between Terra and the Sirian Empire. Mowry is dropped on the planet Jaimec after undergoing training and surgery to blend into the humanoid Sirian population. What transpires next is a taut, but darkly comic look at psychological warfare.

After 9/11 and with terrorism such a buzz word, Wasp has been revived, discussed and debated. I’ve read Wasp twice and just can’t get myself lathered up about it being too close to home. Newly minted critics feel it’s a bad example. The thing is, most of what Mowry does is psychological warfare and not outright terrorism. Mowry creates a mythical rebel organization, places stickers and decals on storefronts, writes menacing letters and places fake wire-tapping devices in high-profile government buildings.

Wasp is about how to use communications to create paranoia and fear. In that way, I find it extremely relevant and interesting. But to tell the truth, each time I’ve read Wasp I simply fell into a reverie of rooting for David against Goliath while marveling and chuckling at the way in which Mowry went about his business. Russell’s Wasp is far more like reading one of Laumer’s Retief novels - a fun, yet intelligent, winking at the reader space opera.

It’s only after enjoying the tight plot line and too cool Mowry that you might connect the dots to present day geopolitics.

If you’re looking for shiny-happy science-fiction then I suggest you pass by Market Forces and Richard K. Morgan all together. On the other hand, if you like dark science fiction with an edge, aren’t afraid of a bit of blood here a bit of sex there, then Richard K. Morgan should be right up your alley. Morgan is, in many ways, an updated Philip K. Dick - which is a huge compliment in my book. Now granted, he doesn’t have the legacy yet, and hopefully Richard won’t be eating cat food or going bonkers like Dick, but … his work is sometimes very similar.

In Market Forces, Morgan merges geo-political globalisation (he’s British so I figure I’ll use the ’s’ instead of the ‘z’) and class warfare issues with Mad Max driving action sequences. Morgan’s characters are always honest in their duality, of doing bad for the sake of good, or simply doing bad and acknowledging that it’s what has to happen. Now mind you, sometimes you get the hint of real politics being throw about, but it’s light enough for me not to notice or not to care. That’s how early Tom Clancy read for me versus the late Clancy which just feels like some political pamphlet dressed up in plot and military tech specs.

There is a bit of fun melodrama here and there in Market Forces as well as interesting vignettes about the corporate world and what it takes to survive and thrive. It’s bleak, it’s powerful and it’s a great read. If you’re a student of what makes books or scripts great it is the idea that someone has to change, has a decision to make and that’s just the case in Market Forces. Chris Faulkner has a decision to make as his life intensifies and careers out of control. His decision seems linked to some … truism. It’s this central theme that keeps you wanting to read to the end, and it’s an ending you’ll want to read. No doubt about that.

Men and Cartoons is a collection of short stories from Jonathan Lethem, which ranges from science fiction to surrealism to literary works. Lethem’s imagination is on bold display and you can see links to his earlier works like Gun with Occasional Music or Amnesia Moon. Some of these stories seem more mature, more layered and more … eerie. Mind you, Lethem has always had an intriguing dark side to his work, but these stories seem just a shade darker than his others.

The abrupt Access Fantasy, strange Super Goat Man and surreal The Dystopianist stand out to me as the highlights to the collection. Though nearly all the stories, upon inspecting the contents, bring back some sort of emotion or mood. So while I likely would recommend Lethem’s other short story collection (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye) before this, it’s a pleasure to see Lethem return to these quirky worlds instead of working within the realm of the pseudo-real. I loved Motherless Brooklyn and was luke warm on Fortress of Solitude. However, both were real life stories and for me, Lethem’s genius is still better expressed through science fiction and other surreal genres.

This is certainly the best book I’ve read in 2007. And I can’t keep it out of my head, it keeps leeching back into my conscious mind, insinuating itself into my thoughts as a reference point. This is the first David Mitchell book I’ve read. I purchased it on Alibris after reading up on it on LibraryThing. Though not stated, I received a signed copy which I now treasure given my affection for the book. I’ve since purchased all of Mitchell’s books and have them in queue for reading in the near future.

In less skilled hands, the structure of the book would likely have been a distraction. Mitchell handles it with ease and leads readers from a long-ago era, to modern day, to the future and then, stepping backwards, complees each story in turn. The writing is fantastic with slight echoes from other works like Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood or an updated version of Asimov’s Rise of the Robots.

The genius of this novel is the structure, storytelling and language. There are six very distinct stories, ranging from Adam Ewing’s South Pacific travails to a post-apocalyptic landscape on what seems like a Hawaiian island. They are strung together from past to present to future and back again. Stepping away from the story, the structure is really and truly amazing. A narrative palindrome of sorts.

In each of these stories there is a unique voice and in many cases a totally different language altogether. I’m reminded of Burrough’s Nova Express or A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Mitchell invents language in some cases and falls into the cadence of long ago eras during others. Despite these ‘gimmicks’ the stories are all compelling.

The stories do connect to some degree, but not directly in most cases. However, the overarching tone, content and theme of each is consistent. Mitchell explores loyalty, power, love and man’s place in his own world. Sure you’ve read about these things before, but never like this. Read Cloud Atlas and become a David Mitchell fan.