Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand

A novel that is as messy as the Goddess it portrays.

It's the end of the world, as we know it. Patriarchy has been in the driver's seat for over 3,000 years. The Benandanti, an ancient order of dudes, have been suppressing the goddess ever since. But now the Goddess is back with a vengeance and Kate Sweeney Cassidy is in the middle of a mystic triangle between the two chosen ones who have been bred to combat the coming threat: Oliver Wilde Crawford (an eccentrically brilliant pretty boy) and Angelica di Rienzi, a pre-Raphelite beauty with a ferocious will, trailing a scent of sandlewood and oranges.

While I think the book has some major problems, Hand's writing, subject matter and some of her characters make me want to try more of her work.

The first third of the book is really slow - I had to wade through it. The descriptions of the university and the portentous details slow the story going forward. We also get flashbacks from Magda Kurtz, the catalyst character who sets the wolf amongst the pigeons. Magda's ill-fated expedition is necessary to the story but where it is placed further slows down getting to know Kate, Oliver and Angelica. Add to this that whenever anything mystical/magical happens everything in the real world seems to freeze and you get a very slow pace to the start of the book. The narrative finally does get going, Magda fulfills her purpose and goes on her way, but it takes a damn long time to get going.

I wonder if the first half of the book - 1975 - couldn't have been folded into the second half of the book - 1995. That way Hand could have slowly revealed what had happened in the past and thus prevented readers from guessing what seemed to me to be the obvious fate of one of the characters from 1975. Not to drop any spoilers, but when a mysterious figure shows up in 1995 it was instantly obvious to me that this was a character from 1975. If 1975 events had been slowly mixed with 1995 events it would have made it much harder or at least would have greatly delayed me guessing the 'big reveal' that doesn't happen until the final climax.

The novel's plot centers around a ritual. The problem I often have with mythical stories, a problem I had with 'Waking the Moon', is that I didn't feel like Kate had any vital human choice or action to push the plot forward. In a novel I want the main character to do something. Here it felt like a bad Christmas dinner where your alienated family invites you to dinner to 'act' your part for the feast and then go away again. Kate had her part in the climax, but it felt generic and not particular to her character.

The only reason I know that Kate is the main character is that the book alternates between her first person narration and a third person limited narration that switches between other characters in the book. But Kate's character, while engaging in someways - I like her romance later in the book - is so passive that she needs a first person 'I' to let the reader know she is special.

I really like that Hand uses a thriller structure with a dark Goddess villain to deal with a subject matter that would usually turn readers off: the patriarchal basis of Western culture for the past 3,000 plus years and the return of matriarchal ways. Usually this type of binary thought would be pretty dreadful for a work of fiction, but Hand isn't either/or and in the tradition of true artists wants to chart an individual and messily organic path. Her method doesn't work for the structure but there is lots of good stuff in this brew.

The Jewish Messiah by Arnon Grunberg

"It's a fascinating book. It's got pace, it's got momentum, it's full of humor, and I think the writer has a story to tell. We've struck gold."

This is as good a review as I can give right now. That the above is one of the two main characters talking about Mein Kampf, which they are translating into Yiddish, gives you an idea of the tone. Biting satire, but satire kept in a disturbingly real, grounded reality. (Well grounded for the majority of the book. Grunberg slowly wound his characters up and in the final section of the book everything is fast and unbelievable.)

Grunberg is the most awesome writer than probably 97% of the reading public would not touch with a ten foot pole. But if you like your lit straight up, fearless and difficult he is the dude for you. If you want to scare a friend or relative go up to them with big puppy dog eyes, hand them the novel and say softly, "I love this book..."*


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*(I would never do this in real life, but on the internet I'm okay with scaring the crap out of all you imaginary people.)

Have Space Suit Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein

I probably would have rated this Heinlein juvenile higher except I felt after the active first half, climaxing on Luna, the book turns more speechifying with long discursions on Vega and the trial scenes (which seems always to be an authors excuse to pile on long monologues). The whole HUMANITY ON TRIAL scenario of the second half feels rather tritely pulpy after the hard sf of the first part. Loved Heinlein's descriptions of Kip's spacesuit and how he improves it and the soap contest is a nice exposé on advertising gimmickry.

Usually I roll my eyes when Heinlein goes on a rant about whatever, but I have to confess really loving his tear on crappy high school education - a rare case of my opinion actually matching his. Of course I didn't go on to teach myself calculus and Latin like Kip.

RAH is the prototypical engineer sf writer and is great at describing closed systems and how to manipulate them -- the problem for his adult fiction is that he tries to apply the same closed system thinking (libertarianism in his case) to the real world.

The Hollow Earth by Rudy Rucker

It's a Huckleberry-Finn-steampunk adventure! But it isn't light-hearted fluff. The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia may be light-hearted but it is also Southern Gothic sf with racism, rape, drug use and the generally dodgy characters that Rucker loves to fill his fiction with. And add to this historical characters, most especially Edgar Allen Poe and his marriage to Virginia, his thirteen year old cousin.

Like Poe's 1883 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym which this book is an alternate retelling, Rucker puts the story forward as an manuscript written by another, in this case Mason Algiers Reynolds. Mason, a naive 15 year old Virginian farm boy at the beginning of the novel, who with his companion Otha (his slave) and his dog Arf, manages to get himself in a hell of a lot of trouble as soon as he ventures off his father's farm. On the run, he seeks employment with his favourite author who works at the Southern Literary Messenger.

Here is where Rucker strikes gold because this author, Edgar Allan Poe, better know as Eddie Poe, is not only a great writer. He also a drunk, drug addict, racist kook who is helping a friend outfit his expedition to Antarctica to prove John Cleves Symmes' (dubious even at the time) Hollow Earth theory. Rucker seems to specialize in these odd, disreputable characters who operate at the margins of society, so I take it with a grain of salt of how much of this is the historical Poe and how much of this is just how Rucker sees the world. Anyways it is great fun, a welcome change from the usual Heilien/Stephensonian/Strossian supermen. Rucker's dudes are fuck-ups, sometimes smart, always self-destructive.

Rucker's take on the Hollow Earth benefits from some equally kookie, if far more respected modern science via Einstein, and ends up being far more fantastical than Poe's more symbolic tale. As well, the haunted darkness of Poe's psychology is allowed to air here, in sort of an all-accepting hippie/70s California, 'we're not judging you, man' sort of way. Yeah, that defuses Poe's vexing power, but now we are in Rucker-land. Light up and enjoy dude.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

Re-reading this novel was a humbling and a little melancholy experience for me, but also enjoyable. I first read and absolutely loved The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when I was thirteen or fourteen and COMPLETELY missed that Mannie the narrator has a faux-Russian accent. I mean, it is right there on the first page!

"Not fastest. At Bell Labs, Buenos Aires, down Earthside they've got a thinkum a tenth [supercomputer Mike's] size which can answer almost before you ask. But matters whether you get answer in micro-second rather than millisecond as long as correct?"

Da, went completely over my head it did as I read silently to myself, hiding in my bedroom all through my tormented adolescence.

Now, I may just have flushed out what didn't compute or what I just didn't have a frame of reference for. Heinlein's sexual politics for one. He comes up with a utopia that is supposed to be better for women, but really the main female character in the book is just there to look good and fall in love with the narrator Mannie. Women have more power on Luna because they are a scarce commodity (the ratio of men to women is very high), but this just boils down to sex objects on pedestals, not any type of feminism. Much of the politics-politics, the rational anarchism as it is called in the book, or libertarianism I suppose in the modern context, went over my head when I first read it. Much of that was actually interesting this time, though I still feel it sounds like a great plan as long as you are never in a position of need yourself. Heinlein is still pretty good at presenting this stuff entertainingly at this point in his writing career, though some of the lectures were starting to get long.

Some stuff that did appeal, how Heinlein characters knew everything and were always more intelligent than their opponents has lost some of its coolness factor, now that I'm not a young teen with an enormous appetite for power fantasies. Mannie, the Professor, and Mike the supercomputer (with Wyo looking on) hatch a plan to lead a revolt for the freedom of Luna and then they enact the plan, and then....the plan goes exactly to plan because they are all so damn smart, nobody else can come up with anything smarter or unexpected to stop them. A lot of Heinlein's supermen characters and the worlds they live in comes off as Papa Heinlein playing god in his own little sandbox and not really engaging with the big, complicated, messy, unfair, chancy world outside.

(Though to be fair, the one thing that struck me this time through was that though the revolution part of the plan goes off without a hitch, any plan for an anarchist/libertarian system afterward is quickly set aside by the people that the revolutionaries free. My sense is that 'the stupids' (all the non-Heinleinian supermen and women) are going to set up a settled ordered democratic government with lots of rules and regulations and taxes. In the end Mannie is thinking about leaving the moon and heading for the less regulated Asteroids. A very American, very western (in the sense of cowboys on the frontier) ending.)

The best part of the book is the relationship of Mike, the newly wakened supercomputer, with his first human friend Mannie, the narrator. This is the part that I do remember from my first reading of the book and its still the part that I feel Heinlein got right this time through. Perhaps because Mike is, in a way, a child at the beginning of the book and then grows up as the novel progresses this actually makes him the most rounded of the characters in the book.

So I enjoyed the story, but Heinlein is that uncle I worshiped when I was younger and now have discovered is all too human, like the rest of us. It would be all too easy just to bash and dismiss someone who was very important to me when younger. I've listed a lots of things that I don't like in the book, but I'm still going to treasure those bits that get my mind and heart firing.

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

*Spoiler ALERT - unreliable narrator discussion*

It comes down to the missing Nat King Cole record and envelope full money for me.

On the surface this might come off as a mid-life crisis, with the lonely guy at the center going off course when a woman suddenly appears as a femme fatale with death in her eyes. If that was all it was, even done as eerie and coldly pretty as Murakami can only do, I probably would just write this off as an overly romantic slice of weird-ass Japanses noir. But....

When I got to the end of a novel and Hajime, the first person narrator, starts going on about 'alternate reality' and how because the senses and memory are so unreliable that you need external objects to confirm reality, but that this raises all sorts of problems because then you need other 'realities' to support the 'alternate reality' of the objects supporting the first reality and that this leads to an endless chain -- a chain that has been broken by the disappearance of the envelope full of cash. Now Hajime looks over the chasm of the broken chain and can't figure out which side he is on --
Well, this reader knew he'd better start questioning what is real in this novel. Most particularly is the adult Shimamoto, the mysterious fem-fatale, a real person?

I don't think she exists, excpet in the narrator's mind. If you go back in the book I don't believe any of the other characters in the book actually interact with her. Yes, I'm talking Bruce Willis and Haley Jole Osmond/The Sixth Sense kind of deal here. The narrator in this book is screwed up and playing a very odd game in his head - one that he isn't aware of but I believe the reader is suppose to clue in on by the end.

I've read other people's reactions to the book, questioning why there are so many loose ends and vagaries, and perhaps SOTB, WOTS is open ended and 'romantic'. But I like my interpretation, which seems to show the book is deadly sharp and anything but romantic.

I don't think Murakami is trying to portray mental illness, but rather playing with the consequences and selfishness of his main character's nostalgic desires -- and by making Shimamoto his character's hallucination shows how anti-life this force is. While Shimamto is the seductress/succubus manifestation of his hunger for the life of others, Izumi (the horrific vision of her at the end, who is also a hallucination, way too much of a coincidence that she suddenly shows up in a taxi) is the hungry ghost the void that lies within him. It all adds up to a bleak portrait of a monomaniacal egotist.

I'm sure there is nothing new in this interpretation, and a lot wrong, but it's my first pass at sinking into the book.

Ender's Game (Ender's Saga, #1) by Orson Scott Card

I thought a lot about Harry Potter as I read this book. Potter is fantasy and Ender is science fiction but both books belong to another genre as well, that of the boarding school novel. Ender's Game is so compact and entertaining in part because it compresses what usually takes the protagonists of this type of story many (in Potter's case seven) volumes to complete into one book. (I haven't read the rest of the 'Ender Saga' but assume that the boarding school structure is set aside, at least for Ender himself.)

Little six year old Ender, Andrew Wiggans, is sent off to Battle School, basically orphaning him from his parents (who are glad to rid themselves of the socially frowned upon third child) and his older brother and sister, Peter and Valentine. Both of the older children have been passed over for what boils down to "the chosen one", the future leader of human forces against the evil Buggers who threaten human existence. Peter was rejected for being an unfeeling sociopath, while Valentine is seen as too empathetic (soft). The hope, just like those beds in the three bears house, is that Ender will be 'just right', the perfect mix of empath and killing machine.

Card tells a pretty tight story when tell the story from Ender's POV and he is good at portraying both his thought and feelings. There is a lot of three dimension strategy in the book and there wasn't a moment where I was confused by how Card laid things out, which is a compliment since I'm a pretty 2-D/1-D kind of guy. The first scene is not from Ender's point of view but instead is recordings of his 'teachers' conversation -- all court accessible I'm guessing. This is a nice break from the usual boarding school novel where the teachers motives and strategies are hinted at but not usually revealed until the end of the novel. In this case the circumstances are a little more complicated (imminent alien doom) and the goal a little different (we need a effective killing machine!)

I found the sections which break away to Ender's sister's, Valentine, point of view a bit deflating in comparison. It felt like it broke the unity of place that comes in a school novel. I can see why Card wanted to get this information and dynamic in the story but I just felt it subtracted from the overall thrust. (I believe in the original short story (which I haven't read) Valentine and Peter and this whole subplot wasn't there. While it wides the novel's scope and sets things up for the next book I just don't feel it structurally fits.) But Card does keep the Valentine intrusions to a minimum and when I got to the end of the novel I can see why it was necessary, at least.

So Ender is getting trained up to fight the evil aliens, while Harry Potter is sent to wizard school to get ready to fight Voldemort. But due to the design of the school and the aims of the teachers, Ender is purposely isolated, prevented from making friends. He is taught that the teachers will never intervene to save him. He is in a Darwinian battle where only the strong survive and they survive by any means necessary. Contrast that with Hogwarts where Potter almost immediately gains three good friends and almost all the teachers are taken on as parental figures. Thank goodness for Snape or there wouldn't be any drama! Right from the very first scene in the school yard Card shows a much harder, grim, less forgiving world where force has to be answered by force, and preferably overwhelming or else the other guy will just come back and do you in later.

There is a fairly questionable Social Darwinian thread through Ender's Game. Ender is bred to be the next Alexander the Great or Napoleon. There is a comment early on that there aren't many girls in Combat School, because millions of years of evolution have selected boys as the best commanders. (One of the annoying things about Valentine is that Card writes her wimpy. As if someone as smart and resourceful as her, who has survived (and to a degree managed) her sociopathic brother wasn't actually pretty fucking tough.) Perhaps some of this is questioned later on in the series. A lot of this leads back to common complaint I have with some science fiction which is that many books like to imagine extreme situations where all human behavior is reduced to a social Darwinian zero sum game which seems to fit with a lot of right-wing thinking. Perhaps I'm just a pinko-red communist Canadian who loves his health-care, but these type of scenarios don't seem to capture the whole picture.

I found the ending of the book was okay. (Mild vague spoilers here on.) Just looking at where I was in the book, how much space was left, gave me enough hints to guess what was going to happen. It felt rather anti-climactic. (To be honest the twist felt like a moral cheat. Were the adults who manipulated and abused Ender all the way through the novel afraid to commit the ultimate crime of genocide? Does it excuse them or Ender from having committed the act? Having a child pull the trigger at the end really paints a picture of a very, very sick culture. And perhaps that is the point.) The long post-script was as much about the book to come as it was about this novel. Though I did enjoy the part about the Buggers, which transformed them from 'evil aliens' to something more complicated. While I don't imagine I agree with Card about much, he is able to raise, and thankfully not answer, quite a few intriguing questions here, about power, morality and how we bridge the gap between the individual and society.