Sultan of the Clouds, by Geoffrey Landis

Continuing my reviews of the Nebula award nominees for this year. Sultan of the Clouds is a real throwback of a story. Geoffrey Landis is one of several accomplished scientists with a sideline in writing. He makes his main living working right here in Houston at NASA. This is the first story of his that I have read.

All the time I was reading it I was thinking about the early 60's. The hero is a basically 2D tech nerd, infatuated with another somewhat different 2D tech nerd. They deal with a power-hungry rich kid in the atmospheric cities of Venus. Zowie! The kid even has a Kinect ("some sort of full-body input device"). The ideas are pretty interesting and the story moves along, but the prose is a little awkward. It's just weird to see something like this as a current, award nominated story. Enjoyable for the hard SF fans among us (and I am one, so I liked it anyway). I'll go ahead and give it 3 stars.

Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, by Paul Park

The past couple of days have been devoted to Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance, a nebula-nominated novella by Paul Park. It is a very literary tale, and ties together with nice subtlety. It is set in the near future, in a period of breakdown. The protagonist is trying to sort out his family history--several minor intellectuals, each with a disparate contribution to the final theme. The trope is familiar as a set of strange stories, or rather, ordinary stories with strange parts to them, far enough in the past that it seemed hard to believe they were truly made up. The defenders of this world are an unlikely lot. Not sure it's a winner, but I give it 3 stars and enjoyed it.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang

Every time I see a Ted Chiang story online, I jump on it, and this is no exception. It is nominated for a Hugo award this year, so I read it with great anticipation.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects is basically an AI story. It's a very thorough study of how humans would relate to trainable software that matures. The "digients" are based on animal personalities, designed so that people would become attached to them. Most people put them aside when they're not convenient anymore, but some, including two of the designers, invest the kind of time and money one would spend on a child. The story weaves a complex romantic interest in as well.

Ted Chiang always has a bit of a dry, earnest style that has the realistic ring of a professional workplace conversation. That's a bit more extreme here, to the point where one wouldn't mind a bit more of an emotional investment. But the story is so complete and thorough that it's forgiven. Chiang isn't prolific, and one understands why when reading him--every passage seems to have had a full edit. I give this one 3 stars, and you'll learn something reading it

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

I have been away for almost two months. This hiatus was caused by a desire to read Infinite Jest. Do not expect that I have much to add to the innumerable reviews. Whole dissertations and readers' guides are available to help you take it apart in detail.

As a speculative fiction reader I am most interested in those aspects. And it is definitely strong there, with social (auctioning off calendar years for sponsorships) and technological (predicted the availability of nearly all media digitally). The novel makes several top-10 literary SF lists . It is, of course, a truly massive read, not just in pages (1076) but that it is densely packed and baroquely footnoted. At one point I required three bookmarks. Everything ever said about it being a tour-de-force is true--it holds one's interest all the way through.

That said, it left me less than satisfied. I'll have to give something of a spoiler here, but really it's hard to say it spoils it. After all thousand pages, the book ends utterly unfinished. Pace-wise, it probably had another third to go. This is making me think very hard about endings, and developing more of an appreciation for authors who can bring a big difficult effort to a close. Wallace doesn't even try, it obviously wasn't in his mind. Robert Jordan mananged to die out from under all 12000 pages of The Wheel of Time. The Gormenghast trilogy, the Worm Ourouboros--all began well and ended poorly. Am beginning to think endings are perhaps a truer indicator of the talent of a writer--thus Infinite Jest begins to look like possibly one of the author's less effective works, even if it has had more influence.

One dives deep into this work. I have lived the detailed lives of a tennis academy student, drug addict, special agent, assassin, and film director/physicist/schoolmaster for months now. Having it end in midair this way just seems weird. Back to my faves at Free SF Online for some relief.

Flesh and Fire, by Laura Anne Gilman

Continuing in my reading of award nominees of 2010, I recently finished Laura Anne Gilman's Flesh and Fire. This one I could not get for free, at least not easily--the local public library did not have it. So I bought one cheap on Amazon, and will donate it to the library. Sometimes you have to give back...

It won't be too tough to let it go. The book was decent. It's a basic magic fantasy, first of a trilogy called The Vineart War. The magic basis is wine, which gives the author access to the rich vocabulary of the oenophile. And while the descriptive language is interesting, the plot is really pretty basic. The society is rigidly hierarchical, with parallel political and magical structures (The mages were once called that, but are now Vinearts). And the title Vineart is repeated so often, with such omnipresent force, as to become a hammer. The War of the trilogy title appears that it will be with some form of rogue Vineart. Vineart, Vineart, Vineart. Oy. It's a basic coming of age story, and I'm sure the rest will be fine too.

The Witling, by Vernor Vinge

Vernor Vinge is not a prolific author, to my chagrin. With this book, I have finally caught up and read all his fiction to date. The Witling is in many ways his least ambitious work, but that's saying nothing bad. It is one of the later examples (published in the mid-70's) of a novel that revolves around a very specific idea--in this case, "what if there really were people who could move things from one place to another without their traveling in between - teleportation?" So he weaves discussions of conservation of energy and angular momentum into the plot. It's tasty work, so if you have read the rest of his work it's worthwhile to go seek this out. The plot itself is just ordinary, so I can't give it more than 3 stars, but it was a good read.

In Great Waters, by Kit Whitfield

I've read plenty of mermaid/men stories--there was another one nominated for a World Fantasy award this year, just as In Great Waters was. This book puts a very interesting new twist on it--the cross between "deepsman" and human is more fit for leadership than either purebred. That's the fantasy part, that human and merman can somehow interbreed.
The book builds somewhat slowly. Whitfield's characters, particularly the halfbreed royalty, are irascible and difficult to like. But build it does. All the types are fully described and realized, and by the end of the book you come to understand them. The royals seem more human than the humans, in the end.
It doesn't seem fated to last--as the clever humans develop technology, they seem likely to push the deepsmen aside entirely. But it's entertaining to think about.