Airs – Ian Lance Taylor

Apparently the great popularity of Stieg Larsson’s novels have triggered a new interest in Swedish mystery authors. I’d like to plug the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. It’s ten books written in the 60s and 70s.

Actually, other than being Swedish, they are entirely different from Larsson’s novels. Larsson reads like an intelligent Dan Brown with real characterization. The Beck novels are police procedurals, telling the story of solving a crime from the perspective of a policeman, Martin Beck. The novels were also intended to be an examination of Swedish society, which sounds daunting but is quite effective in practice.

The Beck novels have some extremely funny scenes, scenes which are made all the funnier by the fact that nobody in the story considers the amusing at all, and indeed they would not be funny if you were involved in them in real life. For example, the police breaking into what turns out to be a completely empty room in The Terrorists (Terroristerna), resulting through a series of completely plausible mishaps in several shootings and near fatalities.

Henning Mankell, a popular current Swedish mystery writer, is clearly strongly influenced by Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Many of Mankell’s novels are quite good, but I prefer the earlier ones.

I’ll read anything which Iain Banks writes, but, frankly, his recent novel Transition was rather weak. I think he was a bit low on the idea bank for this one. This is one of the novels where he sets up surprises, but unfortunately they were not surprising. The ideas which were meant to be challenging and surprising just seemed wrong. The changes to the main character were poorly motivated. The explicit sex, which worked in his novel Complicity because it expanded the characterization, here seemed irrelevant and tossed in just to avoid a talking heads problem.

In a lesser writer, I would think that the ending was setting up a sequel. I sincerely hope that is not the plan here.

Separately, I’ve been reading NESFA’s nice series of collected Zelazny stories. Zelazny has always been one of my favorite SF authors, and it’s refreshing to be reminded of just how good he was. His novels were generally good, of course (avoid the second five Amber novels), but it was in his short stories that he really shone.

I’ve been reading some old science fiction short stories recently, and I was reminded of just how good Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore were writing together after they got married. Writing separately they were notable. Moore in particular wrote the Northwest Smith series of stories in the 1930s, which were pulp stories but nevertheless vivid and memorable. Writing together they were excellent. Besides writing under their own names, they also used many pseudonyms, notably Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell. Their story Mimsy Were the Borogroves was recently made into a movie, The Last Mimzy, although I didn’t go see it. Their stories range all over science fiction; they never fell into a rut.

Unfortunately, novels are where you get recognition, and their best work was in short stories. They are not well known today.

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s new book Anathem. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The book is based on a lot of the Western philosophical tradition, albeit under different names. He provides an SF explanation for Plato’s Theory of Forms, which I think anybody has to appreciate, loosely (very loosely) based on some of Gödel’s work. And he is getting better at actually writing endings to his novels.

I just read the conclusion of Kage Baker’s Company series, The Sons of Heaven, which just came out in paperback. I was lucky enough to pick up her first book, In the Garden of Iden, on a whim back when it came out. That was good enough for me to buy her second book, Sky Coyote, and that book was truly excellent. Since then I’ve bought everything she has written.

The Company series, which is11 books long (and there may be some more short stories not yet collected), is a complicated mix of time travel adventure and social satire. Baker is an excellent writer, and is a pleasure to read even when she is just unfolding plot points–and boy are there a lot of plot points. Her characters are well crafted, and her satire is amusing and more plausible than it really should be.

An aspect of Baker’s writing that I really appreciate is her ability to build up a character who appears to be a stereotype, and then flip the character into something completely different and unique, without in any way changing anything she already described. Bad writers often do this badly, but Baker does it superbly. That what was most impressed me about Sky Coyote, as Joseph, and the reader, keep coming to a deeper and better understanding of the Chumash.

The Company series is so complicated that I was not at all sure that she would be able to actually write a conclusion, but The Sons of Heaven pulls it off, wrapping everything up very satisfactorily while staying true to the series. She even makes parts of the story more plausible as she does so, and looks in on just about every single character–at least, I couldn’t remember any which she left out.

I’m really surprised that Baker has not won more awards in the SF field. At least all her books seem to be back in print now–for a while they were hard to find. I think she is one of the top tier SF writers, but she doesn’t seem to have quite the recognition she deserves.