Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

I’m happy to see that there is a nice new edition of one of my favorite books, The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. For some reason the book drags me in every time I read it. Much of it amounts to a critique of an exaggerated version of our own society, but the most interesting part for me is just the protrayal of Gurgeh (the protagonist) and his very plausible fascination with games. It’s also interesting to consider whether our society would be as unable to cope with the Culture as the society that Banks describes.

It seems that Orbit is planning to rerelease all of Banks’s SF books. Of course Banks should need no introduction to anybody who follows science fiction, but it’s nice to see some high quality editions sold in the U.S. My copies of his early books were all printed in the UK.

I recently read his latest novel, Matter, also published by Orbit. I was mildly surprised to see that he wrote another Culture novel–it seems to me that he pretty much said everything he had to say about it in Look to Windward. As it turned out Matter doesn’t have much to do with the Culture at all; it amounts to a background element in a reasonably typical Banks space opera. In other words, an interesting book well worth reading, but not the fascinating experience of, say, The Player of Games.

Of course Banks has also written a number of non-SF novels, also well worth reading. My personal favorite of those is The Crow Road.

I recently read the trilogy of books by Sergei Lukyanenko: Night Watch, Day Watch, Twilight Watch. I’m surprised they aren’t better known–my local science fiction bookstore doesn’t carry them at all. On the surface they seem rather derivative: they involve a struggle between the forces of light (the Night Watch) and the force of darkness (the Day Watch), and include vampires, werewolves, and magicians. In execution, though, they are quite interesting.

Lukyanenko shows the light and dark forces as parallel, but unlike most such efforts he does it 1) convincingly given the background; 2) in a way which makes the forces of light seem like the good guys while also showing why the forces of darkness oppose them. The books primarily trace byzantine plot maneuvers run by the head magicians which the ordinary characters do not fully understand.

Also the books are originally in Russian and set in Moscow, giving them a different perspective than most books I read. The translation is not very idiomatic English–it’s hard to tell how much of that is the original Russian and how much is the translator. There are a few side comments on the Americans which are interesting.

I understand that there is a movie of Night Watch which was very popular in Russia, but I haven’t seen it. Anyhow, I think these books are definitely a cut above the standard fantasy fare.

I did go to the movie version of Jumper. It had nothing to do with the book. I think there were about three or four scenes from the book in the movie, all at the very beginning. The characters were all completely different, although they had the same names.

In general the movie was pretty bad. The story was full of logic holes. The characters were completely unbelievable. The dialogue was badly written. The acting was stilted–not even Samuel L. Jackson could make his character remotely believable. On the plus side, the special effects were generally pretty good.

Also on the plus side, the story was so completely unlike the book that it doesn’t spoil the book.

Don’t go to this movie, even if it is still in the theaters. Save your money.

Jumper, by Steven Gould, is among my favorite SF books. It’s a simple story based on a simple premise: a teenager discovers that he has the power to teleport. The book is both a bildungsroman and a revenge story, as he uses his power to strike back at his enemies (thanks to the one outrageous coincidence permitted to every story, he has some nasty enemies). He reacts plausibly to his power, the characters around him react plausibly, the government gets involved. The book doesn’t hit any false notes, and it’s not too long.

Gould’s second book, Wildside, was also good, though not as good. It was also based on a single simple premise, in this case a doorway to another world, an Earth without humans.

His subsequent books were by-and-large completely forgettable, alas. He did write a sequel to Jumper, Reflex, which was OK. It lost a lot of the charm by introducing another fantastic element, an evil conspiracy which was not really spelled out and led to an ending to the book which I found quite implausible.

Jumper is now being turned into a movie, being released this weekend. It’s always fun but scary to see a favorite book turned into a movie. Unfortunately, based on the previews I’ve seen, this one is going to be a lot more scary than fun. In the movie Davy is not the only person who can teleport. There are fight scenes between teleporters. There seems some to be some kind of organization which works against teleporters. This might all be good fun, if it weren’t for the fact that none of this is in the book, and that it ruins the basic idea which made the book good. The book as written would be filmable; it has good characters and plenty of action and conflict both between and within characters. I guess it just wouldn’t be a spectacular special effects event movie, though.

Who knows? Maybe the movie will be good after all. And presumably Gould will get a small pile of money out of it, not to mention more book sales.

I like David Weber novels, even though they are terrible, in the same way that I like action movies. You more or less know what is going to happen, and you can tell the good guys from the bad guys in the first page or scene, and the dialogue is vastly different from anything any person might ever actually say, but the enjoyment comes in watching it all come together, with the occasional unexpected plot twist thrown in for fun.

I just read “Off Armageddon Reef.” It has some reasonable SF tropes, all three types of Weber characters—noble, misguided, and perfidious—good battle scenes, fast action, stilted dialogue, almost no sex (though there is a somewhat odd repressed hetero/homosexual (hey, it’s SF) relationship which Weber may or may not have intended). What’s not to like?

What’s not to like is that on a brand new world, created with what amounts to a de novo society without technology or memory of Earth (several plot points there), he has created a society of kings and nobles, with titles of nobility, etc., which is essentially identical to the society in his Honor Harrington novels, and is closely based on the English nobility. The Harrington novels are basically the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars set in space, so copying the English nobility was perfectly fine. But in this book he’s done it all over again, with no excuse at all. He doesn’t even try to explain why the de novo society might have developed this way.

Niven and Pournelle did the same thing in “The Mote in God’s Eye,” but they at least took a page to explain why, and at least their characters knew Earth history. Weber’s characters don’t, and he doesn’t explain.

Obviously Weber’s books require considerable suspension of disbelief at the best of times, but for this book I couldn’t quite manage it.