Paladin of Souls

Paladin of Souls: A Novel, Lois McMaster Bujold

yeah, I know. Fantasy is more dorky than geeky, and I aspire to geek. But I can’t stop craving a nice light fantasy; they’re like literary Pringles. And anyway, this book is “A Novel”, so it must be okay.

I’ve been wanting to read something with magic and swordfights for a while, but unfortunately, most of the genre seems to suck like the Great Vortex of Suk’thia that sucked all the magic out of the world in the last Age. I just made that up, and that’s what much of the fantasy I’ve tried lately reads like: somebody made something up and stuck in a few apostrophes and maybe a few words in italics, and then they were done.

Anyway, Paladin of Souls was a tasty, satisfying mashed potato of a book. Some nicely written action scenes, some reasonable magic, and an intelligent middle-aged widowed heroine who has a crush on the illegitimate son of her late husband’s male lover, who is also sort of undead. Whee!

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell.

A story about stories! It’s so meta. I enjoyed this book very much; I took notes and drew a diagram. I won’t say anything detailed about it because half the fun of reading the book is seeing all the different kinds of stories and how they fit together. The change in narrative voice when the author switches genres is very nicely done.

I thought that the second half of the book didn’t quite fulfill the promise of the first half. I was expecting a vast sweeping something tying everything together in a single beautiful theme, but instead there was some stuff about souls being comets that come back around every few hundred years. Perhaps that’s a little unfair; there are themes of subjugation and freedom that are subtly expressed, but I wanted something explicit and all I got were souls = comets and also souls = clouds. Still, the trite mysticism was overshadowed by the fun of reading all the different genres and seeing how each story wrapped up.

Halfway through the second story I had what I thought was a brilliant insight about how the title is a play on words. It turned out to never be mentioned in the book, which isn’t about nuclear war at all, but I still think it’s a cool idea: Cloud Atlas – A nuclear mushroom cloud as a giant, made of clouds, holding up the roof of the world.

Perfect Circle

Perfect Circle, Sean Stewart.

Reminded me a lot of a Barbara Kingsolver book, except with a male protagonist and ghosts. A slacker misfit, haunted by his past (get it?), wanders around his hometown and the ruins of his life, reminiscing about all the mistakes and missed chances that lead to his sorry state. He’s unable to conceive of a future or a way to get out of his rut, until the interaction between his living and dead family members reaches critical mass and sets him on a path towards change and growth. Which all sounds serious and dull, but it’s written in a wry casual voice, and has ghosthunting, fistfights, and commentary on early 80’s music. Which reminds me, I have to listen to Murmur again.

It’s interesting that Amazon is offering this book paired with “Air”. At first I thought it was a strange pairing, but now that I think about it, the books complement each other well. Perfect Circle is about a character stuck in his past, while Air is about a character trapped in the future. Mae tirelessly plans for an inevitable change that’s coming too quickly, while DK desperately needs change but can’t summon the will to act.

Both characters have ghosts who guide them, and both end up reconstructing a new family out of the remains of families whose destruction they have been party to. And both characters use the internet to solve problems for their relatives. Yay interweb!

Air

Air, or Have Not Have, Goeff Ryman

Shen pointed at the TV. “We don’t want that in our village.”

“I am sure it is for you men to decide,” Mae said, sweetly. Like a cat with humans, she had a voice she only ever used with men.

Air is the on the final ballot for the Nebula awards, so I figured it was a good bet for some solid SF entertainment. Not that Air is “science” fiction – it’s more magical realism. There’s about as much science in it as there is in Midnight’s Children or One Hundred Years of Solitude. No aliens, no spaceships, just a middle-aged woman in a small mountain village who is trying to prepare herself and her community for the inevitable future.

Mae as a character “lives the change” in the way she’d like her village to. She deals with problems by evolving. Every time she faces an obstacle she changes herself until the obstacle is a path, an ally or – in one extreme case – a twisted pile of metal. She is indomitable but malleable – stepping around things and rescaling the fight rather than attacking whatever opposes her. The book reads like a long exercise in creative thinking: how to redefine the problem until it can solve itself. I kept waiting for her to give up, curl up in a ball and whimper, in the traditional “hero almost gives up but then someone reminds them why they fight” sequence, but even when she retreated into her attic isolation she was up all night working on her computer, saving the day with technology. Yay interweb!

If you read Air, comment and tell me WTF is up with the, uh, symbolic Info baby thing. I didn’t quite get that. Or maybe I did, and I just don’t get why it was in the story.