Andrew's Updates

Andrew added 'Cyteen'

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 03:27:51 -0700

Andrew gave 5 stars to Cyteen (Cyteen, #1-3) by C.J. Cherryh
bookshelves: sf-read, hugo-winners, locus-winners
Outstanding. The precursor to Regenesis (2009), one of the best books I've read, successor to Downbelow Station (1981), which provides some wider backstory of the development of this Union-Alliance series. But this is far and away superior to its precursor, if not as outstanding as its immensely involving successor. It is richly detailed, highly political and immersively psychological, and Cherryh demonstrates a higher proficiency in both spheres than any author I have read, with a confidence to her writing and a surety of her world akin to Asimov, Herbert and Banks. I'm not sure, though, if any sci-fi author comes close to her psychological and political thinking, with the possible exception of Leckie, though with far less detail there.

I have now read seven of Cherryh's various sci-fi novels - four of the Alliance/Union series, one of the Foreigner series, and one of the Rusalka trilogy, and Cyteen and Regenesis are so far beyond the quality of the others, it is still hard to reconcile that they are all by the same author. But clearly, Cherryh not only thought in minute and far-reaching detail about this 'world', but was most at home in it. And I am too.

While not quite full-blown space opera, it has, in its Alliance-Union series prequels, extra-Solar expansion, rivalling Asimov's Foundation series and Herbert's Dune series for the verisimilitude of their sociological foundations that make all great science fiction books GREAT.

It is a psychological thriller and a SF political novel - very rare. Herbert's CHOAM and Asimov's Empire are rivalled here as political meta-civilisations - something Banks has never attained directly like these - but indirectly, as vastly.

Further - perhaps most of all - I love the character and being inside of the young Ari all the way through. You not only like her, you adore her, admire her, smile at her throughout. A perfect character. A bit girly sometimes (a hint of Elizabeth Moon), for she's a girl for much of the story. But she's smart, redefines 'precocious', one of a list of uber-geniuses: Einstein, Bok... Emory. So smart, she feels sometimes 'the universe going too slow for her mind' (audiobook 5, 3, 00:47:15). And, most importantly, she is not cruel like her predecessor.

Despite the obvious technological anachronisms (taking 'tape', microfiche), this is SF of the first order. Premised on the widescale evolution of cloning, it is fundamentally about power in the new galactic quadrant. Both Emorys are constantly under threat, from without and within. Who they trust is a very limited cadre, and even those have to be suspect (it is only her bodyguard-companion clones - Catlin and Florian, beautifully drawn - who can really be trusted). Similarly for Justin and his Grant.

One major story strand is ostensibly thematically about the vicissitudes of their suffering, but the book is saved by the development of the young Ari - for although Justin may be smart, special and necessary to the new Ari, he is also an exceptionally irritating personality throughout the novel - dammit. And although Cherryh subtly alters your opinion of him as the story reaches its climax, he reminds you of having to suffer distasteful work colleagues. Yet it is this tension that pervades the book, more so than the political machinations and threats from outside, or the perverse intimate-enemy tensions from within, from Giraud and Denys. There is a distinctly vinegary flavour to this particular enforced symbiosis with Justin, and tolerance of his acid father Jordan, yet it is also these two who we follow through the sequel Regenesis, tainting everything.

It is also one of the triumphs of these books that Cherryh can lean so heavily on such unpalatable irritating principal characters and yet keep you absorbed in the story and their fates. It deals, very closely, at a personal level of feeling, with what is essentially child abuse, the abuse of power, from those who - and they exist in far too many numbers that is good for the advance of the human race - kill at the whim of a mood, any opposition of even thought, who abuse their power every day, who, even while we have an insight into their reasons, which fall under the guise of a 'bigger picture', have lost that essential need in any human, which makes them human at all: empathy. The reverberations are as profound as any deep-set. For that is a must in this overcrowded, self-destructive, remotely abusive world.

I rate these two Cyteen books so highly because, above everything - the richness of detail and character and place, as well as immersive psychology and politics - it is the person of the young Ari that fascinates and secures your affection. Living within her head, her thoughts, her feelings, her unique place, panders to your own need for being special but above all - makes you feel safe. If there is any presiding feeling while reading Cyteen or Regenesis - beyond total absorption, every reader's need of a novel - it is that wonderful cosy feeling whilst doing so of feeling completely safe. As with Cathy H. Remember her?

Andrew added 'Midnight's Children'

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 07:56:08 -0700

Andrew gave 5 stars to Midnight's Children (Paperback) by Salman Rushdie
bookshelves: 1001, booker-winners, auto-biography, india
Lyrical, beautiful, captivating, dense and rich, full of gentle affectionate humour, and depths deep as the lakes in the eyes of a girl from Kerala - you know this already, even from the Introduction.

Yet, despite the density of narrative and expression in this supremely rated novel - winner of 3 Booker prizes - I had several reservations which grew with the telling.

It was a much different story than the blurb had suggested; I expected a series of joyous meetings between the children of midnight as they rode the waves of historical change and poverty that have wracked this mysterious, amazing and appalling country, India. I thought that perhaps this 'magical realism' was the story of the emergence of the most colourful characters of the nation from the massive slums born out of the old Raj. But no, the magical realism was the setting of a tiny handful of individuals that Saleem Sinai, convener of the Midnight Children's Conference, fell in or out with along his journey from birth at that gifting time, to thirty-something.

Largely a tale of autobiography embellished with fantasy, it told of the coincidence - manufactured or nor, believe or don't believe it happened - of key moments of Saleem's strange development in the folds of a family of such awful characters that anyone else would have run away from home very early, with the key explosions of India's history from just before Independence of 1947 and the partition of Pakistan. The writing was always affectionately humourous, colourful and intelligent, a familiar style that allowed reading of a very dense novel; but after the disappointment of the rare appearances and subordination of the other children to this historical-autobiographical plotline, I became bogged down by page 350, and struggled to get through the remainder with any real enthusiasm. It consequently took a month to read.

That disappointment was compounded by the inevitable many references to Indian things, cultural, religious, culinary, that I would have to look up, few of them described; but I hadn't the energy by now. Further, catalogues of the Indian pantheon of gods does need some explanation, and since I believed this should have been an additional seam of richness alongside the novel's cultural and historical layers, Rushdie should have spent a few sentences developing that richness - and not assuming that the Western reader would either know or have the patience to look them all up. This is an unforgivable opportunity missed, and the lack of exploiting this rich seam of religious colour detracted from the enjoyment - and expectation, I confess. One of the reasons Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light [1967] is such an enjoyable, colourful novel is not because of the science fiction meld, but because of the development of the characters of the Indian pantheon - Shiva, Brahma, Kali etc. These are surely central to any upbringing and life in India of the early-mid 20th century... Yet Rushdie skims over them. Shame.

Other disappoinments are minor, and discountable in comparison with the book's treasure of merits. It is a rich, dense tale, yet Saleem's family and fate are a difficult read - whatsitsname - and the constant repetition, previews of, and regurgitations of events - switching back and forth in time, anticipating and back-referencing - became a part of the style that more and more irritated, so that, by the time I reached just over half-way, these irritations and the lack of midnight's children, and the clear emergence that the autobiographical theme was to dominate over the magical theme, and that the realism was simply relating - albeit cleverly - the coincidences of Saleem's life to the historical events of the time, and the politicians involved - Nehru, Indira Gandhi; interestingly mentioning Mahatma only in passing-by - I felt I was reading a different book to the one I was promised, and lost a great deal of interest.

A shame: because this was the promised book, The Booker Winner (1981), The Booker of Bookers (1993), The Best of the Bookers (2008), and if so many well-read erudites deemed it so, it must have been so. Yet, sadly, not for me. It was, half-way, a good 9.4; by the end, mainly because I wanted a riot of midnight's children through the slums of Bombay and Delhi, and they hardly appeared throughout the entire 650 pages, I felt let down and misled, so deducted an entire point for this massive disappointment. Expectation is based not just on others' scoring, but on their reviews, and the blurb on the jacket or GoodReads site. I refused to read any reviews, I wanted this one afresh, yet did read the blurb, and now I am very firmly convinced that blurb is as much hype as twitting is idiocy, and refuse to accept that promise at all from now on. With Dickens, you know you'll hardly be disappointed, because generations have enjoyed and praised the work. In a couple of hundred years, will Midnight's Children or Rushdie be as lauded? I very much doubt it. Perhaps the limitations are in the Booker itself, being 'commonwealth' oriented. Yet, perhaps not; perhaps a small core of pseudo-intellectual elitism is to fault, as any elitism should be. Elitism did not raise Dickens to his heights, and his characters are far richer than Rushdie's. If only he'd based the novel around Midnight's Children, instead of just three of four of them....

Anyway, a few quotes that set up that promise (and many more subsequently I was too disappointed to note):

Introduction, p. xiii: "Between the adored and the adorer falls the shadow."

The perforated sheet, p.4: "... and at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history."

The perforated sheet, p.12: "For an instant, silence, noisier than a waterfall."

Andrew added 'The Shipping News'

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 07:37:46 -0700

Andrew gave 4 stars to The Shipping News (Paperback) by Annie Proulx
bookshelves: pulitzer-winners, 1001
Most of us have heard of Proulx - having seen The Shipping News (2001) and Brokeback Mountain (2005) - but how many of us have read her? For in the reading, her clipped imagistic style compels you through her narratives as much as her investigation of personality, hardship and relationships, very much evident in the films. But it is this style which must be read.

Proulx thrusts you through her incidentally cruel narrative with clipped phrasing raddled with serrated simile, casually stroking like a hacksaw across the sensibilities. Quoyle, as oddly named as native American landscapes, lumbers his way through a series of cruel episodes as though this were some fantasy set in Purgatory, not real in the sense that nothing that unpleasant could be true of the real world, surely. A child of casual psychological abuse, casually abused by his employer, his children sexually abused (but not by him; he loved them with the passion of a man thrown a life-jacket in raised black seas), a cuckolding (such a horrible word, riddled with casual abuse), loveless, abusing wife (soon dispatched by Providence), this tale of the luckless drives them off to the icy blasts of the Newfoundland coast as though there were no place left on Earth fit for humanity.

The sensibilities, then, are assaulted by an incessant stream of abuse, as from an alexithymic politician, no room left for thoughts of affection, caring, kindness, love and soul, the swirl of an inner life. It is all visceral hunger, want and need, like raw wounds that just won't heal, stinging from the otherwise balming sea spray. Why, you would ask, would someone want to read such a tale, let alone write one?

It's because, hidden from sight there lies some invisible layer of that endless unfed need for love, which demands of us in the reading a connection within us in the living, out there, of like minds. All those frightful similes, those reminders of human folly in knotty epigrams chapter by chapter, the clipped, barbed style, the stream of casual abuse, all serve as cloaks of penitence on the ladder of Purgatory, which the endless billions climb in the endless hope of salvation from something endlessly awful, looking eternally skyward in the hope of fine weather, a split of sunshine a gateway to a promised land: a land of love, peace, heartsease.

But for that hope...

Quoyle, as ethnically named as the Paleo-Indian places of Newfoundland, Canada, the States, much of South America and the thousand islands around them, underpinning a pre-culture driven out by Scots and Irish, Spanish and Portuguese, French and Dutch, Norse and European conquestors all, struggles to gain minimal credibility among a community versed in the sea and rough weather and hardship, the only thing he and his aunt and two girls share now with his new neighbours. A small, tight-knit community grounded by quirks and worse and fearful of the sea, who know one another's histories as though they lived with each other, welcome him like a lumbering lamb brought in from the cold.

His mundane job at the local rag - ridden with typos, left in for entertainment - brings him in contact with daily traffic accidents he'd much rather avoid given the reason he's there at all, and the locus of the shipping news, the harbourmaster's office. It seems fate is staring him full in the face each day. His two young girls are bickering with boredom, and the family home, abandoned for thirty years, in as sorry a state as the road out to it, isolated as a tug lost out in an Atlantic storm, in as bad a condition. But it's all they have, and they have to do it up and live amidst the singing hawsers anchoring it to the point's bedrock, the place battered by storms and whipped by winds.

Proulx is an excellent writer. Her similes are so terse they need decoding, often as not, yet superbly evocative. The style, somewhere between poetry and prose, whips you along with a thousand tiny observations, while tackling the big issues of relationships and just merely coping. The short chapters marry the terse truncated style, sewn together with epigrams of different knots, as though homilies of order between the chaos. She drops in fascinating little backdrops to characters, making them very real and alive: aunt Agnis Hamm's life which led to her strange profession, Dennis's fractured relationship with his father, Nutbeem's chipper loneliness, Wavey's bleak isolation, softness under rain; and, of course, Quoyle's own inner life, through whose eyes we see all these folk and their oddness.

There's more than a few references to child abuse, curdling the story, from the overt child slavery for dark pornography to the all-too-closeness of the community, and something else woven beneath his eldest daughter Bunny's strangeness. Being the eldest, perhaps she saw more into the brief episode of losing her mother than the youngest, Sunshine. Sees white dogs everywhere. Quoyle is worried, but his aunt can't reassure him it's all down to a lot happening to her in a few months, at a stage of awakening perception.

There's an undertow, which we can't yet make out, but know is there, feel it there, a powerful stirring current moving beneath. It feels like further disaster is always on the edge of the rough winds across the bay. Quoyle's bulk is temporarily reassuring, but where is this going? The cutting wind drags the past in with it, scattering ends of twine tied in cryptic knots.

'Everything, everything seemed encrusted with portent.' (Harper Perennial, 1994, p.209).

Proulx's Shipping News is unforgettable.

Andrew has challenged himself to read 100 books in 2021.

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:16:33 -0800

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Andrew has challenged himself to read 50 books in 2025.

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 10:42:19 -0800

He has read 6 books toward his goal of 50 books.

6 of 50 (12%)

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Andrew added 'The Great Hunt'

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 10:13:15 -0800

Andrew gave 4 stars to The Great Hunt (The Wheel of Time, #2) by Robert Jordan
bookshelves: fantasy-to-read
Structural issues with the first book of the Wheel Of Time, and the general adolescent tone from following the three young men on their lengthy adventures, are not corrected in this sequel. The Amyrlin Seat comes to them at Fal Dara, instead of them to Tar Valon, and the book opens with Rand al'Thor trying to run away from the Aes Sedai, instead of facing the plain fact that he is the Dragon reborn, and them. Theirs is the Power that might aid him, rather than dock him. His fears and reactions are as naïve as if he had never run away from the Trollocs in the first place, despite all he's been through, all he's learned, and the invaluable friends he has made in the build-up to his first great challenge and the Dark One. Oh, but our principal protagonist is such a fool, so very often! Every other page, Rand is just a fool.

Accepting the obvious that this series is pitched at the young adult rather than maintaining a serious maturity that the archetype did with Tolkien's culturally-informed trilogy - based on Norse and Old English myth and linguistics, and a set of characters and creatures so ingrained in the mind that any mimicry of the prototype is shown up for what it is - helps you cope with these significant shortfalls - all corrected in the Amazon series of the opening trilogy. But it makes the reading feel more like a chore than a labour of love, impatient to get to the thrust of it. No doubt Jordan was keeping his greatest treasures - Tar Valon, the combined Power of the Aes Sedai - in reserve for the uptake of the rest of the trilogy. But if I had not been bought the trilogy as a present, I would not have gone out and picked up this second in the series.

As it is, there is sufficient to proceed. Jordan writes well (a virtue shrouded by the adolescent tone of much of the first book), and despite the copies of so many tropes and types, he casts enough of an original aspect on these to make the sense of a new fantasy project through those nagging concerns. His pinnacle of sororal power, the Aes Sedai, is a shining light amidst these. The delegation of male power - typical of all other fantasy series (Lewis and Pratchett aside) - to this sorority is commendable, and fascinating. The host of coloured Ajah (blue, green, red, brown, yellow), each of different disciplines within the Aes Sedai, and the countering of them in the hateful zealots of the white Children of the Light, an interesting counterpoint.

The idea of the men being unable to control the One Power without wreaking destruction, of their being 'gentled', of sisterly abusers being 'stilled', all support this new aspect of the witch trope. This, all, I like. It to a great degree counters the weakness of the ultimate darkness, the Dark One, being but a shadow of the mythos that was Sauron, but the inclusion of the Myrddraal, plural, generates a plural sense of the Mouth of Sauron that was put to greater effect in the film than the book of the famed prototype. This is to some, initially weak effect, in the first book, supported by the notion of the Forsaken, who are awoken - but whose threat is somewhat muted. But the forces of evil are ranged against the central seven protagonists.

And the positing of three potential ta'veren - threads of power within the Pattern - exploited to the full and resolved in the first book, still adds some irresolution and doubt in the sequel (included for continuity) - though the concern is how the Dragon reborn is going to be reborn: just how will he handle his power? Mat needs cleansing, and Perrin pushing, but they are now weak characters in the scheme of things. The threat of the tinker is more real. And the power of the two girls more interesting. When will Egwene and Nynaeve come into their own? These things sustain the interest in the second that ended rather confused and deflated in the first, as though it could not escape its own structural faults.

Yet, despite the loyalty, and these promises, my brain hasn't stopped working, and the reading of this second tome even further elevates those prototypes in my mind, and I cannot deceive myself that this trilogy is itself a classic, for all its individuality, which lies entirely in the Aes Sedai, the sisterhood of the One Power (the phrase itself a distant ringing of Donaldson's Land), an original take on the witch trope. Its insistence on detail, a burden and a curse in the first book, overlong by 200 pages, now becomes part of its verisimilitude and while you want to hurry story along, it doesn’t waste as much time on the inconsequential thoughts and dreams of the three boys - until it gets bogged down in Cairhien - where Rand's constant doubts and prevarications become wearing.

But it does leave Moraine and Lan, Egwene and Nynaeve behind for times at a stretch, which detracts from its pull. It ventures, briefly, into a mirror world, travelled between stone portals, and the shifting world Rand temporarily inhabits reminds you very clearly of Zelazny's Great Book Of Amber series (1970-91), where his topological sliding of liminal terrain feels very much like Rand's experience of the shifting topology of the mirror world, with the added dimension that time shifts as well. Jordan borrows still, and his personification of Selene harks directly back to the terrible beauty of the Queen of the Underworld in Lewis's The Silver Chair (1953), so much so, you can’t help wondering why Rand cannot see through the obvious deceit. But by now, we realise, Rand al'Thor, born to great things, still has the mentality of a sheepherder, despite all he's experienced and learnt.

In some way an improvement on the first of the series - a little less of insignificant travels if not sojourns, slightly more mature - it cannot, of course, be better than the origin novel in terms of its own lore and world building - the Aes Sedai, the Dragons, its whole mythos - now that much of the fundamental lore has been founded. But it is a maturer improvement on style and structure for the first part, even while it insists on getting us mired in Rand's foolishness far too often and for far too long in Cairhien. But there is enough now built to feel that you are part of a convincing fantasy epic, were it not for that fateful flaw. If only Rand were not such a slow, stubborn, groping character. Call it hamartia, if one could elevate its adolescent foolishness to something grander.

But despite these gripes, the feeling of a full, consistent world has by now been woven into something credible and unique. The mix of Old Celtic (the medieval peasant and merchant world) with exotic Eastern (the Seanchan), of the Arthurian legend (Artur Hawkwing) with the Ways and portal stones and alternate mirror worlds, the world of men and of not (Ogiers, the Aiel), of the channelling men (Logain, Rand) and the Aes Sedai (Moiraine, Verin, Liandrin, the Amyrlin Seat), of the Sisters and the Accepted and Novices (Nynaeve, Egwene, Elayne) and the Whitecloaks, of Dragons and the emerging Forsaken, of the various histories of the land, with its towering cities, its steddings, its emerging map, and its naming, both Celtic (Caemlyn, Tar Valon), and Eastern (al'Thor, sul'dam, damane) conspire to create a credible and full world.

There is now enough to demand that the trilogy be completed.

Andrew made a comment on Sara’s status

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 13:42:36 -0800

Andrew made a comment on Sara’s status

Ah, a treat...

Andrew commented on Jim's review of The Waves

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 13:36:49 -0800

New comment on Jim's review of The Waves
by Virginia Woolf

Lovely review. Apt, precise, concise, articulate, insightful. And Percival. Are you a synopsis author for a publisher? (And yet, in your summation, lurks that shadow cast by the river. Whenever I think of her, and her ways).

Andrew is on page 29 of 355 of The Shipping News

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 13:30:16 -0800

Andrew is on page 29 of 355 of The Shipping News.

Andrew started reading 'The Shipping News'

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 13:29:32 -0800

Andrew started reading The Shipping News by Annie Proulx