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Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer – Not My Cup of Tea

abjvAnnihilation takes a little while to sink its teeth into you, but once it does it won’t let go.The good news is that it’s a beautifully written, compelling novel. The bad news is that the compulsion is to experience dread, dissonance and distrust.

In Annihilation, part one of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, we follow the twelfth expedition into the region described as Area X, with a quartet of women we only know by their functional labels, the psychologist, the surveyor, the  anthropologist, and the biologist, who is also our narrator.

We are assured that horrible, or inexplicable, or banal things happened to the members of the first eleven expeditions, from mass suicide to turning up mysteriously back home with unreasonably placid demeanors.

Except that trying to ignore a region like this is about as easy as ignoring a sore tooth, you’d really wonder why they chose to make it an even dozen misadventures.

There are many genres within science fiction and fantasy, and weird is a perfectly legitimate one. Just not my cup of tea, when it’s all the story offers.

I embarked on the expedition into Annihilation hopeful to find some sort of lost world adventure, but about a quarter of the way through the book, about the place where the biologist, infected with spores from the tower/tunnel and the surveyor are descending into its depths while the psychologist “guards” the entrance, I decided it just wasn’t my thing. Then I realized it wasn’t going to let me go without reading to the end.

The writing is in the “found journal” style that leaves the author open to killing off the narrator, and were it not for the occasional mention of cell phones and other trinkets of modernity, it could have been dated from the time of Arne Saknussemm, on his journey into the bowels of the earth.  Clearly it’s Verne, whose sensibilities were such that he wrote stories that fostered a sense of adventure and discovery, rather than the aim of this narrative, which left me both the narrator and myself with a general sense of unease and ennui.

Now, I know I’m not in good company on this, and I respect that. The worthies (and I say this with some measure of sincerity) at Amazon deemed to make it an Amazon Best Book of the Month when it came out. The New York Times Booklist (magazine) designated it a starred review. Slate adored it. iO9 doted upon it, offering up; “In the best tradition of weird fiction, VanderMeer is evoking the sense of awe and terror that nature brings out in us.” Well, yes. that’s pretty spot on, but I’m more of a sense of wonder type, but I’m pretty flexible in my wonders.

And of course, it’s a Nebula Award nominee, which is why I picked it up in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s more weird than science fictional, which is why it bothers me. Annoyingly, I’m aware that bothering me counts as a win for the book.

Not that I don’t like a certain amount of weirdness. Really, most of my best friends are weird. The problem with tales like this is that weird is all you get, and it’s just not enough for me. Clearly this book has an audience, or it wouldn’t have made it to be a Nebula nominee, so congrats to VanderMeer. If it should win, I won’t feel that an injustice has been served on my literary sensibilities, because there’s room in the genre for more than one sort. In fact, I’m pretty sure I get the attraction here. I just don’t have the desire to unsettle myself sufficiently to appreciate the author’s talent.

I think I’ll go read some Verne.

Links / References

2015 Nebula Awards – See You In Chicago

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The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s 50th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend will be held in Chicago, Illinois June 4 through 7, 2015.

My plane and hotel are booked, I’ve researched the best place to get a hot dog near the Awards Hotel, and I’m looking forward to seeing folks at the Nebulas in Chicago in the first week of June.

By then my brand new Nikon should be just about worn in, and I’ll be submitting coverage to anyone who wants it. Typically, Locus uses a few of my shots, and SFRevu will be running a gallery of them.

There’s a lot of good stuff on this year’s list. Ann Leckie is back with Ancillary Sword, Jack McDevitt’s Coming Home  was a welcome addition to both the Alex Benedict series and these awards, as is my friend Chuck Gannon’s Trial by Fire. I haven’t read either The Three Body Problem, or Annihilation yet, but I’m intrigued by both and will get it done before then. I’ve been off reading shorter works, paradoxically because I don’t have time, but did read We Are All Completely Fine by one of my favorite authors, Daryl Gregory, and I recommend it.

If you’re going, drop me a line or something and maybe we’ll grab a beer at the bar, or head over to Jim’s Original on Union Ave for his famous red hot dog with plenty of “sport peppers.”

Links / References

Departure by A.G. Riddle

Departure by A.G. RriddleThis review originally appeared in SFRevu April 1 2015:

Flight 305 took off for London on time, but it’s going to arrive late. Don’t bother waiting up, because it won’t get there until 2147. Actually, it won’t get there at all, because the space-time warp that plucks it out of the present drops it back onto the English countryside in pieces. And that’s where the fun begins.

If you don’t know who A.G. Riddle is, then you’ve missed the meteoric rise of this sci-fi/pulp/romance author on Amazon’s best-selling eBook lists. You aren’t among the twenty-odd million readers of his Origin Mystery trilogy: The Atlantis Gene, The Atlantis Plague, and The Atlantis World. Maybe you’re allergic to books with Atlantis in the title. I know I am, at least to some degree. Fortunately, Departure isn’t about the lost continent, though he can’t resist using the name somewhere in the book, if to good purpose.

The story moves quickly to the crash of Flight 305 from New York to London, alternating chapters between the viewpoints of the two main characters, Harper Lane and Nick Stone. She’s a journalist-biographer who’d really like to quit ghosting through other people’s lives and write an action character she’s toyed with for years. He’s a dot com lottery winner that needs to find something worth doing before he goes crazy. As they stumble out onto an English countryside one hundred and thirty-three years into their future, little things like what to do with your life become easier to resolve.

Nick discovers that he’s really good in a crisis, something he’d managed to miss until now. While the rest of his fellow first class survivors are content to wander around in circles watching the rear section of the plane sink into a lake, Nick finds himself whipping them into an ad-hoc rescue team, despite the freezing water and danger of being sucked down with the plane. Harper finds herself doing things she never imagined she would, or could, struggling to free passengers from their seats before the cabin slips under the water. In doing her bit, she gets trapped in the plane, and Nick barely pulls her out.

And the expected rescue teams keep not coming.

Gradually they piece together clues that they’re not in 2014 anymore. Clues like the total lack of radio or cellular communications, the bright ring in the sky, and more subtle clues like the holographic Stonehenge museum site they run across. Then about half the survivors start keeling over from a mysterious aliment and the crash site is suddenly overrun with beings in suits that shoot everyone on sight.

Fortunately they’re shooting tranquilizers, and even more fortunately, the late-arriving rescue team has brought advanced medical technology with them to heal the remaining survivors. Unfortunately another group shows up and future war breaks out. Nick and Harper manage to escape with two others, Sabrina the personality deficient doctor, and Yul Tan, the spooky quantum physicist.  Earlier, Harper heard the two talking about knowing a lot more about what was going on than they were letting on, and when Nick confronts them in an abandoned farmhouse, they begin to put things together.

Things in the future are not going well. Almost all of humanity died off shortly after a few wealthy idealists created a cabal of really well-intentioned folks that were going to live forever and help mankind. Modestly, they called themselves the Titans. Now they’ve grabbed a handful of critical people from the past to help save the future. The only problem is that the Titans have split into two factions, one who wants what the Flight 305 survivors can offer them, and the other which wants to do a reset on the whole thing, preventing the flight from ever arriving. When gods fight, mortals should keep their heads down, but Nick, Harper, Sabrina and Yul don’t have any choice. One way or another, they’re at the center of everything that’s happened, and humanity’s only hope.

Of course, if they save humanity, Nick and Harper will probably wind up forgetting their new found feelings for each other. Wait, did I forget to mention that part?

Departure is a quick read and if you like your pulp sf mixed with romance, you’ll find it right up your alley. It’s even got some assorted bits of science thrown in, but I had a hard time getting past the notion of ultra-wealthy do-gooders thinking a cabal of 100 immortals was going to work out for anyone in the long run. Seems like we’ve seen that movie before and it never ends well. Unlike Departure.

Links / References

Inspector Morse: The first three novels by Colin Dexter

MorseMorse, who has been indelibly portrayed by the late actor John Thaw in some thirty three episodes, first came to life on the pages of Last Bus to Woodstock (1975) where the Chief Inspector is handed the case of the brutal murder of a young girl outside a pub in the titled city. We meet the faithful Sergeant Lewis, whom Morse immediately takes a liking to because he’s willing to disagree with him. Typical Morsian perversity.

In this first book, which takes a lot more time than a TV episode offers to get to the truth of things, we find the inspector gleaning clues from here and there until they fall into some sort of pattern. The pattern that’s repeated in this and the subsequent two novels, Last Seen Wearing (1976) and The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977) is that he’s often wrong at first, or second, and generally comes to his wits end before the truth of the matter finally reveals itself to him.

This is rather hard on him, starting as he does with a morose nature of sorts, and does his sidekick no great good either. Throughout his cases Morse comes off as saddened by the affairs of the people whose lives he peers into, and when something like happiness appears to offer itself to him, as it does in the first book, he appears to have the premonition that it would cost rather more than he can afford. For solace he relies on a trinity of vices: crosswords, opera, and considerable quantities of ale.

A delightful bit comes up at the beginning of the second novel, Last Seen Wearing, when Morse is handed a cold case that had been worked on by another inspector who had been killed in an accident.

‘Ainley was a bloody sight better policeman than you’ll ever be. In fact I’m asking you to take on this case precisely because you’re not a very good policeman. You’re too airy-fairy. You’re too . . . I don’t know.’ (reference)

Chief Superintendent Strange may not know, but we’re familiar with the gestalt constructing process that defines Morse, and as for the better policeman, that’s what he has Lewis for. Lewis’ theory’s are almost universally dissmissed by Morse out of hand, but frequently come back to haunt Morse as he finds something in them that gives him a way forward out of the darkness he frequently finds himself brooding in.

Familiar with the character from television, I had some of the expected dissonance meeting Morse, and Lewis, between the sheets of paper that bore them into the world. Or as close as e-ink comes to it. But less than might be expected. Lewis turns out to be older than portrayed on TV, and perhaps a bit more set in his worldview as a result. Morse, perhaps a bit younger, at least at the start, and not quite without hope that he might get something more out of life than solitary pints to keep him company.

Indeed, the young women in the books often find him attractive, and flirt with him more than a bit, but though he’s keenly aware of a reciprocal attraction, he puts it aside for the work at hand.

I wouldn’t say the first three novels yield fast paced drama. Morse and Lewis plod along the trail, often repeating their circuits until the path seems over-worn, light finally dawns and justice is sated, if not always served. I enjoyed all three books, though a certain sameness was soon evident, and though I was happy to read this collection to its end, it left me with no compulsion to follow the inspector through the next ten novels until his death in The Remorseful Day (1999).

Links and References:

Kindle Voyage – Amazon’s Best Ever E-ink Reader, But by How Much?

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Amazon’s latest and greatist E-ink Kindle has sharper text, weighs less, and lights up better than the Paperwhite, but is it a must have upgrade?

The Voyage, Amazon’s latest addition to the Kindle line proves that they’re not abandoning e-ink in favor of their Fire LCD tablets, and that’s a good thing for the many readers who like their reading experience isolated from all the distractions the web is heir to, and who like the reduced eye-strain and wide range of lighting conditons that that e-ink can handle.

The Voyage has a host of features that Amazon touts as new or improved, but the most notable upgrad is the resolution. At 300 DPI it’s got 35% more pixels than the 221 Kindle Paperwhite, which will still be available, by the way. It’s also got “more contrast,” though as far as I could tell what that really means is that the backlight is brighter, maybe 20% or so. Comparing the Voyage and a Paperwhite side by side with the light turned off I’m unable to tell any difference in contrast, only the crispness granted by the higher resolution display. That crispness may actually be take down a miniscule amount by the specially etched glass on the Voyage, which provides effective anti-glare.

The light isn’t just brighter, it’s more even than on the Paperwhite, though it had never bothered me on the Paperwhite. The battery has a longer life, the screen is flush with its bezel, and it sports a 1 GHz 512 KB RAM processor, another slight improvement over the Paperwhite, which had 256 KB RAM. Not that I could tell any difference in speed of the two devices in casual inspection. The Voyage does seem to flip pages a bit faster than the Paperwhite, but as with most things on the device I wasn’t unhappy with the predecessor.

Now, it’s important to note that I’m comparing the Voyage to the second generation Paperwhite, release in September 2013. This device had some substantial upgrades in processor and memory over the original Paperwhite, most of which have been carried along to the new Kindle.

Besides the screen there are some significant design elements that set the Voyage apart from its predecessor. It’s slightly smaller and thinner, and about half an ounce lighter than the Paperwhite, thanks to a new magnesium body. That body has a more angular form factor than the rounded back of the Paperwhite, which Amazon no doubt thinks is a distinctive bit of design, but strikes me as less comfortable to hold than the Paperwhite, and the only area I give the device a serious downcheck.

Though the Voyage, like all Kindles now in production, has a touch screen, it’s been rezoned to better control, and the bezel sports actual pressure sensitive regions that provide page turning with haptic feedback, which you can dial up or down or turn off. I found myself accidentally skipping pages, or flipping in the wrong direction using the side switches and preffered just using the touch screen, but I’m confident that it’s just a matter of getting used to the interface.

Besides not being thrilled with the feel of the case, which is still not bad by any means, the only thing you can really ding the Voyage for is its price. Starting at $199 for the version that comes with ads when on the home screen when you’re not reading, you can crank the price all the way up to $269 if you want it with free 3G connectivity as well as WiFi. I settled for the middle of the road at $219 with just WiFi and no advertising. If you pick up the “Oragami” folding case, which is pretty clever, I’ll admit, and acts as a a useful stand for hands free reading at a desk or table, you’ll wind up shelling out another $44.99. The cover adheres magnetically, like an iPad’s. In fact it’s so clever-cool it’s hard to believe it didn’t come out of Apple’s design studio.

On average, the Voyage will set you back about $100 more than the Paperwhite, but is it worth it? It’s a tough call. If you don’t have a Kindle and are a heavy reader, which seems like an unlikely combination, then I’d say go for it. On the other hand, if you’ve got a 2nd generation Paperwhite and don’t suffer from gadget lust, you might consider staying with your device for another generation or two. E-ink has gotten better, thanks to increased resolution, but it’s still not paper-white, and 300 DPI is only half what most laser printers consider basic resolution.

Amazon is willing to tempt you with a generous 30-day trial period, but I think you’ll find it pretty hard to send the Voyage back. Speaking of sending them back, though you can’t sell your old Kindle on Amazon, you may be able to trade it in, if only for a few books worth of credit.

Links:

Amazon Voyage Homepage: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GDQDRPK