Recent Fiction Reading

Every genre reviewer in the world seems to be raving about Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, so I picked it up for Hugo nomination consideration. I’m about a third of the way into it, now, and to be honest, it’s kind of bugging me. There are some good bits, but also stretches where the author seems inordinately impressed with his own cleverness, which is kind of grating.

Also, I realize that this is more magic realism than SF– the time travel is clearly more of a literalized metaphor than an attempt to do something traditionally science-fictional– so it’s a little unfair to complain about the science, but, well, the science is bugging me. Or, rather, the science words are bugging me, because that’s really all they are– occasional words that approximate scientific jargon, thrown in as window dressing. And they’re thrown in in a way that suggests the author has only the haziest grasp of what they actually mean. I’m not usually an “explosions in space don’t make noise” guy, but something about the technobabble is really getting on my nerves, and I’m not sure I want to devote much more of my exceedingly limited fiction-reading time to this.

That’s as good a lead-in as I’m likely to get to talk about an assortment of other stuff that I’ve read recently:

— I’ve soured on a lot of the “urban fantasy” genre, because it’s harder and harder to find things that aren’t really “paranormal romance,”and I’m thoroughly sick of “My Awesome Werewolf Boyfriend” stories (to the point of being kind of “meh” about N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, another popular Hugo suggestion, because jumping up the ladder to “My Awesome Enslaved-Dark-God-of-Night Boyfriend” doesn’t make me enjoy it any more). Which is a roundabout way to get to saying nice things about Kat Richardson’s latest Greywalker book, Labyrinth. Which has added a romance element, but doesn’t piss me off because 1) the boyfriend in question is an ordinary if somewhat geeky human, not a supernatural being who is powerful and irresistable, but dangerous to be involved with so the heroine has to spend a third of the book angsting about the relationship– quite the contrary, actually, the relationship anchors her from excessive angst– and 2) said somewhat geeky boyfriend is attempting to employ Science to understand how the magical stuff works, and apply that knowledge to the concrete problems facing the characters. The book takes a turn to the myffic, which is a departure from the relatively straightforward PI stuff of earlier volumes, but it’s good brain candy, and much more to my tastes than anything else I’ve read in the subgenre recently.

— Speaking of magical PI stuff in our world, I read Jim Butcher’s collection of Dresden Files shorts a while ago, and it’s basically Dresden methadone, something to pass the time waiting for the release of the next book that advances the actual plot. All the stories are pretty minor, even the much-touted new story from Murphy’s POV shortly after the end of the last book, which is just a big tease.

— Moving on to magical PI stuff in other worlds, reading Glen Cook’s latest Garrett book was an odd experience. Garrett’s been out of the investigating business for a while now, but comes back after a mysterious attack on an old friend, and everything has gone weird. Not in a magical sense, but in a well-this-series-has-taken-an-odd-turn sense. The mystery plot is kind of pushed into the background by a bunch of odd relationship drama, and all of the “everything works better without me” stuff from Garrett is a big change, and not exactly what I want from the series.

It’s a little like picking up a Nero Wolfe book and finding that it’s all about how Archie has been shacking up with Lily Rowan for the last four years while Saul Panzer has taken over his job, and midway through Archie realizes that he’d rather be dating the mayor’s daughter than living with Lily. It was very, very strange.

— Also strange was Cook’s latest in his thinly veiled late-medieval Europe epic fantasy, which comes with the somewhat unfortunate title Surrender to the Will of the Night. Not only is it a Dire Straits lyric (from “Expresso Love” off Making Movies), it sounds like the title of an entirely different sort of book, in which the heroine is irresistably drawn to her Awesome Werewolf Boyfriend but it would be dangerous to be involved, blah, blah, blah.

Happily, it’s very much not that. It’s also sort of oddly structured– one of the characters even remarks on the way the apparent Big Bad exits the story earlier than might’ve been expected– and has some really weird personal stuff. It’s enjoyable, though, in a messing around with history sort of way. I don’t know the period well enough to do more than recognize the broad outlines of the major players, and the occasional more specific correspondence. He’s got a lot of the flavor of what history I have read, though, such as the titanic clash between three celebrated military commanders which becomes a complete debacle for everyone involved because they’re all idiots.

— On the SF side, the most notable thing I’ve read recently was Iain Banks’s Surface Detail, the new Culture novel. Which is, you know, a Culture novel. It’s very inventive, has some great setpieces (seeing an honest-to-God Culture warship in action was cool), and a lot of Banks’s trademark gratuitous nastiness. The grand background conflict never made all that much sense to me, but he gets credit for putting a slightly unusual twist on it.

The reveal of one character’s identity on the last page felt kind of cheap, but it doesn’t make any real difference to the story. It was an enjoyable enough read, but it doesn’t come close to Use of Weapons or Look to Windward.

And that’s what I’ve been reading on the fiction side these days. Recommendations for other or better stuff are welcome, though I’m going to have even less reading time than usual for the next little bit.