This Census-Taker

A short review of This Census-Taker by China Miéville

An immersive story of a boy's isolation, loneliness and terror. He's sure that his father had something to do with the disappearance of his mother, yet he is unable to convince the ineffectual authorities from the nearby town, which lies mostly in ruins. He is befriended by a small band of homeless children who live in the abandoned buildings of the town. Slowly we, the readers, gather clues about the world and the boy's father. A haunting story that retains a grip on the imagination long after the story is done.

I was provided with an advance reading copy.

The 2012 Hugo Awards: Best Novel shortlist

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (Orbit)
Deadline by Mira Grant (Orbit)
A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin (Bantam Spectra)
Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan / Del Rey)
Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)

Starting from worst to best, here are my rankings:

I won’t be reading Deadline by Mira Grant. I read the first book in the series, Feed, which was on the Hugo Award Best Novel shortlist last year and I had a strongly negative reaction to it. It will be a long time before I am likely to give the author another chance.  The main problem with Feed for me, as someone who worked in journalism for many years, is that since the main character is a journalist, the author needs to convince me that he or she knows something about journalism. Unfortunately, Feed demonstrated some basic misunderstandings about what journalists do and how they do it. As a result I lost confidence in the author. I did finish reading Feed. It read as an early draft of the novel that was intended. It’s about zombies, which scores negative points for lack of originality. (For more about Feed follow here.)

Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey (a pseudonym for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) reads like two novels mashed together. Story one: a hard-bitten detective pursues a missing person’s case across the asteroid belt. Story two: an idealistic space-ship captain and his faithful crew have a series of adventures across the solar system. Unfortunately, neither story is particularly interesting. The world building and the plot points are built from over-used parts. The prose feels rushed and hobbled with clichés. The characters are thin. The fascination with weapons and violence suggests that the novel is intended for 13-year-old boys. It features zombies, which scores negative points for lack of originality.

A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin is a category error. The Hugo Awards don’t have a category (thank goodness) for a middle volume of an unfinished and apparently endless series. This book doesn’t belong in the best novel category. It’s certainly not self-contained. It reads like a very long set of middle chapters excerpted from an incredibly long novel, which is exactly what it is. I enjoyed it, even though it is overlong and could use some editing. It comes from the more-is-better school of series fiction, so any complaint I have that it is too long is only a recommendation to those who like this sort of thing. It features zombies, which scores negative points for lack of originality.

Among Others by Jo Walton is a cleverly constructed character portrait of a teenage girl dealing with issues of arriving at a new boarding school, relationships with boys, a dysfunctional family, and grief over the unnatural death of her twin sister. It is also a fantasy novel that confounds reader expectations by being set entirely after the climactic battle between opposing magical forces. Along the way the reader encounters remarkably alien faerie creatures and a vivid and original magical system. Our main character spends much of her time in the school library and discovers a variety of science fiction and fantasy novels from the 1960s and ‘70s and offers her impressions of each reading experience. What could be seen as calculated fan-service instead provides a surprising depth of insight into the thoughts and maturation of our young viewpoint character. Among Others is an excellent novel with layers that reward close attention.

Embassytown by China Miéville is an ambitious, difficult, and brilliant novel. There are problems with the structure and pacing of the novel, none of which matter when rereading the book. I can imagine that many readers new to Miéville will give up in the first hundred pages or so. I’ve read other Miéville novels; he has earned my trust. I knew that if I stayed the course I would be rewarded.  It’s a novel about language. The central metaphor is to literalize certain aspects of language: that language limits our experience of the world, that language circumscribes identity, that language is an intoxicant. It’s set on a far flung alien planet with an intelligent species whose language is confoundingly different from our own. Communication breaks down in a dramatic fashion, causing a revolution among the aliens, and conceptual breakthroughs are required to reestablish communication. This is a fascinating novel, with thoughtful ideas about language incorporated into a compelling story.  Judging from the four Miéville novels that I’ve read, this is his best yet. (For more about Embassytown follow here.)

SF Strangelove’s ranking of the Hugo Awards Best Novel shortlist:
1. Embassytown by China Miéville
2. Among Others by Jo Walton
3. A Dance With Dragons by George R. R. Martin
4. No award
5. Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

Anything after “no award” doesn’t matter in the voting. A Dance With Dragons only barely makes it above “no award” in my estimation.

It’s a relief to be able to say that two of the five best novel nominees are actually worthy of a best novel award. That makes it an above-average year for the Hugo Awards Best Novel shortlist.

Here are novels I’ve read that deserved a spot on the best novel shortlist:

The best science fiction novels published in 2011:
This Shared Dream by Kathleen Ann Goonan
Embassytown by China Miéville
The Islanders by Christopher Priest
Home Fires by Gene Wolfe

The best fantasy novels published in 2011:
The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein
Among Others by Jo Walton

I’m sure I missed a few. Still, that’s more than enough to fill my ideal Hugo shorlist. Simply put, the Hugo Awards nominators missed several superior novels.

Even more May book arrivals

More books arrived in the mail, including some that I am particularly excited about.

If you've read this blog for a while you'll know that I think Kim Stanley Robinson is a first rate writer. I've been looking forward to the arrival of his new novel, 2312. In a previous post I excerpted the Gary K. Wolfe review of the book that appeared in the May 2012 issue of Locus Magazine. Locus Online has now made the entire review available (follow here).

Ad Eternum by Elizabeth Bear is a novella in her New Amsterdam series from Subterranean Press.

Byzantium Endures by Michael Moorcock is the first in his Colonel Pyat Quartet. This is the first American edition from 1981.

Part of his Deepgate Codex series, Damnation for Beginners by Alan Campbell has a lovely cover illustration by Ian McQue and interior illustrations by Bob Eggleton. (Click to enlarge images.)

Tales from Gavagan's Bar (expanded edition) by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, illustrated by Inga Pratt and Tim Kirk, published by Owlswick Press in 1978. This is a collection of stories in the "club story" tradition of Lord Dunsany's Jorkins stories, Arthur C. Clarke's Tales from the White Hart, Larry Niven's The Draco Tavern, and many others.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers recently won the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke award for the best science fiction novel published in Britain in 2011. It's now available in a United States edition. I like the epigraph from Euripides and couldn't resist including it here.

The Moon Moth is one of Jack Vance's best known stories, a classic of science fiction that has been anthologized many times, including The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two B. Here is a new adaptation as a graphic novel by Humayoun Ibrahim. The story is stripped of most of Vance's distinctive prose, still the artist has done a wonderful job telling the story with a visual style that matches Vance in surprising ways.

Railsea, the latest from China Mieville, is marketed as a young adult novel. Interior illustrations by the author.

Links to essays, reviews, book sales

Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room by Geoff Dyer.
The Los Angeles Times today published a book review by Chris Barton about Geoff Dyer's new book, an essay on Soviet-era director Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker. (One of the greatest of all science fiction films, according to your humble blog correspondent.) "For all the witty, self-referential asides that can make the book feel like the smartest 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' episode ever written, it's Dyer's emotional tie to Writer's journey and the wish fulfillment of that vocation that stay with you the longest after the lights finally come up." (follow here)

Rob Latham tackles The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, along with a handful of Dick's science fiction novels in an essay at Los Angeles Review of Books. "Rereading Dick’s early novels through the lens of the events recounted in the Exegesis, just as Dick himself eventually did, shows how consistently the themes of thought-control and ambiguous revelation informed his fiction ..." (follow here)

Graham Sleight’s essay on three of Samuel R. Delany's books appeared in the most recent issue of Locus.
"Dhalgren is that rarest of things: a book that, decades on, has not been normalised. So many innovations of style or content in SF become commodities, to be sold at ever lower prices in ever more ways. Many people have learned a great deal from Delany’s work – I’m thinking particularly of William Gibson’s focus on sensations and the surface of things. But Dhalgren is a book without real successors." (follow here)

The Nebula Awards shortlist of nominees for work from 2011 was announced a few days ago. I've read three of the best  novel nominees:
   God’s War by Kameron Hurley (Night Shade)
   Embassytown by China Miéville (Del Rey)
   Among Others by Jo Walton (Tor)
All three are quite strong. God's War is a first novel and while it's the weakest of the three, it's an exceptional first novel. The three nominees that I haven't read look interesting as well.(follow here)

Lavie Tidhar expresses his disappointment in China Miéville's Embassytown. "(I)t is a niggling feeling; it is a sense of regret, and of puzzlement, that afflicts the non-Anglo reader when coming upon Embassytown. Of missed opportunities, of tired acceptance of the sign that says, This Is Not Your Future." (follow here)

Aqueduct Press is offering Rebecca Ore's new novel Time and Robbery on sale until March 1. (follow here)

New York Review Books is offering a 50 percent off sale on some titles, including science fiction novels Inverted World by Christopher Priest and The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. (follow here)

Embassytown by China Miéville

Embassytown is that rare breed of science fiction novel that has greater depth than first meets the eye. The central metaphor of the novel, that language both describes and prescribes our experience of the world, expands out in all directions.  Language circumscribing identity. Language as intoxicant. Language as a noose that can hang the unwary.

Embassytown is a mostly human community within a larger alien city on a planet in a remote star system. It’s a fragile community, dependent on resources from the host aliens. Even the air of Embassytown is artificially maintained to be breathable for the humans. In order to bridge a confounding communication gap with the two-mouthed alien hosts, the Ariekei, the humans engineer pairs of humans who think alike and speak in overlapping sentences, finishing each other’s thoughts. The twin Ambassadors are able to negotiate the Ariekei language and successfully communicate, where single humans who speak the same words are ignored as non-sentient by the Ariekei. The story concerns a bewildering breakdown in communication between the human Ambassadors and the Ariekei. Chaos overtakes the Ariekei. Political and social structures collapse in Embassytown and the tenuous existence of the human community is threatened.

In the face of disaster, stunning conceptual breakthroughs are required to allow even a tiny trickle of communication. This is a thrilling novel about the nature of language and communication, and a gritty and unsentimental depiction of societal breakdown.

The first-person narrator, Avice Benner Cho, a human, was born in Embassytown, has traveled to many star systems, which is rare among those at the isolated outpost, and returned home. She has both insider and outsider status within the small, cloistered political power structure. Sometimes annoyingly self-absorbed, and relegated to observer status early on, Cho becomes entwined in key events as the story progresses. She is the most complete and memorable character in any Miéville novel I have read.

Embassytown is the fourth and best of China Miéville’s novels that I have read. Each novel has been more accomplished than the preceding one: Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), The City & The City (2009), and now Embassytown (2011).

Embassytown could well have been not just a classic of science fiction; it could have been a breakout novel to a wider audience. Unfortunately, it’s likely to be held back from much of the success that it might have earned by a slow start. Miéville dwells on back-story for far too long. The back-story does not end until page 162 (U.S. edition) out of a total of 345 pages. Miéville interleaves a few chapters of the main story to entice the reader. Each time the author returns to the back-story the momentum is lost. Much of the back story eventually proves relevant as the story plays out. Yet, how many who haven’t read Miéville before, and don’t trust that their patience will be rewarded, will keep reading long enough to appreciate the book?

While the first half of the book is in need of significant pruning, the second half of the novel is excellent and perhaps too condensed, the story a bit rushed. Still, this is a brilliant book and it is one of the best science fiction novels of the year.

Links to thinks

Neil Gaiman writes about Gene Wolfe
"... Gene Wolfe remains a hero to me. He's just turned 80, looks after his wife Rosemary, and is still writing deep, complex, brilliant fiction that slips between genres. ... He's the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy – possibly the finest living American writer. Most people haven't heard of him. And that doesn't bother Gene in the slightest." Read the article.

SF Signal Mind Meld: Which challenging SF/F stories are worth the effort to read?
Some wonderful recommendations, including works by Gene Wolfe, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Neal Stephenson, Cordwainer Smith. As Cat Rambo writes in the comments, add Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem, John Crowley, Justina Robson, and Peter Watts. Who would you add? Read the article.

Ursula K. LeGuin reviews Embassytown by China Miéville
"If Miéville has been known to set up a novel on a marvelous metaphor and then not know quite where to take it, he's outgrown that, and his dependence on violence is much diminished. In Embassytown, his metaphor ... works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigor and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being." Read the article.

Rob Latham on J.G. Ballard
"I believe that, with the possible exception of Philip K. Dick, postwar SF has produced no finer writer, and certainly none more attuned to the perplexities and pitfalls of the modern technoscientific world." Read the article. (Edited: link updated.)

2010 World Fantasy Award Winners

The World Fantasy Awards were announced on October 31, 2010, in Columbus, Ohio. Eligible works were published in 2009.

NOVEL WINNER
The City & The City by China Miéville (Macmillan UK/Del Rey)

NOVELLA WINNER
“Sea-Hearts” by Margo Lanagan (X6, coeur de lion publishing)

SHORT STORY WINNER
“The Pelican Bar” by Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse Three, Night Shade Books)

This gives me a chance to say again that the World Fantasy Awards judges do an excellent job year after year of finding outstanding work to recognize. All the winners and nominees are listed at Locus Online.

The City & The City was a fine novel and “The Pelican Bar” was exceptional, one of the best short stories of the decade. I haven't read “Sea-Hearts” by Margo Lanagan. I did purchase the X6 anthology in the dealers room at Aussiecon 4.

By comparison, the Hugo Awards seem inconsistent, frequently unable to find and recognize the best work. The 2010 Hugo Awards was a pretty good year, especially if we overlook the short story shortlist.

Next year the World Fantasy Convention will be in San Diego. That's too nearby to have any excuse not to go.

Related posts:
The 2010 Hugo Awards: Short Story Shortlist
The Pelican Bar by Karen Joy Fowler
The City & The City and The Other City

2010 Hugo Results and Reactions

2010 Hugo Award winners September 5, at Aussiecon 4, Melbourne, Australia.

BEST NOVEL (TIE)
The City & The City by China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

BEST NOVELLA
“Palimpsest” by Charles Stross (Wireless)

BEST NOVELETTE
“The Island” by Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)

BEST SHORT STORY
“Bridesicle” by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s Jan. 2009)

Two of my four top picks in the fiction categories won. No complaints there. As a bonus none of the really weak stories on the shortlist won. Woot! Short story was the most dicey category in terms of what was on the shortlist. I didn’t expect “Bridesicle” to win, still it’s a respectable result.

A tie is rather rare. This is only the third occurrence in the Hugo novel category. The last one was the 1993 Hugo Awards with the tie between Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (Bantam Spectra, 1992) and A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (Tor, 1992).

This year both winners are particularly strong novels and very different from each other. Not flawless novels, if there are such things. Some people may be frustrated by a tie. When the presenter, the writer guest of honor at Aussiecon 4, Kim Stanley Robinson, stalled for time, spoke of statistical improbabilities, and then revealed that there was a tie, it was an electric moment in the convention hall. There were gasps in the audience. When Robinson named the tie winners I thought it was a particularly satisfying result.

Related posts:
Reviews of The City & The City and The Windup Girl.
The 2010 Hugo Awards: More on the Shortlist
The 2010 Hugo Awards: Novelette Shortlist
The 2010 Hugo Awards: Short Story Shortlist

A Link, a Dink, and a Nod

Philip K. Dick's Exegesis
According to The New York Times, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish a two-volume "consolidated" Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, edited by Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson. Volume one is due 2011, followed by volume two in 2012.

“The title he gave it, ‘Exegesis,’ alludes to the fact that what it really was, was a personal laboratory for philosophical inquiry,” Lethem said. “It’s not even a single manuscript, in a sense – it’s an amassing or a compilation of late-night all-night sessions of him taking on the universe, mano-a-mano, with the tools of the English language and his own paranoiac investigations.” (The New York Times article.)

The City & The City by China Miéville wins Clarke Award
The Arthur C. Clarke Award winner was announced: The City & The City by China Miéville. A respectable result and an interesting book, although here at the Strangelove for Science Fiction blog we likely would have voted for one of the other finalists: Gwyneth Jones’ Spirit,  Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream, Adam Roberts’ Yellow Blue Tibia, Chris Wooding’s Retribution Falls, or Marcel Theroux’s Far North. We will have to duck the question of which one we would have picked, since we are still reading the finalists. Follow here for the SF Strangelove review of The City & The City. Torque Control has an interesting analysis of the finalists and a report and context regarding the winner.

Adam Roberts goes 'round and 'round with The Wheel of Time

Reading the multi-volume and popular and as yet unfinished Wheel of Time series by the late Robert Jordan can be described as an epic undertaking. Adam Roberts has bravely shouldered the task. So far, he has reported, in witty detail, on volumes one, two, three, four, five, six and seven.

The City & The City and The Other City

The City & The City

Having read two of China Miéville’s previous novels, Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002) -- two shuddering, juddering, shambling mounds of story, parts of which work quite well and parts of which do not -- I was prepared to expect whopper-jawed plotting and inventive imagery. Instead, The City & The City (British edition: Macmillan, 2009; U.S. edition: Del Rey, 2009) takes the form of a conventional police procedural -- a police procedural that is emotionally flat and uninflected.

The crux of the book is the setting: two Eastern European cities, Besźel and Ul Qoma, foreign to each other, are superimposed in the same space, where it is against the law to interact with or even look at the people and buildings of the city that is not your own. The citizens of both cities are required to master the ability of not seeing the other city and its inhabitants as they go about their lives, walking around obstacles that they are not allowed to overtly perceive.

Miéville cites Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz in his acknowledgements, and fans of those authors likely will be entranced by the overlapping cities. It is the precision of Miéville’s rigorously worked out concept that moves this slightly fantastic setting into the realm of science fiction. Miéville invents a vocabulary to describe the odd societally-imposed gymnastics of what citizens can and cannot perceive. “Crosshatch” refers to spaces that are simultaneously in use by both cities. Inhabitants of one city “unsee” the buildings and “unnotice” the people of the other city. “Breach” is the term for violating these rules; it is also the name of a mysterious and powerful agency that ruthlessly enforces the separation of the cities. Unificationists are radicals who advocate the merger of the two cities.

The story concerns a murder investigation that unfolds methodically, and it provides an excuse to tour the strange dual existence of the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma. Unfortunately, the murder mystery plods somewhat and only very slowly gains enough momentum to hold the reader’s interest.

A similar strategy was used in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (HarperCollins, 2007). Here, too, a detective story allows the author to provide a tour of an exotic, science fictional setting. Chabon’s alternate-world setting is one where Jewish refugees are resettled in Alaska after World War II. Chabon’s character interactions seem lively compared to the perfunctory tone of the central character of The City & The City, Inspector Tyador Borlú.

Among Miéville’s many nice touches in The City & The City are the different architectural styles and economic statuses of the two cities, ancient artifacts that may or may not have unusual properties, and enough shadings regarding the secretive Breach agency to leave open the question of whether their powers are fantastic in nature.

The Other City

The Other City by Michal Ajvaz (translation by Gerald Turner, Dalkey Archive, 2009; originally published in Czech in 1993), on the other hand, contains all the outrageous and endlessly inventive imagery that I had expected to find in The City & The City and did not. The Other City concerns two Eastern European cities superimposed in the same space, too. Here, the cities are not mutually ignoring each other. One city is Prague; the other city is a secret city that is fully aware of Prague, while citizens of Prague are rarely aware of it.

The surreal imagery leaps from a fish festival, to sepulchral streetcars, to a shark attack in a church tower, with something wild on nearly every page.

A couple of quotes picked at random:

They all took little wooden caskets out of their bags and placed them on the desk in front of them. Then they removed their lids. There was a rustling sound and weasels stuck their heads out of the caskets, resting their forelegs on the front side of the caskets and started to hiss. The listeners stood at attention; so did I. Although there was little light in the lecture room, the people standing alongside me soon noticed that I had no animal hissing in front of me. A scandalized whispering spread around the room and soon the entire auditorium was staring at me. (p. 43)

The red blood trickled across the floor and soaked into the tassels of the carpet. In the foreground of the room the anonymous artist had painted a writing desk with several letters scattered on its surface; on the envelope of one of them could be seen a letterhead with the words Société des Bains de Mer. At the edge of the desk a thick book lay open; a ray of light from the adjacent room fell onto this part of the canvas, so I was able to read the text on its pages. It was The Odyssey and the line: O moi ego, teon aute broton es gaian ikano -- “Alas, what country have I come to now?”  (p. 120)

Our narrator pursues an elusive young woman from the other city. What emerges is a fantastical tour of Prague, with well-known landmarks and others less well-known. The dreamlike sights and events become circular and interwoven to a degree. Still, there is at times a distinct lack of story to drive the narrative.

Linky Establishment

Kim Stanley Robinson profile in the Los Angeles Times:

Some of the highlights are quotes from colleagues.

Terry Bisson: "He's sort of a high-modernist bohemian. But he's pretty middle-class about it too."

Karen Joy Fowler: "He believes that problems can be solved, and he sees the first step as imagining ways they might be solved. He is not interested in councils of despair."

Robinson, referencing his new novel Galileo's Dream (Spectra, 2009): Climate-change rejecters and free-market ideologues "have done just what the Catholic Church did with Galileo. They've made the wrong choice and are going to have to crawl away from it, but the damage will have been done." (read the Los Angeles Time article)

China Miéville on The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard:
"In Ballard . . . the passive voice is part of an invocation of paranoid totality and helps create a baleful world stripped of human agency in which things occur and are done to things."

"Ballard's cool distance does not end at the bedroom door: if anything, what goes on behind that door seems to be dreamlike and abstract fucking, and it spills back out and affects everything else. Investigations of the pornographizing drive as much as an expression of it, this porn is all metaporn."

"Ballard's ambivalence is one of the reasons he is a diagnostician, not a dystopian, and a brilliant one."

(Read the article in The Nation. Be prepared to click through four times to read the whole thing due to irritating website design.)

Best SF and Fantasy of 2009:
Jeff VanderMeer expanded his earlier best of the year list (here) and added commentary: Expanded list. 

International SF and Fantasy:

Jeff VanderMeer compiled a much-needed best of the year overview of international science fiction.

Best Books of the Decade:

Both Jeff VanderMeer and Matthew Cheney have done a brave thing and compiled their lists of the best books they've read over the past decade. These are fascinating and reward close attention.

Jeff VanderMeer's decade and Matthew Cheney's decade.