“The Mysterious Benedict Society” by Trenton Lee Stewart

I’ve had the good fortune over the years to be friends with two men who were New York Times best-selling authors. One was one of my college professors, Jack Butler, who wrote the sublimely and uniquely Southern novel “Jujitsu for Christ.” The other is Trenton Lee Stewart, who married one of the really cute girls I went to college with. Oh, and he also stamped his mark on the literary establishment with his three books for young’uns, starting with “The Mysterious Benedict Society” in 2007.

I’m a big fan of well-written children’s and young-adult fiction. I think it takes consummate skill as an author to put together a book that is age-appropriate for a young audience, yet gives adults something to savor, as well. I’ll freely admit, I have no clue how to do this myself.

Stewart does. While “The Mysterious Benedict Society” isn’t as gripping for the grown-up set as, say, the Harry Potter novels (which, as they progressed, moved their target age further and further away from that of the “Benedict” books), it tells a story that is engaging and features characters you can really get into. It’s just absurd enough to delight readers, like myself, who want a book to engage their willing suspension of disbelief; but it’s also rooted in real-world ideas and possibilities that give you something to chew on, especially for adult readers.

In fact, I find that five years after its initial publication, those meaty parts of “The Mysterious Benedict Society” are even more relevant to what’s going on around us today. While on the surface it’s about a group of resourceful orphans, recruited by a benevolent genius, who must overcome an evil genius and his plan to rule the world — in other words, pretty standard fare — under the surface it’s about the threat of new technology, manipulating people through message control, subversion of the established order in the name of a (however wickedly conceived) Greater Good, the nature of intelligence, the importance of tolerance, and one of my favorite messages in a book for any audience: The inestimable value of friendship, and the importance of holding on to it even under duress.

The book revolves around four primary protagonists: Reynard “Reynie” Muldoon, George “Sticky” Washington, Kate Weatherall, and Constance Contraire. Whether the author intended it or not, you can read a lot about these kids — little kids, mind you, not teenagers — from there names. I find Reynard’s namesake in Reynard the Fox, for his cleverness. Sticky proves to be as valiant in battle as our first president. Kate (without question my favorite character) indeed shows she can weather all situations. And Constance Contraire — well, never was a child more aptly surnamed. Each brings the aforementioned strength to their role in the Society, as they try to winkle out the secrets of the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, run by the enigmatic and prickly Ledroptha Curtain.

The children — all orphans or runaways — have been sent on this mission by the equally mysterious Mr. Benedict, having passed many tests he uses to weed out the clever and resourceful. Their patron is concerned about odd messages being carried over television airwaves, things like “The missing aren’t missing, they’re only departed.” He believes these messages are behind a national malaise known as “The Emergency” and he’s figured out that something much, much worse is coming — and that only a group of truly exceptional children can stop it.

And exceptional these kids are — exceptionally smart, exceptionally resourceful, and exceptionally normal. They have fears and hopes and doubts aplenty, all of which serve both to hinder and help in their quest to identify the mysterious Whisperer and figure out how to silence it.

It’s because his characters are true to human nature, failures and all, that Stewart’s main story worked so well for me. There are no superheroes here; each of the four kids fails again and again during the book, and loses faith in themselves and the others. How they overcome these setbacks is one of the things that keeps you interested (not to mention serving as a good example for young readers). Pondering on the subtler significance of the threat posed by Ledroptha Curtain and his sinister Whisperer, on the other hand, is what will keep adult readers turning the pages.

That’s good, because there’s a lot of pages — more than 500 of them in the hardcover edition — and the pace is not always brisk. In fact, there are infrequent places where the book became a bit tedious for me, but upon reflection those mostly dealt with Valuable Lessons for Children that I had (I swear!) already learned many years ago. As I said earlier, the kids experience doubt and failure and have to work through it, and the third or fourth time through that cycle I was ready to hasten on. But none of those lags lasted more than a couple or three pages — another strength of the book, it doesn’t strand you in any one scene for a long time.

I’m rather glad I read “The Mysterious Benedict Society” now rather than when it first came out. While the political environment of 2007 would certainly have given me a lot to pause and consider regarding parallels with the story, what is happening today in Congress, the Republican primary, and the punditocracy makes 2007 look like a walk in the park. Disinformation, misdirection, spin, and flat-out lies are more than ever the currency of our political class, and looking at Ledroptha Curtain’s world-domination plot through that filter lends the book an especially sinister chill. I honestly think a good creative writing and/or political science professor could make this work of children’s literature the source of much thoughtful dialogue and debate in a college classroom.

And that’s the most remarkable thing, for me, about Stewart’s tale: It’s subtler themes are as relevant now as they were when it was first published, and I imagine they’ll continue to be so as long as our socio-political climate remains as partisan as it is today.

“The Serpent Sea” by Martha Wells

Here is how I read a new Martha Wells book: I pick it up intending to get the first couple of chapters finished, then look up to find it’s 2 a.m. and I’m a third of the way finished.

I love Martha Wells’ writing. I first encountered her work while prowling the shelves of the fiction stacks at Laman Library. I forget why I was back in the W-Z area — looking for some specific author, I bet — and the title “Death of the Necromancer” caught my eye. I checked it out, read it, and immediately elevated it to the ranks of my very favorite books. It is a phenomenal story in an beautifully crafted setting with incredible characters. If you like fantasy, and especially if you like fantasy set in a recognizable historical setting (the Victorian era, in this case), you need to read it.

After that, I scoured the shelves for her other works. I found “City of Bones” and “The Element of Fire” (a prequel to “Necromancer” but a stand-alone book in its own right) and “Wheel of the Infinite.” I looked up her website and corresponded with her and found Martha to be a friendly and disarming person, not a lick of arrogance or self-importance, who was happy to answer a fan’s e-mail.

About this same time she launched a new trilogy, “The Fall of Ile-Rien,” based in the same world as “Necromancer” but just slightly later — call it WWI era. It was an ambitious and different fantasy novel, what came to be categorized as “gaslamp” because of its analogous time and place in our own history, and it had the hallmarks of her other books: Great, character-driven stories that were vividly imaigined.

I read the full trilogy and really enjoyed it… and then Martha sort of vanished. For years. I wrote her once to ask what was up and she mentioned she was having trouble finding a buyer for her latest manuscript. Well, as you will see in this eye-opening and sobering blog entry, that was quite the understatement. Martha almost quit writing, but she finally found someone to purchase “The Cloud Roads,” the first of her new trilogy of novels about a race of shapeshifters called the Raksura. It did well, got good reviews, and jump-started her writing career. She’s now writing the third installment of the series, and just a few days ago my copy of the second book, “The Serpent Sea,” arrived. I read it in two days.

The books about the Raksura are far different from Martha’s other novels. They all fall under the rubric of “fantasy,” but most of her others had some grounding that was analogous to our own world. The five books dealing with Ile-Rien are very European, stretching from (roughly) the 18th to early 20th centuries, and “Wheel of the Infinite” was based in the ancient Cambodian city of Angkor Wat (something I realized only after subsequently reading an National Geographic story about its ruins). “City of Bones” is the exception, being a world invented of whole cloth and which really is closer to sci-fi, yet it still has some identifiable cultural elements.

The Raksura books, on the other hand, are traditional fantasy in the sense that it’s made-up races in a made-up world with a made-up ecosystem, funny-sounding words and all. And I’ll admit, I actually prefer her Ile-Rien stuff, in part because of how beautifully she creates her pseudo-Anglo-Frankish lands and culture. But “The Cloud Roads” and “The Serpent Sea” share one of the most important characteristics of her other books: Fantastic, sympathetic, complex characters. And they are what drive my interest in the Raksura books.

Okay, I’ve probably already written as much just about her as I have in any previous post, and a lot of that has to do with the fact I want to sell you on Martha Wells. She’s a fantastic writer, and everyone (again) should read “Death of the Necromancer.” But I’m also trying to demonstrate that when you’ve got a favorite author and they go off in a largely different direction, even one that doesn’t thrill you as much as their earlier work, if they’re good they can still grip you just as forcefully as those first few books did.

I stayed up until 2 a.m. two nights in a row reading about Moon, Stone, Jade, and the other Raksura — a bizarre dual race with complicated rituals and an archaic caste system — because I really want to know what happens to the characters. The world is interesting, though not as engrossing as other fantasy worlds I’ve entered. The story is pretty straightforward, though not as engrossing as other stories I’ve bought into. But the characters and their relationships and their experiences are like a great meal — the first helping just whetted your appetite for more.

The Raksura are a complex creation. Their race actually has two varieties: The Aeriat and the Arbora. Both versions can assume groundling (human, for all practical purposes) and Arbora forms, the latter being bigger, stronger, armored, with retractable claws and great endurance; but the Aeriat can also assume a form with wings and can fly. There is an exception to this rule; the queens (breeding females) only have Arbora and Aeriat forms and can’t assume groundling shape. There are also clear castes in their society, and the Arbora are, in many ways, subservient to the Aeriat — they handle most of the creative tasks, childcare, agriculture, education, and so forth, but also possess many skills the Aeriat do not, such as the mentors who are effectively wizard-types. Naturally, in an old race with such cultural divisions, this means there are a lot of behavior strictures and traditions about who does what, and who doesn’t.

Enter Moon. Well, he entered in the first book, when he knew he was a shapeshifter but nothing else. His colony was destroyed when he was very young and he wound up escaping and growing up on his own. Turns out he’s a consort — the fertile males who are the queens’ counterparts — and he’s eventually discovered and adopted by Indigo Cloud colony, which needs a consort for their younger queen, Jade.

But here’s the thing: Moon doesn’t know jack-squat about being Raksura. He’s been a loner (a “solitary” in Raksura terms, and that’s not a compliment) his whole life, pulling his own weight and watching his own back. Now he comes into this complicated social structure that he doesn’t know anything about and….

And he remains true to himself. The books are not My Fair Raksura, with Moon struggling to become a right and proper consort. He doesn’t buy in to many of their ways. He stirs the pot, makes trouble, changes minds, adjusts attitudes, injects a little chaos into their world. Moon’s presence in this small, desperate colony of Raksura, struggling to ensure its continued existence, proves a game-changer for them, both in the first book and this one. And it’s because he’s disrupting their established patterns.

So that’s what I love about the Raksura books. Moon is not simply the fantasy-world equivalent of the moody outsider who the prom queen falls for. He’s (quite literally) a force of nature that is forcing a complacent culture to adapt in order to ensure its survival. Not that he isn’t changed, as well — he is, but he’s not co-opted. And by no means are the other Raksura all converts to his way. But Moon’s presence makes a genuine difference, whether the others like it or not (and some don’t at all), while he has to continue to overcome his own shortcomings, ignorance, and anger.

This is how Martha always draws me in, every single book. She makes me care about her characters. While not all of her characters are as deeply developed as the protagonists, she absolutely doesn’t have throw-aways or redshirts or one-scene wonders who only serve to fix a problem with the plot (“Oh, you’re looking for the Ministry of Deus Ex Machina? It’s right down this alley. See ya!”). Her characters matter to the book, and they matter to her. And that’s a big part of the reason why they matter to me.

“The Serpent Sea” seems to be generating good buzz, and Martha (almost as fervent a Facebooker as I am) is working on No. 3. I don’t even know what the title is yet, but I damn well know I’m going to read it. Martha, darlin’, let me know when I can pre-order!

DBTF: “Nymphomania, A History” by Caron Groneman

I figured I’d eventually get to a book I didn’t bother to finish (DBTF), but I’d hardly expected it to be one about a subject that has fascinated me (and just about every other straight man in the the world, whether they care to admit it or not) since roughly puberty.

As it happened, I was hoping for nymphomaniacs and all I got was nymphomania.

My problem with “Nymphomania, A History” is it’s too dry. The author is a history professor and her book does, indeed, read like a textbook – complete with foot notes documenting sources. I suppose I should’ve paid more attention to the author’s note where it mentions her other book was “Corporate PhD: The Humanities and Business.” Doesn’t exactly sound like a wild roll in the hay, does it?

Bad sexual puns aside, this is a shame because it’s possible – and I would say essential – for an academic to write a nonfiction book on virtually any subject and make it both informative and fun to read. Take, for example, Paul Greenberg’s “Four Fish.” It’s about commercial fishing, for the love of Pete. Commercial fishing! How many hours have you lost track of at dinner parties while engrossed in a conversation about the depletion of cod stocks? But Greenberg’s book had me totally hooked (okay, okay, I’m sorry) through good writing, visual storytelling, fascinating information presented in a way that personalized for me the impact of overfishing could and was having in my life, and threading the whole thing together with his own personal stories. It was fantastic.

And that’s what I had hoped Gronerman was going to do with this book, because for all that it’s got catchy title and a racy subject (and a rather cleverly suggestive book cover), the real issue she is dealing with here is one that’s important in our society – the tendency to turn any element of female sexuality that doesn’t conform to the standards set by (primarily) religious partriarchal authorities into a disease to be diagnosed, treated, or at the very least demonized.

I’m not knocking Gronerman’s scholarship here. She certainly seems to have pored over archaic and arcane medical records and textbooks, historical documents, and any other source she could lay her hands on to exemplify just how the concept of nymphomania has been handled over the centuries. And it casts a disturbing light on some of our puritanical roots – the idea that women who showed a penchant for enjoying, and even seeking out, sex were not infrequently institutionalized because of it says a whole lot about some of the lingering attitudes toward female sexuality today. But what’s missing is an acknowledgement that her average reader is not going to be a clinician or fellow historian or student. This could have been so much fun to read, without losing the credibility of her academic approach.

Coincidentally, I’ve got a decent analogy to offer. Last night I watched a documentary from a couple of years ago called “Orgasm Inc.,” about how the pharmaceutical industry is pathologizing the lack of sexual desire in women. It didn’t break much new ground – after all, for years Big Pharma has been creating markets by promoting new “diseases” and making billions on the sale of drugs to treat them – but it was presented in an evocative, interesting, and thought-provoking manner. It kept my attention and drove its point home, which Gronerman utterly failed to do with her book.

I gave her multiple chances, I promise. When chapters recounting Victorian-era clinical treatments started to deaden my brain, I skipped forward,hoping that the annals of Jazz Age or the introduction of psychotherapy might liven things up a bit. But no luck. Whether it was Bedlam or Freud, the manner in which nymphomania was being treated in (and by) Gronerman’s book left me bored.

Which is exactly what you don’t expect from nymphomania.

This is one nympho I'd gladly kick out of my bed.

“Kingdoms of the Wall” by Robert Silverberg

Some books are published because they have great literary merit. Some are published because they have great commercial potential. Some are published because they are popular among certain segments of the market, or fit the mold of the latest hot sales trend, or read a lot like some other book that was really successful.

And some books only see the light of day because they have a “name” author. And such is the case with “Kingdoms of the Wall.”

Really, that has to be the explanation. Silverberg isn’t some hack. He’s been writing for more than 50 years. He’s won the major awards. I’m not exactly a major fan, but I’ve read a couple of his books before and enjoyed them — the Lord Valentine stuff, for instance, was pretty cool as I recall.

But this?This was lame.

It started out reasonably well. The first-person narrator had a strong voice and the setting seemed to hold some promise. But once the central premise came to light, things went quickly downhill. And yeah, that’s a pun because said premise is that the narrator and a bunch of others from his village are going to climb the giant mountain next door in an attempt to reach and personally commune with their gods.

Okay, maybe it’s just me, but if you can reach your gods by foot then they’re probably not all that impressive.

And as the story of Poilar Crookleg and his companions is, ultimately, likewise unimpressive. There are 40 of them all told, and they are the Pilgrims. The villages at the foot of the Kosa Saag (the mountain they call the Wall) have a tradition where they bring together thousands of their young people, then spend years winnowing them down through physical and mental tests to the 40 Pilgrims who will attempt to reach the Summit and commune in person with the gods, just as the First Climber did.

By the way, they do this every year. Ever. Single. Year. 40 go up, and once every few years one or two come back down — usually mad as hatters, or at the very least incomprehensible, and they spend the remainder of their lives basically as honored shut-ins.

So, you’d think that, after generations and generations of doing this, these people would’ve given up,considering they were getting no return on investment. After all, the First Climber (Poilar’s distant ancestor, naturally) returned with the knowledge of fire, agriculture, and all the other necessities of not living like savages. Yet in thousands of years nobody since who’s made it back has said so much as, “I’ve been to the gods and they said, ‘Good job, you’ve tackled agrarian mystic culture with gusto, now how about trying to move on to steampunk? Here’s how you make a hot air balloon.’” (Well, okay, one guy said things like “you’ll know you’re near the gods when the rocks have eyes.”)

I got the clue after the first time Poilar mentioned this lack of successful communion with the gods. But what his own people lack in the perception department they made up in the blind faith department. This is enhanced by the fact that, as Poilar the the Pilgrims make their way up Kosa Saag, they discover in the finest Firesign Theater tradition that everything they know is wrong. At least, pretty much everything they have learned about it since childhood.

Right now you’re thinking something along these lines: “Wait a minute… if nobody who’s returned since the First Climber has done so with a sound mind, where is this information coming from? And how accurate can it be?”

Congratulations, it’s taken you 30 seconds to come to a realization that has eluded Poilar’s people for untold centuries. So you can imagine how the quest is going to turn out.

It doesn’t help that the further up the mountain Poilar goes, the dumber he seems to get. Granted, he didn’t set himself out to be an intellectual at the start, but he at least seemed not entirely naive. But I’m sorry, Silverberg hits him (and the reader) repeatedly over the head with Maxwell’s Silver Hammer of Unsubtle Foreshadowing nearly every step of the journey, yet when he and the surviving Pilgrims (Pilgrims on the Wall, it is established early on, have a lower survival rate than Starfleet redshirts) reach the Summit he’s still caught by surprise at what he finds there. This despite the fact that one of the Mysterious Strangers they meet in the upper reaches of the mountain does everything but draw them a picture of what the situation is up top.

I’d like to find something nice to say about this book, but even the interesting bits of it don’t seem original. Take Poilar’s people: They remain neuter most of the time, but when two of them want to mate they “make the Change,” actually physically altering their bodies to produce sexual organs. Which is pretty cool, except that whether they are in the mood or not, they still have an assigned gender. This makes little sense to me. And it’s not entirely a new idea, either, having been handled much better by Ursula K. LeGuin in “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

So this book was a waste of time. And I should’ve invoked my “don’t finish if you’re not interested” rule, except that it was the proverbial slow-motion train wreck. I kept going because I kept wondering if it could really be as bad (and obvious) as it seemed. And in that respect, at least, Silverberg delivered.

“Souls in the Great Machine” by Sean McMullen

I like me a good trade paperback, you can really put the hurt on somebody if you whack 'em with it! Hey... why the hell is this pitcher sidewise?!?

Okay, yeah, I know I said I was going to use this blog to make myself read what was already in my bookcase. Well, I’m cheating this week; I recently picked up four (just four!) books at the library’s used book sale and once I peeked into this one I was pretty much hooked.

Post-apocalyptic Australia! Vengeful librarians! Wind-powered trains! Religions that ban steam power! Feisty camel-riding nomads! And a mysterious Call that causes every mammal bigger than a small dog to be drawn inexorably to the sea where they’re DEVOURED BY FISH! Okay, total spoiler there, but you’ll get over it.

McMullen’s book  is quite imaginative and his characters are compelling and, at nearly 475 pages, the book is pretty  stout. And while I pored through it with little resistance, I can’t say that the sum of all those tasty, innovative parts was greater than the whole. Uh. I mean… oh, hell, just run with it, Francis!

“Souls” is a good read and a fun book despite some serious shortcomings: A massive deus ex machina, a total non sequitur clearly meant only to justify a sequel, and occasional chronological leaps that leave empty gaps of months or years that can best be explained as “well, it was more convenient to write it that way.” Still, McMullen largely overcomes all of these in one way or another and winds up with a perfectly readable book that doesn’t make you facepalm when you get to the end. (Like, say, “War of the Flowers.”)

Having boned up on the author via his Wikipedia entry, I learned that “Souls” is actually a combination of his first two Australia-published novels, expressly made for the American market. However, they didn’t just stitch them together and change the title; apparently some alterations were made to the work, as well. And I think I can actually pick out where they are. Some of the aforementioned time lapses, for example. Yet I didn’t find myself worrying very long over where those missing 17 seconds went (so to speak) because by the time he was leaving calendrical holes unplugged, he’d already hooked me with his characters.

If you want the nuts of the story, here it is: The vengeful librarians build a calculator made up of people doing math and use it to create the most powerful nation-state on the continent, only to have a renegade from among their own numbers one-up them by joining forces with the feisty camel-riding nomads and nearly bring the whole thing crashing down around them. It’s a great premise, you have to admit. (Yes, you do.) And in the finest Anne McCaffrey tradition, there’s a hidden technological twist to the whole, otherwise low-tech, scenario: Orbiting satellites detect and destroy any electronic functions on the planet’s surface, keeping the good folk of future-Austria from inventing things like iPods and body scanners and light bulbs; plus, self-replicating machines on the moon are building a solar shield between Earth and the Sun to prevent a new round of global warming – but might instead trigger a second global winter.

There’s a bevy of main characters – not to worry, it’s nothing like trying to keep up with the protagonists in A Song of Ice and Fire or The Wheel of Time – and each gains depth as you get deeper in the book. Actual character development, a rare enough bird. And my favorite among those characters, John Glasken, was the biggest surprise, as well, because he starts out like he’s going to be a throwaway minor character, emerges as a roguish rascal you don’t want to like but can’t help it, and triumphs as the true hero of the novel (even though he’s still, at best, only getting third billing in the dramatis). There’s even a nice piece of self-reference in the middle of the story, where Glasken thinks about the trials he’s been through and how they resemble a fantastical story in a book, then wonders why such books never have as their heroes a loveable rake who just likes to have fun and gets to be the good guy in the end. Well, John, wish granted!

McMullen’s characters are flawed and fallible, utterly human, yet exceptional in the way we want our protagonists (and antagonists, and in one case both) to be. His scenarios are outlandish, but never in a manner that threatens your willing suspension of disbelief. His story is founded firmly on an environmental message – global warming and genetic engineering got us into this mess – but it’s never preachy. And if you allow yourself the luxury, you can even laugh at some of his plot devices without losing respect for them. Among the best is the fact that the cruelest, meanest, most unrepentantly homicidal beings still alive are… the whales. Oh yes, they remember all those “scientific whale hunts” and that sort of shit, and they’re out for blood. Greenpeace would be proud.

Yet for all the strengths of this book, and despite the fact I finished it with a smile on my face (not in the least part because he ties up almost all the important loose ends instead of leaving every major mystery unresolved, a la “The Crying of Lot 49″), I still have problems with it. That deus ex machina, for example. I don’t mind heroes being extracted from disastrous situations, so long as it’s done by their own wit and skill (or that of their friends). But when Glasken was in a clearly unsurvivable situation and I was prepared to bid my favorite a fond farewell, he is literally rescued by a bolt from the blue. And yes, while McMullen does a good job of writing himself out of that Hand Of God moment, I still felt… just a little cheated.

And that’s what’s soured me toward reading the sequels to this novel – he’s already established that our surviving heroes are close, personal friends of The Ultimate Power In Space. So, realistically, how can they do aught but succeed in all their ventures? It’s disappointing. But at the same time, he had so many good ideas! Such imaginative inventiveness is not to be ignored. I’m torn. And since I don’t already have “The Miocene Arrow” or “The Eyes of the Calculor” in my bookcase already, I think I’m going to hold off tracking them down until “Souls” has had more time to digest. Maybe after I’ve moved a few more titles into the “done read it” column, I’ll consider checking in with Mr. McMullen and seeing how he handles thing moving forward.

In the meantime, I don’t have any regrets for having read “Souls.” If you read it, I don’t think you will, either.

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler

Another home run here! And I wish to start this review with, of all things, the author’s note.

“I’m a 46-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I’m also comfortably asocial — a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles — a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”

What a manifesto! I’m not sure why I’m so taken with this declaration of self; perhaps it’s because so many author’s notes, or bios, or what-have-you, are written in the third person and don’t truly reveal a shred of the writer’s true personality. But here, at the close of a book that is at its core all about personal revelations, nothing else could possibly have done Butler justice.

This is the first of her books that I’ve read, another shameful oversight for someone who has been a lifelong fan of speculative fiction. This woman, after all, was well beyond the stereotypes of both the authors and the fans

Yeah, I know the photo sucks. Deal with it.

of science fiction. Let’s start with the fact she was a woman, still a rare enough creature in these circles (though their numbers have been steadily rising, much to the benefit of readers). Add to that the fact she was African-American, another demographic sadly underrepresented in the field (and also one that is growing, if more gradually by my observations). And finally, in a genre that is built upon original ideas and often intimidating intelligences, she was singled out for a MacArthur genius grant — the first ever given to a science fiction author.

All of this makes it an even greater tragedy that Butler didn’t get to be the 80-year-old writer she foretold on the last page of “Parable of the Sower.” She died just five years ago at age 58, a loss to literature that we’ll be a long time recovering from.

And having now read this, one of her most popular books, I feel the sadder for our loss. The first of two titles in the Parable series (a third was planned but never written), it’s a dystopian glimpse into America’s near-future (2025) where society is falling apart and everything is going to shit faster than people can adapt. It follows Lauren Oya Olamina, a teenage girl who is in the process of discovering/exploring/inventing a new religion called Earthseed (whose fundamental premise is that “God is change”) while at the same time trying to survive — first with her family in their walled cul-de-sac in a Southern

California, then with a rag-tag band of friends and (mostly) strangers as they head north toward an uncertain future.

Okay, that makes it sound very stereotypical. Blame the reviewer, not the author. What you’ll find in this book is a phenomenal depth of character and intellect, especially in the protagonist but even in the most minor of characters. You will care about them and their fate. You will cringe at every disaster, whatever its outcome. You will sweat over the same decisions they’re sweating over. And you’ll cling to the same faint hopes they cling to, with equal desperation, because Butler is that damn good at real, gut-level emotions.

And the most impressive part about all of that, in my mind, is she accomplishes it despite the fact the reader KNOWS that everything is going to turn out all right (or at least mostly all right)! Why? Because the whole book is sprinkled with verses from “Earthseed: The Books of the Living” – which means that Lauren has to survive to some semblance of adulthood because she has only just started writing the holy text of her new religion when “Sower” begins!

I admire the hell out of that. I’ve always wanted to see if I could write a book so gripping that the narrator can promise in the very opening that “this will not turn out well” or something like that, yet keep the readers hanging onto every page until the end. Now I wonder if I can, because Butler did it and she was smart enough to win a MacArthur grant. That’s a pretty intimidating bar to clear.

“Sower” is also a fascinating read, given the economic and social upheaval of our current times. In my most pessimistic moments, I grouse about how our current culture is on a path to a Bladerunner-style (or at least Max Headroom-style) future, where corporations run pretty much everything. Well, having read this book I will from this moment forward in my most pessimistic moments fervently hope we are on just such a path, because the alternative presented by Butler scares the living shit out of me, all the more so because it’s built upon the old racial and class biases that have caused so much friction in American society over and over during our history. Truly frightening to comprehend her vision becoming real.

“Sower” was nominated for the best novel Nebula in ’94 and its sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” won that award in ’99. That one isn’t in my bookcase yet, but I’ll be on the lookout for it — as well as other works by this remarkable woman, who was

taken from us all too soon.

“Doomsday Book” by Connie Willis

Over the weekend Connie Willis won the Hugo Award for best novel – her third in that category and her 11th Hugo overall. She’s also won seven Nebula awards (including this year’s best novel category) and a number of other awards for sci-fi/fantasy writing.

So you think I would have liked this book better.

Granted, winning the Hugo and the Nebula (as “Doomsday Book” did in 1993) is not a guarantee that I will enjoy a book. “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” by Michael Chabon did just that and I thought it far inferior to many other novels I’ve read.

But this disappointment stood out in particularly glaring fashion for me. That’s because in 1993, “Doomsday Book” wasn’t alone in winning the best novel Hugo; it shared the honor with Vernor Vinge’s “A Fire Upon the Deep,” which I read a few years ago and which instantly rose to the ranks of My Favorite Books Ever.

Further exacerbating my disappointment with “Doomsday Book” is that these two novels share some very salient characteristics. They feature protagonists stranded far from home with little or no hope of rescue. “Doomsday” uses two story lines to keep the actions of its protagonists separate until the climax, “Fire” uses several. And both books touch on themes of long journeys and dire plagues.

When I finished reading “A Fire Upon the Deep” for the first time, I was elated, thrilled, totally agog at Vinge’s narrative and imaginative prowess. Meanwhile, when I finished “Doomsday Book” last night, I just shook my head and wondered what the fuss was all about.

I think for me the difference is this: “Fire” is a book of constant action, whereas too much of the plot in “Doomsday” is built upon reaction. Thankfully, Willis’ protagonists, Mr. Dunworthy and Kivrin, aren’t just sitting around and whining like the pathetic Theo, who passes for a main character in Tad Williams’ “The War of the Flowers” (my current standard for disappointing SFF). Rather, they are each deeply involved in the greatest disasters of their respective times — a mutant influenza and the Black Plague, respectively — as well as the overarching plot of Dunworthy trying to get his errant time-traveling student home from the Middle Ages. But still I spent most of the book waiting for something to happen… and when things ARE happening in the story but you still find yourself waiting, that’s not a good sign.

The way I feel right now, it comes down to pacing. Willis was stingy with her revelations, her plot twists, her tragedies and victories; she doled them out parsimoniously, starting way too late into the book. I remember reaching the end of Part Two (of three) where there was a major reveal, but being so tired of the book by then that it made little impact on me. In fact, I felt like she could have condensed all the action in the first two-thirds of the book into one section and given her readers this breaking news more than 100 pages earlier. (Not to mention making the book that much shorter so I could put it away that much more quickly.)

On the other hand, in “Fire” Vinge ladles out wonders constantly, amazing the reader with incredible characters, phenomenal plot twists, hyperimaginative settings and a story that grabs you by the throat. I never got tired of turning pages when I was reading “Fire,” while I had to force myself to push through to the end of “Doomsday” (in part because I knew if I went to bed with it unfinished, I wouldn’t bother to pick it up again this morning).

I know I’m making something of an apples-to-orangutans comparison here. Willis, after all, wrote a book that depended greatly on real-world history (and some near-future speculation), while Vinge’s far-future novel stretched the boundaries of credulity with its inventiveness. But that really shouldn’t matter; I read speculative fiction because I want to have my willing suspension of disbelief engaged by the author so I can forget for the duration about my life, my world, and have them convince me that theirs is better or, at least, much more interesting.

And Willis’ world — both her near-future Oxford and her Middle Ages village — failed to do that. I was, to quote Dave Lister, “in a state of total un-grippedness.” I started out caring for Willis’ protagonists, and she at least kept me a little off-balance as to the ending until very late in the book, but by then the endgame had become obvious and I was simply ready for them to rescue Kivrin and get it over with.

I’ll be seeing Ms. Willis again at some point in this blog; I’ve also got “To Say Nothing of the Dog,” another Hugo-winner, in my collection. I hope that it proves to be more engaging than “Doomsday Book.”

“Bridge of Birds” by Barry Hughart

I wish that, years ago when I first started buying used books, I’d thought to note inside the cover where I purchased each one. Because I would dearly love to send a thank you note to whatever place I picked up this gem of a read.

Despite a lifetime of reading science fiction and fantasy, Barry Hughart was a name I’d never heard. Not all that surprising, of course, given the number of authors out there who never achieve any kind of prominence. But with this, his first novel, Hughart (as I eventually learned) won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and tied for the World Fantasy Award. It also appeared on one of those ubiquitous and generally untrustworthy lists of “the 100 best sci-fi/fantasy blah blah blah” that are periodically published, this one by NPR. So I figured, what the heck, I’ll start here.

Holy monkey, what a book!

Hughart has crafted exactly the kind of speculative fiction novel that I hope I can turn out one day: Lighthearted and engaging, yet with depths of plot and story that assure the reader he’s not being taken for granted. And such characters! The protagonists, Li Kao and Number Ten Ox (who also narrates), are delightfully drawn, infused with real personality and true character, and continually capable of surprising the reader. The story itself draws upon actual Chinese folklore and fable, as well as the author’s own imagination, and this produces a believable fantasy-historic setting that is equally enthralling. And the secondary characters, whether recurring or one-scene extras, all add to the story in unique ways.

That story is delightful — simple on its face, but (to mix my cultural metaphors) possessed of intricate folds of complexity like a piece of origami. I’m not going to give you a whole book report here, but the gyst is this: Poor peasant Number Ten Ox sets out to find a wise man (the aforementioned Li Kao) to help the children of his village recover from a mysterious malady; in the process, the duo uncover the mystery of a missing goddess, the deceit of a malicious nobleman, and the secret of a thousand-year-old betrayal. Hughart weaves dozens of seemingly insignificant threads into the whole of the story, bringing them all together in the conclusion in a manner that leaves you smiling and nodding, rather than shaking your head and asking, “What the…?”

Hughart, who spent part of his military and civilian careers in the Orient, delivers an authentic atmosphere of medieval Chinese culture. Or at least, it seems so to me, but I didn’t live in medieval China or even study it. Regardless, I’m all about the willing suspension of disbelief, and I happily tossed mine out the window by the time I finished the first page of the book. The voice of Number Ten Ox is is mesmerizing, and the narration keeps you moving through the book. This was one of those I had to force myself to put down at midnight instead of plowing through until 3 a.m. to finish it. His presentation of the story is simple and straightforward, but you quickly realize that there are intricacies to be winnowed from its telling, and that’s what keeps you plugging along. You’ll realize something that just happened is going to be of import sooner or later, and it’s a great temptation to keep reading until you find out exactly how.

This is not to say “Bridge of Birds” is a complex tale. No — it’s a book I would happily hand to a 12-year-old to read (well, okay, there’s some references to sex but they’re pretty oblique, but then again I’m not the kind of person people turn to for advice on appropriate children’s books, anyway). What I mean to say is it will not tax your cognitive powers to follow (and even puzzle out) the plot, but neither will it tax your credulity. Hughart pulls off his marvelous fable without any gratuitous deus ex machina or non sequitur devices, and for that he earns my endearment. And he wraps everything up in a nice, neat package by the last page — something of particular import to me, since I can’t abide a book that simply ends but doesn’t have an ending (hello, “The Crying of Lot 49″).

Hughart had apparently planned to write seven books to chronicle the adventures of Number Ten Ox and Li Kao, but wrapped it up in three, instead, citing problems with his publishers as the primary reason. Well, I’m just happy to know there’s two more out there, and I’ll track them down and dutifully read them, as well. And this time I’m going to write down where I got them inside the front cover, in case I feel an equally strong urge to send the sellers a thank you note when I’m finished reading them.