A while ago, back when I worked at the bookshop, I read Lehane’s Mystic River. I don’t recall why I chose that particular one. I don’t think it was because I knew it was being made into a film, but not long after I finished it I heard about Clint Eastwood having a crack at directing it.

It’s a brilliant book, but I thought the film was shite. It seemed like everything I’d taken from the book was de-emphasised in the film, and I don’t know if that’s further evidence of how people can have completely different takes on something, or if I got completely the wrong end of the stick when I read it. I do know that my mates weren’t keen on the film either.

Sean Penn was really good, don’t get me wrong (and by good, I mean overacted in just the right melodramatic way to be considered Good Acting), but the film was so completely grounded in his all-encompasing grief at the murder of his daughter that everything else was secondary. The other two key characters (Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins) were hardly in it, Bacon’s role in particular not much more than a cameo. That really struck me as a mistake, because my understanding of the book was about how these three characters lives were intertwined since they were children, and changed completely after Robbins was kidnapped and abused while the other two escaped. It was broadly about a copper versus a criminal, but at the same time a whole lot more: why people end up being who they are, the inevitability of character, about all the uncontrollable things that can drag us down, and lead us to our fates.

In short, the book was structured around Penn and Bacon’s characters being two sides of the same coin, almost like two forces in inevitable opposition. The film is nothing like that, Bacon’s character coming across as a wet bit-part rather than the main protagonist. This, of course, has nothing to do with the book I’m actually meant to be reviewing here.

A Drink, Before The War was Lehane’s debut novel and the first appearance of Kenzie and Genarro, his reoccuring PI characters. I started reading it after Mystic River, but didn’t finish it. It’s not as good a book, which isn’t really a surprise. It treads a lot of the same ground as a lot of other gritty detective stories, and there’s not much subtlety to be found.

Even so, where it differs from other books is the uncompromising way Lehane deals with working class life in Boston, and the racism and violence ingrained in all the organisations of the City, from criminal gangs to state politicians. It’s strikingly similar to the themes found in The Wire, a programme that Lehane himself ended up writing for. It’s this undercurrent that’s most interesting in the book, and that raises it about the usual grim crime story.

Anyway, the reason I brought up the Eastwood film is that it’s Ben Affleck’s turn to adapt one of Lehane’s books. Gone, Baby, Gone was out in the US last year, but is only landing this side of the Pond next month. It’s got a couple of good write-ups, but if I’d seen Mystic River the film first, I wouldn’t have bothered with the book. So I need to read the book first, but it’s the fourth in the series, and thanks to nerd obsessiveness I need to get through the other ones first. They’re on order from the library, and Darkness, Take My Hand is up next.

Googling through a few reviews of this book, I notice that it’s associated with The Forever War a lot, and I can see why. It’s a similar sort of protagonist, fighting a similar kind of war, presented as a series of episodic battles and incidents. Of course, the classic SF publishing system gets a different coat of paint here because it was first published in bits on the internet.

It’s a very mod kind of story, with plenty of biotechnology and body enhancements and BrainPal implants that give the characters an intercranial iPhone (mind to mind text messaging comes over particularly well). As a reading experience it must be similar to contemporaries reading 50s SF, when that era’s extrapolation of technology was advanced and realistic rather than dusty and quaint, which Old Man’s War itself, of course, must inevitably become in turn.

I was fifty pages in before realising it, so the work happily conforms to the Current Rules. I got through it at a pace that usually only happens with authors I’ve been familiar with for years. Then again, in a way I am pretty familiar with Scalzi’s writing, even though this is the first of his books that I’ve read, as I started reading his blog regularly last year after I found it, in the disjointed way we find things online, via his short story Pluto Tells All over at Subterranean Press.

His dialogue is one of the thigns that draws a lot of praise, and is used as a selling point on the cover of the paperback edition. I’m not quite sold on it myself, not because it isn’t fun, but because it makes a lot of the characters, regardless of background, sound pretty similar. Then again, maybe that’s actually a downside of reading someone’s writing almost daily; you find yourself tuning in very quickly to their ‘voice’, maybe in a way that you don’t with work that only gets an airing a couple of times a year at the most.

The action bits are top rate, and it’s very easy to get caught up in a story that runs off so energetically in the way it needs to go. It’s made me interested in getting hold of the Heinlein stuff that inspired it. And if I can make a concluding observation without actually reading Starship Troopers, the connecting thread through these works would appear to be that while The Forever War strips the outer layer off the former’s corpse and walks around in it, like a literary camouflage that’ll encourage us to let the complexities into the compound of our minds, Old Man’s War reanimates it, shoves it full of shiny new equipment, then proudly shuffles it off over the horizon towards Adventure.

In fact, its status as a classic makes it a little difficult to review like this. It’s unlikely that I’m going to say anything that hasn’t been said many times before in the quarter-century since it was first published. One thing that does stand out for me, in particular in light of Old Man’s War (the book that would have been reviewed tomorrow but I haven’t finished yet, so TO BE CONTINUED) is the episodic nature of the novel. This is one of a number of parallels between this book and John Scalzi’s, although Scalzi hadn’t read this one before writing his, but I’ll cover that in a later post.

Many classic SF works follow this pattern, unsurprisingly because that’s the way they were first published, chapter by chapter in fiction magazines like Asimov’s. The way the chapters cover different periods of the main protagonist’s life add to this. The hook here is that thanks to relativistic effects of travelling at the speed of light in order to get somewhere and kill things, William Mandella is forever returning to a civilisation farther and farther beyond him (the culture shock represented here by a society where, and I paraphrase, OMFG everyone is TEH GAY). The separate episodes are an effective way of representing the disorientating, disjointed way that Mandella is experiencing his life.

What makes the book stand out historically, and what makes it relevant today, is the way it was written as a reflection of the author’s own experience in Vietnam, in fighting a seemingly senseless war without end, and in returning to a country where everything seems to have changed in the author’s absence. The dehumanising aspects of training troops how to slaughter then dropping them into harsh and inhospitable landscapes are reiterated time and again.

Perhaps the most significant thing about the book is the way it wears the clothes of a rip-roaring military space adventure, but is actually more subversive than that. It succeeds not by presenting human fears as alien monsters to be blown away, or even by getting all Star Trek and suggesting that plot twist the monsters are misunderstood and are in fact just like us! (although there is a spot of that going on), but by using a standard SF archetype to show that regardless of the motive and circumstance of any given war, it’s the soldiers that we send out to do the fighting that end up with all the shit.

Oh, and while we’re talking about the Masterworks line, a couple of other recommendations for you: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (the second in the series and for God’s sake don’t watch the film first) and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. Over in the Fantasy Masterworks companion line, Dan Simmon’s Song of Kali is a very odd, festering little horror story that’s worth a look. All three get the nod for not being of Tom Clancy-esque door-stop proportions.

While waiting for the revolution, I picked up Forty Signs of Rain because it’s only about 350 pages.

The book’s largely set-up, the first of a trilogy dealing with environmental change and humanity’s response to it. It’s surprisingly upbeat, in the sense that while catastrophic climate change is inevitable and we’re all intent on ignoring it, the protagonists are all scientists working in seperate fields that combined may have a way of saving society.

Which makes it all the more heartbreaking that despite this tone, all I’m taking away from the book is a feeling of futility. Robinson’s characters are the scientists we all read about in the days of Asimov, the heroes who use logic and knowledge to better our lives and provide solutions. The book points towards the creation of a scientific institution that can combine different ideas and viewpoints, but that will also carry political weight and influence.

That just isn’t going to happen in this day and age. This isn’t SF, unfortunately. It’s fucking fantasy. I hate to get all doom and gloom, but if the past few decades have shown anything it’s that science isn’t considered the way forward anymore, if it ever was. Science, logic and reason have become something to be dismissed in favour of vague notions of faith and incredibly distinct notions of corporate wealth accumulation. Robinson suggests that it’s possible to make changes now for the better. We all know that’s not going to happen.

OK, that romped off to a bit of a dark place.

Anyway, the book’s a great example of science-heavy SF done well, with likeable characters and a surprisingly touching romantic entanglement showing up unexpectedly towards the end. Sure, there’s probably a little too much Science to appeal to the general populace, but when do we ever give a shit about them? Buy this book and feed your inner lab-nerd.

“…Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an elite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a wilful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses.” – Richard Morgan, from an interview on saxonbullock.com, via Wikipedia.

A few days ago on Twitter I mentioned that if Rambo was an adjective, it would describe this book. Let’s expand on that, Internet Friends.

In the US the novel’s been retitled Thirteen, I’m assuming due to difficulties anticipated with the original name. If this is due to race issues (I don’t know for sure that it is, but it really wouldn’t surprise me), then it makes an interesting echo of some of the themes of the book.

Set about two hundred years in the future, the story is broadly about a genetically-engineered Thirteen’s hunt for a serial killer. Thirteens were created as supersoldiers, all throwbacks to pre-agriculture human hunters, a species of lone killers bred out of the human race hundreds of years ago. With wiring so different from modern humans, they’re seen as psychotic monsters to the general population. There’s a lot of subtext here about views on race and religion, but also on what humans actually are, what role our genes play in behaviour, how behaviour shapes society, but also whether or not life experience really does shape who we are. The “black man” describes the protagonist not just in terms of race, but how his society views him. It’s a dark, cynical book, one that echoes many of this author’s usual themes, outlined most clearly in the quote above.

It’s also incredibly violent, with people getting dispatched in many and various bloody ways. The swears are many, and there’s a couple of extremely explicit bongo scenes. A book for Grown-Ups, in other words.

While occasionally uncomfortable, it’s still very well written and easy to read. On his website, Morgan mentions that a fair few people don’t like the book very much, because they were expecting another Altered Carbon (his debut). Which is a surprise, because it’s not that radically different in terms of style or even theme, although the religion thing tends to get people hopping mad. Morgan has a distinctive voice, and that’s not a criticism. His next one is a Heroic Fantasy (capitals added for extra grandeur), which really will be a proper departure from previous work.

It’s probably not the most accessable of his books; it’s got something to piss of practically everybody and it slows down a bit in a few places, but it’s still very good and damn near essential if you like your SF both thought-provoking and blood-thirsty.