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i read Watts' books as much for the science as for the story, and i have to say, they are the meatiest sf you can get, in terms of really fascinating science. any other book you've read lately have 140 footnotes marking scientific papers & other research? Echopraxia should really be read after Blindsight, even though they are contemporaneous (more or less), not consecutive. most aliens in sf aren't really so very alien--they are some variety of human experience, often exaggerated or skewed, but still... you recognize them. Blindsight's aliens are really, really alien, and not only that, so in some ways are the humans who spacefare out toward the Kuiper Belt to investigate them. Echopraxia takes place back on earth and on a sunward voyage, and the connection between the characters is a very slender one. the very alien aliens have not arrived on earth, and the messages from the spacefarers have not, in large part, arrived. but humans are not particularly good at sitting around waiting, and so... they haven't. let's just say, things back home are not pretty. in Blindsight Watts did a thorough examination of consciousness. in Echopraxia he's taking on "invisible sky fairies seriously enough to incorporate into a hard SF novel"--in other words, religion. but this is not a theological treatise like Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow or any of a zillion snot-nosed, shooting-fish-in-a-barrel takedowns of organized religion--he's seriously contemplating what a deity might be, how it might manifest, and what it would mean for us mere mortals (particularly us atheist mortals). this is not the god of fire and brimstone, or of eternal ponies in the sky. this is not a god that is like us, only better. in fact i don't think i can tell you exactly what Watts' god might be like, except that to it, we humans are very, very small. and not particularly beloved. i adore writing that takes risks--big risks--and gives me a well-stocked playroom full of new concepts and new thoughts. and you just can't get any better than Watts for all that. he's probably not ever going to be warm and fuzzy like Dickens (whom i adore, even when he sharpens up his prose to razors), nor make the bestseller lists, nor have legions of fans who say that his book changed their lives/made them laugh, made them cry/lifted them up to transcendence, etc etc. but if you can read a Watts book and not think hard about it for months after... you'd best make sure your circuitry is still functioning.

a fun and idiosyncratic ride through the videogame world. let me say upfront that i think non-gamers will probably find this dull as dust. but if you've found yourself clutching your controller (or hammering your keypad) at 2am when you really should be doing something else, this book might be for you. the author writes with a clear fan-boy love of videogames, of their development history, of the stories they sort-of tell. he takes us on a ride through the lives of four game developers who've known each other since high school, in 1983-ish when games were a nascent form and could be developed in your friend's basement on a floppy-reading, monoform computer. so, these four lives; plus their other four lives in that strange intersection between self and game character. in fact, the author spends rather more time here, at the intersection, than he does with the meat humans or the digital humans, and that's really what makes this book interesting. real reality and digital reality fade seamlessly into one another. it's not like mages are suddenly catching cabs in Boston; that would be stupid, and actually Grossman is better than that. rather, the two realities meet on an emotional plane. it's a neat trick, well done. the book rather flags a bit toward the end; the boss battle culminates in a whimper rather than a bang. so, not perfect, but really interesting. how would you make the ultimate game? really rather a more nuanced question than one might at first expect.

It's really quite impossible to believe that this is the author's first published work. The writing is so polished, the story so tightly-constructed, the complexity of the beautifully-drawn characters so perfect... I am quite blown away. The story concerns a small handful of people in a Chechen village during the wars: a failed doctor but successful portraitist with a vegetable wife; a skilled surgeon with a hole the shape of her missing sister; a historian writing an interminable history of Chechnya; and his son, an informer responsible for making a lot of villagers be disappeared. Their orbits all collide over a little girl whose father has been disappeared, their house burned to the ground. It's a painful story to read, as war stories often are, but the glory of this one is that it concentrates so specifically on the stories of these few civilians caught up in power machinations far beyond their own spheres of control. This is war from a noncombatant's point of view--people just trying their best to survive, to get by until tomorrow, hoping that nobody lobs a bomb at them or sends a goon squad to the door at 2am. The myriad joys of Marra's writing are really quite too numerous to list, and the deep empathy of the work is evident in every passage. There are no heroes here, but there are no villains either. And in the journey through their lives there is a great deal of wisdom to be gained. Do yourself a favor. Read it.

What an interesting book. I imagine 50 or 100 years from now, if liberal arts education is not laughed off university campuses, students of English lit might actually be studying this one. It’s that layered, yep. About halfway through I realized I was reading something I have run across so rarely: a book where men don’t actually matter much. I’ve read a zillion books where women were just plot devices, getting things kicked off or causing a plot twist. In these cases the men of the story were individuals, pretty much, but the women were interchangeable: the Vamp who sets Plot Twist B into motion is indistinguishable, really, from any other Vamp; the Lover could be any woman within the demographic, and so on. I’m not criticizing these books, understand--for one thing, authors really do sometimes have a hard time writing opposite-sex characters, and sometimes it just doesn’t really matter. But it feels much rarer to run across a book where the male characters are plot devices, and the women genuinely the focus. Not women-in-relation-to-men, but just… women as women. As mothers, sisters, daughters. It was a kind of enchantment there, for a while. But of course one cannot live forever in a world without men, nor should one want to. And the book is not advocating such. In this book, many of the men who come back are far finer than the ones who kicked the plot into motion. The work is full of vocabulary-based felicities--the author apparently loves playing with language, and it pays off. The characters ramble between mythic and painfully or poignantly real; the style from fairy tale to some pretty gritty and stomach-turning scenes of abuse and violence. It’s not as if the author were creating some mash-up of styles and genres, it’s as if she saw where the edges of reality and magical reverie grind against one another like tectonic plates, and wrote from that space. The book is not without flaws, but damn, it’s pretty close.

A story of has-beens, wanna-bes, losers of various stripes, and how they all succeed so beautifully at living. So much American fiction has taken up the puerile, stupid, inanely limited hero's tale. It's the arc of every hollywood movie, the rotting spine of altogether too many novels: hero faces some deeply personal challenge (injustice, cancer, the ever eyerolling eViL), falters but ultimately takes up the fight against it, loses everything and eventually becomes even more resolute because of his/her losses, takes up the sword for one last glorious battle, and poof! wins and gets the girl/boy/diagnosis/legal settlement/money/whatever of his/her dreams. YAWN. Walter's tale is none of the above, which is part of why it is so lovely. There is injustice, dirty-dealing, bad behavior, carelessness, self-destruction, and failure on every page, but absolutely no one takes up a sword, which is what most people don't do. People muddle through, they do what they think is right even when they're not sure what that is, they do the best they can, and frequently, things turn out all right. Not glorious. Not perfect. Sometimes not even as they should be. But they're all right, and even imperfect things have their intense satisfactions, and occasionally, are shot through with joy. This book, however, is I think about as close to perfect as a book gets, and I defy you to read the final chapter without feeling deeply moved. Walter's book will absolve you of your own failures in the sweetest and most clear-eyed possible way.

swoon... what a delightful graphic novel. who'd a thunk it: a sea monster man with a love of iambic pentameter, his three little crabby friends, an agoraphobic, and romance. the art in this graphic novel is lovely, fluid, stark. each drawing is a miniature story in itself--each frame rewards an extended admiration. the author depicts his characters with a superb sense of embodied emotion--how anguish contorts the spine, how glee opens the expression, how love can make one beautiful. truly the work of an artist who has observed creatures minutely and with great compassion. the words of the story are entirely dialogue--no exposition. it makes for great fun, filling in the blanks, making the connections. the author clearly respects his readers--no spoon-feeding here. and iambic pentameter! what fun he must have had writing it. at least as much fun as i did reading it. as romances go, it's quite bent. but it is a romance, and a very satisfying one. i highly recommend reading this on the beach with some fried squid and a beach umbrella.

Nobody knows how to take a what-if to the very furthest point of its logical conclusion better than Max Barry. In this book, the question begins with a dissatisfaction: the flawed engineering of the human body. Then it asks: what if we could re-engineer it? Via mechanical and computer engineering, not nano- or biotech. Max Barry's answer to that question will undoubtedly surprise you. This book is both thoroughly outrageous and logically relentless. The main character is a nerd on nerd steroids: ruthless, addicted to logic, emotionally AWOL. He lives for the puzzle--how to improve things. When he is injured in an accident, he turns this tunnel-vision attention to improving the human body. You won't believe how often you'll be saying: I want that feature. If you are old enough to have arthritic knees and trifocals, you'll be drooling over the possibilities. But all these improvements come with a price, often paid in blood and pain. In Barry's book, the escalating consequences of re-engineering the body start out horrible and end up unspeakably gruesome. But through it all, the voice of our narrator-engineer is just sublimely funny. He is SUCH a geek. An absolutely unforgettable, oddly tender, emotionally tone-deaf geek. The book also features a wonderful send-up of corporations (of course, does anybody do that better than Max?) and some inspired character names (really, you should read it just for the character names). Give this one a chance, and I promise you'll never look at your body the same again.

like jane austen with dirty words. i write that only mildly tongue-in-cheek; only future literary potentates will decide whether this book belongs in The Canon, as jane austen certainly does, but faber's book certainly has equal scope and similar concerns, and fine, fine writing. we contemporary humans tend to look at austen's work in one sense as rather quaint--entire tomes about niceties of courtship and marriage, social position, and how the wrong hat can ruin a woman. but in fact these issues were economic, life-and-death issues for women who had few (to no) other options for financial security. faber certainly gets this, and he makes painfully, horribly clear what happens to those women who fail to make a good match. and he gets women. his portraits of Sugar and Agnes are enthralling, Sugar in particular. the warps in her character caused by her debasement are painful (and sometimes, in a black humor way, very funny) and appalling. one can't help but pity her, and not in an i'm-so-superior way, because faber makes us feel the inevitability of it. and yet she's also extraordinary in her fight to retain her own dignity. i'm pretty sure that if i were in her little lace-up boots, i'd drink or drug myself to death at a fast clip, but Sugar fights and keeps on fighting for both her intellect and her heart. you just can't help, in the end, but admire her. i won't witter on about all the characters. suffice it to say that by the end of the book, the main characters have all been treated to a painstaking examination, and none are perfect, but all are achingly human. warts and all. austen had the advantage of writing about her own times, to an audience that swam in that sea; faber has the uphill battle of not only having had to do a brain-pounding quantity of research, but also having to convey the particulars to an audience only tenuously connected to the times. the details of this book are staggering, yet slipped in so naturally that readers will find no life preserver is needed. it's an astonishing accomplishment. it's also so ingeniously plotted that you can't put it down, a cruel thing in a book this long (and weighty). i'm going to toddle off and catch up with my sleep now, having been up til 1am finishing it off. you just go read the book.

if you have to get on a plane and fly to Portland and sit outside Powell's until they get a new shipment of this book, do it. you can read the summary of the book above. the summary does not do it justice, not at all. and let me say upfront that the whole alternate-world thing isn't really relevant to the guts of this story. doesn't hurt it either, but it's not at all what makes this story work so gorgeously. it's the voice, the voice of the narrator. it is so stunningly unique, diamond-hard and silk at the same time. this book's rhythms slide between pounding hot iron at a forge and sleepy, half-remembered dreams in a perfect, seamless weld. the book asks what any sentient human in these times must: what do you do with all this pain? how can we live day to day with all these wars, and our blue planet's unraveling, and all the endless sound and fury we collectively endure while achieving, seemingly, so little progress toward any sort of nirvana? and the real thrill of it is, this book pulls it off and often makes you laugh yourself senseless. on a weird whim, i bought an autographed copy. it's going on my shelves next to my autographed vonnegut and my autographed studs terkel, two writers who also looked clear-eyed at our times and our species and found, despite it all, cause for hope. and bittersweet, but undeniably sweet, laughter.