BOOK REVIEW: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I've finally done it. I've finished Infinite Jest.

For those unaware, Infinite Jest is a novel by David Foster Wallace from 1996 whose 1100+ pages contain a story notorious for being willfully difficult in a postmodern sort of way (this novel comes with nearly 400 endnotes, some of which run for ten or so pages and have their own endnotes). It's long been though of as "that big book that some people put on their shelves just so they look smart." I've started and given up on it multiple times, but I've finally slayed this beast of a novel.

Reading this book is not unlike eating a cinderblock. It's an original experience that doesn't relent in its challenge, and the first bite goes down pretty much like the last bite. The story takes place mostly in Boston, specifically an upscale tennis academy/boarding school and a nearby halfway house for drug addicts of various kinds. The two locales are eventually linked in the narrative by the search, conducted by triple- and quadruple-agents for a film made by the former headmaster of the tennis academy that is apparently so compelling that it will render a viewer hopelessly, fatally addicted. However, the chronology is a purposeful mess, and many of the scenes of expository action are present only in semi-occluded references, which means that figuring out what's really going on is a puzzle of fairly tall order.

Since Wallace is very interested in being (maddeningly) detailed, you will, over the course of this novel, learn way more than you ever wanted to know about competitive junior's tennis and drug addiction, not to mention fictional US/Canadian relations, optics, and whatever else Wallace decides to include, often at very little prompting. The obsessive detail leads to the very real fact that a reader of this novel will need to be able to confront more than three pages in a row with nary a single paragraph break on a regular basis without cracking. It makes an already very long book even longer as it forces your brain to render all that data into a coherent scene.

The story takes place in the near future, which means the near future from a 1996 perspective, which actually means approximately now-ish. As such, he's included speculative elements about the course the nation could take; some fantastical, some all too possible. It provides him a way to sneak even more commentary into the book, a tendency that he indulges on basically every page. For example, there's a great twenty+ page scene that finds the high-schoolers at the academy playing "Eschaton," a game of their own invention that sits at the intersection of tennis, international diplomacy, and thermonuclear war.

Very few will attempt this novel, fewer will make it through, and fewer still will understand just what happened, but those who do will be rewarded, if rewarded is the correct word, with images and scenes that are totally indelible. It's a book of great density and Byzantine structure that will necessarily change how a person views both fiction and human observation, but whether or not it's worth it is entirely up to the reader, as is the decision as to whether the nested references to Hamlet and other such brain-intensive exercises are actually genius or merely overwrought. For my own part, I'm immensely glad I got to see the view from the top of this word-mountain, but it's unlikely I'll climb it again.

BOOK REVIEW: The Library at Night - Alberto Manguel

The eighteenth trump of the major arcana of the tarot is The Moon, which does indeed represent the nocturnal side of things. It is the sign of the imagination as it conjures both dreams and nightmares. The Moon is uncertain and even a bit dangerous, in the primal way that causes all animals to fear the dark, even if irrationally. It is exactly this twilight sensibility that Alberto Manguel was concerned with as he wrote The Library at Night, an exploration of mankind's relationship with its books.

The book is a series of essays regarding different facets of that literary relationship, "The Library as Space," "The Library as Shadow," "The Library as Survival," and so on, but he's not just referring to the library as a public or private institution (though that is discussed at some length). He's referring to any group of books, from the famed Library of Alexandria, to the more modest personal collection, to the single book that keeps a prisoner of war from going mad. Manguel asserts that books contain stories, yes, but even more, the story of books is our story, as they represent what we choose to collect, emphasize, and remember.

The tarot's Moon also represents the permeability of the boundary between past and present, and as the book examines how mankind has kept and cataloged its stories, the reader begins to see how the past comes to bear on the ways we let our stories live in and with us even today. The Library at Night is meticulously researched and its admirable scope brings a wealth of perspectives to bear on the topic, but true to the nocturnal bent of the title, the essays meander dreamlike through history and culture from the heights of Classical Greece to the depths of World War II to reveal their insights. This book is a rare gem for bibliophiles, as it's clear that Manguel is a reader whose passion matches the best of us, and the essays he's written not only justify our passion for the printed word, but demonstrate that it's perhaps that very capacity for invention and memory that makes us human.

BOOK REVIEW: River of Stars

The latest epic from noted fantasist Guy Gavriel Kaye is surprisingly economical and direct for a book of 650 pages. River of Stars Tells the story of a kingdom on the verge of collapse and the hero who might not only save it, but seems destined to return it to a former glory. It takes in the beauty of a vast kingdom that stretches from plains, to mountains, to marshes and renders it in sharp poetic detail. It involves a broad range of characters, from poets to warlords and everything in between including scheming politicians, honest men of letters and desperate peasants.

With his lean uncomplicated style Kaye brings this vision of remote Chinese history to life, basing it broadly on the events of the late Song Dynasty in the 13th century. Referred to in the book as The Kitan Empire, Kaye builds it into a complex world of both luxury and poverty, beauty and fear. One of the most impressive things about River of Stars is the way the author creates a sense of inhabiting an alien culture. His descriptions are rendered in a form and cadence that evoke Chinese sensibility and he describes character motivations from a complexly unique cultural perspective, communicating their importance without seeming to be giving a sociology lecture.  

There are grand memorable images, like the moving of a giant rock to decorate the emperor's garden, destroying everything in its path as it is moved at the expense of land, homes and lives. The desolation of an army as it is ambushed at a river crossing and the intimacies between a boundary defying female poet and the military hero who might save the empire.

The adventure element is also pretty stunning. Small confrontations in the wooded marsh and battles of thousands arrive in clear exciting bursts. In all Guy Gavriel Kaye puts his stamp as both a top tier fantasist, evoking ghosts, spirits and mystical destiny, as well as a talented historical re-constructionist, providing a clear and plausible image of a long vanished history.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson is a fantasy author who published his first book, Elantris, in 2005. Since then he has released several more successful books, including the Mistborn Trilogy, and The Way of Kings, the first part of an estimated ten-book series. In 2007 he was given the honor of completing the Wheel of Time series after the original author, Robert Jordan, passed away before its completion. Mr. Sanderson co-hosts a podcast at the website Writing Excuses, and teaches a creative writing class on fantasy and science fiction at Brigham Young University. Even with all that on his plate, he was gracious enough to set some time aside to answer a few questions for us regarding what psychs him out as a writer, how he plans to avoid “epic sprawl” and sagely advice for new writers trying to squeeze their way into the epic fantasy market.

INVISIBLE VANGUARD: I am curious if professional writers ever get psyched out by their own works. When you are working on an epic series, such as The Stormlight Archive, do you ever have moments of doubt in your ability to see it through to completion? Does it ever feel overwhelming that you have so many volumes ahead of you to write?

BRANDON SANDERSON: That's not the part that psychs me out. Length doesn't do that to me, particularly when I have a series well planned and I have a feel for how each book is going to be distinctive. This really helped me with the Mistborn series, for instance—when I planned it out, I planned each book to have its own identity. That kept me interested in them.

No, what psychs me out is that sometimes something just turns out really well, like The Way of Kings, and then I immediately start thinking, "I have to do that again, and I don't know how I did it in the first place." Writing becomes a very instinctive thing.

Most of the time when I talk about the process of writing, I'm analyzing what I've done after the fact. The truth of it is that right in the moment, right when you're sitting there working on a book, a lot of that stuff isn't going through your head. You're just running on instinct at that point. So it's easy to get psyched out when you're not sure if you can ever do it again.

IV: Do you feel that each new book you release should be better than the last? Is that something you think about while writing, or do you just do the best job that you can and hope that your works improve naturally over time with your skill?

BS: It really depends on the project. Yes, I want every book to improve, but that's a bit of a platitude. It's an easy thing to say. It gets a bit different when you sit down to think about it.

I followed The Way of Kings with The Alloy of Law. Is The Alloy of Law a better book than The Way of Kings? No, it is not. The Way of Kings I spent somewhere around ten years working on; with The Alloy of Law I had a couple of months. In the case of a book like that, I sit down and say, okay, there are things I want to learn in this process. Different books are going to have a different feel. Now, there are people out there who like The Alloy of Law better than The Way of Kings—it's not a better book, but there are people who will enjoy it more.

When I sat down to write Warbreaker, I said I wanted to get better at a certain type of humor. And I think I did get much better at that, in that book. Is the book itself better than The Hero of Ages that came before it? I do some things better, but it's hard to compare a standalone volume to the third book in an epic trilogy. They're going to do very different things.

So it's hard to say "better book"/"not better book." I think "always learning and growing" is a better way to put it than getting better with each book.

IV: Writing an epic series over many years will surely gather you many fans and many haters. In the case of Robert Jordan, it seems like bad reviews and fan backlash mounted up with each new volume as the series went on. Is that something you are concerned about? Do you try to figure out why people responded that way to that series and work to avoid a similar situation with your own, or do you just disregard the naysayers in general?

BS: Of these things that you've asked me questions on, this is the one that I've spent the most time thinking about. It is an interesting phenomenon. Each Wheel of Time book sold more copies than the one before it, yet each one up through book ten got more and more negative reviews. They start out strong, then a few of the books have balanced numbers of reviews, and then they start to take a nosedive—even as the sales of the books go up and up.

The same thing has happened with my own books—as they have grown more popular, they've gotten worse and worse reviews. It's very interesting. You can watch a book like Elantris, which when it came out had more or less universal acclaim, partially I think based on expectations. People read it thinking, hey, there's this brand new author, it probably isn't that good—hey, this book isn't half bad! And then they go and write reviews on Amazon. There are a number of early reviews there that say, wow, this wasn't half bad! This new guy is someone to watch!

As you gain a reputation, more and more people pick you up by reputation—simply hearing "This is a great book" and picking it up, rather than looking into the book and deciding it's a book they will like. That's going to lead to more people picking up the book who it's just not a good match for. I think that certainly is part of it.

I do also think that there is epic series sprawl; there's a legitimate complaint against these series like the Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire. I think the fans still like the books, but they have complaints about how they're happening. George R. R. Martin and Robert Jordan are really doing some new and unique things. Robert Jordan didn't get to read any ten-book epic fantasy series of that nature; he had to do it on his own without a model to follow. I think that as we go forward in the genre, hopefully we're picking up on things—we're standing on the shoulders of giants, and hopefully we will figure out how we can do this without necessarily sprawling quite so much, which I think is part of the problem. There's this push and pull in epic fantasy where we read epic fantasy because we love the depth of characterization and world building, and yet if the author does too much of that in every book, then we lose the ability to move forward in a central plot. That can be very frustrating.

I will say that when I was able to read the Wheel of Time from start to finish, having the complete story, that feeling that it wasn't going anywhere in places just wasn't there. That feeling came because you would wait two years for a book, and then when you finished it you'd have to wait two more years for the next book, and because of the nature of the epic series you're just getting a little tiny sliver of the story. So that part of it is just the nature of the beast, but I think we can do things to mitigate that, and I will certainly try.

IV: Lastly, what advice can you give to new and unknown authors with limitless ambition who want to write epic fantasy and/or sci-fi books? From my own personal research, it appears that agents and publishers do not want long word counts from new authors. Is it best to start simple with shorter stories and work your way up to your true love: the epic, or should you just go for it and write as much as you deem necessary and pitch your grand masterwork as a whole?

BS: There are so many questions in there that are going to be very situationally dependent. If you have not already written a few novels, I would say absolutely do not write your grand epic yet. You won't have the skill to do it, and it will disappoint you. I've run across a lot of new writers who this has happened to. They want to do their own Wheel of Time, but they don't yet have the skill to achieve it. I tried this myself and learned this the hard way.

That's not to say that it's impossible to do, but I strongly recommend to most writers to try a few other books first. Standalones or something, to really get your head around the idea of characterization and plotting and narrative arcs before you say, okay, I'm going to tell a story across ten books instead.

If you are confident of your skill, and find that you are just incapable of writing anything else? Writing is the most important thing. If something makes you not write, then it's usually going to be bad advice no matter who it comes from. So then I suggest just writing and loving what you're writing. If you can somehow style your book as "a standalone with sequel potential," then that's probably a better way to go.

This is not just for publishers and agents. New readers have a built-in skepticism toward a new author who is trying something that massive. I've found that a lot of readers like to try the standalone to find out what kind of writer you are, before they then read your big series. Having a couple of standalones has been very useful for me for that reason.

At the end of the day, just write what you love. Yes, editors and agents say they want shorter books. This is because historically it has been proven to them that authors trying to write books that are too long for them bite off more than they can chew and the book spirals out of control. But the draft of Elantris that was the first thing I sold was 250,000 words. That's a full 100,000 words longer than what everyone was telling me agents won't even look at. So by empirical proof: They will look at a longer book if it works for them. So write what you love—if you can get into your head that you're going to do this professionally, and that you have years to learn how to do this, then that's going to help you. Taking the time to practice with shorter works will help you get ready to write your epic. But if you just can't do that, then go for it.

IV: Thank you, Mr. Sanderson, for your time and insightful responses, we really appreciate it and wish you well in your forthcoming endeavors!

For more information and the latest Brandon Sanderson news, check out his website /http://www.brandonsanderson.com/.

BOOK REVIEW: Underworld - Don DeLillo

“Masterpieces teach you how to read them, and Underworld is no exception…”    -Greg Burkman for The Seattle Times

    Rarely does a back-cover blurb make you stop and think, but as I was reaching the halfway point of Don DeLillo's masterpiece (one of several) Underworld, this one caught my attention. It's a very true sentiment. A masterpiece should make you a better reader, and probably a better human, by pulling you up to its expectation of what its reader should be. And in this, Underworld is truly no exception, as my own history with it shows. I've enjoyed DeLillo's writings for a long time. I began with his novel of postmodern disaffection White Noise and moved on to the emotional experimentation of The Body Artist and I was hooked. But as I started Underworld ten years ago, I was still young, and I did not yet possess what the book needed me to possess. I lasted all of a hundred pages before realizing I wasn't sufficiently entrenched to prevent being pulled away by other things. Years later I bought a hardback copy of the 800+ page book, certain that what was inside it was going to be important to me, but after another half-hearted attempt at a time when I was between other interests, I drifted away again.

I started the book again recently, and by page two it was a completely different experience. Something connected, and as I reached the halfway point and saw the blurb about how to read a masterpiece, the difference between now and then became clear. In the intervening years, my focused interests in various periods and cultures of the past hundred years had become a full-blown intellectual obsession with the 20th century in general, and the American 20th century in particular. For my relationship to this book, that fact made all the difference, as Underworld is an odyssey into the heart of that very idea, an investigation of what DeLillo refers to in the book as "the curious neuron web of lonely-chrome America."

The story begins in 1951 as the Dodgers and the Giants (both still New York teams at the time) are playing for the pennant. Baseball fans may remember this game as the origin of the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" as Bobby Thomson sent a home run into the stands in the ninth inning to seal the pennant for the Giants. The book follows the home run ball as it ends up in the hands of a young boy who skipped school to see the game and then proceeds to change owners throughout the last half of the 20th century as various owner's fortunes rise and fall. As one might expect, the story is not really about the ball, it is about the people. The ball exists as its own part of the story, but the conceit of the ball is that it provides access to dozens of different narratives and perspectives on America from 1951 to the mid-1990's.

Another significant strand of the story begins on the very same day as the game-winning swing, as the Russians successfully detonate an atomic bomb, which sets in motion the nuclear tension that runs through the rest of the century as well as the rest of the novel. It's that atomic fear that acts as a poetic parallel to the various stresses and the sense of unease that permeate the story, which is broken up into several large sections, each of which could probably have functioned as admirable novellas in its own right. As the cast of characters that ripple out from that home run take their places in the narrative sweep, one begins to see how each perspective is masterfully placed to fill in a piece of the story as well as a piece of the history. Waste management engineer Nick Shay, with his murky past and strange connection to artist Klara Sax, shows us how the guilts and fears that we try to bury never stay that way for long. Chess teacher Albert Bronzini, elderly nun Sister Edgar, and 16-year-old graffiti artist Moonman157 are all pushed and pulled in various directions as the century tosses them about like a rock polisher. Historical figures show up in the book as often as DeLillo's own creations. It's a risky endeavor, but he pulls it off, and his versions of personalities like Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Lenny Bruce, and J. Edgar Hoover never seem obtrusive or distracting. He plays them as they are, just more bits of the story of America.

The idea of the Great American Novel is that of a piece of literature that excels in its craft while simultaneously providing an accurate representation of the zeitgeist with which it is concerned. With those parameters in mind, I see no reason not to at least consider Underworld as a candidate for the label. The writing is outstanding, with the author's signature dialogue fragments and hitches in character speech firmly in place, but it's the way that the story knits together from the macro to the micro into a panoramic view of forty-some years of American life that really shows DeLillo's mastery of the form. The novel reads true, even as fiction, as it portrays Cold War America as both consistent and invisibly dangerous, just like uranium-235, or for that matter, Coca-Cola.    

BOOK REVIEW: Moments Captured - Robert J. Seidman

Eadweard Muybridge was the late 19th century photographer who pioneered the methods of imaging that would eventually lead to the modern motion picture. He was also a volatile personality with a complicated history, one which novelist Robert J. Seidman speculates and expands upon for the purposes of his novel Moments Captured.

Seidman’s account begins in the remote American west in the late 1860’s. Muybridge is an ambitious photographer taking his bulky mobile photo studio over the vast American wilderness. He meets and begins a torrid relationship with feminist dancer Holly Hughes, a sexual dynamo who revolutionizes Eadweard’s life and world view. They fall in love and head west together to San Francisco. There Holly scandalizes polite society while Eadweard becomes ensconced with railroad tycoon and technology enthusiast Leland Stanford. Stanford, as well as being Eadweard’s chief patron, is Holly’s main antagonist and target of her righteous fury.

The story follows a course of cultural crusades, hard won victories of invention and romantic jealousies that all lead to a shocking murder. Seidman’s plot is fascinating and the liberties he takes with history compress the culture of post-civil war America into a blur of artistic invention and adventurous discovery. Yet the book suffers from the author’s obsessive and redundant detail in his characters’ sexual encounters.

When one has a fulsome and rambunctious story, so clearly bridling to be told, slowing to focus on the sensate details of sex, seemingly every few pages, for a dominant portion of the book, though it might be intended to deepen sympathy and heighten visceral involvement, slows the story to a clumsy undisciplined crawl. I found myself rolling my eyes every time the story seemed on the verge of yet another torrid encounter and the prose could be seen gathering its energy to plunge again into descriptions of breasts, penis, thighs and pungent juices. I do not object in the slightest to prominent sexuality in fiction but this novel lingers until the passionate becomes lurid, and the titillating, turgid. At the expense of what is otherwise a fascinating subject and a terrific yarn of Guilded Age Americana.

BOOK REVIEW: The House of Rumor

In The House of Rumor Jake Arnott attempts to link together a handful of obscure cultural mysteries from the last seventy years into a loose theory of existence, centering it on the fictional persona of Sci-Fi writer Larry Zigorski. Zigorski comes of age in the early 1940’s and as a precocious writer at the dawn of the golden age of speculative fiction is drawn into the orbit of Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard and Jack Parsons. Meanwhile, in a parallel story, the persons of Ian Fleming, Rudolph Hess and Aleister Crowley toil at information, disinformation, and survival at the height of World War II in England and Europe.

Arnott’s narrative plays fairly loose with time, moving ahead and establishing a bookend in the 1980’s with a circle of post-punk transvestites and musicians who are linked to the WWII and Science Fiction narratives trough unhappy coincidence and the transfer of information, disinformation, and rumor. The uncertain nature of events, the inherent instability of knowledge, and its similarity to speculation and prediction are the all-pervasive themes of The House of Rumor. Through the lives and musings of British spies, renowned novelists, occult sages, and all of the points where their lives intersect, we get the impression of existence as a garbled message, an obscure transmission, equally visible and equally clouded from all relative points.

Arnott’s book contains much that is remarkable, scenes like a conversation between Ian Fleming and Aleister Crowley, convincing evocations of the crackle of energy as L. Ron Hubbard fences with rocketry expert and charismatic occultist Jack Parsons, the vision of the beach in Cuba the day Castro lifted the exit restrictions and there was a mass exodus upon makeshift rafts for Florida, and a harrowing blow by blow envisioning of the events of Jonestown through the eyes of a twelve year old boy. These items are tremendous and remain in the memory. Yet the book in all its meanderings leaves many story threads frustratingly half spun, like what of the young reporter with the same last name as one of the main characters, last seen preparing to make love to an emotionally vulnerable trans-sexual? Or what of the old spy master whose mishandled memoirs cost lives and scandal but whose fate and reaction we hear nothing of? There are so many instances of the unresolved in this book, ideas left hanging.

The story ends with Larry Zigorski addressing us with the full weight of our shared knowledge about his life and obsessions. He’s looking back and summing it all up. To my sensibility, for a book that began by moving so swiftly between fascinating set ups, its conclusion comes upon a distractingly ponderous note. It is for the most part a book of winks and playful hints, and for the end to be an over-serious meditation on the literal “meaning” of it all feels a tiny bit flat.

That said; The House of Rumor is full of interesting speculation and fascinating glimpses onto cultural crossroads we’ve all likely wondered about. Beyond that it reveals a richness of subculture it’s fun to be faced with after so long thinking one’s self too sophisticated for surprises anymore. In fact most of the strangest things and oddest people in the book are the real ones, and it leaves one to wonder about the details. How much of it credibly reflect reality and how much of it is amusing dissimulation? Jake Arnott has taken as his subject the un-knowability of truth and left it admirably muddled.

BOOK REVIEW: Gardens of the Moon - Steven Erikson

Gardens of the Moon is a fantasy book by Steven Erikson and the first in an epic ten volume series called the Malazan Book of the Fallen. While it injects some sorely needed originality into the epic fantasy genre and is written with admirable sophistication, it suffers from a number of issues that may cripple its appeal to a mass audience. That doesn’t mean it is bad by any means, I already have the second book and am looking forward to reading it, but it’s not for everyone.

I’ll start with the good. Fantasy fans will find a lot to like here. The world is well developed with a variety of different races and regions. It has a sword and sorcery vibe, but expands greatly beyond the clichés and feels appropriately adult in its ideas and graphic imagery. Soldiers use swords in battle, but are referred to as Marines. High explosives are used to wire up a city block for later detonation. That same city is powered by natural gas collected from the caverns it sits atop. The originality combines with a quickly paced plot that feels fresh and (for the most part) holds your attention.

Now, for the bad stuff. Character descriptions are woefully weak, and sometimes completely absent. And there are a lot of characters in this book, sometimes having multiple names and allegiances and it can become tricky to tell them all apart. One of the main characters, a soldier named Whiskeyjack, is described as a man with grey eyes and a beard. I can’t recall much other description. So, obviously, I immediately picture him as Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad. Is that what the author intended? I don’t know, but it’s too late. In my head, Whiskeyjack looks like Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad.

Further complications occur with the book as the reader is thrown right into the middle of the story with few introductions or explanations for what is happening. In a way, I like this, it feels realistic, like you’re the new guy and no one can be bothered to get you up to speed on the current happenings, you just have to pay attention, pick up bits and pieces, and overtime connect it all together. Eventually, you do figure out what is going on, or at least you become more comfortable with not knowing everything, but this doesn’t occur until about three hundred pages into the book. I will admit, it was a difficult barrier to get through. Even prepared as I was by other reviews that mentioned this issue, I still found it difficult to press on. Not everyone is going to be so determined to get hooked into this story. Rarely does a book make the reader responsible for becoming engrossed in its tale, but this book does and it gives you the finger and a firm backhand if you start mouthing off about it. It is what it is. Nobody asked you to read it.

There’s another issue I have with the book that may not be a problem for others. Scenes are short. Sometimes it cuts to different perspectives and plot lines multiple times per page. Longer scenes tend to only be a couple of pages in length. Like I said, this may not be a problem for everyone, but I found that it was hard to get absorbed into the tale or really get connected with certain characters because of this. This may have also contributed to the struggle to break through to the halfway mark. New characters are introduced then it’s quickly off to someone else. Characters have a brief conversation in which you have no idea what they’re talking about. Some assassins fight on a roof top for no apparent reason. Someone has a dream about an ancient god, but it’s actually real. Or is it? A mad wizard in a puppet’s body appears from a rift out of thin air, blasts a couple of talking crows, then disappears again just as quickly.

I think if you read some reviews and get a description of  the basic story elements, you don’t have ADD, and are patient about being in the dark for most of the plot, you’ll know whether this book is for you or not. It’s not an easy, casual read, and it’s got some flaws, but there are some brilliant moments and epic ideas that make the task of seeing it through worth while.

For now, I’m going to relax and take a breather with some “easier” fare, but I will get around to the second book at some point. Based on the observations of other readers, I feel like I will enjoy this book more as I read more of the series. For me, that’s fine, I can handle it, but most people don’t read for the challenge. If you decide to read this book, know what you’re getting into, go with its flow, be patient and I think the pay off will be worth it (unless you just hate the fantasy genre in general, Gardens of the Moon won’t help to change your opinion).

BOOK REVIEW: Doctor Who (The Wheel of Ice)

The Doctor Who brand continues to expand as its 50^th anniversary swings into gear. Its brand managers, showing an admirable understanding of Doctor Who’s strengths, are digging into its history for material. As well as flaunting their youthful and charming cast with a relentless slate of conventions, press tours, and public appearances more befitting the cast of some teen-centric movie franchise, they are commissioning established sci-fi novelists to reach back and expand the mythology of past incarnations of The Doctor, as with 2012’s Second Doctor adventure The Wheel of Ice, by sci-fi writer and mathematician, Stephen Baxter.

A writer with Baxter’s credentials, including co-author credits with Terry Pratchett and Arthur C. Clarke, a four book story cycle wherein he built and destroyed entire species and galaxies, certainly seems a good match for a Doctor Who story. Baxter’s Xeelee books represents one of few notable recent attempts to grapple with the eventual heat death of the universe, along with series three of Doctor Who (10th Doctor and Martha). It's usually a topic speculative fiction writers avoid since its finality kind of tempers the upward-and-outward ethos so beloved of Science Fiction.

For Wheel of Ice Baxter invokes the Second Doctor, he of the ragged jacket, checked trousers and tin whistle. Patrick Troughton as Doctor No. 2 was puckish and impatient. Kindlier than the first Doctor but still of short temper, apt to wear on the nerves of proper authority and, unlike most Doctors, not always interested in the limelight. Often content to hang back and let the “experts” fail before edging in and taking over. It’s a credit to Baxter that the book reads rather bare of style. The characters are sympathetic and the adventure suitably perilous but the author’s voice seems largely absent. Compare that with the frigidly evoked scenes of dread in recent Who novels like Mike Tucker’s Nightmare of Black Island or the post-Douglas Adams whimsy of Gareth Roberts’s Only Human. Wheel of Ice seems rather more like a pristinely evoked episode from 1969, in pearly black and white with Troughton scrambling through corridors and poking at panels of blinking lights and controls.

Another strength of Baxter’s book is the simplicity of his monster. Not only can you imagine it clearly, it also remains the sole focus of tension. The Blue Dolls, as envisioned in the book, are clearly visible in the mind’s eye and not crowded out by a slew of other hard-to-picture inventions. Previous Who novels have had trouble with this, particularly Justin Richards’s Resurrection Casket wherein you had to keep a vision of a slew of steam-powered pirate robots balanced with their labyrinthine ship and a murderous beastly apparition with oddly good manners. Baxter’s baddie manifests as an army blue plasticine humanoids, simple.

The story does falter by sticking too closely to the Doctor Who television formula of, ‘high-concept giving way to action for the sake of simplicity.’ Presumably Baxter could have explored the implications of his central device, an alien archive trying to rebuild its self and preserve the memory of an ancient race of aliens. Instead he explains it in simple terms and then loses the thread among action scenes and narrow escapes. That’s fine for TV writers working within a budget and on a tight deadline, but a writer of Baxter’s quality, working in a medium so amenable to unpacking and investigation, might be expected to indulge the imagination a bit more deeply. As it is Wheel of Ice feels like an exceptional story arc from Doctor Who circa 1969, and for that reason is worthwhile and exciting. I just wish it had been a more exceptional novel.