13. The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. Van Vogt

There is a group of gamers and cool nerds on Google+ who have a roleplayers book club that I keep trying to join but can never find the book or the time.  This time, I found both as this classic was easily found in the library.  We had a lively but short-lived discussion and I am very glad I read the book.

I have since learned that A.E. Van Vogt is an important though sometimes disrespected author in the golden age of sci-fi.  You can go to wikipedia to learn about the critic who dissed him early on in his career and left him with a maligned reputation.  I, for one, enjoyed the book. I particularily appreciated how he wed the space theorizing common to this period with a more aggressive pace than usual, so that just when the wankery was getting a bit too long-winded for my lazy mind, some shit went down (not unlike Raymond Chandler's send in the guns rule) and the narrative moved forward.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle is an episodic tale (technically a "fix-up" being several previously published short stories stitched together to make a novel) about a pioneering ship exploring distant galaxies.  It is high science fiction in the technology, but kind of low in the challenges, which is about a ship full of male scientists battling their own internal conflicts to overcome external ones.  Yes, all men.  And they behave stupidly quite often, which I don't think was intentional, but read today does seem like instead of some meta-philosophy to bring them together, they just could have had a bunch of women (and non white people too).

The meta-philosophy is "Nexialism" and the protagonist is the sole Nexialist on the ship.  His challenge is to use Nexialism to unite all the various disciplines so they can overcome the problems they face, because each discipline alone is too narrowly-focused to see the bigger picture needed to deal with the problem.  Nexialism itself is not entirely thought out, but it's fun and satisfying to see its superiority overcome the petty squabbles of its narrow-minded opponents.  The obstacles themselves are pretty cool as well, space beasts, telepathic societies and the like.  Good stuff.

12. A Dangerous Energy by John Whitbourn

I picked this up in another dollar bin outside a used bookstore, but I can't remember exactly where, somewhere in Vancouver of Victoria.  It just looked interesting and honestly I don't know if it is my honed instinct or that the Goddess of Reading is just blessing me these days but it was another total winner.  Probably more learned and erudite fans of fantasy and science fiction are well aware of Whitbourn's work.  I hope so.  If not, I hope my review will encourage you to seek him out.

Ostensibly, this is a bildungsroman in an alternate reality where the Reformation never happened.  The setting is the primary interest at first, a world where the Roman Catholic church dominates, there is subtle magic in the world (originally of wilder origins but now harnessed and controlled by the church for the most part), colonization is severely limited compared to our world and technology and commerce advancing at a much slower pace.

The story starts in the late 60s and ends in 2026.  Young Tobias Oakley encounters an elf in the forest outside his village who teaches him the rudiments of magic.  This leads him to be shunned by his village, discovered by a priest whose job it is to discover those with the magical gift and then sent to a magical Catholic college in London.  The rest of the book details his conflicts and rise to power, both in the world and in his use of magic.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, I would suggest you stop reading here and just seek this book out.  Anything more I say here, though not explicitly a spoiler, would ruin the wonderment and pleasure of where Winterbourn is going with this book.  I will add that it is pretty fucked up and super dark. 

Because A Dangerous Energy is really about a descent into evil.  Oakley is understandably driven by ambition, but with a singular focus that makes him worthy of a book but also pushes him farther and farther away from morality and ultimately even humanity.  It is done very subtly and there are many moments in the book where there is an opportunity for him to get back on the right path.  Each time, he chooses (or is not able) to stay on the wrong path.  And slowly it starts to rot out his soul.  The language is rich but not flowery, told in an omniscient almost matter-of-fact way that blindsides the reader into the atrocities Oakley undertakes.  It all makes so much sense in the narrative that you have to step back and remind yourself how horrible he has become. 

There is also a nice touch where each chapter is titled with descriptive phrases along the lines of very early novels:  "In which our hero goes to London and is obliged to remain there", "In which our hero receives help from the friend that he helped, and a problem is solved satisfactorily".  These are absolutely accurate descriptions of what goes on in that chapter, except the details are generally super dark and nasty, which adds to the cold irony of the book's presentation.

A lot of his ambition, as he becomes a more powerful magician, is around the development of his understanding of summoning magic.  The imagery around his attempts to contact demons is evocative and the procedures and details of how it all works really cool.  Things like the demons' names, the locations they appear in, how they come into our world are all novel takes that are super entertaining (and gameable).

Likewise, the alternate history itself is fully thought out, but only revealed as is needed to inform the narrative (with a few bits and pieces of material interspersed to add depth like questions from a history exam, excerpts from books, etc.).  I am not well informed on the religious history of Christianity nor a huge fan of alternate realities and this was delivered in such a way to keep my interest (that's putting it mildy) and allow me to keep it all clear in my head more or less.

A great read, strongly recommended.  It is part of a series, too (not with this character, I assume, but taking place in the same world).  Added to my list!

11. The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper

My wife had found this book and suggested I give it a read as her guinea pig.  I did so and polished it off in a few days (ah, vacation).  At first, I almost didn't make it through.  I was actually livid at times with the beginning of this book, which was overly-written and about just about the least interesting subject in Canada, the Toronto middle-aged, educated, urban white male.  It was educational, in that it confirmed a lot of my suspicions of this species from what I have read in the Globe and Mail and interacted with directly and indirectly over the years.  Nice fellows, great conversationalists and generally doing well in life, but just so unmanly and filled with anxiety about their unmanliness.  What is it with Toronto and being so scared about shit all the time?  They are almost as bad as Americans, who at least have guns and a fear-mongering media landscape that makes Canada look positively objective.  And the protagonist in The Killing Circle is the worst.  Guys wife dies and four years later still can't get over it at all.  And of course his only son is his most precious thing and he lives in constant fear that something is going to happen to him.  And there are lines like these:

It is a time in the city's history when everyone is pointing out the ways that Toronto is changing.  More construction, more new arrivals, more ways to make it and spend it. And more to fear.  The stories of random violence, home invasions, drive-bys, motiveless attacks.  But it's not just that.  It's not the threat that has always come from the them of our imagination, but from potentially anyone, even ourselves.

This is not only laughably preposterous, but possibly even offensive.  Toronto was never a dangerous city and the 21st century wealth spurt of globalization has only made it safer.  (A white journalist with a house on Euclid street has no right to claim fear and in doing so basically trivializes the real fear that the poor and people of colour suffer from police brutality and social inequality, legitimized precisely by this vague, bourgeois fear).

This book also does the thing where quotidien activities and mundane locations are elevated to literary heights.  Ooh, exotic, Chinatown ("...whole roast pigs hanging in butcher's windows, their mouths gaping in surprise"), wow Kensington Market ("one of the last places in the city where one can feel a resistance to the onslaught of generic upgrading, of globalized sameness, of money.").  It's relentless and makes one wonder where the editor was.

After having read the entire book, I think I know the answer to that question.  Because once we get past all this faux-literary navel-gazing, the rest of the book is actually a pretty decent horror mystery/thriller with an effective premise, interesting characters and a compelling storyline.  Wimpy protagonist joins a writing circle led by a self-exiled author who fled the Toronto literary scene in the 60s after a controversial first novel.  Shit gets weird, people start getting murdered and it is all connected to the stories in the group.  As is my policy here, I won't give away anything that could ruin the mystery, which is tough in this case because it doesn't allow me to write more about the positive aspects of the book, which really is the last 3/4.  It's not my genre, but if you like macabre tales of modern horror, this could be your jam.  I was honestly quite scared at moments and definitely kept turning the page.

My suspicion is that Pyper wanted to write a straight-up horror thriller, but because in Canada and especially if you are a Toronto writer who gets reviews in the Globe & Mail, you just can't do that.  You would never be invited to another dinner party again, let alone get published.  It was either unconscious or his editor pushed him to fancy up the beginning (or some combination thereof) to get critics and book buyers sucked in, my suspicion is that the beginning was all put there to make the book literary fiction rather than horror (the horror!) and thus acceptable for the Canadian market.

So, ultimately an enjoyable summer read and edifying both as an additional piece of evidence in the ongoing undermining of masculinity by Toronto-dominated media culture and of the ongoing snobbery in the Canadian literary community (and the two things are clearly connected).

10. Summer Lightning by P.G. Wodehouse

It's P.G. Wodehouse and diverting and entertaining as always.  I laughed out loud a few times.  He is such a treasure, because you can go back any time and find a new P.G. Wodehouse and it will most likely be entertaining.  Not unlike John D. McDonald in that way, but responding to very different literary needs.   Reading one this time did help clarify for me something about myself, that I probably would have faired best as a landed aristocrat whose greatest concern was nurturing a prize pig on my estate.  This is a vocation and setting that I think my interests and limited skills would have probably been best served.

9. Blizzard by George Stone

Another pick-up from J.W. Welch dollar cart and while I can't say that this book is a winner, I did enjoy reading it for the most part.  It's rare that I say this, but I found it actually too short for the subject matter! It has the very intriguing premise of a snowstorm over the northeast U.S. that just doesn't stop.  It's one of these multi-character political thrillers that interweaves the effects of the storm with  the various storylines.  The storm effects and the response to it are quite well done.  The storylines were rote  and simplistic (disgraced scientist, plucky female reporter, idealistic politician, evil military dude) but the actual explanation was pretty wacky and entertaining.  As the storm worsens, it becomes more and more apparent that it is not natural.  Is it the Soviets unleashing a secret attack or, worse, coming from our own side?!

It all gets wrapped up too quickly (although ultimately redeemed by the dark ending) for the scope and scale of the premise.  Nevertheless it was a decent page-turner and a nice little time capsule of a book, intersecting disaster fiction and cold war politics.  Also, it has a cool fold out cover where the publisher really tried hard.