Josh Bossie

Category: Book Reviews

  • Book Review: Tau Zero

    Book Review: Tau Zero

    There are obvious dangers serving on a colony ship headed for a potentially habitable planet. Will the crew manage the effects of isolation, zero g, and continuous existential crisis? What about the time dilation effects due to travelling at near light speed – can people cope with the fact that the planet they’re leaving will experience decades of change in their 5 year journey? What if the planet can’t actually sustain life – can you imagine having to go back? Even more practically: will you even survive the journey?

    Tau Zero explores all these types of questions before grinning mischievously and throwing one last monkey wrench into the equation: what if the ship is damaged en route – not in a life-threatening way – and now can no longer stop? In fact, it can no longer even slow down; its crew is able to survive indefinitely, but time is dilating further as minutes on board the ship become centuries outside. They can’t land, call back to home, or even make repairs, and the stars and planets and galaxies they’re able to see outside their windows are looking ever stranger and out of reach.

    It’s a really cool idea. Tau Zero is a hard science (well, for 1970) sci-fi book first and foremost, but at many points throughout it feels closer to a post-apocalypse story. After the aforementioned disaster strikes, the crew of the Leonora Christine become survivors of a very personal apocalypse. The world they knew is gone in every sense of the word, and they themselves have become ghosts without a home or purpose.

    The book excels when it explores these ideas, or when it dips into the poetic to describe cosmic phenomena, or when dives into paragraphs of big, crunchy technical jargon for the all the science work being done. It’s wonderful scifi writing.

    The problem is everything else.

    A book detailing a disaster really needs to get the human element right. People should respond to it believably, which might mean some acting irrationally, others rising to heroics, still others falling into depravity or doom or hysterics. The drama and tension naturally arise from people overcoming their weaknesses, making tough decisions, and so forth.

    But Tau Zero’s characters aren’t really people; they’re barely even 2D cardboard cutouts. They wander from scene to scene expositing dialogue at each other, or saying their internal monologues out loud to advance a thread, or suddenly acting out of character because it’s convenient for the plot at the time. There’s very little conflict (the most physical it gets is a single fistfight over cards) and drama is often resolved with a handwave.

    The dialogue is especially embarrassing. There are some scenes early on where characters are literally just stating their backstories to one another intermixed with current world history that would surely be obvious to them. It’s the type of thing that’d get you in trouble with your 9th grade English teacher.

    The worst by far is the protagonist. He’s a military man, a cop-esque figure on the ship. But also he knows everything about space and astrophysics and chemistry and planetary colonization and can stand toe-to-toe with experts in their field in any scientific discussion. His arguments are always correct, and those who doubt him eventually regret their words and deeds. He’s a better captain than the captain. He’s a master manipulator, with networks of deputies and secret deputies and spies. He can pilot star ships better than anyone. He’s the best melee fighter, the best at navigating zero-g, and the only one with a gun. He’s also naturally handsome, rugged, and is worshipped by at least two women.

    He’s absolutely ridiculous.

    It’s such a shame, because I love so much else about this book. Though the science never really rang true to me, I still suspended my disbelief because it’s explained so well. The premise is excellent, equal parts terrifying and exhilarating, and the tension it weaves throughout the book left my palms sweaty.

    All it needed was a handful of characters who behaved like humans. Instead, we get these weirdos. You get the sense that Anderson viewed humans as an unfortunate necessity to write about a cool spaceship flight. I wish he hadn’t even bothered and made the Leonora Christine an unmanned expedition.

  • Book Review: The Lions of Al-Rassan

    Book Review: The Lions of Al-Rassan

    The Lions of Al-Rassan, by Guy Gavriel Kay

    Lions of Al-Rassan is one of the best fantasy books I’ve ever read, and I say this even though I’m not entirely convinced it is fantasy.

    Whatever its genre, it tells the tale of Moorish Spain and events leading to the Reconquista, but through the lens of the fantastical. The major powers and players are sufficiently mixed up and layered with new details to make it clear this is not earth (there are two moons in the sky!) and it’s not a historical account , but things are also immediately recognizable, even as an American. Instead of Christians, Muslims and Jewish peoples, you have the Jaddites, Asharites, and the Kindath – with all the same customs, stereotypes, challenges, and desires. It’s a little weird, to tell the truth, but more on that later.

    Thankfully, it is much more than just a fantastical retelling of Cantar de mio Cid. At the heart of Lions of Al-Rassan are the lives and personal stories of impossibly powerful, emotional, and clever men and women. There’s The Captain himself, Rodrigo Belmonte, a genius tactician and leader of the strongest band of Jaddites on the peninsula. Opposing, or allied, with him is Ammar ibn Khairan, an Asharite poet, advisor to kings, killer of kings, and lovable rogue. Finally there’s the woman that stands between them, Jehane bet Ishak, a Kindath doctor whose life is defined equally by love, war, and medicine.

    These three heroes are the pillars of the book, with themselves and the people that follow and love them serving as a metaphor for the mishmash of cultures and the inevitable conflict arising on the peninsula itself.

    Al-Rassan is a ticking timebomb of external pressures and irreconcilable differences, but there is a compelling argument made by its characters that it doesn’t have to be. There’s a dream shared by many characters that conflict is not inevitable, that it is possible to blend disparate cultures (in some cases quite literally) to create something new, better, but fragile. This struggle is the source of its many emotional highs and lows.

    I don’t think I’ve ever read a more human book, especially in the fantasy genre. Characters frequently stop and appreciate beauty, celebrate companionship, weep at tragedy, and profess respect for their friends and rivals.

    The key here is that, with few exceptions, there are no evil men. There are competing and incompatible cultures, religions, and political systems, but humans are human, and their shared likenesses are as important as their differences. These are crafty and intelligent men having crafty and intelligent conversations with each other, even in conflict. You end up sympathizing with everyone, even going so far as hoping, naively, that they somehow all get what they want.

    They won’t, of course. One of the greatest themes running throughout the book is that these men would be great and lifelong friends if not for just one small problem – the tragedy being that these “small” problems are often the most defining parts of their lives.

    It is a nearly flawless book, though there are a few problems I couldn’t get past.

    I’ve read plenty of books that straddle the line between fantasy and historical fiction, but this is the first time it’s been a source of distraction. Events and characters are so close to their real world counterparts – often with comically referential names, titles, or descriptions – yet at the same time are very clearly not.

    I kept wishing that the book fully committed to fantasy or history.

    Take the three major religions as example. Going by their descriptions, you’d likely say they are sufficiently fantastical: the Jaddites worship the sun as god, the Kindath worship the two moons, twin sisters of the sun god, and the Asharites worship not the gods but the stars and the human prophet who preached their glory.

    And yet when you read of their cultures, practices, and so on, you’ll quickly find they are literally Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The Kindath (Jews) are called the Wanderers, valued for their skills and trades when times are good, but immediately blamed, persecuted, segregated, expelled, and labeled as sorcerers and baby eaters when times are bad. It’s not subtle!

    It’s also not a bad thing, necessarily, because the fantastical framing is as good of a teacher as any historical drama would be. And yet… it remains distracting, taking me away from its world and putting me back in my own.

    More distracting are the names of its characters: Rodrigo “The Captain” Belmonte is of course El Cid himself, Rodrigo “The Lord” Diaz. The character of Ammar ibn Khairan is based on a man named Muhammad ibn Ammar. A major city in the book is named Silveness (Seville), ruled by the khalifate (caliphate), which eventually falls and is replaced by the Almalik (Almoravid) dynasty.

    Both book and reality contain a Sancho the Fat, yet they are different people… sorta?

    On more mundane annoyances, there are a number of writing ‘tricks’ that Guy Gavriel Kay goes back to a few too many times.

    Often – too often – there will be a scene in which an important event is viewed through the perspective of one of the characters. It will then end on a cliffhanger – like a character’s death, not yet named – and then the perspective shifts. Sometimes the cliffhanger is resolved, but more often than not this trick happens a 2nd or even 3rd time, or the time frame jumps suddenly and you’re left to infer what happened before the book eventually just tells you.

    The writing is very clearly aware that it’s dangling the reveal in front of you, and it’ll purposefully lead you down false conclusions to stretch out the tension even more. Once you notice the trick it’s hard not to get impatient or even frustrated by it.

    There are also a number of repetitive words and phrases that grate after a time – people can only talk about “dissembling” or “diverting” so many times before it becomes irksome – but they’re minor.

    Indeed, all of its problems and distractions are minor when compared with the work as a whole. They are primarily noted only because the rest of the work is so phenomenal that even the smallest error stands out of place.

    It’s a remarkable book, one that should be on the shelves of every fantasy fan, and it’s made me a Guy Gavriel Kay for life. Just don’t read it too close to taking a test or quiz on the history of Spain, because it will cause you to fail spectacularly.