Joe Haldeman – Forever Free

When Joe Haldeman won the Hugo award for his novel Forever Peace in 1998, a lot of people were disappointed that the book wasn’t a sequel to his 1974 Hugo and Nebula award-winning classic, The Forever War. Both books have a similar thematic underpinning, though, and put across a strong anti-war message; as a Vietnam veteran, Haldeman is always at his best when he writes about his “core values”.

Now, in Forever Free, he does return to the world and the same characters he left behind in The Forever War, in particular William Mandella and his wife Marygay. In The Forever War, the main characters were soldiers, fighting battles on distant worlds, and hopping forward through time in the process (relativity still being in effect). Each time they returned to Earth, they would find society changed almost beyond recognition. Eventually, human society evolved into a group mind known as “Man”, and the war ended.

Some twenty-odd years have now passed, and Mandella and Marygay have settled down on the planet Middle Finger. They have a family, and live in a peaceful farming community. Life is hard (the planet spends most of its 6-year “year” in deep winter), but peaceful. Mandella and his fellow veterans, though, believe that Man is keeping the old humans around as a genetic backup for the human race, in case something goes wrong with “Man” as a species.

To Mandella, the society is stale. His life is stale. He doesn’t have confidence in the future of Man, and wants to do something about it–if he can’t change the society itself, he will escape from it. Using a combination of hibernation and an ancient spaceship cranked up to relativistic speeds, he and a group of other veterans plan to take a short-cut to the future, and come back in 40,000 years’ time.

So far, so reasonable. This is a fairly logical extension to the first book, and takes the ideas forward at a gentle pace. Haldeman sets up some interesting conflicts between Mandella and Marygay, who considers the society a dystopia, and his children who think the opposite. Man is initially willing to go along with the whole expedition idea, but puts up resistance later; this ultimately leads to a showdown in which the veterans steal the spaceship.

…And then it all goes a bit strange.

I don’t want to give too much away about the second half of the book, but it is like Haldeman decided he’d had enough of the original plot, and threw it away in favour of something completely different. All of the interesting questions he sets up in the first half get dropped unanswered, and the emotional conflicts get rolled back to a previous state, as if they hadn’t happened at all. The characters are the same, but they’re in the middle of a bizarre and completely unexpected adventure. This new story doesn’t depend on the original characters in any way, and could have been set in any generic SF world–no need to place it in an established and well-loved environment. He introduces not one but two dei ex machina, and then doesn’t do anything with them!

I’m baffled. It’s like a head-on collision between two different novels, and the characters ultimately end up walking around in a bit of a daze.

What bothers me most is that Mandella and his fellow veterans to have no apparent stake in the outcome of the second part of the book; why did Haldeman not choose characters upon whom the outcome would have a deeper (read: “any”) impact?

I feel like this is a waste of a sequel, and I can’t help wondering if this book is more inspired by marketing forces than a genuine desire to explore the further story of William Mandella. Haldeman is a master writer, and he has written some of the best SF in the last quarter century (in addition to his novel Hugos, he has also won numerous awards for his short fiction), but although this book is unquestionably well written, I found the story terribly disappointing. Perhaps I had my hopes up too high.

The Forever War is a hard act to follow, and much though I hate to say it, I wish Haldeman had left it to stand on its own.

Michael Marshall Smith – What You Make It

Michael Marshall Smith is the author of three books, Only Forward, Spares and One of Us, which have assured him–in Britain, at least–the status of Hot New Author. This status is quite rightly deserved. Only Forward is a true masterpiece of modern fiction, weaving a unique blend of science fiction, psychological horror, fantasy, dark humour, and genuine literary charm. Smith has an engaging narrative voice that draws you into his books like a snake charmer hypnotising a cobra. You’re led into a world that you know is strange, but because his characters are so convincing and sufficiently comfortable with their own reality, you go along with it, thinking, yeah, this is cool, this is interesting, and then suddenly–snap. The trapdoor shuts behind you and you can’t get out. The protagonist is on a nightmare ride, and you’re right there with him.

What You Make It is Smith’s first story collection, and it brings together eighteen pieces from 1988 to 1998. The stories range from humorous (“Diet Hell”) to downright disturbing (“More Tomorrow”), with several excursions into tender and deeply touching (“The Man Who Drew Cats”, and “Always”). What they all have in common, though, is Smith’s confident narrative. Whether his protagonists are witty and urbane bachelors bemoaning their lot in life, or old men sipping their beers in their favourite bar and swapping tales of old times, they are always believable. You know these people. You see them every day. You live and go to work with them.

This is exactly what makes you uncomfortable when the world in these stories suddenly takes a turn for the worse (which it does in most cases). Rather than choosing the option of supernatural horror (although in “A Place To Stay” he does his own take on vampires), Smith stays firmly with the psychological. Inside the human mind lie terrors far more upsetting than the worst creature from the dark dimensions.

One of his recurring themes is the continual questioning of reality: has the world gone mad, or have I? As in his novels, Smith explores the possibilities of this question in several of these stories. “The Owner” and “The Fracture” follow the protagonists through their descent into insanity. In “Foreign Bodies”, like in all three of his novels, he examines his characters’ reaction to the revelation of truths so hideous they’ve kept them hidden from themselves.

Another common thread running through the stories is that of (romantic) relationships gone awry. Many of his characters have been through a psychological wringer, involving painful break-ups and the inability to find or keep hold of love. Smith’s sharp wit is at its finest when he lets his twenty-something single males rant about women, work and life in general; his tenderness and compassion shines through most when he talks about love. Here is a writer with a lot to say, and I have a lot of time to listen.

If this all seems a bit heavy and deep, well, it is. This isn’t an easy read. In places it is profoundly unsettling. The first story, “More tomorrow” built up a feeling of genuine dread in my stomach, and left me feeling shocked at its end. “Always”, the second-last story, produced a lump in my throat. It took me about a week to read through the whole collection, because I had to give some stories time to sink in before I was ready to read the next. Like strong drink, it doesn’t take much to intoxicate. Take too much too quickly, and you’ll feel like you’ve been kicked in the head.

There are inevitably a few weaker stories here as well. “Sorted” is blunt, and covers the same ground as “More Bitter Than Death” but with much less flair. “The Dark Land”, one of the earlier stories, is fairly perfunctory in terms of its plot, but is interesting in that it seems to lay a lot of the foundation upon which Only Forward is built.

On balance, though, the good stories outnumber the bad, and the excellent outnumber the merely good. I can’t give the book anything other than a top rating, but I should warn that it will not be to everybody’s taste. To draw a somewhat inaccurate analogy, in terms of the experience it provides it is far more Blair Witch than Scream: deep discomfort rather than slash ‘n splatter. Read it and be impressed.

James Patterson – When The Wind Blows

I read this book on a recommendation from both my mother and my sister-in-law, and I’ve come away questioning their sanity. This is without a doubt the worst book I’ve read in the last year, and ranks very highly in my all-time awful league.

I had never read anything by James Patterson before this, but I had high hopes going in: the film “Kiss the Girls” (based on his book) was great, and I was looking forward to an exciting thriller with a touch of darkness to it. No such luck.

The main characters are flat and remain undeveloped throughout the book. Dial-a-stereotype must have been having a clearance sale: a maverick FBI agent (handsome, of course), whose wife and two sons died in an air crash, and who now fears flying; a talented veterinary surgeon (beautiful, of course) whose husband, a medical researcher, was murdered; a genetically modified young girl (spunky, of course) who has escaped from a top secret research institute. Yawn.

The only conflict between the characters stems from the initial meeting between Kit Harrison (Fed) and Frannie O’Neill (Vet), when Frannie takes an instant dislike to Kit because he is incognito, and looks like a hunter. It’s beyond obvious and well into blatant that they’re made for each other. And the only character development that takes place is Frannie overcoming her initial misgivings about Kit, swiftly followed by the two of them jumping into their first relationship after the deaths of their spouses.

If the plot had been better, I would have forgiven the characterisation. But it isn’t. A decent plot leaves some mystery, takes a few turns, builds up through some action and setbacks for the hero(es), then reaches a climax. Instead, this book takes the shortest route from point A (the girl’s initial escape from the evil institute) to B (I’d better not say, but it’s really no surprise).

The prose is leaden and unimaginative, but at least it flies by–small mercy. I normally read at 60-70 pages an hour, but I was doing 150 most of the way through this book. I had to ask myself every few pages why I was still reading. The only answer I could come up with is that I just couldn’t believe how bad it was. I kept hoping that something interesting would happen, that the genetic engineering would be given a stronger basis in reality and science, or have some kind of a neat twist to is. As it stands, though, the only scientific backup is provided in the author’s notes at the start of the book: Patterson boasts about the real doctors and geneticists who have read it, and claims the story is “tomorrow’s headlines”.

Perhaps I’ve been spoiled. I read a lot of science fiction, and the underlying themes of this tale (the future shape and genetic possibilities of mankind) have been explored extensively and to much better effect in books like Greg Bear’s “Darwin’s Radio”, Nancy Kress’s “Beggars in Spain”, and many others. “When the Wind Blows” doesn’t examine the characters’ reaction to the genetic experiments going on, nor does it *glance* at the potential impact on society. As a thriller, it doesn’t satisfy my expectations of how the police or the FBI would react, or even common sense: why don’t they go to the media straight away?

I’m baffled by how this book managed to reach bestseller status. It reads more like a first novel dredged up out of the author’s trunk and dusted off after he’d reached stardom. I can only assume that Patterson’s other novels are substantially better, because this one is appalling.