Book Diary: Gini Koch – Touched by an Alien

This book was intended as a fast and fluffy read after heroically battling  my way through all of War and Peace, but as you can tell from the three novels I managed to read in the time it took me to finish this one, things did not work out that way. I really wanted to like this book, as the concept is very cute: A bunch of gorgeous, Armani-suited aliens is fighting a secret war against a horde of horrendous, over-sized other aliens, and our heroine and first-person narrator becomes involved in this conflict, falls in love with the aliens (the gorgeous ones, I should add) and fights evil (in form of the horrendous aliens). There’s a kick-ass heroine, there’s super-strong, gorgeous male aliens and super-intelligent, equally gorgeous female ones, there’s slimy monsters and lots of intentionally cheesy pulp Sci-Fi – all the ingredients for an enjoyable and funny romp, one would think – but it just tasted bland and did not work for me at all.

The problem seems to me that Gini Koch, although she comes across as a very nice person, just is not a good writer – the protagonist is just too good to be true and a clear case of auctorial wish-fulfillment, all the other characters are paper-thin, the plot has no pacing to speak of and just strings one event after another. Even comic fiction should have some kind of coherency that goes beyond a breathless iteration of “and then… and then… and then…”, some kind of story arc and, dare I say it, character development, all of which is sadly absent in Touched by an Alien. It was a real slog to get through, and probably would have ended up DNF if had not already bought the second volume in the series. I might give that a try some time and see whether Gini Koch as improved her writing skills any, but I’m not in any particularly hurry to do so.

What I’m Reading: C. J. Cherryh – Betrayer

When we left Bren Cameron at the end of Deceiver, he was in a very precarious position - not only in the middle of hostile territory but also in the middle of a potentially deadly conflict of man’chi (the feeling of allegiance and loyalty that holds together atevi society). It will take him some considerable maneuvering to escape with his own and his bodyguards’ skins intact, and if the previous novel was taken up mostly with intrigue and this politics, then Betrayer is comparatively heavy on the action, a large part of it consisting of Bren’s flight back to his country estate while being chased by assassins.

What I’m Reading: C. J. Cherryh – Deceiver

I love reading stories about intrigue, where the aim is to outwit your opponents, not to overpower them, where complex machinations are set into motion and then clash with each other in unexpected ways, where the antagonists dance around each other with words rather than bashing at each other with weapons, but where a well-placed word can be as deadly as a swordstroke or a bullet. And C. J. Cherryh belongs to the authors who do this best, in particular in her Science Fiction (which I tend to prefer over her Fantasy), and even among her extensive work the Foreigner series marks a high point in the way she unfolds, develops and finally wraps up political intrigues.

What I’m Reading: C. J. Cherryh – Conspirator

C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series is (with volume #14 about to be released as I’m writing this) one of the longer-running series in Science Fiction and might very well be the one with most detailed world-building, or, more precisely, with the most detailed exploration of  an alien culture. As so often with Cherryh, it is at its heart a story about culture clash between different species, in this case between the humans (or a group of them that has been stranded on a far-off planet) and the atevi (the dominant species on that planet).

What I’m Reading: Peter F. Hamilton – The Evolutionary Void

The third and final installment in Hamilton’s Void trilogy. Thankfully, it has only very few and comparatively short Edeard chapters this time, and those even are on a somewhat comedic note (although I am not certain the author actually intended them to be that way) thanks to some Groundhog Day elements getting mixed into the Epic Fantasy. In retrospect (although I am quite certain that the author did not actually intend it that way), this might even be read as a self-parodistic commentary on all the Edeard chapters in the trilogy’s previous novels – I certainly often felt like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, bored to tears for having to re-tread already familar ground over and over and over again…

Book Diary: Peter F. Hamilton – The Temporal Void

The second volume of Hamilton’s Void trilogy. Most of it is taken up with the continuing story of Edeard, i.e. the Fantasy-ish narrative strand, and it is just as bad as in the first volume, only worse because it takes up so much more space while remaining deeply cliché-ridden and profoundly unoriginal. The SFnal part is okay, but only consists of a third or maybe even a quarter of the whole novel and in no way can make up for the utter dross of the rest. Oh, and big surprise – Edeard is “the Chosen One.” Ugh.

What I’m Reading: Peter F. Hamilton – The Dreaming Void

A lot of people think very highly of Peter F. Hamilton, and the cover of my edition even names him as “Britain’s Number One Science Fiction Writer”. I assume that this refers to the number of books he has sold, because that is the only area where one might reasonably make such a claim (at least for as long as Scotland is still part of the United Kingdom) - compared to the likes of Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross, Hamilton comes off as mediocre at best.

What I’m Reading: Robert Silverberg – To the Dark Star: The Collected Stories Volume 2

In To Be Continued, the first volume of Robert Silverberg’s Collected Stories, not every story was good, but each one was interesting – due to no small part to the introductory note by Silverberg himself prefixed to each story: Taken together, those notes provided a fascinating account of what it was like to be an American Science Fiction writer in the 1950s. The second volume, which is titled To the Dark Star and covers the period from 1962 to 1969, again has those introductions, but they are for the most part more limited in scope – they still are interesting to read, but as contributions to a biography of Silverberg rather than as giving an overview over the state of Science Fiction literature in the United States at the time (although that aspect has not completely vanished, it just has receded into the background). On the plus side, the stories they are introducing are significantly better at this stage in Silverberg’s writing career, and the reader starts to get an idea of why Silverberg is not only considered one of the most prolific but also one of the best SF authors.

Book Diary: Catching Up

Due to my recent blogging slump I’ve fallen far behind on keeping up with the books I’ve read, pretty much beyond hope of ever catching up by way of regular blogging (at least for someone as fundamentally lazy as myself). Considering that the main purpose of this blog is to keep track of my reading, I did not want to just skip them like I did last year in a similar situation (and still regret doing), but constantly dragging two months behind is not an appealing prospect either, I’m finding it rather more fun to write about books while they’re still fresh in my mind. So I’ve decided to do a catch-up post that will bring me up to date (or at least close enough) where I basically just write a sentence or two on most of the books that I’ve read in October and November. I’m hoping to be able to return to at least some of them (Checkmate and Hydrogen Sonata in particular) for a more extensive post, but at least they won’t drop completely under the table.

What I’m Reading: Jeff Noon – Channel SK1N

I first encountered Jeff Noon’s works through a reading from his second novel Pollen he did in a Camden Town bookstore while I was on vacation in London. I wasn’t really reading any Science Fiction anymore at this time, but I was looking for something to do that evening when I saw the announcement and his novels seemed very well written, so I decided I might as well give it a try. And I am very glad that I did, not only because I walked away with a signed copy of Pollen from that reading but also because it introduced me to one of the most exciting contemporary Science Fiction writers, and one of the very few for whom SF is a form and a language as much if not more than a content. In that light, while he used to be called the British answer to William Gibson, I’d much rather view him as continuing in the vein of the work of the young Samuel R. Delany.