Review of Germline by T.C. McCarthy

Title: Germline
Author: T.C. McCarthy
Series: The Subterrene War #1
Published: 26 July 2011
Publisher: Orbit
Genre: science fiction, military sf
Source: own copy
Rating: 5/10

“I’ll never forget the smell: human waste, the dead, and rubbing alcohol – the smell of a Pulitzer.”

That’s what journalist Oscar Wendall thinks as he makes his way to the front line of the Subterrene War. It’s the 22^nd century and the USA is once again fighting her old favourite enemy, Russia, in a bloody war over the mineral resources buried in the mountains of Kazakhstan (simply referred to as Kaz). Oscar is the first member of the press allowed on the front line (currently underground), but he doesn’t find a story so much as a new life, fighting alongside the soldiers amidst plasma bombs that will cook you alive and flechette bullets that rip you to shreds.

In fact, Oscar is a dreadful journalist but a decent soldier. It’s not long before he gets fired by his paper, but he finds ways of getting back into his armour and out onto the battlefield. He falls in love with one of the “genetics” – beautiful teenage girls genetically engineered to be the USA’s supersoldiers. They’re clones, indoctrinated all their lives with a religion that teaches them to live for war and hope for a glorious death in battle. They’re often on Oscar’s mind and he finds his way from one battlefield, trying to deal with all the horrors of war.

Germline is known as a non-stop, action-packed novel about the brutality of war. This is true. I couldn’t keep track of the number of battle scenes, each of them full of explosions and death. The novel hurtles along from one action scene to the next and apparently doesn’t have much time for things like character development or world building.

The result is that a lot of events or emotions feel tacked on. It’s not that these things are necessarily implausible, but the build-up to them is rushed and insubstantial. The author tells you things that you don’t quite feel. For example, we’re told that fighting underground causes soldiers to be fearful of the surface. In the tunnels, danger comes from only one direction, but topside it can come from multiple directions, with the sky being the most threatening. This makes perfect sense, but it doesn’t feel right for Oscar to develop this fear within the very first chapter. The novel doesn’t give us a chance to really understand the experience of being in the tunnels and the effect it has on people. We just get a quick run-through, and suddenly Oscar is speaking like a war vet.

There are other examples. Oscar makes a few friends among the soldiers and when some of them die he goes on and on about how deeply this affects him. It sounds insincere when these friendships don’t have much time on the page and Oscar doesn’t even bother to learn the soldiers’ real names, going only by their nicknames. When Oscar falls in love with a genetic named Bridgette, he does so in a matter of hours, claiming that it “was easy to fall in love because neither of us was likely to live long anyway” (p.66).

The world building is equally feeble. We’re told almost nothing about the war beyond the simple fact that Russia and the USA (along with some allies) are fighting over mineral resources in Kazakhstan. But how did the war start? What are the metals they’re mining used for? How the hell can the Americans lay claim to mineral resources in Kazakhstan? (my boyfriend answered that last one by pointing out that they’re basically doing the same thing in the Middle East. Fair point). What kind of social changes allowed the USA to regress to the extent that genetics have replaced female soldiers with the idea that there will be more women to give birth to more soldiers? What do US citizens and the rest of the world think of the war? Is McCarthy saving the details for the second and third books in the series?

As a journalist Oscar is the ideal character to give the reader this information, but he’s so bad at his job that he just doesn’t seem interested in any of it; he just wants to be in the warzones with a gun in his hand. I can’t understand how even a barely competent editor could have given him this assignment. Besides being an awful reporter, he’s got a long history of substance abuse. He actually picks up a new drug addiction in the first chapter, and seems to be addicted to being in the war as well. That’s the only good explanation I can think of for why he insists on staying. Oscar himself is rather evasive on the topic. For all his interior monologues on the war, his character is a bit flat. We don’t learn much about anyone else either – a disappointment for me, because I really wanted to know more about the genetics, the most interesting feature of the novel. I wanted to know more about their weird religion (a kind of modified Christianity), the prayers they say before battles, and the fact that they are shot when they turn 18, because their minds become unstable and their bodies begin to rot. Oscar’s obsession with the genetics seems to end at wanting to be close to one of them; he doesn’t ask them many questions when he is.

So let’s face it – the focus of this novel is combat. It’s about the weapons, the armour, the explosions, the gunfire, the corpses. It’s a barrage of bullets, grenades, plasma bombs, blood, gore, faeces, and mangled bodies. We follow Oscar from one battleground to another, with him pontificating about the war in between. He talks about his armour, mostly about how disgusting it is when it comes to waste disposal (or lack thereof). He goes on about either wanting to fight or wanting to get out. He talks about the friends he’s lost. And then a bomb explodes and he’s running for his life.

Despite all the graphic violence, Germline has this odd PG-13 feel to it because anything sexual is glossed over. When Oscar puts on his armour for the first time and hooks up the tubes used for his waste disposal, he refers to his penis as “your you-know-what” (3). Later, there are a few sex scenes, but they’re all just start with a bit of kissing and then fade out with “when we were done” or whatever. It’s like either the author or the publishers are trying to keep this clean enough to market to a teenage audience, and violence, insanely, has always been deemed more acceptable than sex. However, it seems so ridiculous that a man like Oscar is uncomfortable referring bluntly to his own genitals or that he’d go into detail about everything that happens to him but not the sex that he apparently finds so fulfilling. A pity; I think the sex scenes could have done a lot to give a little emotional depth to this novel.

In many ways, this Germline reminds me of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974) – the constant fighting, the pace, the lack of character development, and a sense that the war is being fought for its own sake, rather than for the reasons stated. But even though I often didn’t understand the science of The Forever War and I found the characters forgettable, it still made an impact on me. You really felt the brutality of the war, and the unbelievable waste of life. It was a short book, but a forceful one.

Germline is longer but has less of an impact. It didn’t live up to the hype, and I didn’t particularly enjoy reading it. With its lack of emotional engagement or details about its world, it was often boring. All those action scenes just didn’t do it for me, especially since I didn’t really care what happened to Oscar.

Strangely enough though, I’m actually looking forward to reading the sequel, Exogene. Exogene’s protagonist is a genetic, and shows the war from their perspective. I wanted to whack Oscar over the head for not asking more questions about them, but book 2 will give me a chance to get that story while Oscar won’t be there to get in the way.

Buy Germline (The Subterrene War #1) at The Book Depository

Review of The Pillars of Hercules by David Constantine

Title: The Pillars of Hercules
Author: David J. Williams writing as David Constantine
Published: 06 March 2012
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Genre: mythology, historical, steampunk, alternate history
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 3/10

Alexander of Macedonia has just taken over Egypt, a province of the powerful Athenian Empire. His conquest marks the beginning of his campaign to crush the Empire as a whole. He believes himself to be a god, the son of Zeus, and it seems like nothing will stand in his way. Everyone speaks of the sorcery that Alexander has at his command – Greek fire, deadly war machines designed by his former tutor, Aristotle, as well as the seemingly god-like ability to control the weather. And Alexander isn’t just planning to conquer the Athenian Empire. Beyond the Pillars of Hercules – the gateway to the outer ocean – lies the lost city of Atlantis and powerful artefacts of the ancients. If Alexander can get control of such secrets, he won’t stop at conquering the Athenian Empire – he’ll aim for world domination.

Helping the ambitious prince is his ever-loyal lieutenant Eumenes, and experienced generals like Perdiccas. Many are trying to stop him or take the treasures of Atlantis for themselves. Alexander’s cold-hearted father, Philip, has sent his bastard son Ptolemy to thwart the legitimate son who wants to rule the Macedonian Empire. Barsine, a Persian noblewoman, holds a deep grudge against Alexander for conquering her homeland, and possesses the means to undermine his goals. She recruits a pair of soldiers to help her – a Gaul named Lugorix who wields an axe he calls Skullseeker, and a Greek archer named Matthias. The Athenian commander Leonidas is determined to save his Empire from slaughter as he pits his forces against Alexander’s.

These intertwined narratives clash in battles of blood and flame, with swords, axes and battleships going up against automatons, gunpowder and siege engines. Myth and magic are intertwined with science, in a novel that combines steampunk, alternate history, mythology and the ancient world.

It’s a pretty weird genre mash-up, but it sounded like an interesting idea. Unfortunately it failed. Miserably.

I don’t know what to start with, so I’ll start at the beginning, when I had hope. I generally liked the characters, of which there are many. Too many, I eventually realised. The story is made up of multiple strands, and the author, David J. Williams writing as David Constantine, frequently adds or removes POVs from the narrative, even towards the end (it’s really irritating). Not all the characters are likeable and some – like Alexander – could have been fleshed out more, but the narrators were interesting enough. Although I could handle the large cast of characters however, I was struggling to get a grasp on the politics and military strategy, simply because I have no head for that stuff and my mind tends to wander. To make things easier, I clicked over to the Wikipedia entry on Alexander the Great in order to get a better idea of what was going on. Instead I found that Constantine had little interest in historical accuracy and an article on Alexander wasn’t going to help much, except to confirm that some of the major character really did exist.

According to his website for the novel, Constantine’s intention was, in part, to explore the question of what might have happened had Alexander gone west, rather than east. In Pillars of the Earth, Alexander doesn’t die in Babylon as the history books tell us, but conquered it and continued east to Afghanistan. It’s there that he receives an order from his father to come home, so he turns around and returns to Pella, Macedonia, attacking Egypt on the way. This brings me to another major historical difference – at this point in Alexander’s life, his father had been dead for over a decade, and he was already King of Macedonia. Here, however, his father is alive and the two are caught in a power struggle for the throne. Philip is king, but Alexander’s army is more powerful, and their relationship has always been tense at best.

Alexander’s mother Olympias is long dead, although in reality she outlived both her husband and son. I was a bit miffed about her absence. Other than Alexander, she was the one character I wanted to see – the woman who claimed she’d been impregnated by Zeus and given birth to a god. I would have loved to see her interactions with Alexander, convincing him of his divinity. Instead, Constantine killed her off in favour of a more mundane father-son conflict.

Technically, all this puts the novel in the alternate history genre. However, it feels a lot more like the author is just exploiting an historical narrative to write an action adventure novel, without much respect for his source material. Constantine would hardly be the first to do this, and I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed wildly inaccurate books or movies simply because I thought they were fun. But in this case the author goes way too far and it really pissed me off.

My biggest issue was the language. Alternate history is fine. Steampunk in the ancient world sounds cool. But your characters cannot bloody speak in modern slang saying things like “awesome”, “what gives” and “dig this”, or high-five each other after blowing up enemy ships. The dialogue also has a very brash American quality to it, which makes it even worse. At one point, Barsine says “Suck on this” before firing a torpedo. The Macedonians are referred to as “Macks”. Matthias crudely says “Fuck you very much” to a man he doesn’t like. There is also mention of the terms “turkey shoot” and “human pretzel”. Pretzels?! Really? They didn’t even exist then! I’m fairly sure turkey shoots didn’t either.

I already hated Constantine’s writing because of this, but my opinion of it was further lowered by the fact that the book was riddled with errors. I usually don’t mention this when it comes to ARCs, because they still have to go through a final proof. In this case however, there were way, way more errors and inconsistencies than I’ve ever seen in an ARC and I just couldn’t see Constantine as anything other than a sloppy writer.

Then there’s the steampunk aspect, which also contributes to the historical authenticity issue. The idea in itself is fine, but there’s lot of tech that seriously pushes the boundaries of plausibility, usually for the sake of big explosions. Barsine, the Persian noblewoman, has a ship that can travel at high speed, fire torpedoes, and be converted into a submarine. Alexander has a hoard of war-machines designed by Aristotle. In this novel, Aristotle isn’t portrayed so much as a philosopher as a sorcerer/scientist. Magic and science are intertwined, in the sense that those who don’t understand things like periscopes or bombs call them magic, while those who know how they work call it science. Aristotle’s designs include a giant siege engine, automatons, and something called a Leviathan – a huge, mechanically controlled human figure. The siege engine and Leviathans were ok, but I couldn’t imagine how they’d program robots or have missiles and torpedoes. Constantine just pushes his premise way too far with little explanation for how these things are possible, to the extent that it feels like you’re reading about modern warfare.

The author’s final major crime is relying far too heavily on artificial mystery. The characters in the know keep their plans from others and the reader, so that you’re never sure exactly what’s going on until a plan is executed, and even then you might not know why. Sometimes, they don’t even keep significant information from you. A character might just see something worrying (like a bunch of soldiers coming at them), but they still won’t say what it is until later. To facilitate this, Constantine switches the POV every few pages, as if to create a diversion. So at the moment when it something momentous could be revealed, the POV switches so we can’t find out what it is. Constantine keeps this up right until the climax of the novel, when he starts switching POVs every few paragraphs.

As far as maintaining the mystery is concerned, this tactic works. But mystery should be tense and exciting whereas this is just extremely irritating and confusing, especially when almost every character is one step ahead of you. It also makes it devilishly hard to keep up with the complex plot and the large cast of characters. By the end I was so tired of it all I couldn’t give a fuck about the big secrets at the end of the Earth. I just wanted the damn book to end. My rating dropped from 5 to 3 because every sentence was setting my teeth on edge.

This story might have worked as a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. It wouldn’t take up more than 2 or 3 hours of your time and there’d be sexy people and mind-blowing CGI to keep your attention off all the ghastly flaws. Instead, you have to spend a good few hours making the effort to read it, and it’s painfully obvious how much this doesn’t quite feel like the ancient world. If you really don’t care about any of this as long as someone’s getting an axe in the face every couple of pages, then there’s plenty for you to enjoy. If not, it will probably make you want to scream.

Review of Ragnarok by A.S. Byatt

Title: Ragnarok
Author: A.S. Byatt
Series: Canongate Myths
Published: First published 6 September 2011 by Canongate. This edition published 1 February
Publisher: Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic
Genre: mythology
My Rating: 9/10

Ragnarok is not quite the story that the blurb of my edition implies – a modern retelling of a Norse myth featuring a child living in the English countryside during World War Two. Rather, it is a semi-autobiographical tale of a young child reading and re-reading Asgard and the Gods, endlessly fascinated by its stories. The child – known only as “the thin child” – is not the focus of this book, but rather a means for Byatt to write for her “childhood self, and the way I had found the myths and thought about the world when I first read Asgard and the Gods”. In this manner, Byatt not only relates a set of rich, mysterious and beautiful mythical stories, but leads the reader through the musings about reading, storytelling, mythology and religion that occupy her philosophical young protagonist.

The thin child is a classic book lover and fantasy fan:

She devoured stories with rapacious greed, ranks of black marks on white, sorting themselves into mountains, and trees, stars, moons and suns, dragons, dwarfs, and forests containing wolves, foxes and the dark.

She frequently reads late at night, under the covers with a torch, or in the sliver of light from her bedroom doorway. When we dive into the pages of Asgard and the Gods with her, we aren’t given the text of the book itself, but a rewritten version that recreates for us the same sense of awe that the thin child experiences. The feel of Ragnarok is partly a product of the Norse myths themselves, but mostly an effect of Byatt’s writing – it’s lush and vivid, bringing to life a bizarre world in which humans play no real part (they’re created after dwarves and elves and then promptly ignored). She also chooses to hold true to the style in which the myths were told. Most of the other authors who wrote for the Canongate Myths series chose “to assimilate the myths into the form of novels, or modern stories, retell the tales as though the people had personalities and psychologies”. Byatt however, writes something more akin to what she calls “raw myth”:

Gods, demons and other actors in myths do not have personalities or characters in the way people in novels do. They do not have psychology [...]. They have attributes – Hera and Frigg are essentially jealous, Thor is violent, Mars is warlike, Baldur is beautiful and gentle, Diana of Ephesus is fertile and virginal.

At the beginning we’re told of Yggdrasil, the World Ash and Rándrasil, the Sea-Tree. The thin child ponders the question of how something came from nothing, leading us to the Norse creation myth, wherein a giant is born from chaos and is later slain by the first gods, who dismember his body and use it to create the heavens and the earth. Later we learn about Asgard, home of the gods, and encounter the divinities themselves. There’s Odin, the sinister, damaged god who lost an eye drinking magical knowledge from a fountain. The thin child’s favourite character is Loki, “a being who was neither this nor that”, a trickster who alone among the gods possessed the ability to change his shape and even his sex. She admires his humour and wit, and finds his changeable shapes and cleverness attractive.

Byatt relates the stories that eventually lead up to Ragnarök, which “means the darkening of the Regin, i.e. of the gods, hence the Twilight of the Gods; some however explain the word Rök to mean Judgement, i.e. of the gods’”. The thin child likes Ragnarök because it a real, bloody ending not a cyclical one, and unlike the Christian stories, it’s not humans who are judged but the gods themselves. They are flawed and stupid in a disturbingly familiar human way – they “know Ragnarök is coming but are incapable of imagining any way to fend it off, or change the story. They know how to die gallantly but not how to make a better world”.

In reading Asgard and the Gods, the thin child contemplates the tropes of storytelling – the way prohibitions are there to be broken (like one God gave to Adam and Eve), the recurrence of the number three, the way the youngest of three children is always the most important, and how in every story something must go wrong and not even the gods are powerful enough to stop it. She notes how myth differs from the fairytales, and how “[t]hey cannot be explained and do not explain” but haunt her nevertheless “coiled like smoke in her skull, humming like dark bees in a hive”.

The thin child’s fascination with myth means that it becomes intertwined with the way she thinks about her own life. Her father – who’s been away at war for years – is portrayed as a mythical figure, fighting battles in the air in places that, for the thin child, exist only in books. She remembers him as having “red-gold hair and clear blue eyes, like a god”. At church, she can’t help but compare the Norse myths to the Christian stories, and comes to the realisation that Christianity too, is a set of man-made myths, only far less interesting than the Norse ones. Consequently, she can’t believe in either, even if she can take pleasure in their stories. A particularly interesting illustration in Asgard and the Gods, when seen in relation to the landscape of her home, gives her an idea of how myths are created:

The picture gave the child an intense, uncanny pleasure. She knew, but could not have said, that it was the precise degree of formlessness in the nevertheless scrupulously depicted rocks that was so satisfactory. The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended. She had noticed that a bush, or a log, seen from a distance on her meadow-walk, could briefly be a crouching, snarling dog, or a trailing branch could be a snake, complete with shining eyes and flickering forked tongue. This way of looking was where the gods and giants came from.

In a shadow of the way Byatt loved Asgard and the Gods, her Ragnarok also gave me “an intense, uncanny pleasure”. She very beautifully achieves her aim of recreating a sense of the profound reading experience from her childhood. Ragnarok is an exquisite book that I feel I could re-read multiple times, savouring the details and letting myself be as enchanted as Byatt was. The eARC I received for this review will not be sufficient – this is a book I need to have in hardcover to grace my shelf for years.

Buy a copy of Ragnarok at The Book Depository

Review of Prador Moon by Neal Asher

Title: Prador Moon by Neal Asher
Author: Neal Asher
Series: Polity #1
Published: first published 26 May 2006 by Night Shade Books. My edition published 17 October 2008
Publisher: Tor, an imprint of Pan MacMillan
Genre:  space opera
Source: review copy from Pan MacMillan South Africa
My Rating: 6/10

Chronologically, Prador Moon is the first in Neal Asher’s collection of novels about a post-human space-faring society known as the Polity. It’s the 7th of a series of books set in this universe though, so it functions as a prequel. For me however, it served as an introduction to Asher’s work, so I basically read it as a stand-alone.

The Polity is mostly composed of humans but is ruled by AIs. Although it’s a space-faring society, they’ve only ever encountered two alien species. One is already extinct. The other, known as the Prador, is alive but evasive. The Polity has gathered a few scraps of info about the aliens, but no one has ever seen one of them. That’s about to change however, as the novel opens with the first meeting between the Polity and the Prador.

It does not go well. The Prador are revealed to be giant crabs, and their first and only words in this scene are, “I am Vortex, first-child of Captain Immanence. [...] You humans will surrender this station to us” (7). Each of the Prador whips out as many guns as they can hold in their multiple claws, and so the war begins.

The crabs would like to enslave humanity to use them as part of an organic hardware system that controls their ships’ critical systems. Plus human flesh turns out to be pretty tasty, and the Polity has some rather nice habitats and technology too. The Prador are a naturally aggressive species with highly sophisticated weaponry, and since the Polity hasn’t had to deal with a conflict like this for a long time, humans and AIs scramble to switch to military mode. Epic bloodshed and destruction ensue, with loads of guns, bombs and spaceship battles.

Prador Moon is certainly the kind of novel that deserves to be called a “no holds barred action-packed thrill ride”, but – not surprsingly – it lacks depth. I mean, look at the aliens – a hoard of giant, cannibalistic, man-eating crabs who want to enslave humanity. They have a viciously hierarchical society where progression through the ranks is typically achieved by killing (and then probably eating) your superior. The most powerful crabs have hoardes of children who are hormonally bound to obey their fathers’ every word. Most of these children are kept in stasis until cannon fodder is needed. Human prisoners on the Prador battleship are recklessly used in experiments that inevitably lead to gruesome deaths. Seriously, everything about the Prador just screams EVIL. This absurdity is actually openly acknowledged in the book as “the kind of scenario that would have been laughed out of the door by a modern holofiction producer” (9), implying that the story has a kind of necessarily pulpy realism. Admittedly, I was happy to just go with that because I found the Prador pretty entertaining in a scandalous way.

The human and AI characters aren’t all that sophisticated either, but they’re less interesting. Jebel Krong (whose name always makes me think ‘jezebel’), is a super-soldier who quickly becomes famous for his skills in killing Prador. He would sacrifice himself to stop the Prador, partly because they’re evil, but mostly because they killed his woman (she was preparing a romantic dinner for two when the crabs attacked). It’s kind of funny. I actually like the few AI characters, but you don’t learn much about them.

What the novel lacks in depth it tries to make up for in technical complexity – how that machine works, what this AI’s capabilities are, and so on. Some of this is very cool. Humans can get cybernetic enhancements that give them a few AI-style abilities. The Prador have these awesome ships that absorb the energy of anything you fire at them and use it to for their own massively powerful weapons or to repair damages. It makes them fantastically hard to defeat. The only ship that can really take them on is an old but advanced AI ship called the Occam Razor whose mind is fused with a human captain.

Unfortunately, most of the tech stuff was boring and too confusing for me, and there’s quite a lot of it. One of the protagonists – Moria Salem – receives a particularly advanced enhancement that allows her to process extremely complex calculations. Thanks to this, she and super-soldier Jebel represent the Polity’s best hopes of defeating the Prador, but I for one did not know what the hell she was doing. Fans of hard sf would probably love it. I could not.

However, since the novel manages to be an entertaining read without a sophisticated plot or characters, I didn’t really need to understand the details of the tech in the same way that I don’t need to know how guns work to enjoy an action movie. I just got through it by translating long paragraphs of explanation to something suitably dumbed down like “Moria does something really complicated with the fancy technology”.

Unfortunately, this came back to bite me in the ass at the end, when I didn’t have a clue what the big plan for the final showdown was. I re-read the ending and got a vague impression of an epic strike outrageous enough to suit the rest of the book. On the whole though, I had fun with Prador Moon, even though it does take itself a little too seriously. I’ve also heard from one or two reviewers that it’s not the best of the Polity novels, and either way I wouldn’t mind reading a few more if they are in fact characterised by “over-the-top violence and explosive action” as the blurb of this book suggests. On my list of review copies is Gridlinked (2001), the first Polity novel to be published, as well as the first in the popular Agent Cormac series. We’ll see how that goes.