Christopher East

Ian McDonald has been working his way up my list of favorite SF writers over the past few years, and The Dervish House (2010) just brought him that much closer to the top.  Both in the impressive Brasyl and the spectacular River of Gods, McDonald has proven himself to be one of the field’s most accomplished visionaries:  an inventive, thought-provoking, and entertaining novelist.  What I love best about his work, though, is how thoroughly he immerses the reader in his vivid futures, which are already vibrant and detailed, but all the more fascinating for their unique settings.  With these recent books, McDonald has been taking SF to corners of the globe most white, westernized SF fears to tread, and it serves as an enjoyably disorienting double-jolt to the system, not just showing us how diverse and complex the future will be, but how diverse and complex the world already is.  McDonald may not be the only author reminding us that the future isn’t just happening to Los Angeles and London – that change is a truly global thing – but  he’s certainly among the best.

The setting of The Dervish House is Istanbul, and it’s a thematically significant one – a bustling crossroads bridging the divide of the Middle East and Europe, old ways of thinking and new, the past and the future.  A simplistic plot summary won’t suffice.  Let’s just say there’s a fearless nine-year-old boy with a unique heart condition and the coolest “action figure” ever…a crusty Greek economist with a dark political past and an eye for redemption…an ambitious art dealer who sets out to uncover an ancient artifact…her husband, a cut-throat wheeler-dealer looking to set himself up for years to come…a young woman who takes a job pitching a revolutionary new nanotechnology to venture capitalists…and more memorable characters, their stories told over the course of an eventful week during a relentless heat wave.  Various interests – business, political, cultural, technological, religious – are on a collision course, and as the novel progresses, these characters are witnessing it all, and exerting their effects upon history.  The individual stories are ingeniously interconnected, and together they tell the story of a city, and of a future.  It’s breathtaking stuff, and it’s the essence of “futurismic” – it should be required reading for anyone submitting fiction to Futurismic, that’s for sure.

McDonald’s work can be challenging, at times – bringing SF reading protocols to an unfamiliar culture, even as you’re learning that culture, can be hard work – but it’s well worth the effort.  I do recommend setting a big block of time aside to truly sink your teeth into this one, though; I feel I would have enjoyed it even more if I hadn’t had to divvy it up into bite-sized chunks, due to an unfriendly reading schedule.   It’s great science fiction, and deserves all the attention you can give it.

Mary Rosenblum’s second novel, Chimera (1993), focuses on virtual reality.  Jewel Martina is a medical aide who has wrestled herself up from poverty, trying to make a name for herself as an information broker in the VR web.  She works for a “web node” named Harmon Alcourt, a powerful controller of the internet economy who’s sequestered himself in a remote compound in Antarctica.  Jewel’s struggles to swing her own deals online are sidetracked when her fate becomes entangled with a virtual artist named David Chen and his loose-cannon lover Flander, a shifty designer of VR avatars who’s run into trouble with a criminal element.  Jewel’s past and David’s love for Flander thrust them into the middle of a complicated power struggle, in an adventure that leads them from Antarctica to the Pacific Northwest and back again.

I enjoyed aspects of Chimera, but overall I found it a slow read, and not all that enthralling.  For a novel seventeen years old, it holds up pretty well science fictionally, and certainly feels ahead of the game in its approach to VR and AI.  The internet as depicted in Chimera feels conceptually dated compared to modern reality; the way the web commodifies information doesn’t quite ring true, and the fact that the internet isn’t ubiquitous feels a little like a predictive misfire.  But considered in the context of its era, it still feels like a valid, earnest guess at the future, and the ideas Rosenblum plays with here are still being examined in depth today.  So even if its details aren’t quite right, it does strike me as a book that had its finger on the SFnal pulse.

Unfortunately, Chimera fell a bit short for me in its story-telling.  For much of the novel, Jewel and David seem to be one step removed from the plot’s real machinations, and the proceedings feel murky until its various threads come together quickly in the final chapters.  There is a sound plot running underneath it all, but it doesn’t quite propel the narrative.  I also felt its focus on the theme of illusion versus reality was a bit heavy-handed, and would have liked to see more contrast in its real world; the novel’s vision of its non-virtual world is uniformly bleak and dystopic, perhaps a bit too one-note.

The prose is quite well written, the characters are distinctive, and for the most part it examines its SFnal ideas effectively; it’s not at all a bad novel.  But ultimately this one didn’t thrill me.

The latest, excellent Alan Furst adventure, The Spies of Warsaw (2008), takes us to Warsaw in the mid-thirties, where newly appointed French military attache’ Jean-Francois Mercier, a veteran of the Great War and a widower, has become a soldier of the intelligence world.  His first assignment in Poland involves putting the squeeze on a German who’s fallen into a French honey trap and is well placed to provide insight into German armor production.  From here, Mercier’s intelligence-gathering efforts evolve to paint an ever-clearer picture of German military intentions, as he combines reluctant forays into diplomatic circle gossip with hands-on, in-the-field adventures running agents, investigating the German-Polish frontier, and spying on Wehrmacht military exercises.  Along the way, he falls for a lawyer for the League of Nations, Anna Szarbek; becomes entangled with Russian spies jeopardized by Stalin’s purges; acquires a brutal nemesis in the SS; and makes contact with a potentially important, highly placed German scientist.  Mercier carefully balances duty, expediency, and personal happiness as he fights this clandestine battle against the increasing Nazi menace.

I find it hard to comment on a Furst novel without first mentioning its unwavering adherence to a distinctive formula, and then adding how much I don’t care about that, because it’s such a great formula.  But with The Spies of Warsaw it strikes me that Furst’s work is changing, subtly.  As opposed to the sprawling, epic scope canvases of his first few books, his more recent ones have been impressively focused works, happy to center on their protagonists and one specific area of historical interest.  If the earlier works felt more immersive and comprehensive, these more recent ones feel brisker and more intense.

Either way, Furst always delivers a vivid window into the past, both entertaining and illuminating.  The Spies of Warsaw is a tightly composed and thoroughly engaging novel that leaves you wanting more, but happily so.

The prolific Walter Jon Williams is generally reliable, but Implied Spaces (2009) — although not without its impressive aspects — was a bit of a misfire for me.

In a post-singularity solar system filled with numerous “pocket universes,” Aristide is one of the founders of the new society — a restless immortal, now spending his days exploring the accidental “implied spaces” of the multiverse.  His swashbuckling examination of the fantasy-gamer world of Midgarth, however, leads to information that the multiverse may be in jeopardy.  One of the massive artificial intelligences that administers the multiverse has gone rogue, and someone, somewhere is weaponizing wormholes.  After centuries of peace, a war appears to be brewing, and Aristide becomes an integral part of the effort to counter this threat — first going undercover to suss out intelligence against the enemy, and later participating in a military capacity.  This peaceful, anything-is-possible universe of near-utopia is in dire jeopardy; can Aristide save the day?

As mentioned, the novel has its strengths:  a solid plot structure, generally smooth writing, and simply piles of Big SF Ideas.  But something is missing.  I found the opening chapters in Midgarth frightfully dull, and very nearly didn’t get through them.  The pace picks up a bit in the middle sections, as the universe acquires more definition and the plot comes into focus, but as the conflict escalates, events are depicted more broadly in vast tracts of summary and expositional dialogue.  I didn’t much care for Aristide as a protagonist; he’s just a bit too formidable, too perfect, to worry about, particularly in a universe where personality back-ups and resurrection technology make death merely a temporary inconvenience.  But my main problem involved the villain’s motive for going to war against this near-perfect, peaceful multiverse.  Throughout, I found myself wondering why someone would want to destroy it, and when the reasoning is finally provided (in a massive infodump, incidentally), I wasn’t convinced.

The novel raises interesting questions about the existential dilemmas such a near-perfect future for humanity might create, and fans of galaxy-spanning, big-concept SF will probably find much to like.  But on the narrative level, Implied Spaces didn’t quite click for me as a smooth, enjoyable read, its ambitious plot rather crushed by the weight of its ideas.  I was interested, but never fully engaged.

Why haven’t I heard of Halfway Human until now?  I found myself asking this question frequently while reading Carolyn Ives Gilman’s 1998 debut; it’s so good, surely it made some noise back when it came out, right?  Was I out to lunch?  Was science fiction?  At any rate, this is superb SF, a novel people should know about.

My science fiction interests tend to be closer to home, and to the present, than this far future tale, which depicts — in glorious, convincing detail — not one but two thoroughly imagined cultures descended from our own after an interstellar diaspora.  It’s the story of Tedla, a “bland” from the planet Gammadis, whose suicide attempt brings it by chance into the life of xenologist Valerie Endrada on Capella Two.  In investigating Tedla’s history, and the reason for its despair, Val uncovers the hidden truth about the faraway culture of Gammadis.  There, gender is not determined until children come of age, but not all children become men or women; the unlucky ones become “blands,” who remain in their “natural,” neuter state, and find themselves reluctantly indoctrinated into a working underclass, conditioned to expect nothing of themselves but mindless, obedient servitude.  Tedla is burdened with good looks and considerably more intelligence than blands are “supposed” to possess, which make it stand out in a situation where standing out is not an asset.  Fate takes Tedla through this unjust culture’s darkest passages, but its story is less one of an individual versus society as it is one of someone at war with itself.  Despite cruel treatment and every inclination to be a proper bland, Tedla achieves the utmost importance in universal affairs — not only to the Gammadian establishment, who want to quiet her story and send a message to the bland underclass, but to the greedy, opportunistic information companies of Capella Two, who want to benefit from her unique insight as a bridge between cultures.

Halfway Human is compelling science fiction on just about every level.  It succeeds spectacularly in its world-building, first of all.  Gammadis is a rich, fascinating, thoroughly developed world, with much more depth and degree than my villainous “evil society” thumbnail gives it credit for.  The tri-gendered society is confidently rendered, and I can’t think of a more convincing depiction of life under a tyrannical, unjust system…that isn’t a historical novel, that is.  Even as Gammadis is center stage, Capella Two — the more Earthlike world — is given real character for its highly regulated information economy.  And it’s through Capella Two that the novel succeeds — again, spectacularly — as metaphor.  The concept of “blandness” in the book extends beyond gender difference to a broader examination of a the human condition, in any society where power is commodified and concentrated.  The book is full of interesting gender politics, but to me, thematically, it’s class politics that are even more strongly realized.

Finally, the novel succeeds wonderfully on the storytelling level.  For all the thought-provoking material — political, sexual, social, science fictional — it’s the storytelling that may be the most impressive to me.  Gilman juggles multiple tracks and timelines with sure-handed authority, and while the history-mining backstory of Tedla’s life journey clearly dominates, the urgent present crisis of Val trying to help Tedla is just as compelling.  Often science fiction makes narrative sacrifices for the sake of its ideas — clunky infodumps, sloggy exposition as reading protocols are established — but this book, while no less rich for it, benefits from smooth, engaging prose that tells the story well.

Be warned, this is dark, dark stuff on many levels, and perhaps not for the faint of heart.  But I found it inspiring, and full of wisdom, and the payoff in its final moments is well worth it.  This is the best SF novel I’ve read in a very long time.

In The Spanish Game (2006), Charles Cumming returns to the viewpoint of Alec Milius, who debuted in Cumming’s first novel A Spy By Nature. Several years have passed and Milius, retired (with mixed feelings) from the intelligence world, has gone to ground in Madrid. Although Milius is no longer active, he still practices countersurveillance tradecraft and maintains a low profile — enlivening his dull bank job with a clandestine affair with his boss’ wife, but otherwise leading a lonely expatriate existence. He assumes that enemies and “friends” alike from the intelligence world he left behind, if they ever found him, would make his life hell. This reads like paranoia to his old friend Saul, whose visit proves to be an omen, for spying is about to enter back into Milius’ life. When his boss sends him into the Basque region of Spain to interview people about its suitability for investment, Milius befriends a Basque nationalist named Mikel Arenaza, whose ties with the terrorist ETA are behind him. Arenaza’s disappearance puts Milius onto the scent of a government conspiracy, and — quite unable to resist — he begins investigating on his own, ultimately putting himself in the crosshairs of various secret influences in the war on terror.

The Spanish Game is a convoluted, twisty affair, thanks largely to Milius, a truly unique character in spy lore — he’s a man at the mercy of his very nature, a pathological liar with delusions of grandeur, constantly evaluating his own state of mind and frequently getting it wrong (often, it seems, deliberately). He lives for the adventure of spying, even as it tears his life apart, and his skills at the nitty-gritty of the business often get in the way of his view of the big picture. The early sections of the book are slower, as Cumming refamiliarizes us with Milius’ unreliable narration and lays the groundwork for the Basque separatist issues that are central to the novel’s plot. It’s time well spent in both cases, particularly the latter, as this is unique, rarely explored territory in the genre (in my experience, anyway). The plot accelerates later, though, as Milius’ meddling quickly makes him a person of interest to terrorists, conspirators, and intelligence services, putting him in position to work his deceptive nature on multiple targets. It definitely makes for a brisk, entertaining read.

I think, in the end, I preferred Cumming’s earlier novels a little bit more to this one.  The Spanish Game’s incredibly dense plot feels a bit too contrived, so that it lacks the ring of authenticity the earlier books possessed. The characters aren’t quite as distinctive (a particular strength of A Spy By Nature). And while Milius’ unreliable narration keeps the reader’s head spinning as to what’s actually going on, his ultimate fate is not terribly surprising (although the denouement is a nice subversion of expectation). Reservations aside, though, I quite enjoyed the read, and I expect fans of Cumming’s other work will find plenty to like in this one.  Looking forward to more.

My first impression of Cory Doctorow’s novel Makers (2009), as I read its early pages, was that he’d written “Boing-Boing, the novel”:  a near-future science fiction tale filled with passion for weird, interesting, fun stuff.   But for all that its physical world feels like it’s modeled on the internet, it quickly becomes clear that there’s much more to Makers than sheer, geeky inventiveness.

Makers kicks off when two dinosaur corporations – Kodak and Duracell – merge under the leadership of a visionary businessman named Landon Kettlewell.  Rather than continue the slowly dying business of making film and batteries, the rebranded “Kodacell” goes in an excitingly weird new direction:  leveraging its vast corporate resources and infrastructure toward the financing of small teams of intelligent, creative people to produce, well, whatever they want to produce.  Kettlewell entices a sharp tech industry reporter, Suzanne Church, to get in on the ground floor of this high concept gamble, sending her to cover the efforts of Kodacell’s flagship creative team,  Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, who’ve set up shop in a Hollywood, Florida ghost mall.  It’s an outpost of inventive tinkering in the commercial ruins of old school, decaying capitalism, and exciting things soon start happening:   Suzanne’s exhaustive, persuasive coverage helps sell the charismatic duo’s ingenius inventions – and the Kodacell business model – to the world, leading to a movement called “New Work,” and an unexpected economic surge.

Things don’t stay rosy forever, though, as this found family – which grows and morphs and changes throughout, as relationships evolve under new stresses and strains – navigates the treacherously shifting world of Doctorow’s future.  It’s a future where biotech conquers obesity, creating a bizarre new caste of pleasure-wallowing “fatkins;” where endlessly inventive reality-hackers turn the detritus of American “super-abundance” into fascinating kludges of recycled, useful knick-knackery; where down-and-out homeless drifters spin together magical shantytowns; and where new fabbing technologies look to transform the very nature of how people live.  It is, in other words, highly inventive, totally futurismic fiction, real wheelhouse stuff for me.

I can’t say I enjoyed every minute of this novel; after the initial, thrilling rush of the rise of New Work in the early stages, the novel snagged for me later when it shifted focus to Perry and Lester’s near-accidental creation of a network of nostalgic, New Work-related rides in abandoned superstores.   Here, Doctorow’s unabashed enthusiasm for theme parks and Disney seemed to get the better of him…for a while.   But as the battle between Perry and Lester’s network and a villainous Disney executive continued, the novel gradually won me back, and not just with its eyeball kicks and nifty futurismic gadgetry.   Doctorow also ventures into areas most science fiction ignores – the economy, the business world, law, and journalism, to name a few.  He examines these broad topics with the same inventive eye most SF writers reserve mainly for science and tech, and it makes the scenario all the richer.  His enthusiasm for the material can sometimes be exhausting, and I’m not always sure I’m buying what he’s selling – despite well drawn conflict, the odd disaster, and some truly deplorable villains, there’s an underlying optimism to the mindset of this fictional world that I sometimes find hard to swallow.  (Curse my jaded eye!)  But I have to admire the boundless, brainstormy energy of it all.  The next question is always asked, sometimes even before the previous one has been answered, and that feels like life to me – there’s something really authentic there.

Another thing I loved about Makers was its fearlessness regarding change.  For all that they’re supposed to be forward-looking and engaged by the future, science fiction people don’t always seem that interested in or comfortable with change.  Doctorow does not have that problem.  Makers is all about change, the inevitability of it, and the need for people to learn to adapt to it.  The characters here – all of them strongly drawn and distinctive, I might add – confront change constantly, facing tough decisions that often pit them against their own pasts and predispositions.  This is SF that challenges people to think about how systems work…and how to balance the need for progress against the draw of nostalgia…and how to look at old ways, current ways, and new ways, and when to change track.  This stuff is important, and I wish SF did more of it.

On the whole, then, a pretty damn good SF novel.   For me it started out like gangbusters, lost focus and slowed down for a bit, sped back up, changed gears and directions a bunch of times, and ended with a profound and effective final note that brought the whole, grand mess of it together.   Really good stuff.

One of the perils of writing near-future SF is that, by setting your sights so close to the present, you risk trapping your work there.  Bruce Sterling, one of the field’s foremost futurists, has never been afraid to take this risk; in fact, I suspect he embraces it, which is why his science fiction always feels so immediate and relevant.  His stories riff off the real world, something I wish science fiction would do more often.

It comes as no surprise, then, that his collection Globalhead (1992) very much feels like a product of its time — but not at all in a bad way.   Featuring thirteen stories published between 1985 and 1992, the collection features near-future SF, contemporary fantasy, historical fantasy, alternate history, and “non-SF” — stories that feel science fictional without necessarily being science fictional.  Regardless of subgenre, Sterling’s stories here (like his newer work) tend to explore the real world through an SFnal lens.  The world of these stories, though, is colored by its era, so the stories tend to fall under the shadow of the Cold War, the American-Russian geopolitical divide, the tail end of the Reagan regime, and the early, early days of the internet and personal computing explosions.  It’s tempting at times to accuse the work of feeling dated, then, but more often it merely feels ahead of its time; this is the “futurismic fiction” of its day, fearless and forward-thinking, but still in communication with the modern reality from which it was conjured.

I have to admit, I don’t always exactly get Sterling, and the stories here — which are very idea-driven, sometimes at the expense of narrative — occasionally flew right over my head.  I found “The Compassionate, the Digital,” a weird Islamic political screed involving AI, and “The Gulf Wars,” a densely written time-bending fantasy (?) about two Middle Eastern soldiers, to be politically interesting but somewhat impenetrable.  They do represent rare examples of SF of this time period wrestling with Middle Eastern concerns; not particularly satisfying stories, but Sterling was definitely ahead of the curve identifying the next important area of focus for the US in the wake of the USSR’s decline.  A more satisfying read in this arena, and perhaps even more prescient, is “We See Things Differently,” a near-future tale of culture shock as an Arab reporter from a powerful Islamic Caliphate visits Florida to interview a politically active rock star in the wake of the US’s decline as a superpower.

The two collaborations on display in this volume are also products of their era, and consistent with the collection’s global themes.  “Storming the Cosmos” (written with Rudy Rucker) is a chaotic, energetic secret history that mines the lore of the Russian space program and a certain famous Siberian mystery, a breezy, entertaining tale that has the feel of a “hot typewriter” collaboration.  And “The Moral Bullet” (with John Kessel) has a post-apocalyptic feel familiar from the time, detailing a future wherein life extension pharmaceuticals have wreaked worldwide havoc; a standoff develops between responsible European missionaries and a greedy bandit kingdom that’s come into power in the fragmented, anarchic new US.  It’s a bit unsubtle politically, perhaps, but an inventive and nicely realized scenario.  Both collaborations are satisfying reads.

The solo SF feels more unmitigated, though.  Take, for example, “Our Neural Chernobyl,” written in the form of a book review that looks back at the spread of an intelligence-enhancing plague.  It’s the near-future treated as a deeper future’s past, containing more ideas in ten quick pages than some SF novels.  In “The Unthinkable,” US and Russian political counterparts contemplate the changing world landscape — an interesting mix of Cold war politics and surprising genre content.  There’s also “The Shores of Bohemia,” a transformed far future where a weird European enclave of retro-humans resists the world’s inevitable change; the intrigue here is in gradually unlocking the secrets of the world outside its walls.

Three stories fall into what I think of as the “non-SF” category.  “Jim and Irene” could in fact be more traditionally classified for its fantasy elements — but the mindset is so SFnal, I’m tempted to call it “futurismic fantasy.”  Whatever it is, it’s one of my favorite stories in the volume, an engaging and heartfelt road fantasy about an unlikely relationship between an off-the-grid thief and a Russian émigré, which reads now like an early 1990’s period piece, looking at its now through a futuristic filter.  Less satisfying as story, but jam-packed with ideas and humor, are the volume’s two Leggy Starlitz tales, “Hollywood Kremlin” and “Are You For 86?”  Starlitz (also the star of Sterling’s 2000 “non-SF” novel Zeitgeist) is kind of a quirky international scam artist with a skill for evading the authorities and rolling with every weird geopolitical punch.  The more interesting of the two is “Hollywood Kremlin,” where Starlitz debuts as a cog in the black market machine of decaying Russian influence in Azerbaijan, but “Are You For 86?” is good edgy fun too, transplanting Starlitz to the U.S., where he and his bisexual girlfriends run afoul of right-to-lifers as part of an abortion-drug smuggling ring.

I’ve saved my favorites for last.  “The Sword of Damacles” is a wickedly funny deconstruction of a famous Greek myth about the perils of political power, subversive postmodern metafiction that most writers would never have gotten away with.  And “Dori Bangs,” like “Jim and Irene,” is a kind-hearted and kinda beautiful alternate history, mashing together the lives of two somewhat obscure underground pop culture figures in an unconventional and touching love story, ending the collection on a perfect note.

Globalhead is a challenging and at times difficult collection, perhaps more for Sterling enthusiasts than casual SF readers, but I found it an interesting and rewarding read.

World War II is a subject tailor-made for alternate history speculation. The conflict was just so vast, so complex, and so chaotic; the possibilities for divergent events and radically different outcomes are just countless.  I have to admit, I find the subject fascinating, but oddly I haven’t read much fiction in this vein, and little of it satisfying.

My only previous encounter with Harry Turtledove’s alternate history work at novel length is Days of Infamy (2004), which speculated on a different Pearl Harbor; what if the Japanese had followed up their airstrike with a land invasion?  I didn’t much care for the book, which felt sloppily written and overlong, and didn’t stretch itself much beyond its narrow theater of focus, little investigating the consequences of its changed scenario.  And irritatingly, without advertising itself as such, it was the first book of a two-book series, so it didn’t even resolve.  I was more than happy to leave that timeline firmly in the past.

But I’ve been in a “second chance” frame of mind lately, and allowed Turtledove’s latest to find its way onto my shelf.  Hitler’s War (2009) has a considerably more interesting and ambitious premise:  what if the British and French had drawn their line in the sand earlier than they did in our reality?  In this timeline, Chamberlain and Daladier refuse to cede Czechoslavkia’s Sudetenland to Hitler at Munich, thus kicking off the hot war in Europe one year earlier.  Through the eyes of a massive cast of soldiers and civilians from most of the major combatant nations — Germany, England, France, Russia, Czechoslavkia, and more — the book spins out an alternate sequence of events.  This is no small feat, for it isn’t simply a matter of subjecting the Czechs to the intial blitzkrieg rather than the Poles.  It forces into consideration a plethora of altered circumstances:  the Spanish Civil War is still raging, here with a more committed Fascist ally, General Sanjurjo, in command; the shocking nonaggression pact between Russia and Germany hasn’t come to pass; and Japan’s military ambitions are still directed toward the Asian continent rather than south into the Pacific, among other things.  In light of all this, will a stingy Czech foe, defending tougher, better-fortified territory than the hapless, sandwiched Poles did in our timeline, significantly change the course of history?

The answer, as I read it, is an unsatisfying “yes and no.”  The situations above are all major factors in the novel’s timeline, and when addressed, they make for interesting historical thought experiments.  Turtledove also does a good job detailing how one year less of military-industrial build-up and technological advancement, on both sides of the conflict, might have affected the course of events.

Unfortunately, the novel spends less time on its genre conceits and its broader geopolitical situations than it does on painstakingly, and quite repetitively, reconstructing – with a certain amount of realism, perhaps – the day-to-day lives of the people subjected to this war’s perils.  Largely, this means it focuses on the  precarious lives of the soldiers on the ground, in the air, and at sea.  There is also some small focus on the plight of a Jewish family in Germany, and a stranded American tourist who winds up in Berlin.  But ultimately it focuses so closely on these day-to-day details – the horrors of war, the paranoia of living in a Fascist police state or Stalin’s Russia, the helplessness of being a Jew under the Nazis, the banalities of soldierly life – that it’s hard to see the speculative wood for the historical trees.  Most of these sentence-level details differ only minutely from a depiction of the real conflict that might occur in a non-genre historical novel.  Which isn’t to say Turtledove doesn’t know his stuff.  But since I know his stuff, too – a lot of it, anyway — I felt like I wasn’t being shown anything.

This wouldn’t have bothered me so much if all these individual stories had been interesting and engaging, but unfortunately that isn’t the case.  The characters are thinly developed, basically conduits through which to view the period, at the mercy of their orders, their police, or their bad luck.  They all have the same motivation – get through the war.  And while there are some minor traits differentiating them, they’re all cut from generally the same cloth, and ultimately pretty forgettable.  Their world is interesting, but sadly, they just aren’t.

Also, be forewarned, since again the packaging fails to do so:  this is the beginning of a series.  I was rather expecting it this time, and in light of the vastness of the undertaking it didn’t surprise me.  I’m not saying the future volumes might not realize some of the intriguing possibilities of the scenario – the broader historical story of the book, once parsed from the tedious narrative, is still pretty interesting – but I doubt I will be discovering that firsthand.  For me,  Hitler’s War succeeds only as a thought experiment, but it’s not a very entertaining novel.

Daniel Silva is frequently mentioned on lists of the top-ranked spy novelists.  A few years ago I read his first novel, The Unlikely Spy, a tale of historical espionage set during World War II, and found it  decent but unspectacular.   I recall chalking up my disappointment mostly to the fact that the novel was so historically accurate that its plot failed to surprise, if you were familiar with the history at all — which I was.

So I decided to give Silva a second try, moving on to his follow-up novel, The Mark of the Assassin (1998).   Terrorists strike down a jetliner in New York, and in the aftermath, the suspected culprit is found murdered, adrift off the eastern seaboard.  The attack is a national tragedy with immediate repercussions, both on government policy and a tight presidential election, but it also has personal resonance for CIA counterterrorist officer Michael Osbourne.   A former field officer relegated to desk duty after his cover was blown, Osbourne recognizes the assassin’s killing style, and when other targets start dropping to “October’s”  bullets, it’s Osbourne who starts to put the pieces together.  Meanwhile, Osbourne’s wife Elizabeth finds herself in the thick of things as well, when her best friend, a reporter, winds up killed in what looks like a botched break-in.  It’s all connected, of course, in an adventure that puts the couple onto a vast international conspiracy and eventually thrusts them into the assassin’s deadly path.

This one is more of an action-thriller than the kind of heady, paranoid mindbender I tend to prefer.  The involved plot is well conceived, and the book progresses briskly; it feels much shorter than its five hundred pages.  The action scenes are nicely clocked, and there’s some nice international scenery.  In the right hands, it would probably make a pretty good movie.

But my overall reaction is lukewarm.  The writing style didn’t always appeal to me – something repetetive and formulaic about the sentence structure — and the dialogue felt unconvincing at times.  The machinations of the story were suitably complex, but I was never fully absorbed, I think because I had a hard time getting invested in the characters.  The people all struck me as “types,” with the female characters – often a weakness in this genre, but more egregiously so here – particularly disappointing.  Not that the men are all that much more developed, but at least they have lives, and fulfill plot functions, that aren’t gender-related.

Silva is well regarded and certainly sells a lot of books, so obviously he’s doing a lot of things right, and despite my complaints I found the read generally entertaining.  But ultimately I suspect his work just isn’t a perfect fit with me.