Monkey Droppings -Robopocalypse vs. Major Karnage! Winner take all!

Today, the monkey pits two two sci-fi actioneers against each other.

One is a heavily-hyped apocalyptic epic with a huge promotional push and expectations up the ying-yang.

The other is an unassuming, almost unheard-of sleeper from an unknown Canadian author.

Guess which one works, and which one doesn't?

Robopocalypse (Doubleday, 2011)
by Daniel H. Wilson

"You humans are biological machines designed to create ever more intelligent tools. You have reached the pinnacle of your species. All your ancestors' lives, the rise and fall of your nations, every pink and squirming baby—they have all led you here, to this moment, where you have fulfilled the destiny of humankind and created your successor. You have expired. You have accomplished what you were designed to do."

This is the big one, the tentpole action epic of the summer reading season! A high concept thrill ride, already speculated to soon be adapted to film by Steven Spielberg! With blurbs by heavy-hitters such as Clive Cussler! Lincoln Child! Robert Crais! The author Daniel Wilson has a Ph.D. in robotics! He's a genius! How could this be anything less than a genre masterpiece?

Quite easily, as it turns out.

It's all in the execution. Depending on whose hands wield the power, a tale of robots battling mankind can be either spectacular, exciting, and thought-provoking (think The Terminator), or dreary, repetitive, and uninspiring (Transformers). Robopocalypse lands far on the lesser end of the spectrum; it has some good ideas, but it has a paucity of style, little originality, and not much in the way of imagination.

Granted, it starts out nicely, as an oral history of humanity's battle with the robots (tremendously reminiscent of the format of Max Brooks' World War Z, a novel about the zombie uprising that is nowhere near perfect, but aces out Robopocalypse on every level). Humanity is just starting to recover from its years-long struggle, a struggle which began at the advent of artificial intelligence. The intelligence Archos viewed mankind as a danger, both to itself and to all other forms of life on Earth, and began the conquest of the planet through control of all mechanized resources it could summon.

There is a hint of real originality at one point, when true artificial intelligence is created in other robots, who then in turn decide to rebel against their robot overlord, but such flourishes are lost in pages of deadening prose and disposable, interchangeable characters. Three days after completion, I am hard-pressed to remember anything of the plot save a few scenes of robotic warfare that would, in a movie version, likely raise the coolness factor, but in the book merely get an eyebrow raise. I got far more entertainment in twenty-two minutes from the robot rebellion in the episode "Mother's Day" from Futurama, where I was treated to humour, style, and the image of Hermes Conrad screaming "Help! My stapler is collating me alive!" while being chased by an electric stapler. Not to mention the immortal phrase, "Conquer Earth, you bastards!"

So Robopocalypse isn't great, or even good, but what's even more damaging is that it is a dull, dull book. Direct comparisons are made in the publicity to Michael Crichton and Robert A. Heinlein, but Wilson has none of the satiric or stylistic flair of the latter, and very little of the former's ability to synthesize believable scientific research into a propulsive plot. Crichton was no maestro, but at his best (The Andromeda Strain, Sphere) he was able to throw out vast quantities of scientific exposition that never bogged down the storyline but instead actually enhanced it. Crichton didn't write great art, but he wrote great pulp (until he became bogged down in his own portentousness). Wilson's research isn't half as well presented, and never remotely believable, which lends the book an air of fantasy rather than the true-to-life science it appears to aim for.

Robopocalypse is a real let-down, not even a mildly diverting beach read. I was promised Crichton and Heinlein, Spielberg and James Cameron; I was given Michael Bay instead. Not a fair exchange.

Not even close.


VERDICT: MONKEY IS DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED



Major Karnage (Chizine, 2010)
by Gord Zajac

"Welcome to the Dabney Correctional Executive Class Hospitality Centre. We hope your stay with us is a pleasant one. Please enjoy these pastoral images and soothing mood music while you await trial and sentencing. And remember—at Dabney Correctional, we believe everyone is innocent until proven guilty. And it shows."

Now, see, if you're going to be derivative, this is how you do it.

Major John Karneski ('Major Karnage' to his friends/enemies) is unhappily enjoying forced retirement. After many glorious campaigns, he and his soldiers have been forcibly confined to a Veteran's Home for observation and re-education. In a world without war, a world completely run by the Dabney Corporation and its mascot cat, warriors are unnecessary, but people as violent as Karnage cannot be expected to meld back into society willingly. So for the better part of two decades Karnage has been held against his will, his violent tendencies held in check by a Sanity Patch on the back of his head which will explode if stress levels reach critical mass. At the start of Major Karnage, the patch is set at Lemon Breeze, with colour-coded levels that run the gamut from Snow White to Tricycle Red, with stops at Daffodil, Citrus Blast, Peachy Keen, Tangy Orange, Sharp Cheddar, Coral Essence, and many others. At Tricycle Red: boom!

But Karnage knows that the world is not safe. His man Cookie has been receiving alien transmissions in his skull, and it looks as if Unidentified Flying Objects of Death! are already on their way to lay waste to humankind. Only Karnage can hope to halt the invasion, but he'll have to fight his way past the guards, and then have to cope with a world that has moved on without him. To save the world, Karnage will have to deal with Dabneycops armed with Goober Guns, bizarre religious cults, alien sandworms, squidbugs, and a diligent cop named Sydney who can incapacitate a man with one flick of her baby toe:

"[Karnage had] never seen anyone move like this before. It was like a martial arts version of shiatsu. Sydney knew all the right pressure points to cause extreme pain in the body. It was brilliant. It was like ballet, except it didn't suck."

Quite obviously, Gord Zajac is first and foremost concerned with having a good time. This is not hard science fiction, and unlike Robopocalypse it doesn't have any pretensions to be. No, this is glorious b-movie-worth sci-fi ridiculousness, a non-stop chase through a landscape limited only by Zajac's imagination. Heavily indebted to pretty much every movie and novel you can think of, Zajac begs, borrows, and steals to great effect, steamrolling over plotholes and inconsistencies with glee.

Let's face it, you are either in the mood for such entertainment, or you're not. Me? Sign me up for more. Zajac is not a great stylist, but he moves his plot along with a sense of fun that is impossible to fake. There's more than a bit of the joy of Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series and the early satire of Heinlein to be found here, by way of Douglas Adams. It's an anything goes, balls to the wall approach that can be wearying, but manages to hit all the right notes. It's nonsense, but it's good nonsense. ChiZine has always put out a quality product, but this may be their first release that is just out and out genre merriment.

If Zajac sees fit to continue the adventures of Karnage, I, for one, will be eagerly awaiting the next installment. Robopocalypse may get the endorsements and the mega-budget film, but Major Karnage is the winner.


VERDICT: MONKEY LEAVES WELL-SATED

Monkey droppings - magic, magic everywhere, but not a drop to drink

Today, the monkey goes in search of magic and adventure.

And he finds some.

And he learns that sometimes, magic is not enough.

Vegas Knights (2011, Angry Robot)
by Matt Forbeck

I love me some magic realism. Taking the world as it is today, twisting it out of shape through supernatural means, always entertains me a sight more than the usual fantasy output of vaguely middle age-ish scenarios wherein dwarfs, elves, and centaurs form gangs and quest to their hearts content. Not that those are necessarily bad, it's just that I have a hard time relating. Put those same characters in a realistic setting, and I'm there. Lev Grossman's The Magicians is one of the best fantasies I've read in years, right up there with Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

So a novel about magicians set loose in Nevada would seem ideal. Or at least fun. And Matt Forbeck's novel is fun, in a free-wheeling, loosey-goosey way. I just wish it had some more meat on its bones.

Bill and Jackson are, outwardly, fun-loving young men bursting to have a good time on the Vegas strip. In actuality, they are novice magicians, on break from their college courses in "trans-quantum postulating," looking to fleece some casinos during Spring Break. Being able to predict cards and change hands would seem an easy way to get some quick cash, but the boys are not aware of the sinister underbelly of the city, one that depends on magic to keep its allure alive. Two magicians playing blackjack is less a rare occurrence than they believe, and soon they discover that they may not be up to the challenge of taking on the entire magician's syndicate.

Forbeck has a lot of fun with this conceit, bringing in some lovely pseudo-science to explain the actuality of magic's existence. As Jackson explains:

"That's the stigma that surrounds magic—that it's the product of demonic pacts or other crazy things—but it's nothing close to the truth. Using your mojo is simply the conscious manipulation of the quantum state of things. By taking control of an altering probability, we can make things happen that seem magical, but every bit of the process can be explained with science."

Makes perfect sense. Or not, really, but it's fun to play with.

But Forbeck isn't a strong enough writer to bring his characters to life. His magicians are heroic and intelligent, but there's no depth to the portrayals. The plot moves briskly, and I can see this making a very enjoyable feature film, but Forbeck's style is too mundane to create much excitement. His prose is plodding, and despite a vivid imagination, he can't summon up the breathless excitement his non-stop narrative requires (for a better example, see Gord Zajac's Major Karnage, a non-stop sci-fi chase that brings enough wit and oomph to the pursuit that you don't even mind some gaping logic holes).

But even more than than, a story of magic requires, well, magic to make it work. Clarke and Grossman and others of their ilk (Tolkien, C.S. Lewis) have genuine mastery of language and style, proving themselves magicians of the highest calibre. Forbeck is likeable, with strokes of originality, but at present he's an off-strip illusionist at best. I wanted to enjoy much more than I did, as the publisher Angry Robot appears determined to produce high-quality genre fiction, as evidenced by its recent re-release of K.W. Jeter's steampunk classics Morlock Nights and Infernal Devices, along with Lavie Tidhar's The Bookman and Camera Obscura. But Vegas Knights is a trifle at best; much like Vegas itself, it plays at glamour, but in the end it's a rather cheap entertainment, diverting but unmemorable.

VERDICT: MONKEY ENJOYS LIKE HE ENJOYS NCIS

Harbor (2011, Thomas Dunne Books)
by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Ah, hyperbole, where would we be without you?

I received the ARC of Harbor (to be released in October), and was taken in by the promise of "a sprawling horror epic." But having completed said novel, I make the following suggestion: if you are going to promote your book as a "horror epic," it had better be damned horrific and damned epic. The Stand is a horror epic. Carrion Comfort is a horror epic. Swan Song, Frankenstein, World War Z; these are epics of horror.

Harbor is not a horror epic. It contains elements of horror, yes, but its horrors are muted and small, personally terrifying to a character, yet hardly epic in scope.

That said, Harbor is not a bad read. Indeed, it has moments of creeping dread, and a storyline presented in vivid yet intimate detail. It's no horror epic, but it has elegance and style, and it takes time to build up its characters so that the horror, when it comes, is all the more intense. But it's also flabby and awkward, and makes the cardinal sin of having secondary characters far more interesting than the lead.

To be fair, it starts like gangbusters. On the remote Swedish isle of Domarö, Anders and Cecilia have taken their daughter Maja for a winter hike to a lighthouse, when she mysteriously vanishes. Cut to two years later; Anders is now a compulsive alcoholic, his marriage long dissolved, coming back to Domarö because it is the only thing he has left that still connects him to his daughter. His grandmother Anna-Greta and her companion Simon take care to keep him alive, but both are harboring secrets about the island, and from each other. There is an evil to Domarö, and Maja may have been a victim to something that has ruled the sea for centuries.

This has the potential to be a great, old-fashioned horror story, the kind that emphasized character and atmosphere over shocks. Domarö is an intriguing place, and even if the island never becomes what I hoped it would—there were echoes of Lovecraft early on, and I had visions of a great Cthulhu uprising that was not to be—it retains an aura of menace that Lindqvist and his translator (from the original Swedish) evoke with care and restraint.

Yet after a while, it becomes apparent that Harbor, for all its plentiful strengths, is rather schizophrenic, as if Lindqvist could not make up his mind what story to tell. Frankly, Anna-Greta's and Simon's story is by far the more compelling; Lindqvist goes into great detail over Simon's past life as a magician and escape artist, a man who one day discovers a strange insect that imparts to him supernatural powers over water. Simon's story is laden with intrigue and suspense, and his relationship to the secrets-holding Anna-Greta becomes the lynchpin for the entire narrative. Or rather, it should have, as it's by far the more effective plotline. Yet Lindqvist awkwardly fuses their story with that of Anders, who through his alcoholism and mania is a far less interesting protagonist. His missing daughter plotline may be more readily identifiable to readers—how many of us have been granted water-based superpowers?—but it doesn't hold the attention.

I am not familiar with Lindqvist's past work—all I know of him is the Swedish film adaptation of his vampire novel Let the Right One In and its American counterpart Let Me In, both very strong, atmospheric horror films with some poor CGI moments. Based on those movies, I will one day read the novel, as Harbor displays a writer with true gifts. Sadly, Harbor is very likely lesser to his previous work, a novel full of ideas that is unable to string them together.

VERDICT: MONKEY LOVES MOMENTS, BUT ONLY LIKES THE WHOLE

A lesson in the art of spin; or, I didn't say that, did I?

Yesterday, I was schooled in the art of spin. Owned. Pwned, as the kids say, bless their unable to spell hearts. And while I am fairly angry about it, a part of me can't help but admire the cojones of all involved.

A little background:

In my wanderings through the literary landscape, I have had the opportunity to, once in awhile, espouse my views on certain written works for sums of money i.e. I write book reviews for publications. I have always tried to give such reviews my best attention to detail, trying to do more than simply summarize a plot and giving a thumbs up/down. I make no claims to greatness, but I take the work seriously, and try to give every author I read the benefit of a doubt. I have praised books I've admired, and when confronted with the occasional shall we say less-than-stellar offering, I usually do try to put the best face on a bad situation. The authors have presumably worked hard to bring their vision to print, and although I may not enjoy the result, I appreciate the effort.

Ah, but I am human, and flawed. Sometimes a book hits me below the belt, and I cannot help but to respond in kind. In the pages of The Winnipeg Free Press, I laid waste in five hundred words to such destroyers of trees/hope as Michael Slade's Bed of Nails and Paulo Coelho's Eleven Minutes, barely containing my rage at how such authors managed to scuttle away with vital hours from my life with their horrible prose, insipid characters, and limp narratives. We all have read such books, and cannot help but rail even when public opinion is against you, or if your own common sense tells you to back off, that you are making a fool of yourself.

Such it was with Chuck Palahniuk's Tell-All. My review was not so much an incisive dissection of a novel as it was a rant against an author I deeply admired for foisting upon his abundant fanbase a novel so lazy, so flaccid, and so dreary. In the past, I had forgiven Palahniuk for lesser efforts such as Snuff, knowing that even the greatest authors had off days. A man who gave me the gruesome, obscene satirical pleasures of Fight Club and Rant and Choke had earned some leeway. But Tell-All is atrocious, a novel that would likely never have been published save for his name on the cover. I place it in the same terrain as the gut-wrenchingly awful books of James Patterson, the flavourless spewings of Stephanie Meyer, the utter stupidity of Tim LaHaye. In the annals of disappointing releases from authors I deeply admire and respect, it belongs in the same category as Ira Levin's dismal Son of Rosemary, Richard Matheson's inane Seven Steps to Midnight, and Robert A. Heinlein's lamentable The Number of the Beast. I condemn it to the basest reaches of my filth-laden soul, and continue to do so, even as I begrudgingly admit that I'm looking forward to Palahniuk's next novel, it sounds like all sorts of awesome.

So, I trashed Tell-All in the Arts section of the Winnipeg Free Press, and I stand by my words. So it was with no small amount of surprise that I picked up the recent Canadian paperback release (to see who, if anyone, had actually praised it), and read the following on the back cover, just underneath the plot summary:

"A devastating dissection of celebrity . . . classic Palahniuk fare." — Winnipeg Free Press

Huh.

I checked my original review, and found the sentence in question:

Written in a style akin to gossip tabloids of the time (complete with boldface font for every name mentioned), the novel promises on its surface to be a devastating dissection of celebrity, classic Palahniuk fare.

Of course, this sentence handily ignores the rest of the review, including the following nuggets:

But with Tell-All, his fourth novel in as many years, Palahniuk simply gives up, delivering a novel as negligible in size as it is in ambition.

and

Tell-All is the effort of an author who has utterly given up. It is a soggy, misshapen mess of half-baked parody and puddle-shallow inspiration.

and

Tell-All is an insulting shrug of indifference from an author who once actually mattered on the literary scene.

Wow, that was harsh. I may have forgotten to take my happy pills that day.

Now, in addition to working as a reviewer and author, I earn a living as a publicist for a highly-regarded independent Canadian publisher. So I am intimately familiar with the concept of 'spin.' I have had opportunity to scour reviews for phrases I can employ to highlight my books in press releases and advertising. And occasionally, I have lifted chunks of wordage and used them slightly out of context, so that a review that rates a book as average can be used to highlight a novel's marvelous atmosphere or rich characters. It's part of the job. Not lying, exactly, but tweaking the truth in a certain way to achieve an intended result.

But this . . . this is complete falsity. They are using a review specifically designed to keep people as far away as possible from their book as a tool to lure people in. They've taken a spray can to a sign labelled DO NOT SWIM, SHARKS IN THE AREA, leaving it blaring to the public, SWIM AREA.

I do admire the ability to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, no question. But when faced with Tell-All, the proof is in the quotes; they did not have many to choose from. Check out the screenshot of the praise page above: most of them are fairly quiet on the novel itself, concerning themselves with Palahniuk and his reputation rather than the merits of the book. I've looked around; critical praise for Tell-All was fairly lacking. The page looks good, but when you come down to it, it doesn't tell you anything more than the praise pages for most of James Patterson's recent books, pages made up of glorious plaudits from bloggers and bloggers only. Yes, I'm being a little snobbish here, but my point is, there is no critical praise from reputable sources to be had. Some show it obviously (Patterson) and some hide it expertly (Palahniuk).

Who to blame? It's all the publishing company, and the publicists. They're trying to sell a product here, the art is left to the artists. I don't blame Palahniuk for the manner in which his company markets him, I only blame him for the product itself.

My point? Could it be, don't believe everything you read? That'll do, I guess. But the real point here is:

I did not praise Tell-All. The Winnipeg Free Press did not praise Tell-All. The quotation is a bald-faced distortion, a lie through and through. If you must read Tell-All, don't blame me if you feel used afterwards.