Ender’s Game

I have finally read Orson Scott Card’s brilliant novel Ender’s Game which is the first book in the Ender’s series.  This was originally a shorter novelette but was reworked into a full length novel by Card.  It is about a young boy named Ender who is a long hoped for military genius on a future Earth.  He is force trained to become the tool that will save mankind from an alien menace.  But Ender is, in the end, his own man or boy.  A product of his handlers but not them; the book has an incredibly surprising finish. 
I enjoyed it very much. It is intensely psychological and, like many of the best examples of fiction writers, Card dwells strongly in the territory of human relationships. That’s what makes Ender so interesting. In the end, Ender is more important than even Earth leaders think. The fate of more than just human’s is involved.
I definitely want to read more in the series.
Highly recommended.

The Night Wanderer

Drew Hayden Taylor’s 2007 novel, The night wanderer (Annick Press Ltd.), is about a 350 year old Anishinaabeg (Ojibway) Vampire meeting a modern Ojibway (Anishinaabeg) teenage girl.
It has the subtitle ‘A Native Gothic Novel’ but I beg to differ with that categorization, ‘gothic’ implies something else to me. A dictionary defines it as:

A novel in a style emphasizing the grotesque, mysterious, and desolate.

To me, a better and less limiting summation would be ‘A Native Vampire Story’. While one of the two main characters, Pierre L’Errant, is certainly mysterious and has been, at times, desolate, he is never grotesque to me. Definitely not a typical vampire. And although Tiffany, the 16-year-old other main character, is frightened and helpless at times she has untapped inner strength. I see her as neither a gothic heroine nor could she afford to look like or be a goth. Taylor has created two very unique characters who inevitably clash with interesting and, IMHO, satisfying results. What I found most fascinating was Pierre’s view of the contrasts between his former culture and the current native culture found in Tiffany. I wanted more of that actually. Tiffany’s grandmother provides a sympathetic bridge between the old and the new as someone who yearns to hear Anishinabe language being spoken but lives patiently in the here and now.
All in all, a quick and highly recommended read!

Seed to Harvest

Anything written by Octavia E. Butler is science fiction gold IMHO. I just finished the quadrology entitled Seed to Harvest which contains the following novels in story chronological order:

• Wild Seed
• Mind of My Mind
• Clay’s Ark
• Patternmaster

The first two books tell the story of mutations in the human species that produce telepathic, telekinetic, shape changing and healing humans and the third; the birth of a new hybrid human through mixing with a microscopic but incredibly aggressive alien species. The last book describes when these two forms of human clash.
Butler was a visionary and her stories really bring you into a completely new and, I think, entirely possible and plausible future. It’s great and hard science fiction. But what makes her so interesting is that her focus is on more than just new gadgets and technology, she really explores social issues like slavery and race, religion, sex and politics. And through it all, she provides strong female role models but also develops strong male characters as well. Another interesting focus of hers is extending biology into the future: that is something (as a trained biologist myself) I often see done very simplistically in SF. Butler does it in a realistic and yet imaginative way. You can see this especially in Wild Seed with the character Anyanwu and in Clay’s Ark with the doctor Blake Maslin.
The actual books in the Patternist collection, her first series, were released as a set of five over an eight year period in this order:

1. 1976 Patternmaster
2. 1977 Mind of My Mind
3. 1978 Survivor
4. 1980 Wild Seed
5. 1984 Clay’s Ark

so Butler actually expanded her original idea into four other books by writing prequels. And yet, when assembled in the proper order in Seed to Harvest they read very well.  Survivor, in story time, should come between Clay’s Ark and Patternmaster; it wasn’t reprinted like the four others – possibly because Butler didn’t like it afterward. And so it’s the only Patternist novel I haven’t read yet. It may be hard to find (I know my library doesn’t have it) but I’ll look anyway.
Also, during this eight year period, she had time to write Kindred too.  This shows how prolific an imagination and writing ability this author was gifted with.
Very Highly Recommended!

The Kite Runner

As I wrote previously, I’m a fan of Marc Forster. I finally watched his 2007 movie The Kite Runner last night and it did not disappoint.
The location in China, the acting (especially the two boys from Kabul: Amir and Hassan played by Zekeria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), the cinematography were all fantastic. The moving book by Khaled Hosseini was a richer experience, of course, but the film was pretty much dead on. I would have liked a little more reality when it came to the hell Amir had to endure to get Sohrab back to the US from Pakistan in the book, but you can’t have everything.
Khalid Abdalla did an incredible job at keeping the complexity of the older Amir believable. This antihero role was played meek, forceful, hopeful and tragic in all the right places. I also loved the beautiful work in showing the kites flying in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Very highly recommended whether you’ve read the book or not. Not for young children.

Writing my novel using Ubuntu

One of the nice features of using OpenOffice for writing on my Ubuntu machine is that it exports directly into PDF. So when I finished the major edits of my manuscript I was able to output it into the format that pleased me although not without a few twists. For example, I really liked the font ZapFino for the title. But this is a Mac font: so I just put my odt file on the Mac and used NeoOffice (the version of OpenOffice for it) to add it in. Of course, I probably could have downloaded a ZapFino-like font for Ubuntu but it’s fun not being system-dependent for my word processing. I can move from Ubuntu to Mac to Windows with no issues. It was fun to experiment to get what I wanted. 10 Point fonts were fine to read zoomed on my system but I found I had to change to 12 points in order to be easily read in PDF without zooming.
I’m using PDF because my reviewers are computer literate and it would be, I think, too wasteful to print out more copies than I already have.
The name of the book is “The Relater” and it’s a science fiction novel for young adults that reads a little like a fantasy. You could say it is fantasy but that with no magic if that works for you. It’s set on a planet in the distant future where metals are scarce and so little advanced technology still exists after the humans and several other races first landed five thousand years previously.
The hero is a 12 year old boy who wants to be a Relater or story teller. And the story begins with him getting ready for his rite into adulthood.
The story seems straightforward but there are three twists that affect him: a prophecy, a chance meeting with another race and something special about him and his relationship with the solar system. There was not enough time for everything to be explained in the book. It would take a trilogy to do that…

Finished my novel

Three words I didn’t expect to say. But now I can. Actually I’ve been finished for a while but I’ve been editing it so saying it’s finished sounds wrong but the main writing effort is done. I have read the whole thing through for continuity and made quite a few corrections but that wasn’t enough. I’m halfway through reading it out loud to the boys and I’ve caught more errors and other issues. That whole oral process of telling your story aloud to an audience (even if it is a small one) is an excellent way to find issues. Speaking of my audience, they seem to like it so far but they are not the harshest of critics. Once I’m through this stage I’ll be giving it out to some serious target readers. I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say about it.
One of the biggest problems was knowing where to cut the book off. I did take a chunk out of the first book and put it in a file for the second book if I ever get that far. There are, I think, enough ideas for a trilogy but that decision is down the road a bit.
I plan to self-publish. I have friends who have done that and I like the idea of the control you have. I also have friends who’ve had problems going with a professional publishing company. These days, I feel, authors are treated very much like commodities. I don’t like the idea of being a cog in a corporate machine. I’m not under any illusions that this book must bring me fame and fortune. If it does and I do it myself than so much the better. But if it doesn’t then I will treat it the way it should be treated: as a stepping stone to improving myself as an author.
While I’m going through the throes of publishing I’m planning on working on a short story in an entirely different vein. I am planning it as a break.

Oryx and Crake

I listened to the unabridged audio version of this speculative novel by Margaret Atwood. She has amazingly crafted such intimacy with her characters. I refer especially to the most interesting hero of the book. Of course, the hero is neither Oryx nor Crake but the self-denigrating narrator Snowman. Jimmy or The Abominable Snowman, as he calls himself, is a movingly sad though resilient person.
I can’t help but think about how Crake, the tormented genius, saw his only friend. He obviously saw the strength in Jimmy that Jimmy himself didn’t know. He thought him strong enough to survive his own manipulation. Atwood is so incredibly good with character that I think I can read into Crake what he had planned. He needed someone strong to bear the burden of his new species. It’s obvious to me that Crake set it all up. He found Oryx just to ensnare Jimmy. He hired her and ensured that she had enough hints to figure out part of Crake’s sociopathic master plan to wipe out humanity to make room for his own creation.
So Oryx would have Jimmy promise to take care of the Crakers. It is all speculation, of course. Crake planning all that…? But he was smart enough to pull it off.
I give you Crake’s last words. They go something like “You know what to do, Jimmy.” Then like some kind of tragic opera, he kills Oryx. But why? Jealousy? I don’t think so. By killing her, he ensures Jimmy has no else but the Crakers to be responsible for. He knows Jimmy will react with his own murder. Crake expects to die. He wants to die; he is so possessed by his genetic masterpieces (his ‘floor models’ as he calls them) that he ensures even he doesn’t influence them. He can’t bias his creation if he’s dead.
I think that Crake’s convinced that Jimmy’s character, though strong, won’t effect his Crakers. But here is his error. The Crakers feel so much for Snowman that they do something that Crake had strived so hard to eliminate from their genes. They create an effigy or an artistic likeness of Snowman while he goes back to the Paradise Dome. They need him that much. I wonder what Crake would think of that. His intellect may be off the scale but he still might consider it frightening.

Mindscan

Mindscan (2005) is a Robert J. Sawyer novel (his 16th) with a central focus on consciousness. This is a topic he’s touched on in other books but this time he really gives it his complete attention. And that is saying something as I consider Sawyer one of the most intelligent and technically accurate science fiction writers going. He really puts a lot of research into his topic and seems to grok before writing. If you look at the list of reference works on the ‘consciousness’ at the end of Mindscan you’ll see what I mean.
This book has an heir to a Toronto beer fortune with a life threatening brain disease and an elderly world-famous author who is near death as the main characters. They both transfer their minds in a new process to android copies of themselves. Sawyer explores the legal, moral, philosophical and practical issues that ensue from their choices.
I was particularly intrigued by the inability of future scientists to produce viable artificial intelligence in the world Sawyer paints for us. They have been able to create complex enough electronic brains but not the ‘mind’ to use them. But why throw these brains away? Why not use real consciousness to power the mind of an android with the ‘power of attorney’ of the individual instead. The original humans are nicknamed ’skins’ and shipped one-way to a luxury complex on the dark side of the moon. Sawyer leaves to the imagination how the company came up with that particular necessity. Hmmm. It would be a good short story for Sawyer’s website where he discusses his ideas before and after writing about them.
So if you see this book at your library I recommend you pick it up and give it a read. Even if you’re not a sci-fi fan, you will find that Sawyer’s fiction is very approachable. And if you do, you’ll love the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy and Calculating God by the same author. I haven’t, in fact or fiction, come across anything by Sawyer that I haven’t liked.