Reviews and Comments

Greg Rucka is one of those writers that you find yourself impressed with in every book. He describes a world in which government works behinds the scenes, and a good politician can be more lethal than a sniper. And Tara Chace is good enough at her job to survive most of them.

The Last Run is especially satisfying to me because Cocker, the man in charge while Tara is running a mission, finds himself with no more political capital to spend. He's overruled by his boss and corralled neatly to the side because he is too outspoken and inconvenient in his desire to do a good job of keeping his agents alive and the department effective. Tara, meanwhile, is getting too well-known for her own good. She's been 9 years in the field, and as she complains, there are pictures and profiles of her in every intelligence agency across the world. One of these days, her luck is going to run out.

And of course, that's exactly what happens.

God, I love Greg Rucka.

Oddly disconnected. It has bits and pieces of a life, but it's not clear what makes her tick -- especially when it becomes clear that her friends lie to her, spread gossip that is untrue and self-serving, and try to get her to jump off a ledge when she's high on acid. It's clear this isn't just about sex, but about relationships and about "fun" -- but what she describes as fun made me feel like I had insects crawling all over me. Especially when she gets kicked out of the house by her parents and lives on the streets. Or has a crush on a guy behind the counter at Denny's who steals car stereos as a hobby. Or... jeez. I felt bad for her. But worse than that, I didn't see any kind of progression or inside growth -- first she's a girl, then she's a woman, first she's playing games of doctor and then giving blowjobs, and it's hard to tell where the line is or how old she is in each story, because it's all the same flat affect.

I'd put it in the same category as Phoebe Glockner -- this is something you read once and goggle at, then never read again.

The problem with this book comes in the first paragraph:

"Though the coastal island of Siane's Eye was lush with whispering palms and tropical flowers too exotic for the names of men, the wind that swept ever outward from its alabaster monuments came chill as a lifetime of penance. It prickled Vidarian's skin, but he hardened himself to it; the Sisters would not see a Rulorat captain hiding his hands like a saltless boy."

When it comes to describing a scene, the sentences are overegged ("came chill as a lifetime of penance?"). When it comes to describing personality and character, the book tells rather than shows. And when it comes to the plot, it's not at all clear exactly why Vidarian believes anyone when it comes to the prophecy -- for someone who starts off doing this as a job under pressure and has his own mind, he's disturbingly easy to lean on, first because he's fallen for a girl he's just met, and second... well, I'm not quite sure why he makes for the Great Gate.

Is it Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance or Diana Wynne Jones? Nope, but the cover clearly indicates what this is, and you either you like this or you don't. Is it fun? Yes. There's good old fashioned facemelty magic, gryphons, hapless spear carrying minions who get mowed down by the protagonist, and mean old women. It's better than David Eddings or Piers Anthony, and leagues better than Twilight.

This is a story about a man who lives inside a small time travelling cubicle and travels around the universe and tells people that everything they've hoped and dreamed for is impossible.

The world that this man lives in is unfinished science fiction, with lumpy protagonists and sidekicks, and people like Our Protagonist in the background trying to keep everything running. This man is very sorry for his life and everything that hasn't happened in it. His boss is a Microsoft computer program. The AI that runs his machine is clinically depressed and prone to crying jags. His mother has retreated to a fictional dinner with a fictional son on a time loop that repeats every hour, and his father has long since disappeared.

It's clear from the narrative that the writer misses his father terribly, but it's never clearly exactly why. His father didn't even seem to like him all that much, and was mostly focused on inventing time travel. He doesn't have any great love for his mother. He claims to have a crush on his AI, but they don't exchange much dialogue with each other... in fact, the only real affection that we see in this book is for Ed, his dog.

In any event, he keeps the cubicle set to the "indefinite present" rather than an actual time period so long that the machine breaks and he has to limp home to get it fixed. And then... he sees his future self handing him a book. So he shoots him. Because nothing happening to him is apparently better than anything at all happening. The plot of the book continues from there.

There is a conceit in the book that a fictional person in a science fictional who "remembers" the past in a book is literally time-travelling back to it, and cannot tell whether he is re-experiencing it or remembering it. It's all the same to him, all times, all places. And so most of this book is internal dialogue, flashbacks and exposition. The book even points this out -- "no time" passes in the cubicle so the clock only ticks when he goes outside and actually does something. The point of the book -- that he rarely does so -- is so apparent that you start to understand why his AI seems frustrated and has crying jags.

But there's a bigger problem with this book. This isn't science fiction. In other books, i.e. The Time Traveller's Wife, you cannot have the story without the science fiction element. In this book, you could have him stay in a one room studio, then he goes through his father's old letters, finds a phone number, and dials it, and then the book ends. There's no actual science fiction in the story -- all the rules, footnotes, corporate owned universes etc. are irrelevant to the actual plot. It's a sham.

To be fair, the book explicitly points out that it's a crappy, unfinished, fictional universe. But simply saying you're a failure doesn't make you interesting or unique. Think of how interesting the Doctor would be if he were afraid to go outside of the TARDIS. Then throw this book in the trash and never read it again.

The book is set in Istanbul, Turkey. It makes a big deal out of this. Despite being set in the future, the history of Istanbul and of each of the protagonists is gone over in every chapter, in intersecting parts.

As a literary device, it helps ground the section in the worldview and mentality of the speaker -- as a plot device, it drags the plot down every other page, to the point where I would forget who was a current character and who showed up in the past as history. Imagine if you were watching a TV show where every time you changed a scene, you'd be treated to a five minute flashback. One of the protagonists, Cam, is 9 years old, and I would breathe a sigh of relief every time he started narrating simply because he was the only character completely grounded in the here and now.

I think it does this because the plot itself has very little to do with the history of Turkey. It's a story about nanotech and the future and investment banking and an economist who has a crush, and a boy who likes playing detective. And a couple of antiquarian MacGuffins that give an excuse to dig more deeply into the history of the city.

Is the plot good enough to make up for the reminiscences dragged behind it like a shaggy dog's tail? No, not really. It's serviceable, but it's a framework for the book rather than the meat of it. That's a shame, but it's clearly how the book was conceived.

If you like Martin Amis or Philip Roth, you'll probably like this book -- if you like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, you'll want to attack this book with a red marker or simply chop out a third of the book with a razor blade. It's up to you.

This book is creepy. It's a story about magic being used for war, and so in that sense it shares something with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but during World War II, and against the Nazis. And instead of negotiating terms with the intuitive Earth and with the wacky crazy Fairies, negotiation is done in terms of blood with beings that are all the more disturbing by being entirely sane and rational goal-seeking entities.

On the English side, there's Will and Marsh. On the German side, there's Klaus and Gretel. The Engishmen are clearly the good guys and the Germans are the monsters... or so it seems at the beginning, until it becomes apparent that all of them will kill for their own reasons. Klaus in particular is sympathetic to people that he really shouldn't be, while Gretel's odd precog behavior may be an indication that she is mad and enjoys death and destruction, or that she is trying to save her friends from an unseen cloud of world-ending futures.

The book does not have any kind of a conclusion, and so is clearly planned as a sequence of two. There are hints about plot points in the next two books, notably the reason for the Eidolon's hatred of humanity being because of humanity's own "violition" being exercised through the batteries. There are elements of the Anubis Gates in the story, through the workings of fate to the odd primacy of Marsh's character, but this is a bleak tale that talks about the entirely mechanistic and reasonable way that the unthinkable becomes commonplace to a war machine, even at the cost of sanity itself.