Greatly Belated Book Reviews: The Last Days of Krypton

(SPOILER ALERT: Krypton blows up at the end.)

Back in the day, I read a lot of Star Wars Expanded Universe novels. Nearly all of them, in fact. (Not counting a number of children's books and such, though I read a fistful of those as well.)

I didn't stop until the "Jacen is a Sith" story started wearing me down*, which means I sat through the entire friggin' Yuuzhan Vong storyline from one end to the other and spent a lot of time carping about the creative choices that were forced on the story by various editorial and publisher mandates**.

And so that means I read a pretty fair fistful of works by Kevin J. Anderson, the author of this book, The Last Days of Krypton (who wrote a trilogy, a fistful of short stories, edited collections of short stories, and co-wrote a pile of kids' books with his wife, all of which are part of the now-defunct Star Wars EU).

I didn't have a problem with the stories at the time, but looking back, a lot of his works... well, let's just say I understand the criticisms leveled at them. (It likely has a lot to do with the fact that I've since had a big chunk of literature-focused college education and my brain finished growing; I was kinda still a kid when I originally read them.)

So how does The Last Days of Krypton hold up?

Eh, meh.

A work like this was always going to borrow a lot from preexisting media; it was published in 2007, well into the nerdstalgia era. This isn't inherently bad; the DCAU managed to take that sort of thing and trim it down into one of the best possible versions.

This, well... it basically wants to be the prequel to the old live-action Superman movies, and just filled in the gaps with Silver Age stuff lifted wholesale from the comics.

Those movies were, well, mostly mediocre except for their casting (I know I'm in a relative minority for not liking them, but I'm not the only one) and so I found details such as Jor-El having white hair and the Phantom Zone being a window pane to another dimension stupid distracting.

There were, on the other hand, things I did in fact like.

For instance, an alien shows up and (rather heavy-handedly) tells the isolationist Kryptonian government that they really would benefit from outside contact and trade. They don't respond well to him, and so he wanders off with Jor-El, who he clearly sees as a kindred spirit of some sort as one of the only serious scientists on Krypton. Jor-El and the alien are trying to figure out something to do about the seismic issues Krypton's been having, when Zod (because OF COURSE there's Zod) has the experiment sabotaged and it blows up in their face, killing the alien.

Because a visitor from outside, a place Krypton has no familiarity with, has just been killed, and Zod is whipping up paranoia in an effort to gather personal power to himself, the Kryptonian government decides they should throw Jor-El under the bus for the accident and punish him to the full extent of the law.

But before that can happen, Brainiac carries off the capital city of Kandor, and does so in such a way that only Zod knows the truth. And Zod uses this as an opportunity to seize power for himself.

I should note that I find Zod kinda really silly, but this explanation for how he came to power actually really works***.

This actually ends up being where the story kind of goes off the rails, though; thanks to Zod coming to power, Jor-El is able to effect a solution to save Krypton.

You read that right-Jor-El stops the original Krypton disaster.

It isn't that simple, of course; while watching the skies as part of Zod's new planetary security mandates then spots an incoming comet. (He also overhears a message from Mars at the end of its history, which ends up being why he sends Kal-El to Earth-because J'onn J'onnz, the Martian Manhunter, brought his attention to our solar system. Which is another thing I'll admit to liking pretty well overall.) In a convoluted but predictable fashion, Jor-El is then forced to engineer Zod's downfall and destroy the comet in one fell swoop by wasting Zod's doomsday weapon trump card on it.

(Another thing I'll admit to liking: The weapons in question were extremely long-ranged and very powerful missiles created by an ancient Kryptonian warlord who definitely had panache when it came to naming stuff, such as these weapons, the nova javelins.)

Day saved again, right?

Except then a bunch of idiots throw the Phantom Zone into a volcano (...how does that even work? That's why I don't like the stupid movie version of the Phantom Zone), and Krypton explodes anyway, because it's a bad idea to throw naked singularities into your planet's core.

I'm a little torn; I'll admit I find the sudden "Krypton is always doomed" factor kind of amusing, but mostly in a narmy way. It's almost as if the cosmos of the novel is self-correcting. "This isn't an Elseworlds," cries the cosmos, "Krypton's supposed to blow up!"

But that brings me to my biggest problem with the story: The way the narrative treats... well, a lot of things.

The reason the Phantom Zone gets thrown into a volcano is because some people who'd been in it had been put straight into positions of power afterwards, the Phantom Zone having been the way Zod quietly disposed of his political dissidents. These people had been quivering wrecks when they'd been brought out, and serious PTSD sufferers at best, and you people put them straight into positions of power in the government? At the very least, give these guys some time to recover before you give them serious responsibilities again!

And the narrative essentially treats these guys as being at least a little evil for having PTSD. What the hell.

It gets... further down some kind of rabbit hole. The author seems to find writing Zod romancing his girlfriend/consort/wife a little too fascinating, if you catch my meaning.

While it wouldn't necessarily have jumped out at me, the story ends up having Jor-El's and Lara's romance parallel that of Zod and his ladyfriend, and Jor-El's and Lara's relationship is very chaste while Zod's and his gothy hipster girlfriend's relationship is sexy (the reader is subjected to actual foreplay). There are multiple things I could see this meaning, one being what I've already suggested (the author finding it sexier than the other romance) and the other main one being that the author was depicting sex scenes as evil. And both those things are pretty screwed up. (Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the author seems to like writing women who've had sex with powerful men, e.g. Admiral Daala from his Star Wars novels, who'd been Moff Tarkin's lover [yes THAT Moff Tarkin]. Weird.)

(And it's very specifically sex scenes, not actually sex. And having babies is highly acceptable, because Kal-El had to happen. Also Kal-El was conceived in his grandfather's Fortress of Solitude, which in the novel's universe apparently somehow inspired Superman's Fortress of Solitude. I'm not making this up.)

And oh yes, apparently gothy hipsters are evil and ambitious.

And then there's Nam-Ek, who aside from suggesting a DragonBall Z joke is a really horrible stereotype of a character, a man rendered mute by the horrifying experience he had as a child when his father killed the rest of his family and tried to hunt him down as well; he loves animals and tortured and murdered a man who slaughtered some animals, and implicitly from his skill and efficiency had been killing a lot of people. I'm not sure exactly what stereotypes these embody, but they sure as hell are stereotypes of something, and I don't like what they say.

Finally, there's the strangest, most bizarre thing in the entire story, which makes me shake my head at the whole thing: Supposedly, Krypton's long, heavily regulated history made everything too average, and as a result of this too average-ness, there was a sudden spike in violent maniacs and a fistful of supergenius people to counterbalance the disruption of the bell curve.

THAT. IS. NOT. HOW. STATISTICS. WOOOOOOOOOOOOORK.

In review, let me put it this way:

I read this book so nobody else would have to.

Yes, there are parts of it to like, but they're isolated bits in what is for the most part a train wreck. Even if I'm not a fan of his Star Wars novels, they're better than this was.

*This is actually my biggest concern about the new Star Wars trilogy; it's already, in the first movie, retread a lot of the ground from the EU that I'd have been fine depth-charging into oblivion. I'm really hoping it goes in different directions with the next two.

**For instance, there were three Solo children in the old EU. They were going to have the youngest do some critical magic things in the war with the YV, but they were told that they weren't allowed to focus on that kid by Lucasfilm... because said Solo kid was named Anakin and the prequels were still coming out, so they were concerned audiences would confuse the two characters with each other. Might not have been so bad, except that they decided that meant it was time to kill Anakin Solo.

***It also ties Brainiac's theft of Kandor to Krypton's destruction, something that was done in a similar yet quite different way in the Legion of Superheroes cartoon. Actually, while LoSH was a rather underrated cartoon and one of my favorites from its era, I think I actually like the more sociopolitical explanation from this novel better, despite this novel generally being hit-and-miss.

-Signing off.

(Slightly) Belated (Brief) Book Review: Words of Radiance

I was thoroughly converted into a Brandon Sanderson fan by the book The Way of Kings, a huge epic high fantasy book that is the first of ten planned books.

Words of Radiance is the second.

It's really good.

That's not much of a review, of course.

In the first book, we get a great deal of backstory on the character Kaladin, who is pretty much the first book's main character. This book's backstory is on another major character, Shallan.

Now, I'm not going to talk too much about it, but Kaladin's backstory is relatively predictable; we know a pretty fair bit about it from early on, and it follows paths I often saw coming. (This is no doubt colored by the fact that I've read TWoK at least three times, maybe four; I can't quite keep it straight in my head at this point.) Without ruining things overmuch, I can say: Shallan's backstory has a few twists in it that really took me by surprise.

This book also has some much bigger status quo shakeups than I was entirely expecting coming into it; I'd rather thought that there might be another book or two in between where things were at the end of TWoK and where they are at the end of WoR. Not that I mind.

What to say that isn't just nerdy nerdiness? Nothing I can think of. I can say that the ending of Words of Radiance left me super-excited for what's next, more so than the ending of The Way of Kings did.

I'm also a bit worried, because apparently Words of Radiance is literally as physically large as the current binding technology used by the publisher will allow, and the idea of the books' structure being limited that way genuinely upsets me. As I mentioned in the review for TWoK, these books would suffer if broken up into smaller ones than they want to be.

Anyway, we learn quite a bit more about the nature of the world this time around, which is great. (I realize, looking back, that I made no mention in the TWoK review of Shardblades and Shardplate. The Shardblades are particularly important in this specific book, and we learn some interesting things about them.) There's even more relatively cryptic references to others of the cosmere books that Sanderson has written, including a teaser for the best possible crossover teamup in all of the cosmere in the next book. I'd explain, but that would be too much of a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read the book.

(Of course, according to the author, the character in question has been part of the series since the early version of The Way of Kings that didn't really get published, and didn't appear in what the readers see as the "native" book for said character until years later from Sanderson's own perspective. Can you tell I'm really into this stuff?)

Anyway, good (long) read, five million billion stars out of five, and all that.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Reviews: Journey to the West

Journey to the West is a really old, pretty well-known book about a guy called Monkey and... some other stuff.

...I'm sure there was more to the story than Monkey.

Journey to the West is one of the single biggest influences on action/adventure genre anime and manga ever. The whole nature of magic and powers in Japanese fiction, the style of formula plots, the style of the protagonist... Not to say there aren't other influences, or that the Japanese (and generally East Asian) mindset isn't part of it generally, but the influence isn't to be underestimated.

Let's just say that if you've ever read or watched anime and manga (of a certain genre), there'll be something familiar about Journey to the West, even if it's not one of the ones that is either an adaptation or wears the influences on its sleeve.

The main character of Journey to the West is a guy called Monkey, as I noted before. That's not really his name, but most people call him that, so don't sweat calling him anything else. He's also known as Stone Monkey, Handsome Monkey King, Protector of the Horses (but don't call him that to his face), Great Sage Equaling Heaven (you can tell he's a modest fellow), and Sun Wukong (Monkey Awakened to Emptiness, or something like that) or Sun the Novice (because technically he's somebody's disciple in Buddhism). The first part of the book describes his bizarre origins (he was given birth to by a rock because it was a special rock in just the right place and oh gosh but that explanation is hilarious) and then describes how he became immortal, gathered strength and power, and ambitiously attempted to conquer the heavens.

For a while, it looked like nobody could stop him. Then the Buddha dropped a mountain on him.

Wait, wasn't the Buddha supposed to be a pacifistic sort of guy?

Anyway, because Monkey is basically completely indestructible, this was only a significant inconvenience instead of insanely lethal like it would be in any remotely normal circumstances, and he spent the next five hundred years with his head peeking out from under the mountain. Eventually, a dude would come along and let him out, and Monkey would have to agree to follow that guy and be his protector on a journey of either 36,000 or 60,000 miles (based on the translation I've read-both figures are cited by the same character at different times, so I find myself wondering which if either is more correct). If he did all that, he would get to be a Buddha.

Oh, yeah, didn't I mention that? There are apparently three thousand Buddhas or potential Buddhas exactly in Journey to the West. I don't know where the figure comes from (and frankly don't care), but I honestly find it pretty hilarious.

Anyway, the guy who frees him is the ostensible protagonist, known by the names Tang Sanzang, Tripitaka (which is a pun on some Buddhist... stuff... that I don't feel competent enough or involved enough to explain), or Xuanzang. He's been recruited by another deity to fetch Buddhist scriptures from India to bring back to China. Unlike Monkey, who is nearly a god incarnate, Sanzang has basically no powers or notable abilities except one: He's the reincarnation of a student of the Buddha, and since he's lived through ten lifetimes wherein he's never failed to follow the precepts of Buddhism, he's the most supernaturally enticing meal/sex object to demons and monsters in the universe.

Yes, I just wrote "meal/sex object." One of the things about him is that if anyone eats of his flesh, they'll live forever and ever and ever. (And they really mean it, too-they talk about the time scale being on the same order of magnitude as the death and rebirth of the world itself. Unless they're being metaphorical, which is perfectly possible.) On the other hand, if a female entity of any stripe successfully seduces him, she'll get the same benefits.

And for reasons presumably having to do with wacky Chinese mysticism, the characters talk about Sanzang losing his virginity in basically exactly the same tone as they talk about his being cooked and eaten. This is possibly the single funniest part of the book, and it happens at least three or four times. Sanzang himself says at some point that if he "loses his primal masculinity" to a woman that he'll basically go to hell forever.

I think that's a bit of an overreaction.

Anyway, obviously Monkey's job is to get Sanzang from China to India so that he can get these scriptures, and he can't let him get eaten or seduced by any of the approximately hundred thousand demons on the way, or let any purely incidental insane royalty, wild animals, bandits, or secretly-evil-demons Taoists hurt him either. (Because apparently the vast majority of Taoists are actually demons.* Who knew?)

Should be easy, right? Among Monkey's many prodigious powers is the ability to fly on clouds at enormous speeds, such that he can cross 30,000 miles in the time it takes him to complete a somersault. At that speed, Monkey could circumnavigate the globe a few hundred times a day or take a tour of the solar system in a reasonable length of time, assuming he didn't need to breathe or use air to move.

Nope. Even though demons can pick Sanzang up with wind or in spirit forms, Monkey can't transport Sanzang magically except to catch him when he's falling and in other need-to-explain-why-Sanzang-didn't-splat sorts of circumstances. Sanzang is apparently magically heavier than Monkey can carry, despite Monkey still being able to fly when he's hundreds of feet tall or when he's carrying and fighting with his magic weapon, a cudgel or staff that weighs nearly nine tons.

Anyway, not only must they walk (or in Sanzang's case ride a horse) the whole way, but they've got to make the journey over a distance considerably larger than the length of the equator, even though China and India are pretty close to each other from the whole "traveling the breadth of the globe" sense. (Apparently, in Journey to the West, India is much further away from China. Don't bother worrying about it.) And even though Monkey once took on armies of 100,000 gods without flinching, he now is regularly challenged by single foes.

...I think Monkey tends to forget that he can be larger than a mountain and can summon a horde of clones of himself, that his weapon can be increased in size and number (yes, increased in number) to match, and he can also take basically any shape, paralyze people or put them to sleep nearly at will, is invulnerable to nearly everything (including a furnace that was supposed to be able to incinerate any immortal being), is stronger than basically anyone, and can see through illusions, pick any lock, and control horses.

Yeah, obviously starting right there the plot tends to have a lot of points that feel like the author is just screwing around trying to make things more interesting.

I also lost count of the number of times that demons had excellent opportunities to immediately devour Sanzang, and said either "Oh, wait, no, if we do that we'll make Monkey really mad, so we'd better wait until we're sure he's given up/defeated first" or "No, wait, this guy is truly a special meal, let's prepare him all nice-like, invite all our relatives, and putz around for a few days first." (The attempted seductions always felt more farcical, especially since the characters treated it with precisely the same urgency.)

And Monkey also has to deal with the fact that some pesky goddess gave Sanzang a torture implement to use on him any time he misbehaves, and Sanzang is wimpy, weepy, easily traumatized, and easy to fool into using said torture implement for no good reason by their supposed allies.

Which brings me to the next point: Basically everyone in this story is a tremendous jerk at least once, regardless of whether they're supposed to be the goodest of the good or the baddest of the bad.

When Monkey is a jerk (or a sociopath), you expect it, because he's basically a sapient wild animal turned god-being. When Sanzang or a Buddha does something jerky, you go "okay, is this supposed to be a vicious parody? Because that felt like a vicious parody moment just now."

There's more characters, plot, and whatnot, but that's what I felt like talking about.

So: Journey to the West. A crazy book, with a lot of padding. (And odd poetry that doesn't translate well.)

And Monkey peeing in the Buddha's hand. There's that, too.

Of course, there's a link to a free (if iffy) translation on the Wikipedia page I linked earlier, so it's not like it'd take a lot of effort to obtain it.

I had a lot of "so that's where that concept came from" moments, which is what I was there for.**

*This is sarcasm. The author often seemed to have something against Taoists, despite frequently paying lip service to the idea of harmonies between China's two big, organized religions.

**Fun fact: If you believe Journey to the West, centipedes have a hundred/thousand eyes.

-Signing off.

(Quick) Greatly Belated Book Review: Alloy of Law

I recently did a quick review of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. As I've labeled Sanderson among my favorite authors, it shouldn't be a surprise that I thought it was very good.

Alloy of Law is a book set in the same world as the Mistborn trilogy, but three hundred years later, with a changing setting leading to different features of the world. Unlike Mistborn, I can talk about some (though only some) of the things that make this book fantastic without ruining things:

1). Sherlock Holmes expies.

2). Magic gunfighting is awesome.

3). A relatively light-hearted story. (The Mistborn trilogy is a little bit dark.)

4). Callbacks.

The last of these is particularly interesting because in my first reading, I didn't pick up on the callbacks because I hadn't read the Mistborn trilogy just yet.

You can read Alloy of Law without having read any of the previous books; in fact, I think this book stands alone very well for a book that technically is a sequel to a trilogy.

But reading it after knowing what all that stuff is about makes it that much better.

There's only one problem with the book as a standalone or as part of a series: It's clearly part of a larger set of books (it ends on an open-ended but not urgent cliffhanger). But that's not a problem, because I really like the characters and I'd be happy to visit their bit of the setting again.

-Signing off.

(Quick) Mildly Belated Book Review(s): The Mistborn Trilogy

I've waxed poetic about really liking Brandon Sanderson's work in the past.

The Mistborn Trilogy is the set of books that helped him build his reputation as an author; prevailing opinion is that more people get into his work as a result of reading Mistborn than any of his other works. I'm the odd duck here, seeing as how I got into his work with his currently largest single published book, The Way of Kings, which (aside from being the book I've reviewed previously) is comparable in size to Lord of the Rings yet is only the first book in a ten-book series (note, of course, that I'm generalizing and comparing my large softcover LOTR with thin, glossy pages to the heavy and sturdy TWoK hardcover... and doing it from memory, no less, because I'm not even sure where my copy of LOTR is). And because I'm a guy who likes thick books and long reads, TWoK is right up my alley.

I was a little worried, therefore, that Mistborn would fall a little short by comparison, because I like big books and Mistborn is less so... and I totally spoiled the heck out of myself on various websites beforehand, and thought it sounded less interesting as well.

I can happily report that it was not in any way a disappointment.

Even all together, the Mistborn Trilogy is not very comparable to TWoK, but on the other hand, it doesn't need to be and it shouldn't be, because it's its own thing. Mistborn was written to be accessible; The Way of Kings was written to be the kind of book that Sanderson himself loves to read and write.

I don't know that I have much else to say about it, because it's a hard series to talk about without spoiling stuff, other than the fact that it rather strongly reminds me of anime in general, and the story in Mistborn proper reminds me of one anime in particular. (If you know about certain plot points in only one of the series, then the link I'm about to provide will be aimed at a spoilery destination.) Most especially, Kelsier and Vin remind me of a couple of other characters; if you're familiar with both, you'll probably get what I'm talking about.

I can recommend the Mistborn Trilogy more wholeheartedly than The Way of Kings because reading the first book is a considerably smaller investment of your time to decide if you like the author or not. Which one is "better" is a matter of opinion.

-Signing off.

It Was A Brandon Sanderson-Related Wiki

I don't really have much today, as I've burned the day diving into a wiki I recently discovered and driving around in a snowstorm (which is pretty stressful), as well as not getting as much computer access as I might have.

I'll provide a link, though, to this website: The SCP Foundation. It's a site that documents fictitious anomalous... things. A grim sense of humor is rather required.

If you're not interested in that, here's the Pacific Rim trailer again.



Because it's cool, that's why.

-Signing off.

Here, Have J.R.R. Tolkien Reading Elvish Poetry

I've been reading a trilogy over the past few days, and hope to review it soon, but I can't until my sister finishes it too (the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson, if you're wondering-previous works of his I'd read are The Way of Kings, Warbreaker, and the Mistborn side-novel Alloy of Law... and Towers of Midnight, if you count that).

So here's this audio of Tolkien himself reading in, erm, I can't remember the actual "elvish" language name for it. (Sindarin or something.)



It always reminds me of Arabic, for some reason.

(That's a completely neutral evaluation, by the way. I don't attach value to how any language sounds unless it actively hurts my ears, which can be sensitive.

For some reason, some Mandarin bothers me. I don't know why.)

-Signing off.

Short Book Review: Leo Geo

This is one of those comics a fan of comics as a medium should be aware of.

This review has an image that shows a bit of why: Structurally, Leo Geo is one of those Scott McCloud-type experimental comics. You need to reorient the book several times to read it (and change the structural order you read pages in), but it's incredibly natural and intuitive.

Despite the simplistic design of the titular character, the art alone would also be worth the read. The story is a strange mix of fantasy, science facts, and things that honestly don't make sense (though in a "I'm willing to ignore that because this is sufficiently fun" way) that... well, let's just say it's not really that much of a story, but it does what it needs to, which is give the artist an excuse to do cool and fun stuff and crack the occasional remarkably straight-faced joke.

"I can't (let the underground civilization invade the surface)! There's too much good solid science going on up there!" (Emphasis mine.)

Seriously.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: Towers of Midnight

I've followed the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan for probably eight years or so. Compared to many of its fans, I'm a newcomer (little wonder, as I was pretty young when it started coming out), but I've been well aware of the series' staggering length and the increasing size of its volumes since I first caught up with its progress a short while after I got the first book. (I got two books from the series for my birthday one year, and was finished with the series by that fall, a couple of months later, and thus had to wait for the later books to come out.)

The series, I've discovered, has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism for becoming slow, bloated, and meandering. I'll agree that there was a certain amount of that in the last couple of books that came out while Jordan was still alive.

But thirteen books in, Towers of Midnight has turned things around, and I'm excited for the last book again.

I should explain a little. The author Brandon Sanderson, a long-time fan of The Wheel of Time, and also the author of The Way of Kings (which, in case you don't recall, is a book that I have said you need to read), was tapped to finish the series by Jordan's estate and publisher after his death from a long struggle with illness. (Jordan always said that he would keep writing until they nailed the coffin shut. Well... He pretty much did.) While Jordan literally plotted the series out to the end on his death bed, pretty much this entire book was written by Sanderson.

Now, I'm not saying that Jordan wasn't a good writer. He was; he got both myself and Sanderson (and plenty of others) hooked. However, the stretch which readers most often complain about seems to have been a rough patch in his overall plot.

But there's a payoff.

At the end of the previous book, The Gathering Storm, which was largely written by Sanderson, there was a Moment. It was one of the most defining scenes in the entire series.

Basically (I pretty much need to go into spoilers, so you should probably stop reading if you haven't read it but intend to), the main character, who is a prophesied and messianic figure, is on the verge of committing suicide and taking literally everyone else with him. He's been brutalized by his role, with a severe unhealing wound in his side, losing a hand, unable to use his magic powers without vomiting, and insane, with a voice of one of his past lives in his head that he must battle for control of his body. It's rather understandable why he's tried to cut off all his emotions, tapped into dark powers he shouldn't have, and set to murder his enemies with nuclear blast-sized bolts of energy that warp reality itself. And, oh, yeah, his messianic main character powers have turned to corrupting things around him.

And then, he gets better.

Just what this means isn't gone into until Towers of Midnight, but this is the point where things change. And the opening scene of Towers of Midnight shows us just how drastically things have turned around.

I don't want to go into it because details would ruin it, but it is seriously a brilliant exploration of how, within the world of The Wheel of Time, a messianic character works. Any meandering or padded narrative in previous books is forgiven, because much of it, ultimately, set up for this.

Towers of Midnight is the best book in the series for me. Part of the reason it works so well is because the character changes from narrating many to most of the chapters about him to being a mysterious figure that the others don't understand anymore, and don't even understand why they don't understand him. It is seriously one of the most dramatic transformations of a character I've ever seen in a narrative, and it works.

I have a difficult time recommending this book to a general audience. It's a great book, but there are twelve books of prerequisite reading you have to get through to read it. Also, many people would see the main character as too much of a power trip character, i.e. a Mary Sue of sorts. They're actually totally right in my opinion, but the thing is, there's actually a place for such characters.

And this is that place.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: Empire From the Ashes

Empire From the Ashes (find it for free here) is a trilogy-turned-collected-volume that is one of the earliest works by David Weber, who is probably best-known for his Honor Harrington series. (His earliest credit on Wikipedia's list of his published works is for some book in 1990; his next is Mutineer's Moon in 1991, which was the first part of this story.)

It's pretty good, especially since you can read it for free, but its quality in and of itself is not specifically the reason why I felt like reviewing it.

No, that would be because it reads like a checklist of his favored plot points and story features.

Here's just a few of the things I've noticed, based on things entirely off the top of my head and only from books of his that I've randomly read:

Numerous and extremely powerful ancient aliens who nonetheless never advance technologically in time periods spanning millions of years. (This book has the Achuultani; the later Safehold series, of which I have read one book, has the Gbaba, which may be an even more extreme example of this. It should be noted that Weber does not use many advanced aliens in his works.)

Humanity has fallen back from being extremely advanced spacefarers to stuck on a single primitive colony world. (Notably, Empire From the Ashes has two worlds shown which this applies to, and it actually happened at least two more times; this is the central precept of the Safehold series.)

A contrast between huge-scale combat between spacefaring civilizations and smaller-scale warfare in medieval/Renaissance-class cultures. (Earth's moon turns out to have been destroyed by Dahak, a massive warship from an ancient human civilization, in order to camouflage itself as the moon, and it was a ship tasked with picket duty [it was also stated that it could have vaporized Earth itself]. On the other hand, the planet Pardal was stuck in a sort of medieval stasis for about 45,000 years. Safehold, again, has a lot of this; a certain amount of it can also be found in the Empire of Man/Prince Roger series.)

Characters are apparently killed and believed missing for a period of months or years, but they're protagonists and still alive, struggling for the entire time to make their way back with limited resources. (Five of the characters were nearly assassinated by the self-destruction of a ship similar to Dahak, mentioned above, but the ship jettisoned them beforehand because it had special programming not to harm them [it's too much of a story to explain], and they spent about two years traveling to the nearest solar system, and found that it was inhabited by primitive humans who were controlling a quarantine system [ditto], but which had what they needed to get home if they could just get a hold of it. In Empire of Man/Prince Roger, a trilogy's worth is about the journey across a planet with varying levels of cultural sophistication to get a spaceship, only to discover that they're now wanted outlaws. And in Honor Harrington, the titular character was once thought dead but managed to escape to a prison planet, where she was able to stage a prison break.)

Religion is used as a tool to hold back technological development. (I'm not going to go too deeply into this, but it's a feature shared, again, with Safehold. It's almost as if the Pardalian sequences intrigued Weber enough that he wanted to do more with them than he had space for, and so he decided to write an entire series about a variation of them. It should be noted that these religions were generally ironically paired with technology to help maintain them.)

Extensive explorations of the implications of differences between the less advanced cultures and both our own counterparts to them and the advanced cultures encountering them are a must. (The planet Pardal, stuck in medieval stasis, had a number of native animals that made for differences in military development between their cultures and ours. Safehold, surprisingly, doesn't explore this aspect much [as far as I recall], but it's a pretty big deal in Empire of Man/Prince Roger. As for advanced versus less advanced, there's usually a lot of adding to the primitive side's tech base in sustainable ways and limited, careful use of the advanced side's limited technological resources and transhuman abilities. It should be noted that this was usually hidden in Empire From the Ashes and the Safehold series and given a mystical explanation when revealed to the "primitives," but in Empire of Man/Prince Roger, they don't bother doing anything but using it. Of course, the people of Marduk, who happen to be the only nonhuman example of "primitives," know a bit better than those others, but still...)

There are probably (well, definitely, actually) plenty more comparisons that could be made, but I don't want to list everything because 1) you could read it for yourself quite easily, and 2) I'm tired right now and I think I'm pretty close to done.

Empire From the Ashes is definitely a good read; if you don't mind reading a long text on the computer and like military science fiction, it's a darned good deal.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review(s): M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales

(AKA "Pals in Peril.")

Every once in a while, you find a children's book of exceptional quality. (Here's an older review of a comic-format book that I read some time back. I ought to figure out how to review the Robot City books, which I read a while ago, too...) M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales, of which I have read "The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen" and "Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware" are clearly qualified as exceptional.

I'll admit, children's books often have an easy time engaging me. I might be an adult who is generally regarded by those who know me as smarter than average (not boasting, just stating what others state), but I'll happily read or watch things aimed at any age group if it suits my tastes.

And these books have what is usually an easy way to interest me: Make things funny. They are very funny. Even better, it's hard to explain a lot of the funny bits without spoiling the plot.

The narration is extremely lemony, to the point of getting lost in talking about mostly irrelevant things that are happening rather than the plot. Amazingly, the books don't suffer for it.

However, the humor isn't what makes the books great, although it is the primary contributing factor to what makes them an enjoyable read.

No, what makes these books great is that they are perhaps the best metatextual commentary on the nature of fictional characters I have ever seen. And despite being about good and positive things, like friendship, courage, problem-solving, and heroism, the world the characters live in is one of the bleakest fictional worlds I've ever seen because of it. (Though like our own world, it also has its moments of wonder. Those're the good bits.)

Explaining why would be telling.

Also, Jasper Dash is one of the best characters ever. Why? Because he's an Edisonade character living in the modern world. And it is hilarious. (Also, while he's funny and silly, I also think he's a genuinely great guy.)

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: The Eye of the Beholder

The Eye of the Beholder is a novel "adapted from" an episode of the Star Trek cartoon by Alan Dean Foster from back in the day.

Why the quotes?

Well, the first half of the novel or so follows the episode rather closely. It alters some details-the Lactrans, enormous elephant-slugs, are made more inscrutable in appearance (the originals had eyes, while Foster's version not only lacked eyes but could not easily be identified as having a front or back end) and the dialogue is more sophisticated and occasionally explains things more thoroughly and better-but all in all, it isn't altered too extensively.

The first clue things are about to go far afield comes when the resolution of the episode should be arriving, and instead things take a widely deviant turn. (Spoilers ahoy, in case you couldn't guess.) The plot of the original episode is that the Lactrans, elephantine sluglike creatures with powerful telepathy and incredibly fast minds, mistake members of the Enterprise crew (and some other humans) for animals, and stick them in a zoo exhibit. In the episode, the revelation that humanity has starships is enough to cause the Lactrans to let them go free, but this isn't quite the case in the book.

You see, in the book, they regret their error, but they also want to acquire an extremely elusive animal from somewhere else for their zoo, and so they've requested assistance from the Enterprise to do so. (The Lactrans claim they no longer have starships; the Enterprise crew finds this dubious, but the Lactrans are highly resistant to phasers, immensely strong, and could fry their brains with telepathy, and also have advanced devices that they could use to battle the Enterprise, so they don't belabor the point.) The animal is called a jawanda, and the Lactrans admit that even they don't know how to catch the creature, which they fail to describe.

This leads them to set out for a world called Boqu, a world that the Lactrans, who abandoned space travel ages ago, admit they do not know for a fact still exists. It confuses them, because there's no star on their charts in the direction they're sent-not in the bounds of the galaxy, anyway. They eventually find a tiny, dim star along their path that wasn't on the charts, and here's where things really get interesting.

See, the Boqus of Boqu would be happy to help catch a jawanda (although they are shocked by the mere idea of it), but they're all really sick. So sick that they're going to die out if someone doesn't find a cure for their mysterious ailment fast. Unfortunately, they're silicon-based lifeforms, and the Enterprise doesn't have a doctor of that sort. (Spoiler: It gets resolved fairly quickly.)

Then, the Boqus reveal why they were shocked: The reason the Boqus could trap a jawanda is because they had to invent a means of keeping the jawandas away... from their star. Because jawandas are enormous creatures from the intergalactic void that feed on radiation, and Boqu's sun is one of the only active stars small enough that it wouldn't trap a jawanda in its gravitational pull. (Jawandas were a cause of frequent extremely violent climate change on Boqu, until the Boqus drove them away.)

And how could such creatures be driven away or caught? By using a gravity manipulating device made up of six of Boqu's moons.

They find a jawanda the size of North America. Note that this refers to surface area. The jawanda is extremely flat in order to maximize its surface area to absorb radiation with; the creature they meet up close was too vast to see at that distance, but also no more than a millimeter thick, and could be torn by the force of human muscle, although it healed from such injuries with great rapidity.

They successfully catch said jawanda, and begin to take it back towards the galaxy and Lactra, when suddenly they realize that more jawandas are chasing them because of the jawanda's distress calls. The Boqus scientist with them nervously notes that "their" jawanda is probably a juvenile; Boqus records indicate that there were jawandas that were "five times the size of Earth."

Things get kind of urgent after that, especially when they spot a jawanda whose size is estimated to be capable of engulfing the Sun.

This is a fun and inventive story, although it's not flawless.

First, it doesn't mesh perfectly with pre-existing (even by that point) Star Trek continuity. It's impossible to travel outside of the galaxy thanks to the Galactic Barrier; while it wouldn't have helped with their medicine, they had in fact met silicon-based life forms previously despite their exclamations that they hadn't; and the characters' goggling at the first jawanda's size seemed quite silly considering some other creatures that the very same crew had met on occasions that were intended to be previous. These are things I can pull off the top of my head, and I'm not even a big Star Trek fan. Foster can be forgiven these, as there's no guarantee that he had seen all of those episodes, and besides, it would ruin his situations that he plotted. (It helps that Foster is one of my favorite authors, having ghost-written, written, and adapted hundreds of books for dozens of franchises and series, including the original Star Wars novelization, The Black Hole [the Disney one, not the one I reviewed], The Last Starfighter, the live-action Transformers, and several Dinotopia novels. That's not even getting into his original works, of which I have read a few.) Personally, I think his version of the story would have worked quite well adapted into an original, non-Star Trek version.

The second major problem comes from the behavior of the jawandas. We know that the Lactrans didn't like the idea of keeping sapient beings for their zoo, but there were repeated objections to the idea that the admittedly incredibly simple yet vast jawandas could be anything more than fairly mindless animals. They probably reproduced via fission, and they had no discernible equivalent to a central nervous system. But one called for help, and others responded. Creatures so large that also lived in an area so vast that they could only be tracked and pursued at warp speeds had a behavior equivalent to a rescue behavior.

What could prey on a jawanda? Not much, aside from those critters I linked the articles of, but it doesn't seem like jawandas would have the capacity to combat such things. Why would they need to be social anyway? There were presumably millions of the things, and one's survival couldn't have been that important. I'm more inclined to think that the jawandas were reacting so because they were fairly intelligent, and weren't afraid of anything but large gravity wells. Intelligent enough to try to help a "child," and to care even though it didn't affect them directly.

Folks, that's altruism. The jawandas struck me as being simple but sapient, perhaps on the level of a whale or an elephant instead of a human, but still quite smart. The juvenile jawanda eventually gave up when it realized that the other jawandas weren't going to save it. The Lactrans probably wouldn't want a jawanda "in" their zoo if they knew it was that intelligent.

And so there you go. I want to see a sequel where someone frees the jawanda. (I don't really believe in freeing whales and such from their captivity; humans can protect and aid them, and ultimately help preserve their species. There's nothing that the Lactrans could do for the jawandas as a species.)

Of course, that's not going to happen...

I did enjoy the book, though. It's fun, and makes up for a rather condescending episode of the cartoon.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: Spectacular Spider-Man Essential Volume One

I noted a while back that I had recently acquired an Essential volume for the Spectacular Spider-Man comic book.

I can happily recommend the book to fans of Spider-Man, if for only one reason (though there are ultimately others): It's got a lot of characters who are pretty obscure in it.

There's El Tigre Blanco, the Lightmaster, Razorback, "the Big M," the Tarantula, Carrion, and the Spider Amoeba. And I'm pretty sure there were some other guys in there that I'd never heard of (and that's saying something).

And you know what? I liked the obscure guys. They gave things a bit of flavor, a sense of newness and a lack of the eternal repetition that the various iterations of superheroes fall into.

I want to see a Spider-Man cartoon with these guys instead of Doc Ock, the Rhino, Mysterio, Electro, the Lizard, the Vulture, etc. etc. etc. forever yet again. Not to knock the preexisting Spider-Man cartoons or anything-I enjoyed them-but they tend to recycle a little too much.

Gimme some new old stuff, not the old old stuff.

-Signing off.

Moderately Belated Book Review: The Way of Kings

The Way of Kings is this century's first great epic fantasy.

A bold statement, yes, but I'm not the first to make bold statements of praise about this book. Howard Tayler, creator of the webcomic Schlock Mercenary, made some far bolder ones in his brief review of it when he received an Advanced Reader Copy.

This book was my biggest purchase during a recent shopping trip to Borders. I considered it to be a mild gamble purchasing it instead of waiting to see if the library would pick it up, but only a mild one. While I respect Tayler's opinion greatly, nobody agrees all the time. Lucky for me, the book immediately dug in its hooks, and while it took almost a week, snatched mostly from random moments in my day, for me to read (it's just over a thousand pages), it was time well spent.

To say that The Way of Kings is this generation's The Lord of the Rings is a comparison many will likely make, but I'll rather presumptuously say that it's rather more than that. Huge books can often afford to be split apart into smaller pieces or reduced in length for economic reasons, but this one couldn't (although its sheer length clearly was a lot of work for whoever edited it-while the number of typos and mangled sentences was admirably low, a number of them were within the space of two pages).

Why not?

Because the world it's set in is a construct that is crucial to the story, and blazing through it would only confuse the readers. If time wasn't taken to allow people to absorb it, its uniqueness would be lost.

And it is unique. The world is wracked by storms, which have apparently stripped away nearly all the world's soil. (One region has soil because it's been sheltered by mountains from this weather, and it generally more closely resembles Earth.) Plants somehow obtain all their moisture and nutrients from those storms and the rock of the ground. Animals as we know them couldn't survive in such a world, so the animals of most regions are arthropods and tough amphibians and reptiles, using shelter or tough carapaces to escape harm. The largest land animals are crablike creatures called greatshells, which somehow grow precious gems inside their bodies.

These gems are important, because gemstones are the only thing that allow people to harvest magical energy from the great highstorms that wrack the world. Without magic, there would be no way to build the durable stone structures necessary to endure the regular hurricane force winds. Magically powered transmutation drives much of the economy-stone structures will often be constructed through the carving of wood into the desired forms, and then transforming the wood. Ironically, wood is scarce, so it is common to get wood by transmuting stone. Magic is so important that gemstones, the only things that can hold it for an extended period, are the primary form of currency.

There's plenty more to like about the world, but consider what I just explained: In this world, magic is money. All things considered, this seems to be the logical conclusion if magic has economically viable uses.

(There's another aspect to the world-there are spirit-beings called spren which are something like Shintoism's kami, in that they pervade everything. Interestingly, they are often visible, appearing in response to things such as extreme fear or pain, and they come in numerous varieties. I fail to mention them above because I couldn't figure out how to work a mention into the above paragraphs.)

To actually talk about how well constructed the plot is, to go into the journey of each character, and to talk about the brilliance of the revelations in the later part of the book would be epic spoilers, and I'm not going there.

Oh, yes, and it's also important that the book introduce the world as well as it does because it's only the first book in a series which, according to some, may run for ten books in all.

If this book gets the acclaim it deserves, in thirty years or so, we can look forward to its themes and ideas seeing a huge amount of bleed into the general pop culture in a way to rival The Lord of the Rings. If it doesn't, well, I'll be sad. I mean, I like the LOTR-derivative paradigms as much as anybody, but the old formulas need some spice mixed in, and this series is definitely an original, new creation which is truly distinct from it.

You should read this book. Just be sure to set aside a lot of time, and don't start in on it late at night, because you'll realize it's almost morning far too often.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: The End of Eternity

(Over at the Writing Blog, I give my thoughts on the timey wimey ball. Don't worry, I'll explain what the heck I mean by that over there.)

I've never been one for playing the "What's/who's your favorite _____?" game, but as authors go, I'll generally read almost anything by Isaac Asimov that gets put in front of me. (The same is true of Timothy Zahn.) He was a great idea man, a master of the English language, and just plain knew how to create an interesting scenario.

The End of Eternity is, hands down, the best novel about time travel I've ever read, and probably the best novel about time travel I'm ever going to read. After this, I'm unlikely to even want to read many other time travel stories (I'm not generally a big fan of time travel stories anyway).

The crux of the story is this: Eternity is an organization that was originally founded to establish trade between time periods, but which rapidly evolved into a social engineering project on an absurd scale, with what were almost certainly trillions or quadrillions of individuals working on a tremendous scale, altering and tweaking the flow of time to make society the best society it could be.

The main character is noted as being one of the best Eternals at making the changes out of the entire society. When presented with how to engineer a particular time flow change, he was able to whittle the method of enacting the change from a) killing dozens of people in an accident to b) moving an item on a shelf to another shelf where it would take longer to find. Yes, really. This book is that awesome.

Asimov clearly put quite a lot of thought into things. His consideration of the logistics, methodologies, and the like is superb and complete. The only thing that strikes me as a logic flaw is somewhat critical to the book, but not to the point that it is unreadable. The flaw in question is that women can't become Eternals, supposedly because their leaving history causes greater disruptions in time's flow, and the Eternals are all carefully chosen to avoid that.

Presumably, Asimov's logic had something to do with reproduction, but the removal of a man from a gene pool would probably have a more dramatic effect than the removal of a woman. Think about it. Like it or no, men are more capable of spreading their genetics around than women.

That aside, it's a great book with a brilliant plot twist at the end. To say much more would ruin it.

-Signing off.

Commentary on a Good Book and a Link

(Ah, finally! A new post at the Writing Blog! It's short, but it's enough.)

I recently read The Domino Pattern, the latest novel in the Quadrail series, which I mentioned in this post back during the Alien Invasion theme week I did last July.

I'd do a more typical review of the subject, but reviewing something written by Timothy Zahn is hard. (I do so here, but, well, that's different.) This is mostly because it's hard to explain very much about his work (or any mystery-oriented work) without completely ruining it for any future would-be readers.

I will say I had a blast reading it-I finished it pretty quickly (I could easily have had it sent back to the library first thing the next morning, and I got it somewhat late in the afternoon). I will also add that the time estimates I gave in my previous commentary were greatly exaggerated, as the time they spend on a space train at one point is about a month and a half-but the time is still disproportionate, especially when one considers that they're talking about traveling to the opposite side of the galaxy.

Anyway, good stuff (as if I would say anything else about Zahn's work), and I recommend it.

-Signing off.

Short Book Review and Link

(Here's the Writing Blog post. I talk some about tone.)

As bad as you might think things are where you live, if you live in the United States, chances are you have things pretty good. Heck, if you're reading this, you've got things very good indeed.

Compared, at least, to people who live in the poorer parts of Africa.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is both a sober reminder of this fact and the autobiographical tale of how one young man managed to bring hope and light to his family and community during hard times, despite being forced to drop out of (the frankly already inadequate) school by financial woes, and using his own intelligence to do so.

Using nothing but his trial-and-error learning in electronics and a few science textbooks granted to a local library, William Kamkwamba was able to use junk, scavenged parts, and a few gifts from his friends to build a windmill, a device never before seen in his home country of Malawi, despite famine and hardship.

And he did this by the time he was twenty. (He's only in his early twenties today.)

So, if you want to learn about the harsh parts of Africa in the present, and an uplifting ending, this is a good book.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Reviews: Secret Science Alliance

Every now and again, I end up feeling the need to review something different, such as Secret Science Alliance.

This particular book, or rather graphic novel, is a children's book, and obviously so. (Google it for yourself if you're interested-there's not really a convenient information site that I can find on short order.) I likely wouldn't have seen it, except that my little brother saw it at the library and had to read it.

After glimpsing a few pages of it, I knew I had to read it for myself.

It's definitely written for children. It's over-the-top goofy, simple, and completely straightforward. It's also uncondescending and genuine, in a way that reminds me somewhat of Calvin & Hobbes (though don't look for mildly subversive hidden commentary).

The book is about the adventures of three young students (reputedly Junior High level, though the stubby proportions of two of the three make that mildly dubious) who love science and inventing. Thus, they formed a secret club, partly on the insistence of one of their members who believes that adults will steal their inventions and take credit for them. (This character gives off strong Calvin vibes. These days, that makes me cringe a bit, because with an eight-year-old brother I have a lot of sympathy for parents and teachers, but I'll excuse it here.)

What makes it engaging is the mastery of the comic form that the author displays. It's no wonder that Scott McCloud calls her one of the most innovative voices in the field. Each page displays a craftsmanship that suggests great care, without detracting from the fun of the book.

The most common use of the medium that comes to mind is the use of speech bubbles. Frequently, characters would have conversations of middling to low relevance and secondary importance to another conversation or some image in the scene such as a character's expressions. Rather than simply exclude the speech bubbles entirely, they tend to get covered by other speech bubbles or, more commonly, panel borders.

If I was a college professor teaching a class on the comic medium, this would be a required reading selection in my class.

What more can I really say about it? It's a great little graphic novel that's fun if you like children's adventures along the lines of a non-imaginary Calvin & Hobbes. I must recommend it.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: Wizard World

You ever look at a book and think its title is too generic?

Roger Zelazny's Wizard World, originally published as two novels, Changeling (even more generic!) and Madwand (not actually generic at all) is a book like that.

Further, "Wizard World" isn't actually that appropriate for the work as a whole. Sure, there's magic and junk. And there are plenty of wizards. But that name just doesn't fit.

Changeling is all about two changelings, one from a world like ours and the other from the world that most of the book's action takes place in (the alleged "wizard" world). Madwand is about the one of them originally from the magical world, as he is a "madwand," a wizard who learned magic without training or tutelage, and is thus (since magic is something of an innate talent to him) more skilled and powerful on average than the typical magic user.

But each book is also about something else-wars between primeval forces. (Spoilers ahead; it's rather inevitable.)

In Changeling, the war is between the forces of technology and the forces of magic. In times gone by, there had been one such war in a time now all but forgotten, and it would seem that this war separated the technology and the magic from each other into two worlds (one of which is clearly Earth or a close counterpart of it). Various forces, including the switch of a magically powerful child from the magic world with a technologically inclined child from the technological realm, resulted in technology reasserting itself in the magic world with that child, eventually an adult, as the focal point. (This probably would explain the character's seemingly magical ability to invent devices far beyond the capabilities of the rest of the area, even before he found the ancient storehouse of technology near where he lived.)

In Madwand, the war is between an older, more magical world and the first magic world. What kind of older, more magical world is it?

Here's a hint: You might meet this guy walking down the street there.

As it happens (and this is a bit of world-building I really appreciate), if the greater magic of the older world were to spill over into the younger one, the magic there would get much, much stronger. On the other hand, it would be proportionately harder to control. In effect? Only madwands, who are rather rare, would be able to use magic in the new world that resulted.

I'd recommend, if you read this book, that you read the two parts in rapid succession. Changeling is rather depressing; Madwand has a satisfying ending. And with that said, I'd also recommend the book itself heartily if you like fantasy that isn't quite in the traditional mold.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Review: A Meeting With Medusa

I've never been prone to picking "favorite authors." If I like something, I like it; if I don't, I don't. I decide how I like things on a case by case basis. It takes a lot of consistently good work from someone for me to proclaim that I like "their work."

I mention this merely because I've never really liked Arthur C. Clarke. Sure, he's a giant of science fiction and all that, but his work is generally too cerebral and a bit too arrogant for my own personal tastes. (There's a discussion penned by Clarke on how an alien might look here. It operates under some odd assumptions, the primary one being that intelligent aliens would naturally be more efficient than ourselves. It also insisted that the human hand was good enough that it was okay to anthropomorphize it when designing aliens. That's an odd set of assumptions to play against each other.) If you disagree, that's fine-you get to decide what your tastes are. But Clarke's works aren't quite to mine.

A Meeting with Medusa, however, is a Clarke story that plays to his strengths, and is definitely my favorite such.

Why? If nothing else, it's a first contact story that created the entire modern concept of what life on a gas giant would be like. If nothing else, that would be enough to secure it a place in my own personal literary canon.

What really makes it work is that it's a simple voyage of discovery. It's not about bizarre, high-falutin' concepts like ascension to godhood and contact with things we can't understand. In this story, a man goes into space, goes to Jupiter, and then meets some aliens. How smart they are or aren't isn't much gone into, but that's not important-it's just first contact, after all. (And it's hard to hold a conversation with a mile-long sky jelly that's possibly trying to eat you.)

There's an element of transhumanism in the story; that is to say, in a surprise reveal at the end (sorry for the spoilers), we learn that the pilot was a cyborg who was so extensively modified he moved around on wheels. It was his opinion that mankind couldn't own the stars, and that only fully sapient mechanical intelligences could manage to survive and prosper in deep space. (His argument is probably sound, all things considered.) It's a bit of a downer, really, but that's probably the other reason I'm not a huge fan of Clarke's. (Give me Asimov any day.)

A strong story all around, and one I'd recommend reading if you can find it.

On a side note: The cover on Wikipedia is for the same version I own. Ironically, the printing I have, at least, has a printing error that attributes authorship to Kim Stanley Robinson (whose book Green Mars was co-printed as a "double" book with it).