Benjamin J Newland

Market Forces by Richard K. Morgan


I have half a dozen books by Richard K. Morgan on my shelves already. I’ve previously reviewed his sci-fi series that begins with Altered Carbon, a novel that reads like the illegitimate love child of Dashiell Hammett and Philip K. Dick. I haven’t yet tried to review The Steel Remains because I’m not sure how to do so without putting an NC-17 rating on the plot outline alone.

Market Forces is set in the near future, in a world that extrapolates the worst of free-market capitalism into a dystopia where road rage is a sanctioned way to climb the brutal corporate ladder. The story is set in a London where the haves are separated from the have-nots by razor wire and automatic weapons, and only high ranking executives can afford a tank of gas. Morgan’s prose is graphic and gripping, and he takes what—in lesser hands—could be a trite and tired “big corporations are evil” premiss and transforms it into something compelling, believable, and interesting. Even at the end of the story there are no clean places of black or white, just some very bloody shades of grey.

Like all of Morgan’s work, Market Forces is full of sex and violence to the point where the word “amoral” starts stomping on your frontal cortex. At least in this novel the sex is mostly separate from the violence; in fact, there is a pretty fascinating subplot about marital monogamy running through the main character’s life. Yet this kind of amoral violence is so common in popular entertainment any more that I almost want to recommend Morgan’s brand of amorality as a corrective to the kind pedaled by your average summer blockbuster. Yes, there is horrific violence, both intimate and disconnected, but nobody makes lighthearted quips or offers corny one-liners after a death or maiming. The impact of the violence is inscribed on the souls of those perpetrating it and observing it, and the story engages the suffering in a way that feels authentic to me.

One final side note for my friends who study writing craft: Morgan does something odd with periods in this novel. I read a digital library copy of Market Forces on an eReader, and maybe these were just mistakes in the digitization of the text, but sometimes he’d put a period where I would think a comma should have been and the next word wouldn’t be capitalized. In other places he’d put a period after the penultimate word in a sentence, then capitalize the final word and give it it’s own period. As far as I can recall this always happened in dialogue, so I think he was going for an inflection or speech pattern. If so, I think I liked it, after I got used to it. I’d be interested in someone else’s thoughts.

So, if you like Richard K. Morgan’s other work, I think you’ll like Market Forces. If you don’t read much fantasy or science fiction, this might be the best place for you to try the author out, as it feels much more like a near-contemporary novel—a corporate thriller perhaps—than his other work. If you don’t care for excessive swearing or graphic violence, maybe leave this one alone. I picked up a nice clean young adult urban fantasy novel to read next, just to cleanse the palette, you know?

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Ready Player One by Ernest Cline


A blast from the past, set in the future.

Whoa. I know. You’re mind, is like, totally blown.

Here’s most of what you need to know: The author photo on the inside back leaf shows him leaning against a DeLorean. Which he owns. Yeah, that kind of book.

This is a debut work for Ernest Cline, and honestly, if it hadn’t been on the New Fiction shelf at my library (and thus, free) I might not have picked it up. It sounds so gimmicky. Granted, it’s a gimmick that appeals to me, so that helped.

The set-up goes like this: a computer genius spends his teen years in the 1980s. Due to a complete lack of social skills, he spends all his time writing computer games and playing D&D. This earns him a ton of money. He goes on to create a massively multiplayer online roleplaying environment that begins as a game, but as the world falls apart becomes almost everyones favorite alternative to reality. Kids go to school in this virtual environment, all media and entertainment run through it, etc.

The story opens, somewhere in the 2040s, with his death. Having no heirs, he puts up his vast fortune as a prize for the ultimate game. A single clue is given. For five years people try to solve the clue and fail, knowing only that an in-depth knowledge of the 80s, with which the deceased was obsessed, will be necessary.

It’s a good set-up, with lots of candy for someone like me, who shares a certain nostalgic fondness for 1980s games and culture. And yet, that wouldn’t be enough. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be. The story stands alone, and I suspect you could enjoy it without caring about the 1980s, though that’s a hard premise for me to test objectively. I really enjoyed the main characters, and the theme of under-resourced independent freelancers vs. over-wealthy, win-at-all-costs corporate drones fits the story well and is handled more gently than you might expect. Subplots (a romantic line and a reality vs. fantasy line) mesh nicely and fill out the story well.

Highly recommended to anyone in my age-bracket, though I’d particularly like to hear from someone who isn’t and read the book anyways.

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The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson


I discovered Brandon Sanderson’s work in 2009, and not in the usual way (by reading his postmortem completion of Robert Jordan’s monstrosity). In Elantris, a standalone novel, I found his creativity within the realms of fantasy to be amazing. In his Mistborn: The Final Empire trilogy he proved he could sustain such creativity over an impressive number of pages. Besides his apparently bottomless supply of innovative magical systems, most fascinating to me was the way he completed an entire story in the eponymous first book of the Mistborn trilogy, only to have the entire novel be a kind of subtle critique of storytelling in general. At the end of book one the hero has triumphed, the evil emperor is cast down, and we all realize that the emperor wasn’t that evil and that killing him has just screwed the world big-time. It’s like the Rebel Alliance finally managed to kick Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine’s asses only to discover that hey, maybe they weren’t doing such a bad job of ruling the universe after all. Oops.

Anyhow, I was in Bellevue the other day keeping myself occupied during a snow storm while my lovely wife practiced for an upcoming concert. Wandering the shelves at Barnes & Nobel, I chanced upon the New Fiction shelf and found to my delight that Brandon Sanderson had a new novel out, and that it was set in the world of Mistborn.

After choking up an entirely too-large wad of cash (seriously B&N, I like your stores, and you served me well that day, but neither of those things is worth what has essentially become a 50% markup over the now-normal price for a book), I set-to reading the cover materials. It seems that even when returning to one of his already established worlds, Sanderson can’t help getting creativity all over everything.

The Alloy of Law indeed takes place in the world of Mistborn, in the very same city in fact, but 300 years have passed since the world-altering events that ended the original trilogy. Some of the magic of that original world remains, but some has been lost. And time marches on, of course, so that what was once a creative re-take on standard sword-and-sorcery fantasy has become a unique mash-up of western and steam-punk settings. It’s not tongue-in-cheek Victoriana by any stretch, and the setting works in support of and service to the story as it should. Still, I like me some railroads and gaslamps and was thrilled to see Sanderson treat the genre to his particular madness.

The novel ends satisfactorily, but leaves plenty of room for more in the same vein. Here’s hoping Sanderson taps that vein again soon.

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Rule 34 by Charles Stross


I looked at the cover of this book a long time, once I'd picked it up off the "new fiction" shelf at the Puyallup Library. I was having cover deja vu—couldn't remember the story when I read the jacket material, but it looked so familiar. I ended up taking it home based mostly on the blurb where the author was praised as a "master of the near-future." Near future sci-fi is very hit-or-miss for me, so I was curious about what mastery in the niche genre read like.

I'm recommending this book mostly because I want someone else to read it and tell me what the hell...? I'm a pretty astute reader; I've had lots of practice. This one, however, left my brain spinning, and I can't decide if that was on purpose or not. I enjoyed it. Glad I read it. Still not sure if the author mismanaged his (admittedly) complex plot or if I just couldn't keep up. Someone let me know.

Meantime, let me tell you something about this novel that is, in my experience, almost completely unique: this novel is written in the second person.

[Technical note, since even my really smart friends are asking: 1st person is the "I" perspective, 3rd person is the "he/she" perspective. Both common in novels. 2nd person is the "you" perspective, as in "You walk into the room and smell blood, which is how most of your Mondays begin, now that you think about it." The only other books I can think of that do this are the Choose Your Own Adventure books I read as a kid. Can you think of another?]

Of course I noticed the 2nd person perspective right away, and was aware of it throughout. This isn't a great sign, novelistically speaking; you'd rather people notice your story and not your writing. And yet, is it even possible to write in the 2nd person and not have it be constantly noticed? It's just way too rare.

My second concern was that the author had done this just to stand out. I can understand the impulse, having studied the publishing context the past couple years. The more I read though, the more I thought it worked. I'm pretty tolerant of oddity in novels, so your experience may differ, but I liked it, if only for the variety.

The author doesn't pull a single punch either. He's already made you uncomfortable by choosing this unusual perspective, but then he piles on by writing multiple points of view. Not only are you being forced to experience the novel as one of the main characters, your are being forced to adopt the perspective of different main characters each chapter as the author rotates through his approximately three POV characters.

How can there be approximately three main characters? Damn good question, because he's not done messing with you yet. First you're forced into the odd 2nd person perspective, then you're forced into a multiple POV situation, THEN he makes the characters people you probably can't identify with. First chapter I'm a lesbian cop with career issues, second chapter I'm a bisexual muslim man with a family, third chapter I'm a predatory psychopath on meds. And there is no shortage of graphic scenes to illustrate these different life-choices. Let me tell you, as a Standard White Male, all of this required some serious mind-bending.

The approximate part comes in when you realize over the course of the early chapters that there is some kind of maybe-artificial-maybe-guided computer intelligence at work, and occasionally there's a chapter from that perspective that isn't clearly identified. Three main characters? Four? You have to finish the book to find out.

There's a lot going on here. It may be that you'll find the novel a failure as a work of literary entertainment, but you've got to appreciate the madness involved in even attempting such a thing. I may buy a copy just so I can have this conversation every time someone stands in front of my bookshelves.


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Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn


Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares is a straight up romance—no zombies, no steampunk, no paranormal creatures or unlikely technologies of any sort. I was a little startled by this, as I generally am, for how did such a book slip through my normality thwarting defensive screen? Ah well, I’m glad it did.

Dash & Lily is an interesting book from a craft perspective. The story is dual protagonist first person. The chapters alternate, one from Dash’s point of view and the next from Lily’s. Each of the kids write the story from their own standpoint, so while it’s a first person story, you don’t get that feeling you sometimes get with this POV of being trapped with a pretty narrow outlook.

The piece of writing skill that makes this work is that Dash and Lily have very distinct voices. I never once had to flip back to the head of a chapter to remember who was telling me the story. Of course, this is a coauthored work and the authors admit that they each wrote one kid, which might be cheating.

The kids themselves are completely likeable. They’re well rounded characters, if I had to put it so unromantically, with all the character flaws and redeeming qualities you could want. Dash is a linguaphile, and his dialogue shows it, though his narration isn’t overburdened with big words just for the sake of it. Lily is a bit sheltered, but she knows it, and her actions reflect that wonderfully.

The voices in this novel are enchanting; Dash & Lily resonate with an ironic self awareness that reminded me of the best of the Juno dialogue, and the supporting characters are varied and engaging as well.

The plot centers around a theme that literary folks are likely to drool over. The set-up takes place in a famous Manhattan bookstore, much of the story unfolds on the pages of a Moleskin journal, and the climax involves a print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, all twenty volumes of it.

Really, really enjoyed this.





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Dreadnought by Cherie Priest


I read Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker last year and really liked it. Then I ran into her at Steamcon, which was cool. I started following her on twitter last week (@cmpriest), and that lady has some funny going on. So I bought Dreadnought without having read it first, a breach of policy granted only to my most trusted authors. It was not a mistake.

Dreadnought is actually the third book in The Clockwork Century series, though the second, Clementine, is by a different publisher, and at 200ish pages is more of a hefty novella than a full scale novel of Boneshaker/Dreadnought proportions. Clementine is already out of print, or so I gather by the ridiculous prices for used copies on Teh Amazonz. I bought a Kindle edition and am trying to resurrect my 1st gen device to read it on, though I’m going to miss the book design of the other novels—brown ink!

All this is apropos of nothing, except that these are stories embedded in the lovingly textured Civil War era steampunk world that Priest has constructed. It’s a world I can heartily recommend to you, for where else shall you encounter airship pirates, canon bestrewn train engines, and a zombie infested Seattle, all in the same story?

My favorite thing about Priest’s novels are the leading ladies. I made this same comment on Boneshaker, and she’s done it again, possibly even better. Vinita “Mercy” Lynch is absolutely a woman of her era, and yet…

[I’ve written and deleted several strings of adjectives here.]

She’s really just a great character, and I’d like you to meet her. If you’re at all interested in alternate history and/or steampunk as genres, you’d be doing yourself a huge favor to get with Cherie Priest and her protagonists.


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