February’s podcast stories, all read by Kate Baker, consist of:

Torquing Vacuum by Jay Lake

I have very mixed reactions to Jay Lake‘s stories. When they haven’t worked, they really haven’t worked. But sometimes he gets really inventive and I’m just suckered right in. You know, like a tentacle just grabbed me.

But oddly, while Torquing Vacuum wasn’t particularly inventive, I still liked it. A starship mechanic working on a job for a V.I.P. is forced to take a rest after zoning out on the job. During his break, he gets a little nooky from a hot young pretty but not too bright boy toy on the station. But on waking up in the morning, he’s got a call from high mucky mucks and is in trouble for reasons he doesn’t know but suspects have to do with his late night dalliance.

I won’t spoil the cause of the trouble, but you’ve probably seen it told before. I didn’t actually figure it out until the revelation, but at that point I thought Ah! This all fits! It’s a comforting plot because it’s so familiar.

Audio version of Torquing Vacuum

The Language of the Whirlwind by Lavie Tidhar

One nice thing about listening to fiction podcasts is that I can learn how to pronounce authors names correctly. I own Lavie Tidhar‘s anthology The Apex Book of World S.F. and read the Tidhar co-edited World S.F. News Blog because I’m trying to read more diversely (though I haven’t yet gotten to the anthology, a curse of owning 900+ unread books). His name is one of the more buzzed about names in the last year or two, but it isn’t Anglo-Saxon enough for me to intuitively know how to pronounce it. Kate Baker saves me from putting my foot in my mouth (in one way at least) if I ever meet the man.

The Language of the Whirlwind is set in a post-apocalyptic Tel Aviv, cut off from the rest of the world by black mountains or a wall of some sort. A volcano of some sort has arisen in the center of the the city, and people are killed when they try to ascend. Possibly sentient giant dust devils periodically sweep in from the Mediterranean and carry people away. People scrabble by on rats and scavenged food and goods, while some assemble into gangs that enslave anyone unfortunate enough to be unable to fight back. Among the ruins, one man copes by becoming a priest of a new religion revealed to him alone. This is his story and the story of a boy who follows him with a whistle.

I liked this story more than I did Tidhar’s story in Interfictions 2, but it was still out there enough that I was really confused as to what was going on. There’s so many moving parts, and most of them have little explanation. I was constantly trying to figure out in my head what each of these things really was. Is that a volcano that appeared? possibly not. Who is this fireman that the priest keeps talking about? What are these whirlwinds? What’s happened to the rest of the world? The questions might not even really be that important, but I couldn’t stop wondering about them. Sometimes I like stuff that has unanswered questions, but in this case they seemed to pull me in so many different directions that I never really got a point from the story.

Audio version of The Language of the Whirlwind

Non-Zero Probabilities by N.K. Jemisin

Ms. Jemisin has received a lot of buzz recently as well. Orbit Books just released her debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. And Non-Zero Probabilities made the final ballot for the Nebula Awards in the short story category. It’s the first time I’ve read Jemisin, and I love the story. I have a copy of her novel and am looking forward to reading it after hearing this.

Adele lives in New York City. It’s a New York City almost exactly like our current New York City, except that sometime in the recent past probability was altered so that unlikely events became much more likely. Basically, the bell curve has been flattened somewhat. Just in New York City.

One of my fascinations is how people respond to statistics, numbers and risk. Bruce Schneier, for instance, constantly harps on how people overvalue the risks involved with unlikely but specific events. For instance, we (as an American society) are much more scared of a terrorist attack like at the World Trade Center than we are of car accidents. Yet Americans living in the U.S. are at least 12 times more likely to die in a car accident than they are of dying in an incident of terrorism.

So here we have a New York City where dice roll double ones repeatedly, trains derail, and people win the lottery out of proportion. Some people can’t handle it; they leave. Others flock to the city hoping for a one in a million miracle cure. Others, like Adele, adjust. She carries lucky items with her for protection, and avoids one in a million events. But unlikely things aren’t all bad (such as the miracle cures), so she stays in the city. Also, it’s New York City.

Audio version of Non-Zero Probabilities

Bugs in the Arroyo by Steven Gould

Episode 004 contains Steven Gould‘s Bugs in the Arroyo, narrated (I think) by the author. According to Gould’s comment on Tor.com, this is an excerpt from a new novel.

The southwest has been overrun by bugs, little machines that feed on metal to create copies of themselves. They can’t stand water, which is why they haven’t spread past the southwest. They are swarming things, and if they get excited they’ll go after the iron in a person’s blood. The scene is a girl stuck on a rock in the desert surrounded by bugs. Makes me think of the scene in Tremors, except with these bugs. A bunch of people a distance away have to figure out how to save her. Pretty cool story, and I’ll look for the novel when it comes out.

The Starship Mechanic by Ken Scholes and Jay Lake

Episode 005 has two stories by Ken Scholes and Jay Lake. The two authors sat down together to write these stories in public; each started a story and then they switched after a time to finish the other’s. Here they read their stories. One note to the two of them on reading their work: drink less caffeine! Holy cripes but you guys read fast. My experience is that audio fiction needs to be read at a fairly slow pace to keep up.

The Starship Mechanic is the first story. Pretty good story of Penauch, the first alien on earth, who keeps returning to Borderlands Books to hang out with the narrator. Penauch has the ability to fix just about anything, except himself as it turns out. I liked this.

Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder by Ken Scholes and Jay Lake

Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder is the second story from episode 005. Protagonist is still messed up from the death of his parents on the same day a decade earlier. His therapist robot recommends Wild Blue Yonder, some sort of hallucinogenic drug. This story was very much not my thing. Hell, pretty much any story about therapy won’t be my thing.

The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles by Kij Johnson

Episode 006 is part of The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles, a story from Kij Johnson about a cat. A semi-homeless cat. Johnson’s work can be hit or miss for me. I liked 26 Monkeys, Also The Abyss, but thought The Fox Woman was kind of slow and fairly pointless. And so I felt about this story too, until going back to the web site to prepare this post. I hadn’t realized the podcast only has half the story. So I wouldn’t listen to this podcast until Tor.com posts a second half. If they do.

Catch ’Em in the Act by Terry Bisson

Episode 007 has Terry Bisson reading his story Catch ’Em in the Act. Loved this story, and loved the narration. The two previous Bisson stories I’ve read had a very similar feel. Understated plots with a twist. Lou buys a CrimeStoppers video camera on eBay, and finds that when he films people they automatically commit crimes for the camera. Lou uses these filmed scenes for blackmail to build up a group of people around him, because at heart Lou is a lonely guy. Not laugh out loud funny, but still full of scenes that caused me to snicker to myself.

During my workout this morning, I finished listening to the audiobook version of Jay Lake’s Mainspring.

The big selling point for Mainspring is the world Jay Lake has created. The world looks much like earth in the late 1800s. Earth is a mechanical world. Massive brass gears around the equator spin the Earth around the sun on a brass orbital track. Young Hethor of New Haven, Connecticut receives a visit from the Angel Gabriel, telling him that he has to save the world. What follows is a very by-the-book fantasy hero quest, other than the fine world that Hethor explores along the way. It has a somewhat promising beginning, but goes slowly downhill and more or less falls off a cliff by the end.

I thought Jay Lakes characters in Mainspring were pretty deficient. Other than Hethor and his lover Aurelia (sp?), none make more than passing appearances. The book never explains their motivation, and often they do things that make no sense whatsoever. Librarian Childress of Yale, for instance, decides to help Hethor in his quest when respected members of the University (namely the sons of Hethor’s master) accuse him of theft. Later she gives him a password to a secret society that helps him, though why this would be part of their charter remains unexplained. A female hearse driver makes a pass at Hethor, perhaps because he is naively innocent. Hethor declines and that’s the last we see of her. That’s perhaps the biggest drawback of the characterization. After grand entrances, most make quick and quiet exits. Librarian Childress, the hearse driver, a country farmer, numerous navy sailors, a Jade Abbott, numerous correct people and others. In and out.

Plot-wise, Mainspring is kind of a mess as well. While the world Hethor explores is fantastic, Hethor gets thrown into places it seems merely so Jay Lake can show it off. Early on, Hethor gets thrown into a dungeon full of candle people by the Viceroy. Locked underground, these folks make candles all day. Why? Who knows? Later on, after being press-ganged into a naval zeppelin ship, they explore a vertical city on the equatorial wall. An abandoned city. In this case, the explanation is that the ship chases after an a band of the Queen’s army that recently visited the city. No one is there, of course, and just as the army is about to be found, Hethor is snatched away by winged savages.

Are the winged savages, friend or foe? At first, they attack the zeppelin. A later attack has them kidnapping the navigator, and a still later attack they kidnap Hethor. At this point, I thought they might be under the control of the Jade Abbott. But why go to such bloody and elaborate lengths? Hethor’s kidnapping in particular. There is plenty of opportunity for them to get him without a fight. In later chapters, they attack Hethor’s party mercilessly.

Hethor himself is not very likable. He’s whiny. His thoughts are repetitive. Again and again the narrative of his thoughts has him recap events and mantras of the past. Midway through the book, Hethor gains magical powers. Not only does this subvert the mechanical world, but Hethor manages his escapes conveniently. Oh, they are still harrowing, but mostly because Hethor is obstinate and doesn’t think he’s worthy of his role. Until things looks really grim when he turns to his magic and his band survives (after losing a few more people each time). And for the life of me, I can’t tell what the beef is between William of Ghent and Hethor. Rule of thumb over rivalries based on obscure religious canon: use real religions rather than made up ones. It makes it super hard for this reader to care when the moral being fought over has no meaningful analog in my world.

Pretty damn unsatisfying, despite a promising beginning and what could be a fun world to explore.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Bibliophile Stalker
• Fascination Place
• Rev-e-rie
• jasondwittman
• Athenæum
• Orion’s Archive
• Lord of All Fools

Title: Mainspring
Author: Jay Lake
Cover creator: Stephan Martiniere
Series: Mainspring; 1
Imprint / publisher: Macmillan Audio via Audible.com
Format: Audiobook
Length: 13 h., 24 m.
Publication date: December 2007
LC classification: PS3612.A519 M35 2007

Back in January, I wrote about my views on the graphic novel: a worthwhile art form, but not literature as I define it because the primary mode of storytelling in it is visual. I might occasionally put up a review of a graphic novel on this blog because the blog covers books in all their forms. Cookbooks and atlases are rarely literary, and yet I include them. I’m a pragmatist.

In contrast, I consider audiobooks to be literature. While the medium for storytelling is verbal, the transaction between the book and reader is conveyed by the words. The narrator’s skill can add or take away in presentation, but to me the words are equivalent to the written form. The words are what are important to me.

But I’ve never listened to an audiobook before. That’s partially because audiobooks are freakin’ expensive. But it’s also because I have a much harder time focusing on the story. Audiobooks are often played in the background while a busy person does something else. When I read, my full attention is on the pages in front of me. To listen to an audiobook that way, my tasks would need to be so mindless that I my full attention could be devoted to the book.

In listening to METAtropolis, I also determined that not being able to look back a few words, sentences, or paragraph’s detracted from my comprehension. On a page, if I don’t quite get something I could scan back briefly and get that understanding. And my comprehension looking at a word was much better in the first place. I seem to mis-hear things when spoken more frequently than I mis-read as well.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. When my mom lost the use of her hands this summer, I signed her up for Audible.com so we could get some audiobooks for her to listen to. She could operate a laptop with her feet, so Audible was a much better choice than buying CDs. Cheaper too. She left a few unused credits when she died in October, so I selected a few books to use them up. Figured it was a good opportunity to try audiobooks.

First up is METAtropolis. Right now it’s only available through Audible, so this was a perfect opportunity. It’s a shared universe anthology. Two of the five authors (Schroeder and Buckell) are among my recent discoveries. The other three have been on my list to check out for a few months.

In the Forests of the Night by Jay Lake (read by Michael Hogan)

I didn’t really like Michael Hogan’s breathy reading. It seemed overly dramatic to me. Tyger is a mercenary newcomer to Cascadeopolis, an anarchist green commune in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade mountains. Capitalists have targeted the semi-secret community for their intellectual property, which they normally give away freely using open source licenses. Tyger and another operative are under contract to the capitalist, but Tyger has gone rogue. I did not understand the ending to this at all.

Stochasti-city by Tobias Buckell (read by Scott Brick)

In Detroit, a green movement needs help fighting against the Edgewater Company’s private security forces (the police are more or less non-existent) who are trying to prevent them from forcibly make Detroit car-free. Often jobs are done through turking which I believe is a take-off of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, though where they got it I do not know. In this method, anonymous employers split up jobs to anonymous employees who only get to see a little bit of the big picture. Think of hiring 50 movers each to carry one box for you. That sort of thing. The green movement hires Reginald, a former military colonel now working as a bouncer to do part of the work. BUt then he gets sucked in to the plot just a but more. Good story. The legal setup for parts is a bit unbelievable, but I do like the economic landscape described.

The Red in the Sky is Our Blood by Elizabeth Bear (read by Kandyse McClure)

Okay, now I see a formula behind this anthology. Third story in a row of a band of outsiders/reformers trying to live in the margins of a decaying or decayed United States. Outsiders are environmentally conscience kibbutzim type places. Not necessarily a bad premise, but all three stories seem to follow the same general lines. As in, introduce a non-member to the place and use that person as a foil to explain how the kibbutz works. Throw in the newcomer mistrust, and a little conflict where the newcomer can play a key role, and there you have your story. So far, I prefer the Buckell version of the formula.

Utere Nihil… by John Scalzi (read by Alessandro Juliani)

Slacker kid needs to take a placement exam to go out and get a job. Starts off with slacker kid Benji playing the friend role to a girl he really likes, and telling her that her current boyfriend doesn’t really respect her. Job he gets is dealing with pig shit, cause that’s about all there is for someone who screwed around as much as he did. In this story, the insular enclave is not the insurgent group, but instead established St. Louis. And the city is set upon by the have-nots outside the city boundaries. A little different from the other stories but still has a lot of the same feel as them, particularly with Jay Lake’s contribution.

To Hie from Far Cilenia by Karl Schroeder (read by Stefan Rudnicki)

Meh. Schroeder’s contribution is, surprise, a reworking of a lot of the ideas that appeared in Lady of Mazes. Virtual reality. The theme behind METAtropolis overall is that disparate locations, generally cities, are linked together in a much stronger bond than nation-states. Cascadia is a combination of Portland, Seattle, and Portland, across a still extant U.S. and Canada. Citizenship in St. Louis provides privileges to visit cities in Asia and Europe. Schroeder takes it one step further. Every place falls not only within several jurisdictions in real life but also within virtual worlds. Put on glasses and enter overlayed worlds of virtual reality, such as Oversatch. Frankly, there’s a lot of magic happens here to make it work. The basic story is that plutonium has been stolen in the real world by someone who lived in one of these virtual worlds. Gennady is an I.A.E.A. inspector who is hired to help find it, and he must travel through these virtual worlds. I thought the story was pretty underwhelming. Even more so than the other stories, I wasn’t fond of the immense amount of explanation the technology in the story required. It took away from the actual story.

I think the concept behind the anthology is strong, but in execution it lacks a lot. The stories feel very much alike, particularly the first three. All of them rely too much on explication rather than story. In other words, I want my stories to tell the concepts needed, rather than breaks in the story where the narrator steps in to explain the concepts.

In addition, I wasn’t too fond of the actors hired for narration. The hook was that three of them appear on the new Battlestar Galactica series. Way to hook in the geek crowd, but they aren’t great readers. Michael Hogan read extremely breathily, for instance. Stefan Rudnicki (not a B.S.G. actor) was quite excellent though.

Some other blogged reviews:

• Indentured Mind
• Dichroic
• AzureScape

Title: METAtropolis
Editor: John Scalzi
Imprint / publisher: Audible Frontiers
Format: Audiobook
Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
Publication date: 21 October 2008

I don’t know if it’s the steampunk sub-genre or the fact that the publisher is U.K. based, but a lot of the stories in this original anthology have a distinctly British flavor to them. Certainly a Dickens style world lends itself well to steampunk’s low-technology ethos, dark brooding and full of all sorts of intrigues that can serve as a basis for a plot. On the other hand, it starts to feel a bit monotonous after a bit. The last four stories thankfully aren’t Brit themed, but you gotta read a while to get to them (or intersperse them out of order now that you know).

I definitely appreciate getting the chance to read a few authors I haven’t been exposed to prior to this, at least beyond seeing their names mentioned in a few reviews here and there. I think this is my first reading of eight of the twelve authors appearing.

My favorites of the anthology are from Roberts, VanderMeer and Lake. Lovegrove’s Steampunch is a good opener as well. There’s nothing I hated or couldn’t get through, even with Youmans’ confusing Static. I normally hate the stories that confuse me, but this offered other delights. Good to see a fairly new imprint in SF making a name for itself. As they say on EBay, AAA+++.

Steampunch, James Lovegrove

An old hand at a penal colony tells a newcomer his story. He used to train Steampunch, the mechano-boxing legend, before robot fighting was declared illegal. Battlebots with an edge. Decent story.

Static, Marly Youmans

I couldn’t really figure out most of what’s going on here. There’s a lot of electricity in the air. Not tension. Electricity. And a woman abuses and/or treats poorly her ward, her grand-niece. On the good side though, Youmans uses some great metaphors in the story. Nothing was thrown away at The Towers, so time accumulated its sediments inside hatboxes and wardrobes. Great stuff. If only I understood what was going on.

Speed, Speed the Cable, Kage Baker

Saboteurs scheme to destroy the Trans-Atlantic cable before it’s even been laid. Counter-schemers plot to prevent this from happening so their secret world domination plans aren’t disrupted. Kind of eh, but not bad.

Elementals, Ian R. MacLeod

I’ve never much been fond of Law of Attraction kinds of things. I’m a born skeptic. If science ever shows that it’s true, I’ll gladly go along. But until then, it’s a lot of hooey (like most of the anti-Obama bull-crap that right-wing ignoramuses spout on blogs and chain email). Elementals is a law of attraction kind of story. Not that MacLeod believes it (I’ve no evidence either way), but it’s mere presence as the unifying theme of the story biases me against it (like it did against a similarly premised Ursula K. Le Guin story from an anthology). The premise here is that elementals are energy spirits that can inhabit people or things and provide them a life of their own. The key this time is that people have to believe in them for them to be effective (or at least believe in their effect, kind of like a self-additive bubble). The scientist who has discovered them and determined a process to use/enhance them can’t convince people his theory is sound, and so he falls by the wayside because no one believes in his elemental self. To sum up, eh.

Machine Maid, Margo Lanagan

I could see where this story was headed fairly soon in, so there’s a strike against it. On the other hand, Lanagan wrote something that affected me in a way that doesn’t happen all that often. She wrote a character that I really dislike, but also one for whom I felt a lot of sympathy. Mr. Goverman owns a remote Australian tract of land, and moves there with his wife (the story is about her) to better track his investments in nearby gold mining. Mrs. Goverman hates sex, and detests contact with her husband. Then she discovers that the electric maid, Clarissa, has functionality to service male owners. I dislike the character for being both insufferable and a prude. And I sympathize with her for accepting/allowing that which she so clearly hates as well as her distaste for her position in general that she feels forced into by society. The plot isn’t anything to write home about, but the character and some of the moral implications are quite interesting.

Lady Witherspoon’s Solution, James Morrow

I don’t doubt that Morrow’s tale is a take off on Hitler’s Final Solution what with references to Nietzsche spread throughout the text. In the satire, Morrow not only spoofs 19th century feminism but also the Nietzschean übermensch. A couple of spots in the story made me laugh here sitting in my favorite coffee shop. And that ain’t easy to do.

Hannah, Keith Brooke

The intro by Nick Gevers says Hannah is about medical ethics gone bad. Seemed more like a garden variety cloning story to me.

Petrolpunk, Adam Roberts

An alternate reality version of steampunk. Featuring a writer Adam Roberts and an editor Nick Gevers in a world where steam technology continued to be dominant because of a Compound that is added to water to lower the boiling point to 40° C. Of course, Compound is also toxic. But from an alternate reality comes other people who want to steal the petroleum and ship it through dimensional gates to their petroleum based worlds. Quite good, even if I really am tired of British themed stories at this point.

American Cheetah, Robert Reed

Finally a non-British theme! Robot Abraham Lincoln faces off with robot Jesse James gang. Reminded me a little too much of Asimov’s robot stories for me to go hey neat. That and there’s already been a couple of robot stories in the anthology. I prefer the less intelligent versions of Steampunch or Machine Maid if we’re going to have a steampunk story. Again, it’s not bad. But it didn’t stand out either.

Fixing Hanover, Jeff VanderMeer

Another robot story, but this one stood out for me. Not quite sure why. I liked the interplay between Daniker, Lady Salt, and jealous Blake. The steampunk aspect isn’t the important part of the story, though it adds spice. Though it could use a better title.

The Lollygang Save the World on Accident, Jay Lake

I’ve generally been a sucker for created worlds. I don’t mean world-building, though that is nice and has a part in created worlds. I mean artificial worlds, like ringworld, or Dyson spheres, or the smoke ring, or Virga. But they don’t have to be space-based. I loved the Linear City. This story features a created world consisting of a very large Pipe of indeterminate size. Where is it? Doesn’t matter. Could be in space. Could be on a planet somewhere. People live in decks inside. It’s been created by beings as an experiment, and most likely left to rot. Many parts of it lay disused and in disrepair. Unused communications devices. Pipes and tanks with unknown fluids. Totally awesome! The Lollygang (which is as you might think from the name, a youth gang), come across Gloves which let them perform feats unimaginable in their world. “Magically” opening locks and whatnot. Not really sure what they can do, and for once I didn’t care that I didn’t know. But the gloves have a way of taking over. Sounds contrived when I write it out, but it really works in the story.

The Dream of Reason, Jeffrey Ford

I believe Jeffrey Ford is the author that told me to kill myself this summer. And you all thought I was cranky one on the internet! The Dream of Reason is a good story about one man’s scientific experiments to determine the composition of stars. His theory, if he slows light enough eventually diamond dust will fall off it. Dust picked up by bouncing off far away stars. But how to slow it down enough? And how to build a big enough device to conduct the experiment (it’s like a steampunk version of the Large Hadron Collider!).

Solaris Books provided this mass-market edition of Extraordinary Engines free of charge through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. In return for a free copy, I am obligated to post a 25 word (or longer) review on LibraryThing. This entailed no other obligations.

Title: Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology
Editor: Nick Gevers
Cover creator: Adrian Wood (photo) / Alex CF (artwork)
Imprint / publisher: Solaris
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 441 p.
Publication date: September 2008
ISBN-10: 1-84416-634-1
ISBN-13: 978-1-84416-634-3