Microreview [book]: Beacon 23, by Hugh Howey

An excellent spacemance!

Howey, Hugh. Beacon 23. Broad Reach Publishing: 2015.

Buy the complete novel here (I also recommend the audio-book).

“Spacemance (n): a romance tale cloaked in a robust veneer of space opera.”

Can an ex-jarhead learn to love? I’d say the answer to that, a la Avatar, is a resounding “yes”, and Hugh Howey agrees based on the content of Beacon 23. And more importantly, he crafts a story that works both as romance and as space opera (with hundreds of millions of lives on the line, no less).

I only picked this up to read/review because of my fondness for several, if not quite all, of Howey’s other books, particularly Wool. That is to say, if someone pitched me a “The Notebook…but in space, and without the whole forgetting who the guy is thing!”, I don’t think I’d really have been sold. But Howey works considerable magic into this tale, which might well be his most poetically written yet. It’s an elegant mix of crass interiority and beautiful turns of descriptive phrase, painful honesty about (and from) the unlikely hero and tremendously empathetic passages that one can hardly read without growing a little teary-eyed.

If we’re being honest, I blubbered a bit myself here and there during the story, and was forcefully struck by the beauty of certain passages, and by the powerful recurring metaphor of the space beacon-as-lighthouse, and the mysterious painting showing either a wise person resigned to a terrible fate or a fool with no clue about what is coming. Needless to say, the main character is revealed to be both the wise man and the fool, both worthy of love and desperately in need of it.

But here’s the best aspect of this spacemance: the being both worthy of and in need of love character trait/flaw turns out to be the very quality the Other is trying to find, and the only thing that can, perhaps, bring an end to the cycle of interspecies warfare. To quote another Hugh(ie), it’s the power of love!

I’m sure all that sounds cheesy, but remember how beautifully Howey crafts the story and you’ll begin to understand why it’s such a success. He’s created one of his most compelling characters yet, and arguably his most beautiful and emotionally evocative story. Fortunately or unfortunately, the story is also complete (like the first Matrix movie was complete), and can’t really accommodate a sequel (yes, all you Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions fans, I’m saying what you think I’m saying: those movies were as unnecessary as they were crapitudinous).

In conclusion, if you like beautifully written romantic stories set in space, then it’s safe to say Beacon 23 is for you!

The Math:

Objective assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for raising the beauty of his writing to a new level, +1 for creating one of his best characters yet

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 “Space + romance = where do I sign up?”

[‘That’s a pretty low score for such an enthusiastic review, isn’t it?’ Answer: ‘no.’]










Zhaoyun has been sniffling through many a spacemance since joining Nerds of a Feather as a regular contributor in 2013.

Microreview [book]: I, Zombie, by Hugh Howey

Like Warm Bodies but without the Funny

Buy it here.

 

Howey, Hugh. I, Zombie. Broad Reach Publishing, 2012.

Don't like exceedingly visceral descriptions of death by zombie? Then perhaps you should give this book a miss. I decided to listen to the audio version rather than read this, thinking the vignette style would be perfect for my bit-at-a-time-while-making-dinner (etc.) listening practices, and I'm still not sure whether I was right and the audio format is best suited to the story/structure, or I did the book a disservice and would've liked it (even) more if I'd just read it like a normal person.

Howey presents us with quite a gory series of encounters between zombies and their (mostly) hapless victims, but with a twist that separates this tale from the vast majority of zombie stories out there: it's a zombie-eye perspective. That's right, we see the world filtered through their hunger for braaaains (and all the viscera, as it turns out). Yet that's not all—we are also treated to the horrified observations, via internal monologue, of the people these zombies used to be, aghast at what their bodies are doing.

If I had to choose one song that best characterizes the strange situation these people-yet-zombies are in, it's definitely Metallica's "One" (the know the 'one', right? haha!). That's because they're definitely locked in, *almost* entirely unable to influence their zombie bodies' behavior and certainly powerless to resist the hunger for other humans. This is a curious coincidence for me personally, as the next book I will review here at Nerds of a Feather is Scalzi's "Lock In", about a very different and rather more optimistic version of locked-in syndrome.

Strange as it may sound to say, this might be, despite the gore, Howey's most beautifully written book (so far). Some of the descriptions of what each zombie is doing (and what each former person thinks of these actions) are exquisite, not in the florid, yanking-on-the-heartstrings melodramatic way but with the staccato beauty of Hemingway. And parts of it, where Howey suggests the new reality these people experience being locked inside zombies might not quite be as final and irrevocable as they think, have deliciously chilling implications for human nature: if you were bitten, and then felt a very powerful urge to chomp on the hapless idiot standing next to you, of course the most appealing interpretation of the messy result would be that you had no choice, that you were powerless next to that mighty hunger...but what if, instead of being truly powerless, it was simply very difficult to resist the compulsion to snack on your neighbor—and you chose not to fight it? Howey may be hinting, here, that some of us might experience a rather smoother transition to zombiehood than we might want to believe.

Despite all that recommends it, I ultimately couldn't connect with this particular story (or format) quite as well as Howey's more straightforward sci fi adventure stories like Wool or Sand (both of which we've reviewed here). Perhaps that is because of my slavish desire for a mostly sympathetic or at least tough as nails protagonist with whom I can (in my dreams!) identify, a feature that is certainly missing from this vignette-style panorama of zombiedom. Or perhaps I should've read this rather than listened to it (the endless descriptions of evisceration by teeth did get to me, I'd wager, more by listening to another human being narrating them than they would if I could just scan the page and potentially skip over the gore). Whatever the reason, for this reviewer, at least, I, Zombie, while intriguing and certainly worth reading (listening to!), can't measure up to Howey's best work.

 The Math

Objective assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for reanimating the zombie genre with an interesting if horrifying speculation on what would happen to people whose bodies are zombified; +1 for the hauntingly beautiful descriptions

Penalties: -1 for the vignette approach (though, admittedly, I can't really think of a better method to tell this sort of story, as any one zombie would have a difficult time sustaining reader/listener interest as a traditional protagonist)

Nerd coefficient: 7/10 "An enjoyable (if gory!) experience, but not without its flaws"

[We use a bell-curve scoring system in which very high or low scores are exceedingly rare, meaning a 7/10, while not earth-shattering, is quite a good score: see here for details.]

Brought to you by Zhaoyun, zompire aficionado and NoaF jedi knight (or at least Paduan apprentice, though in the interests of full disclosure, I've never even been to Padua!) since 2013.

Microreview [book]: Sand, by Hugh Howey

Wool for Scuba Diving Enthusiasts!

Howey, Hugh. Sand.  Broad Reach Publishing, 2014.

Buy the e-book omnibus (when did that word stop meaning just 'bus', anyway?) edition here.

You know when you're diving, and as you sink slowly down, you feel the pressure start to build, and build, until even just 25 meters down or so, you feel a glimmer of understanding of the essential fragility of human life? Well (Hugh Howey asks), what if you could do the same thing in sand?

Meet the eponymous story. The decidedly post-apocalyptic (probably nuclear holocaust in the distant-ish past?) setting of Colorado is covered in mighty dunes, drowned in a dry ocean of sand. The pre-cataclysm world is still reachable, though, to those who have mastered the art of sand-diving, which sounds more or less like scuba diving plus some sophisticated technological telekinesis (divers 'tell' the sand to move with a thought via their special diving suits, and voila! Move it does). And (especially metal) artifacts buried under hundreds of meters of sand are beyond price (which is just a fancy way of saying they're worth a lot) in the crappy new world, which is why divers risk running out of air mid-dive and asphyxiating in the middle of a sand dune, or otherwise expiring during the tremendously dangerous course of a dive.

If this is all sounding awesome...it is, let me assure you. Howey has spun together a mesmerizing tale here, one that contains many of the elements that made the Wool series so riveting. Beyond the obvious similarities like the setting in post-apocalyptic America, there is also the sense that the main characters, as in Wool, tremble on the edge of mind-blowing discoveries about the nature of their world, and might have the tools to remake that world to be more just and equitable. (Man, it's getting hard to say anything else without dropping a tornado of spoilers all over you, dear reader!)

Naturally, there are plenty of important differences to Howey's other work. First of all, this particular story is all about a family, one that has experienced especially harsh swings of fortune from giddy heights to dismal lows, and thus one that (to paraphrase Rick!) is like every other family, only more so. Each of the siblings, as well as certain other family members, seems critically important to this still inchoate quest to right the world's wrongs (though methodologically they take less a Gandhi so much as a (for those of you who know UHF!) "Gandhi 2" approach!), and I'm quite certain we'll be hearing more about each of them in the (by this reader, at least) eagerly anticipated sequels.

As sci fi goes, Sand feels more far-fetched than Wool, in the sense that I can totally believe a) someone might someday build (assuming they haven't already!) some huge silos to save people in the event of a cataclysm, and b) that said cataclysm might someday happen, whereas with Sand, it's harder to speculate what the scientific explanation could be for why the old world's covered in hundreds of meters of sand, or the pseudo-mystical mechanism of the sand-diving suits. Does this greater difficulty in suspending disbelief negatively impact one's enjoyment of the story? Not really—after all, sand-diving is such a cool idea I'm prepared to let Howey run with the concept, however wacky, and that's partly because (in this ever-more-complicated metaphor) Howey is such a good runner! Stylistically, that is, Howey only appears to be getting even better, with great dialogue, and sporadically wonderful descriptions (sometimes of a strange and lyrical beauty, like Tolkien pared down to Hemingway-level pithiness).

So, the bottom line: is Sand worth reading? Absolutely, for anyone who has the slightest interest in post-apocalyptic fiction (and quite a wide range of others, I would imagine!). Is Sand better than Wool? Not quite, but perhaps that's just the first bite is sweetest problem: if you find a great bakery (or wherever) and sink your teeth into a fantastic cake (or whatever), better than practically anything you've ever tasted in all of cake-dom, even if the next cake from that same place is just as good or even better, how can it really compete with that first endorphin rush?

The Math:

Objective assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for scintillating storytelling and an intriguing (if improbable-sounding) premise

Penalties: -1 for the improbable-soundingness of it all

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 "Well worth your time and attention"

[I know what you're thinking: "Only an 8?" But as you can see here, an 8 at Nerds of a Feather is like a 10/10 most other places; we only go to 9 for a tiny handful of mind-blowing masterpieces, and to 10 practically never (our 10 corresponds perfectly, in fact, to Spinal Tap's 11!]

The opinions elucidated herein are solely those of Zhaoyun, sf/f nerd-junkie extraordinaire and Opinionator at Nerds of a Feather since 2013, and should not be taken to reflect the views of Nerds of a Feather's megacorporation owner (everybody's got some (corporate)body, am I right?) or its fat-cat investors, or indeed anyone else in the entire world except those rare few with the same taste as yours truly.