Battle of the Books, Fall 2012, First Semifinal :: Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson vs. The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Final Four of the belated Fall 2012 Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books begins with Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson against The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi. The book I most want to continue reading after 100 pages will reach the championship round.

Further: Beyond the Threshold: 47North trade paperback, May 2012, 343 pages, cover art by Marcel Clemens & Algol. Further reached the semifinals by defeating Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson in the first round and Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy in the second round.

Ramachandra Jason (RJ) Stone is from our near-future, after Earth was devastated by a meteor strike. Stone was the captain of the first interstellar voyage, but the suspended animation system malfunctioned, and now he has been woken 12,000 years in the future. Most of the opening sections of Further consist of him looking around this strange far-future universe, in which humans, post-humans, and AIs have settled in a myriad of wolds, most connected to each other by wormhole gate. In the second 50-page section, he travels with his eagle-shaped AI guide to a world populated by "anachronists," to whom Stone is a great celebrity. There Stone meets Xerxes 298.47.29A, an envoy from a group of humans who settled beyond the web of wormholes. Xerxes is very bored, and one expects that Stone and Xerxes will soon form a plan to get outside this fabulous but very lived-in future civilization.

The Drowned Cities: Little, Brown hardcover, May 2012, 434 pages, cover art by Neil Swaab. The Drowned Cities got here with wins over Alexander Wisbal and the Hall of Heroes by Isaac A. McBeth in the first round and James Swain's Dark Magic in the second round.

The star of the opening 25 pages of The Drowned Cities was Tool, a bioengineered man-beast familiar to readers of Bacigalupi's prior novel Ship Breaker. Tool was chased by soldiers through the demolished "Drowned Cities" of the East Coast, then did battle with a mutant alligator. The next 25 pages featured Mahlia, a young doctor's assistant, hated by the locals because her father was one of the Chinese peacekeepers who came to America to help it recover from its collapse, only to give up and leave. In the next 50-page section, the two storylines come together. Mahlia and her friend Mouse find a weakened Tool, who captures Mouse. Mahlia bargains for her friend's life, promising to bring Tool antibiotics. But she is thwarted by the soldiers who are searching for Tool, who have set up camp at the doctor's house where Mahlia lives.

The Battle: Generally, if you make it to the semifinals of the Battle of the Books, you're doing a lot of things right. What this Battle comes down to is many little things that Roberson does well and Bacigalupi does exceptionally well.

For instance, both authors do a nice job of giving their main character a backstory to help readers feel emotionally connected. In Further, Captain Stone's amazement at this future world is tempered by his loneliness and regrets from being the only survivor of his mission. There is a strong scene where he wistfully watches an old movie that fictionalized the mission while it was still lost in space, including a hypothetical romance between him and a crewmate, with whom he actually had hoped to become involved. (Forgive the plug, but I especially liked this because my story "The Long View" in the March-April 2013 issue of F&SF also features a protagonist transported into the future who watches a film glamorizing her own life.)

In The Drowned Cities, Mahlia struggles with feelings of abandonment after her father returned to China without her, while she is simultaneously persecuted by the locals for being half-Chinese, even losing her right hand to their prejudices. Here she flashes back to before her father left, when she was still proud of her Chinese heritage:

Mahlia had been glad she was Chinese then, all the way up until her father took a toy wooden horse away from her and she bit him for it. He slapped her then, and said she had too much Drowned Cities in her.

"No respect," he said. "Drowned Cities, through and through. Just like your mother. Animals."

Mahlia's mother fought with him over that, and then he called them both Drowned Cities, and suddenly Mahlia was afraid. Her father hated the Drowned Cities more than anything. And now she discovered she was the same as the people he fought every day.

This is entirely a subjective reaction, but after 100 pages, I appreciate Roberson's characterization of Stone, while I have ceased to think of Mahlia in terms of characterization, because to me she has become an actual person.

Similarly, both of these books have an excellent setting. Roberson presents his imaginative far-future through Stone's first-person point of view with wonderful exuberance, e.g., when Stone is shown his palatial new quarters, he remarks "the interior was even grander than the outside, which had been constructed out of diamond." Bacigalupi's fallen America is also fascinating, and somehow not as bleak as it should be, because this future is a backdrop to show the strength of character of Mahlia, Mouse, and their benefactor Dr. Mahfouz.

But while the opening sections of Further are a travelogue directly focused on exploring the setting, the opening of The Drowned Cities launches straight into the plot, tossing out details about this future even as the main storylines unfold. This is not a complaint against Roberson——it makes sense for him to take the time to show why Stone is not satisfied to hang around this far-future universe, before the next phase of Stone's journey begins——but it does make Further not quite so difficult to put down after 100 pages as The Drowned Cities.

THE WINNER: The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

The Drowned Cities advances to the championship round, to face either Glamour in Glass Mary Robinette Kowal or Auraria by Tim Westover.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Fall 2012 :: Final Four

We have quickly arrived at Final Four in the belated Fall 2012 Fantastic Reviews Battle of the Books:

Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson vs. The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal vs. Auraria by Tim Westover

We hope you've enjoyed this tournament so far. This sixteen-book bracket, our fourth, contained a wide variety of genre books. Hopefully some sparked your interest. There were a number of appealing, well-written books. Now only four books remain.

Dropping good books after reading only 25 or 50 pages can be difficult, but this format allows us to sample and spread the word about many more new books and authors than we otherwise could.

Three of the four "seeded" books made it to the Final Four: Further: Beyond the Threshold, The Drowned Cities and Glamour in Glass. The dark horse of the group is Auraria, an independent book that has proved a surprisingly strong competitor, pulling off consecutive upsets over top-flight authors.

Thanks again to all the authors and publicists sending us great books to consider. If you're an author or publicist, click here for the rules and an address to send your book if you'd like to be included in a future bracket.

We have had a tremendous response to the Battle of the Books format. More brackets are to come, so stay tuned!

Battle of the Books, Fall 2012, Second Round :: Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy vs. Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson

We start the second round of the Fall 2012 Battle of the Books with Hemlock Grove by Brian McGreevy vs. Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson. The winner will be the book I most want to continue reading after 50 pages.

Hemlock Grove: Farrar, Straus & Giroux trade paperback, April 2012, 318 pages, cover art by Matt Buck. Hemlock Grove advanced to the second round by defeating Dave Freer's Cuttlefish in the first round.

In the first 25 pages we met 17-year-old Peter Rumancek, who is suspected by the other local teens of being a werewolf and possibly responsible for the death of a young woman in the woods. The second 25 pages remove any doubt as to Peter being a werewolf, and another murder occurs. Meanwhile, we've spent more time with Peter's classmate Roman and his very rich and very weird family, including his mother and uncle who are having an affair with each other, and his deformed, seven-foot-tall sister named Shelley (get it?).

Further: Beyond the Threshold: 47North trade paperback, May 2012, 343 pages, cover art by Marcel Clemens & Algol. Further got past Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson to get here.

In the opening, we saw Ramachandra Jason (RJ) Stone, captain of the first interstellar voyage, wake from suspended animation to learn his ship was struck by a micrometeor. He is the only survivor, and 12,000 years have passed. In the next 25 pages, RJ and his guide, in the form of a metallic eagle, travel by wormhole gate to a dramatically transformed Earth, populated by a wide variety of humans, post-humans, and artificial intelligences. RJ is an instant celebrity. We know from the back of the book that another interstellar mission is in RJ's future.

The Battle: Werewolf stories have been done to death in recent years, and stories about a man waking up in the far future had been done to death before I was born. The lesson of today's Battle of the Books is that even a tired old story concept can be a lot of fun in the hands of a talented writer. Both Hemlock Grove and Further make for interesting and entertaining reading through 50 pages.

The quirky characters of Hemlock Grove make this feel like a werewolf story the way David Lynch might do one. Roman's family brings some soap opera elements to the story and McGreevy throws in genuine horror touches, notably a memorable description of Peter's transformation to a werewolf——he literally tears his human skin off to reveal the wolf underneath. McGreevy varies the tone of the story from scene to scene, and so far that's working well.

There is a wonderful exuberance to how Further: Beyond the Threshold attacks the far future. Roberson gives a dizzying array of details about his future Earth, including believable touches such as RJ unwittingly offending his guide by suggesting that AIs aren't "human" and quickly attracting fans nostalgic for Earth's past:

If I squinted, the two men might have passed for 20C Americans, but they wouldn't have stood up to any kind of scrutiny. They wore suits, ties, and hats such as were common in that era, but exaggerated to ridiculous extremes. The result was a sort of stylized zoot suit, such as those worn by lecherous wolves in old Tex Avery cartoons. As I drew near, the look on their faces was so hungry, so near lust, that I almost fancied I could see their hearts pounding out of their ribcages, their tongues rolling out like red carpets.

It's a nice touch that often RJ's best way of making sense of everything he sees is to relate it to virtual reality games he played as a kid.

While I'm definitely enjoying both of these books, I'm required to pick one to move into the semifinals. The Battle of the Books is inherently subjective, and I'm more in the target audience for one of these novels. The soap-opera aspects of Hemlock Grove don't have much appeal for me, while the whiz-bang style of Further is right up my alley, providing the kind of sense of wonder that I love.

THE WINNER: FURTHER: BEYOND THE THRESHOLD by Chris Roberson

Further: Beyond the Threshold advances to the semifinals, to face either Dark Magic by James Swain or The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi.

To see the whole bracket, click here.

Battle of the Books, Fall 2012, First Round :: Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson vs. Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson

The Fall 2012 Battle of the Books continues with Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson vs. Royal Street by Suzanne Johnson. As always, whichever book I most want to continue reading after 25 pages will advance to the second round.

Further: Beyond the Threshold: 47North trade paperback, May 2012, 343 pages, cover art by Marcel Clemens & Algol. By my count, Chris Roberson has published a dozen original novels and eight tie-in books, as well as a number of short stories in top-notch markets like Asimov's and Subterranean. He is a two-time Sidewise Award winner, was twice nominated for the Campbell Award for best new writer, and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award as a writer, an editor, and founder of MonkeyBrain Books.

Roberson's original work so far has emphasized alternate histories and secret histories, but Further is all space opera. Captain Ramachandra Jason (RJ) Stone was the leader of the first expedition to another star system. But the automatic systems failed to wake him or his crew from suspended animation. 12,000 years later, post-humans find RJ. The first 25 pages end with an eagle-shaped A.I. taking him through a matter transmitter back to Earth. The back of the book tells us RJ will soon take part in a new interstellar mission.

Royal Street: Tor trade paperback, April 2012, 336 pages, cover art by Cliff Nielsen. Royal Street is Suzanne Johnson's first novel, with a sequel, River Road, that came out in November. It's urban fantasy set in New Orleans, at the time of Hurricane Katrina.

Our heroine is Drusilla Jaco (DJ), a young wizard still learning the ropes. The text describes her as blonde and teal-eyed, and cover artist Cliff Nielsen decided she's actually Nicole Kidman. In the opening chapter, DJ is sent on assignment to tangle with the ghost of notorious pirate Jean Lafitte, who greets her with a six-pack of fruit-flavored condoms. After that encounter, DJ tries to persuade her mentor Gerry that he can start giving her more such high-level assignments, once this little storm heading for New Orleans blows past.

The Battle: Further starts with perhaps the best opening line I've yet encountered in the Battle of the Books:

When I woke up, surrounded by talking dog-people, it was clear we'd strayed pretty far from the mission parameters.

Granted, it's not exactly a novel concept for an author to wake a modern man up far in the future so he can look around with us. But Chris Roberson tells the tale with a lot more flair than Philip Francis Nowlan ever did.

Turning to Royal Street, New Orleans during Katrina is a great setting for an urban fantasy, even if I'm not sure it fits Johnson's light-hearted tone. But too many of the lines that are meant to be clever strike me instead as tired: "A word rhyming with witch," "note to self," "gator bait," etc.

Chris Roberson and Suzanne Johnson are going for a similar fun tone, but through 25 pages RJ is getting better lines than DJ.

THE WINNER: Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson

Further advances to the second round, to meet Brian McGreevy's Hemlock Grove.

To see the whole bracket, click here.