Thoughts: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Some stories are smooth and satisfying, easy to follow, thematically consistent, and tie the plot threads into a neat little bow at the end.

American Gods is not that story.

When Shadow, waiting to be released from prison, learns that his wife is dead, he finds himself free but at loose ends. He takes a job from a old man who seems to be strangely fixated on him. While driving Mr. Wednesday around, running errands for him, and helping him run con jobs, Shadow meets an assortment of very odd people. He comes to believe they are ancient gods struggling to survive in the America's cultural desert. Short memories have begotten flashy, dangerous new gods: media, technology, credit. With Shadow's help, Mr. Wednesday is gathering an army to fight them, so the elder gods can reclaim their rightful place.

But all is not as it seems. Shadow has been left in a small northern Wisconsin town to wait for Wednesday: a friendly, helpful town with a place for everyone and a wrongness at its very center. A secret third organization, trying to foil Wednesday's plans, kidnaps Shadow, threatening to torture him. Meanwhile, Shadow's dead wife, Laura, has come back...

American Gods is a tangled knot of mythology, mystery, horror and warped Americana. Woven through Shadow's story are short, fascinating, interludes on how some of the elder gods came to America and what the newer gods are up to as they ascend to power. 

Gaiman's writing is lively and his deep understanding of myth make for an thoughtful read. Oddly and significantly, many of the meetings with the elder gods are quite banal, while scenes like that of Shadow foolishly trying to walk to town during a dangerous cold snap, take on a mythic quality. The plot winds around its subject matter in coils, rather than a straight line.

But the many, many story threads stubbornly refuse to jell into a whole, and Shadow's passivity doesn't give the story much of a rudder. (Humorously, even Mr. Wednesday comments on it at one point.)

There is much to like here, and readers who like fiction that grapples with philosophy will find much to challenge them. But readers who like their stories to be plot driven with tidy endings may be frustrated.

"Clean" by Alex Hughes

Clean by Alex Hughes is an enjoyable piece of science fiction noir, sharing its sensibilities with many popular urban fantasy series, but committed to its near-future environment and characters. If I could have wished for more exploration of the villain's telepathic crimes (how did he do that exactly?) and of the telepaths' powers in general, it was gratifying to see another voice on the science fictional side. I like my fantasy just fine but it has been subsuming everything lately; I love to see some science fiction breaking through.

I don't enjoy entertainment reviews or plugs that say, "It's x crossed with y!" But I have to admit,  Clean does make me want to use the phrase.

I picked up the book because the premise reminded me of Alfred Bester The Demolished Man, one of my favorites. Playing in the yard with Bester's toys strikes me as good fun, and a fine place to start a novel. Telepaths, telekinetics, a powerful Guild: it's all here.

But the (almost) unnamed protagonist is about as far from the confident, powerful Lincoln Powell as you can get. He is a drug addict living on the seedy edge of tomorrow, thrown out of his Guild and distrusted even by his own colleagues. Sound familiar? It put me much in mind of George Alec Effinger's Marid Audran books. A very good thing.

I'm curious as to how much the series will delve into the criminal element; Clean's protagonist is much more of a boy scout than Marid ever was; even his addiction stems from a scientific experiment performed inside the Guild, though it's grip on him makes him no less dangerous. He wants to commit to rebuilding his life after nearly destroying himself; will he stay on that path?

I look forward to reading the next book, Sharp, in April.

Quote

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

Carl Sagan

World within world within world...

"Hazel wished she had something in her hands to throw. She looked away and sat down.

"She opened up the new library book she'd brought for the bus ride and willed her thoughts to disappear in the pages. The girl in it was reading A Wrinkle in Time. She was best friends with a boy who lived in the apartment below. And then one day the boy stopped talking to her. Hazel closed the book."

Breadcrumbs
by Anna Ursu
p. 131

Hazel, the main character of Breadcrumbs, reading Newbery winner When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, in which Miranda, like Hazel, loves A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Cute.

Jellyratfish

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat.” 

Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University.

There's a SyFy channel movie here somewhere.

Debris by Jo Anderton

I don't read as much as I'd like during the school year. Lack of focus more than lack of time, I think. So the mark of a good novel has become "when I put this down and pick it up a week and half later, do I still want to read it?" Inertia can get me through a lot when I have the brain wattage, but leaden prose and plot meandering just kill me when I am tired.

Debris by Jo Anderton passed the test quite well. Anderton has an enjoyable authorial voice, a welcome relief in a genre with too many plodders. Her plot, while probably spread a little thin for 450 pages of novel, nevertheless takes the reader through a fascinating world that has amazing technology (pions, little lights that build, fix and heal) but that has mostly forgotten how it all works. 

Much like Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet, Anderton creates her own wonderfully original fantastic world. I have no idea if this is fantasy or science fiction and I don't much care. It's so nice to see contemporary authors using the genre's freedom to build really cool things -- and being rewarded with publication.

Quote

"It would just draw attention. Nobody likes a blonde in a hamster ball."

Veronica on Veronica Mars
"Happy Go Lucky"