It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

If Charles Dickens hadn’t laid claim to the line a century and a half earlier, Kage Baker could have used it to pithily sum up this jewel of a novel.

(The only spoilers in here are for the first five pages of the book, even if it doesn’t look that way. Honest.)

Imagine a future in which two inventions revolutionize the world: Time travel and immortality. Actually, you invent the immortality first, and then you invent the time travel in order to test it. But, in any case, both of them come with catches: First, the process for creating an immortal is horrendously expensive, can only be performed on young children, and requires surgery so horrendous that few parents would subject their children to it. Time travel, on the other hand, is an incredibly expensive, one-way street: You can send people into the past, and bring them back to their point of origin, but you can’t send them into the future. Plus, most people find traveling into the past uncomfortable: It’s dirty. It’s violent. It’s unpleasant. It’s full of strange people.

What do you do?

Well, if you’re the Zeus Company you find a simple solution: You go back into the past to the dawn of interesting human history, pick up some orphaned natives, turn them into immortals, give them a top-notch education and massive historical databases, and then come home. Now you don’t have to keep shuttling back and forth your operatives: You just let those immortal natives you’ve recruited travel through time the old-fashioned way – by living it. Along the way they’ll be saving priceless works of art from destruction, preserving endangered species, and recruiting more agents to the cause.

Cool concept? I thought so.

Having rapidly crafted a cunning universe, Kage Baker begins crafting a cunning tale. On the surface, it is a simplistic (perhaps even obvious) tale: A young, orphaned girl is rescued from 16th century Spain by the Company, turned into an immortal operative, and then sent on her first mission to Queen Mary’s England.

Viewed from that simplistic angle, The Garden of Iden is an unremarkable – even boring – novel. But, in truth, the story of this novel is not a nifty time travel mission. The story of this novel is the story of its title character: It’s an emotional, gut-wrenching tale, and the most surprising thing about it is the subtlety with which its emotional punch it delivered.

As you read The Garden of Iden you are lulled into a seeming complacence: Pieces seem to fall into place just the way you would expect, the cast of characters seems to do just what you would expect, and so forth. Through this complacency you are kept heartily – if lightly – entertained through Baker’s irreverent wit, startling reality and depth of characterization, and beautifully accurate descriptions of setting and history.

But then, suddenly, you realize that this complacency is all an illusion. While you’ve been enjoying a light tale of romance and mild adventure, Baker has been gently gathering up the rug you’re standing then: Suddenly she’s yanking the rug out from under you and throwing an emotional fist right into your gut.

And as you stumble back from the impact, you realize that you’ve actually been reading brilliance at work. Because the surprise doesn’t come out of left field: Baker has been building it up from the very first page, and you didn’t see it coming at all.

GRADE: A

THE GARDEN OF IDEN
Kage Baker
Published: 1998
Publisher: Avon Eos
Cover Price: $5.99
ISBN: 0380731797
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I’ve been meaning to give Lawrence Watt-Evans a try for a long time. Last week the stars finally conjoined in such a way that I found myself with a copy of Nightside City clenched between my fists.

One sleepless night later the novel had been devoured and I had come to one simple conclusion:

Nightside City is an unsung masterpiece.

This book stands somewhere between Neuromancer and Snow Crash, and deserves to be as well-known as both. Lawrence Watt-Evans crafts a riveting tale which is one-half cyberpunk and one-half detective noir, with strong dashes of hard SF sensibility, insightful characterization, and tight plotting thrown in to spice the mix.

The world in which the novel takes place is not only immediately memorable for its unique conception (a city in a crater on the dark side of a planet, slowly revolving into the devastatingly deadly rays of the sun), but also deeply immersive as a result of the loving detail Watt-Evans flawlessly weaves throughout the story.

The plot is a tight, fast-paced mystery told with all the style and aplomb of a Chandler – although I’d recommend skipping the back cover text on this one (my edition calmly summarizes the first half of the plot and removes most of the mystery).

In case I haven’t made myself clear, this one comes highly recommended.

GRADE: A

NIGHTSIDE CITY
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Published: 1989
Publisher: Foxacre Press
Cover Price: $13.50
ISBN: 0970971117
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As promised on Saturday, we’ve got our first substantive update of real, honest-to-god content in the form of five What I’m Reading reviews:

1. Nightside City – Lawrence Watt-Evans
2. Garden of Iden – Kage Baker
3. Gods in Darkness – Karl Edward Wagner
4. The Ruby Dynasty – Catherine Asaro
5. The Stars My Destination/Demolished Man – Alfred Bester

These can also be accessed through the Reviews page, of course.

I saw the new War of the Worlds yesterday. Cruise gives us his typical intensity. Dakota Fanning gives a surprisingly nuanced and subtle performance. Spielberg delivers a breathtaking vision and beautifully-crafted cinematography.

I won’t say that the movie is an unqualified success, but I will say that it sets a new and impressive standard for alien-invasion flicks. (I hesitate to say that, because I’ve seen some people mouthing the opinion that this movie somehow spells the death of Independence Day. I don’t see how this conclusion can possibly be drawn, given the fact that War of the Worlds and Independence Day exist at almost opposite ends of the spectrum: One doesn’t truly take itself seriously. The other is firmly rooted in reality.)

This post isn’t really meant to be a review, however. What I’m really aiming to do is comment on the stunning stupidity of audience members. There seems to be a sizable number of people who need to have everything spoon-fed to them: If a filmmaker asks them to give the slightest thought to the film; to provide the slightest bit of closure; to ponder the most immaterial of mysteries… these morons are lost at sea.

This is not surprising to me. What is surprising, however, is the willingness for these mindless fools to trumpet their lack of mental faculties far and wide. Apparently they are truly incapable of distinguishing the difference between a shortcoming in themselves and a shortcoming in the filmmaker.

With a certain degree of synchronicity, I first started to notice this trend with Cruise’s Mission Impossible. I thought the movie was clever, stylistic, and very well done.

I was shocked to discover, a few days later, that apparently there were many people who were incapable of following the film’s plot. In fact, I’ve never been able to truly comprehend what, exactly, baffles these people. But, apparently, it has something to do with the false-flashback sequence used to show Cruise’s character piecing together the truth of the catastrophe that befell him early in the film.

I remember watching Jay Leno make fun of the movie’s “incomprehensible” plot in his monologue and thought to myself: “If we ever wonder why Hollywood thrillers are so utterly simplistic, this is the reason why.”

In War of the Worlds, Spielberg quite intentionally leaves the true motivations and machinations of the aliens a mystery: The protagonists aren’t in a position to know such things and neither are we. From what we see of the aliens’ actions, intuitions can be drawn. But true answers are not to be found. In fact, we even see the characters in the film itself struggle to find the truth behind the invasion. Some of their answers are insightful. Others are simply absurdities.

For many audience members, however, this is simply beyond their ken. Somehow their minds leap directly from “Spielberg has not given us an answer engraved upon tablets of stone” to “this movie doesn’t make sense” before making a slight detour into the cul-de-sac of “this movie sucks”. Perhaps most amusing to me are those who accept the paranoiac rantings of a red-neck survivalist driven to near-insanity as gospel truth. They are apparently able to recognize the fact that these rantings are nonsensical, but are apparently incapable of grasping that this is entirely intentional on the part of the filmmakers.

So the next time you find yourself wondering why Hollywood produces so much simplistic crap, stop and reflect upon those who are baffled by the subtle intricacies of “complex” film like Mission Impossible and War of the Worlds. They get what they deserve. Unfortunately, we’re taken along for the ride.