Book Review: Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone - This Is How You Lose the Time War

Time-travel stories are generally fun to read as long as you don't demand perfect conceptual rigor, but sometimes you find one that fully commits to the logical weirdness that the genre requires and makes it work. This is one of those stories, essentially a lesbian Romeo and Juliet crossed with the hit 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Timecop that's both well-written and rewards rereading. Red and Blue are temporal assassins fighting a war back and forth in time. The actual causes of the war are obscure, but the technology-obsessed society that sent Red is implacably opposed to Blue's own nature-worshipping culture. The two start leaving taunting messages to each other after each timeline-shifting operation, one professional to another, which then gradually grow more fond as they begin to bond over their shared isolation, until their correspondence becomes so intimate that they decide to betray their respective factions and abscond together. There's a pleasing ouroborus structure lying behind their decisions, and the contrasting styles of the two protagonists' letters (El-Mohtar wrote Blue and Gladstone wrote Red) make their eventual infatuation all the better.

Book Review: Jin Yong - Legends of the Condor Heroes Vol. 1

This is the first volume of one of the most popular Chinese martial arts novel series ever written, and it reads like an excellent novelization of a kung fu film, although of course it's really the other way around given how influential this series has been on depictions of martial arts in all forms of media ever since it was first published in the 50s. If you've ever seen a kung fu movie, chances are it borrows heavily from Yong's work in tone, setting, or spirit. Naturally wuxia/martial arts novels have had a long tradition dating back centuries before these books were written (in a pleasing fan-fiction-y touch it's revealed that the protagonist Guo Jing is a distant descendant of one of the characters in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Novels), but Yong's work is fully its own despite inhabiting the well-trodden, familiar universe of medieval China. Yong evidently didn't set out to reinvent the wheel in terms of wuxia tropes, but in much the same way that a genre classic like Harry Potter outshone a whole host of similar young wizard adventure novels by being the best version of that genre, Yong's work hits the optimal sweet spot of family drama, political turmoil, patriotism, and of course plenty of incredibly-named kung fu action.

Sometimes it occurs to me to describe novels as "comic-book-ish". Even the most resolutely naturalistic novels involve a certain amount of exaggeration and poetic license, but there's a particular way of simplifying the messiness of reality while simultaneously presenting complicated narratives with exaggerated human nature and (especially) physical traits that some authors use in their works which reminds me of comic books. Stories of noble, innocent heroes with mysterious dramatic backgrounds fighting sinister, irredeemable villains for life and death stakes while continuously threatened with various forms of supernatural peril will always be popular no matter the delivery format, and this fits that archetype to a T. Guo Jing is pure of heart but a little dim, naturally clumsy but willing to train hard, and as such practically the ideal protagonist, especially once the Seven Freaks begin to train him in the martial arts, each move more hilariously named than the last. The novel's setting during the Song Dynasty's struggles with the Jurchens on one hand and the Mongols on the other (a young, up-and-coming Genghis Khan is a major and sympathetic main character) also lends itself well to action, as the horrors unleashed by the collapse of central authority and the evils of foreign domination have been staples in Chinese fiction since forever. There's also plenty of humor, as the plot is full of farcical contrivances (everyone is related to someone else, there's tons of convenient coincidences, many scenes are done with a perfect comic sensibility). This volume ends on a cliffhanger, after Guo Jing has just discovered important details about his heritage, and even though I've seen some complaints about the translation, I found this a whole lot of fun.

Book Review: David Heymann - My Beautiful City Austin

A loosely-connected collection of short stories that perfectly conveys the fun, relaxed, not-overly-driven spirit of the idealized Austin that seems lodged permanently in our memories of our twenties. Though Heymann swears that the characters in the novel are not drawn directly from his own life, it's obvious that the rich detail here, down to specific species of trees in clients' yards, comes from having spent a good amount of time marinating in the town (like the protagonist, he's been a "practicing" architect in Austin since the mid-80s). My favorite story was "Keeping Austin Weird", where the main character solves an oak-poisoning incident on the site of one of his clients' properties with the help of an arborist whose personal life is straight out of a letter to Penthouse; it mixed thoughtful architectural discussion with barbecue ("There are a series of barbecue joints positioned like Stations of the Cross in a ring of towns around Austin"), serendipitous encounters, and a satisfyingly salacious yarn. But each of the other six stories are also a pleasure to read, and properly appreciative of the way that people balance their inner and outer lives. There's not a higher moral here, just thoughtful appreciations of how pleasant it is to while away the hours in a city with seemingly limitless opportunities to let time float peaceably downstream.