Book 316: The Lives of Tao

"He would have to go shopping for a new wardrobe to fit his new role. Roen imagined a long trench coat like Neo, with cool sunglasses and a big gun hanging at his waist. Maybe he could have a secret weapons locker built in his closet, or by the laundry hamper. Or better yet, it could be a compartment that opens once he turned some hidden lever. Turn the faucet left two turns, pull Brave New World on the shelf, tap the alarm clock twice; bam, machine gun!"

Dates read: May 15-20, 2019

Rating: 5/10

What is it that makes for greatness? Not just normal high achievement, but the people whose names go down in history. I mean, obviously having been part of a dominant culture helps (if you're on the vanquished side, it likely won't matter how amazing you were because no one will survive who ensures your story lives on). And talent is crucial, too, though also subject to the flukes of opportunity. But it's something different that pushes the great to the the top, even as the merely talented and/or skilled fall into anonymity.

In Wesley Chu's The Lives of Tao, it seems that what often bridges the gap from being good at something to true greatness is the help of an ageless, symbiotic alien race called Quasings. When they crash-landed on Earth, the different gravity/atmospheric pressure rendered them unable to exist without a host, and the best hosts were the most powerful creatures on the planet: humans. Over time, the Quasings split into two camps: the Prophus are sympathetic to humans, and want to work with them to achieve their goals, but the Genjix are ruthless, wanting only to return home by any means necessary. When we meet the Prohus Tao in Chicago, his longtime host is Edward Blair, with whom he's developed a deep and trusting relationship, and who is highly trained for the espionage that the war between the aliens requires. But Blair is killed, leaving Tao precious little time to find a new place to live. Who he finds is Roen Tan, who is lazy and out of shape and unhappy with his life as an IT worker, and so a new partnership is born.

Roen isn't especially pleased, at first, to have a bossy alien suddenly living in his head, particularly one whose presence means that Roen is now targeted by the Genjix. But there are upsides: Tao helps him to become extremely good at his job, have more confidence and finally ask out his longtime work crush, Jill, and starts getting him in shape through combat training with a fellow Prophus host, Sonya. Tao also shares with Roen the lessons he learned (and imparted) during the experiences he had while connected to Sun Tzu and Genghis Khan, among others. The training becomes the most essential, though, as Tao's leadership role among the Prophus means that Roen needs to be ready to go into battle much sooner than he would have liked.

This book manages to be complicated and kind of dumb at the same time. Thankfully, in large part because of Chu's ear for snappy dialogue, it's charming enough to sort of get away with it. The heart of the book is the relationship that develops between Tao and Roen, the slow growing of fondness and trust. Both characters can be a little one-note: Tao tends to be pedantic, remote, and impatient, while Roen is often whiny and immature (he does have a "growing up" arc, but it's not sold especially well). But when their banter gets to a quippy bicker, as it often does, it's enjoyable and reads quickly. Indeed, the whole thing reads quickly, because many of the beats, like the training montage and the first battle, feel very familiar to anyone who's ever watched an action movie.

In the end, though, there was just too much plot and too much sloppiness in executing it for the book to actually succeed. While Chu's enthusiasm for the world he created shines through, there's way too much backstory about the Quasings without nearly enough reason to care. It feels like he has so much story that he wants to tell that he forgets to give any of it room to breathe, rushing frantically from event to event without really taking time for the character moments that would give it heart. If you're looking for a light-hearted, science-fiction action story, you'll probably get a lot out of this. It would be an easy airplane or beach read. If you're looking for something with more character focus or substance, though, give this a pass. 

One year ago, I was reading: The Wife Upstairs

Two years ago, I was reading: Catch-22

Three years ago, I was reading: Margaret Beaufort

Four years ago, I was reading: Fourth of July Creek

Five years ago, I was reading: Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

Six years ago, I was reading: The Creation of Anne Boleyn

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Book 316: The Lives of Tao

Book 135: Stranger In A Strange Land

"She had not thought about it at the time, as she had not believed that anything could happen to Ben. Now she thought about it. There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk 'his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor' on an outcome dubious. Jill Boardman encountered her challenge and accepted it at 3:47 that afternoon."

Dates read: March 21-27, 2017

Rating: 4/10

Lists/Awards: Hugo Award, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Growing up, it's easy to believe that almost everyone lives more or less the way you do. It's only as you get older that you start to realize that's not true. But it's hard to resist the urge to think of the way you grew up as the right way. But what if it wasn't just the people in your neighborhood or town that you were comparing yourself to? What if it wasn't even the same state or country? What if it was a person who came from an entirely different world?

Valentine Michael Smith, the central character of Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land, is an entirely unique person: the son of two space explorers on Mars who died shortly after his birth, he was raised by Martians in Martian culture. As an adult, Mike returns to Earth to explore his "home" planet. Initially hidden away in a hospital by the government, which is trying to figure out what to do with him, he's discovered by a reporter and smuggled out by a nurse. That nurse, Jill, becomes his constant companion, sheltering and protecting him as he learns about the world and becoming something of a disciple as he comes into his own and begins teaching Martian ways to his friends and, eventually, the world.

Jill and Mike are taken in, after their initial flight from authorities, by author/lawyer/doctor Jubal Harshaw, an older, cynical man who lives in a sprawling compound with three young women he employs as on-call stenographers for his writing and a handyman to keep things in good repair. This group forms the core of what becomes the Church of All Worlds, a religious movement centered on Mike and the teachings he espouses, including the deep significance ascribed to the sharing of water, the concept of "grokking", and (of course!), non-monogamous sexual relationships. The rise of this church upsets the established power structure of this future Earth, with predictable results for the figure at the center of this upset.

Smith is both human and profoundly non-human, which raises interesting questions about what exactly it means to be a person, a fairly common theme in the science fiction genre. Perhaps because it had been done before, or perhaps because he was disinclined to explore the issue, this is not the route that Heinlein chooses to go. Rather, he uses the story to explore the "Martian" philosophy on life. Which is interesting, for a while. But since the portions of the book that are effectively espousals of this philosophy actually make up a solid majority of the book, with relatively little character development, I found myself getting bored pretty quickly.

The plot is pretty straightforward: it's a messiah tale, with the kind of story progression you'd expect for this kind of tale. The prose is...not fluid. It's clunky, and the long passages of expository dialogue aren't handled with any particular deftness. While it raised some thought-provoking ideas, it never captured me as a piece of literature. I don't think there's any reason genre fiction can't be successful from a literary standpoint, but I never got wrapped up in the story this book was trying to tell me. It may be a sci-fi classic, but it didn't do it for me. I wouldn't recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends...what are your favorite genre fiction books?

One year ago, I was reading: The Good German

Two years ago, I was reading: Missing, Presumed

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Book 135: Stranger In A Strange Land

Book 90: Neon Green

"It was his birthday after all, and this was who he was- a committed environmentalist. The very idea filled him with energy. His life was a fight. He was a fighter, no apologies and no breaks for inconvenience. Of course he knew that mopping up the spill would probably do nothing, that it was an infinitesimal smidgen in the grand scheme of things, but his fight was no less important when it was symbolic. Symbols added up to something." 

Dates read: September 17-19, 2016

Rating: 5/10

What is history? Specifically, what is historical fiction? I've been trying to wrestle my head around it for a while. If a book was written as contemporary literature 100 years ago, is it now historical fiction? On a related note, I think we'd all agree that a book set 50 years ago is historical fiction...but what about 40? 30? 20? 10? Or is it based on set events? Is a pre-9/11 book set in America historical fiction, since there was a significant cultural shift that occurred after that point? Is it within a lifetime? Whose? As an almost-32-year-old, I don't like to think about my own lifetime as encompassing history, but to a 14 year-old, a childhood before smart phones may well be.

Set two decades ago, before widespread home computing/internet access and cell phones, Margaret Wappler's Neon Green seems like it can be considered historical fiction relatively safely. Well, maybe, because there's an important difference: in Wappler's world, Earth has been visited by alien life from Jupiter since the early period of the Reagan administration. While the details are kept carefully shrouded (a time before Wikileaks!), it's become normalized enough that you can send in an application to be visited by an alien ship. No lifeforms will emerge, but it looks really cool on your lawn for several months. You have to be at least 16 to apply, which means that Gabe Allen is just old enough to secure a ship for his family's yard. The problem is that his parents, especially his father, are definitely not on board with it.

Parents Ernest and Cynthia Allen are both staunch environmentalists: Cynthia has channeled her passion into an environmental law-focused career, while Ernest does freelance environmental consulting. They're the early-90s-crunchy-granola kind of people that do most of their shopping at the food co-op and brought their own bags long before it was trendy. They live a cozy little life, mostly pretty happy, in a cozy little neighborhood outside Chicago until two things happen in fairly close succession: the spaceship arrives, and Cynthia's advanced brain cancer is discovered. The confluence of these events sends Ernest over the deep edge.

Despite the aliens, this isn't really a science fiction story. It's a story about a family in crisis...in particular, about a man in crisis, because Ernest is really at the heart of the narrative. The social changes around families and gender roles that took place throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s eroded a lot of markers of traditional masculinity, and not even hippy-dippy types like Ernest are immune from the angst that can bring. It's easy to see that his reaction to the spaceship is rooted mostly in his inability to control what he thinks of as his home turf, and the ways in which he tries to cope with his wife's health situation only further demonstrate that he's spinning out. Both son Gabe and daughter Alison deal with their grief about their mother's grim prognosis in their own different ways, and before long the once mostly happy family is unrecognizable from what it used to be.

It's well-written enough, but for me, there wasn't enough "there" there. It's the kind of character-driven family drama that I tend to enjoy, but crucial to these kinds of books is a connection built to the characters. The story suffers for its focus on Ernest, whose masculinity-based identity crisis isn't particularly compelling. I thought Alison's story was much more interesting but incredibly underdeveloped, and Gabe and Cynthia herself could have also done with more attention paid to them. This didn't "feel" like a book written by a woman, to me: thinking that a middle-aged guy's largely self-inflicted sufferings are worth a preponderance of the reader's time and energy doesn't usually tend to be a mistake female writers make. I enjoyed the 90s throwback nostalgia, but otherwise found this pretty skippable.

Tell me, blog friends...do you think we'll make contact with aliens within your lifetime?

One year ago, I was reading: Wild Bill Donovan

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Book 90: Neon Green