Author Archives: J.J.S. Boyce

About J.J.S. Boyce

I'm a freelance writer, critical thinker, science fiction fan, addicted traveller, and educator, with continuing interests in all of the above. Comments can be left on site or via e-mail, at jjsboyce (at) hotmail (dot) com. For a more detailed bio, see About.

Book Review: Triggers

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A couple of years ago, one of Robert J. Sawyer’s novels was turned into a prime-time television series, in the vein of 24. For fans of the science fiction writer who missed it, this may come as a surprise. Sawyer novels are interesting, perhaps even epic, but what they are not is action-packed. And indeed, the change of genre was a conscious one in the hopes of attracting a mainstream television audience.

But it got the writer thinking. Maybe he could write a thriller novel, something that might appeal to the sort of audience his series had brought to his fiction. He came up with an idea: what if an experiment gone awry suddenly caused a random group of strangers to become psychically-linked to each other, able to access memories not their own? And what if one of those people was the president of the United States, on the eve of a major military operation, resulting in an unprecedented breach of national security?

It sounds sufficiently thrilling to be worth a shot, and Sawyer must have thought so, too, since it was only a short time later that Triggers was born.

Dan Brown wrote a couple of techno-thrillers, which were heavy on the thriller and frequently inaccurate on the technical details. Still, they were readable, if not thought-provoking. Sawyer, coming at the problem from the other side, must have had a different sort of struggle. Trying to keep the frenetic pacing required while exploring the kind of philosophical quandaries that keep SF readers and writers so addicted to the genre must have been quite a balancing act.

If I were to treat this as a straight thriller, there were probably some spots after the first third or so of the novel where I might have said “we don’t need this scene”, “that’s slowing us down too much”, “we need another disaster right about here to ramp up the immediate tension again”.

But it’s not a straight thriller, and we do need those scenes, and the novel does maintain its tension, just not of the same kind as in a pure thriller. Sometimes it’s an emotional tension, and sometimes it’s the anticipation of nascent intellectual discovery. Sawyer develops his characters more, allows them (and the reader along with them) to sit and think about things a lot more, and fills in a lot more (fascinating) technical background on the scientific underpinnings than a thriller writer would.

This should come as no surprise. After all, a number of Sawyer novels one might point to involve little more than smart people sitting around and talking, and you can’t expect him to forgo this sort of material entirely. Calculating God, for example, is a book-length conversation between a dying paleontologist and a visiting extraterrestrial. There is some action in there, but not the violent sort one finds in the genre of espionage and assassins.

The ending of Triggers, too, is of a very classic SF sort. It’s one previously employed by a couple of past SFWA Grandmasters, whom I will decline to name, rather than give anything away. And it’s also very in line with themes of consciousness explored by Sawyer over much of his career. I’m reminded of one of his early hits, The Terminal Experiment, along with his recent WWW trilogy.

But just because I’ve been sitting here explicating where Triggers differs from your standard thriller, don’t get the impression that I’m arguing against that label. I just think SF fans should know this Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell award-winner hasn’t gone over to the dark side. There’s still plenty of food for thought here, nestled between gun-fights and explosions.

(Ace, 2012)

Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2012) The Green Man Review

Book Review: The Chronoliths

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Robert Charles Wilson is fast becoming the guy I pull out when I want to stealth-gift SF to my non-genre friends. It used to be Margaret Atwood or Michael Chabon, but it’s nice to be able to point to someone firmly in the genre as an example of some of the finest writing being done today, period.

Read the rest of my review at AESciFi.

Keeping Up With Reviews

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I’m down to my last three review titles on hand. I expect to finish off two of them (a pop physics book from Brian Greene and a text from an academic press for Library Journal) this week. Then I’ll get started on the last by the weekend, and hopefully put a big dent in it before a new batch of review copies from a favourite small press of mine will be introducing me to a new author.

I’ve made notes of a few books from another publishing house I plan to request, but I’m not even going to ask for them until I get caught up with my other stuff.

You might well ask, with so many review books, when do I get a chance to read for pleasure? Well, the answer to that is two-fold:

First, by and large, I do get pleasure from reading these review books, or I wouldn’t have requested them in the first place. Some were assigned to me, rather than requested, but I have broad interests, so I usually enjoy them, as well.

Second, I do find time to slot in books I’ve bought and paid for (though I make fewer purchases these days than I used to and have mostly been working my way through a two-year old pile). Sometimes I’ll have a pile of six books to review, and after reading half of them, I’ll grab something from my non-review pile that will be a fast read, a sci-fi paperback, for example, and take a couple of days with that before jumping into more review copy.

It all depends on my deadlines, of course. But deadline-wise, I’m doing okay. I haven’t been late on any assigned reviews this year. Not that that’s a frequent occurrence even at the worst of times.

Book Review: Physics of the Future

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Michio Kaku is a physicist and science popularizer, taking a page each from the books of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and fellow string theorist, Brian Greene. He’s written several popular science books on the wacky and wonderful words of relativity, quantum mechanics, and string theory. His last book, however, Physics of the Impossible, was a departure from branes and n-dimensional space. He used fictional technologies like teleportation, time travel, and Star Trek’s phasers as jumping off points for the known physics of today.

That book turned into a Science Channel program of the same name, and the approach was successful enough that he’s done something similar this time around. In Physics of the Future, however, there is a clear, unifying theme. Though he still offers somewhat of a grab bag of physics, drawing on all different areas based on what’s interesting right now, it’s all geared towards answering one question: what are the next hundred years going to look like?

Kaku looks at basically every technology or technological field that is a) integral to our lives, and b) likely to undergo serious changes in the next few generations. There’s a chapter on the future of computing, a separate one on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, medicine, energy, and space travel. Each chapter has an introduction, a vision of the near future (until 2030), mid-century (2030-2070), and the far future (2070-2100).

The last two chapters, the future of wealth and the future of humanity, are less about any specific technology than the specific changes to our economic, social, and legal systems as a result of these technological changes. The end of wealth, for example, is about our transition to a more and more information-based economy throughout the world, and how we will need a new economic system with the end of scarcity (though he points out certain things will remain scarce, primarily knowledge workers whose labour can’t be automated).

The text is very readable, any number of sections could be essentially lifted from the book and used as feature articles in Popular Science or Discover. For all I know, selected excerpts have indeed seen magazine stands. Kaku is careful not to get bogged down too much in the science behind these technologies. The book’s audience are technology geeks, futurists — most of us, in fact, of the digital age. It’s for the curious layperson, not just the educated layperson. No physics education required

Speaking as someone who has some education in physics, this is nevertheless refreshing. Kaku could have screwed things up by doing too much — trying to give a detailed grounding in the physics when the book is really about how the technology will affect our lives. Having spoken to three hundred scientists at the leading edge of their fields, I’ve no doubt he took enough notes for a dozen technical volumes. But he resists the temptation to ramble, considering societal consequences in broad strokes while avoiding technical trivia.

And that’s the beauty of this book. It’s deep in insights but not bogged down in details. The result is a fast read that you’ll continue thinking about long after you’ve finished the book. Time will tell which predictions hit the mark. But it gives all of us something to look forward to, whether we expect to experience Kaku’s epilogic “day in the life in 2100” or not.

Reprinted with permission from The Sleeping Hedgehog
Copyright (2012) The Sleeping Hedgehog

Exclusive Interview: Robert J. Sawyer

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Conducted by yours truly. Robert J. Sawyer is a favourite author of mine, and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn a little bit about what makes him tick. His new novel, Triggers, comes to bookstores everywhere today (so if you haven’t read him yet, this is your perfect opportunity to start).

You can read my full interview here at the Green Man Review.

Freelancing Reviews

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A while ago, what I started doing is requesting review copies of books from publishers directly, then pitching publications to run my reviews. The goal was to get whatever books I wanted, even if they hadn’t been submitted to the usual places I write for.

But while I’ve generally received the books I’ve requested, I’ve also found it’s annoying trying to place a review after the fact, not knowing whether a place will accept freelance submissions, if I’ve conformed to their style guidelines, if perhaps they’ve already reviewed or assigned a work for review, etc.

In other words, I’ve learned how much work I can create for myself by bypassing my editors instead of working with them on prospective submissions from the start. Not only might they sometimes be more successful at soliciting review material, they can let me know in advance what they want covered.

This is true of all kinds of writing besides reviews. It’s usually better to pitch an idea and get a provisional acceptance for it from a specific publication (and additional notes, i.e., “I’d like to see you focus more on this angle”) rather than trying to sell a finished article when it hasn’t been tailored to their needs. At best, you’ll be doing a lot of rewriting by not having a discussion with your editor before you’ve written the first draft. At worst, you may not even be able to place it.

Writers write in order to be read. I hate having unpublished work on my harddrive.

I have a bunch of finished reviews that will be running in the next couple weeks, and I have three books on hand I still need to write up as well as place somewhere. An additional five that should be arriving in the mail any day now are, fortunately, already specifically promised to certain review pubs. So I know exactly what style and focus to take as I write each of them up.

(On the plus side, my previous efforts to place articles have led to a couple new regular paying outlets for me. So that’s nice.)