FACT SF Reading Group

February 2009

February 2: Sunshine by Robin McKinley

Ten of us gathered at A. T.’s house to discuss Robin McKinley’s Sunshine. The title character is a young woman who works as a baker. One night she gets kidnapped by vampires, and she discovers unexpected abilities that allow her to free herself.  She also discovers that some vampires are less evil than others.  This kicks off an intriguing story of personal discovery, set in an alternate world startlingly different from our own. None of us had read McKinley before. All of us started the book, and three finished it.

One person commented that Sunshine is an ideal girl: hard-working, conscientious, talented, affectionate, and brave.

We liked the family restaurant where Sunshine works. The place is fully described and much of the action takes place here, and it’s filled with a rich supporting cast of Sunshine’s family and coworkers. The restaurant is almost a character in its own right. It reminded one reader of Chocolat.

One reader disliked the book because she felt that it was written for a teen audience. She disliked the book’s vocabulary and tone, plus the frequent infodumps.  She also felt the book reused the tired “woman as victim” trope from vampire fiction. Mainly she’d expected and hoped for this book to be an urban fantasy aimed at adults, and this is not what she found.

Another had mixed feelings. He felt that the nature of exposition was more like science fiction than fantasy. He disliked this book’s absence of chapters. However he did like that this book’s heroine makes a living baking cinnamon rolls.

We generally found that the author had a clear prose style and put together interesting turns of phrase. However, several of us found this book hard to read in large chunks, and felt that it was too easy to put down. One person felt that the author did not pull off first person narrative as well as might be hoped.

A couple of us were simply tired of vampire novels. It was not clear from the cover what the subject of the book was. These readers started the book, but as soon as they encountered vampires, they stopped.

A few of us were intrigued by the alternate America in which this novel takes place. Although we don’t see much of the world in this story, it’s interesting and it imparts of feeling of science fiction to the story. There are several species of humanoid species, and a government agency enforces segregation between them.

The reader who recommended to the book to our group was an enthusiastic fan of Sunshine. She felt the characters and setting were charming. And while she does not usually like vampire books, she liked this one.

Overall this book provided us with a nice discussion. After the meeting, many of us had a nice dinner at Culver’s.

 -- A.T. Campbell, III

February 17: Halting State by Charles Stross

12 people attended the discussion. Everybody but 4 people finished it. 1 of them was planning to finish it. Everybody has read Charles Stross before. Halting State starts out with a bank robbery in a multiplayer online game. Three people set out to investigate the robbery, or rather a security flaw that allowed the game code to be breached: a programmer named Jack, an auditor named Elaine, and a police officer Sue Smith. As their investigation uncovers spooky ways in which real and virtual economies are intertwined, they find out there is much more at stake than a game company's reputation.

We discussed some aspects of this book that can make it potentially hard to read: gamer jargon, Scottish dialect, and second person point of view. The computer and gaming jargon kept one person from finishing the book. The rest of the readers were not baffled by any of those things. One reader even knew Scottish dialect well enough to think that the way the police officer Sue talked was inconsistent with Edinburgh slang. Several people pointed out how much they liked Charles Stross' witty prose, his punchy language.

Almost all of us found the book entertaining and fast-paced. It got some people to reminisce about the early days of the internet, when "University of Wisconsin developed a rabbit hole between Usenet and Bitnet, and it really [angered] ARPA. Those networks were not supposed to communicate with each other. Each network was supposed to do what it had to do." Many readers in the group have played roleplaying games. Back in the day when they ran dungeons, they were well familiar with players wanting to bring in people from their old dungeons, instead of starting fresh in a new dungeon. They would try to bring in their stuff, and that would cause inflation in the new game. So most readers could relate to the virtual economics of Halting State. Some even called Halting State a period piece, rather than science fiction, the period being turn of the century dot com bust. Others argued it's near future, because we still don't have self-driving cars, we don't wear goggles with screens to which content is streamed through our cell phones, and we don't have enough 3G bandwidth to play multiplayer online games on our phones. Not satisfied with either near future or near past label, one reader somewhat cryptically suggested this is "near present". In any case, most people agreed there wasn't much speculative element in the plot, so this could be more correctly considered technothriller than science fiction. As often is the case with Charles Stross' books, people regretfully noted that this novel will age very quickly.

Everybody enjoyed well-developed characters. Sue was especially useful as the character that grounded the others. When the others were getting, in one reader's words, "too virtual", she would bring them back to the reality of the problems they were facing. One reader noted that Elaine and Jack's points of view quickly became redundant, because Elaine and Jack were spending almost all of the time together. It didn't make much sense to have things described from one person's perspective, and then immediately from the perspective of a person standing next to him.

A reader who worked in game industry thought Halting State was authentic in portraying the ways industry people think and speak. He even recommended it to his coworkers at a game company. However, he found it not realistic that this book showed only the business side and not the creative side of the industry. There were very few mentions of developers, and not a single game artist in the novel. This reader wanted to have a closer look at how games are being developed in the future, but there was very little about that in Halting State. It didn't show how creative people work. "It's like having a novel set in the film industry, and the only people you talk with are accountants," said the disappointed reader.

Some people criticized the ending. At least one person thought a critical plot twist at the end was not plausible. Despite all that most people found the book enjoyable, as it made them think of how the intertwining of virtual and real worlds affects us in ways we are not yet aware of.

 -- Elze Hamilton