Babel.

R.F. Kuang won the most recent Nebula Award for Best Novel with her first novel for adults, Babel, a long and intense fantasy story that upends many of the conventions of the ‘youth goes to magic school’ subgenre while also attacking serious questions of colonialism and privilege. It’s dark and riveting, and perhaps its best feature is how unsentimental it is about its subject and characters.

The book’s full title is the unwieldy Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, which I think makes the book sound boring when it’s actually a thriller for the majority of its 500-odd pages. Set in the 1830s, it follows a Chinese orphan who is adopted by a strange English academic and brought to Oxford to study at its translation school, which is the most powerful institution in the country and perhaps the world. In this alternate history, translators can create powerful objects from silver by taking advantage of the meaning gaps between words in different languages that might have the same denotations but that have cultural or other contextual differences not captured by a word-four-word translation. These silver bars power much of the world at the time, but Oxford is their only producer, making England the world’s most powerful nation and allowing them to dictate the terms of trade with their partners … and to leave much of the non-European world in a state of underdevelopment because they refuse to share the technology. The orphan, who takes the English name Robin Swift, finds himself torn between the comfortable world of his academic setting and his own values, including his ties to China, which drive him to fight the ivory tower and try to bring silver-making to the broader world.

Kuang begins her novel with a familiar trope – the orphan is plucked from poverty by a mysterious (white) person who brings them to a school that reveals hitherto unknown talents and opens up a world of power and possibility to them. Robin is fluent in Mandarin and becomes so in English, while his professor-benefactor, who takes him in as a ward until he’s old enough for Oxford’s Linguistics Department, drills him in other languages to better prepare him for academe. Once there, Robin becomes fast friends with a few classmates and acclimates quickly to a life of privilege and sudden respect, as the linguistics tower is the jewel in the Oxonian crown, and those ticketed for its top floors – where the silver-making is done – are the Big Linguists On Campus. (I’m not making that other joke, sorry.) The plot begins to diverge from the archetype shortly after Robin matriculates, as an outsider attempts to recruit him to a shadowy, decentralized activist group that wants to pilfer silver bars from Oxford to share them with the developing world. Robin doesn’t choose his fate immediately, although he ultimately chooses – or is forced to – side with the rebels, opening up the second portion of the book, where Kuang continues to explore the same themes of exploitation and social justice, but shifts the style from Magic School Wunderkind to a spy thriller with tons of action and many, many surprising twists.

As a straight read, Babel is a smart and clever thrill ride up to the very last page. The gimmick around languages, using what gets lost in translation as the proxy for magic, is incredibly clever and a credit to Kuang’s intellect and her own linguistic prowess; it feels like the sort of idea you’d have if you’re fluent in several languages without much or any relationship and have tried to translate something but found the words lacking. That alone won’t power a book, but Robin is a superb protagonist, principled but cautious, anxious yet willing to make bold decisions, flawed but ultimately heroic in his own way. His friends are fun side characters, perhaps not as fleshed out as they could be other than the Indian-born Ramy, but this book is already long and giving any of them more time would probably just pad the length.  

This particular subgenre has many smart and entertaining books in it, but I can’t think of an other example that is this serious at its core. At heart, Babel is an angry book, based loosely on the leadup to the Opium Wars and the English crown’s exploitation of both its colonial empire and of China after it subjugated the latter by use of superior weaponry. It’s also a metaphor for the two centuries since then, where the West has seen enormous economic advancement, leading to longer life expectancies and better health outcomes, that it has not shared with the developing world. Some Asian countries – the so-called “Tigers” – have caught up, but did so by selling to the west and undercutting labor costs, while a few western financiers played God with their currencies and nearly killed their economies in the process. The same imperialist-capitalist philosophy that leads fictional England to keep silver-making to itself drives nations and drug manufacturers to charge market rents for treatments or cures for diseases that are devastating sub-Saharan Africa. Over 90% of the children with HIV and over 90% of the pregnant women with HIV in the world live in that region. People with HIV make up over 2% of the population of Africa as a whole. The virus is driving a co-epidemic with tuberculosis. The developed world has not stepped up with sufficient funds to stem the spread of the virus and reduce the death rate through antiretroviral drugs. Even ignoring the potential economic benefits of helping a continent with over a billion people fight an epidemic, isn’t there a moral imperative to help people not die of a disease that is 1) mostly preventable and 2) mostly treatable, just because they don’t have the money or even a way to get it?

Robin’s answer, ultimately, is yes. How he gets there, and what he and his friends end up doing to try to topple the tower, literally and figuratively, makes Babel one of the smartest and most thought-provoking page-turners I’ve read in years. I can even see why readers who’d read this first might have been disappointed by her next novel, Yellowface, which feels insubstantial by comparison. Its ideas are also important, but Babel creates a universe to call out universal ills, and forces you to reckon with its themes by plunging you into a story you won’t want to put down.

Next up: Currently reading Daniel Mason’s North Woods.

Sea of Tranquility.

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was a masterpiece, a beautiful novel of humanity set in the most despairing, hopeless setting – the onset and aftermath of a global pandemic that causes society to collapse. Her follow-up, The Glass Hotel, had the same sparkling prose and characterization, but the story fell apart at the end, undermining the entire work. Her most recent novel, Sea of Tranquility, brings back one of The Glass Hotel’s characters and the fictional town that served as its setting, with an entirely new story that delves further into science fiction than Mandel has ever gone – and this time, she sticks the landing with a conclusion that ties the entire novel together and brings the reader back to the sense of humanity that set Station Eleven apart.

Sea of Tranquility begins in 1912, as the disowned grandson of an English aristocrat arrives in Caiette, British Columbia, after his exile from his family. While there, he walks into the local forest, but has a mysterious experience where he hears a violin playing – despite there being no one else in sight – and the world around him seems to go black. Shortly afterwards, a visiting priest asks him about the experience, but it appears that the priest may be an impostor. The story then jumps ahead a hundred years, then nearly two hundred, then about two hundred more, and there’s very little in common between the stories except for that impostor-priest person, who appears in different guises in each story. What ties them all together is the mystery that guy is trying to solve.

Mandel’s previous two novels leaned quite heavily on her strength of characterization, but that’s the weakest part of Sea of Tranquility, which might only have one true central character who gets a three-dimensional rendering on the page – that guy, who at one point in the novel is known as Gaspery. Instead, Mandel’s exploration of humanity, both what it means to be human (and whether we have free will) and how we treat one another, comes through an inventive plot device that doesn’t reveal itself until at least halfway through the novel. (You might figure it out before then, but I’m trying not to spoil it.) Crafting a story like this requires a fine attention to detail and an ability to maintain plausibility in the face of automatic disbelief. Mandel couldn’t manage this with a simpler story in The Glass Hotel, where her main character made more than one irrational decision that didn’t sit well with me, given what had come before for her character. Here, her central character’s actions, while not always entirely rational, are at least believable, and thus don’t get in the way of the broader story.

So much of Sea of Tranquility recalled David Mitchell’s magnum opus Cloud Atlas, another book told in pieces separated in time by decades or centuries, leaving it to the reader to connect them. In Mitchell’s case, however, the connections were tenuous, and only there for the audience, while the novel succeeded because he wrote each of the six sections (five of which were then split into two) in a different literary style. He also loves to bring back characters from previous novels, even just for cameos, something Mandel did in The Glass Hotel with some minor characters from Station Eleven. Sea of Tranquility lacks the grandiose ambitions of Cloud Atlas, but it’s also far more focused on its core themes and more effective in asking its questions about them. I may not answer Mandel’s main mystery question in the affirmative, but I found it easy to go along for the ride as she explores it.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Nurrudin Farah’s North of Dawn.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is one of the biggest successes in self-publishing in the last decade or so, as she ran a successful Kickstarter to give her the time to finish the book, which sold well enough that Hachette’s Hodder & Stoughton picked it up and published their edition a year later. The book now has three sequels, winning the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2019, and all of the sequels earned nominations for the Hugo for Best Novel. This book, at least, has “first effort” all over it, though, and it’s kind of clunky and overdone in so many parts, especially the world-building, which detracted somewhat from a fun if very light story about a group of misfits becoming an ersatz family aboard a spaceship.

The Wayfarer is that ship, and as the series opens, Rosemary is heading for the Wayfarer to serve as its clerk, handling all of the paperwork the ship needs to move through space, across civilizations and, often, punching holes in the fabric of space to create shortcuts across great distances. These artificial wormholes are the Wayfarer’s main source of income, and they do it with a truly motley crew of specialists drawn from multiple species. Each crew member gets their own moment in the spotlight here, so rather than a single plot we get a series of episodes that allow the focus to move across everyone on the ship, from Corbin, the stubborn, meticulous biologist who grows the algae that helps power the ship; to Dr. Chef, the mechanic and, yes, chef, from a dying species who also serves as the ship’s counselor; to Jenks, the engineer who is – slight spoiler – in love with the ship’s AI. Really. (Needless to say I found that one a bit hard to take.)

I think the real problem I had with Long Way was the extensive exposition as Chambers builds out her universe, with giant civilizations of many species, endless rules, fictional technologies, and at least seven characters who need some sort of back stories. It’s a trap many first-time writers seem unable to avoid, and I at least attribute it to the benign desire to get all of these thoughts – the whole universe they’ve built up in their heads – out on to the page, as well as to prevent too much confusion on the part of readers. It also drives me up the wall, because 1) we can learn about this stuff as the story goes along and 2) if I really, really need to understand the technical details of how interstellar travel works in your books, or get a full description of every species’ cultural norms, that’s a bigger problem than just giving us a few pages of extrapolation can solve. Since Long Way visits a lot of planets and has such a diverse crew, we get a lot of that cultural stuff, and the book ends up spinning its wheels for pages and pages while Chambers describes trivial points about handshakes or mating customs.

The book does tackle some larger social themes, although it does so in a cursory way because there are so many smaller stories in the novel’s 438 pages. There’s a bit about cloning, a part about LGBT relationships, some stuff about war and the ethics of supplying one side (pretty timely right about now) when you’re not involved, and more, but none of tit gets more than superficial treatment.

The Long Way has to stand on the strength of its characters, since the plot is modest and the prose more akin to YA fiction, and there Chambers has some more success, although it’s a mixed bag. Rosemary is fine as the closest character we have to a protagonist, as her wide-eyed views and relative inexperience outside of her home planet make her a sensible lens for the reader to view most of the action. Some of the non-human characters are a little overdrawn, notably the navigator, Ohan, so again we get bogged down in details rather than seeing the characters develop. The more I write, the more I realize I just didn’t care for this book at all, other than that it was light and easy to read. It’s not The Calculating Stars bad, but I hope the remainder of the series spends more time developing the characters than explaining its fictional universe.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 done with Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go.

Nope.

Nope is the third feature film from writer-director Jordan Peele, who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the outstanding Get Out, which was a biting satire wrapped in a smart horror film. For some reason, the studio behind Nope tried to pitch it more as another horror film, but that’s not just underselling it, but also probably misrepresented it. This is much more of a sci-fi mystery with a surprising moral to it, another smart film from Peele but in a completely different vein from his debut. (I haven’t seen Us, his second film.) You can stream Nope on Peacock or rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as the siblings OJ and Em Haywood, who run a horse farm where they train the animals for roles in film and television. As Nope begins, their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), is killed by metal debris that falls from the sky, with a nickel impaling him in the eye and a key embedded itself in the horse he was riding. They assume these fell from an airplane and eventually they try to pick up more business, but when they find it’s lagging, OJ sells some of his horses to the nearby western theme park Jupiter’s Claim, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star whose TV series ended in tragedy when the chimp who starred on the show became violent to several of the cast members – but not to Jupe. When the electricity starts going off on the Haywoods’ farm without explanation, and the horses start reacting badly to some unseen force, the siblings decide to invest in some high-tech cameras to try to figure out what’s going on.

Nope is a slow burn, similar to Get Out, but not quite the same – where Peele’s first film was sinister until the big reveal, this one unfurls its mystery by degrees, with more misdirection that allows you to experience the perspectives of multiple characters. It was also easier to figure out what was happening in Get Out, or at least get the sense, than what’s happening in Nope. The obvious answer would be that it’s a UFO, which, of course, most of the characters think is the answer, including the Fry’s Electronics employee Angel (Brandon Perea), who realizes from the start that something weird is happening out at the ranch and invites himself to be a part of the investigation. What they find is much more interesting on a literal level and a thematic one.

The cast is fantastic across the board. Kaluuya has never missed for me, right down to his pre-fame appearance on Doctor Who (where we get to hear his British accent for once). The steely reserve that made him so menacing in Widows here works in a different direction, as his character is so tightly wound that he feels like he’s about to combust. Yeun probably needed more to do, but he’s excellent, as always, as a huckster and entrepreneur trying to squeeze every dollar he can out of the limited assets he has. Perea is a scene-stealer in a comic relief character that’s actually well conceived and well written – he’s hilarious, but also plays important roles in the plot and helps illuminate the relationship between the siblings and also later provide some connection to a fourth character who helps them try to unravel the ultimate mystery. If there’d been any awards attention for this movie, he would have been worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, as well as a potential Original Screenplay nod for Peele. Wrenn Schmidt is a little wasted as Jupe’s wife, while Barbie Ferreira is even more wasted in a cameo as Angel’s co-worker, but I did enjoy the cameo from ‘80s prime-time soap star Donna Mills.

There’s one overarching theme to the story here that I might spoil by discussing, so if you haven’t seen Nope and intend to, you may wish to stop reading. The throughline that connects Jupe and the Haywoods is the use of animals for entertainment, with the implication that how we treat these animals in turn affects how they will treat us, or even what sort of animals they will become over time. OJ shows respect for their horses, and when he’s trying to show one horse, Lucky, for a commercial, he bristles at any suggestion from the director that might distress the animal, even telling a crew member not to make eye contact with Lucky for fear it will upset him. While we don’t see Jupe’s chimpanzee colleague being openly mistreated, the flashbacks – the one bit of the film where there’s some actual violence on screen – strongly imply that the chimp was being exploited, and that his rampage was the result of this treatment. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole about this, several critics and writers have noted that this subplot mirrors the actual story of Travis the chimp, who was separated from his mother at three days old and sold to a couple who kept him as a pet, only to have him turn violent one day, mauling and disfiguring a family friend.) All of this comes together in the film’s resolution, which also features some spectacular visual effects, to make it clear that the story is at least trying to make us realize the extent to which we are exploiting other creatures – and perhaps, on some level, other people – for no purpose beyond our entertainment. The characters who don’t understand this end up dead; the others survive. I don’t think you could make the moral much clearer than that.

Right now, I have Nope in my top ten for the year, although it could end up pushed out as I see more foreign-language films, since several of the most acclaimed non-English language movies, including two Oscar nominees, still aren’t available digitally as of February 27th. (Here’s hoping I wake up to find The Quiet Girl is rentable.) Regardless of its exact ranking for me whenever I wrap this cycle, Nope is excellent, another cerebral, thoughtful undertaking from Peele, even if it’s not quite up to the high bar he set for himself with Get Out.

Elder Race.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race made the shortlist for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which first brought him to my attention even though he’d written twenty-odd novels before this and won a few awards along the way. It’s a quick read with a clever conceit at its heart: what if the person who’s supposed to be a great wizard is, in fact, just a human who possesses sufficiently advanced technology that it appears to be magic?

The ’wizard’ Nygroth Elder is, in fact, Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist left in stasis to keep an eye on this colonized planet while the remainder of his crew has long since left to return to Earth – which may or may not still be a going concern. Lynesse Fourth Daughter, a princess so junior you might call her a spare to the spare, believes there’s an existential threat to her people, so she treks to Nyr’s tower to try to enlist his help to fight what she calls a demon, which her own mother thinks is a fabrication to try to gain attention or glory. Nyr reluctantly agrees to help, even though his directive is to observe but not interfere, even if refraining might cause harm to the people he’s watching, and they set off on a quest to find and defeat the threat. Along the way, the culture clash between the two emerges through their languages, as Nyr can’t even explain what a scientist is, and the translation engine he uses makes everything sound to Lynesse like some sort of magic.

Elder Race is a quest novel – or novella, which is how the Hugo Awards characterized it, giving it a nomination in that category in 2022 – but one with a metatextual component as well that, in some ways, is the more interesting of the two. Tchaikovsky tells the story by alternating narration between Lynesse and Nyr, thus presenting both sides of most of their conversations, which operates as a commentary on fantasy literature and works that try to blend fantasy and science, as well as a more humanist look at the challenges of communicating across cultures. The fact that Lynesse’s language lacks so many words that Nyr takes for granted and finds himself unable to express even through translation recalled Samuel Delany’s classic novella Babel-17, which takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that the structure of a language influences how its speakers view the world – and turns it into an entire story, where a language is a weapon that alters speakers’ minds. Here language is less insidious, but stands as a concrete example of the difficulty of communicating across all of the boundaries that separate people, not just language but culture, history, religion, and more. Language is the visible manifestation of what amounts to a religious difference between Lynesse’s people and Nyr; what her family and subjects believe is magic is just technology they’ve lost in the centuries since humans colonized this planet.

Nyr is the more interesting and developed character of the two, in part because Lynesse is, by design, depicted as naïve – she’s young, but also not very worldly even within the confines of this civilization, and her faith in Nyr based on a historical anecdote is almost charming in its innocence. Nyr, meanwhile, has to grapple with both his role as potential savior, or as a failed savior, to Lynesse’s people, while also facing the fact that he might be severed permanently from his own civilization, condemned to a lonely existence where he enters long periods of suspended animation and can’t forge enduring relationships with anyone. He encounters crippling depression and covers it up with the help of embedded tech that takes the old trope about men compartmentalizing their emotions and turns it into software; he can just push it aside and deal with it later.

Tchaikovsky – who spells his name Czajkowski outside of his writing, as he’s of Polish descent rather than Russian – packs a lot into the 200 pages of Elder Race, without skimping on the quest part of the story, which is the real narrative that drives the book forward. You could probably just read this as a straight-up quest without giving the larger themes a second thought and still enjoy it. I found those themes gave this novel more heft and staying power in my mind after I finished. It’s to Czajkowski’s credit that he managed this in such a brief novel that revolves almost entirely around just two core characters.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my writeups, but I’m currently reading Brian Clegg’s Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe.

How High We Go in the Dark.

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark was one of three finalists for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Leguin Prize for Fiction, losing the ultimate honor to Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust. Nagamatsu’s work is a short story novel, a series of connected anecdotes that involve related characters, all of it set in a dystopian but easy to foresee near future where climate change is melting permafrost, thawing out a virus that causes a horrifying global pandemic. Each story after the opening one explores the ramifications of these two events, ranging from the ridiculous to the tragic, but always returning to the humanity of their characters.

The initial story sets up everything that follows, as we meet Dr. Cliff Miyashiro at an archaeological dig site in eastern Siberia where his daughter, Clara, fell and died shortly after discovering the remains of a possibly-Neanderthal girl who died of mysterious causes with strange markings on and near her body. It emerged as the ice melted due to climate change, which also activated a virus in the corpse that quickly infects several members of the camp. By the start of the second story, it has become a global pandemic, and, in almost direct contrast to SARS-CoV-2, it is far more deadly to children, which leads to especially perverse ideas – like an amusement park where parents take their gravely ill children to be euthanized on a rollercoaster.

Within a few stories, Nagamatsu has reshaped society around the pandemic, making funerary companies the most valuable in the world that also control the cryptocurrencies that take over the world’s economy. It goes a bit too far – the company that manufactures the spaceship that heads out in search of another habitable planet is Yamato-Musk, which seems especially embarrassing for Nagamatsu after the last week – but that’s clearly his concept, pushing every idea to the farthest possible boundary and then exploring how his characters respond to it. In that sense, it’s very Philip K. Dick, but less insane, with at least some grounding in actual science, at least to the extent that he’s anticipating readers’ first objections to some of his concepts. There are a pair of stories that broke my suspension of disbelief, but even in those cases, I could go with it because they were both well-written and focused on the characters rather than the impossible facts.

Nagamatsu eschews easy answers, and one possible reading of How High We Go in the Dark is as an  extremely bleak outlook on the near future of our planet and our species, that climate change is inevitable (true) and we are totally unprepared for its impact (partly true), that our current pandemic, which isn’t mentioned in the book, is a harbinger of more and larger ones to come (likely). I didn’t read it that way, as grim as the subject matter is. Nagamatsu’s characters all look forward and try to find not just ways to survive, but reasons. There’s just one direct suicide in the book, and some euthanasia of the very sick, but the vast majority of the characters here are fully engaged in living. Even Dennis, a character in multiple stories who would probably have been equally at odds and ends in a non-catastrophe world, is still striving for something, even if he has no idea what it might be.

Even with such dismal subject matter, How High We Go in the Dark is one of the most compelling and fastest reads I’ve had in ages. Nagamatsu’s prose is clear and unadorned, hitting the right amount of detail when he’s delving into science or his speculations. There’s so much more focus on people than ideas here that the work rises above most cli-fi or other stories of realistic dystopias, up to the level of Station Eleven, a novel that turned a global pandemic that crumbled civilization into a story of great beauty around humanity, kindness, and the enduring power of art. Nagamatsu deals more with the personal tragedies of his characters and how society might grapple with mass deaths that involve far more children than our current pandemic, where the world has largely shrugged at the deaths of 1 in every 1000 people. It’s a remarkable novel and thought experiment, one of the best things I’ve read this year.

Next up: Jess Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. I have an advance copy so I can read it before Jess comes on my podcast in two weeks.

A Desolation Called Peace.

Arkady Martine won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel for A Memory Called Empire, the first in what is now the Teixcalaanli series of stories involving a character who has the memories of the man who preceded her as ambassador implanted into her brain. I despised it for its pretentiousness and its lack of character development, so I wasn’t exactly pleased to see the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the same award this year. It offers more plot than the first novel did, and has one new, interesting character (giving it one more than its predecessor), but suffers from the same pretentious style and emphasis on all the wrong things.

Mahit Dzmare returns from the first novel as the ambassador from the outpost Lsel Station to the Teixcalaanli empire – you know we’re in outer space, because the letters are all in the wrong order! – but the story here goes well beyond her. Where Memory was a bit of a whodunit, as she tried to find out who assassinated the previous ambassador – and that’s whose memories she has in her brain, although it’s not just memories, but his entire persona. She’s part of a bigger story this time that involves an unknown species that has attacked Teixcalaanli settlers on a remote mining world, eviscerating the victims for no apparent reason, and then attacks a fleet of military ships with some sort of viscous substance that eats through metal and might be ingesting (dissolving?) the pilots. Mahit’s superiors want her to sabotage any Teixcalaanli attempts to negotiate peace with the aliens to protect Lsel’s interests and sovereignty. Meanwhile, the heir to the Teixcalaanli throne, a precocious eleven-year-old boy, finds himself involved in the discussions that ensue around how to proceed against the unknown enemy.

One some level, A Desolation Called Peace didn’t stand a chance coming in, because the same elements I found so pretentious in the first novel are still here. The constructed language is back, with the same overly complex grammar and unpronounceable or just plain weird phonemes, like “ezuazuacat” or “yaoklat.” So are the Teixcalaanli names, which involve a number and usually a noun, like Nineteen Adze, Eight Antidote (the heir to the throne), or Three Seagrass. It’s showy, except that it’s not showing anything. This is the stuff I would have found extremely cool when I was a teenager, but that’s not a compliment here – it’s a sign that the entire endeavor starts from the wrong place.

However, the story here exceeds that of the first novel, both in construction and in interest. It’s part Ender’s Game, part Imperial Radch series, part Star Trek: The Next Generation, and nothing here is all that original, but it’s at least reasonably entertaining. Eight Antidote, the future Teixcalaani emperor, is the best character to appear in either novel, which is also a low bar to clear, but given how uninteresting Mahit Dzmare is – which is quite a feat, given that she’s simultaneously two people – it’s a huge improvement. He’s not just some imp, nor is he a savant; he’s a smart kid, doing smart kid things, getting into trouble, but also finding his way through an adult world that he knows, one day, will revolve around him. Martine divides the story into three interwoven plot lines, one around Eight Antidote, one around Mahit Dzmare, and one around the military discussions.

The other saving grace of A Desolation Called Peace is the resolution, where all three storylines converge in a reasonably satisfying conclusion, albeit one that’s a bit derivative of one of the works cited above. Even with the mediocre writing, with heavy use of archaic or esoteric terms that have common equivalents, and the bizarre nomenclature of Teixcalaanli characters, it’s pretty quick-moving. I also appreciated the de-emphasis of Mahit Dzmare’s character and her implanted predecessor, which got old very quickly in the prior book. If you enjoyed A Memory Called Empire, you might enjoy this one even more, even though I’m still not a fan.

Next up: Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark.

Behold the Man.

Michael Moorcock has a huge bibliography of fantasy, science fiction, and some literary fiction, while also writing lyrics and even singing on a couple of tracks for bands like Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult, and I’d never heard of him until I came across one of his books in the London bookstore Hatchard’s in August. Moorcock won the Nebula Award for Best Novella for Behold the Man, which plays with a small but interesting conceit: A time traveler goes back to the time of Jesus, only to find that the ostensible Messiah isn’t, and that John the Baptist and his followers think the time traveler might be the promised savior.

Karl Glogauer is a man adrift in his world in the early 1970s, dabbling in studying philosophy, engaging in and sabotaging various romantic relationships, never finding an actual job or calling, or anything that might anchor him in society. He ends up falling in with a mad scientist who claims to have developed a time machine, which we know actually worked – once – because Karl crash-landed in AD 28 in the device, which was damaged badly enough that there’s no hope of a return trip. Because he arrived in a strange box in a flash of light, the people who saw him think he must be supernatural, and of course word spreads that someone who might be the Adonai.

You can sort of see where the book is going early on, even though Jesus doesn’t actually appear until past the halfway point, but in this case the plot isn’t the point. I’m sure some readers would find it sacrilegious, but this is more a character study than an attack on religion. Karl is a man without a purpose, with multiple neuroses, even told by at least one of his girlfriends that he has a messiah complex. Moorcock intertwines the 1970s narrative with the Nazarene one, so you can see the character developing as you watch his reactions to the Jews of Christ’s era trying to ascertain if he is the Chosen One – and then trying to convince him that he is. Karl goes from trying to dissuade John the Baptist and other followers that he’s anyone special to becoming a peregrinator to taking deliberate steps to fulfill the events of the Bible, not out of faith or obligation, but because it gives him a sense of purpose.

Whether this novella works for you will depend on what you think of Karl, and perhaps how much  you know of either the Gospels or the works of Carl Jung. I know a bit about the former but very little of the latter, other than that he was influential early in the days of psychiatry and believed in a lot of stuff we know now as woo. The novella does subvert the hero’s journey in multiple ways, from the way that Karl knows exactly what he has to do, since it’s already been written, to the fact that he’s deceiving everybody he meets, either because he’s a narcissist, or because he believes he’s doing the right thing by fulfilling the Scriptures.

Moorcock’s prose style is very easy to read, even with the frequent time-shifting and differences in dialogue styles between the two settings, and the author doesn’t overburden the prose with background information, such as more about Jung’s beliefs. There’s a somewhat disjointed passage about Karl having a fling with an older man, which I think makes the mistake of the time period of conflating homosexuality with a clear case of abuse, that hasn’t aged well. Beyond that, it was more than good enough for me to look into more of Moorcock’s oeuvre.

Next up: Still reading Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly.

Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a madcap adventure, a martial-arts action film, a dark comedy, a sci-fi romp, bursting at every seam with ideas and dad jokes. It’s a brilliant work of screenwriting, carried by a career performance from the always wonderful Michelle Yeoh – who nearly wasn’t even in the film. (You can rent it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, etc.)

The film, written and directed by the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert, who also directed the bawdy video for Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What”), follows Evelyn (Yeoh), a harried, unhappy laundromat owner, married to the hapless Waymond (Ke Huy Quan). They have a daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), and Evelyn’s estranged father, Gong Gong (James Hong, who turned 91 during filming), who is just arriving from Hong Kong. Evelyn is preparing a welcome party for her father while also staring down piles of receipts for an upcoming IRS audit (with Jamie Lee Curtis playing the tax authority’s agent). It’s clear that Evelyn is unhappy across the board in her life, but while the two are in the elevator at the IRS offices, Waymond suddenly changes and begins telling Evelyn that theirs is just one universe among many in the multiverse, and in his (the Alphaverse), people can verse-jump, gaining special skills from their parallel selves – but one person, Jobu Tupaki, has used this to accumulate immense power and is threatening to destroy all universes at once. It’s up to Evelyn, our universe’s Evelyn specifically, to save them all.

Part of the genius of this script is its combination of highbrow philosophical questions with lowbrow humor. The difference between existentialism and nihilism, with the former holding that the only meaning in life is created by the individual while the latter views life as meaningless, full-stop, is at the core of the movie; Jobu Tupaki sees and experiences all universes simultaneously, and thus believes that there is no meaning anywhere, only pain. (I don’t think there’s a Major League reference here, but I also wouldn’t say it’s impossible given some of the other allusions here, including one to a 1990s alternative song that is so perfectly integrated into the dialogue I had to pause the movie just to admire it.) Jobu is the film’s Bazarov, accumulating followers in a sort of nihilist cult, even as she seems to be speeding towards her own destruction.

The Daniels originally envisioned Jackie Chan in the main role, but rewrote the script to make the lead character a woman, with Yeoh their first choice, and the decision to re-center the film around not just a woman but a mother and an immigrant changes one of the film’s core messages. Evelyn is asked to run the family business and manage the family, to handle the finances and the relationships and organize this ridiculous party for a father who disowned her decades earlier when she chose Waymond and his dubious financial prospects against her parents’ wishes. Of course she has to save the universe: She’s a mother. If this wasn’t written as a commentary on the modern working American mother, who is expected to do it all and 20% more, it sure as hell plays like one – and Yeoh never lets us forget it, with an undercurrent of stress on her face throughout almost the entire movie. It’s a tour de force of a performance, one that lets her show tremendous range, and I’m going to hazard the opinion that it’s the best thing she’s ever done, even though I know I haven’t seen most of her performances because she’s been extensively pigeonholed since Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Look at her filmography – it’s a sad commentary on the industry’s narrow view of Asian-American actors, and I haven’t even mentioned that this is Quan’s first film role in 20 years after he retired due to the lack of interesting parts offered to him.

The movie is also highly, consistently funny, from the allusions to wordplay to some gross-out jokes to some of the bizarre parallel universes we see, like the one where people have hot dogs for fingers, or the one where there are no people, just rocks. The sheer audacity of much of the humor, often right in the middle of a huge action sequence or a big emotional scene, helps some of the goofier jokes land, and even makes what is probably the grossest gag in the film much more acceptable. It feels like a film written by two people who never said no to the other’s wackiest ideas, and in this milieu, where we’re suspending disbelief to allow for its premise of travel between parallel universes, that sort of humor is almost a requirement. I do think the Daniels missed an opportunity by not having Eels or at least Mark Oliver Everett on the soundtrack, though.

I thought the story here ended exactly where it should, and the script gets to that point in a reasonable and not too predictable fashion, although it does involve a big downshift from the intensity of the first ¾ of the film. There’s yet one more theme that comes up in the back half of the film that further informs the ending, although discussing that would involve a significant spoiler; I’ll go as far as saying that I thought that was handled perfectly and hope those of you who’ve seen it know what I’m addressing. I doubt I’m going to find ten films this year that I liked more than this, or five performances by actresses I like more than Yeoh’s. It’s just a fantastic film in almost every way.

Dune.

Dune could have gone wrong so many ways, but the biggest risk in converting Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic to the big screen was always the plot. The novel’s setting is iconic, from the desert planet to the sandworms, yet the complexity of the story around the Christ-like Paul Atreides stood out as the greater challenge, the one aspect of the book that couldn’t be addressed with CG. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune does a remarkable job of distilling the first half of the book into a single, accessible story that simplifies the plot without overdoing it, while also providing the look and feel that have helped make the novel an enduring classic of its genre.

(Disclaimers: I love the original Dune novel, so much that I read all five of Herbert’s increasingly terrible sequels, but have still never seen the David Lynch film adaptation from 1984.)

Dune follows the familiar template of the ‘chosen one,’ a story arc that stretches back to the Bible and continues now in YA fiction, most notably the Harry Potter series. The messiah here is Paul Atreides, the teenaged son of the Duke Leto Atreides, who rules the planet Caladan, and his concubine Lady Jessica, a member of the cultish spiritual order the Bene Gesserit. Paul exhibits unusual mental abilities from an early age that indicate that he may be the savior foretold by the Bene Gesserit’s prophecy. The story opens when the Emperor orders the Duke to take stewardship of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the drug known as spice or mélange, which also happens to be an essential element in interstellar travel. The present rules of Arrakis, House Harkonnen, are not especially keen to lose their powers, leading to armed conflict that puts Paul on the run and in charge of his own destiny.

Villeneuve’s decision with his co-screenwriters to split the book into two films, hoping the first would fare well enough that the studio would greenlight the second, paid off twice – it did do well enough that we will get a sequel, and I would argue that it only did that well because it didn’t try to cram a densely plotted 500-page novel into a 150 minute movie. There’s so much room to breathe here that Timothée Chalamet gets far more screen time to give a little depth to Paul’s character, while Rebecca Ferguson, as Lady Jessica, may be an even bigger beneficiary, as some of that character’s most important scenes would almost certainly have been cut in a single-film adaptation. Paul’s character comes alive more in the second half of the book, once he’s on the run with the Fremen people, which leaves a modest void in a first-half movie for another central character to fill, and Ferguson does so with the film’s best performance.

The cast of Dune is incredible on paper, although the result is more “I can’t believe they got Charlotte Rampling!” than “I can’t believe how great Charlotte Rampling is!” Oscar Isaac is here. So is Javier Bardem. Stephen McKinley Henderson, who you know by sight even if you don’t know him by name. And there is some value in having these very famous people, any of whom can command a scene by themselves, in smaller roles. They don’t get quite enough to do – not even as much as Jason Momoa does in a memorable turn as Duncan Idaho.

The film does look amazing, though. Villeneuve is no amateur at worldbuilding on the screen, and this is the Arrakis of the page, whether in wide shots or close-ups, feeling vast and foreboding and terrifyingly dry. You’ll find yourself craving water watching this film. Many of the special effects are impressive, especially those showing the various flying vehicles on the surface of the planet, but there’s just as much wonder in the sword fights or the scenes showing troops massed in formation when the Atreides arrive on Arrakis to take control.

Dune ended up with ten Oscar nominations this year, including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but not Best Director, which surprised me given how much Villeneuve had to put together here even taking the script (which he co-wrote) as a given. I’m not surprised at the lack of acting nominations, given how many people and named characters in the film, and how little depth most of them get even in a film that’s a solid two and a half hours. Ferguson might have had an argument for a supporting nod, but that’s probably it. My guess is Dune wins a bunch of technical awards – ones it may very well deserve – without taking Best Picture or Adapted Screenplay. Of the four BP nominees I’ve seen so far, though, I think it’s my favorite.