→ March 20, 2019
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The Mars Room.

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room sits atop that Pulitzer Prize predictions list I’ve mentioned a few times previously, the same that guided me to read There There (now at #2) and Asymmetry (my favorite of these three, but down to #11). Kushner’s book is a blindingly fast read built around a compelling central character, although the story itself fell short of my expectations and I was never sure what Kushner was trying to express in either the main story or the many subplots throughout the novel. It’s clearly a feminist novel, but perhaps too hopeless and scattered to get that core point across.

The Mars Room centers on Romy Hall, a woman serving two life terms for a murder that will be explained partway through the book, as she details her experience going from sentencing to jail and then serving time in a women’s prison in California while also giving flashbacks to the traumatic life that got her to this point. Romy encounters other women incarcerated for similar reasons, crimes against a society that had brutalized them first, as well as a small cast of unusual side characters who get more development than most secondary characters do in novels but whose stories end abruptly enough that their presence ends up unsatisfying.

The most prominent of these additional characters is the trans woman Conan, whose story would probably be worthy of her own book – although Kushner uses male pronouns to refer to her because the book is written in Romy’s voice, and Romy can’t see Conan as anything but male. Conan is originally sorted into a men’s prison, then is transferred to the women’s prison, but is kept separate from gen pop while authorities try to sort out what to do with her, during which time the other prisoners aware of her presence split into two factions around her status in the jail. This subplot was both as interesting and as nuanced as Romy’s until Kushner cut it short by turning it into a device to push Romy’s plot towards its denouement. It does the Conan character a disservice to use her as a prop rather than even beginning to truly explore the plight of a trans person in our prison system, or using a trans character to illuminate the way our prisons serve to dehumanize everyone incarcerated in them.

The other side characters who get more prominent billing in The Mars Room feel too tangential to the main story and end up distractions when it becomes clear that Kushner isn’t going to tie them together with Romy’s narrative. The dirty cop Doc ends up getting what’s coming to him, in a sense, but before then recounts his history of corruption and violence against suspects, provoked and unprovoked, but the connection to Romy is never established. The prison teacher Gordon at least has more to do with with Romy, in part because he becomes platonically involved with many of the prisoners he teaches, which means he inserts himself into Romy’s story and provides her with a critical piece of information that spurs the action that ends the book, although, again, he’s more of a prop than a fully-realized character (and, ultimately, not that interesting).

There’s one point of social criticism in The Mars Room that deserves far more exploration than Kushner gives it, although in fairness to her I’m not sure how much more she could have done within this plot. Romy committed a crime against someone whom she believed, with reason, posed a threat to her and her son, but her public defender refuses to let her testify (and explains why) and also has very little time to spend on her or any of his cases. If you are poor in this country and are arrested for a crime, you will get a public defender who is probably competent and capable but wildly overloaded with work and thus given no time to devote to cases where that same lawyer might achieve much better results for the client given more time. Locking Up Our Own looked at this same issue and gave a statistic that, I think, claimed that public defenders get an average of about four minutes to work on any specific case. This system is totally broken even before we ask whether it is biased against women who commit violent acts against men who assault them or threaten to do so. Romy has been broken against the wheel, and the act that put her in prison for life was, at the very least, worthy of more consideration and likely more mercy than she received. The ways in which this world robs women, especially women without means, of everything from their dignity to their agency to their lives, are myriad, and define the plot at the core of The Mars Room. Perhaps Kushner had the right kind of anger, but just needed another story to express it.

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→ March 5, 2019
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Asymmetry.

Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry is one of the best, most immersive, cleverest new novels I’ve read in the past year, at least since Lincoln in the Bardo and possibly back to In the Light of What We Know. Built around a single, interconnected narrative in three highly asymmetrical parts, it takes a fictionalized account of Halliday’s affair with the much older writer Philip Roth and spins it into a dazzling, textured story that gives her stand-in character an agency not typically seen in these stories and uses the relationship as the platform to show the development of her writing voice.

The first part, the longest of the three, is called “Folly” and tells the story of how Alice, an editor at a New York publishing house, met the Pulitzer-winning author Ezra, and began an affair that is itself asymmetrical. He’s older, successful, world-weary, and confident in his writing voice; she’s younger, new to the publishing world, naive in some ways (but not totally or hopelessly so), and a would-be writer who has yet to develop her own voice or even find confidence that she’s a worthy enough talent to be published. Their relationship is sweet and grounded in reality, with descriptions of the mundane far more than the tawdry, like Alice picking up very specific foods Ezra loves or medicines he needs, and dialogue that reveals layers of their relationship even through the minutiae of the topics. It doesn’t hurt that Ezra loves the Red Sox and makes Alice into a fan, which then becomes a running theme through the book as the seasons pass and the Sox win their first World Series in 86 years during their affair. What could be weird or even inappropriate never seems such because Alice never loses her autonomy or sense of self within the relationship, even standing up for herself a few times, and often the balance in the relationship shifts in the other direction, as her youth and greater ease in the world giver her an advantage over the less physically able and less flexible Ezra.

The second part, “Madness,” details the Kafkaesque trial of Amar, a dual citizen of the United States and Iraq who gets caught in the purgatory of the UK’s equivalent of homeland security as he tries to make a stopover in London on his way to see his brother in Iraq by way of Istanbul. Amar is powerless in this situation, despite possessing two passports, a valid air ticket, and specific reasons for the stopover and the trip; the power rests entirely in the hands of his tormentors, who demur and delay until they finally decide they’re not going to allow him to leave the airport to legally enter England to visit his friend Alastair. The connection between these two stories is only made clear in the third part, although in hindsight you can see how Halliday presaged it; and even then it’s merely in passing, but that link also gives the first part a new level of significance beyond retelling a May-November romance story that we’ve heard before.

The third part is an interview with Ezra on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs program that functions as an extended epilogue and really ties the room together, although I don’t think it stands that well on its own except as an amusing trifle. It provides a coda for the first part, and an explanation for the relevance of the second part, while also giving us more of Ezra Booker, who is himself a wonderful character – an old man with a young spirit, a speaker who’s light on his feet, and, by this time, Alice’s ex-lover but someone who’s obviously tracked her career with pride.

The novel is also a treasure of literary allusions, both to other works – I doubt Alice’s name is any sort of a coincidence, as so much of the dialogue between her and Ezra is reminiscent of what Lewis Carroll’s protagonist may have found through her looking glass – and to real-world literary events, including Roth/Booker’s desire for a Nobel Prize that never came. Ezra gives Alice books to read on all sorts of subjects, the way an older writer might mentor a younger one, but also buys her expensive (albeit practical) gifts, further exacerbating the asymmetry of their relationship. Nothing is balanced in Halliday’s telling, nor is it any more balanced in reality.

The ultimate question Halliday seems to ask in Asymmetry is whether any of us can truly see the world through the eyes of another person. Ezra has done so through his books, or so Alice believes, but his characters – and Roth’s alter ego Zuckerman – share his perspective on the world, whereas Alice wants to write the character of someone who could not differ from her in a more fundamental way. So much of what we see is merely the way our brains interpret the motions of particles or radio waves, and thus each of us sees a different picture as we move through the same world. Halliday takes that aspect of physics (is the title a wink to supersymmetry?) and asks whether any of us can truly understand the views and experiences of another, even when we seem to walk the same path. It’s a gorgeous debut that can’t answer that question but will linger on your palate long after you finish.

Next up: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s novel My Uncle Napoleon.

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→ February 9, 2019
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There There.

Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There draws its title from multiple sources, including the great Radiohead song of that name and the oft-used but misunderstood Gertrude Stein quote about Oakland, which might give you some idea of how hazy and broad the novel is as a whole. With twelve central characters in a novel of a scant 290 pages – including a lot of white space – there are interesting ideas but, for readers who like to connect with characters in novels they read, not much there here.

Orange is Native American, a enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma (I was ignorant of this idea of enrollment before this) and the idea of being Native American in our current society, which simultaneously fetishizes aspects of indigenous cultures while putting substantial pressure on people of Native descent to assimilate. The twelve characters in There There are connected by a complex web of biological relationships and coincidental acquaintances, all of which leads them to a major pow-wow at whatever it is we’re calling the Oakland A’s stadium right now. Several of the characters plan to rob the powwow using 3D printed guns made by yet another character, which, of course, leads to a mass shooting event that closes out the book. (That’s a spoiler, but if you don’t see that coming by everything that comes before, we may need to talk about foreshadowing.)

The characters themselves don’t get enough page time to develop any depth or to distinguish themselves from each other – it’s not always this simple, but 14-15 pages per character doesn’t give the author much time to develop them – so I had a particularly hard time keeping their relationships straight. That’s exacerbated by what I assume was a major point of Orange’s – that the fractured nature of Native Americans living in a sort of parallel or shadow world next to ours can lead to fractured family relationships. Nobody in this novel has or grew up in a nuclear two-parent home where all members were biologically related, and many were raised by someone other than a parent. In that sense, the lack of definition around the characters works in the novel’s favor, because every individual seems just a little out of focus – and from the way many of them describe their upbringings, that may also represent how they feel.

There are other elements of Native culture present in the book that didn’t make sense to me in context, although I could simply have failed to understand them because I know so little about Native traditions. Several characters report pulling spiders’ legs out of their own legs – they’ll have a wound or cyst of some sort, and then will pull strands out of them that resemble spiders’ legs. It’s the only bit of magical realism in the novel – assuming that’s what it is – and it’s never explained, eventually just disappearing without explanation. If that’s a symbol, I missed it, and yet felt like there was something significant about the descriptions that I needed to grasp to fully understand the book.

And then there’s the mass shooting, which, unfortunately, is way too familiar in contemporary fiction, which is of course an artifact of how familiar mass shootings are in American life today. The way the shooting plays out makes it feel like a jumble of knots Orange used to tie off all of the loose threads he’d created over the course of the novel, and avoids the trap of having to give each of these characters individual endings. The failure to develop any of the characters also makes the ending – some are shot, at least one dies, some do heroic things – surprisingly inert for what should be an evocative portrayal of a gigantic trauma. You should feel something when a significant named character dies on the page; I was still trying to sort out who was who, leaving me disconnected from everything that happened to them.

I heard of There There from a site that tries to predict each year’s Pulitzer winner so that collectors can try to get first editions; this was currently their most likely title to win, although I don’t believe they had last year’s winner, Less, on their board at all. (They nailed the previous year’s winner, The Underground Railroad.) Perhaps they’re right – it has been positively reviewed, and stories about Native Americans in modern America would fit the Pulitzer’s guidelines favoring stories about the American experience. It just didn’t click with me in the least.

Next up: Already more than halfway through the Booker Prize-winning novel The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson.

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→ January 18, 2019
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An Unkindness of Ghosts.

Rivers Solomon’s debut novel An Unkindness of Ghosts bears a blatant stylistic similarity to the writing of N.K. Jemisin in her Broken Earth trilogy, from prose to characterization to both writers use of old-time religions in futuristic settings. And both writers put young women right at the heart of their respective stories, with Solomon giving us Aster, a young adult on a ‘generation ship’ that has, over centuries of drifting in space to an unknown and possibly nonexistent destination, devolved into a caste system by ship deck that incorporates skin color into its stratification, resulting in something that looks a good bit like American slavery.

Aster is a self-made scientist and doctor’s helper, often working with the Surgeon General, Theo, as well as tending plants in her botanarium, even though she’s a low-decker on the ship Matilda. That vessel has been in space at least 300 years, and thoughts of its Golden Land destination are more remote and have become tied up in a sort of doomsday religion that most of the ship practices – or, perhaps, that the upper-deck castes use to control those on the lower decks. Aster is neurodivergent, although Solomon never identifies her difference in any specific way, and for reasons that are only somewhat revealed by the end of the book, she’s marked for especially cruel treatment by the Lieutenant, a sadistic leader who is poised to take control if the Sovereign in charge dies. (You can guess whether that comes to pass.) Lune, Aster’s mother, took her own life the day Aster was born, but left behind cryptic clues in a series of notebooks that Aster and her bunk mate Giselle start to decipher when they realize its code may contain clues about the ship, as well as a potential way off of it.

There is, as we say on Twitter, a lot to unpack here, as Solomon has written a tight 350-page novel that incorporates race, religion, class, sex/gender, sexual harassment and assault, how people (mostly men) use and retain power, and a healthy dose of science fiction. There are women in the upper castes, but every authority figure we see is male. Women and girls on lower decks have darker skin, and are also used, to put it bluntly, for breeding, so the ship will have an ongoing supply of workers. Officials and guards have the tacit authority to rape or abuse women as they please, and it’s implied they do so with boys as well. One scene where Aster mouths off (with justification) to an upper-class twit woman lays bare the societal strictures that hold the barriers between upper and lower decks in place, backed by the force of the guard.

Unlike so many science fiction authors, good and bad, Solomon doesn’t spend a ton of time building the world in An Unkindness of Ghosts, giving the readers just what they need to understand what’s happening in the story, or where the characters might be in the architecture of the ship, but nothing extraneous. (Somehow there is meat on the ship, quite a bit of it, and I’m not sure how that one would work unless it’s supposed to be lab-grown.) The result is that the characters are extraordinarily well-developed for the genre – Aster, Theo, even Giselle and the caretaker known as Ainy or Melusine, whose importance grows as the book progresses. Solomon also defies many plot conventions by, again to be blunt, having smart characters still make stupid mistakes, especially Aster, who often acts without foresight because of her youth or how her brain works. She’s the hero, without question, but she’s flawed in a different way than your typical flawed hero. She’s flawed because she was born that way, and her successes come both in spite of that and often because of it, because she makes the best out of who she is, and can thus do things neurotypical people probably couldn’t. All of this, and other aspects of her character including some unspoken history of abuse and her unusual connection to Theo, make her one of the most interesting protagonists I’ve come across in a long time.

Solomon can get caught up in some clumsy prose, another similarity to Jemisin’s writing, such as when they start trying to describe the physics of space travel in their universe, especially the discovery Lune made that changes everything for Aster and her comrades, or in the description of Baby, the ship’s main power source. Yet they also display facility with creating language, giving each deck its own dialect, much the way slaves in different parts of the South would blend their native tongues with English and create new patois, such as the Gulla dialect still spoken today off the coast of South Carolina. The culture and economy of Matilda feel impossibly rich for a book this short; even when I wasn’t gripped by the plot, I was enveloped in Solomon’s world. The book starts slow, but stay with it; the last hundred pages are a barnburner and the ending is satisfying without becoming sentimental or obvious.

Next up: Still reading Camus’ The Plague.

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→ January 11, 2019
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All the Birds in the Sky.

Charlie Jane Anders was a founding editor of io9, the Gawker subsite dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, so it’s no surprise that her debut novel All The Birds in the Sky combines those genres and works in many tropes common in those areas, especially coming-of-age novels from the fantasy realm. Despite a slow ramp-up that doesn’t hint at the novel’s greater ambitions, the story builds to a bold climax that recalls many pioneering novels in these fields without ever coming off as derivative or unoriginal.

Anders’ gambit in All the Birds in the Sky is to create two synchronous, intertwined stories, one of which draws from straight fantasy and one from realistic, hard science fiction, with one character at the head of each, and contrast the complicated personal relationship between the two of them with the growing and apparently inevitable conflict that will occur between their two forces. Set in the near future where climate change and runaway capitalism have led to catastrophic weather patterns and rapid societal breakdown, the novel keeps raising the stakes between its two protagonists and pushes them into difficult, sometimes dangerous choices that only might help save the world.

Patricia and Lawrence are those two central characters, both misfits in their junior high school, albeit for different reasons. Patricia lives with her overbearing, judgmental parents, and a too-perfect older sister whose bullying of Patricia borders on the sociopathic. Lawrence lives on the other side of town, with warmer parents who don’t quite understand him, both of whom gave up ambitions of bigger careers to settle into working-class malaise. Patricia discovers one day that she can talk to animals, if only briefly, and ends up following a chatty bird to a giant tree in the middle of their forest where the birds are holding their Parliament (which is not restricted to owls). Lawrence is a gifted hacker who scavenges parts and builds a supercomputer in his closet, giving it a machine-learning algorithm that allows it to grow by talking to real people online, one of whom is Patricia. Of course, both kids are badly bullied – to such a cruel extent that reading the first few chapters was painful – which pushes them together but later pulls them apart, something exacerbated by a guidance counselor who isn’t what he seems to be, and is acting on a vision of the future where the two lead opposite sides of a global conflict between science and magic that threatens to end the planet as we know it.

The prologue was tough sledding, but once Anders gets her characters out of school, thanks to a dramatic flourish where Patricia rescues Lawrence from misery and possible death at a military academy of dubious merit, the pace picks up and the nonrealistic elements, both magic and fictional science, contribute more to the development of both the story and the two characters. Both Patricia and Lawrence are flawed, due to immaturity and the challenges of each of their upbringings, and then are pushed into situations, Patricia by her classmates at magic school and Lawrence by colleagues at a Boring Company-like startup, for which they aren’t well-prepared. Anders’ greatest achievement in the novel is showing those characters’ growth even through failures, one of which would be particularly traumatic, so that they are better prepared when the climax of the story arrives and the decisions they must make have the largest consequences yet.

All the Birds in the Sky will remind you of many great novels in these genres without ever drawing too heavily on any one source. The entire tenor of the book brought the great Magicians trilogy to mind, including the emphasis on the flaws in the two characters and how events in our youth can have long-lasting effects on our personalities and life choices well into adulthood. The influence of the major YA fantasy series like Harry Potter or The Chronicles of Narnia is evident in the background, but never overt, and any similarities are muted by the presence of the parallel sci-fi strand around Lawrence. He’s something out of a Heinlein novel, but better, more well-rounded and a lot more aware of the existence of women as actual people than anything Heinlein ever dreamed up.

I expected the ultimate battle between science and magic in this novel to play out differently, perhaps as some sort of faith/reason allegory, but it doesn’t, and that’s just how Anders rolls – so much of this novel sets you up in a comfortable, familiar way, and then resolves matters in a way that defies expectations without cheap surprises. All the Birds in the Sky won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2017, beating The Obelisk Gate (a result that was flipped for the Hugo), and I certainly agree with that result. It’s a fun, smart, compelling read, appropriate for young and full-grown adults alike.

Next up: Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts.

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→ January 8, 2019
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The Black Angel.

Cornell Woolrich’s name is scarcely heard today, although in his era he was one of the most important writers of pulp fiction, with his stories and novels adapted into acclaimed movies like Rear Window, The Bride Wore Black, and The Black Angel, the last of which is loosely based on his novel of the same name. The book isn’t easy to find in dead-tree versions, but it’s $1.99 right now for the Kindle and is also available on iBooks. First written in 1943 and adapted for film three years later, The Black Angel is classic noir as it follows a young woman on a desperate quest to exonerate her husband, convicted of capital murder, by finding out who really killed his mistress.

Alberta French is just 22 as the novel opens, and, as the narrator, tells of her wonderful love affair with the man she has now married, but whom she knows has been cheating on her because he’s stopped calling her by the nickname “Angel Face.” She figures out who his paramour is – a chorus girl named Mia Mercer – and goes to Mia’s apartment, but finds the woman’s corpse instead. Within hours, her husband, Kirk has been arrested, and the story skips through his trial and sentencing (to death) to get Alberta on the move, following just a few scant clues she swiped from Mia’s apartment to try to find her murderer. Woolrich then sends her on four missions, one to each of the names she found in Mia’s address book who might fit, each of which puts her in dangerous situations until she finally finds the real killer and nearly dies for it.

I’m a sucker for noir fiction, whether novels or films, and The Black Angel delivers that while avoiding at least a few of the worst clichés of the genre. Noir fiction was viewed as pulp in its own time, a style with commercial appeal but minimal literary or critical merit, and as a result much of what was published was hackneyed and predictable – material written to meet the low expectations of the market. The Black Angel has a female protagonist, which is rare enough, and then has her develop from a meek but determined woman into a clever if overconfident one by the end of the novel, someone who perseveres through failures (obviously, or the book would end rather early) and whose character changes as she learns from them. Woolrich also ditches much of the egg salad you’ll see in pulp short stories or radio programs of the era – the easy violence to jump the plot forward, the women all called up from central casting – to focus just on Alberta’s story and her increasingly involved attempts to deceive each of the suspects to try to figure out who killed Mia. It’s unsurprising given his own background as a failed writer of more serious fiction, but it makes Black Angel a good follow-up for folks who, like me, loved the work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler but have already read their limited output.

I mentioned the film adaptation of The Black Angel above, but haven’t seen it yet; the story changes so that Alberta’s character, now named Catherine, has to pair up with a man to hunt down the murderer, with other substantial changes to the plot. Alberta’s character as the protagonist and de facto detective was one of the most interesting aspects of the book, so demoting her to half of a team with a big strong man to help her along seems like a downgrade.

Next up: Anna Burns’ Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Brize.

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→ November 23, 2018
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Terra Incognita.

I’m a huge Connie Willis fan, and have been since I first encountered To Say Nothing of The Dog a few years ago, enough so that I chose that book for my guest appearance on the Hugos There podcast a couple of months back. I’ve read all of her Hugo-winning novels (four books for three awards) and two more of her novels, but hadn’t tried any of her short(er) fiction until I stumbled on Terra Incognita, a collection of three of her novellas, in the Strand back in August. The collection includes “Remake,” which was sold as a standalone novel when it was published and sits on the blurry line between short novel and novella, as well as “D.A.” and “Uncharted Territory.” Two of them are great, and the third feels like filler.

“Remake” is the star of the show, so to speak, and features some of the imagination and prescience found in much great science fiction back to Jules Verne. Willis envisions a world where studios no longer make movies; they use computer algorithms to digitally update old movies, inserting different actors into others’ roles, and then fighting over the legal rights to every actor’s likeness on celluloid. They can change plots and endings, all automagically, and even go back and erase all traces of alcohol or tobacco to satisfy the Temperance League. Into this world comes a young woman who just wants to dance in the pictures, and who captures the attention of a programmer responsible for those digital edits, including the aforementioned temperance nonsense. He tries to talk her out of it, saying she won’t even find a dance teacher let alone movie roles, but then something strange happens and he’s convinced he’s found her likeness in the background of some classic films. Did she find another way in? Was it time travel?

That story was worth the price of the book, even though it’s a bit more ridiculous than even Willis’ lighter fare (Crosstalk and Bellwether), as the central mystery of the story is so clever and there’s no way you won’t start rooting for the girl to make it. The half-hearted romantic tension between those two is sort of a red herring, and there’s some frippery involving the third character, Hedda (also spelled Heada), that takes us away from the main story, but the central plot is strong and I loved dancing along with Willis through the golden age of musicals. She got the CGI part of her future right, but she shouldn’t have bet against musicals coming back into vogue – everything comes back into fashion eventually.

“D.A.” is the shortest of the three entries in this volume, and felt to me like a taunt directed against Ender’s Game, which is much beloved and very male-centric, even though author Orson Scott Card tries to walk back the toxic masculinity with the short story that is tacked on to the novel’s end. (The story came before the novel, but that’s a discussion for another day.) A young woman in cadet school finds herself drafted for duty on the space station … but she didn’t even apply for the spot. She’s brought to the base against her wishes, albeit not quite against her will, and spends all her available time trying to find out what went wrong in the selection process, with the help of an earthside friend with some convenient hacking skills. I could see the vague outlines of the ending coming, but I still enjoyed the journey.

“Uncharted Territory” was the one story that never clicked with me, although there’s one comic element that is funny in a very Connie Willis sort of way. Three humans and one non-human are charting the terrain on an unpopulated planet that likely holds some substantial mineral resources, and must deal with harsh conditions while also coping with the interpersonal relations of that sort of mission … including some strange attractions among them. The characters just don’t gel here at all; Willis rarely has trouble giving her characters unique profiles and three-dimensional personas even in just a handful of pages, but these characters, human and otherwise, just don’t come together. The one non-human’s habit is a good running gag, and there’s a little comic material in the fact that the two species can’t seem to distinguish biological sex in the other species, just not enough of that to salvage the story.

Next up: Still Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders, winner of the Man Booker Prize.

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→ October 22, 2018
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A Deepness in the Sky.

Vernor Vinge has won three Hugo Awards for Best Novel, including A Fire Upon the Deep, the first book in his so-called “Zones of Thought” series, as well as the cyberpunk-lite Rainbow’s End, but in both cases Vinge focused more on the hows of the science in his science fiction than on the story or characters. The third winner was his longest, A Deepness in the Sky, the second book in the Zones of Thought series but taking place hundreds of years before the preceding book, and despite its length and Vinge’s usual prolixity, for once he gives the reader a plot with some teeth and a few truly intriguing, three-dimensional characters. At a girthy 775 pages, it’s not for everyone and perhaps not worth the time investment, but compared at least to the other two Vinge novels I’ve read, it was the best and most enjoyable read.

The long and often confusing setup to the A Deepness in the Sky boils down to two storylines. Two human forces have both reached a new star system, with the star referred to as OnOff for its bizarre cycle of going dark every hundred years* or so, and with one planet occupied by a sentient non-human race known colloquially as Spiders. One force is the Qeng Ho band of interstellar traders, who also appear in A Fire Upon the Deep, while the other are the Emergents, a belligerent group unafraid to use violence or coercion and, as becomes clear a bit later in the book, willing to use humans as high-tech slaves by reprogramming their minds to Focus on specific tasks. The two sides agree to work together and almost immediately betray each other, with the Emergents coming out on top, leaving just a handful of Qeng Ho characters, including the mysterious old man Pham Trinli, the younger leader Ezr Vinh, and the precocious young Qiwi Lin Lisolet, who grows from annoying child to central character over the course of the novel, to try to free their side from the Emergents’ grip.

* Vinge is too clever by half with his way of telling time in the book, referring to everything in terms of seconds, so thus using Ksec (kiloseconds) or Msec (megaseconds) rather than weeks, months, or years. It may have some veneer of accuracy, since our definition of a year is tied specifically to this planet, but it is annoying as hell to read, and it’s not as if Vinge adheres to this idea of planet-independent language throughout the book.

Meanwhile, on the planet in question, the Spiders themselves are growing into a high-tech civilization, led by the eccentric polymath Sherkaner Underhill, who develops technologies that allow his specific country to survive the Dark years when their sun goes dim and the planet experiences a deadly deep freeze. Unaware that they’re being observed by aliens, Underhill and his colleagues are also pushing a cultural change that threatens the ‘natural’ order of things, defended by a right-wing religious group called the Kindred. The Emergents view the Spiders as a culture to be exploited, even more so when the Spiders discover a mineral that contains anti-gravity properties, while the remnants of the Qeng Ho hope to save themselves and the Spiders from that and the massacres that would precede the Emergents’ invasion.

Vinge’s specialty has always been his ability to conceive futuristic technologies and incorporate them thoroughly into his plots – although, again, that can work to the detriment of the story – and that’s especially true here of the “localizers,” a sort of smartdust tech that Pham Trinli trades to the Emergents, with an ulterior motive, and that allows the Emergent leader Tomas Nau to create a police state aboard their ships as they orbit the Spiders’ planet. These nanodevices, some floating and some embedded on people or objects, allow Nau and his sadistic enforcer Ritser Brughel to monitor everyone under their command and even to sense changes in mood or sentiment, including whether someone is lying to them. While slightly farfetched, the technology allows Vinge to ratchet up the tension within the story by creating a razor-thin margin for Trinli and Vinh to overthrow their leaders. The Focus technology is probably even less realistic, but introduces an advanced sort of slavery, one where the enslaved become obsessed with their specific task, losing their free will and their emotional selves but allowing the Emergents to solve bigger problems faster and thus push their civilization forward, creating philosophical conflicts within the story about the morality of such practices (although for the reader it’s hardly much of a debate).

There’s still no reason for Vinge to drone on as long as he does in A Deepness in the Sky, with maybe 500 pages of real story in a 775-page book, bloated again by descriptions of future tech and irrelevant asides, along with some subplots that just aren’t very interesting (Ezr’s attempts to save his former lover Trixia Bonsol from Focus are particularly weak). Vinge also isn’t great at creating female characters; the most prominent woman in the story, Qiwi, starts as a child, is manipulated by Nau into a not-really-consensual relationship, and only regains true agency in the last few pages of the book. It’s a sort of hard science fiction that has fallen somewhat out of favor today, with good reason, as we have more diverse voices writing in the space and an increased awareness that better prose and character development can work in genre fiction. If you’re looking to pick up a Vinge novel, this would be my pick of the three I’ve read, but I think sci-fi still has much more to offer than A Deepness in the Sky provides.

Next up: Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke.

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→ October 10, 2018
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Sabrina.

I’ve said a few times that I’ve never been a fan of comic books, neither as a kid even when I had friends who liked them nor as an adult when longer versions of these, often called graphic novels, have crossed over somewhat into the mainstream and even earned critical acclaim. Alan Moore’s Watchmen is often cited as the greatest or one of the greatest graphic novels ever published, but I found it thin, clichéd, and very short on plot. The form itself isn’t conducive to great storytelling because so much real estate is dedicated to the images that pushing a narrative forward becomes secondary to the artwork, and creating a plot worthy of the term “novel” would require several hundred more pages and, I imagine, a substantial amount of additional work for the artist.

So when Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina showed up on the longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, becoming the first graphic novel to earn the honor, my immediate question was whether the work was worthy as a novel, or simply there because of the novelty of the format. (It didn’t make the six-title shortlist, announced a few weeks ago; this year’s winner will be announced next Tuesday.) I can at least say, however, that Sabrina uses the graphic novel’s form to enhance the underlying story, adding to the senses of dread, suspense, and isolation that affect its central characters, while also creating a jarring sensation of unease as Drnaso switches settings without visual or textual warnings. The story itself is also different, with three interlocking narratives stemming from a single source, telling a contemporary tale of our disastrous modern media environment and how it affects the psyches of vulnerable people.

Sabrina herself only appears in a few panels at the start of the book; her disappearance and the discovery of her murder at the hands of a stranger set off the three main threads of the plot. Her boyfriend Teddy, devastated and unmoored by these events, goes to stay with his friend Calvin, an Air Force serviceman stationed in Colorado who works a job that is socially and emotionally isolating, while Sabrina’s sister Sandra is left to try to cope with her loss and the detritus of Teddy’s life with her sister. After Sabrina’s death is discovered and someone leaks video the killer recorded of her murder (never shown or described in much detail, but implied to be highly graphic), the story becomes the focus of American news outlets for several days, after which the mainstream media moves on to the next murder, allowing conspiracy theorists to step in, claiming the murder was staged as a false flag event and that the three protagonists of the book are actually crisis actors. Teddy ends up listening to an Alex Jones clone on the radio while he’s holed up in Calvin’s house, refusing to leave, even though doing so furthers his isolation and essentially claims his grief is fraudulent, while Calvin and Sandra are doxxed and harassed by delusional randos (including a stand-in for the fired FAU professor James Tracy, himself a Sandy Hook hoaxer).

There’s more narrative depth here than you’d find in a short story, albeit probably less than you’d get even in a 200-page novel; there is only so much a writer-artist can do with the aforementioned problem of visual real estate. Drnaso compensates brilliantly by packing subtext into many panels, with or without dialogue, that support that ongoing sense of unease or psychological imbalance. When the characters don’t feel ‘right,’ it’s immediately apparent in the panels – with their facial expressions or posture, with the angles from which Drnaso depicts them, and even sometimes with his use of lighter or darker shading in specific panels.

Sabrina probably also benefits in the minds of critics and readers for how of the moment the story is. We are inundated with fake or slanted news reports from sources outside the mainstream who have gamed various algorithms to appear higher on social media feeds or search engine results – I’ve seen links to Daily Caller and Gateway Pundit, both alt-right blogs with minimal editorial controls or regard for veracity in their stories, appear in the first ten results of Google searches – and conspiracy theories follow every tragedy that hits the news. The effects of this, itself an extension of our increased alienation from each other as we spend more time online and less in the real world, on something as difficult and fundamental as grief, especially when processing the horrible and sudden death of a loved one, are enough fodder for a book this length and then some. Drnaso has taken a critical, timely subject, and presented it in a new way, both with his art and with his storycraft, to produce a work that is worthy of the praise it’s received.

Next up: I’m reading an Agatha Christie novel before diving into Vernor Vinge’s mammoth Hugo-winning novel A Deepness in the Sky.

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→ September 20, 2018
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Florida.

The National Book Award announced its longlist for its 2018 fiction prize last week, and among the ten titles was Florida, the new short story collection from Lauren Groff. She was previously nominated for the same honor for her 2015 novel Fates and Furies, which earned widespread critical acclaim and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Florida is a good bit shorter and showcases Groff’s ability to craft a compelling narrative in just a handful of pages, with the typical inconsistency of most short story collections but some standouts that rank among the best things I’ve read all year.

The stories in Florida are connected only by that state, which is the setting for most of them and the place of origin for central characters in the others, with recurring themes across stories like the pernicious effects of climate change (including the existential fears it causes for various characters), physical or metaphorical sinkholes, or growing income disparity in a state often associated with ostentatious wealth. Groff paints a grim portrait of the state’s present and its future in stories that range from psychological horror to pleas for empathy, turning the so-called “Sunshine State” into a vaguely menacing and often depressing backdrop for stories of lives gone awry.

The best story in the book – and quite possibly the best story of any length I’ll read in 2018 – is “Above and Below,” which tells of an adjunct professor who slides far too easily into homelessness and follows her over several weeks and months of living in her car, in a homeless encampment, in a flophouse hotel, and more, documenting her own feelings through the process of simply trying to stay alive and safe. The story, about 30 pages long, manages to touch on so many aspects of the protagonist’s life, including her broken relationship with her mother and stepfather, as well as the way superficial factors affect our sense of self and how people within our lives can quickly become invisible to us. There’s so much heartbreak in this brief work that I found it easy to understand and empathize with the main character, even though I’ve never experienced any of this; nothing hit me harder than the moment when she thinks she’s been recognized by a former coworker and is mortified by the thought of him seeing her in her current state, only to realize he’s seen right through her and is looking at someone else.

The other true standout in the collection is “Dogs Go Wolf,” which reads like a horror story, with two young girls left alone in an island cabin by their mother who may be off partying (although as with most off-screen details in Florida, Groff leaves much of this ambiguous) while a storm approaches and the girls’ supplies start to dwindle. They’re young enough to be scared of imminent threats but probably should be more scared about who’s going to rescue them, and manage to keep themselves feeling somewhat safe by telling each other stories – a theme, that stories can nourish and comfort us, that recurs throughout the novel in all manner of settings.

One maddening aspect of Florida is Groff’s insistence on leaving characters without names. Once in a while, it can be a clever rhetorical device, something that helps make a story seem more universal, or that can emphasize the dehumanizing experiences a character undergoes, but when every story has the same feature, it begins to feel like affect rather than a purposeful decision on the part of the author. The opening and closing stories appear to include the same central character, a woman who in the first part is trying to avoid making a scene at home after dinner and in the second has her two young sons with her on a quixotic working vacation to research Guy de Maupassant in France, but she’s also one of the least sympathetic figures in the entire collection, someone who hamstrings herself with questionable choices and rash decisions, and even in 70-plus pages featuring her, the reasons for her odd behavior are never made clear.

I haven’t read any other nominees for the National Book Award yet, so I have no idea where Florida might rank, but I do expect to see it come up frequently in best-of-2018 lists given its quality and Groff’s history. It’s certainly miles ahead of the latest Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, the forgettable novel Less, with stories here that will stay with me for months, and a hazy, sluggish atmosphere throughout the collection that left me feeling dazed the way a humid summer day in Florida itself would.

Next up: Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.

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