→ August 12, 2026
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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.

Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter might be the most overtly violent novel I’ve ever read; it certainly is if measured by the volume of blood spilled, since it’s a vampire story at its core, but one Jones uses to retell the story of the Marias Massacre, in which U.S. troops killed about 200 Piegan Blackfeet women, children, and infirm or elderly men who were in their undefended camp. It’s a story of revenge and grief and the endless toll of genocide, where the American colonizers saturated the ground of the west with the blood of humans and buffalo, and where the vampire is both hero and monster, avenging his people while leaving destruction and death everywhere he goes. (It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel this year.)

The novel opens in the present day, as Etsy Beaucarne, a professor trying to complete a research paper that will improve her tenure application, obtains a long-hidden manuscript that was written by her great-great-grandfather Arthur Beaucarne, a pastor in Miles City, Montana, in 1912. A desecrated corpse was just found outside Miles City, and another will be found shortly, with no clues at all as to who has killed these men or why. Arthur is then visited by a peculiar Native American man named Good Stab, who wears sunglasses all day, who refuses to eat or drink what Arthur offers, and who says that he is there to confess, apparently familiar with the Catholic sacrament of penance. Over the course of many days, Good Stab describes how he was killed by a white man, but lived, thanks in some way to the supernatural powers of the vicious killer known as the Cat Man, and went on to become a vampire – almost immortal, feeding only on blood, but in this case taking on some characteristics of the creatures on which he feeds, with the blood of his own people the most powerful for healing and for providing him with strength and energy. Good Stab begins his undead life as an instrument of vengeance for the Blackfeet people and the buffalo, killing every trapper and hunter he finds and destroying their traps and weapons to prevent others from using them, but as time goes on, he becomes more wanton in his killing until an eventual Boss Battle with Cat Man himself that takes place over several years.

Meanwhile, Arthur has his own demons; he has not killed, but he was there at the Marias Massacre, and is carrying a heavy load of guilt and shame for his failure to do anything to stop the murders of innocents, which in turn led him to take up the cloth as a form of penance of his own. His voice is quieter than Good Stab’s, and he is especially weak next to the superhuman strength of his penitent, but he stands in as the voice of those who stood by and watched as their fellow colonizers wiped out entire peoples across the Americas along with decimating the buffalo population.

Jones chooses an epistolary-adjacent format – they’re not truly letters, but Good Stab’s soliloquies interrupted by diary entries from Arthur – in what I presume is an homage to Stoker’s Dracula, an epistolary novel itself that comprises letters and diary entries as well. Where Stoker’s vampire is pursuing women in a sort of sexual conquest, killing his first victim to make her a vampire as well, Good Stab’s violence is aimed primarily at men, first at the white men who are destroying his people and their way of life, and then later at anyone who can sate his thirst and keep him alive. His desire for vengeance ends up destroying his inner self, which might be a soul in another context.

The novel is extremely violent, to a level that makes Cormac McCarthy’s violence seem mundane. Blood is, of course, a core part of the plot, and the most obvious symbol in the book, but the ways in which Cat Man and Ghost Stab kill beyond just getting the blood they need to heal and survive are gorey and often stomach-churning. I understand that some of this is just Jones’ representations of the depredations of genocide; I’m sure the colonizers did these things and worse to the natives they abused and murdered. It doesn’t make it an easier read, especially when Jones lingers on some of the more violent deaths.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is also heavy with metaphor, starting with the blood itself, a symbol of life and the importance of family, clan, and tribe. Good Stab drains his victims of blood, leaving them empty, lifeless shells, not dissimilar to how the colonizers leave the ancestral lands of the people they wipe out – people for whom blood ties hold stronger meaning. Skins, and taking the skins of animals and later people as ‘robes,’ appear as a metaphor for race and the artificial distinctions between people, even people who should ostensibly be on the same side. It’s a novel replete with the kinds of literary techniques that will make it fodder for academic papers for years.

I’ve largely avoided giving anything like an opinion so far on The Buffalo Hunter Hunter¸ because I am of two minds on the book. It is a powerful fable, a searing indictment, a retelling of a shameful moment in the history of the United States. It’s also violent as hell, to the point of distracting from what I interpreted as its aims, and Good Stab’s remaining humanity is often hard to see through the blood, making him a less compelling character than he might have been had he been more discerning in his choices of victims. The chapter where he and Cat Man have their ultimate fight goes on too long, while the final conversation between Good Stab and Arthur is probably too short. I recommend it, with qualifications. It is a strong work of contemporary and indigenous literature, and it’s also very hard to stomach in many parts. Your tolerance may be quite different from mine.

Next up: Percival Everett’s God’s Country.

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→ October 31, 2025
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Someone You Can Build a Nest In.

John Wiswell won this year’s Nebula Award for his novel Someone You Can Build a Nest In, while also making the shortlist for the Hugo for Best Novel and winning the Locus Award for Best Novel. It’s a queer love story that tries to approach some enormous questions about the meanings of family, secrecy, and what it means to trust and be trusted, but it gets bogged down too much in the details of how its shapeshifting protagonist works.

Shesheshen is that main character, a shapeshifter with no natural form who lives by eating living creatures – including humans – and absorbing their body parts to create facsimiles of them, although she* can also use inanimate objects to take the places of bones and other hard physical structures. Thus she can imitate a human’s form and even some of its senses despite lacking a circulatory or nervous system. She recalls being born from a sac of eggs within a host human and having to defend herself when her siblings tried to attack and presumably eat her, eating them instead to survive. She lives in a castle outside a town whose residents fear a “wyrm” in the countryside, and the story opens when three adventurers, one the scion of a noble family, invade the house to try to kill her – despite not knowing what manner of creature she is – and collect some sort of bounty. She survives the battle but is wounded, and when she wakes after a fall, she finds herself in the care of a traveling woman named Homily who rescues her and nurses her back to health. Shesheshen develops feelings for Homily, something she has never experienced before, which becomes far more complicated when the full picture becomes apparent.

* I believe Wiswell used she/her pronouns for Shesheshen, while specifically identifying other characters as nonbinary, but obviously the concept of gender for a literal shapeshifter is a bit silly.

Shesheshen learns early on that there’s a connection between Homily and the people who want her dead, and also realizes that Homily thinks she’s a human, but despite coming close multiple times she decides not to tell Homily the truth until much later in the story (mild spoiler, but obviously that reckoning is coming at some point). This presented the most compelling aspect of the entire narrative, even more than the “will they/won’t they” between the two main characters or the eventual conflict between Shesheshen and the Baroness Wulfyre, who has sworn to kill the wyrm and take its heart so that she can lift a curse on her family. Instead, Shesheshen goes through the very familiar and normal set of rationalizations as she vacillates between coming clean – hi, I’m a human-eating monster of no fixed shape, also I think I love you – and avoiding the inevitable conflict and recriminations, both of the actual truth and her choices to deceive Homily for what turns out to be quite some time. It’s a superb portrait of the internal monologue that people who are conflict-avoidant (raises hand) go through, and the lies we even tell ourselves to rationalize our decisions.

Wiswell’s a fine prose writer, but there is just way too much ink spilled here about Shesheshen absorbing and digesting parts of the humans and creatures she attacks. The issue isn’t so much that it’s gross – it is kind of gross, but I’ve seen worse, and Wiswell’s descriptions aren’t lurid – but that it occupies so much of the page when we should be following the plot. There’s a lot happening in this book, and I’d say at least one very big twist, and it gets a bit drowned by all the blood and viscera being spilled by Shesheshen and some of her enemies.

Wiswell has a neuromuscular disorder and other disabilities, which he speaks about often and incorporates into some of his work; I was looking for the possible metaphors for disability and visibility in Someone to Build a Nest In, but if they’re there, I missed them, and thus possibly missed some significant context for the story itself. All I saw was a mildly interesting love story (where you know they’re getting together somehow, although it could prove tragic in the end) boosted by Shesheshen’s moral dilemma and the wrong choices she continually makes, even as she tries to convince herself they’re the right ones. That made for a solid novel but hardly the best of the year, certainly not over finalist The Book of Love by Kelly Link, which remains the best new novel I have read this year.

Next up: I just finished Theft, the newest novel by Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, and started Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn.

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→ May 8, 2025
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Rite of Passage.

In a not-too-distant future, where Earth is uninhabitable and humans have spread out to other star systems and colonized hundreds of worlds, a civilization on a starship has an unusual initiation for its adolescents called Trial: They’re dropped on one of those colony worlds with no information and no supplies, and if they survive for a month and are able to hit their rescue button, they pass. Many don’t return.

Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, winner of the Nebula Award for Fiction in 1968, sounds like a YA novel by modern standards – and read that way, it’s quite a good one, not least because the main character, a girl of about thirteen named Mia Havero, is extremely well-written. She’s spirited and smart, but arrogant to the point of obstinacy, and her relationships with her peers, notably her best frenemy Jimmy, feel realistic within the artificial setting of the story.

Mia narrates the book, so we know she’s survived Trial already, but the bulk of the book comes before she, Jimmy, and their group are dropped on a hostile planet, as she recalls some of her adventures growing up on the starship and getting into various sorts of mischief. She sneaks around the ship through the air ducts, going to forbidden areas and learning things about their makeshift civilization that only people like her father, one of the ship’s political leaders, would know. She also struggles to make friends, between her father’s position in the hierarchy – with some hints at significant political divisions among leadership, including what the starship’s relationships should be with the colonies – and her own attitude, something she struggles to understand.

Kids employ two general strategies during Trial – turtle, hiding out as much as possible to survive the month with minimal risk; or tiger, exploring the world and making an adventure out of it. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would choose tiger in reality, but Mia does, and of course runs into trouble almost immediately. This world has a native simian population that the human colonizers have enslaved, assuming they’re not sufficiently sentient or intelligent to have basic rights, one of many things during Trial that affects Mia’s very limited worldview.

There are other events throughout her month on the colony world that also force her to reconsider past prejudices, which is where the book really clicks. What comes before Trial is fun, but trivial; she runs around the ship like a kid who’s a little too smart for her own good, narrowly escaping punishment and/or death, thinking that she’s invincible in the way most kids do. Trial is stark, a way to weed out the weak or unintelligent in the thinking of the starship’s authorities, but it’s also a strong metaphor for the ways in which teenagers become adults through experience. For me, it was college, where I was first exposed to people from other backgrounds and beliefs, first forced to reconsider things I’d always assumed or believed to be true, and first forced to take care of myself for any period longer than three weeks. I did not have to escape angry colonists mad that my home ship wouldn’t share all their technology, though.

The prose and general style in Rite of Passage feel slightly dated, and give the whole book the YA feel I mentioned earlier – this is what a lot of sci-fi writing was like in the 1960s. A huge part of Robert Heinlein’s bibliography reads just like this, to pick one, even his books that weren’t explicitly for young adults. Some of the ideas Panshin is pushing still resonate today, including ideas of colonialism and imperialism, or the moral obligation of developed nations to share technologies or medicines with the rest of the world. And content that might have seemed “adult” in 1968 is pretty tame by modern YA standards – there’s some violence, and one reference to Mia having sex that’s almost entirely off-page (thank goodness), and that’s it. I was pleasantly surprised at how well this held up, given how poorly some early sci-fi award winners – the ones that haven’t maintained their status atop the genre – have fared over the last half-century.

Next up: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.

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→ April 22, 2025
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Uprooted.

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2015, inverts the usual formula for the “chosen one” story about a child who turns out to play an extremely important role in a history-changing event, and whose powers are critical in the way that event unfolds. The protagonist here, Agnieszka, isn’t even the one her village believes is going to be chosen by the local wizard, called the Dragon to serve as his apprentice, and she’s hardly the sort of student the Dragon was hoping for, but her presence there sets off a broad, violent conflict that will determine whether their society can survive or will be overrun by the sentient forces of the Wood. It’s smart and vaguely subversive of the traditions of this trope, although it becomes unspeakably violent in the resolution in ways I found hard to stomach.

Agnieszka lives in a small village near a dangerous forest called the Wood that acts with malevolence, corrupting anyone who enters it or eats its fruits or leaves and causing them to commit violence against anyone around them, like automatons under the Wood’s command. She’s chosen to become the next apprentice to the Dragon, the wizard for this particular part of the kingdom, a stern, cold man who takes a young girl under his tutelage every ten years or so – but after they leave his service, they never return to their original villages. Once Agnieszka gets to the Dragon’s tower, however, one of her friends from her village ends up corrupted by the Wood, which would normally require her execution to protect the rest of the valley, but Agnieszka finds a spell that might remove the corruption from her friend. That in turn attracts the attention of the crown prince, whose mother disappeared into the Wood many years before, and who demands that the Dragon and Agnieszka come with him into the forest to find and rescue the Queen.

Much of what Agnieszka does – or what happens to her – is a combination of circumstance and her own tenacity, making her an interesting lead character but not a terribly complex one. She’s driven by a simple sense of right and wrong that is fundamentally humanist; she refuses to sacrifice a single life, ever, even if it has the potential to save many other lives down the road. Some of this is wisdom, as she realizes the path of killing everyone corrupted by the Wood has no end to it, as it doesn’t stop whatever force underlies the Wood’s endless thirst for territory, but Novik defines Agnieszka more by the high value she places on an individual life. Again, it makes her interesting, but not very deep.

The Wood ends up the more intriguing character, so to speak, although I got a bit lost in the explanations of what exactly is behind the Wood’s sentience and its Anton Chigurh-like drive to kill anything in its path without regard for anything about the victims. It’s a better exercise in world-building than character development, saved by the fact it’s well-written and mostly well-paced.

The body count in Uprooted is enormous, enough to make George R.R. Martin jealous; it’s most likely a comment on the futility of war of any sort, but Novik’s tone towards the massive losses of soldiers in the last two conflicts borders on the callous, and it’s out of sync with Agnieszka’s almost single-minded focus on saving any individual life she can. This was ultimately what turned me against Uprooted, even though I enjoyed most of the read; it just devolves into pointless violence, with one scene that recalled the trench warfare of World War I, and there’s no real point to any of it. Characters climb over piles of dead bodies to continue the fighting, and often don’t even understand why they’re doing so. It’s just too far removed from what powered the first three-fourths of the book. I wouldn’t recommend against Uprooted, but in the end it just didn’t get over the line for me.

Next up: Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy, winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

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→ March 28, 2025
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Stations of the Tide.

Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1990, beating out one of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vor novels, Barrayar, and a William Gibson novel, The Difference Engine. Swanwick combines elements of fantasy and science fiction, including a significant amount of speculative writing that seems especially prescient today given the rise of (highly questionable) AI-powered bots. It’s a shame it’s undone by a trap that many white male sci-fi writers have fallen into: Swanwick is obsessed with sex, and writes about it like a teenaged boy.

Stations of the Tide takes place on a planet called Miranda, where the human civilization faces a catastrophic flood once a generation, for which they must prepare and evacuate while the ocean devours the land, destroying property but also helping renew the ecosystem. A rogue calling himself a wizard is promising residents that he can cast spells to help them survive the inundation, such as giving them gills to breathe underwater, and the interplanetary authorities suspect that he has absconded with proscribed technology stolen from them, so they send an agent, simply called the bureaucrat, to Miranda to track him down and retrieve it. This sets in motion a story that’s a blend between a spy novel and a paranoid thriller, moving through various settlements in tropical areas of Miranda that evoked Apocalypse Now for its contrast of a lush backdrop for social desolation.

The actual spy story within Stations of the Tide is its strength: The bureaucrat learns very early on that he can’t trust anyone, and his suspicions only deepen the further along he goes – except for any time a woman tries to seduce him, because he’s easier than Sunday morning. The small cadre of agents with and around him keep the circle of intrigue limited, as it’s clear early in the novel that someone has helped the wizard, named Gregorian, keep track of the investigation and the bureaucrat’s movements, but it’s not clear who’s behind it.

Swanwick’s speculations on technology include the use of holographic projections of people to allow them to be in more than one place at once, with the avatars able to act semi-autonomously and to even survive their creators. Not only does this allow the bureaucrat and his colleagues to work along several paths at once, but it allows the protagonist to operate across several (virtual) planes to try to figure out who’s double-crossing him. I imagine in 1990 this technology seemed fantastical, but today it seems possible, if undesirable, with Big Tech’s twin obsessions with LLMs and virtual worlds. Swanwick’s mind might have moved faster than his pen here, though, as his conceit of never using the bureaucrat’s name along with the fact that all of these officials using the technology are men can make it extremely confusing when real people and avatars are conversing.

The sex in this book veers from the unintentionally comic to the creepy, and it destroys the hallucinatory vibe that infuses most of the novel. Swanwick seems unable to conceive a female character who isn’t promiscuous, and the women in this book all exist almost entirely in their relationship to men. His descriptions of sex are awkward, at best, and betray the teenager’s fascination with anatomy over emotions, made worse by Swanwick repeatedly using the word “vagina” when he means something else. It reminded me of some of the worst sci-fi and fantasy novels I’ve read, like the later Dune sequels when Frank Herbert introduced the Honored Matres, or the first Game of Thrones book, or Snow Crash. Stations clearly came out in a different era, and it has aged extremely poorly.

There are some strong scenes in the book involving the bureaucrat and Gregorian’s agents, along with a reasonable climactic scene that uses something I probably should have seen coming but didn’t to resolve the final confrontation. Swanwick allows the bureaucrat to consider the moral implications of his actions and the authorities’ choices to limit technology transfer to these colony worlds, a theme that appeared here and there in the novel while becoming more prevalent near the end, opening up possible interpretations around paternalistic government, colonization, and regulations that tied the room together at the very end. It was enough to bump me up a half-grade or so, figuratively, to the point where I’d recommend the book if you don’t mind the bad sex writing. There’s enough suspense here to keep the story moving, and it turns out in the end that Swanwick did have some larger points to make. It’s not good enough to get me to pick up more of his work, but was worth the time I spent reading it.

Next up: Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper.

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→ March 11, 2025
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A Song for a New Day.

Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day depicts a United States in the near future where people are compelled to stay at home and avoid any kind of public gatherings in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks and a pandemic that killed some unknown part of the population. She published it in 2019. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel on June 1st, 2020. I am going to say I think this one might have included a little bias – this is a perfectly cromulent novel, but I don’t think it’s really up to the historical standard here, even though that wasn’t a great year for sci-fi/fantasy novels.

A Song for a New Day follows two main characters, both queer women, through plot lines that intersect, split, and intersect again, with one of the two jumping forward in time. Luce Cannon (say it out loud) is a singer/songwriter whose band happened to play the last concert before the world shut down; Pinsker tells her chapters in first person, and begins her story with that final show before moving forward to the future time when live music is essentially banned. Rosemary Laws (no relation) is a young naïf who lives with her parents and works for the everything-store SuperWally (subtle) in customer support, dealing with users through a sort of virtual reality that works through wired hoodies. Through a small coincidence, she ends up getting a job with StageHoloLive, a company with a monopoly on recorded music and that streams ‘live’ shows to the SuperWally user base, again through virtual reality. Rosemary becomes a recruiter, going out into the real world in search of underground music venues to find new bands for StageHoloLive to scoop up, which eventually puts her in the crowd at one of Luce’s shows. Rosemary is, naturally, a true believer that these conglomerates are benevolent and that their services really help people, while Luce and her counterculture friends and acquaintances have other ideas – or, they just have ideas, and they help Rosemary come up with some, too.

The best parts of A Song for a New Day don’t revolve that much around the characters, neither of whom is that special or memorable, or even that tangible off the page – it’s the music, as Pinsker must be a dedicated fan of music, especially live music, to be able to evoke the sense of watching a great band in person just through her descriptions. Some of the music she describes is a little too far-fetched, as we’re talking maybe fifteen years in the future, not two hundred, but the descriptions of just being there, hearing it, feeling it in your bones, recognizing a song but also hearing it in a new way because it’s live, are the real standout here. There’s some fun and intrigue in the narrative around Rosemary’s attempts to find these illicit shows and scenes; it dovetailed nicely with my watch of A Complete Unknown, where Bob Dylan and some of his peers get their starts in little coffeehouses and other underground (albeit legal) venues in New York.

Pinsker also takes aim at Big Tech dominating more of our lives, a philosophical view I happen to share, but she lays it on so thick that it loses some of its bite. The company names, like many of the character names, are too obvious, and there’s the usual blame-the-consumer part going on – I can never blame people who simply choose the cheapest option, regardless of the hidden costs, or people who say yes to same-day delivery of something for no extra fee. That’s rational economic behavior. It’s also not in our natures to consider the externalities of anything we do; you have to learn those behaviors, like separating your recycling from your trash to keep it out of a landfill or breaking down those cardboard boxes so you’re not making more work for someone else. The blame should fall on the complicit governments that allowed these companies to get so much control over our lives and our economy – and now our Administration – but not on the consumers.

Even from my spoiler-free description, you can probably guess most of where the plot of A Song for a New Day ends up. There were virtually no surprises in the story or the development of Rosemary’s character – I don’t think Luce’s develops at all, except maybe for one sentence near the end of the book that hints at something further – so while it’s pleasant, it’s not as compelling as it could have been. The novel functions much better as a paean to the power and beauty of live music than anything else, and maybe that’s good enough for most readers. I just wonder if it would have won the Nebula if it hadn’t had a pandemic baked into the back story.

Next up: I just finished Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown and started Ursula Le Guin’s Nebula-winning YA novel Powers.

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→ January 22, 2024
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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.

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→ October 10, 2022
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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.

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→ September 14, 2021
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Network Effect.

The six books on the shortlist for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel were all written by women, which I believe is a first. The list includes N.K. Jemisin’s tremendous The City We Became and Susanna Clarke’s triumphant comeback novel Piranesi, as well as a sequel to the awful 2019 winner The Calculating Stars.

Martha Wells’ Network Effect might have some momentum going into this autumn’s vote, as the novel won the top prize in both the Nebula and Locus awards, which would give it the Triple Crown of science fiction (also won by The Calculating Stars, so clearly it doesn’t mean anything more than baseball’s Triple Crown). It’s the first full-length novel in her award-winning MurderBot series, which stars a nameless android called a SecUnit as the protagonist that is gradually evolving more humanlike thoughts and emotions after breaking free of the technology that chained it to its employers. It’s also very, very good at killing.

The novel opens with a brief story where SecUnit thwarts an assassination attempt against its boss, but the bulk of the novel surrounds a kidnapping attempt that brings SecUnit and his boss’s teenage daughter Amena on a ship that is full of hostile humanoid beings, which SecUnit calls Targets, and that is about to take them through a wormhole away from their own ship and her family. That’s all the plot the book really needs, although Wells adds some layers of intricacy and brings back a character from one of the earlier novellas.

Network Effect plays out like a hard-boiled sci-fi book, as SecUnit is sarcastic, dry, and often unfeeling, although not quite to the degree of being callous, and there is a mystery at the heart of the story – not just who is behind the kidnapping, but why. (I’ll spoil something obvious: It’s not just about the Targets.) We get a lot of ass-kicking, in which SecUnit specializes, and some cool technology bits, like SecUnit’s mini air force of drones, and some technology bits you’ll just have to accept and move on, like all of the mental coding that goes on in the book.

SecUnit is a robot, ultimately, which means it runs on code, and that proves central to the story, as multiple bots in the book end up turning the nature of source code into a pivotal plot point. Wells appears to be using this as a metaphor for human consciousness, and a way to explore the most basic questions of identity and dualism. If a bot is deleted, and restored from a backup, is it the same bot? What if someone copies a bot’s kernel and loads it into a new body? You could just read Network Effect as just a rollicking sci-fi adventure – which it is – and ignore this detail, but I think Wells is at least trying to do something more here.

There’s a fair bit of in-world jargon that threw me off, since I haven’t read any of the previous stories set in this universe, and you do have to just accept a lot of the technical stuff as given, especially anything revolving around coding. The action and the three-dimensional rendering of SecBot, who could easily be flat and boring, are strong enough to make up for any deficiencies in those other areas, and Wells deftly steers the plot through a couple of very sharp turns that give this book a ton of narrative greed. I don’t think I’d vote for it over Jemisin’s or Clarke’s books, but it is a very fun ride.

Next up: Colson Whitehead’s new novel Harlem Shuffle, which comes out today.

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→ August 27, 2020
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This is How You Lose the Time War.

This is How You Lose the Time War won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella this year, limited to works that run between 17,500 and 40,000 words, among the many plaudits for its unusual call-and-response structure and its commentary on war. Written by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, the book follows two time-traveling soldiers on opposite sides of an interdimensional war who find common threads between them and eventually fall in love through their letters to one another.

The only names we get for those two soldiers are Red and Blue, although they’ll refer to each other by various puns and nicknames as their relationship moves from taunting to affection over the course of the novel. The nature of the war they’re fighting is never quite clear, other than that they both seek to alter the courses of history in various instances of the multiverse by changing single events that will ripple forward in a sound-of-thunder-like pattern to enact massive changes in societies, civilizations, and even entire species. They go about implementing those changes in different ways, but they seem to be assigned to similar or related tasks, so their paths nearly cross multiple times, which allows them to start communicating with each other, secretly, in strange and incredibly imaginative ways.

They are, of course, being watched at the same time, by shadowy presences and interdimensional seekers, spies who want to decode Red and Blue’s missives to one another, and eventually that matter has to come to a head to provide some narrative thrust to the story. How the two figure this out and plot a way to escape their pursuers and fool their bosses, which risks splitting them apart forever, is the real purpose of the story, since we never get that much sense or meaning of what exactly the two sides want from the Time War.

This is How You Lose the Time War is a slow burn despite its short duration. The prose isn’t easy; both authors jump right into the new vernacular of their multiverse, and it teeters on the edge of the ridiculous for a while before the plot comes along to subsume any concerns you might have about word choices or syntax. There’s also a leap, pun intended, when Red and Blue go from rivalry to deep affection in the span of just a few letters; it felt incredibly sudden, as if the mutual respect they develop on the temporal battlefield was enough to make them fall in love with each other, visible in the abrupt shift in the language and tone of their notes.

It’s hard to entirely buy why they fall so hard for one another, but the payoff is strong; it feels like the two authors needed the first half of the book to find a shared rhythm, and once they got it, they could both put their feet on the gas. I didn’t quite buy how they fell in love, but once Red and Blue are there, and their budding relationship is threatened by the powers that be (were, will be, always are?) in their timelines, it’s credible and compelling – and the way it ends is satisfying and avoids the too-predictable traps into which the authors might have fallen. The novella is probably my least favorite format of prose fiction, compared at least to novels and short stories, but This is How You Lose the Time War felt like it was just the right length, and the way the two authors intertwine their voices produces a remarkable, emotional book.

Next up: I’ve already finished N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became and moved on to Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson’s Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back.

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