→ 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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→ November 11, 2019
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The Calculating Stars.

Mary Robinette Kowal won the trifecta of sci-fi literary awards this year for her novel The Calculating Stars, taking home the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus prizes for the year’s best novel. (The Hugo’s list of nominees included six titles, five written by women, which I think is a record.) The book seems destined to hit the screen somewhere, given its popularity, themes of feminism/misogyny, racism, and climate change. It’s also utterly awful, a bit of trite juvenilia, easily one of the worst Hugo winners I’ve read, with silly plotting, stock characters, and prose befitting a first-time author. How this book won any of those awards, let alone all three, is totally beyond me, because, while I finished it since it’s an easy read, it is treacly nonsense.

Elma is the protagonist, and as the novel opens, she’s on a hillside north of DC with her husband, where they’ve flown in a private plane to get away for a little sexytime, only to have their reverie interrupted by a massive explosion somewhere to the south. After their initial fears that the Soviets have launched a nuclear missile appear to be unfounded, they realize it was a massive meteorite strike into the ocean, which they learn shortly afterwards has vaporized the mid-Atlantic coast, killing millions, and will eventually lead to runaway global warming because of all of the water vapor the impact sent into the atmosphere.

Elma and her husband Nat both work in aerospace, she as a computer (a term that used to refer to people, not machines), he as an engineer, and both are immediately involved in the international effort to race into space to try to get off this planet before it boils. Elma is also an experienced pilot, having worked as a WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, although I’m sure Kowal intended the wordplay around calling Elma, a somewhat observant Jew, a WASP) during World War II, and she seethes when she realizes that NACA (the actual predecessor of NASA) is only considering men as astronauts, even though colonizing the moon or Mars or anywhere else would obviously require women. (Actually, it only requires women; you can send the male contribution to reproduction to space in a test tube.) The bulk of the book covers her quest to become an astronaut, to change hearts and minds, to fight a little garden-variety racism, and to overcome her anxiety disorder enough to get a seat on the rocket.

There’s so much wrong with The Calculating Stars, but nothing is worse than how incredibly obvious the whole book is. Of course Elma is going to be an astronaut. Of course she’s going to fight racism and win. Of course everything she does is going to work out, because this is a children’s book – well, it would be, were it not for the frequent and very awkwardly written sex scenes, although even those are written as they might be in a young adult novel. Elma is ridiculously perfect as a person; the calculations she can do in her head defy credibility, and if there are people who can do what she does there couldn’t be more than ten in the United States. (Her obsession with prime numbers, however, is completely credible, and one of the only things about her character to which I related.) She nearly always has the right words, the right responses, and when she doesn’t, Nate does. It makes Kowal’s hamhanded attempts at cliffhangers fall totally flat, because they always work out within a few paragraphs in some ordinary fashion.

The science also feels incredibly dicey to me. Kowal refers to colonizing Venus, which scientists already suspect was inhospitable to life by this time period, as Rupert Wildt theorized that the surface temperature of Venus was above the boiling point of water due to all of the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. She later creates a sort of cold fusion mechanism in a chapter heading, where “a catalyst” allows rockets to combine atomic oxygen in the upper atmosphere into O2, releasing substantial quantities of energy for free. Even throwing those small points aside, Kowal has 1950s science building and successfully launching an orbiting space station and planning a lunar colony several years before the MOSFET transistor, without which modern computing would not exist, was even invented. It’s a fantasy, and it detracts from the realism Kowal is trying to infuse in the cli-fi aspects of her story.

If I had to speculate on why this book won the big three awards, I’d guess it’s because the novel is, indeed, a climate change story. The climate isn’t changing because of man in The Calculating Stars, but it’s changing, and because the meteorite in the novel hit water and not land, it has probably pushed the climate past the point of no return. Kowal simply accepts that as a given, and then uses it to give us Republicans in Congress denying the accuracy of climate models, or average citizens asking why the government is spending money on long-term projects instead of helping people who need it today. It’s so thinly veiled you can see right through it, and even though I’m obviously on the side of the world’s scientists who say that climate change is real, I found Kowal’s approach graceless and infantile, including how easily some of the climate change deniers in the book suddenly drop their opposition. I don’t see the present GOP changing its tune on climate change quite so easily.

That’s without even getting into how weak the characters are; most are more memorable for their names than anything about their personalities. Elma and Nathaniel are themselves just too good; he’s certainly a dream husband for the era, progressive and willing to stand up for what he thinks is right. People are flawed, even the best people, and protagonists like these two don’t really appear in adult novels, not in 2019, certainly not in novels that deserve consideration for major awards.

It’d be hard to be worse than the second Hugo winner, They’d Rather Be Right, which isn’t really even a proper novel, but The Calculating Stars comes close. After the Broken Earth trilogy won the last three Hugos – and while I had issues with those novels, especially the third, they are way better written and more intelligently plotted than this novel – Kowal’s book is a huge letdown. I need to read some of the other nominees because there is no way there wasn’t at least one sci-fi novel better than this one in 2019.

Next up: B. Catling’s The Cloven, the conclusion to his Vorrh trilogy.

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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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→ July 22, 2018
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The Stone Sky.

N.K. Jemisin became the first African-American author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, and I believe the first woman of color to win it, when she took the prestigious (but generally white-dominated) prize home for her 2015 novel The Fifth Season, the opener of the Broken Earth trilogy. The story continued with The Obelisk Gate, which also took home the Hugo, and finished with last summer’s The Stone Sky, which is one of six nominees for this year’s Hugo and won Jemisin her first Nebula Award earlier this year. Continuing the saga of Essun and her daughter Nassun, two ‘orogenes’ who can control seismic movements in an earth subject to massive tectonic upheavals that cause lengthy climate disasters, The Stone Sky explains the origins of the post-apocalyptic setting and combines the parallel narratives – Essun’s, Nassun’s, and the nameless narrator of Essun’s sections, who is identified near the end of this book – into one story that answers all of the questions from the first two books. Wrapping up a series of this magnitude is difficult, and Jemisin, who has authored many other books, including series, seems to wobble as she tries to conclude this one. (UPDATE: This novel also won the Hugo, making Jemisin the first author to win the prize for all three books in a trilogy, and the first to win three straight Hugos for Best Novel.)

In the Broken Earth trilogy, humanity is in dire straits, as relatively unpredictable “Seasons” occur that produce catastrophic weather conditions that make survival extremely difficult, driving most humans, especially those near the Rifting (which I sense is by the equator), underground for the duration. If they don’t have food stores to survive, then they die. Somehow, enough humans have survived that the race persists, including some humans with the strange power of orogeny, allowing them to move the earth’s plates enough to try to stop some of those catastrophes from occurring. They also can draw on the power of the planet for combat, defensive or offensive, and there’s some overlap between the orogenes and people with a power the book refers to as magic, of even more obscure origin. And then there are the stone eaters, humanoid creatures who do as their name implies, can move through rock, and are effectively immortal.

Essun and Nassun are mother and daughter, but have been apart since the very beginning of The First Season, when Nassun’s father killed her little brother because he showed signs of orogeny and then absconded with her, leaving Essun to come home and find her son’s body with her family gone. Essun is part of a new ‘comm,’ which is trying to reach a distant haven before the imminent Season arrives, but is also still hoping to find her daughter, and in this book, she becomes aware that Nassun is doing things with her own nascent orogenic powers, driving Essun, herself one of the most powerful orogenes on the planet, to try to stop her daughter from wreaking unimaginable destruction on the world.

Nassun, meanwhile, has now lost her brother and father, and is separated from her mother, leaving her only with her Guardian, Schaffa, who acts as a father figure but also has ambiguous responsibilities beyond protecting his young charge. When his life is threatened, Nassun sets off on a quixotic mission that might save him but bring about an eschatological crisis from which humanity and the planet would never recover.
Although the series’ post-apocalyptic setting appears in the first novel to be the result of unchecked climate change, the cause of the Seasons turns out to be more fantastical than that, and any indictment of man’s reckless misuse of the planet and its environment is strictly metaphorical. The stronger metaphor, played out in parallel with Essun and Nassun, is one of man’s relationship with ‘Mother’ Earth, and the changes in the nature of that relationship over the course of the lives of both mother and child. Nassun needs her mother, but resents her absence (feeling abandoned, although that’s not fair to Essun). Essun is torn between her responsibilities to her comm – which is what’s keeping her alive – and her responsibilities to her daughter. Nassun eventually takes a course of action that reflects her youth and the poor judgment of humans whose brains have not yet fully developed, and it takes a heroic effort from Essun to try to stop her. The parallel with the man/Earth relationship here – there’s a hint of Gaia theory underneath the novel – is not perfect, but similar ideas, like man taking the environment for granted, using it up and discarding it when finished, appear in both the literal and figurative aspects of the novel.

The problem with The Stone Sky and the trilogy as a whole is the resolution of the main storyline, which seems to require Jemisin to create some new magic to complete it. The first book conceived a world that, while strange and often vague, felt self-contained: You didn’t know all of the rules of the environment, but you could trust that the author knew them and worked within their limits. By this third book, however, it seemed like Jemisin had expanded her own rule set to get to the finish line, including the transport method – like a hyperloop train through the earth – that is essential to get everyone in the right place for the slam-bang finish, and I found my suspension of disbelief starting to fall apart. Between that and some plodding prose – Jemisin is clearly brilliant and creative, but I found her style sluggish to read – I finished this book because I felt an obligation to it, but wouldn’t say I enjoyed it to the end.

Next up: still reading John Wray’s The Lost Time Accidents.

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→ July 1, 2018
→ By

Annihilation.

Paramount made some curious decisions earlier this year with the release of the film Annihiliation (amazon • iTunes), loosely based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name (which I have not read yet), including an off-period release date in the U.S. and the sale of the film directly to Netflix for most of the world (other than the U.S., Canada, and China). Marketing of the film wasn’t great either; I saw the trailer before its theatrical run, and the trailer doesn’t represent the film well at all, overselling the horror elements and underselling the story. The result is that the movie didn’t fare that well at the box office despite positive reviews, undercut somewhat by Paramount’s machinations and I think the failure to push this film as a smart sci-fi flick that overcomes some modest flaws with a big finish.

The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) in medical isolation, being interrogated by a British scientist (Benedict Wong) about what happened to her on a mission that went wrong and from which she is the only survivor. She’s somewhat vague on details, after which we flash back to before the mission and see that she’s a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School and that her husband, a special forces Sergeant (Oscar Isaac), has been missing for a year and is presumed dead. He shows up at the house one day, but is totally vacant and almost immediately begins hemorrhaging, which eventually leads to Lena volunteering to lead a mission of five women soldiers and researchers into a mysterious, growing region called the Shimmer, into which the military has sent many missions but from which only Lena’s husband has ever returned. The women find a seemingly impossible environment where animals and plants are swapping DNA, with increasingly horrifying results the longer the team stays within its boundaries.

Annihilation has two main conceits in its story: the ongoing mystery of what the Shimmer is and what it’s doing, and the fact that previous teams have all disappeared and are likely dead, a Lovecraftian mystery trending towards horror since we know from the start that Lena is the only survivor. (The Wikipedia entry on the movie notes the script’s similarity to a Lovecraft short story, “The Colour of Space.”) The former is revealed gradually at first, but proceeds in fits and starts in accordance with discoveries the team makes and with Lena’s examinations of blood and other cells under her microscope. The latter builds as the story progresses and the team moves through the Shimmer with increasing disorientation; they encounter animals that loosely resemble familiar creatures but that have evolved at impossible speeds. Eventually Lena reaches the lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer and discovers something more of the nature of the anomaly in a gorgeous special-effects sequence right before her final battle to escape.

The script does waste too much time on irrelevant details outside of the mission, including Lena’s affair with a colleague while her husband is missing, a subplot that is neither germane to the main story nor resolved in any satisfactory manner during the film. And while screenwriter/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) tries to give the team members some identities as individuals, none but Lena comes across as much more than a redshirt, not even ostensible team leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), so none of their losses is particularly tangible to the viewer. One team member cracks under the stress after the first death and another attack, which is foreshadowed in earlier dialogue but really not well explained by her character at all. Lena’s decision not to reveal to other team members that her husband was on an earlier mission is played up as a major issue, but without justifying why that’s a big deal or why the team member who cracks is so angry about the omission.

There are two scenes of gore in Annihiliation, more than enough to earn its R rating but not so much that I’d call this a straight horror film. There’s more of an intellectual undercurrent to the script than the trailer gave it credit for having; the way the Shimmer evolves, and then affects the members of the team, poses real questions about what it means to be human or even conscious, ones the film doesn’t try to answer even as characters directly ask what the Shimmer “wants.” Maybe it was just too hard to market on its own merits, but Annihilation is intense and smart enough to deserve to find an audience now that it’s more widely available.

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→ March 22, 2018
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Speaker for the Dead.

My annual post predicting breakout players for the upcoming season is up for Insiders.

I read – more precisely, listened to – Orson Scott Card’s Hugo-winning novel Ender’s Game back in 2006, before this blog existed, and somehow have only referred to it once in all of the posts on science fiction I’ve had on the site since then. I thought it was fine, certainly entertaining, with an ending that felt tacked-on (because it was), a good young adult sci-fi novel that followed a fairly typical storyline of “outcast kid saves humanity” but that ended somewhere unsupported by the story that came before. I just read the book’s sequel, Speaker for the Dead, which won the Hugo the following year and takes that tacked-on ending and blows it up into a full-length novel in its own right. It holds together much better than its predecessor, and this time around Card manages to create a few more well-rounded characters, but Ender has become a little bit insufferable, Card’s admirable philosophy comes across in ham-handed style, and if anything this book feels even more like it’s written for a teenaged audience.

Ender, born Andrew Wiggin, has become the Speaker for the Dead after defeating the “buggers” in a war that he learned never needed to take place at all. He now travels through portions of space inhabited by humans delivering funeral orations that attempt to sum up each deceased person’s life in full, rather than, say, delivering the sort of encomia we expect when someone dies but that fail to do the subject justice. Because of the relativistic effects of faster-than-light travel, however, he arrives at planets years or even decades after his services have been requested, which allows much of the action of Speaker for the Dead to take place in his absence.

In this book, humanity has encountered another sentient species, called “piggies” due to their porcine facial appearance, on the Portuguese Catholic-controlled planet of Lusitania. The human scientists on the planet observe the piggies, more formally called pequeninos, and operate under fairly strict rules on non-interference, including avoiding exposing the piggies to any human technology so they don’t accelerate the latter species’ evolution in any artificial way. A plague wiped out much of the earliest human settlement, and Novinha, the daughter of the two scientists who found a cure but still died of the disease, calls for Ender to Speak for the scientist who raised her but was killed by the piggies in some sort of religious ritual after he discovered the secret of the plague’s place in the planet’s ecosystem. By the time Ender arrives, however, twenty more years have passed, Novinha’s former lover (the dead scientist’s son) has also died in a similar ritual, while her son and her former lover’s daughter have fallen in love while also studying the piggies. Ender walks into this quagmire just as the all-powerful “Congress” prepares to sanction the humans on Lusitania for illegally sharing technology with the piggies.

Speaker for the Dead swept the big three sci-fi awards (Hugo, Nebula, Locus) in 1987, beating out, among others, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and William Gibson’s Count Zero (the sequel to Neuromancer; my only review of a Gibson novel is of the third book in the trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive), which I can only assume from this vantage point was in response to its popularity. Card is offering a sort of pop philosophy in this book about tolerance and understanding – at odds with his longstanding opposition to gay rights – of other cultures and religious traditions, one that is admirable even if he does beat you over the head with that particular hammer. Ender was a regular if precocious kid in the first novel, going through the same kind of boarding-school experience that would later show up in Harry Potter and the Magicians series, but here he’s like a new Dalai Lama with a bit of an ego. (I suppose when multiple planets know your name and you’ve founded a new religion, you probably get a bit of a big head about it all.)

The big advantage of this book compared to Ender’s Game is that Card seems to have learned how to create compelling characters, even complex, difficult ones. Novinha is fascinating, even if there was a note about her that sounded off key to me, but one that involves something everyone has a hard time understanding – why women stay in abusive relationships. The kid scientists all have distinct personalities as well, even if they don’t get the page time of the adults, and there’s at least an attempt to distinguish the various named pequenino characters even though they cycle in and out of the story rather quickly.

There’s some graphic violence in this book – the ritual mentioned above would never make it to a theater if someone filmed this story – that is truly at odds with the overall tone. Card writes like he’s talking to a teenager, and as if his characters are all stuck in teenage modes of expression. Nicknaming the alien species “buggers” and “piggies” comes across as puerile. He also has a simple idea of atonement or redemption, one that I don’t think fits with the events that come before those moments, as if doing the right thing today wipes out all the wrong things you did before. I wish life worked that way, but it doesn’t.

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→ March 21, 2018
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Forever Peace.

I wasn’t a huge fan of Joe Haldeman’s Hugo-winning novel The Forever War, which described the history of a soldier involved in a war that takes place across several millennia due to the relativistic events of time travel. The science aspects of the story worked fairly well, but his depiction of the declining society on earth seemed homophobic and beyond mere dystopian thinking. Haldeman won the Hugo a second time (and the Nebula) for his 1997 novel Forever Peace, which isn’t a sequel or even truly connected to the first book other than in name, and takes an entirely different tack on the question of what causes wars and who really stands to benefit from them.

In Forever Peace, scientists have built the largest ever supercollider out within the moons of Jupiter, but it turns out that there’s a hitch in the system – if the experiment is allowed to proceed to its conclusion, it will result in the end of the universe, much as real-world opponents of the Large Hadron Collider claimed would happen once that came on line. (We are, at the moment, still here.) This would seem like a fairly straightforward story – the folks who discover what’s amiss in the collider have to convince the authorities to stop it – but in Forever Peace they are opposed by a fundamentalist Christian group, the Hammer of God, that has infiltrated the top levels of government, the military, and academia. Known colloquially as “Enders,” they *want* the end of the world to occur for religious reasons.

The main character, Julian Class, is a soldier who never sees the battlefield, working from a central command center and controlling ‘soldierboy’ mech units hundreds of miles away in what seems like a fairly clear precursor to Avatar’s main conceit. (I haven’t seen the latter movie, so I’m somewhat guessing here.) That disconnection between the actor and the violence s/he causes is a core idea in the book, and also foreshadows our increasingly indirect methods of waging war, like drone attacks in the Middle East that allow us to kill enemies real and imagined without risk to any American lives. When Julian has to take a life, it has a stronger, more profound effect on him than anything he says he’s experienced before, even when piloting the ‘soldierboy’ through Third-World villages and destroying property and crops.

There are also new Neuromancer-esque technologies where people can jack in to a shared network, which can connect your mind to others on the network at the same time, and which, of course, also becomes an interrogation technique. The protagonists discover a way to reprogram people via this technology to convince them of the utter futility of war or violence, by jacking them in with a group of other people for about two weeks, whether of their own free will or under coercion. Accessing the network in this way requires surgery to implant the jack, an operation that is sometimes unsuccessful and leaves the patients permanently offline, occasionally leaving them with brain damage as well. The operations are semi-legal, and Americans cross the border to Mexico to undergo them.

Haldeman’s writing is impersonal by design; none of his characters here or in the preceding book feel terribly real or fleshed-out, and many of his side characters are just props. Doomsday cults are real, of course, but the Enders depicted in this book feel so sharp-edged that I couldn’t take them seriously – it’s satirical, obviously, but the internal inconsistency of these characters, from the top government officials in the cult to the assassin trying to chase down Julian and his girlfriend, Blaze, so they can’t stop the collider, made them feel like cartoon villains.

As with the first novel, Forever Peace left me wondering what exactly the point was. Yes, war is bad, I got that, thanks. Removing the actor from the effects of his actions is also bad. Understanding other people, regardless of background, should reduce conflicts, yep, got that. There’s nothing here you wouldn’t find in a decent YA novel, and the latter character would almost certainly have better female characters than Haldeman could ever create. I know he’s built quite a following for his novels, and certainly his military experience means that his battle scenes are better written than most of what you’ll find elsewhere in sci-fi, but after these two books, Haldeman hasn’t convinced me he has anything interesting to say in his fiction.

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