Category: science fiction

An Autumn War: Anvils

I’ve realized something about Abraham’s writing. He shows you the anvil he’s going to drop on your head. There’s a sussurus of silk as he slowly lifts the cover away, a hint of jasmine in the air as you sip tea, growing cold the way everything warm does. You consider the anvil, the way it is dark and sits, anvil-like, unassuming as the inevitable. You watch it lift, slowly, and the servant that moves the pulleys pulls hand over hand, one fist in front of another. It’s beautiful, the way the lines stretch taunt, and then go slack, and then stretch taunt again. It’s like life in its consideration, a bowl going cold because you are too busy living to drink, and then you drink and it’s cold and regretful. 

And then the fucking anvil hits you on the head, and it’s not about how unassuming the anvil is, or its color or shape, but about how the expectation is not the same as the experience, and the experience is not the same as the aftermath. There are birds and little arcane symbols tweeting around your head, and you can’t understand how that damn black and metal thing hit you so hard because you knew it was coming. You saw it unwrapped, like a stiptease of your coming mortification. 

It took me forever to get through An Autumn War (The Long Price Quartet). I cheated on it with several other books, because I could feel that coming shock. This series is stagy like nobody’s business, and that is intentional, deliberate, one foot in front of the other, a chess move that moves the other pieces like a diagram. I don’t like military books, as a rule, because I’m a squirming girl who can’t handle glory. There’s no glory here, just ash and pain and a thousand bad and completely understandable choices that end in the worse and the incomprehensible. Good Lord, this anvil. It is hard and dark and made of metal. I will grope my way through the next book, but not right now. I’m going to lie down and consider the patterns on the insides of my eyelids for a while.


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A Betrayal in Winter

It pisses me off how good a writer Daniel Abraham is. It pisses me off more that you lot don’t seem to be reading him at all. I’m going to start buying his books and mailing them to you for your birthday, L. Ron Hubbard style. This is not an idle threat. 

 A Betrayal in Winteris the second in the Long Price Quartet. I always feel a little weird writing reviews for later books in series, because I’m going inevitably to drop spoilers from the first book. With that in mind, there may be mild spoilers for A Shadow in Summer, but that can’t be helped. (As an aside, I keep having to look up the names for these books as I write this review, which is a pretty serious problem, I think. I get how they work together thematically, or whatever, but they do not marry to their content well and are pretty forgettable. I never know who to credit/blame with titles – bad titles can be the fault of either writers or publishers, for different reasons – but these are straight up bad.)

A Betrayal in Winterstarts roughly a decade after the first book, in another city, with some cast changes. I really feel the absence of the character Amat at first, with her mashalled, gendered anger, but she’s found her corollary in Idaan. Maybe corollary is the wrong word; Idaan is more a cautionary tale. I keep getting surprised by these books, because they have this really sly, cutting gender commentary, and fantasy, Goddess bless it, often doesn’t. Come to think of it, books that deal with fantasies of one stripe or other often fall into gender ghettos. Fantasies for women play out one register of stereotypes; fantasies for men another. (Arguably, Fantasy with a capital F is fantasy for men. I do not say this to start fights.) When either kinds of fantasies play out in semi-medieval settings, I think you get a lot of sexist play-set action. Not so, here, at all. 

The plot is almost Shakespearean: the king is dying. There is no primogeniture; his sons will have to kill one another to determine succession. His daughters, well, they do not count. All of them are too old to start the killing game, but one of the four sons dies suddenly, of poison, in an opening gambit blamed on our Otah, our upstart, from the first book. This would probably have more frission with an Elizabethan audience, having just gone through the whole mess with, um, something historical that I have forgotten about? Scottish succession and what a total mess it was? Anyway, um, back to my point, which is that if I spend much more time outlining the plot, I’m going to make it sound like one of those court intrigue jobs that I have mixed success with. No. My Dad is fond of quoting the following aphorism: all politics are local. Then he winks and says: No, actually, all politics are personal. Sometimes I fall asleep when I’m reading court intrigue dramas because they forget the actors are people, and not just widgets in a system. At some point, one of the characters says, “We are all men under our robes,” which is beautiful and perfect, because they are, of course, when they are men. But sometimes they are women, and that makes a difference. That difference fuels some of the plot. 

There’s other loves for me in here. The first book set forward some fantasy mechanics that have deepened here. There’s the poets, who call into being andats – semi-living embodiments of an idea who are something between a metaphor and bound god. We met one in the first book, Seedless, and here we meet another, who changes our ideas of how the andats work, how metaphors work. There is still the gesture-language, not as fully utilized as in the last book, but one that puts a spin on the statements of characters in this book. And then there is the continuing metaphor of the sleeve, where people keep their correspondence, or have it spill on the pavement; the cloth that covers the wrist also conceals the heart, or reveals; the difference between the mask and the person, the clothes and the man. Or woman. Ah ah ah. 

I think this book could almost be read as a stand-alone text, something that makes me quake. I blame Tolkien’s editors for breaking LotR into three books when it should have been one, and giving later fantasists license to write a bunch of narratives that never culminate, never complete. I mean, sure, I like how Fellowship ends, with it’s downbeat incompleteness, but I can’t remember the break between Two Towers and King, and King is mostly appendix, and OMG, I’ll stop nerding out here. This book does not ramble to its end, to be begun again where it finished like after a nap. That said, there are things in Winter that tighten into the next arc, a late moment when I realized that the library is at the heart of the metaphors in a way that makes my booknerd soul become incandescent with glee. I’m really impressed, and you lot should get up off your asses and start reading Abraham right now. Now. 

(And this, and the previous book, A Shadow in Summer, can be be found packaged in an omnibus called Shadow and Betrayal. Get on that shit.) 

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A Shadow in Summer: The Cotton Djinn

Regularly, I spend maybe too much time agonizing about star-ratings, because they are dumb and evil and should be abolished. There’s a lot in A Shadow in Summerby Daniel Abraham to love – a lot – but I cheated on it with no less than three other books, profligate that I am, and usually when I get to cuckolding it is Not A Good Sign. But now, a week or so past when I finally finished this novel, I think the cheating was vital to my enjoyment. (Look at me justify the sluttiness!) No, seriously, this book is weird. It’s difficult to sum up the plot; the ideas are subtle, textured, and more intimate that the usual OMG SMASH SMASH of science fiction or fantasy.

And now, a random digression into genre. I fight Richard tooth and nail about the distinction between fantasy and scifi, because he’s always saying thing like, “I hate fantasy. All those godamn elves.” And then I point out that he totally hearts Neil Gaiman and Tolkien, so what is he talking about? And he says if it doesn’t have elves in it, it’s not fantasy. And then comes the name calling and taunting. When I went to class this book on my admittedly bullshit shelves here on GoodReads, I realized I’d internalized his hard line in the sand between genres – a book is either one or the other, with no meeting in the middle.

This book meets in the middle. There’s magic, but it is so tightly circumscribed as to be just a mind-blowing metaphor for the ways in which a technology encompasses a world view. Tolkien, in all of the snore-inducing extra-biblical writings about Middle Earth, re-writes God’s Divine Logos as a song, each life adding a note or chord into the chorus of history. Le Guin’s Earthsea books use word-magic, the idea of a pre-Fallen language, to sketch her ideas about the Tao. Even crappy young Christopher Paolini, not so much standing on the shoulders of giants as having a piggy-back ride, sees magic as resting in language, even if his magic is stupid and pointless.

In A Shadow in Summer, the magic is language-based, but language-based the way my computer is programmed. I have a really bad background in math, so I took a lot of logic classes in college because they count as math credit – it’s all, like, symbolic, man! So I’d translate an argument into a proof – all of those neat symbols adding up into incontrovertible proof of God’s existence one page, or His divine non-existence the other, and eventually that translation seemed as slippery as fish, as cold as fish, as fishy as fish. The proof is not proof, as they say. The argument can be watertight and wrong. “And” and “but” are both translated into the same symbol – & – but they do not have the same connotation.

Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is that in this book, a group of people called “poets” call into being beings called “andats” who are slippery folk, fishy folk, complex non-persons who embody an idea. Much of the plot of ASIS deals with the andat Removing That Which Continues, who is commonly called Seedless. He’s person-like – he walks and talks but doesn’t really breathe – but he was called into being by a poet for the purposes of continuing the monopoly on the cotton trade that his culture enjoys. The previous andat ripened cotton; this one removes the seeds. As an almost unintended effect, Seedless also presides over the Sad Trade, as abortion is called in this reality. The andat are called and bound by poets after long study, and the failure to bind the idea results in the death of the poet. Released after the death of their poet, the andat returns to the great-unbeing, and calling them up again becomes harder and harder for later poets. 

Ideas are tricky; technology, magical as it is, is tricky. The pocket watch made of gears is rendered obsolete by the digital watch, not only because digital information is more useful to culture – arguably, arguably – but because the pocket watch was invented to compute longitude, and that’s simply not a concern in the digital age, because the digital is an analog for the analog, and we’ve harness the digital to entirely different ends. And now I’m talking nonsense, but I’m sure there’s something to my nonsense. Abraham’s andats are technology manifest – the way a new invention, a new idea, insinuates into our history almost compulsively – reworking what we think about society and people and the order of those things. How much of our ideas of the nation-state are dependent on the Bomb, the machine gun? How did the printing press reorder Medieval notions of God – and would the Enlightenment have happened without it? 

I’ve been blathering pseudo-metaphysically, but the beauty of this book is in how careful the character sketches are, how concise the language is. There were moments when I would ah-ah-ah ah ah – the way Abraham would describe the skin on almost-frozen water, or the moment of revelation when you see the possibilities blooming like blood into water, and I would be stopped cold by the power of his language. I’ve got some problems with the multi-volume fantasy/sf “trilogy”, and this is no exception: the first half is almost inert, stagy, setting the players very carefully on the playing field like little green army men about to work out their inevitable battle. But (and?) then in the latter half the characters come to life and start moving unexpectedly – not in violation with their characters, but in the way people make stunning choices that make sense only after the fact. Like logic, Abraham translates a technology into a person, a person who speaks back, who schemes and plans, and his translation turns on the subtle distinction between “and” and “but” – the diction of culture. 

There’s other clever things in this story – Abraham alludes to a language of posture that exists in the culture he’s created – how someone can say something, and then raise their arms to mean welcome or irony or gratitude. This takes some getting used to, but this is subtly done, the way some characters use this body language easily, and others don’t – how any ritualized behavior has implications as to cultural status and placement. My most giggle-producing moment was when I realized that Seedless is a Cotton Djinn – sound it out – maybe this is funny to me and maybe just me, but I wonder even now if that’s what Abraham intended, this sly pun that turns on the way translation is both funny and sad, bound by language that is untranslatable.



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The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

A strange book, to be sure. The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord wears its influences on its sleeves so much that it’s more patchwork quilt than whole cloth. Star Trek (lots of Star Trek), Ray Bradbury, possibly Bujold (though it could just be similar influences, but the central characters remind me very much of Aral & Cordelia), the Janes Austen and Eyre (and I know it is monumentally unfair to conflate a real writer with a fictional character just because they have the same first name, but still I do it), the obvious Voltaire (or possibly Candide), LeGuin’s anthropology that often quests for the humaneness in our humanity. This is not going to work for many readers, especially after giving the usual your mileage may vary disclaimer about the influences. But the quilted quality, for me anyway, worked pretty decently with the the overriding themes of the novel: hybridization (as Mike notes, and you should read his review), the intersection of the domestic with societal, and love, love, love, baby.

This is the second science fiction novel I’ve read in the last month that focused at least as much attention to their interpersonal and romantic upheavals as to the more traditionally science fictional elements, and I find I like this a good deal. (And, the science fictional stuff here – like aspects cribbed pretty hard from some of my least favorite things, like Star Trek’s The Chase – were the least interesting part of the story for me.) Space opera especially can be very dudes-in-smoking-jackets-avuncularly-solving-society-with-reason, and that this book takes that reasonable computation – here is how we will solve our problems with Science! – and then puts the rubber to the road is actually quietly subversive. Yes, that’s a very nice theory you’ve got there, but when you resolve that plan down to specific human beings, who tend not to run to spec, you’re gonna have some problems. And the problems are not with the people, but with the plan.

Speaking of Star Trek, the opening is very much what happens in the third act of the most recent Star Trek movie – so spoiler alert on that, if you haven’t seen it – where the entire planet of Vulcan is destroyed, leaving a smattering of Vulcans in exile traumatized by genocide and weighted with the monumental task of rebuilding/preserving an entire culture. (I suppose this also happens in Star Wars when Leia’s home world of Alderaan is vaporized – seriously, that is not a spoiler – but that’s treated so topically as to be callous. Hey, a boy’s quest to manhood is way more important.) Ms. Lord notes in her afterward that this idea for her was sparked by reading about the lingering effects of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami that killed a quarter of a million people and displaced millions more. Because of a quirk of timing and culture, women were killed disproportionately, leaving sometimes whole communities of family-less men. A culture without women, without children, is not one that going to survive. (The reverse is true, certainly, but that’s not what happened.) So this is where we are with the Sadiri as well, and Cygnus Beta is suddenly a pioneer settlement filled mostly with Sadiri men.

Because the Sadiri are pretty much Vulcans – cool, mannered, intellectual – they build a little plan to entice (functionally) mail-order brides from the pluralistic society of Cygnus Beta to act as the new mothers of Sadiri. Ambassador Spock is tasked with surveying outlying communities for quanta of Sadiri genes, and mid-level Cygean bureaucrat/scientist Grace Delarua is sent along with him and his team. This is a pretty terrible idea – the whole assessing ladies for their breeding/genetic potential – and Grace even knows it. But whatever, road trip! We’ll just sort this shit out on the way. There’s a lot of sly commentary on racial construction in the novel – how the ways people look define how others respond to them, how racial characteristics are constructed and enforced, etc. (I actually laughed when someone exclaims “But slavery is illegal!” when the dawning realization that they are dealing with a culture predicated on slavery hits the group.) Which makes the white-washing of the cover that much more discouraging; I don’t think there is one character in this novel described as having white skin, and certainly Grace (who that is?) does not. But this has been going on in sff covers for a long time, witness the very dark-skinned Ged from A Wizard of Earthsea who has been subjected to whitewashed covers and “color-blind casting” (snort, as if) for decades. I kind of can’t imagine Ms. Lord had anything to do with this cover decision, and boycotting her work is punching a bystander, so I don’t really know what the solution is here. Strongly worded email to the publisher? Vocal bitching? Heaving dramatically ironic sighs?

The story is told mostly in Grace’s voice, which, as I gestured to in my last paragraph, is pretty breezy and chatty, sometimes irritatingly so. Sometimes less than snappy banter goes on for too long, and there are occasional dips into preciousness. But I think part of it is deliberate. Grace has an encounter with someone (trying not to go spoiler here) which is a pretty brutal assault on her mental autonomy, and it took me several chapters to have the magnitude of the assault sink in, partially because Grace jumps up and dusts off. Well, are we getting back to work or what? She’s got the glossomania of the traumatized, running scads of cheerful commentary on everything but the injury (not unlike Rae from Sunshine.) Mr Spock is doing the same thing, in his way, retreating into logic and genetics as solutions to a problem that is cultural, and therefore infinitely more non-linear. (To put it super dorkily; jeez.) It’s only through a series of glancing conversations – ones not about their traumas at all – that I began to see the avoidance mechanisms at work. Very subtly done.

Anyway, I predict that there will be many reviews of this book that dismiss it as just a love story, but The Best of All Possible Worlds – very overtly in places – reads to me as that sly kind of women’s fiction that says occasionally dangerous things about how we construct our societies, very gently and chattily drawing out our idealized visions of how people work and resolving them down to individuals. The syllabus is not the moment of insight. That Ms. Lord pulls this off in the historically all-male fantasy playset of the space opera is charmingly subversive as well. So, as I said in my opening, an odd book, patchy in places, with the kind of narrator who can even set the teeth of those inclined to like her voice (and for those who aren’t, forget about it). This book puts the soap in space opera, and I enjoyed greatly what came out in the wash.

I received my copy from NetGalley.com

The Mad Scientist’s Daughter: Collapsing Sadness

When I was in junior high, I knew this girl who claimed to be a test tube baby. She claimed a lot of fantastic things, like that she had no sense of smell because of the scientific tinkering of her experimental origins, and some other odd physical anomalies. I pretty much knew this was bullshit, but this was back before I could spend 15 seconds typing into a screen on my cell browser “first test tube baby US” and get the name and birthdate of Elizabeth Jordan Carr, born on December 28, 1981. Ms Carr was the 15th test tube baby in the world – as the NYTimes article notes,” in vitro,” the more commonplace term now, means “in glass” – born a full 7 years after the girl I knew had been born. I remember questioning my friend gently about her sense of smell: do you have trouble tasting things? Is it all just bland like you have a cold? Oh no, I taste everything fine. Oh, I thought, bullshit. We were never close or anything – in truth, I didn’t like her much – but I let all this slide.

Even with my somewhat flimsy adolescent class sense, I knew how poor her family was. They – she, her mother, and a round-robin of her mother’s “boyfriends” – lived above a corner grocery, the kind that sells Campbell’s soup for double its price, cigarettes and 3.2 beer. Her family didn’t even have a phone, but used the pay phone on the corner. They weren’t the only ones, and there was this complicated set of protocols and negotiations when you called it – gather ’round children, because pay phones used to exist, and they used to accept incoming calls: the guy who would bang on the door to the stairs leading to their apartment, leaving the phone hanging, the guy who wouldn’t, the corner store owner with an angry, thick accent who would go through periods of 86ing her family (I think for non-payment of their credit, but also for more noise-centered complaints). Corner store owners used to extend credit, young’ens, in a notebook-under-the-register kind of way. They still may, if the great gossiping neighbor center who is Mohammed at the corner store on my block is any indication. I’ve certainly walked out of S-Mart with goods I didn’t have the money for, but just because I forgot my wallet like an idiot. I could be into him for hundreds if I were closer to the edge. There but for the grace of God, etc.

So I knew what she said was bullshit, but I got why she was running that line of bullshit. The science fictional aspects of her supposed conception added a shine of dramatic ethics to her impoverished upbringing. Again, children, this was long enough ago that the whole concept of “test tube babies” had this op-ed worthy hand-wringing about it. You could still run the false-Darwinian line about how in vitro fertilization was violating the spirit, if maybe not the letter, of survival of the fittest with a straight face – nevermind any business about God and His Will and whatnot – and you could run it without hitting millions of children who have been conceived this way since then. I myself know at least a half dozen. I’m not saying that the ethics of in vitro fertilization have been solved or anything. I got into a surprisingly fractious argument with my husband about a specific messed up situation created by IVF, and we concluded our argument with the understanding that even people who generally agree about the broad moral questions are going to get tripped up by issues of gender, personhood, and ownership. At a certain point, all that crystalline logical scaffold teeters and collapses into hard core interpersonal gut-reaction.

Catarina is five years old when her father returns one day with an android named Finn. Cat is five, so she doesn’t quite get what Finn’s extraordinary assistance might mean. There have been automata and AI in this scorched, rebuilding world, but Finn is unique, more and less human than anything that came before. But five years old does not mean but be. She decides Finn is a ghost, because that makes sense to five. My daughter just turned six on Christmas, and we recently had a long conversation about how the Easter bunny and the tooth fairy are obviously me, but Santa is real. As much as I’ve always believed in not running bullshit on my kids, I just didn’t know what to say there. I figure in a year or two the world will inevitably crush her understandings of Santa’s precise reality, and it’s not like I need to be the messenger there. Which is one of the many things that clove me about this story: the way I completely empathized with both parent and child, feeling the hard shocks of understanding when Cat’s mother snaps at Cat’s choices – I wasn’t built to be a housewife; no girl is – while bleeding for the casual judgement. Jesus, what we do not in the name of love, but because of love and our studied ignorances. Finn acts as tutor to Cat, and the world and its ethical understanding changes around them as they change. They move from a world in which the term test tube babies dissolves into the commonplace in vitro fertilization, but that doesn’t mean the hard core interpersonal gut-reaction is just semantics.

I kind of don’t want to get into the mechanics of the plot, because I’m not sure concrete action says anything about the long tides of lived lives. Cat grows; she goes to school; she marries. That’s just facts. But about halfway through, I sat up on the couch and said to my husband, this is so sad, I’m not sure I can take it. I spend the next half of the book near weeping, and if I’m going to be honest, weeping. We are such disastrous creatures, humans, and it’s not such a huge surprise that the consciousnesses we create will be disastrous too. Part of this is that on a very overt level, this is an unrequited love story; this is an emotional response to intrusive technology, and the cultural scaffold is less important than the teetering and its fall into the personal.

I was very careful in the last paragraph not to use the word romance in relation with Finn & Cat, which I think belies in me a certain discomfort with love and sex and the domestic in fiction. Certainly, the term romance applies in many ways, though more in its capital-R incarnation: the Romance. Romanticism attempted to inject strong emotion into the bloody warfare of Classicism, valued folk art as authentic craft, got its rocks off on rocks, trees, and landscape. That’s all in here: a brooding, personal recollection of the world after ecological disaster, with an eye towards the beauty of that devastation; the folk art of weaving that Cat takes up, confusing her scientist parents, and on some level, herself; the near-Gothic near-Freudian setting of the family home, with the father in the basement and the android in the aerie. The opening section, with Cat catching fireflies in a jar, was almost too much for me – such vividly worn shorthand for wonder – but I promise this works long term.

Anyway, at some point, Clarke tips her hat to Kazuo Ishiguro and Maureen F. McHugh, and I smiled at the tip. We’re at the edge of science fiction here that thrills and bleeds with the literary wasteland of cool sentences and felt emotion, that understands that it’s not about whatever jibber jabber about the great Frankenstein’s Oedipal monster, but his daughter, growing up in a world that has transmuted from test tubes to in glass, but in glass in another language. There was a comment thread recently about this odd edge of genre, about how at a certain point science fiction sails over the edge into some more literary metafiction, and the literary metafiction sails right back, and they stand silhouetted on the water. Ishiguro’s clones, McHugh’s chimera, Atwood’s genetic engineering, Whitehead’s zombies, Boudinot’s Age of Fucked Up Shit – these creatures and stories all fall into this strange edge of the science fictional or the literary, one or the other or both in a quantum uncertainty.

But The Mad Scientist’s Daughteris also a romance. It is about love. It is about love in the most collapsingly personal way there is. God, and it’s so, so sad.

I didn’t understand why this novel had been published by Angry Robot, because, so far, what I’ve read from that publisher has been much more pulp sensible. (I am not using the term pulp as a brush-off or indicator of poor quality. Pulp doesn’t give a shit where it’s shelved.) But in writing this review, I get it now. The literary and the science fictional have been doing a dance since New Wave, running the ethics of technology met up with our humanity and the inherent surrealism of such a project, into a martial art of which part of the bookstore to shelve such a thing. Add in romance – the stories of love and the childhood bedroom, of uneasy marriages and disappointed parents – and the dance becomes something…maybe not new, but old, the way we who have lived through gigantic technological upheavals – and that is all of us – navigate the old, messy questions of consciousness and emotion in new mediated ways. This book takes a cell phone and calls that payphone on the corner. Who answers will break your heart. Or, in any case, it broke mine.

I got my copy from Netgalley and Angry Robot, in exchange for a fair review. Thank heavens.

Christmas Stars: What to Get Your Younger Brother

When they finally prove the existence of the chronoton – that’s the time particle for you folks who haven’t been wallowing in science fiction lo these many years – no doubt the Christmas season will be involved. Some mad scientist will put together one of those rad boxes with der blinken lights and point it at some American trying harriedly to pack up a bunch of boxes and sign cards and survive the company Christmas party without vomiting up gross milk-based hard alcohol concoctions & anger about the recent massive layoffs on management, and the scientist will actually see the chronotons pouring off this frazzled American. Christmas sucks up all your time. All of it. It’s a black hole; a gravity well; an event horizon of weight gain and family squabbles. 


Given my tendency to misuse science concepts in the service of my Christmas melt-down, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that some enterprising editor put together a truly awesome Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of fictional delights: You got my Christmas in your science fiction! Yum. There are two things that I’m astonished by when think of Christmas Stars: Fantastic Tales of Yuletide Wonder. First, that there are enough science fiction stories about Christmas to warrant a pretty hefty anthology. Second, that some of my favorite SFF Christmas stories – which includes “Santa was” by Neil Gaiman collected in Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders and something by Charles de Lint that was about a talking dog – aren’t even included in this anthology. And third, that I can even think of other stories that could be included, but weren’t. I guess that’s three and not two. I’ll come in again. 

So, science fiction nerds, get your ass in gear and get down to whatever random thrift store has this lurking on its shelves. I’m not one for evil gift guides, but if you haven’t been able to think of anything for your younger brother, and you don’t want to get involved in the specifics of his Warhammer obsessions – honestly, whatever you get him will be wrong – this is the book for you. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and he’s got on a little space suit, and so do the reindeer, and the sleigh is a spaceship. Oh, yes.


Light by M. John Harrison

Now this is one of the weirdest ass books I’ve read in a long while. This is not a criticism, just an observation. It’s really defying me to encapsulate the story and themes in 50 words or less, but I’ll try to give it a whirl. Three different plots lines follow three different people in three different times. This is not really accurate either: two of these time periods are the same, or overlap, and one of these people is not really a person anymore, but a sentient space ship working on the purpose for a weirdass alien artifact. The contemporary story follows a serial killer who is working on quantum computing. The third follows a man who has just been dumped out of a tank and is running about in something approximating a Noir plot, but with lots of cyberpunkery as ornament. 

This book made me have a couple revelations about genre, and for that I thank it. I don’t generally enjoy super hard science fiction because it’s really weird and schematic. The authors tend to get their duuuuuude on about concepts, and then they forget about good writing and character and all that. I’m up for this occasionally, as I have humanities-type person aversion to reading about science, so I enjoy hard sf for the narrative wrapper that it puts around scientific thought. I’d rather eat glass than read something written non-fictionally about the Technological Singularity (c.f. Kurtzweil, et al.) but it’s cool as a bit of play in a story. (Also, I know, please don’t freak out, that the TS is more bullshit and masturbation than *actual* scientific thought. It was just the first thing I thought of that I would rather see in fiction than in a treatise or similar.)

Anyway, I think it might be time for a massive digression. I recently watched a pretty fascinating conversation go down on Goodreads between a romance novelist and a reader who doesn’t generally read romance. The author spent a lot of time explaining where she was coming from in terms of the characters, how she was trying to say something about sex addiction within the confines of the romance genre. This got me thinking, why did she confine herself to the romance genre? She talked about the editing process, how her publisher edited pretty hard, and how some things got lost in the mix. Why not try to publish something that would break out of the romance ghetto? 

I’m going to answer my own questions in true asshole fashion. She wrote a romance because that’s the genre she enjoys. I read Light because a friend of mine, who is also an sf nerd, gave this to me for my birthday, and he must have thought I’d enjoy this. And I did. The language is totally killer, slick with a sort of cyberpunky Noir damage, but with these quick sketches which nail character in short, hard strokes. I hadn’t really seen the relationship between Noir and cyberpunk before I read this; the way both tend to rely on hard-luck and the image of the Street; the chase and the mystery; the beauty of the flickering neon and ugly marketing of a gutter-level view on things. 

The code parlors, the tattoo parlors – all run by one-eyed poets sixty years old, loaded on Carmody Rose bourbon – the store-front tailor operations and chop joints, their tiny show windows stuffed with animated designs like postage stamps or campaign badges from imaginary wars or bags of innocent-coloured candy, were already crowded with customers; while from the corporate enclaves terraced above the Corniche, men and women in designer clothes sauntered confidently towards the harbour restaurants, lifting their heads in anticipation of Earth cuisine, harbour lights on the wine-dark seas, then a late-night trip to Moneytown – wealth creators, prosperity makers, a little too good for it all by all their own account, yet mysteriously energised by everything cheap and tasteless. Voices rose. Laughter rose above them.

But then the real heart of this story has to do with sex, and it’s totally uncomfortable and tricky as hell within a genre that doesn’t really lend itself to that. I love science fiction like the brother I never had, but space opera, cyberpunk, doesn’t generally have much to say about early childhood trauma, internalized body issues, sexual abuse. Or if it does, it says it in ways that are stupid and juvenile. (Sorry, science fiction. *arm punch* You know I love you.) Why did Harrison choose to write about this in this genre? Who the fuck knows? But probably because this is a genre he enjoys, and he clearly has fun in it & knows the idiom like a fever dream. 

SPOILERS BELOW

So my mention of the technological singularity in the first part of the review wasn’t a total accident, although my equation it with scientific thought mostly was. Harrison brushed up against the singularity in the almost god-like Shrander, and in the ways that bodies are replaced and renewed, put on ice, cloned, proxied, etc. Science is often a collection of data, but those data are put into narrative by scientific thought and theories; the hypothesis is a story looking for causality. Sometimes I think all the ridiculous “theorizing” that goes on about the singularity – how it is already here, how it will make human life perfect or something, is this strange narrative that says more about our discomfort with our bodies than anything. Harrison kind of rips this apart. Seria Mau becomes disembodied because of childhood sexual abuse, but taking the body away doesn’t take away her trauma. She keeps murdering her human cargo – sorry for this bad phrase, but it kind of works – because they keep having sex. The narrative, fractured though it is, drives her to heal her own fractures and get her body back. Her brother twinks out in a tank, living in stories that play for him in the cliched idiom of the Noir plot, and his non-seeing is part of his not-seeing in childhood, not understanding what was happening to the sister he loves.

END SPOILERS

I guess I’ll just say one last thing, not under cover of spoiler  This book does not make a lot of sense in the end, in terms of plot-lines, and lots of reviews seem to grumble and imply that you need multiple reads to dig it all. Maybe. But I think it’s pretty cool how the symbols just sort of rolled together like the patterns on dice, and didn’t slip-knot into a hard conclusion, but into the impression of a conclusion, the bones held in the hand for the next hard throw. Inside the hand is bones too. Ah.

Perdido Street Station: Race/Race

Despite having declared Mr. Miéville my literary boyfriend some time ago, I have to come out and admit I’ve only read one (1) book by him. I’ve read his foray into YA, Un Lun Dun, which thumbs the touchstones of his writing: urban spaces, a bunch of weird ass shit, and literary genres ground through the pulper of his baroque writing. But, being YA, the profanity and sheer globbing fuckallery of his writing was dampened a bit. No so, here. And dag, yo, that’s some stuff.

Man, I don’t even know what to say here now. I guess I could get into the plot, but you can go consider the mechanics of who did what where in other places. Despite this being a tumbling, active book, I’m not sure that will give you anything. Something about this book kept reminding me of Light by M. John Harrison, and has strangely convinced me to go back and give that book another star. I didn’t get what Harrison was doing there, how he sliced open the childhood teddy bear and sewed it back together inside out and upside down. I looked at that ravaged bit of stuffing with the black zig-zags of thread, and thought, what the fuck are you doing? That is wrong, and possibly gross.

There’s a lot in New Crubuzon that is wrong and possible gross, and I feel like I’m too close to the end the my read to articulate the totality of what exact teddy bear Miéville vivisected. Here’s one little stuffed arm I can grope toward: race. We use the term race in daily life to mean different kinds of people, different ethnicities, different colors, what have you. (I’ve found I’ve lost all the nomenclature for talking about race, so sorry. Like profanity, I can’t describe it succinctly, but I know it when I see it, and so do you. And like profanity, we’re going to define it differently. This parenthetical comment is getting out of hand.) Fantasy uses the term to mean different species, although this term is a little off because fantasy doesn’t pretend toward scientific rigor, and the term “species” implies that a bit. Although Prof Tolkien has warned us against allegory, I think we can safely say that often, and maybe even always, the fantastic races are symbolic chits of our racial discomfort. No, an orc isn’t exactly, allegorically a Black Man, or an Arab, or whatever racial boogey we’ve got, but an orc is a biologically determined creature who holds inherent moral worth, or worthlessness, as you will. Race is deterministic, so is race.

Perdido Street Station opens to a pair of lovers working through their morning languor. It’s a sweet, slow-moving, romantic coupling and decoupling, two beings who love each other sweet-talking though their morning, but the sweet-talk is familiar and clouded with the near-conflicts and innuendo of couples who have been together a long time. Of course, one of the pair has a beetle for a head, and the other is a walrusy, wheezing human scientist. They are different races, and their love is shot through with their sense of perversion and transgression. The beetle-headed artist, having shucked her kepri community, can more or less openly admit the two are lovers; the human scientist has a lot more to lose, as humans are less understanding of bug-fuckery. Their love is tense, an open secret, complicated because of the paradox of that term.

Let’s now think about a similar scene with Aragon and Arwen. First off, I’m pretty sure there was no pre-marriage post-coitus for those two. Second, the elves were, yes, totally skeeved that Arwen wanted to marry a human, but the embodied disgust is so coded, so reified. Instead of “Omaigawd, I can’t believe you’re banging that mortal meat-sack”, it’s “Marrying him will take away your immortality.” And ultimately, thirdly, there is no disgust at the bodies themselves. Aragon is rough and unattractive, but he is understood to be imbued with the power of his rule, his sentience. Arwen and he meld their minds, the Platonic forms of themselves, their love arches over the dirty business of knocking boots, carefully ignoring the cat-ears of Arwen’s that fire the lusts of so many readers. I am not bagging on this; it is nice work if you can get it.

Hmm, I want to say I’m not after Tolkien here at all, but I can’t help falling back on his stuff because it’s so much more memorable than a lot of the fantastic twaddle that gets written in his loooong shadow. And this book isn’t high fantasy either, it’s…well, who the fuck knows what it is. Like New Crubuzon, it’s a patchwork of stuff, steam-punk arms, magical boxes, science-y glass tubes, natural philosophy with wings pinned to cotton, the horror of the flying death, in their non-discreet neighborhoods, throwing grappling hooks over one another, building up and digging down, heaping trash from one genre to another, running shit and blood and cables through the whole mess, throwing a switch and cackling, EEETS ALIIIVE. Still though, I think there’s something in the story of the lovers that is about the difference between miscegenation and bestiality in the slash between the terms race/race, and how both of those terms are pretty gross.

I’m kind of flailing here with the stitching and the stuffing, but I was honestly, genuinely, purposely affected by the strange, quiet love story between the human and the kepri. I love the ways the various races were cataloged as having this set of characteristics or that, but almost no one hewed to those characteristics, a constant sly denial of race/race; one that doesn’t pretend there isn’t a perverse glimmer in bug-fucking, or banging the mortal meat sack; one that isn’t about love as a moral force, tied to our moral bodies, but a social one, a plank thrown between neighborhoods where we construct our racial identities and have them constructed for us. Occasionally people walk that creaking tightrope from one side to the other, their arms outstretched, and it is a dangerous, scary, heart-pounding thrill.

There’s more in this book, a lot more stuffing and wires that I’m sure my brain will sift through in the coming months, and I really like that about it, how it’s this this baffling, active monster slaying quest on one hand, and then this lazy walk through a bazaar on another. (I see I have failed to mention completely that the main plot is about hunting down and killing some badass killer moths who are much scarier than the term “killer moth” might imply. So. Now I have mentioned it.) I guess I also feel like I should mention that Miéville’s writing style is likely a love-it or hate-it proposition. He does not use 5 words when 50 will do, and 5 of them will be made up, and another 5 will be thesaurus words, and another 5 will be profanity. I like all of these things, but you may not. So, yeah, that’s what I’ve got for now.

Born to Darkness: Compromises that Work

Another day, another plane read. 

Born to Darkness by Suzanne Brockmann was on the deck due to one of those library displays that I both drat and keep falling for. This turned out well better than I’d hoped, an extremely active little story that lets the characters just barely get out their conversations before the next twist bang bang shoot shoot. The set up is a cross between X-Men and Wild Cards, where a very limited number of people, the Greater-Thans, have a “metal integration” much higher than your average person’s, allowing then to do things like violate physics and read minds and stuff. Of course, there is a group of good guys, and a group of bad guys, and the bad guys are producing a drug which induces higher integration, yet also has the side effect of making its users batshit insane, or “jokering”. Which is what reminded me of Wild Cards, I’ll have you know. 

As a sort of cross between science fiction and the romance novel, the story occasionally fails the way a compromise can. There are three romantic pairings, an abduction to solve, and a whole Second Great Depression America to sketch here, in addition to fight and love scenes, and that the story hurtles along the way it does is no small feat. While the sex scenes did not gross me out or make me laugh, I was occasionally irritated by the lovers and their simultaneous orgasms – seriously, get out of the damn way, lovers, and explain the mechanism by which the whole “integration” thing works instead of experimenting with bjs. 

But! Because of the sometimes romance novel sensibility, Born to Darkness tackles some issues I can’t imagine a straight science fiction writer – and I kind of mean the double entendre there – taking on with success. One of the Greater-Thans, the unfortunately nicknamed “Mac”, has as one of her powers the ability to thrall sexually any person who swings towards girls. When we meet her, she’s full adult and aware of her powers – down to using them seriously unethically, seriously – but as a teen when her powers were first presenting, there was a fair amount of ugliness and violence as people – including her own father, yuck – respond to her unwitting transmission of sexual power. 

Mostly this backstory is used as an impediment to her romance with hot SEAL dude – the Navy thing, not a selkie. Oh noes! He might love me only for my super-charged vagina! But that the complex relationship between a woman’s sexuality and sexual violence was addressed at all was really notable. I was just this afternoon stewing because of some comment threads I read about the recent Walking Dead episode – the one where a character is threatened with rape and sexually assaulted – where some commenters were like, it’s realistic that she would be near-raped because obviously men are just waiting for civilization to break down so they can rape to their hearts content. (Of course, leaving aside the realism of walking cannibal corpses, etc.) I just, I mean, I hate the fuck out of this view of both women and men, that justifies sexual violence by conceptualizing male sexuality as this disgusting violent nightmare, and then acting like this view of people is the “reasonable” one. Fuck you assholes. Point being, I guess, that I thought the whole interplay here between sexual violence, coercion, attraction and whatever was an interesting one, even if it was treated kinda topically in the text. 

Because this was not wholly science fiction either, I had some irritations with how exactly the Greater-Than thing worked, but then I also get the impression that this is just the first in series, so information will be parceled out as it comes. The mechanism of the magical/scientific powers was certainly better than a lot of PNR I’ve read, which seems to pull magical rules out of its ass to fit the needs of the romance and not the other way around. (Does that metaphor even work?) The whole post-Depression America thing was kind of a kick, especially because the sensibility seemed a lot less regressive than I usually find in romance novels – the creeping lack of availability of birth control, for example, is seen as the dystopian nightmare it is. 

The ending seems to fall off a cliff of dotdotdot next episode next week. But the nice thing about continuing series is that there isn’t the need to tie off all relationships into perfected bliss, and the almost downbeat conclusion to some of the romantic plotlines was cool and unexpected. (Especially because I almost wanted to barf, given how happy two of them are. Especially given that mind-reading was in the mix. Maybe I’m just a whole-hearted bitch, but there is no way I want even my own husband of 14 years in my mind ever. That is not romantic to me.) Anyway, pretty brilliant plane read, and probably deserving of another star from me just for sheer enjoyment. Shiny.

Review: Glass Houses

I suffer from intermittent insomnia. I go to bed at the usual hour, no problem, and then awake and squint at the clock which reads something between 2 and 4 and think, “Damn.” After I find my glasses, things are clearer, but I’m still awake. The television is no good at this time of night, although I do play a game where I try to count how many stations are running “Girls Gone Wild” infomercials. The record stands at four. (Not that this has anything to do with the review, but this is the thing I don’t get about Joe Francis’s titty empire: if you want to buy porn, then why not just buy porn?)

So I read Glass Housesby Laura J. Mixon in the strange hours between too late and too early, and I was happy for it’s company: not overly taxing, stylish, and driving toward some smaller human truth. My step-mom uses the term “little movies” when she refers to films that set out to accomplish some narrow thing and then succeed; in this way, this book is a “little book.” (And to be clear, this term is not a dig; success on any scale is success, and sometimes art fails because its reach exceeds its grasp.) It was written in the early 90s, and its cyberpunk sensibilities feel worn and frayed, too indebted to its sources to really make the genre new and vital. Mostly, I didn’t mind, but then I like cyberpunk. My real complaint is that the stylishness of the setting, the window-dressing of global warming as global apocalypse, the sense of technology driving the breach between haves and have-nots had little to do with the actual emotional heart of the book. Why dress it as cyberpunk at all?

Our protagonist, an agoraphobic scavenger using a proxy-device, almost rescues a very important man from his rather gruesome death. She steals his newly-written will off of his body, and then decides, due to the assholery of his family, to deliver the will to the rightful heir. Well and good; this will serve as plot. The real story is about her coming to terms with her roommate and sometimes lover Melissa. Her relationship with Melissa is the soul of the book, and the thing I responded to the most, even if the revelations felt forced at times, and the protagonist’s changes incomplete or untrue. I have fallen in love with users. At some point you realize that thee concept of unconditional love is something of a trick designed by people who have been keeping score. It’s not unfair to count the points yourself. 

I say that this is a little book, but I wonder if these things are little at all. It’s hard to say. I read this as my twilight self, companioned by the audible silence of the house and my frustrations with my continued awakeness. This is the odd thing I felt when I finished this book: I might have liked this better had it been billed as young adult, not that I disliked it. It’s fun to complain about marketing; I do it all the time. And I don’t want to fall into the the trap of thinking fiction written for the younger set is somehow smaller and less important. But there is something fundamentally young in the awakenings found within its pages, a young that isn’t naive exactly, but a young that keeps trusting the prostitute she loves despite the obvious metaphorics of her profession. It’s a good first book, worthy of a look at Mixon’s later work. And a good book for the edgy hours before dawn.