Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
My rating: 3 of 5 stars "What do you think one person can do?" The shock of the SF new in Louise McMaster Bujold's Falling Free (1986) doesn't come from the space opera stellar vista of its opening sentence: "The shining rim of the planet Rodeo wheeled dizzily past the observation port of the orbital transfer station." Instead, it comes from the interstellar corporation GalacTech's 25-year bioengineering project: four-armed humans designed to work and live in zero-gravity ("null-gee"). Bujold's protagonist Leo Graf meets the "quaddies" in the first chapter: "Leo blinked, and caught his breath in shock. The boy had no legs. Emerging from his shorts were [sic] a second set of arms." At first Leo thinks the youth is the result of a birth defect that would make him "a cripple, downside" (on a planet with gravity), but he soon learns that the 1000 quaddies (of both genders and of varying ages up to twenty) are "The first generation of GalacTech's new super-workers." Leo is impressed by how well suited they are for their null-gee setting on the orbital habitat they call home: "Leo thought of a flock of canaries, of flying squirrels, of monkeys, of spiders, of swift bright lizards of the sort that run straight up walls." The problem for Leo "wasn't the arms, or the quick, too-many hands. . . It was their faces . . . . They were the faces of children." For he senses that the kids have been engineered and educated to be obedient slaves ripe for exploiting by the company, which defines them as "capital equipment" and "post-fetal experimental tissue cultures." (The exploitation of obviously human "non-human" products of genetic engineering prefigures the bleaker Never Let Me Go [2005]) "Crowding forty, sandy and square," Leo has been summoned to the orbital habitat to teach the quaddies null-gee engineering (welding, inspecting, etc.). During his long career as GalacTech engineer, Leo has trained many engineers and designed many efficient and safe space stations and the like. Despite his misgivings, Leo adheres to the remit of his job. What would he do were GalacTech to terminate the quaddie project for being unprofitable or obsolete? What would he do if forced to choose between company loyalty and his sense of what is right for the quaddies? Complicating things for Leo is his former bad student Bruce Van Atta, now the executive in charge of the GalacTech project and hence Leo's boss. Van Atta looks down on the quaddies ("four-armed creeps"), and is quite the exploitive male chauvinist pig, calling females who displease him (like his ex-wife) "bitch" and the c-word and sexually exploiting a girl. Despite depicting Van Atta negatively and some strong female characters positively, Bujold does engage in a little sexist ageism, painting two of the less pleasant female characters as middle aged and ugly, like the GalacTech VP: "Dumpy, on the high end of middle-aged, frizzy gray hair cut short, she might have been somebody's grandmother, but for her eyes." And, hey, I got a bit uncomfortable about a budding romance between a teenage girl and a man about forty. (I've never read a Bujold novel featuring a romance between an older woman and a younger man.) Two other eyebrow raising points. First, I find it hard to believe that, among all the advanced, far future tech (artificial gravity, jumpships, wormholes, holovids, uterine replicators, etc.), condoms would still be in use. (Perhaps Bujold is educating or encouraging her circa 1986 readers to practice safe sex at the dawn of the AIDS era.) Anyway, she shouldn't tell her story so that at a crucial point I (who am no scientist or engineer) think of gasoline before Leo (consummate engineer improviser) does. Bujold thoroughly imagines the inchoate vision and culture of a new type of four-armed human sub-species. The quaddies have been educated for "maximum socialization" to help them share limited null-gee living and working spaces. They use some special language, like "uppers" (for their upper arms) and "lowers" (for their lower arms, legs on usual humans), and instead of saying "the next step will be…" they say "the next reach will be…" (because they move about their null-gee habitat by reaching for handholds). The little quaddie kids play a dance-like game: "It involved creating a sort of duo-decahedron in mid-air, like a human pyramid only more complex, hand to hand to hand changing its formation in time to music." Bujold even imagines sex with a four-armed person in null-gee! Because the quaddies have never been on a planet (where the gravity would oppress them), they don't know much about how "downsiders" live (apart from what they can glean from contraband holovids like The Prisoner of Zenda). When some quaddies wind up on the planet Rodeo (about which their habitat orbits), Bujold effectively demonstrates what it would be like for people born and raised with four arms in null-gee to experience gravity on a planet. In addition to exploring the nature of freedom, humanity, and home, the novel encourages us to make a difference by disobeying bad orders and following our consciences. At one point, Van Atta says to Leo, "There's only so much one human being can do." Not long after that, Leo begins wondering where his own limit for making a difference might lie. Falling Free is read, like all Bujold's Vorkosigan books, by consummate professional and uber-Bujold-voice Grover Gardner. He reads every word and sentence in just the right way and with plenty of apt emotion and intelligence. Although Falling Free is not so memorable and Leo is no Miles, it is a solid Bujold book-- entertaining, fast-paced, witty, unpredictable space opera comfort food with a political/social bite. I recommend it for fans of the Vorkosigan saga (for which it is a prequel), although readers new to Bujold's work should start with the early Vorkosigan books featuring young Miles, like Warrior's Apprentice (1986), or Miles' mother Cordelia, like Shards of Honor (1986). View all my reviews
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A Comedy-Tragedy of Gods, Giants, Dwarfs, and Monsters
FIVE STARS (out of Five) Near the end of the only romantic happy ending story in Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology (2017), Gaiman makes a brilliantly ironic aside: "Their wedding was blessed, and some say their son, Fjolnir, went on to become the first king of Sweden. He would drown in a vat of mead late one night, hunting in the darkness for a place to piss." In his introduction, Gaiman says that "I've tried my best to retell these myths and stories as accurately as I can, and as interestingly as I can. . . . I hope that they paint a picture of a world and a time" of "long winter nights" and "the unending daylight of midsummer," when people "wanted to know . . . what the rainbow was, and how to live their lives, and where bad poetry comes from." He achieves his aims. Gaiman also explains what fascinated him as a boy about the myths: they are full of tragic heroes and villains "with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all." In both Norse and Greek mythologies the gods and goddesses are powerful, flawed beings who embody human traits or forces of nature and give appropriate justice or unexpected trouble, and who appear in stories that feature origins, metamorphoses, and ethical messages on hospitality, oath keeping, and the like. But in the Greek myths, the main gods and goddesses just keep going. Gaiman first introduces the three main "players" of the myths: Odin ("highest and oldest of all the gods," the wise, far-seeing, "all-father"), Thor (the thunder god, son of Odin, strongest, simplest, and most violent of the gods), and Loki (blood-brother of Odin, the supreme trickster, father of monsters, maker of an interesting but unsafe world). He relates the creation of the nine worlds and gods and giants. And then he tells thirteen stories. (Though they should be read in sequence, each story can stand alone, for Gaiman repeats a few details when referring to something in a later story that he's already introduced in an earlier one.) The first two tales ("Mimir's Head and Odin's Eye" and "The Treasures of the Gods") detail how Odin got extra wisdom and how Loki staged (and interfered with) a magical artifact competition between two teams of dwarfs. Then follow an assortment of violent comedy fantasy stories like "The Master Builder" (a reckless bargain, an amazing builder, and some cross-species conception), "Freya's Unusual Wedding" (the theft of Thor's hammer and some comical cross-dressing), and "Hymir and Thor's Fishing Expedition" (an outrageous tall tale). Interspersed among those are an origin story "The Mead of the Poets" (war + spit + blood + honey + dwarves + sex + eagles = mead and bards), an ominous story "The Children of Loki" (the fates of Loki's monstrous kids), and a love story "The Story of Gerd and Frey" (even a god may fall in love with a giantess). Ending things are a tragedy ("The Death of Balder"), a punishment ("The Last Days of Loki"), and an apocalypse ("Ragnarok"). Before Norse Mythology, I read the beautifully illustrated D'Aulaires' Book of Norse Myths (1967) for children. I found that the humor, violence, imagination, pathos, and plots are essentially the same in both, but that Gaiman gives more emotional, psychological, and physical detail. For example, what the D'Aulaires write in one sentence ("The mead made the gnomes feel so grand that they recklessly killed an old jotun, and when his wife came looking for him, they slew her too"), Gaiman develops for pages. Gaiman adds to the myths his own vision and "joy and creation." Gaiman writes more violence, scatology, and sex than the D'Aulaires do, as when he recounts Thor doing what he does best ("Methodically, enthusiastically, one after the next, Thor killed all the giants of the waste, until the earth ran black and red with their blood"), or Odin escaping as an eagle ("Odin blew some of the mead out of his behind, a splattery wet fart of foul-smelling mead right in Suttung's face, blinding the giant and throwing him off Odin's trail"), or Odin seducing a giantess (nude bodies and nuzzling). His renewal finale, when golden chess pieces representing the gods, Loki, and the giants are found lying scattered in the grass, is more numinous and less Christian than the D'Aulaires'. He also belongs to the contemporary villain revision trend, making Loki and some monsters (like his children Hel and Fenris) a little more understandable and sympathetic than do the D'Aulaires. In dialogue Gaiman writes a few jarring modern idioms, like "The temperature was all over the place" and "What kind of woman do you think I am?" And he tends to overuse fairy tale superlatives (e.g., "the gods drink the finest ale there ever was or ever will be" vs. the original Poetic Edda's "And now the gods/drink good beer"). But his writing is wonderful. His style features rich Norsy alliteration and description, like "a murky mist that cloaked everything hung heavily." He writes apt and evocative similes, like "She laughed as loudly as a calving glacier." He's often funny, e.g., "He tossed them [a pair of nefarious dwarfs], still bound and soaking, into the bottom of the boat, where they wriggled uncomfortably, like a couple of bearded lobsters." He writes a terrifying apocalypse: "The misty sky will split apart with the sound of children screaming." He's a master of the neat parenthesis, like, "(that was Naglfar, the Death Ship, made from the untrimmed fingernails of the dead)." Gaiman is in fine fettle reading his audiobook. His Loki, Thor, Fenris, giants, and ogre lord are great. His wit, enthusiasm, and pauses and emphases are engaging. When a pretty giantess says to Odin, "my father would get quite irritable if he thought that I was giving away his mead to every good looking stranger who penetrated this mountain fastness," Gaiman pauses archly after "penetrated" to make us expect "penetrated his daughter." He paints aural illustrations the equivalent of the D'Aulaires' wonderful pictures. Listening to Gaiman's audiobook was a pleasure. The Transformative "Assault of the Strange"
Five Stars (of five) "He'd spent many lazy Yzordderrexian evenings on the roof of Peccable's house, watching the tail of the comet disappear behind the towers of the Autarch's palace, talking about the theory and practice of Imajical feits, writs, pneumas, uredos, and the rest." The first time I began Clive Barker's epic fantasy novel Imajica (1991), I gave up after the third chapter. Why? Because I found the characters too unappealing for so a long book. It begins with Londoners John "Gentle" Zachariah Fury, a gifted forger of art and seducer of women, and Judith Odell, a beautiful woman whose occupation seems to be getting older, overweight, and wealthy men to fall possessively in love with her. But several months later I re-entered Imajica, persevered, started really liking Gentle and Judith as they began experiencing, learning, and changing, and ended up seduced by Barker's ambitious fantasy. Barker's fertile imagination is by turns gruesome, sublime, beautiful, suspenseful, erotic, apocalyptic, magical, and comical. His fantasy develops his themes (about religion, drama, gender, love, freedom/servitude, reconciliation, transformation, responsibility, memory, identity) and feels relevant due to its philosophical ideas (e.g., everything from a mote to godhead being connected), political thrust (e.g., empire-building male elites feeling threatened), and mundane details (e.g., on the eve of Armageddon Judith shopping for deodorant). The Imajica is "a single, infinitely elaborate pattern of transformation" comprised of five Dominions, of which earth, the Fifth, is "hard and unpoetic" and "unreconciled," cut off from the magical others, except for a few "despairing or inspired" magicians, poets, priests, etc., the vast majority of humanity being blind to the wonders next door. The plot concerns the coming 200th-midsummer anniversary of the Maestro Sartori's cataclysmically misfiring spell-ritual attempt to Reconcile earth with the other four Dominions. As the novel develops, Gentle and Judith are caught up in the conflict to prevent or foment a new attempt at Reconciliation. Lurking behind everything is "the Unbeheld Himself, Hapexamendios," the God of the Imajica, who long ago went through the Dominions killing deities (especially goddesses), until he got to the First, where he hid behind a veil and shut dead souls out. While Gentle and Judith become interesting, the supporting characters are compelling: Charlie Estabrook and Oscar Godolphin (aristocratic brothers subject to toxic sibling rivalry), Kuttner Dowd (an urbane "divine pimp, perennial servant . . . actor chappie, and occasional murderer"), the Autarch of the Imajica (a builder of cities and committer of atrocities), Celestine (a former "bride of God" imprisoned in a cell for centuries), Little Ease (a simian cherub "chatterbox" hailing from a race of "apologists, bumblers, deserters, and cowards")--and above all the marvelous Pie 'oh' pah (a centuries-old protean androgyne assassin/whore/slave). After committing terrible crimes Barker's complex people may reveal a sympathetic vulnerability, and after taking responsibility for their actions they may make an appalling mistake. Barker writes many scenes of potent fantasy, as when Gentle looks across a valley and senses the gaze of a double, or Gentle, Pie, and Huzzah arrive at Yzordderrex, or Celestine tells the circular story of Nisi Nirvana. For all his fantastic imagination (Nullianacs, the Pivot, the City of God, etc.), he remains socially aware. Clem and Taylor and AIDS could be a token gay situation played for a few tears and forgotten, but it becomes a plot engine and gives the fantasy novel a romantic and realistic core. Barker's painterly, elegant, and versatile writing is a pleasure to re-read: --"Such dust, every mote as wise as a planet from floating in this holy space." --"Children wore ash today, and carried their parents' heads like censers, still smoking from the fires where they'd been found." --"Amid the foliage on the higher branches were clusters of comet-ripened fruit, like zebra tangerines." --"It made a laugh from its lightening, but there was more humor in a death rattle." --"Consciousness went from him, and, uncaptained, he sank." And his irrepressible humor is quite funny, whether in clever dialogue ("Death's put some strange ideas in my head") or witty descriptions ("Everywhere along the route faces were once more appearing at windows and doors like anemones showing themselves after being brushed by the underbelly of a shark"). Audiobook reader Simon Vance's silky voice and refined British accent are perfect for Barker's poetic and decadent fantasy. The majority of Vance's character voices are fine. His dusty, insane Celestine is wonderful; his superior, insecure Unbeheld unsettling; and his exotic, androgynous Pie appealing. Flaws? Some mysteries remain unsolved at the end. And I wonder, why five Dominions instead of two or four? (Although the Fifth and the First are distinct, the middle three are confusable.) And Barker's early sales pitch for the Dominions ("teeming with wonders") may oversell them. But his book is an impressive paean to the imagination (a Dominions curse is "May everything be as it seems to you"), magic ("the first and last religion of the world"), the unfettered spirit (religious readers may find the novel disturbing), and love (Imajica features as much graphic sex as violence, unlike most epic fantasy). The amnesia devices and exotic cultures recall Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle, the painterly descriptions evoke Peake's Gormenghast, and the assault on organized religion (and a male God) prefigures Pullman's His Dark Materials, but Imajica is Barker's own vision. Imajica is a spiritual and romantic epic fantasy, not a military epic one, being closer to Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus than to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Barker's quest is not to save the world from darkness or tyranny via violence, but to enrich the world by becoming a more understanding, caring, and imaginative person. A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance Three Stars (out of five) Elias is an elite Martial soldier who wants to escape his destiny, Laia a naïve Scholar slave who wants to rescue her brother. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon realize that they are both embers in the ashes, waiting to burst into flame and transform their world. And that world could stand some improvement. Five hundred years ago the Martial Empire conquered the Scholar Empire and has ever since brutally oppressed the Scholars, enslaving them and crushing their culture thanks to their superior weapons and ruthless Masks, elite soldiers who, after having martial skills trained in to them and humanity trained out, don silver masks that permanently bond with their faces. And "mythical fey"--ghuls, jinn, ghosts, efrits, wraiths, and wights--are suddenly active. Perhaps the most interesting device of Sabaa Tahir's Young Adult epic fantasy novel An Ember in the Ashes (2015) is its alternation between chapters narrated by two young members of the rival cultures, 17-year-old Laia and 20-year-old Elias. Some time ago Laia's Resistance-leader parents were betrayed and killed, and in the beginning of the novel her house is raided by Martial soldiers, her grandparents butchered, and her older brother Darin arrested, forcing her to contact the Resistance to make a deal to rescue her brother. Elias is the bastard scion of a powerful Martial family and is the best trainee of Blackcliff Military Academy, but he yearns to be free from the brutality and violence of his apparent destiny and has been plotting to escape it on the eve of his and graduation to the ranks of the Masks. Although he doesn't know his father, he sure knows his mother, the sadistic Blackcliff Commandant. Far from showing any favoritism for her son, she hates him and tries to get him killed. When the Resistance leader makes Laia become a slave to spy on the Commandant in return for promising to spring her brother from prison and the Martial Augurs (a council of immortals with prophetic, telepathic, and other powers) announce that it's time to choose a new emperor via the series of physical and mental tests known as the Trials, and that Elias will be one of the four Aspirants, Tahir's novel becomes page-turning. In addition to the first person, present tense narration, Tahir's novel shares many traits with the current crop of popular young adult fantasy and sf novels:
But her book feels rather fresh because of the notion that the Scholar Empire was not completely beneficent (their pursuit of knowledge and power by exploiting jinn led to their downfall), the fact that the Masks are abused as well as abusing, the possibility that Laia's mother was not a great Resistance leader, the suspicion that Elias' mother has a legitimate beef against his father (and grandfather), and the devastating and unglorified violence throughout: floggings, mutilations, executions, murders, death matches, near-rapes, etc., mostly directed at powerless victims or friends. Also, Tahir writes more main characters of color than usual YA fantasy books: Elias' skin is "golden brown," Laia's "warm honey." Although the dual narration is promising, however, Tahir doesn't differentiate Laia and Elias' voices enough. The style with which she writes both their story strands is nearly identical, down to their misusing "lay" (e.g., Laia: "I lay uselessly, unsure of what to do, when the Augur decides for me." And Elias: "a vast body of water lays shimmering like a mirage."). At times during the climax when the chapters become quite short I sometimes forgot for a moment if I was reading Elias or Laia. And sometimes Elias says things that I can't picture a rather humble young man saying, like revealing that he's "broad-shouldered and well over six feet" and "the best student Blackcliff has seen in two decades" or that I can't imagine a 20-year-old soldier trained only in the arts of war saying, like noting that Laia's "high-necked dress . . . clings to her body in ways I find painfully unfair." More flaws. I don't get why many names from our world (Marcus, Helene, Cain, etc.) appear in a fantasy world with no connection to ours alongside exotic names (Sana, Teluman, etc.). And I suspect that after 500 years a conquered culture would be more assimilated into the conquering culture. The Roman Empire, which inspires Tahir's Martial Empire, was quick to assimilate new peoples. And the climax is, if pleasing, rather unbelievable. But I do like the themes about violence, guilt, knowledge, destiny, and freedom, and I am curious to find out what happens to Elias and Laia and their world, which presumably will develop the supernatural beings and other cultures like the black Mariners and the Tribal Bedouin-like nomads and, so I will probably read the sequel, A Torch in the Night (2016) (but I hope Tahir will conclude her story with the second book!) Readers who like hard-edged epic YA fantasy with plenty of romance (without sex) should like the novel. |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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