Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Anglo-Patois Nanotech AI Cross-cultural Exchange The narrator starts telling us an anansi story about a strong wiry woman with skin like cocoa tea, arms hard with muscle, and long black naughty of locks hair: “She name Tan-Tan, and New Half-Way Tree was she planet.” The only thing soft about her was “she big, molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would start to beat time boobaloops with every flutter of she long eyelashes. One look at she eyes and you fall for she already.” Indeed, “From Garvey-prime to Douglass sector, from Toussaint through the dimension veils to New Half-Way Tree, she leave a trail of sad, lonely men—and women, too, oui?—who would weep for days if you only make the mistake and say the words ‘brown eyes.’” From the start we appreciate ‘the narrator’s distinctive style, an “Anglo patois,” a Caribbean kind of African-French-English fusion, poetic and demotic and, oui, savory and catchy. From the start, author Nalo Hopkinson is infusing black history into Midnight Robber (2000), with famous figures like Garvey, Douglass, Toussaint, Marley, and Tubman having their names given to planets, bands, people, and the like. I really liked the language and style of the narration, the repeated adjectives (e.g., "She heard her feet landing, quiet quiet, like lovers whispering to each other”), the different use of pronouns (e.g., “She sins come to haunt she”), the colorful similes (e.g., "Slow, the way molasses does run down the side of a bowl”), and, oui, the frequent use of “oui.” The narrator (maybe we’ll find out who or what she is in the last lines of the novel?) then introduces Tan-Tan’s world New Half-Way Tree, where all the drifters and thieves and murderers are sent from the mirror planet Toussaint (“where I living”). Toussaint received colonists of African, Asian, Indian, and European races along with the “Marryshow corporation sinking earth engine number 127 down into it like God entering he woman; plunging into the womb of soil to impregnate the planet with the seed of Granny Nanny” (nanotech sentient AI type things), while New Half-Way Tree is deprived of (or free from?) Granny Nanny, leaving its criminal exiles “head blind without the sixth sense” they had on Toussaint. Anyway, Tan-Tan’s story starts with her parents’ adulteries leading to her father, the self-important Mayor Antonio, getting exiled with seven-year-old Tan Tan to the prison planet New Half-Way Tree. There they must survive by fitting in with their fellow-human exiles from Toussaint and the indigenous “little people,” a bird-lizard-looking species who’ve learned human language while trading with humans and keeping most of their own culture secret. (The story is partly an sf rendering of earth colonization history.) The novel then details how Tan-Tan grows up into the legendary Robber Queen of New Half-Way Tree. It features a monstrous father who is all too human, a harpy stepmother, a sweet and homely youth, plenty of exotic and formidable local flora and fauna, a fascinating “alien” culture (of course right at home living on their own world, no thanks to all these human criminals being dumped into their backyards). And some awful, incestuous rape scenes. And a lot of great folk tales about Tan-Tan. And everything recounted by that savory narrator and perfectly and engagingly read by the audiobook reader Robin Miles. (She reads the spicy dialect so engagingly that I found myself imitating her!) I thought that Hopkinson sometimes has characters do things I couldn’t quite believe they’d do and I wished Tan-Tan would get in Robber Queen mode a bit sooner and more consistently, but I enjoyed listening to this novel a lot. “Wire bend, story end.” View all my reviews
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La Loi des mâles by Maurice Druon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Yikes—You, two, Philippe? La Loi des males (the law of men), the fourth novel in Les Rois Maudits (the Cursed Kings), continues Maurice Druon’s absorbing autopsy of the epic fall of France as a superpower in the early 14th century. After over 300 years of the blessed rule of eleven long-reigning kings, the Capetians are said now to be cursed, for eighteen months after the Iron King Philip the Fair died, his successor and son Louis X (the Quarrelsome) has died, presumed to have been poisoned (a dog expired after licking Louis’ bloody bandages). The situation at the start of this novel is fluid and flammable: Louis died leaving his second wife Clemence several months pregnant and a five-year-old daughter by his first wife Marguerite, whom he had killed in prison to enable him to marry a less adulterous and more pious woman, and now the girl’s uncle the Duke of Bourgogne is promoting her claim to succeed Louis, while Louis’ uncle Charles Valois is eager to become the Regent for the fetus inside Queen Clemence. Still more. Louis’ capable and ambitious younger brother Philippe is off in Lyon trying to get the Conclave of Cardinals to choose a France-friendly Pope and could return at any time to make his own play to become Regent. And let’s not forget the fractious Flemish, the starving populace, the dry treasury, and the long-running d’Artois family feud between the giantess Mahaut and her giant nephew Robert! Getting tangled up in that power politics plot is the doomed romance between the young Lombard money lender Guccio Baglioni and the poor country aristocrat girl Marie Cressy. And yes the world is run by the law of men, women largely being awfully treated, like the village women in d’Artois counties raped by Robert d’Artois and his men on their pillaging spree, or Queen Clemence being denied any role in serving as regent for her own baby son, or Blanche the wife of Louis’ younger brother Charles still going mad in a dungeon for having committed adultery, or Marie Cressy being forced to serve as wet nurse for the Queen and being denied access to her husband Guccio. The only woman somewhat free from the law of men seems to be Mahaut d’Artois, the formidable psychopath with a fondness for potions and poison. Twenty-five-year-old Philippe is a likeable, capable, cool, calculating, myopic (literally) guy who’s willing to bend rules, play hardball, intimidate, bribe, confine, or ally with enemies, accept regicide to get the power he believes (and is probably right) he is the most qualified to wield, and then to need a bit of comfort from his wife. Mahaut turns into an ever-scarier monster, while Robert is a larger-than-life, foul-mouthed, self-centered, shrewd, brutal, raping, scheming, bullying thug. I am glad he’s in the series, but I sure wish he’d get his comeuppance (as in finally being exiled from d’Artois). After recovering from her long debilitating illness and feeling that being good didn’t do her any good, Clemence undergoes a fascinating metamorphosis from a frugal, pious, modest Queen to an extravagant hedonist widow, throwing a fortune away on entertainment (with handsome young men) and rare gourmet foods, counting her jewels, and lolling about the palace in see-through-fabrics. Guccio and Marie are sweet, but we were told in the third novel when they parted that it was the last time they’d ever see each other again. Guccio’s uncle Tolomei does his best for the young couple (while keeping an eye out for the main business chance), but his usual shrewd eye deserts him when dealing with Clemence’s protector Bouville and his appallingly practical wife. The 72-year-old Cardinal Dueze gets barely three hours of sleep a night while researching theology, law, medicine, alchemy, corresponding with umpteen VIPs, reasoning in his private time that there probably isn’t any heaven or hell (or God), all while finding time to do some astrology to calculate the most propitious time to try to become Pope. I feel worst about what happens to Marie than to what happens to anyone in the first four books. Unlike the Templar Grandmaster, the squire lovers of Marguerite and Blanche, Enguerrand de Marigny, and Louis Hutin, et. al., Marie is harmless, innocent, and pure. She’s not physically tortured or burnt at the stake (yet), but jeeze. I’m upset by Druon’s treatment of her, and I’m hoping she’s a real historical figure, not a character he created to torment! By the way, one wonders how Druon came upon much of this history if it was such a secret and all! I imagine he read some historical rumors? Louis Hutin’s death, for instance, is said by Wikipedia (for what it’s worth) to have been due to illness and not to poison. Will Mahaut’s poisonous activities (according to Druon) ever be exposed, then? I’m itching to check online about it all but will refrain till I finish the last book. Like the first three novels in the series, this one features compelling characters, interesting historical details, riveting scenes (like a cool surrender, an appalling baptism, and a suspenseful coronation), great writing, and provocative foreshadowing bombs (like “The time of punishment [for Philippe] was just starting”) Also as in the first three novels, Druon is keen to demonstrate how our successes (especially those for which we have sacrificed a wee bit of our integrity) do not always bring unalloyed joy. I’m onto the fifth book, intrepidly but trepidatiously. View all my reviews
Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The brain has to rule the flux” C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen (1988) is a big, impressive novel, an imaginative and exhaustive exploration of politics, identity, free will, responsibility, relationships, and nature vs. nurture in the 23rd century: genetics, womb-tanks, clones, education tapes, psychology, longevity augmentation, etc. Despite being a harsh planet hostile to humanity, Cyteen has been colonized and become the central planet in Union, which has been caught in a Cold War with Alliance for decades. Union has its factions: Expansionists, who want to keep colonizing worlds and using clones to augment the population, Centrists, who want to suspend colonization, and Abolitionists, unrepresented in the government and resorting to terrorism to stop the exploitation of clones. Then there are the factions within those factions, like those aligned with or hostile to Defense, which has its own factions, and so on. And there are some aliens lurking in the shadows (though they never appear in the novel). The most important Administrative Territory in Union is Cyteen’s Reseune, which, thanks to its corner on genetics and psychology, wields great scientific, economic, and political power. Reseune is the sole producer of azis ("artificial zygote insemination" clone workers, soldiers, companions, and so on) and the sole producer of the computer tapes (programs?) that mold them into ultra-capable and obedient servants. The leader of Reseune and of the Expansionists is the 100+ year-old “special” (rare genius) Ariane “Ari” Emory. While thwarting or coopting the Centrists and working on her own genetics projects, Ari finds time to sexually harass Justin Warrick, the teenage clone “son” of colleague Jordan Warrick (another “special” specializing in education), until she is found dead, presumably murdered. The head of Reseune Security, Giraud Nye, forces Jordan to confess to the crime (despite his probably being innocent) by promising to protect his son Justin and his son’s azi companion and “brother” slash lover Grant, while implicitly threatening them if Jordan doesn’t cooperate. The bulk of the novel depicts the twenty-year development of the traumatized Justin (prey to flashbacks of being drugged and raped by the original Ari) and Grant (aware that as an azi he belongs to Reseune and may be reprogrammed or “put down” against his will) and especially of Ari’s “PR” (parental replicate), an exact clone of Ari who will be raised as much like the original Ari as possible in order to end up with another Ari who will eventually continue leading Reseune as effectively as the first one did. One of the interesting things about the novel is the evolution of Ari’s feelings about being a PR as she matures. In addition to all the cloning, there’s plenty of other future sf tech in the novel, like rejuv (by which people extend their life spans up to 140 years), terraforming (though it takes a long time), faster than light travel (though the entire novel takes place on Cyteen), and “tape” education. The computers seem primitive by today’s standards, with time using them limited to prioritized projects. I could never quite grasp how the education by “tape” works, though it involves a combination of drugs and computers and includes “deep tape,” “skill tape,” and “entertainment tape.” While azis receive deep tape programming from the time they’re decanted newborn from the womb-tanks, CITs (citizens) don’t start receiving tape education until age six, having parents to educate and socialize them from birth. Other differences between azis and CITs concern the clones’ superior speed and strength and appearance and their discomfort with ambiguity, gray areas, and “flux” (change from one state to another), while CITs are able to handle such things and even to thrive intellectually on them. Cherryh’s writing is serviceable, and if it suffers from some repeated tics (e.g., characters do too much biting or gnawing or chewing of lips till they bleed), it does neat things with the future technology, as when people say things like, “Don’t go azi [robotically compliant] on me,” or “Animals do tape on [manipulate] each other,” and has some nifty lines, like “Politics may make strange bedfellows, but bedfellows make deadly politics.” It's a very talky novel! Very little suspenseful violent action. Apart from a small number of scenes featuring an escape, a rescue, security training, and sex, the vast majority of the novel is conversations, transcripts, book excerpts, hearings, interviews, parties, medical procedures, interrogations, and so on. It is a different kind of science fiction from that of, say, Tchaikovsky, Reynolds, and Banks. Cherryh’s characters have a LOT of room to feel, think, talk, and live in her big novel (680 pages or 36.5+ hours), and although I came to really like new Ari, Justin, Grant, new Florian, new Catlin, and others, I do think it could have had wee less conversation. The novel may be ahead of its time for positively depicting two homosexual relationships and hinting at a third. Readers worried about kids acting precociously may shudder at the alcohol, tranquilizers, porn, sex, and parties of new Ari and her teen friends (but my own teenage memories from the late 70s are about par for Cyteen’s course). There is a distressing rape scene—though Cherryh doesn’t write it for titillation and uses it as a core plot pivot with long-lasting ramifications. The ending is abrupt, leaving plenty of outstanding questions a sequel could wrap up. Fans of mystery novels may be disappointed by the ambiguous resolution of the who-killed-Ari plot strand (though we can guess as to their identity!). The audiobook readers, Gabra Zackman and Jonathan Davis, are fine. Zackman reads the main chapters of the novel, Davis the excerpts from books and interviews and diaries etc. that come between the chapters. I enjoyed reading the novel! Cherryh interestingly explores independence and free will and emotions and stress and creativity and change for azis compared to CITs and what it’d be like for a CIT to love an azi and vice versa and what it’d feel like to be a PR. The way politics work and the ethics of exploiting clone servants are carefully thought out. The relationships between politics and technology/science and between personal and social politics are all convincing. Finally, how much of our behavior and personality and “free will” is based on our biology and how much on our environment/education? View all my reviews
Sabella, or The Blood Stone by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Martian Chronicle for Adults When I was a teenager, I was in love with Tanith Lee. Her fantasy and sf were plentiful, unpredictable, cruel, scary, sexy! To see how my crush has held up, I’ve taken up my old yellow-paged, yellow-spined DAW paperbacks, rereading some like Kill the Dead (1980) or reading some for the first time, like Sabella: Or the Bloodstone (1980). Sabella is vintage Tanith Lee: a compact, potent brew of gender, sex, death, guilt, pleasure, pain, symbolism, surrealism, and religion, all written in a style that is terse and poetic, elliptical and overwrought: e.g., “It [a church] had an austere whitewashed frame, through which had been stabbed great wounds of windows, like sliced pomegranates, green angelica and blue ink.” The novel takes place in the future on Novo Mars, where certain aspects of our culture appear in a distorted mirror, like an evangelical Reformed Church; Mara the mother of Jesus; “Anice (or is it Alicia)” falling into a “hare’s warren”; self-driving cars; drugs like hashish cigarettes and “mescadrine”; Sin City-like conurbations with bars, “girl-houses,” hyper-markets, and 3-V cinemats, etc. The plot gets going when a charismatic and persistent stalker called Sand Vincent forces himself into the life of the first-person narrator Sabella Quey—a vampire—when she flies to her aunt’s funeral, receives a poisonous inheritance, and then returns to her home, where she’s been living away from cities and keeping a low profile among Martian desert “wolves.” As she tells her story, Sabella recounts how she came to be a vampire after her first menstruation when, disturbed by her body, she took refuge in a quarry tunnel (“which may have been a metaphor for the vagina”), where she found (by chance?) a mysterious “bloodstone” that she made into a pendant that made her a vampire. Her first experience drinking male blood came during a date rape that climaxed in the death of her partner. After that bloody start, she learned how to somewhat restrain her impulses so as to usually avoid killing her partners, how to dump them so they wouldn’t continue to pester her, how to drink deer blood mixed with fruit juice as a (less fulfilling) alternative to human, etc. Throughout her sexual vampiric encounters, the line between victim and victimizer has often been blurry; she has been raped more than once, and, in the case of Sand, there is more to him than meets the eye (which is one reason Sabella tries to discourage him). And I won’t mention Sand’s hot, masculine big brother Jace who shows up asking pointed questions, calling Sabella things like Jezebella, and bulldozing her basement. This being a Tanith Lee book, there is sex, violence, dreamlike scenes, sudden escapes, new identities, provocative dialogue, stunning revelations, fear or acceptance of the other, and intense description (e.g., “His skin smooth and marvelous, his loins blossomed into a single hard fierce flame”). The novel adopts some elements of the vampire tradition (super speed and strength and charisma, vulnerability to sunlight, craving for blood, relation of blood drinking to sex) while rejecting others (inability to cast a shadow or reflection, crucifix phobia, Dr. Van Helsing, turning new vampires). I liked reading the play-like novel, an early example of the sympathetic vampire, though I didn’t enjoy it, as the characters are not so appealing: e.g., “I'm the masochist you supposed me to be. Because I want you to hurt me for what I do to you, I want to expiate my sins with your blows ringing on my flesh.” That said, once I started the novel, I sure couldn’t stop reading it, for it evokes a strange and visceral mood. It minds me of a Ray Bradbury Martian Chronicles story for adults: the question of indigenous vs. colonist Martians, the metaphoric use of sf motifs, the lack of scientific explanations or technological underpinnings, the poetic language, the nightmarish quality. I feel a little more critical of Lee after this one, but I’m still in love with her. What next: Don’t Bite the Sun or Death’s Master?? View all my reviews
Classical Archaeology of Ancient Greece and Rome by John R. Hale
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Everything You Wanted to Know about Ancient Greek and Roman Archeology I fully enjoyed all of Classical Archaeology of Ancient Greece and Rome (2006) by John R. Hale, the first Great Courses audiobook I’ve listened to. It consists of thirty-six thirty-minute lectures: twelve about the history, development, and current state of archeology as a “mature science,” including things like site finding, dig organizing, and artifact dating, preserving, and displaying, as well as profiles of important figures in the history of archeology (I loved Harriet “I was never a collector—only a detective” Boyd) and explanations of key branches of it like battlefield archeology, underwater archeology, and experimental archeology; twelve about seminal, stunning, and still ongoing discoveries and sites and wrecks and digs etc., from the Bronze age to the Roman age; and twelve about archeological answers to larger questions about classical civilization like what is unique and original about ancient Greek culture, what happened to the Roman Empire, and why we should study the past. Throughout, Professor Hale is refreshingly unpretentious, explaining his preference for saying “tree ring dating” instead of “dendrology,” occasionally tossing in references to popular culture like Mordor, Madonna, and Yogi Berra, clearly and concisely defining technical words (like stratigraphy) or difficult words (like adumbrated), making regular spicy or witty asides, like “There’s nothing that the archeological mind loves more than a status symbol” (like ancient pots decorated for public display rather than for private use), using plenty of demotic English like “A pile of flour in a baker's shop [in Pompeii] was found--I can't imagine the care with which this stuff was hacked away to leave this kind of stuff visible,” and quoting here and there great literary sources, like Tolstoy (War and Peace), Gibbon (Decline and Fall), Shelley (Ode to Naples), Homer (the Iliad), etc. I liked his clear delivery and contagious enthusiasm, as when he says something like, “the humble implements, tools, carpenter’s saws, weapons, jewelry, these small finds, these little bits of people's lives revealing an ancient world that nobody thought existed... We could feel that we were present at the time and the place where archaeology was born.” Or like, “Go to the Reggio museum! Throughout, he provides interesting touches on things like the differences from and convergences among archeology and geology, anthropology, history, literature, mythology and other disciplines; the etymologies of words like village, capital, palace, martyr, rostrum, pornography, and aqueduct; the links between ancient peoples and us; and the exciting or funny or amazing stories and anecdotes he has accumulated and told his students in his classes (e.g., “You can do this at home: take off your clothes and stand in front of a full length mirror in contrapposto like the Riace bronzes”). His lectures are chock full of cool information, like pagans had outdoor altars for their temples (cause they sacrificed and burnt meat etc.), while Christians put their altars inside their churches, or the Pythagorean theorem was in use 1000 years before Pythagoras, or that ancient Greeks and Romans colorfully painted their statues, or why tripods were so popular for ancient Greeks and Romans, or that many of the Pompeii houses frozen by lava were already 200 years old (belonging to pre-Roman civ) when Vesuvius erupted, or that the Pompeii plaster casts of dead body spaces revealed trimmed pubic hair, or that Socrates probably ate bread made from grain imported from Ukraine, or that if you imagine our own tea, coffee, chocolate, alcohol, medicine, and drugs all combined into ONE thing, it still wouldn’t come close to what wine was for Greeks and Romans, and how the Greeks (on pottery) and Romans (on frescoes) glorified everyday life. The Course Guidebook pdf accompanying the audiobook is a detailed 276-page outline of all the lectures, followed by historical and archeological timelines, a glossary of key terms, biographical notes on important archeologists, and an annotated bibliography. Note that this is not really an audiobook but a series of lectures, so that Professor Hale makes occasional mistakes in speaking that he corrects on the fly, like “Out there on the Thames—sorry—out there on the Seine.” There are about one or two per lecture. He begins each lecture after the first by saying, “Welcome back,” and each lecture is introduced by a brief loop of peppy baroque music and is concluded by audience clapping. Despite it being a lecture series audiobook, apart from clapping, you can only hear Professor Hale during each lecture, which is a little odd because you’d expect to hear people laughing at his occasional witty asides (like “This is what graduate students are for”), all of which leads me to suspect that he is reading his lectures in a studio after which the producers overlay canned clapping. I would like it better without the music and clapping. It’s an enriching, entertaining, and stimulating series of lectures, and now I am looking forward to Professor Hale’s lectures on the Greek and Persian wars. View all my reviews |
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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