Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I am a harmonizer!” Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015) is a neat Hugo and Nebula award-winning sf novella featuring a brilliant 16-year-old mathematician girl who’s leaving home for the first time after winning an all-expenses paid scholarship to Oomza Uni, the top university in the Milky Way (only 5% of the student body and teaching staff etc. are human). The only problem is that her people, the Himba, although adept in mathematics and known for making astrolabes (portable personal computer-like devices that contain one’s entire past life as well as all forecasts of one’s future life), are also known for never leaving home, preferring to explore the human mind rather than the universe, and Binti’s big family opposes her leaving for the Uni (and Binti reckons that by leaving home her marriage prospects just went from 100% to 0%). And then on the spaceship (“a magnificent piece of living technology,” being a giant, sentient creature genetically enhanced to process harmful gases and produce oxygen etc.) taking her to the Uni planet, a force of Meduse, war-like tentacled aliens who hate human beings (because, they say, “Humans only understand violence”) barge in and kill everyone on the ship, including Binti’s new university friends. The Meduse spare the pilot and Binti because they need the former for their mission and are unable to kill the latter because she carries a potent “god stone” (an ancient, blue stellated metal cube with strange fractal swirls of blue, black, and white inscribed on it made by some long gone culture) and is anyway of a different race than all the other passengers and crew members on the ship. About race, Binti comes from a dark-skinned, kinky-haired “tribal culture” living near a majority white-skinned race (the Khoush). Her desert dwelling, mathematically advanced people feel naked unless they’ve coated their bodies and hair with otjize, a fragrant clay and oil. The novel concerns the need to communicate with and understand the Other (especially in situations where each side thinks they’d better kill the Other before the Other kills them), the difficulty of such communication, and the way that such communication inevitably changes oneself in the process. It also is about the superiority of solving problems for harmony not violence (after all, “people were people anywhere”). Binti is a master Harmonizer, able to mathematically meditate and mediate and to solve complex problems and even to “make atoms caress each other like lovers.” Perhaps it’s all finally a little too easy; perhaps Binti gets over witnessing the massacre of all her new friends a little too soon; perhaps she is a little too special (yet another young adult heroine who is very special indeed, as in, “You’re the pride of your people”); perhaps the relationship between Binti and Okwu, a young Meduse she gets to know, could be more developed. But the writing is fine, and Binti is appealing, and the themes are fine, and the sf tropes feel fresh, and our world can use more sf protagonists (especially heroines) of color. I would like to read more about Binti’s further adventures in mathematical harmony and aliens and all. Robin Miles, the reader of the Audiobook, enhances the story. One interesting thing she does is give Binti an African accent and the white-skinned Khoush typical American white people’s voices, thus emphasizing the racial and cultural differences between Himba and Khoush. Recommended for fans of cleanly-written, intelligent, culture- and character-driven sf like that by Octavia Butler and Robert Heinlein. View all my reviews
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Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Mostly Charming Magical Fantasy Home Alone “Whenever Castle Glower became bored, it would grow a new room or two. It usually happened on Tuesdays. . .” In addition to being able to alter its layout by adding or removing rooms or doors or stairways or furnishings and so on, the sentient Castle Glower also chooses the royal families to rule Sleyne, its kingdom. In the beginning of Jessica Day George’s pre-teen novel Tuesdays at the Castle (2011), the current King Glower the Seventy-Ninth and his wife go on a trip to see their eldest son Bran graduate from the College of Wizardry, leaving at home their three youngest children, “queenly and matronly” acting Lilah, fourteen-year-old Rolf the heir, and eleven-year-old Celie, “the fourth and most delightful of the royal children.” When the news comes that the King and Queen and Bran have been killed by bandits, the story turns into a magical fantasy Home Alone, as the three kids have to pull together to defend their Castle from treacherous counselors and suspicious princes from neighboring countries, all of whom seem eager to take advantage of the apparently orphaned royal children. Luckily, the siblings are spunky, clever, and loving and have plenty of help from the blacksmith’s son Pogue, who is so handsome that he’s always getting into fights, and especially from the Castle, with which (whom?) eleven-year-old Celie has a special bond. Multiple characters tell Celie at different times that she is the person the Castle loves best, and she has been working on an atlas of the Castle, a never-ending project because the Castle is always changing. The novel is often fun or funny and sometimes suspenseful or moving. Day George has a convincing feel for how kids think and act and how siblings interact. The book is cleanly written and should be an easy and fun read for elementary schoolers. This adult enjoyed it, too, and I’m curious to read further books in the series to see how the kids develop as they age and to find out more about the Castle. Just exactly what the Castle is and how it came to be sentient and who made it and why and how it is able to add or remove rooms and doors and furnishings at will is left unexplained, though some characters offer theories, like Bran’s idea that rather than make or delete rooms, the Castle pulls them out from or puts them into “another plane of existence,” or Rolf’s idea that maybe the Fair Folk made the Castle. Presumably future novels in the series will answer such questions. In any case, it is a neat concept, the Castle being of like a giant pet or parent or friend or playhouse, depending on the situation or person. The book does get a bit juvenile at times, when it’s most like Home Alone except with less slapstick, as the Castle aids the kids in sabotaging the clothes and beds and rooms of their foes (the manure is too much), but Day George does some neat things with gender as Prince Lulath—he of the perfectly coiffed long hair, an extensive wardrobe of fine clothes, and three lap dogs he calls his babies—turns out to be more than an effeminate fop, while Prince Khelsh—he of the ox-like neck, temper tantrums, and macho posturing—turns out to be less than a manly man. Although Celie is prone to fits of crying (hey, she is only eleven!), she is strong, brave, loyal, intelligent, and quick, and often comes up with good ideas. Each of the siblings is vital for the defense of their Castle. One slightly odd thing about the book is that Day George, an American, uses some British English expressions here and there (like Mummy and co-ee), while her characters do plenty of American sit-com things like rolling their eyes and raising their eyebrows. But she does a nice job of making the foreign princes from different countries, Khelsh from Vervhine and Lulath from Grath, speak English with strange syntax and diction, to simulate their inability to speak normal Sleynth. (And maybe it’s just because their characters are so different, but I think she differentiates between their “accents” and manners in speaking “English.”) A couple times Celie unconvincingly despairs or doubts her Castle or herself and needs her big sister Lilah to buck her up. For a small eleven-year-old girl Celie perhaps does some unlikely moves with hostile guards here and there. The too obviously treacherous Emissary is strangely forgotten in the end of the novel. A bigger flaw in the book is that if the castle is so magical and sentient as to help the kids as much as it does, you’d think it would just physically eject the villains. But then we wouldn’t have an exciting story, would we? But then Day George should address that somehow by having, for instance, a suggestion floated by Celie that the Castle is not exercising its full power in order to challenge the kids and make them grow. But the climax is exciting and the whole book entertaining. And I’ll probably read future entries in the series: Wednesdays in the Tower (2013), Thursdays with the Crown (2014), Fridays with the Wizards (2015), Saturdays at Sea (2017). Some day. View all my reviews
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “We stand apart and shape our own world” Alfred Bester’s classic space opera novel The Stars My Destination (1956) is still impressive. Its ambitious style (which at times prefigures New Wave sf), plethora of concepts (many of which prefigure cyberpunk), cynical view of capitalism, romantic view of human potential, page-turning plot, themes relating to love, revenge, will/thought/imagination, and growth, and larger than life characters, especially the obsessive protagonist Gully Foyle, all hold up well today. The novel begins with a prologue explaining 25th century solar system culture, “an age of freaks, monsters, and grotesques” in which teleporting by an act of will (jaunting) has transformed human transportation, economics, and relationships, and led to an endless war between the Outer Satellites and the Inner Planets. In that future, Bester imagines many interesting cultural trends: jaunte jackals who scavenge the sites of accidents or disasters; women who chafe at being confined to the “seraglio” that is a reaction to the freedom that jaunting would otherwise give them; workers who jaunte to and from work and often quit too soon cause they can jaunte anywhere anytime; rich family corporation heads who show off their wealth by eschewing jaunting in favor of antique forms of transportation like cars and bicycles; Cellar Christians (and adherents of other faiths) who practice their banned religions in secret; people who voluntarily disconnect their nervous systems to abandon their five senses; commandos whose bodies are electronically enhanced to speed up so normal people move in slow motion; a form of torture which uses nightmarish virtual reality scenarios; a corporation which specializes in growing bacteria in giant vats on a moon; a robot bartender who suddenly gives insights like “Life is a freak. That’s its hope and glory”; and much more. In that future, Bester’s anti-hero, the uneducated, brutish, ambitionless “stereotype Common Man” Gulliver Foyle, spends six months dying and yet remains alive when the Nomad, the spaceship on which he is Mechanic’s Mate 3rd class, is attacked and wrecked, leaving him the sole survivor, mostly confined to a coffin-like tool locker on the ship. When another spaceship, the Vorga, owned by the Presteign family corporation, happens by, raising his hopes for rescue but then goes on its way ignoring his desperate flares, Gully’s transformation into a unique uber-man driven by his obsession for revenge begins. Gully teaches himself to read the Nomad manuals and then finds a way to get the ship moving again, which sets in motion the plot of the novel, which reads like a compact 25th century Count of Monte Cristo. Gully becomes a monster, a tiger, for revenge (“Rot you I kill you filthy!”), symbolized by the tiger-demon mask tattooed on his face by the Scientific People he happens upon, a research group lost in space and living for 200 years by scavenging wrecked spaceships. He will go on to rape and torture, to use brains rather than bombs, to assume a buffoonish Bruce Wayne-like false identity, to dabble in physics, chemistry, poetry, judo, and yoga, to speak more standard English than his original gutter variety, to try to control his emotions, to become Solar Enemy #1, and to single-mindedly pursue his revenge. Supporting characters in the novel are compelling: Robin Wednesbury (a black “telesend” who can send her thoughts to others but can’t receive theirs), Jisbella McQueen (a thief who tries to get Gully to control himself and to think—Maybe your target should be not the Vorga itself but the person in charge of it?), Saul Dagenham (a radioactive skull-faced man who runs the biggest jaunting courier service), Peter Y’ang-Yeovil (a clever Central Intelligence chief who speaks Mandarin but doesn’t look Chinese), Presteign (a basilisk-smiling business clan chief who follows the credo “blood and money”), Olivia Presteign (his blind albino ice princess daughter who has some issues with sighted people). They are convincing and larger than life, less potent versions of Foyle. Lurking in the background of Foyle’s vengeful ambitions and the war between the Outer Satellites and the Inner Planets is PyrE, a thermonuclear explosive element detonated by thought. The way in which Bester brings together PyrE, the major characters, and humanity in the transcendent climax of the novel is apt, satisfying, exhilarating, and neat. The way he writes the climax, with disorienting and poetic synesthesia and chronological tricks, is impressive. And Bester’s insights into human nature (hate, love, revenge, forgiveness, growth, etc.) are cool, like this one: “There’s no defense against betrayal, and we all betray ourselves.” The mental jaunting is something most sf would explain with scientific innovations and technological breakthroughs, but Bester wants to say it’s all a matter of mind over matter. Finally, the novel demonstrates that it’s up to each of us (or should be) how we shape ourselves and our world, whether we destroy everything or transcend. Audiobook reader Gerard Doyle is fine, but perhaps his voice is not deep enough for the burning core of Gully Foyle. Some things feel out of place in the 25th century future, like paper mail, and the Gouffre Martel sequence feels a little long and labored, but fans of Golden Age, classic, influential and well-written sf should read Bester’s novel. View all my reviews
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “one great big suntanned hangover” At times Raymond Chandler’s penultimate Philip Marlowe novel The Long Goodbye (1953) reads like a hardboiled southern Californian Great Gatsby. There are references to F. Scott Fitzgerald and to T. S. Elliot and to hollow men and to corrupt American culture, and adjacent to the sordid real world (here smoggy LA) there is an exclusive community (here breezy Idle Valley) of amoral “pure gold” wealthy people who attend bacchanalian cocktail parties and abuse tranquilizers and commit adultery too often, and there is even a pair of former lovers who can’t be together and can’t forget each other. Of course, there is also Philip Marlowe, the bitter yet romantic, solo-chess-playing, liquor or coffee drinking, “shamus” (Private Investigator) knight stubbornly trying to do the right thing in the wrong situations, renting a small house on Laurel Canyon and a dusty office on Cahuenga in LA, “the big sordid dirty crooked city,” now 42 and feeling his age, still unable (or unwilling) to make much money, still single. Marlowe is more of a man of action than Nick Carraway and is more cynical about the rich (“bored and lonely people”), but as the common man outsider looking in at the lives of the rich (“I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split”), he offers a similar vantage point in The Long Goodbye. The novel’s plot gets going when Marlowe sees a woman basically dump a drunk out of her car and decides on the spur of the moment to help the guy because there is something likeable about him, despite or because of his white hair, scarred face, weak charm, and peculiar pride. The man is Terry Lennox, and knowing him will soon have Marlowe driving around LA and vicinity, including once to Tijuana and several times to Idle Valley, not to mention being arrested, interrogated, insulted, beaten, threatened, hired, helped, rewarded, accused, used, tempted, confided in, lied to, and more. There will be murder and unusual jobs. There will be private investigation and media manipulation. There will be a $5,000 bill and surprising telephone calls. There will be seductive ladies and unsavory doctors and good cops and bad cops and eloquent thugs and an impudent Chilean servant and a “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” quoting black chauffeur. And a guilty and possibly suicidal alcoholic writer stand-in for Chandler himself, though Roger Wade is an author of best-selling sexy historical romances instead of hardboiled detective novels. This being a Chandler novel, it is enlivened by original similes and vivid descriptions: “Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.” (Coffee) “He looked at me like an entomologist looking at a beetle.” “Sparrows with rosy heads hopped about pecking at things only a sparrow would think worth pecking at.” “An hour crawled by like a sick cockroach.” “The air was warm and quiet and full of the tomcat smell of eucalyptus trees.” And by great lines of dialogue: “You’re a piker, Marlowe. You’re a peanut grifter. You’re so little it takes a magnifying glass to see you. . . You got no guts, no brains, no connections, no savvy, so you throw out a phony attitude and expect people to cry over you. Tarzan on a big red scooter.” “All tough guys are monotonous. Like playing cards with a deck that’s all aces. You’ve got everything and you’ve got nothing. You’re just sitting there looking at yourself. No wonder Terry didn’t come to you for help. It would be like borrowing money from a whore.” “You know something, Marlowe? I could get to like you. You’re a bit of a bastard—like me.” And by cynical life wisdom: “Drunks don’t educate, my friend. They disintegrate.” “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” “The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. . . We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.” It also features much social criticism of American culture and capitalism, everything from the lousy food of American restaurants and planned obsolescence of mass production to the corruption of media, politics, business, and law into essentially organized crime: “The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer.” It sometimes almost reads like a McCarthy-Era apology for communism: “There’s a peculiar thing about money. . . In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own.” The Long Goodbye is a page turning book without cheap suspense. There are some neat twists in it. I like how Marlowe will get irritated by a person who’s too snotty or thuggish or phony and then aggressively spew at them the analysis he’s been privately cogitating without narrating it. It’s effective storytelling, because we haven’t come up with Marlowe’s conclusions ourselves because we’ve been reading his exploits with rapt attention, so when he suddenly explains us up to speed while dressing someone down we experience a cool “Ah hah!” This being a 1950s novel, there is casual racism directed at Latinos and Japanese and blacks, but the worst people Marlowe encounters are white. Finally, does Marlowe protest too much when he says things like, “I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars”? In any case, his narration sings with a terse sordid urban poetry: "Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. "It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed." Fans of hardboiled fiction must read The Long Goodbye, but also people interested in well-written, unglamorous depictions of LA and America in the 1950s. View all my reviews
Duma Key by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “God always punishes us for what we can’t imagine” Stephen King’s Duma Key (2011) is an absorbing, ultimately disappointing novel about memory, artistic creation, family, friendship, and evil (and the something that’s “on the other side of the equation”). The first-person narrator is fifty-year-old Edgar Freemantle, who was a millionaire building contractor with a loving family until a crane crushed him inside his pick-up truck, taking his right arm and leaving him with serious trauma to his leg and brain. The latter caused him such frustrated rage when he couldn’t say the right words that he took it out violently on wife Pam. Acting on the advice of his anger management psychiatrist, Edgar relocates from Minnesota to Florida to try to do something he liked to do when younger, draw. The setting for his new life is a house he dubs Big Pink on Duma Key, a narrow island which is mysteriously undeveloped but for a handful of houses on the northern end. As Big Pink is perched overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, Edgar immediately begins drawing intense sunsets, the days “ending in glory.” The new setting and his new occupation seem to be healing him. But something’s funny. Edgar often feels a painful stinging itch in his phantom right arm (the real appendage was burned in a hospital incinerator), and the only thing that relieves it is making pictures, but when he draws or paints it’s as if something takes over, until he’s unsure how much of his impressive art works are him and how much Something Else. And his works are disturbing. For one thing, they surrealistically impose shells and flora and ships onto the sunsets, and for another they may be predicting violent events. And when he starts painting a series of pictures in which a derelict ship of the dead is approached by a rowboating girl wearing the dresses his beloved daughter wore when she was a girl-- Luckily, Edgar makes new friends in Florida, like Wireman, a wise middle-aged ex-lawyer who takes care of Elizabeth Eastlake, the wealthy old woman who owns the northern end of Duma Key and the houses on it. In addition to sprinkling his speech with Spanish, pithy sayings (“the gospel according to Wireman”), and allusions to books, movies, and music (he’s “an artesian well of useless information”), Wireman is able to almost telepathically understand Edgar’s feelings. This wouldn’t be connected to the coin-sized scar on his temple, would it? Elizabeth is fading away into dementia, but in her clear moments she aesthetically arranges china figurines on a table, has Edgar read poetry to her, and says cryptic things like, “You won’t want to, but you must.” This wouldn’t be connected to the scar on her temple, would it? The relationship between Edgar, Wireman, and Elizabeth is interesting, funny, and moving. What has brought them together on Duma Key and for what purpose? The novel is full of King’s fine writing: Moving moments, as when Edgar remembers his daughters as little girls. Life wisdom, like “When memory takes its strongest hold, our own bodies become ghosts haunting us with the gestures of our younger selves.” Interesting insights into artistic creation, like the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious minds. Vivid, evocative descriptions, like this: “The thunderheads stacked up, huge flat boats, black on the bottom and bruised purple through the middle. Every now and then lightning would flash inside them, and then they looked like brains filled with bad ideas. The gulf lost its color and went dead.” Scary moments, like when Edgar tries to visit the south end of the island with his daughter or when twins (from The Shining?!) visit him. Many humorous lines (like “I’d never seen a heron that didn’t look like a Puritan elder thinking which witch to burn”) and scenes (like when Edgar and Wireman first meet). And many allusions to high culture (Shakespeare, Dickens, Dickenson, etc.) and popular culture (the Three Stooges, Pepe Le Pew, Peter Straub, etc.). This being a book about art, there are many references to modern painters, like Wyeth, Dali, and Hockney. (Sometimes I wondered how a building contractor could invoke Scooby Doo one moment and quote The Tempest the next--But the references are neat.) Finally, as I’ve found with others of his novels (like It), this one is most impressive before we learn what’s going on supernaturally. The more the nature of the ancient, malevolent force (gendered female here) is revealed, the more mystery and human agency decrease, and despite my believing in his main characters I often find King’s supernatural horror to be absurd and contrived. If a sentient evil power (“old when the children of Israel were grubbing in gardens in Egypt”) can make people far away murder people they have no reason to harm or suffer heart attacks or forget vital things, etc., then when she doesn't do something she could do, it all ends up feeling like King’s contrivance. Furthermore, if the evil is “not even close to human, something other, beyond human understanding,” human perfidy is diminished. In The Shining the supernatural evil force in the Overlook Hotel resonates with Jack Torrance’s inner alcoholic devil and doesn’t make Wendy and Danny do things against their natures. In Duma Key King tries to balance the supernatural evil force with something benign that has his heroes act on intuition to good effect, but then that diminishes human goodness and makes his book feel like a pseudo-Christian allegory. Thus, my favorite parts of the novel come in the first half, watching Edgar rehabilitate his body and mind, Edgar and Wireman hang out with Elizabeth, and Edgar discover his painting jones and related psychic ability. I also liked reading about artistic creation (a series of How to Draw a Picture vignettes reveal King’s advice to artists—and writers—like truth is in the details, be brave, and don’t quit). John Slattery reads the audiobook just right, with clarity and understanding without over doing it. Fans of It should like Duma Key, but I prefer Misery, The Shining, and Doctor Sleep. View all my reviews
Dangerous Women by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Uneven Anthology with too Few Dangerous Women In his introduction to Dangerous Women (2013), which he edited with George R. R. Martin, Gardner Dozois says that the “cross-genre anthology” will "showcase the supposedly weaker sex's capacity for magic, violence, and mayhem.” Hey, it sounds great, doesn’t it? But among the anthology’s 21 stories from various genres, including fantasy (ghost, magic, epic, etc.), science fiction (space opera, post apocalypse, superhero, etc.), and realism (crime, historical, and wrestling etc.), I found too few dangerous women protagonists and too much sexism. Here is an annotated list of the uneven stories. 1. “Some Desperado” by Joe Abercrombie (read by Stana Katic) A violent and suspenseful story about a “contrary” young woman on the run from her treacherous male bank-robbing accomplices. Replace the medievalesque fantasy weapons like bow and battle-axe with guns, and it’d be a hardboiled western. 2. “My Heart Is Either Broken” by Megan Abbott (read by Jake Weber) After their toddler daughter is kidnapped, a husband tries to remain loyal to his wife, while the media and police view her sexy outfits, bar dancing, and smiling with suspicion. A Gone Girl vibe but with only the husband’s view. 3. “Nora’s Song” by Cecelia Holland (read by Harriet Walter) Intense doings of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II seen from the point of view of Eleanor’s spunky little daughter. “I want to be a hero,” she says to her father, who replies, “God gave you the wrong stature.” A vivid story about the powerlessness of children, especially of girls. 4. “The Hands That Are Not There” by Melinda Snodgrass (read by Jonathan Frakes) This space opera sympathizes with people open to other species (i.e. races), but finally seems to validate the ugliest Trumpian prejudices. The protagonists are men, the antagonist a by-the-numbers femme fatale. 5. “Bombshells” by Jim Butcher (read by Emily Rankin) Wizardly apprentice Molly and two other “bombshells” crash a Chicago party hosted by mythological beings and get caught up in supernatural terrorism. The title is a sexist pun, the story a male fantasy of “smoking hot” women playing Charlie’s Angels, flaunting their “racks,” and saying, “I rock this dress!” 6. “Raisa Stepanova” by Carrie Vaughn (read by Inna Korobkina) A suspenseful story about a brave, capable woman who is a WW II Russian fighter pilot set on becoming an ace or dying trying. And she’s not sexualized as a “knockout” and has no romantic interest. 7. “Wrestling Jesus” by Joe R. Lansdale (read by Scott Brick) A Karate Kid, geriatric pro wrestling, and succubus story. It’s predictable, profane, and unconvincing, and the femme fatale antagonist is “a knockout,” “a girl,” and “that bitch.” 8. “Neighbors” by Megan Lindholm (read by Lee Meriwether) A potent story about a woman fearing dementia while her loving children want her in assisted living. After losing an old friend to the Tacoma fog, she starts feeling unmoored from time and (maybe) becomes able to access another world. 9. “I Know How to Pick ’Em” by Lawrence Block (read by Jake Weber) An unpleasant story in which an uber-hard-boiled narrator (6’5”, heavily muscled, and observant) works a twist on the old Body Heat scenario. 10. “Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell” by Brandon Sanderson (read by Claudia Black) A woman runs an inn in the Forest, whose deadly shades are attracted to fast movements, fire starting, and blood spilling. And she’s secretly a bounty hunter. Can she save her place and protect her daughter? 11. “A Queen in Exile” by Sharon Kay Penman (read by Harriet Walter) Constance, wife to cold King Heinrich, heir to the Holy Roman Empire, is enduring a cold German winter and missing her balmy southern Italy when her life path changes. Constance is strong but not dangerous. 12. “The Girl in the Mirror” by Lev Grossman (read by Sophie Turner) The leader of a female club in Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy plans a practical joke on a male student only to find herself in a “fucked up magical mystery tour.” A cool heroine, creepy scenes, vivid descriptions, and interesting magic. 13. “Second Arabesque, Very Slowly” by Nancy Kress (read by Janis Ian) After 99% of women became infertile, civilization collapsed, leaving male-dominated packs scavenging ruins like the Lincoln Center, where 64-year-old “Nurse” observes two young pack members discovering ballet: “There are worse ways to die than gazing at beauty.” 14. “City Lazarus” by Diana Rowland (read by Scott Brick) A corrupt police captain falls in love with a creole exotic dancer in a New Orleans that’s a “fucked up shell” because the Mississippi River has changed course. The best part of this hardboiled story is the river-abandoned city. 15. “Virgins” by Diana Gabaldon (read by Allan Scott-Douglas) Virgins in sex and killing, Scottish Highlanders Jamie Fraser and Ian Murray are working for a mercenary company in 1740 when they are assigned to escort a beautiful Jewess and a priceless Torah from Bordeaux to Paris. Ivanhoe’s Rebecca as a female “praying mantis”? 16. “Hell Hath No Fury” by Sherilynn Kenyon (read by Jenna Lamia) The sexist cliché alluded to by the title doesn’t fit the story, about a psychic young lady and her obtuse friends visiting a ghost town to film supernatural events and finding a curse, a ghost, an Indian philosophy hodgepodge, a didactic lesson, and an unconvincing ending. 17. “Name the Beast” by Sam Sykes (read by Claudia Black) An alien-human story with vivid imagery but too clever by half: events are out of chronological order, and it’s too hard to figure out who are the aliens, who the humans, and who the beast. 18. “Pronouncing Doom” by S.M. Stirling (read by Stana Katic) Oregon. Year Two after the machines stopped, fires burnt, and the plague killed, forcing the survivors to band together under warlords or Wiccan Highlander-esque clans (!), like the one led by folksinger Juniper Mackenzie, who must judge a conveniently unrepentant rapist. 19. “Caregivers” by Pat Cadigan (read by Janis Ian) The relationship between the 53-year-old Val and her younger sister Gloria gets complicated when Gloria starts volunteering at the rest home where the sisters’ mother is living. It’s a funny, moving, and finally unsettling story. 20. “Lies My Mother Told Me” by Caroline Spector (read by Maggi-Meg Reed) In the Wild Cards universe an alien virus has given some humans super powers (Aces) or grotesque mutations (Jokers) which various organizations try to exploit. I like the only LGBTQ characters in the anthology, but the entertaining story is weakened by the old author-can-do-anything-for-the-plot-with-super-powers syndrome. 21. “The Princess and the Queen” by George R. R. Martin (read by Iain Glen) A Westeros Grand Maester has written the “true” history of the Dance of the Dragons, a devastating civil war of succession fought by branches of House Targaryen and their dragons and supporters. Alas that the flaws of Queen Rhaenyra derive from her being a mother. The audiobook readers are fine, except for their tendency (apart from a few like Janis Ian) to overdo intense scenes. The pompous British accent and portentous manner of the woman who introduces authors and stories is irritating. Finally, there aren’t enough dangerous women in the stories. And those that do appear are too often femme fatales who do bad things to men or try to get men to do bad things. (Both editors are men.) Some stories are fine, but overall I regret the time I spent on this book. View all my reviews
The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Stories can be risky for someone like me” Like her multiple award-winning space opera Ancillary Justice (2013), Anne Leckie’s epic fantasy novel The Raven Tower (2019) does neat things with narrative voice and time. Both books begin disorientingly, because the narrators are not human beings and only gradually reveal their natures, and because Leckie alternates between two seemingly unrelated story strands far apart in time and place from each other and only gradually reveals their connection. Part of the pleasure of reading both books, then, derives from not knowing just who (or what) is speaking to us and not knowing just what is happening. In both books the pleasure of mystery fades when the identity of the narrator has been revealed and the two time strands of the plot have merged. Luckily, Leckie writes compelling main characters, convincing sf and fantasy narrative worlds, and clear prose. The narrator of The Raven Tower is The Strength and Patience of the Hill, a god who inhabits a stone and is one of the Ancient Ones, one of the first and strongest gods that came to the world. Strength and Patience alternates between two narratives, a first person one depicting the long history of its consciousness and life as a god in a stone in the north and its long friendship with the Myriad, another Ancient One manifested in mosquitoes, and a second person one happening in the present of the novel in which Strength and Patience addresses itself to “you,” like this: “Could you hear me, Eolo? Can you hear me now? I’m talking to you.” Eolo is a soldier of the nation called Iraden and right-hand man to Mawat, the heir to the Raven’s Lease. The Raven’s Lease is the ruler of Iraden who must dedicate his life to Iraden’s protective god the Raven (not an Ancient One, but a younger god) so that when the Raven’s Instrument (a raven through whom the god speaks) dies, the Lease will sacrifice himself to the Raven. In return, the Lease rules the land, in consultation with the Directions (men who represent different regions of Iraden) and the Mother of the Silent, the senior priestess of the God of the Silent Forest who supposedly protects Iraden. As the novel begins, Mawat and Eolo ride into Vastia, the capitol of Iraden, because the Instrument and hence the Lease of Iraden is soon to die, so Mawat expects to take over as Lease. Instead, they find that his uncle Lord Hibal has suspiciously become Lease, because, he claims, Mawat’s father absconded from the Raven’s Tower (the center of the god’s power in Vastia and the residence of the Lease). The rest of this part of the novel concerns Eolo’s efforts to find out what happened to Mawat’s father while managing the hot-headed Mawat. The situation is complicated by the presence in Vastia of representatives from an expansionist culture and by the increasingly organized and threatening raids of a barbaric culture in the south. Meanwhile, Strength and Patience is filling us (“you,” because it’s telling the story to Eolo) in on its millennia of existence, from when it found itself at the bottom of a sea and when the sea receded and left it on a hillside, to when it began to be worshipped by human beings and when it met the Myriad (or vice versa), and so on. Apart from its narrative tactics, the novel may sound like a typical epic fantasy (complete with usurping uncle), but Leckie does interesting things that set it apart from the herd. First, her book is a compact stand-alone novel and not first in a door-stopper trilogy or longer series. Second, she doesn’t just write gods as super-humans but as Other beings, as with, for instance, the way they gain power from sacrifices and offerings and the care they take with language and boons and curses because anything they say Will Happen but often with unforeseen consequences that may wind up, say, killing their worshippers or they themselves. Third, she does more cool things with gender than most fantasy novelists do (I can’t say what they are without spoiling a neat surprise, but can say that after a certain point gendered pronouns become problematic). It’s not a perfect novel. Although Eolo and Strength and Patience are great protagonists, supporting figures are not as interesting. For instance, there is a pair of one-dimensional twin villains who do too much smirking skullduggery (though they have their reasons for being reprehensible, as twins in Vastia are cursed and ostracized). Also, the book almost tired me in its first third, when it seemed that Strength and Patience was going to take forever to catch up to the present. And readers who require exciting battles scenes will be disappointed, because Leckie generally avoids them or depicts their aftermaths. There are a couple scenes showcasing Eolo’s man-to-man fighting prowess, but many more showing his diplomatic skills and keen insight into political machinations and motivations etc. Finally, I recommend Leckie’s book because it is thought-provoking and moving (but unsentimental) and uses gods to highlight human brevity and mortality, the power of language, and the wonder of working together to create something better for our posterity. 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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