City of Bones by Martha Wells
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Relics, Arcane Engines, Magic, and a Wasteland City Martha Wells’ City of Bones (1995) is a post-apocalypse steampunk alien contact archeological mystery fantasy featuring lots of action and lots of info dumping. The imagined world is vivid. Fringe Cities are scattered around a desert wasteland left behind by some past calamity, as the Survivors’ descendants try to regain the lost knowledge of the Ancients by studying their relics and trading with each other via caravans sent on dangerous journeys through the desert and its city castoff pirates and poisonous predators. Then there are the krismen, genetically modified by the Ancients to survive in the desert, sun proof, needing scant water, immune to poisons, and possessed of marsupial-esque reproductive pouches (a nice touch that plays a role in the plot). The City of Bones, Charisat, is the capital of the Fringe Cities. The city is eight-tiered, the eighth being the lowest, most impoverished and dangerous, the last stop before expulsion into the wasteland, the first being the highest, home to Patricians (aristocrats), Warders (mage warriors) and the Elector (ruler) and his Heir. The city also houses scholars (studying and teaching in the Academia), fortune tellers (burning bones to see the future), black marketeers (frequenting the Silent Market). The authorities consist of vigils, lictors, and the dread Trade Inspectors (who draconianly punish anyone interfering with trade or using verboten coins). Warder magic consists of things like reading minds or manipulating thoughts or “seeing” in the dark or suddenly appearing or safely landing from high falls. Warders risk going “mad” if they access such powers too frequently or deeply. The story concerns an ex-patriot krismen relic dealer called Khat and his ex-patriot foreign scholar partner Sagai living on the sixth tier, where the smell of sewage is not so bad. Their relics business is limited by the fact that as non-citizens, they must handle trade tokens (representing hours of artisan work) instead of coins. Being an outcast from his krismen Enclave (whose people scorn him for having survived capture by pirates) and shunned in Charisat (whose denizens view krismen as feral and soulless), Khat finds it difficult to trust other people, not unlike Murderbot. Also like Murderbot, Khat often thinks of doing bad things while acting ethically. Khat stays in the city because he likes books and relics and his partner Sagai (the relationship between the younger crismen and the older married scholar is neat). The story begins when Khat is hired to guide a veiled Patrician into the Wasteland to investigate one of the Remnants (structures made by the Ancients and left scattered around the Wasteland for some unknown reason). The page turning plot then involves steamwagons, pirates, Ancient relics (from illustrated tiles and cryptic books to painrods and arcane engines), a young female Warder, a charismatic “mad” Warder, a vengeful gangster, a creepy Heir, betrayal, a race to find two stolen relics, a hint of cross-cultural romance, a little torture, a couple murders, some fights, some Silent Market action, inimical aliens, and a timeless doorway. The climax is mind bending but (to me) disappointing, as Wells is writing a more traditional and less Adrian Tchaikovsky-like intercultural communication and acceptance story. Also, I found the novel a little longer than it needed to be with a few more infodumps (on bone takers, gates between tiers, veils, wind chimneys, the Silent Market, krismen pouches, etc.) than were good for narrative flow. Here’s an example. Khat is trying to get half of his fee before guiding the party into the wasteland, while an asshole party member is trying to avoid paying him, and suddenly in the midst of their interaction, we get this: “In Charisat and most of the other Fringe Cities, citizenship had to be bought, and noncitizens couldn’t own or handle minted coins unless they bought a special license to do so, which was almost as expensive as citizenship itself. And sometimes not worth the trouble, since Trade Inspectors paid special notice to sales made with minted coins. Trade tokens were a holdover from the old days of barter, and worthless without the authority of the merchants or institutions who stamped them. If a city became too crowded and faced a water or grain shortage, it could always declare all trade tokens void, forcing noncitizens to leave or starve in the streets.” The information is important for the story, but it could be delivered more entertainingly or more in the voice/mind of a character. On the plus side, the resolution is restrained, the characters are appealing, and the writing is clean, and there are neat places where (without explanations) we find out things like the people calling fish and ducks depicted on Ancient relic tiles “water creatures” and “water birds,” presumably because water is so scarce that there are no more fish or ducks. And Wells does effectively work in some world information by having Khat tell Elen, a young female Warder who’s forced by her master to work with him, about krismen, or she tell him about Warders. On top of all that, it's a rare self contained stand alone book! The audiobook reader Kyle McCarley is fine, really, but egregiously overdoes the NPC voices and gets a LITTLE too excited for action scenes. Fans of Wells (like me!) would enjoy the book. View all my reviews
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Kalin by E.C. Tubb
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Witch Hunting and Spaceship Jacking, the Brotherhood and the Cyclan, Zardles and Zerds, Vendettas and Symbiotes Kalin (1969), the fourth entry in E. C. Tubb’s LONG Earl Dumarest series of pulpy space opera with teeth starts with a bang: Earl Dumarest is stopping over on a planet celebrating Bloodnight, an annual festival where everyone tries to kill their foes, rivals, enemies, and victims, and he and some other fellow passengers are safely watching from behind the guarded fence around the spaceport, when they see this red-haired, green-eyed, long-legged “girl” running from a rabid mob shouting “Kill the witch!” so Dumarest (naturally) intervenes: “‘Do we have to kill you to get her?’ ‘You could try,’ said Dumarest.” Ever chivalrous, he pays for her passage on his spaceship, soon discovering that Kalin (her name) is indeed a witch, having the ability to see the future, albeit somewhat vaguely. One of the interesting things about Kalin is that she fears seeing bad things that will happen and yet can’t help morbidly looking at them, despite Dumarest repeatedly asking her not to because seeing future calamities upsets her and because he doesn’t want to know what’s going to happen: “The temptation to use it, to be sure, against the temptation not to use, to retain hope. And how long could the desire simply to hope last against the desire to know for certain?” The short novel packs a lot into its story: an aged mercenary and his aged lover planning to hijack a spaceship so he can buy an army to rule a world and she can pay for an expensive operation to transplant her brain into a nubile body; a miraculous rescue in deep space; a trip to a dead-end slave-mining planet where the only hope to earn enough to buy passage off world is “by hunting a zardle and hoping to find a zerd” (!); the altruistic machinations of the Brotherhood of the Universal Church, whose monks want to help humanity by teaching us that “The pain of one is the pain of all,” and the malevolent machinations of the Cyclan, whose cyborgs think that without emotions they’re better equipped to run the galaxy than us; a vendetta world’s half-metal survivor of a five-year war between two families, looking for his daughter to carry on the family line; a pastoral planet’s House whose brothers’ horse breeding business is threatened by winged predators and a comatose sister’s medical care; a blinding and an eye operation; a stunning revelation featuring a symbiote that connects back thematically to the opening of the novel; and a genuinely unnerving and moving kiss. How Earl Dumarest connects all these plot strands (on five different worlds!) is exciting, surprising, poignant, tragic, and neat. And compact! People sure don’t write such punchy and concise less is more novels nowadays. Four novels into the series, we know that Earl Dumarest ain’t gonna end up with a lover, ‘cause he has to keep going on his Big Mission via countless spaceship rides to countless worlds, “Travelling, always travelling, always looking for Earth. For the planet which seemed to have become forgotten. The world no one knew. Home!” Frustratingly, most people he meets in the galaxy think Earth is a legend or a piece of nonsense: what planet would be called “earth”? And how could the myriad human beings on myriad worlds ever have come from a single planet of origin? I’m getting used to him meeting a new “girl” near the start of a novel, getting involved with her in the middle, and then losing her somehow in the end so he can go on to his next world/adventure/girl. He doesn’t want to love ‘em and leave ‘em! He really falls in love: ‘You are you,’ he said slowly. ‘If you were to have an accident, lose your beauty in some way, it would make no difference to the way I feel. I didn’t fall in love with a pair of green eyes, some white skin and red hair. I fell in love with a woman.’ In addition to his endless search for home, we learn a bit more about Earl in this book, like his traumatic childhood on Earth, as well as confirm his formerly established traits: speedy and ruthless fighting, loyalty to friends, chivalry to women, laconic speech, natural leadership, and resourceful and indefatigable survival skills. Tubb had a fertile imagination for SF devices: --Bank funds accessed by inserting your forearm into a device to read subcutaneous tattoos. --Dream Helmets that give you dreams while you sleep. --Books with animated pages (especially useful for porn). --Quick-time hypos to slow you down so time passes faster and slow-time hypos for the opposite. --Symbiotes that give you your desired dreams in return for a little nutrition from you. --Cyborgs. *But so far he has no interest in aliens. It’s not high literature, but Tubb wrote vivid, tight, pointed sf prose, like: “His eyes looked like holes punched in snow.” And “There was a head, bald, shining, creased like a mass of crumpled crepe, swollen to twice normal size. The eyes were thin glittering slits, the mouth a lipless gash and the chin was a part of the composite whole which was the neck. A sheet covered the body with its strange and alien protuberances. Pipes ran from beneath it and connected to quietly humming machines. Tanks and instruments completed the life-support installation. ‘Nice, isn’t it?’” Yes, there is neat stuff here about bodies (aged, diseased, injured, scarred, repaired, cybernetic, etc.). What happens to our mind/soul/relationships when our bodies are damaged or changed? There is alas late 60s sexism, like “Woman-like, she was indifferent to the comfort of others when a problem filled her mind,” but otherwise, Tubb’s novels seem rather timeless. I’m looking forward to the next novel in the series, wanting to find out what kind of trouble Earl and his new love interest get into. View all my reviews
The Veiled Throne by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Cooking, Conversations, and Cross-Cultural Exchange The Veiled Throne: The Dandelion Dynasty Book 3 (2021) is a nearly 1000-page epic fantasy novel whose long set piece climax is a three-part cooking contest between rival restaurants that even the gods of Dara show up to watch. Although the novel does also feature infiltrations, massacres, and escapes, as well as a large-scale naval battle involving a gargantuan city ship, a submersible ship, a large-screen shadow-puppet show, explosives, hand-to-hand combat, cow-dragons, and whales, author Ken Liu seems most interested in cooking and conversations—about politics, love, philosophy, strategy, engineering, storytelling, truth, taste, drama, disguise, parents and children, teachers and students, literacy vs. orality, genius vs. nature, character-based writing vs. alphabet writing, accommodation vs. war, and more. The Dandelion Dynasty is closer to traditional sf than to traditional epic fantasy, in that the books are novels of ideas based on the concept that the universe is knowable, with biological/scientific explanations for the seemingly fantastic creatures (like the flight and fiery breath of the cow-dragon garanafin) and convincing cultures (art, religion, war, language, cuisine, ethics, funeral customs, gender roles, families, and foundation myths) extrapolated from different environments and histories. No magic. Although gods do play a role, at times trying to influence events, they generally fail to prevent the mortals from doing what they want to do and mostly serve as a chorus for the action. It has been called a silkpunk epic, with technology, devices, and inventions based on scientific principles, e.g., silkmotic (static electricity) lamps and lances, airships, submersible ships, programmable mechanical carts, a roller coaster, etc. The main plot starts eight years after the events of the second book, The Wall of Storms (2016). Two years remain in the uneasy ten-year truce between the “barbaric” Lyucu invaders of two Daran islands (Unredeemed Dara) and the rest of the “civilized” Daran islands (Free Dara), with Daran Empress Jia still wielding power as Regent for still “unready” to rule twenty-year-old Phyro, while mollifying the Lyucu occupiers by giving them tribute and ignoring their atrocities and attempts to use pirates to kidnap scholars and craftsmen from Free Dara. As usual, Jia is working on a secret scheme “to uproot the weeds of war and cultivate the plants of peace” despite knowing it will alienate her from her people and family. (To—unfairly—generate suspense, Liu narrates much of the novel from Jia’s point of view so that whenever we’re in her head she avoids thinking about the details of her it’s-fine-to-fight-evil-with-evil plan, apart from a highly addictive drug she’s developing.) The conquering Lyucu stuck on their two occupied islands are divided between their accommodation faction wanting to treat the local Darans as subjects rather than slaves and wanting to learn Daran writing and technology and to incorporate the Darans into their government and army and the hardline faction wanting to destroy the language, religion, bodies, and souls of the Darans to turn them into obedient slaves and their towns into pastures. The Lyucu ruler Tanvanaki is trying to strengthen the accommodators with the help of her righthand thane Goztan (whose son Kinri is secretly learning Daran history and language and culture from a Daran scholar), but the hardcore haters are persistent and potent. At the end of the second novel, Thera abdicated as Empress of Dara to sail on a desperate mission with about 1000 Daran soldiers and scholars and her husband to be, Takval, scion of the Agon (ancient enemies of the Lyucu) to the scrublands on the far side of the world across the Wall of Storms to make an alliance between Dara and the Agon which will (she hopes) end in the Agon conquering the Lyucu so they’ll be unable to send another invasion fleet with which to complete their conquest of Dara. In this third book Thera is discovering the unexpected costs of merging her Darans with the native Agon. Whew. Liu develops all those situations and sub-plots through a rotating array of compelling characters from various classes and cultures. Most of his villains have appealing qualities, as his heroes have disappointing flaws. One of my favorites is Rati Yera, an elderly, illiterate, wheelchair-bound, graverobber-inventor and the leader of the do-gooding Blossom Gang of street performers, but I also like the earnest Kinri, drawn to Daran culture despite being the son of an important Lyucu thane, and the naïve Princess Fara, aka Dandelion, who likes art and stories, unlike her martial, older brother Phyro who’s all, “Free occupied Dara from the yoke of barbarian oppression NOW!” It’s very much a novel of cross-cultural conflict and influence. Many Lyucu see Daran writing (“word scars”) as an evil force stifling the natural breath of the spoken voice, farming as soul-destroying, and Darans as cowardly, sneaky, scheming villains, while many Darans view the Lyucu as illiterate, savage, sadistic, treacherous monsters. As characters say, “In war you tend to become like the enemy.” Indeed, the Darans are working on raising Lyucu garanafin, while the Lyucu are working on adopting Daran military technology. Is it possible to merge with the other by sharing non-martial things like language and cuisine? Where should one’s loyalty lie when one has a parent from each culture? Will it all end up in an Adrian Tchaikovsky-like salvation via enriching cultural interchange or in a mutually destructive apocalypse? We’ll have to read the fourth novel to find out. Liu too often indulges in easy plot contrivance, moments where careful characters get sloppy with disguises, or shrewd characters get gullible with untrustworthy villains, etc. But there are also many more impressive scenes (like the cooking contest) and many cool lines like these: “To hold competing ideals might save your life.” “Why should we listen to the gods or to dead scholars? What do they know of being alive?” “History is always a story told through the present.” “Young people who haven’t experienced suffering easily romanticize the past.” “One of the best things about teaching is learning something new from one's student. Audiobook reader Michael Kramer does a professional job of enhancing the story. By the end of this book, Liu has set up situations with different sets of characters in different places, all of which ought to come together in a massive climax in the last novel, so I’m looking forward to the (41 hour, eek!) conclusion to the series, Speaking Bones (2022). View all my reviews
Blindness by José Saramago
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The whole world is right here In an anonymous city, a car stays stopped after the light changes to green, infuriating other drivers. Approached, the driver shouts, “I’m blind! I can’t see!” A good Samaritan drives him home, saying, “Not at all. It’s your turn now. Later it will be my turn.” And then he drives off in the blind man’s car! Such is human nature in Portuguese author Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness (1995): “This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice.” Saramago imagines a sudden plague of blindness that makes the victims’ see only white. The “white sickness” has no known origin and is highly contagious. The authorities quickly quarantine anyone who has gone blind and anyone they’ve contacted, but from the start it’s too late. The first half of the novel concerns the hellish experience of the first newly blind people—imprisoned in an abandoned insane asylum, monitored by jittery soldiers, and left to fend for themselves without any support other than occasional food drop offs. Luckily for our group of first internees, among their number is an ophthalmologist and his wife, and she has mysteriously remained sighted and is only feigning blindness to stick with her husband. Thus, she is able to help organize her party for toilets and beds. As in H. G. Wells’ potent short story “In the Country of the Blind,” however, it’s not an unalloyed advantage to be able to see when confined with a bunch of blind people. The wife wants to keep her sight secret from the blind internees to avoid being exiled or enslaved by them, but it’s not easy to maintain the pretense, and as time passes and the inmates become ever filthier without being able to wash their bodies or clothes or use the toilets hygienically, the things she can see become ever more unpleasant. She at times wishes to become blind like the others, or to die. In vivid detail Saramago depicts the internees’ hellish situation, exacerbated by the frightened soldiers ordered to shoot any inmates who attempt to flee the asylum and by a group of well-organized blind thugs. They commandeer all the food and extort valuables and sex from the other internees, who are too cowed to resist. The more one reads, the more one fears there will be no explanation for the plague, no intrepid researchers to find a cure, no return to “normal.” I’m not spoiling the novel but merely pointing out how I felt while reading, far before I approached the end. Faithful to the concept that “these distasteful realities of life also have to be considered,” Saramago’s novel is not cheery. He vividly demonstrates the fragility of our modern “civilization,” dependent on electricity, running water, and systems of government, infrastructure, security, transportation, sanitation, and finance, etc. He does depict some of the best of human nature, as in a quasi-prostitute (“the girl with dark glasses”) who adopts a child (“the boy with the squint”), “the old man with the black eye-patch” who provides needed wisdom, and of course the doctor and his wife who are natural leaders. But the story is painful precisely because they are sympathetic characters we care about and because the people evincing the worst of human nature seem more numerous. Also, Saramago is so clinical and detailed in his account of what it would feel like to lose one’s eyesight, to become one of the asylum inmates, and yet to (of course) desperately want to survive, that his novel at times moves past the bracing into the unbearable. Indeed, when the blind thugs start gloatingly gang raping women, I almost quit reading. Although much of the novel is (nearly unbearably) bleak—and has long paragraphs and no chapters to take rest breaks after—it is worth persevering till the end, for there are many moving, memorable scenes, like the doctor’s wife and the girl with dark glasses hugging each other, the doctor’s wife finally using a pair of scissors, a timely fire wreaking havoc, the dog of tears gaining its nickname, the three graces washing themselves in the rain on a balcony, a shocking scene in a church, and two mismatched people confessing their love for each other. Furthermore, although many scenes in the book recall Bruegel’s appalling painting The Blind Leading the Blind, in which six blind men are following each other tumbling into a ditch, in the novel, after all, Saramago’s six blind main characters have a sighted saint to lead them. And if his characters say things like, “One way or another, we are all murderers,” they also say things like, “The only miracle we can perform is to go on living.” It’s also worth persevering through for its cool lines, like “A glass of water is a marvelous thing,” and “Animals are like people. They get used to anything,” and “If before every action, we were to weigh up all the consequences in earnest, immediate ones, probable ones, possible ones, and imaginable ones, good and evil from our deeds would go on apportioning themselves through all our days till the endless ones after we are gone, which might be a form of our immortality.” Saramaga’s novel reads like a fusion of Camus' The Plague and something by Kafka. It has the former’s awful and objective detail, ineffectual authorities, religious questioning, system limit revealing, human limit pushing, terrible suffering, unheroic heroes, and random fates, as well as the latter’s surreal quality, fatally absurd authorities, and anonymous city and characters (who are referred to by attributes). Blindness also recalls McCarthy’s The Road, though there are “seven pilgrims” instead of a father and son. The audiobook is read by the excellent Jonathan Davis, whose voice and manner enhance the text. View all my reviews
Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Leaving Utopia to Remake Eden In Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite the Sun (1976), the anonymous 25-year-old narrator repeatedly burns her mouth by biting the sun--challenging the system of her perfect, post-scarcity, dome-enclosed city run by QRs (quasi-robots or androids) and worked by robots for their pampered human charges—by trying and failing to do meaningful things like work or make a baby. She and her Jang (young) friends take drugs, “have love,” play sabotage, make social circles, pay for things with “emotional energy,” change genders, commit suicide, and exit Limbo in new bodies ready to resume their hedonistic lives. All that continues in the sequel, Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977), but the narrator is now a he (wearing the body of a handsome consumptive Romantic poet) and is immersing himself in the History Tower, researching forgotten customs of humanity like God and dueling. As his frenemy and occasional lover Hergal “the Turd” tells him, “You sit up there on your tail in the History Tower, in the dust with a couple of rusty robots that don't know what rorl [century] it is. You read about things that don't exist anymore and won't ever exist anymore. Adventures, wars, illness, obsolete social behavior patterns--poets.” Needless to say, the narrator is still unfulfilled by life in his society, and his friends can’t understand him: “And your vocabulary!” she bawled. “Those words! Factory? What's that?” “A place where they make audio plugs,” I said. The plot of this second novel begins with the return to the narrator’s city Four BEE of a former lover/friend Danor (currently female), a duel to the death with an envious jerk called Zirk (currently male), and an exile from the utopia-dystopia city into the harsh, hostile, beautiful desert: “Now’s your chance to prove you can do more than sit on your tail complaining and drinking sapphire wine with your tears of self-pity. Come on, come and do battle with me, come and fight me. I'm more than a match for you. I'll devour you if I can, but I'll do it cleanly and openly, not with words and dark little tanks in Limbo. Don't be afraid of human death and human age. I've seen it all, and I know it. It's just dust blown over the rocks. Look at me, how dead and old I seem, and yet, watch me grow, watch me live. Come on. Come and find me. I'm waiting.” Will the narrator find a way to stop drinking sapphire wine and to live a “real” life? What gender body will he (she?) choose to live out his (her) life in? Will he (she?) go crazy in isolated exile in the desert? Will dome city life continue carrying on stagnantly and safely without him (her?)? Like the first novel, this one is bleak and humorous, Lee revealing how, despite all their gender and body changes, people remain essentially the same, and how living an immortal life of ease with robots doing all the work and androids making all the decisions may not be so enjoyable, if you are a thinking person who wants to live a meaningful life. There are some neat surprises and twists and developments and characters. I like the love between the Jang Danor and the Older Person Kam and between Hatta the Horror and the narrator. I like the narrator trying to make “My Garden” in the desert. I like the benevolent QR Committee starting to act a little less benevolently. And the rediscovery of the ancient human past here and there is neat. I also liked the Jang slang used (though it’s really not necessary, because Lee uses plenty of regular slang): “My name’s Esten,” he said. “Derisann to meet you.” “Damn you, you’ve got a farathooming bloody cheek. What are you up to, you bastard? What’s the grakking game, you--” I like the decadent sf descriptions: “Kley was female right now which meant watch out, but when I glanced about, in a new body. Dazzling. Hair like lava, eyes like raw gold, skin like polished brass, and dressed to kill in see-through pattern with gold daggers, and with a brazen skull--of all antique masterpieces--grinning on her groin shield.” The novel is pretty conservative re gender despite all the gender changing. There are hints of the narrator in her female body being attracted to another Jang in a female body, but she never acts on that and remains heterosexual, like almost everybody she knows (apart from her makers—parents—who do live together as males). Though it is neat to find out that Hatta became female for a while to try to understand the narrator, he says he’s 80% male, and everyone is predominantly one or the other. There are no hermaphrodites or neither nor or neutral or non-gendered bodies; there are only male or female bodies. Although the novel is promoting living a real life in the real world rather than in a druggy VR, does Lee make it too easy (via “water mixer” machines etc.) for the narrator to make her My Garden in the desert? There apparently aren’t any predators, and the insects don’t bite or bother but just make pleasing whispering noises with their wings. Is this really “real” life?! Anyway, for 1977, the novel feels ahead of its time and is a compact, strong, stimulating read, and fans of Tanith Lee (like me!) should like it. View all my reviews
To Live Forever by Jack Vance
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Perhaps there is a touch of the Weird in all of us After accidentally killing a rival newspaper man seven years ago, the Grayven Warlock had to feign his own death, abandon his immortal Amaranth class, and start living under an assumed identity as Gavin Waylock (one wonders why he chose a name so similar to his real one!). Gavin’s ambition is to work his way from the bottom Brood rank back up to his true Amaranth status. Complicating his agenda is the Jaycinth Martin, a newly minted immortal 19-year-old Amaranth beauty discovers Gavin’s secret, conceives an implacable hatred for him as a “Monster,” and Welcome to “Clarges, the last metropolis of the world,” an ancient, futuristic sf uber-city of skyscrapers “tall enough to intercept passing clouds,” tubes, slide-ways, and air-cabs, and myriad shops and millions of denizens. Its outstanding feature (that makes it the most envied/hated city in the world) is being a sealed culture forbidding immigration while offering citizens the chance to become immortal. The core of Clarges’ hyper democratic-capitalist system is the Fair-Play Act, whereby one’s public and social achievements are reflected in the angle of one’s “slope” as determined by the Actuarian computers. Careers are called “strivings,” and the steeper one’s slope, the farther and faster one may ascend through the five ranks of “phyle” (status), each with more years of healthier life than the last: Brood, Wedge, Arrant, Verge, and Amaranth. Amaranth bequeaths youthful immortality on the successful social climber, as well as the privilege of making five “surrogates” (clones) to serve as backups in case something unfortunate happens to you. The Jaycinth Martin was, in fact, 104 and running out of time when she became a 19-year-old Amaranth. The flaw in the Fair-Play Act is that, in order to prevent disastrous overpopulation (which 300 years before resulted in the near collapse of the civilization), people have time limits for ascending to each level, the failure to meet which results in visits from the Assassins. And for each new member of the Amaranth, about 2,000 people must be euthanized from the lower ranks in order to maintain the population at an optimum number. About a fifth of the populace opt out of the Fair-Play system, remaining (Dr. Seussian) “glarks” who live a mere 82 years and have low social status. The stress of striving to ascend through the phyle to Amaranth (“Up the slope, devil take the hindmost”) and of being aware that one’s clock is ticking turns an increasing number of Clarges denizens into unorganized “Weirds” lurking in the shadows to stone citizens punished in the Cage of Shame or into members of cult-like political groups like the Whitherers or to let off steam in Carnevalle, a Las Vegas-like adult theme park where “Compunction no longer existed; virtue and vice had no meaning.” Due to all the mental illnesses afflicting the stressed-out citizenry, Gavin decides to start working at a Palliatory (mental hospital), caring for a ward full of “cattos” (cationic-maniac syndrome patients), reckoning that such work may earn him enough “career points” to move up-slope quickly. Unfortunately for Gavin, the obsessed Jaycinth Martin starts drawing upon the formidable resources of the Amaranths and Assassins to relentlessly persecute the “Monster.” The picaresque story is compact and unpredictable. Vance’s vision of capitalist dog-eat-dog competition whose ultimate goal is immortality is interesting. He writes neat set-piece scenes, like a Pan Arts Union exhibition of the water sculptures of a spaceship navigator and the skits of a professional mime and a Zoom-like meeting for the 229th conclave of the Amaranth society to decide if Gavin Waylock is martyr or monster. He sketches concise, vivid, often grotesque descriptions of characters (e.g., "a bushy dark-browed man crouched over his desk like a dog over a bone") and sets them verbally fencing with his anti-hero, as when the Jaycinth explains her fervid persecution of Gavin by saying, “I'm an ordinary person with strong feelings,” and Gavin warningly replies, “So am I.” Dry Vance-isms abound, like “I find your humor superfluous,” and “Who is hated more than the lucky bungler.” Violence breaks out suddenly and unpredictably. While for the majority of Clarges citizens “Death is the vilest word in the language, the ultimate obscenity” (“transition” being the preferred term), some, like a Whitherer woman Gavin gets to know, suspect that “all people have a desire for dissolution.” Vance’s 1956 novel is an sf satire of 20th-century American culture, with superior health care for the wealthy, almost everyone engaged in a competitive race to the top, and everyone vulnerable to succumbing to a variety of psychological disorders due to the stress of that competition. As a character says, “Perhaps there is a touch of the Weird in all of us.” The novel does suggest a path to sanity and viability: looking outward from one’s hermetically “safe” home, including a spaceship called the Star Enterprise seeking new worlds for humanity (which made me think that the Star Trek creators may have read this 1956 novel). The ending feels hurried, but fans of Vance or of vintage ahead-of-its-time sf should like the compact novel, which is well read by audiobook reader Kevin Kennerly. View all my reviews
Don't Bite the Sun by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Dystopic Eutopia; or Having Everything (Except a Meaningful Life) Is Droad In some future on some planet in a dome-enclosed city called Four BEE, the anonymous 25-year-old first-person narrator (who’s usually but not always female) introduces us to the hedonistic, empty lives of her culture’s Jang (youth). Thanks to their post-scarcity civilization’s advanced technology, including robot servitors and QR (Quasi-Robot, or android) caretakers, the narrator and her fellow Jang are immortal and work-free, but without anything meaningful or real to do they spend their time going to the Dimension Palace (to experience umpteen dimensions) or to the Dream Rooms (to design and experience dream sagas) or shopping (and in the narrator’s case shoplifting) or taking drugs like “ecstasy” or eating by “meal injection” or having sex (“having love”) with each other physically or telepathically (though usually they get briefly “married” first). Attended by their personal “bees,” little floating machines who keep an eye on them, they get about via things like the movi-rail or the Body Displacer (which disorients them and may result in a lost mole) or personal bird-planes (which they often intentionally crash). When overly bored, they indulge in sabotage or suicide (the novel begins, “My friend Hergal had killed himself again”). If they manage to kill themselves, they wake up in Limbo in a new body. In fact, they can change gender and physical appearance as often as they wish (including getting bodies with wings or two heads etc.), though the QRs may make them wait for sixty “units” (days) if they’ve donned too many new bodies too soon. The Jang speak their own language—the novel has been translated into our English—with some words remaining untranslated like drumdik (ghastly), farathoom (bloody fucking hell), droad (bored), and derisann (beautiful). Diligent readers will find themselves either learning the slang or consulting the glossary. The Jang may have “makers” (parents) from among the Older People, the narrator’s being “kinky,” not because they’re currently both male but because they decided to stay together with her, though they don’t seem to spend much time advising or educating her and don’t recognize her when she shows up at home in a new body. The novel concerns the narrator’s quest to find a way to live a fulfilling life amid all that “eutopic” ultra-hedonism. This involves her trying to mature out of the Jang category (the QR counselor advises her to wait at least another quarter “rorl” or century), to find meaningful work (the few jobs consist of pressing buttons or turning dials at the direction of computers), to make a baby (the act requiring a male partner she can’t presently drum up), to have an archeological desert adventure (the glar, or professor, in charge just wants to lecture to his volunteers). And so on. She’s unhappy, ending the first part of the novel crying all night after exiling herself from her own social circle. Luckily, she has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor, so it’s fun to read her escapades accompanied by her furry white pet, a bit like a dog, a bit like a cat, a bit like a naughty child, given to biting on a whim. As the narrator takes it all for granted, Lee gives no detailed “scientific” explanations for the super technology of her brave new world. She does write some passages of austere, sublime sf beauty, like this: “Night bloomed over Four BEE, and I went out walking along ancient, non-moving paths, the pet dogging my heels, playing with its shadow and mine, blackly cast from us by the big stars and the jeweled signs sizzling between the buildings.” It’s a funny book, as in the following passage: “Anyway, I told him I'm here now so you might as well go on with testing me. I suppose I'll have to pay whatever happens. He looked slightly embarrassed, but rode it well. Of course he could, he said, if it would set my mind at rest. (Bland Diplomacy in Dealing with Jang Female Barbarian.)” It’s a compact novel and for 1976 a bit risqué in terms of gender, sex, and drugs. Lee is exaggerating the late hippy-era culture of the 1970s, free to do anything but unable to find anything meaningful to do. The frequent gender changes and hedonistic future civ recall Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, also published in 1976. Speaking of gender, a dated aspect of Lee’s novel is that they can only make a viable human baby with a soul from half of a female maker and from half of a male one, which seems odd given all the gender switching going on in their future. And you can only make a baby by combining the “life-spark” from two different genders AND from two different people: you can’t give half of your self as a female and then later change into a male body to give the other half. After all, it’s a binary gender world. Although anyone can change gender back and forth any number of times, everyone is always either male or female, with one or the other gender being “predominant,” such that the narrator usually chooses female bodies, her friend Hergal male ones, and so on, but nobody chooses gender neutral or gender ambiguous or hermaphrodite bodies. It ends up feeling confining rather than liberating (which may be the point). Finally, Lee’s future world is a dystopia because the “good” elements are oriented around appearance rather than fulfillment, so that even though the benevolent QRs want the best for their human charges, they haven’t devised a way to make them happy by providing them meaningful things to do or vital ways to grow. The novel is a plea for authentic, living life, as opposed to our virtual realities of media and art, as when the narrator, in the desert outside her dome city for the first time, says, “It’s all beautiful and real, and throbbing and singing and alive!” I’d like to see what Lee does with all this in the sequel, Drinking Dandelion Wine (1977). View all my reviews
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
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 |
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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