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
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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
The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Vivre le difference,” but too much contrived suspense Best friend lovers Lisa “Lee” Chandrapraiar (studying zoology) and Elsinore “Mal” Mallory (literature) are into “cryptozoology,” hunting legendary monsters (“crypoids”) on YouTube, when at 19 they get onto the trail of a “birdman,” visit a rural farm in the South of England, and at the site of three standing stones strangely called the Six Brothers discover that actually finding a monster brings terror and loss. This starts the plot of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel The Doors of Eden (2020), which, in addition to Lee and Mal, features the transgender genius mathematician/physicist Dr. Kay Amal Kahn, MI5 agents Alison “Matchbox” Matchell and Julian “Spiker” Sabreur, nationalist-fascist-xenophobe-homophobe wealthy businessman Daniel Rove and his military-veteran thug Lucas May, as well as an assortment of “monsters,” aliens from a variety of alternate Earths where alternate time lines have produced alternate evolutionary paths and sentient beings, from pacifist Neanderthals, dinosaur-bird-people, and rat-ferret-people to immortal vast spaceship trilobites, frozen fish computers, and an ediacran sponge thing covering an entire Earth. As a character says at one point, “Vivre le difference.” “Their Earth was part of a sequence of variables, each one branching off from the next… and now the principles that had separated them were failing.” Yes, Tchaikovsky is developing a theme present in his sf like the Children trilogy and in his fantasy like Redemption’s Blade: although the alien Other is often terrifying, cultures are stronger in proportion to the amount of difference they accept from within and without. He likes to depict aliens interacting with each other as he tries to make us open our eyes and minds and get past difference to find common ground. Repeatedly in his work, he arranges things so that embracing the other leads to survival and thriving (“Difference is strength”), while remaining unable to handle “Bugs and monkeys and vermin and queers” leads to collapse and death. Tchaikovsky excels at imagining different ways of living and being and thinking according to different environments and variables. Here he inserts between chapters excerpts from a book on alternate evolutionary paths of different Earths, with a variety of sentience and civilization, including scorpions, cockroaches, mollusks, trilobites, spiders, monkeys, and more. And his writing is clean, witty, and fast-paced. However, I found this book less impressive than the others of his I’ve read. For one thing, he writes only human point of view characters (while I loved the spider and octopus and microorganism aliens of the Children trilogy). His point of view characters come in a varied group (lesbian, trans, hetero; military, MI5, scientist; evil mastermind, good; white, dark; etc.), but they’re all human and all British. Furthermore, I regret his making the trans woman Dr. Khan a foul-mouthed chain-smoker who doesn’t emit any genius mathematician-physicist vibe. The characterization of Khan is stereotypically female as a man and stereotypically male as a woman, and it’s never easy to believe that she’s a unique genius vital to the survival of multiple alternate Earths. And for the sake of his non-stop frantic action plot, too many of his characters do unbelievable things given their character development, like Lee, Julian, and Alison being too xenophobic at key points, given their experiences and situations. And the reverse movement happens with the Neanderthal types, who early on perform (offstage) sensational ultra-violence in beating a few white nationalist thugs to death with furniture but later are said to be, due to their biology, environment, and culture, averse to conflict and violence. A related problem is that the fractures between the alternate Earths are too plot convenient, letting Tchaikovsky do all sorts of suspense-inducing tricks at will by opening “doors” between Earths and instantly moving people into or out of tight spots or not opening “doors” and keeping people where they are. At one point he has his characters fall into our Earth on the 80th floor of a tall building and then makes them climb up 15 flights of stairs to the top while everything’s breaking apart around them, when he could have just had them fall into our Earth on the top of the building, but then that wouldn't be so exciting. He works in plenty of popular culture references (because his story largely occurs in contemporary London), like Narnia, Star Wars, James Bond, Flatland, The Hills Have Eyes, The Lord of the Rings, Apocalypse Now. Such things are fun, but fix this novel in time more than his Children trilogy. Finally, Tchaikovsky does nifty things with alternate endings based on alternate choices made by the characters that along with the wonderful excerpts from the book on evolutionary biology in between chapters (almost) makes the book a four-star novel for me. But though I’ll surely read more books by him, this one was rather forgettable. View all my reviews
Derai by E.C. Tubb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Dumarest in Love with a Fragile Telepath In Derai (1968), the second book in E. C. Tubb’s 33-volume (!) Dumarest series, E. C. Tubb’s hero Earl Dumarest, a penniless traveler searching for Earth, has made it to Kyle, a tourist world holding a festival celebrating life and death with all these creatures in the sky mating and being fought over and eaten (not unlike krill and larger predators in the sea), while on the ground hucksters tout VR torture and sex: “Hey, you there! Want to know what it’s like to be burned to death? Full-sense feelies give you the thrill of a lifetime! Genuine recordings of impalement, live-burial, flaying, dismemberment and many more. Sixteen different types of torture! You feel it, sense it, know what it’s like. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Dumarest is there earning a pittance by fighting people for entertainment. When his sadistic fighter partner Nada suggests pairing up with him, he refuses, quits the business, and runs into a monk of the (possibly benevolent) Universal Brotherhood who arranges for him to escort a strange silver-haired, long-necked aristocratic young woman called Lady Derai of House Caldor to her homeworld, Hive. Dumarest reckons that Derai’s fears that someone is trying to kill her are mere paranoia and takes the job because he wants to go to Hive anyway and because his pay will be two expensive High space travel tickets. He soon discovers that Derai is a telepath (a handy ability for gambling) and that she and he are falling in love. On Hive, Tubb introduces more point of view characters: Derai’s bastard half-brother Blaine (musing about the fate by which their father didn’t marry his mother but did marry hers and about how the suitable motto of their House, “the Grasping Hand”); her uncle Emil (wanting to keep Derai under wraps to exploit her telepathy in the service of the House commerce in a jelly called ambrosaria made by mutated super bees); her cousin Ustar (a real aristo piece of work, sadistic, spoiled, entitled, and reckoning that he’ll marry Derai and control the House); the Old Man (the House patriarch kept alive on ambrosaria as a rotting vegetative bag of guts); and Regor (the House cyber, a creepy robotic man really working for “The power of central intelligence, the tremendous cybernetic complex which was the mind and heart of the Cyclan,” which wants to rule the human galaxy). Oh, and, for the first time in the series, a person of color, Yamay, a shrewd black businessman who’ll help Dumarest as far as it’ll be profitable for him (and maybe a little farther). *Although Tubb has started introducing characters of color into his saga, he still isn’t writing LGBTQ characters (although Blaine perhaps leans a LITTLE that way vis-à-vis Dumarest). The story is a compact, lurid, page turning, fast moving, interesting, unpredictable, pulpy space opera. It will soon have Dumarest et al traveling to a third world to participate in a deadly competition reminiscent of a Hunger Games for adults. Neither young nor old, Dumarest is a tall and handsome loner who’s visited multiple worlds on his quest for his homeworld, the mythical Earth, which he knows is a blasted world with some life surviving underground, while people he asks about it often respond, “Earth? Every world has earth!” He’s not a superman, being capable of making mistakes and getting injured, but he’s fast, ruthless, clever, cool, compassionate, reliable, and aware. Belonging to the less is more ethos of the late 1960s and early 1970s sf publishing world, the novel has some neat sf writing: “He [Regor] became a living part of an organism which stretched across the galaxy in an infinity of crystalline sparkles, each the glowing nexus of naked intelligence. A skein of misty light connected the whole so that it seemed to be a shifting kaleidoscope of brilliance and form. He saw it and at the same time was a part of it, sharing and yet owning the incredible gestalt of minds.” Tubb writes some cool dialogue featuring the dry Dumarest: ‘Finish your wine,’ said Dumarest, ‘and learn something: trouble does not vanish because you run away from it.’ All that said, he can also write some corny and or stilted dialogue: “‘Eat, My Lady,’ he said curtly. Didn’t she realise the importance of food? ‘Eat,’ he said again, his tone more gentle. ‘It will do you good.’ ‘My name is Derai. Yours is Earl. Must we be so formal?’” There is some sixties sexism and too much of the hero (ala James Bond, Conan, and Captain Kirk) being too irresistible to women while not needing to end up tied down: “I like to keep moving.” The fragile Derai is dependent on Earl and given to nightmares and fears. “‘You are a strange man,’ she murmured. ‘I have never met anyone like you before. With you I could be a real woman—you have strength enough for us both.” Earl says brusque things to her like “Stop acting like a child.” She is another woman (like the Matriarch’s ward in the first novel) who lacks experience with the realities of life for the majority of people. Tubb’s bete noirs are cruel aristocrats like Ustar and cybers like Regor. He favors practical, hardworking, smart, outsider types like Yamay and Dumarest. Tubb’s vision is grim. Of the three worlds here, Kyle, Hive, and Folgone, none are any kind of utopia or arcadia. “Folgone was a bleak place, a world of ice and frozen gases, the single planet of a white dwarf star. The surface was sterile; what life existed was buried deep in gigantic caverns lit and warmed by radioactive elements … a sealed prison of a world from which there could be no unauthorised escape.” Of the characters, many are vile, and the relatively decent ones, like a few who get close to Dumarest, are unsafe. And there are plenty of bleak insights into human nature: “‘When are you going to learn that subconscious thoughts have nothing to do with intended action? We are all of us beasts,’ he added. ‘Most of us learn to correctly judge what we see and hear.’ It was a lesson he had tried to teach her during the entire journey. He’d had little success.” I am liking the Dumarest books plenty and will soon forge on to the third-- View all my reviews
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sublime SF and Human Choices, Changes, and Relationships Ken Liu says about The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020), “Rather than worrying about which stories would make the ‘best’ collection for imaginary readers I decided to stick with stories that most pleased myself.” Is that why I ended up preferring his earlier collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016)? The more recent collection makes a neat “meta-narrative,” as its nineteen well-written stories coalesce around ghosts, identity, memory, morality, technology, civilization, nature, and families, but the result is less varied than his earlier collection. 1. Ghost Days Three times, places, and protagonists: 2313 Nova Pacifica and a "human" girl bioengineered to suit her toxic world; 1989 East Norbury CT and a Chinese immigrant trying to fit in to high school; 1905 Hong Kong and an anglicized young man trying to understand his father. Past and future, parents and children, immigrants and aliens, story and authenticity: “Digging into the past was an art of comprehension, making sense of the universe.” 4 stars. 2. Maxwell's Demon During WWII, the US authorities force a Japanese American woman to “defect” to Japan to spy on Japanese scientists, one of whom hopes to find a “demon” to separate fast moving air molecules from slow ones to get more energy. Can or should Takako train the ghosts of Chinese slave laborers killed by the Japanese? “No matter what she did people would die.” 4 stars 3. The Reborn Aliens who conquered Earth are now seemingly benign immigrants marrying cooperative earthlings. The human protagonist’s job catching vengeful xenophobic humans leads him to upsetting questions about his past, memory, and identity. 3 stars. 4. Thoughts and Prayers A family falls apart when a mass shooter kills one of two daughters, and the mother has a VR documentary made about her daughter’s life, so internet trolls target her despite her digital “armor,” all highlighting memory, reality, technology, and American “freedom” and guns. 5 stars 5. Byzantine Empathy Virtual reality, crypto currency, human disasters, charities. Liu tells the story from the point of view of two women who were university roommates and now have very different ideas about how to make the world a better place based on empathy or reason. 4 stars 6. The Gods Will Not Be Chained Bullied at school, Maddie is missing her deceased father when she’s contacted via chat window and emojicons by his digitally uploaded consciousness. Will such post-humans be content doing the same work they did when human? (Liu imposes a dramatic limit on his digital mind stories: consciousness cannot be uploaded without destroying the original.) 4 stars. 7. Staying Behind A small number of mortal human beings refuse to have their consciousnesses uploaded to join the digital post-human colony of immortal minds. What happens when the mortal narrator has to deal with his daughter and her boyfriend making a different choice? 4 stars. 8. Real Artists Satire on the use of computers and technology in making movies that strike emotional chords with the audience. Are the movie makers artists? Or is the software the artist? 3 stars. 9. The Gods Will Not Be Slain An unseen digital war: resentful uploaded post-human gods decide to destroy human civilization by goading mutually hostile countries into starting wars, while some uploaded post-human gods like the father of Maddie from the earlier story try to thwart them. 4 stars 10. Altogether Elsewhere Vast Herds of Reindeer Real Earth reverts to flora and fauna as 300 billion “human beings” live in a data center as uploaded consciousnesses, communicating via thought and designing multi-dimensional worlds. A mother takes her daughter on an eye-opening real world day trip: “Anything real must die.” 4 stars 11. The Gods Have Not Died in Vain Maddie and her cloud-born digital sister Mist (“a creature of pure computation, never having existed in the flesh”) try to prevent the uploaded “gods” from returning to life, but life in a data center without bodies, death, or rich/poor is appealing after a world of scarcity. Aren’t we all just electric signals anyway? 4 stars 12. Memories of My Mother A strange and moving relationship: a 25-year-old mother with two more years to live makes time with her daughter last longer via lots of fast space travel, so that, while not really aging, she meets her daughter when she’s a little girl, 17, 33, and 80. 4 stars 13. Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts A wealthy hermit philosopher floats around on “Old Blue” (earth) above Sunken Boston after all the ice caps have melted and drowned most of the cities. Humanity’s capacity for adaptation to and exploitation of nature: “We dare not stop striving to find out who we are.” 3 stars 14. Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard In the far future, a midden-miner sifts through the detritus of the ancients like plastics and electrical circuits, until to save her brother she becomes a hero wererabbit in a world where godlike wereanimals abuse their powers as they rule over and exploit the common people. 4 stars 15. A Chase Beyond the Storms Not a story but a cliffhanger appetizer from the third novel of the Dandelion Dynasty: princess Thera of Dara and her fiancé prince of Agon make it past the wall of storms only to discover they’re being pursued by an enemy city ship equipped with flying dragon-cows. 2 stars 16. The Hidden Girl A general’s daughter from 8th-century Tang Dynasty China is stolen by a nun who trains her to be a multi-dimensional super assassin. Morality and power and ramifications. What will the girl do when told to kill a governor as her graduation test? 4 stars 17. Seven Birthdays The narrator’s relationships with her “mad scientist” mother and her own daughter through birthdays, from age seven to age 823,543 (!), when digital post-humanity has spread throughout the galaxy terraforming worlds and turning planets into giant solar-powered computers. “There is always a technical solution,” but there’s also always human darkness. 4 stars 18. The Message A father who’s never met his 13-year-old daughter Maggie (Liu’s third red-haired Maggie, including The Paper Menagerie stories) takes her to work with him, recording 20,000-year-old alien ruins and translating their message on a planet soon to be blank-slated and terraformed by humanity. The neat ideas on alien human “contact,” uranium, and parental responsibility cross into contrivance and sentimentality. 3 stars 19. Cutting A prose poem story: for generations some monks have been cutting “unnecessary words from their holy book so that over time it has come to look like lace, “like a dissolving honeycomb,” and only words like “experience,” “is,” and “forget” remain. 5 stars In his stories Liu pushes human boundaries and explores ways in which technology transforms society, relationships, and identities. What will happen to humanity if we abandon our bodies to become digital minds or expand throughout the galaxy terraforming planets? He views such issues from multiple sides, making it difficult to decide what we’d do. And his relevant ideas and sublime sf are grounded in human relationships (e.g., parents and children) and experiences (e.g., losing loved ones to time, work, or violence). The four readers of the audiobook are all fine. View all my reviews
The Winds of Gath by E.C. Tubb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Compact, Pulpy, Gritty, Philosophical, Political, and Bleak Space Opera Mark Monday’s fun reviews of the early books in E. C. Tubb’s 33-volume (!) Dumarest series made me dive in. The first book, The Winds of Gath (1967), is a compact space opera: pulpy, sexy (a little), tricky, philosophical, political, imaginative, violent, and bleak. The novel starts with Earl Dumarest waking up from being “doped, frozen, ninety per cent dead” in one of the many “coffin-like boxes” in “the steerage for travellers willing to gamble against the fifteen per cent mortality rate.” He learns that he didn’t reach his contracted destination world because a powerful party had the ship rerouted to planet Gath. This is a problem because whereas his target world had a viable economy that would enable him, a “penniless traveler,” to earn the money to go elsewhere, Gath is a tourist planet famed for its winds blowing through mountain caves, rumored to sound like voices from people from your past. Will Dumarest be permanently stuck on Gath? Tubb distinguishes between tourists, who have the money to space “travel High,” which is safer and easier, and sightsee rather than work, and travelers like Dumarest, who have no savings and need to “travel Low,” which is unhealthier and riskier, and work hard wherever they go to scrape together enough money to travel Low to another world. In addition to Dumarest, numerous point of view characters propel the story. There’s Dumarest’s hapless acquaintance Megan (“Man, am I sorry to see you!”) who’s been stranded on Gath for over a year and is on the verge of dying there. There’s the octogenarian Matriarch of Kund, who’s guarded by taciturn, masculine women, rules over a system of worlds, and has diverted Dumarest’s spaceship to Gath because her ward Seena Thoth, a lovely, naïve young lady, has been the target of assassination attempts. The Matriarch’s advisor Dyne is a “Cyber,” ostensibly giving objective and rational counsel because he was modified at an early age: “He was a coldly logical machine of flesh and blood, a detached, dispassionate human robot.” Cybers belong to the Cyclan, a “gestalt” of telepathically linked brains with long-term plans for ruling all inhabited worlds, because, being freed from emotion, they think they’ll do a better job than humans can do. Indeed, the decadent “Prince of Emmened who had ruined a world by his whims and would ruin more unless stopped by an assassin,” is a malign tourist who gets his jollies from ravishing young ladies or watching his trained fighter Moidor (!) kill strangers. Luckily, the Church of Universal Brotherhood sends monks out “striving to turn men from what they were into what they should be,” and one of them, Ely, is humane and shames the slimy authorities of Gath for exploiting travelers. Tubb complicates his “good” figures, though, so the monks travel High and hand out communion-like wafers treated with euphoric drugs whose effects wear off, so Megan regularly attends their services to maintain his wafer high. The plot has Dumarest trying to survive till he can work up the money to get to another planet and other characters preparing for the winds of Gath while tending to murky matters. It proceeds to an apocalyptic climax with sanity compromising wind voices, multiple assassination attempts, a magic mirror, a tricky coffin, a foiled plot, a damsel in distress (with frostbitten feet), and more. Throughout, Tubb’s writing is lean and able, capable of sublime flights and lurid fancies, and endowed with the less-is-more ethos of 1960s and 70s SF. Dynamic description: “It came with a continuous rolling of thunder which tore at the ears and numbed the senses. The lightning was a web of electric fire across the sky, stabbing at the ground, searing wetly into the sea. The rain was a deluge, pounding the ground into mud, turning the air almost solid with its moisture.” Neat SF writing: “With shocking abruptness, the universe slowed down. It hadn’t, of course. It was just that his own metabolism, reflexes and sensory apparatus had suddenly begun operating at almost forty times the normal rate. The danger lay in accepting the illusion of a slowed universe as reality.” Corny dialogue: “You will wear earmuffs at all times. Do you understand? You will not attempt to listen to the noises of Gath. Now go!” Tubb’s characterization is rudimentary, but the Matriarch has depth (e.g., “A man, dust for over eighty years, now talking and breathing at her side, his voice, his beloved voice, soft in her ears”). And in hardboiled Dumarest’s past lurk a beloved father figure and an unidentified lover, though “He was not a man who regretted the past. Not when the future looked so black.” He can kill at a pinch, but although he opines that “In combat there are no rules” and will kick your knee if he can’t reach your groin, he’s no sadist. He helps people in trouble and not only to win favors. He has a goal: rather than aimlessly traveling around from planet to planet, he’s moving “deeper and deeper into the inhabited worlds” as he tries to find Earth, his home. To other people, Earth is a myth, to Dumarest, a “desert, a barren wilderness in which nothing grows. It is scarred with old wounds, littered with the ruins of bygone ages. But there is life, of a kind, and ships come to tend that life.” In addition to the dying Earth, the novel boasts plenty of SF stuff: various worlds of various cultures, including (gasp!) at least two Matriarchies; space travel; the ability to slow down or speed up time for individuals; cybernetic advisors; exotic weapons like vibratory darts. Some of it smacks of hyper 60s western culture, like the many drugs, the great medical care for the rich, the tourism industry, the admen, and the fear of (or attraction to) strong women in charge. So far, much on income gaps: “There was a romance clinging to the concept of slavery which appealed to the rich.” So far, no alien aliens, just a variety of human beings. So far, no people of color or LGBTQ people: Dumarest and Seena are very white hetero. There are interesting moments where characters muse on human nature and life, like the paradox between people being animals but having higher selves, the “perversity in human nature which gloried at the bestialisation of its own kind,” the belief that “Life is a lottery,” and the hope that “the travellers might take a hand in their own destiny.” There are loose ends: vanishing characters, telepathic animals, Dumarest’s past, etc. But you gotta love a space opera that ends: “A gust of wind swept from the mountains and he heard the music of Gath. Deeper now, slower, but quite unmistakable. The empty sound of inane, gargantuan laughter.” If you like Jack Vance and especially Barrington J. Bayley, you should try Tubb. I’m on to book 2 in the series! View all my reviews
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars When Racism More Pernicious than Lovecraftian Horror In Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) the eight stories make a composite novel about the African American Turner and Berry families and their friends as they encounter the malign Adamite Order of the Ancient Dawn, an organization of white natural philosophers (call them wizards or alchemists at your peril) scattered across the USA in big cities like Chicago and tiny towns like Ardham (not Arkham!). The Turners et al have to deal especially with the descendants of the Order’s 18th-century founder, Titus Braithwhite, namely the amoral mad occult scientist Samuel Braithwhite and his son Caleb (pretty “likeable for a white guy” but may be the devil incarnate). Each story features a different point of view protagonist and a different supernatural challenge. Initially bemused by the supernatural, the characters quickly accept it and try to deal with it. After all, they have grown up in Jim Crow America, always having to be very careful around white people, whose natural dangers have prepared them for the supernatural ones. Here is an annotated list of the stories: The novella “Lovecraft Country” reveals to Atticus Turner, a 22-year-old African American Korean war vet, the existence in 1954 Jim Crow America of weird things like those he’s read of in H. P. Lovecraft stories: a mysterious silver car, an unseen powerful noisy thing in the woods, a community of serfs living around a manor house, an occult cult of natural philosophers, and a portentous ritual. But maybe the scariest and most dangerous things are everyday white people like racist policemen. In addition to Atticus, the story features his wise uncle George Turner (publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide!), his feisty childhood friend Letitia Dandridge, and his spicy father Montrose. 4 stars. After Letitia buys the very haunted Winthrop House in a white neighborhood in Chicago in “Dreams of the Which House,” she then stubbornly attempts to get the white ghost if not the neighborhood to accept her (You don’t want to play poker? How about chess?). This real estate deal can’t have some connection with Caleb Braithwaite, can it? 4 stars. “Abdullah’s Book” concerns a notebook of back wages (plus interest) owed a family slave ancestor, Caleb Braithwaite, a scary and comedic Chicago Museum of Natural History heist of an occult Book of Names attempted by some members of the Prince Hall Freemasons (including George, Montrose, Atticus, and a small and eager dentist), and a surprising and almost satisfying conclusion. 4 stars In “Hippolyta Disturbs the Universe,” Hippolyta, “a giantess and a negress” and a scout for husband George’s The Safe Negro Travel Guide, as well as an amateur astronomer, visits Warlock Hill in Wisconsin to check out the observatory of the somewhat deceased Order of the Ancient Dawn member Hiram Winthrop and finds herself looking through a telescope at another world and then having to decide whether or not to jump through a “doorway” into it. Some strange, sublime sf: “She steadied herself and turned around, to find Ida staring at her from several feet and thrillions of miles away.” 4 stars In “Jekyll in Hyde Park,” Letitia’s sister Ruby (an accepting and deferring doormat) comes in for some serious temptation by learning firsthand how much easier her life would be white. Is the mysterious and creepily clean-cut Caleb Braithwhite “the devil”? Or just “a man who knows what he wants and how to get it?” The story is my least favorite, partly because I can’t believe pious Ruby would do what she does in it. 3 stars “The Narrow House” is devastating. Caleb B makes another offer that can’t be refused, sending Montrose and Atticus to find Hiram Winthrop’s son Henry Winthrop, who ran away to be with a black maid, with whom he had a son of his own, so they can retrieve some potent books from the guy. This story highlights “the horror, the most awful thing, to have a child the world wants to destroy it to know you’re helpless to help him” in the context of racism and the horrifying Tulsa Massacre. 4 stars To get intelligence on his mother, in “Horace and the Devil Doll” the Chicago branch of the Order targets Horace, the sweet, creative, imaginative, and asthmatic twelve-year-old son of Hippolyta and George Berry. It features a nasty spittle curse and a creepy pygmy African witchdoctor devil doll. Can Caleb B help? At what cost? 3.5 stars 8. The Mark of Cain This story depicts the climactic showdown between rival members of the Order of the Ancient Dawn from Chicago and Ardham trying to wipe each other out, with Atticus as the prize, without reckoning on the formidable interference of the Turner and Berry and Dandridge families plus a few of their friends. I found it a bit over the top, unconvincing, and convenient. 3 stars The audiobook reader Kevin Kennerly does a fine job without over-dramatizing his voice for kids or women or old people or white or black people. He understands the story and reads it with enough enthusiasm and intelligence to enhance it. I enjoyed the book: it’s scary, funny, moving, and exciting. Ruff writes a straight-forward page turning story with teeth and heart. I like the references to Barsoom, Bradbury, and Lovecraft et al. (“But stories are like people, Atticus. Loving them doesn't make them perfect. You try to cherish their virtues and overlook their flaws. The flaws are still there, though.”) I got a kick out of Horace’s homemade comics about Orithyia Blue (inspired by his mother). I like the main characters and their relationships. The descriptions are vivid, the plots tight, and the dialogue often funny, especially via Montrose, like when he nails John Carter for being a Confederate officer or says things like, “You want me to go to Philadelphia and pick up the trail with my special Negro powers?” I like (painfully) the touches about racism in the US, which was worse in pre-Civil Rights era USA (e.g., in 1921 and the Tulsa massacre, which shaped the Turner and Berry families, and in 1954, when the story takes place, and, for example, black realtors couldn’t join the national realtor association) and which Ruff (as a white guy) has researched and thought and felt and imagined a lot about, and which also tell us a lot about how it’d feel to be a person of color today, because although things are better now, they are definitely not fair or equal either. By the way, in its depiction of a world in which the supernatural horrors are not worse than the discriminatory dangers the characters of color face in the USA, it resembles Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation books, though Ireland, unlike Ruff, is African American, and she’s writing supernatural alternate history while he writes supernatural historical fiction. And Victor la Valle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is more Lovecraftian in spirit than Ruff's novel. View all my reviews
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Necromancers and Cavaliers in an SF Mystery Romance “In the Myriadic Year of Our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the Kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.” Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth (2019) starts with the 86th attempt 18-year-old Gideon has made to escape from the House of the Ninth: Keepers of the Locked Tomb, House of the Sewn Tongue, the Black Vestals, where reanimated skeleton servants outnumber the living, who paint their faces like skulls, use soap made from human fat, eat snow leaks, and do without weather or sunlight. Gideon’s life as an indentured servant in the decayed necromantic House (“high on ancient shitty treasures but low on liquid assets”) buried in “the darkest hole of the darkest planet and the darkest part of the system” has been boring and gloomy and lonely. When Gideon’s anonymous mother dropped in, dropped Gideon, and died, all 200 children of the Ninth then present quickly succumbed to some virus that somehow spared Gideon and her lone enemy-playmate-mistress Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, Heir to the Ninth House. Well, no wonder Gideon wants to abscond to join the army! This time she’ll surely succeed, won’t she? Alas, 17-year-old Harrowhark foils Gideon’s attempt at the last second to inflict maximum pain on her long-time whipping girl, whom she then informs must become her cavalier, her sworn swordswoman/companion of the “one flesh, one end” variety, which means that she has to take a crash course in manners and fencing (after growing up fighting with a two-handed longsword) and paint her face skull white, all in order to enter with Harrowhark an unprecedented competition to be held at the First House among the top necromancer adepts and their cavaliers from the Second to the Ninth Houses. The winner is to become Lyctor, “an undying necromantic saint” and disciple to the Emperor. If Harrowhark wins, she’ll ostensibly set Gideon free from the Ninth House. Gideon decides to play along. After Gideon and Harrow arrive at Canaan House, the beautiful, dilapidated, labyrinthine site of the competition, the novel speeds up, as they meet a variety of strange and savory “people,” including the priest-host Teacher and the competition: the Second House’s martial discipline pair, the Third’s twin adepts (one gorgeous, one wan) and snide cavalier, the Fourth’s naïve and jumpy fourteen-year-old boy and girl, the Fifth’s hospitable middle-aged couple, the Sixth’s ultra-cool library-medicine experts, the Seventh’s dying adept and hulking cavalier, and the Eighth’s puritanical young uncle adept and stolid old nephew cavalier. Except for being advised not to open locked doors, the competition has no guidelines or rules. Muir does employ rules for her magic system, based on Thanergy (death energy) and Thalergy (life energy), which enable Bone, Flesh, and Spirit magics. One neat touch is that because the void of space has no life and hence no death, travel between planets is risky for necromancers, because they can’t do their usual stuff then. Another neat touch is Harrowhark’s ability to conjure up skeletons from bone fragments: “From as little as a buried femur, a hidden tibia, skeletons formed for Harrow in perfect wholeness, and as Gideon neared their mistress, a tidal wave of reanimated bones crested down on her.” Although the novel at first looks like a standard YA story about an unappreciated and unloved orphan who is super talented and Destined for Big Things, albeit set in an necromantic solar system, it morphs into an And Then There Were None murder mystery and a Hunger Games last one standing challenge and even a cracked romance. And in the end Muir bracingly feels no need to fulfill reader expectations. I enjoyed reading this book because I cared about the characters and wanted to find out what would happen and who would survive and who was the villain and why. I especially loved the hostile odd-couple relationship between Gideon (“Griddle” or “Nav” to Harrowhark) and Harrowhark (Harrow or “my crepuscular queen” to Gideon). They are contrasting and complementing frenemies whose banter is amusing and whose backgrounds reveal unexpected depths. Harrow is a brilliant, stick-like, unhealthy (sweating blood and passing out when overdoing the necromancy), adept heir, Gideon a muscular, physical (“thinking with her arms”), instinctive, cavalier orphan. Can they get in formation to win let alone survive the competition? Or will they just act all “Touch me again, and I’ll kill you” and “I hate it when you act like a butt-touched nun”? Lots of exciting violent action: blades, bone constructs, duels, boss fights, and the like. The climax is full scale and the resolution surprising and moving. And it’s well written—I found myself constantly cracking up and jotting down great figures of speech or lines or descriptions, like-- Similes: “Crux advanced like a glacier with an agenda.” “So with extreme reluctance, as of an animal not wanting to take medicine, Gideon tilted her face up to get painted.” “… eyes glittering like beetles beneath the veil, mouth puckered up like a cat's asshole.” “Harrow slithered more deeply underneath the covers like a bad black snake...” “Cold air wheezed out like a pent-up ghost.” Lines: “Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.” “She wouldn't have passed muster with a glaucomic nun in a room with the lights shot out.” Dialogue “Your vow of silence is variable, Ninth.” “I'm variably penitent.” Description: “It was just simply suddenly there, like a nightmare, a squatting vertiginous hulk, a nonsense of bones feathering into long spidery legs, leaning back on them fearfully and daintily, trailing jellyfish stingers made-up of millions and millions of teeth, all set into each other like a jigsaw. It shivered its stingers, then stiffened all of them at once with a sound like a cracking whip. There was so much of it.” The boss fight goes on a little too long. And it is improbable that with their 10,000-year history, including lots of scientific and necromantic research and interplanetary (at least) space travel and space shuttles, they’d no longer use guns. But it was a great read, a little like Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Empire of the Necromancers” (1932), but with compelling characters, amusing conversations, and moving revelations, and I’m looking forward to the second book. Especially as it’s read by the splendid Moira Quirk. View all my reviews
Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Manners, Emotions, and Identity in a Colonial Context Ancillary Sword (2014), Anne Leckie’s second Imperial Radch Trilogy book, begins a week after the end of the first novel, Ancillary Justice (2013). A civil war has broken out between two factions of the myriad clones of Anaander Mianaai, the three-thousand or so year old Emperor of the far-flung Radch empire. One is bent on constant expansion and annexation of ever more inhabited worlds, while the other wants to shrink the military, stop expanding, and stop making ancillaries for their sentient AI ships. (Ancillaries are human prisoners taken from annexed worlds and used as replaceable soldier/crew puppets by AI ships.) The protagonist Breq has aligned herself with the more pacifist Lord of the Radch, who has given her a new connection as a supposed relative, a new role as Fleet Captain, a new ship (the Mercy of Kalr), and a new mission: go to Athoek Station and secure it, its gate, and its planet for the “good” Emperor faction. Accompanying Breq are the experienced Lieutenants Seivarden and Ekalu and the “baby” Lieutenant Tisarwat, a teenager added by Anaander Mianaai at the last second. Breq senses something inconsistent in Tisarwat’s personality: the “good” Emperor couldn’t have given Breq Trojan Horse, could she? Breq is an interesting character, being a two-thousand-year-old former AI space warship (the Justice of Toren) who once had (at least) hundreds of ancillaries to enter and control at will but is now limited to a single “human” body, albeit with implants and enhancements permitting nearly instant access to ship and station AIs. Twenty years ago, the “bad” Anaander Mianaai faction destroyed Justice of Toren and all her ancillaries but one, Breq, who says things like, “I could almost forget that I wasn’t a ship anymore,” hums or sings songs from different cultures, and feels very human. Because she can access the sensors and data of the AI ship Mercy of Kalr and of the AI of Athoek Station, has two-thousand-years of experience with various human beings and aliens and their cultures, and is sensitive, observant, thoughtful, careful, and wise, Breq is a semi-omniscient first-person narrator who hears and sees and feels what everyone on the ship or in the station is saying, doing, and feeling at any time, limited mainly by her respect for other people’s privacy. It leads to moments like, “As she spoke I knew Seivarden was in stage two of NREM sleep. I saw pulse, temperature, respiration, blood, oxygen, hormone levels. Then that data was gone, replaced by Lieutenant Ekalu, standing watch. Stressed—jaw slightly clenched, elevated cortisol.” Leckie also plays a compelling narrative trick with gender, as the Radch no longer distinguish between genders, using female pronouns for everyone. And because Breq never describes anyone with our gender markers, we read most of the novel never knowing what gender the characters are! The only clues come when Breq interacts with people from Radch annexed worlds whose locals still notice gender. At one point, she refers to such a person as “she” in her narration but as “grandfather” when talking to “her,” and at another, she is corrected to understand that such a person has a “brother.” Similar clues in the first novel reveal that in our culture Breq may physically be female and Seivarden male, while some clues in this one reveal that Tisarwat may be male. But nothing they do confirms or refutes our idea of their gender. When Breq learns that one member of a couple is an abusive bully while the other is a compliant victim, we categorize the former as male and the latter as female based on our culture’s gender lens, but both characters are referred to as “she.” The net effect is similar to reading Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness: you forget about gender for long stretches and see people as people rather than as men or women. Once Mercy of Kalr arrives at Athoek Station, Breq immediately sets about improving the lives of the scorned and exploited locals and workers. As Athoek (the planet) is famous for producing the tea so vital to Radch culture and as the Radch authorities and tea plantation owners look down on the annexed people and treat them unequally and brutally, we realize that Leckie is using the Radch to comment on the British Raj and human empires (and on the American slave system). As one character says, “You murder and rape and steal and call it civilization.” A side element of Breq’s mission to Athoek Station concerns Basnaaid Elming, the younger sister of Lieutenant Awn, who was a Justice of Toren officer loved by Breq, who was forced to kill her by direct order from the “bad” Emperor, which was the trigger for Breq to align herself with the “good” one. Basnaaid lives and works on the station, and Breq wants to protect and aid her. Another wrinkle is that Breq has a secret super weapon, a gun that will shoot through anything in the universe, given her by the alien Presger, an advanced civilization of obscure aims and fearsome technology. For most of the story, in addition to trying to improve the life and work of the annexed denizens of the station and that world, Breq is trying to find out who’s smuggling bodies and artifacts, but she and Mercy of Kalr never really engage enemy Emperor faction warships. Although the climax involves violent action, it’s over pretty quickly and doesn’t feel so convincing, so I suspect that Leckie prefers depicting fraught conversations than graphic fighting. The novel is intensely emotional and psychological, Breq detailing people’s emotions: “I could see, almost feel myself, the thrill thrumming through Lieutenant Tisarwat at Basmaaid’s presence.” Leckie writes some devastating lines on empire and human nature, like “I can’t fix every injustice” and “We are all of us only human. We can only forgive so much.” She also asks interesting questions about identity. Who is the real Lord of the Radch? Are you committing treason no matter which faction you support? And “How much can a person change and still be the same?” The audiobook reader Adjoa Andoh has a great voice and British accent and perfect manner—but she overdoes the voices of the contemptuous and contemptible types (cocky sword ship AI, entitled plantation owners, corrupt governors, etc.). What they say is bad enough without needing it said in exaggeratedly obnoxious voices. I am looking forward to the third book in the trilogy! View all my reviews
The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Imagination, Thought, Culture, the Other, and Humor The Found and the Lost (2016) collects thirteen of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novellas, ranging from 1971 to 2002 and including eight science fictions, four fantasies, and one historical fiction. The novellas depict unconventional male and female “heroes” (damaged, other, young, old, powerless, brilliant, etc.) who become heroic not by martial or magical violent action, but by holding fast to what’s right despite deprivation, isolation, enslavement, imprisonment, torture etc. Often, they are outsiders, seeing beyond what is “normal” in their cultures or traveling to other worlds. Often, they transcend their cultures and experiences to communicate with and understand the alien other. She writes detailed accounts of different cultures (language, religion, history, families, love, work, etc.) and plenty of poignant romance, frank sex, worldview-enlarging education, and revolutionary change. And many wise insights into life and human nature and the world. And much vivid, sublime description (e.g., "There it lay, a dark, green jewel, like truth, at the bottom of a gravity well”). And lots of sly, dry humor, as in describing a girl who becomes an “Angel” in a religious cult as “soft, mild, and as flexible as a steel mainbeam.” The audiobook would be better if you could easily navigate among the different chapters of the novellas. As it is, you don't know how long any given novella is going to last until it's done. For a long audiobook (35+ hours), good readers are vital, and although Jefferson Mays is fine (despite almost sounding prissily sophisticated at times), Alyssa Bresnahan forces a clipped staccato rhythm onto the text (e.g., “You could teach the wizard [pause] a lesson”). Here is an annotated list of the novellas. "It was not a happy ship." In “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” (1971), an “extreme survey team” of neurotic misfits arrives beyond the pale at planet 4470, a jade world full of unknown plant life. Their greatest problem is the empath Osden, who looks like a flayed albino and reflects everyone’s antipathy in a toxic feedback loop. Can the team members open up to the alien other with love instead of fear? 4 stars (Mays) “Yes, you can keep your eye.” In “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (1987), a Native American mythology-flavored, female-centered Jungle Book, “Gal” survives a plane crash and is mothered and mentored by the earthy, uber-female Coyote, living among the first people of America, like Chickadee, Jackrabbit, and Bluejay, while learning about her own people, “the new people,” European Americans, the “illegal immigrants,” who are taking over America. 3 stars (Bresnahan) “What can I say that you can hear?” “Hernes” (1991) relates key moments from the lives of four Herne women—Fanny, her daughter Jane, her daughter Lily, and her daughter Virginia—from 1898 till 1979 as they try to live free and fulfilled in Oregon despite feckless or entitled men, amid vivid descriptions of nature (like unceasing female sea foam and dwindling elk), finally tarnished by plastic trash and oil spills. 4 stars (Bresnahan) “’My life is wrong.’ But she did not know how to make it right.” Through reports, stories, interviews, etc. “The Matter of Seggri” (1994) tells the history of Seggri, a planet where women outnumber men 16-1 and where men live in “castles” and can only play violent sports and service women in “fuckeries,” while women live in “motherhouses” and do all the physical and intellectual work. Will the utopian Ekumen turn them on to “The body's unalterable dream of mutuality”? 5 stars (Mays) “Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time.” In “Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea” (1994) Hideo tells of growing up on a farm on planet O, where the traditional marriage is a complex set of two male and two female members. At18, he leaves his home and family to go study physics on Hain, researching a new technology to permit instantaneous travel through space with unexpected consequences, all in the context of a poignant love story. 4 stars (Mays) “I feel like an oaf blundering into your soul.” In “Forgiveness Day” (1994), a cocky young Ekumen envoy on Werel, a slave-system world, chafes at being “protected” by a “cold and inhuman” bodyguard she scornfully nicknames “the Major.” And then we switch to his point of view. A collision of opposites: male/female, diplomat/soldier, traditional/international. What will a terrorist attack and a kidnapping do to the pair? 4 stars (Bresnahan) “All knowledge is local, all truth partial.” “A Man of the People” (1994) is about a man raised in a traditional, lineage- and gender-based community on Hain being sent as an Ekumen envoy to Yeowe, Werel’s former slave colony world, there to facilitate the fraught change from a male dominated slave society to an egalitarian one. Can you retain your identity and home while seeking the alien other? 4 stars (Mays) “The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.” “A Woman’s Liberation” (1994) consists of a woman telling her life story, being born a slave on a plantation on Werel, becoming a sex pet of the mistress, then a “use-woman” on another plantation, then immigrating to the “liberated” Yeowe and learning history and working for equality. “It may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women.” 4 stars (Bresnahan) “He is my great gift… You do hold my joy.” In “Old Music and the Slave Women” (1999), during a civil war between the Army of Liberation (led by white slaves) and the Legitimate Government (led by black owners), the 62-year-old “alien” Ekumen ambassador to Werel, Esdardon Aya, is captured by a faction, taken to a ruined plantation, tortured, and befriends some female slaves, one with a dying baby. He’s no John Carter! 4.5 stars (Mays) “I will not work in the service of evil.” “The Finder” is a moving story about love, power, education, community, and gender during a time of disunity, slavery, and tyranny in Earthsea. Otter’s boatwright father tries to beat the boy’s gift for magic out of him, until he is bound to work as a dowser for a mad wizard looking for cinnabar to refine into quicksilver. Couldn’t the world use a school for magic for men *and* women? 4 stars (Bresnahan) “The changes in a man's life may be beyond all the arts we know and all our wisdom.” In “On the High Marsh” (2001) a ruined man with a beautiful voice, shows up at the farm of the widow Gift, who thinks he’s a king or a beggar, senses that he is kind and true, and offers him hospitality, so he works as a curer, healing the area cattle afflicted by an awful murrain. Who is he running from? Is he dangerous? Enter a scarred stranger called Hawk... 5 stars (Mays) “She had no wisdom but her innocence, no armor but her anger.” In “Dragonfly” a large, beautiful, uneducated young woman of undefined power wants to find out who she is, so she tries to enter the male-only Roke School for wizards and catalyzes a change in the school. The relationship between her and an expelled student from Roke is neat. 4 stars (Bresnahan) “People are a risky business.” “Paradises Lost” (2002) interestingly extrapolates a 4000-person culture hermetically sealed in a generation spaceship traveling on a 200-year voyage of scientific discovery from earth to a destination planet. The funny and moving story explores nature, civilization, reality, religion, life, sex, family, education, freedom, poetry, love, and more. 4.5 stars (Mays) The novellas demonstrate the wonderful range, consistency, and quality of Le Guin’s writing. 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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