Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Communicating with the Alien Or “There was always another way” Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time (2015) depicts the collision of a civilization of uplifted sentient spiders with some human generation ship explorers looking for worlds to colonize after earth has been destroyed. That book’s depiction of spider culture is fascinating, its themes regarding the need to talk to rather than attack the Other are fine, it achieves flights of sf sublime, its plot construction is suspenseful, and its characters are appealing. All those good features are on display in the sequel, Children of Ruin (2019), where Tchaikovsky spreads his imaginative wings, introducing to go with the spiders and humans and their AI not one but two new alien cultures—an octopoid civilization and a sentient slime-mold analogue. I really like his desire and ability in his fantasy and science fiction to write from the points of view of very different kinds of characters and species and life forms, all with different ways of communicating, thinking, feeling, learning, living, etc. Tchaikovsky runs two main plot strands together here: in the past a human space-traveling, terraforming team from earth arrives at a system and finds two possible planets to tinker with, after which they learn that earth-based humanity has violently self-destructed; and in the present thousands of years after the past plot line (and just after the close of the first novel) a joint spider-human-AI team of space explorers comes upon the system discovered long ago by the terraformers. The past chapters progress chronologically up to the present ones with ever greater suspense as the terraformers encounter an indigenous, microscopic, self-evolving, group-mind parasitic life alien life form wanting to go on an adventure by riding new vehicles (like human beings), while the spider-human-AI space explorers in the present stumble upon the results of that past encounter. The novel interestingly depicts the challenges of communicating with the alien, as the humans traveling with the spiders are trying to learn how to better translate the spiders’ feet tapping and palp manipulating into words via technology and empathy, when they stumble upon the octopode civilization that’s resulted from Terran octopi having been uplifted and released upon an oceanic world, and both spiders and humans need to learn how to interpret the octopi’s color- and tentacle- and emotion-based language asap. Time is pressing, because the parasite group mind (whose chapters are narrated as “we”) is working towards their “adventure” in what appears to be monstrous way. It’s cool watching how all this develops! What the alien slime mold does to its hosts and how it replicates them from random detritus is horrifying, but is it really a dangerous parasite or a catalyst for symbiotic enrichment? How much of a host it alters needs to remain intact in order to retain its identity? How much of a human mind must be uploaded into an AI in order to retain its identity? Is it better to be happy in a group or unhappy alone? Is it possible to ever really understand an alien species? The novel develops themes about identity, consciousness, communication, copies vs. originals, storytelling, exploring, and the Other, especially stressing the importance of being open minded enough to try hard enough to communicate with the other, no matter how alien and monstrous they may seem to us or we to them. Tchaikovsky writes a page turning story by generally ignoring mundane details like eating, eliminating, sleeping, and making love etc. in favor of intense situations and by starting chapters in mid-crises involving the life or death or metamorphosis of individuals or their cultures and by ending chapters with cliffhangers. He can write vivid, weird, suspenseful, and sublime sf: “She [the AI Avrana Kern] is nothing but a copy of a copy of a copy rebuilt by spiders and filled with ants.” “There were lakes in the desert, though of what was unclear. They leapt at the eye from the dull brown expanse, yellow, ferrous red, the blue-green of copper compounds, often concentric rings of one unlikely, toxic-looking color within another and then another. They looked like waste pools from some factory about to be shut down by the environmental lobby, their shores crusted with glittering crystals. The sight was beautiful, yet a poster child for something inimical to human life. The display recorded a temperature of sixty-one degrees centigrade.” “She calls out to Portia again, feels the spider’s legs curve about her body, Portia’s underside clasping against her back in a futile attempt to conserve heat. Both their suits strain with the chill. Heaters that would have coped in the insulated cold of space are losing the battle against the conductive cold of the swirling water, and the spearheads of the ice forest grow closer and closer.” And his ironic-humorous-bleak tone is neat. When a human researcher called Meshner tells his arachnid colleague Fabian that they don’t want to fry his brain (by downloading too alien an experience from Fabian to Meshner’s cranial implant), Fabian says something like, “as tasty as that image is, we’d better be careful,” and Meshner wonders if Fabian is making a human joke or saying a spider idiom! While his humans are like straight men, he imagines fascinating details on Portiid spider culture (gender bias for females and against males, transmission of experiences and information by the sharing of chemicals), as well as on Octopode culture: unorthodox problem solving, spaceship names like the Profundity of Depth and the Shell that Echoes Only, independently acting arms, frequent mind changing: “Rigid certainty is anathema to their mind. They would never trust a leader who nailed his or herself to any one issue or belief. Such dogmatism would be truly alien to them.” This novel, then, is a first contact story (from the points of view of all sides when a number of mutually alien life forms meet for the first time), a terraforming story, and a human evolution story. It's a little like Bear’s Blood Music, Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost,” and Banks’ Culture novels. I really like the novels by Tchaikovsky's I've read so far, Redemption's Blade, The Children of Time, and now Children of Ruin. The audiobook reader Mel Hudson is great. View all my reviews
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The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “All life is an experiment” The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016) by Ken Liu collects fifteen stories ranging from Stapledonian cosmic exploration and evolution through steampunk alternate histories and cyberpunk serial killer thrillers to Chinese legends and postmodern “documentaries.” It features clear writing, convincing characters, unpredictable plots, serious themes, and neat plays with genre elements. His stories often foreground intercultural interaction and exotic Chinese culture, including foods, superstitions, paper money offerings for spirits, and written characters. The character for autumn is composed of the characters for fire and for rice/millet, because in the north of China in autumn they harvested grain and burnt the stalks to fertilize the fields. And the character for autumn combines with that for heart to make sorrow or worry. Liu’s Preface explains that the stories show his interests and that any story is a translation: we can’t be sure how people who read it understand it, but writing and reading stories bring people closer together. “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” explains the writing and books of interstellar species, including ones who write and read with their proboscises, mechanical ones whose stone brains are books, energy “field potentials” who read stars and planets and black hole event horizons, and a tiny people who collect other species’ obsolete books and turn them into tiny cities. (4 stars) In “State Change” Rina is a quiet young woman who believes that her soul is an ice cube. If it melts, she’ll die, she thinks, so she keeps it in a refrigerator by her bed at home and in a freezer by her desk at work, where she is completely ignored—no one knows her name—until a friendly new guy starts working there. Could she be wrong about souls? (3.5 stars) In “The Perfect Match” a search Engine called Centillion has become a lifestyle tool based on data collection. Sai’s virtual assistant Tilly plays wake up music for him, sets him up with compatible women, and suggests discounted products for him to buy. Ala Fahrenheit 451’s Clarisse and Montag, Sai’s neighbor Jenny makes him see his life in a new way. (3.5 stars) In “Good Hunting” the son of a demon hunter narrator tells his story over many years, as the traditional Chinese superstitions and magics and supernatural beings like fox demonesses are dying out and being replaced by seemingly more powerful western technology of trains, engines, and clockwork. The story has a weird, transcendent climax. (4 stars) “The Literomancer” is about a Texan girl in Taiwan, the magic power words have to affect the world and our lives in it, the awful things done by one group to another for “noble” reasons, and the tragedy of children discovering that their parents are not admirable. (5 stars) Through the plot lens of a new kind of camera and the fraught relationship between inventor father and estranged daughter, “Simulacrum” explores the nature of reality in the context of human attempts to capture it (and probably thereby to lose or avoid it). (3 stars) In “The Regular” a meticulous serial killer of prostitutes is sought in Boston by a 49-year-old private eye with a traumatic past requiring a spinal implant “regulator” to control her emotions. The story is too much of its genre, lasts too long, and ends in a too pat climax. (3 stars) In “The Paper Menagerie” the American narrator recounts how his relationship with his Chinese mother changed from loving, imaginative, and fun when he was little and speaking Chinese and playing with the paper animals she made for him and animated with her breath, to distant as he aged, became more American, and forced her to speak English. (5 stars) “An Advanced Readers’ Picture Book of Comparative Cognition” features an account of memory and cognition in different species (like one made of uranium), while the narrator tells his daughter why the child’s mother went on a mission out into the solar system to try to catch alien communications. After all, the world is a boat. (4 stars) In “The Waves,” the people traveling on an exploratory generation ship evolve through renewable flesh, uploaded consciousnesses, and steel bodies and silicon brains to become beings of light, while Maggie tells ancient origin stories from earth. (4 stars) “Mono No Aware” is about the last 1000 or so human beings in the universe traveling on a “habitat module” called The Hopeful to 61 Virginis. We get the background for all this and a message about the transience of life (we’re all ephemeral cicadas) from the narration of a young Japanese man: “a kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.” (3 stars) In “All the Flavors: A Tale of Guan Yu the Chinese God of War in America” Lord Guan, the 3rd-century Chinese hero God of War, (possibly) appears in frontier-era Idaho City. As in “The Literomancer,” a red-haired white girl called Lily meets a kind Chinese man who introduces her to Chinese culture, though here he learns the Irish song “Finnegan’s Wake” from Lily’s father instead of being tortured by him. (4 stars) Set during the golden age of the Qing Dynasty, “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” features a “legal hooligan” who helps the poor in their legal conflicts with the rich. Egged on by the trickster Monkey King, the master has to deal with a verboten book and an exiled student as the comedic story turns heroic. “We are all just ordinary men faced with extraordinary choices.” (4.5 stars) “A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel” recounts how a 1938 trans-Pacific submarine tunnel linking Japan, China, and America prevented World War Two, maintained Japan's East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and led to various technologies being innovated earlier than in our world. The Formosan narrator who worked on the tunnel tells the source of his nightmares to his American lover. (3 stars.) “The Man Who Ended History” uses an sf time travel breakthrough (photons, sub-atomic particles, the human brain, etc.) to relate the Japanese Unit 731’s appalling experiments (exposure, amputation, syphilis, etc.) on living and unanesthetized Chinese children, men, and (pregnant) women during the World War II era, killing up to 500,000 people. The story explores hegemony, history, memory, narrative, truth, and human nature. Does the Chinese American scholar of Japanese history Evan Wei end or free history via his and his Japanese American physicist wife Akemi Kirino’s invention? The “story,” a documentary composed of excerpts from interviews, news shows, hearings, and articles, warns that calling men like the doctors of Unit 731 “monsters” distances us from them when really anyone is capable of such behavior. The story devastated me--I’ve been living in Japan for thirty years. (4.5 stars) The audiobook lacks the reproductions of the Chinese characters described in “The Literomancer” and the notes and dedication (“to the memory of Iris Chang and all the victims of Unit 731”) after the last story. The readers Corey Brill and Joy Osmanski are capable. View all my reviews
Deathless Divide by Justina Ireland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I ain’t gonna be part of his science experiment!” The premise of Deathless Divide (2020), the sequel to Justina Ireland’s 19-century alternate history zombie apocalypse race relations novel Dread Nation (2018), is that during a Civil War battle for some unexplained reason the dead rose up and started attacking, eating, and turning the living. To kill the “shamblers” you must generally remove their heads, hence the preference among experienced fighters for bladed weapons (though they’re also proficient with firearms). African Americans are made to do the dirty work of putting down the dead, while whites stay out of harm’s way, though when an entire town is overrun by a horde, no one is safe. The southern and eastern states have been lost. With its protective mountains and deserts, California has resisted the worst of the shambler plague, but “Eventually, the dead will come walking.” The narrator Jane McKeene, now about 18, explains that at Miss Preston’s School for Combat for Negro Girls near Baltimore, she and Katherine Deveraux started off enemies, but that their adventures, culminating in an escape from the white nationalist “utopia” Summerland when it was overrun by a shambler horde at the end of the first novel, have made them best friends. Jane thinks she’s getting her ex-boyfriend Jackson back, until a shambler ambush and a past marriage destroy her hopes. Acompanying them are Jackson's little sister, an orphan boy, and some prostitutes. Jane also reveals her attraction to Gideon Carr, a white scientist-inventor. Jane et al decide to try for the Great Plains African American town of Nicodemus, where they hope to find some Miss Preston alumni. Jane’s ultimate goal is California, where she hopes her mother and aunt are waiting for her in an idyllic community called Haven. While Dread Nation was narrated solely by Jane, here she and Katherine take turns narrating chapters. Their different voices, personalities, and experiences complement each other. Their chapter epigraphs come from Shakespeare (Jane) and the Bible (Katherine). Jane is more violent, reckless, and down to earth, Katherine more ladylike, careful, and polite. With her golden skin, blond hair, and blue eyes, Katherine can pass for white, while Jane is obviously black. While Jane has loved both boys and girls, Katherine has never needed a lover. One moment, she’ll say, “A good pair of swords is always the best accessory,” the next, “I take a deep breath, enjoying the reassuring grip of the corset on my ribs before I set out.” Katherine fills us in on Jane killing the hateful sheriff of Summerland at the end of the first book. Ireland writes other interesting characters, like Jackson, who becomes a resentful but helpful haint haunting Jane; Gideon, who is driven to continue his experiments on living (especially black) people as he tries to perfect his anti-shambler serum so he can (he hopes) make up for causing the deaths of untold people; and Daniel Redfern, a Native American “survivor” who won’t risk his neck to help anyone. The first part of the novel takes place in the Great Plains, the second in California, morphing into a hardboiled zombie western, as Jane’s character transforms from the Angel of the Crossroads (shambler scourge) to the Devil’s Bride (human bounty hunter), saying things like “Killing a person who needs it is like making a garden. It's hard work but the result is pleasurable.” Gone are the days when she worries about crossing the line from survivor to killer. Katherine also changes in the second part, determining never again to pass for white, abandoning her corset, and becoming a shrewder observer of men. Jane’s part-two chapters start with epigraphs from books of sensational “true stories” of the “wilding west,” Katherine’s with quotations from travelers’ accounts of the wonders of California. Ireland imagines a fallen world of misery, loss, and death for all, and not only because of the zombies. At least as deadly for people of color are the pervasive white supremacy, racism, and discrimination. In San Francisco Katherine finds the same “greed and exclusion” as everywhere else in America, but here it's the Chinese running things, the whites paying for their labor and goods, and the negroes getting burnt out of their neighborhoods. Black people are “illegal” in the Oregon Territory, and criminals only get prices on their heads for crimes against whites. The absence of justice for black people in the novel’s alternate history reflects today’s USA. The sketchy steampunk elements introduced in the first novel remain underdeveloped here, with cameos by a “pony” (a steam-driven ironclad wagon) and a limited railgun. Ireland should leave such things out. And there are some unconvincing, lazy plot developments when for suspense Jane and or Katherine get snuck up on and put in tight spots there’s no way they would permit, given their trained, experienced, and capable characters. And the climax is too quick and tidy after so many chapters leading up to it. Nonetheless, the novel is exciting, moving, relevant, and funny. It’s exciting to read a book in which strong, capable, and charismatic young heroines of color have adventures and pursue justice in dangerous, unjust world. LGBTQ people are fully represented, too, even as Ireland resists de rigueur YA love triangles. And the writing is enjoyable, as in the following lines. “You and this corset are a recipe for disaster.” “My voice is as flat as the Great Plains themselves.” “God aint’ got nothing to do with this. It is the province of man.” “A mouthy Negro girl without any kind of sense? I am the world's most perfect scapegoat.” One sign of the strong writing is that, although audiobook reader Jordan Cobb irritatingly overread the overwrought Song of Wraiths and Ruin, she was OK reading Katherine’s half of this novel (though her “refined” English voice is egregious). When Katherine’s chapters read by Cobb feature Jane’s dialogue and when Jane’s chapters read by the *prime* Bahni Turpin feature Katherine’s, it’s not as jarring as it could be in less careful hands. The themes re race, revenge, survival, and identity are potent, the resolution satisfying, and Jane and Katherine appealing, so if Ireland writes a third book set in their world, I’ll read it. View all my reviews
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Immersive, Thoughtful SF about Society and Self Vagabonds (2016) by Hao Jingfang begins in the year 2190 on earth, the year 40 on Mars, forty years after Mars won a war of independence from earth, David defeating Goliath (in the present of the novel, Mars has 20 million people to earth’s 20 billion). Ever since, the two countries have been caught in a cold war with mutual suspicion and misunderstanding, earth seeing Mars as a dictatorship where people have no individual freedom and children are exploited for labor, Mars seeing earth as a selfish, corrupt capitalist dystopia where everything and everyone is for sale. As the novel opens, a Martian spaceship called Maearth is bringing a group of Martian youths home after their five-year study stay on earth and a group of Terran diplomats on a mission to work out a trade agreement with Mars. Two of the most important point of view characters are Luoying Sloan and Eko Lu. Luoying is the dance student granddaughter of the Consul of Mars, Hans Sloan. She experiences reverse culture shock upon her return to Mars, seeing her culture through the lens of her five years on earth, making it difficult to fit back into Mars or to view either world’s system as idyllic or dystopic. She begins asking questions like why her parents were punished when she was a little girl, leading to their deaths in a mining accident; whether her grandfather is, as the Terrans say, a dictator; why she was chosen to join the group of students sent to Earth; and how she can live on Mars while chafing at limitations she didn’t notice before. Eko is a Terran film maker visiting Mars for the first time. He realizes that he is seeing Mars through the critical lens of Terran culture when he thinks that the transparent glass walls of his hotel room reveal the comprehensive surveillance of the compliant Martian citizenry but then learns that glass is the main building material on Mars and that he can make his walls opaque with the turn of a switch. Eko starts asking questions like why did his recently deceased teacher Arthur Davosky’s short visit to Mars turn into a stay of years, why did he return to earth after staying on Mars for so long, why did his teacher’s friend (who is also Eko’s patron), the influential businessman Thomas Theon, recommend that Eko talk to Luoying about his documentary on Mars, what kind of film can he make about Mars that will tell the truth while satisfying both cultures, and what kind of films did his teacher make on Mars. The first part of the novel features chapters alternating between Luoying and Eko with titles for settings on Mars (e.g., The Hotel, Home, The Film Archive). The second part of the novel is made of Luoying point of view chapters with titles for things on Mars (e.g., Membrane, Sand, Rock). The third part features chapters alternating between the points of view of multiple characters of interest with titles for their names, Luoying, her young friends (including those who stayed on Mars and those who went with her to earth), her ambitious brother Rudy, her solitary and philosophical mentor Dr. Reini, and her grandfather. One of the impressive things in this book is how Hao Jingfeng eschews easy sentimentality and typical scenes and situations involving romance and familial relationships, handling them with restraint, so that it’s moving rather than corny. Although Hao Jingfeng runs the threat of renewed war throughout her novel, she is not writing military fiction, so any bombs, battles, strategies, and casualties are only memories mentioned in passing. Readers who need plenty of violent action may be bored. That said, the trade negotiations between Mars and Earth are intense, because hawks on both sides are eager to find excuses to go to war, while political maneuverings between Martians who want to stay in their domed city or abandon it to live in an open-air crater assume great importance. And there are some suspenseful action scenes involving young Martians adventuring outside their city without permission or participating in a demonstration in Capital Square--will it turn into another Tiananmen Square event? The novel engages with world culture, referencing Camus, Dostoyevsky, Tarkovsky, St. Exupery, etc. And there is plenty of wonder-inducing sf technology, though not as much as in the writing of, say, Iain Banks. The English translation by Ken Liu reads well. It has vivid, evocative descriptions, like “The western sun shown on the stern of the ship, casting a long shadow ahead of the hull on the yellow sand like a long black sword probing over the ground.” The audiobook reader Emily Woo Zeller has a nice manner, voice, and pace, though perhaps her male voices are a bit too dramatically male. Vagabonds is a bit like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress if Heinlein’s novel took place forty years after the war of independence from earth, but it is more reminiscent of Le Guin’s sf like The Dispossessed and “Paradises Lost” in being thoughtful, imaginative, political, character-driven, and full of convincing extrapolation about human nature and society from a set of science fictional givens. Like the best sf, the novel effervesces with ideas: on cities, freedom, creativity, art, travel, cultural exchange, commerce, communication, language, history, dance, flight, fashion, memory, fate, love, relationships, social systems, etc. If it’s possible to see Martian society mirroring that of contemporary China, Terran that of America, Hao Jingfeng doesn’t choose which is “better.” Instead, she leaves it up to the reader to decide while suggesting that all societies have good and bad points because they’re made by people, and that after all the best thing we can do is to remain individuals while helping other individuals—and to remain perpetual vagabonds without any fixed address, ever visiting different cultures. View all my reviews
Time and Again by Jack Finney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Stereoscopic Time Travel Manhattan Romance On a November Friday in 1970 just before lunch, twenty-eight-year-old commercial artist Simon Morley is sketching a bar of soap from various angles to find the best way to depict it while counting the hours till the weekend, the days till his vacation, and the years till his retirement, when he receives a visitor who changes his life: U.S. Army Major Ruben Prien. He wants to recruit Si for a secret government project, “the damnedest experience a human being has ever had,” way bigger than the space program: time travel. Why Si? He has the perfect mix of physical, psychological, and temperamental qualities required for the project’s time travelers, being able “to see things as they are and at the same time as they might have been” with “the eye of an artist.” It also helps that Si’s unmarried (though he has a great girlfriend, Katherine Mancuso), and especially that old photographs make him feel a “sense of wonder, staring at the strange clothes and vanished backgrounds, at knowing that what you’re seeing was once real” and that “You could have walked into the scene then, touched those people, and spoken to them. You could actually have gone into that strange outmoded old building and seen what now you never can—what was just inside the door.” Finally, Si is just a uniquely sensitive guy. As a young lady of 1882 tells him, “You’re the most understanding man I've ever known.” (Are we indulging in the creative artistic type’s fantasy of being appealing to women?) Time travel in Jack Finney's Time and Again (1970) is perceptual rather than technological. No fancy time machines! You just listen to a spiel on Einstein’s ideas on time, research the target time and place, prepare yourself to fit into them, unplug your TV and read a vintage novel, cut as many of the myriad “invisible threads” tying you to the present as you can, engage in a little self-hypnosis, and then… step out of the present and back into the past of, say, 1850 Montana or 1432 Paris. In Si’s case, he trains to walk out the door of the well-preserved Dakota apartment building of 1970 NYC into the Central Park of 1882 NYC. Why January 1882 NYC? Kate’s adoptive father’s father killed himself while leaving behind a cryptic and partially burned letter postmarked then and referring to the destruction by fire of the world, after which his wife buried him under a tombstone featuring the symbol of a nine-pointed star inside a circle comprised of tiny dots but no name, and Si wants to solve that mystery. To investigate it, Si rents a room in the same Grammercy Park boarding house where Jake Pickering, the man who sent the letter, lives. To avoid changing the present in some unforeseen way, Si is supposed to observe without intervening, but will that be possible in a boarding house with several boarders and two landladies, one of whom is a beautiful young woman named Julia Charbonneau?! Without departing from his role as non-interfering observer, how can Si prevent Julia from disastrously marrying the older macho domineering Jake, who sure doesn’t appreciate Si hanging around Julia and drawing her portrait?! Rather than using scientific and technological details to convince us that time travel is possible, then, Finney uses minute observational and sensual details as to what New York City in 1882 January looks like, sounds like, smells like, and feels like. Thus, the story is a paean to NYC (especially Manhattan), as Si relates its different and similar wonders and horrors in both 1970 and 1882. Indeed, the novel is stereoscopic, with vivid descriptions of contemporary and old NYC combining to give a three-dimensional picture of the city, similar in effect to that Si says occurs when gazing at stereoscopic photographs: “the almost, but not quite, identical pair of photographs mounted side by side on stiff cardboard, that, looked at through the viewer, give a miraculous effect of depth.... Because the good ones, the really clear sharp photographs, are so real.” Finney’s novel prefigures something like Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book (1992) more than recalls HG Wells’ The Time Machine. Depending on your tastes, the novel may take too long to get Si time traveling. Finney’s meticulous attention to detail (faces and clothes, facades and interiors, offices and saloons, streets and parks, and so on) at times becomes too much of a good thing. And the prolonged climax featuring a harrowing fire scene and an excessive chase scene could be shortened without harming the impact of the novel. Also, Finney may fudge the differences between English spoken in 1882 and in 1970. When Si gets excited, he sounds too much like a man of 1970 (e.g., “We need money, damn it”). Some of that is intentional, for humor, as when he forgets himself and asks Julia, “Suppose we telephoned your aunt.” But after drawing attention to how melodramatically and ornately people in 1882 talk and write, Finney writes conversations between its people and Si that don’t sound much different than any we might expect to hear in 1970. At the same time, the novel is dated to 1970 in some of its language, for example, Si referring to young women as “girls” and to African Americans as “negroes.” The novel’s political heart is in the right place. It is a Vietnam War era book. Despite Si rarely mentioning that war (he references the atomic bombing of Japan more often), his anti-authoritarian ethical/moral center derives from his disillusionment at learning that the people at the top making the decisions for the country are no better informed or well-intentioned or more intelligent than anyone else and have no idea of the ramifications of their decisions. The novel takes an interesting turn when the military starts wanting to nudge the time travel project into more active interference in the past so as to benefit the USA in the present. It also features some pointed lines like this one about police: “Why, why do cops habitually and meaninglessly act nastily as if it were a kind of instinct?” And some moments really give a time traveling frisson, as when Si observes a belled sleigh gliding through central park or finds himself at a busy intersection in which all the trams, buses, taxis, etc. are horse-drawn or sees the arm of the statue of liberty holding the torch in Madison Park or stands outside the house of Herman Melville or plays games with the people of the boarding house or sketches Trinity Church (whose steeple was the tallest point in NYC), etc. Fans of thoughtful time travel fiction should like the novel. Audiobook reader Paul Hecht is fine; nothing fancy; straightforward and competent; easy to listen to. View all my reviews
Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Happiness, free, for everyone!” Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is a reverse image of Solaris (1961). Whereas in Stanislaw Lem’s classic novel humans go to an alien world, study the alien life form there for years but only learn more about themselves, in the Strugatskys’ book aliens have seemingly visited earth for, presumably, a brief stop enroute to somewhere else, leaving behind artifacts, which human beings have been researching (and illicitly stealing and selling) but only learning about themselves and human nature. In both novels, then, despite the most rigorous human science the alien is unknowable. Both works expose the limits of human knowledge. The Strugatsky novel (translated by Olena Bormashenko) begins with an interview with Dr. Valentine Pillman, the scientist whose name has been (undeservedly he says) given to the pattern in which the six alien “Visit Zones” were scattered across earth thirteen years ago. He works for an organization dedicated to preventing the alien artifacts from falling into the wrong hands. The plot begins in the first-person voice of Red Schuhart, a hardboiled 23-year-old lab tech at the Harmont Branch of the International Institute of Extraterrestrial Cultures. Red moonlights as a “stalker,” illegally entering the Harmont zone at night to purloin and later sell alien artifacts. For over a year now, Red has seen his scientist “egghead” friend Kirill fruitlessly obsessing over “empties,” alien artifacts in the form of pairs of rings held in suspension, such that each disc stays just so far apart from the other, without any discernable force keeping them so. Carrying an empty is like carrying 20 pounds of water without a bucket--one of the vivid similes used by the Strugatskys to convey what dealing with the alien is like. Concerned for Kirill, Red guides him on a daylight journey into the zone to bring out a rare “full empty,” an empty with a blue syrup-like liquid between the rings. The zone is full of traps like gravity wells, grinders, and hot spots. Time passes differently inside than outside. Thus, to get out of the zone alive, anyone who enters must follow “rules,” like avoiding straight routes, tossing nuts and bolts ahead to suss out traps, keeping quiet, walking around certain things, not feeling relief when starting the return trip, and being decontaminated after an excursion. There is no moral logic behind who survives the zone: “The zone didn't give a damn who the good guys or the bad guys are.” The alien artifacts are sometimes beneficial, often dangerous, and their true purposes and the science behind them remain incomprehensible. The abandoned houses adjacent to the Harmont zone look normal and well-preserved, apart from the TV antennae being covered with what looks like hair. Are the zones a treasure trove of advanced technology that will, when sufficiently studied by our scientists, usher humanity into a utopian era of peace and plenty? Or are they an open sore, attracting the fly-like criminal and military dregs of humanity to “Satan’s baubles” and hastening our progress to self-destruction? What causes the children of stalkers to mutate after birth, decades-old corpses to reanimate, and emigrants from zone adjacent communities to cause a spike in fatal events wherever they relocate? What was the alien intention in visiting earth and then departing, leaving the artifacts? Are the aliens still here, observing what we do with the artifacts before deciding our fate? What must we do (or not do) to pass such a test? Or were the aliens just having a “roadside picnic” on earth and thoughtlessly left behind their garbage? The Strugatskys don’t answer such questions (“People imagine all sorts of things, and what they imagine has nothing to do with reality”), but they do extrapolate from the presence of alien artifacts to show how human culture would be affected by them. The Harmont zone attracts young men who want to make their fortunes but become disillusioned and leave or become stalkers or Institute technicians. The authorities are setting up a military style perimeter around the zone, in theory to better control who takes what alien artifacts out. Some of the artifacts can be adapted for human use, like “eternal batteries.” Some are better left unexamined, like “hell slime.” Some become legendary, like a large golden ball that becomes a holy grail by supposedly granting any human wish. One of the core themes of the book concerns the nature of intelligence, as foregrounded by a conversation between an amoral businessman and a cynical physicist. The scientist offers definitions that don’t reflect well on human beings, e.g., intelligence is the ability to alter one’s environment without destroying it. Another key theme of the book concerns the alien, and the book says it’s either impossible to understand the alien or a matter of faith (which makes you think you understand everything while knowing nothing). In that context, as the story moves forward several years for each new chapter, it movingly depicts redeeming human qualities, like the love of Red and his wife Guta for their child, whom they call “Monkey” because she’s clever, cute, and covered with silken, golden fur. And like Red’s self-reliant insistence on doing things the right way: breaking stupid rules, staying loyal, and finally sitting in the middle of the unknowable, appalling zone and shouting to whatever (if any) alien (or divine) power might be listening, “I never sold my soul!” Personal victories in the context of human insignificance. In such small victories by overwhelmed people, the novel has a Philip K. Dick vibe. The zone becomes a metaphor for the world, a stalker’s trip to wrest swag from the zone a metaphor for our own run through life, which is also fraught with dangers and opaque to knowing. After the novel comes a bleakly humorous Afterword from 2012, written by the surviving Strugatsky brother, Boris, who explains how he and Arkady came up with the idea for the novel (including what inspired the word “stalker”) and then details their 1970s struggle to publish it, which lasted for over eight years and hundreds of letters to and from editors, publishers, and communist party committee members, including lists of all the things the editors wanted changed, like slang, violence, and drinking. Boris says that the resistance to publishing the novel wasn’t due to it being ideologically off for Soviet readers (its main ideology is anti-capitalist), but rather due to it failing to elevate the nation, being too colorful in its language, and having too much brutal reality in it. Of course, those features help make it great sf. Robert Forster reads the audiobook with throaty energy and a very American accent. View all my reviews
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The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars H. P. Lovecraft Gets a Diversity Makeover N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020) begins as NY (“This wild, incredible, stupid-ass city”) wakes up, birthed as one of a small number of sentient cities in the world. It is a complicated birth, involving six human avatars, one for each of the five boroughs plus one “primary” for the city as a whole, and attracting an “enemy” and its “harbingers” from another universe, out to kill the infant city and or to subsume it by taking out the avatars before they can figure out what’s going on and unite as a composite, powerful, self-aware city. The avatars had been leading more or less normal lives as human beings (city politician, Art Center director, graduate student, homeless graffiti artist, etc.) before suddenly becoming able to switch back and forth between normal “real” human perception and abilities and the at first disorienting “surreal” city ones. This book is urban sf with an overt political thrust. Fitting the diverse nature of NY, its six avatars are a diverse group. Five are people of color (two African Americans, one Native American, and one Tamil and one multi-racial person), four are female, at least three are gay or lesbian, and one is a not an American citizen. In addition to the newly born multi-cultural NY, the two sentient cities featured in this story are South American (Sao Paolo) and Asian (Hong Kong) who manifest as gay “men.” The only one of the six NY avatars to be white and straight is also repulsive (though her controlling, racist policeman father is worse). The malignant multi-dimensional enemy from a universe inimical to ours, meanwhile, mostly manifests in NY as a series of white-clad white women like “philanthropic” businesswomen or obvious Karens while puppeteering numerous sympathetic and “synchronistic” white racist or xenophobic or homophobic or anti-feminist New Yorkers and proliferating a plague of white tendrils, tentacles, feathers, or flowers. Many of the threats to the avatars fantastically exaggerate the daily dangers people of color experience in any American city, like hostile police and suspicious passersby. I don’t want to complain about all this, because the majority of sf (and fantasy) has been written by, for, and about straight white people, and aggrieved and defensive white racism is toxic (“White dude whining as a growth industry”), but the diversity on steroids, including excrescent touches like the roommate of the avatar of Manhattan being a quickly introduced and forgotten trans Vietnamese from London, did start getting a little too much. The novel also affirms creative people, artists, musicians, or mathematicians (though the mathematics of the graduate student Tamil avatar are underused), while condemning city gentrification through the driving out of low-income residents, the replacement of unique local shops with generic chain satellites, and the like. The novel is a love song to NYC and to big cities in general and a plea for them to stay dirty, distinctive, and individual. The writing is vivid, funny, and fast paced, with the entire novel occurring over the course of a few intense days as the new avatars try to get it together while fending off smirking threats and insidious attacks from their enemy. There are no sex scenes. The violence mostly happens on a metaphysical plane and isn’t very graphic. There are some suspenseful scenes of sf horror, in which, for instance, white x-shaped spider things attack a pair of brownstones in Brooklyn, Starbucks chains start attacking a jeep, a toilet stall in the women’s restroom in the Bronx Art Center gets aggressive, and a subway car mutates into a monster. There are many f-words and other salty exclamations. Plenty of pop culture references, too. Most work fine, like, "She looks like an evil mid-career Joni Mitchell” or “a cross between a church lady and a female Colonel Sanders.” Some sound funny, like when the enemy manifests as the Woman in White outside a suburban Staten Island house and warns the NYC avatars, "You shall not pass!" but after initially chuckling at it, it struck me as childish, because why would the enemy want to or be able to imitate Gandalf facing the Balrog at that point? The enemy then says something like, “I’ve always wanted to say that,” but it sounds like Jemisin and not an inimical alien entity from another universe. And lines like “Now it’s just the two of them, living city and eldritch abomination, face to face and ready for the showdown to come,” so obviously playing with Lovecraft, make it difficult for me to care deeply about what’s going on in the story. The concept is intriguing: sentient cities transcending an unlimited number of alternate universes, the personalities of the human city avatars reflecting or embodying those of their cities, and so on. And Jemisin’s varied cast of characters mostly feel convincing. But as I read, I got the feeling that Jemisin hinted at and then summarized too much of the situation as she went, so I found that I knew what was happening before the characters did and then had to wait for them to catch up while getting ever more summaries of the situation to bring them up to speed, so I started thinking that the book could have been edited more tightly. And Jemisin fully indulges in the old overly talkative villain syndrome and in the old employ (or avoid) super abilities to do whatever the writer wants at any moment trick. The City We Became reads like a cross between Samuel R. Delaney (dirty, holy, gay, city street folks), China Mieville (monstrous, hybrid, animated city things), and especially H. P. Lovecraft (multidimensional inimical entity from another universe bringing its proliferating, “wrong,” and sea-reeking tentacles, tendrils, and towers to a city), with a strong dose of diversity and big city-love. I listened to the book read by Robin Miles, who throws herself body and soul into her reading, keeping the voices of the diverse characters distinct and consistent while ratcheting up the suspense. Listeners who prefer restrained readings of books might be turned off by Miles’ energy, but I enjoyed her. Will I go on to listen to the second book in the series? Hmmm. Not right now. View all my reviews
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Oh, Ford, Ford Ford, I Wish I Had My Soma!” Brave New World is a bitterly funny and humorously tragic dystopian novel in which Aldous Huxley satirizes modern civilization’s obsession with consumerism, sensual pleasure, popular culture entertainment, mass production, and eugenics. His far future world limits individual freedom in exchange for communal happiness via mass culture arts like “feelies” (movies with sensual immersion), the state-produced feel-good drug soma, sex-hormone gum, popular sports like “obstacle golf,” and the assembly line chemical manipulation of ova and fetuses so as to decant from their bottles babies perfectly suited for their destined castes and jobs, babies who are then mentally conditioned to become satisfied workers and consumers who believe that everyone belongs to everyone. In a way it’s more horrible than the more obviously brutal and violent repression of individuals by totalitarian systems in dystopias like George Orwell’s 1984, because Huxley’s novel implies that people are happy being mindless cogs in the wheels of economic production as long as they get their entertainments and new goods. Michael York does a great job reading the novel, his voice oozing satire for the long opening tour of the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and then modifying in timbre and dialect for the various characters, among them the self-centered brooder Bernard Marx, the budding intellectual poet Helmholtz Howard, the sexy, sensitive, and increasingly confused Lenina Crowne, the spookily understanding Resident World Controller of Western Europe Mustapha Mond, and especially the good-natured, sad, and conflicted Shakespearean quoting “savage” John. I had never read this classic of dystopian science fiction, so I’m glad to have listened to this excellent audiobook, because it is entertaining and devastating in its depiction of human nature and modern civilization, especially timely in our own brave new Facebook world. View all my reviews
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Important Dystopia Almost Immolated by Overwriting Thirty-year-old Guy Montag is a “fireman” whose job involves not putting out fires (houses etc. are fireproofed) but burning books and even the people who possess them. He thinks he likes his work and life, until a free-spirited, “antisocial” sixteen-year-old neighbor girl called Clarisse befriends him and asks him things like, “Are you happy?” Montag is really, of course, deeply unhappy, being in a state of despair verging on insanity. Though he lives with his wife of ten years, Mildred is so cut off from him by technology like “Seashell Radios” inserted in her ears or like their living room “walls” showing inane interactive TV dramas that she, too, is unconsciously unhappy, such that she now and then needs to drive her car recklessly fast or overdose on sleeping pills. As if all that weren’t enough, Montag is also feeling guilty about something he’s hiding behind a ventilator grille in his home. It couldn’t be a cache of verboten books, could it? What will happen if Mildred finds out what her husband’s been hiding? Will she ever get the fourth television “wall” to complete her living room? Will the firemen’s dreadful “Mechanical Hound” continue growling at Montag? When Montag stays home “sick,” will his boss Captain Beatty calm the fireman’s unquiet soul? And why has Clarisse suddenly stopped running into Montag before or after work? Just how has America turned into the kind of place where pretty much everyone is unhappy? First there was a lowest common denominator dumbing down of culture so as to entertain the maximum number of people and a related simplifying of literature via things like digests (and digests of digests). Meanwhile, new technology like television began occupying more of people’s time. Then it was decided to ban and burn all books because there are so many different kinds of people that any given book would inevitably hurt the feelings of one or another minority and because reading makes people think and thinking often leads to doubt and pain. The resulting America is a totalitarian state that warps history, uses technology, “education,” and advertising to control people, and has neighbors informing on each other and citizens turning off their minds by turning on their TVs and conforming and consuming. Even the Bible has been banned, leaving Jesus Christ to shill for various products. From 1953, Bradbury imagined a nightmarish dystopic future that exposes flaws in American culture that are still relevant today about seventy years later. And he isn’t just targeting the replacement of reading books by viewing screens in his dystopia. He also works in numerous other of his betes noirs like majority rule, fast cars, amusement parks (“Fun Parks”), caesarean sections (!?!), advertising, cities, war, and young people who go out “shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another.” And he offers no reassuring remedies. The “resistance” and its passive, patient, long-game off-stage is strange (and both less convincing and less unsettling than in Truffaut’s fine 1966 film adaptation of the novel). Apart from wondering how Montag or anyone for that matter can read in a society without books, or how easily the firemen burn the supposedly fireproof houses of closet bibliophiles, the problem I have with Bradbury’s novel is that it is too often unsubtle and overwritten. Bradbury repeatedly bludgeons the reader over the head with overblown descriptions of Montag’s perceptions, as when Mildred watches TV: “A great thunderstorm of sound gushed from the walls. Music bombarded him at such an immense volume that his bones were almost shaken from their tendons; he felt his jaw vibrate, his eyes wobble in his head. He was a victim of concussion. When it was all over he felt like a man who had been thrown from a cliff, whirled in a centrifuge and spat out over a waterfall that fell and fell into emptiness and emptiness and never-quite-touched-bottom-never-never-quite-no not quite-touched-bottom... And you fell so fast you didn't touch the sides either... never... quite... touched... anything.” (41) He writes lines from television programming or from Mildred and her friends that are too vapid to be satirically funny, like this: “Doesn’t everyone look nice!” “Nice.” You look fine, Millie!” “Fine.” “Everyone looks swell.” “Swell.” “Isn’t this show wonderful?” “Wonderful.” And when, as in the following speech, he bursts through Montag to rant, it’s just too damn much! “Jesus God . . . Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 1960! Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the rest of the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well-fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much? I’ve heard the rumors about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do you know why? I don’t, that’s sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don’t hear those idiot bastards in your parlor talking about it. God, Millie, don’t you see? An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe…” Such moments yanked me out of immersion in the dystopia and prevented me from sympathizing with Montag, as if Bradbury thought I were already one of the mindless unhappy people living in his future America and thus in need of garish messaging. Such moments made me feel the compact novel was too long. The book is said to be a classic, but I think Bradbury’s passion for his remarkable book burning firemen concept nearly ruined it by overwriting. Zamiatin and Orwell also exaggerated the targets of their earlier (and greater) dystopias We and 1984 so as to satirize and criticize aspects of their contemporary societies, but they restrained their writing enough and imagined vivid and convincing societies enough and created authentic characters enough for me to care about their plights. All that said, if lines like “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them” ring true, Fahrenheit 451 (1953) should speak to you. Despite his being known for fantasy and science fiction, Bradbury here (as he does in most of his work) exhorts the reader to fully and imaginatively embrace life in the real world. For him in this novel, worse than not reading books is not experiencing life in all what he calls its “texture.” View all my reviews
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Brand had stolen my dog and I had to try Griz is a boy living with his father, mother, big brother, big sister, and two terriers Jess and Jip on a small island in the Outer Hebrides near Scotland. It’s been well over a century after a “soft apocalypse” they call “the Gelding” rendered humans sterile or infertile, reducing the number of people in the world to, they calculate, less than ten thousand. Griz’s family lives by farming and fishing, supplementing their needs and interests by “going Viking” (scavenging through abandoned houses etc. on other islands) and by “Frankensteining” (cobbling usable machines etc. from various sources). There is no more electricity, and most science has been lost, though Griz’ father continues to “Leibowitz,” trying to maintain some scientific and technological knowledge. Griz had another older sister, Joy, but she fell from a cliff into the sea, which loss led to his mother falling and damaging her brain so she cannot speak. The only other people they know is a family called the Lewises who live on another island. Early in his story, Griz goes farther from home than ever before because of the visit of a stranger. Brand is a man with red boat sails, icy blue eyes, fiery red hair, a flashing smile, and a gift for telling stories. He says he’s a trader and an adventurer. But he’s also a liar and a thief, stealing Griz’ dog Jess. And because dogs are at least as rare as people (perhaps because people sterilized or poisoned them during the Gelding), and especially because Griz’s dogs are family, he recklessly sets off with only his remaining dog Jip on a quest to retrieve Jess from the thief. The novel, then, recounts Griz’ adventures in a world with a vanishingly small number of people, a world nature is reclaiming from the impressive ruins of “your” civilization, roads, bridges, buildings, towns, etc., “The sheer relentless immensity of all that had been left behind by your people.” Griz is writing his story to “you,” the imaginary friend he has conjured from a scavenged pre-Gelding photograph of a boy jumping joyfully in the air on a beach with his younger sister and their dog. So Griz regularly addresses “you,” saying things like “The plastic your people made was strong stuff,” “With so many marvels around you, did you stop seeing them?” and “Was it always safer being a boy than a girl when you were alive?” Griz likes writing (needs to write) because he likes reading: “I lose myself in stories and find myself.” Reading, he says, is another way to survive; it helps us know how we got here. And opening a new book is like opening a door and traveling far away. He often alludes to books he’s read, like The Hobbit, the Narnia books, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Asterix. His favorite genre is post-apocalypse, so he’s read novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Road, The Death of Grass, and The Day of the Triffids. Griz reads such books “sideways” to find out about life when they were written. Griz is a good storyteller. He likes to drop suspense bombs into his narrative like, “That's how I ended up here alone with no one but you to talk to,” and “I did not know that one day I would feel exactly what the tree had felt like, riven in half by bolt from out of a clear sky,” and “We were just going to get some honey. Not everything sweet is good for you.” Griz also has a knack for concise and telling description, as when he sees bramble-overgrown houses like shells out of which tall trees are growing, or as when he describes what it’s like for the first time to walk in a green forest or to climb a dilapidated roller coaster track or to eat a fresh peach or to listen to violin music or to see an impossible bridge (a breathtaking arch, light and joyous, a leap made from stone). Griz’ story does what the best science fiction does: defamiliarizes our everyday world. He makes us see newly things that we take for granted like cars, music, bridges, marmalade, squirrels, songbirds, zoos, and statues. At one point, he says something like, “Having been in the ruins of your world made me feel strongly the fragility and glory of life.” That is just what Fletcher’s novel does. At times it is a little unbelievable that Griz could read SO many books. When he sees some partially submerged giant windmills, he references Don Quixote tilting at them, and I can’t imagine a boy reading that long, difficult, strange novel (especially given how hard his family has to work to survive). At times Griz seems a little too aware of how things were before the Gelding, as when he asks, “Do you think the animals [in zoos] felt like they were in prison?” In such times Fletcher the author yanks me out of an otherwise deep immersion in Griz’ world and voice and thrusts me into the here and now. Despite such authorial intrusions, Griz is a compelling character. He’s ethical. He dislikes violence. Though he does kill deer and rabbits for food, when hunting he always makes them suffer as little and as shortly as possible. Despite his tendency to do rash things (like setting off on his boat alone with Jip to pursue a man who might be dangerous), Griz is also thoughtful and sensitive. He says things like, “My once bigger now forever smaller sister” (because Joy was older than he when she died, after which he’s continued growing). And “Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold the whole universe. A fist only what it can grab or hit what it can't.” It’s a tight, powerful, suspenseful, beautiful book. In addition to Griz, there are other memorable characters, especially Brand, Jeanne d’Arc, and Jip. And author Fletcher reads the audiobook version perfectly. The novel is a paean to dogs (alas, nary a member of the cat family is mentioned). Griz relates many great instances of canine behavior, like chasing rabbits, being affronted by squirrels, seeing or hearing or smelling things Griz can’t, and acting like Griz should be able to solve problems or be in charge. “’Things could be worse,’ I told Jip, who thumped his tail and went back to licking the rabbit.” 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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