First Lines of Annalee Newitz's "The Future of Another Timeline"

"Drums beat in the distance like an amplified pulse. People streamed over the dirt road, leather boots laced to their knees, eyes ringed in kohl, ears and lips studded with precious metals. Some gathered in an open square below the steep path to the amphitheater, making a bonfire out of objects stolen from their enemies. The smoke reeked of something ancient and horrific; materials far older than humanity were burning. A rusty sunset painted everyone in blood, and shrieks around the flames mixed with faraway chanting."

- The Future of Another Timeline, Annalee Newitz

Love the idea that time travel is an accepted and regular part of life. Also accept the premise that people are inevitably going to want to change it, and that some people will always want to take away the rights of others. Interested to see where this one goes!

First lines of Jeff Vandermeer's "Bourne"

 "I found Borne on a sunny gunmetal day when the giant bear Mord came roving near our home. To me, Borne was just salvage at first. I didn't know what Borne would mean to us. I couldn't know that we would change everything."

- Borne, by Jeff Vandermeer

I should have loved this book. It's right up my alley: it's set in this harsh, post apocalyptic world where a few plucky survivors eek out a living rummaging through scraps of old technology and evading the dangerous results of genetic experiments gone awry - like Mord, an almost God-like flying bear. Rachel, our protagonist, stumbles upon a mysterious object during a foraging trip, and this is where the book really hits its stride. The object is Bourne, and it's fascinating to see his/her/its transfomration from an object to a pet, then to a strangely human-like cephalopod, and eventually to a childlike weapon. 

And yet. Despite all of these fascinating details, the book left me cold. Rather than marveling at the ineffable mystery of creation like in the Southern Reach books, Bourne tells a tale of people trying to survive in a brutalized world. It was interesting but I felt that the plot's ultimate quest to be a bit trite, his descriptions fascinating but meandering, and the whole thing just too long. 

Don’t get me wrong, VanderMeer is an incredibly talented writer, and I’ll definitely keep exploring his works. But in the end I found Bourne just didn't resonate with me the way his other books have.

First Lines of Samuel R. Delany's "Nova"

 "'Hey, Mouse! Play us something,' one of the mechanics called from the bar.

'Didn't get signed on no ship yet?' chided the other. 'Your spinal rocket'll rust up. Come on, give us a number." 

The Mouse stopped running his finger around the rim of his glass. Wanting to say "no" he began a "yes." Then he frowned."

- Samuel R. Delany, Nova

Delany's work has always impressed me, but i've only really known his famous works: Dalghren,  Trouble on Triton, the always stunning "Aye, and Gomorrah" from Dangerous Visions. Nova is one of his earlier novels, appealing to me for having more plot than the sprawling Dalghren and for his elements of Tarot, Moby Dick, and classical mythology. Overall, it's a vibrant book - filled with color and invention with very little of the obsolescence that 50 years of scientific progress can often bring to older speculative fiction. Like many of his books I felt like I didn't catch all of the thematic references, but then again I didn't feel like I needed to because there were so many fascinating aspects to the story. My favorite parts were the univeral acceptance of the Tarot, the power structure of the galactic governments and how Von Ray - the Ahab-like obsessed captain - wanted revolution, and the different species and how they spoke and related to each other. An excellent example of New Wave scifi.

 Good summary of the book here.

First Lines of Samit Basu's "The City Inside"

 "Sometimes Joey feels like her whole life is a montage of randomly selected, algorithm-controlled surveillance cam clips, mostly of her looking at screens or sitting glazed-eyed at meetings. As a professional image builder and storyteller, she finds the lack of structure even more offensive than the banality of the material. She's always taken pride in her instinct for cuts and angles and rhythms in the wildly successful stories that she produces--one day, one perfect day, her life will be just as award-worthy."

- Samit Basu, The City Inside

This wonderful novel is a frenetic ball of energy, depicting the world of New Delhi in a plausible near-future where social media, algorithms, and authoritative governments rule the day. Basu's prose, filled with ideas and sprawling vitality, covers a lot of ground very quickly - you're immersed in Joey's world, finding yourself looking for societal insights and warnings. A smart, entertaining read. Abigail Nussbaum's review (under it's original title Chosen Spirits), inspired me to pick it up.   

First Lines of Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game"

 "I've watched though his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one. Or at least as close as we're going to get."

"That's what you said about the brother."

- Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

Review of "The Best American SciFi and Fantasy 2022"

The "Best Science Fiction and Fantasy" anthologies are always a good source of interesting tales. All of the stories in the 2022 version (edited by Rebecca Roanhorse) are high-quality - there wasn't one story that didn't seem like it was best in class. But like any collection of stories from multiple authors, some worked for me, and some didn't. Here are the ones that I can't stop thinking about:

1. Meg Elison, The Pizza Boy. Pizza delivery... in space! A blue-collar captain struggles to make and deliver pizzas in a future of bureaucracy and scarcity. When will he find enough mushrooms? Unexpected twist at the end.

2. Aimee Ogden. The Cold Calculations. A response to Tom Godwin's famous The Cold Equations, but 100% angrier and with an ingenious - but seriously ugly - solution to the problem.

3. Nalo Hopkinson, Broad Dutty Water: a Sunken Story. Wonderfully inventive story of a woman whose collection of impromptu bio-implants take her to a place she never expected. An unpredictable tale that's also memorable for its post-glacier melt setting.

4. Sam J. Miller. Let All the Children Boogie. Two misfit teens explore alternative music and gender identity while trying to decipher the messages from a mysterious voice that interrupts their favorite radio station. Sympathetic and moving.

5. Kelly Link. Skindler's Veil. A long story about a college kid who ends up house sitting for Death. Or some form of demi-god. Doesn't matter: I classic dose of that wonderful Link magic. Looking forward to digging into her latest collection White Cat, Black Dog.

6. Peng Shepherd. The Future Library. An imaging of what would happen if the real Future Library fell prey to climate change politics. A sad, moving fantasy.

7. Catherynne M. Valente. L'Esprit de L'Escalier. What if Orpheus had succeeded in bringing Eurydice back from the underworld? Valente's irreverent take imagines the scene as a failed marriage between an egomanic and a zombie. Extremely entertaining.

8. Rich Larson. Tripping Though Time. A waiter serves drinks to time-traveling tourists who gawk at famous historical natural disasters. The class consciousness in this one reminded me of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Friday Black collection.

9. Maria Dong. The Frankly Impossible Weight of Han. Stick with this one through the overtly meta comments as the structure of the tale reveals itself. Wonderfully moving mix of scifi, folklore, and religion.

The first lines of Becky Chambers "A Psalm for the Wild Built"

"If you ask six different monks the question of which godly domain robot consciousness belongs to, you'll get seven different answers."

- Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild Built

A quirky tale by the author of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Entertaining but felt lightweight, despite the interesting world building (the details about the different gods, history and evolution of robotics and their withdrawal from humanity). I wasn't sure why it left me cold, but after reading Clark Seanor's essay about Chambers at Strange Horizons ("Recycled Air: Wayfarers and the Tyranny of the Everyday") I think that there's very little danger in the book. I never really felt like the characters were in any real danger - either physical or psychological. Perhaps this is because I knew this was the first book in a series, but without that edge it was hard for me to really invest in the plot.

 

First Lines of Becky Chambers' "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet"

 "As she woke up in the pod, she remembered three things. First, she was traveling through open space. Second, she was about to start a new job, one she could not screw up. Third, she had bribed a government official into giving her a new identity file. None of this information was new, but it wasn't pleasant to wake up to."

- Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Fun SciFi novel about the close-knit inter-species crew of the Wayfinder who has signed up for a dangerous but lucrative shipping gig. Succeed, and they'll have sufficient funds to live comfortably. Fail and they'll find themselves in a politically fraught situation with no clear way out.

Chambers is playing a long game here - the main plot plays out over a series of multiple novels, which makes this a relaxed entry into her world. I appreciated the time she took to introduce the characters, providing all of them with varied backstories and motivations. It was a fun read, mainly because the characters are (with one notable brooding exception) refreshingly pleasant and get along with each other.  There's an easy optimism and refined species relations that reminded me of the original Star Trek. However, the crew's easy comradery prevented me from taking their struggles too seriously - there was a lack of edge to the character dynamics. It didn't help that the book reads less like a novel and a collection of interconnected short stories - like the first series of a long Netflix series. 

Regardless, I felt like The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is an excellent beach read: entertaining and interesting but not too challenging. I enjoyed it and am curious to see if this impression changes as the series progresses.

First Lines of Octavia E. Butler's "Wild Seed"

 "Doro discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of his seed villages. The village was a comfortable mud-walled place surrounded by grasslands and scattered trees. But Doro realized even before he reached it that its people were gone."

- Octavia E. Butler, Wild Seed

I'm about half-way through this unique book with mixed emotions. On one hand, it's a killer pitch: a struggle between two frenemy immortal shape changers, one of whom is obsessed with breeding ever more powerful and unique abilities and the other who can provide them but doesn't agree with the project. On the other hand, much of the book takes place in long, intense conversations that, while skillfully rendered, take a long time to unfold without much actually occurring. It's essentially philosophical dialogue, but about the esoteric situations of these two supernatural beings that don't directly connect to the moral dilemmas that I personally find relevant. I've debated stopping the book but find myself compelled to return to it - there's a understated, moving power in Butler's prose. Curious to see how this ends; i'm hoping it's a clean ending and not merely a bridge to the next Patternist book.

First Lines of Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary"

 "'What's two plus two?'

Something about the question irritates me. I'm tired. I drift back to sleep.

A few minutes pass, then I hear it again.

"What's two plus two?"

The soft, feminine voice lacks emotion and the pronunciation is identical to the previous time she said it. It's a computer. A computer is harassing me. I'm even more irritated now."

- Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary.

Another entertaining book from the author of The Martian. I don't want to give anything away about this book as there's a steady stream of revelations, but similar to his successful first novel the book is propulsive, humorous, and doesn't shy away from using science to make sense of the world. While I found some of the scenes, explanations, and achievements to be a bit too pat, Weir's engaging every-geek protagonist helps you suspend disbelief and go along for the ride. Fun vision, well executed, great read.

First Lines of Premee Mohamed's "These Lifeless Things"

"Today we dug up bones in the Botanical Garden.

I was briefly, reflexively confused: How did these get here? But what a question. People just die where they die."

 

- Premee Mohamed, These Lifeless Things

A fun novel covering what would happen if Lovecraftian creatures didn't immediately destroy our sense of reality. What would learning about such creatures do to us? What meaning is there in a world where such creatures exist? What would we do? The parts of the novel that deal with these questions are the strongest, utilizing the 1st person to share delicious observations in line with someone struggling to make sense of something unknowable: "Pain is interesting, I was told when I started my studies. People don't want to read about happiness. They want to read about pain. That's what will get you published."

 

I enjoyed the book's post-apocalyptic world with the left-over quality of a Roadside Picnic or The Leftovers even if I felt like the slow burn towards a final quest was a bit forced.

 

 

Book Review: "The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories" (ed. Jeff and Ann VanderMeer)

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer's The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories is an impressive accomplishment. I've tried to write this review a number of times and nothing I do is capturing my experience of reading it's 1000+ pages. So let me just write some words.

The VanderMeers compiled the best "weird" stories over the last century. By weird, we're not talking horror - although that is often an element in these stories. Weird here often means surreal and bizarre, but can also be tender and moving. To me, the common element is often an element of surprise, not from jump scares but from a joyful examination of an impeccable internal logic. Exploring the strange takes one many, many forms, and all of them are included here: From the different worlds in Michel Bernanos' surreal "The Other Side of the Mountain" to SciFi dystopias (perhaps best represented in Craig Padawer's "Meat Garden"), to lots and lots of strange creatures (Lovecraft's classic "Dunwich Horror" but also "Margaret st. Clair's "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles").

The first portion of the book (its arranged chronologically) is almost quaint in it's pre-ironic story telling. There's a good slice of surrealism, a lot of monsters, and a good amount of gothic tales. 

As the book progresses, the stories get more brutal - or more tender. The older I get, the less appeal gore and horror have for me, but Daniel Abraham's masterful "Flat Diane" plays horror wonderfully with parental guilt and the "Flat Stanley books (and killer lines like "The best trick Hell has to play against its inmates is to whisper to them that this - this now - is the bottom. Nothing can be worse than this. And then to pull the floor away.") The tender - yet often creepy - is represented by two tales I can't stop thinking about: Martin Simpson's moving domestic ghost tale "Last Rites and Resurrections" and the slow burn of child fantasies gone sour in Micaela Morrissette's "The Familiars." 

There are also stories here that, to me, are undisputed masterpieces. These include:

• Michael Chabon's "The God of Dark Laughter". Brilliant combination of the paranoid with the weird, told with an impeccable literary voice.
• Jorge Luis Borges's examination of infinity in "The Aleph"
• Kafka's brilliant "In the Penal Colony"
• Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "The Hell Screen." Which turned me on to Akutagawa's brilliance (Jay Rubin's translation of this fantastical tale is the better version IMO).
  
• James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Terrible Things to Rats” 

Not every tale in the book was good, but then again, that's the greatest part about these collections. If you don't like one, wait a moment and the next one comes along. There were so many good stories in The Weird you won't be waiting long!

First Lines of Allistar River's "Century Rain"

 "The river flowing sluggishly under Pont de al Concorde was flat and grey, like worn-out linoleum. It was October and the authorities were having one of their periodic crackdowns on contraband."

- Alastair Reynolds, Century Rain

My beach read this year, I picked Century Rain because of it's interesting "alternative history" premise, a promise of a lot of Paris, and fond memories of his entertaining opera Pushing Ice. Alas, I was greatly disappointing. I found it to have wooden dialogue that stretched on for far too long, and interesting ideas buried beneath obscurely described action. I'm sure some people love this kind of thing, but it didn't do anything for me. For my next Reynolds book I'll stick to the deep space operas.

First Lines of Cixin Liu's "The Three-body Problem"

 "The Red Union had been attacking the headquarters of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade for two days. Their red flags fluttered restlessly around the brigade building like flames yearning for firewood."

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem

I picked this up after reading Cixin Liu's excellent story "Moonlight" in Ken Liu's curated Broken Stars compilation. Marketed as "the best Chinese science fiction novel translated into English," the book plays out a unique spin on a first-contact scenario. The perspective of such an event from someone who has a completely different experience and culture from mine alone was worth reading. I can't say I enjoyed all of the novel: I found it's tone to be schizophrenic, and the chapters detailing the eponymous "Three-Body" game didn't speak to me at all. But Cixin Liu's immersive worldview is powerful and got me thinking. I just won't be reading the rest of the trilogy. 

First Lines of James S. A. Corey's "Leviathan Wakes"

 "The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot."

James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

A very entertaining read, starting out with an excellent mixture of action and space opera politics. It did not go in the direction I had expected - opening up a vein of horror about two thirds of the way through made the narrative a bit more pedestrian in my eyes, but didn't take away from the compelling thrust of the story. I enjoyed it, but am not compelled to pick up the (many) sequels.

First Lines of Joanna Russ' "The Zanzibar Cat"

Katy drives like a maniac; we must have been doing over 120 km/hr on those turns. She's good, though, extremely good, and I've seen her take the whole car apart and put it together again in a day."

- Joanna Russ, from "When it Changed", the first story in the collection The Zanzibar Cat.

I fell in love with Russ when I encountered her amazing story "The Dirty Little Girl" in The Hidden Side of the Moon. It's a mesmerizing story, compelling and deeply weird at the same time, and I can't stop going back to it. A few stories in, The Zanzibar Cat is not of that quality (yet?) but is still entertaining.

First Lines of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Moon"

"Someone had told him not to look while landing on the moon, but he was strapped in his seat right next to a window and could not help himself; he looked. Quickly he saw why he had been told not to -- the moon was doubling in size with every beat of his heart, they were headed for it at cosmic speed and would certainly vaporize on impact."

- Kim Stanley Robinson, "Red Moon". Entertaining read that starts and ends well but with a bit of a lull in the middle. Love his outlook on life.

First Lines of Ursula LeGuin's "The Name for the World is Forest"

"Two pieces of yesterday were in Captain Davidson's mind when he woke, and he lay looking at them in the darkness for a while."

- Ursula LeGuin, "The Name for the World is Forest"

Neuromancer's Influence

William Gibson's Neuromancer, along with Stephenson’s Snow Crash, fully envisioned an entirely new SciFi idea: cyberspace. Essentially virtual reality, it was famously described by Gibson as “a conceptual hallucination… a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…”  This concept was also very exciting to those of us who were limited to going to the arcade to pay-to-play or by playing Atari chunky-pixel games or text-based games at home.

Case, the main character of Neuromancer is an addict hacker tricked into jacking into a corporate network, after which, of course, complications ensure. The novel alternates between the incredible cyberspace scenes and his real live in "the Sprawl,” a megalopolis ranging down the east coast of North America from Atlanta to Boston (think Bladerunner).  With the help of Molly, a hip augmented "street samurai", Case tries to get his life under control while also changing the entire face of cyberspace.

It feels almost quaint now, since that vision of an electronic frontier with hackers as noir-like freedom fighters died an early death after 9/11 as government has taken more and more of a role in total mediation of the online experience. (This is one of the themes in Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, among other things.) It’s also incredibly influential – everything from the Matrix movies to the Lego movie owe Gibson a debt. He also predicted the modern focus on hacking, surveillance, terror, and an almost workship of technology. It should be said that Gibson's writing isn't the smoothest prose out there, but it gets the job done. For me, it’s hard to separate the strength of the book from the impact that it made upon me as a young’en. It sparked the cyberpunk aesthetic (google that term for fun pictures!), which was very exciting to a kid like me living in rural America that didn't even get Fox on our televisions. In the end, this quote sums up a lot:

"Neuromancer," says novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow, "remains a vividly imagined allegory for the world of the 1980s, when the first seeds of massive, globalised wealth-disparity were planted, and when the inchoate rumblings of technological rebellion were first felt. A generation later, we're living in a future that is both nothing like the Gibson future and instantly recognizable as its less stylish, less romantic cousin. Instead of zaibatsus [large conglomerates] run by faceless salarymen, we have doctrinaire thrusting young neocons and neoliberals who want to treat everything from schools to hospitals as businesses."

Happy Banned Books Week!

"We all know that books burn, yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny of every kind. In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt

The American Library Association has named September 21-27th Banned Books Week as a way of celebrating the freedom to read. It's remarkable to think that it wasn't so long ago that books were regularly being censored - the famous ones I can think of are The Catcher in the Rye, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Naked Lunch, and - one of the great formative novels of my youth - Robert Cormier's excellent The Chocolate War. Luckily, through vigilance and additional delivery platforms such as eBooks, censorship appears to be minimized these days, but it's worth remembering how grim the situation was.

In reading about this event, I came across this powerful afterward added to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:

"About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles. But, she added, wouldn't it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women's characters and roles? A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn't I "do them over"? Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.  Two weeks ago my mount of mail delivered forth a pip-squeak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story "The Fog Horn" in a high school reader. In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a "God-Light." Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in "the Presence." The editors had deleted "God-Light" and "in the Presence." ... Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above?
By "firing" the whole lot.
By sending rejection slips to each and every one.
By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.
The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches."

h/t Daily Kos

Cross Posted in Reading, Running and Red Sox