David Mitchell – Slade House

I enjoyed Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (and admittedly have never watched the film), so when Slade House came up on a list of great ghost stories I decided to check it out.

I’m happy I did. Slade House tells the story of two soul carnivores, members of a sect of Anchorites, who lure people into their house (which exists in a time bubble, having been destroyed in the Blitz in 1942). They, of course, consume their souls in order to live forever.

Thoughts:

• The two Anchorites are brother and sister, and have learned some pretty interesting tricks.
• Having your soul consumed is not pleasant.
• They are eventually defeated (sort of) by a cop who has had his soul consumed but who managed to get a hairpin into the hands of the next victim, who uses it.
  • This act also alerts an Horologist to the presence of the twins. The consequences for the Anchorites are not good.
• The scenes in which the twins bend time in order to lure victims are particularly interesting – the sense of surrealism and lack of connection with reality are well-described, and come complete with the types of irreconcilable details that seem insignificant at the time but that as good fans of horror we know we should be aware of.

I’m looking forward to the rest of Mitchell’s works.

Dan Simmons – Hyperion

I’m often embarrassed by the books I haven’t heard of. Just when I want to think of myself as at least a well-read aficionado in a genre I find mentions of a text that seems fundamental to that genre, and the fact that I haven’t read those books makes me sort of feel like an imposter.

Hyperion is one of those novels. I stumbled across a mention of it somewhere, and I realized that maybe I’m not reading as much scifi as I should be. So thanks to my local library I got my hands on a digital copy, and, well, the hype is real.

Hyperion lovingly riffs on multiple other texts. It borrows its format from The Canterbury Tales, with travelers telling each other tales of how they came to be on this mission. The fact that their trip is mission-based is Simmons’s update of Chaucer, as he adds eminent world destruction to a story of pilgrimage.

As if that’s not enough, each separate story comes from either a scifi sub-genre or a specific author – there’s Heinlein, Asimov, LeGuin, and Bradbury at a minimum, and genres such as cyberpunk, showcasing Simmons’s ability to work in each of those genres and/or styles.

In each case Simmons does what good authors do – he engages in conversation with the original, either author or genre, and extends that conversation in brilliant and thought-provoking ways. As a reader, it’s fun to both recognize the original and marvel at the extension, and I definitely did both.

Holistically, much of the narrative of the novel is driven by the Shrike, an entity that may or may not exist. It’s earned a place in the cosmology of space, however, as it appears to be able to bend the space-time continuum, causing some to worship it and some to want to destroy it. Simmons neatly encapsulates the ways in which scifi narratives are often driven by seemingly inevitable confrontations with alien Others, and his use of the Shrike as this other is layered and multi-faceted.

In my mind, Hyperion lives up to the hype, and I’m glad I added it to my have-read list. This quick post doesn’t do it justice – the individual stories are fascinating as narratives in and of themselves and could serve as enjoyable short stories. Simmons’s ability to engage other texts in conversations while simultaneously challenge legions of scifi narratives helps Hyperion earn its place in the canon.

Ashok K. Banker – Upon a Burning Throne

In Upon a Burning Throne, Ashok K. Banker mixes the conventions of fantasy – spun as the genre is from northern European folklore – with Indian myths and legends to build a world that embraces both the cultural anxieties about the importance of royal lineage in maintaining civilization evident in Tolkien with the magical realism of Rushdie. Princes are fathered by gods, demigods, and demons, thrones test the validity of royal claims with fire, and fantastical creatures threaten to bring down venerable civilizations, with all of these elements combining to create a thoroughly-realized world.

What more could a fantasy fan want?

I found myself most drawn to the challenges that Banker makes to what it means to be human. In the world of the Burnt Empire we are all clearly touched by divinity in multiple points in our lives, and those touches are both all-consuming and empowering. The empire of Krushan represents the forces that connect us – family mostly, but also duty, responsibility to order, and a sense of law – and demonic forces of all sorts tear at the edges of these constructions. Demonic powers can transform a city into a living entity that destroys armies, and they can madden entire armies of assassins so much that they seek to kill entire royal lines. The same powers are present in the demigods who protect human civilizations, and they represent justice that is both fair and unyielding that I’m guessing the mythology argues that humans cannot be.

The cultural fears present in this novel are omnipresent. Entire armies die to protect royals who are aware of their importance to maintaining social order, and the forces arrayed against them are just as destructive (and self-destructive). Despite the apparent luxurious lifestyles of the royal court, their viability is constantly poised on a knife’s edge, and the sense of the precariousness of maintaining civilized order is powerful.

This novel is the first of Banker’s that I have read, and it will not be the last.

Martha Wells – Fugitive Telemetry

Fugitive Telemetry is the sixth (!) book in the Murderbot series, and while these are fun, quick reads, they’re also an interesting look at how corporate power manifests itself as humans move into space. At first the Murderbot series felt like it lacked vision – there were no grand alien races or other mysterious powers of the sort that mark Altered Carbon or The Expanse. As I have continued the series I now realize that I’m glad Murderbot doesn’t have any of this: adding that sort of element to these short novels (even done well, as both of the other series do) would take away from Wells’s rational, almost realistic extrapolation of current trends to future societies. Murderbot provides readers with an unadulterated look at how power congeals in money, even in space, and how resistance also happens, even if in unforeseen places. Aliens sometimes become techno-fixes, either helping humans band together against the menacing power or learn from other, wiser races, and Wells doesn’t take that deus ex machina.

George Lucas and the Star Wars clans should read these.

This episode continues Murderbot’s awakening of a personality increasingly influenced by the progressive, democratic, and freedom-loving folks of the non-Corporate rim. It protects our favorite doctor (Dr. Mensah, the first person to realize that Murderbot’s personality had deviated significantly from its programming and was becoming sentient in a non-Terminator way, due mostly to its incredible consumption of digital stories through the 24th century equivalent of soap operas). Further evidence of MurderBot’s growth comes as he helps to uncover a human slavery/trafficking/Underground Railroad, and he rescues the humans who are trying to escape.

I admire how Wells’s command of technology and the ways it might develop doesn’t overwhelm her concern for humanitarian issues and her disgust with corporate power. Envisioning a security unit (MurderBot) that can *not* become a terrifying rogue destroyer of all things human is subtle and brilliant, and she even adds factions among the other machines as they become increasingly self-aware.

Here’s hoping MurderBot continues its sardonic, very funny, and enlightening journey towards becoming a fully functioning human-like cyborg, continuing to use its powers for good.

Sarah Gailey – Magic for Liars

Detective novels have a long tradition in the American pantheon, and the formula they follow is clear, even if some of the details change – the detective is given a case that appears to be mysterious, they immerse themselves in solving it, often to the detriment of every other aspect of their life, they take a few wrong turns, and then they solve the mystery, often in a way that doesn’t result in what we might ordinarily think of as justice. Sarah Gailey’s Magic for Liars follows this formula carefully, allowing however for some alterations that make the novel a surprisingly sophisticated read.

My thoughts:

• True to generic expectations, Ivy Gamble, the detective whose point of view we follow, is sort of hard to like. Contrary to those same expectations, however, Gamble’s reasons for being sort of unlikable are understandable – her sister, a mage who teaches at the high school where the murder took place, is immensely popular and sort of an asshole to Ivy. I for one felt a bit sorry for her, and understood her coldness towards magicians.
  • Detectives are not supposed to have families, and Gailey’s willingness to violate this dictate allows her to take the novel in much less grand but much more honest ways. Even worse, they are supposed to be the emotionally detached part of the plot, so Ivy’s emotional turmoils make clear how unusual this case is.
• Detectives are also supposed to be able to negotiate underworlds of criminality for us suburbanites who want the thrill of taking on criminals without the risks. This murder takes place in a school for wealthy students, and there are few class undercurrents at all, no hatred of working class and/or brown or black people as happens in Chandler or class consciousness as Hammett provides.
  • Instead, she is immersed in the wealth and privilege of this school, as the novel clearly delineates between her own tiny and ugly apartment and the very nice guest house and the lavish retainer she is given upon taking this case. It also marks how different her cases were in the mundane world – basic cheating husbands and wives made up the bulk of her business – from this bizarre and foreboding mystery.
• The ending was a surprise to me as well, although several plot twists hinted at it. More importantly in my mind however is how tragic the murder was, one caused by love attempting to fix a wrong more than by a desire for wealth or fame. Love in traditional detective novels is something that perpetrators of crimes cannot truly have, caught up as they are in the pursuit of their ambitions. That is not how this story plays out.

Gailey’s novel was surprisingly sad, which should not have surprised me based upon the title. I perhaps was thrown by the conversation it has with Harry Potter – there’s even a confused kid who thinks he is the One, ala Harry, I’m guessing, but who is just listening to a prophecy that doesn’t seem to have any effect on the lives of real mages. None of those potential twists are given much narrative energy, however, in ways that help us understand that there is no Harry to rescue us from whatever evil lurks. Instead, the action is driven by a desperate attempt to cover up what is essentially an accident of the worst sort. Unsurprisingly, no form of justice of the sort that we expect in detective stories happens, not even one that does not involve the proper authorities.

That emotional turn is one that will mark Gailey in my book as an author to watch, and I look forward to reading more of her work.

Jeff Vandermeer – Dead Astronauts

Dystopias became fixed locations in the 2000s. Starting with The Hunger Games in 2008 (perhaps), a series of interesting-yet-similar trilogies came out, like clockwork, as publishers tried to get in on the rush for dystopia dollars (which I’m assuming spend like real dollars, but are only available in gold or other valuable metals).

Some of the original dystopias created this territory for us. From a science fiction perspective, post-Armageddon novels like Earth Abides or A Canticle for Lebowitz imagined post-biological/nuclear weapon worlds, while those trapped under the peculiarly Soviet brand of dystopia like Zamyatin and the Strugatsky brothers created incredibly well-imagined worlds that rivaled anything Wells, London, Orwell, or Huxley were producing in the West. We can continue further down this rabbit hole with truly imaginative novels like Delaney’s Dhalgren (I often wonder if Samuel R. Delaney will ever fully get his due as an influential science fiction and fantasy writer), but the crux of the argument is this: these narratives create worlds that have recognizable literary borders that readers can quickly identify. These borders include some configuration of ruined planet, barely-surviving remnants of humanity, and survivor figures who are heroically striving against these destructive forces in the hopes of restarting the world, hopefully this time with a better plan/ideology.

Vandermeer’s Dead Astronauts uses those generic expectations in a barely-recognizable fashion, and in the process of transforming those borders takes dystopias to a whole new level. The world of Dead Astronauts (coming from the Borne series, so having read Dead Astronauts first I am out-of-sequence) has been degraded by a bioengineering firms, here represented by what I’m assuming is the sole survivor, The Company, and some of the creatures that The Company has created through what is essentially the type of torture that Neal Stephenson documents in his Baroque Cycle series beginning with the Royal Society’s insane “experiments” have survived to dominate this new landscape.

Vandermeer’s language evokes the pain and suffering that millions of organisms had to go through in order for The Company (and its real-world equivalents) to do the kind of research that I guess their shareholders demand. The most coherent (from a narrative standpoint) character is the Blue Fox, who I’m guessing is mostly fox but also lots of other organisms, and who is able to pass seamlessly through borders of time and space that either do not affect it or have been so altered by The Company’s experiments that they are unrecognizable or ineffective. The fox is an interesting choice on Vandermeer’s part, as it evokes beauty in a way that animals like coyotes may not but seems tameable and not frightening (in its original incarnation) in ways that wolves could never be. That said, this Blue Fox is terrifying, but it also does not seem to want to harm what’s left of humanity, except perhaps for Charlie X, a clinically insane research scientist who has created a monster that he has no idea how to control, one that roams the wasteland that used to be the Georgia/Florida coast.

Dead Astronauts also features the types of rebel leaders we are used to seeing in dystopias, even if these folks are reincarnated astronauts who end up fighting other versions of themselves as they cross space-time borders. While these three start the narrative, they are not its primary source, and we barely hear from them by the end. The ambiguous shape and often unidentifiable forms that they take are disconcerting, at least to me, as generically we expect either heroic figures who are sort of ambiguous in how they seek to start the revolution or ones who have clear superpowers and who have to defeat an even greater power to trigger the new world. These dead astronauts have neither coherent plan nor any sort of understanding of the ways in which the world has changed, and they spend lots of energy confronting versions of themselves that they run across as they travel – often inadvertently – through time.

Vandermeer’s imagination is spectacular, and his ability to take a well-worn form and invigorate it through both the sheer virtuosity of his language *and* the barely-recognizable contours of the world he has built gives me hope for the future of the genre. Dystopias that are locked into the last man standing have relatively obvious generic and cultural biases, and their appeal seems to have run its course until the next round of pop culture recycling, yet Vandermeer, along with the Afro-Futurists, offers entirely new possibilities in envisioning how we might destroy ourselves. We can only hope that these warnings from the not-so-distant future will help us alter our behaviors and start thinking of the world that we leave our descendants.

Zen Cho – The True Queen

The True Queen takes chances in ways that I admire. Rather than continue the story of Zacharias Wythe (a fun first novel in the series that I talked about in this post), Cho branches off on a new, albeit related, story about two sisters from Malaysia who are being protected by the head witch of the Janda Baik set of witches and a feud with Faerie, which has a different configuration in the East.

That takes huevos.

While the story itself is engaging and interesting, what I’m particularly fascinated by is Cho’s writing style. It contrasts with her project, which is anti-racist and anti-sexist in all the best ways. She is clearly taking a view of Faerie similar to that taken by Susannah Clarke, but she’s more light-hearted and less overtly subversive. The danger of Faerie – and the ways that Britain tried to deal with it, in ways bound by gender and class – was very clear in Clarke’s books, while Cho takes a much less obvious route to the subversion she’s pulling off.

The true danger that Cho sees (at least in these novels) comes from the violence with which the ruling classes will defend their privilege. Even when the Faerie Queen and one of her court threaten to kill all the witches in England, the threat never seems real, mostly because they clearly respect the power of mortal magic. The threat that white, male magicians see in having women and people of color who can use magic is clearly a comment on imperialism and nationalism, and Cho sticks the knife in gently, so much so that I’m hoping the ruling classes didn’t even notice it go in.

Cho’s project is a critical one, and she joins some other amazing authors in using genres that typically have thought of themselves as apolitical and non-ideological to show just how full of cultural narratives they actually are. I’m hoping that there’s a third novel to the Sorcerer Royale project, but no matter what I look forward to reading more of Cho’s work in the future.

Erin Morgenstern – The Starless Sea

I am not quite sure how to read Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, a probably fairly common response among the novel’s readers. My guess is that Morgenstern wants us to question how to read, as her novel is a meta-treatise on narrative, engagement, and the fundamentally radical act of reading.

I have other thoughts:

• Most of the action takes place in The Harbor, a place that hovers between myth and fantasy and our own ability to become immersed in stories.
  • It also has lots of cats, a kitchen staffed by bees that somehow anticipates what you want, and it can be accessed by really weird doors.
• The novel’s action neatly recreates the feeling I get when I lose track of time while reading. Characters slip in and out of time constantly, and they get lost and found and lost all over again.
• The novel mocks allegory in several places, which is a good thing, since it skews perilously close to allegory itself. Its supernatural characters all demonstrate human-enough emotions to be more than allegory, for the most part.
• Its beginning is almost a misdirect – it reads as a sort of light-hearted look at a couple of nerdy grad students, only to change abruptly when one of them finds and walks through a mysterious door.
• It also sort of refuses to gives its readers a happy ending, all the while encouraging them to participate in the larger project. Star-crossed characters are given tantalizing glimpses of beautiful lives that they could have lived, only to discover that they have not found themselves in the same time as their soul mate.
• Morgenstern clearly values the immersive potential of games, and one of the novel’s major characters is a game designer. The potential of narrative in both mediums drives her own novel, and she uses that narrative in a bunch of its configurations as well – comedy, tragedy, epic, fantasy, myth.

My guess is that I will be thinking about this novel a long time from now. It offers a fascinating world built through the power of story, one that has made think about the ways in which narrative helps us understand the primal forces and energies of our beings.

Brandon Sanderson – The Well of Ascension

The Well of Ascension is the second book in Sanderson’s Mistborn series (my post on The Final Empire, the first book of the series, is here), and unlike most second novels in a trilogy it does more than just move the plot forward. By its end we have started to get a better feel for who the actual enemy is, and Vin’s and Elend’s paths have become clearer…but most second novels do that. The Well of Ascension goes a bit farther in exposing not just the narrative but also the generic tweaks…

More thoughts:

• A generic expectation of fantasy is that we know that once we find the source of evil, our heroes will work to confront and defeat it. They will go through the entire Hero’s Journey, and will bring back the boon and, in modern versions, even survive.
  • Sanderson’s portrayal of Vin’s journey so far fits along those lines, with some interesting differences. For instance, she’s fallen in love with a potential rival (Elend), and that relationship has threatened a couple of times to derail her following of the storyline. Generically, relationships simply cannot happen, even when the love is as pure as that shared by Frodo and Sam.
  • She has confronted increasingly threatening challenges, which also fits. The challenges feel a bit off, though, not in the typical arc that I at least suspect. This disruption feels as if it comes about because of the ease with which they are defeated, at least so far – rival army lords die because of their own weaknesses, another Mistborn who seemingly has the upper hand on Vin gives her a potential boon and then is killed with almost suspicious ease – and generically those challenges need to seem greater, as if they are the proving grounds on which heroes hone their craft.
  • Again, I will need to wait for the final novel in the trilogy to see just how far Sanderson will push this…
• A character that I am fascinated by is the mist. My guess is that the mist is some sort of toxic residue left from previous populations. I might be sorely disappointed if it is actually some sort of supernatural force aka Thomas Covenant…
• One question that I have not dealt with much yet is the idea of ascending, an act that clearly will or has happened, and is part of this world’s history. The mistborn are god-like in their powers, and we just witnessed one character ascend to that status, but there is little talk of religion in this context.
  • Sanderson is not ignoring religion – there is a cult of humans who have dedicated themselves to simply gathering all the stories of religions in order to disseminate them back to folks. So whatever divinity awaits is an intentional product of the narrative.

The Well of Ascension promised all sorts of interesting threads, and I am looking forward to the final book. I am fairly certain that I have not captured all of the intricacies of what Sanderson is doing, but there is one more blog post that awaits…

Lauren Beukes – Afterland

Lauren Beukes’s fiction is always sufficiently weird to make me a fan. Perhaps this is a sign of the changing landscape of fiction, but Afterland is not all that weird, at least in comparison to all the amazing literature available. I am still a fan.

This story takes place after a virus has wiped out a huge percentage (feels like 99.9) of men on the planet. Our protagonist, Cole, tries to get herself and her son Miles (who has survived, somehow) back home to South Africa. She is stalked by her sister and her sister’s employer, a rich woman who wants Miles’s semen in order to hopefully corner the market on post-pandemic procreation.

More thoughts:

• When the novel starts Miles and Cole are living in a government detention center. They are being held, although supposedly it’s a sort of protective custody. The US government is confused and clueless, and that’s evident in Beuekes’s portrayal of the center.
• Her sister is only interested in making money, and sees her nephew as a meal ticket. She represents a sort of gangster-enabler, and her delusions about her ability to control the situation repeatedly put Cole and Miles at risk.
• Their are multiple forms of community that take place in this rebuilt USA, ranging from a hippie commune in Salt Lake City to a traveling set of nuns who are trying to convince a supreme being to bring men back. Cole effectively utilizes each of these groups to get back home.
• The main emotion in this novel is grief. Miles had a wonderful marriage, and the survivors have to mourn not only their own losses (sons as well as husbands and fathers) but the fact that many will never be able to have children.
• Beukes’s vision of a post–pandemic identifies the specific cultural traits of the US as seen by an outsider (she’s South African). It is hard to argue with what she sees as our anxieties…

Afterland moves through a dystopic landscape cloaked as a narrative about gender, but it is just as much about our inabilities to imagine different visions of our future. The only survivors who make any attempt to remake themselves could easily land in a Cory Doctorow novel, but even they get quickly shunted aside by the realities of the new landscape. Everyone else returns to some diminished version of past strategies, and none of these are effective. I hope that Beukes writes an Afterland 2 that takes place in South Africa, so we can see what differences she sees happening on the African continent.