Month: November 2014

Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia: From Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion. Mostly Turkmenistan and the bits just around it. If you’re trying to fill in early Turkmen history, here’s a start but not a lot of detail/depth.

Daryl Gregory, Afterparty. Near-future SF with designer drugs and a lot of discussion about neurology and religion/atheism. The “party” aspect of the title is not very present in the book–there’s a lot more running around trying to control one’s mental health under the influence of unknown newly engineered substances and also not get killed by various groups.

Ilyon, Samguk Yusa: Legends and History of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea. Brief tales, good background in an area that’s difficult to find in English. One of the worst copy-editing jobs I’ve ever encountered, though.

Carolyn Johnston, Voices of Cherokee Women. Quite often I say of the works of nonfiction I discuss here, “Does what it says on the tin.” This is the opposite. It is substantially not the voices of Cherokee women. It is mostly the voices of white men, sometimes the voices of white women, and only a small percentage the voices of Cherokee women. Nor are the passages quoted from white people about the Cherokee people particularly well-focused on the women’s roles or experiences. My friends who bought me this as a present were doing a very good thing, because I would have loved a book that actually was Cherokee women’s perspective. This is not it. It’s disjointed, and there’s no particular reason you should read it.

Laurie R. King, With Child. Another mystery in the Kate Martinelli series. I wouldn’t start here–a lot of the emotional resonance is dependent upon already knowing who these characters are and how they relate to each other, and it’s very much a characterization book rather than a pure mystery. A good installment in that series, though.

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem. Discussed elsewhere.

Judith Mackrell, Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation. There were all sorts of chewy little details in this book–things that make utter sense in context once you come to them, but are just not the way history is usually presented in our current context. For example, in the introductory section about WWI, there was a bit where two young women shared a comforting needle of morphine on the night when a young man they cared about was shipped out to the trenches in France. Not the standard view of the young ladies in their victory bodices, and another piece of the lead-in to how the Roaring Twenties became the Roaring Twenties. There were some weird quirks in this book, though–for example, Mackrell’s refusal to call Emerald Cunard “Emerald,” insisting on “Maud” when very few people know her by that name and it was not the one she chose–and it fell apart in the last section, when Mackrell seemed to have forgotten that she herself had deliberately chosen to write a book about flappers. It wasn’t that she randomly selected six women of a particular age range and–oh my, who could have guessed–ended up with Zelda Fitzgerald and Tallulah Bankhead among them. It’s that she deliberately picked these women. And they’re interesting women! But then going on to generalize about the achievements of women in this age range when women in the age range she covered included serious scientists, musicians, politicians, writers, and on and on–just not as much in the flapper set–was a step too far.

Carla Speed McNeil, Finder: Third World. I think my favorite Finder yet. Funny and weird and wry and full of world-buildingness. A perfectly cromulent place to start, although it won’t give you everything; what Finder will?

Paul Thomas Murphy, Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem, and the Rebirth of the British Monarchy. Detailed accounts of each of the assassination attempts on Queen Victoria plus the state of her monarchy around them. An interesting angle, and while it looked like a fat tome, it was a very quick read for its size.

Greg Rucka, Lazarus Two. Another chunk of story in this post-apocalyptic graphic novel series. Definitely does not stand on its own. Go back and start with one if you want engineered warriors in major social inequality. Which you might. It sounds like you.

Brian Staveley, The Emperor’s Blades. Errrrgh. So frustrating. Two thirds of the point-of-view characters–far, far more by page count–were doing absolutely standard-issue fantasy novel things. Pseudo-Buddhist monk training in one case (although in Staveley’s favor, he does not have delusions about Buddhism being a religion of peace); military training in the other. Mostly quite, quite obvious. And the third POV was their sister the finance minister, and she got hardly any page count. She was the interesting one! She was the one who was not cut from the same cloth as dozens of others! Sigh, SIGH. I like a big fat fantasy novel from time to time, and this one was readable for that (especially if you are a sucker for training sequences, which…I am not really…but a lot of fantasy readers are), but there was the hint that it could have been so much more. Maybe the sequel will be? Maybe?

Peter Watts, Beyond the Rift. Significant overlap with earlier Peter Watts short story collection, but still enough new stuff to be worth the time.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

I don’t usually note the translator of translated works I read, but in this case it’s Ken Liu, and he is himself a notable writer of science fiction. It’s one of the best works of translation I’ve ever read: the translator notes are clear, concise, and well-chosen. At the risk of playing armchair psychologist, I would guess that Ken has a lot of insight into what he would want someone in China or Tanzania or Bosnia to know about his stories if they didn’t have that background, while simultaneously being able to say, “Ah, okay, here’s a place Anglo readers are going to trip.”

As for Cixin Liu’s book itself, I recommend it to hard SF readers and to people interested in China, because oh my goodness, it is so Chinese. It starts with the Cultural Revolution, and the awareness of that permeates the book so thoroughly. Even western authors who are trying to write about Chinese characters who endured that period have never managed, in my opinion, to make it so organic and integral as it is to these characters’ thought processes. It shapes all their reactions to the science fictional elements. The fact of having to rephrase “sunspots” so that they don’t have political implications is exactly the sort of grounding detail it’s hard to figure out you’ll need from a different cultural background. Of course a scientist who has had that as their life circumstance will react very differently to news of aliens, will speculate quite differently about who those aliens might be and how humans should react to them. It’s hard to get all that right from the outside. This is why we need more SF in translation.

So anyway: you have people–scientists, thinkers, mostly, celebrities, a few ordinary people–playing a game that’s helping them think through the biggest news in the world: that aliens are coming. That aliens have already interfered from afar and are about to interfere from closer up. And I don’t want to spoiler more than that. It’s fun, it’s good, you should read it. Especially if you like near-future SF or literature in translation, but especially especially if you like both.

Please consider using our link to buy The Three-Body Problem at Amazon.

Holly Black and Ellen Kushner, editors, Welcome to Bordertown: New Stories and Poems of the Borderlands. I read some of the Borderlands books when I was a teenager, when I could find them in used bookstores mostly. This collection is much newer–a few years old–and features stories by a much newer set of authors as well as authors whose Borderlands stories I loved as a teenager. There is a tendency for Borderlands stories to feel quasi-autobiographical, and this works beautifully for some authors and less well for others. Catherynne M. Valente, for example, wrote a story that fits so perfectly in the Borderlands universe that one is tempted to explain it with the year she spent in Bordertown in college. Other newcomers who fit in so seamlessly that one is sure they have always been there include Amal El-Mohtar, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Janni Lee Simner; stories by Emma Bull and co-written by Ellen Kushner and Terri Windling reminded me of what I’ve always liked about this series.

Chaz Brenchley, Bitter Waters. Discussed elsewhere.

A. S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale. This felt a bit like an out-take, like a run-up to better work, particularly The Children’s Book. There were some goodish bits, but mostly it was a bit abstracted and none of the major characters ever really connected for me.

Jean-Pierre Courtiau, Paris: Cent Ans De Fantasmes Architecturaux Et De Projets Fous. Projets Fous: crazy projects. Yep. This is a French book of pictures and discussions of the crazy stuff people have proposed to do to Paris. Like enclosing Notre Dame in plexiglass. My standards for crazy are probably a bit high, but it was still entertaining.

Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise. The middle of the three books of the Craft in terms of publication order, the first chronologically. I don’t know anybody who’s started here, and I wouldn’t, but I was still glad to read it and am still looking forward to more.

Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper. A bit disappointing as Ross King books go: not a lot of nitty gritty about pigments or materials. Still reasonable if you’re looking for a discussion of what it says on the tin. Just not as all-out nerdy about How He/They Did That as King’s usual stuff.

Margaret Maron, Death of a Butterfly and Death in Blue Folders. Two in a mystery series that impinge a bit on the New York art world of their time (a few decades back). I’m generally on the lookout for a readable new mystery series right now, but this isn’t actually helpful, because the library only has one more. I found them quite readable, though, and will be glad to get to that one. Artists, organizational details, people sorting themselves out despite inauspicious beginnings sometimes.

Juhani Paasivirta, Finland and Europe: The Period of Autonomy and the International Crises, 1808-1914. Weirdly focused on newspapers and their subscribers, but okay, that’s useful to know. Also touches on pieces like how Russia wanted their new Grand Duchy not to have access to Sweden and how they attempted to cut that tie and where they succeeded and failed.

Jim Rasenberger, High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World’s Greatest Skyline, 1881 to the Present. A bit breathless, both about New York and about its steelworkers; my consistent mistyping of this title as “darling men” was perhaps Freudian. Also the timing of “the present” was very close on the heels of 9/11/01, so there was quite a lot of that and not a lot of the building thereafter. This is understandable–it’s an event that’s hard to overstate in the history of that skyline. But inevitably you will get a different perspective on what the work is like a few months after than a few years. Anyway, there were some startling and some head-shaking anecdotes in this. It was not ultimately very deep, but it didn’t have to be. The interviews with/profiles of steelworkers from different ethnic groups were worth the price of admission alone.

Sarah Rees Brennan, Unmade. The end of its trilogy, and for the love of Pete do not start here. I felt that it was a satisfying ending, albeit rather tied up in a bow in a couple of ways that were predictably more for its main audience than for me. If you’re worried that she won’t carry through on some of the darker aspects of the premise, though–no, there’s dark here, there’s follow-through. It’s not a downer of an ending, but it also doesn’t flinch from consequences.

Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History. Mostly the early modern period here. Pre-industrial, mostly politics, mostly powerful groups and political things rather than peasants and artisans, but I’m told one can’t have everything, and certainly one can’t fit it all in one volume.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show. Sylvia Townsend Warner never met an Aristotelian unity she gave a damn about, and this book is not going anywhere it looks like it might from the first few pages. It is a ’48er book. There are places where its attitudes about race and religion are remarkably progressive for its time, and places where that still falls short, just for a warning if you’re not up for that. But gosh. What a thing. What an odd, perfectly itself sort of thing to have, wandering around the barricades with its jewelry and its prejudices and the prejudices of other people it can see clearly. Gosh.

Peter Watts, Beyond the Rift. Short story collection that overlaps only somewhat with the one I read a few weeks back, plenty of other things to ?enjoy? ?appreciate? whatever the verb is for what one does with Peter Watts stories. Other than read. Read is a good verb.

Roger Zelazny, Unicorn Variations. There is only so much first-person asshole narrator one can have at once, and this was right up at the edge of that for me. Several bits of this are the places where Zelazny was most influenced by Hemingway, which…made me want to sit him down with several volumes of Elizabeth Gaskell until he felt better. This sort of impulse rarely ends well.