Novel Gazing Redux

Exclusive of manuscripts, which I don’t talk about publicly.

Octavia Cade, Chemical Letters. This was a joyful, beautiful, nerdy romp through poems and chemistry. The world needs more like this. Hurrah. Hurrah.

Thomas Goetz, The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis. Oh, this book. So first of all: it is gross. It does not stay with the parts of TB where someone dies looking pale and ethereal. It goes into TB and the rest of medicine in the time, in ways that are useful and disgusting. Now, me, I am the sort of person who read this while eating lunch, no problem. You judge for yourself whether you are, though, because Goetz…does not hesitate to go there. And not just with the gross, though. It is tragic: people not accepting procedures that will be lifesaving. People self-deluding that they have cures they do not. Koch, a great medical man in some ways, gradually painting himself into a corner wherein he believes himself to be unjustly persecuted just because he peddled a false TB cure and also opposed pasteurization of dairy products. (OH IS THAT ALL. POOR YOU HOW THEY PERSECUTE YOU THERE THERE.) The other thing this is, though, weirdly, is a piece of biographical criticism, of how Arthur Conan Doyle could become the man who could invent and write Sherlock Holmes in the first place. And John Watson. The influences upon him, the things that touched his life that pushed and pulled and added up to…yes, there he is: the creator of Holmes and Watson. And it’s not even a very long book, to pack in the medical background of the time, serious amounts of Franco-Prussian War politics, and the character of the two men and their families. So if you have the stomach for it, I do recommend this. But if you don’t, I don’t blame you for it.

Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard, The End of the Sentence. A spooky ghost novella, but a kinder one than I feared to begin with, and worth the trouble. I’m glad that Magonia made me seek it out.

Tove Jansson, Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir. I should have guessed from reading the Moomin books that Jansson would have an unerring feel for what it is like to be a child, but you can’t tell in advance that someone is going to write a memoir in that frame of mind, in the frame of mind of what it was like at the time. Remembering that perspective. It was so lovely, because she was sensible in the way that children are sensible, and there were so many important details that adults leave out, things that one would want to know about 1910s-20s Finland.

Fiona MacCarthy, Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, 1860-1960. Lots of pictures, less text. The jacket copy focuses on radical sexual politics, which is not much in evidence in the minimal text at all–I personally am a better source on that than this book is–and there’s a bit more on radical non-sexual politics, but only a bit. As for influence, yes, there’s some of that, but only darting into it here and there, considering how broad and deep Morris’s influence runs. I’m glad to have this book, but it’s weirdly frustrating. Not even so much shallow as spotty. And that particularly surprised me from MacCarthy, who gave us the giant exhaustive Burne-Jones biography that took up so much of my time in 2015–but this was a volume from curating an exhibit, so. Well, there’s other Morris stuff out there.

Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here. Fascinatingly, the fantasy plot is both completely crucial and entirely relegated to the edges of this book. What a neat needle to thread. This is a YA telling the story of the kids who aren’t in the middle of saving the world from the giant fantasy menace. They’re caught up in their own senior year relationships, and oh, does Ness remember what it’s like to be a high school senior. To be in love with your best friend, to be weirdly awkward with your other best friend for reasons you don’t fully understand, to be trying to figure out how to be good to your family and still have things the way your newly adult self needs them…with magic you can’t control or even quite see, that isn’t much to do with you, all around the edges…yes, Ness has a handle on the end of childhood very, very well.

Terry Pratchett, The Shepherd’s Crown. The last Terry Pratchett novel, and you can see where it’s not quite done, where in some spots it’s an outline–gesturing at Terry Pratchett Discovers Third Wave Feminism, sketching in Pterry’s Last Love Letter To the Old Codger He’ll Never Get To Be. And yet he gave us one more bit of Tiffany Aching, and the death of Granny Weatherwax–the loved ones of Granny Weatherwax mourning her–and you know, that was enough, I think. Not his chart-topper, his greatest masterwork. But enough. Trying for more even to the last, I hope we can all say as much.

Alter Reiss, Sunset Mantle. I must admit that I critiqued this novella in draft form. And now it’s published! Go team! This is fantasy with strong religious worldbuilding (by which I mean in-world religion, not our-world religion) and a military component, with a loving central relationship and practical work, all packed into a plotty action-filled novella. But I’ve admitted my bias.

Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell, eds., Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. In addition to having amazing cover art (seriously, who did that?), this covers a wide range of what Delany has meant to various people, in both fiction and nonfiction. Some people are just doing their own thing, which is influenced by him indirectly. Some are more directly trying to demonstrate his influence. For me the standout stories were Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “The First Gate of Logic” and Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl’s collaborative “Jamaica Ginger,” but I imagine that this is very much a “something for everyone” anthology, and what that something is will vary considerably.

Gordon Shepherd, Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters. My subtitle: “Why Nonfiction Voice Matters.” This is a book whose author does not know who his audience is. Is it people who are interested in highly technical things? That would have been fine. Is it a lay audience with no technical skill? That would have been okay, too, because I could have skipped it; his voice when writing for the lay audience is really, really patronizing, and his metaphors completely unenlightening if you didn’t understand them from the technical passages. And then there are the chapters where he wanders off outside his own fields of expertise to speculate about things like Why Modern People Are Obese and goes completely off the rails, and if you want someone speculating about that on little to no expertise, why pick someone with a terrible prose voice? The parts that were Shepherd writing technically in his field were a-okay with me, but for that I think looking up his papers in journals on academia.edu or some such is a far better way to go. Also this is what happens when people who are obsessed with visual processing try to do other things; they can’t even see that something that is processed spatially in the brain may not be processed visually, come on, people, this is not hard. ALSO. Let me be the first to tell you that it is possible to write about taste/smell and memory without dwelling on Proust. Do it now. Do it today.

Salla Simukka, As Black As Ebony. The third in the “Snow White” trilogy of Finnish crime YA novels. It felt tacked on, obligatory; Our Heroine…does some stuff…figures out some stuff…has some stuff done to her and triumphs in the end. All very short chapters. If you liked the first two in the series, this one is still skippable, unless you are really really set on learning what happens to Lumikki.

Leslie Valiant, Probably Approximately Correct: Nature’s Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World. This…is an excellent example of what happens when you know your own field (mathematics/computer science) really really well, are interested in someone else’s field (biology/evolution), and…do not perhaps take as much time as you ought to understand what they are saying. About evolution and its mechanisms and why. As a result Valiant is very clear when he’s talking about algorithms, and less insightful than he hopes when he’s talking about evolution.

A bit late, as the new year has been a series of minor mishaps. Ah well, no one is on a very tight schedule to find out what the last few things I read in 2015 were, I don’t think.

Mike Allen, ed., Mythic Delirium Issue 2.2. Kindle. I find that whenever I get things to read on my Kindle that are also available online, I end up mostly reading them online and then flipping through to confirm that I didn’t miss anything. Up side: this confirmed that it was a very solid issue and I should make more of a point to read Mythic Delirium regularly if this is the sort of stuff they’re putting out. Good to know.

Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection. Like if Chesterton and early Lethem had a rain-soaked bike-riding baby. (Okay but I meant that as a compliment.)

Leah Bobet, An Inheritance of Ashes. A heartfelt and beautiful book about the aftermath of war and its effects on the homefront. Also about the ripple effects of abuse in a family, and about keeping the world turning–practically and emotionally–with the limited resources we have, and–stuff. There’s a lot here. Go read it.

Chaz Brenchley, Three Twins at Crater School, Chapters 4-7. Kindle. I read a lot of boarding school books as a kid, and so I was sufficiently excited about Chaz’s Patreon project to let my enthusiasm for it overwhelm my general sense of how serials work for me. These are short chapters. I need to let more story stack up before I read more, because I am impatient for more about the aliens. MOAR ALIENS NOW CHAZ KTHX.

A.C. Buchanan, ed., Capricious Issue 1. Kindle. For me the standout story of the first issue of this new magazine was A.J. Fitzwater’s “She Must.” The way the prose twisted around the fairy tale tropes entertained me. I’ll keep an eye out for more Fitzwater and more Capricious.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents. Reread. This is not one of my favorite of Butler’s body of work. It’s still worth the time–I’m not courting controversy to say that everything of hers is–but the crucial step of how the insightful young teenage refugee becomes the cult leader is elided, dreadfully elided. Swooped through. Skimmed. The heartbreak of the mother-daughter relationship is entirely clear. So the emotional core, she doesn’t flinch from. But the science fiction plot is oddly unbalanced for me this time through. Especially with the end commentary, where Butler is talking about what she did and didn’t know how to do in this story. A partial success, I guess.

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber. I finally got this for Christmas after years of feeling like it should be in every library system I used and not finding it where it was supposed to be. I particularly connected with “The Erl-King” and “The Company of Wolves”–yes, give me the deep forests, I am predictable both as a person and as an ethnotype–but in general it was interesting particularly remembering how early it was in the fairy tale retelling sub-genre, how much it was shaping and informing the things it looked like to my eye.

Diane Duane, Lifeboats. Kindle. A Young Wizards novella that read mostly like fanfic by its own author. Kit and Nita are side players to the main thing going on, deliberately this time, and introduce aliens to crucial Earth culture while they struggle with how to celebrate Valentine’s Day. A reasonably entertaining thing to read on an airplane, but not horribly deep, ends abruptly, uses a really cliched joke/story as its central premise.

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, The Rabbit Back Literature Society. Finnish magic realism about books mutating and relationships mutating and garden…creatures…and general oddments. Really lovely, less repressed than a lot of fiction that gets translated from the Norden, more overtly speculative than some magic realism and yet still feels like it belongs in that category. Weird stuff. Recommended.

E.K. Johnston, A Thousand Nights. Very, very different from her Owen books. Not as funny. As one might expect from the title, it’s a riff on the Thousand and One Nights story: a desert civilization, a bride telling tales and figuring out how to survive. She is brave and strong, a weaver, a sister, and while this is not Owen and Siobhan, I don’t actually want the authors I like to get stuck doing one thing for their whole careers, so: yeah. Neat different thing.

Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light. A classic I am delighted to encounter. Bears! Dragons! Princesses who go off their own way to do their own dragonish things and stomp around alternately-named Byzantium and decline the opportunities to choose the slain! How could I not love this book from the moment the bears got involved?

William Morris, A Dream of John Ball and A King’s Lesson. Kindle. Two entirely separate things packaged together by Gutenberg. The former is a Robin Hood tale/early Socialist lecture from when you had to have some frame story excuse to be telling a fantasy at all, and it’s largely a discourse on What Was Wrong With England Then And Now. The latter is What Is Wrong With Monarchies. William Morris: fascinating about vegetable dyes, not always Captain Subtlety. I was reading this for research on him and not for pure pleasure; and a good thing too. Unless you also have a research interest in Uncle Will, skip it.

David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861. Entirely about faction politics between formally active white male politicians of some means. Had interesting spots, but if you’re interested in acknowledgment that, for example, Native Americans had agency in this period, or that immigrants were relevant in some way other than as a focus of Know-Nothing ire, this is not the book. It should by no means by the only book on the era anybody reads. For filling in gaps, okay. Nobody in this book likes anybody else in this book. I was relieved when the Fremonts showed up, because they at least appeared to like each other. Then the Fremonts left again abruptly. Drat.

Karina Sumner-Smith, Defiant. Second in its series, definitely wants the first to make sense. Backstory development while forward motion continues, focus on friendship while not losing politics and worldbuilding. Eager to see how the series resolves in the third book, and I’m behind enough on my to-read pile that it’s already available, so.

Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, eds., Uncanny Magazine Issue 7. Kindle. Another of the “making sure I’ve caught up on what’s in this issue” issue.

Derek Walcott, Omeros. A Homeric epic by a contemporary Caribbean poet. I like the passages about the sea best–yes, who’s being ethnotypical again–but the characterization is fascinating, the places where it draws on the classics and the places where it’s making its own place, engaging in an erudite way with its own locale and making the classical texts feel their own context more strongly. Would like to talk about this with people who have stronger Mediterranean feelings than I have.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. Also I have known the author approximately since the dawn of time, though I think it’s fair to say not particularly closely.

Another thing I think it’s fair to say: this is not “another one of those.” While the focus is on two races of anthropomorphic elephant people, there are dozens more anthropomorphic races. (And unlike my complaints about a certain comic series, there is no human savior for the animal folk.) Their story takes place tens of thousands of years in the future–farther out than all but a handful of stories have been set in recent decades.

And the main thrust of the plot deals with koph, a drug that allows its visionaries to talk with the dead by gathering their soul particles from the farthest reaches of the universe. Koph–and its refinements and control, and the wisdom of generations past obtainable with it–is the center, the heart of the book–that and the relationships of the elephant people on the planet from which it is obtained.

So yeah: not another one of those. Quite uniquely itself. There is only the tip of the galactic iceberg here in how the different anthropomorphic species relate to each other and among themselves. There’s room for more, much more, and if this is your style of science fiction, Schoen definitely executes on it.

One thing that surprised me was that I’m used to thinking of Lawrence wearing his linguistics hat, and the linguistics aspect didn’t come into the book until very late. It’s there! So if that’s something you’re looking forward to in a Lawrence Schoen novel, rest assured that it is present! But it doesn’t come in until quite late in the narrative.

Please consider using our link to buy Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard from Amazon.

Diane Ackerman, I Praise My Destroyer. Reread. I find that I am less enthusiastic about this over a decade later, but the science- and scientist-related poems are still of interest. I think other Ackerman volumes will be where I find my favorites. I may find that I am wrong.

Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad. Usually when I read a short story collection I like to call out particular favorites. This whole thing is my particular favorite. Read the whole thing. This is so good. I–so from the very beginning, if you have any Malaysian friends, the dialog. Oh, the dialog. There is this comfortable confident feeling that she is telling the truth about your friends, and that makes you feel like she is also telling the truth about whatever speculative element. This is what good dialog does. (See also: good whatever else.) If you give readers the sense that people don’t really talk like that, it’s a short hop to these aren’t really people, they’re just ink marks on a page. These are really people. They are really particular, beautifully drawn people. Doing various things with heart and interest. I liked Sorcerer to the Crown a lot a lot, but this–I love this so much.

A.M. Dellamonica, A Daughter of No Nation. Discussed elsewhere.

Angelica Gorodischer, Prodigies. This is about the house of a poet, in Berlin. It is not the masterwork Kalpa Imperial is, and it makes me so very happy to have the chance to read something secondary, to get a translation that isn’t the One Biggest Best Thing. What a great future it is where I can read not just one Angelica Gorodischer book, oh yay yay yay. I mean, this is an interesting book. I just…don’t take translations for granted.

Ryan North and Erica Henderson, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel Power. Extremely exuberant. Punny. Pugnacious. I heard someone say that it talks like the internet; yep. There are better audiences than me for this book, but I smiled at bits of it all the same. It pretty much does what it says on the tin, though.

Nnedi Okorafor, Binti. I feel like this is a book that is doing a lot–a lot–to try to reach audiences who are unfamiliar with some aspects of African cultures and get them African-based alien interaction SF that they can be okay with. I love alien interaction SF and am pretty comfortable with less hand-holding through African cultures, so rock on.

Greg Rucka, Lazarus Three. Near future dystopian comic continues. Don’t start here, see if you like the early ones. I’m feeling pretty lukewarm at this point and would rather have his prose in something like Alpha, but writers are allowed their choice of projects and not mine. (What is this free will nonsense. What.)

Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. I keep saying that things do what they say on the tin; this does not. I am deeply interested in the future of neurodiversity, and there is almost nothing about that in this book. It is substantially Awful Things People Have Done To the Autistic Through History. I wanted to read it to see what mainstream people will think about my autistic/other neurodiverse friends and family, since it’s a pretty popular pop-science book, and aside from a few moments of historical diagnosis (staaaaaap) it didn’t have a lot that I’m going to have to beat out of people with my shoe. But it’s not very much fun to read if you already know the Awful Things Etc., and it does pretty much nothing for the future of neurodiversity if you’re a nerd/proto-activist in that direction. Well. We’ll just have to build it ourselves, folks. (And by “we’ll just have to build it ourselves,” I mean “I will be calling on you to build this with me, so saddle up.”)

Molly Tanzer, The Pleasure Merchant. Eighteenth century…science fiction? ish? or just historical fiction, depending on how you read it. Not like anything else out there, that I know of. Proto-mesmerism, and sex, and people’s best and worst natures, and oh my goodness so very eighteenth century. I love the eighteenth century, and Molly hits on so many things about it. Recommended.

The Hmong American Writers’ Circle, How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology. Quite a lot of poetry, some fiction, a little nonfiction, some art. An interesting mix. I’m a little frustrated by how many people told these writers that they had to “speak for their people” when white writers are put under no such constraint, but having a forum for their voices to be heard is a good thing regardless of whether you’re leaning that on them.

Derek Walcott, The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948-2013. Lots to love here. Some political, some highly personal, and not clustered at one end of his career or another, either. You can watch him struggle with the legacy of colonialism pretty explicitly and in a fantastically erudite way. You can also just revel in what he does with language. Gorgeous, great. More.