Novel Gazing Redux

Review copy provided by Tor.

Every once in awhile there is an epic fantasy that makes me say, “Oh yes, right, that’s why I read epic fantasy!” Even better when it’s a debut author, so I can say that and anticipate more of that person later. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is one of those books. It’s not perfect, of course, but this is not the universe for perfect. (Ours, I mean. Baru’s either.) What it does quite effectively, though, is show a young woman in the process of using the tools of empire to subvert the empire in question–and Dickinson has correctly identified bureaucracy and monetary policy as major tools of empire.

This, folks, is a fantasy of logistics. All the things that we talk about wishing there was more of–accounting, supplies, all of that–in exciting form. Any time someone tries to tell you that bashing people with swords is the main fantasy theme because supplying armies is boring should be turned around so they are pointing at The Traitor Baru Cormorant and then given a gentle shove.

(Also there is bashing people with swords. Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge…true love not in the direction one might expect….)

There is twistiness. There is plottiness. There is double-crossing, there is a sense of priorities not going where they necessarily would for the modern reader. More. More.

Please consider using our link to buy The Traitor Baru Cormorant from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books. I think I’ve met Fran in person one weekend unless I’m forgetting another time (if so, sorry, Fran!), but we’re friendly online.

The best first novels are the ones where you can tell that the author is having fun with tropes and images they particularly enjoy. In the case of Updraft, that’s human flight via gliders. The humans in these books live in giant, at least somewhat-living structures, towers, that are interconnected with a few bridges but mostly conduct their trade and social contact through glider pilots flying back and forth. The Singers in the highest Spire keep the secrets of the towers, enforcing the Laws and protecting the tower denizens from the monsters who fly around them.

Or do they? Kirit and her friend Nat are trying to earn the right to fly alone between the towers as adults, but their curiosity leads them to some strange places and even stranger questions. They don’t have the backing of rich and powerful adults like some of their peers do, and the evidence that there’s more going on in their home than they’ve been taught keeps piling up. They take more risks and then more to find out what’s going on, and soon their loyalties to their home and each other are at risk. They find relationships they thought were lost and gifts within themselves that they never suspected existed.

This is really fine adventure fantasy that made me feel fourteen again in the best way.

Please consider using our link to buy Updraft from Amazon.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

This is the third in its series, and I think there’s enough weight of story ahead of it that it’s really worth going back and reading California Bones and Pacific Fire if you can. The story in Dragon Coast will do an entirely great job of reminding you who these people are and why they matter to each other if you’ve already read the first two, but I think the emotional heft of it will be diminished if you just pick it up as “converging on a dragon on Treasure Island, osteomancy, go!”

The earlier volumes were very focused on Southern California; this one moves north and to a partially new cast of characters, whose relationships to each other are important and unknown to the people trying to navigate them. One of the great strengths of these books is van Eekhout’s portrayal of how people bond in complex ways in stressful situations, and having the previous sets of emotionally close people contrasted and shoved up against new sets made that strength particularly clear.

That makes the books sound cerebral and measured, and in fact they are action-packed and rollicking. They are action-packed, rollicking books with bone magic, and they are about relationships formed and tested and warped in stressful situations.

And also there is a recognition of the importance of water and water magic, particularly in California, so there’s a hot button of mine lovingly pressed.

They’re a good time, is what I’m saying, this one no less than the previous books. There is convergence of three storylines upon the disabled dragon on Treasure Island. That’s what these books are doing. So yeah.

Please consider using our link to buy Dragon Coast from Amazon.

John Joseph Adams, ed., Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 57. Kindle. This is the disadvantage to reading things on my Kindle in bits and pieces when I am waiting in line places etc.: it takes forever, and in the case of short fiction, I note what to recommend and then forget what was in that issue. In this case I mostly remember Bear’s reprint novella as really lovely. Very old issue of Lightspeed, but I am not the only one with a giant reading queue, so I think I will not stress about it.

Anil Ananthaswamy, The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self. Fascinating neurological cases focused (in some ways loosely) around disorders of sense of self. This is one of those books that makes me uneasy, because I felt it was fascinating and well-researched pop neurology, except for the chapter about autism, where I know the most from research and personal experience. That chapter had some statements that were utter bullshit. (Example: autistic people do not engage in imaginative play? The hell you say, they do it in my living room. In most rooms of my house in fact. Also, I continue to maintain that treating autism as all one thing is a major problem, and the fact that Ananthaswamy was willing to charge merrily on with the idea that autistic people have trouble with theory of mind when over a third of the autistic people in the tests he was discussing did not have any such trouble is only one example of why I think this is problematic.) And…when that happens, I have to wonder whether the people with other neurodivergences or neurological diseases and their family members are reading the book going, oh yes, great stuff except for the one chapter I know about….

Victoria Brehm, ed., Star Songs and Water Spirits: A Great Lakes Native Reader. This book does not divided along US/Canada borders for the quite sensible reason that the Native/First Nations tribes/groups did not use that national boundary for their cultural boundary. It has a wide variety of authors telling very different types of stories, some old legends, some poems, some talk about life in various eras. Very interesting reference book, good jumping-off point for further reading.

Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid. Interesting study of a semi-legendary figure that takes a brief and startling left turn into Saint Olaf, and if anybody should be incapable of being startled by that venerable personage it should be me. Goes into the contrast of the legend and the fact and how political needs shaped later stories. Probably not a great introduction to the legend of the Cid or to the Moors in Spain and the Moors going out of it again, if you’re looking for an introduction.

Reginald Hill, Underworld, Bones and Silence, Asking for the Moon, Recalled to Life, Pictures of Perfection, and The Wood Beyond. (Ed. note: only the last four of these seem to be in print.) So two things happened here. One: I got a cold, and rereading a favorite series felt just right, comfy and nice. Two: I hit the really good part, the part where I would recommend people start reading for the first time. That line happens at Bones and Silence. That book is still of its time in a few demographic details, but it is, in my opinion, the point in the series where Hill really cuts loose and starts playing with literary reference and structure; after that, the books have the reasons I wanted to read the whole series in the first place. Even a volume like Pictures of Perfection, which is structurally weak and gimmicky, is still essentially charming as a reading experience. The exception here is Asking for the Moon, which is a set of four shorter pieces and highlights why short mystery pieces are harder. It also contains a dead-end: Hill had no idea, twenty years in, how much longer his mystery series would stretch, so he had a 2010 moon base setting with an elderly, retired Dalziel, when in fact the last volume of the series was published in 2009 and…no moon base, not nearly so elderly a Dalziel, not nearly so cynical a relationship between the titular two detectives. The other thing that happens at Bones and Silence besides structural and literary complexity is that the role of Wield consistently continues to expand, and I love Wieldy; he is my favorite. His life improves and his role in the books expands and la la la yay Wieldy.

Nalo Hopkinson, Falling in Love with Hominids. Cannot lose with this volume of varied speculative short work from one of the modern masters of the genre. I don’t feel that the very short pieces are her strength, but otherwise just dive right in. Recommended. One caveat: if you have zero tolerance for horror or creepiness, this is not the place to start with Hopkinson, because some of these stories are quite effective at being unpleasant.

Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest. Discussed elsewhere. I would like to talk about the title metaphor with someone who has read the book, please, if such a person would email me.

David McCullough, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. Nineteenth century, mostly early. Oh lordy there is so much James Fenimore Cooper. You might think, “How much James Fenimore Cooper can there be?” And the answer is, “ARGH TOO MUCH.” There are other people who are more interesting than Cooper (LIKE EVERYBODY), some of them even crossing the line into actually interesting. But the pressing need to slay James Fenimore Cooper with a dull spoon pour encourager les autres really dampened my enthusiasm for this book. Especially since there were lots of 19th century American medical women who got short shrift thereby, and I was promised plagues! Promised plagues and received Fenimores! What a thing!

Oliver Sacks, On the Move: A Life. I am very glad that I read this eminent and chatty neurologist autobiography a few days before Dr. Sacks died, rather than having the fraught decision of whether to read it immediately upon hearing his death or having it hanging around being a thing I want to read but freighted with different meaning. Its structure is very much “here are some things I wanted to say about myself before I go,” and I’m glad he got the chance. I am gnashing my teeth in particular about the missing book about myoclonus (noooooooo)

Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang. This was just the sort of nice rural Chinese 17th century history, focused on a region and its inhabitants in ways that one doesn’t get often, that allowed me to brace myself for the titular darkness of The Dark Forest. I hold further volumes of Spence in reserve for future need of similar kind. I feel sure they will have famine and bandits and trials and other things like that, things that are quite interesting when happening far away to other people.

Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score. I didn’t want to put this down while I was reading it. Afterwards I felt somewhat less positive, though I still liked it. I guess I feel that Mo is not as successful a voice as Bob–her concerns are too similar to his, the details she notices too similar. Also the ending made me furious. FURIOUS. Not in a “haha the author sure got you” sort of way that one should feel smug about but literally incandescent with rage, and yet I did not dislike the book enough–and I love the series–that I am anti-recommending the book on the basis of the last few FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE pages. Somebody who has read this please email me and talk to me about this so that I can vent without harming the innocents. Breathing. Yes. Really, as I said, love the series. Did not want to put it down while reading it. Have hopes of further volumes. But those last two pages OH MY GOLLY. And really: do not start here. Do not. Start at the beginning of the series, there’s a dear. You have direct evidence further up the page that I am not a “start at the beginning at all times” purist, and I bet you don’t have to start with volume one here. But not this one. And not just because of the flames. Because there are all sorts of places where follow-ons and consequences matter quite a lot here.

Jeff Sypeck, Becoming Charlemagne: Europe, Baghdad, and the Empires of AD 800. This is a warm and charming book. It is a quite reasonable introduction, so it probably has things many of you won’t need. On the other hand, it talks about what we can know about Charlemagne’s relationship with his daughters and with the nascent Frankish Jewish community, which was awfully nice. And there was the poor fellow who walked most of the way from Baghdad to Aachen with the elephant. Which is bad enough, being him or being the elephant, but can you imagine being the Frankish peasant along the wayside? “Gran, there’s got to be ergot in the rye, you won’t believe what I’ve just seen.” “Na, lass, come look what it’s left behind as a gift, the fields will bloom for years. Get the shovel.” Give me a book about the Empress Irene and I still end up in the fungus and dung. Peasant ancestry woooo! Annnnnyway. I brought that bit with me, you can’t expect it in the book. There was the Empress Irene in the actual text, though, so that’s all right then.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

Translation by Joel Martinsen. I note this because I felt that Ken Liu walked a very fine line between keeping the Chinese feel of the text in the first volume of this series, The Three-Body Problem, and rendering it in smooth English, and he did it carefully and well. While that is still true, I want to say that I think Joel Martinsen did equally good work with the same hard job. Regular readers know that I am a giant translation nerrrrrrd, so kudos Martinsen hurrah. I wrote this review before I knew that The Three-Body Problem and Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s “The Day the World Turned Upside Down” won the only Hugos given for written fiction this year. It is a great time for works in translation to English, and I hope we see even more.

I had to steel myself to read The Dark Forest, not because I expected it to be bad, but because I did not expect it to be, well, cheerful. And it is not. Most of humanity continues to freak out at the impending aliens and at each other. (Note: you could probably pick it up without the prior volume, but I really recommend starting at the beginning.) While this installment lacks the Cultural Revolution, look, folks, he went and put “DARK” right there in the title, and he went and made up a future historical event that makes the Cultural Revolution look like a cotillion and ice cream social.

So what I’m saying is that this is a book that is more interesting than pleasant to read.

Add to that the fact that while it has tons of East Asian influences, the major Western influences are Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. That means psychohistory and alien artifacts, awesome! It also means tons of exposition, weirdly uneven pacing, and almost no women characters. And one of the largest roles a woman character plays is in and “ideal girl/dream girl” subplot, which would have been iffy enough if there were lots of interesting, full-fledged women characters. But there weren’t. There was, however, an incompetent beautiful waitress killer fembot. So hey, there’s that.

I do find it interesting where someone steeped and rooted in the Cultural Revolution–and before that, more happily, in Chinese classics–goes with their tale of humans freaking out and trying to cope–to varying degrees of success–with impending contact with an alien race. I’m very interested in where the third volume of this trilogy goes. I want to read more of this in particular, and of SF in translation from Chinese and from other languages in general. It’s just that sometimes the things that I want are a bit less fun and a bit more of a slog than I had hoped for. Well. Next book maybe.

Please consider using our link to buy The Dark Forest from Amazon.

Blue Balliett, The Wright 3. This is a sequel to Balliett’s Chasing Vermeer and again deals with kids, art, and codes. The characters feel just a little off from where I am, like I’m not bringing quite the right reader’s 50% to the table to make them really come alive, and I feel like Balliett is, like many die-hard Frank Lloyd Wright fans, stacking the deck considerably. But I enjoy the series anyway and will keep reading it.

Becky Cloonan, Brendan Fletcher, and Karl Kerschel, Gotham Academy Vol. 1: Welcome to Gotham Academy. Maps is the best. I like Maps. I hope that later volumes spend more time on Maps, and I will read them with that hope. The more Batman, the worse, as far as I was concerned; this angle on the Killer Croc may be noncanonical, but I liked it anyway. And Maps.

Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. An important book in cross-cultural medicine and probably the main (in some cases the only) exposure that Americans outside Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Merced, California, have to the existence of Hmong people. Which latter part is not at all Fadiman’s fault–quite the opposite, she is a loving chronicler of Hmong culture and very clear that she is an outsider. And yet it’s problematic for any one book–especially one a generation old–to be the sole lens on a culture. Fadiman’s research on the medical difficulties caused a particular little girl by the intersection of her immigrant family’s difficulties in a new land and that new culture’s medical establishment are extremely sympathetic and educational. I do wish that Fadiman had been less dogmatic about the chances of Hmong assimilation–there are several places I winced for all sorts of reasons. Now, and even at the time this book was published, Hmong Minnesotans of my generation are succeeding in all sorts of professions. They vary. They are our neighbors. They are “us Minnesotans” now. So when someone starts talking about how the respectful way to do medicine with Hmong people is to always have the male elder in the room and always address that male elder, I am horrified, because that practice may well have been necessary in getting the best medical care for the immediate wave of immigrants, and it would almost certainly block the best medical care for actual women I know, in ways that we owe to them NOT TO DO. So. Complicated book, interesting book, worth reading. But also worth reading beyond.

Ben Hatke, Little Robot. Discussed elsewhere.

Ian Lendler and Zack Giallongo, The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents: Romeo and Juliet. Discussed elsewhere.

Robert Levy, The Glittering World. Changeling stories very rarely feel alien to me. Changeling stories often feel alienated, usually in the way a fifteen-year-old feels alienated. This…is not that. It starts out looking like it will be that. It starts out looking like a dozen other urban fantasy novels. And Levy actually goes completely off the cliff in a number of places instead of looking out over the cliff and saying, “What a lovely view I’m so glad we came let’s open a bottle of wine mmm nice” and then driving home. It isn’t much like Adam Stemple’s two solo books structurally, but in that sense of jumping off a cliff from the ordinary urban fantasy book you began with, yeah, same deal.

Nnedi Okorafor, The Book of Phoenix. In the same universe as some of her other lovely stuff, but quite intimately in the towers, as well as in an African village and various other locations. Vivid, active, awesome. Recommended.

Paul Pope, JT Petty, and David Rubin, Battling Boy: The Fall of the House of West. Discussed elsewhere.

Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Nonfiction. I’d read a lot of this from various linkage, but it was entertaining anyway, a good collection to dip in and out of.

Hanna Pylvainen, We Sinners. A mosaic novel about a Laestadian family. Laestadians are the far-conservative end of Finnish Lutheranism. These are American Laestadians, and there are some things about them that will be familiar to anyone with family who fled Scandinavia for religious reasons and some things that are quite unique either personally or culturally. I feel like Pylvainen has a far better grasp on what causes people to leave than to stay–that is, she has a full range of ideas of what might cause someone to leave, but completely misses the parts of religious sentiment that are not fear and inertia. Further, none of the family members who leave seem to find a gentler (or equally repressive but different) religion, which…is not my observation about people leaving similar situations/sects. So it’s an interesting but I think very limited book.

Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth Century History. This is the microhistory of a Scottish family. Rothschild coins a new term for a family microhistory, but I don’t think that’s actually warranted; I think many microhistories have focused on that scale. It’s an interesting thing she’s doing all the same, though, because she looks at the family’s servants and slaves as much as possible as well as the biological members of the family. Empire being what it is–or more to the point, what it was–while the origins are in Scotland, the story scatters across several continents. If you like microhistories, this is your jam. I do.

John Scalzi, The End of All Things. Discussed elsewhere.

Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Brooke Allen, and Shannon Watters, Lumberjanes: Beware the Kitten Holy. I’m not a person who usually needs an identification character, but with the Lumberjanes I identify with too many of them. They’re very Girl Scouty, and I am very pro-Girl Scout. Adventure! Excitement! Varying skills and personalities! Lumberjanes hurrah.

Molly Tanzer, Vermilion. I romped through this. My fair warning is that the voice is very modern despite the 1870s setting, so if that’s the sort of thing that will constantly grate on you, this will not be your book. However, if you like Jaime Lee Moyer’s Delia’s Shadow, Vermilion may well be its older, rougher predecessor: a miner’s San Francisco, barely out of Forty-Niner days, rather than an Art Nouveau San Francisco, but you can see where the two have bones in common. And where Vermilion really shines is when its heroine takes to the mountains of Colorado to track down some seriously dark deeds. Tanzer has done research on parts of Chinese-American history that are dear to my heart and made me grin. This is a good time.

Catherynne M. Valente, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland. And this is the sort of Changeling story I mean: it’s not bad that it’s more about alienation than about anything actually alien. But it is. I feel that it is a much sadder and darker and generally less fun book than the previous ones in the series because it’s the other side of Changeling stories–it’s the earthly side mostly, not the Fairyland side–but there is more to come, and I don’t think you would want to have skipped this one.

Chris Van Allsburg, The Sweetest Fig and Two Bad Ants. I continue to sift through the library’s Van Allsburg collection, and I keep not finding the outstanding thing I am hoping one of them will be. He is obviously a very talented visual artist, and that keeps not adding up to anything amazing for stories. The Sweetest Fig had a plot that was not only predictable but abrupt, and Two Bad Ants had ants that were not that bad really, and their different view of the universe was well done but not very creative under the circumstances. Meh. Meh, I say! Meh!

Gene Luen Yang and Mike Holmes, Secret Coders. Discussed elsewhere.

Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer. This is a Hmong-American immigrant memoir. Anne Fadiman endorses it on the cover, which–see what I mean, above? It totally makes sense to have the person who is most well known for writing about the Hmong give a cover blurb: more famous person endorses less famous person, that’s how the business works. And yet it ends up with non-Hmong person validating the work of someone saying what it’s like to be Hmong, and if that doesn’t make you at least a little bit uneasy, think about it a little longer, it will. Yang does a lovely vivid job of telling her family’s story and her own, from the mountains of Laos to Minnesota. Her time with her grandmother is particularly heartfelt and touching, especially her account of Hmong funerary customs. I cried and thought a lot.

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

It’s really hard to review John Scalzi’s books in the Old Man’s War universe at this point, because most people know whether they want them. You pretty much shout, “Hey, there’s a new one of these!” And the people who want them queue up, and the people who don’t wander off.

But in case you’re one of the potential audience and haven’t tried them, what are they, and why do people want them? Well, they’re science fiction in which humans and a bunch of different alien species have done a lot of colonization, and they’re written in a contemporary American everyman voice. Here is the beginning of a passage about the sensory deprivation of being a brain in a jar: “Go ahead and close your eyes. Do it right now. Is it totally dark? I just realized you wouldn’t have read that last question if in fact you’d just closed your eyes when I asked you to. Look, I told you I wasn’t a writer. Let me try this again: Close your eyes for a minute. Then when you’ve opened them up again, ask yourself if it was totally dark when you had them closed.” It goes on for two solid pages after that, in a similar vein, about the difference between not seeing anything with your eyes closed and not seeing anything without eyes to close. If that strikes you as breezy and fun, onward! If it strikes you as annoying, there will be other passages that will probably grate as well.

If what you flagged on was not the prose voice but, wait, brain in a jar? Yep. One of the narrators is a brain in a jar. There are four sections, four related novellas telling the story of a group of humans, Rraey, and other aliens who…shall we say…have a little problem with the available major powers in the galaxy. And some drastic ideas about how to solve it. The diplomacy, and the things going boom, are narrated by different species and sexes who are varying degrees of likely to earworm you with “That’s Amore.”

I wouldn’t recommend starting the series here, as I think it presupposes a fair amount of knowledge about the Colonial Defense Forces, who is in them, and why, but if you’re comfortable with being thrown into the atmosphere not knowing whether you’re going to explode (hey, you take your metaphors, I’ll take mine), go on ahead.

Please consider using our link to buy The End of All Things from Amazon.