Novel Gazing Redux

Charlie Jane Anders, Victories Greater Than Death. If you like space opera with lots of different aliens and friends pulling together to make the thing go, this is for you. Teens figuring out their identity while evil people shoot space guns at them! Okay!

Kate Baer, What Kind of Woman. This is the kind of book of poetry that is attempting to disprove Tolstoy’s maxim about unhappy families, because these poems are very much about the kind of unhappiness that you see in dozens of magazine articles on half the websites on the internet. Are they keenly observed, sure, but they’re keen observations of husbands who wouldn’t dream of cooking or changing a diaper, and I do hope the second wave comes for Baer and her friends soon, as this volume came out last year.

Italo Calvino, Numbers in the Dark. Reread. I have the unfortunate habit of reading things all at once, or at most over a week, and I feel like this would have been improved by reading it one story at a time. Some of them are satire that still has quite a piercing blade, some more localized, and there are moments of racism and other -isms that I would hope we simply would not endure in a contemporary writer. But there are also moments where the mostly flash-length stories are just such perfect little gems.

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire. This is an incredibly depressing book very much because it’s so well done. It chronicles exactly what the subtitle says: here’s how the East India Company went in and pillaged what is now India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh. Here is how they kept wrangling their government contracts so that they ended up with UK government backing for some of their incredibly terrible decisions. Here is the propaganda they spread to try to blame the people they hurt for the hurt inflicted on them. Not that Dalrymple pretends that everyone in South Asia was a perfect angel, but he knows he doesn’t have to, the idea that if anyone in South Asia ever did anything wrong the East India Company was perfectly justified is exactly the kind of propaganda he explodes in detail here.

Victory Hugo, Ninety-Three. If you’ve been thinking that you might want some Victor Hugo but you just do not have the time and energy to commit to one of the really long ones, do I have the recommendation for you! This is Victor Hugo’s short (no, really!) novel of the French Revolution! It’s got Marat and Robespierre and theirs arguing in the middle! It’s got all the Romanticism and none of the long days of your life dedicated to reading it! This is Victor Hugo: The Vacation.

Andri Snær Magnason, LoveStar. If you’ve been missing Kurt Vonnegut and thinking, gosh, if only there was a contemporary Vonnegut, at least as satirical and surreal but with a slightly less complicated relationship with science fiction–oh, and Icelandic–then here you are! This is the book! Apocalyptic, socially critical, ridiculous, all the things you used to get from Vonnegut, now with a new and Nordic twist.

Hieu Minh Nguyen, Not Here. Local poet, writing about being queer, immigrant, fat, in a difficult family, all sorts of things. I am not his main audience. I don’t have to be to see what he’s doing well.

Megan E. O’Keefe, Catalyst Gate. The conclusion of this giant space opera series full of clones and spaceships and varying family relationships and kinds of intelligence. Definitely absolutely do not start here, but if you’ve enjoyed the beginning of this trilogy, you’ll find this a satisfying end.

Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. A light-hearted romp through animal encounters with the laws humans attempt to make about bodily harm and property. Lots of interesting trivia, won’t take you long, chatty voice.

DaVaun Sanders, B. Sharise Moore, et al, eds., Fiyah Issue 20. Kindle. Lots of interesting perspectives on artificial intelligence in this theme issue. My favorite element was Renee S. Christopher’s “When I fell apart my mother put me back together,” which I have reread several times since I first read it.

Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History. A family member loaned me this book without me asking, and I was initially dubious, figured I’d give it a look and either read it or return it with thanks unread. I was won over by the smooth prose voice and the fact that Schutt has no intention of covering serial killers. He starts with cannibalism in the animal world, talking about under what circumstances which species engage in eating members of their own species. His discussion of humans is particularly interesting when he’s considering under what circumstances human anthropologists are willing to report cannibalism that they have not witnessed and why, and when they are eager to debunk it and why. This is still not for the squeamish but really could be far worse.

Maggie Smith, Goldenrod. Like the Baer volume above, these poems chronicle a troubled (in fact, ending) marriage. Unlike the Baer, Smith seems to be observing a very specific corner of the world, naturally and personally. There are moments of grace throughout as well as moments of grief.

Samanth Subramanian, A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane. A fascinating if flawed book. Haldane is a character and a half, and Subramanian is interested in what made him make such large politically-driven mistakes when he had every scientific reason not to. So am I. What I think makes this book less successful is that there is not enough Naomi Mitchison. Okay, but really though: not just because I am a fan of Naomi Mitchison, but because Subramanian seems to want to treat Haldane as a singular being less than a member of a very powerful and well-connected family, and I contend that not only does that deprive us of some of his most interesting interactions (his novelist sister being my personal favorite–and overidentification character–but by no means the only one) but of a great deal of the context that makes other people’s reactions to him make sense. Which is what we want a biography for. So…if I had three or four biographies of Haldane–and heaven knows there’s enough material for them–this would be a fine one to have as just the “why did he screw this stuff up” volume, but as the only one I’ve read and the only one I currently have access to, it’s a bit lacking. (And even so I’d rather have a biography of Mitchison that touches a bit on Haldane. And a pony. Well.)

E. Catherine Tobler, Sonya Taaffe, David Gilmore, et al, eds., The Deadlands Issues 5 and 6. Kindle. What lovely things, what a lovely time to read them, particularly Amanda Downum’s column and particularly Alexis Gunderson’s “All the Open Highways.”

Anne Ursu, The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy. This MG fantasy felt like it was reading something I’d read as a child, but for the first time. Do you know what I mean? Not like Anne had in any way plagiarized, not that kind of familiar. Not repetitive or derivative. But like it fit in with the sort of thing I’d enjoyed as a child, except somehow I had never read it before now. It was the missing one, and now it’s here.

James Wright, Selected Poems. I used to say that I tend to either love or hate poetry, and that’s less true now that I’m reading more poetry, but it is sure true of this volume of James Wright poems, of which I loved some and hated several. There were a few of the “I have keenly observed this thing” poems that took my breath away, and quite a lot of “I’m drinking and wallowing in crapulence and it is the ’60s and/or ’70s” poems for which I have very little patience. Would the balance be different in a collected rather than selected works, I rather doubt it, I think it would just be more so. Ah well.

Roshani Chokshi, The Bronzed Beasts. The culmination of a fantasy trilogy, many things much worse than chickens coming home to roost for characters who have been running out of time to save themselves, their friends, and their relationships with each other for two books now. Magical twists and turns. Glad to be here.

Jan Grue, I Live a Life Like Yours. A disability memoir translated from the Norwegian. Some of his approaches are very culturally and personally familiar. I will note that Grue leans extremely heavily on literal heteronormativity for his appeals to what “like yours” means: he has an opposite-sex partner and a biological child he is raising with his partner, and while he also has a “normal” job, I can’t help but think that some of what he’s doing here, while it isn’t wrong per se, leaves out some of the people I think he wouldn’t want to exclude. So that’s a very interesting balance point. He’s telling his own particular story, which includes those elements, and when he sticks to that part it’s great–it’s when he reaches for the larger point, for what he feels makes him really human, that I start to go, hmm, huh, this is…I think probably not completely what you meant, Grue.

Barbara Hambly, A Scandal in Babylon. 1920s Hollywood murder mystery. Drinking and debauchery generally at arm’s length from a nerdy heroine who is a bit out of her element. Not as much to my taste as the Benjamin January series, but still a fun read and worth the time.

Ada Palmer, Perhaps the Stars. Discussed elsewhere.

Gervase Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages: Guilds in England, 1250-1550. An interesting analysis for anyone who wants to think past default assumptions about the organization of society in this era, what’s important and why. Rosser’s ideas about guild and gender, for example, go past “everything in England must have been like it was in [preconceptions of] Italy at the time” by quite a wide margin. Not long but good.

Christopher Rowe, Telling the Map. Reread. Someone wanted to talk to me about the first story, so I was just going to reread that, and then I just…didn’t stop. Because I find Rowe’s prose and settings so compelling. I’m very pleased to have looked it up and found that there will be more Voluntary State fiction coming soon, but in the meantime, this is entirely worth its own return.

Lynne Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas, et al, eds. Uncanny Magazine Issue 42. Kindle. Two stories in this really struck me, Betsy Aoki’s “On a Branch Floating Down a River, a Wren is Singing,” and Rachael K. Jones’s “Six Fictions About Unicorns.” Quite different stories, but examining tropes that want a good look, very effectively too.

Cadwell Turnbull, No Gods, No Monsters. This pulled me in immediately, with its layered cast of characters and their varying monstrosity and relationship to their own and other people’s monstrosity. Turnbull’s ability to synthesize contemporary issues so that they can be woven seamlessly into a manuscript that is about other things (and is also about those contemporary issues of race and power and gender and attention management) is astonishing. Also this book is fun to read. What a balancing act. So well done.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

In some ways it’s hard to review a book like this, where I know not only the author but also many of the people closest to her. In other ways it can become a fun game, smiling along to see–oh yes, there’s another of her favorites, and oh, I think I know who she was talking to there.

One of my favorite things about later books in a series is that you go in knowing what you’ve agreed to. The parameters are set. If you have issues with the worldbuilding, you know what those are, you’ve decided that you’re up for them at the moment, or else you don’t go in at all. This is the culmination of everything you’ve liked or disliked about the worldbuilding of the Terra Ignota series. This is the moment when the factions plunge into a worldwide war of non-nations, when we see what it is for bashes instead of families to be torn apart or reunited. There are aspects of it that are thrilling, touching, funny, and moving. My particular favorite was when humanity was excoriated about learning to get better at First Contact with truly alien intelligences–indeed, we do need to learn that, and fast, not just in case of little green men but in the smaller ways that more mildly alien intelligences all around us require it of us.

Unfortunately, I am fundamentally in axiom lock with this book. There is a fundamental principle that both major sides of this war agree on: that making Earth a nicer place to live will make it psychologically harder for humans to choose to pursue space travel, to reach out for the stars and other potential intelligences who live there. They are simply in disagreement on whether they should or should not make this choice–in enough disagreement, in fact, to go to war over it. No one in the entire book seems to say, “Wait–do we have solid reason to think that’s how humans work?” And in fact I don’t think it is. I certainly don’t think it’s substantiated enough that everybody should just say, oh yeah, obviously, now let’s pick a team. There’s a point about three-quarters of the way through where a character well known to the reader from a previous volumes who has not been interacting with the others in this volume shows up and has this presented to them. And instead of examining evidence of this–instead of asking questions about, for example, whether people who do science in very extreme conditions (deep sea! Antarctica! space but not just space!) now tend to come from comfortably-off families and countries (I think they do) and whether most people who pursue extreme sports tend to come from comfortable circumstances (again, I think they do)–whether in fact having a safer nest to launch from allows people to fly farther–instead, this character, upon having this axiom presented, basically nods and says, oh yeah, I get it, and picks a side.

This particularly frustrated me for two reasons. One, because I have personal examples in my life of people who come from more, not less, comfort being the ones who want to take risks for what they view as something greater than themselves. (We all miss you, Maxi.) And two, because it was not actually necessary for the plot to work. It would be a major spoiler to say which faction(s) is/are aligned against the pursuit of space travel as primary and why, but there is a specific other goal the major group is pursuing that would be entirely convincing on its own without this axiom coming up over and over again unchallenged.

I think this is one of the hard parts about trying something really ambitious. If a book isn’t aiming for something world-spanning, it’s easier to shrug when you run into something like this: okay, perhaps these five people all have this axiom. But the very overarching nature of the scope of this series means that when nobody seems to be thinking of something, it’s really nobody–or at least nobody who, in the context of this world, gets a chance to matter. I was left at the end of the book hoping that the places where there was compromise and contact with alien minds would allow for this particular piece to open later, or at least for readers to open a door that the book’s context left firmly closed. Which I think, from what I know of the author, is exactly the sort of thing she would like to have happen.

Stephanie Burgis, The Raven Heir. This is a new series from Steph, and it’s lovely. It’s a family story, a magic story, a forest story, all the things I like best all at once, and the end made me cry a bit in the best way.

Gardner Dozois, Modern Classics of Fantasy. Kindle. Well. This sure is a collection of fantasy stories published in the mid-90s. I was reading quite a lot of fantasy by then, and the genre Dozois is outlining is completely unrecognizable to me. It’s also comprised entirely of white people, the overwhelming majority of them men; meanwhile I was reading…a…variety of people? It was particularly jarring because I wanted this collection for a Suzy McKee Charnas story that’s not readily available elsewhere. That story, at least, was quite good. Some of the others were quite good. A lot of the remaining ones were sexist gaze Silver Age blather, and I know times have changed and to some extent Dozois changed with them, but he felt he had to include two stories each from Avram Davidson and Fritz Leiber while ignoring, lordy, just about everything Terri Windling ever edited, there’s a Bruce Sterling story in here, he talked complete nonsense about what T.H. White tropes had become “universal” in other Arthurian fiction at the time–and I know it was nonsense because I did a gigantic survey paper about contemporary Arthurian fiction two years before this book came out. I spent most of this book just wondering how it is that I managed to come of age reading fantasy that was a completely different field than this one wanted to engage with and promote and use his clout in the field to attempt to set as canon.

Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana. Reread. Just as I was about to start talking about this, a discussion of it broke out in a private forum I’m on. I still do like it, but I feel its age particularly in the shape of roles the women take–what kind of heroism is possible to the women characters. There definitely is some, but it’s a constrained heroism for reasons that seem assumed rather than built into the world particularly, and the focus is chosen rather than necessary. Still, the moments where no one else can hear the name of the obliterated homeland, where they strain to make out what word the Tiganan characters are saying…those stayed with me, ever since the first time I’ve read it, and that’s the core of the book I keep returning to.

L.M. Montgomery, Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Reread. This is another random collection of Montgomery stories. This one seems to be highlighting the places where our values do not align very well–if you believe these stories, the central problem of family life is that people are too proud, and I don’t really believe that’s true. Ah well, at least I’ve reclaimed the shelf space, and there are other Montgomeries I still do love.

Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Son of the Storm. This is a fascinating book, because structurally it is so very secondary world fantasy, and worldbuilding-wise it is extremely Africa-influenced. So if you wonder what that looks like…this is definitely the book.

Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science? A concise and thoughtful take on what science has to offer as a system of apprehending the world. This series about modern thought is set up to offer challenges to the main body of the book by other thinkers and then gives the author a chance to rebut those challenges, and Oreskes’s work in that regard is magisterial, a joy to behold.

Lucy Pick, Pilgrimage. Historical fiction that weaves a tale from a figure along the periphery of actual history: a blind minor noblewoman from what would now be Belgium in the 12th century, swept along on what becomes a pilgrimage into Spain. Her comfort and skill in her own world are repeatedly upended, and her resourcefulness (and her dog’s resourcefulness!) in dealing with new circumstances are beautifully drawn but not superhuman. Because this is based on an actual historical life, there are places where I could not predict what would happen next because they’re shaped by real human chance rather than narrative convenience. Interesting.

Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Refreshingly, Roach decided to turn her wry and anecdotal eye not on weapons of destruction but on the peripheral technologies of warfare and its fallout. This is not a book for the fainthearted–there are descriptions of genital reconstruction surgery here, there are discussions of intestinal distress in field conditions–but the focus is not on killing but on survival.

DaVaun Sanders, B. Sharise Moore, et al, Fiyah Issue 18. Kindle. For me the standout story here was Marika Bailey’s “The White Road or How a Crow Carried Death Over a River,” but once again Fiyah does an excellent job of bringing a variety of new-to-me authors to my attention.

Lisa Sanders, Diagnosis and Every Patient Tells a Story. In some ways these two volumes are opposite views of the same author. The first is a series of 2-6 page essays, sort of a “best of” her column in New York Times Magazine about diagnosis. Each is a self-contained medical mystery, and as with many very short mysteries they can be a bit unsatisfying because there isn’t room for much other than exposition and solution. Frankly I recommend it as bathroom reading. The latter volume is where Sanders has the chance to talk about diagnostic medicine at length, conceptually and holistically but most importantly in its human context–to talk about where she feels its stories fit in the human story. It’s a much better book.

Greg van Eekhout, Weird Kid. A shapeshifting kid investigates strange happenings in his town, gradually becoming part of them. Mayhem ensues. Fun times.

Shannon Watters, Kat Leyh, et al, Lumberjanes: A Summer to Remember. This series is clearly wrapping up, and this was a bit of a nostalgia tour rather than…the actual plot wrap-up. For which I’m getting more and more impatient. I am also getting pickier about the art as we near the end. Ah well.

Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants, and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe. Okay so this was great. This actually looked at why Scandinavians converted to Christianity when they did, taking into account that Adam of Bremen was not an unbiased observer about…the topic of how great and holy Adam of Bremen’s bosses were. You can believe in sincere conversions while still noticing that things like when and how the French fortified their bridges had a serious effect on Viking raids vs. merchant connections in the world, and having an author like Winroth who is willing to treat the Scandinavians of that time as active rather than passive participants in their own conversion made all the difference in the world. I was very excited about this book.

Basma Abdel Aziz, The Queue. A dystopian novel from an Egyptian writer after the Arab Spring. This is short, full of human relationships, not generally pleasant but interesting to have as part of the span of dystopian literature, a very different part than most of Anglophonie.

Kalynn Bayron, This Poison Heart. Briseis has a gift with plants–even poisonous ones. Especially poisonous ones. So when she and her mothers have a chance to move out to a mysterious house with a gigantic garden, it seems like it might be the best opportunity in the world, as well as a chance to find out more about her birth family. I loved the voice, and the fantasy elements were as captivatingly handled as the trust themes. Looking forward to the sequel.

Robert Darnton, Publishing and Pirating: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment. As thorough as Darnton generally is, going into detail about who had the rights to publish what, who did it anyway, who tried to skip town and leave their family in the lurch, what it all cost and how they scraped by. Mostly centered in Francophonie, and that’s appropriate for the period. The title gives you a fair idea of whether you’ll be interested.

Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group. This is 100% not my kind of book, and I unintentionally devoured it all in one sitting anyway. It’s a conscious examination of horror movie tropes, what life is like for the one girl who gets out of a massacre, how those lives might still be trauma-ridden afterwards and how there might be another thriller/horror story yet to live through. Absolutely not my jam, and extremely well done.

Hildi Kang, Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea, 1910-1945. This is a compiled series of interviews with elderly Korean-Americans who were living in Korea as young people during the Japanese occupation, on a range of topics about that experience. It’s really interesting and illuminates all sorts of topics I would not have thought to ask about, and it’s a view of colonized experience that is not western-centric in any direction, so that’s fascinating. Also reasonably short.

Lori M. Lee, Pahua and the Soul Stealer. Discussed elsewhere.

Yoon Ha Lee, Phoenix Extravagant. Art and revolution and dragon automata and…determined characters who screw up a lot. I think this is my favorite of Lee’s long form works so far. There’s a clarity and a drive to it that I find very appealing.

H. M. Long, Hall of Smoke. I really liked the tone of this secondary world fantasy and the way that its characters interact with gods who are not all the same type/level of gods, how the theological and metaphysical ramifications made the fantasy, how they wandered in the wilderness in ways that made total sense for their story and their world. I enjoyed this a lot.

L. M. Montgomery, Chronicles of Avonlea, The Golden Road, and The Story Girl. Rereads. For a long time I had a habit of assuming that if I loved one book by an author, I should get–and keep–all their other works. And so I have been hauling these books around since the late 1980s without…really…rereading them in adulthood. Because I love The Blue Castle and some of the others. It turns out that I heartily dislike The Story Girl and its titular character (and its sequel, The Golden Road–the characters are on the golden road of childhood, you see, this is the most saccharine end of Montgomery’s work) and while I read them often enough in my chronically book-short childhood that they fell apart upon the reread thirty years later, I have zero desire to replace them. Sara Stanley, the so-called Story Girl, is a mouthpiece for very minor L.M. Montgomery tales of the sort I’ll get to in a minute in Chronicles of Avonlea. She has every melodramatic tendency Anne Shirley ever had, but everyone loves her and tells her she’s amazing all the time. The protagonist of these two books–written in first-person, not a strength for Montgomery to begin with–is Bev, a thirteen-year-old boy and/or his middle-aged self looking back. Montgomery attempts to put in what she thinks a 13-year-old boy would think about a lot–how pretty the girls are, basically–but tries to balance both that and the fact that Sara Stanley wants to be Gasp Oh No An Actress with constant teeth-aching simplistic Sunday School moralizing. So: everybody is obsessed with who is pretty and/or fat but also it is VERY WRONG to be vain. The characters are shallowly drawn and boring, and in order to make up for the slight nature of the stories, Bev is constantly putting his thumb on the scales to tell us how captivated everyone was, how amazing Sara is, what a great story it is. That we can read on the page and go, eh. Not so great. (Major Menolly Problems here.) At one point she is asked to recite the multiplication table to demonstrate that she can make it fascinating. I CALL SHENANIGANS, NO SHE CAN’T. So yeah, that was a horrifying trip down memory lane. Chronicles of Avonlea is a slight but inoffensive volume, lots of people finding love by setting aside their pride, whatever, with the exception of one story in which a disability is cured by (bleh) really REALLY wanting it. Otherwise it’s entertaining enough. Although there are constant asides about “that Anne Shirley over at Green Gables,” which: eyeroll, but whatever.

Alex Woolf, From Pictland to Alba 789-1070. This is a history of early medieval Scotland, on the “kings and lairds and battles” front. Lots of the information about this period is from external sources and has to be triangulated from multiple languages, so there is quite a lot of “are we talking about the same person here because this is the Irish version of this Norse name” and “how seriously do we take the sagas that were written hundreds of years later as a source on this period vs. the chronicles that were written hundreds of miles away by a hostile power.” But if you get tired–as I get tired, I get very tired–of having Scotland as a sort of combination totally central crossroads of northern Atlantic politics of this period and mist-shrouded, uh, well, Brigadoon, this sort of thing is going to have to happen to help disentangle it all.