Tag: bookses precious

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Langston Hughes and the RNC: the 1940s

The 1940s! Surely there’s nothing to be said about combating overly simplified political narratives, propaganda, infighting, and or demagoguery in that decade, right?

…um.

The poems Langston Hughes wrote in the 1940s did not stop calling American domestic politics to account. The Bitter River was a cry of anguish and anger after two more very young Black Americans were lynched. But the thing most of us think of when we think of the 1940s, WWII, gave Hughes a very sharp focus as he called his country to account. I think a lot of American historical accounts act as though the rise in attention to Black civil rights was something that came with the Second World War, but leaders like Hughes were seeing the parallels in prejudice and ill-treatment all along, and calling them out in poems like Beaumont to Detroit: 1943. There was no dawning “wait a minute” afterwards for thinkers, activists, and artists like Hughes: all along, he was saying that Hitler and Jim Crow had the same goals of prejudice, cruelty, inequality.

Still, the poems of the 1940s took a turn for the more lyrical and upbeat than the poems of the 1930s–not all of them, but there was a lot more fun interspersed, and a lot more poking affectionate fun at himself and those near him. Poems like “It Gives Me Pause” and Morning After are in most ways lighter than the entire section from the 1930s. Hughes also introduces the series of poems about Madam Alberta K. Johnson, an opinionated woman full of character and spark. My favorite, not immediately showing up online, is “Madam and the Wrong Visitor,” but I also like Madam and the Minister; I like all of them really, at least from the 1940s. I’d have Madam Johnson (Alberta K) over for coffee any day of the week.

And one of the poems that I would have thought any American could agree was openly positive, sentimental patriotism–until I heard some of the things said about immigrants lately–is Second Generation: New York. That a Black American of that generation reached inside himself to find that beauty in empathy for New Yorkers of mixed white ethnicities is the best of America, the best of urban living in urbane cities everywhere. And anyone who thinks that that kind of intergenerational empathy only works if it’s specifically about Ireland or Poland needs to sit down and have a good hard look at what Hughes was really talking about and why.

Tomorrow the RNC is over, but I haven’t gotten through all the poems–a decade at a time was about all that I could take on–so I’m going to take the rest of the week to finish this off. I don’t see any good reason not to.

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Langston Hughes and RNC: the 1930s

It’s a relief when people get in trouble for what they actually said. It makes things easier, more straightforward. What does that have to do with the RNC going on? Well, you decide, that’s up to you. But Langston Hughes, well. Most of the stuff that people try to call him out for, oh yes, he said that stuff. He did that stuff.

The context of him saying it, now. That’s a little trickier.

Take Goodbye Christ, possibly Hughes’ most controversial poem. It was hard to find a link that didn’t go into explanation, exegesis, excuses for that one. It’s not a poem that goes well with the Gospel sentiments of some of Hughes’ poetry of the 1920s–or perhaps it could be. It might not be so hard, after all, to see how the same poet who was inspired by the message of Jesus and his ministry could be pretty turned off by the modern followers who claim to speak in His name. But he did not pull any punches in saying so; he did not hedge it around or pull his punches, and if you want to view it as an angry rejection of actual Jesus, that’s there to be had, go ahead.

The 1930s saw, in addition to the poem that kicked off this blog series, overtly political poem after overtly political poem from Hughes. He was paying attention to labor conditions–it was the 1930s, who could ignore them?–the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (mostly ignored or unknown by modern white readers). By the time he got to Song for Ourselves, with “Czechoslovakia lynched on a swastika cross,” the litany of “oh crap what now” looks simultaneously historically familiar and…contemporary. Highly contemporary. Relevant.

This is where the people who are sure that Hughes was a Communist start to have their fodder. There are poems to Lenin, and Good Morning Revolution and its ilk are not exactly subtle. They aren’t trying to be. As another American three decades later would tell us, you gotta sing loud if you want to end war and stuff.

Not everyone likes this approach. Not everyone liked it then. Nor did Hughes like everyone else’s approach, as the poem To Certain Negro Leaders makes pithily clear. There’s a lot of variety in this decade of Hughes poems–short, long, rhyming, non-rhyming, ranging the world over–but by the beginning of the 1930s Hughes had won himself a place, a soapbox, a voice, and it looks like he wasn’t about to give it up for anything.

I’m not sure we’d have heard of him if he had.

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Langston Hughes and the RNC: the 1920s

I turned on my Twitter feed long enough to see that Donald Trump is the official nominee, as we have known he would be for weeks now. They have various people doing the sorts of things a convention does. So here’s your reminder from Langston Hughes that I, Too.

“I, Too” (also often called “I, Too, Sing America”) is both prophetic in an era when our current President is Black, and not prophetic enough. All sorts of Americans are still being sent to eat in the kitchen. It’s also one of the most openly political poems Hughes published in the 1920s. Not that he was apolitical at the time, but he had not come into his full fierceness until the end of that decade–the section I read today was the section of his poems from the 1920s, and they had a lot of jazz lyrics, a lot of blues lyrics, a lot of things that were cultural references, whose political stance was inherent by what they considered important enough to write a poem about, who they considered important enough to write a poem for, rather than overt.

One of the clearest things going on in American history of the time that’s showing up in Hughes’ poems was the Great Migration. Poems like The South and “Migration” are chronicling one of the greatest and most influential movements of people inside the US, ever, and one that was not taught in American history when I was in school. (I hope it is now.) Even some poems that have the form of nature poems are implicitly from the perspective of someone for whom nature has changed, grown chillier and more seasonally sharpened–someone who has gone north.

One of the poems I liked best from this era is one that I can’t find easily online because it’s also the title of a Hughes biography, “Dreamer.” It’s short, and I think some of you will need it, so I’m going to put it here, with more tomorrow. It’s a very young man’s poem. There is nothing wrong with that. Sometimes there is a great deal right with that.

Dreamer

I take my dreams

And make of them a bronze vase

And a wide round fountain

With a beautiful statue in its center,

And a song with a broken heart,

And I ask you:

Do you understand my dreams?

Sometimes you say you do

And sometimes you say you don’t.

Either way

It doesn’t matter.

I continue to dream.

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Books read, early July

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800. This is a giant tome on the institutions and background of slavery throughout the Western Hemisphere and how it is seriously distinct from, say, the Roman Empire’s slaves, or serfdom. This is mostly institutional and focused on the slaveholders, which is useful in its own way, but if you want focus on the slave narratives–which of course you do, because balance–there will need to be additional books. There was also a lot more direct contrast in the early years. Less of how things had diverged in different parts of the slaveholding New World in 1800, which I would really like, since I know that even within the US or within the Caribbean institutions and customs varied considerably in how people’s lived experience played out. So: good start, more needed.

Steven Brust and Emma Bull, Freedom and Necessity. Reread. Strange how differently things read with different experiences. The very ending got…hmm, I don’t know, practically realistic but emotionally…I am not sure what I think of it any more. The person I am talking to about this is almost done, and I’m glad, so I can have a good spoilery chew over it. Possibly because of reading AS Byatt.

Sean B. Carroll, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution. This is basically a love song to evolution written for the popular science audience. It’s got all sorts of juicy tidbits, weird things animals have evolved to do. Which monkeys have ruminant stomachs for leaf-eating, which fish have no hemoglobin and why not, how rhodopsins are tuned differently in aquatic animals depending on the depths at which they live. Very cool stuff even if you’ve already got the main thrust of his audience. Highly recommended for a broad audience.

Benedict Jacka, Hidden. The latest in its series, which is fun urban fantasy, like Mike Carey or Ben Aaronovich methadone. This time around he is tackling a bit more of pacifism and urban fantasy head on. I’m afraid I’m losing my taste for this type of series, but I don’t think it’s any fault of the author’s.

Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared. This is…basically Swedish Forrest Gump. In the present-day thread of the book the titular character Has Wacky Adventures; in the flashbacks, same, but with Famous World Figures. Our Swedish relations wanted to share this with us, so I was the fourth person in the American branch of the family to read this copy. Because the Swedes are less obsessed with the Baby Boom than we are, it’s less the voice of a generation than of a century. Still, Swedish Forrest Gump is not far enough off that your reaction to that phrase will probably pretty accurately determine how you’ll feel about the actual book.

David D. Levine, Arabella of Mars. Discussed elsewhere.

Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, and Brooke Allen, Lumberjanes: Friendship to the Max. This is gleeful and full-tilt and exactly like my experience of being a Girl Scout. Including the appearance of one unnamed goddess? Yeah, sure, it’s pretty much like Tam Lin was like my experience of college, my brain is flexible that way. Looking forward to more of this.

Gerald Vizenor, Treaty Shirts: October 2034–a Familiar Treatise on the White Earth Nation. This is. People. People. You would not believe the excited noises I made when I saw this in the dealer’s room at Readercon. It is! It is the thing it says it is! It is a science fiction novella that is completely focused on the concerns of the White Earth Nation at the time. The author, Gerald Vizenor, is himself White Earth Anishinaabe (which many of you might better recognize as Ojibwe, okay, that’s a word that’s used too, but that’s not the word he chooses and let’s be respectful). And there are all sorts of concerns with casinos, with treaties with the federal government, with what kinds of totem animal are permissible, whether hybridization is okay or not okay on what levels. The language. If you have read Anishinaabe/Ojibwe poetry, if you have been to a reading/performance/sing of poetry, the prose rhythms feel like that. The way they circle around, the type of deliberate artful repetition. The pace of exposition, the way you can tell things are important by what position they take up within the repetitive structure. This book completely–I can’t even say rejects, because when you reject things you are concerned with them. This book is just not doing what most of science fiction is doing. It’s not sitting around having an argument about whether telling a story of a particular Native group’s future is worth doing, because there is no argument. Of course it’s worth doing. The worth is embedded in the prose, the structure, every line. He just goes on and does it and thank God he does. I am so excited about this book. I am so excited to find more of Vizenor’s stuff, because there’s a bunch more out there. It’s not all SF. I just want to find out what other stories he wants to tell.

Jo Walton, Necessity. Discussed elsewhere.

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Making America: Langston Hughes and the RNC

Back when Donald Trump was not even the certain nominee, I heard the slogan “Make America great again.” And a voice whispered in my head, “America was never America to me.”

Such are the perils of an education: put in demagoguery and get out Langston Hughes. Let America Be America Again is the poem I mean, and it’s well worth reading in its entirety. Please do. And at the time I thought: we’re going to need something to get us through this RNC. We’re going to need Langston Hughes.

Friends, I had no idea.

I had no idea that we were going to see so many more shot in the streets this summer even before the protests during the convention start. (I hope for peace and free speech this week. I hope. The rest of this year–and some of our country’s history with political conventions–makes me very nervous.) But there’s Langston Hughes, with his stanzas reminding us that it’s like this, we’ve been here before. The Thirties were like this, the Sixties. We’re like this. America is this. We can’t say we didn’t see it coming. If we didn’t see it coming, it’s because we didn’t look.

And–one of the reasons I love this poem. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this poem, about all of his poems. Is that it is so much more passionately patriotic than the slogan. “Make America great again” is beaten any day by “The land that never has been yet–and yet must be.” Who loves you more? The person who wants to restore you to your high school glory, or the person who thinks you can be better than you’ve ever been? Who believes in you more? The person who thinks you’ve peaked or the person who thinks you have far to go?

I know two women who had strokes in middle age. For a lot of people, that would be it, a clear sign that whatever they did next would be lesser-than, a decline. One has gone on to change how she does her visual and tactile art form for the better. The other has built on a career of being a great storyteller to find ways to be a great wordsmith as well–to find ways to make lightning bugs into lightning. Neither one did it by pretending that bad things never happened, that her health was perfect. As an individual, as a people–you can’t. You make a better way forward–you approach a dream–by acknowledging that the bad things have happened. That they have happened to you. That they are a part of you. Langston Hughes has to acknowledge enslavement of Black Americans and dispossession of the Native Americans from the land. He has to acknowledge class inequality and gangsterism and greed as part of American history. Because if he doesn’t, he can’t see his way around them to the bigger dream past them, without them. There is no Golden Age for Langston Hughes to hearken back to because he’s willing to work to build one that’s never existed before. And when he describes the dream as almost dead today, he’s willing to tell you who’s almost killed it and how.

There’s going to be a lot more about that as I read and blog about his collected poems this week. Langston Hughes has a lot of punches not to pull and a lot of beliefs he will come right out and tell you in words, not sideways or sneakily. Like: “LIBERTY!
FREEDOM!
DEMOCRACY!
True anyhow no matter how many
Liars use those words.” (That’s from In Explanation of Our Times, which talks about people with no titles in front of their names getting to talk. Which is going on now too I think. And how they–and Langston Hughes–would not shut up.)

And that’s worth talking about this week. Every week. But this week in particular. So come on ahead and join me, blog about it, tweet about it, whatever you like. That’s the only way we get there from here.

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Books read, late June

Short post, due to reading friends’ manuscripts and reviews for elsewhere a lot this fortnight. Did not get posted due to personal stuff, so here you get it late.

Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Snow White, Blood Red. Reread. While this was a reread, it had been years since I’d picked it up again. Some of the stories now look much less fresh, as happens when a new thing becomes an established genre. Others were still really great. I think this must have been the first thing I ever read of Caroline Stevermer’s, given the timing of when I bought this book. I really liked Jack Dann’s “The Glass Casket,” and “The Snow Queen” might well be my favorite Patricia McKillip story–maybe I should seek out more of her short work. Or maybe I’m finally coming around? A lot of people I know and respect are huge McKillip fans, but she never really clicked for me. But this story did. I’m a huge sucker for Snow Queen stories, though.

Kate Elliott, Black Wolves. This book has a lot of things I would say I want. Layers of imperial politics. Different cultures under empire. The demon coils were a kind of magic I liked. There were cool things in this book. It took some time for me to get going with it, and I never really got very emotionally involved. I wanted to talk to a couple of friends at Readercon about this book, but I had to drag myself through caring on a purely intellectual level in several spots. Also, when I say that I am tired, tired, tired of reading fantasy novels where women get raped, it is not because I want more fantasy novels where men get raped. It is particularly not because I want more fantasy novels where men who are not major point of view characters get raped to motivate other men because God forbid we should have to deal with the fallout of a man in that kind of experience having to go on with his life and protag; it’s hard enough to get women that way. So that is a major content warning for you there I guess.

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners. Sometimes when you’re in your early twenties, the wrong person gets associated with a movie or a singer or an author. They enthuse too much, they press the thing on you–maybe it’s a toxic friend, maybe it’s an ex-love, maybe it’s a relative who just wouldn’t let you be. And the art or the artist gets a bad association in your head, you think, ugh, that. And then gradually you’re not that age any more, and you’re not around that person any more, and for some reason you listen to a song by the singer, you read a story by the writer, whatever, and you think, hey, this is really good. This is actually a lot more my sort of thing than I thought. And that person and their associations aren’t important to me any more anyway. Well. Here we are in my mid-thirties reading the Kelly Link back catalog. And I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer, because there’s not only the title story, but there’s “The Faery Handbag.” There is an old Scrabble-playing lady with a large foreign vocabulary. I needed this story. I am so glad not to have done any longer without this story. I will need it again, and now I will have it. Yay.

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Arabella of Mars, by David D. Levine

Review copy provided by Tor Books

David is one of those lovely people on the border of friend and acquaintance. He is certainly the close friend of several of my close friends. I wanted to make sure to get this book read and reviewed when it was coming out, even though it arrived at an inconvenient time, because I like David personally and want to see him do well, and he’s gone through some incredibly hard stuff the last few years.

Sometimes that kind of personal disclaimer does not fit the review that follows. I fear this is one of those times.

Look, the prose and the adventure plot flow smoothly in Arabella of Mars. It is well-written in that sense. It is a Regency adventure if Mars was part of the Regency-era British empire, if clockworks and odd gases and a crablike Martian race were part of the world in which the British were fighting Boney. The adventure plot is primary–the stuff about automata and Martians sort of is background–but if that’s what you want it does that thing, and there is clearly more, it’s clearly the beginning of a series.

But it is yet another plot where the plucky heroine is being distinguished from other girls because she does not like girl stuff. This doesn’t end up looking like “be yourself, society and its gender norms are stifling” if you never have plots in which plucky boys are distinguished from other boys by not liking boy stuff. If you don’t have any other human females who are interesting people and do happen to like “girl stuff.” (In the entire book. Ever. There is one other female character who does more than scream, faint, or act annoying, and it’s another species–who gets very, very little page time.) If “girl stuff” is always and forever the same. It just ends up looking like girls and our stuff suck. Which is bad enough when it’s a woman writer who may have been smooshed by social expectations, letting her frustrations out on the page. When it’s a male writer? Sorry, but I just feel like I’ve been thrown under the bus. Or maybe I’m plucky and not like other girls because I like science and science fiction? Yeah, thanks, but don’t do me any favors–I count as a girl.

This gets worse with a passage in which Arabella decides not to fight “like a girl” but rather to fight “to win.” Despite having had a female Martian warrior as her main role model–making this kind of internalized sexism pretty odd–she associates women fighting with ineffectual scratching and hair-pulling. Not with, oh, say, fending off your rapist desperately and succeeding. So much fail. And–if this is meant to be Arabella’s internal viewpoint, if this is meant to be a devastating portrait of internalized sexism, then having any women characters at all besides Arabella herself who are effectual and interesting might be nice. Instead, no. So…yet another lesson in “being like a woman is being ineffectual, you need to be like a man to be effective and worthwhile” from Arabella of Mars. Good to know, thanks.

And it gets worse again when one her most dramatic acts of heroism is praised explicitly as being really great for a girl. This would be good for a man, but gosh, it’s really great for a girl. And again, that’s definitely something someone from a sexist culture would think. But it’s not challenged, it’s not undermined, it’s just there: yep. Arabella, really great–for a girl, I guess.

Do I seem angry? I am angry. I am angry, because I expected better. Because I am so tired of books that are fun romps being fun romps on my face in hobnailed boots.

I want David to do well. I want him to sell future books. But I want him to sell future books in which he doesn’t do this stuff over again. In which he can play with swashbuckling and clockworks and atmosphere between the planets and not have the same tired depictions of misogyny to do it. If it had been someone else, I probably would have quit reading at the halfway point, where she didn’t fight like a girl, she fought to win. But because it was David, I thought, oh, surely he’s going to flip all this on its head. Surely Arabella is going to run into some other human women who are not shrieking, sniveling incompetents. One? One other human woman? Surely the nauseating levels of internalized misogyny are not going to be consistent throughout. Surely someone who was raised by Martians will not be surprised when a Martian warrior is a woman–how completely implausible in context was that.

Be less sure than I was, friends. If you’re waiting for that, wait for the sequel. Because I still believe David Levine can do better than he did here. But if you’re going to try it….

Please consider using our link to buy Arabella of Mars from Amazon.

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Necessity, by Jo Walton

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

Jo is, as I have said in previous reviews, a dear friend, and also you will find me in the acknowledgments, because I have already read this book twice to comment on it before it was published. Let no one say there is a secret cabal here, because this cabal is right out in the open.

So. Necessity. It is the end of a trilogy, and I think that it does the thing where it reminds you of what has come before, what is important about the previous volumes, quite admirably. I don’t think that it’s going to be a very good choice to read without the others–the emotional weight won’t be there, the impact won’t be there. So really start with The Just City if you haven’t. But if you’re a person who wants the series to be complete–this series is really, really complete. The ending is an ending really and for true. The first one stands alone completely, and each of the others is doing a different enough thing that they’re worth having on their own, not just warmed-up leftovers, but they also follow the arc on naturally as the best kind of sequels do. There are new characters here as well as some of the old ones.

There is robot viewpoint. And that is my favorite thing. My very, very favorite thing. Not only do you finally get more about characters who are not golds–major characters in this book are Iron and Silver, hurrah hurrah!–but Crocus, Crocus speaks. Crocus speaks at length. This is in some ways the book where the robots and the aliens come into their own, without the gods giving up their say in the process. So yes: a very weird book, robots and aliens and gods and time travel, like nothing else I can point at, very hard to talk about without spoilers for the others.

(There are aliens, though! That’s a spoiler but! Aren’t you glad I did?)

The series continues to take on volition, purpose, and consent head-on. How to live, how to grapple with time and causality and the gods…things take a turn for the metaphysical but do not leave the realm of human emotion in this volume. The cities and their inhabitants continue to evolve, to change and grow and learn. And to free themselves and each other, which is the best part of all.

I don’t believe there’s much likelihood that you’re bound by necessity–the loops of time, potential paradoxes–to seek out this one. So you can do it of your own free will, which always feels nicer.

Please consider using our link to buy Necessity from Amazon. (or The Just City, or The Philosopher Kings.)

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Books read, early June

Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest. Vivid modern faery novel that does some interesting second-generation things that are hard to explain without spoilers. I feel like there are some things about family dynamics that it took the Datlow/Windling fairy tale series to drag out in the open 20 years ago, that could only be discussed at the extremes then, that authors like Black can take on with more subtlety now, and can spend more time directly on the heroism of heroines like Hazel and less on what sparked her heroism. It can be a less angry book and still rooted in some of the same themes. There is more complexity of character, more forgiveness and still themes of memory and the power of origins. I do recommend this to people who have liked tales of faery all along; it is moving farther in the direction those anthologies started, not merely rehashing the same ground and yet using a style that I think early fans of those anthologies will enjoy.

Becky Cloonan, Brendan Fletcher, and Karl Kerschel, Gotham Academy Vol. 2: Calamity. I think that ongoing fans of Gotham and DC Comics in general might get more out of this than I did, but on the other hand they might be more annoyed by departures. It’s a boarding school story, featuring Bruce Wayne’s son as a supporting character in one of the storylines–Gotham’s kids, basically. It’s fun stuff so far, not blowing my mind but entertaining enough.

Albert Goldbarth, Adventures in Ancient Egypt, Heaven and Earth, and Popular Culture. Rereads. Of these volumes, Heaven and Earth is the one I got to first the first time I read them, the one that explains why I persevered with Goldbarth back in the day. He was trying to do the most with science in it. And yet the pervasive midcentury sexism that was there the first time I read these poems stifles me now. It…I can deal with midcentury sexism to some extent, but in a lot of these poems it just left me nowhere to stand, no room to breathe, nothing to love. No reason to go back a third time. There were a few beautiful moments, things he loved, and I could even see clear, a little, to why. But I was so desperate for anyone who tried to build a bridge between the arts and the sciences, back in my early twenties. I am less desperate now.

Ben Hatke, Nobody Likes Goblins. Discussed elsewhere.

Laura Lam, False Hearts. Discussed elsewhere.

Gonzalo Lamana, Domination Without Dominance: Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial Peru. Wow, if there was ever a book that needed its subtitle for a safe search. This is an anti-colonialist book, so it rehashed a great many of the same historical events I read in May but with jargon that recontextualized them. Which I think must be useful, and yet…not as much for me, honestly. I felt like…maybe I’m assuming too much? but a lot of the stuff that the jargon was doing with pointing out that the Spanish experience was not central and universal is stuff that people should be doing all the time anyway. I know, I know: they’re not. Sigh. Also, it was…wow, am I in a particular demographic here…very male anyway. Yeah, I said that. Okay. But it’s true.

Stella Nair, At Home With the Sapa Inca: Architecture, Space, and Legacy at Chinchero. This is an amazing book. Oh wow. It goes into great detail about the buildings involved and what they imply about the life of the high Inca royalty and nobility (and from there, what we can infer about the Inca who were not royalty and nobility). Non-architectural sources–textual sources–are also used extensively, but grounded constantly in the buildings. This is exactly the sort of book I wanted. This is exactly the sort of book you probably want, if you’re interested in the Inca and even possibly if you aren’t. Of all the Inca Imperial material I’ve read, this is the one I would recommend most highly.

George O’Connor, Olympians: Ares, Bringer of War. The publisher has sent me review copies of every other entry in this graphic novel series but this one, so I got it in the library to stay current and be able to talk to my godkids about the series. I was a bit disappointed that O’Connor chose to focus his Ares volume on the Trojan War, basically bringing in almost no obscure or small-scale myth about Ares.

Antti Tuomainen, The Healer. This is a post-climate change mystery thriller set in Finland. It gets described as both spare and vivid. I lean toward the former unless you have just been to Helsinki. Lucky me, I have! So when pieces of Helsinki geography are more mentioned than described, I have just been navigating those streets and remember which ones are which; I can picture from memory rather more than from text. Anyway: serial killer in Helsinki after a very, very extreme climate change but not a lot of science fictional change otherwise. It’s not a book I would recommend widely, but it was an interesting read given my interests.

Clayton Ward., Jr., Mallory Lykes Dimmitt, Joe Guthrie, and Elam Stolzfus, Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition: Everglades to Okefenokee, 1000 Miles in 100 Days. This is mostly pictures–sawgrass, tupelos, cypress. One of Mark’s relatives who lives in Florida liked this and sent it to us for Christmas, and I just got around to looking at it. I like tree pictures, so I liked it too.

G. Willow Wilson, Ms. Marvel: Last Days. Compared to the volume I read last month, this was much better. I know that the apocalyptic scenario here is a larger Marvel comics scenario that Wilson and her team have to work around, but I think they did a lovely job of the characters in crisis. I am not the least bit attached to whatever else is going on in the Marvel universe. This is pretty much the only one I’m reading, because I like Alif the Unseen and wish that Wilson was still writing novels, and this is how I get her work right now.

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False Hearts, by Laura Lam

Review copy provided by Tor Books.

Usually when a book is compared to a mass media property, whether I love or hate the mass media property, I find the comparison inaccurate to the point of annoyance, because the comparison is there for people who are not me. Specifically, it is there to lure in people whose main points of comparison are all filmed, who think entirely in terms of filmed media, which are mostly not all that similar to written media in how I enjoy either.

In this case, however, several of the reasons I enjoy Orphan Black–barring Tatiana Maslany’s astonishing acting skills–were entirely present in False Hearts, and the comparison was completely apt. And I love Orphan Black. So: wow. Go figure.

Tila and Taema are formerly conjoined twins, formerly residents of a semi-primitive cult, now cured of both conditions and living in the San Francisco of the future, a peaceful city of the new nation of Pacifica. Taema believes that she knows her sister better than anyone in the world–until Tila shows up soaked in blood, with the police on her heels. All the evidence points to her as that rare bird, an actual murderer rather than someone who can get her violent impulses out in medically assisted virtual parlors. Reconciling that with the sister she knows–and diving into an underworld she never cared to explore–becomes Taema’s mission. She needs to prove to herself and the police either that Tila is as innocent as she believes, or that she didn’t really know her sister at all.

So you have the sibling relationships, you have the murky past, you have the running about future adventure stuff, you have a certain amount of bio-SF albeit along a different axis than in Orphan Black, you have a strong acceptance of differences but also understanding that none of it is simple…really. The comparison is not a bad one. And yet it does so with book nature, not with false cinematic consciousness. So okay, good then.

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