Satellite Falling #01 Review for Bounding Into Comics

Check out my review of Satellite Falling #01 from IDW, written by Steve Horton, drawn by Stephen Thompson, and colored by Lisa Jackson.

Plutona #1, by Jeff Lemire and Emi Lenox

Plutona #1, by Jeff Lemire and Emi Lenox

Publisher: Image Comics
Art: Emi Lenox
Story: Jefff Lemire and Emi Lenox
Colors: Jordie Bellaire
Rating: 2/5

I think that Plutona is directed to a much younger age group than the one that I belong to, and most of my criticisms can be reduced to that. It's a simple story, with young characters who are broadly and sparsely sketched in this first issue. It's also a sweet story, though, with a cute premise and a diverse cast that will probably appeal much more to kids.

In Plutona, five kids - snarky and self-centered Mie and her younger brother Mike, quiet superhero-watching Teddy, unhappy, cigarette smoking Ray, and Mie's downtrodden friend Diane - find the body of a superhero named Plutona in the woods. That's essentially all that happens in the first issue, after the introduction of our cast.

The dialogue can get pretty cloying and too on the nose, in the way that writing for kids gets sometimes. Hopefully the characters will be more than just the fairly wooden stereotypes from the first issue.

The art is beautiful, with pastel watercolors on the cover and a kind of saturated-pastel color palette inside. I particularly liked the switch to Plutona's POV, which featured an emphasis on traditional comic elements and stylization.

This isn't for me, but I'd definitely recommend it to a younger child (partly just to see whether they actually like or not - I'm worried that it might be a little too twee, too written-down).

Review: The Last Witness

The Last Witness by K.J. Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I've been reading as many of these Tor novellas as I can get my hands on. I love this entire publishing endeavor, and I think it's a great effort to get short fiction a wider audience. I'm actually surprised that my local library has so many of them. The only one I'd read previously, "Binti" by Nnedi Okorafor, was an exciting, imaginative, emotional galactic story. I also just finished "Patchwerk" by David Tallerman (review forthcoming), and that was a whirlwind adventure as well.

In comparison, "The Last Witness" doesn't hold its own. It has an interesting premise: there is a man who can steal memories from others' minds and keep them in his own. Over the years, he has accumulated many memories, so many that he has trouble remembering which were his to begin with. But as his memory is muddled, so is much of the story. Tallerman tries to work some creative work with the memory ambiguity, and there were times where it seemed to be working - I was intrigued, I could tell there was something to fish out and I tried to nose it out myself - but the twist introduced at the end of the story was both underwhelming and a little bewildering. For that kind of twist to work well, you need to have that feeling of 'oh! It all makes sense now!' but Tallerman made the clues too subtle (though they're definitely there, just not pointing in any direction) for that satisfying 'eureka' moment. (Though this might just be a poor reading on my part; I may have to do a re-read and re-evaluate.)

This secret plot was so well hidden that it was completely lost under the surface plot, and I have to say that this cover plot was not particularly compelling. The main character gambles, loses his money, earns more money, gambles again. He gets himself embroiled in politics. He tries to leave the politics, but gets sucked back in. Meh. I didn't care about him or his problems at all.

I will say that the final arc of the story and the last couple of scenes were full of some delicious vengeance, a vengeance I enjoyed reading and (had the rest of the novella built up to it) should have been immensely satisfying. There is a confrontation between two characters who have a history that one knows nothing about, and the sheer pain, hatred, and piteousness in that confrontation had me cackling in delight.

Overall, I'm not a huge fan, but there was definitely some substance to this novella that may require a re-read for me to appreciate fully.

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Review: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard

Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard by Lawrence M. Schoen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have been waiting for this book for almost six months. I hopped right on that hype train as the publisher rolled it out of the station back in August or September. It's an SF book written by a cognitive linguist! That's like the majority of my interests all rolled into one book! I even participated in an AMA with the author the day I checked the book out of the library, which was cool

And then I started reading it. I'd been expecting the sentient elephants, since they're the main premise of the story. I didn't expect the rest of the sentient animals, or their ridiculous names, or the many indulgent nods to real-life academia, or the boys-club feel to the story, or... well, a number of things were unexpected. I probably should have expected that this wouldn't be my favorite, given that anthropomorphic animals have never been my thing, even as a kid.

The story begins with Jorl, a Fant who can use koph. Koph is essential to the lives of the Fants. Certain Fants (and, more rarely, creatures from other species) can use koph to communicate with the dead, so long as they know enough about the person they want to talk to that they can summon a good amount of the tiny particles of consciousness/personality that emanate from all living beings. Jorl believes he might be the Fant to fulfill an obscure prophecy made long ago, but he's not even sure what the prophecy means. He spends many of his days using koph to talk to his best friend, who committed suicide several years earlier, leaving behind a son who is a pariah due to his albinism. He is also an academic, and the source of most of the winking complaints about academic life. These come across as inside jokes and for me, broke the fourth wall because the screamed self-insertion of the author; a perfect example of where the author should have 'killed his darlings.'

Jorl's quest begins with a search for the missing dead - Fants who have sailed away from their home to die peacefully, as the Fant do, on an island they will only find once they reach their time to die, but who Jorl can't reach through koph. (Spoiler: Only now do I realize that this seems like a contradiction, as later in the novel it's revealed that you can certainly use koph to speak to people who are alive, and the process is essentially the same as summoning the dead.) His dead friend's son, Pizlo, also begins a journey - the moons of the Fant world have spoken to him, and he knows he must meet Jorl toward the end of his quest. Pizlo's journey throughout the book is the most engaging plot for me; his status an an outcast makes him a great character to explore the Fant society and his strange ability to communicate with non-sentient objects is intriguing (and potentially related to the the secret linguistic premise of the story - perhaps we'll see that in a sequel).

Much of this book is about the politics of this universe populated by sentient animals, but this is the biggest weakness of the novel for me. Nothing about this felt refreshing or imaginative. It feels tired, because nearly every character relies on stereotypical (Western) anthrophomophization; dogs are loyal, cats are feral and individualistic, otters are playful and carefree, elephants have long memories (in the form of koph). Every character has the 'personality' of the species they're from, which grows reductive and repetitive when you see multiple characters from the same species.

The gender dynamics in this book made me a little uncomfortable. It's not that women don't exist in this world, but they're not solid characters, and their stories don't really matter. All of the important relationships are between men, all of the important stories belong to men. Which, I suppose, is fine on its own, but the permeating tone of masculine pretension throughout the story, the almost complete dominance of men in minor and side roles, and the treatment of the few female minor characters (like the young female bookstore clerk who is in love with Jorl, and seemingly only exists to show us how desirable he is, or the otter who is a shallow, vapid party girl who gets absolutely zero character development despite undergoing some traumatic events), all add up to that uncomfortable feeling of 'I suspect this author included women because he knows women should be included, and that he feels proud of himself for inclusion, and gave very little thought beyond that.' Which is a surprisingly common feeling for fiction in general and SF in particular.

Overall, the plot is not hugely compelling. The 'rules' of koph seem to change to be whatever is most convenient for the story to proceed, and any story based in prophecy needs to tread lightly on that ground (especially in science fiction), not trample over it with giant elephant feet. There's a twist toward the end of the book that has very little to do with the actual plot, but seems to be the central point of the book, and maybe the reason why the book was written. Maybe if the story served that reveal, or the reveal served the story, it wouldn't feel so shallow, but shallow it does feel. I'm likely biased because of my distaste for anthropomorphic animals, but I wouldn't recommend this to fans of SF, because it feels much more like fantasy. If it had committed to that fantastical aspect, I suspect I would've liked it a bit more.

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Review: Dragonquest

Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Dragonquest, the second book in the Dragonriders of Pern series, feels like more of the same. There are dragons (obviously), there are dragonriders, and there are lots of disgruntled nobles. This installment features several predictable but slow-moving plotlines, and hints of stories or developments I hoped would McCaffrey would capitalize upon, but to no avail.

There are two main related story threads: the first is the discovery of fire lizards - the small creatures from which dragons were eventually bred, long ago; the second is the discovery of secret rooms inside some of the Holds that contain long-forgotten technology. This technology (namely a telescope) allows the dragonriders to take a closer look at the red star that causes all of their problems.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the cause of most of the problems in this book is Kylara. She has turned out to be a raging entitled bitch who sleeps around. Not exactly surprising, given the previous book, but still - I was hoping for better. She doesn't have a single redeeming quality, and is never presented in an empathetic light. She runs the Southern Weyr but doesn't do any of the work, instead leaving it to Brekke. Brekke is a young woman who is entirely capable and pure and doesn't even want to have sex with F'nor because she only wants to have sex with one person, and that person will have to be whoever flies her dragon. We also have our whore-madonna dichotomy set up quite nicely.

As soon as she finds out that the fire lizards can imprint on non-dragonriders, Kylara gives a clutch of eggs to her main lover - a lord - upending the entire hierarchy of Pern, in terms of both the balance of power between lord holders, dragonriders, and the craft holds, and the careful negotiations between the holds. F'lar and Lessa solve that problem fairly easily by giving away fire lizard eggs like candy on Halloween, but several of the lord holders (now emboldened by their dragon-like companions) are insistent on traveling to the red star to defeat the Thread at its source. Meanwhile, F'nor and F'lar are trying to figure out other ways to beat Thread, including grubs that seem to eat burrows of Thread and magically heal plants that have been burned by it, and finding another planet in the system that accounts for the recent irregular Threadfall.

Then Brekke's dragon rises to mate, and Kylara's dragon, due to Kylara's sluttiness and irresponsibility, attacks it, which results in the deaths of both of their dragons. This traumatizes Brekke. I'm not sure what the narrative point of this is, except to give the madonna a horrifying "first time" and castigate Kylara for being a whore and a bitch.

F'nor tries to jump to the red star and comes back, with his dragon, horribly injured.

My main problem here is that there is very little build to this book. There's not a plot, per se; there are a series of linked events that follow each other, but there is no build-up, and there's little relationship between any of the several sub-plots (like the young lord of Ruatha imprinting on a malformed white dragon). This book exists to move the world forward, not to move any story anywhere at all.

I also had some difficulty stomaching all of the mysterious unknown technology from the past - unknown to the characters, immediately obvious to the reader, and discussed in-story in cartoonishly oblivious ways, as if the reader shouldn't guess what the instrument is until the big reveal to the characters. It was painful to listen to.

And, obviously, there's the nauseating portrayal of women. I get that these were written in the late 60s, early 70s, and I should probably be satisfied that there are women at all. There are even brief pretensions toward an equal rights movement in Pern, when Brekke thinks about her young female ward and tells F'nor that the child would make a great dragonrider - even on a bronze, green, or blue dragon - and that maybe women and girls should have the chance to impress all dragons. But that's quickly discarded (at least for this book) and then it's a return to Brekke the pure and sweet and perfectly good, Kylara the vain, slutty, stupid, and bitchy, and Lessa, the firecracker who can only be tamed by her man, for whom she'll keep house and be a good sex object. Those are my words (mostly), but that's exactly how the book portrays them, with no exceptions. It's the three oldest tropes in the book, and at no point are they subverted. Even when Brekke and Kylara both suffer the loss of their dragons (which, to be fair, *is* Kylara's fault), everyone reaches out to Brekke and tries to pull her out of her stupor, while they confine Kylara somewhere distant. The nicest thing anyone does for Kylara is decide not to kill her. I remember reading the Harper Hall books as a kid, and loving the women in those books for their power and rebellion. I'm tempted to re-read that series instead of continue with this one.

Overall, it was an okay book to listen to while working out, but nowhere near as good as the one I'm listening to now! (Stay tuned for my review of the audiobook version of "Lagoon" by Nnedi Okorafor.)

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Savannah Liars Tour, by Will McIntosh

"Savannah Liars Tour," by Will McIntosh. Art by Galen Dara. From Lightspeed Magazine, edited by John Joseph Adams. Featured on io9.

This week, I read "Savannah Liars Tour" by Will McIntosh. I heard about it through one of my favorite websites, io9, which features one short story each month from the current issue of Lightspeed Magazine. I've heard great things about Lightspeed - it won a Hugo in 2014 (plus four nominations), and its short stories often get nominated for SF short fiction awards. The current editor, John Joseph Adams, recently edited a volume I've been meaning to read: the first ever Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy.

(A brief aside: I've had an obsession with the Best American series since high school, when I read one of their Best American Essays collections. Each Best American series collects either short fiction or essays from a particular genre; generally one person is the series editor, and they have a guest edit each volume. I've purchased almost every Best American book I've ever found at my favorite used book store, more than . There's a Best American collection for everything, from essays to horror to science writing. But there wasn't a collection for sci-fi and fantasy until 2015?! Atrocious.)

Either way, for better or for worse, I've heard great things about Lightspeed but nothing about Will McIntosh in particular, and nothing about the story - I'm trying to add a smattering of short stories, both recent and archived, from a variety of sci-fi mags, to my reading app each week, but I don't generally read the blurb so I'm always surprised.

The title of the story captures possibly the most charming and memorable part of the story for me. The main character (Ben)'s dead lover, Delilah, was in her life the tour guide for the titular tour. Her job: tell outrageous but entertaining lies about the town of Savannah to tourists on the trolley. She never tells the same lie twice - Ben can attest to this because he takes her tour frequently before approaching her. The brief yarns we hear from her in the corners of the story make me want to hop onto the trolley with her, and add some much-needed character to the story.

Because this is largely one of those Idea stories characteristic of the sci-fi/fantasy genre. The author has an Idea, either for a cool world or a particular story frame or character they want to use, and then add the rest of the story elements to serve that Idea; everything else comes second to whatever the Idea is. Of course, that's not a bad thing, per se, if it's done well and the characters aren't flat and the story and the world-building work together. Nor are these stories unique to SFF - I think they're more obvious in those genres, though, because SFF places much more emphasis on world-building (obviously), and because navel-gazing description of a realistic idea could summarize most short stories in the New Yorker and is therefore a canonized 'literary' style, while navel-gazing description of an SFF idea reads as indulgent at best and infodump at worst.

I'm not sure if the Iiea here is the SF device or the plot; one is slaved to the other, but I'm not sure which. The device: people can speak to any dead person, but only if they pay exorbitant fees to go into cryogenic sleep. The plot: Ben is torn between his dead lover, Delilah, and his wife, Jillian. We know almost nothing about these characters, except that Ben keeps visiting Delilah, Jillian doesn't want him to, and Delilah delights in lying (and is dead). The conflict in this story feels artificial or contrived - exactly like McIntosh had an Idea for a story and forced everything in the story to revolve around that idea. The characters' wants and existences didn't matter beyond the conflict of desires that propelled the story forward. We literally get no details about the characters, and few details about the world, beyond what is directly necessary for this story to work.

For me, this is a fatal flaw. It wasn't like it was unpleasant to read, but I was distinctly un-wowed by this, and was surprised it made it to publication. To me, it read like stories I've read as a slush reader for an SF/F/horror magazine and passed on. Sure, it has some lovely turns of phrase and an interesting premise. But your world, your characters, and your message all need to take a step beyond the premise to be interesting and compelling. There's a lot of opportunity in a story where death is kind of a nebulous concept to delve into deeper topics, but instead the story hinges on what feels like a cheap twist. Overall, I'd say this is 2 stars (which, according to the Goodreads metric, means 'it was ok' - and it was). 

Review: Junction True

Junction True by Ray Fawkes
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I received a free e-galley of this book from Netgalley.

I had no expectations going into "Junction True." I knew it was a comic, and I assumed it was sci-fi since I'd requested the galley, but it had been so long since I'd read the description that I no longer remembered anything about it.

So at least I wasn't disappointed. This is a fairly solid, middle-of-the-pack story about body modification and power. The main character, a woman named Teralyn, is telling the first several issues of the story to what appears to be her lover. She's telling the story of her largest, most significant body modification.

In this world, mods are common (in certain circles, called Neumods) but fairly dangerous. They're also generally not mechanical; they're organic, like aphid tears you can install in your tear ducts to cry psychedelic tears, or tapeworms you can eat to make yourself skinny, or small creatures you can put under your skin to make colorful patterns. Of course, being insects and parasites and bacteria and viruses, these things can do a lot of damage. Teralyn meets Dirk at a club and he instantly falls in love with her. She instantly sees how she can use him; she tells him she only wants a puppet, and he agrees to be that puppet. Together, they decide to undertake a dangerous, horrifying mod, one that has been done on few people because it's illegal: they will essentially install junctions into their bodies that will make Dirk's digestion dependent on Teralyn. He can't process nutrients except as she feeds them through their junction. If she takes drugs and connects to him, he will get high whether he wants to or not.

Dirk's journalist friend Naoko doesn't think this is a good idea. (Neither do I.) She documents the stories of people whose Neumods have gone horribly wrong, and we see those interviews throughout the story. Some believe the mods ruined their lives, others think that their deformities are just one of many possible outcomes of Neumods - they made an informed decision going in, and they'd make it again. But Dirk agrees to this true junction (so named because the junctions are true to one another; no other link can be formed with them) after knowing Teralyn only a little more than a week, and Naoko is concerned.

She's right to be. Teralyn has never exactly hidden her crazy from Dirk, but she insists that they only refer to themselves as "I" or "we," never "you," and only "Teralyn," not Dirk. Only Teralyn exists. It may not even be a week before she runs off, leaving him to starve.

At this point, Teralyn stops narrating her story, saying she doesn't know or care what happened to him. She assumes he's dead. But then, he and Naoko enter. Dirk is hooked up to a machine, his junction torn out, and asks to speak to Teralyn alone while a video records them. He tells her he only wants to be a part of her again, and then kills himself. His friends are not so kind - they forcibly remove her junction and connect her to Dirk's machine.

We see that the true narrator is Naoko; this is perhaps a book, or video-chronicle, of the story she is compiling. She feels guilt for what she did to Teralyn and spends the rest of her life caring for the now-invalid woman.

The story is haunting and dark. The dynamic between Teralyn and Dirk falls just short of disturbing because Dirk, to me, doesn't feel hopelessly in love, or like he wants to be controlled, or like he actually knows what he wants at all; he feels stupid. We don't get much depth from him and could do with more. I'm not a fan of 'love at first sight' or Romeo & Juliet stories, both of which this story works with, because they feel shallow. That's a good word to describe my general feelings toward the book: shallow. It wants to say a lot about power, sex, relationships, autonomy, but it doesn't have much to say about them, and it lays it all out on the page. The characters aren't substantial enough to make up for the the brief plot, either, so it's left feeling lacking.

The art is, at times, beautiful. It reminds me of certain issues of The Sandman, with its angular faces, blue-washed watercolors and populated backgrounds. But it's also visually dark, and while there's a good amount of detail, it gets lost in the darkness. There's a grimy feel to it, which is certainly intentional since this is a cyberpunk-y world, but it doesn't appeal to me very much.

A quick, solid read that certainly wasn't bad, but wasn't excellent.

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