2017: A Year of Reading

Much of my life can be measured in books. One summer, when I was twelve, I read one hundred and ten books over three months - it was a lonely summer, in some ways, but I didn’t notice. I’ve slowed down since then as my books have gotten longer and my life has filled with other joys. Still, I track my reading in part because I can divine truth about my inner life by my reading habits. It’s kind of like a tarot reading for reading.

I read 84 books in 2017. This is a record high as long as I’ve been tracking my yearly reading (obviously not including my prodigious childhood years). This has been a busy year, so I was surprised that I got so much reading done - I beat out 2015 by 1 book, and that year I spent working in a bookstore and living alone in the mountains. But then I got a good look at the format breakdown:

Format:
eBook	9
Audiobook	59
Paperback	11
Hardcover	4
eARC	2

*Note that numbers don’t add up to 84 because I read some books in multiple formats simultaneously, switching between eBook and hardcover or audio and paperback.

Almost ¾ of the books I read were audiobooks! That’s a much larger percentage than I would have guessed, but it makes sense. Three factors drove those numbers way up this year. First, I started off the year with a series of hilarious memoirs by female comedians that were narrated by the authors - Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler, Carrie Fisher - and that got me into the audiobook habit.

The second two are linked. This year, I made the exciting and terrifying decision to move cities to go to graduate school (I start in September 2018!). The choice to go was a hard one, and both before and for months following the decision I was wracked with anxiety. It was hard to exist alone with my thoughts. Having a book to focus on as I drove, painted, worked out, walked, played Call of Duty became crucial if I wanted to enjoy what I was doing, or at least keep from succumbing to constant anxiety and tears.

You can see below that there are upticks in March, when I was waiting for acceptance letters, and in June, after I made my decision to go. I spent a lot of time during both those periods exploring D.C. on my own, walking through the city and discovering new places on random weekdays off.



Audiobooks have done almost as much for me as therapy.

I try to be conscious about my book choice. I aim for 50% books by female authors and 30% by authors of color. I did better this year about both but have yet to hit that 30%. I also try to read authors that are new to me and to shake it up if I find myself reading the same authors over and over. About half the authors I read this year were authors I'd never read before, and I only had a few 'repeat' authors over the course of the year.

#POC	19
%POC	22.3
#F	49
%F	58.33
#POC or F	68
%POC or F	80.95
#New to me	42
#Unique	63

Author numbers are hard to track because of anthologies that collect a bunch of authors, so typically if an anthology has any authors that meet any criteria, it gets counted as one entry in that category. So an anthology with 3 authors I’ve read before and 8 I haven’t is 1 ‘author’ in the ‘new’ category.

So how do I keep up this habit? Used book stores, partly, but mainly: libraries!

Source:
Library	50
Library (school)	2
Own (ebook)	2
Own (physical)	29
ARC/Galley	2

**Again, numbers don’t add up because of multiple copies.

February is library lovers month and I will take every opportunity to plug my own public library, Montgomery County Public Library, and public libraries in general! Guys, I am learning how to build a robot at my public library - playing around with circuits, programming, and 3D printing for free! My library also has an agreement with the surrounding counties from Maryland, Northern Virginia, and D.C. that residents in one county can have a library card in all the counties, so I have access to some excellent online catalogs. Anything I can’t get there I’ll get through UMD’s interlibrary loan service, delivered straight to my work mailbox. One of my favorite things to do when I’m exploring D.C. on a weekday is to check out a new library. Heck, I’m sitting in my library right now to write this. Everyone should go to the library!

And lastly, one of my favorite things is comparing my ratings to Goodreads to see exactly how much of a curmudgeon I am. I’m notoriously critical of what I read, so it’s unexpected to see that my average rating is lower - but a .6-point difference is huge even for me! In 2015 and 2016 it was only about .3. That’s driven by a lot more 1- and 2-star reviews, possibly because my general emotional valence was higher this year than other years - if I didn’t like a book, I really didn’t like it - and possibly because I still feel compelled to slog through every new Star Wars book even though they’re universally atrocious.

Ratings:	Me	Goodreads
1	9	0
2	13	0
3	19	48
4	21	36
5	20	0
Average:	3.365853659	3.908333333
Average difference:		-0.6226190476
Median:	3.5	3.88

This was a hard year but a wonderful one, and I think that comes through in my reading. I discovered a new ‘use’ of reading in my audiobook habits, I read more than ever, and I’m a savvier library user now, too.

Do other people track their reading this extensively? I’d love to see anyone else’s numbers - especially how other people differ from that Goodreads mean!

Review: The Sword of the Lictor

The Sword of the Lictor by Gene Wolfe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm going to review the entire Book of the New Sun series here, rather than split the reviews up between the volumes.

Other people have said that The Book of the New Sun is like nothing they’ve ever read. That’s nearly true, for me, but Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota (for which she cites Gene Wolfe as an inspiration) is remarkably similar in quite a few ways. Both four-volume series feature suspiciously unreliable narrators who know much more about their world than they’re telling us (and can’t seem to report the facts quite accurately anyhow). Both are masterworks about a wondrous future where humanity is striving for the stars. And both deal with the potential of having religion revealed and a vessel of a god working godly powers upon the Earth. Or Urth. I found myself trying to talk about BotNS and slipping into theories about Mycroft’s past in Terra Ignota. I’m struggling to articulate the philosophical similarities, but there are discussions to be had about the nature of god and identity and goodness in both, and I would love to have read/re-read these as a paired set for a course or book club. For now, I will review BotNS on its own terms (as much as I can).

Severian lies. That’s the first thing I ever heard about this book. I’d heard it was great, I even knew Palmer had named it as one of her influences, but the first specific fact about the content of the book was that Severian lies. Apparently, there is some debate about this fact. I am inclined to think that those who believe Severian does not lie are extremely literal-minded sociopaths. Somewhat like Severian himself! Severian tells us perhaps in the first few pages that his memory is perfect. He can recall any memory and relive it like it is happening just now in front of him, and says in fact that is what he is doing, as he is writing this chronicle to his reader (or Reader, as Mycroft would say). We’ll see about that.

He is a student of the Guild of the Seekers for Penitence and Truth when the book begins. A torturer, in other words. Shadow of the Torturer, the first book, is structured like the beginnings of a bildungsroman. Severian grows up, becomes a journeyman, meets a lady. He leaves the guild to take on a new role, meets another lady and then another lady, and gets into a swordfight but with plants instead of swords. He thinks a great deal about his ladies and whether he loves them. In many ways, the first book sets you up to expect a fairly traditional fantasy story with some occasional weird window dressing, then ends just when your epic fantasy novel would start to pick up.

If the first book cuts off its story arc midway, the second, Claw of the Conciliator has no real arc at all. Severian wanders into and out of various situations with no real direction or sense of how his own story is building - even as he narrates it to us. He is still generally making his way to his new post, with many detours and no sense of urgency. He gets there by the third book, Sword of the Lictor, which also has him wandering - but with much more self-direction, and it feels like the book is telling one singular story of a journey rather than some stuff a guy did on a road trip. He is still uncertain about some fundamental facts of the world (and the reader is even more so). The second and third books are both chock full of atmosphere and worldbuilding and fascinating vignettes and characters, but the second feels directionless in the whole, and even after reading book three I was not sure I’d like the overall series unless the fourth book brought the whole thing together for me, and it would have to do a whole lot of work to make that happen.

Citadel of the Autarch, book four, did an impressive amount of work without making it look like work at all. Severian, and more importantly, the reader, finally has enough information about the world to make some informed decisions and/or guesses. I would say that the shape of the series becomes clear in retrospect, but it would be more accurate to say that some of the many shapes the series could possibly be are visible but still distant beyond a hazy fog. Part of what many people love about the Book of the New Sun is that it’s a puzzle. People like who like to solve puzzles seem to obsess over the book, but this one is one that isn’t meant to be solved. It’s supposed to be turned over, prodded, combed through, dis- and re-assembled. Lots of the pieces fit into many slots. There are pieces leftover that still fit in the puzzle somehow, just not in it, y’know.

The best parts of the books are just how strange this world is. Set maybe a million years in the future, told in the style of an epic fantasy, following a totally-truthful liar who knows nothing about the world beyond his towers and who witnesses some of the strangest bits of his Urth’s locales and peoples.

I don’t think anyone volume of the series could satisfy a reader, and I’m not sure even one reading of the whole series has satisfied me. There’s a “coda” in the form of another novel, Book of the New Earth, and I think it would take several (re-)readings of all five books to even approach satisfaction. It has definitely engaged me, though, and it was worth it to read all four, despite my doubts.

View all my reviews

Review: The Will to Battle

The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I simply can’t say enough good things about the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer. My past reviews are gushingly full of a love that I struggle to articulate, I moderate a subreddit about the books, and I lend the first book out like a religious person lends a Bible: with the passionate fervor fueled by both a burning need to talk about the book and the belief that other people will truly be bettered by reading it. So I was surprised, but not too surprised, when I received an email through NetGalley offering me the chance to read the third book, The Will to Battle. They reached out to me – something I’ve never experienced before! The past few weeks have fulfilled all of my big ol’ nerd heart’s desires. I jumped straight from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series (which Palmer cites as a huge influence on her work) to The Will to Battle, and in the midst of reading it I attended Chessiecon in Baltimore, where Ada Palmer was guest of honor. I sat in on readings and discussions led by Palmer and got a set of books signed – including a hard copy of The Will to Battle, a full month early! So, full disclosure, I loved this series going into book three.

And it didn't disappoint! Where book two, Seven Surrenders, felt very much like a sequel necessary to complete the story of book one, TWTB is a new chapter; while it follows the same story and characters, it strides confidently into new settings and conflicts. The series continues to succeed where it has done well before, with Mycroft’s tricky narration supplying more intriguing - and alarming - deception as we finally see his growing instability unedited. Palmer methodically lays out the new starting grounds for who are all facing the fallout from public reveals of two separate nests of collusion while they struggle to ready their unprepared world for war and theological unrest.

Some of my favorite moments are first steps into new settings. The world is bigger and more wondrous as it provides glimpses of technology and history unseen in previous installments - and more legal minutiae than any book has a right to make so compelling! A simple walk through a Utopian neighborhood was so delightful that I re-read it half a dozen times before moving on. Several chapter-long courtroom dramas are as engrossing and dramatic as attempted murder, and I’m sure many die-hard fans (myself included) will be poring over those chapters for much longer looking for clues about the world.

The character work is strong, too. I’m impressed by how thoroughly and efficiently Palmer handles the large cast, although there are a few characters who are noticeably absent from all or most of this chapter (I suspect that’s a deliberate choice intended to make us think about what those characters are doing until we do meet them). There are beautiful moments of utter catharsis - a passage where a character chooses to finally live their dream had me weeping with the joyful possibility that there is always a way forward into the life you want. Even J.E.D.D. Mason, who is arguably the central character in this drama but is not high on my list of favorite characters in the series, now has goals (and some fascinating scenes with religious figures - a rare instance in a world with a religion taboo) that make him more exciting.

My only complaint would be that, after three books, it feels like we may be just at the beginning of the physical action, but at no point did I feel the story was slow, and I may just be trying to get more books out of the series. The book is called The Will to Battle, after all, and an interjection by Thomas Hobbes (yes, THE Thomas Hobbes) points out that the Will to Battle is not yet Battle itself, but it just as important. And for all the build-up surrounding Achilles’s importance to prepare for this battle, he felt underused. Hopefully we’ll see more of him in book four.

And, as always, we are left with so many questions - the kind I can't ask here, as they'd be full of spoilers - but check out the subreddit!!


View all my reviews

Review: The Stars Are Legion

The Stars Are Legion by Kameron Hurley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

They say don't judge a book by its cover and that's especially true in this case. Never has a book deserved a pulpy, lurid, colorful cover more, and what did it get instead? Some generic photoshopped planets in gold and black. I read the premise for this a while back and thought it was interesting, but was put off by the cover; it looked like your standard-issue hard-or-military SF cover. Thankfully I picked it up because 1) I heard it had lots of ladies and 2) it was one of the few books on my to-read list available in audio from my library. This book is not your standard-issue anything. I love this book. It's easily in my top 5 so far this year, and might be in my top 20 of all time.

What this cover doesn't convey, but could and should, is the primal, goopy, biological nature of the book. Hurley has written a true successor to Russ and Tiptree, interbreeding Russ's adventurous heroines with Tiptree's weird bioforms and the staunch feminism of both to create a fleshy beauty of a tale.

The plot:

The story follows a woman named Zan who has just awoken on a ship with severe injuries and has no memory of her former life. The people that surround her claim they are her family, but she feels this is deeply wrong - and she also feels some strong, non-family-like feelings for Jayd, a woman who is constantly by her side.

Then Zan finds out this has happened before - many times. She is sent out to fight, she loses, and she comes back with no memories. But this time might be different. She is sent to the bowels of the ship and has to force her way back to the surface, while Jayd's mother marries her off to secure an alliance that might have consequences her mother doesn't realize.

But none of that plot description makes any sense unless you know the key thing about this world: in the Legion, ships are biological and circle (apparently, according to other reviews) an artificial sun. And all the ships are dying, save one that has been able to detatch itself from the 'thing' at the center of their solar system and move of its own accord. This ship is the one Zan is sent out to fight over and over.

Oh, and every creature on the ship and every ship component is birthed. This is a book about wombs and bodies and birth.


The good:

I loved this book. I loved the atmosphere, the visceral body horror, the slimey-stickiness. I loved how different it is from anything I've ever read. I love that all the characters are women and that makes *sense* for the world and that the world revolves around life-giving.

Full disclosure, I listened to the audiobook, and while I wasn't the biggest fan of the narration (I think there were two narrators, one for Jayd's chapters and one for Zan's, but I honestly couldn't tell them apart), it wasn't a hindrance. I liked that truly strange accents from the center of the ship were not quite recongizable or mappable to any Earth language - like the narrator had come up with a unique combination of phonemes. And they doubled down for characters who were supposed to have similar accents, which was cool.

Zan meets a lot of people along her journey, which is a Quest in the most traditional sense. She starts out in the deep center of the ship with the trash and refuse and has to fight her way through many levels, encountering races and cultures that people on the surface don't event know exist. Hurley does an excellent job creating a cast that is varied and vivid where even months later they feel as real to me as when I was reading. The idea of pushing your way out of the center of a core of flesh layer by layer is fascinating and Horrifying with a capial H.

The story pushes forward through some completely unexpected and inventive detours though it resolves fairly quickly and predictably come the final act. There was so much *un*predictable, weird, engrossing stuff in the plot and the world and the characters that I can forgive the ending - but I absolutely want more Legion.

The less-than-good:

I don't really buy that a civilization can be completely unaware of several other civilizations that live within the same lump of flesh - the world just seemed physically too small for that to be realistic. But it's supposedly a decaying world and no one knows how to fix anything, or how any of them got in this mess to begin with. If there were a sense of history of the Legion, maybe it would be easier to accept, but this is a story very tightly focused on the personal (and narrated by someone with amnesia) so history is absent.

And about the amnesia. Stories that start out with amnesia are risky, and I think my biggest complaints with the story are related to the amnesia, but Hurley successfully avoids most of the tropey problems. Zan is capable, despite her memory loss. She thinks about it occasionally but it doesn't overwhelm her personality. It does loom too large in the story, though. Zan is sent out to attack a ship that kills everyone but her *many times*, strangers often treat her with far too much deference, and she knows that she's not from the ship she's currently on. What ship could she *possibly* be from, and who could she *possibly* have been before? It's obvious to the reader from the very beginning but it doesn't occur to Zan until she's basically told.

The slightly unrelated:

I'm currently reading the Dominion of the Fallen books by Aliette de Bodard - a very different series about an alternate-reality Paris where fallen angels reminiscent of vampires have just come off a devastating battle that has sapped most of the city of its strength and beauty, with occasional appearances from Asiatic immortals and minor deities. They're similar in many ways, though. The sense of decay and lost power and desperation pervades both. There's a long history that is critically unexplored and leaves gaping holes in both stories (a much more grievous offense in the Dominion books, IMHO). People are petty and conniving and weak, House/ship alignment rules everything, clever powerful sadists manipulate women who are fearful of *and* drawn to them simultaneously, an underclass functions as its own separate world, and both have excellent queer/female/POC representation. The Stars are Legion is a stronger work in pretty much every way, but I might meditate more on these parallels for my reviews of de Bodard.

View all my reviews

Review: Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body - Audiobook – Unabridged

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body - Audiobook – Unabridged by Roxane Gay
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It’s always a treat to listen to a memoir narrated well by its author. It makes the book feel intimate. Until recently I had only listened to happier memoirs – the kind written by TV comedians about their careers and artistic lives. Roxane Gay’s Hunger is certainly a change of pace, then, but it was a welcome one for me. To hear a woman talk about the difficult moments in her life, big and small, was poignant and powerful. As she remarks, it’s easy to forget to think about the different ways in which people move through this world. She talks specifically about bodies and their shapes and abilities, but it’s true more generally. Her voice is gentle and cozy. It sounds like she is reaching back through time to tell her younger self that it’s okay to hurt and that eventually, even if she has not fully accepted herself, things will be a semblance of okay. It was both challenging and comforting to listen to (especially as I listened to it on a flight, and I’m an anxious flyer). She does not shy away from discussing the traumatic gang rape that led her to re-shape her body into a “fortress” that would be safe from men or the psychological fallout of that event that still affects her today, but she is also unafraid to set firm limits on how much she will tell and how much is hers to keep. Some of the most moving passages for me were about more mundane things - hiding her secrets from her parents, moving to various academic positions in the middle of nowhere. This is the epitome of memoir: her life has been shaped by forces that many will never understand, and yet there are moments that will resonate with every reader’s life.

View all my reviews

Review: The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am obsessed with The Fifth Season. It was all I could talk about for weeks after reading it and its sequel, The Obelisk Gate. It’s wholly original while still echoing the best of the genre - it has the scope and feel of Game of Thrones paired with completely reinvented genre trappings. The plot is the kind you can’t put down, the characters are achingly real, and the story is so neatly, tightly structured that it feels like a beautiful machine. Plus, it’s rare that an audiobook is so excellent that it elevates the source material when the source material is so good in itself. I was especially impressed because I was slightly underwhelmed by Jemisin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I’m so thankful I gave her another try!

But Jemisin’s work is powerful above and beyond her technical skill and a good story. This is a powerful narrative about racism and institutionalized slavery. The echoes of America’s history are clearly visible, here, but she did not simply lift the same dynamics and social structures from that history and place them in a new world. Instead, this is a story that feels very much like it organically grew out of its theme, which is the tension between the perception and the reality of black Americans’ role in American society. She took that tension, specifically, and used it as a seed of a new story planted in the soil of a fictional world and this is the story that grew. Just as the Confederate South insisted that black slaves were less than human and fully disposable yet went to war so they could keep those slaves because their way of life could not survive without them, the orogens are despised and reviled but literally necessary to keep the Stillness from falling apart. Even the oxymoronic name Stillness echoes back to early America - the United States were no such thing (and still are not today). And just as black Americans still could hold so much more power in the country if institutional blocks on their power were removed, the orogens must be carefully monitored by an institution that breaks the most powerful of them and forces them to be part of the system. The orogens who survive must keep deciding that the Stillness is worth saving so the institution has to teach them to believe that they are inhuman and worthless. The parallels are deeply woven into the story and fairly visible from my vantage point now, having finished the first two books, but I also didn’t feel at any point that Jemisin was preaching or writing some kind of morality play. I think that’s partly due to the complexity of the role of the orogens in their society and how the impact of the institutional oppression on the individual characters is unpacked steadily throughout the story, not all at once. Of course, the rest of the work is done by Jemisin’s masterful writing.

The icing on the cake, for me, is the recurring theme of Father Earth. In a world where the very ground threatens the survival of the species, the earth cannot be seen as something nurturing, and I think Jemisin is doing something deeply clever by re-gendering the Earth. I audibly gasped when the narrator pointed out ‘there is something absent from the story - notice that people do not look up at the sky.’ (A paraphrase, not a quote! The actual line is about a thousand times better.)

I keep saying that “oh but the BEST thing about this book is…’ because as each piece of the book pops back into my mind I’m continually surprised and pleased by how well they work. The magic system (which I suspect might actually end up being science) is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. It’s power over kinetic energy, heat, the movement of molecules and earth. The smallest and the biggest power. I think it’s appropriate for an allegory for black Americans, too - it’s a power that is largely unseeable despite its massive force. It’s also linked intimately with re-shaping the very world.

Overall, this is one of the best pieces of fiction I have read in a long time and I am oh so eager to get my hands on the third volume. Read this! It earned both its Hugos!


View all my reviews

Review: The Mote in God's Eye

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read The Mote in God's Eye basically because it was convenient. I accidentally let my free Audible trial continue and paid for an extra credit, and there was a buy-one-get-one sale on specific SF books. This was one of them. It wasn't a bad choice; it's a pretty long book, the authors are classic authors I've never read, and I enjoyed parts of it.

This is a classic - and maybe the defining? - first contact story. A bug-like creature in a spaceship shows up in the middle of an inter-solar human empire, and the humans mount an expedition to the home planet. It's also a very military-SF book as the expedition is primarily military. All in all, it's not exactly what I expected from a classic first contact story... and yet it somehow is exactly what I expected from a classic first contact story. There are so many interesting ways in which the story innovates, and there are just as many where it falls back on tired tropes and uninteresting moments. The aliens are both strange and alien, and also conveniently similar to humans.

The plot, in brief (spoilers follow): a military-led expedition travels to an alien solar system. They find evidence of civilization going back hundreds of thousands of years, and yet these creatures have no faster-than-light travel and even seem to have lost some of their technological development. The aliens have several castes - worker/engineers, negotiators, masters - that are highly specialized. Negotiators can mimic individual humans down to their thought patterns. Workers can take any piece of technology, even if they've never seen it, and remake it into something better and more efficient instantly.

The humans are simply trying to see if they are a threat to humanity - and based on those two castes alone I feel like the answer should very obviously be an emphatic YES, but the humans think solely in terms of whether or not there are weapons or technology that could be used as weapons. The humans initially host one worker on one of their ships, but that worker brings some smaller versions of itself that get loose and end up making the ship unsuitable for habitation, so they have to blow it up. They really should leave at this point because, again, it's clear how big a threat these creatures are (they rerouted the warnings and weapons systems of the whole ship!), but instead they go down to the planet's surface.

They see some fascinating things - artwork geared solely toward commemorating mediation, an indoor zoo that includes "city ruins" as one of its habitats, a better-than-real mock-up of a human castle. Just as they are heading back to their ship, there's a conflict in which several human ships are shot down. At this point the narrative takes a sharp turn and follows the humans on the alien planet for a bit as they discover the big thing the aliens are hiding: they can't control their population. They've essentially been in a boom-bust culture cycle for hundreds of thousands of years, which doesn't bode well if they ever get access to interstellar travel. The resolution of the conflict isn't as exciting as I would've liked but I won't go into that here.

These are some crazy interesting aliens! They are obsessed with their population control issue and it defines every aspect of their culture. They have museums full of artifacts from previous civilizations so that they can jump-start their culture once they get back to a certain point after falling back into ruin and dark ages. There are creatures evolved to live in city ruins. And the fact that this all centers around reproductive policy is fascinating. If they don't have children on some regular basis, they die. They can't figure out a way around this that prevents them from having children entirely (though... they do have a hormone treatment that allows sterilization prior to ever having children, which seems like it could at least partially solve their issues). In some ways, this doesn't seem plausible - couldn't you remove whatever their ovaries are and only provide a fertilized egg when it's wanted? Could inducing pregnancy and then aborting solve the issue? How does this species of entirely female (I think?) creatures even reproduce, since it's shown that in isolation they cannot? But I'm willing to look past that and think about what it means for the story and the themes. There is only one woman on the human expedition (womp). If there were more women, the humans probably could've figured out the aliens' secret much quicker. I like to think that maybe this is intentional. Maybe this should make us think about why diversity of perspective is important and not just incidental.

There are other interesting critical readings that are present, even if not explicit. For example, I'm not sure if the book means to critique military culture, but there are certainly elements that sound like critique. There's a lot of formality, ceremony, rigidity in the humans even as they are confronted with a species whose defining characteristics are their irreverence and flexibility. Only the non-military humans even come close insight into the alien psychology (though to be fair, they are not much better than the military men). The commanding officer follows standard protocols and *believes* in those protocols. On the other hand, the narrative doesn't ask us to question this belief even when it precludes obvious solutions and fails to stop threats, and even when there couldn't possibly be a protocol in place for the situation at hand.

As I mentioned, though, all of the humans are spectacularly and unbelievably bad at dealing with the aliens. Isn't rule number one of NASA that there can't even be a 1/10000 chance of contaminating an alien plant if you want to launch a mission? Would you want to completely avoid interacting with alien biology until you were very damn sure there are no microscopic beasts that could kill you? Why would you even accept the *chance* of letting tiny alien creatures loose aboard your ship, and why further would you not then evacuate when they couldn't be found? All of these things and more seem irresponsible to the point of incredulity. But again, maybe Niven and Pournelle want us to think about how our ideals and rules hold up when thrown into completely uncharted territory and when managed by perfectly adequate but unexceptional people. Would we really do much better if we made first contact today?

I can't complain about a book that made me think as much as this one did, even if a lot of what I thought about were the implausibilities.


View all my reviews

Review: Plague Ship

Plague Ship by Andre Norton
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Plague Ship is the first book I read for my Readathon of women in SF! It might also be the oldest novel I'll read for this project - it was published in 1956. Andre (Alice) Norton is an author I'd never read before, but I have heard of her, which makes her an exception to my general attempt to read books by women I'm not already aware of. But Andre Norton is exceptional in many ways. She was the first female Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy, Grandmaster of the SFWA, and inductee into the SF&F hall of fame. She wrote from the 1930s until her death in 2005. Her early SF&F in the 40s and 50s is pretty influential; I've heard a lot of people say that Norton was one of their favorites as a child. She was a librarian (at the Library of Congress, even!) as her day job and briefly owned a bookstore here in Maryland. Toward the end of her life, she collaborated with new SF&F authors to co-write YA books set in her established universes. She wrote under a pseudonym (actually several) of course, though she legally changed her name from "Alice" to "Andre Alice." And she was such a D&D nerd that she got to play with Gygax himself and *then* wrote a novel set in the world he created!

Plague Ship was recommended to me by several internet sources claiming it's Norton's best sci-fi work. Given that context, it was a bit of a disappointment. This is clearly an early genre work with lots of genre hallmarks and not much to recommend it beyond that. It's also the second book her Solar Queen series, which I didn't know until I'd finished. I actually thought it was perhaps the first in a series, given that it seemed like it really wanted to introduce a colorful cast of characters and then leave them in a situation where they will have to go on more adventures.

The novel follows the crew of the Solar Queen, a freelance trading ship, as they attempt to stake their claim on trade with a newly discovered planet full of cat people. The cat people love scents and perfumes. The human crew of the Solar Queen do not enjoy this and struggle to find something that the cat people will want to trade. They discover that some government-funded traders are trying to poach their trading opportunity. But after a while they figure out the cat people like catnip (WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED) and trade like one catnip plant for a hold full of jewels and fancy wood. This part is very long, about the first half of the book plus a bit, and not very interesting, and often reminded me of the Star Wars fanfiction I wrote as a child about a (canonical!) species of cat people.

You may notice that we're more than halfway through a book called Plague Ship without any mention of plague and actually very few mentions of ship, either. I noticed. The Solar Queen takes off, though, and several crew members promptly fall into comas. The crew can't figure out why, but they're certain it's not a plague, because the pattern of illness doesn't fit. The government traders somehow know about the illness, though, because they put out a "plague ship" alert for the Solar Queen, which means they can't dock at any ports.

The Solar Queen arrives in Earth's solar system and things finally pick up. For the first time, the plot and the world grabbed me. Earth has been nuked to hell at some point (as it often was in SF from the 40s-90s) and there are still "hot zones" that are uninhabitable. There are space stations spread throughout the solar system and beyond. I wanted to know more about all of this - what is it like to a be stationed on one of those space stations? What's it like to be an Earthling (or a Terran) in this world full of radiation? Sadly, those questions aren't answered.

The Solar Queen decides to land in a hot zone since no one will expect them to do that and send a heavily-shielded shuttle to look for medical help. The best scene in the book is the trip through the hot zone, which is full of strangely evolved and heavily mutated flora and fauna. It reminded me very strongly of Forbidden Planet and other early SF movies. They find a doctor, some more shenanigans happen, they threaten a whole bunch of people, and their names get cleared and the crew is healed, but they're not allowed on Earth any time in the near future.

The second biggest problem with this book is the pacing. The first half of the book could have been 1/4 of what it is, with those extra pages devoted instead to exploring the way-too-quickly-resolved climax and finale. In fact the whole debacle on the cat planet could have been a separate book with a separate story and that would have been preferable.

The biggest problem with the book and the main reason I give this 1 star was the characterization. I say "the crew" instead of any particular character name because they're all just a bunch of white dudes and maybe a token minority stereotype with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. The captain is very captain-y. The younger crew members are very young-y. The doctor is very responsible. That's about it. I don't think there's even a single female mentioned by name. Maybe one cat lady?

I can see why Norton is so well liked, though. It's a pretty quick read, and I was taken in by the history that her universe had. I wanted to know more. But I wanted her to tell a different kind of story than the one she wrote.

I can also see why she found success in YA later in life. That's a genre that didn't formally exist when this was published, but if these characters were maybe 15 years younger, this would be a great candidate for a YA success. There is daring-do, adventure, exotic planets, and dashing young men solving problems with courage and sensibility. They get justice in the end and there's a promise for more adventure. I wouldn't read more in this series, I don't think, but I'd go for one of her fantasy novels. It's hard to dislike a trope-y SF book that existed before the tropes were really tropes, but it's also hard for me to enjoy it. I'm much more tolerant of tropes in fantasy than in SF.

View all my reviews

Review: Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel

Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel by James Luceno
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After reading this, Rogue One, and Tarkin, I have one thing to say to the Star Wars creative group: stop trying to make Tarkin happen. It will never happen.

Neither Catalyst nor Rogue One feel like a fully complete story to me. What happens in this book is basically just backstory for Rogue One and nothing really happens. But without any of the context provided by this story, Rogue One feels like an empty adventure with no stakes or connection to reality.

Catalyst is the story of Jyn Erso's parents. One is a crystal scientist, the other is a surveyor. Both are manipulated by the wannabe-mastermind Orsin Krennic, though how they're susceptible to his clumsy plotting is a mystery to me. The story is really heavily invested in convincing the reader that Krennic and Tarkin are two distinct characters who are fighting for influence in the new Empire but honestly, emphasizing their rivalry makes it very obvious that they could've been collapsed into one character and everyone would've been better off.

The most positive thing I got out of this book was an eerie comparison between the nascent Empire and today's world/US politics. Lots of people burying their heads in the sand and denying the possibility of anything bad happening despite power-hungry men taking over the government.

View all my reviews

Review: The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an example of a good book read at the wrong time and in the wrong way. I started this over Thanksgiving and didn't finish until late January and this is absolutely a book that should be read in a single sitting, if possible. It's unquestionably a wonderful, bizarre book. It just didn't land right with me because of how I read it

Oedipa Maas becomes the executor of state for her ex, Pierce Inverarity, and gets caught up in a conspiracy involving the Postal Service and alternative mail carriers that spans centuries - but she's not quite sure she should believe anything she's experiencing. Her journeys up and down the coast of California, seeing strange plays and investigating stamps and sleeping with various men who inevitably go insane, feel like a dreamlike haze. She wanders aimlessly with an unrealized mission, each stop almost accidental but becoming meaningful in hindsight. The book ends just as a dream would, right before the moment when you'd receive any answers.

Much could and has been said of the constellation of symbols and signifiers that flood the book and what they mean, and I'm not up to that right now. It's enough to say that the onslaught of symbols adds to the dreamy nature of the story. Many things feel illogical or impossible or random and simultaneously perfectly arranged and promising meaning, if you only look at them the right way. It's an impressive work. I imagine it's difficult to create something with so many layers of near-opacity and obfuscation that also reveals the hints of meaning and a deep structure if you push further, and Pynchon does it well. I mostly read speculative fiction nowadays and "The Crying of Lot 49" gives me the same feeling: a wholly constructed, imagined world with its own rules and a tenuous grip on reality.

View all my reviews

Review: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story by Alexander Freed
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Wanna hear something shocking? I haven't seen Rogue One. Me, the chick who's read nearly every Star Wars book to date, who saw Revenge of the Sith in theaters three times (and cried through each one, mourning the End of Star Wars Movies), who has dressed as Darth Vader and/or Padme Amidala for numerous Halloweens and costume parties, has not seen the most recent Star Wars movie and has no plans to do so. The new canon books started weaning me off Star Wars and The Force Awakens made me go cold turkey. I lapsed a bit last fall and read the first two Thrawn books from the old canon, and I've considered reading the entirety of the old canon again from start to finish, but I just couldn't muster any interest in the new stuff.

But audiobook pickings are slim and typically Star Wars audiobooks are fun, at least, so I checked this one out. My feelings: a resounding "meh."

Freed tries to make you care about these characters. You have to care about them, right? Because we know they get the plans in the end, we need to have something to care about, and they wanted it to be the fate of these characters. But as with so, so many movie-to-book translations, generating internal thoughts and feelings that genuinely motivate the characters' on-screen actions fails in one of two ways. The internal lives of the characters are incoherent, largely because the on-screen action is driven by plot necessity and consistency of character is sacrificed. Or they are wildly grandiose and mercurial, because all the emotion that is typically expressed on screen by slight movements and glances must (for some reason) be explicitly stated, several times, and without any ambiguity or nuance.

Some illustrative, but not literal, examples: "He winced" is my least favorite set of words in this book because it's rarely used in any context where someone would actually wince, and it's never given any space to breathe or left on its own. 'He winced and tried to explain his actions' (nb: not an actual quote) just doesn't work. You don't do those things in the same breath. Or 'Jyn gave a genuine smile. It was the first time Cassian had ever seen her smile for real, and it was so honest and real it made him happy' (again, not a real quote). Also not necessary. There was (again, as typical of movie novelizations) way too much telling instead of showing.

I do appreciate the attempt to show that Jyn really does suffer due to her traumatic upbringing. I think it's a failed attempt (because the book, more than Jyn, seems to fixate on that cave imagery), and a melodramatic attempt, but I like that they tried.

And can we talk about the weirdly homogeneous cast of this story? I know Star Wars Brand is trying so desperately hard to get any points in the representation department - look, they cast pretty fair-skinned brunette white girls as leads for two new movies! - and this one does better than most. I love that Cassian gets to keep his actor's Mexican accent. I love that most of the rest of the main cast are people of color. So good on that front, Star Wars Brand! But it's weird, right, that outside of Mon Mothma, Jyn, and Jyn's mom, there are literally no other women in the story? Right? And that there are like, no non-human characters in this science fiction story set in a universe where there are lots of non-humans? And that Chirrut and Baze are definitely romantic partners but the story never explicitly says it?

Anyway, this didn't make me want to see the movie at all. The ending was a surprise but it didn't pack an emotional impact like it was trying to do.

View all my reviews

Review: And Chaos Died

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is classic Joanna Russ. I've mentioned her complex, often overwhelmingly dense prose before, and "And Chaos Died" is the epitome of that style. The opening of the story finds a ship crash-landed on a planet where everyone has the powers of telekinesis, teleportation, and telepathy. The rest of the book is an attempt to convey the experience of telepathy and telekinesis as a normal human would comprehend it. It's an insane goal. And somehow she succeeds. The book is crazy hard to follow, one of the most challenging things I've ever read, but I enjoyed it, I think.

I usually try to do a brief summary of a book when I review it. The plot is... fairly unimportant here, but I'll give it a shot anyway. Jai and his ship crash land on a planet populated with telepathic, telekinetic people. He slowly develops these powers as well - it seems like those abilities are inherent in humans and just being around people with them will teach you how to use them. When he's rescued one woman comes with him as a representative of the world. When they get back to Earth, she disappears and Jai travels around using his powers, trying to stay out of the hands of people who would make him into a lab rat. He makes a friend, a young boy, and they go on terrifying adventures through the strange world that Earth has become. The finale is especially bizarre. Several other telepathic people from the other planet come to Earth and offer to meet with some major leaders. There's some kind of wiping of the global human consciousness. And then it ends!

The biggest 'pro' of the book is how well it does the overwhelming, disorienting nature of telepathy (or at least, what I assume telepathy would feel like, and what Russ thinks telepathy would feel like). It would involve states of consciousness completely foreign to our experience and combined with telekinesis, it would change our entire way of interacting with the world and the way we constitute self. As I said before, Russ did this well, which makes the book good and almost unreadable. It's slow. There are huge swathes of story in which nothing concrete happens or where none of the things that happen have any basis in normal human experience. It's great! And very challenging!

There are two very interesting things in this book aside from the feeling-of-telepathy aspect: the portrayal of Earth, and Jai Vedh's sexuality.

Earth in this story is in a state of extreme overpopulation and climatic disaster. Coastal areas have flooded, plains areas are desert wastelands. There's not enough space for humans to live and when they're gathered so close together there is often hedonism and destruction. There's a chapter-long description of a riot and another chapter that follows a couple living out hyperbolic examples of 20th-century gender roles. To see Russ's vision of the future is to see a very modern vision of apocalypse: gender roles are exaggeratedly performed not because they're how people want to live them but because it's traditional, global warming is destroying the world, and the American government (or at least the puppet organization that controls it) has a secret agency that hunts people.

Jai is gay. He says this in the first few pages. It was a little uncomfortable because it was immediately connected to his interest in fashion. It got very, very uncomfortable when Russ paired him off with a woman not just romantically but sexually (over and over again). I appreciate that Russ included a queer person as her main character, and I understand that the whole story focuses on the propagation of telepathic humans throughout the galaxy, and that he would be influenced by the thoughts and desires of those around him. But to then treat him as if he were straight throughout the entire rest of the story (because he definitely keeps having straight sex until almost the very end) is a little problematic.

Overall, parts of the story feel very much of their time, other parts feel incredibly modern, but the entire effect is strikingly original. This is a story that will drag you along and stick to you after you've read it.

View all my reviews