Review: Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements by Walidah Imarisha
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Usually, it's pretty easy for me to write thousands of words about terrible books. I don't even want to put the effort in for this one. I desperately wanted to love this; by all rights, I should have loved it. Octavia Butler is my favorite author, and a book of stories inspired by her rooted in modern social justice movements sounds like a great idea, and something I would totally adore! I even love the cover! But most of these stories are written by activists, not writers, and it shows BIG time. There are about 2 stories, plus the essays that finish the collection off, that are readable. A few more have interesting premises but fail in execution. Everything else is full of hackneyed, over-the-top premises, way too many adjectives, unconvincing characters, and generally dreadful prose. I can't believe I even finished it. It was probably an interesting exercise for those involved, but it never should have been published. Don't spend your time reading this.

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Review: Falling in Love with Hominids

Falling in Love with Hominids by Nalo Hopkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Disclosure: I released an e-galley copy of this book from Netgalley.

My problem with this book is that if every story were as good or better than the best story in this collection, it would be really good, and possibly even great. Unfortunately, the best stories here are worlds better than the worst - and even much better than the second-tier stories, which for me lands this collection squarely in the "decent" category.

There are several stories that are only a page or two long, and - especially given their brief introductory statements - feel much more like drafts of writing exercises than publishable stories. I'm also not a fan of Hopkinson's tendency to use song lyrics as a frame for her stories; there's been one or two instances where it adds depth, but usually it just makes it read like fanfiction, where that format is popular. There are also quite a few stories that feel childish. Maybe their original audience was young adults or kids, but it makes the collection feel even more like a smattering of every piece of short matter Hopkinson has ever written. A lot of them just have a strange, inconsistent tone where things are incredibly absurd but supposed to be taken seriously. And generally they suffer from a lack of plot, substituting absurdity or spectacle for substance.

The Bordertown shared-universe short story was a standout, to me; it's one of the longer stories and I feel that it benefits from the direction and structure that comes with the length. There were a few others I enjoyed while reading them, but to be honest I can't remember them right now, which doesn't say a whole lot about how good they are.

On the plus side, it's definitely a fresh and imaginative collection with a lot of out-there ideas and a perspective you don't often see in SF. I just wish it were better executed.

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Review: Warm Worlds and Otherwise

Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

James Tiptree Jr., if you didn't know, is a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon, who wrote many short stories in the 60s and 70s. Tiptree was known for a while for being very reclusive and quiet about 'his' identity, and this early collection begins with an essay by Robert Silverberg on the theme of "Who is James Tiptree, Jr.?" Silverberg correctly picks some of the easy identifiers out - he figures out that Sheldon worked for the government and lived in the DC area - but also goes on what is a deliciously fallacious spiel about how Tiptree is obviously male, because of the "masculine" qualities of his mind evidenced by his interest in the nature of the universe and big, SFnal ideas. There is also a short editor's note after the essay, from Silverberg, mentioning that after Sheldon's identity came to light she sent him a letter saying that she hoped he wasn't embarrassed by his emphatic insistence that she was male, and he writes that he has now had to grapple with some confusing ideas about gender and the mind. I enjoyed every minute of it.

The story collection itself is a bit of a mixed bag. I started with "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," since that was the story I had heard about and was most eager to read. "Plugged In" uses a device common to several of the stories in this collection, wherein the narrator is speaking to the reader. This device takes on different iterations throughout the anthology - sometimes it's simply a narrator/reader relation, sometimes a character in the story is telling the story to you as if you were a friend who needed to be filled in - and I don't quite think it always works for me. Sometimes it adds a frame to the story that makes the story a bit bigger, takes it beyond the thought-experiment quality that many SF short stories have, but sometimes it's used to lower the level of detail and formality in the story, taking what could have been a much fuller, more structured story and turning it into a casual conversation over drinks with many unrelated interruptions. It almost works better within the anthology than not, because the repeated use of the device creates the idea that these are all just casual happenings in a world where weirder things happen regularly.

There is also a strong pulp feel to all of the stories, a sense of a luridly colorful, occasionally grimy world filled with wondrous strangenesses. Several of the stories are knockout classics - "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is one, "Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death" and "The Women Men Don't See" are two others. The others, while varying levels of quality, all have a depth to them that is both literary and pulpy at the same time, a sense that there are layers left to explore on further readings, but that those layers are dark crevices and alleyways. Some stories are primarily character studies, but most are iterations of our own world with a slight technological/SFnal twist. A few, like "Plugged In," go beyond the here-and-now and stretch into the future, or into other worlds. Most are concerned with human nature (the big ideas that Silverberg considered so masculine), a few with gender and other social issues. They are all well-constructed and intriguing, if occasionally uneven and bewildering on a first read.

I may add short summaries of each story to this review at a later time, because I'm having a hard time finding summaries of the more obscure stories elsewhere.

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Review: Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora by Sheree Thomas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As with many short story collections, this was very uneven. There were a lot of stories in this collection that I loved, and quite a few that just didn't hold up. Steven Barnes' "The Woman in The Wall" was beautiful and evocative and powerful, Derrick Bell's "The Space Traders" rings strikingly true on the feelings of white Americans toward their fellow black citizens even today, and I loved the inclusion of W.E.B. DuBois' "The Comet." But there were a lot of stories that were clearly experiments in style and subversions of the tradition sci-fi, in ways that just didn't work for me. And maybe I'm the problem, as I am a white reader coming with my white-influenced interpretations of what speculative fiction should be, so I hesitate to criticize, and any criticism I do give must be taken with a grain of salt as I might not 'get it' because I have never lived the cultures from which these stories come. A lot of stories that experimented heavily with structure and formal elements (like punctuation, vocabulary, etc.) were weak on story, and while I can see *why* that would happen, it does make the effort of adjusting to the non-standard elements less rewarding. I also think including short excerpts from novels weakened the anthology. "Black No More" by George Schuyler worked, but it was the only one; the rest just didn't flow as well without their context. Even Octavia Butler's contribution, while interesting on its own, was strikingly similar to her other works - as in her 'Patterns' series, select people with a potentially dangerous mental power can control others with that power, but unlike in her novels, the ideas of power and interpersonal dynamics aren't explored in a satisfying way (and giving her characters almost the exact same supernatural power as the one in her 'Patterns' stories made me realize that it's basically the same as the aliens' powers in 'Lilith's Brood,' which makes me feel like she only had one good idea... which is sad for me, because I love both of those series, and I wish this short story hadn't made me like them less). I absolutely loved Delany's essay on racism in the science fiction world - the other essays were only a page or two long, and I could have used more from them, but they do provide a good glimpse of the culture of SF fandom and criticism, so they're useful.

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Review: Magic for Beginners

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My first exposure to Kelly Link was through a contemporary literature course my final semester of college. I read the eponymous story, "Magic for Beginners," which is about a group of loyal fans of a TV show about a library inside a tree. But it's hard to describe what Link's stories are ostensibly concretely 'about' in a way that captures their magic. A better description for that story might be 'the best short story I've read, in a way that dug down deep inside my psyche and showed me what I fundamentally enjoy about short stories and media in general,' or 'an exploration of the relationship between media and its audience, shown through the experience of one fan as he navigates his changing relationships with his family and friends, as well as with the show they all love.' The show only airs on channels that are otherwise static, and doesn't air according to any schedule. The actors don't play the same characters from week to week. There's an episode that takes place entirely in darkness, inside a card catalog.

I feel like that story is a thematic template for all of Link's stories. Plots are dreamlike and fantastical and, in theory, impossible, but all the more beautiful because she doesn't try to explain what makes them possible in this world. Things just are, and Link encourages the reader to roll with the punches and to accept the impossible strangenesses of her worlds, and thus our own world. The writing is lovely and whimsical and haunting, and the stories stick with you for a long time.

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