Review: The Core of the Sun

The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one gets a lot of comparison to Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale," and deservedly so - both are dystopian futures focused on women and gender relations. Sinisalo's tale has its own spicy flavor as part of the Finnish Weird genre, but the similarities to Atwood's tale are strong: women are divided into distinct castes based on their desirability and kept essentially illiterate, and while men are allowed to work and learn, most of the men are not necessarily fulfilled or happy with this arrangement. Sinisalo has been getting a lot of buzz lately in the English-speaking SF world, partly due to this translation and partly due to some good press from the Vandermeers (who are established fans of Weird in all its forms).

The story centers on Vanna, who has lived her whole life pretending to be a gender she isn't. She has the body (or "phenotype") of an eloi - she's a blonde, sexually desirable woman - but unlike the rest of the airheaded, brainwashed eloi, she's a sharp and intelligent woman, and that makes her a morlock. She's spent her whole life in the country with her grandmother (who's old enough to have a special immunity from gender assignment) and her sister (a happy, oblivious eloi). When she moves into the city to go to eloi college - where they study how to keep house and bake - she gets caught up in the illegal chili trade.

And that's where the weird comes in. Chilis have been banned like alcohol and drugs because of their addictive, mind-altering properties. That's also just about where the weird ends. The story reads as familiar to me as a non-Finnish reader. It focuses on the relationship between the sisters and Vanna's struggles as a false eloi and chili addict. Much too much of the story is devoted to basic exposition for this very familiar landscape and still doesn't fully explore little gaps where things would be most interesting. What are the lives of morlocks and minus men like? How permeable are Finland's borders? The third act hints at answers but it's not given quiet enough space in the story to explore them.

On the whole, I enjoyed reading this so much. I read the whole thing in one late night with a tiny booklight - something I don't do so often anymore. But there were definitely some flaws - it did feel too familiar, the feminist critique of patriarchal societies felt flat and unsubtle, and the story relied too heavily on flashback and "newspaper-article" insert exposition. I think I would've loved it unreservedly if I hadn't already read "The Handmaid's Tale" and other, more nuanced feminist dys/utopias. But the flashback/article format meant that the relationship between Vanna and Manna, upon which the story rests, doesn't get fully explored or have its full weight until late in the story.

The things "Core of the Sun" does that no other story like it does that I love are 1) critiquing not a patriarchal capitalist society but a socialist one and 2) loving its zany bits. The first is something you don't see in contemporary, revolutionary American literature, and it's interesting to see that whether the government i s capitalist or socialist, what we fear about it is over-regulation and prescription of our lives. I'd love to read this in conjunction with "Herland" or "The Woman at the Edge of Time" or "The Female Man" as part of a course on feminist dys/utopias. The second is mostly rewarding but occasionally a bit of a stumble. There are lots of little tidbits and facts in the books - lots about chilis, some about psychological and evolutionary research, a bit about synesthesia - and clearly Sinisalo enjoyed researching and writing about them. But sometimes they're just not as interesting to me, or they don't weave in to the story in any meaningful way. Vanna's synesthesia is an example of that. I think the writing is beautiful because of it, but having a character comment on it in the last 10% of the book made me think it would matter, and it really doesn't. Still, I learned a heck of a lot about chilis and evolutionary psychology.

I enjoyed this quite a bit, and would highly recommend it.

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Review: Super Extra Grande

Super Extra Grande by Yoss
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I received an e-galley copy of this book from Edelweiss and Restless Books.

I was super extra excited to read this because Restless Books' last Yoss translation, "A Planet for Rent," was one of the best books I read last year. "Super Extra Grande" isn't quite up there, but it has different strengths. It doesn't have the emotional teeth as "Planet," instead showing off Yoss's comedy chops by dialing up the absurdity and dispensing with the colonialism allegory. Yoss knows how to build a functional, coherent SF world without going on at length. His universes are brightly colored with unusual (but logically consistent) working parts - think a world of Lego or K'nex.

Dr. Jan Amos Sangan Dongo (whose last name is a play on words that essentially means 'big') is a veterinarian - in space! He specializes in "super extra grande" creatures, giants from all planets. When we meet him, he's literally wading through shit as he walks through the bowels of a giant space whale. He's huge himself, for a human, and his previous two assistants (both beautiful women, for their species, who he had to fire because they were in love with him) were also incredibly tall. Sangan Dongo can't do anything small.

The book gets off to a slow start. Sangan Dongo wades through shit for a good third of the book, with many asides and reveries that give the reader background on this world. We learn that Spanglish is the universal human language. We learn that there are seven spacefaring species who all happened to discover interstellar travel at the same time. We learn that Sangan Dongo has always had an affinity for larger creatures - because in veterinary school, his size was a hindrance when working with the smaller animals - and the only giant species he has never worked with are laketons (so named because the single-celled organisms look like large lakes, and weigh tons). Once he gets out of the belly of the beast, he's sent into the belly of the beast again - to rescue his assistants, who have crash-landed (together!) on the home planet of the laketons. The plot wraps up as quickly as the beginning was slow, but altogether, it's a good ride. As I said before, the book is a riot, and it's a quick read, so if you have the chance to pick it up, do!

Personally, as a linguist who's currently in a lab focusing on bilingualism and code-switching, I'm fascinated by Yoss's (and the translator's) idea of what Spanglish will be in the future. I'd be really interested in seeing the changes Frye made in translation - what words did he switch from Spanish to English, and vice versa? Did he change the syntax? Because honestly, I don't know if I would've understood huge patches of the story if I didn't know Spanish, but it's also not in line with general patterns of Spanish-English codeswitching. One easy example: If you switch from Spanish to English in the middle of a determiner-noun pair, the determiner will almost always be masculine - you'll say "el fork" or "el spoon," never "la fork" or "la spoon," even though fork is masculine and spoon is feminine in Spanish. But "la (English noun)" occurs a lot here. So what does this sound like in the original Spanish to native Spanish speakers - like a natural extension of Spanish/English contact, or like some strange futuristic evolution of the two languages?

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Review: A Planet for Rent

A Planet for Rent by Yoss
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After the huuuuge disappointment of "A Legend of the Future" - another Cuban SF translation, by the same translator and from the same publishing house, that near unreadable due to both awkward translation and poor formatting choices - I took a risk with "A Planet for Rent." But it paid off - this is easily one of the best pieces of fiction I've read all year.

The book is a compilation of stories - about eight of them, from what I remember - that all take place in the same universe, with an equal number of short interludes that give more information about that universe. It's a world in which Earth has met aliens, and was immediately threatened, colonized, and exploited. Aliens visit Earth, whose only industry is now tourism, but humans rarely leave - the ones who do must do so in the custody of (usually owned by) an alien, or have some wonderfully rare skill or talent. Even in those cases, their memories are usually blocked or wiped if they are allowed to return to Earth. This keeps Earth in perpetual economic deference to the rest of the world; they can produce no technology, nothing that they can sell or trade or use to leverage their way into equality.

Many of the stories are struggles for freedom, attempts to escape the financial, physical, and mental prison humans are now in. These struggles are intensely personal; this is the first piece of literature in a long time that has, in its exploration of the caverns of human emotion, unveiled a sensitive place inside me that I previously hadn't discovered. I cried. I gasped. I was alarmed. It was a viscerally emotional experience at points. I don't want to go into details at this point in the review (though I will write some about each story below, for my own reference), because any description of my own would cheapen the effect of the book itself. Yoss has created a world where death in many senses has little meaning - cloning exists, as do mind back-ups - and instead of writing tragedies where the stakes are life or death, his stories are about people who must make choices between miserable, safe lives or glamorous, short ones; between lives of servitude among family and friends or freedom among the stars; between their own, personal happiness and a slim chance for Earth to gain back some power.

So yes, a lot of the meat of the book is haunting (which is a good thing in itself, since it's done well!), but Yoss does a tremendous job weaving in moments of hope and humor to keep the spirits up. Some of the most horrifying parts simultaneously have a dry, dark humor. Some alien interactions are intentionally hilarious. One story follows a group of humans who play the interstellar equivalent of soccer (and while it's probably the lightest of the stories in terms of subject matter, it still has its wrenching moments).

Yoss does characters so well. His world is not very complex, but incredibly well thought out, and each character feels born into the world, shaped and formed by the forces and systems Yoss has laid out. Even in what I feel is the weakest story, mostly told as a didactic lesson from an older agent of the Planetary Tourism force to a younger one, is elevated by the clear voice of the character (and I must note here that some considerable credit should go to the translator, because character nuances are one of the first things lost in a translation, from previous translated stories I've read - they can easily be dropped entirely or turned into caricature).

I can't say enough good things about this book. I hope that Restless Books' future translated works are on this level, and not like the other one I read. And hopefully we'll soon get some more Yoss!

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Review: A Legend of the Future

A Legend of the Future by Agustin De Rojas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The setting for A Legend of the Future is (as the cover says) highly reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It quickly descends into something much bleaker, where a group of tight-knit cosmonauts (I seriously adore that they stick with the Soviet Union word in the translation, rather than the American astronaut) are faced with their certain impending deaths. It took me a while to realize that this wasn't going to be some sort of triumphant story where the plucky characters overcome insurmountable odds, but instead those odds would actually be insurmountable and they would inevitably succumb. I feel like many story threads took a while to settle in, but once they did the story flowed quite nicely and the characters opened up and became real.

That lag between the beginning of the novel and when the novel really starts working was frustrating, though, and it was certainly not helped by what seem to be either printing errors or terrible formatting choices. Any time a character thinks, the dialogue is put in quotation marks as if they were speaking. There is no distinction between speech and thought. This demands a lot of double-takes and re-reads to parse correctly. There are also many places where the scene abruptly changes but there is no space (and sometimes not even a line break) between the two scenes. Put that together with the thinking/speaking problem and the book feels error-ridden and confused. These may be deliberate choices, given that the characters' mental states are slowly degrading and eventually can't tell what's real and what's not, but for the most part the odd formatting doesn't correlate with the characters' behavior or sanity, and the presence/absence of page breaks is inconsistent, so I doubt it - and either way, there are ways to convey the disorganized mentality of the characters while making it clear to the reader what is going on, or signaling that there is some intentionality in the formatting.

It took quite a while for the relationships between the characters to become clear, and while I understand the choice to begin with the incident that damages their ship, the action at the beginning and the devastation it wreaks on the remaining crew would be much more impactful if we had known anything at all about the characters first. Getting to know the characters through flashbacks in the latter half of the book was still emotional, unfolding the tragedy and effectively creating the grief we don't feel at the beginning. It also works pretty well if you see Gema as the main character, since she is almost immediately wiped of her personality and rediscovers some of it through these memories (an important arc that is heavily emphasized at first but trails off and is never explored as fully as it could have been or as it was implied it would be).

The worldbuilding also comes later in the book, and it was a delightful surprise. There's some heavy-handed exposition at the beginning (one character monologues about history known to the other characters, and one even notes that they know all this already and it's not typical for that character to talk so incessantly), but it eventually creates a pretty intriguing world where some children are selected for space-faring groups at age 14, placed with 5 other children whose personality profiles match theirs closely, and trained with that group for years before being vetted for actual space travel. It's also a world strongly influenced by the divide between the communist Soviet Union (here the Federation) and the capitalist world (the Empire) - de Rojas was passionate about communism and the Soviet Union and actually went a little insane after the Soviet Union fell, so there's a bit of wordy rhapsodizing about the wonders of communism, but it adds some flavor we don't usually see in the SF world nowadays. One bit of the worldbuilding, the Dream Palaces, suffered the same lack of development and payoff I've mentioned before, despite it being one of the more intriguing SF premises in the book.

I also feel there's some humor intended in a lot of places that isn't quite expressed in the translation, which is a shame.

Overall, I'm not sure how much this novel suffered through translation and poor publishing, but I suspect it would be a 4-star book for me in its original form. It blossoms into a beautifully tragic character study, has some fantastic cyberpunk/space exploration hard SF premises, and pulled me into the action. It feels like a rough draft, though, because the beginning feels cluttered and confused and the ending feels rushed, with many of the more interesting lines of character development and side-plots left unsatisfied.

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Review: The Dark Forest

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had the pleasure of reading The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu as the first book in the trilogy, The Three-Body Problem, won the Hugo award - the first translated novel ever to do so (and during a particularly contentious year for the Hugos). I'll admit that one of the main reasons I picked up The Dark Forest was because of the buzz, as I felt The Three-Body Problem was lackluster in terms of pacing, plot, and dialogue (oh, the horrendous dialogue). But I'm glad for the buzz! While The Dark Forest certainly didn't do any better in terms of dialogue and the first half of the novel is still pretty dull, at least in this edition there is a goal from the outset, and at the halfway point I suddenly understood what everyone loves about this series.

(read plot summary here if to better understand my review, as long as you're okay with spoilers)

So, my biggest qualms are the dialogue and the interpersonal interaction. All the science, all the philosophy and ideology, and almost every single motivation for every action, including all premises leading a person to a conclusion and the meanings of small nods and gestures, are explained either from one character to another or from the narrator to the reader. No person has ever spoken like any of these people. And when occasionally a premise or three is skipped, a character will respond with a non sequitur and both characters will perfectly understand what is happening (though the reader may not) because everyone is always on the same intellectual page in this world (this reminds me of the terrible movie 'Aloha' though not nearly as bad). Between the

So the problem with Escapism and defeatism and the related ideological movements (why is one capitalized and the other is not? Who knows. Why is every character able to constantly discriminate between these two nuanced and interrelated ideas and always agree on the precise definitions of these terms as well as their logical consequences? Probably poor writing.) is related to the dialogue problem and also tied to one of the larger themes of the novel, too - the cosmic sociology Luo Ji occasionally ponders. Humanity (and alien civilizations) is always described to behave as one unit entirely in consensus (or like two smaller factions) who all make up their minds, change their minds, define terminology, support particular efforts, and react to things EXACTLY THE SAME WAY. Everyone follows the same train of logical thought. No one provides counterarguments ever, or different ways to see the world - except for one crucial point at the end of the book, which kind of undermines this unity. I feel like this is a huge flaw considering how much of the plot rides on everyone behaving predictably; it's infuriating that they do, but for the novel to work it has to be consistent, and it betrays itself in the last few pages.

Though it was hard for me to get past the dialogue problem, the homogenous ideology finally let me make the connections that let me appreciate the story. This isn't about characters, or dialogue, or even pretty writing (though there is a considerable amount of the last): this is another Asimov's Foundation, a story about an inevitably bad future and plans that smart people make based on the predictability of people as a whole to avoid that future. The logical but surprising unfolding of the plot and the technological developments are the point, and they make it worth it. This isn't a story of people - it's the story of humanity. It earns that comparison to Foundation and deserves to be just as revered. There were also echoes of Arthur C. Clarke, in the descriptions of how an alien threat looming over Earth can change a civilization both for the better and for worse. The sheer inventiveness, the occasional beautiful passages, and the absolutely fantastic section about halfway through the book when things start moving along make even the worst dialogue worth it.

Plot summary (spoilers):

The novel picks up where the last left off: aliens called Trisolarans are coming to Earth to take it over, but they won't arrive for another 400 years. The Trisolarans have the technology to see anything that physically happens on Earth instantaneously even from that distance, so every one of Earth's battle plans will be laid out in front of them, although we do learn that they don't understand lying. We meet Luo Ji, a normal guy living a normal life. He once met Ye Wenjie (a character from the first book) and she told him to start the field of cosmic sociology, even giving him a few key points upon which to build. But he was a bad academic, and instead continued to live a practical, easy life where he doesn't get to attached to anyone or anything. We see a glimpse of how his life could be different when he accidentally imagines his dream girl too hard and she takes on a life of her own, in one of the novels stranger ramblings. Then, he becomes a Wallfacer.

The Wallfacers are humanity's desperate gamble. Each of the four (all male) Wallfacers will come up with a plan inside their mind, sharing it with no one, and be given all the resources of Earth to complete that plan. They are in fact encouraged to be erratic and hide their true goals, since the Trisolarans are aware of everything and might figure out plans that are too obvious. Luo Ji doesn't want to be a Wallfacer but can't reject the responsibility (though he tries) since no one can believe that what a Wallfacer says is true. So he instead uses his power to scour the world for his dream girl (successfully, and she doesn't even find this ordered-to-his-exact-specifications thing creepy, and they fall in love).

Zhang Beihai is a soldier in the Chinese navy who sees that the problems of Escapism and defeatism are going to be insurmountable if not counteracted immediately, and he does everything in his power to ensure they ARE counteractted. Escapism is the notion that some people want to flee the solar system to survive the Trisolarans, and defeatism is the related notion that the humans are surely doomed. More on these later.

After two of the Wallfacers' plans are revealed to include killing many or all humans and maybe most of the solar system even, Luo Ji and the other remaining Wallfacer go into hibernation. Zhang Beihai does as well, separately, as part of anti-defeatist reinforcements to the future. Luo Ji (and Shi Qiang, who readers will remember from the first book) and Zhang Beihai both awaken about 200 years later, and the description of the world at this halfway point is easily the coolest part of the book for me. It's a hard science world, but fantastical and full of whimsy, an almost unrecognizeable world due to both cultural, technological, and geographical change. The descriptions are beautiful and the story finally picks up. Despite a great tragedy shortly after Luo Ji hibernated, tchnology has shot ahead farther than anyone predicted, there's a giant fleet in space, and everyone in the world believes that the humans will undoubtedly defeat the Trisolarans. It's such an abrupt change that I thought perhaps the other Wallfacer's device, which was supposed to eliminate defeatism, had gone too far. But it's real! Luo Ji and Da Shi also realize that the Trisolarans still want Luo Ji dead, so they flee to the aboveground cities, which are mainly filled with hibernators.

Zhang Beihai is given command of the flagship of the space fleet as the first Trisolaran probe approaches. He immediately uses that command to fly the ship into the middle of space, because he's secretly been a defeatist and Escapist all along and he wants at least some of humanity to survive. The probe arrives and everyone is awed by its beauty and perfection and see it as a symbol of peace, until it destroys every ship in the entire fleet in like half an hour. Zhang Beihai's ship and the ones persuing it turn on each other, because they realize that with a permanent journey (as they don't have enough fuel to turn around) and limited resources, most of the ships should be cannibalized and the people killed, so that the life support systems can survive. Everything is suddenly very grim.

But Luo Ji comes to the rescue. The probe is blocking the sun, so they can't use it as an amplifier for any signals, but he sets up a mist of oil film throughout the solar system that will flash to any observing civilizations in the universe the location of Trisolaris (and because of that, also the location of Earth), and then ties the dispersal of that mist to his heartbeat. This forces the Trisolarans to negotiate with him, because if he kills himself, he kills them all - because he finally understands cosmic sociology, thanks to Zhang Beihai's fleet. There are limited resources in the solar system, and no one can be sure that any other civilization is benevolent, so any time someone's location is announced the safest bet is to destroy them if possible. The Trisolarans agree to a truce, and the book ends.

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Review: The Three-Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm trying hard this year to read outside straight/white/cis/male authors thanks to the challenge posed by K.T. Bradford (and because I've been trying to go outside the "usual" sci-fi I read anyway). And (with some exceptions) it's been super easy, because there's so much great stuff to read that qualifies!

I've been meaning to read The Three-Body Problem for a while. It was suspected to be nominated for a Hugo (ahahaha... whomp) and a bunch of other awards, now that it's finally translated into English.

The story starts with the Chinese Cultural Revolution, focusing on a character whose family is composed of intellectuals and sees them suffer for it. She's sent to a secret base, doing grunt work on projects that no one will explain to her.

A second plot picks up around modern day, where a bunch of famous scientists have been killing themselves for unknown reasons. A man who's been recruited to look into those deaths is also getting into a video game called 3body, where a civilization experiences sudden catastrophes and cataclysms.

There are some huge third-act spoilers - don't read on if you don't want to know!


The two storylines come together when the man, Wang Miao, meets up with the woman, Ye Wenjie, and discovers that she's actually the first person to ever converse with aliens - and that her message to them is basically "come to Earth and take over- humans have FUBAR." 3body, the game, is a history of their civilization, which was formed on a planet that's part of a three-star system. The pattern of gravity that the three stars follow is completely unpredictable and the aliens have to come to Earth (or another habitable planet - but Earth is the one yelling "come here!") if they want to survive. Ye Wenjie is now the leader of a faction of humans who all are preparing the world for the arrival of the aliens, partly by throwing all of modern science off track so we can't mount any defense by the time the aliens get here.

Spoilers end here!

Overall, this was a pretty compelling story, with a lot of original ideas and a very freakin cool video game. However, he pacing and tone felt weird - it opens the story with the Cultural Revolution and then abruptly only talks about the Cultural Revolution / most of the things that actually happen through flashbacks. It dulls the emotional impact of what's happening. It feels like this story should have been about Ye Wenjie and instead is about Wang Miao, even though he does very little except play 3body and listen to Ye Wenjie talk (very clinically and succinctly) about all the things that happened to her. I also felt like the actual prose suffered through translation, but that's typical of translation, I guess.

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