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!!


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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!


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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: The Circle

The Circle by Dave Eggers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The Circle" is a book that has gotten a lot of buzz. Several schools made it required reading for incoming freshmen. It's getting a movie starring Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, Karen Gillan, and John Boyega. It's written by Dave Eggers, whose short stories I have read and enjoyed in the past, and who is generally an acclaimed author. And it's a literary novel with a sci-fi genre coating, which usually appeals to me, so I took it on with some enthusiasm.

Mae Holland begins work at a giant company called The Circle that is an amalgamation of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and any other site you can think of - an account with the company unifies all of a person's online accounts and ties them to their real names, which has the effect of making the entire internet polite. But despite the grandiose, heartfelt, well-intentioned projects spearheaded by the company, something feels wrong to Mae. She believes that the company's philosophy - and I'm paraphrasing, but it's generally 'knowledge solves all problems, so if everyone knows everything, then all problems will go away' - is right, but she doesn't understand why they question her initial lack of participation in company social media, or post about her occasional kayaking trips. It feels, at first, invasive.

This book wants very much to be the modern "1984." And, on the surface level, it is: it's a dystopian near future concerned with the privacy, independence, and rights of the individual citizen under the power of a powerful super-entity that controls behavior (though in this case, instead of hiding information from the masses, they share everything with everyone). The Circle's slogans, including "Sharing is Caring," are deliberately constructed to mirror the infamous "War is Peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is Strength." Mae's initial resistance to and eventual complicity with the Circle's endeavors follows Winston's path. Even her relationship with Kalden, who urges her to break free of the Circle's grasp and work against them, is similar to Winston's relationship with Julia.

The striking, damning difference, though, is that "1984" contains compelling arguments against totalitarian government and obfuscation, while "The Circle" simply asserts that voluntary surveillance and always-on internet culture is bad, because privacy is good, with no explanation as to why privacy is good beyond 'surveillance is bad.' I'm not saying I disagree with Eggers, here - I think he's generally right, that people are too willing to hand over freedoms for convenience, that people should be able to opt out and increasingly are unable to do so, that privacy is a good thing. But he relies entirely on my a priori idea that privacy is good, and his few attempts at conveying *why* it's good are flimsy and shallow. Mae likes her private kayak trips because they make her feel connected to the world, yeah, but she likes keeping up her internet presence for the same reason. (We're supposed to believe that the former is more fulfilling because while doing the latter, Mae often feels a gaping emptiness inside her, but you can feel that gulf sadness and unfulfillment no matter where you are or what you're doing, and Mercer, her anti-tech ex, tries to go off the grid and tells Mae that the Circle is bad because it doesn't let you opt out or have real privacy, and suffers for his attempts, but this is again the circular logic (pun fully intended) Eggers uses: surveillance is bad because privacy is good because surveillance is bad.

My other huge gripe with this book is how whiny it sounds. It's saying the same things that anyone who doesn't 'get' technology says, a litany of complaints and accusations with little evidence - we're addicted to technology, there's no such thing as privacy anymore, we spend all our time staring at screens. So many screens. Every time Mae gets promoted or funneled into a new program, she gets a new display screen added to her computer; I think she totals 8 by the end, and each scene is increasingly absurd. But it's not an effective, message-bearing absurd. Instead, it reminds me of parents who grumble that their perfectly normal children spend too much time online and not enough connecting with people or reading books (not understanding that many younguns use the internet primarily *for* connecting, for which it is an effective tool, or reading and research). Because regardless of whether there's truth to Eggers' and grumbly parents' complaints (and I do feel there is truth there), and even considering that this is a dystopian satire where things are purposely taken to their logical extremes, the fact that it feels driven by pathos instead of logos and the sheer amount of absurd and ironic but repetitive sequences of 'this technology is presented as good but is obviously an atrocity' make it feel like we're reading a rant, a litany of Eggers' personal annoyances and nightmares.

(Also, because the progression to absurdity follows a pathos instead of a logos or ethos, many of the doomsday-inducing scenarios fall apart with a little thought. Yes, again, it's satire and exaggeration, but it's tough to swallow some of the bigger assumptions the novel makes - not the least of which is that the culture and dominance of technology in America will take hold in the exact same way globally.)

Despite its logical and tonal problems, the book does work, to a degree, as an indictment against a sometimes mandatory plugged-in culture that is prevalent in some circles (again, the pun is definitely intended). I think more now about *why* I want to post things, and what I gain versus what the company whose platform I'm using gains. And that's really Eggers' point, so it's successful there. Still, I'd give my firstborn and probably most of my rights to privacy to work at a campus like the Circle's. And its prose is strong, if incessant and not particularly beautiful. While I read, it was a page-turner, but the minute I put the book down I didn't want to ever pick it up again because it didn't give me anything new after the first hundred pages.

Overall, it's a too-long tirade against technology, but a well-written one that has some valid points and definitely instilled a bit of fear or caution in me.

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Review: Only Ever Yours

Only Ever Yours by Louise O'Neill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this book at the suggestion of my friend Caroline, and with some hesitation because of its YA categorization. Young adult novels are not a disqualifier from my reading list, but I do tend to scrutinize them a little more prior to reading them. This was absolutely worth the risk. There are stretches where it's heavy on the YA feeling, but in the end it commits to the darkness within the story and the characters in a way that's more typical of classical dystopian literature than any YA novel I've read in the past 15 years.

A brief summary of the premise reads like a YA version of "The Handmaid's Tale" mixed with a morality tale about social media: In the future, some sort of ecological disaster has happened, the oceans have risen and separated the world into geographically and economically distinct 'zones', and female babies are no longer born naturally, but manufactured. They come off the production line with features like Perfect Green eyes, Ebony #2 hair, Flawless Pink skin on body template #607. The number of girls produced each year equals the number of men born that year in that zone, multiplied by three. This is because there are three roles a woman can fill: companion (the equivalent of wife), chastity (future teacher to young girls), and concubine (this one should be obvious). Until the age of 16, all girls are raised in a School where they learn all the things that women should learn to fill these roles, which, in this world, is mainly just how to be prettier, skinnier, and better than everyone else. They have no contact with the outside world (and, indeed, the novel never leaves the School, one of the many devices used to create a feeling of panic with no chance for escape), but are rated by the men of the zone based on weekly pictures, which determines their school rank and essentially their entire life.

I won't bother with a summary of the plot, because the standout of this novel is not plot but character. The main character, frieda (women's names and titles aren't capitalized here), has never been low in the ranks, but never been #1, either. That spot, from age 4 to 15, has gone to her best friend, isabel. But at the start of their final year, isabel suddenly withdraws from frieda and loses all interest in her ranking and physical appearance. frieda, unmoored from her emotional, psychological rock, slowly begins a slide into insanity. This is where the novel excels, wholeheartedly. frieda begins to crack under the constant pressure to be perfectly beautiful, her constant failure to do so, and the competing demands of what perfect entails (we're talking 'blonde or brunette?' here, not 'pretty or true to yourself'). It's a gut-wrenching, painful train wreck as we watch frieda try to navigate a social field she's never had to before, because she had one friend and that was enough. One of the understated messages of the book is the need for true human companionship; it's not just isabel's honesty or decentness or kindness that frieda desperately needs, but simply her presence, her interest in frieda. The presence of someone she can trust. When everyone treats you as an object, obstacle, or tool to leverage themselves, you have no context for 'self' beyond that, and frieda is not strong enough to create one from scratch. But their trust is broken, frieda can't bring herself to truly trust isabel again. There is a point where it seems like frieda might get the typical YA happy (or at least bittersweet) ending - she might land the hottest guy (who's nice, and into her as a person!) - but the novel grimly marches past that to the logical conclusion of frieda's personality and instability and what is allowed for her in this society. There are obvious comparisons to "The Handmaid's Tale" in terms of worldbuilding, but the most apt comparison for me in terms of how this novel felt was "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or maybe "Woman at the Edge of Time" by Marge Piercy. Hell, throw in some "1984" for that ending. It's a tragedy in the classical sense, and an entertaining (if horrifying) spectacle to read.

There are some sizeable flaws in the story. Most notably, this world holds up to absolutely zero scrutiny. There are only 40 people born in a year in an entire Zone, and 30 of those are women with absolutely no skills, not even an idea of what 'math' is? And this place is somehow functional? No animals exist? It's not particularly solid storytelling in that respect.

The novel walks a fine line between 'satire or dystopia' and 'caricature,' and occasionally crosses that line. All of their high-tech sci-fi devices have names like ePad and MyFace - cutesy concatenations that seem like snide jokes, like what a middle-aged adult thinks things that teenagers like are called. Every Zone on the planet apparently functions in the same way and has the same culture (with strikingly Western values). Some of the world-building problems are a result of this effect, where something is so obviously exaggerated for effect that it couldn't possibly actually work. But this isn't always a problem. I don't think there's a single thing in this story that isn't just an exaggeration of what women experience in the real world on a regular basis. This world is clearly intended to be the real, gendered (Western) world with the contrast and saturation turned up to maximum.

I personally think there is a huge missed opportunity with this story in the relationship between frieda and isabel. The book is billed as a story of a deteriorating friendship between two girls; the title is "Only Ever Yours," referring to the girls' belonging to each other, not to these men. I was expecting something along the lines of Black Swan, maybe, but where the girls begin as true friends. But the novel begins at the end of their friendship, and while there are some moments of near-reconciliation, their relationship is not the story at all. A bigger focus on these two girls as friends, trying to be functional together but failing somehow, would've added a lot to the story (especially toward the middle, where it feels a bit repetitive).

Highly recommend this. I'm rating it 4 stars because of how powerfully the characters are written, but I suspect that after a few months I'll want to bump it down to 3 because it's not particularly complex or groundbreaking.

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Review: Low, Vol. 2: Before the Dawn Burns Us

Low, Vol. 2: Before the Dawn Burns Us by Rick Remender
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclaimer: I received a free e-galley copy of this book from Image Comics.

I have gushed about Low, Volume 1 previously, and here I am to gush about Volume 2. If the artwork was stunning last time, it's decadently astonishing this time. The colors (which tend toward blue/orange, like Volume 1, but add in some lovely red/green/yellow and purple/green locales as well) are rich and layered. The oppositional color schemes work without looking cheesy because while the blues and oranges are rich and deep and pure, they're also nuanced; the blue has streaks of green, the orange streaks of red, both have streaks of yellow intermixed. I also still love the connection between color and location. In such a visually busy comic (that, as I mentioned last time, tends to skimp on backgrounds), the colors are a clear and beautiful way to establish location, so that detailed backgrounds for each panel aren't necessary.

One of the many things I love about the world created here - a world where everyone is forced underwater due to the toxic radiation of the sun, where humans have lived under the ocean for centuries - is that it echoes a lot of concerns in the solarpunk movement. Solarpunk is generally about fiction that has an optimistic view of the world (like the one Remender tries to convey here) and focuses on ecologically and socially sustainable futures. In terms of the literal world here, where most of the underwater colonies are in disrepair and societal collapse, it's not quite solarpunk, but the importance of sustainability is definitely a strong theme here, and I like that a lot.

My problem with Volume 1 re: the nakedness of all the ladies and the not-nakedness of all the men is somewhat rectified here. There are fewer ladies and fewer men, so fewer chances for disparity. Though it still succeeds in showing us the boobs of almost every female character to grace its pages.

I wish the story had flowed a little bit better here. Coming from the first volume, everything is mostly fine (except for the first sequence with Della, where it's initially unclear who the characters are or where it's taking place), but the switch from Della's story to her mother's and back across three issues makes this volume on its own feel choppy or uneven, as if it's not sure what story to tell at first. By the end, though, things feel fine; the focus is unequivocally back on mom and her journey to the surface.

Della's story arc also seemed brief - I wanted to savor her anger, her conflict in this society, but it resolves so quickly that I'm not even sure where she is (though this might be because it's been a while since I read Volume 1). I could read a whole volume, at least, about her life in this place, maybe about her youth. That goes for all the characters and all the locales, too. I just want so much more about this world, because it's so rich and invites so many story opportunities. Leaving a reader wanting more is definitely not a bad thing, though. Just a thought if this story wraps up soon - we're all eager to read more stories in this world!

There are still some trite-ness issues in the writing for the optimistic characters. Even when Stel becomes briefly disillusioned with her optimism, she seems one-dimensional - just in the opposite direction than usual. It makes the characters seem immature, like they can only hold one very literal interpretation of the world in their heads at once. And again, I have problems with the idea that their thoughts can literally change the world around them, because it's a strange belief for a person to hold. And it's executed pretty poorly. The characters say superficial things, they aren't allowed nuance in their understanding. It's single-mindedness, and it's frustrating.

Still - this is a beautifully illustrated comic, an intriguing and expansive world, and an interesting story to follow. I would definitely recommend this to anyone trying to get into comics who isn't into superheroes or is into beauty. Review was initially 3 stars, and then I realized that despite the technical issues I simply love this story so much I had to bump it to 4.

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