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.

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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.

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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.

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Review: Star Songs of An Old Primate

Star Songs of An Old Primate by James Tiptree Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There wasn't a moment of reading this book where I wasn't engaged, excited, or delighted. Ursula Le Guin's excellent introduction was especially fun, as this collection came out very soon after Tiptree was revealed to be Alice Sheldon. Le Guin insists that saying Tiptree "doesn't exist" is absurd (after all, she's exchanged many letters with him) and urges the reader to think about how identity is formed, and how an author shapes our expectations. She also points out a tidbit I didn't know but thought was neat: Tiptree withdrew "The Women Men Don't See" from award consideration prior to being 'outed', because many lauded the story for Tiptree's ability to understand women despite being a man.

Anyway, this anthology is classic Tiptree. You can see Alice Sheldon's long government and research careers at work in "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats" and "Your Haploid Heart." Her interest in biology and gender come to the fore in "Haploid" as well as "A Momentary Taste of Being," "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" and "She Waits for All Men Born." "All Men Born" is a fantastically dark, optimistic end to the anthology, and feels very modern even today. As characteristic of Tiptree, many of the stories read like mysteries; something is hidden, just barely visible through the layers of the story, until a sudden reveal in the third act. And yet I didn't get tired of the format, even when re-reading "Houston" for the third time.

I have a major bone to pick with "A Momentary Taste of Being," though, because I wrote half that damn story and plotted out the rest of it. The central premise of the story and several of the big moments map on to a short story I drafted a year ago, though of course Tiptree's is eerier and she had a much better set-up and payoff. I had to put down the book halfway through that story and kick myself for not finishing my story earlier, because now I certainly couldn't write it without constant comparison to this one.

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At the End of Babel, by Michael Livingston

"At the End of Babel," by Michael Livingston. Art by Greg Ruth. From Tor.com, edited by Claire Eddy.

Published: July 1, 2015

Word count: ~7600

Rating: 4/5 stars

As a linguist and avid reader, I live for words. Stories about words are the best kind of stories, in my opinion, and anything referencing the Tower of Babel immediately jumps to the top of my 'to-read' list.

In Livingston's "At the End of Babel," words are powerful - but most of them are forbidden. All languages have been outlawed except one (which I assume, but I don't think is specified, is English). Tabitha Hoarse Raven is the last remaining member of her clan, and the last speaker of Keresan. She watched her father and the rest of her community get gunned down for speaking Keresan and dancing the moondance when she was a child. Now, she is going back to her ruined village to dance the moondance and call the gods in Keresan.

The story is anchored on Tabitha, and although we know a lot about her life, I feel she's lacking in personality. Still, she has a persistent, focused determination to complete her mission, and the story feels much the same. It is focused, constantly moving forward, and while it leaves little time for niceties (like elaborate character touches), it grabs your interest and marches you through this tightly-written story. Her determination is Livingston's determination is the reader's determination. We are all in this together, and we want her to succeed.

Until it happens, it's left a mystery what this 'success' entails - and when it does, it provides the most fantastical element of the story. In the beginning, I almost didn't recognize the story as SF/F, because the premise of a country (especially a dry region of the southern US, where I imagined this taking place) outlawing any minority languages under the pretense of 'unity' is hardly far-fetched. Livingston starts the story off, even, with a quotation from a proposed amendment to the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006 that states:

No person has a right, entitlement, or claim to have the Government of the United States or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide services, or provide materials in any language other than English.

This isn't a dystopia; it's modern-day America.

Livingston, though, shows us the visceral strength of language, the surprising and powerful things minority languages can do, in his closing act. Tabitha sings to the gods and they rain lightning down on her enemies in a storm that doesn't dissipate but travels on. And like that storm, Tabitha and the other native people she accumulates along the way show that people and cultures don't simply disappear, either, but persist.

The Killing Jar, by Laurie Penny

"The Killing Jar," by Laurie Penny. Art by Koren Shadmi. From Motherboard, edited by Claire Evans and Brian Merchant.

Published: January 14, 2016
Word count: ~5300

Rating: 3/5 stars

So Motherboard does science fiction. That's news to me, but apparently they've been publishing short fiction for over a year. I've been poking around their website for a while now and I absolutely adore the artwork they use. It looks like a lot of it is done by Koren Shadmi, who did the above art for "The Killing Jar," and who is absolutely killing it. Go check out the link above for some great SF art!

"The Killing Jar" didn't knock my socks off, but it was a good read. The premise is cute: the main character is an intern for a professional serial killer. Oh yeah, and professional serial killers exist, and are encouraged by the government, because serial killing has been designated a Fine Art. It's a tough gig to get, though, so you have to intern and work your way up through the ranks.

Our main character has a knack for killing, and a is pretty darned good at the paperwork that goes along with it. She is repeatedly frustrated by her employer, Tony, who just doesn't get what makes a good serial killer good. He's never in the news, and he can't figure out why - but our main character does. She understands that you need to be creative, you need to go after the right kind of people, and you need to fill out all the paperwork so you can keep killing people.

She also has a roommate, Mona, who dissects frogs, and as a gift covers the main character's walls in dead butterflies.

Like I said, it didn't blow me away, but there are some great moments here. In the culmination of every millennial intern's dreams and the climax of the story, the main character kills her boss and takes his place. She's encouraged by her roommate (and now partner, both romantically and in business), who shows her that she is truly suited for this. You get the feeling that she's a psychopath, or sociopath, but maybe just a frustrated intern.

The prose is clean and functional, and while some short stories fall flat on their neat little premises, this carries it out to a conclusion that is both interesting and logical, and keeps it fun along the way. The professionalism of both the website and the writing is encouraging; I may not have a compelling desire to read more by Laurie Penny (though I would if I came across it), I will definitely be reading more of these Motherboard stories.

Review: Invisible Republic, Vol. 1

Invisible Republic, Vol. 1 by Gabriel Hardman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Invisible Republic" isn't my typical choice for SF graphic novels or comics. I like flashy, bright, colorful art and tend toward stories that play around with narrative structure. "Invisible Republic" is darker, grittier, and has a straightforward story - but both the art and the story have such a tight focus that it's a gripping read. The 'what if...' at the core of this SF story isn't particularly wild: what if the disenfranchised people of a colonized moon took power, and then potentially damning information about their leader threatens to leak after he is deposed? The story follows two threads, one in the 'present' and one, told through the journal of his young cousin, about the rise of a populist dictator.

I'm not sure what the stakes are in the present-day part of this story line, as the dictator - Arthur McBride - has already either died or been deposed, marking the end of the Malory Regime, and the economic/political scene is already in chaos. A journalist has discovered a journal written by McBride's cousin, Maia Reveron, that begins with McBride's murder of two soldiers, kicking off the story of his rise to power. I'm a little muddy on the exact politics in either of the story arcs. I think that at the beginning of the earlier story, they live on a moon that was settled prior to FTL travel and so was fairly rural and poor, but now that FTL exists and there are new, higher-tech powers settling the moon, there is conflict between the original and new settlers. I think. Either way, there's a dearth of clear sci-fi elements in the story which was kind of disappointing for me as an SF fan. I suspect we'll see more of those, though, as the story continues. Still, the story is the most compelling aspect of this volume, and I'm eager for more.

Although the characters are the vehicle for the story here, and in fact the story is essentially the story of two people and the journalist covering them, the characters really take a backseat to the politics, and aren't particularly memorable. Maia is a promising lead, and I enjoyed her sojourn into beekeeping, but I have no idea what makes her Maia - I don't know her desires, what she enjoys, any character ticks or traits. Same goes for pretty much all the rest of the characters (with the partial exception of McBride, because we know he wants power and we're also supposed to be unsure of his motivations).


I mentioned before that the art is not my typical style. I like abstract art, things that aren't super representational. In that respect, "Invisible Republic" strikes an okay balance for me, because the art style is pretty loose and sketchy. The rough edges and unfinished quality fit the feel of the story, which is nice. I liked the visual distinctions between the storylines - mostly in terms of color, with brighter colors for the past - but I'm not sure they were entirely intentional, since much of the earlier storyline takes place in rural places while the later one is entirely in the urban centers.

Overall, I enjoyed this and I will probably pick up another volume if I stumble across it, but I'm not sure how good a grip I'll have on the plot, politics, and characters at that point, because even now it's hazy and muddy for me.

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Review: Star Wars: Darth Vader, Vol. 1: Vader

Star Wars: Darth Vader, Vol. 1: Vader by Kieron Gillen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I loved the Star Wars EU, so I was pretty sad when they de-canonized them (for months, I teared up every time I saw a bunch of them on a shelf at the library or bookstore). But I was also cautiously hopeful - maybe we'd get new stories that were more inclusive, or maybe as fun as the old ones with a more professional shine to them! Then we'd have two great universes to read in! But honestly, the tone of the EU that I loved, the craziness and campiness and never-ending space opera, was the result of individuals who loved Star Wars. There were some real out-there stories, some terribly bad stories, but they were usually bad because people took risks and they failed. It was fans who made the old EU happen, because they loved it, and the EU grew from the bottom up. And the new novels are entirely the result of top-down story direction, with Disney deciding what plots and character types to include so they can market the books to as wide an audience as possible, and "obsessive, life-long, passionate Star Wars fans who loved the EU" is a very niche audience. You can see it in the recurring bland character types they use for every truly new character. They won't have any Starcaves or MindHarps or Sun Crushers (oh wait...), but I think it will take a while for the books to get back to the beloved, well-worn feel of the old EU, if they ever do. I think it would require Star Wars falling out of the public consciousness for a long time, and there's no way Disney's going to let that happen if it can still make them money.

(Above taken from a comment I made on reddit.com/r/StarWars to provide some context for my feelings).

So, obviously, I've been disappointed by so much of the new EU. But this first volume of the Star Wars: Darth Vader comic has finally given me a new hope for the future of the new canon! For the first time, we get some crazy, strange ideas that aren't slick, consumer-tested plots and characters guaranteed to offend no one, or re-packaged ideas from the original trilogy. And, like in the old EU, I'm not sure these ideas do work - but I'm so excited to see how they work out! There's a woman who's draws heavily on Indiana Jones, an archaeologist-turned-thief who gets recruited to work for Vader himself. And on top of all of that, they're mucking about in the plotlines directly relevant to the original trilogy! Palpatine has a secret group of apprentices(? maybe?), beings trained and scientifically augmented to be weapons that don't necessarily draw on the force. There are psychopathic twins, a person who controls a swarm of flying robots - this is weird shit, folks, and it's all happening during the original trilogy. It's glorious. I want all Star Wars to be like this again.

The story also continues the new EU theme of Vader's ambivalence toward his role as Palpatine's apprentice, and his constant memories of the life he lived before. I don't know yet how I feel about this. In some ways, it makes his conversion in Return of the Jedi make a little more sense, and it provides some character continuity; Anakin doesn't immediately become the monster Vader and change personalities. In others, though, it kind of cheapens the work Luke does throughout the original trilogy. If Vader is doubtful, if Vader has always questioned his choice to embrace the dark side, then Luke's job wasn't actually difficult at all (or at least not as hard as it was made out to be). It definitely works better than in Lords of the Sith, because at this point, Vader's old life has been forcibly re-awakened by Luke's entrance into his life.

I'm not a huge fan of the artwork, though. It stays in incredibly safe, well-trodden territory. I like my art weird and symbolic and colorful and abstract, and Star Wars comic art has generally always been fairly iconic and strictly representative (though I like the strange color palettes for some of the pre-Republic tales in the old EU).

I will gladly keep reading this series, because it's kickass. I want to see more of Indiana Jones-lady. I want to see more of Palpatine's insane kill squad. I want more risky, strange, fun stories in the Star Wars universe.

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Review: The Last Witness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: Find Me

Find Me by Laura van den Berg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Find Me" is an ethereal, eerie character piece about displacement. Its post-apocalyptic backdrop that feels almost inconsequential to the story, which focuses on a young woman named Joy and her hazy wandering existence, both in this new world and in the past. It's very much a 'literary' novel doing what a lot of 'literary' novels are doing lately - snatching bits and pieces of the sci-fi genre and weaving them into more mainstream (or prestigious) genres. I like this trend - the more SF the better! - but I'm also a little wary, as authors sometimes try to deny the SF-ness of their writing to keep themselves out of the genre ghetto. Either way, the SF premise drew me in, and while it didn't turn out to be hugely necessary to the story I wasn't disappointed at all (well, at least in terms of genre).

Joy is in a hospital. At first, it's unclear what kind of hospital she's in, or why. Outsiders gather outside, trying to get into the hospital, and no one in the hospital seems ill. Slowly, we discover that all the patients in this hospital are thought to be immune to a plague sweeping America, one that causes amnesia and then death. Joy suspects she's immune because she's already lost the memories that are important to her. She has recently received her first photo of her mother, and there is a curious year of her life in foster care she doesn't remember at all.

Joy eventually leaves this strange hospital and the people she has met there. She runs into the only foster-brother she's ever cared about while wandering the east coast on a series of sketchy long-distance buses. She's searching for her mother, who she believes she identified from TV as a lost-ship-chaser who lives off the shore of Florida.

Nothing in this book is in the foreground. Joy's memory problems and the inconsistency of memory throughout the story constantly displace both event and emotion. Though the story is roughly chronological, life-changing moments happen off-screen and are not referenced until Joy has digested them enough to temper their emotional impact. Thus the tone perpetuates a constant, unchanging level of emotional valence. Often, this deliberate disaffection creates a clashing contrast with the actual events Joy remembers, and the slow, steady grind of emotion becomes a relentless crashing wave of white noise drowning out all the things Joy should be concerned about but ignores with her single-minded goal.

It's an impressive build, but the question for me is: what does it build to, and how does it land? And, unfortunately, the answers are a disappointing 'not much,' and 'no.' I shouldn't have been surprised (and I wasn't, as the novel neared its end and with only pages left Joy was supposedly only moments away from her mother) that a novel that is primarily about lack and uses lack as a literary device displaces the ending beyond the final page of the book. Perhaps this means for the reader that we must understand Joy's journey is not about the destination, but about the getting there, but for Joy herself this isn't even the case. She has undergone a lot and her life has drastically changed, but her primary concern is still finding her mother and she refuses to foreground any of her more immediate problems.

Still, up until the last page, it was engrossing read. I could have used some closure and I feel the story would've benefited from it, but the author clearly disagrees, and I respect that.

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Review: The Liminal People

The Liminal People by Ayize Jama-Everett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The Liminal People" was a slim, quick read in the vein of Octavia Butler's Patternmaster series with a slight gritty-superhero vibe.

Taggert's power is healing, but as he says, the best healers are the ones who know how to hurt. In his youth, he dated a woman with powers like his (though she controlled fire), but in the years since he's traveled across Africa healing all those he found, then joined up with a crime lord who also has superpowers. As in Butler's books, the story is largely concerned with power; all of the liminal people have powers that put them above normal humans, but there are superpowers behind the scenes who outrank even Taggert's boss. We see characters form similar relationships - the strong taking others under their wing to 'protect' them but also to use them, people fleeing from that control to form familial bonds with equals, other people squirming at the idea that maybe they must serve one power or another.

At this point, it's been a little over a month since I read the book, and while I felt pretty good about it immediately after reading, it hasn't aged well. Taggert wasn't very compelling. One of the surprise reveals wasn't at all surprising (though I don't know if it was supposed to be surprising for the reader - perhaps just for Taggert). I'm fascinated with bits and pieces of the story, like the drastic change of events after Taggert has dinner with his ex-lover, and the true identity of the power running London. But the story doesn't have much pull beyond those odds and ends. I still may pick up the sequels because the resonance with Butler's work lends this a certain fondness, but I don't love it, and I'm amending my review from 4 to 3 stars.

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Review: Planetes Omnibus, Volume 1

Planetes Omnibus, Volume 1 by Makoto Yukimura
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disclosure: I received a free e-galley copy of this book from Edelweiss.

I'd heard about "Planetes" when I received my e-galley copy, but I hadn't heard much. I had no idea what this book was about, no expectations, and I was honestly pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed everything about it. From the opening scenes the characters, the world, and the style pulled me in. All of the SF anime and manga I've consumed has either been near-future, Earth-based, and often dystopian or cyberpunk (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, Akira), or set in the far future when humanity is already living comfortably in space (Knights of Sidonia) - but above all, thematically concerned with human and other, instantiated as humans and the super-human (either superpowered humans or something more alien and more powerful). "Planetes" is unique (to me) in that it's a near-ish future concerned with expansion into space and humans living their lives. There are no giant aliens, no cyborgs, no superhumans, just humanity.

This focus on human life is clear from the opening scenes: a man and his wife are flying in a low-orbit ship across the planet. The wife is nervous, as she always is. The husband moves to the back of the ship to get some coffee, and the entire front end of the ship is destroyed. A few years later, he is part of the three-person crew that are the core characters of the story. Their ship is a garbage collector; they spend their days literally cleaning up after humanity, collecting space debris. This is an important job, though, because the thoughtless, random detritus of human expansion can be deadly, from the largest chunk of space station to the smallest screw. There's Yuri, who is looking for his late wife's compass, Hachimaki, who wants nothing more than to be chosen for the longest space trip ever, a trip to Jupiter, and Fee, who wants nothing more than a good place for a smoke.

Most of the story arcs can stand alone, and many are slice-of-life pieces, but together they build a story that spans several years and chronicles the lives of a crew that grow together and come to depend on each other. I love the character dynamics, especially as the series continues and minor characters blossom. I also very much enjoy the world Yukimura has built (as a side note, I'm impressed that he's both the writer and illustrator for the whole thing). It's a world with moving parts and importance, and a message that comes through pervasively but not overwhelmingly. The art was a slow burn. I didn't love it at first, because I do have a strong preference for color over black and white, but there are some absolutely gorgeous scenes where the blackness of space feels as vast and drowning as it is in reality.

Overall, strongly recommend this collection, and I'll be on the lookout for the second one soon!

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Review: A Guide to Being Born: Stories

A Guide to Being Born: Stories by Ramona Ausubel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am getting way too far behind on my reviews, so I'm going a bit out of order on these. On the blog, you'll notice I've started tagging reviews with months - those are the month the book/story was read, to better keep track. I read "A Guide to Being Born: Stories" immediately after reading "Find Me," by Laura Van Den Berg (review forthcoming), and the two share a lot of immediately striking similarities. (I'm hoping this review will make the other one easier; I have a lot of feelings and no proper words to explain them for "Find Me.")

This was an impulse read, something I found on the library shelf when I was ostensibly there just to pick up some long-planned reads that came in from on hold. This happens a lot to me. It's like going shopping on an empty stomach, only I'm always hungry for more books. It was a quick read, too; I finished it in one sitting.

As the title indicates, it's a book of short stories, many following the theme of birth, life, and death. It shares with "Find Me" a kind of deliberately disaffected, dark curiosity about birth and motherhood that suggests someone trying desperately not to reveal their obsession. In one story, a pregnant woman's husband wakes to find he has empty drawers in his chest. He fills them with significant odds and ends to feel like he contains something important, too. In another, a young woman who finds herself accidentally pregnant can't believe she's actually having a human baby, and instead imagines her child will be any of a variety of animals. The stories oscillate between pointedly oblique - directing your thoughts exactly to one specific place without ever saying it outright - and commandingly, heartwrenchingly plain, laying out exactly the meaning as they grasp your heart by the collar and shove it up against a wall. That is to say, the collection attempts that dichotomy, but often falls short of the emotional strength needed.

The thematic concern with life is emphasized by stories about death and not living life well. One of the stories most vivid in my memory takes place on a boat. Everyone on the boat is a grandmother, and none of them know how they got there. There are many kinds of grandmothers, but all of them are on this boat, and some, in desperation, choose to jump off. Another is about a young girl who plays catch with the ghost of a Civil War soldier. The young girl lives alone in the woods with her mother and grandmother. She thinks she knows a lot about how she was born, but much of it is a lie.

These stories are sweet pastries, easy to consume quickly but perhaps better to chew on slowly, doled out one by one. There's no plot to be found in any of these stories. As with much stereotypical high-literature short fiction, they are mundane slices of life (in this case, mundane turned fantastical). If that's not your thing, this isn't for you, but the collection certainly made for a pleasant evening.

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Review: Rat Queens - Deluxe - Volume One

Rat Queens - Deluxe - Volume One by Kurtis J. Wiebe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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

Why did I wait so long to read Rat Queens?? This ARC has been on my computer for at least a month, probably more. I'd heard about the series last fall, and the local comic store clerk recommended it to me after finding out I liked Image and played D&D. Seriously, though: it's a hilarious, well-drawn, action-packed AND character-driven story about an all-female adventuring party (with some queer action thrown in)! It's everything I've ever dreamed of!

The story opens with the town of Palisade deciding what to do about the rowdy parties of adventurers that, while ostensibly protecting the town, tend to cause a lot of commotion (and property damage). Enter the Rat Queens (through the wall of the building): a beardless dwarf named Violet, a drug-and-women-loving smidgen named Betty, a necromancing elf named Hannah, and a human(?) paladin named Dee who no longer follows her god. The Rat Queens and the rest of the adventurers are sentenced to some boring, run-of-the-mill quests to get them out of jail (and keep out of future trouble), but the missions are quickly revealed to be traps intended to kill them all.

From this fairly standard RPG beginning, it's easy to assume that the story would be cookie-cutter the rest of the way, too - lots of fighting, straightforward quests, lots of dungeons and/or dragons, and not much in terms of character development or world building. Thankfully, this story upends that expectation right away. There's a large, self-contained story in this volume and while the action is certainly thrilling and frequent, it serves mainly as part of a larger story about the relationships between these characters and this town. We get mid-battle flashbacks (due to magical effects) for some origin stories, we get complicated sexual and romantic relationships, we get a sense that this team loves each other deeply and *that* drives the action and the story.

The art is pretty fantastic - a perfect choice for this kind of story. Bold, strong lines, bright colors, and the right kind of detail that reflects and adds to the personality of each character. The artists changed a bit of the way through the series, but I wasn't looking for it, and couldn't tell.

The one drawback to the series is that several times, either due to scene changes or maybe just being slightly dense, I couldn't figure out what the dialogue was referring to. Sometimes flipping back helped, sometimes I was left puzzling and moved on. (For others who have read it, here's one of the points I could still use some clarification on: When Betty tells Hannah she's scared of her black eyes, what is she referring to? I flipped back to the previous scene but I didn't see any obvious eye changes.)

This edition was also lovely, with some extras in the back that riff on the characters and show us some cute extra artwork.

Would highly recommend to anyone who likes D&D, epic fantasy, great stories, and a fun, compelling read!

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Review: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: Dragonquest

Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Review: The Fall of Hyperion

The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

**This review contains spoilers for both "Fall of Hyperion" and "Hyperion." There will be a spoiler warning before they begin.

As I mentioned in my review of "Hyperion," I immediately picked this up after finishing the first one. There's no way to read a novel that amazing that ends on that kind of unresolved note and not pick up the sequel. Sadly, "Fall of Hyperion" is not quite as good as its predecessor (but they rarely are, I suppose). I wanted to immediately tear into it, but the beginning is a slog, setting up what feels like already-established political maneuvering, introducing a character whose existence is still questionably justifiable in my mind, making established characters wander aimlessly around in a desert storm, and refusing to immediately address any of my burning questions. At almost exactly the halfway point, though, things pick up - and go from zero to sixty in the course of a chapter.

The second half of the book is intricate and surprising and, at times, mind-blowing. The world-building that Simmons did over the course of "Hyperion" and the slow political set-up at the beginning of this story explode into a truly unexpected (well, for me, at least) galactic story that broadens and deepens the world, and changes it fundamentally, while tying even the smallest details back to the core story (although, at times, it seems like too many throwback details, a few convenient connections that don't seem to add any meaning). Simmons did a wonderful job connecting the worldbuilding to the unfolding story; each step in one direction allows room to move in the other. And while Hyperion was more about character, Fall of Hyperion is much more about the world in which these characters live, and that allows for the introduction of many kinds of characters and aspects of the world that we couldn't see through the pilgrims' eyes, like Ousters and AI.

In the end, I was left questioning a few decisions - like why there was ever a second version of Keats; it didn't feel necessary story-wise - and suspicious of how neatly all the loose ends tied together, but ultimately (finally) satisfied by the scope and complexity of the ending. If the first book was a lock with each pin falling into place, this was like watching a convoluted machine get put together piece by piece, with no idea of its eventual function until the last cogs are set. Overall, it's not as solid a piece of work as "Hyperion," but it's a strong follow-up that is both true to and expands on the original.

My summary follows. Spoilers abound!

When we last left our pilgrims, they were singing their way down the yellow brick road toward the Time Tombs to meet the Shrike. Only when they get there, the Shrike's not there. They search each tomb a couple of times, then settle down, and then - oh so foolishly, as anyone who's ever consumed media could tell you - they split up.

Interspersed between the pilgrims' chapters is a character I certainly didn't expect to see: John Keats. No, not the original one. And not quite the one that Brawne Lamia gets to know in the first book, either. He's a second incarnation of Lamia's John, and to keep a low profile, he goes by Joseph Severn (aka Keats' best friend in his original life - he's not very good at the low-profile thing). We learn that Severn's dreams follow the journey of the pilgrims, and so he knows essentially exactly what the reader knows about their journey. Because of this, he's an asset to Gladstone, CEO of the Hegemony, who reveals that the AI government discovered and passed along the identities of citizens whose requests from the Shrike had the potential to change the course of the Hegemony's war. This whole part of the book moves at a glacial pace, taking more than its share of time to establish Severn's identity as a kind of human-AI meld, the reasons he's still alive (though I'm still not clear about that), and his role as Gladstone's informant/reporter on the pilgrims.

When the pilgrims' stories finally take off, they are picked off by the Shrike, one by one. Hoyt dies, but through the cruciform is re-born - but as Father Dure, whose cruciform Hoyt had also carried on his body. Silenus returns to the City of Poets and in one day, in a frenzy of writing, almost completes his Cantos - and is met by the Shrike, who puts him on the torture tree. Brawne Lamia gets a permanent hook-up to the datumsphere where she is reunited with her version of Keats and converses with the AI who is Keats's parent (and who promptly re-kills her version of Keats). The Consul uses his magic carpet to fly back to his ship, in hopes that he can stow Rachel safely away in a cryochamber before she de-ages completely. Kassad finds Moneta, who takes him through time and space to fight the Shrike. Sol is alone with Rachel (and, briefly, the Templar - who he and the Consul found wandering among the Tombs, but who is clearly not well and dies quickly), and at the moment when she should de-age entirely, the Shrike visits him and asks for his daughter - and Sol gives her up, because his recurring dream has recently changed: in the dream, when God demands he sacrifice Rachel, she says to him that she wants him to do it.

During all of this, the new Keats is watching Gladstone maneuver the Hegemony into this war over Hyperion. Based on information she received from the AI conglomerate, she has learned that this war with the Ousters - which is precipitated by the Hegemony bringing Hyperion into the fold - is necessary for the Hegemony to even have a chance of surviving in the future. But suddenly, the war takes a drastic turn: thousands of Ouster ships turn out to be almost right on top of the Hegemony, when they should have been many systems away. Planets are destroyed.

New Keats, though, has been trapped on the AI re-creation of Old Earth, and is dying of tuberculosis. He's there because he learned the great secret behind this war: the AI are behind every step of it. The ships attacking the Hegemony are not Ouster ships, but AI ships. The AI have been in communication with a god that they have created in the future, but can speak back to them through time. This god, in the future, is fighting with a human-created god, and the Shrike is the AI god's messenger. The human god (who is composed of three parts) may have sent a messenger back, too - and maybe it's Keats? I'm actually not sure about that part. He discovers that the AI don't have a homeworld; their 'core,' as it were, is the entire system of gates between worlds, and they use the humans' brains as processors. As an aside, we also learn that the AI were behind the destruction of Old Earth - the "accident" that destroyed it wasn't an accident, but they managed to transport the planet into a different system. Their 'recreation' is the original planet itself. Keats, after dying, is able to travel into a new and strange aspect of the datumsphere to Hyperion, where he saves baby Rachel from the Shrike and is able to briefly talk with Brawne Lamia.

At this point, the Consul has left Hyperion at Gladstone's request and is meeting with the Ousters. Once there, he is put on trial for the murder of the Ousters who gave him the device that would open the Time Tombs (turns out the device was a fake, though; they were testing him). His sentence: not to die, but to live and to help the galaxy recover from his actions. As soon as this happens, Gladstone's right-hand man launches an attack based on Keats' new information: he orders his men to simultaneously destroy every single portal in existence, completely disabling instantaneous travel between worlds, killing and dooming many, but also saving them from AI control.

On Hyperion, Brawne Lamia goes to rescue Martin Silenus. She finds out that the torture tree is actually a chamber in one of the Time Tombs, and everyone on the tree is unconscious on the floor with the same kind of hyperlink cable attached to their heads as was attached to hers. Their torture is real, but entirely inside their brains. To rescue him, she must confront the Shrike, and with some advice from Moneta and some magical nonsense where she walks on air, she defeats it. Oh, also: Kassad has died at this point.

Moneta also appears to Sol, carrying baby Rachel (who she picked up from Keats), and it is revealed that Moneta is, in fact, adult Rachel. She, Sol, and baby Rachel must use the newly-activated Time Tombs to travel into the future, where Sol will raise her once more, and she will become the warrior who keeps the Shrike in check throughout time. Several of the Time Tombs have active portals (but not the AI kind), now; the time-travel one opens only to some and one opens onto Old Earth.

Now that the portals are gone and the only way to get between worlds is by a long trip through space, the Consul begins a long humanitarian journey to begin re-building connections between worlds.

It's a fairly satisfying ending (again, with some moments that are slightly *too* satisfying and coincidental), and the action in the second half of the book rescues it from the drudgery from the first half. I would love to talk about this more with someone who has read both books. I've been meaning to decompose each pilgrim's meeting(s) with the Shrike - how do their interactions with it relate to the request they would have asked or did ask of it? What's going on with this whole God situation, especially the Empathy messenger sent back through time? What are we supposed to make of the Templars throughout all of this?

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Review: Hyperion

Hyperion by Dan Simmons
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This may be cheesy, but Hyperion may be one of the best-written SF novels in existence. Its format and a good deal of its subject matter are repurposed from classic literature; most notably, it is written in the format of "The Canterbury Tales" and deals heavily with themes of the poems (and life) of John Keats (one of his most famous poems is also called "Hyperion"). This is a rare (and perhaps unique) book that makes me want to immediately read the rest of the series, but also become a scholar of classical lit, and probably also get a doctorate in genre fiction. I want to dedicate an entire course to this book. I want to have written it myself.

As in "The Canterbury Tales," the story is composed of six stories within a frame story that is a pilgrimage, with each of the shorter narratives told by one of the pilgrims. Simmons masterfully weaves these six stories together and embeds them carefully in their frame, so that as you read each story it feels like another tumbler in a lock has fallen into place. Each story is fascinating and readable on its own, and each has a different tone and genre. There's a private-eye noir, a slow family story, an anthropologist's exploration, a love story, a war story, and a debaucherous life of an artist. All six of these pilgrims (the soldier, the priest, the poet, the consul, the scholar, and detective), along with a templar, are making the journey to the planet Hyperion to visit the Shrike - a horrific monster whose origins and temporal status are both unknown, who is also said to grant the wish of one pilgrim of every seven.

None of them know exactly why they've been chosen for this final pilgrimage, but they do know that humanity's galactic government - the Hegemony - is about to go to war with a faction of humans who broke away hundreds of years before and have since evolved into something that may not quite be human, and that it seems to be because of Hyperion. There is a fear that the Shrike and the Time Tombs where it dwells may be re-orienting to the flow of time as the rest of the world experiences it, and no one is sure what will come of that. Hyperion loads itself chock full of questions, questions that are baked into the core of the world-building and the characters, and the true joy of the book is uncovering more about this world, and how it might work.

The one true flaw of "Hyperion," though, is that the final tumbler never falls; there is never a satisfying resolution, none of the truly pressing, global questions are answered. There is a poetic-ness to the ending of the story, but there is no fulfillment. It's a masterpiece of high science fiction, and of literature, and each of the short stories in themselves are a delight to read, but while the structure of the book feels like it should be a solid, complete work, the unanswered questions demand a sequel - and there is one, and that review will be coming shortly, and it will not be as good.

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Savannah Liars Tour, by Will McIntosh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: 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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