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: Souls/Houston, Houston, Do You Read?

Souls/Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by Joanna Russ
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wasn't planning to read this yet, but I shouldn't be surprised that I picked it up and read it out of order, since it's the first book I've actually purchased in quite a long time (support your local library, folks!). I liked the idea of a neat pair of double-bound novellas. They're printed upside down and backward to each other. So cute, and such an excellent pairing of novellas and authors. Both won the Hugo and Houston additionally won the Nebula.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr. starts with three male astronauts attempting to reach Houston. Instead, they make contact with an unexpected ship full of young women. The main character, Lorimer, is a man who is very aware of his lack of masculinity, and juxtapoxing that insecurity between the competent young women and the very masculine men on his ship provides some beautiful (if slightly unsettling) meaning and character development. I won't go into the plot here, but this is the best of Tiptree's stories that I've read so far and deserves any award that you could throw at it.

Souls by Joanna Russ features a sharp-minded Abbess in Germanic England who is faced with a Viking invasion. Again, with such a short story I won't go into the plot, but I'm slightly disappointed that the vague plot summary on the cover is not really what happens in the story. It's compellingly written - not quite the masterpiece that Houston is - and a quick but fascinating read.

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