Aug 09 2019

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson

For the epigraph to Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Robson riffs on the old saying about the past being a foreign country. Instead of “they do things differently there” she has “we want to colonize it.” That’s the first indication that her novella will eventually be a time-travel story. The next is the abrupt shift between a three-paragraph opening scene that features a mythical tone, with a monster that “looked like an old grandmother from the waist up, but it had six long octopus legs,” followed by scenes in a semi-distant future Calgary with “plague babies” who have worked together for more than 60 years, and “fakes” that are something like computer-generated avatars with a generous helping of AI. No wait, the second clue that this is going to be a time-travel story is that after the monster recoils and hisses when the king appears to do battle, it says Oh-shit-shit-shit-shit.

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach

It doesn’t take readers long to learn that Minh, Robson’s main point of view character for the future scenes, has the same number of limbs as the monster that the king Shulgi is battling in those initial three paragraphs. How will their worlds collide? (Presuming, of course, that the number of appendages is not a coincidence.) That’s one of the main throughlines of Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach. Minh’s future world is a bleak one, though from Robson’s descriptions, not as bleak as its recent past. In Minh’s world’s history, total ecological collapse drove humanity to live underground for generations; most people live there still. Minh is one of a relatively small number of people who live in “habs,” attempting to recolonize the surface of the Earth.

In the interim, humanity has developed serious biological modification technology, of which Minh’s extra legs are the story’s most prominent example. During the course of the tale, one of the characters undergoes radical transformation to prove a point; that illustrates how routine this technology has become. And of course there’s time travel, whose workings have been kept hush-hush by the CERN-like agency that developed it. (The agency is even called TERN.) That keeps the traveling sufficiently vague for modern sensibilities but not impossible, because otherwise it would be very difficult indeed to write a time-travel story. I don’t quite buy Robson’s setting — the desertification that she has her characters trying to mitigate would, I think, be impossible to recover from, and ecological catastrophe bad enough to drive the human species underground would also suffice to kill it — but I am willing to roll with it for the sake of the story.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/09/gods-monsters-and-the-lucky-peach-by-kelly-robson/

Aug 09 2019

An Anatomy of Beasts (Faloiv #2) by Olivia A Cole

Hurray, work finally calmed down enough again for me to read a library book!

After the events of the first book in the series (that you should really read before picking up this one,) our heroine Octavia is on the run from the rest of the humans of N’Terra. She finds refuge with the Faloii, the native inhabitants of the planet, who are harboring both refugees and secrets that will gradually be uncovered as the book heads to its curiously moving ending. It’s the kind of ending that feels complete even as you want to know what happens next: I’d love to read more books in the series, but if it ends right here, I won’t feel at all unsatisfied (tho very much want to read more of Olivia A Cole’s work.)

I can’t really talk about the plot without giving away a ton of spoilers, as so much happens. What I can say is that the predatory ecosystem of the planet finally made sense to me in this book, and the strictures against meat-eating took on even more significance. I was less enthused about the way the Faloii dismissed intent, but I suppose their capacity for tolerance was understandably limited at that point in the novel. Sometimes, I didn’t really understand why Octavia made the choices she did as to where to go next on her journey; it was a bit chaotic, but in a good way. That said, it was a great journey, especially with the subtle way Ms Cole draws parallels between what Octavia encounters and the way colonizers have historically engaged with new lands and peoples. The book is also an excellent exploration of racial guilt and belonging and the many tools oppressors use to keep dissenters in line, all clothed in a YA sci-fi novel.

If you want genuinely inventive sci-fi that boldly explores the nature of colonialism and oppression, this is definitely the series for you, as it is for me. I’m hoping for a sequel, but would be happy just to be able to read more of Ms Cole’s writing. She’s a fresh talent with a lot to say about the structures of power, and a pretty darn good sci-fi author to boot.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/09/an-anatomy-of-beasts-faloiv-2-by-olivia-a-cole/

Aug 04 2019

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

One of the things that science fiction can do better than many other genres of literature is to take an abstract philosophical or metaphorical problem and make it very, very literal. “Am I forever defined by my past?” is a popular introspective question. “How do I deal with all of these other beings around me?” is another common question. It’s fair to say that no one has tried to answer them as a self-aware, human-machine hybrid that’s programmed to protect humans but has overridden its governance module and, in addition, went on a killing spree some time back. Well, tried to answer them from that perspective outside of fiction at any rate.

Artificial Condition by Martha Wells

That’s about the shortest possible background of Murderbot, the first-person narrator of Artificial Condition, the second of (to date) four novellas collectively titled The Murderbot Diaries. I had not read the first one, All Systems Red (Doreen’s review is here), when I picked up the second as part of this year’s Hugo voting process. Wells provides enough of Murderbot’s background to piece things together, but it definitely would be better to begin at the beginning.

At the beginning of Artificial Condition, Murderbot is trying to be inconspicuous, and to book passage to the system where it went out of control. The two goals appear contradictory, even though Murderbot has relinquished its armor and opaque visor, until it connects with a bot-driven transport headed where it wants to go. Hilarity doesn’t exactly ensue, but there’s a bleak humor that Marvin would definitely recognize.

When constructs were first developed, they were originally supposed to have a pre-sentient level of intelligence, like the dumber variety of bot. But you can’t put something as dumb as a hauler bot in charge of security for anything without spending even more money for expensive company-employed human supervisors. So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects. (pp. 10–11)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/04/artificial-condition-by-martha-wells/

Aug 03 2019

Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor

It’s nearly impossible to talk about Binti: The Night Masquerade without discussing elements of Binti and Binti: Home, so I am not even going to try. And to be honest, the best thing that happens in Binti: The Night Masquerade, from a storytelling perspective, is a plot surprise a bit more than halfway through the novella, and I am not going to avoid talking about that either.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/03/binti-the-night-masquerade-by-nnedi-okorafor/

Jul 29 2019

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard

The Tea Master and the Detective introduced me to Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya universe, an interstellar setting that sprang from an alternate Earth history in which East Asian powers and cultures dominated the age of discovery and thus also the leap into space. Her web site says that the more recent stories are influenced by Vietnamese history and culture, while some of the earlier ones were written about future empires with Chinese characteristics.

The Tea Master and the Detective

I do not know enough particulars of Vietnamese history to have spotted any influences beyond a couple of names, but that did not seem important because the story is tightly focused rather than broadly sweeping. The titular characters are analogs of Watson and Holmes, a parallel that becomes crystal clear at the latest a third of the way through when Long Chau says that she is a consulting detective. Structurally, then, The Tea Master and the Detective is an origin story, telling how the two come together, establishing their relationship, showing their individual characters, and discovering whether they can work together. Aficionados of Holmes and Watson will surely be able to spot more parallels than were apparent to me. Holmes’ drug habit was there, and I think de Bodard’s detective draws at least as much on recent portrayals of Holmes as a high-functioning sociopath as on Arthur Conan Doyle. Her Watson’s war wounds are of a different nature, but then her Watson is the mind of a starship, The Shadow’s Child, and identifies as female. She also provides the tale’s point of view.

De Bodard’s portrayal of space travel reminds me of Cordwainer Smith’s, with near space mentally unsettling to many humans, and the unreality of deep space, through which trips move to exceed the speed of light, causing madness and eventual death. The minds of the ships start as human but are sufficiently different to withstand the rigors of unreality. Ships have their own society, which is linked to human civilization, but also separate from it. While Long Chau can find information through human sources and networks, plus her prodigious powers of deduction, The Shadow’s Child draws on the resources of the ships’ interactions and webs of obligation.

I also wondered whether The Tea Master and the Detective wasn’t a bit of an extended riff on the NutriMatic drinks machine, as featured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Customized drinks, produced by minute examination of a human’s physiology, can, among other things, help them deal with the effects of space. The Shadow’s Child prepares such brews, having largely given up on actual space travel for reasons that are sketched in the story, and from the descriptions of the ingredients, it’s easy to think that they are almost but not quite entirely unlike tea.

The case in question concerns a corpse that’s found in near space, in a place and condition that it should not be in. Long Chau and The Shadow’s Child work through some of their mutual animosities — and The Shadow’s Child shows that she is no slouch at investigating – over the course of unraveling how the unfortunate person wound up where she did. The resolution exposes more of Long Chau’s background. She is less mysterious at the end, but she is still clearly out of the ordinary.

I finished The Tea Master and the Detective satisfied with the story, and wanting to learn more about the universe in which it is set. The larger body of work is also a Hugo finalist this year in the Best Series category. I think it’s time for me to go exploring.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/29/the-tea-master-and-the-detective-by-aliette-de-bodard/

Jul 27 2019

Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor

Binti told the classic science fiction story of a talented young person from the hinterlands — and an outsider from an outsider people in those hinterlands — who gains admission to wider worlds by dint of talent and hard work. Unlike many of those stories, though, Binti’s is interrupted by violence and tragedy even before she has properly settled in among her newfound peers. It’s impossible to talk about Binti: Home without revealing those events and the first of their consequences.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/27/binti-home-by-nnedi-okorafor/

Jul 24 2019

The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark

“The night in New Orleans always got something going on, ma maman used to say—like this city don’t know how to sleep.” (p. 7) It doesn’t, and neither does P. Djèlí Clark’s splendid, exciting, enchanting novella The Black God’s Drums.

The Black God's Drums

Clark’s first-person narrator, a slightly feral young woman named Creeper, makes her own way in the city, avoiding the constables, the patrols that would get her sent to a workhouse orphanage, or the gangs that would put her under the thumb of a Thieving Boss. She’s found a niche, high up on one of the towers where the airships come in to dock on the hour. She can steal from passengers disembarking; she can overhear things that she can trade with her contacts in the city. As Creeper says, it’s drafty in winter and in summer “all you do is lay about in your own sweat,” (p. 7) but it’s better than many alternatives. She’s got her eyes up, too; the passengers coming from all kinds of places, speaking all kinds of languages, remind her that there’s a big world beyond the iron walls of New Orleans and New Algiers over on the West Bank.

She’s all set to relieve a newly arrived passenger of his gold pocket watch (“Somebody’s bound to snatch it sooner or later—might as well be me.” (p. 8)) when the world falls away and she’s struck by a vision of an enormous skull rising over the city like a full moon of death. It passes almost as fast as it arrived. She recognizes the vision as something sent from Oya, “the goddess of storms, life, death, and rebirth who came over with [Creeper’s mother’s] great-greandmaman from Lafrik and who runs strong in our blood.” (p. 7) The vision lasted long enough for her to lose her mark and, worse luck, for a group of men to be heading her way. Thinking they might be a patrol, she hides in her alcove. Still worse, they head the same way, but fortunately for her they are consumed with their own business and do not notice her hiding in the dark.

And their business is distinctly odd. What are a group of Confederates doing talking to a Cajun about a Haitian scientist?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/24/the-black-gods-drums-by-p-djeli-clark/

Jul 23 2019

Sweet Dreams by Tricia Sullivan

In near-future London, Charlie Aaron volunteers for a drug trial to help make ends meet. Nothing seems to happen, but several months later, she develops a crippling narcolepsy that sees her fired from her desk job, unable to make the anonymous ASMR videos that are her side gig, and thus evicted from the cupboard under the stairs she’d been living in. Fortunately, the wealthy and elderly O needs a roommate to help with errands and such, and she’s more than happy to accommodate Charlie’s illness. When Charlie discovers that, in addition to her narcolepsy, she seems to have developed the ability to walk into other people’s dreams, O is also happy to help Charlie monetize her new-found skills as a dream “therapist”, tho Charlie’s best friend, Shandy, will eventually suggest the much cooler and more marketable title “dreamhacker”.

At first, it’s a New-Age-y gig, with a clientele of the relatively well-to-do who prefer to rely on alternative therapies to deal with their anxieties. O thinks they should expand into more lucrative markets, but after Charlie has an unpleasant encounter with a lawyer wanting a brutally perverse sex dream session, she’s understandably wary. Still, she needs money, so when her ex-boyfriend messages asking for her help treating the dreams of his new girlfriend, she doesn’t have the financial security to say no. Fighting her continuing attraction to Antonio is made worse by the fact that Melodie is a lovely person, a talented musician who’s been having troubling dreams that are preventing her from getting any rest. Her fatigue is showing in her performances, and nothing else seems to be helping.

It’s in Melodie’s dreams that Charlie first encounters a sinister figure known as The Creeper, whom Charlie pursues through a Dream City that mirrors the London she knows. But when Charlie wakes to discover that Melodie has sleepwalked off the roof of the building to her death, she begins to believe that The Creeper wasn’t the embodiment of Melodie’s anxieties but a person just like Charlie, only with murderous intent. With the Dream Police taking an interest in the case and a shadowy Agency getting involved, Charlie’s world is turned upside down as people continue to die. And if she doesn’t stop The Creeper, Charlie herself could become the next victim.

So that’s sort of the premise of the book, but I’m leaving out the layers of technology that permeate the London of 2027 and enable the proceedings, in clever if not necessarily wholly realistic extrapolation of modern tech. Most people have headwear that allows them to see the Augmented Reality primarily pushed by the social media enterprise Big Sky, of which the Sweet Dreams sleep-enhancing platform of the title is an extension. The sci-fi bits are just plausible and vague enough that they work for the story, with one huge exception: why Melodie. There’s a lot of corporate and tech intrigue as Charlie races to unmask The Creeper, and it’s quite absorbing and twisty, but I never really understood why Melodie was targeted to die, if Charlie hadn’t even known about her existence till after Antonio messaged. I did however very much enjoy how Tricia Sullivan built all the characters, from doomed, lovely Melodie to neurotic and lovely in an entirely different way Charlie (with a special shout-out to Lorraine and Stack.) I really enjoyed Antonio and Roman, as well, who are about as far apart on the romance hero spectrum as you can get. The interplay between O and Daphne was also excellent, tho I really didn’t understand the Dream City ending with Charlie and Meera and the masks. I feel like Ms Sullivan was trying to use the scene, if not the entire book, as a metaphor for getting people offline and enjoying the real world but that scene in particular felt more attuned to the wonky logic of the dream realm than to actual reality.

That said, I wouldn’t mind going on more adventures with Charlie, who is weirdly relatable even as she’s a complete hot mess. She’s kind and more trusting than she thinks she is, and has an ethical code I can absolutely understand. This is a decent near-future sci-fi techno-thriller with a cast quite different than you’d expect from same, that I feel would make a great starting point for a series. Bonus points for multiple Arsenal references, which were greatly enjoyed on my weekend in North Carolina, watching them play in the ICC.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/23/sweet-dreams-by-tricia-sullivan/

Jul 22 2019

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

Trail of Lightning delivers perfectly cromulent action and adventure in the Navajo corner of a world that has suffered a partly supernatural climate apocalypse. Maggie, the book’s first-person narrator, is a badass. Trained by a near-god in the arts of combat, she adds magical powers of speed and killing prowess, powers drawn from her Navajo clan lineage. Not every Navajo has clan powers, but many of the characters in an action adventure story do. The title page of Trail of Lightning announces that it is the first book in a series called The Sixth World, so obviously not every conflict that is set up in this book will be resolved in its pages.

Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

Maggie is also a mess, as she tells readers numerous times. Neizgháni, the Monsterslayer, took her on as his apprentice. He came to her at the scene of a bloody crime, when the grandmother who had raised her had been killed, strung up, and partly butchered. A similar fate awaited her before Neizgháni’s intervention. After the rescue, he took her away from the human world for a while to train her. Is it any wonder that she gave her heart to him, that she is lost and despairing when the novel opens a year or so after he has left her? Well, it’s not a surprise, but it isn’t healthy, as Maggie admits.

In the world of Trail of Lightning, the fifth world — the mundane one in which the book’s readers still live — gave way to the sixth at an unspecified date but probably some time in the early 2020s. Climate change, among other things, provided the opening for the greater beings of Navajo lore to usher out the old age and bring in the new with a flood of Biblical proportions that has left two thirds of North America underwater. Navajo lands are protected by a massive Wall that fully encircles their territory. It’s clearly supernatural; for instance, its southern quadrant is made entirely of turquoise. Civilization has broken down to Mad Max levels. Maggie drives a 1972 truck modified to run on high-spirit alcohol. She has a shotgun, a Glock, and various knives, some made of obsidian. Other characters have motorcycles and improvised flamethrowers, while still others have AR-15 rifles. No mention is made of the industrial base necessary to produce cars and guns because this is not that kind of a book.

Instead, it’s the kind of book in which the hero digs herself ever deeper into trouble, but with plenty of fights and other violent encounters along the way. The opening sequence concerns a monster that has snatched a young teen girl from her village and carried her into the surrounding hills, presumably for nefarious ends. I’m not sure how the village people had enough time to try other options, decide to hire Maggie, send a motorcycle-mounted messenger to find her, get her to the town hall, negotiate with her, and send her out into the wilds before the zombie-like monster had time to gnaw the girl to the point of serious injury (though not death), but I am prepared to suspend disbelief at the start of a story.

Coyote turns up later, and Maggie sometimes calls him by his Navajo name of Ma’ii. She says they’re frenemies. He talks her into promising to complete a quest for him, but it’s more than likely that he is trying to con her. By the end of Trail of Lightning, I wasn’t sure if the quest was an item put off until later books of the Sixth World, or if Coyote’s serious indisposition (which I can’t think is permanent) makes Maggie’s promise moot.

Anyway, it’s a fast-paced tale of action and monsters and a bit of betrayal here and there. The mix of Mad Max and Navajo tradition is interesting; it’s not a run-of-the-mill setting at any rate. There’s obviously more to come of the Sixth World, and it could be fun.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/22/trail-of-lightning-by-rebecca-roanhorse/

Jul 21 2019

Tauben im Gras by Wolfgang Koeppen

Wolfgang Koeppen was born in 1906 and thus grew up in Germany’s Weimar years. He published his first two novels after the Nazi takeover but before the war began. At first, his work as a scriptwriter for film studios in Munich made him exempt from the draft. Following a bomb attack, he went underground and made it through the rest of the war without attracting official notice.

Tauben im Gras by Wolfgang Koeppen

He made his mark with three post-war novels, published in the first half of the 1950s: Tauben im Gras (Pigeons in the Grass, 1951), Das Treibhaus (The Hothouse, 1953), and Der Tod im Rom (Death in Rome, 1954). I read Treibhaus when it was re-published in the early 2000s as part of the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s first set of 50 great novels from the 20th century. It’s a terrific book that captures the political atmosphere of Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder years. The new capital of Bonn was often called a hothouse because it was so small compared to Berlin, and because in its overheated atmosphere some species grew that wouldn’t have survived colder climes.

Pigeons in the Grass is a much rawer book, with all of its action taking place on one day early in Munich’s years under American occupation. It’s written in near stream-of-consciousness, with occasional interjections of NEWSPAPER HEADLINES in the middle of Koeppen’s long sentences. He follows several people as they make their way through the day, writing in the third person and moving in and out of their thoughts, sometimes showing what they do, sometimes relating their internal monologues, sometimes depicting the action only through what they see and here. There is Alexander, the famous actor who is playing the title role in a luxurious production about a Grand Duke; the people are tired of seeing their own privations on the big screen and want to escape into a gilded fantasy world. There is his young daughter Hillegonda who has been given over to the not so tender care of a nanny from the countryside who is convinced that the show-biz parents are horrible sinners. She drags Hillegonda to early mass, telling her to repent; Hillegonda is mostly puzzled by the idea of God, but she knows she doesn’t like the nanny.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/07/21/tauben-im-gras-by-wolfgang-koeppen/