Jun 09 2022

Hugo Awards 2022: Best Novelette

Myth, starfaring bots, near-future Nigeria, fell fae, artistic immortals and the magic of the mind all feature in the 2022 Hugo finalists in the category of Best Novelette.

“Bots of the Lost Ark” by Suzanne Palmer sets its story on a large interstellar ship that just barely survived an encounter with hostile aliens and is trying to limp back to Earth while its human crew is in stasis. Unfortunately, certain things are not behaving as expected. Many of the small bots that take care of maintenance tasks have formed themselves into agglomerations that believe themselves to be the human crew. Nevermind that several agglomerations each claim to be the same crewmember. One “glom” believes itself the rightful commander, and is battling the ship’s own conscious systems for control of everything remaining. Moreover, different parts of the ship are damaged and offline, and some of those may harbor other things that are behaving unexpectedly. To top everything off, the ship’s sole course back to Earth takes it through the space of a lifeform that is implacably hostile to inorganic life. They have placed an ultimatum: submit to boarding and prove that organic life is in complete control, or be destroyed. Into this race against time comes Bot 9, original source of some of the shipboard anomalies, brought out of stasis in hopes that it can rectify the situation. Situations. I enjoyed this space adventure among non-human intelligences, even as I thought I had seen its elements used at least as well elsewhere: the servitor bots in Yoon Ha Lee‘s Machineries of Empire stories, conscious but uncertain ship intelligence by Ann Leckie, slightly lost self-aware machines by Becky Chambers, and chatty bot by Martha Wells.

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer, magazine cover

John Wiswell mixes horror and recovery from abuse in “That Story Isn’t the Story.” Wiswell’s tale opens with Anton packing his stuff into a single black trash bag and escaping from the psychological clutches of Mr. Bird, who has kept him and several others in a New York townhouse. Grigorii, Anton’s friend from their school days, drives the getaway car. It’s a classic cult-like abuse situation, and the rest of the story shows Anton trying to build a semblance of a normal life while fighting his own self-doubting, self-destructive urges that tell him to return. Grigorii stick with him — Anton’s family saved him from an abusive situation when he was much younger — and gives him a mantra, the story’s title, that serves as protection against the efforts of other cultists to bully him into returning. Mr. Bird’s effects on the members are suitably creepy, and Anton’s struggle is sufficiently uncertain to make this a deeply felt tale.

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Jun 07 2022

Magical History Tour Vol 9: The Titanic by Fabrice Erre & Sylvain Savoia

I, like millions of otherwise worldwide, thoroughly enjoyed James Cameron’s film Titanic (tho am in the probably far smaller subcategory of viewers who certainly didn’t expect to!) I cried my way through much of the last twenty or so minutes of the movie, as the scale of the tragedy unfolded on-screen. Of course, the romance in it isn’t for everyone, or every age. If you’d like a concise book version of events, with far less fiction and kissing, then you simply cannot pass up the latest installment of the Magical History Tour series, focusing on what happened to that allegedly unsinkable ship, why and the aftermath.

Nico is getting ready to zoom down a bike path on his roller blades when his big sister Annie reminds him that for all that he thinks he’s invulnerable, safety must always be his watchword. This was a hard lesson learned by everyone involved in the sinking of the Titanic, a cautionary tale that she imparts to him as they prepare for his run.

In simple, engaging language, Annie describes the construction of the ship and the composition of its passenger list as the Titanic set sail on its maiden voyage in 1912. She talks about the class stratification aboard, but emphasizes that for most if not all of the passengers, this was an overall positive journey for their first five days. But then disaster struck on the night of the fifth, as a series of unfortunate events — each harmless or merely inconvenient on their own — converge to doom over two thirds of the lives aboard.

Annie explains the scale of the disaster in a manner that is both matter-of-fact and empathetic: a tragedy of this scale doesn’t need further sensationalism, after all. She also discusses the aftermath of the sinking, including the way ship safety was tightened and improved across the industry, as well as the lingering cultural legacy of the wreck.

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Jun 04 2022

Hugo Awards 2022: Best Short Story

In my fourth time as a Hugo voter, I can see that while I like formal experiments in fiction and am glad to find them as finalists on the ballot, they don’t rise to the very top of my preference list. I’m not sure if that’s because the attention needed — both author’s and mine — to deal with the formal aspects means there’s not enough left at the end for me to say, “Yes! This is the best story on this year’s ballot” or if there is something else going on.

Apex Magazine, Issue 121

I’ve been part of online discussions (threaded and otherwise) for more than a quarter century now, so I thought the premise of “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” by Sarah Pinsker was pretty neat. It’s an online discussion of a fictional folk song, with various people adding footnotes, comments, comments on the comments, and so forth. The discussion, as Wikipedia puts it, “gradually uncovers a dark secret.” I’ve been in online communities where actual dark secrets, though not about centuries-old ballads, have come to light — sometimes even things the commenters didn’t realize about themselves. In this case, though, my attention strayed during all of the recursion, and I found myself doing what most people do with extended footnotes.

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Jun 03 2022

Lore Olympus: Volume One by Rachel Smythe

When this won a Goodreads Award a while back, I tried to give it a go on Webtoons where it was originally published, but found myself bouncing off of the format — or lack thereof, tbh. I like my visuals to fit a single consistent page so I’m not scrolling back and forth to try to fully capture each block, a necessity when reading this online that makes it pretty hard to immerse myself in the story and text. My husband and eldest kid occasionally read other Webtoons on their tablets, but my Kindle Fire gave up the ghost a while ago. And, frankly, it irritates me to have to find yet another device to be able to enjoy just the one story.

So thank goodness this came out in book form, where I could actually appreciate the art and story in a format that didn’t make my eyes glaze over with frustration! The copy I was sent in the Hugo voters’ packet doesn’t say if anyone besides original creator Rachel Smythe was responsible for the excellent layout of the graphic novel, but kudos to whomever reworked the Webtoons to fit so beautifully on the page.

My old-lady-eyes fussing aside, what did I think of the work? Tbh, I was pretty doubtful about another Greek mythology retelling. In theory, I like the idea of a deconstruction with modern sensibilities, but in practice, the reinterpretation of the Hades-Persephone myth as a cute love story doesn’t sit well with me. Ms Smythe does her darnedest, and in fairness, I really do enjoy what she’s done with Persephone, presenting her as a country girl with an overprotective mother who’s just ready to fall in love with the first guy who treats her like a grown-up. But that doesn’t make the premise of their relationship any less icky, especially if we’re supposed to be applying the afore-mentioned modern sensibilities to the tale. Perhaps the age gap is addressed in later installments of the series: it’s just not the kind of thing I was able to root for in this volume.

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Jun 02 2022

Hugo Awards 2022: Best Short Story Nominee

Hugo packets are out, hurray, and I have till August to read everything! Having already consumed and voted for the nominees in the Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form category and reviewed the first in the Graphic Story category, it’s time to look at the Short Stories, which I’ll discuss here alphabetically by title. Links are included to each story as available.

The first of these is Mr Death by Alix E Harrow, a writer I often find hit or miss. Mr Death starts out as a hit for me before slowly devolving into a sentimental miss. It’s essentially the tale of a man who gets recruited to become a Reaper, one of the guides that watches over the souls of those about to die and is on hand to immediately bring them over the river to a Nirvana-like eternity. His record is exemplary… till his latest assignment, which hits far too close to his own pre-afterlife. I mean, it’s fine, and were I in a different state of mind, perhaps I would have found the ending more hopeful than mawkish. As it was, the story did not land for me, tho I appreciated the attempt to grapple with grief.

Jose Pablo Iriarte’s Proof Of Induction is second on this list and second in my esteem. It’s a near-future sci-fi tale which also tackles grieving and the afterlife, but in a way that feels far more complex and human. It’s a bit of an academic’s Rogue Moon (by Algis Budrys, natch,) only instead of searching for a MacGuffin, the protagonist is searching for something even more impossible to attain. Plus, I have a hard time resisting stories where math is a central ornament.

The Sin Of America by Catherynne M Valente is extremely American, and for once I do not use the phrase to cast even the dimmest of aspersions. A young woman has been selected to eat a meal that represents the sins of our nation, in the process cleansing the rest of her fellow citizens of their guilt, in a sort of 21st century update of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery via the old practice of sin eating. The story unflinchingly looks at the crimes, past to present, of the United States and coolly extrapolates a horrific way of dealing with them, given the nature of the average American. On its own, it is very good — third on my list of favorites — but sometimes I worry about Ms Valente’s inclinations to punish her heroines.

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Jun 01 2022

The Peacekeeper (The Good Lands #1) by B.L. Blanchard

This may easily be the most fascinating invented setting I’ve read for a murder mystery in ages, and that definitely includes the Anglo-Nordic nation Peter Spiegelman created for his excellent A Secret About A Secret. Imagine, if you will, a near-future world in which North America was never colonized by Europeans. Instead, the indigenous tribes were allowed to develop and war on their own, with the Anishinaabe culture eventually prevailing around the area we know in our reality as the Great Lakes.

Chibenashi is a Peacekeeper in the historic village of Baawitigong, in the Anishinaabe nation. It’s a relatively easy job: crime is low, ebbing and flowing with the influx of tourists, and most of his duties involve retrieving lost people and items. This suits him just fine, as his life otherwise is preoccupied with taking care of his needy younger sister Ashwiyaa, who has never really recovered from the one murder to afflict Baawitigong in the last twenty years: the slaying of their mother Neebin. Their father Ishkode confessed to the killing and was sent to prison in the nearest city, Shikaakwa, but the stain of his crime marks his offspring still, leaving them outsiders in the only home they’ve ever known. The siblings aren’t entirely friendless, but even the best efforts of their community falter in the face of Ashwiyaa’s instability. Only their immediate neighbors and their mother’s best friend Meoquanee insist on being there for them daily.

With the onset of the twentieth anniversary of his mother’s death, Chibenashi braces himself for the onslaught of memory and grief that accompany that date every year. What he does not expect is for another murder to shatter the peace and happiness of Baawitigong once more. Meoquanee has been slain in her own wigwam, and the evidence suggests that whomever killed Neebin all those years ago is responsible for her death too.

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May 31 2022

Monstress Vol. 6: The Vow by Marjorie M. Liu & Sana Takeda

Wow, has this series grown on me! As with last year, I selected this title first of the Hugo nominees for Graphic Novel in hopes of getting it out of the way, but was pleasantly surprised to find that it actually does keep getting better from volume to volume. As always, an overwhelming amount happens with far too little of it explained, but dang it, I care about the characters now! Tuya still sucks, but I’ve come round to rooting for Maika and Zinn and especially dear, darling Kippa.

It helps a lot that this volume opens with a Kippa tale, detailing the gut punch that is her memory of the most delicious meal she’s ever had. The follow-up, Maika’s own memory of the last time she was truly happy and carefree as a child, was also poignant, as Maika and Kippa exchange stories while working in the kitchens of a besieged town. I think the town is Ravenna? Like I said, there is a lot going on in these books, and while I enjoy the story well enough, I do not, however, sufficiently care to keep track of who is betraying whom on whose behalf where and how, because it happens all the damn time in places that are mostly sketched at in a seemingly fungible spacetimeline. But at this point in the story, I’m invested enough that details are a mere curiosity, my subconscious mind doing the connecting work while I’m wholly absorbed in the plot as laid before me in each new book.

And this plot here is a doozy! It’s been six long volumes, but Maika finally discovers the identity of the Baroness, and it all goes about as well as expected. Even more importantly, Maika and Zinn come to a new… oh let’s say accord, as their ends increasingly align. Very interesting snippets are also revealed about the history of this planet and the origin of the Old Gods. It’s all thrilling stuff, beautifully depicted by Sana Takeda in her trademark horror manga style with punctuations of extreme cuteness. The two-page spread where Maika puts the pieces of the mask on again is particularly electrifying, with excellent use, too, of colors and lettering. And! It was easy for me to tell throughout who was who! I can be a bit faceblind, but in this volume I wasn’t constantly mistaking one character for another, tho I think that this book overall was also better about providing contextual hints than prior installments were.

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May 29 2022

Black & White by Lewis Shiner

I went and checked, and Lewis Shiner never did reconcile with his father. Terrible fathers feature so prominently in several of his novels — Glimpses (1993), Outside the Gates of Eden (2019) and Black & White (2008); maybe also the other three that I’ve read, but it’s been so long that I do not remember for sure — that it was impossible for me not to think that there was a real-life model behind them. In Glimpses the protagonist’s father is dead from the start of the book, so no reconciliation is possible. In Eden the break between Cole and his father is also irretrievable, but the novel offers positive alternatives, particularly in the Montoya family, and it follows its characters long enough that some of them become parents themselves, trying to do better.

Black and White by Lewis Shiner

Black & White changes the dynamic a bit: The father wants desperately to reconcile with his son Michael, or at least to explain, but cannot bring himself to say so directly. He is dying of cancer but insists on moving from Dallas, where the family had moved when Michael was an infant, to Durham, North Carolina for his final days. Robert, the father, and Ruth, the mother, met there, though they grew up in different parts of the state. Robert was from Asheville, where his parents had worked as servants on the Biltmore estate; Ruth was from rural Johnston County, where her father was a farmer and a local bigwig. They married in 1962, and Robert started a career in construction, working as an engineer for a company that was key to building the Interstate through Durham, before the three of them suddenly moved to Texas and cut off all contact with Ruth’s family. Michael thinks that his father is trying to say something by going back to Durham to die, something that will explain the cold home he grew up in, something that will fill in the blank pages where most people have a book of family history. Black & White is the story of what he finds out.

Intertwined with the personal story of Black & White are stories of power and race, and economic change, in the American South. Durham had been an agricultural center, and then a hub for collecting tobacco and manufacturing products from it, mostly cigarettes. By the early 1960s, though, the mills and the headquarters of the tobacco companies had all left, and the city’s economic lifeblood had nearly all drained away. North Carolina’s research triangle, which drives Durham’s economy today, was still sketches on a civic booster’s whiteboard. To make that happen, roads — Interstates — connecting the cities of the triangle had to be built, and those roads had to go somewhere. And where it went was right through the thriving Black business district of Durham, called Hayti (pronounced “Hay-tie”). Robert’s company was the one that tore down most of Hayti. As Ruth says when the time comes for her to finally tell her story:

Now Robert was the reluctant hand of that [destruction]. She knew it didn’t sit well on him, and she wished she could ease his mind. It wasn’t like there was another way for this to turn out. Durham needed the highway so people could get to the new business park. The city would die without it. The highway was going to displace somebody, anywhere you put it. It only made sense that it was the poor people that had to move. It would cost a hundred times more to buy up rich people’s houses.
They told Robert a new, better Hayti would rise from the ruins, and he wanted to believe it. Ruth let him, and never said a word about her father’s prophecy. Between the word of Mitch Antree [head of Robert’s company and devotee of Hayti] and the word of Wilmer Bynum [Ruth’s white supremacist father], she knew which would prevail. (pp. 288–89)

Black & White begins and ends in 2004, but goes back to the 1960s in two long sections that tell the stories of Robert and Ruth. Michael learns much about both of his parents, including many things that neither ever told the other. It is a rich and satisfying novel, one that explains people without excusing them, that shows the contradictions that people live with, and how people facing similar constraints and opportunities make different choices. Even within Durham’s Black community, for example, there were different views about Hayti, different responses to its destruction. Shiner captures both eras, bringing life and complexity to pictures that are often seen in black and white.

(Spoilers follow about what Michael learned.)
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May 28 2022

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

It isn’t true that the full title for When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain was originally meant to be When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain With Her Two Tiger Sisters and Considered Eating Cleric Chih but it could have been. Except that at that point it would have been politic to mention the mammoth and her rider Si-yu because without the two of them the tigers probably would have eaten Chih before they could even begin a proper conversation.

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

Cleric Chih returns from The Empress of Salt and Fortune, this time far up in the mountains. They are hoping to get up and over a high pass, and they arrange for a member of the mammoth corps, Dong Si-yu, take them up, hoping to make the way station by dark. The two of them have ridden Si-yu’s mammoth Piluk through woods and snow, and the refuge is in sight when “A deep and jagged snarl erupted from behind them, like something tearing through the stretched and scraped skin between the world of the flesh and the world of the spirit. Piluk bugled with alarm as Si-yu swore.” (Ch. 1) Tiger! Not just one, for Chih soon sees streaks of orange on both sides.

The way station’s barn is in sight, and it’s big enough to hold mammoths, thus offering a refuge from the tigers. Between them and the barn, Chih sees two figures on the ground. “On his back, face obscured by the hood of his sheepskin coat and arms thrown out as if he had hoped to catch himself was Bao-so [attendant at the way station and friend of Si-yu’s family]. A stocky naked woman bent over him, and she draped her arm over his belly with a casual ownership, immune to the blistering cold.” (Ch. 2) A hurtling mammoth with two passengers breaks up the sinister tableaux. “The mammoth’s speed was ponderous, but it was like a mountain had started to move. If it was coming for you, you didn’t care how fast it was coming, and that was apparently what the naked woman thought as well because in two bounds she was away and lost to the shadows.” (Ch. 2)

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May 27 2022

Softcore by Tirdad Zolghadr

In Softcore a first-person narrator, annoyingly also named Tirday Zolghadr, relates the weeks and days before the opening of a new and arty nightclub in contemporary Tehran, interspersed with his remembrances of earlier times in and around Iran’s capital city. The book has some funny bits, such as a running gag about the splittist tendencies of Iranian leftist groups; at one point a friend of the narrator’s sums up the banalization of the many public portraits of Iran’s revolutionary martyrs, “It used to be art, now it’s Burger King.”

Softcore by Tordad Zolghadr

Unfortunately, the narrator is himself increasingly unable to distinguish between provocative art and banal gestures, even if they are banal gestures that fleetingly catch the fancy of art journalists and buyers. The narrator is ostensibly a curator — a profession he shares with the author, along with many other personal details — and in many ways the night club is very much like an exhibition that he is planning and curating. He does not find an overarching theme for the club and constantly toys with different visuals, presentations, and artworks that he considers for the opening night.

Insertion of the author as the leading character in a novel is a pet peeve, and I was sorry to see it happening in Softcore. Nearly 18 years ago, I wrote “How many times does one have to encounter the device of inserting the author into the fiction before it becomes tiresome? For me the answer was twice, and I read both of them more than a decade before [late 2004].” Softcore does not really do anything new with the author as character, though maybe it will be a novelty for some readers and lead them to speculate about the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Zolghadr is good with describing moment by moment flows of events, he is good at evoking moods and characters with quick sketches. I like how his narrator champions Tehran’s suburbs and invites readers into the life that’s teeming in modernist high-rise neighborhoods. In a series that’s set in global metropoles, it’s good to see more than just the historic centers and obvious locations being given center stage. I enjoyed the anecdotes about Iran before the Islamic Revolution, and even liked some of the author-narrator’s casual cynicism about how the old aristocracy got where it was. He’s also good at showing how a government that claims to be revolutionary can hardly sustain that claim forty years later.

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