Jun 20 2022

The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

This is one of those books that I can appreciate, even if I don’t like it. And there’s a lot to like here, so maybe it’s just a me thing. I just… I feel like Cat Valente has a lot to process in terms of abuse and marriage, and that her issues spill out way too messily on the page for me to pretend that her writing isn’t a far too personal peek into a private life that requires a lot more therapy. I totally understand using fiction as a coping mechanism, but I feel more trauma-dumped than entertained every subsequent time she writes about a victimized woman or a fucked-up marriage, both of which feature in this novella.

I originally read the first part of this book, The Future Is Blue, in the excellent John Joseph Adams anthology Wastelands 3. TFiB is a striking short story: a young woman growing up on a floating trash barge in a post-apocalyptic Earth does something so terrible that she’s subject to unthinkable punishment. The Past Is Red moves some years into the future to see what’s become of that young woman, whether her actions were validated and how she survives.

So, first, what I thought was good: the use of Garbagetown as a metaphor for Earth, and the gentle admonishment against leaving it for pie in the sky promises. The critique of consumerism is also pointed and valid, and leads to much of the book’s humor, just in wry observation of how very unnecessary and over-the-top much of corporate branding and marketing is. And I very much liked the idea of our heroine Tetley as a futuristic Candide, tho she’s arguably more Panglossian given that she never rejects optimism, no matter how terrible her circumstances.

The mediocre to bad: the critique of survival mechanisms, and an inability to differentiate between rationing and hoarding, particularly for the purposes of political power. It felt like a clumsy critique of private health care, a deserving subject which was conflated here with the very existence of pharmacies, which exist for a very good reason! I was also a little annoyed at the mini-rants against private ownership when Tetley’s few belongings were both clearly valuable to her and things she was unwilling to cede to others.

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Jun 17 2022

The Ultimate RPG Character Backstory Guide: Expanded Genres Edition by James D’Amato

with the subsubtitle “Prompts and Activities to Create Compelling Characters for Horror, Sci-Fi, X-Punk, and More”

As an RPG nerd from way back, I was both deeply appreciative and somewhat perplexed by this book. I’ve never really had trouble dreaming up backstories for my characters, but can see how people with less active imaginations would find the many exercises and minigames in this guide to be super useful for filling out why their characters are the way they are when game begins. There’s even a helpful section in the book as to what to do in the event of a mid-game time jump, with players sitting around a table and drawing playing cards for prompts from the book (tho I’m unclear as to what James D’Amato means by making a visible break in the circle of cards. I assume that the cards are divided into stacks of four or are otherwise layered in some fashion?)

There were a few other sections where I was a little confused as to what was required of the reader. The strong and weak prompts for Standing Out In A Crowd in the Western section, for example, weren’t as clearly marked as they might have been. But overall this was a very thoughtfully designed handbook covering a variety of genres that, as the author notes, can be mixed and matched to accommodate the particular nuances of a game’s setting, using superhero prompts in a fantasy setting, for example, if you’re running a swords and sorcery story that involves secret identities. The language used throughout was also excellent, particularly in making this book feel welcoming for all players and reminding readers to avoid harmful tropes in our designs.

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Jun 15 2022

Once & Future, Vol. 3: The Parliament of Magpies by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora & Tamra Bonvillain

Oooh, Bridgette with a sword on the cover, y’all!

Inside however, as in prior installments, good old Gran is more comfortable with a gun, using it to good, if horrifying, effect when the titular parliament of magpies comes calling, bearing ominous news. She immediately calls her grandson, the reluctantly heroic Duncan, who says he’ll call Rose who, since she’s standing right next to him, calls him out on the little pause he always makes before lying. Rose and Duncan, after their failed first date and subsequent misadventures, have gotten closer, you see. But are they actually dating? This conundrum leads to a conversation that made my semantic-loving heart near overflow with pleasure. /nerd

Rose’s initial divination finds nothing awry, so with Duncan’s car totaled, she drives him up to visit Gran the next day on New Year’s Eve. They decide to follow a lead to the Lancelot Arms, in hopes of uncovering what the treacherous Mary had been up to prior to summoning King Arthur. Their interview with the inhabitants is violently interrupted (I shrieked with horrified glee when I realized by whom,) forcing Rose to get even closer to the Story when she realizes that she’s unwilling to let Duncan imperil himself further by taking on more than two roles out of legend. Bridgette has to admire her logic, even as she worries as to what she’s getting another innocent into. The fewer who know about all this mystic stuff, the better, after all.

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Jun 14 2022

Hugo Awards 2022: Best Novelette Nominee

I’m a big fan of ordering my group reviews for the Hugos alphabetically, but what to do when my favorite is the very first of them? I haven’t had a chance to read much Suzanne Palmer, but I adored Bots Of The Lost Ark, which managed to pack a whole bunch of interesting and delightful surprises into its 20+ pages. Essentially, a sentient Ship is attempting to limp home to Earth after a succession of battles left it both damaged and wildly off-course. With another potentially deadly encounter on its horizon, Ship is forced to wake the troublesome Bot 9 in order to help it overcome the conflicts plaguing it internally before even being able to prepare for examination at the hands of the AI-distrustful Ysmi. The story is fun, inventive and funny. I loved it.

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer, magazine coverSecond alphabetically is Caroline M Yoachim’s Colors Of The Immortal Palette, which I loved much less. I appreciate the fact that this novelette tries to grapple with what it means to belong and to matter when you’re not in the mainstream of society, but didn’t feel that it said anything particularly new or interesting, or that the supernatural conceit of longevity added anything to the story. It was fine, but probably at the bottom of my list of nominees this year.

Next up is Catherynne M Valente’s L’Esprit D’Escalier, which I was pleasantly surprised to find did not end by punishing the heroine, as I was fearing was becoming a habit with this author. This update of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice was beautifully written and wonderfully observed, tho a large part of me would rather have had the story told from primarily Eurydice’s perspective.

Fourth on the list and in my esteem is Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s O2 Arena. The dystopian setting of underground fighters battling to the death to earn a fortune in oxygen credits in a world seared by pollution isn’t the freshest, and the ending of the piece a little too abrupt, but the depiction of bullshit patriarchal systems dominating in even supposedly enlightened academia hit home to me as someone who went through a similar system. I’m just… well, I always assumed that the trade-off for putting up with crap like that was at least a strong social net and a functioning system of medical welfare, particularly for the ill and disadvantaged, but apparently that’s not as common in Nigeria as in Malaysia, and that sucks. I greatly admired the passion behind this story, even if I think the craft still needs work.

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Jun 12 2022

Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Elder Race offers an extended meditation on Clarke’s Third Law, some thoughts on cultural contamination that are not new but are important to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s characters, all wrapped up in a fast-paced adventure of swords and sufficiently advanced technology. The novella is set on Sophos 4, a planet colonized by humans during the first interstellar flowering of Earth’s civilization, when generation ships were sent out into the cosmos. That effort proved unsustainable on humanity’s home planet and starfaring stopped, leaving the colonies to fend for themselves. Much later, a second wave of exploration began with the mastery of faster-than-light travel.

Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Nyr, the first-person narrator of half of Elder Race was part of that second wave. As he puts it, “My name is Nyr Illim Tevitch, anthropologist second class of Earth’s Explorer Corps. I am centuries old and light years from home.” (p. 25) He was part of an expedition to Sophos 4 that observed the colonists’ descendants and sought to understand their cultures and developments without letting them know that they were being observed. The inhabitants of Sophos 4 had lost all of their advanced technology, retaining only myths of an origin from across the seas of night. Some of the colonists had been modified to breathe water as well as air, and these traits had become inheritable. Nyr’s expedition aimed to understand these changes, too, and what had happened in the generations since the first arrivals. At some point in the study, Nyr’s fellow scientists were recalled to Earth, and he was left to mind the store for what they thought would be a brief hiatus. Something happened, though, and they have not returned although centuries have passed. Even communications have stopped coming. Nyr is stranded, alone with the machines that were designed to study the planet, and which support him through many decades of stasis.

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Jun 11 2022

Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

Forbidden love between two princesses. Forbidden not because they are both women, but because they are princesses, and relations between their two states are tense and unequal. Thanh is a princess of Bình Hải, in the south, nominally superior to its northern neighbor but falling back in relative power because of the neighbor’s greater access to silver and guns. Eldris is a princess of Ephteria, the north country where Thanh had been sent by her mother the Empress to serve as a child hostage, and also to learn the ways of the barbarian neighbor, the better to contend with them when she was older and playing a role in statecraft.

Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

They fell in love as teenagers while Thanh was in the foreign capital of Yosolis. Eldris had seemed aloof until the night a fire ravaged the royal palace. Nobody thought to look after Thanh, but she made it out on her own and even rescued a Bình Hải serving girl named Giang. That commanded the court’s attention, and Eldris’ more personal interest followed soon after. The affair ended, as it must, when Thanh returned home some years later. As Fireheart Tiger opens, Eldris has come to Bình Hải as part of a trade delegation, one that is pushing for greater privileges for Ephterian merchants and other concessions that will hem in Bình Hải’s independence.

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Jun 10 2022

Once & Future, Vol. 2: Old English by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, Tamra Bonvillain & Ed Dukeshire

Old English indeed!

I decided I needed to pick this up to quickly read before getting into the Hugo-nominated Volume 3 of the series and oh, gosh, I’m glad I did! Besides using up some soon-to-be-expiring Kindle credits, this really filled in an important part that I knew I would have wondered about if I’d gone into Vol 3 without having read this first.

That said, how much to tell that isn’t spoiler? To recap the first volume, Duncan finds out that his feisty granny Bridgette is a monster hunter from way back, and that he’s more or less expected to go into the family business. Volume 1 not only set up that premise but also shocked and astonished with the remarkable amount of family drama it managed to pack into its pages, ending finally with Duncan wanting to call it quits with Gran but having enough of a sense of self-preservation and duty both to take up the mantle now that King Arthur has been resurrected. Arthur, you see, wants a land free of Anglo-Saxon invaders, which is played to hilarious effect — well, my idea of hilarious anyway — when certain Little Britainers find out that Arthur is not about their white power life.

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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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